text:
Amazon com : Letter to Shareholders – Form 8-K
Dear shareholders:
Over the past 25 years at Amazon, I've had the opportunity to write many narratives, emails, letters, and keynotes for employees, customers, and partners. But, this is the first time I've had the honor of writing our annual shareholder letter as CEO of Amazon. Jeff set the bar high on these letters, and I will try to keep them worth reading.
When the pandemic started in early 2020, few people thought it would be as expansive or long-running as it's been. Whatever role Amazon played in the world up to that point became further magnified as most physical venues shut down for long periods of time and people spent their days at home. This meant that hundreds of millions of people relied on Amazon for PPE, food, clothing, and various other items that helped them navigate this unprecedented time. Businesses and governments also had to shift, practically overnight, from working with colleagues and technology on-premises to working remotely. AWS played a major role in enabling this business continuity. Whether companies saw extraordinary demand spikes, or demand diminish quickly with reduced external consumption, the cloud's elasticity to scale capacity up and down quickly, as well as AWS's unusually broad functionality helped millions of companies adjust to these difficult circumstances.
Our AWS and Consumer businesses have had different demand trajectories during the pandemic. In the first year of the pandemic, AWS revenue continued to grow at a rapid clip-30% year over year ("YoY") in 2020 on a $35 billion annual revenue base in 2019-but slower than the 37% YoY growth in 2019. This was due in part to the uncertainty and slowing demand that so many businesses encountered, but also in part to our helping companies optimize their AWS footprint to save money. Concurrently, companies were stepping back and determining what they wanted to change coming out of the pandemic. Many concluded that they didn't want to continue managing their technology infrastructure themselves, and made the decision to accelerate their move to the cloud. This shift by so many companies (along with the economy recovering) helped re-accelerate AWS's revenue growth to 37% YoY in 2021.
Conversely, our Consumer revenue grew dramatically in 2020. In 2020, Amazon's North America and International Consumer revenue grew 39% YoY on the very large 2019 revenue base of $245 billion; and, this extraordinary growth extended into 2021 with revenue increasing 43% YoY in Q1 2021. These are astounding numbers. We realized the equivalent of three years' forecasted growth in about 15 months.
As the world opened up again starting in late Q2 2021, and more people ventured out to eat, shop, and travel, consumer spending returned to being spread over many more entities. We weren't sure what to expect in 2021, but the fact that we continued to grow at double digit rates (with a two-year Consumer compounded annual growth rate of 29%) was encouraging as customers appreciated the role Amazon played for them during the pandemic, and started using Amazon for a larger amount of their household purchases.
This growth also created short-term logistics and cost challenges. We spent Amazon's first 25 years building a very large fulfillment network, and then had to double it in the last 24 months to meet customer demand. As we were bringing this new capacity online, the labor market tightened considerably, making it challenging both to receive all of the inventory our vendors and sellers wanted to send us and to place that inventory as close to customers as we typically do. Combined with ocean, air, and trucking capacity becoming scarcer and more expensive, this created extra transportation and productivity costs. Supply chains were disrupted in ways none of us had seen previously. We hoped that the major impact from COVID-19 would recede as 2021 drew to a close, but then omicron reared its head in December, which had worldwide ramifications, including impacting people's ability to work. And then in late February, with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, fuel costs and inflation became bigger issues with which to contend.
So, 2021 was a crazy and unpredictable year, continuing a trend from 2020. But, I'm proud of the incredible commitment and effort from our employees all over the world. I'm not sure any of us would have gotten
through the pandemic the same way without the dedication and extraordinary efforts shown by our teams during this period, and I'm eternally grateful.
It's not normal for a company of any size to be able to respond to something as discontinuous and unpredictable as this pandemic turned out to be. What is it about Amazon that made it possible for us to do so? It's because we weren't starting from a standing start. We had been iterating on and remaking our fulfillment capabilities for nearly two decades. In every business we pursue, we're constantly experimenting and inventing. We're divinely discontented with customer experiences, whether they're our own or not. We believe these customer experiences can always be better, and we strive to make customers' lives better and easier every day. The beauty of this mission is that you never run out of runway; customers always want better, and our job is both to listen to their feedback and to imagine what else is possible and invent on their behalf.
People often assume that the game-changing inventions they admire just pop out of somebody's head, a light bulb goes off, a team executes to that idea, and presto-you have a new invention that's a breakaway success for a long time. That's rarely, if ever, how it happens. One of the lesser known facts about innovative companies like Amazon is that they are relentlessly debating, re-defining, tinkering, iterating, and experimenting to take the seed of a big idea and make it into something that resonates with customers and meaningfully changes their customer experience over a long period of time.
Let me give you some Amazon examples.
Our Fulfillment Network: Going back to the pandemic, there's no way we could have started working on our fulfillment network in March 2020 and satisfied anything close to what our customers needed. We'd been innovating in our fulfillment network for 20 years, constantly trying to shorten the time to get items to customers. In the early 2000s, it took us an average of 18 hours to get an item through our fulfillment centers and on the right truck for shipment. Now, it takes us two. To deliver as reliably and cost-effectively as we desire, and to serve Amazon Prime members expecting shipments in a couple of days, we spent years building out an expansive set of fulfillment centers, a substantial logistics and transportation capability, and reconfigured how we did virtually everything in our facilities. For perspective, in 2004, we had seven fulfillment centers in the U.S. and four in other parts of the world, and we hadn't yet added delivery stations, which connect our fulfillment and sortation centers to the last-mile delivery vans you see driving around your neighborhood. Fast forward to the end of 2021, we had 253 fulfillment centers, 110 sortation centers, and 467 delivery stations in North America, with an additional 157 fulfillment centers, 58 sortation centers, and 588 delivery stations across the globe. Our delivery network grew to more than 260,000 drivers worldwide, and our Amazon Air cargo fleet has more than 100 aircraft. This has represented a capital investment of over $100 billion and countless iterations and small process improvements by over a million Amazonians in the last decade and a half.
