Amazon

Tuesday

Paige Aarhus

Bitcoin’s whiplash volatility is still a problem

Crypto markets were in a tizzy over the past week following rumours – later quashed – that Amazon was planning to accept bitcoin for payments. Last Thursday, Amazon posted a job opening for a digital currency and blockchain lead, prompting a media frenzy that culminated with a report that the company would accept bitcoin payments by the end of the year. Bitcoin prices had been declining since April, but they surged by almost 15 per cent to hit £29,000, before moderating to around £27,000 yesterday after Amazon denied the report, saying the speculation around specific plans for cryptocurrencies was not true.

elites revolution
Daniel McCarthy

The mock revolution of the elites

From our US edition

‘Protesters in California set fire to a courthouse, damaged a police station and assaulted officers after a peaceful demonstration intensified,’ ABC News recently tweeted. The wording was perfect — better than any satire as an illustration of the corporate media’s biases. These biases have lately come at cost for CNN and the Washington Post, both of which have paid to settle the suits brought against them by Nick Sandmann, a Covington Catholic High School student whose life they nearly destroyed last year. But the corporate media cannot be embarrassed into mending its ways, neither by its own risible tweets nor by lawsuits from the people harmed by its misreporting.

Saturday

Patrick J-Buchanan

Where did all those ‘capitalist pigs’ go?

From our US edition

'There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money,' is an insight the famed biographer James Boswell attributed to Samuel Johnson. Clients of the late Bernie Madoff, however, might take issue. Over four decades, Madoff, acclaimed as the greatest fraudster of them all, ran a Ponzi scheme that swindled 40,000 people, including his closest friends, out of $65 billion. But if 'getting money' is among the most innocent of callings, America has more than its fair share of the goodly people who excel at it. According to Forbes's 35th annual ranking of billionaires, last year witnessed a population explosion. Some 660 new billionaires were added to the number for a total of 2,755. And more than one in every four billionaires is an American.

oligarchy tech capitalist pigs

Thursday

Deborah Ross

This film deserves all the awards and praise: Nomadland reviewed

Nomadland won multiple Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress, and if there’d been an award for Best Film In Which The Woman In Her Sixties Isn’t The Least Developed Character In The Screenplay, Hallelujah, About Time, it would have scooped that too. Not much competition, regrettably, but you have to admire the film just for that, plus there is much to admire generally. It is based on the non-fiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by the journalist Jessica Bruder, who spent months living with older Americans who, out of economic necessity, eke out a living while travelling from place to place for seasonal employment.

Wednesday

Katrina Gulliver

Picking Apple

From our US edition

Would you sign up for a screening streaming service that only had a dozen movies? A handful of series, and no classics? You might pause and ask if it’s worth it, compared to the range of options on other streaming providers. But if you’re like many of us, you might decide to pony up — after all, it’s only $5. Of course, I’m describing Apple TV+. It’s cheaper than Netflix or Hulu. But what you get, at least for now, is pretty limited. That’s not to say what they have isn’t good: they’ve pumped in a massive budget to lure creators like Oprah and Werner Herzog to this enterprise. Their movies have major stars. There just aren’t many of them. But they could have gone the other way.

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Saturday

Roger Kimball

Amazon’s book bullying is just the latest act of woke intolerance

From our US edition

The house of the Lord, we are told, has many mansions. So does the house of wokeness. If you are Coca-Cola, you address flagging sales by embarking on an ad campaign (and internal training regimen for employees) urging those drinking its sugar water to 'try to be less white', i.e.,  'less arrogant, less certain, less defensive, less ignorant and more humble'. If you are Disney, you scour your cartoons for images, situations, or language that worried white bureaucrats imagine might cause offense to anyone on this week’s list of designated victim groups. If you are Dr Seuss Enterprises, you cashier six of your books because they 'portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong'.

Friday

Annabel Denham

The BBC needs to face up to the truth about the licence fee’s future

It won’t come as much of a surprise to learn that the National Audit Office thinks the BBC faces 'significant' uncertainty over its financial future due to changes in viewing habits. The NAO’s findings are about as ground-breaking as your average anodyne Beeb drama, but they do tighten the cilice on a funding model that is impossibly outdated in the 21st century.  In the past decade alone, there has been a 30 per cent decline in BBC TV viewing; on average, the amount of time an adult spent watching broadcast BBC TV fell from 80 minutes per day in 2010 to 56 minutes in 2019. When it comes to younger viewers, the NAO’s findings are ever more troubling for the BBC: in the UK, 18-34 year olds now watch seven times as much Netflix and YouTube as BBC1 content.

