Warren Buffett said it would be “ridiculous” for the conglomerate not to do business with gun makers, noting that he doesn’t want to impose his political views on Berkshire’s investment decisions or business operations.
.. “I think what the kids are doing is very admirable, but I don’t think Berkshire should say we’re not going to do business with people who own guns,” Mr. Buffet said on CNBC. “I think that would be ridiculous.”
.. The companies could pare health-care expenses 3% to 4% through negotiating power alone, but the initiative intends to go further. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and JPM CEO Jamie Dimon are perfect partners, he said, because “we can make things happen. Our companies are big, yet we can still make things happen. We don’t have the bureaucratic problems or the constituency problems” that other large companies have.
Tim Harford: The case for ending Amazon’s dominance
Two economists, Germán Gutiérrez and Thomas Philippon, have argued that corporate America is underinvesting. One reason is that companies are impatiently funnelling cash to investors and executives rather than take a long-term view.
If that is a worrisome state of affairs — and it should be — then Amazon is the shining counterexample. The online retailer’s strategy is driven not by short-term profit but by investment, innovation and growth. If only there were a few more companies like Amazon, capitalism would be in a happier spot.
.. Marc Levinson’s history of container shipping, The Box (UK) (US), describes Malcom McLean — the entrepreneur behind containerisation, a risk-taking visionary reminiscent of Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos. When McLean tried to expand his operations, one of his largest obstacles was the Interstate Commerce Commission in the US, which regulated US railways from 1887 and interstate trucking from 1935.
The ICC, writes Mr Levinson, had to approve each new route, every new commodity and any new price schedule. When McLean wanted to start a trucking route at a low price, he had to hire lawyers and argue his case at the ICC, while his competitors protested bitterly — “unfair and destructive”, said the railways. He did not always get his way.
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There are two schools of thought. One is to focus on consumers’ interest in quality, variety and price. This has been the standard approach in US antitrust policy for several decades. Since Amazon makes slim profits and charges low prices, it raises few antitrust questions.
The alternative view — which harks back to an earlier era of antitrust during which Standard Oil and later AT&T were broken up — argues that competition is inherently good even if it is hard to quantify a benefit to consumers and that society should be wary of large or dominant companies even if their behaviour seems benign
.. Donald Trump’s history of publicly attacking Mr Bezos is worth pondering too: do we really want the US government to have more discretion as to who is targeted, and why? We should not wish to return to a world in which a plucky new competitor must beg regulators — over the objections of incumbents — for permission to cut prices.
Canadian Tech Sector Thrives, but Struggles to Keep Its Talent
Government seek to attract investment from big foreign players while stopping the brain drain
Mr. Trudeau has lamented a “brain drain” of Canada’s best tech minds, saying at a recent Google event in Toronto, “Quite frankly, we’re tired of Google poaching our best graduates from the University of Waterloo and sucking them down to California.”
.. Trudeau wrote to Mr. Bezos, asking him to consider Canada because of its inclusiveness, single-payer health-care system, and an immigration system designed to attract high-skilled talent.
.. Canada is widely considered to be at the nucleus of some world-leading research in areas such as machine learning and artificial intelligence.
.. Seminal work published by University of Toronto’s Geoffrey Hinton, University of Montreal’s Yoshua Bengio and others has spawned advancements in voice recognition and automated driving. Mr. Hinton published breakthrough research on “deep learning” in 2007 and 2012 that ushered in a new wave of AI and the potential it could have for smartphones, self-driving cars and other devices.
.. Canada’s AI talent pool is also the third biggest in the world behind the U.S. and the U.K., with about 1,100 researchers in the country
.. An Amazon move to Toronto might also end up being a “Trojan horse” that would draw Canadian workers to the company’s Seattle base rather than improve Canada’s economy
.. “The best and brightest Canadian engineers or marketers that operate under Amazon Canada will see their career path head down to Seattle, not in Canada,”
.. He says companies like Facebook have different needs than startups, noting that staff at Facebook’s AI lab in Montreal are focused on more advanced research.
.. Cole Clifford, a 23-year-old machine-learning engineer at Toronto-based startup DeepLearni.ng , said he received about 50 recruiter emails in his LinkedIn account last month, most of them from Silicon Valley firms
.. the Canadian government spent C$125 million last March to set up new AI “superclusters” in Toronto
.. The goal is to keep researchers in Canada and create 1,000 AI graduates in the next five years
.. “We aren’t realizing that the intellectual property developed by these individuals and all of those economic benefits are rarely in Canada and not taxed in Canada,” Mr. Ruffalo said. “That’s the problem.”
.. One potential avenue for keeping foreign companies in check is for Canada to withhold R&D tax incentives
.. Another option is to create a government-backed sovereign patent fund, similar to what South Korea, Japan and France have launched in recent years, which would protect smaller startups from patent claims by foreign companies
Amazon Review Policy Change & More
Amazon now requires you to purchase a minimum of $50 worth of books or other products before you can leave a review or answer questions about a product. These purchases, and it looks like it is a cumulative amount, must be purchased via credit card or debit card — gift cards won’t count. This means someone can’t set up a fake account, buy themselves a gift card and use it to get around the policy.