Two news stories have been running through my mind this week.

A few weeks ago Amazon announced their two new locations for HQ2. Queens and Northern Virginia. Both are already heavily populated and expensive places to live.

And, if we are being fair, those cities may not truly benefit from Amazon arriving. Time will tell of course, but a greater impact might have occurred had Amazon chosen a medium sized city.

I recall the madness/hope by city leaders all around the nation. They lobbied, made promises and petitioned for Amazon to arrive and help their city thrive.

I live in St Petersburg, FL and we have a growing tech scene. We also have an MLB baseball stadium with low attendance and in a prime part of the city. Our proposal to Amazon included tearing that park down and leasing the 80 acres at a reduced cost to Amazon. I’m sure other cities made comparable offers.

All in an effort for salvation from one company.

You hear the other side of it too. GM is closing five plants. Tens of thousands of skilled employees are now laid off. Those were good jobs, too, for the area.

They are the anchor companies that allow the baker, the book store and the banks to survive. When those plants came to those cities it was salvation. People had a job, benefits and could raise a family.

I understand that companies come and go. I firmly believe in the free market and realize that companies are not charities. They are profit driven and make decisions based on the bottom line.

My point to all of this is that cities cannot rely on one industry alone. They need diversity. Salvation is not found in any one company.

What do you put your faith in?

Image credit: Joe Wolf

Tech firms know a lot about you…

but that’s nothing compared to data brokers, who collect from everywhere and sell to anyone.

Do you care about the appalling conditions of many workplaces? Not overseas, but here, in the US?

Do you care about the impact enterprise has on the environment?

On people?

Do you fret, because you can’t DO anything?

Or can you?

Fashion has a terrible environmental report card, especially so-called “fast fashion.”

Change happens when we consumers vote with our feet and take our money elsewhere.

Fast fashion may be on its last legs. Take it from H&M, which was forced to admit in its March financial report that it had $4.3 billion of unsold inventory left hanging on its racks, along with a massive drop in sales. In fact, the Swedish company has started incinerating clothes in power plants to generate energy. When you consider all of the raw materials, chemical pollution, human labor, and transportation costs required to make just a single shirt, the scale of the waste is astounding.

Brands may seem impervious to complaints, negative press and exposés, but the operative word is ‘seems’, as Ivanka Trump learned when she was forced to shut down her fashion line.

The business seemed to be floundering: One source found that online sales of Ivanka Trump products sold on Amazon, Macy’s, Bloomingdales, and Zappos fell nearly 55% over the last year. (…) The brand was the target of a massive boycott, spearheaded by Grab Your Wallet, a movement urging people to protest the Trump family’s ethical violations by refusing to shop with retailers selling their brands.

The article made me wonder if the same approach could affect Amazon, the 8 thousand pound gorilla of ecommerce

Wait a minute, didn’t Amazon just agree to pay minimum wages to all workers?

Today (Oct. 2), he announced that he will be raising the minimum wages for his e-commerce company’s US workers to $15 an hour, a move that will affect 250,000 full-time employees and 100,000 seasonal workers.

Yes, and while it looks like a big deal, it was more in the line of self-preservation.

Earning $15 an hour isn’t likely to impress Amazon’s Prime customers, who mostly earn far more (it takes 8 hours of very hard work to pay for Prime).

But just as fashion takes a huge toll from the environment and labor, the people who deliver your packages pay an exorbitantly high price for the privilege.

For Amazon, paying third-party companies to deliver packages is a cost-effective alternative to providing full employment. And the speed of two-day shipping is great for consumers. But delivering that many packages isn’t easy, and the job is riddled with problems, (…)  Others, including several labor experts, said they felt blame should be placed with Amazon, adding that the company was pressuring courier companies to deliver more, faster. They said Amazon was profiting off cheap labor that it doesn’t have to protect because it’s outsourcing the job to companies that it doesn’t adequately supervise.

Read the article and you’ll see conditions similar, maybe worse, to those that have led to protests, boycotts and change when they’ve happen on production lines overseas.

Amazon’s response is typical.

“We have worked with our partners, listened to their needs, and have implemented new programs to ensure small delivery businesses serving Amazon customers have the tools they need to deliver a great customer and employee experience.”

Nothing about driver experience.

The problem has nothing to do with Bezos’ wealth, he earned that, and everything to do with Amazon using it’s savvy, backed by it’s power, to change the game.

So how do you get the attention of an 8 thousand pound gorilla?

The same way consumers moved the fashion industry — money.

Think of the effect if just 20% (or more) of the 100 million paying Prime members bought just two items a month from a different merchant.

There’s no question that would get Amazon’s attention.

Image credit: Drew Stephens

I ended a post a couple of weeks ago by asking “when will they ever learn” and answering my own question with “never.”

