by JanieM
Last night John Cole at BJ quoted at length from this Bloomberg article:
Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud computing business, is its fastest-growing and most profitable division, but it comes with a lot of upfront infrastructure costs and ongoing expenses, the biggest of which is electricity. Over the past two years, Amazon has almost doubled the size of its physical footprint worldwide, to 254 million square feet, including dozens of new data centers with vast fields of servers running 24/7. In at least two states, it’s also negotiated with utilities and politicians to stick other people with the bills, piling untold millions of dollars on top of the estimated $1.2 billion in state and municipal tax incentives the company has received over the past decade.
Today in the dentist's waiting room I was reading the preface to GBS's The Apple Cart, from 1930, and came across this:
...the conflict is not really between royalty and democracy. It is between both and plutocracy, which, having destroyed the royal power by frank force under democratic pretexts, has bought and swallowed democracy. Money talks: money prints: money broadcasts: money reigns; and kings and labor leaders alike have to register its decrees, and even, by a staggering paradox, to finance its enterprises and guarantee its profits.
I hope the cure isn't as drastic this time as it was last time.
here in the US, we have gone GBS one better.
money has become a person, endowed with inalienable rigts.
money is our national golem
Posted by: russell | August 22, 2018 at 08:09 AM