#john herman

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The view of Amazon from China is worth considering everywhere. Amazon lets Chinese manufacturers and merchants sell directlyto customers overseas and provides an infrastructure for Prime shipping, which is rare and enormously valuable. It also has unilateral power to change its policies or fees and to revoke access to these markets in an instant — as it has for thousands of Chinese sellers in recent years, with minimal process, because of alleged review fraud. It’s a lot of power for one firm to have. E-commerce analyst Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, has highlighted growing concerns in the country about Amazon’s dominance and trajectory, including an editorial in the People’s Daily critical of the company’s e-commerce “chokehold.” Amazon’s position in the United States isn’t as different as it first looks. The company’s decades of aggressive investment and execution have resulted in the creation of a service without credible direct competitors: a commerce platform with more than 150 million subscribers, backed by a singular logistics empire that employs hundreds of thousands of people, with more market share than its next 14 competitors combined.[...]Amazon doesn’t have a “chokehold,” but it’s in a good position to squeeze.

-John Herman, The Junkification of Amazon

[underpaidgenius]

John Herman, New Technology Is Built on a ‘Stack.’ Is That the Best Way to Understand Everything Else, Too?

People from nutrition geeks to philosophers are using a metaphor from software to describe the world.

The stack metaphor is today’s ‘ghost in the machine’:

“Stack,” in technological terms, can mean a few different things, but the most relevant usage grew from the start-up world: A stack is a collection of different pieces of software that are being used together to accomplish a task. A smartphone’s software stack, for instance, could be described as a layered structure: There’s the low-level code that controls the device’s hardware, and then, higher up, its basic operating system, and then, even higher, the software you use to message a friend or play a game. An individual application’s stack might include the programming languages used to build it, the services used to connect it to other apps or the service that hosts it online; a “full stack” developer would be someone proficient at working with each layer of that system, from bottom to top.

The stack isn’t just a handy concept for visualizing how technology works. For many companies, the organizing logic of the software stack becomes inseparable from the logic of the business itself. The system that powers Snapchat, for instance, sits on top of App Engine, a service owned by Google; to the extent that Snapchat even exists as a service, it is as a stack of different elements. “What you end up with is entire companies being built on a set of software tools and services,” says Yonas Beshawred, whose own company, StackShare, lets tech professionals publish their companies’ stacks and see what others are using, comparing technology the way hobbyists might compare gear. “You can think of them as Lego blocks.” A healthy stack, or a clever one, is tantamount (the thinking goes) to a well-structured company.

[...]

As theory, the stack remains mostly a speculative exercise: What if we imagined the whole world as software? And as a popular term, it risks becoming an empty buzzword, used to refer to any collection, pile or system of different things. (What’s your dental care stack? Your spiritual stack?) But if tech start-ups continue to broaden their ambitions and challenge new industries — if, as the venture-capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz likes to say, “software is eating the world” — then the logic of the stack can’t be trailing far behind, ready to remake more and more of our economy and our culture in its image. It will also, of course, be subject to the warning with which Daugman ended his 1990 essay. “We should remember,” he wrote, “that the enthusiastically embraced metaphors of each ‘new era’ can become, like their predecessors, as much the prison house of thought as they first appeared to represent its liberation.”

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Amazon’s cross-border commerce arrangements have led to the creation of a delightfully weird branding language almost unique to Amazon, whose marketplace affords special privileges to brands with registered American trademarks. Strings of unpronounceable letters are intended to move easily through the trademarking process; on Amazon, where star ratings and search placement are king, their uselessness as conventional brands doesn’t really matter, so “IOCBYHZ,” “BANKKY,” and “KLAQQED” work just fine.

John Herman, The Junkification of Amazon

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A pet theory: At the core of every successful social network is a glowing nugget of shame, a little radioactive power source mined from the depths of human weakness. Nobody particularly likes to talk about it, but it quietly helps keep the whole thing going. Instagram, for example, is a place to share and keep up with friends. It’s also a place to compare yourself ruthlessly and fruitlessly to others — a machine for reproducing status anxiety. It certainly makes you feel something, and that something doesn’t always feel so good.

-John Herrman, Twitter's Day of Spite

[johnherrman]

John Herman

He was the only real boy of John Herman of Barton Place, Exeter, and Bedford Square, London, by Ann Katencamp or Katenkamp, daughter of the German merchant moved in Exeter, and it was born there on 5 August 1779. The grandson of Samuel Merivale (1715-1771), tutor inside a local dissenting academy in Exeter, he has introduced up a presbyterian. He spent some time at St. John's College, Cambridge, but left if you don't take a diploma. In later existence, he conformed towards the Church of England.

On 17 December 1798 Merivale joined Lincoln's Inn, where he was known as towards the bar in Hilary term 1804. He practised in chancery and personal bankruptcy and printed Reports of Cases contended and determined within the High Court of Chancery, London, 1817-19. He sitting around the Chancery Commission of 1824, within the report which he agreed, but expounded a broader plan of reform inside a Letter to William Courtenay, Esq., about the Chancery Commission, London, 1827.

On 2 December 1831 Merivale was hired to some commissionership in personal bankruptcy, that they held until his death, on 25 April 1844. He was hidden within the churchyard, Hampstead.

In 1811 Merivale printed, for that Society for that Diffusion of Understanding respecting the Punishment of Dying and also the Improvement of Prison Discipline, A Short Statement from the Proceedings both in Houses of Parliament within the last and offer Sessions upon the number of Bills introduced having a view towards the Amendment from the Criminal Law: plus a General Overview of the Arguments utilized in the Debates upon individuals occasions, London. He was Robert Bland's principal collaborator in the ‘Collections in the Greek Anthology and in the Pastoral, Elegiac, and Dramatic Poets of A holiday in Greece,’ London, 1813, In 1814 he printed Orlando in Roncesvalles, London, a poem in ottava rima, in line with the Morgante Maggiore of Luigi Pulci, as well as in 1820 a totally free translation within the same metre of the foremost and third cantos of Niccolò Fortiguerra's Ricciardetto.

An edition of Merivale's Poems, Original and Converted, made an appearance in 1838, London, 2 vols., having a continuation of James Beattie's The Minstrel, some translations from Dante, along with other miscellanea. When past mid-life he learned German, and very soon before his dying printed translations, partially reprinted in the brand new Monthly Magazine for 1840, in the Minor Poems of Schiller in the Second and Third Periods, London, 1844.

Merivale would be a friend of Lord Byron, who recognized his translations in the Greek and the Orlando in Roncesvalles. He would be a frequent cause of the Quarterly Review along with other reviews and periodicals. In 1837-8 he printed within the Gentleman's Magazine letters by Walter Moyle.

Merivale married, on 10 This summertime 1805, Louisa Heath, daughter of Ernest Drury, by whom he'd six sons and 6 kids. His two oldest sons were Herman Merivale and Charles Merivale.

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[johnherman-fanblog]

“You can do finger guns.”

-John Herman

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