Ironically, just before COVID started, we'd made the decision to invest billions of incremental dollars over several years to deliver an increasing number of Prime shipments in one day. This initiative was slowed by the challenges of the pandemic, but we've since resumed our focus here. Delivering a substantial amount of shipments in one day is hard (especially across the millions of items that we offer) and initially expensive as we build out the infrastructure to scale this efficiently. But, we believe our over 200 million Prime customers, who will tell you very clearly that faster is almost always better, will love this. So, this capability to ship millions of items within a couple days (and increasingly one day) was not from one aha moment and not developed in a year or two. It's been hard-earned by putting ourselves in the shoes of our customers, knowing what they wanted, organizing Amazonians to work together to invent better solutions, and investing a large amount of financial and people resources over 20 years (often well in advance of when it would pay out). This type of iterative innovation is never finished and has periodic peaks in investment years, but leads to better long-term customer experiences, customer loyalty, and returns for our shareholders.
AWS: As we were defining AWS and working backwards on the services we thought customers wanted, we kept triggering one of the biggest tensions in product development-where to draw the line on functionality in V1. One early meeting in particular-for our core compute service called Elastic Compute Cloud ("EC2")-was scheduled for an hour, and took three, as we animatedly debated whether we could launch a compute service without an accompanying persistent block storage companion (a form of network attached storage).
Everybody agreed that having a persistent block store was important to a complete compute service; however, to have one ready would take an extra year. The question became could we offer customers a useful service where they could get meaningful value before we had all the features we thought they wanted? We decided that the initial launch of EC2 could be feature-poor if we also organized ourselves to listen to customers and iterate quickly. This approach works well if you indeed iterate quickly; but, is disastrous if you can't. We launched EC2 in 2006 with one instance size, in one data center, in one region of the world, with Linux operating system instances only (no Windows), without monitoring, load balancing, auto-scaling, or yes, persistent storage. EC2 was an initial success, but nowhere near the multi-billion-dollar service it's become until we added the missing capabilities listed above, and then some.
In the early days of AWS, people sometimes asked us why compute wouldn't just be an undifferentiated commodity. But, there's a lot more to compute than just a server. Customers want various flavors of compute (e.g. server configurations optimized for storage, memory, high-performance compute, graphics rendering, machine learning), multiple form factors (e.g. fixed instance sizes, portable containers, serverless functions), various sizes and optimizations of persistent storage, and a slew of networking capabilities. Then, there's the CPU chip that runs in your compute. For many years, the industry had used Intel or AMD x86 processors. We have important partnerships with these companies, but realized that if we wanted to push price and performance further (as customers requested), we'd have to develop our own chips, too. Our first generalized chip was Graviton, which we announced in 2018. This helped a subset of customer workloads run more cost-effectively than prior options. But, it wasn't until 2020, after taking the learnings from Graviton and innovating on a new chip, that we had something remarkable with our Graviton2 chip, which provides up to 40% better price-performance than the comparable latest generation x86 processors. Think about how much of an impact 40% improvement on compute is. Compute is used for every bit of technology. That's a huge deal for customers. And, while Graviton2 has been a significant success thus far (48 of the top 50 AWS EC2 customers have already adopted it), the AWS Chips team was already learning from what customers said could be better, and announced Graviton3 this past December (offering a 25% improvement on top of Graviton2's relative gains). The list of what we've invented and delivered for customers in EC2 (and AWS in general) is pretty mind-boggling, and this iterative approach to innovation has not only given customers much more functionality in AWS than they can find anywhere else (which is a significant differentiator), but also allowed us to arrive at the much more game-changing offering that AWS is today.
Devices: Our first foray into devices was the Kindle, released in 2007. It was not the most sophisticated industrial design (it was creamy white in color and the corners were uncomfortable for some people to hold), but revolutionary because it offered customers the ability to download any of over 90,000 books (now millions) in 60 seconds-and we got better and faster at building attractive designs. Shortly thereafter, we launched a tablet, and then a phone (with the distinguishing feature of having front-facing cameras and a gyroscope to give customers a dynamic perspective along with varied 3D experiences). The phone was unsuccessful, and though we determined we were probably too late to this party and directed these resources elsewhere, we hired some fantastic long-term builders and learned valuable lessons from this failure that have served us well in devices like Echo and FireTV.
When I think of the first Echo device-and what Alexa could do for customers at that point-it was noteworthy, yet so much less capable than what's possible today. Today, there are hundreds of millions of Alexa-enabled devices out there (in homes, offices, cars, hotel rooms, Amazon Echo devices, and third-party manufacturer devices); you can listen to music-or watch videos now; you can control your lights and home automation; you can create routines like "Start My Day" where Alexa tells you the weather, your estimated commute time based on current traffic, then plays the news; you can easily order retail items on Amazon; you can get general or customized news, updates on sporting events and related stats-and we're still quite early with respect to what Alexa and Alexa-related devices will do for customers. Our goal is for Alexa to be the world's most helpful and resourceful personal assistant, who makes people's lives meaningfully easier and better. We have a lot more inventing and iterating to go, but customers continue to indicate that we're on the right path. We have several other devices at varying stages of evolution (e.g. Ring and Blink provide the leading digital home security solutions, Astro is a brand new home robot that we just launched in late 2021), but it's safe to say that every one of our devices, whether you're talking about Kindle, FireTV, Alexa/Echo, Ring, Blink, or Astro is an invention-in-process with a lot more coming that will keep improving customers' lives.
