There's nothing stopping an increase in competition is the problem. Sellers want the visibility of Amazon's platform with the benefits of rolling their own. There's nothing physically preventing a merchant alliance from forming its own platform, merchants (that aren't Walmart) simply don't do this because they know they're still getting more value by being on Amazon instead. Online retail isn't new or novel at this point, merchants have had all the time in the world to figure out a more favorable system.
Theoretical competition =/= actual competition. Yes, that could technically happen, but Amazon's market power makes it extremely difficult. Here, there's a two-sided marketplace (consumers and sellers) where Amazon has both sides. It's not enough for one side of the market to decide they want out. For example, see what merchants have done with Shopify and the Shop app (merchants are all on board, but consumers don't care).
What you're describing is the competitive advantage of shoppers preferring Amazon though, at least from how I'm reading your post. If a seller alliance or rival omnicorp can't entice consumers then they need either better marketing or better deals, competing in short. If they can't succeed at either of those in a manner significant enough to challenge Amazon then how is targeting Amazon with legislation actually helping consumers? It seems like most policy proposals boil down to making Amazon less competitive rather than cultivating an environment that results in more platforms capable of reaching Amazon's combination of scale and popularity. If Google was worse at Search there'd be more competition in the space but it'd hardly be a win for consumers unless you change the definition of a win.
Yup, that's exactly what the linked article describes, but you have to take into account barriers to entry. Consumers prefer short term, lower prices on Amazon, others are pushed out, Amazon raises prices in the long run (already seeing this in prices and other ways - like higher search results) and strong network effects make barriers to entry too high for firms to re-enter.
Political realism is about optics. If the Democrats back down on their egregious lockdowns they'll look even more disorganized than they did in the primaries so it's not worth the risk when the progressive arm of the party is still throwing a tantrum and Biden is struggling to unify the party. On the other side, many Republican states have constituencies that see COVID as a matter of personal responsibility and which feel that nearly any restriction is overreach by the government. So neither group has an incentive to back pedal even if both would probably benefit from pivoting. Couple this with the reality that the scientific communities seem to have embraced making normative statements outside the direct scope of their fields (sometimes even acting against or excluding peers with political differences) and you have little reason for people to act on good advice anyway.
The democrats are not in control of the country, they are in control of a few states but there's a lot of different ideas gonig around. No one would say NY would be better off if they hadn't cut it down a lot and shut down. Washington state is another place that looked like it was going to get out of control but the shutdown moved us from worst in the us to a much smaller impact than originally feared.
Now look at Texas where their daily positive covid 19 detection has double in the past weeks from about 750 a day to 1500 a day. They are going to have a lot more people getting really sick, because that just following from daily exposure. See https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/texas/ (go to daily new cases in texas, click on 7 day average). You can se e the same data at rt.live (find Teaxs, click on per day).
What you say is not true - it could be true potentially but the data shows that's not the case. Tests counts relatively stable recently but pos counts went up and percent of tests that were positive also increased.
See https://www.covidexitstrategy.org/. As you see on this page, many states are increasing absolute number of tests - Texas is actually steady for a week at around 18k tests per day. But the % of people testing positive is increasing (see that same website).
On that page scroll to 'how is my state doing on testing' and look at Texas, it's interesting to compare states. Notice last week number of daily tests was around 18k/day. Test positivity went from 5.5% to 7.7%.
This isn't a political issue, it's just the actual numbers. Compare to say Wyoming (increased tests unlike Texas from 472 to 690 per day, test positivity went down there). Oregon is getting worse (2.4k tests/day, in the last week 1.5% to 3.4% of tests are pos).
Texas is having increasing covid-19 positive tests, it's not from increasing the number of tests and icu bed space is going down. This website gives the data source so you can look at it yourself.
You are missing the nuance once again. I am glad you mentioned Oregon, because I am in Oregon and have been following my states response pretty closely, for obvious reasons.
Oregon recently had an outbreak at a seafood plant, and retirement center. The seafood outbreak infected around 125 people, the retirement center around 35. There is also a smaller outbreak at a food processing plant in Washington County, with I believe 5-10 infections.
