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"It is bigger than the GDP of most countries in the world. I mean, it is larger than the market cap of many companies that are on the S&P 500,"

Rounding out the group of five centibillionaires are Musk, Bill Gates of Microsoft with a net worth of $129 billion

In fact, Musk and Zuckerberg each ascended to the $100 billion club this year after shares of Tesla and Facebook rose 677% and 39%, respectively.

"It's not anything to celebrate. It's kind of a disturbing milestone," he says. "But I think it's a predictable outcome of four decades of flat wages and steadily concentrating wealth and power."

Bezos, for example, has such a staggering fortune that despite going through a messy divorce and giving up one quarter of his Amazon shares to his ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, he still remains the world's richest person.

At the turn of the 17th century we have “the birth of the modern novel, the conception of the essay, the development of a market for printed plays, and the debut of the newspaper – all occurring within years of each other”.

“Print cemented the story … as the core institution of culture around the world”, informing everything from journalism and political propaganda to creative writing. A print culture built on linear narrative and the sequential ordering of content is gradually giving way to something altogether more chaotic.

“I see a rug being pulled out from under our understanding of the world: a crisis of cognition.

But he is no catastrophist, and even suggests it might do us good to reject the seductions of narrative and embrace new forms that are more truly reflective of life’s messy complexity.

Jarvis believes sensible technocratic solutions will help us ride out this epochal shift. We need to “establish flexible frameworks for oversight, collaborating with technology companies, their communities, regulators, civil society, and researchers.”

“To fight to eradicate bad speech is a distraction,” he writes. “In the history of Gutenberg’s age, what worked instead was the creation and expansion of institutions dedicated to nurturing, supporting, and sharing the best of what came of print: editing, publishing houses, criticism, and expansion of libraries and disciplines of humanities and arts in universities and schools.”

“It is genius for the current consumer culture,” Christine Whelan, a clinical professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. “It encourages and then meets the need for the thing, so we then continue on the hedonic treadmill: Buy the latest thing we want and then have it delivered immediately and then buy the next latest thing.”

With traditional retail, “there’s the friction of having to go to the store, there’s the friction of will the store have it, there’s the friction of carrying it,” Whelan said. “There’s the friction of having to admit to another human being that you’re buying it. And when you remove the friction, you also remove a lot of individual self-control. The more you are in the ecosystem and the easier it is to make a purchase, the easier it is to say yes to your desire rather than no.”

“It used to be that being a consumer was all about choice,”

But now, “two-thirds of people start their product searches on Amazon.

Prime discourages comparison shopping—looking around is pointless when everything you need is right here—even as Amazon’s sheer breadth of products makes shoppers feel as if they have agency.

“Consumerism has become a key way that people have misidentified freedom,”

what Amazon represents is a corporate infrastructure that is increasingly directed at getting as many consumers as possible locked into a consumerist process—an Amazon consumer for life.”

Amazon offers steep discounts to college students and new parents, two groups that are highly likely to change their buying behavior. It keeps adding more discounts and goodies to the Prime bundle, making subscribing ever more appealing. And, in an especially sinister move, it makes quitting Prime maddeningly difficult.

the United States now has more Prime memberships than households. In 2020,

In 2019, Amazon shaved a full day off its delivery time, making one-day shipping the default, and also making Prime an even more tantalizing proposition: Why hop in the car for anything at all when you could get it delivered tomorrow, for free?

As subscription numbers grew through the 2010s, the revenue from them helped Amazon pump more money into building fulfillment centers (to get products to people even faster), acquiring new businesses (to control even more of the global economy), and adding more perks to the bundle (to encourage more people to sign up)

“Every decision we make is based upon the fact that Amazon can get these books cheaper and faster. The prevailing expectation is you can get anything online shipped for”— he scrunched his fingers into air quotes—“‘free,’ in one or two days. And there’s really only one company that can do that. They do that because they’re willing to push and exploit their workers.”

Thanks in large part to the revenue from Prime subscriptions and from the things subscribers buy, Amazon’s value has multiplied roughly 97 times, to $1.76 trillion, since the service was introduced. Amazon is the second-largest private employer in the United States, after Walmart, and it is responsible for roughly 40 percent of all e-commerce in the United States.

It controls hundreds of millions of square feet across the country and is opening more fulfillment centers all the time. It has acquired dozens of other companies, most recently the film studio MGM for $8.5 billion. Its cloud-computing operation, Amazon Web Services, is the largest of its kind and provides the plumbing for a vast swath of the internet, to a profit of $13.5 billion last year.

Amazon has entered some 40 million American homes in the form of the Alexa smart speaker, and some 150 million American pockets in the form of the Amazon app

“Amazon is a beast we’ve never seen before,” Alimahomed-Wilson told me. “Amazon powers our Zoom calls. It contracts with ICE. It’s in our neighborhoods. This is a very different thing than just being a large retailer, like Walmart or the Ford Motor Company.”