“They” referred to the millions of people who continue to rely on Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. — in spite of every security breech, hack, lie, prevarication, hedge, and excuse — not to mention buying all kinds of smart devices.

So what’s new?

What’s new is that Google won (conned) the right to teach kids how to behave online.

The tech giant is positioning itself in schools as a trusted authority on digital citizenship…

That is the message behind “Be Internet Awesome,” a so-called digital-citizenship education program that the technology giant developed for schools. (…)  Google plans to reach five million schoolchildren with the program this year and has teamed up with the National Parent Teacher Association to offer related workshops to parents.

Impressive, considering that historically the NPTA has been dominantly female (although they’re working to change that) and Google is the company that not only protects high ranking abusers, but pays them millions.

Mr. [Andy] Rubin was one of three executives that Google protected over the past decade after they were accused of sexual misconduct. In two instances, it ousted senior executives, but softened the blow by paying them millions of dollars as they departed, even though it had no legal obligation to do so. In a third, the executive remained in a highly compensated post at the company. Each time Google stayed silent about the accusations against the men.

The spying, listening and other sneaky actions of Google Assistant and Alexa are legion and now Facebook joins the herd, with a new in-home device equipped with microphones and a video camera that can really sell you.

“Portal voice calling is built on the Messenger infrastructure, so when you make a video call on Portal, we collect the same types of information (i.e. usage data such as length of calls, frequency of calls) that we collect on other Messenger-enabled devices. We may use this information to inform the ads we show you across our platforms. Other general usage data, such as aggregate usage of apps, etc., may also feed into the information that we use to serve ads,” a spokesperson said in an email to Recode.

You can bet people will buy it.

Alexa has a particularly creepy approach.

Amazon has submitted a patent application, recently granted, outlining how the company could recommend chicken soup or cough drops to people who use its Echo device if it detects symptoms like coughing and sniffling when they speak to it, according to a report by CNET. It could even suggest a visit to the movies after discerning boredom. Other patents submitted by the company have focused on how it could suggest products to people based on keywords in their conversations.

And, if you have one in the bedroom, just think what Echo could suggest based on what it hears.

Most smart devices cater to “what’s in it for me,” with little concern for their users.

However, some work a bit more for the public good, such as Kinsa smart thermometers, which has a public health focus.

“What this does is help us really target vulnerable populations where we have a clear signal about outbreaks,” Mr. Sarma said.

Mr. Singh, who was an executive vice president at the Clinton Health Access Initiative, said that Kinsa worked only with clients that can help with its mission of preventing the spread of illness through early detection. It made sense to work with Clorox, he said, because of the C.D.C. recommendation about disinfecting.

Since it’s Halloween, we’ll end with a truly terrifying look at Facebook in the detailed review of The Autocracy App by Jacob Weisberg

When will they ever learn?

As every link in this post proves…

Never.

Image credit: Paul Downey

Are you familiar with the song Where have all the flowers gone?

It was written by Pete Seeger, with additional verses added by others, and the full circle of the song is as valid today as it was when Seeger wrote it nearly 60 years ago.

The refrain at the end of each verse is “Oh, when will they ever learn? Oh, when will they ever learn?” and it became one of the best known protest songs of the Viet Nam War. Fast forward to today you find proof across the globe that we still haven’t learned.

That refrain also applies, with some rewording, to the war being waged between technical advances and consumer safety and security.

In September, Facebook hesitantly admitted that its access keys were hacked due to flawed code — a hack that potentially affected more than 50 million users, including Zukerberg and Sandberg.

Facebook explained that the hack was caused by multiple bugs in its code relating to a video-upload tool and Facebook’s pro-privacy “View As” feature. (…)

Most recently, a major flaw was found in the AI code used in personal assistants, such as Alexa, Siri, or Cortana.

Scientists at the Ruhr-Universitaet in Bochum, Germany, have discovered a way to hide inaudible commands in audio files (…) the flaw is in the very way AI is designed. (…) According to Professor Thorsten Holz from the Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security, their method, called “psychoacoustic hiding,” shows how hackers could manipulate any type of audio wave–from songs and speech to even bird chirping–to include words that only the machine can hear, allowing them to give commands without nearby people noticing. The attack will sound just like a bird’s call to our ears, but a voice assistant would “hear” something very different.

The “damn the security / full speed ahead” mentality isn’t anything new.

Nor is the greed that drives it.

There is an old saying, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

When will they ever learn?”

It’s likely the answer is “never.”

Image credit: koka_sexton

Bezos may be a genius and Amazon may be beloved by it’s customers, but for years it has been reviled for it’s (mis)treatment of fulfillment center (AKA, warehouse) workers.

The newest weapon in it’s fight to correct the facts is a Twitter campaign.

