Author Archive: Stephen Green
July 23, 2024
BILL WHITTLE: Remembering Dick Rutan.
A powerful tribute to a great man.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Men, This Is the Best Campaign Advice You’ll Get (Ladies, Tell Them I’m Right).
A BILLION HERE AND A BILLION THERE…: Alexa Is in Millions of Households — and Amazon Is Losing Billions.
Echo speakers are the type of business success companies don’t want: a widely purchased product that is also a giant money loser.
Chief Executive Andy Jassy is trying to plug that hole—and move away from the Amazon accounting tactic that helped create it.
When Amazon launched the Echo smart home devices with its Alexa voice assistant in 2014, it pulled a page from shaving giant Gillette’s classic playbook: sell the razors for a pittance in the hope of making heaps of money on purchases of the refill blades.
A decade later, the payoff for Echo hasn’t arrived. While hundreds of millions of customers have Alexa-enabled devices, the idea that people would spend meaningful amounts of money to buy goods on Amazon by talking to the iconic voice assistant on the underpriced speakers didn’t take off.
Customers actually used Echo mostly for free apps such as setting alarms and checking the weather. “We worried we’ve hired 10,000 people and we’ve built a smart timer,” said a former senior employee.
As a result, Amazon has lost tens of billions of dollars on its devices business, which includes Echos and other products such as Kindles, Fire TV Sticks and video doorbells, according to internal documents and people familiar with the business.
Between 2017 and 2021, Amazon had more than $25 billion in losses from its devices business, according to the documents. The losses for the years before and after that period couldn’t be determined.
They gave away the razors before ever figuring out how to make the razor blades.
NAH, THEY’LL LINE UP TO DUTIFULLY VOTE FOR THE REPLACEMENT CANDIDATE SELECTED FOR THEM: Conservatives told the truth about Biden. Democrats failed to listen. “If I were a Democrat, I’d be furious right now.”
I HOPE NOT BUT…: Biden’s Exit Brings Us Closer to World War in the Middle East.
BUT CAN IT RUN CRYSIS? New quantum computer smashes ‘quantum supremacy’ record by a factor of 100 — and it consumes 30,000 times less power. “Using the new 56-qubit H2-1 computer, scientists at quantum computing company Quantinuum ran various experiments to benchmark the machine’s performance levels and the quality of the qubits used. They published their results June 4 in a study uploaded to the preprint database arXiv. The study has not been peer-reviewed yet.”
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Joe Biden Wasn’t Brave, Selfless, or Patriotic for Dropping Out.
COURTESY OF THE SAME ELITES WHO CHATTER INCESSANTLY AT US ABOUT “SUSTAINABILITY”: Interest Payments on US National Debt Will Shatter $1,140,000,000,000 This Year – Eating 76% of All Income Taxes Collected. “The economist also reports that interest on the national debt was the single biggest expense for the government in June, far outrunning other critical public services, and the Treasury expects it will break the $1.14 trillion level this fiscal year.”
2024, MAN: When ‘The Death of Stalin’ Comes to Life. “Last night the world learned that in 2024, America is closer to the USSR in 1953 than we should be comfortable admitting, as a new leak revealed that Presidentish Joe Biden was sick with something potentially much more serious than COVID.”
THE CHINA SYNDROME: China cuts several major interest rates to support fragile economy.
The cuts to the central bank’s key short-term policy rate, its market operations rates and benchmark bank lending rates came after China reported weaker-than-expected second-quarter economic data last week and its top leaders met for a plenum that occurs roughly every five years.
The country is verging on deflation and faces a prolonged property crisis, surging debt and weak consumer and business sentiment. Trade tensions are also flaring, as global leaders grow increasingly wary of China’s export dominance.
“The cut today is an unexpected move, likely due to the sharp slowdown in growth momentum in the second quarter as well as the call for ‘achieving this year’s growth target’ by the third plenum,” said Larry Hu, chief China economist at Macquarie.
