Matt Stoller, looking at this month’s antitrust suit against Amazon filed by D.C. attorney general Karl Racine: To understand why, we have to start with the idea of free shipping. Free shipping is the God of online retail, so powerful that France actually banned the practice to protect its retail outlets. Free shipping is also the backbone of Prime. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos knew that the number one pain point for online buyers is shipping — one third of shoppers abandon their carts when they see shipping charges. Bezos helped invent Prime for this reason, saying the point of Prime was to use free shipping “to draw a moat around our best customers.” The goal was to get people used to buying from Amazon, knowing they wouldn’t have to worry about shipping charges. Once Amazon had control of a large chunk of online retail customers, it could then begin dictating terms of sellers who needed to reach them.

This became clear as you read Racine’s complaint. One of the most important sentences in the AG’s argument is a quote from Bezos in 2015 where he alludes to this point. In discussing the firm’s logistics service that is the bedrock of its free shipping promise, Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), he said, “FBA is so important because it is glue that inextricably links Marketplace and Prime. Thanks to FBA, Marketplace and Prime are no longer two things. Their economics … are now happily and deeply intertwined.” Amazon wants people to see Prime, FBA, and Marketplace as one integrated mega-product, what Bezos likes to call “a flywheel,” to disguise the actual monopolization at work. (Indeed, any time you hear the word “flywheel” relating to Amazon, replace it with “monopoly” and the sentence will make sense.)

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Source: Slashdot – ‘Amazon Prime Is an Economy-Distorting Lie’

A plan to reimagine math instruction for 6 million California students has become ensnared in equity and fairness issues — with critics saying proposed guidelines will hold back gifted students and supporters saying it will, over time, give all kindergartners through 12th-graders a better chance to excel. From a report: The proposed new guidelines aim to accelerate achievement while making mathematical understanding more accessible and valuable to as many students as possible, including those shut out from high-level math in the past because they had been “tracked” in lower level classes. The guidelines call on educators generally to keep all students in the same courses until their junior year in high school, when they can choose advanced subjects, including calculus, statistics and other forms of data science.

Although still a draft, the Mathematics Framework achieved a milestone Wednesday, earning approval from the state’s Instructional Quality Commission. The members of that body moved the framework along, approving numerous recommendations that a writing team is expected to incorporate. The commission told writers to remove a document that had become a point of contention for critics. It described its goals as calling out systemic racism in mathematics, while helping educators create more inclusive, successful classrooms. Critics said it needlessly injected race into the study of math. The state Board of Education is scheduled to have the final say in November.

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Source: Slashdot – California’s Controversial Math Overhaul Focuses on Equity

The world’s largest food company, Nestle, has acknowledged that more than 60% of its mainstream food and drinks products do not meet a “recognised definition of health” and that “some of our categories and products will never be ‘healthy’ no matter how much we renovate.” FT: A presentation circulated among top executives this year, seen by the Financial Times, says only 37 per cent of Nestle’s food and beverages by revenues, excluding products such as pet food and specialised medical nutrition, achieve a rating above 3.5 under Australia’s health star rating system. This system scores foods out of five stars and is used in research by international groups such as the Access to Nutrition Foundation. Nestle, the maker of KitKats, Maggi noodles and Nescafe, describes the 3.5 star threshold as a “recognised definition of health.”

Within its overall food and drink portfolio, about 70 per cent of Nestle’s food products failed to meet that threshold, the presentation said, along with 96 per cent of beverages — excluding pure coffee — and 99 per cent of Nestle’s confectionery and ice cream portfolio. Water and dairy products scored better, with 82 per cent of waters and 60 per cent of dairy meeting the threshold.

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Source: Slashdot – Nestle Document Says Majority of Its Food Portfolio is Unhealthy

theodp writes: The U.S. isn’t producing nearly enough students trained in computer science to meet the future demands of the American workforce,” lamented Amazon in a Friday press release, adding that it is “urging Congress and legislatures across the U.S. to support — and fund — computer science education in public schools.” Well, the ‘urging’ seems to be working. On Friday, Representatives Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN) reintroduced the Computer Science for All Act (Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft all lobbied for the bill’s predecessor, the CS for All Act of 2019), which provides $250 million in new grants to support a diverse ‘tech pipeline’ in pre-K through grade 12 education. Amazon and Amazon-funded nonprofit Code.org were cited as the bill’s ‘supporting organizations’ and quoted in Lee’s accompanying press release for the legislation, which aims to improve equity in CS education. “We look forward to working with Representative Lee and the bill’s cosponsors to meet these objectives,” said Brian Huseman, VP of Public Policy for Amazon, which in 2017 curiously broke from other tech giants and stopped releasing the gender and racial data on its workforce it’s required to report to the federal government. “Right now, there are over 400,000 open computing jobs in the United States,” added Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi. “Frustratingly, only 47% of our public high schools teach computer science.

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Source: Slashdot – Amazon Calls For Funding K-12 CS, Eyes 0M Seed Money From Congress