/biz/ - Business & Finance

Amazon now controls 43 percent of total e-commerce in the United States with a market capitalization of $435 billion. Overall, e-commerce has been rising by $40 billion per year since 2015, which is now pushing traditional retail into extinction. Amazon bought Whole Foods to expedite their move into grocery delivery. Most everyone has bought goods from Amazon. It is virtually impossible for any brick and mortar retailer to compete against Amazon on price as Amazon doesn't have to invest in storefronts and can focus on building an efficient delivery system at the highest volumes.

Here's their other advantage - Amazon doesn't need to make money. In its 20 years as a public company, Amazon often has not turned a profit. A number of years ago, some financial types noticed and shorted the stock, saying, "amazon doesn't make money." In response, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos stopped investing in anything new for a year and ramped up profitablity. Those who bet against Amazon were burned badly. Now, no one bets against Amazon, and it's stock price is over $900 per share, making Jeff one of the richest people in the world.

One Department of Labor survey in 2012 found that 41 percent of displaced manufacturing workers between 2009 and 2011 were either still unemployed or dropped out of the labor market within three years of losing their jobs.

How do the 40 percent of displaced manufacturing workers who don’t find new jobs survive? The short answer is that many became destitute and applied for disability benefits. Disability rolls shot up starting in 2000, rising by 3.5 million, with the numbers increasing dramatically in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and other manufacturing-heavy states. In Michigan, about half of the 310,000 residents who left the workforce between 2003 and 2013 went on disability. Many displaced manufacturing workers essentially entered a new underclass of government dependents who have been left behind.

In places where jobs disappear, society falls apart. The public sector and civic institutions are poorly equipped to do much about it. When a community truly disintegrates, knitting it back together becomes a herculean, perhaps impossible task. Virtue, trust, and cohesion—the stuff of civilization—are difficult to restore. If anything, it’s striking how public corruption seems to often arrive hand-in-hand with economic hardship.

Morgan Stanley estimated the savings of automated freight delivery to be a staggering $168 billion per year in saved fuel ($35 billion), reduced labor costs ($70 billion), fewer accidents ($36 billion), and increased productivity and equipment utilization ($27 billion). That’s an enormously high incentive to show drivers to the door—it would actually be enough to pay the drivers their $40,000 a year salary to stay home and still save tens of billions per year.

Other autonomous vehicle companies report similar timelines, with 2020 being the first year of mass adoption. The market rewards business leaders for making things more efficient. Efficiency doesn’t love normal people.

How do you go about developing cashflow? My current goal is to get to the point where my assets make me enough money to cover my liabilities.

Here are a few passive ways to develop cashflow off the top of my head:
Real Estate (requires a lot of money)
Dividends (no point buying now because stock market will crash)

>>15073939
It hasn't even begun.

How do I profit off of automation?