Bloomberg was more on point with their headline: China Surprises With Rate Cut After Xi’s Big Meeting Disappoints.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: The Incredible Vanishing President. “You know who didn’t look very concerned yesterday? Kamala Harris. Honestly, I don’t think it’s because she has any concrete knowledge of what’s going on with her boss. This is everything that she hoped for and was beaming for all of her public appearances. It had a decided ‘Man, I’m thrilled he’s finally out of the way,’ feel to it.”
LET THEM DRIVE FISKERS: ‘Very few’ Democrats are willing to buy a Tesla after Elon Musk endorsed Donald Trump.
DIVIDE AND CONQUER IS FOLLOWED BY UNTIE AND RULE: Your Friendly Reminder That the Democrats Are Brilliant at Using Chaos to Their Advantage.
KEEP LOOKING: Searching for the Real Kamala Harris.
As a city prosecutor and later as state attorney general, Harris led a harsh intervention against chronic truancy, justified by the fact that a high proportion of violent criminals were high school dropouts. She pushed for criminal penalties for parents whose children missed too much school. She also pushed for the transfer of undocumented youth charged with felonies to ICE for deportation.
In the sometimes insular world of San Francisco politics, she was a moderate or even conservative voice on public safety and crime issues.
But in the Senate and on the national campaign trail, Harris walked back her previous tough-on-crime record in the shadow of the Trump presidency. Harris championed decarceration efforts and even gestured toward support for the “Abolish ICE” movement. “We need to probably think about starting from scratch,” she told MSNBC. Unlike her first campaign, Harris’s presidential campaign, in line with the rising status of identity politics in progressive circles, stressed her focus to “expose racial disparities in the criminal justice system.”
As I’ve documented in previous investigations of Harris’s record, her rhetoric sometimes failed to match her record. She was among the first to create a district attorney-level environmental justice unit to prosecute polluters in low-income, minority neighborhoods. Yet, her office instead went after small-time defendants, none of whom had spilled a drop of hazardous material in the communities she claimed to protect.
Read the whole thing.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Presidentish Joe Biden: A Look Back Without Fondness.
July 22, 2024
FROM “RIDIN’ WITH BIDEN” TO “NETFLIX AND CHILL WITH DOCTOR JILL”: Biden cancels nine trips, extends Delaware stay after dropping out of 2024 race.
Kamala is the acting president now but without any of those messy 25th Amendment necessities.
I JOKED EARLIER THIS YEAR THAT “CONSPIRACY THEORY” NOW JUST MEANS “THREE WEEKS AHEAD OF THE NEWS” BUT NOW IT’S DOWN TO A FEW DAYS:
I didn’t believe until right now that a specific stand down order was given by the Secret Service to leave the assassin alone. But now that we know Cheatle refused to record or archive the comms (or potentially even deleted them), I don’t think there’s any other conclusion to… https://t.co/XMoQNgxLTt
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) July 22, 2024
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Presidentish Joe Biden: A Look Back without Fondness. “”Somewhere in America’s vast wetlands, there’s a one-legged duck with a broken wing who just heard about Presidentish Joe Biden and said, “At least I’m not that guy.” Biden entered lame-duck status long before his sudden announcement on X Sunday afternoon — it was his announcement, right? RIGHT? — and I can even pinpoint the exact date for you.”
HMM:
We're only starting to dig into the cover-up of Biden's cognitive decline. Everyone knows Kamala Harris is going to be under the microscope.
But key to the cover-up was Kim Cheatle. Look at her record (detailed below), and it's clear she was hired to help conceal from the… pic.twitter.com/Q9uHlhgm0E
— Joel Mowbray (@joelmowbray) July 22, 2024
This bit stands out:
The Bidens forged such a bond with @POTUS’s personal doctor, Dr. Kevin O’Connor. Per terrific reporting by @SchreckReports, O’Connor became close, personal friends with the Bidens during the Obama administration, and he even pursued business together with James Biden.
Everyone serious understands that Dr. O’Connor’s rosy pronouncements about Biden’s health were central to the cover-up of Biden’s rapidly detoriating condition.
Now, it is time to ask these questions about what Cheatle was expected to help cover up.
The Secret Service has been covering for presidential peccadillos and extracurricular activities since at least JFK. But the health of the president’s brain is a much more serious issue, and the public has the right to know how involved the Service was under Cheatle in covering it up.