late night thoughts on amazon

  • by now Amazon is a metonym of so many different things for so many different people

  • an ideological indulgence of mine (which is sometimes actually very energizing & good) is the figure of the "great man"

  • will probably have to read a biography of jeff bezos at some point

  • you still can’t really search books

  • goodreads lacks elo ranks, shared annotations

  • on the early internet there were GET requests before there were POST requests

  • “i want to make it easier for people to find and consume knowledge”

  • early users: people whose heart burned for .. making it easier to find rare books ?!

  • the only real test i have for a startup is still: are regular people are using it regularly and deriving real value? are we 1 or 2 clicks out from the early nerd adopters telling their family and friends?

  • becoming a millionaire is simple, if impossible for many: graduate from college with no debt, get a $50,000 starting salary at 23, save 8 percent per year, and get 2 percent raises every year for the rest of your working life. by 65, you’ll have $2.7 million socked away, ready to burn on a long-term care facility.

  • there are 24 million millionaires in the US currently. that's about 7.2% of the population!

  • what's tricky is to do it before you're 30. what's trickier than that is to become a billionaire. there's not really a path for that, right? (right?) (echo / echo / echo)

  • "culturally, billionaires not only possess but represent wealth that can be neither justified nor “earned”: the vast and malignant pools of overaccumulation that often result from long periods of pacifically exporting conflict to the periphery of the world system"

  • "when Bezos founded Amazon in 1994, there was no good reason to think that it would beat out the hundreds of other tech companies to become the world’s largest merchant monopolist. but the possibility that such a mega-capital would emerge is baked right into the technology."

  • how to turn ability into money. ok. the first thing is to be honest with oneself that they want and desire money. the rest, according to sid: "is context-dependent and straightforward" assuming average-case skill and intelligence.

  • charles munger: "you have to be very intelligent, work very hard, and be very lucky. you have to be lucky."