Prime Video: We started in 2006 with an offering called Amazon Unbox where customers could download about a thousand movies from major studios. This made sense as bandwidth was slower those days (it would take an hour to download a video). But, as bandwidth got much faster to people's homes and mobile devices, along with the advent of connected TVs, streaming was going to be a much better customer solution, and we focused our efforts on streaming. In 2011, we started offering over 5,000 streaming movies and shows as part of customers' Amazon Prime subscriptions. Initially, all of our content was produced by other studios and entertainment companies. These deals were expensive, country-specific, and only available to us for a limited period; so, to expand our options, we started creating our own original shows. Our early efforts included short-lived shows like Alpha House and Betas, before we had our first award-winning series in Transparent, and eventually created multi-year franchises in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, The Boys, Bosch, and Jack Ryan. Along the way, we've learned a lot about producing compelling entertainment with memorable moments and using machine learning and other inventive technology to provide a superior-quality streaming experience (with useful, relevant data about actors, TV shows, movies, music, or sports stats a click away in our unique X-Ray feature). You might have seen some of this in action in our recent new hit series, Reacher, and you'll hopefully see it in our upcoming Lord of the Rings series launch (coming Labor Day 2022). We also expect that you'll see this iterative invention when we launch Thursday Night Football, the NFL's first weekly, prime time, streaming-only broadcast, airing exclusively on Prime Video starting in September 2022. Our agreement with the NFL is for 11 years, and we will work relentlessly over the next several years to reinvent the NFL viewing experience for football fans.
This track record of frequent invention is not only why more sports entities are choosing to work with Prime Video, but also why so many large entertainment companies have become Prime Video Channels partners. Channels is a program that enables entertainment companies to leverage Prime Video's unique technology and viewing experience, as well as its very large member base to offer monthly subscriptions to their content. Companies like Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, Starz, Corus Entertainment, and Globo have found that they're driving substantial incremental membership and better customer experience through Channels. While there is so much progress in Prime Video from where we started, we have more invention in front of us in the next 15 years than the last 15-and our team is passionately committed to providing customers with the most expansive collection of compelling content anywhere in the world.
This same sort of iterative invention can be applied to efforts supporting people and communities. Last summer, we added two new Leadership Principles: Strive to be Earth's Best Employer and Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility. These concepts were always implicit at Amazon, but explicit Leadership Principles help us ask ourselves-and empower more Amazonians at all levels to ask-whether we're living up to these principles.
For example, more than a million Amazonians work in our fulfillment network. In 2018, we championed the $15 minimum wage (which is more than double the federal minimum wage), but haven't stopped there. We continued to increase compensation such that our average starting hourly salary is currently over $18. Along with this compensation, we offer very robust benefits, including full health insurance, a 401K plan, up to 20 weeks of parental leave, and full tuition coverage for associates who want to get a college education (whether they remain with us or not). We're not close to being done in how we improve the lives of our employees. We've researched and created a list of what we believe are the top 100 employee experience pain points and are systematically solving them. We're also passionate about further improving safety in our fulfillment network, with a focus on reducing strains, sprains, falls, and repetitive stress injuries. Our injury rates are sometimes misunderstood. We have operations jobs that fit both the "warehousing" and "courier and delivery" categories. In the last U.S. public numbers, our recordable incident rates were a little higher than the average of our warehousing peers (6.4 vs. 5.5), and a little lower than the average of our courier and delivery peers (7.6 vs. 9.1). This makes us about average relative to peers, but we don't seek to be average. We want to be best in class. When I first started in my new role, I spent significant time in our fulfillment centers and with our safety team, and hoped there might be a silver bullet that could change the numbers quickly. I didn't find that. At our scale (we hired over 300,000 people in 2021 alone, many of whom were new to this sort of work and needed training), it takes rigorous analysis, thoughtful problem-solving, and a willingness to invent to get to where you want. We've been dissecting every process path to discern how we can further improve. We have a variety of programs in flight (e.g. rotational programs that help employees avoid spending too much time doing the same repetitive motions, wearables that prompt employees when
they're moving in a dangerous way, improved shoes to provide better toe protection, training programs on body mechanics, wellness, and safety practices). But, we still have a ways to go, and we'll approach it like we do other customer experiences-we'll keep learning, inventing, and iterating until we have more transformational results. We won't be satisfied until we do.
Similarly, at our scale, we have a significant carbon footprint. It's a big part of why we created The Climate Pledge a few years ago (a pledge to be net-zero carbon by 2040, ten years ahead of the Paris Agreement). We're making significant progress on this effort (we're committed to powering our operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025-five years ahead of our original target of 2030, we have ordered over 100,000 electric vans to deliver packages, and have over 300 companies who've joined us in The Climate Pledge). But, we have a different challenge than most companies given the diversity and intensity of our operations (including shipping billions of packages per year). We're committed to the challenge, but it will take relentless invention.
We also are trying to increase the amount of affordable housing in the communities in which we have a large presence. Our more than $2 billion Housing Equity Fund that we started a year ago has already allocated $1.2 billion toward affordable housing initiatives in the areas around Washington state's Puget Sound region, Arlington (Virginia), and Nashville (Tennessee).
A final quick example is Kuiper, our low Earth orbit satellite network that we're spending over $10 billion to build in the next several years. Kuiper will serve customers with minimal to no fixed broadband connectivity, changing access to information and resources for many communities (analysts estimate approximately 300-400 million customers globally are in this category). We're optimistic that there is a pretty good business model for us too, but we'll see-and it's a real game changer for underserved families and businesses that will unfold over many years as we keep evolving its capabilities.
This type of iterative innovation is pervasive across every team at Amazon. I could have given comparable examples in Advertising, Grocery, Gaming, Amazon Music, Amazon Care (our telemedicine offering), or Pharmacy, to name a few. All of these stories are still being written as we rapidly experiment, learn, and continue to try to make our customer experience better every day.
If this approach sounds appealing, a natural question is what's required to get good at it? It's easier said than done, but here are some components that have helped us:
1/ Hire the Right Builders: We disproportionately index in hiring builders. We think of builders as people who like to invent, who look at customer experiences, dissect what doesn't work well about them, and seek to reinvent them. We want people who keep asking why can't it be done? We want people who like to experiment and tinker, and who realize launch is the starting line, not the finish line.
2/ Organize Builders into Teams That Are as Separable and Autonomous as Possible: It's hard for teams to be deep in what customers care about in multiple areas. It's also hard to spend enough time on the new initiatives when there's resource contention with the more mature businesses; the surer bets usually win out. Single-threaded teams will know their customers' needs better, spend all their waking work hours inventing for them, and develop context and tempo to keep iterating quickly.
