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First, I say something in my talks. I highlight that Apple is the largest tax avoider in the world because lawmakers treat it like the hot girl on campus—if she pays a little attention to them, they swoon and are willing to enter into an abusive relationship. I say that Uber is fomenting an ethos i…

Amazon has also effectively conspired with half a billion consumers to use algorithms to starch the margin brands used to garner and deliver those savings to their ally, consumers. A retailer leveraging its power to grow a higher-margin private label is not new. We’ve just never seen anybody this g…

As a species, we are weaker and slower than a lot of our competitors. Our developed brain is our competitive differentiation. Empathy is what makes us more human. The explosion in images distributed on social media platforms has led to more empathy, which should make us less likely to gas children,…

Put another way, anybody who matters in the consumer world is for Apple. Young Democrats (millennials with college degrees) didn’t just inherit the Earth, they conquered it, led by engineering grads from MIT and Harvard dropouts. They are growing their income, spending it irrationally, as young peo…

Venture labor stood in for venture capital—both in the real sense of resources needed to build companies and in terms of seemingly being an accessible option for wealth accumulation of middle-class knowledge workers. This plays into the political right’s rhetoric of the “ownership society” that emp…