I find it useful to compare Big Tech to climate change, another force that is altering the destiny of everyone on Earth, forever. Both present themselves to us all the time in small ways—a creepy ad here, an uncommonly warm November there—but are so big, so abstract, so everywhere that they’re impossible for any one person to really understand

Both are the result of a decades-long, very human addiction to consumption and convenience that has been made grotesque and extreme by the incentives and mechanisms of the internet, market consolidation, and economic stratification

Both have primarily been advanced by a small handful of very big companies that are invested in making their machinations unseeable to the naked eye.

Speed and convenience aren’t actually free; they never are. Free shipping isn’t free either. It just obscures the real price.

Next-day shipping comes with tremendous costs: for labor and logistics and transportation and storage; for the people who pack your stuff into those smiling boxes and for the people who deliver them; for the planes and trucks and vans that carry them; for the warehouses that store them; for the software ensuring that everything really does get to your door on time, for air-conditioning and gas and cardboard and steel. Amazon—Prime in particular—has done a superlative job of making all those costs, all those moving parts, all those externalities invisible to the consumer.

The pandemic drove up demand for Amazon, and for labor: Last year, company profits shot up 70 percent, Bezos’s personal wealth grew by $70 billion, and 1,400 people a day joined the company’s workforce.

Amazon is so big that every sector of our economy has bent to respond to the new way of consuming that it invented. Prime isn’t just bad for Amazon’s workers—it’s bad for Target’s, and Walmart’s. It’s bad for the people behind the counter at your neighborhood hardware store and bookstore, if your neighborhood still has a hardware store and a bookstore. Amazon has accustomed shoppers to a pace and manner of buying that depends on a miracle of precision logistics even when it’s managed by one of the biggest companies on Earth. For the smaller guys, it’s downright impossible.

Amazon’s revenue from subscriptions alone—mostly Prime—was $25.2 billion, which is a 31 percent increase from the previous year

Just as abstaining from flying for moral reasons won’t stop sea-level rise, one person canceling Prime won’t do much of anything to a multinational corporation’s bottom line. “It’s statistically insignificant to Amazon. They’ll never feel it,” Caine told me. But, he said, “the small businesses in your neighborhood will absolutely feel the addition of a new customer. Individual choices do make a big difference to them.”

Whelan teaches a class at UW called Consuming Happiness, and she is fond of giving her students the adage that you can buy happiness—“if you spend your money in keeping with your values: spending prosocially, on experiences. Tons of research shows us this.”

With five months to go before Election Day, Mr. Trump has already said he would “loosen” libel laws to make it easier to sue news organizations. He has threatened to sic federal regulators on his critics. He has encouraged rough treatment of demonstrators.

His proposal to bar Muslims from entry into the country tests the Constitution’s guarantees of religious freedom, due process and equal protection. Advertisement Continue reading the main story

And, in what was a tipping point for some, he attacked Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel of the Federal District Court in San Diego, who is overseeing two class actions against Trump University.Mr. Trump accused the judge of bias, falsely said he was Mexican and seemed to issue a threat.

Beyond the attack on judicial independence is a broader question of Mr. Trump’s commitment to the separation of powers and to the principles of federalism enshrined in the Constitution. Randy E. Barnett, a law professor at Georgetown and an architect of the first major challenge to President Obama’s health care law, said he had grave doubts on both fronts.

“You would like a president with some idea about constitutional limits on presidential powers, on congressional powers, on federal powers,” Professor Barnett said, “and I doubt he has any awareness of such limits.”

Mr. Post said that view was too sanguine, given the executive branch’s practical primacy. “The president has all the power with respect to enforcing the law,” he said. “There’s only one of those three branches that actually has the guns in its hands, and that’s the executive.”

“I don’t think he cares about separation of powers at all,” said Richard Epstein, a fellow at the Hoover Institution who also teaches at New York University and the University of Chicago.

President George W. Bush “often went beyond what he should have done,” Professor Epstein said. “I think Obama’s been much worse on that issue pretty consistently, and his underlings have been even more so. But I think Trump doesn’t even think there’s an issue to worry about. He just simply says whatever I want to do I will do.”

“I can easily see a situation in which he would take the Andrew Jackson line,” Professor Epstein said, referring to a probably apocryphal comment attributed to Jackson about Chief Justice John Marshall: “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce i

“I can easily see a situati

There are other precedents, said John C. Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who took an expansive view of executive power as a lawyer in the Bush administration. “The only two other presidents I can think of who were so hostile to judges on an individual level and to the judiciary as a whole would be Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Roosevelt,” he said.