3/ Give Teams the Right Tools and Permission to Move Fast: Speed is not pre-ordained. It's a leadership choice. It has trade-offs, but you can't wake up one day and start moving fast. It requires having the right tools to experiment and build fast (a major part of why we started AWS), allowing teams to make two-way door decisions themselves, and setting an expectation that speed matters. And, it does. Speed is disproportionally important to every business at every stage of its evolution. Those that move slower than their competitive peers fall away over time.
4/ You Need Blind Faith, But No False Hope: This is a lyric from one of my favorite Foo Fighters songs ("Congregation"). When you invent, you come up with new ideas that people will reject because they haven't been done before (that's where the blind faith comes in), but it's also important to step back and make sure you have a viable plan that'll resonate with customers (avoid false hope). We're lucky that we have builders who challenge each other, feedback loops that give us access to customer feedback, and a product
development process of working backwards from the customer where having to write a Press Release (to flesh out the customer benefits) and a Frequently Asked Questions document (to detail how we'd build it) helps us have blind faith without false hope (at least usually).
5/ Define a Minimum Loveable Product (MLP), and Be Willing to Iterate Fast: Figuring out where to draw the line for launch is one of the most difficult decisions teams must make. Often, teams wait too long, and insist on too many bells and whistles, before launching. And, they miss the first mover advantage or opportunity to build mindshare in fast-moving market segments before well-executing peers get too far ahead. The launch product must be good enough that you believe it'll be loved from the get-go (why we call it a "Minimum Loveable Product" vs. a "Minimum Viable Product"), but in newer market segments, teams are often better off getting this MLP to customers and iterating quickly thereafter.
6/ Adopt a Long-term Orientation: We're sometimes criticized at Amazon for not shutting much down. It's true that we have a longer tolerance for our investments than most companies. But, we know that transformational invention takes multiple years, and if you're making big bets that you believe could substantially change customer experience (and your company), you have to be in it for the long-haul or you'll give up too quickly.
7/ Brace Yourself for Failure: If you invent a lot, you will fail more often than you wish. Nobody likes this part, but it comes with the territory. When it's clear that we've launched something that won't work, we make sure we've learned from what didn't go well, and secure great landing places for team members who delivered well-or your best people will hesitate to work on new initiatives.
Albert Einstein is sometimes credited with describing compound interest as the eighth wonder of the world ("He who understands it, earns it. He who doesn't, pays it"). We think of iterative innovation in much the same way. Iterative innovation creates magic for customers. Constantly inventing and improving products for customers has a compounding effect on the customer experience, and in turn on a business's prospects.
Time is your friend when you are compounding gains. Amazon is a big company with some large businesses, but it's still early days for us. We will continue to be insurgent-inventing in businesses that we're in, in new businesses that we've yet to launch, and in new ideas that we haven't even imagined yet. It remains Day 1.
Andy Jassy
P.S. As we have always done, our original 1997 Shareholder Letter follows. What's written there is as true today as it was in 1997.
1997 LETTER TO SHAREHOLDERS
(Reprinted from the 1997 Annual Report)
To our shareholders:
Amazon.com passed many milestones in 1997: by year-end, we had served more than 1.5 million customers, yielding 838% revenue growth to $147.8 million, and extended our market leadership despite aggressive competitive entry.
But this is Day 1 for the Internet and, if we execute well, for Amazon.com. Today, online commerce saves customers money and precious time. Tomorrow, through personalization, online commerce will accelerate the very process of discovery. Amazon.com uses the Internet to create real value for its customers and, by doing so, hopes to create an enduring franchise, even in established and large markets.
We have a window of opportunity as larger players marshal the resources to pursue the online opportunity and as customers, new to purchasing online, are receptive to forming new relationships. The competitive landscape has continued to evolve at a fast pace. Many large players have moved online with credible offerings and have devoted substantial energy and resources to building awareness, traffic, and sales. Our goal is to move quickly to solidify and extend our current position while we begin to pursue the online commerce opportunities in other areas. We see substantial opportunity in the large markets we are targeting. This strategy is not without risk: it requires serious investment and crisp execution against established franchise leaders.
It's All About the Long Term
We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term. This value will be a direct result of our ability to extend and solidify our current market leadership position. The stronger our market leadership, the more powerful our economic model. Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.
Our decisions have consistently reflected this focus. We first measure ourselves in terms of the metrics most indicative of our market leadership: customer and revenue growth, the degree to which our customers continue to purchase from us on a repeat basis, and the strength of our brand. We have invested and will continue to invest aggressively to expand and leverage our customer base, brand, and infrastructure as we move to establish an enduring franchise.
Because of our emphasis on the long term, we may make decisions and weigh tradeoffs differently than some companies. Accordingly, we want to share with you our fundamental management and decision-making approach so that you, our shareholders, may confirm that it is consistent with your investment philosophy:
We will continue to focus relentlessly on our customers.
We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions.
We will continue to measure our programs and the effectiveness of our investments analytically, to jettison those that do not provide acceptable returns, and to step up our investment in those that work best. We will continue to learn from both our successes and our failures.
We will make bold rather than timid investment decisions where we see a sufficient probability of gaining market leadership advantages. Some of these investments will pay off, others will not, and we will have learned another valuable lesson in either case.
When forced to choose between optimizing the appearance of our GAAP accounting and maximizing the present value of future cash flows, we'll take the cash flows.
We will share our strategic thought processes with you when we make bold choices (to the extent competitive pressures allow), so that you may evaluate for yourselves whether we are making rational long-term leadership investments.
We will work hard to spend wisely and maintain our lean culture. We understand the importance of continually reinforcing a cost-conscious culture, particularly in a business incurring net losses.
We will balance our focus on growth with emphasis on long-term profitability and capital management. At this stage, we choose to prioritize growth because we believe that scale is central to achieving the potential of our business model.
