Can't see the difference between the green and the yellow

People walk over those who are pushovers. Being nice and being a pushover is not the same. Hell, very often being a pushover is being the opposite of nice, and pushing back is the kindest thing you can do.

I can’t say I’ve ever seen someone who was very friendly generally be disrespected for it.

Friendliness oozes confidence. Reaching out to someone else socially is a strong signal (even if faked), that you’re confident in your own state.

There’s a difference between being friendly and being a pushover though.

Reminds me of the Death of Stalin

Like if your wife is dying from an autoimmune disorder and you want to sleep with her friend, then do what you feel. It doesn't matter if your wife commits suicide over it, because if she minds then she doesn't matter.

This is sort of one of the reasons I think a price floor of some sort might help.

It would put a minimum limit on how much vertical integration could benefit.

E.g. if somehow we say a t-shirt needs to cost at least $30, then Amazon can’t sell them for $5, so the small company who makes tshirts can compete with them.

I don’t know exactly how you could sensibly implement that - there’d be a myriad of ways to bypass it depending on how the law is phrased - but just a thought.

I hear the drums echoing tonight…

I can’t understand their reluctance. A lot of people use partial truths and misleading statements to push agendas in both sides.

It's obviously not price gouging, the chart is right there.

On $127 billion in revenue, they make $2.9 billion in profit. That's like a 2% profit margin.

They're actually operating on mega-slim margins. The obscene profit amount comes from the fact that they're creating hundreds of millions of transactions that they take a slim cut from (known as salami slcing like is superman 3 or office space).

The cheaper those transactions can be, the more that will occur and the more money they will make. That's why they drive the prices ever-downward, and why they use their bargaining power to create super low-wage positions to make super cheap things.

You can't really fix this with taxes. Even if they paid 50% corporation tax or something that doesn't change the chart above significantly. Just cahnges that 2.9 billion to 1.45 billion with 1.45 billion in taxes. They'd still underpay workers.

I think there is a an argument for a price floor. Minimum wages is one example, but I also think that maybe some of the stuff you can buy on Amazon is simply unethically cheap.