Amazon R&D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France
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Id say, considering that, and considering that for these corps taxes are lava, i’d go to look at incentives on taxes about R&D filing
It's both hilarious and disheartening how much of a tax grift it is.
I mean I work in a RnD dep. now and it honestly is some R but like 2% of my time.
I took R&D as the bucket that we put both research and development into.
This doesn't seem like a profit-driven decision.
Bench / sub 100% utilization is one reason consultants cost so much.
1. What publicly-traded companies report to investors and what they report to the IRS are more different than you might initially suspect.
2. This $73.2B figure was pulled directly from their 2022 10-K filing[1] under an ops expense line item labeled technology and content, which includes R&D and then some. The devil in the details is buried in a footnote on p. 26:
>> Technology and content costs include payroll and related expenses for employees involved in the research and development of new and existing products and services, development, design, and maintenance of our stores, curation and display of products and services made available in our online stores, and infrastructure costs. Infrastructure costs include servers, networking equipment, and data center related depreciation and amortization, rent, utilities, and other expenses necessary to support AWS and other Amazon businesses.
At face value, to handwave this figure as just R&D and purport that it's directly comparable to other publicly-traded companies who report disaggregated research and development strikes me as somewhere between shotgun analysis and hoodwinking.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000101872423...
I suspect the numbers are wrong.
My own hypothesis was that the first table and the second table don't measure the same thing. Which would mean the headline is comparing apples to oranges.
You want to give tax breaks for real research and development of new things.
The thought of research tax breaks is that the market qualifies them as useful. Useless inventions make no money, and have no income to be taxed anyways.
Take a car, replace all the perfectly good knobs with touch screens you won’t be able to replace in 5 years. Innovation! Massive conglomerates control the internet and feed you expertly tuned rage engagement. Innovation! Smart home lights that stop working when the servers go offline. Innovation!
On and on. If the markets were rational and efficient NFTs wouldn’t have even started. Crypto wouldn’t be a thing. Printers that refuse to print black because you’re out of cyan wouldn’t exist.
Markets blow and aren’t really maximizing productive anything directly. Tangentially, occasionally, when they’re not causing cost savings that cause doors to blow off of planes to save money. Seems tenuous at best.
I think in most of your examples, you want something different than what the market values, and me too! But our values are different than the average person. I'm willing to fiddle with running a home server to do those things, but most people aren't.
> Printers that refuse to print black because you’re out of cyan wouldn’t exist.
They do because the crappy business practices let them sell at a lower upfront cost. That appeals to enough people for the company to make money.
> Markets blow and aren’t really maximizing productive anything directly. Tangentially, occasionally, when they’re not causing cost savings that cause doors to blow off of planes to save money. Seems tenuous at best.
The markets optimize for profit. That generally comes from innovations in something; products, processes, equipment, who knows. I won't pretend the markets are perfect, or efficient. What I will say is that I don't have a better proposal. Planned economies have historically turned out much worse than free markets.
I think there are compelling arguments that we're short on regulations in a fair few places. I'm more leery of arguments that the government should be making broad definitions of "innovation", it veers a little too close to central planning for my liking.
If I build a new assembly building for a new product, that roof is going to be mainstream, long lasting, cheap as I can get it, and billed to “development” because that’s exactly what it is.
You can say the same standing up a CD/CI infrastructure, writing unit tests, mundane documentation and validation processes. It’s all development, getting stuff into production and into the market.
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-regs/research_credit_basic_sec41...
(Not 100% sure this is the most up to date definition but it gives you an idea)
If we don’t understand how Amazon categorizes R&D, we can’t make a fair comparison to France.
If anything, IRS’s (very) broad definition of R&D helps France in that Amazon’s R&D spend isn’t truly R&D in the colloquial sense (or the Wikipedia definition)
In other words, Amazon’s R&D spend is likely overstated (based on what an average person would consider “R&D”)
Not in the UK and most EU law is identical to UK.
I can't wait until we automate the people cheered this law on, out of a job.
I always felt, from outside, that anti trumpers just are against everything he does with simplistic explanation, its a good law amazon has enough money to pay their own r&d
What if the R&D is open-sourced?
Or what if the R&D would be for a product genuinely beneficial to people? Think a new drug, or infrastructure like Google Maps, etc.
For example, a new drug can take 10~16 years to get to the market, and this is intended by government regulations (there is often no way around it). One has to show the drug is safe and works against the intended disease, before one can sell a drug.
However, before you can even start this clinical work in humans, you must discover the drug first and optimize it through laboratory and animal testing. Only after that can you enter the clinical stage to test it in humans. Clinical stages are typically divided into phase 1/2/3 and each stage requires more time and money. After you complete all that, you can finally ask for approval to sell your drug at a profit from the government (US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)/ EU European medicine agency (EMA)).