Thursday

Lara Prendergast

Why charity begins in shops

When everything re-opened after the first lockdown, I didn’t immediately head to a restaurant, bar or hairdresser. I went to the Second Chance charity shop on Blackstock Road in north London. It wasn’t that I was feeling particularly charitable. If anything, my visit came from a place of selfishness. I wanted to rootle around, alone, and find something unexpected — and probably pointless — in the piles of bric-à-brac. Out I came with a milk jug (£2.50) and a book titled Cool Names for Babies (50p) written by two women called Pamela Redmond Satran and Linda Rosenkrantz. I instantly felt better, as though the past few months had been a bad dream. I can’t be the only person who has missed this sort of experience.

Wednesday

Robert Jackman

What to watch on Amazon Prime this Autumn

Whether you’re stuck at home in quarantine or just looking to spice up those weekday evenings, there’s plenty coming to Amazon Prime over the autumn. Here’s our round-up of the shows and films you don’t want to miss: The Boys (Season Two), 4 September https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MN8fFM1ZdWo Set in a parallel universe in which superheroes are real – and form a crucial part of America’s police industrial complex – The Boys is a smart and timely satire that packs a serious punch. Don’t let the familiar capes and claws aesthetic fool you: this is no Marvel rip-off. For all their YouTube-friendly stunts, this is a series about how latex-clad ‘supes’ aren’t always as wonderful as they make out – a fact hidden by their shadowy corporate backers.

Wednesday

Matthew Lynn

The stock market isn’t the success story Trump thinks it is

From our US edition

COVID-19 is still raging, with little sign of coming under control. The economy is already a tenth smaller than it was at the start of the year. Joblessness is soaring. And the budget deficit? Don’t even ask. But, hey, perhaps we shouldn’t worry about any of that. As the President of the United States keeps pointing out, the stock market is doing great, and, in his opinion, anyway, that means America, to borrow the kind of slogan that fits neatly onto a baseball cap, is great again as well. There is a problem, however, with Trump’s breezy 21-character analysis. It is not really true. The main equity indices reflect many different things, and the health of the economy is not always one of them. https://twitter.

stock market

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

In defence of Amazon

We should take heart from BP’s £5.1 billion second-quarter loss, accompanied by a halving of its dividend. What’s good about that? Nothing — except that the loss reflects a write-down of the value of oil and gas assets that shifts the company to a more realistic footing for an extended period of low oil prices and reduced demand, indicating resilience rather than impending doom. In recent times, BP has lived through Deepwater Horizon, history’s most politicised oil-rig disaster, and extricated itself from TNK-BP, history’s nastiest Russian joint-venture. It operated when oil was below $20 a barrel in 2001 and when it hit $147 in 2008. It has plans to achieve net zero carbon by 2050.

Wednesday

Leo Thuman

Trump’s Burkean moment

From our US edition

President Trump surprised some on Saturday when he shared a video from Business Insider explaining that billionaires have amassed half-a-trillion dollars during the coronavirus pandemic as millions face unemployment. A conventional, supply-sider Republican president of the past would have never harped on about income inequality, especially not in an economic recession. But Trump bucks conventions. He voiced his approval of the video in his usual exclamatory style: ‘I actually agree with this. Too much income disparity. Changes must be made, and soon!’ Inevitably, that tweet drew criticism from free-market fundamentalists within the Republican party. Some compared his statement to the socialist rhetoric coming from the American left. But Trump is right.

burkean

Thursday

Stephen L. Miller

Four main takeaways from the House’s Big Tech antitrust sideshow

From our US edition

Here’s a terrifying thought: Mark Zuckerberg is the only person in Silicon Valley that the political and intellectual right can trust when it comes to ‘Big Tech’. Wednesday’s ‘Antitrust’ House hearing resembled a group of Neanderthals trying to reason with Data from Star Trek. The worst of both sides was on show as Democrats and Republicans jockeyed for the news cameras, rather than getting real answers on antitrust practices or how Silicon Valley bows to the authoritarian regime in China. I watched the grueling insurance seminar so you don’t have to: here are the four big lessons.1.

big tech
Martin Vander Weyer

Will retail giants outsmart the online sales tax?

