Amazon

Tyler Durden would be proud.

Those who enjoy the city life should not stop others who want to experience the same thing.

National Landing just made a huge mistake.

Amazon-owned AbeBooks announced that they would no longer host sellers from multiple countries, prompting the response.

On this latest episode, the Substandard discusses Amazon's new series, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan. The cohosts rank Tom Clancy movies and JVL ranks the books. Flash gets benched, Vic prepares for a 5K, and Sonny gets a new pair of shoes. Plus a review that is too hot to handle!

Tom Clancy’s hero returns in a new Amazon series, but with less geeky charm. Nicholas H. Loya explains.

The most recent entries in the film universe went to the blockbuster formula. Amazon has a chance to right the ship.

Plus, Philip Van Cleave's suspect defense.

In this latest micro episode, JVL, Sonny, and Vic share their wishes and wishlist on Prime Day 2018. But is it a Merry Prime Day or Happy Prime Day?

Greetings from the Midwestern Bureau of TWS. We’re dark this week, as regular readers know, but we’re not taking the week off! The website must go on. A number of Standard writers and editors are back in their non-swamp ancestral homes for the Fourth. I’m in Saint Louis, where I went to college…

In a move that will surprise no one who reads science-fiction, Amazon is now selling a facial recognition tool, called Rekognition, to local police departments, marketing it as a “low cost” way to track persons of interest. According to the company, this tool recognizes “tens of millions of faces”…

The false panacea of taxing online retail sales.

Republicans are just over six months away from the 2018 midterm elections, and there's plenty to worry about. Midterms almost always favor the party out of power, and Democratic voters are far more enthused about the election than their Republican correlatives. And although one should never…

President Trump's use of the presidency to pursue a private vendetta with Amazon is appalling. But that doesn't mean policymakers shouldn't take a close look at the internet giant's power and competitive tactics.

Republicans have been awfully quiet over the last few days, and they probably should have been. The question is why they were so quiet.

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, Charlie Sykes talks to reporter Andrew Egger about the demise of Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin, President Trump's new-found feud with Amazon, and Egger's recent profile of Missouri Senate candidate Josh Hawley.

Amazon opened its first bookstore in the Washington D.C. area last week, a real brick-and-mortar storefront on ritzy M street in Georgetown, and is attracting the kind of attention you would expect. “An Amazon bookstore? What the hell?” one woman exclaimed to her friend, stopping for a double-take…

During the Cold War, American intelligence efforts were divided. The NSA, FBI, CIA, and other groups functioned in an atmosphere of both cooperation and competition—“coop-tition”—to keep an eye not just on the Soviets but on each other. We didn’t put our eggs in one basket, to borrow a phrase.

On Tuesday, Walmart’s value, as reflected in its stock price, dropped by more than 10 percent. That’s nearly $31 billion. It had a bad quarter and in no small part suffered as a result of complications with its online inventory restocking system—it ran out of some items in demand and so couldn’t…

In that wonderful movie Patton, George C. Scott’s title character imagines himself in a one-on-one tank battle with Field Marshal Erwin Rommel—the winner wins the war. Donald Trump, who hates the Washington Post and therefore its owner, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, may have a similar vision of…

Today is the March for Life, the annual pro-life demonstration that takes place around the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. In a first, President Trump addressed the rally via satellite from the Rose Garden. (George W. Bush addressed the group over the phone.) It's worth considering Trump's…

About a year ago, just as Donald Trump was waiting be inaugurated, two twentieth century novels skyrocketed up the bestseller list. One was George Orwell’s 1984, which topped Amazon’s sales rankings that week. The other was Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which repeated the feat two weeks…

How will tax reform impact you? It hasn't passed just yet, but it just might! The New York Times has a basic calculator worth checking out. And Maxim Lott has one that's a little more advanced. Neither are perfect, but worth examining to get a broad sense of how the tax reform bill might benefit or…

Wonder Woman isn’t the only Amazon who’s beating people up. Municipalities across the country are competing to land the second headquarters of the giant online retailer of the same name, including an offer by Chicago to give tax revenue collected from Amazon workers directly to Amazon. But…

All Hail the Middle Man. (Or at least this one.) Meet Ryan Grant, a 28 year old who raids the clearance aisle at big box stores, and upsells items as a third party seller on Amazon. He started doing this to make some side hustle money, but then quit his job in accounting to do it full time. It…

Uber comes along and ends the rainy days and nights of waving fruitlessly at cabs with flashing “off duty” signs, and governments respond to pressures from threatened incumbents by making life difficult or impossible for the welfare-enhancing newcomer.