We will continue to focus on hiring and retaining versatile and talented employees, and continue to weight their compensation to stock options rather than cash. We know our success will be largely affected by our ability to attract and retain a motivated employee base, each of whom must think like, and therefore must actually be, an owner.
We aren't so bold as to claim that the above is the "right" investment philosophy, but it's ours, and we would be remiss if we weren't clear in the approach we have taken and will continue to take.
With this foundation, we would like to turn to a review of our business focus, our progress in 1997, and our outlook for the future.
Obsess Over Customers
From the beginning, our focus has been on offering our customers compelling value. We realized that the Web was, and still is, the World Wide Wait. Therefore, we set out to offer customers something they simply could not get any other way, and began serving them with books. We brought them much more selection than was possible in a physical store (our store would now occupy 6 football fields), and presented it in a useful, easy-
to-search, and easy-to-browse format in a store open 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. We maintained a dogged focus on improving the shopping experience, and in 1997 substantially enhanced our store. We now offer customers gift certificates, 1-ClickSM shopping, and vastly more reviews, content, browsing options, and recommendation features. We dramatically lowered prices, further increasing customer value. Word of mouth remains the most powerful customer acquisition tool we have, and we are grateful for the trust our customers have placed in us. Repeat purchases and word of mouth have combined to make Amazon.com the market leader in online bookselling.
By many measures, Amazon.com came a long way in 1997:
Sales grew from $15.7 million in 1996 to $147.8 million - an 838% increase.
Cumulative customer accounts grew from 180,000 to 1,510,000 - a 738% increase.
The percentage of orders from repeat customers grew from over 46% in the fourth quarter of 1996 to over 58% in the same period in 1997.
In terms of audience reach, per Media Metrix, our Web site went from a rank of 90th to within the
top 20.
We established long-term relationships with many important strategic partners, including America Online, Yahoo!, Excite, Netscape, GeoCities, AltaVista, @Home, and Prodigy.
During 1997, we worked hard to expand our business infrastructure to support these greatly increased traffic, sales, and service levels:
Amazon.com's employee base grew from 158 to 614, and we significantly strengthened our management team.
Distribution center capacity grew from 50,000 to 285,000 square feet, including a 70% expansion of our Seattle facilities and the launch of our second distribution center in Delaware in November.
Inventories rose to over 200,000 titles at year-end, enabling us to improve availability for our customers.
Our cash and investment balances at year-end were $125 million, thanks to our initial public offering in May 1997 and our $75 million loan, affording us substantial strategic flexibility.
The past year's success is the product of a talented, smart, hard-working group, and I take great pride in being a part of this team. Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will continue to be, the single most important element of Amazon.com's success.
It's not easy to work here (when I interview people I tell them, "You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can't choose two out of three"), but we are working to build something important, something that matters to our customers, something that we can all tell our grandchildren about. Such things aren't meant to be easy. We are incredibly fortunate to have this group of dedicated employees whose sacrifices and passion build Amazon.com.
We are still in the early stages of learning how to bring new value to our customers through Internet commerce and merchandising. Our goal remains to continue to solidify and extend our brand and customer base. This requires sustained investment in systems and infrastructure to support outstanding customer convenience, selection, and service while we grow. We are planning to add music to our product offering, and over time we believe that other products may be prudent investments. We also believe there are significant opportunities to better serve our customers overseas, such as reducing delivery times and better tailoring the customer experience. To be certain, a big part of the challenge for us will lie not in finding new ways to expand our business, but in prioritizing our investments.
We now know vastly more about online commerce than when Amazon.com was founded, but we still have so much to learn. Though we are optimistic, we must remain vigilant and maintain a sense of urgency. The challenges and hurdles we will face to make our long-term vision for Amazon.com a reality are several: aggressive, capable, well-funded competition; considerable growth challenges and execution risk; the risks of product and geographic expansion; and the need for large continuing investments to meet an expanding market opportunity. However, as we've long said, online bookselling, and online commerce in general, should prove to be a very large market, and it's likely that a number of companies will see significant benefit. We feel good about what we've done, and even more excited about what we want to do.
1997 was indeed an incredible year. We at Amazon.com are grateful to our customers for their business and trust, to each other for our hard work, and to our shareholders for their support and encouragement.
Jeffrey P. Bezos
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Amazon.com Inc. published this content on 14 April 2022 and is solely responsible for the information contained therein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 14 April 2022 10:04:32 UTC.
Publicnow 2022
All news about AMAZON.COM, INC.
Analyst Recommendations on AMAZON.COM, INC.
Sales 2022 541 B
Net income 2022 24 449 M
Net cash 2022 67 205 M
Yield 2022 –
Capitalization 1 582 B
1 582 B
Nbr of Employees 1 608 000
Duration : Auto. 2 months 3 months 6 months 9 months 1 year 2 years 5 years 10 years Max.
Period : Day Week
Technical analysis trends AMAZON.COM, INC.
Trends Neutral Neutral Neutral
Please enable JavaScript in your browser's settings to use dynamic charts.
Last Close Price 3 110,82 $
Average target price 4 097,98 $
Previous articleTruCentive Expands Payment Delivery Options with PayPal and Venmo
Next articleEssay contest for Osage County students under way


Few things you see this week will be as interesting as this hour-long conversation between Zane Lowe and Rick Rubin. The two kick things off by talking about Rick's involvement in Kanye West's Yeezus album and the process that went into getting the album together. He said that with about five weeks to go before the release date, they were sitting on almost three hours of music, most of it with no vocals.
Along with talking about how they finished the album, Rubin talks about his admiration for Ye and his creative genius, calling him "the most consistent great artist right now." Rubin also details working with Eminem in the studio and says that Em is very critical of every detail that goes into his music.
The full interview can be seen above.


