#like they probably had disney or google levels of growth

[martinsorbit]

Finders Keepers warm up sketches b4 I start designing some character stuff

I missed themm

The DCAs arms/hands keep breaking because of how much they move and do silly acrobatics, pairing that with some leftover water+fire damage, it is one of the things that Y/N has to repair often;

New compatible parts are hard to find + expensive (considering how old the DCAs model is), so Y/N normally has to go to old faztech electronic trash dumps to find something that might work, which is usually pieces of other similar-looking Attendants from some old FAZCO animatronic line. You really hope sun and moon don't know about this, or else things will get awkward

[sataniccapitalist]

FEBRUARY 18, 2019

31 Actual National Emergencies

 by PAUL STREET

A Wannabe Strongman’s Brown Menace Straw Man

Everyone with five functioning gray cells knows that the aspiring fascist strongman Donald Trump’s Declaration of a National Emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border is absurd.

There is no “national security crisis” of illegal immigration on the southern United States border.

Illegal crossings are not at “emergency” levels; they are at a fifty-year low.

Undocumented immigrants are not a crime and violence threat.  They are less likely to commit crimes, violent ones included, than naturalized U.S. citizens.

Drugs come into the U.S. not through gaps in border fencing but primarily through legal ports of entry.

There is no big call for a completed U.S.-Mexico wall on the part of U.S. citizens on the southern border.

The United States military has not been “breaking up” and blocking “monstrous caravans” of illegal immigrants trying to harm the U.S.

The only crisis at the border is the humanitarian one created by Trump’s war on asylum-seekers and legal as well as technically illegal immigrants. The wannabe strongman has set up a ridiculous brown menace strawman in an effort to take an unprecedented step. He wants to use the National Emergencies Act to fulfill a ridiculous campaign promises to his white-nationalist base.  He wants to make an end run around Congress to spend federal taxpayer on a project that lawmakers chose not to fund – a political vanity scheme that is opposed by 60 percent of the U.S. populace.

Actual National Emergencies

An irony here is that the United States today is in fact haunted by many actual and interrelated national emergencies.  Here below are the top thirty-one that came to the present writer’s mind this last weekend:

1. Class Inequality. America is mired in a New Gilded Age where economic disparity is so extreme now that the top thousandth (the 0.1 percent, not just the 1 Percent) possesses more wealth than the bottom U.S. 90 percent and three absurdly rich U.S.-Americans – Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett – possess more wealth between them than the bottom half of the country.

2. Poverty. The nation’s 540 billionaires (Trump is one of them) enjoy lives of unimaginable opulence (Trump flew off to one of his resorts to play golf after declaring his “national emergency” – an “emergency” he foolishly said he didn’t actually have to declare) while 15 million children – 21% of all U.S. children – live in families with incomes below the federal poverty threshold, a measurement that has been shown to be drastically below the minimally adequate family budgets families require to meet basic expenses.

3. Plutocracy. “We must make our choice,” onetime Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandies wrote in 1941. “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Consistent with Brandeis’s warning, the leading mainstream political scientists Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens find through exhaustive research that “the best evidence indicates that the wishes of ordinary Americans actually have had little or no impact on the making of federal government policy.  Wealthy individuals and organized interest groups – especially business corporations – have had much more political clout.  When they are taken into account, it becomes apparent that the general public has been virtually powerless…Government policy,” Page and Gilens determined, “reflects the wishes of those with money, not the wishes of the millions of ordinary citizens who turn out every two years to choose among the preapproved, money-vetted candidates for federal office.” Economic power is so concentrated in the US today you can count on one hand and one finger the multi-trillion-dollar financial institutions that control the nation’s economic and political life: Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley. “You have no choice,” George Carlin used to tell his audiences earlier this century, “You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear.”

4. Bad Jobs. Trump boasts of American job creation and low official unemployment rate (real joblessness is a different story) while deleting the fact that tens of millions of the nation’s workers struggle with jobs whose pay lags far behind employment growth thanks to declining unionization (down to 6.5% of the private-sector workforce due to decades of relentless employer hostility), inadequate minimum wages, globalization, automation, and outsourcing. A third of the nation’s workers make less than $12 an hour ($24,960 a year assuming full-time work) and 42% get less than $15 ($31,200 a year). Good luck meeting a family’s food, rent, childcare, medical, and car payment (car ownership is often required in a nation that lacks adequate public transportation) costs on those kinds of returns on labor power. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently reported that a record 7 million U.S.-Americans are three months or more behind on their par payments. As the Washington Post reports: “Economists warn this is a red flag. Despite the strong economy and low unemployment rate, many Americans are struggling to pay their bills. ‘The substantial and growing number of distressed borrowers suggests that not all Americans have benefited from the strong labor market,’ economists at the New York Fed wrote in a blog post. A car loan is typically the first payment people make because a vehicle is critical to getting to work, and someone can live in a car if all else fails. When car loan delinquencies rise, it is a sign of significant duress among low-income and working-class Americans.”

5. Corporate Media Consolidation is so extreme in the U.S. now that just six corporations – Comcast, FOX, Disney, Viacom, CBS, and AT&T – together own more than half of traditional U.S. media content print, film and electronic. The Internet giants Google, Facebook, and Amazon rule online communication and shopping. (It is isn’t just about “news and information” [Carlin], by the way. The corporate-owned mass media probably spreads capitalist, racist, sexist, authoritarian, and military-imperialist propaganda more effectively through its entertainment wing than it does through its new and public/political affairs wing. A movie like “American Sniper” beats CNN reporting bias when it comes to advancing the U.S. imperial project [see #s 28 and 29 below]. A film like Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino” beats the evening news when it comes to advancing racist mass incarceration and racial segregation [see #s 6 and 9 below]).

6. Racial Disparity and Apartheid. The U.S. Black-white wealth gap is stark: 8 Black median household cents on the white median household dollar. Equally glaring is the nation’s level of racial segregation.  In the Chicago, New York, Detroit, and Milwaukee metropolitan areas, for example more than three in every four Black people would have to (be allowed to) move from their nearly all-black Census tracts into whiter ones in order to live in a place whose racial composition matched that of the broader region in which they reside. These two statistical measures are intimately interrelated since housing markets distribute so much more than just housing.  They also distribute access to jobs, good schools, green spaces, full-service groceries, safety, medical services and more that matters for “equal opportunity” and advancement.

7. Gender Inequality. Among full-time U.S. workers, women make 81 cents for every dollar a man is paid. The gap is worse in part-time employment since women more commonly work reduced schedules to handle domestic labor. Women ‘s median retirement savings are roughly one third of those of men. Households headed by single women with children have a poverty rate of 35.6 percent, more than double the 17.3 percent rate for households headed by single men with children. Women comprise just 27 percent of the nation’s top 10 income percent, 17 percent of the upper 1 percent, and 11 percent of the top 0.1 percent. By contrast, women make up nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of U.S. workers paid the federal minimum wage.

8. Native American Poverty. Thanks to the savage white-“settler” ethnic-cleansing of most of North America from the 16th century through 1900, Indigenous people make up just 1 percent of the U.S. population. The Native American poverty rate (28%) is double that of the nation as a whole and is particularly high in most of the commonly isolated and high-unemployment reservations where just more than a fifth of the nation’s Indigenous population lives. Native American life expectancy is 6 years short of the national average. In some states, Native American life expectancy is 20 years less than the national average. In Montana, Native American men live on average just 56 years.

9. Racist Mass Arrest, Incarceration, and Criminal Marking. The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world, fueled by the racially disparate waging of the so-called War on Drugs. The racial disparities are so extreme that 1 in very 10 U.S. Black men is in prison or jail on any given day. One in 3 Black adult males are saddled with the permanent crippling mark of a felony record – what law professor Michelle Alexander has famously called “the New Jim Crow.” Blacks make up 12% of the U.S. population but 38% of the nation’s state prison population.

10. Trumpism/Fascism. The U.S. mass media focuses so heavily on the seemingly interminable awfulness of the creeping fascist Donald Trump (whose hideous nature is a ratings bonanza at CNN and MSNBC) that it is easy to lose sight of the fascistic horror of his authoritarian and white-nationalist supporters – roughly a third of the nation. The best social and political science research on Trump’s base reveals a fascist-like movementseeking a “strong” authoritarian “leader” who will rollback civil liberties and the gains won by women and racial and ethnic minorities since the 1960s. Trumpism wants to Make America more fully white-supremacist, patriarchal, and authoritarian (“great”) Again. Herr Donald’s disproportionately armed throng of die-hard devotees backs their Dear Leader no matter how terribly he behaves. It is a grave, creeping fascist threat to democracy.

11. The War on Truth. The aspiring fascist leader Trump made on average 15 false statements per day in 2018. He had stated more than 7,600 untruths as president by the end of last year. Trump lies constantly about matters big and small. He is a practitioner of what Chris Hedges calls “the permanent lie.” It is no small matter. In his description of this as “the most ominous threat” posed by Trump, Hedges quotes the philosopher Hannah Arendt. “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth,” Arendt wrote in her classic volume The Origins of Totalitarianism, “is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.” Trump is only the most extreme and egregious wave of fabrication in a vast sea of national deception. U.S.-Americans, once accurately described by Alex Carey as “the most propagandized people in the world,” are surrounded by duplicitous and misleading information and imagery. This constant barrage of falsehood – examples include the thoroughly untrue notion that the U.S. possessed  a “great democracy” for the Trump campaign and Russia to (supposedly) “undermine” in 2016 – threatens to exhaust our capacity to distinguish fact from fiction.

12. Gun Violence. Fully 40,000 people died from shootings in the American “armed madhouse” in 2017 (we are still waiting for the grisly statistic for 2018). The U.S. was home to 322 mass shootings that killed 387 people and injured 1,227 in 2018. Twenty-eight mass shootings, killing 36 and wounding 92, took place in January of this year. A mass shooting killed five workers in Aurora, Illinois, on the very day (last Friday) that Trump declared his fake national emergency.

13. Sexual Violence. One in 5 women and 1 in 71 men will be raped at some point in their lives in the U.S.

14. Illiteracy and Innumeracy. More than 30 million adults in the United States cannot read, write, or do basic math above a third-grade level.

15. Manufactured Mass Ignorance and Amnesia. Thanks to corporate control of the nation’s media and schools, U.S.-Americans are shockingly ignorant of basic facts relating to their own history and society. White U.S.-Americans are mired in extraordinary denial about the level of Black-white inequality and the depth and degree of discrimination faced by Black Americans today. U.S.-Americans in general know next to nothing about the criminal and mass-murderous havoc U.S. foreign policy wreaks around the world.  This renders them incapable of understanding world politics and woefully vulnerable to nationalistic propaganda and militarism. Eleven years historian Rick Shenkman wrote a book titled “Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter.” Shenkman found that a majority of Americans: didn’t know which party was in control of Congress; couldn’t name the chief justice of the Supreme Court; didn’t know the U.S. had three branches of government; believed George W. Bush’s argument the United States should invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein had attacked America on 9/11. Ask an average U.S.-American when the American War of Independence or the Civil War or WWII were fought and why, what the Bill of Rights was, what fascism is past and present, or what the Civil Rights Movement was about, and you will get blank stares and preposterously wrong answers. A people that doesn’t know its history wanders without a clue through the present and stumbles aimlessly into the future. Real historical knowledge is a great democratic people’s weapon and it is in perilously short supply in the U.S. today.

16. The Israel and Saudi Lobbies. Israel’s power in U.S. politics and political culture is so absurdly exaggerated that a freshman Muslim U.S. Congressional Representative (Ilhan Omar) was recently subjected to a massive and bipartisan political assault absurdly charging her with “anti-Semitism” for daring to Tweet seven words suggesting the elementarily true fact that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) – a deep-powerful, deep-pockets public relations and lobbying organization committed to the advance of Israeli state interests – exercises money-lubricated influence on U.S. politics and policy. To visibly raise the question of Palestinian rights and Israel’s horrendous treatment of Arab peoples is to invite an onslaught from the Israel Lobby’s vicious and powerful attack-dogs. They’ve even been known to strip professors of tenure. Meanwhile, the despotic Saudi regime, possibly the most reactionary government on Earth, continues through money and other means to exercise huge influence on U.S. politics even as it senselessly crucifies the people of Yemen (with direct U.S. military assistance), cultivates terrorism across the Muslim world, and vivisects dissident journalists in its foreign embassies.