YOU get a baby, YOU get a baby, EVERYONE GETS A BABY! If you're not hip to the popular memes kids are using, that's an Oprah reference. Amazon mistakenly sent out an email to lots of people yesterday—perhaps hundreds of thousands—suggesting somebody bought something off of their (in most cases…

Can the bodega be killed? Probably not. But two ex-Googlers (ugh) want to try, per a write up from Fast Company:

I love grocery shopping, so much so that two weeks ago I drove three hours round-trip to see the German grocer Lidl's foray into the U.S. And so naturally, on Monday, I went to check out Whole Foods on the day that Amazon’s purchase took effect.

Move over, Bill Gates: There’s a new richest man in the world.

“The trusts are hijous monsters. On the one hand they must be crushed underfoot; on the other hand not so fast.” So spake Mr. Dooley, the fictitious Irish bartender and font of wisdom created by Finley Peter Dunne in the late 19th century. Trusts were the form monopolies took at the time. Dooley…

On the latest micro-episode of the Substandard, Vic, JVL, and Sonny curse David Brooks for ruining Amazon Prime Day and suggest ways for the beneficent Jeff Bezos to improve the most wonderful time of the year.

The company that is the 12th biggest in the U.S., larger than all the big banks, is staunchly anti-union. It's putting mom-and-pop retailers out of business and driving even big chains into bankruptcy.

American TV has become the equivalent of India's Bollywood—an almost unimaginably prolific source of filmed entertainment. Bollywood produces more than a thousand movies a year, more than double Hollywood's output. Similarly, the networks and cable channels and streaming services have been…

American TV has become the equivalent of India’s Bollywood—an almost unimaginably prolific source of filmed entertainment. Bollywood produces more than a thousand movies a year, more than double Hollywood's output. Similarly, the networks and cable channels and streaming services have been…

The other day, I happened to click on to Amazon and read their top 100 best-selling books for that hour. As I read the list, I was shocked to note—fully understanding that as a conservative, time has passed me by—that 5 of the top 100 books had the f-word in the title.

July 12 just might have been the day on which the retail sector as we have known it here in America came to its end. If not its end, surely the beginning of its end. Amazon has an estimated 54 million Prime customers in the U.S. who pay $99 per year, and millions more around the world who pay about…

Incomes are up. Jobs are so plentiful that employers complain they cannot find workers who have the right skills and can pass a drug test, and college graduates are entering the best market in years. Industrial output is rising. Housing starts rose 6.6 percent and building permits 3.6 percent in…

On the surface, little seems to have changed as the opening bell rang for the retailers’ battle that is the holiday shopping season. On Thanksgiving day we carved some 46 million turkeys and downed 50 million pumpkin pies despite a shortage of pecans created by Chinese consumers who imported the…

Retailers are having difficulty moving apparel these days. One analyst attributes the groaning shelves and racks to two successive years of warm weather. So retailers’ worries will soon be over: the world’s leaders are about to assemble in Paris to end the trend to global warming, a bigger threat…

There are times when excessive attention to monthly data reporting what’s up, what’s down, can be allowed to obscure underlying structural changes in an economy. With the game of what-will-Yellen-do-next in full flow, this is one of those times. No, the proverbial tectonic plates are not shifting,…

They are men, mostly. They are young, mostly. They are visionaries on a mission -- to systematize and make all the world’s knowledge accessible (Google); to connect all the world’s people with each other (Facebook); to change the way books are read and the sound of music is heard (Apple, Amazon);…

Some three hundred years ago Sir Walter Scott asked, “Breathes there a man with soul so dead who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land.” Well, in America corporations are legally deemed  “persons,” so the answer to Scott’s question is “Yes,” at least when it comes to tax…

In Geneva, the famous “Pink Star” diamond fetches $83 million at auction, almost double the price ever paid for such a stone, and in Arkansas, Walmart lowers its sales outlook for the holiday season. That might be a metaphor for the holiday shopping season, where grouchy retailers are predicting a…

Readers will, we hope, forgive The Scrapbook for the undue pleasure we have taken in Washington Post stories about the impending sale of the Post to Amazon founder Jeffrey Bezos. 

Governments everywhere are on the prowl for more revenues. French president François Hollande wants to tax incomes in excess of €1 million at a 75 percent rate. Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, has jacked up VAT. Southern Europe’s finance ministers have come up with the novel…

Last week I wrote a long exegesis on microtasking and the future of temporary, remote workers. I only dabbled in microtasking on Amazon's Mechanical Turk exchange, but reader D. Bush uses it often and writes in about her experience:

Tired of journalism’s glamour and prestige, I decided to take a second job last week. I went to Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk website—a sort of virtual job fair matching thousands of businesses and online workers—and got a microtasking gig. It didn’t take long. I filled out a few forms, proved I was…

Talking Points Memo: "FBI Arrests Man For Plotting To Attack Capitol, Pentagon With C-4 Loaded Remote Controlled Planes"

Mike Murphy says enough with the Iowa caucuses already.