Here is the secret, Oregon is _now_ doing contact tracing. So _everyone_ at Pacific Seafood was tested, despite a vast majority showing no symptoms. These people would _not_ have been tested two weeks ago. Two weeks ago, testing was generally voluntary and people would request tests if they felt they needed one. Now, people who have confirmed interaction with infected individuals are being tested by state mandate. So of course, now Oregon will have more cases discovered and more positive tests.
You see how your "actual numbers" still don't tell the whole story? There is context in every single state, city, county that you miss just looking at raw numbers. Without that context you make generalizations about what the data is telling you. Stop that.
Yes, Texas should be watched, but the health authority in Texas does not seem to be worried. My own governor, Kate Brown, who has taken this (imo) too seriously, has stated publicly that she _fully expects_ an increase in cases over the coming weeks as we reopen. But now, we have the hospital and treatment capacity to handle it.
And about the Texas example, where ICU beds are decreasing. The site you linked does not seem to really mention what those ICU patients are in for. When states reopen, so do car wrecks, workplace injuries, major surgeries etc. A bypass surgery will require a few days in an ICU, so now that major surgeries are happening again, of course ICU capacity would be taxed. Again, as I've been saying, you lack context. This time last year, what was the ICU bed utilization in Texas? Now that we see that intubation and invasive ventilators actually worsens outcomes, how many COVID patients can be treated _outside_ of an ICU?
As I said in my original post, we are not updating our metrics to meet new understandings. ICU beds are a silly metric now, but they sure are scary!
> The democrats are not in control of the country, they are in control of a few states...<
Yes but (assuming I understand your point correctly) the U.S. federal government isn't in control of the country either in this context. They certainly could have been more cooperative with states in terms of distributing supplies and communicating new developments as they came in but, short of bringing in troops and asserting themselves by force, they lack the authority to implement a hard nation wide lockdown. Given the early panic over the virus it's hard to imagine a federal level quarantine not resulting in violence.
>No one would say NY would be better off if they hadn't cut it down a lot and shut down.<
I'm not sure if I phrased my first post badly or if we agree here. When I said the lockdowns were egregious compared to Rep. states I was speaking relative to the present. I agree things would have been much worse if early and cautious action hadn't been taken.
>Now look at Texas where their daily positive covid 19 detection has double in the past weeks from about 750 a day to 1500 a day. They are going to have a lot more people getting really sick, because that just following from daily exposure.<
This is basically the entire national debate. We've seen increasingly that just getting the corona virus isn't a death sentence for most people. Texas' infections have been rising, which will by extension lead to some amount of additional deaths, but Texas also has an extremely low death toll compared to other states in terms of deaths per million people (going by Worldometer). The significance of this is that most infected arent going to die and dying after infection, for the most part, isn't a random lottery and so whether it's wise or not to continue to force people to remain in lock-down is a value/political judgement rather than a distinctly scientific one. This holds especially true when people in need are refraining from visiting hospitals for fear of getting the virus and instances of depression and suicide have risen dramatically as a consequence of lock-down policies. You can argue fewer people might still die with heavy lock-down measures in the present but those deaths arent the same people and so what's ultimately being dicussed is whether or not it's fair to drive certain individuals to death or unnecessary physical suffering in order to save people they largrly have no relation with. And that's before discussing the small business owners who have lost their life's work due to government mandates (consumers didn't stop going out by choice after all).
My point about the parties themselves was purely meant to highlight that at this stage both sides could probably be managing their policies better (regardless of value distinctions) but neither wants to make it look like the other team was correct. The irony is that neither side would be taking the same actions since for Dem states like California this would be loosening up a little while for Rep stated it would be tightening up or at least implementing financial support for at-risk individuals and their cohabitants. From here, my broader point was that it's an election year and so, regardless of if any particular state is actually beholden to a particular plan of action, anyone who breaks too far off from the party line (in a manner that risks bad optics) is going to lose clout within their party. I'm not endorsing that as the way things should be but that's the apparent state of things going by the predominantly partisan split in terms of current lock-down action.
