Why not both
porque no los dos
Or, idk, maybe people shouldn’t be subscribed to a newspaper owned by the world’s richest capitalist. The owner of a company that brings in former intelligence officials to bust unions, sells facial recognition tech to police, does business with the Israeli military, dodges taxes, spends tens of millions of dollars on lobbying, and BOUGHT A FUCKING NEWSPAPER?
Seriously. You can debate the merits of boycotting a company that sells generic products. They may be doing bad stuff, but so are a lot of companies and you need, say, food, and their food is as good as any others. But in a case like this the very essence of the product is compromised by it’s ownership. Even if the moral argument isn’t persuasive to you, why would you consume news generated by a company owned by capitalists who have very direct, material interests in shaping narratives and influencing the government? This obviously goes beyond WaPo and Amazon, but it certainly seems like one of the more egregious examples of a “news” outlet just being another arm of a giant conglomerate.
I would consider commissions and patreons supporting independent artists and journalists as equivalent to supporting most charities if you have the means, people need to eat and pay rent or a mortgage and directly supporting that I think is virtuous if you’re able to cover your family costs and savings goals first. If you don’t have the time to research independents then local news orgs would probably benefit more from individual subscriptions way more than national news corps.
Tl;Dr if people with the means to don’t pay for journalists to give them some autonomy from corp sponsors then we’ll get what we pay for
Me as of yesterday:
- WaPo
- Prime Video without ads
- Audible
- Kindle Unlimited
- Amazon Cloud Storage
- Sprouts > Whole Foods
We left AWS for Azure two years ago, so that doesn’t count.
Me today:
I am currently studying what it would take to drop Amazon Prime. So far a combination of sites seems to do the trick. I first search Amazon for what I want, then I start searching elsewhere where to buy it from. My guess is that I’ll be able to cancel it by the end of the year.
I spend five figures on Bezos owned products every year. Not anymore.
You can always shop on Amazon without prime. It just takes a couple extra days to get stuff to you and you have to buy a certain dollar amount at once to get free shipping. We dropped prime months ago but still occasionally make an Amazon purchase.
AWS is roughly 70% of Amazon’s profit. The retail side is inconsequential.
Yet I’d say Amazon’s retail operation has had the far greater impact on the market. That’s the reason Lina Khan launched the antitrust lawsuit against Amazon. She wrote a detailed paper on how Amazon uses algorithmic pricing to crush the competition.
Yeah, our AWS yearly spend was high eight figures if you count the clients we supported on the platform. The software update has included a migration to Azure with Oracle Exadata which has now pushed that spend to nine figures. AWS fell asleep at the wheel, IMHO.
Cloud spending is massive.
