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Comment by raw_anon_1111 | Hacker News Reader

This is very bad math on the part of the article. You can’t just take total revenue/number of households. I mean have they not heard of a little side business Amazon has called AWS?

Amazon is not just a US company either.

They also have an ad business. You could rightfully argue that ad spend gets passed on to the consumer.

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The number Matt’s quoting doesn’t include AWS, AFAICT. It’s “North American segment” revenue in AMZN accounting. AWS is accounted separately as a global unit.

Though now that I write that, I wonder if Matt divided by the total number of North American households or the number of US ones.

EDIT: Amazon North American segment revenue divided by aggregate North American household count is roughly $2,300. But I’m guessing the real number is closer to Matt’s estimate as US households are wealthier and likely represent a disproportionate fraction of that revenue.

This is sadly typical arrogant HN commentary jumping off to sound clever, cynically playing on the 'engineer mentality' fallacy, having put no effort to discredit the argumen as witnessed by the now clearly stupid argument presented, yet selfishly putting the onus on others to correct. It's quite sociopathic.

I dunno, going in with the starting assumption that Matt Stoller is innumerate and/or will twist statistics to support his otherwise specious arguments is not a terrible approach.

On the particulars of this number, he seems to be close enough, but it’s not nearly as shocking with any context: The average American household Walmart spend is comparable, Apple captures almost half that with a handful of devices and services.

Would you rather I suffer from Gellman Amnesia?

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2021/01/18/gell-mann-amnesia/

If you can’t trust someone’s analysis about something you know about, why trust him about something you don’t?

There are more important things than continually arguing on an internet forum, as you have been with multiple people here, that you're right when it's been pointed out numerous times that you jump off half cocked and is not the case. More generally, it is an unfortunate arogant and dangerous mindset from a sizeable part of the HN community.

Well, I actually am right - just not quite as right. He still took “North American revenue” that includes Canada and Mexico and divided that by US households..

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