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I would have downvoted for the "general national security" bit.

Everything else, sure. But national security, especially expressed like that, is just another "WON'T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN".

> general national security by not outsourcing knowledge and infrastructure critical to national security to save a few bucks.

That's the best argument?

ZTE was literally being used to spy en masse. maybe start there instead of "general national security".

Care to explain Canada and the EU getting tariffs?

> Canada

too late.

and then they talk about all that and go out and vote for people who support none of those things.

Actions speak a lot louder than words. If you vote republican you absolutely stand behind those things.

Republicans actively try to destroy any sort of reasonable social safety net. I really don't care how partisan you think I'm being, the republican viewpoint on this is cruel and wrong and I think extremely low of anyone who supports it.

Extremely low.

Or we could quit making excuses given that Elon consistently over-promises.

Or fuck you, it's my phone.

0.9% increase on a minimum wage salary.

Just salary, not even the full cost of having an employee on staff.

I just refuse to believe this is a massive burden on these businesses without numbers.

People said the same stuff about the minimum wage increase.

> Probably a better idea to look at how the tax system is setup here to favor the wealthy versus low income.

They did and that's why they decided on this tax instead of yet more horribly regressive sales taxes.

Washington has a god awful tax system. This is one of the options they had to get the money without squeezing the poor and middle class even more.

> The tax did far more damage than impair Amazon's bottom line

It really didn't though.

Amazon can't afford to fire or force relocation on 45k employees. That would end up costing them millions.

Not if they get pushed from barely being able to afford it to not being able to afford it in the span of a month or two.

It raises the cost (excluding everything but salary, which is unrealistic) of a full time minimum wage worker by 0.9% per year. Add in the additional costs of an employee and that percentage drops even further.

It was also targeted at the top 3% of companies or something.

This was a paltry tax. If you want to convince me otherwise I want hard numbers, not "oh but the low profit minimum wage employers".

Actually it was thought out and picked as the only progressive option they had.

Now it’s property or sales tax. Hurray.

There is lots of discussion of that and to suggest otherwise is ridiculous.

A years long process won’t do anything to help thousands of homeless now.

They did pass it, after months of review.

They repealed it a day after the announcement that they were doing so.

Seattle is a company town now.

What blackmail?

If anyone was engaging in extortion it was Amazon.

Huh, I gues the documents they put on were just gibberish.

I’m looking forward to watching this same short of bootlicking and idiocy when Jeff comes around to extort tax breaks with the threat of HQ2.

This is a major net neutrality issue.

AT&T can now say all of time warner's content is free for mobile devices. Major blow to their competitors.

AT&T is a major telecom and provider of mobile internet access.

> Same goes for whatever ends up happening to Amazon/WaPo.

Pretty sure Bezos bought it, not Amazon.

We can still pull out the pitchforks based on the notion that he didn't understand the "expert" opinion presented and just decided not bother?

> Their size makes them an attractive target for nationalization

Sure, except this is America.

> in expectation earn at least the same as they would at a public company

No, it should be multiples. Otherwise why is the employee taking on that risk?

They aren't treated as founders of any sort. They get paltry equity and then don't get raises.

So anyone who is good enough to work for a big company you have no interest in?

Con of startups, these are the people you might end up working for.

What's good for your personal growth was other people trying to make a living at a company being run by people who don't know what they are doing. Maybe it's fine, but that level of uncertainty is definitely a con.

Why wouldn't you have beef with the founders? Their decisions left them rich and you with nothing in exchange for years of your life lived with excessive risk and a lower standard of living.

Yeah okay.

You see, after the part your put in quotation marks I added on "at least to the company". This was meant to mean that the work you are doing is meaningful, but perhaps only to the company. Rather than working on a small part of a small part of a small part of the massive machine, you get to work on the entire thing because no one else is around to do it.

I really don't understand why I got downvoted for that. Not sure what part of the HN hivemind I upset with that, seems fairly uncontroversial.

> How much would it cost Amazon to assess the value of each book uploaded to Kindle? Some AI process could be trained on "real" vs "scam" books and attach a score, then humans could review the worst scores and then maybe investigate the authors who post a majority of bad books.

or someone could just read them.

Has anyone ever referenced that work and not been a complete racist piece of crap?