17. Neo-McCarthyism. The original Orwellian-American and Russia-mad McCarthyism of the late 1940s and 1950s has been resurrected in the post-Soviet era with a curious partisan twist. Anti-Russian hysteria has been picked up by the Democratic Party, which has been eager to blame its pathetic failure to defeat Trump on Russia’s supposedly powerful “interference in our [unmentionably non-existent] democracy” in 2016 – and to deny its politicos’ role in provoking any such relevant Russian interference as may have occurred. On the Republican side, Trump (who was mentored by Senator Joe McCarthy’s onetime chief counsel Roy Cohn!) and other GOP leaders now routinely follow in the footsteps of Joe McCarthy by calling even cringingly centrist corporate-neoliberal Democrats and everything they propose “socialist.” One of the most horrific moments in Herr Donald’s sickening State of the Union Address came when the Orange Mother of all Malignant Assholes (OMoAMA) told the assembled federal officials to “renew” the nation’s “pledge” that “America will never be a socialist country.”  Numerous Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy “We’re Capitalist and That’s Just the Way it is” Pelosi (net worth $71 million) and “progressive” U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren ($11 million) joined the GOPers in attendance in applauding that “pledge.”  McCarthyism was always and remains a richly bipartisan disease.

18. Health Care and Health. The United States’ corporate-owned/-managed for-profit health care system is the most expensive in the world but ranks just 12th in life expectancy among the 12 wealthiest industrialized countries. The U.S. spends almost three times more on healthcare as do other countries with comparable incomes. Reflecting poor, commercialized and corporate-imposed food systems and lethally sedentary life styles, 58 percent of the U.S. population is overweight, a major health risk factor.

19. Bad Schools. The nation’s expensive but very unequally funded schools deliver terrible outcomes. Among the world’s 34 ranking OECD nations, U.S. schools are the fifth most expensive, but the U.S. ranks scores far below average in math.  It ranks 17th among in reading and 21st in science.

20. Child Abuse. Childhelp reports that “Every year more than 3.6 million referrals are made to child protection agencies involving more than 6.6 million children. The United States has one of the worst records among industrialized nations – losing on average between four and seven children every day to child abuse and neglect…A report of child abuse is made very ten seconds.”

21. Depression and Substance Abuse. The United States, once described by onetime U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson as “the beacon to the world of the way life should be” (in a speech supporting the Congressional authorization of George W. Bush to invade Iraq) has the third highest rates of depression and anxiety and the second highest rate of drug use in the world. “One in five adults in the U.S. experiences some form of mental illness each year,” according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. That estimate is certainly absurdly low.

22. Immigrant Workers Without Rights. Undocumented immigrants make up 55% of hired labor on farms, 15% of laborers in construction, and 9% in both industry and the service sector. “These workers,” CBS reported earlier this year, “play vital roles in the U.S. economy, erecting American buildings, picking American apples and grapes, and taking care of American babies. Oh, and paying American taxes.”  Their technically illegal status makes them easily exploited by employers and undermines their ability to organize and fight for decent conditions both for themselves for other workers.

23. The Dreamer Nightmare. Eight hundred thousand people living in the U.S. were brought to the country as children by parents without U.S. citizenship.  These “Dreamers’” legal status is stuck in limbo.  They are not allowed to vote. They live in the shadow of possible future deportation, with their legal status treated as a partisan political football.

24. Vote Suppression. State-level racist voter suppression and de facto disenfranchisement is rife across the United States. Among other things, this has contributed significantly to the Republicans winning the presidency in 2000, 2004, and 2016. A “gentleman’s agreement” between the two reigning political parties pushes this critical problem to the margins of public discussion. (The Democrats have widely ignored the matter while they have obsessed for two years plus about Russia’s real or alleged role in the last election.  Moscow’s influence was likely small compared to American-as-Apple Pie racist voter suppression in electing Trump.) “The United States,” political scientist David Schutlz noted on Counterpunch last year, “is the only country in the world that still does not have in its Constitution an explicit clause  affirmatively granting a right to vote for all or some of its citizens.”

25. The Absurdly Archaic U.S. Constitution. Popular sovereignty, also known as democracy was the late 18thcentury U.S. Founders’ ultimate nightmare.  They crafted an aristo-republican national charter brilliantly crafted to keep it at bay – in the darkly ironic name of “We the People.”  Two and a third centuries later, their handiwork continues to do its explicitly un- and anti-democratic work through such openly authoritarian mechanisms as the Electoral College, the apportionment of two Senators to every U.S. state regardless of population, the distant time-staggering of elections, the lifetime presidential appointment and Senate approval of Supreme Court justices.  The preposterously venerated U.S. Constitution is an ongoing 232-year old authoritarian calamity in dire need of a radical and democratic overhaul. It is long past time for the populace to declare a national emergency and call for a Constituent Assembly to draft a new national governing structure dedicated to meaning popular self-rule.

26. Trump and the Imperial Presidency. The OMoAMA (Trump) is by all indications a demented and malignant narcissist, a pure sociopath, and a creeping fascist. But the fact that someone as twisted, venal, sexist, and racist as Trump can pose dire threats to humanity in the first place is in no small part a function of the extreme powers that have accrued to the United States constitutionally super-empowered executive branch over the many decades in which the U.S. has reigned as the world’s most powerful state.  The absurdly vast and authoritarian powers of the imperial presidency are an on ongoing national and global emergency.

27. Election Madness/Electoralism. In the early spring of 2008, the late radical American historian Howard Zinn wrote powerfully against the “Election Madness” he saw “engulfing the entire society including the left” in the year of Obama’s ascendancy. “An election frenzy seizes the country every four years,” Zinn worried, “because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls. …” Zinn said he would support one major-party candidate over another but only “for two minutes—the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth.” Then he offered sage counsel, reminding us that time-staggered candidate-centered major party electoralism is a very weak surrogate for real popular sovereignty, which requires regular grassroots organization and militancy beneath and beyond what his good friend Noam Chomsky has called“the quadrennial electoral extravaganza”: “Before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice. … We should not expect that a victory at the ballot box in November will even begin to budge the nation from its twin fundamental illnesses: capitalist greed and militarism. … Before [elections] … and after … we should be taking direct action against the obstacles to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. … Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war. Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.” The reigning “mainstream” US media and politics culture is fiercely dedicated to advancing the hegemony of the major party candidate-centered election cycle, advancing the deadly totalitarian notion that those two minutes in a ballot box  once every four years – generally choosing among politics vetted in advance for us by the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire – is the sum total of “politics” – the only politics that really matters.  Since the hidden corporate control of the US electoral politics on behalf of the center-right ruling class rules out victory for candidates who accurately reflect majority left-progressive public opinion, these ritual exercises in fake democracy deeply reinforce the fatalistic and false belief that most Americans are centrist and right-wing. The 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidate Iowa-New Hampshire circus is already sucking up vast swaths of cable news coverage and commentary while numerous pressing matters (like most of what is listed in the present essay) is largely ignored. It’s pathetic.

28. Guns Over Butter. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. rightly preached that the U.S. could not end poverty or escape “spiritual death” as long as it diverted vast swaths of its tax revenue to a giant war machine that “draw [s] men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.” Just over half a century after King said this, the United States gives 54 percent of its federal discretionary to the Pentagon System, a giant subsidy to high-tech “defense” (war and empire) corporations like Raytheon and Boeing. Six million U.S, children live in “deep poverty,” at less than half (!) the federal government’s obscenely inadequate poverty level, while the U.S, government maintains 800 military bases in more than 70 countries and territoriesaround the world (Britain, France, and Russia together have a combined 30 foreign bases) and accounts for nearly 40 percent of all global military spending. It is deeply offensive that the progressive-populist (fake-“democratic socialist”) U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has repeatedly cited Scandinavian nations as his social-democratic policy role models without having the elementary Dr. Kingian decency to note that those countries dedicate relatively tiny portions of their national budgets to the military. It is disturbing but predictable that most Congressional Democrats voted for Trump’s record-setting $700 billion Pentagon budget last year. U.S. Americans must choose: we can have democracy, social justice, guaranteed free health care, well-funded public schools, and livable ecology or we can have a giant global war machine.  We can’t have both.

29. Doctrinal Denial of U.S. Imperialism. Across the U.S. “mainstream” political and media spectrum, it is beyond the pale of acceptable discussion to acknowledge that the United States is a deeply criminal and imperialist power. The examples are endless. It is normative for U.S. cable talking heads, pundits, and politicians to discuss Eastern Europe or East Asia as if the Washington has as much right to influence developments there as Moscow and Beijing, respectively. Terrible developments in the Middle East and North Africa are routinely discussed by “mainstream “U.S. politicos, talking heads, and pundits as if the United States had not wreaked nearly indescribable havoc on Iraq and Libya and the broader Muslim world. Migrants seeking asylum from Central America are regularly reported and discussed with zero reference to the fact that the United States has inflicted massive and bloody devastation on that region for decades – and without mentioning the Obama administration’s support of a vicious right-wing coup in Honduras in the spring of 2009.  Reporting on the current political crisis in Venezuela comes with complete Orwellian deletion of the United States’ role in crippling the nation’s democratically elected socialist government on the model of the Nixon administration’s campaign to undermine Chile’s democratically elected socialist government in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  No serious discussion is permitted of the historical context of Washington’s longstanding intervention and regime-change operations across Latin America. The reigning Empire-denial is absurd.

30. Amazon. Google (lol) up its mind-boggling and many-sided monopolistic reach and then thank the New York City Left for stopping this public-subsidy-sucking, zero tax-paying corporate monstrosity from setting up its headquarters in the nation’s largest city.

31. Last but not at all least, Ecocide. The climate catastrophe poses grave existential threats to livable ecology and all prospects for a decent human future. It is a national and global emergency of epic proportions. It is the single biggest issue of our or any time. If this environmental calamity is not averted soon, nothing else that progressives and decent citizens everywhere care about is going to matter all that much. The United Nations Panel on Climate Change has recently warned that we have a dozen years to keep global warming to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which true cataclysm will fall upon hundreds of millions of people. Under the command of capital, we are currently on a pace to melt Antarctica by 2100. The unfolding climate disaster’s leading political and economic headquarters is the United State, home to a super-powerful fossil fuel industry with a vast, deeply funded lobbying and public relations apparatus dedicated to turning the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber.

Towards a Green New Deal

If a vicious and moronic creeping fascist like Donald Trump can declare a fake national emergency over a non-existent crisis in order to build a political vanity wall rejected by Congress and 60 percent of the population, perhaps a future decent and democratic government sincerely committed to the common good could declare a national emergency to address the all-too real climate crisis by moving the nation off fossil fuels and on to renewable energy sources while advancing environmentally sustainable practices and standards across economy and society.  A properly crafted Green New Deal would also and necessarily address other and related national emergencies including the crises of financial oligarchy, bad jobs, inequality, poverty, plutocracy, racial inequality, mass incarceration, untruth, inadequate health care, fascism, poor schooling, mental illness, substance abuse, gun violence, militarism-imperialism, gender disparity, spiritual death, and much more.  I plan in a future essay to elaborate on what it is meant by a “properly crafted Green New Deal.”

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PAUL STREET

Paul Street’s latest book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014)

[tonxstark]

The rise of subscription models in 2020? Here is a "operation guide" for the overall game to join the subscription mode

During the past two decades, the overall game industry has only had two business designs, the "try before buying" model that began in 2000 and the "absolve to play" model that emerged in 2010 2010. "Attempt before you get" premiered at the beginning of the 21st century. Big Fish Video games releases a game every day time that can be performed for the initial hour free of charge, allowing players to try it before selecting whether to get the complete game. This model has brought numerous female gamers to the gaming industry, especially older women. In the first 2010s, after download free + in-app purchase games dominated the Asian market, they began to get into the European and American areas. In this mode, the game is truly free, and more than 90% of players will not spend a cent. However, the real reason for free games is to allow the nearly all invested gamers to spend more cash to boost or accelerate their video gaming experience. Numerous top-up players will spend thousands or actually thousands of bucks on their favorite games. After free games, what will be the next model that will disrupt the gaming industry? Based on the development of other industries, subscription could become the next disruptive setting of the overall game industry. Developments inside other industries show that subscriptions could become the disruptive pressure. Amazon, the world's largest store, uses its premium subscription services to secure clients; Salesforce.com, one of the largest businesses in the enterprise software field, uses a subscription design, which puts the established rivals into problems; the world's second largest entertainment company Netflix uses subscriptions The design has gained present industry status; actually Disney is gambling its future on Disney Plus' subscription model. It is a switch inside people's attitudes that contributed to this change. Ten years ago, people would not purchase digital content material. For example, ten years ago, people would not pay for songs, but would buy a Dvd and blu-ray or CD. However now, people's attitudes possess changed. In accordance with Reuters, in the United States, the proportion of people aged 18-24 who purchase digital news has jumped from 4% in 2016 to 18% in 2017. So, are subscriptions equally effective inside the gaming business? First, many video gaming companies already are using subscription models. A post previously published by Google gave some information and functions about subscriptions. According to Google's blog post, the annual growth rate of global sport subscriptions is 70%. Secondly, the membership model has indeed played a role in the gaming industry. Google's post demonstrates game companies that use the subscription design have increased consumer retention by 20%. Finally, subscriptions offset the chance of creating and releasing brand-new games. The overall game joins the subscription service "Operation Guidebook"

