Comment by smelendez
6 hours ago
I think failing to take advantage of the charisma of both Lina Khan and Janet Yellen, and not making them public-facing economics gurus like Alan Greenspan or Larry Summers historically were, was a huge tactical mistake by Biden.
Fair, but the biggest mistake by far was failing to take charge of the immigration debate. The second biggest was his press secretary's insistence on announcing that everything was fine in the economy over and over as a distant second. Third was not resigning when it became clear that he couldn't really keep up with the job, or at least not trying to run for a second term. Virtually nothing else matters by comparison.
Fear over economic damage due to immigration is perhaps the last remaining unifying force among the American political right wing. Biden actually did a lot of good things as president -- arguably a lot more good than he did in his time as senator. But his administration was too eager to just run the federal government as a quiet meritocracy and avoid dealing with any of the hot political issues of the day. He and his administration fucked up so bad that now not only is most of that good undone, but we are in a dire existential situation, facing generational-scale damage that might be unfixable.
It's one thing that they genuinely fumbled the handling of the huge immigration/refugee waves spanning the entire continent and it took them well over a year to start coordinating a response (which they never really did apart from eventually just closing the border) -- it's another that they kept trying to insist everything was fine, there was no problem, there's nothing to see here. People were freaking out about it all over the country, and of course they were being heavily propagandized, but that's not the point. A strong and proactive White House would have made all the propaganda look stupid. Instead, it looked like the truth.
It's absolutely mind-boggling to look back on just how weak the president had to have been from 2020-2024, to somehow let the party of Jan 6 and the disastrous handling of the Covid-19 pandemic regain enough control of the political narrative to make Trump seem like anything other than a narcissistic mobster.
Yellen was objectively the dumbest Treasury Secretary ever. When everyone and their dog realized inflation was getting out of control, she thought it was transitory. She literally gets an F- as an economist.
And some former Roomba employees may have thoughts about Kahn.
Kahn was right about Roomba. Amazon was going to torpedo all the superior competition on the Amazon platform where almost all robot vacuums are sold in the US, plus as the e-commerce monopoly, Amazon was going to instantly have access to an army of cameras inside people’s homes to analyze personal information related to purchase preferences.
IMO allowing Roomba to hit chapter 11 was still a better option for the consumer than handing them to Amazon. They’re still in business as an independent competitor on the market, consolidation was successfully avoided.
Yellen, I don’t have much of an opinion on, but she absolutely wasn’t alone in that opinion (the nuance of that opinion being inflated by this hyperbole), and the treasury is a lot less involved than the federal reserve in doing anything about inflation, anyway.
This is a tangent to my first comment parent to this one, but also more related to the actual article at hand: whether it's Amazon buying Roomba or Nvidia buying Hugging Face, I have a somewhat radical (or is it?) opinion that large companies like Nvidia, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, etc, should not actually be allowed to acquire companies. At all. under any circumstances, even if competition is healthy.
These companies are generally large enough that they do not need the competitive aid of buying an existing company and starting with that sort of structural advantage.
E.g., did Nvidia not have enough money in their bank to start a company to compete with Hugging Face? This is a company that reportedly has ~200-300 employees with investment rounds totaling $400 million. Nvidia made $31.9 billion in net income last quarter.
I look at a company like Xiaomi which just developed its automotive division in-house without resorting to buying car companies. I think our traditional business and finance mindset has an overreliance on acquisitions.
Roomba was not competitive in the market, no amount of Amazon market manipulation would have changed that. Best case scenario, Amazon would have invested in making it competitive. Worst case, their engineers would have been absorbed into Amazon's warehouse robotics projects.
Is either of those worse than what actually happened: the company is now a zombie brand for a Chinese company?
1 reply →
iRobot is now 100% owned by Shenzhen Picea Robotics of China. (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1159167/000115916726...)
3 replies →
The company's name was iRobot, not Roomba.
I spent a little time working there around 2017. Whatever you're implying my former colleagues' thoughts on the subject are (or mine, for that matter), you're probably wrong.