Other legal scholars said they were worried about Mr. Trump’s commitment to the First Amendment. He has taken particular aim at The Washington Post and its owner, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon

On one hand, Mr. Trump seemed to misunderstand the scope of presidential power. Libel is a state-law tort constrained by First Amendment principles, and a president’s views do not figure in its application.

“There are very few serious constitutional thinkers who believe public figures should be able to use libel as indiscriminately as Trump seems to think they should,” Professor Somin said. “He poses a serious threat to the press and the First Amendment.”

On the other hand, said Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, Mr. Trump’s comments betrayed a troubling disregard for free expression.

Many of Mr. Trump’s statements about legal issues were extemporaneous and resist conventional legal analysis. Some seemed to betray ignorance of fundamental legal concepts, as when he said in a debate that Senator Ted Cruz of Texas had criticized Mr. Trump’s sister, a federal appeals court judge, “for signing a certain bill,” adding for good measure that Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., while still an appeals court judge, had also “signed that bill.”

But bills are legislative rather than judicial documents. And, as it happened, Judge Alito had not joined the opinion in question.

The report is likely the Justice Department’s last major investigation before President-elect Donald Trump takes office. During President Barack Obama’s tenure, the Justice Department has aggressively investigated nearly two dozen police departments and pushed for reform, particularly after high-profile police killings. But Trump and his attorney general nominee, Jeff Sessions, have voiced skepticism of the investigations, suggesting that the Trump administration will do less to hold local police departments accountable through the Justice Department.

Yet just 1.3 percent of complaints over racist language between 2011 and March 2016 were sustained by internal investigators, the Justice Department found.

We found that officers engage in tactically unsound and unnecessary foot pursuits, and that these foot pursuits too often end with officers unreasonably shooting someone — including unarmed individuals.

CPD has not provided officers with adequate guidance to understand how and when they may use force, or how to safely and effectively control and resolve encounters to reduce the need to use force

But it’s not just tolerance; at times the police department appears to engage in an active cover-up — particularly through “a code of silence” and by hiding evidence.

One particularly striking statistic: More than 30,000 complaints are made against the Chicago Police Department every year. But while the department sustains less than 2 percent of those complaints, most are never investigated at all.

Still, it’s worth emphasizing that these findings may not be exclusive to Chicago. Whether it’s Baltimore, Cleveland, New Orleans, or Ferguson, Missouri, the Justice Department has found horrific constitutional violations in how police use force, how they target minority residents, how they stop and ticket people, and virtually every other aspect of policing. These issues come up time and time again, no matter the city that federal investigators look at.In that sense, it’s not just Chicago policing that’s flawed, but American policing as a whole.

For Mr. Kislyak, Washington is no longer the place it once was. It has become lonely, and he has told associates that he is surprised how people who once sought his company were now trying to stay away.

For years, observers have wondered if Amazon’s shopping business — you know, its main business — could ever really work. Investors gave Mr. Bezos enormous leeway to spend billions building out a distribution-center infrastructure, but it remained a semi-open question if the scale and pace of investments would ever pay off. Could this company ever make a whole lot of money selling so much for so little?

Amazon’s retail operations had reached a “critical scale” or an “inflection point.” They meant that Amazon’s enormous investments in infrastructure and logistics have begun to pay off. The company keeps capturing a larger slice of American and even international purchases. It keeps attracting more users to its Prime fast-shipping subscription program, and, albeit slowly, it is beginning to scratch out higher profits from shoppers.

Now that Amazon has hit this point, it’s difficult to see how any other retailer could catch up anytime soon. I recently asked a couple of Silicon Valley venture capitalists who have previously made huge investments in e-commerce whether they were keen to spend any more in the sector. They weren’t, citing Amazon.

“The truth is they’re building a really insurmountable infrastructure that I don’t see how others can really deal with,”

Amazon also faces a wider set of competitive threats internationally. Although it has reported increasingly brisk sales in India, the company has had a difficult time breaking into the lucrative Chinese market, where Alibaba dominates the shopping scene

Walmart, which on Tuesday published earnings that came in slightly above analysts’ expectations, is also spending billions to slow Amazon’s roll. But Walmart said that in its latest quarter, e-commerce sales had grown only 10 percent from a year ago. Amazon’s retail sales rose 20 percent during the same period.

What has been key to this rise, and missing from many of his competitors’ efforts, is patience. In a very old-fashioned manner, one that is far out of step with a corporate world in which milestones are measured every three months, Amazon has been willing to build its empire methodically and at great cost over almost two decades, despite skepticism from many sectors of the business world.

Amazon has built more than 100 warehouses from which to package and ship goods, and it hasn’t really slowed its pace in establishing more. Because the warehouses speed up Amazon’s shipping, encouraging more shopping, the costs of these centers is becoming an ever-smaller fraction of Amazon’s operations.