Needless to say, the success of the subscription model depends upon the implementation. Just as a huge selection of game companies have failed to achieve success through free games, obtaining users a subscription successfully is equally difficult. Adding registration services to the game demands mastering the next 6 core concepts. 1. Subscription should be related to privileges The largest challenge for game companies is to provide users using what kind of subscription content. Virtual foreign currency? Do not. Effective subscription models provide a service that allows players to acquire privileges. In a casino game like "Legend of Bow and Arrow", it could gain a particular level or energy. The advantages of subscribing can also be special avatars or special in-game routines. In short, the main element is to allow players to obtain a privileged knowledge, not to allow players to acquire virtual currency or premium currency. 2. Keep it simple One of the core concepts of creating a successful product would be to ensure simplicity. In the event that you provide customers with way too many options, you might be overwhelmed and struggling to choose any of them. World of Warcraft has the very easy subscription design that emphasizes the value of long-term contracts without causing an enormous cognitive burden. If players have a variety of subscription options, including registration terms, monthly costs, revenue amounts, etc., they are likely never to choose. Therefore, the main element to subscription would be to make it possible for players to understand the value, choose between several plans, and decide whether to subscribe. 3. Be honest Among the reasons why subscriptions are usually difficult to be universally accepted is that some businesses deceive clients to register for subscriptions, and then it really is difficult to cancel. Preventing clients from leaving behind or deceiving them to subscribe isn't only unethical, but also bad for business development. Tezos One of the basic ideals ??created by subscriptions for companies is the connection with users. Top companies make use of subscriptions to improve their basic company, such as Amazon, Netflix, Spotify along with other large businesses reap the benefits of user subscriptions. So when you add membership content material to the overall game, let worth drive the product rather than deceiving customers never to cancel. 4. Build an ecological environment An effective subscription plan ought to be tied to the game itself. The more you let customers play the overall game, the increased the value of the registration. Battle Pass is usually a good example, players can get reduced experience from subscription. In addition, it creates a very powerful ecological band, and subscribed players can get more rewards for continuous participation in the overall game. 5. The gradual upgrade of registration value The evolution of revenue is another essential aspect in the success of membership plans. In accordance with Google, ��As gamers invest even more in the overall game, be it time, abilities, or some other IAPs, the advantages of subscription increase accordingly.�� Although AFK Arena is not a good example of a casino game that uses subscriptions as a monetization model, its mechanism allows players to improve their income in the game as their VIP level increases. 6. Subscription as an affirmation for large R players VIP reaches the core of almost any game's success. 60% to 90% of most free game revenue comes from the very best 1% or 2% of players. Thus, encouraging players to be VIPs and retaining them should be the focus of the overall game team.

Several product managers will avoid subscription plans because they are worried that when players can subscribe to VIP plans for a fixed amount, this can limit VIP spending inside the game. This concern leads to the first point of subscription design and style, that is privileges, not replacing present purchases. If somebody spends a lot of money on your game, don't make an effort to encourage them to invest another $5 or $10 membership fee every month. Instead, convert the registration into an affirmation of their VIP status. Give them a free subscription, and the goodwill worth will far surpass the short-term earnings produced by forcing VIPs to purchase subscriptions.

research study: Subscription assistance for "Legendary: Game of Heroes" "Legendary: Sport of Heroes" is a card elimination video game posted by N3TWORK Inc. in the usa. Gamers can cultivate their very own monsters and invite them to evolve continuously, thereby increasing the probability of winning the fight. The iOS version of the overall game has a total global income of US$2 million in October 2019, and typically the most popular country may be the United States. With regards to subscription solutions, "Legendary: Game of Heroes" did a great job. . VIP privileges. There exists a store specifically for VIP gamers in the game, where players can buy items that they might otherwise have to perform multiple steps to purchase. Players can shift openly in the overall game without viewing movie ads. After experiencing the game membership, the ball player cannot imagine how exactly to play the game without a registration. . Get content in advance. VIP gamers who subscribe inside a certain time period will get tokens, permitting them to start battling with higher-degree bosses before some other players. . Lifetime rewards. In addition to daily rewards, VIPs may also receive lifetime rewards. Lifetime rewards should be more important than daily rewards. . Increase the worth of in-app buys. Users will acquire loyalty or mileage points for every purchase. The more factors a player gets, the bigger the VIP level, the better the every day and lifetime rewards. . Create predictability for players. Set items that subscribers can do every day, such as for example daily benefits they can expect. This can ultimately provide players with rewards and fortify the above points. . Allow non-clients to furthermore accumulate life time tokens. In "Legendary", non-subscribers have also founded their VIP degree. Higher VIP amounts provide better value; therefore, if they reach a high enough VIP level, it is apparent that they can convert into subscribers in the next step. . VIP unique customer service. Compiled from "Here's How Subscriptions Will Disrupt the Games Industry". (Author: xiaohan) Recommended reading Apple company and Disney are usually stirring up the web video subscription market in the centre East. App Annie predicts that subscription services will grow quickly in 2020. App Annie 2020 5 major developments in the mobile business predict the rise of in-game subscription models. Through the membership subscription model, this company has taken 1 product from the iOS best-selling list in the United States 500 is pushed to the 99th place. The global membership market will exceed 500 billion U.S. dollars in 2023. Subscription services are becoming a fresh mainstream consumption design. Business cooperation Zheng Xusheng | Line�G18558713545 Overseas cooperation Hao Yijun | Series: 18513119881 Long press the picture to scan the code Sign up for the Beluga community

[bigyack-com]

DealBook: ‘This Airplane Is Designed by Clowns’

Good morning. The Labor Department’s job report for December will be released at 8:30 a.m. Eastern — tell us your predictions. (Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.)

Boeing takes heat for embarrassing internal messages

The airplane maker released more than 100 pages of internal messages to Congress yesterday, many of which showed employees mocking federal rules and joking about flaws in the 737 Max. It wasn’t pretty.Some of the messages:• “Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn’t,” one employee said to a colleague in an exchange from 2018, before the first of two deadly 737 Max crashes.• “This airplane is designed by clowns, who are in turn supervised by monkeys,” an employee wrote in an exchange from 2017.• One employee, upon learning that pilots of an earlier 737 model didn’t need flight simulator training for a 737 Max, wrote, “You can be away from an NG for 30 years and still be able to jump into a MAX? LOVE IT!!”“We regret the content of these communications,” Boeing said in a statement, adding that it was apologizing “to the F.A.A., Congress, our airline customers and to the flying public for them.”The revelations aren’t likely to help get the 737 Max flying again anytime soon. Though the Federal Aviation Administration said that the messages didn’t reveal any new safety risks, Boeing will almost certainly face more scrutiny from Congress.More: American and allied officials now believe the 737-800 plane that crashed in Iran on Wednesday was shot down by Iranian forces, probably in error. ____________________________Today’s DealBook Briefing was written by Andrew Ross Sorkin in New York and Michael J. de la Merced in London.____________________________

What CES 2020 tells us about the future

The huge electronics expo in Las Vegas ends today, after hundreds of tech companies and gadget makers unveiled their latest offerings. Many of those will probably flop, but what’s clear is that our lives will become a lot more connected, Brian Chen of the NYT writes.• “Your next car will probably connect to the internet. So will your TV and doorknobs. One day, you may even adopt a robot companion capable of analyzing its environment and reacting to your actions in real time.”• Google and Amazon highlighted the huge growth of their virtual personal assistants, with an Amazon executive saying consumers interact with its Alexa service “billions of times a week.”• Mr. Chen thinks that auto safety technology, like features that monitor drivers’ blind spots, may be the most practical thing to emerge from this year’s expo.

The streaming wars are flooding us with TV

The television industry aired a record number of scripted shows in the U.S. last year, John Koblin of the NYT writes. That’s a lot of programming — and expect that number to keep growing.Roughly 532 shows were broadcast, according to research from the cable network FX. That’s 52 percent more than in 2013, the year that the first season of “House of Cards” debuted on Netflix. (Include reality shows and daytime programming, and the number swells to more than 1,000.)It’s all because of the rise of streaming services. Netflix alone spent $15 billion on original programming last year, while offerings from Apple and Disney introduced yet more shows. HBO and NBC will add to the race when they debut their services this year.Is that a bad thing? John Landgraf, the head of FX (which is owned by Disney), thinks so:• TV programming will become more expensive. (Disney’s “The Mandalorian” cost about $100 million to make, while Apple reportedly expects to spend $150 million per season on “The Morning Show.”)• But most programs probably won’t get enough viewers to be considered successful.“The danger of the internet is that everything becomes junk food,” Mr. Landgraf said.More: Password sharing cost streaming companies about $9.1 billion last year, according to data from the research firm Parks Associates.

Ominous signs in the stock markets’ new highs

The S&P 500 hit a record yesterday. Market conditions look great. But there could be reason to worry, James Mackintosh of the WSJ notes: There’s a lot of red ink on company balance sheets.The S&P closed at 3,274.7, extending the nearly 30 percent rally that it posted last year. Matt Phillips of the NYT credits that winning streak to continuing low interest rates and high consumer confidence.Not even economic concerns like the trade war are frightening investors. “There’s nothing that tells me that we’re at a peak and the market can’t go higher,” Bruce Bittles, the chief investment strategist at Baird, told the NYT.But a lot of companies are running at a loss. Nearly 40 percent of publicly traded American businesses have lost money over the last 12 months, including Tesla and G.E., Mr. Mackintosh of the WSJ writes. That is the highest level since the late 1990s, excluding recessions.Investors should be worried that “their willingness to tolerate losses at companies promising growth has allowed many new businesses to finance losses well beyond what’s justified,” he adds.

What if Harry and Meghan’s royal split were a corporate spinoff?

The announcement by Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, that they plan to step back as senior members of Britain’s royal family has generated tons of headlines. But Jason Karaian of Quartz has fun imagining what the move might have looked like if it were a corporate deal.• “The directors of House of Windsor P.L.C. (formerly House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha A.G.) note recent speculation in the media about a spinoff of its Sussex-based operations. Discussions are at an early stage about the future of the division, which was officially formed in 2018.”• “Traditions are important to the firm but in this fast-changing global economy we acknowledge the need to be nimble. This includes altering our corporate governance when necessary.”• “Greater independence for the group’s Sussex-based operations is in keeping with the approach of other world-leading companies consolidating younger, more speculative units into dedicated divisions.”• “There will be no Q. and A. It has not been a great quarter.”More: How could Harry and Meghan achieve “financial independence?”

Revolving door

Willie Walsh will step down as the C.E.O. of International Airlines Group, the parent of British Airways, in March. He’ll be replaced by Luis Gallego, the C.E.O. of the Spanish airline Iberia.The Managed Funds Association, the big hedge fund trade group, hired Bryan Corbett from the Carlyle Group as its new chief.Citigroup named David Chubak as the head of its U.S. retail banking unit.

The speed read

Deals• Grubhub denied news reports that it was in the process of selling itself or had plans to do so. (Bloomberg)• The retirement services company Voya Financial had reportedly considered selling itself. (FT)• Occidental Petroleum plans to “significantly” cut jobs after completing its $38 billion takeover of Anadarko. (CNBC)• Rushing to take advantage of low borrowing costs, American investment-grade companies have sold more than $61 billion of bonds so far this year, double what they did during the same time last year. (Bloomberg)Politics and policy• The White House yesterday moved to allow major energy and infrastructure projects to proceed without detailed environmental reviews. (NYT)• California may seek to reach agreements with pharmaceutical companies to introduce its own prescription drugs for the state’s 40 million residents. (WSJ)• The Chamber of Commerce appears to be embracing more policy proposals favored by Democratic lawmakers. (Axios)Tech• Hackers forced the currency exchange company Travelex offline and have threatened to sell sensitive consumer data unless they are paid $6 million. (NYT)• The electric scooter company Lime plans to leave over a dozen markets and lay off 14 percent of its employees. (WSJ)• Waste from electronic devices is rapidly becoming a huge problem. (FT)• Mark Zuckerberg has stopped his annual tradition of setting personal challenges for himself. They included wearing a tie every day and learning to hunt and cook. (Facebook)Best of the rest• The Lebanese authorities have ordered Carlos Ghosn not to leave the country. (NYT)• WeWork has drastically slowed its expansion in New York City and London. (Bloomberg)Thanks for reading! We’ll see you next week.We’d love your feedback. Please email thoughts and suggestions to business@nytimes.com. Read the full article

[johnhuber]

Berkshire Meeting Notes – Daily Improvement, Business Evolution, and Investment Strategy

Last week I headed to Omaha to attend Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting. Nowadays, there is less of a reason to attend the meeting in person because it is available to watch online, but I love attending the event for all of the peripheral meetings that occur. It was a great weekend, and I got to connect with a few Saber Capital clients, as well as some good friends that I don’t see very often.

No matter how long you’ve been following Buffett and Munger, there are almost always some valuable learnings to be had at this event, and they usually touch on a topic or two that provokes me to think more deeply about a particular subject.