“FC ambassadors are employees who have experience working in our fulfillment centers… The most important thing is that they’ve been here long enough to honestly share the facts based on personal experience.”

The effort was first outed by Flamboyant Shoes Guy, who also said in a comment,

What amazes me is that a entire board of people on 7 or 8-figure salaries had several meetings regarding this, discussed it thoroughly and then concluded that there was no way anyone could possibly notice.

But if you think warehouse conditions are bad now, when the economy is hot and bodies in short supply, just wait until it turns, as it will. (What goes up always comes down. It’s the nature of the beast.)

Be it Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, etc., you need to remember that companies, just like people, aren’t all good or all bad.

It’s just that their bad has a much larger effect.

Image credit: Twitter

It’s so sad. At least it is if you believe Vinod Khosla, who claims that no one over 45 has new ideas, let alone disruptive ones.

That doesn’t bode well for a new his new healthcare venture.

Amazon is forming a joint venture in healthcare aimed at employees with J.P. Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway, according to a company press release.

Obviously, Khosla and his groupies forgot to tell 54 year-old Jeff Bezos that he is dead in terms of new ideas and that his co-founders, Jamie Dimon, 62 and Warren Buffett, 87, are even deader.

Not only are his co-founders old-to-ancient, one of his first hires was a geriatrician (in case you don’t know, that’s a doctor that specializes in the Medicare crowd)

Must be those dead brain cells at work, since the tech crowd, who are disrupting healthcare with bio hacks and drop-in clinics, know that speed and convenience are what’s needed.

What is it that old guys can see — and the under-40 just don’t get?

If Amazon is looking to disrupt the healthcare industry, why start with geriatrics -— a specialty that hardly seems cutting-edge? But what tech experts don’t know, and what Amazon has figured out, is that to provide high-quality health care for seniors, physicians must be innovative — and disruptive.

Cutting edge IDEO figured that out in 2016.

Just as writers must use their life experience to write with any kind of authenticity, you can’t expect innovations from people who have never experienced or noticed the problem.

When your body, and those in your social circle, work as they should 99% of the time you are unlikely to have a handle on the difficulty of managing multiple, chronic diseases, especially with severely limited resources — financial and human.

So let’s hear it for the old crowd, may they focus their efforts on the problems and challenges of which their younger brethren are barely aware.

Hat tip to Emily White for sending the article.

Image credit: Stuart Richards

Have you ever been to a post-holiday potluck? As the name implies, it’s held within two days of any holiday that involves food, with a capital F, such as Thanksgiving, Christmas and, of course, Easter. Our group has only three rules, the food must be leftovers, conversation must be interesting and phones must be turned off. They are always great parties, with amazing food, and Monday’s was no exception.

The unexpected happened when a few of them came down on me for a recent post terming Mark Zukerberg a hypocrite. They said that it wasn’t Facebook’s or Google’s fault a few bad actors were abusing the sites and causing problems. They went on to say that the companies were doing their best and that I should cut them some slack.

Rather than arguing my personal opinions I said I would provide some third party info that I couldn’t quote off the top of my head and then whoever was interested could get together and argue the subject over a bottle or two of wine.

I did ask them to think about one item that stuck in my mind.

How quickly would they provide the location and routine of their kids to the world at large and the perverts who inhabit it? That’s exactly what GPS-tagged photos do.

I thought the info would be of interest to other readers, so I’m sharing it here.

Facebook actively facilitates scammers.

The Berlin conference was hosted by an online forum called Stack That Money, but a newcomer could be forgiven for wondering if it was somehow sponsored by Facebook Inc. Saleswomen from the company held court onstage, introducing speakers and moderating panel discussions. After the show, Facebook representatives flew to Ibiza on a plane rented by Stack That Money to party with some of the top affiliates.

Granted anonymity, affiliates were happy to detail their tricks. They told me that Facebook had revolutionized scamming. The company built tools with its trove of user data (…) Affiliates hijacked them. Facebook’s targeting algorithm is so powerful, they said, they don’t need to identify suckers themselves—Facebook does it automatically. And they boasted that Russia’s dezinformatsiya agents were using tactics their community had pioneered.

Scraping Android.

Android owners were displeased to discover that Facebook had been scraping their text-message and phone-call metadata, in some cases for years, an operation hidden in the fine print of a user agreement clause until Ars Technica reported. Facebook was quick to defend the practice as entirely aboveboard—small comfort to those who are beginning to realize that, because Facebook is a free service, they and their data are by necessity the products.

I’m not just picking on Facebook, Amazon and Google are right there with it.