text:
Vol. XXX, No. 1, Fall 2013
Forum – Fall 2013
Energy for global development
In "Making Energy Access Meaningful," Morgan Bazilian and Roger Pielke Jr. (Issues, Summer 2013) raise important questions about what we mean by access to electricity. As they note, the World Bank and its 14 partners who designed the Global Tracking Framework (GTF) to measure progress toward the three goals of the Sustainable Energy for All (SE4ALL) initiative, have come up with a five-tier definition of access. They argue that even the GTF's top Tier 5 household electricity access, which includes the ability to use high-power appliances, translates into a comparatively low level of household consumption at just 2,121 kilowatt- hours (kWh) per year.
The multi-tier framework was developed precisely to counteract a tendency in some quarters to set the access bar too low by counting a solar lantern or a small solar home system as equivalent to 24/7 grid power. By differentiating among these solutions, the multi-tier framework allows off-grid solar to be acknowledged as a step toward but not the final destination of energy access.
A comparison of minimum household electricity consumption of 2,121 kWh a year at Tier 5 with average household consumption shows it to be about right. It's about half of the average household electricity consumption in Greece (3,512 kWh), Spain (3,706 kWh), Germany (3,788 kWh), South Korea (4089 kWh), Bulgaria (4,650 kWh), and Japan (4,826 kWh) and nearly the same as that in Italy (2,527 kWh). It is about twice the level of power consumption of connected households in India (901 kWh) and China (1150 kWh).
The developed-country figures cited by the authors refer to overall per- capita electricity consumption for residential and nonresidential purposes, including that for cooking, productive uses, and community requirements. This cannot be compared with GTF benchmarks for household residential electricity consumption. To reflect these other energy needs, the GTF report includes a framework for measuring access to energy for cooking. It also acknowledges the importance of access to energy for productive uses and community applications and commits to developing similar multi-tier frameworks for them as well.
I share the sense of justice that animates the authors' contention that an electricity access goal of modest ambition would reflect a "poverty management" over a "development" approach. But their contention is misplaced. The level of ambition for SE4ALL goals in each country needs to be defined by governments, in consultation with civil society, entrepreneurs, developmental agencies, and the public. The GTF's multi-tier framework for access seeks to facilitate this process so that each country can define its own electricity access targets.
The chasm between high ambition and unfeasible goals must be filled by pragmatically designed intermediate steps. Such intermediate steps include interventions that would allow children to study at night, village businesses to stay open after dark, and rural clinics to provide basic services to those who heretofore have had none. These intermediate steps take us closer to the ultimate goal of full energy access. They are worth pursuing, and they do not exclude pursuit of the ones that lie beyond them.
S. VIJAY IYER
Director, Sustainable Energy Department
The World Bank
Morgan Bazilian and Roger Pielke Jr. get the essential point right: that meaningful access to modern energy services must go beyond lighting to other productive uses, such as water pumping for irrigation. Like many observers, however, they seem daunted by the scale of investment required, which they estimate at $1 trillion to achieve a minimal level of energy access and 17 times more to reach a level comparable to that in South Africa or Bulgaria.
Those numbers are very large compared to the amount that might plausibly be available through conventional development assistance, but that is the wrong lens to use. Electricity is a commodity that even very poor people are willing to pay for. Indeed, they are already paying more than $37 billion a year for dirty, expensive fuels (kerosene for lighting and biomass for cooking), according to an International Finance Corp. report. With the right financing, solar energy in rural areas is cheaper than these sources or diesel fuel for generators. The availability of energy is a spur to economic development that can quickly become self-sustaining.
Providing access to modern energy services should thus not be seen as a burden for governments to bear, but as a multi-trillion-dollar business opportunity, and there is plenty of capital available for such investments, prudently made. The best way for the world, through national governments, "to ensure that the benefits of modern energy are available to all" is to create safe environments for private investment and to use limited public funds to reduce the political risks to investors and the cost of borrowing. Facilitating this pathway is one of the principal objectives of Sustainable Energy for All, the farsighted initiative launched by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and now co-led by World Bank President Jim Yong Kim.
REID DETCHON
Vice President, Energy and Climate
United Nations Foundation
AN IMPORTANT GOAL FOR THE COMING FEW YEARS IS TO DEVELOP A TRUE SUPPORT SYSTEM SO THAT COMMUNITIES, UTILITIES, AND MINISTRIES CAN COUNT ON THESE MINI-GRIDS TO DELIVER AN EXPANDING SET OF SERVICES.
The central message of the paper by Morgan Bazilian and Roger Pielke Jr., at least to me, is to highlight the explosion of demand and the diverse modes of energy consumption that are possible and should be anticipated as energy access (and in particular electricity access) is expanded. This is an important observation that ties together many stories: (1) the value of energy access for both basic services and economically productive activities; (2) the need to analyze and to plan around unmet demand, so that a small taste of energy services does not lead to unrealized expectations and then dissatisfaction; (3) the complexity of building and planning an energy system capable of providing services reliably once the "access switch" has been turned on.
The question is not the value of energy access or the need for interactive "organic" planning of the emerging electricity systems to be as resilient as possible against surges in demand, technical problems in delivering electricity, or even the problems of managing the market (payment, theft, etc.). These are key issues, but all energy systems deal with them.
What is unresolved, and where readers of Bazilian and Pielke's paper need to keep a watchful and innovative eye, is on the tools that energy planners use to build adaptive energy networks. Although "simply" plugging into the grid may be the ideal (or in the past has been the aspirational goal), the record of the past decades is that this has not been technically, economically, or politically easy. National grids have not expanded effectively in many nations, in terms of coverage or service reliability or cost, so new models are needed.
Micro- or mini-grids have gained tremendous popularity because although they do require more local knowledge, they are faster to install, more flexible, and suffer less from the "tragedy of the commons," where people just tie in and feel (culturally or economically) less responsible for being good citizens. For example, walking through the Kibera slum in Nairobi in the early morning is an adventure in "energy fishing," as people who have illegally tapped into the distribution system unhook their fishing lines from the overhead wires.
Some mini-grids work very well, providing service and responding to local needs. A great many, however, are in technical disrepair or the tariff assessment and collection scheme is not working. The lesson from these mini- grids is not that they do not work or can't provide the range of services (not just lighting, but energy for schools, clinics, and in many eyes most critically businesses) but that engagement, planning, and service quality must be brought to these systems.