Here are a few main highlights from the meeting that I thought were worth mentioning:

On Learning and Getting Better

I’ve talked before about the process of continually getting better as an investor. I think investing is in some ways similar to other performance-based disciplines such as athletics or music. Top performers work on getting better each day, and while there isn’t usually a noticeable difference on any given day, stringing together a bunch of days where you are getting incrementally better by even a very small margin leads to a collectively significant improvement over time. As Buffett has pointed out many times, knowledge builds on previous foundations and grows over time, just like compound interest.

Munger has often said that your goal as an investor should be to go to bed a little bit smarter than when you woke up. Along with the idea of focusing on “the work that’s on your desk” (i.e. not looking too far ahead and just keeping focused on the task at hand), I think this goal of daily improvement is one of the most useful and practical lessons that Munger has ever taught us. I’ve tried to build Saber Capital’s business around this idea, keeping a clear schedule each morning to ensure that this objective stays at the top of my priority list.

Over the weekend, this topic of self-improvement came up, as it often does. Munger talked about his most important learning lesson, which he thought was See’s Candies.

I want to go into a brief tangent on some thoughts I have relating to this discussion. I occasionally think about what Buffett and Munger might be investing in if they were starting today. I think it would look a lot different than it did then.

First off, Munger said See’s was his most important learning lesson because it taught Munger and Buffett about the value of owning a great business, specifically one that can produce ever growing levels of cash flow with very little incremental capital requirements. See’s was a cash cow that didn’t need to be fed. And it produced more and more milk each year, still without requiring any “food” (i.e. little to no cash needed to be invested back into the business to grow).

See’s produced $4 million of pretax earnings the year they bought it. They paid $25 million, or somewhere around 12 times earnings after tax. Since that time, the company has sent around $2 billion of pretax cash flow to Berkshire, using just $40 million or so of incremental capital investments. As Buffett said in the 2014 shareholder letter:

“See’s has thus been able to distribute huge sums that have helped Berkshire buy other businesses that, in turn, have themselves produced large distributable profits. (Envision rabbits breeding.) Additionally, through watching See’s in action, I gained a business education about the value of powerful brands that opened my eyes to many other profitable investments.”

What If Buffett Knew What He Knows Now?

Everyone knows by now that See’s was a great business to buy. But the tangent I wanted to briefly take is to consider how the See’s experience likely would have impacted the decisions Buffett previously made. In other words, would it have changed some of his investments, or would it have changed his investing approach had he been able to go back in time, knowing in the 50’s and 60’s what he learned in the 70’s from the See’s investment?

I think the answer to that is undoubtedly yes. And while I’ve always thought that there is somewhat of a misunderstanding* about Buffett’s early investment strategy, it is true that he bought some cigar butts (seemingly cheap stocks of poor businesses). I think the learning experience they had with See’s would have significantly changed some of their major early investments. Buffett almost certainly wouldn’t have started buying Dempster Mill in the 1950’s—a capital intensive windmill and farm equipment company with sub-par returns on equity. Nor would he likely have purchased Hochschild Kohn (the Baltimore department store) in the 1960’s.

*(Note, when I say misunderstanding about Buffett’s early investment style, I mean the following: yes, he bought some cigar butts of mediocre businesses, but even very early on he grasped the power and value of owning a good business—he bought GEICO in 1951, putting 65% of his then-small net worth into the stock as a 21-year old. Also, two of his biggest and most meaningful contributors to his results in the 1960’s, American Express and Disney, were stocks purchased while still running his partnership. Even the incredibly cheap stocks that he bought in the early years of his fund, like Commonwealth Bank or Western Insurance, were still pretty decent businesses with stable earning power and good balance sheets. He certainly bought some laggards like Dempster Mill and even Berkshire Hathaway itself, but those were usually when he felt like he could gain control of the business eventually and reallocate the cash. Even early on, he made most of his money in the stocks of better businesses).

So the point is: I don’t think Buffett and Munger would be buying cigar butts in today’s world if they were starting from scratch, given the knowledge they gained in the 70’s and 80’s from investing in both good and bad businesses.

If they could start over with their current knowledge base, I think Buffett and Munger would be buying small and large cap stocks (and everything in between). I think they’d be turning over rocks just as they did in the early days, but I think they’d place a much greater emphasis on the earning power and longer-term viability of the business.

This Time is Different

This also gets me into a broader point on today’s markets: Things would look a lot different if Buffett and Munger were starting today. Buffett said recently that if he had started a partnership in 2004, he would have been 100% invested in South Korean stocks. Munger said at the Daily Journal Meeting that he’d be focused on looking for opportunities in China if he were starting out today.

Neither of these ideas are recommendations, it just means that they’d be approaching things differently based on the skillsets they’ve developed over the years and the knowledge they’ve accumulated. They would use that experience to capitalize on the most obvious and best available opportunities that are offered in today’s business world.

Capital Light Businesses

Along these lines, Buffett talked about how different businesses are now. He mentioned that business moguls like Carnegie, Mellon, and Rockefeller would be absolutely shocked if they knew how quickly companies could grow today and how little capital would be required to support that growth.

He pointed out that the five largest companies in the market are:

Apple

Google

Microsoft

Amazon

Facebook

With the exception of maybe Amazon, those companies require virtually no capital to grow, and even Amazon, despite spending billions of dollars building out its foundation for growth, has a number of major business lines like its third party seller marketplace and its cloud business that produce extremely high returns on incremental capital investments. Facebook, which was founded just over a decade ago, did $27 billion of revenue that had 45% operating margins last year. In just the last twelve months, the company grew its pretax earnings by $6.2 billion on just $3.7 billion of additional capital investments, including acquisitions (good for a healthy 170% incremental ROIC).

In fact, the business probably would be growing even without that additional capital, and the nature of Facebook, Microsoft, and Google’s main businesses are that they produce huge returns on capital, significant cash flow, and require little to no capex.

All of these businesses got to scale much more quickly than Carnegie’s steel plants, Rockefeller’s oil refineries, or Mellon’s banks. It took decades of toil and significant sums of capital to go around the country and cobble together a network of refineries in the late 19th and early 20th century. It took Zuckerberg just eight years to build a business from scratch that reached a $100 billion valuation, and four more to reach $300 billion. In 2010, Facebook had $1.9 billion in revenue. Last year it did over $12.5 billion in pretax profits. These are businesses that Carnegie and Rockefeller could only have dreamed about.

I’d also add that the great companies of a century ago were confined primarily to their industries. Rockefeller was an oil man. He wouldn’t have even thought about getting into retail, or banking. But companies like Alibaba or Amazon start in retail, and then use their foundations and user bases to expand into businesses such as banking, payments, storage, and even investment management.

Given the value these companies provide and the size of the markets they might enter, these businesses can likely become much larger than the relative size of even the greatest monopolistic giants of last century.

I’m simply using the large-cap tech stocks as an example to illustrate my point (I’m not suggesting that buying mega-caps is solely what Buffett would be doing). I don’t pretend to know what stocks Buffett and Munger would be buying today if they were starting over, but what I do think is relevant to take home is that Buffett and Munger were both very independent-minded in the 1960’s. They did things their own way. They capitalized on the opportunities they had at that time, and I think they’d be doing the same today.

I think the foundation of value—getting more future cash flow for the price paid—will always be the philosophy that works. I also think that investors should use Buffett’s blueprint to form their own independent thoughts about opportunities—both big and small—in today’s business world. There are lots of incredible opportunities, and the one thing that will always stay the same is human nature—Mr. Market will always be moody.

Consumer Shift

Buffett also mentioned Apple, and how his main thesis was observing consumers’ perception of the brand and the stickiness of the software ecosystem. This leads to predictable demand for the iPhone, and other related Apple hardware products.

But he also said that consumer behavior is more difficult to judge than it used to be. I think that this is in part because people aren’t as beholden to consumer brands as much as they used to be. Or, put differently, I think many companies that we think had a brand really just had a distribution advantage that came from being a big incumbent with the largest market share for many years. The high gross margins led to bigger advertising budgets, which further entrenched these market leaders. Kraft used to own its place in the center of the grocery isle. This advantage is eroding, as distribution costs have plummeted. The internet and social media have lowered the cost of getting products to market and reduced the time required to get to scale. They’ve cut out the middleman in many cases, allowing small upstart companies to sell directly to consumers and avoid the typical retail markup.

Is the Product Undervalued?

As I mentioned in my 2016 year-end investor letter, one of the things I try to consider when analyzing a potential investment is whether the company’s product or service is a good deal for customers. If a business has attractive economics but is extracting value from (rather than adding value to) its customers, then I think there are some inherent risks in that model that will eventually come home to roost. This parasitic relationship might lead to above average profitability in the near term, but it also leads to customers who feel exploited, and when a competitor comes in that offers more value to customers (in the form of better products and/or lower prices), these alienated customers will be much more quick to leave.

For example, Costar owns a commercial real estate website called Loopnet, which had enormous embedded pricing power when Costar bought the site. The company understood that the site was essential to commercial real estate brokers, and began raising prices very rapidly. Some brokers I’ve talked to have seen their Loopnet subscription costs rise multiples from where they were just a couple years ago. Just about everyone in that business that I’ve talked to feels that they aren’t getting good value, but they continue to pay because of the monopoly-like position of the website (it’s basically the commercial real estate MLS, and brokers must have access to it to do business in most cases).

This type of position is often viewed as an attractive asset, a moat. But as a business owner, I’d be worried that my customers would quickly jump ship if a competitor came up with an alternative. Contrast that with the experience customers feel at Amazon Prime, which continues to provide more and more value to customers through wider selection, greater convenience, and prices that more often than not can’t be beat. This extreme customer value makes it more and more difficult for a competitor take customers away from Amazon’s platform.

The Most Important Moat

I gave a talk last weekend in Omaha called “The Most Important Moat”, which basically outlined this idea that the best way to build an enduring competitive advantage is to focus on ensuring that the customer feels like the product or service that you’re selling is a good deal.

If not, you will no longer be able to rest on the laurels of barriers to entry, high distribution costs, incumbent advantages like shelf space, bigger advertising budgets, switching costs, or just about any other advantage that you used to enjoy in years past. It’s much easier to start a business, sell directly to consumers and build a product brand using social media. This allows you (and other small like-minded upstart companies) to collectively compete against much larger brands, despite having much lower advertising or distribution resources.

I think the advantages that used to be relied on by big incumbents like Gillette, Kraft, or Kellogg are eroding. Consumers have more options to choose from, better information on products, and receive more value for the price paid.

High margins and consumer brands are still very valuable, but I think the key is determining whether a company’s perceived brand comes from its market share, distribution, or advertising budget, or whether it comes from providing customers with great value. I think the former category will see their brands lose value. The latter category will still face plenty of competition, but I think it’s much harder to dislodge a company with the best value proposition to the end customer.

Bezos said the following:

“The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies. The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it.”

So I think some things to keep in mind regarding Buffett’s comments about the greater difficulty in predicting consumer behavior are the following:

Brands are generally less powerful than they used to be

Distribution and advertising costs are no longer insurmountable barriers to entry (companies can sell directly to consumers on a shoestring ad budget)

Products can scale much faster

Large market share and well-known products don’t necessarily equal a moat

Key questions:

Does the company have a true brand that offers a valuable product?

Or is it a highly profitable incumbent whose high margins are due to an overpriced product and an eroding “shelf space” distribution advantage?

Is the customer getting a good deal when they buy the company’s products or services? I think spending time trying to think about and answer this question will go a long way in helping understand consumer behavior and also help value the business in question.

That wraps up some of my main notes/thoughts on this year’s meeting. I enjoyed meeting some of you in Omaha, both readers and clients of Saber Capital, and hope to see you there next year!

Disclosure: John Huber and Saber Capital Management clients owns shares of AAPL.

John Huber is the portfolio manager of Saber Capital Management, LLC, an investment firm that manages separate accounts for clients. Saber employs a value investing strategy with a primary goal of patiently compounding capital for the long-term.

To read more of John’s writings or to get on Saber Capital’s email distribution list, please visit the Letters and Commentary page on Saber’s website. John can be reached at john@sabercapitalmgt.com.