Amazon’s investments in Prime, the $99-a-year service that offers free two-day shipping, are also paying off. Last year Mr. Bezos told me that people were increasingly signing up for Prime for the company’s media offerings

Mr. Schachter, of Macquarie Securities, estimates that there will be at least 40 million Prime subscribers by the end of this year, and perhaps as many as 60 million, up from an estimated 30 million at the beginning of 2015

he predicted that by 2020, 50 percent of American households will have joined Prime, “and that’s very conservative,” he said.

its operating margin on the North American retail business was 3.5 percent, while Amazon Web Services’s margin was 25 percent.

“retail gross profit dollars per customer” — a fancy way of measuring how much Amazon makes from each shopper — has accelerated in each of the last four quarters, in part because of Prime. Amazon keeps winning “a larger share of customers’ wallets,” the firm said, eventually “leading to a period of sustained, rising profitability.”

“The thing about retail is, the consumer has near-perfect information,” said Paul Vogel, an analyst at Barclays. “So what’s the differentiator at this point? It’s selection. It’s service. It’s convenience. It’s how easy it is to use their interface. And Amazon’s got all this stuff already. How do you compete with that? I don’t know, man. It’s really hard.

A widely cited 2006 report estimated that 18% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions were attributable to cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, camels, pigs and poultry. However, analysis performed by Goodland, with co-writer Jeff Anhang, an environmental specialist at the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation, found that figure to now more accurately be 51%.

a molecule of CO2 exhaled by livestock is no more natural than one from an auto tailpipe.

Today, tens of billions more livestock are exhaling CO2 than in preindustrial days, while Earth’s photosynthetic capacity (its capacity to keep carbon out of the atmosphere by absorbing it in plant mass) has declined sharply as forest has been cleared.

One way in which this will be particularly troublesome for livestock producers will be that crops grown for feed will be refocused on biofuel sources.

But who — if anyone — will follow?

Well aware of the mercurial nature of the president, most congressional Republicans are loath to do or say anything that could upset Mr. Trump and risk provoking an early-morning Twitter tirade from the White House when they are trying to delicately piece together a complex tax agreement.

One can practically sense Republicans tiptoeing around the Capitol, taking extra care not to awaken the president to their presence in a way that could draw a scolding or rebuke.

They are equally wary of raising the ire of hard-right activists who already had Mr. Flake in their sights, contributing to his decision. Those activists celebrated Mr. Flake’s decision, claiming a Republican scalp.

While Mr. McCain, who is being treated for brain cancer and has spoken bitingly of Mr. Trump in recent weeks, glowingly praised his home-state colleague for his “integrity and honor and decency,” he did not use the Senate floor to second Mr. Flake’s worrisome message of a government and nation at risk. Mr. Flake is popular with his colleagues, and his fellow Republicans quickly noted how sorry they were to hear of his decision. But none joined him publicly in urging Republicans to stand up more defiantly to the president.

Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, credited Mr. Flake as a “team player” and man of high principle after Mr. Flake’s speech. But Mr. McConnell quickly turned the Senate floor back to a minor debate over a budget point of order.

The image of Latinos breeding makes them not quite human, parasites among a host people, an enemy within given sanctuary when they should be cast out. The aliens among us are not like us, but, unfairly protected, they breed and bring danger.

The notion later became a staple of Nazi propaganda. From 1944 : “Jewry is the product of the inbreeding of asocial, criminal, sick, degenerate, and rejected elements. . . . [It] leads a rootless, parasitic life at the expense of the host peoples. Its current homeland is largely the criminal neighborhoods of the great cities of the world.”

let’s look at the modern custom in this country of likening immigrants and minorities to breeding animals.

rump appointee Carl Higbie resigned after the publishing of his earlier complaints that black women think “breeding is a form of government employment.”

ep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) has spoken of immigration policy as “allowing any kind of vagrant, or animal . . . to come in.”

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), a Trump ally, described the screening of immigrants: “You get the pick of the litter and you got yourself a pretty good bird dog.”

Dan Stein, the president of the anti-immigrant Federation for American Immigration Reform, famously said immigrants are conducting “competitive breeding” to dilute the white majority.

White nationalist Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute frets about white “displacement by the subject race through differential fertility rates and interracial breeding.”

Dive into the fever swamps of the Internet and social media and you will find the conspiracy theory that minorities’ higher birthrates are designed to bring about “white genocide” in America: “We can’t let the Muslims and Mexicans outbreed us . . . Their goal is to come here and breed whites out of existence . . . What they will do is breed like rats and displace white people and white culture. . . . They’re outbreeding us and outvoting us.”