I've listened to Carlos Cashman and I've listened to this guy and a bad situation has just gotten worse.
Why is Thrasio screwed?
1. E-commerce is getting killed this year because of risings costs 2. They used debt to buy mostly garbage brands
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3. Chinese competition 4. There are ~zero returns to scale (possibly negative actually) to rolling-up Amazon brands for many reasons 5. Everything I've seen from them shows they are not the amazing operators (like me and @michaelpatron0) necessary 2 succeed
RIP Thrasio
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@patrick_oshag the two people whose podcasts I listened to (you have many wonderful ones obviously) that I said were no bueno are Carlos and the Shippo person.
I ended up going outside and having a 20 minute long conversation with him.
My takeaways:
1) it’s a lot easier to have a policy for homelessness if you never have to have a face to face conversation with them as people.
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2) Austin and Texas banned public camping and he told me this has been a problem for him but that he had a solution.
3) His solution is move farther out. I told him “well what about coming in to get food etc?”. He said that’ll be a problem but he can solve with a battery
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(I was halfway thorough writing this thread and my kid had explosive diarrhea)
3) (continued) he needed a battery for his electric razor scooter. His backup was to live by a river where there are fish. To me this sounds impossible and that he’s not going to be able to camp.
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Not a stock guy, but here's why I would think twice about buying Amazon shares.
1. Everyone thinks AWS is the huge driver of Amazon profits. It kinda is, but in my opinion amazon marketplace + ads is a better more moaty business
2. At some point, if there is justice in
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this world, Amazon is going to get slapped by the government for doing something antitrust.
3. I think this is one of the reasons why Bezos is out of the business. He knows this is coming and as such, it's not fun anymore
4. After Amazon gets slapped, it's going to
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emasculate them. They're going to lose their mojo, just like Microsoft did between 1996 through 2014. The fear of government regulation/interference really defangs a company and makes it significantly harder to get things done. Bureaucratic rot starts to set in.
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Does anyone understand what is going on with Amazon testing requests in Canada, Australia, and other small Amazon markets?
There are a couple of pretty serious issues with this situation:
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1. Unless your product is a super seller, there isn't enough sales on these small Amazon markets to justify spending $300 or so on testing. 2. These tests are the same thing whether it's Canada, USA, Australia, or EU but with minor differences. It's kind of a testing racket.
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3. While I haven't done it myself, I have seen enough from Amazon to know that they'd probably accept fake test results. 4. A lot of labs which are accredited in China by the gov't of the USA actually don't test. Yeah, that's right. They charge really low fees by not testing.
I've been picking up too many followers lately, so let me tell you how I'd solve the 14,000 (!) mostly Haitian migrants huddling under a bridge in Del Rio, TX trying to get into the USA.
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If I were Biden I would fly down to Del Rio and give a speech in French on loudspeakers (later uploaded to youtube) saying that:
- no one is getting in
- no humanitarian aid (food water etc) will be given
- if you trash in the river you're getting hit with rubber bullets
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Biden's current plan is to fly the migrants back to Haiti on the USA's dime.
Why?
That's like saying "don't make it into the US illegally, get a free ride back home" so it incents this behavior, plus it makes it easy for Mexico.