[ashishjadhavtechnologyforum]

The rise of subscription models in 2020? Here is a "operation guide" for the game to join the subscription mode

In the past two decades, the game industry has only had two business models, the "try before buying" model that began in 2000 and the "free to play" model that emerged in 2010. "Try before you buy" was launched at the beginning of the 21st century. Big Fish Games releases a game every day that can be played for the first hour for free, allowing players to try it before choosing whether to buy the complete game. This model has brought a large number of female players to the gaming industry, especially older women. In the early 2010s, after free download + in-app purchase games dominated the Asian market, they began to enter the European and American regions. In this mode, the game is truly free, and more than 90% of players will not spend a penny. However, the real purpose of free games is to allow the most invested players to spend more money to improve or accelerate their gaming experience. Many top-up players will spend tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on their favorite games. After free games, what will be the next model that will disrupt the gaming industry? According to the development of other industries, subscription may become the next disruptive mode of the game industry. Developments in other industries have shown that subscriptions may become a disruptive force. Amazon, the world's largest retailer, uses its premium subscription service to lock in customers; Salesforce.com, one of the largest companies in the enterprise software field, uses a subscription model, which puts its established competitors into trouble; the world's second largest entertainment company Netflix uses subscriptions The model has gained current industry status; even Disney is betting its future on Disney Plus' subscription model. It is a change in people's attitudes that contributed to this change. Ten years ago, people would not pay for digital content. For example, ten years ago, people would not pay for music, but would buy a DVD or CD. But now, people's attitudes have changed. According to Reuters, in the United States, the proportion of people aged 18-24 who pay for digital news has jumped from 4% in 2016 to 18% in 2017. So, are subscriptions equally effective in the gaming industry? First, many gaming companies are already using subscription models. A blog post previously published by Google gave some data and functions about subscriptions. According to Google's blog post, the annual growth rate of global game subscriptions is 70%. Secondly, the subscription model has indeed played a role in the gaming industry. Google's blog post shows that game companies that use the subscription model have increased user retention by 20%. Finally, subscriptions offset the risk of developing and releasing new games. The game joins the subscription service "Operation Guide" Of course, the success of the subscription model depends on the implementation. Just as hundreds of game companies have failed to achieve success through free games, getting users to subscribe successfully is equally difficult. Adding subscription services to the game requires mastering the following 6 core concepts.

1. Subscription must be related to privileges The biggest challenge for game companies is to provide users with what kind of subscription content. Virtual currency? Do not. Successful subscription models provide a service that allows players to obtain privileges. In a game like "Legend of Bow and Arrow", it can gain a special level or power. The benefits of subscribing can also be special avatars or unique in-game activities. In short, the key is to allow players to obtain a privileged experience, not to allow players to obtain virtual currency or premium currency. 2. Keep it simple One of the core principles of creating a successful product is to ensure simplicity. If you provide customers with too many choices, you may be overwhelmed and unable to choose any of them.

World of Warcraft has a very simple subscription model that emphasizes the value of long-term contracts without causing a huge cognitive burden. If players have many different subscription options, including subscription terms, monthly fees, revenue levels, etc., they are likely not to choose. Therefore, the key to subscription is to make it easy for players to understand the value, choose between two or three plans, and decide whether to subscribe. 3. Be honest One of the reasons why subscriptions are difficult to be universally accepted is that some companies deceive customers to register for subscriptions, and then it is difficult to cancel. Preventing customers from leaving or deceiving them to subscribe is not only unethical, but also bad for business development.

One of the basic values ​​created by subscriptions for businesses is the connection with users. Top companies use subscriptions to improve their basic business, such as Amazon, Netflix, Spotify and other large companies benefit from user subscriptions. So when you add subscription content to the game, let value drive the product instead of deceiving customers not to cancel. 4. Build an ecological environment A successful subscription plan should be tied to the game itself. The longer you let customers play the game, the higher the value of the subscription.

Battle Pass is a good example, players can get a premium experience from subscription. It also creates a very powerful ecological ring, and subscribed players can get more rewards for continuous participation in the game. 5. The gradual upgrade of subscription value The evolution of revenue is another important factor in the success of subscription plans. According to Google, “As players invest more in the game, whether it's time, skills, or other IAPs, the benefits of subscription will increase accordingly.”

Although AFK Arena is not an example of a game that uses subscriptions as a monetization model, its mechanism allows players to increase their income in the game as their VIP level increases. 6. Subscription as an affirmation for big R players VIP is at the core of almost any game's success. 60% to 90% of most free game revenue comes from the top 1% or 2% of players. Therefore, encouraging players to become VIPs and retaining them should be the focus of the game team.

Many product managers will avoid subscription plans because they are worried that if players can subscribe to VIP plans for a fixed amount, this will limit VIP spending in the game. This concern leads to the first point of subscription design, which is privileges, not replacing existing purchases. If someone spends a lot of money on your game, don't try to get them to spend another $5 or $10 subscription fee each month. Instead, turn the subscription into an affirmation of their VIP status. Give them a free subscription, and the goodwill value will far exceed the short-term income generated by forcing VIPs to purchase subscriptions. case study: Subscription service for "Legendary: Game of Heroes" "Legendary: Game of Heroes" is a card elimination game published by N3TWORK Inc. in the United States. Players can cultivate their own monsters and allow them to evolve continuously, thereby increasing the probability of winning the battle. The iOS version of the game has a total global revenue of US$2 million in October 2019, and the most popular country is the United States. In terms of subscription services, "Legendary: Game of Heroes" has done a great job.

. VIP privileges. There is a store specifically for VIP players in the game, where players can purchase items that they would otherwise need to perform multiple steps to purchase. Players can move freely in the game without watching video ads. After experiencing the game subscription, the player cannot imagine how to play the game without a subscription. . Get content in advance. VIP players who subscribe within a certain period of time can get tokens, allowing them to start fighting with higher-level bosses before other players. . Lifetime rewards. In addition to daily rewards, VIPs can also receive lifetime rewards. Lifetime rewards should be more valuable than daily rewards. . Increase the value of in-app purchases. Users will earn loyalty or mileage points for every purchase. The more points a player gets, the higher the VIP level, the better the daily and lifetime rewards. . Create predictability for players. Set things that subscribers can do every day, such as daily rewards they can expect. This can ultimately provide players with rewards and strengthen the above points. . Allow non-subscribers to also accumulate lifetime tokens. In "Legendary", non-subscribers have also established their VIP level. Higher VIP levels provide better value; therefore, when they reach a high enough VIP level, it is clear that they will convert into subscribers in the next step. . VIP exclusive customer service. Compiled from "Here's How Subscriptions Will Disrupt the Games Industry".

[flipfundingstuff]

Building More Customer Loyalty With Your Brand

Modern entrepreneurs face a conundrum: it’s easier than ever to connect with your customers through Facebook, Instagram, email, text, or dozens of other methods. These diverse customer conduits also mean saturation is a problem. You’re clearly not the only business owner with access to your audience, and any message you send will be a single drop in their ocean of daily content.

Making your messages stand out is more crucial than ever. And the best way to make a message stand out is to make it personal. Of course, you can only personalize what you know. Otherwise, it’s like receiving a letter from your grandmother that refers to you as grandchild #5.

Taking it personal

Engaging with customers on a different level than the other messages they’re receiving requires understanding and engagement. And it’s imperative for your business.

“Digital marketing experts estimate that most Americans are exposed to around 4,000 to 10,000 ads each day,” says Forbes.com. “At some point, we start a screening process for what we engage with and start ignoring brands and advertising messages, unless it’s something that we have a personal interest in. Of the brands that you have interacted with today, which ones did the best job of marketing to your needs or interests? Do they have a clear message? How did they connect with you?”

The trick is to stand out from the clutter while staying true to your brand’s voice and personality. It’s hard for customers to engage with a moving target. And they won’t stick around for stunts. You should strive for what some experts refer to as “continuity of customer experience.”

You can’t greet a stranger by name

To create familiarity and trust with your customers, you’ve got to learn more about them than that they’re one of the 40,000 contacts on the latest email list you bought from a shady business you found online.

Take it deeper by leveraging resources like Google Analytics, market research, surveys, and reviews to learn aspects of your customers:

age

gender

location

occupation

income

interests

shopping habits

pain points

Once you’ve gathered these kinds of relevant data, you’ll be better equipped to connect with your customers. This stage is when brand intimacy, sparked by an emotional connection, helps you relay messages that matter.

“We now know more about how the human brain processes information and triggers our behaviors than ever before,” reports Branding Strategy Insider. “For example, we know that the majority of the decisions we make are based on emotion and instinct, not rational thought and measured consideration. It’s been revealed that our decisions are the result of less deliberate, linear, and controlled processes than many of us realize.”

A relationship with benefits

According to the researchers behind Brand Intimacy: A New Paradigm in Marketing, the ways people form relationships with brands aren’t much different from how they form them with humans. Thus, not every customer who has a relationship with a brand is intimate with it. However, every customer who is intimate with a brand definitely feels a strong emotional connection.

Notable brands that have established this level of emotional connection with customers include BMW, Amazon, Apple, Disney, Target, Netflix, and Google. If you’re not currently in an intimate relationship with any of those brands, take a moment to think about what brands you feel close to. What was it about that brand that made you want to connect on a deeper level? What have the benefits of your relationship been?

“In terms of revenue, intimate brands exceeded the Top 10 companies listed on both the Standard & Poor’s 500 and Fortune 500 lists,” reports Delianet.com. “The Top 10 companies from the Brand Intimacy Ranking had a whopping average growth rate of 10.3%. Meanwhile, Standards & Poor companies were growing at 5.7% and Fortune 500 companies at a low 3.2%. Intimate brands also established an upper hand in pricing as well: 33% of people are willing to pay 20% more for an intimate brand, whereas only 6% of people were willing to pay that same 20% increase for non-intimate brands. Intimate brands have been proven to excel over time, have stronger growth revenue, and command price premiums.”

Whom do you trust?

Since relationships with brands are akin to relationships with humans, it’s worth looking at various ways they’re initiated. For example, what would you do if you were single and were contacted out of the blue by an individual who said they wanted to pursue a relationship with you? You’d immediately block that person’s number. It’s highly unlikely you’d ever meet up to learn more about them and ask how they acquired your personal contact information.

Now, imagine an acquaintance from work tried to set you up on a date with someone. Because your relationship with this coworker is surface-level, you probably wouldn’t trust them to match you with someone who complements your unique strengths and would appreciate your quirks. Because random set-ups like this rarely go anywhere, you’d probably decline from the beginning.

Finally, think about what you’d do if a trusted friend told you they had someone special you should meet. This friend knows enough about you to understand what you’re looking for — and they know what kind of person you’d appeal to. Due to your emotional connection with your friend, you might give the green light to meeting up with the person they’re recommending.

Unsurprisingly, it often works this way with brands. If a business sends you an unsolicited and irrelevant email, you’ll most likely delete it. If the guy sitting next to you on the subway says you’ve just gotta try the new TurboTax software, you’re probably not going to rush home to download it.

But if your friend recommends a brand, you’ll probably listen.

“Marketers worldwide would be surprised to learn that 70% of customers trust recommendations from friends but only 10% trust advertising content,” says Delianet.com “What can companies do to obtain and maintain customer attraction? Most decisions are emotion driven, therefore emotive brands that seek to establish profound customer relationships tend to thrive. In addition to nostalgia, fulfillment and enhancement, authenticity is also a stimulant for brand intimacy.”

Just as you consider your closest friends’ recommendation to be authentic, you look for that same authenticity from a brand. That driver has become more important than ever in the crowded market of today’s advertising world. Many in-house attorneys spend their days tracking down unscrupulous competitors who copied the content directly from their website and pasted it on their own. That’s how regurgitated and cloned most brand messaging is.

The one and only

Once you’ve connected with a customer and have a basic understanding of who they are, and your interest seems to be reciprocated, it’s time to set the standard for all your future interactions. You should ask yourself the following questions:

How will I connect with this customer?

How do I want them to feel when I connect with them?

In its purest form, the answer to these questions can be written at the top of a Post-it Note. A prime example of this is Zappos, the footwear giant with more than $1 billion in annual sales. Their simple mantra is “Deliver wow through service.”

“WOW is such a short and simple word, but it encompasses a lot of things,” says an article touting this core value on the company blog. “To WOW, you must differentiate yourself, which means do something a little unconventional and innovative. You must do something that’s above and beyond what’s expected. And whatever you do must have an emotional impact on the receiver. Zappos is not an average company, our service is not average, and we don’t intend for our people to be average. We expect every employee to deliver WOW.”

Regardless of what you want to convey to your customers, take the Zappos approach and focus most on what they’ll take away from the interaction. After all, your intentions are practically obsolete. What matters is the result.

With this in mind, the following ideas may be helpful in your efforts to establish brand intimacy with your customers.

Add something to your customer service: You don’t need to copy the Zappos mantra, but you can learn from it. Customer service is one of the key touchpoints for brand intimacy. Treat them with kindness and empathy, and they’ll come back in droves. 

On the flip side, research shows that a single bad experience will cause the majority of Americans to ditch a planned purchase. Worse yet, it’ll cause 33% of customers to think about leaving the company for good.

To meet your customers’ needs, connect with them wherever they are. These methods include phone calls, emails, social channels, review sites, and forums. Listen first, then do whatever you can to resolve any issues as quickly and fairly as possible.

Harness the power of reviews: Don’t simply view your company reviews as potential fires to put out. They can also be leveraged for positive impact. The average consumer checks out 7 reviews before trusting a business, so your objective should be helping to put a handful of positive reviews in front of them.