In some of the mini-grids I have been involved in designing and assessing in Kenya and Nicaragua, the lessons have been spectacularly good. Community engagement in the planning and operation of these grids means that they have been able to flexibly respond to changes in demand, and formerly powerless villagers have ramped up their demands and expectations.
The key issue for groups such as Sustainable Energy for All, researchers, and nongovernmental and public officials is to find ways to support this new mode of energy access. An important goal for the coming few years is to develop a true support system so that communities, utilities, and ministries can count on these mini-grids to deliver an expanding set of services. My laboratory at the University of California ), Berkeley, is engaged in efforts ranging from publishing journal papers, to creating wikis, to running training efforts in off-grid and recently connected communities. Needed will be a large community working together on all of these issues, and establishing goals for technology standards, data sets on different market and tariff schemes, and a list of new hardware needs to increase services and service quality in this burgeoning field.
DANIEL KAMMEN
Class of 1935 Distinguished Professor of Energy
Energy and Resources Group
Morgan Bazilian and Roger Pielke Jr. provide a valid long-term perspective on the energy needs of the developing world, but the critical question is what practical difference does it make to think in the more ambitious, longer-term way that they propose? We don't do that for any of the other United Nations Millennium Development Goals such as those for health, education, and water. Why, then, should we do so for energy? What investment choices or policies would we approach differently?
The authors suggest that it would make a big difference, but they do not provide the detail or analysis necessary to understand what changes would result. A related concern that they do not consider is that their effort to emphasize the enormity of the long-term challenge could make the task seem so daunting that it will discourage the development agencies from taking the smaller steps that must be taken now to put the developing nations on the path that will ultimately lead to an adequate energy supply. Thinking about the trillions of dollars that will be needed over many decades rather than the billions of dollars that can make a difference now could be paralyzing.
Marshaling the resources to make incremental improvements has been hard enough. For example, the effort to improve the performance of simple cookstoves has yielded good results but could use additional resources to fulfill its potential. Until this can be accomplished, is there any point in worrying about what it will cost to provide every one with an electric stove?
One could approach this question from another direction by examining the most successful examples of electrification and energy modernization such as that in China. Was their success the result of focusing on an ambitious long-term vision? Or did they progress one step at a time by addressing immediate needs and achievable goals, and then setting new goals that built on each accomplishment?
Principal Climate Change Specialist
Environment Department
Making job training accountable
Louis S. Jacobson and Robert J. LaLonde ("Proposed: A Competition to Improve Workforce Training," Issues, Summer 2013) have led the development of accountability systems since the 1970s. They began their work in the heyday of employment and training programs. At that time, their focus was on increasing the accountability of Comprehensive Employment and Training (CETA) programs. In those days, the state of the art in this field was to use short-term training programs to assist individuals in dealing with employment challenges. Jacobson and Lalonde realized that "second-chance" training programs such as CETA weren't sufficient to confront the challenges that displaced workers and low-income individuals faced in finding employment. Instead, it was more important to provide individuals with an adequate first chance that prepared them to find and maintain stable employment in high-demand fields.
Since the days of CETA, we have experienced a shift away from short-term training programs toward educational solutions to promoting employment. This shift has been driven mainly by the skill-biased technological change in the economy. Over the past several decades, technology has been automating repetitive tasks and activities on the job. As a result, more and more jobs left to people are nonrepetitive and require skills beyond those produced by a high-school education. The resultant increasing entry-level skill requirements for work have made postsecondary education and training the gatekeepers for access to jobs that pay middle-class wages.
In truth, CETA never had the horsepower to accomplish its objectives. The $2 billion to $5 billion spent annually on CETA programs is minuscule compared to the over $300 billion that is now spent just on postsecondary education.
The essence of Jacobson and Lalonde's work on connecting education and training with labor market outcomes has always stretched the boundaries of the state of the art in accountability in education and training and is now receiving greater attention in the wider discussion. As they point out, the surest way to efficiency and maximum choice without interference in complex institutional and consumer-driven decisions is transparency in measured outcomes. Yet, although some progress has been made in enhancing the accountability and transparency of programs at for-profit institutions, this model needs to be expanded to all of postsecondary education and training.
All the necessary data for the implementation of college and career information systems already exist. This information just needs to be interconnected and made accessible to prospective students and trainees in a form that they can understand and use to make better decisions. This information also should be made available according to the program of study, for as Jacobson and Lalonde point out, there are vast differences in the costs and outcomes of different postsecondary career and technical education programs, and individuals are often not well equipped or sufficiently supported to make good choices in this regard. The Student Right to Know Before You Go Act introduced by Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Marco Rubio (R- FL) is the legislative gold standard for making this type of information widely available to the public. In no small part, this effort is a result of Jacobson's and Lalonde's work in promoting transparency and accountability in educational outcomes.
ANTHONY P. CARNEVALE
Research Professor and Director
The Georgetown University Center on
Education and the Workforce
cew.georgetown.edu
Are there enough STEM workers?
Hal Salzman ("What Shortages? The Real Evidence About the STEM Workforce" Issues, Summer 2013) ably punctures several myths about the scientific and engineering labor market, but his thoughtful analysis does not address whether U.S. students in general are learning science and math well enough to prepare them for good jobs. As Salzman points out, the claims of extensive science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) worker shortages are hard to reconcile with engineers and scientists experiencing only average wage growth and with the number of science and engineering graduates rising as fast as the number of job openings. Science Ph.D.s take nearly eight years of graduate study to complete their degree, and then many languish for years in modestly paid postdoctoral positions, hoping for one of the few openings in university professor positions. Another much heralded shortage—of high-school math and science teachers—is apparently a problem of high attrition and is not due to low absolute numbers of newly qualified math and science teachers.
Still, engineers and scientists earn well more than double the average level of earnings. Mean earnings for most science and engineering occupations are as high as the mean earnings of lawyers, although well short of the mean earnings of physicians. Thus, even though shortage claims about engineers and scientists lack convincing evidence, most individuals are likely to achieve high rates of return on their investments in attaining those degrees.