When I worked in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur long ago, my office looked across Jalan Tun Razak, a boulevard named in honour of the country’s second prime minister and ‘father of development’. This week his son Najib Razak, its sixth prime minister (2009-2018), was convicted of charges relating to the disappearance of $4.5 billion from a sovereign wealth fund called 1MDB which he once controlled. More trials await, but 1MDB may go down not only as the world’s biggest corruption scandal but also the most vulgar — proceeds that might have helped Malaysia’s poor having been frittered on private jets, penthouses, parties in Las Vegas and the financing of The Wolf of Wall Street.

Tuesday

Robert Jackman

What’s new to watch on Amazon Prime

While the coronavirus might have delayed filming for now, the big streaming services are still managing to put out new content – at least for the time being. Here are eight new releases on Amazon Prime to keep you entertained on those lazy summer evenings: Dating Amber, available now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVU_e0Kq4A8 Fans of Sex Education and Derry Girls will likely be charmed by this kind-hearted semi-romcom about two nerdy misfits – one male, one female – coming to terms with their sexuality in 1990s Ireland. As a ploy to hide their real preference from homophobic bullies, the two friends decide to pretend to be a couple. But it’s when they escape to Dublin for a weekend of underage partying that their divergent coming out journeys begin.

Wednesday

James Delingpole

The best Independence Day films to watch on 4th July

Jaws, Amazon (To rent or buy) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1fu_sA7XhE Nothing says ‘Murica’ quite like insisting the beaches stay open – killer shark or no – because it’s the 4th July weekend. It’s why – during his brief libertarian phase – Boris Johnson once declared that Larry Vaughn, the Mayor of Amity, was the movie’s true hero. Apart from the now rather obvious clunkiness of ‘Bruce’ the mechanical great white, the film still stands the test of time – the jump scare when they investigate the sunken fishing boat; the memorable scene where Quint describes his experiences after the USS Indianopolis was torpedoed; the literally explosive climax.

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Tinkering with VAT won’t make us trust the government

Should Chancellor Rishi Sunak cut VAT as an emergency stimulus to the consumer economy? When Labour’s Alistair Darling made a 2.5 per cent £12 billion cut after the 2008 crash, I called it ‘an unconvincing and expensive gambit’, on the basis that shoppers would barely notice and that ‘far more significant will be the general level of confidence as it is affected by business failures and job losses… and the general grimness of global economic news’. The same applies today only more so, given that inflation is dormant, households’ pent-up spending power has in many cases been boosted by lockdown and the top VAT-cut winner would likely be Amazon. By all means relax Sunday trading laws and restrictions on outdoor food and drink service.

Tuesday

Bridget Phetasy

It’s gonna be a long day with myself

From our US edition

I wake up confused. Oh. This is really happening. I wasn’t dreaming that the entire world is on house arrest. It’s actually real. I’m disoriented. What day is it? What month is it? What is time anyway? I’ve lost all concept of it. Am I in Vegas? Oh that’s right, Vegas is closed. Today is going to be the day. The day I live my best quarantine life. I’ll practice guitar and spend an hour learning Arabic and bake sourdough bread and do some YouTube workouts. This is the 19th day in a row I’ve said that. Who am I kidding? I don’t even own a guitar. And where the hell am I gonna use Arabic other than when I’m binge-watching Jack Ryan? Again. I don’t trust the subtitles. I don’t trust anything anymore. Except the mirrors.

myself

Sunday

Will Lloyd

Privacy or death — the final triumph of Big Tech

From our US edition

‘During that time it seemed no easy thing to see any man on the streets of Byzantium, but all who had the good fortune to be in health were sitting in their houses, either attending the sick or mourning the dead… and work of every description ceased, and all the trades were abandoned by the artisans, and all other work as well, such as each had in hand.’ That’s a passage from Procopius’s History of the Wars, describing the way the bubonic plague ravaged Byzantium in 541 AD. If you want to feel historical time collapse, and the distance of centuries evaporate, it is worth reading the whole account.

amazon silicon valley

Friday

Tyler Grant

Amazon Prime should be protected by the War Powers Act

From our US edition

I suit up most days (thank you, casual Fridays) and with the stress of New York’s walking speeds and tremendous cleanliness of its streets, the closet life of suits falls somewhere between the lifespan of a monarch butterfly and a succulent fathered by a man in his twenties, another way of saying: cherish life.So, we will call it a Tuesday of last week. I found myself either a) running from hired guns of a Memphis law firm after I had uncovered their Cayman Islands-based money laundering scheme or b) catching my pocket on the armrest of a conference room chair, when I split my dress pants down the leg.

amazon