This trajectory can typically be divided as follows: Drug Discovery (early lab testing) 2-4 years, $2-15M Preclinical Drug Development (advanced lab/animal testing) 2~3 years, $10-15M Clinical Stage 1 (First in human studies) 1~2 years $15~30M Clinical Stage 2 (medium-sized human study), 2~3 years, $40~60M Clinical Stage 3 (large, longer term human study), 2~4 years $100~300M.
Total: 9~16 years of research & development with a cost of $167~420M. Then finally you can sell the drug for a profit. If you are a startup focused solely on such development, you have no way (or very limited ways) to make money/profit in those 9-16 R&D years. In such a case, R&D tax benefits are really useful.
Sounds like quite a broad brush. As a former Trump voter (to my shame), I realized he's a broken clock that can be right once in a while; yet still such a profoundly net negative that I'd rather he be in jail than in office.
In particular I'm most against his record of sexual assault, association with predators, peeping at young pageant participants, boasting about such things, bending the law and policy to benefit his friends, praise for despots, his demand for loyalty over talent, and racist commentary.
The US tax code already requires that self-classified R&D expenditures be treated as capital-expenditures, and subject to a 5-15 year depreciation period.
Section 174 requires that any and all software development costs be treated as R&D expenditures, and thus capitalized/amortized.
The total tax paid at the end of the depreciation period will be the same, but the upfront tax in the first year of a given expenditure is now 5-15x higher (depending on where the work was done).
If your goal was "foment another wave of far-right nationalism in America", this is a good idea. Judging by the rest of your post, however, I don't think that's what you had in mind.
How the huge mining companies get away with claiming so much is beyond me. But they do.
But genuine R&D would look very similar. There isn't a good test to distinguish "I don't know how to do this thing" from "nobody knows how to do this thing". I don't have the time, resources or inclination to know what everyone else knows. And then having to second guess what the tax office thinks everyone knows, because I know they'd accept some of the things I'm doing as research. It just isn't clear where they think the line is.
All four of those non-Adidas hits are "Sponsored" results, but that's not particularly easy to notice (for one of them it's almost impossible).
I would agree with GP that Amazon product search often leaves much to be desired. It's hard to search for X without getting accessories for X, competitors to X, products that can be connected to X. This is annoying at best, and crippling if you want to, say, sort by price (all the cheapest matches will be accessories or otherwise not what you wanted).
Now that Amazon has captured user-share, they will (ineluctably) abuse user good-will (by padding search results with ad-placed products the user does not want) until they reach some marginal breaking point. The users that remain are either oblivious or cursed with a lingering taste of bad-faith and bullshit.
Eventually the giant will strangle itself in its sleep, but that's probably 50+ years out given how these things go.
I can see (because I was there discussing it back in 95) what the appeal of personalized search results could be for both sellers and consumers. But a few decades of that BS have fairly convincingly made the case that it is a horrible idea.
I’ve stopped trying to save by online ordering, within reason. If a store has what I need + points me in the right direction and demonstrates they are knowledgeable, they will get my business. 5-10 dollars is not worth saving at the expense of fuelling the enshittification machine. If that makes a huge difference to you, then reevaluate if you actually need the item
You’ll end up with less stuff, better stuff, with less hassle and noise, and a relationship to a vendor which may speed up returns and maintenance. As always, pick your poison
This is the natural, simple, user-friendly design I want.
Don't give me some bullshit instead.
So many modern UX issues are from people presuming what users want, rather than just giving them well-designed tools and getting out of the way.
E.g., would you know exactly the price range to pay for a tool set which lets you do general repairs around the house? Should it be ₹100? ₹500? How will a search engine know for sure that you’re an aware customer who knows their price ranges versus a newbie exploring the space? Even google claims to have millions of results per query meaning they, for all their talk about organising the world’s information, don’t know what exactly you want.
It’s all about trade offs and checkboxes(layovers, specific terminals, airlines, aircraft body types, price ranges, dates, non-stops, insurance, in-flight Wi-Fi, meals, early boarding) etc.
Do you first look through the page with all the options, then open different tabs with each unique combination of checkboxes and options enabled/disabled? That must exponentially (literally) harder than simply viewing fuzzy results on screen and pruning the decision tree in your head.
I input my source and destination and date and travel class and then choose from the listed results. At no point I would expect the website to show me business class if I chose economy. If I chose non-stop, I expect non-stop flights and nothing else.
You could offer me a flexible search option, as some sites do (+/- x days on flight times, etc.). Great! Now I can request that we search within a date range. Nice! That might be a good feature for some people!