Use feedback software to collect kind words and great examples of what your company provides to customers. Most customer feedback services use a brief survey to collect the gems and also bring bad experiences to your attention so you can reach out with an apology and a solution.

Negative reviews are valuable, as they expose weaknesses and breakdowns in your operations. Rather than get defensive, view them as an important way to candidly see your brand through the customer’s’ eyes.

Reward your customers’ loyalty: Take a moment to think about what you’re doing for your loyal customers. They have plenty of options, and if they’re taking the initiative to return to you, that’s worthy of a little celebration.

Perhaps you can offer an exclusive promotion to them. Utilizing your data, you can tailor the deal so it really hits home. Another option would be to send them a gift or resource, such as a product sample, white paper, or software tool.

At the very least, keep your longtime customers in the loop. They should be the first to know about new products, expanded services, or upcoming promotions.

Hold a contest: Everyone loves the opportunity to win a prize, particularly if that prize is customized to their preferences and interests. For this reason, many businesses allow their customers to select their favorite prize from multiple options when they fill out the entry form. Don’t try to be a wizard and predict one prize that’ll somehow appeal to everyone. Let them tell you what gets them excited.

To get the maximum mileage from your contest and to reach as many potential customers as possible, you can even partner with one or more non-competing businesses. This joint effort allows you to show that although you have a unique voice and brand differentiators, you’re not an island. You have connections and are trusted by other brands.

Strengthen the homefront: Your customers are a top priority, but so are the employees in your company. By ensuring you’re taking care of your people, you’ll be setting them up for success to take care of your customers. In the end, it doesn’t matter what mottoes you have written on your walls. What matters is how your people are treating your customers.

There’s no time like the present

It’s important to remember that your customers are the reason you got into business in the first place. Whether you had a product idea you couldn’t wait to share with the world or a service you knew would make a difference, your business’s offerings are essentially conduits to the lives of your customers.

Take 15 minutes today to set goals for how your business can improve its interactions with customers. The burdens of running a business are legitimately immense, but they should never be allowed to obscure the purpose of running a business.

The post Building More Customer Loyalty With Your Brand appeared first on Lendio.

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[feedbaylenny]

Gotta love a snow day if you don’t have anywhere to be. Yes, I have a busy week ahead and things to prepare, but they don’t require going out.

http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/cbs3-radar/

The TV people were right this time. It’s almost 1pm and I’m supposedly getting 3 inches of snow an hour, which should end up as 6-10 inches when it’s done, and the snow didn’t even stick at first.

The storm comes less than a week after this last one, last Friday.

March 2, 2018

Luckily, I have lots on my mind to share with you today.

From ugly weather (to those of you in Florida) to an ugly video: Monday, Britain’s Independent reported, “The National Rifle Association has released a video containing a threatening message to journalists, warning them ‘your time is running out.’”

You see an angry looking and sounding “conservative political activist and TV host Dana Loesch telling “every lying member of the media” that “we are done with your agenda” and they have “had enough.”

She names lots of media hosts and shows. Then, at the end, she ominously says, “Your time is running out. The clock starts now,” and she turns over an hourglass.

Talk about bitter! Thousands of Americans have stood behind the young survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre in Florida that killed 17 of their classmates, as they called on lawmakers to reform the gun rules.

Click here for more details and reaction to the video.

Also Monday, Variety reported President Trump will be talking about gun violence — with leaders of the video game industry!

According to the Entertainment Software Association, which represents major video game makers:

“Video games are enjoyed around the world and numerous authorities and reputable scientific studies have found no connection between games and real-life violence.” … “Like all Americans, we are deeply concerned about the level of gun violence in the United States. Video games are plainly not the issue: entertainment is distributed and consumed globally, but the U.S. has an exponentially higher level of gun violence than any other nation.”

But a group spokesman says they’ll be there anyway.

The entertainment magazine reports after the Parkland massacre, the President said,

“I’m hearing more and more people say the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts.”

The ESA — which operates a voluntary ratings system — said the White House meeting

“will provide the opportunity to have a fact-based conversation about video game ratings, our industry’s commitment to parents, and the tools we provide to make informed entertainment choices,”

but their titles don’t contribute to real-life mayhem.

In 2011, the Supreme Court struck down a California law to restrict minors’ access to video games, ruling it’s protected by the First Amendment.

I’m excited about something else. It’ll help you watch out for hidden agendas in news, or media that knowingly publish falsehoods or propaganda.

The Nieman Journalism Lab announced a start-up initiative called NewsGuard that’ll fight fake news by rating more than 7,500 news sources. NewsGuard says it plans to hire dozens of people with journalism backgrounds and have them

“research online news brands to help readers and viewers know which ones are trying to do legitimate journalism — and which aren’t.”

The ratings will be like a traffic light. A real newspaper publishing good content will get green. A fake news site will get a red. Then, according to Nieman,

“A site that’s not putting out deliberately fake news, but is overwhelmingly influenced in its coverage by a funder that it’s not eager to disclose? Maybe a yellow.”

And the ratings — called “nutrition labels” – will come with “a 200- to 300-word write-up on each source’s funding, its coverage, its potential special interests, and how it fits in with the rest of the news” world since the founders acknowledge not all of the sites in a given color category are equal.

I can’t wait for this to start. The folks behind NewsGuard are Steven Brill (founder of The American Lawyer and Court TV) and L. Gordon Crovitz (former publisher of The Wall Street Journal).

Brill told CNN “algorithms aren’t cutting it, so real-life reviewers are needed to judge reliability.”

  They say their “goal is to give everyone the information they need to be better informed about which news sources they can rely on — or can’t rely on.”

Analysts will work in pairs. They may not settle on a rating if they feel they don’t have enough information to be confident, or have editors weigh in if the analysts disagree.

Plus, “The company will also have ‘a 27-7 ‘SWAT team’ that responds to breaking news and news items that are suddenly trending.” It plans to stay in business by licensing “NewsGuard’s encyclopedia of news sources to social media platforms and search engines” – in other words, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter, which could leave out the reds or use them with a warning – and offering advertising for businesses that “want to be spared any embarrassment that comes from advertising on deliberately fake sites.”

Brill said the tech companies will pay because, “We’re asking them to pay a fraction of what they pay their P.R. people and their lobbyists to talk about the problem.”

Good luck, guys!

Now, to Rupert Murdoch’s chutzpah and greediness. In January, he called for Facebook to pay for the content his companies – 21st Century Fox and News Corp. – publish on the site, while it’s Mark Zuckerberg’s company that really does him a favor by distributing the stuff! (You can decide how much the stuff is worth until NewsGuard kicks off.)

Now, the U.K.’s The Register is reporting Facebook “abandoned its ‘fix’ for news after publishers complained about a drop in traffic” and that’ll mean more clickbait for the rest of us.

Facebook had added an Explore tab in October, to show us more from friends and family on our News Feeds, and remove professional publishers.

The Register described a few examples:

“Clickbait-focused publishers such as Buzzfeed had benefited enormously from being promoted on Facebook – and owed much of their success to lightweight ‘shareable content.’ But after the changes, traffic dropped sharply. Facebook rushed to assure publishers it was just a test. It has now formally abandoned the experiment, counting “feel-good news and service content” publisher LittleThings among the casualties.”

On Feb. 28, the U.K.’s Business Insider reported once flourishing women-focused digital publisher LittleThings closed down, blaming Facebook’s huge algorithm tweak.

The Register explained Facebook has “come under fire” since the 2016 Presidential election. First, the News Feed was “hand-curated by low-paid graduates” but “accused of political bias.” Then it replaced the people “with an algorithm that valued ‘engagement’” but a “low bar for inclusion” exposed more “inflammatory and bogus material.”

It also quoted former senior Facebook exec Antonio Garcia Martinez, who explained how viral content was given a premium value.

“Rather than simply reward that ad position to the highest bidder, though, Facebook uses a complex model that considers both the dollar value of each bid as well as how good a piece of clickbait (or view-bait, or comment-bait) the corresponding ad is,” Martinez said. “If Facebook’s model thinks your ad is 10 times more likely to engage a user than another company’s ad, then your effective bid at auction is considered 10 times higher than a company willing to pay the same dollar amount.”

And Donald Trump’s campaign – which spent very little money – was playing by Facebook’s rules since “rural targets were cheaper to reach than urbanites, and Trump wanted to reach them, so Facebook ad spending proved to be very good value.”

Bottom line, according to The Register:

“The results of Facebook abandoning this particular experiment is that clickbait-hungry publishers will continue to rely on the platform for exposure, rather than building their own brands, and Facebook will rely on clickbait-y free content to keep people on the site. It’s a marriage of the desperate.”

That’s not what I wanted to read.

I suggest Zuckerberg suspend all Fox and News Corp. accounts from Facebook for a week. Every newspaper, TV station, news anchor, etc. That should show ‘em!

Meanwhile, Miami’s CNN’s Jeff Zucker accused Facebook and Google of having a duopoly or monopoly on money from digital content, and wants regulators to look into the two companies.

Keep in mind, CNN was a monopoly on 24-hour cable news from June 1, 1980 to 1996 when MSNBC started on July 15, and Fox News Channel went on the air on Oct. 7. (That’s except for when ABC/Westinghouse’s Satellite News Channel competed from June 21, 1982 until Oct. 27, 1983, and CNN founder Ted Turner bought it.)

Sounds like a sore loser. His ratings stink.

Late last month, he tried to come across as a spokesperson trying to protect good journalism when The Hollywood Reporter quoted him as saying,

“Everyone is looking at whether these combinations of AT&T and Time Warner (his own company, which AT&T wants to buy for $85 billion, and may put his own job in jeopardy -Lenny) or Fox and Disney pass government approval and muster, the fact is nobody for some reason is looking at the monopolies that are Google and Facebook. … That’s where the government should be looking, and helping to make sure everyone else survives. I think that’s probably the biggest issue facing the growth of journalism in the years ahead.”

Government “helping to make sure everyone else survives” sounds a whole lot like President Obama bailing out the U.S. banking and auto industries during the Great Recession. It was probably the best thing he did as President. Philosophically, maybe he shouldn’t have, but nobody can deny it worked and saved jobs.

But the banking and auto industries are not journalism. They’re not protected by the First Amendment. And intelligent people will turn to quality news, even if it’s hard to find, and that has already become harder and harder for years.

Advice for Zucker: Do a better job on TV. In contrast to President Obama, explain why you hired so many digital staffers a year ago, only to lay off roughly 50 of them last month – and why you shouldn’t be one to go.

Vanity Fair reports, “Several high profile digital initiatives are being scaled back.” Media analyst Jeffrey McCall told Fox News the layoffs “seem to suggest that CNN may have outkicked its coverage” and Zucker wanted his digital group to “grow too quickly” before having a “comprehensive plan” in place. Also, “It does seem odd that these cuts are apparently targeted for the digital side at this time, when most strategists seem to think that’s an area for potential growth,” McCall said.

And the kicker (rather than “kick ass”), according to the Fox article,

“Last month, YouTube star Casey Neistat — hired by Zucker on the recommendation of his teenage son — abruptly walked away from CNN less than two years after CNN reportedly paid more than $20 million for his video-sharing startup Beme.”

Time Warner is a big company. It owned AOL – one of the early pioneers of the Internet – until about the time you were hired. Why didn’t TW compete? Or did it, and free enterprise sent the experiment to wherever those 50 laid off digital staffers are?

According to TV Newser, the Justice Department sued to block the AT&T-Time Warner deal back in November, and the antitrust trial is set to begin March 19.

Zucker, get more people to your website and have your digital salespeople do a better job, you sore loser, or you’ll be out of a job!

Back to 21st Century Fox’s Murdoch. He got a black eye about a week ago when Philadelphia-based Comcast (the cable company that also owns competitor NBC) topped his company’s offer to buy the 61 percent of Sky PLC it didn’t already own. That could halt Fox’s attempt to consolidate ownership of the British broadcaster. It has owned 39 percent of Sky for years.

Today on https://corporate.comcast.com/, obviously important to the company!

  But even more importantly, Sky is supposed to be one of many assets Fox plans to turn around and sell to Disney (owner of ABC) — while keeping only its American broadcast network, TV stations (you know by now Fox doesn’t bother list them on its Stations Group website) and plans to buy more, the Fox News Channel and the Fox Business Network — in a separate $52 billion follow-up deal.

But Fox was cheap.

Reuters reports Comcast offered £12.50 per share ($31 billion), significantly higher (more than 16 percent) than Fox’s £10.75 per share. (Yes, I know how cheap Fox is. I worked for them. The one exception is the NFL.) Sky already agreed to be sold to Fox, but the British government delayed the takeover because it’s concerned about Rupert Murdoch’s influence. In 2011, he closed the News of the World after its journalists admitted hacking phones to get scoops, but he still owns The Sun and Times newspapers.

Fox promised to keep Sky News fully independent for ten years, but faces skepticism across the pond. And with a ten-year promise, I don’t understand how it could be sold to Disney.

