A Scent of Desperation

Sometimes, you see news stories that are connected without the reporters mentioning the connection. February 7th saw two stories like that. In the first story, it was announced that Amazon is raising the price of Amazon Prime by $20. The second story was about Amazon raising the base pay cap for corporate executives from $160,000 to $350,000. Ah, so they raised the price of Prime and then gave themselves more than a double pay raise. Yes, I think I see the connection there.

However, there's one more connection to make. The following day saw this story: Silicon Valley is no longer the edgy tech frontier as workers flee Google and Amazon for crypto and Web3 startups, recruiters say. According to the article, some of the "best and brightest of Silicon Valley" are leaving Big Tech in a brain drain on those companies, and it's happening very quickly. Fascinating. Apparently, the move to jack the price on Prime and give executives a massive pay raise is fueled by desperation and fear.

I'm eagerly looking forward to seeing what happens to Big Tech after the brain drain. During my watching of French news videos, I ran across a story saying that the European Union has caught GAFAM red-handed tampering in U.S. elections in order to change the outcomes. This is in defiance of the will of the American people. The EU has declared GAFAM not only a threat to U.S. democracy but also a threat to European democracy. GAFAM is an acronym for Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. Caught red-handed tampering in U.S. elections and yet that never appears in our news media. Funny, isn't it? It'll be interesting to see if the brain drain hampers future election fraud.

It was another week of recovering from shoulder pain. Last Friday, the pain was almost gone. Somehow, I re-injured it. I think the dental chair had something to do with it. I also think sitting in the chair in the living room instead of at the computer was the main culprit. I wanted to be away from the keyboard to give it time to heal, but I could never get comfortable in that chair. It seems to have really aggravated the injury. However, after staying out of it, the shoulder is doing much better. I could raise my arm today without the same level of pain as on Wednesday, for instance, but it's still not back to normal. This is the shoulder for the arm I broke when I was a kid.

Have a great weekend.