Offering a simple query interface that returns what it says it will doesn't mean we can't offer flexible search parameters.
Flights are a terrible example of where I'd want to offer fuzzed results... having booked flights on the wrong day before, the last thing I want is to ask for X, but get offered Y.
Logically, you should want to control each of these variables while searching for flights. If you are ready to trust a flight aggregator with these choices, some fuzziness in price seems acceptable too.
You are probably thinking that you don’t want to make a choice about aircraft type or seating configuration and so, whatever the search engine shows in whatever order is fine by you. If so, consider that others might have the same ambivalence towards price fuzziness.
I.e. the UI needs to be there to efficiently help the user do what they ask not to try to be smarter than the user. Unless the user asks for fuzzy matches it doesn't make sense to make the response lead with them.
All those options (the ones I see anyway) are used, so when I limit the search to "Condition - New" they all go away.
How do you define a Adidas shoe? Something with the same name could easily be fake
The problem is, they don't.
Would you believe what drives more sales and what you think you want could be different?
I'm sure Amazon does optimize results based on conversion, but only fools believe search results are optimal based on concrete criteria.
Also, some search results are clearly awful. Once I saw canned fish items showing up while searching for USB drives.
What's an associated seller?
Can you see where this would not work, or how it can be exploited ?
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/01/lazy-use-of-ai-leads-to-a...
eg searching for 25GbE network cards shows a bunch of 2.5GbE network cards, and no amount of -"2.5GbE" nor "NOT 2.5GbE" options (and variations) gets rid of them. :(
Ebay though seems to work ok. :)
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/corporations/irc-41-asc-730-r...
(Though, of course, that might be wrong. American SEC tries to have global jurisdiction, whether you want them to apply to you or not. Matt Levine writes about that a lot in his 'Money Stuff'.)
If you imagine a tech company that declares that they're feature-complete, and they cut expenses to those required to maintain existing service to a high degree of quality/reliability, that seems like a reasonable benchmark of spending that could be classified as "not R&D".
https://pro.bloombergtax.com/brief/rd-tax-credit-and-deducti...
I get that they have high R&D costs but I'm still trying to get my head around how that money is being spent.
This bit:
Cost of Sales: 272,344
Fulfillment: 75,111
Technology and Content: 73,213
Sales and Marketing: 32,551
General and Administrative: 8,823
Other Operating Expense (Income), Net: 62
I think Fulfillment covers warehouse and delivery costs.
"Technology and Content" presumably mixes in Amazon Prime studios, which apparently was $16bn in 2022: https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/03/amazon-ramped-up-content-s...
My guess is that it covers AWS infrastructure too.
No regulation is bad or worse. Even less accountability.
There is nothing technically stopping ChatGPT from hitting up endpoints with JSON other than OpenAI's forced limitations.
It has excellent voice to text, excellent text to voice, excellent comprehension (it can understand vague commands like "set all the lights in the house to a Christmas color theme") and it knows how to generate JSON in a particular format that you can specify. That plus an output scraper that knows where to send the JSON to is pretty much all you need to make this work. It's so close to a commercial product that I can literally taste it. And yet here we are, having to hack together our own solutions... with local LLM's that are about as good as GPT 3.5.
To me, it feels like Siri/HomeKit (or even Home Assistant/Assist) has a much clearer path to that ideal than ChatGPT spitting out JSON.
These are not flying cars, but batteries that are 5 times cheaper in 10 years is impressive. I don't know much about farming but it looks like now, tractors do most of the job, and the guy in the cab is just checking to see if everything goes well. Farmers are still needed, be we need less and less of them for bigger and bigger fields.
Tesla and Panasonic and CATL are doing R&D on batteries. And Tesla and Panasonic are known long-term partners. So, how do they share the R&D? Do they research different topics (chemistry, manufacturing, etc...), does Tesla pays Panasonic to do the R&D? Directly or indirectly?
Tesla must have played a major role regarding battery technology. Other EV manufacturers too, but I suspect Tesla more than the others since they were the biggest player for quite a while (and still are by some metrics), have loads of money, and offer battery products other than cars.
Amazon market cap: $1.6T
France GDP: $2.9T
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMZN/
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locat...
This is a lot like the recent “Novo Nordisk’s market cap is greater than the GDP of Denmark!” comparisons — true, but they’re not like numbers (and indeed, much of Novo Nordisk’s revenue is captured in Danish GDP).
# of Amazon employees: 1.7M
# of working people in France: 30M
That isn't a comparison that makes sense. It's sort of like confusing stocks and flows, but market capitalization isn't even a stock.