Reuters reports Sky’s shares jumped more than 20 percent, while shares of Comcast, Fox and Disney all fell. So if the Sky-to-Fox first part doesn’t happen, investors may expect a bidding war.

You’ll remember in December, Comcast bid $60 billion for Fox’s assets – “substantially more” than Disney – maybe even $10 billion more, according to Philly.com. But Disney’s bid beat Comcast’s. The Wall Street Journal reported Murdoch “was concerned that a Comcast deal would be opposed by U.S. regulators and instead opted for the lower Disney offer.” The deal still needs approval from the Justice Department.

The Hollywood Reporter says Comcast said at the time:

“When a set of assets like 21st Century Fox’s becomes available, it’s our responsibility to evaluate if there’s a strategic fit that could benefit our company and our shareholders. … That’s what we tried to do, and we are no longer engaged in the review of those assets. We never got the level of engagement needed to make a definitive offer.”

More merger news: Broadcasting & Cable reports eight of the 50 states’ attorneys general came out against the Sinclair–Tribune merger. They told the Federal Communications Commission “it does not have the authority to raise the 39 percent national audience reach cap for TV station groups, that it does have the authority to eliminate the UHF discount” – the old rule that discounts the number of viewers UHF stations reach by half, because they were weaker and harder to watch years ago before modern technology like cable, computers, etc. – and that it should eliminate the discount.

That UHF discount was gone until FCC chairman Ajit Pai – a President Trump appointee under investigation for improperly pushing for rule changes to benefit Sinclair Broadcasting in its attempt to acquire Tribune Media. Now it’s back. Critics say Sinclair has forced local stations to provide favorable coverage to Republican candidates for years.

Ajit Pai (Wikipedia)

B&C claims Pai is “saying the previous commission should have considered the cap and the discount together, which it is now doing.”

The attorneys general are from Illinois (home to Tribune), Pennsylvania, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, California and Virginia.

They – according to B&C – argue “getting rid of the cap would threaten diversity, competition, and localism, and cites Sinclair Broadcasting, whose Tribune deal would benefit from lifting or eliminating the limit, pointing out that it distributes news stories that must run in its newscasts.”

In November, The Baltimore Sun reported Maryland’s attorney general opposed the takeover because “the combination would decrease consumer choices and diversity in the media marketplace.” Sinclair is based in Maryland.

According to The Sun, Sinclair claims “the merger would allow the new company to better serve local viewers with expanded local coverage, better facilities and more programming, delivered in part by operational efficiencies.”

The company announced it would sell several stations to stay under a new cap, but the deals it reached would let it continue to control the New York and Chicago stations it sells, so those big cities won’t count. (Is there ANYBODY who thinks that’s OK?)

According to Variety, Sinclair will sell WPIX-New York for a measly $15 million to Cunningham Broadcasting. More than 90 percent of that company’s stock is controlled by trusts owned by the estate of Carolyn Smith, the late wife of Sinclair founder Julian Smith and mother of Sinclair chairman David Smith. So the Smith children own it. Talk about a shell corporation! Cunningham owns 20 stations but at least 14 of them are run by Sinclair!

And it would sell WGN-TV Chicago for just $60 million to Steven B. Fader, chairman of Baltimore-based Atlantic Capital Group and business partner of David Smith in Atlantic Automotive Corp.

Those stations are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe a half-billion.

On top of that, Variety says,

“Sinclair would not only continue to operate the stations and receive the lion’s share of their revenue, but the sale agreement with both buyers gives Sinclair an option to buy the stations back within eight years. That’s seen as a marker for the company to bide its time in the hopes that the FCC relaxes its station ownership restrictions in the near future.”

The $3.9 billion deal – if it goes through – would make the nation’s largest television broadcast company even larger. Sinclair is already largest with 191 stations, while Tribune brings another 42 stations before divestitures. The post-merger reach would be 72 percent of U.S. homes. (Does that include the huge markets of New York and Chicago?)

This is something I didn’t consider in my last blog, about the possibility Fox buys Miami’s CW affiliate WSFL due to the merger, even though it doesn’t produce news, and gives up strong affiliate WSVN – simply to own a Miami station since Miami has an NFL team, the Dolphins. TVNewsCheck‘s editor Harry Jessell reported, “Fox has one other obvious option in Miami. It could buy ABC affiliate WPLG.” Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway bought it from Graham Media (the former Post-Newsweek) in 2014, and it’s Buffett’s only station.

I’m sure Buffett makes money but he has no vertical integration. Graham was supposed to help run the station after the sale, and it still has a Graham station look. So does its website. Also, Buffett is not the type to get attached (except maybe to Omaha) and would be willing to cash out of the price is right.

If he sells WPLG to Fox, then it makes sense ABC would probably call WSVN. Makes the most sense by far, but I wouldn’t swear on anything. In 1988, CBS seemingly surprised everyone by buying the former WCIX instead of affiliating with WSVN.

Jessell also reported he spoke to Ansin who said Fox hasn’t mentioned anything about “moving into the market and no expression of interest in WSVN.”

I also want to point out another example of a TV network not renewing a local TV station’s affiliation because it competed for viewers in part of a city where the network owned its own station. The last blog mentioned NBC getting rid of WMGM in Atlantic City because of its Philadelphia station, WCAU, and how ABC was much nicer years earlier when it paid the owner of KNTV in San Jose to leave the network because it owned KGO-TV in San Francisco. (WMGM shut down its news department.)

Since then, I remembered NBC dropped WHAG (now WDVM) in Hagerstown, Md., in the middle of 2016 because of Washington, DC’s WRC. Since then, the independent station really became competition, expanding its coverage area by 1.2 million households, also serving Chambersburg, Pa., Martinsburg, W.V. and Winchester, Va.

Also, I learned NBC dropped KENV-DT in Elko, Nev., which served a lot of the Nevada side of the Salt Lake City market. It aired its own news, but was run out of Sinclair NBC affiliate KRNV in Reno. That goliath Sinclair also owns three stations in Salt Lake City, but not the NBC affiliate. KENV is actually owned by Cunningham Broadcasting, and it shut down its news department.

And then I remembered something similar in the Tri-Cities of TN/VA, where I used to work. ABC dropped affiliate WKPT, the only TV station owned by Holston Valley Broadcasting. Yes, the station was weak. But no, there weren’t any other local stations that carried news. And no, ABC couldn’t get one of the two that did to change over to ABC. Instead, it made a deal to put ABC on the CBS affiliate’s subchannel! That shows it pays to be big and powerful (in contrast to what happened at Ed Ansin’s two stations in Miami and Boston), and that networks have a lot more possibilities for affiliates when it comes to subchannels. It’s not a good idea to get on their bad side. WKPT dropped local news and I showed you the unbelievable farewell to the main anchor just before that happened!

And Jessell also wrote he’s hearing “Fox is once again pushing the idea that it should represent its affiliates in all retrans negotiation.” That means instead of each station demanding money from cable and satellite companies to carry them, Fox would do the work for them all and send each station its share. It would carry the power of nearly 200 stations, and those stations won’t have to bother negotiating. Of course, Fox would also carry power over the stations, and the network’s opinion is its programming (sports) makes the stations worth more and will take its share. Plus, somebody has to pay for Thursday Night Football!

For me, it was nice peeking out the window and watching the snowstorm as I wrote, but like this blog, and certain stations’ newscasts, it appears to be over.

http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/cbs3-radar/

By the way, you’re not alone. This blog site reached more than 10,500 views today! Please, if you like what you read, subscribe with either your email address or WordPress account, and you’ll get an email whenever I publish.

Flakes and facts, lots on my mind Gotta love a snow day if you don’t have anywhere to be. Yes, I have a busy week ahead and things to prepare, but they don’t require going out.

[tortuga-aak]

We talked to Morgan Stanley's head of media research about Netflix, Disney, and cord-cutting (MS, NFLX)

Morgan Stanley

When Ben Swinburne joined Morgan Stanley’s equity research team in 1999, companies like Netflix, Amazon, Facebook and Google were in their infancy, if they existed at all.

Now, 18 years later, they're some of the most highly valued equities on stock markets.

We spoke with Swinburne, now a managing director and head of media research at the bank, about how cord-cutting and the rise of streaming are affecting all companies, from legacy cable providers like Altice to movie studios like Disney.

Here's what Swinburne says to expect this earnings season from Netflix, Disney, Pandora, and the other 29 companies he covers.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Graham Rapier: What's on your radar as we approach earnings season?

Ben Swinburne: We're seeing an acceleration in consumer adoption of over-the-top content. That's showing up in a lot of different places. We're seeing significant growth in network usage, both wireless and wired, which is obviously helping the cable industry and leading the charge in terms of taking share in broadband business. We think it will also help drive value for DISH's stock because Dish owns a unique portfolio of spectrum assets.

And then on the content side, there are clearly businesses benefiting from that shift, Netflix being the most obvious. But there are other companies who either own unique intellectual property, like MSG, who own the Knicks and Rangers, where we're seeing the value of that unique IP grow in a market where you have more and more money funneling into over-the-top and trying to reach consumers.

Even on the traditional network side, there are businesses that clearly have some challenges but have really exciting opportunities in that shift. One of those names we tend to talk about is Lionsgate, which owns Starz. Starz and its fellow premium network, like HBO and Showtime, they've all typically always been sold at the top end of a pay-TV package that can run $80 to $120 per month. They're now able to reach the consumer and broadband-only homes in a way that they weren't before, so that's quite exciting. There are traditional companies that have easier and more challenging tidbits toward this skinnier bundle and OTT world that we're clearly moving toward even faster this year.

Rapier: You mentioned Netflix specifically. What will you be watching in its earnings report next week?

Swinburne: Obviously they're going to report subscriber results and guide to the fourth quarter, so that'll be a big focus. Longer term, we really believe the company has significant profit potential, and they're just starting to generate earnings today. We believe there's a path to significant margin for this business. The cost structure is largely fixed, and what I mean by that is there's no relationship really between how many customers they have, how much revenue they generate, and how much they're spending, particularly on content. To the extent that they can drive pricing or customer growth that will translate into greater and greater margin over time. So the fact that they've introduced some new price increases recently tells you that their path toward profitability is improving and accelerating more than the market has previously realized.

Rapier: Most of Netflix's growth in recent quarters has come from abroad while the US subscriber growth has decelerated. How do you see this playing out?

Swinburne: The US market is obviously the one where they've got furthest along in terms of penetration, but they've done really well in international markets as well, so I think the international opportunity is certainly significant. On the US side, there are 80 million paid TV households in the United States and a roughly similar number of broadband homes, so there is certainly room for Netflix to grow.

There are 80 million paid TV households in the United States and a roughly similar number of broadband homes, so there is certainly more room for Netflix to grow.

What I think Netflix is doing around distribution is quite smart. They have an agreement with T-Mobile, for example. They have an agreement with Comcast on the X1. So when you look at 2 hours or more of viewing a day in a Netflix home, that level of engagement would suggest this can be a fairly widely adopted, if not mass market product, in the United States.

What they've proved is that the model can be replicated in other markets. I'm not sure they'll get to US penetration and US profits in every market — there are markets that culturally don't watch as much television as we do and don't spend as much money as we do. I'm not sure that's going to dramatically change, but Netflix may be serving these markets in a way they haven't been served before from a product perspective.

The history would tell you that the company, if given time, can ramp in almost any kind of market. It's probably intuitive that a market with a relatively developed economy like the US and the UK, and certainly English language with a strong technology adoption curve, strong broadband networks, would be a successful one for Netflix.

Then you look at a market like Brazil — obviously an emerging market, with a much different income per capita, a much weaker broadband-network structure than what you typically see elsewhere, and the product has scaled to profitability and significant penetration rates that should give people confidence that they can scale in other kinds of markets.

Netflix

Rapier: Will competing platforms eat into Netflix's potential market? Will they be successful on their own?

Swinburne: Over time you'll see more direct-to-consumer strategies come out of traditional TV businesses that have been wholesaled. You'll see studios — who also compete with Netflix — be very careful in licensing to Netflix. What Netflix has proven out so far is they have a nice strategy to hedge that risk.

For one, they've vertically integrated and are producing a lot of their new programming themselves. That also includes hiring showrunners who are exclusive to Netflix, like the Shonda Rhimes deal that was announced recently. They're attracting talent to their platform, and between their checkbook size and their global scale and subscribers, it's a unique place to go make TV shows and movies for.

The other piece is that when most traditional television studios make a show or produce a film, there are equity participants in those assets. Specific producers or directors may own equity in that show, and it's very important that that talent is happy with how the product is monetized and distributed. So if Netflix is the best place, financially and otherwise, for that show to end up, that's what will happen more often than not.

Rapier: What about Disney? Can its standalone service compete? What are you looking for in Disney's earnings on November 9?