Digital eavesdropping

Amazon and Google, the leading sellers of such devices, say the assistants record and process audio only after users trigger them by pushing a button or uttering a phrase like “Hey, Alexa” or “O.K., Google.” But each company has filed patent applications, many of them still under consideration, that outline an array of possibilities for how devices like these could monitor more of what users say and do. That information could then be used to identify a person’s desires or interests, which could be mined for ads and product recommendations. (…) Facebook, in fact, had planned to unveil its new internet-connected home products at a developer conference in May, according to Bloomberg News, which reported that the company had scuttled that idea partly in response to the recent fallout.

Zukerberg’s ego knows no bounds.

Zuckerberg, positioning himself as the benevolent ruler of a state-like entity, counters that everything is going to be fine—because ultimately he controls Facebook.

There are dozens more, but you can use search as well as I.

What can you do?

Thank Firefox for a simple containerized solution to Facebook’s tracking (stalking) you while surfing.

Facebook is (supposedly) making it easier to manage your privacy settings.

There are additional things you can do.

How to delete Facebook, but save your content.

The bad news is that even if you are willing to spend the effort, you can’t really delete yourself from social media.

All this has caused a rupture in techdom.

I could go on almost forever, but if you’re interested you’ll have no trouble finding more.

Image credit: weisunc

This week I was reading a post about the top companies to work for. The usual were on the list, Alphabet, Facebook, Salesforce and others. Amazon topped the list for a variety of reasons.

In the news as well is the Chapter 11 Bankruptcy that Toys R Us is filing. As I dug deeper, I also learned that Amazon is considering buying up some of the prime locations that will now be vacant, so they can move further into brick and mortar retail.

I found it pretty amazing that for all the news about retail being a dying segment it’s not actually the case. Instead, we are seeing a right sizing and elimination of poor performers across industries. Amazon is willing to move into direct retail in a way that Toys R Us or others never did. In my mind there are a lot of factors that go into it, but one thing is sure, the culture of a company will determine its outcome.

Now I’m not here to dissect what failed at Toys R Us; in fact I have fond memories of it as a child. As an adult, I was less than overwhelmed when I stopped in and I am not that heartbroken that they are closing.

From an economist’s standpoint I applaud the invisible hand working. However I also realize that decisions made years ago, such as a leveraged buyout, made Toys R Us susceptible to market failure.

What lesson can we pull from these two somewhat unrelated events?

On one hand, you have a top ranked company that wants to move further into brick and mortar retail. On the other hand, you have a major player leaving and many others struggling.

Is our future one where we have only a few spots to shop, Walmart, Amazon and perhaps Target? In that same breath do we also have three competing delivery systems now that Target acquired Shipt?

It probably won’t be that simple, but it does make one think how can we make a positive impact in our own industries.

Are we innovating? Are we looking at the needs of our customers and anticipating the future? Are we digesting data in ways not currently mainstream? These all can lead to greater returns and profits.

Now we just have to execute.

Image credit: drivebysh00ter

I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry when I see ads for stuff that responds to voice command, especially when it is for stuff like changing the TV channel. I guess that using the remote takes either too much energy or too much intelligence to work it.

Everything today is about convenience, a trend I’ve been suspicious, although I wasn’t sure why.

However, after reading an op-ed piece by Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia and the author of “The Attention Merchants: The Epic Struggle to Get Inside Our Heads,” called The Tyranny of Convenience I’m starting to understand what about it makes me itch.

In the developed nations of the 21st century, convenience — that is, more efficient and easier ways of doing personal tasks — has emerged as perhaps the most powerful force shaping our individual lives and our economies.

Granted I’m known as a digital dinosaur, but there are some conveniences — washing machines, telephones, cars, email, and Skype chat, among them — I’m all for.

However, I have no cell phone, avoid any app, service, etc., provided by Google, clean my own house, wash my own clothes, shop for my own food, and do my own cooking just as I’ve done since I was 18.

I search using ixquick.com, no ads, no tracking and my life functions just fine without always being connected. I’m not on social media and don’t suffer from FOMA; I meet friends for meals and fun and we talk on the phone in-between.

I suppose that all sounds very inconvenient these days, but I’m never bored and enjoy the feelings of accomplishment that come with doing stuff yourself, as well as figuring out better ways to do it — it’s called ingenuity.

I’ve seen many “convenient” items come to market years after I came up with a similar approach to use for myself.

Americans say they prize competition, a proliferation of choices, the little guy. Yet our taste for convenience begets more convenience, through a combination of the economics of scale and the power of habit. The easier it is to use Amazon, the more powerful Amazon becomes — and thus the easier it becomes to use Amazon. Convenience and monopoly seem to be natural bedfellows (emphasis mine).

Professor WU (or someone) needs to do a follow-up article entitled, “How Convenience Killed Creativity and Strangled Entrepreneurship.

Image credit: jim212jim