Swinburne: On this next earnings call we'll get greater clarity on the near-term impact to earnings from this shift toward over-the-top. The biggest dilution in 2018 will probably come from their BAM tech acquisition, which closed in September. You'll start to see some licensing revenue go away because they will be pulling products back for themselves. We'll get a little more clarity on the impact of all that on the 2018 financials when they report. That obviously will be a big focus for people.

Bigger picture, though, what we have seen in the past several years is that there's tremendous demand for over-the-top content. It's not just Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu. We've seen lots of other services, traditional services like Starz or CBS All-Access, but also niche services like Japanese anime from Crunchyroll scale to 1 million-plus subscribers relatively quickly in a market that's very early.

Then we have these virtual MVPDs [multichannel video programming distributors], whether it's YouTube TV or Sling, that we think are going to reach 4 million subscribers by the end of this year. People are adopting and watching more than ever. When you think about Disney's brands — Disney, Pixar, Star Wars, Marvel — they've got a better chance than probably any other existing content and media company to take advantage of all this.

Now, that will take time, and it will take some initial investment, but we think particularly on the kids side and how important OTT is to kids viewing and families, there's a huge opportunity for them globally in a direct-to-consumer Disney environment. That's different for ESPN, but certainly for the Disney side of the house, the outlook long term is quite bullish.

Rapier: What's different with ESPN? What will you be watching for in that business segment?

Swinburne: Our eyes are all wide open. ESPN has probably benefited more than any other business in the existing bundle, from a profit perspective. They are facing a market where skinny bundles are the future, so they have to figure out a way to run their business in that environment. The good news there is that they are aware of these challenges. They are moving to an over-the-top product in 2018 that will give them a lot of insight into how sports can work — or not — in an OTT environment, which will inform them quite a bit in how they think about bidding for sports rights in three or four years, when the NFL, baseball, and other big sports deals are up.

The last piece would be that they just had a very successful renewal with Altice, the first distributor renewal in an upcoming cycle and very important to driving the earnings for that particular business in Disney going forward. I think investors should take some confidence out of the Altice renewal that the Disney portfolio of networks — which is not just ESPN but also ABC, Disney Channel — remain incredibly important assets in a competitive cable world.

Rapier: What's going on in the cable industry? Is there any upside potential in those service providers?

Swinburne: Absolutely. Whether you're talking about a Disney or Lionsgate, they certainly have value in this new ecosystem. Their content is being consumed at generally higher levels than before and there's a clear path at least for some of these businesses to build new profit pools in an OTT environment.

On the cable-specific side, Comcast and Charter are two stocks we like. The fact that they are cable businesses is almost a misnomer today. They're really ISPs.

The fact that they are cable businesses is almost a misnomer today. They're really ISPs.

Every cable operator has more broadband customers than video customers today. The earnings contribution from broadband is growing rapidly, while the earnings contribution from video is declining. Their exposure to television and cord-cutting is probably a lot lower than people realize. You'll see the number of devices people have in the home, the data they're consuming, has been growing 30%, 40%, 50% year-on-year, a trend that's going to continue. That really plays to the cable industry's strengths.

Rapier: Is there any competition to these incumbent service providers? Is Google Fiber or something like that even on their radar?

Swinburne: They really have a unique product position in the marketplace; they've got the best mousetrap. The cable plant is the most flexible plant in adding capacity inexpensively, where they compete with twisted pair, DSL, they offer much faster speeds. It's incredibly expensive to build a scaled fiber business across the United States. Google Fiber has essentially stopped adding any new footprint.

Rapier: What haven't we talked about that's on your radar?

Swinburne: We're quite bullish on the music business. There are not a lot of ways to play that in the public markets today. We have an overweight on Pandora; we think they are in a position to disrupt and take share from the traditional radio market from an advertising perspective. That's a part of media that, after 15 years of declines in spending, has really started to take off with growth in subscription streaming. We think it's a business that's going to grow rapidly for a long time.

NOW WATCH: Now that Apple has unveiled iPhone X, should you dump the stock?

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[takebackthedream]

Land Taken From Freed Slave's Descendants for Amazon Data Center? by Richard Eskow

This is a story about property: real and imagined, legitimate and illegitimate. It’s a story about who gets to decide who can own what, and whom.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

It’s a story of reality, both physical and virtual. It’s a story that begins with humans in chains, moves through Disney’s desire to make a theme park out of our most painful history, and ends with the descendants of slaves dispossessed by a company owned by one of the richest people in the world, a company named for a river.

That river runs through the churning electrical heart of the American internet.

It’s also the story of eminent domain gone wrong. We live in a nation that seizes the property of working people while helping the wealthiest among us to carry out some of the greatest property grabs in history.

The moral of the story is this: we need to radically rethink our approach to property rights.

The Virginia Turnpike

The state considered Livinia Blackburn Johnson another human being’s property when she was born into slavery, two years before the end of the Civil War.

The Civil Rights Act of 1866 gave freed slaves like Johnson the ability to own property. In 1899, under the provisions of that law, Livinia Johnson purchased a plot of land along Carver Road in what eventually became the town of Haymarket, Virginia.

Now, the Dominion of Virginia is seizing the land Johnson purchased, in order to build an Amazon data center. Her descendants have lived in Haymarket for the last 118 years. They are required by law to sell their land to Dominion Virginia Power, which will use it to build towers that will bring power to Amazon’s facility.

The area has been threatened by the march of progress before. The Disney Corporation bought up land around Haymarket in the 1990s, in order to build a Civil War theme park, but objections put an end to their plans. At the time, author William Styron wrote in a New York Times op-ed:

I have doubts whether the technical wizardry that so entrances children and grown-ups at other Disney parks can do anything but mock a theme as momentous as slavery. To present even the most squalid sights would be to cheaply romanticize suffering.

Disney’s project was blocked, and a developer bought up the land it had purchased, building high-end homes for a subdivision he called Somerset Crossing.

Here, where stagecoaches once stopped to change horses on a turnpike established in 1812, where the railroad arrived in 1852 and warring armies passed by a few years later, its new five-bedroom McMansions are described without any apparent sense of irony as “colonial.”

The well-to-do residents there managed to block any eminent domain efforts on their property. So Amazon’s agents turned their sights to Haymarket, where Livinia Blackburn Johnson’s descendants presumably have less political pull.

Amazon Highways

A turnpike, according to Merriam-Webster, is a “road (such as an expressway) for the use of which tolls are collected.” There’s a through-line between the horse-drawn turnpikes that crisscrossed Northern Virginia in the 1800s and the more than a hundred data centers dotting its landscape today.

Virginia’s data centers carry most of the world’s internet traffic – as much as 70 percent, according to local officials. An unknown but substantial share of that traffic flows through the electronic highways in Amazon’s data centers.

Twenty years have passed since Disney’s failed bid for Haymarket. Disney’s animatronic robots and 3D simulations were state-of-the-art in 1996, when the internet was still in its infancy. Today’s web brings artificial realities into almost every home – and almost every pocket – in the form of words, images, GIFs, videos, and sound.

It takes lots of physical energy to churn all that data. Internet promoters speak of the “cloud,” as if these transactions took place in some ephemeral and immaterial dimension. But to invert the words of William Blake, data centers are a “cloud inside a fiend.” Servers need electricity to cool the space around them and keep the data engines moving.

The digital universe runs roughshod over the environment, from the toxic byproducts of chip manufacture to the destruction and disease caused by discarded equipment.

Dominion Virginia Power, which received permission from Virginia to seize the Johnson land, says each data center uses enough electricity to light 5,000 homes. To power Amazon’s data center, they’ll need to install 100-foot tall towers carrying 230,000 volts of power on the Haymarket land.

The Power and the Powerful

In these data centers, which are sometimes called server farms, the primary crop is you: your searches, clicks, likes, purchases, movements, habits, and by inference, even your thoughts.

If corporations are mining our lives through “data refineries,” Northern Virginia is its Gulf of Mexico. Computer scientist and author Jaron Lanier writes, “All the computers that crunch ‘big data’ are physically similar. They are placed in obscure sites where they can radiate heat into the environment, and they are guarded like oil fields.”

Lanier argues that individuals should receive “micropayments” for the use of their own data, but that’s not how today’s internet works. Instead, “ordinary people” get the immaterial benefits of an informal economy, while the material wealth flows to the top. As Lanier writes:

“Social media sharers can make all the noise they want, but they forfeit the real wealth and clout needed to be politically powerful. Real wealth and clout instead concentrate ever more on the shrinking island occupied by elites who run the most powerful computers.”

That “wealth and clout” fuels the political and economic processes that are dispossessing these ancestors of slaves. The need to serve Amazon’s profit-making turnpike is usurping the property rights Livinia Johnson’s descendants have enjoyed for more than a century.

Amazon itself is no respecter of community or shared property. It maintained the tax breaks that fueled its initial growth by arm-twisting politicians at the state and local level, robbing government treasuries of the funds needed to preserve and expand our public wealth.

Amazon has mistreated warehouse workers, exposing them to 100-degree temperatures and grueling working conditions. Electronic devices track their every move and force them to keep up a brisk pace or face the consequences.

Now, thanks to Virginia’s use of eminent domain, Amazon’s electronic turnpike is about to grow even bigger. How will Big Data use its new processing power?

As Nathan Newman points out in a white paper, the industry’s practices include predatory individualized pricing, invasion of privacy, the marketing of subprime mortgages, and the promotion of unethical scams.

Supreme Lordship

The way our country thinks about ownership is, in a word, strange. You do not own your own data, because you have given it away to corporations like Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google – sometimes referred to collectively by the acronym “FANG.”

The federal government doesn’t own the valuable drug patents whose research it paid for, because it gave them away to corporations. Most of us don’t own our homes or cars, because we have mortgaged them to fundamentally dishonest financial institutions.

All of these property rights – FANG’s ownership of your data, Big Pharma’s exclusive rights to government-financed patents, Wall Street’s ownership of mortgages and pink slips – exist because we as a nation choose to enforce them.

The term “eminent domain” comes from the Latin phrase dominium eminens, which means “supreme lordship.” Sometimes homes must be taken through eminent domain in order to serve the public interest, for dams to protect the land and provide electricity, or for new roadways to open a city.

But eminent domain is also used to benefit corporations like Amazon. The rationale is that communities need economic development just as much as they need highways and waterways, because it brings jobs and economic growth.

But in times of extreme economic inequality like these, most of the wealth from development goes to the already wealthy.

Whose Domain?

The fact that Amazon’s Haymarket story has received so little attention is a measure of our stunted political vision and bleak moral landscape. Apparently our politicians and pundits find it unremarkable that homes passed down from a freed slave can be seized to help a corporation the government created and nurtured.

Yet, the same politicians and pundits would be horrified if we thought differently about eminent domain – or for that matter, the government’s ability to seize assets when the owner is suspected of committing a crime – and chose to use them to correct corporate injustices and right longstanding wrongs.

Attorney General Jefferson B. Sessions III recently reinstated a much-abused policy that allows law enforcement officials to conduct civil asset forfeitures and take the property of individuals they suspect of breaking the law, even if those individuals are never charged with or convicted of any crime.

Civil asset forfeiture can be used against companies as well as individuals. What if civil asset forfeiture was used to seize the assets of corporations that have been proven to break the law, not once, but over and over? The list includes all the country’s biggest banks, as well as corporations like General Electric.

The list also includes Amazon, which has reportedly broken both antitrust and employment laws in the U.S. It has also allegedly violated European Community and German laws. Yet instead of seizing its assets, the assets of others are being seized to maximize its profits. Not that Amazon needs any help. For a brief moment this week, Jeff Bezos was the richest man in the world. He probably will be again.

Rethinking Property

British elites were shocked and horrified when Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn proposed taking over unused luxury apartments in London to house some of the people made homeless by the Grenfell Tower fire. But the public understood.

A national poll showed that 59 percent of British adults agreed with Corbyn. City officials, reading the public’s mood, quickly took Corbyn’s suggestion.

There is compelling evidence that pharmaceutical corporations knowingly and criminally encouraged the spread of opioid addiction in this country. Why shouldn’t their executives’ country homes be used to provide drug treatment to addicts?

If there is unused investment property in this country – at, for example, One Central Park West – why shouldn’t it be used to help people recover from the ravages of opioids?

It’s clearly time to take back some of the Big Pharma’s patents. Patents are a form of government protection that they have abused, letting people die so they can maximize their profits. It’s time to take those patents away, especially since so many of them were developed at government expense.

It’s time to ask ourselves what kind of country takes property purchased by a freed slave to enrich a corporation, especially one like Amazon, which grew by exploiting a government invention – the internet – and a government loophole – tax-free online sales.

The people gave FANG its enormous wealth and power; it now has the ability to make or break careers and companies. These corporations should be regulated like public utilities.

Data should serve the people. And the Dominion of Virginia should leave the descendants of Livinia Johnson alone. The community she created should be allowed to live in peace, while we all work to strengthen our sense of the nation as a community, where property rights are valued, but where human beings are valued even more.

Cross-posted from Alternet