Salzman's analysis leaves open a key question: Would doing a better job of teaching STEM subjects increase U.S. productivity growth? Here the research is less clear, especially for intermediate- level jobs that do not require a BA. Employers looking for workers who qualify as technically competent machinists or welders sometimes ground their complaints of shortages in terms of weak academic skills. Improving STEM education, especially through career and technical education programs and apprenticeships, might increase the job opportunities and enhance the careers of many young people.
For workers attaining advanced science and engineering degrees, the impact of an expanded supply is not entirely clear. It is no coincidence that Israel, boasting one of the largest numbers of scientists and engineers per capita and highest shares of gross domestic product spent on R&D, is also at the forefront of innovation and high-technology entrepreneurship. But the connections may not be supply- driven. Instead, it may be that added R&D spending is creating the demand for an increased supply of STEM- trained workers, many of whom in turn spur innovation. By implication, a good way to encourage more young people to major in STEM subjects and potentially increase innovation is to raise both public and private R&D spending.
Finally, I want to lend my full support to Salzman's position on immigration. Rather than focus visas on temporary workers who work for specific firms in the information technology industry, U.S. policies should promote a balance in terms of the skills of new immigrants on a permanent basis. Because the family unification strategy already attracts low-skill workers, the remaining programs should provide adequate places for medium- and high-skill immigrants.
ROBERT I. LERMAN
Institute Fellow, Urban Institute
Professor of Economics, American University
The STEM workforce often inspires extreme assertions. In 2007, Microsoft's Bill Gates testified that there is a "terrible shortfall in the visa supply for highly skilled scientists and engineers" and asserted that "it makes no sense to tell well-trained, highly skilled individuals—many of whom are educated at our top universities—that they are not welcome here." Gates urged Congress to eliminate the 65,000-per- son per year H-1B visa cap. At the other extreme, University of California, Davis, Professor Norm Matloff says the "H-1B [program] is about cheap labor." Foreign workers tied to a particular U.S. employer for up to six years, and hoping to be sponsored for an immigrant visa by their U.S. employer, are young, "loyal," and cheaper than older U.S. workers.
Conventional wisdom, according to economist John Kenneth Galbraith, is "commonplace knowledge" that the public and experts believe to be true but may not be true. Galbraith used the term to highlight resistance to new ideas in economics, but it also applies to claims of labor shortages in agriculture, health care, and STEM occupations, where employers and blue-ribbon commissions warn of shortages and offer solutions that include admitting more guest workers and immigrants.
Hal Salzman and Lindsay Lowell are empirical sociologists who have examined the data and found that the conventional wisdom about STEM labor shortages is wrong. Consider three facts. First, the United States produces plenty of graduates with STEM degrees. Only one of every two graduates with STEM degrees is hired into a STEM job, and only two of three computer science graduates are hired in information technology. Second, STEM careers do not promise high lifetime earnings to high-ability students. STEM college courses require ability and discipline, but many STEM occupations offer neither financial nor employment stability, as advanced degree holders in science often fill a series of low-paid postdoc positions before getting "real jobs," and many engineers face industry-wide layoffs that make re-employment in engineering difficult.
Third, labor markets work. Economics textbooks do not include chapters on "shortages." Instead, they discuss how changes in prices bring the supply and demand for goods into balance, and changes in wages balance supply and demand in the labor market. Not all markets respond instantly, and labor markets may respond slowly if training is required, but people do respond to market signals, as is evident today in the rising number of U.S. petroleum engineers. On the other hand, jobs offering wages that hover around the minimum, few work-related benefits, and seasonal and uncertain work explain why over three-fourths of U.S. farm workers were born in lower-wage countries.
The United States is a nation of immigrants that has welcomed millions of newcomers to the land of opportunity. In recent decades, employers have asked for guest workers who lose their right to be in the United States if they lose their jobs. Whether phrased as overcoming brain or brawn shortages, admitting guest workers to fill labor shortages is government intervention that slows what would otherwise be normal labor market adjustments. In the case of agriculture, rising wages would probably reduce the demand for labor via mechanization and imports; in STEM, rising wages would attract and keep more U.S. workers in STEM occupations.
PHILIP MARTIN
Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics
Hal Salzman's article questions the prevailing view that America has a shortage of STEM workers. Even a narrow definition shows an annual supply of STEM graduates 50 to 70% greater than the demand. Similarly, labor market data are not compatible with shortages: STEM salaries have been stagnant since the 1990s, and unemployment has been rising.
The pervasive public view that the United States has a serious STEM shortage is due in part to employers' very successful public relations campaign. It obviously would not be politically acceptable to argue for large numbers of temporary foreign workers (TFWs) to suppress wages or to avoid raising wages to overcome labor shortages (as Salzman shows petroleum engineers' employers have done). TFW advocates obfuscate their real motives by arguing that foreign workers strengthen competitiveness, which they define as lowering labor costs by reducing wages rather than by increasing productivity and quality, which clearly would be better for workers and the nation.
Advocates buttress their case for more TFWs with such assertions as:
(1) There are not enough qualified Americans; without admitting that serious efforts have not been made to recruit Americans or that employers resist raising wages or training domestic workers if TFWs are available. The presumption that successful business leaders know what they are talking about gives them unwarranted credibility on this issue.
(2) TFW advocates often cite the real advantages of immigration without revealing the sharp differences between indentured TFWs and immigrants who have the right to freely change employers and become citizens, which TFWs cannot do. TFW advocates rarely propose more legal permanent residents, and the companies hiring the most TFWs sponsor few of them for permanent residency.
(3) The quick exhaustion of annual H-1B quotas is commonly cited as evidence of STEM shortages, although all it really shows is a demand for indentured TFWs who can legally be paid below-market wages.
(4) The absence of reliable data, research, and agreed-upon definitions and methodologies for calculating shortages enables these questionable claims to persist despite fairly consistent evidence to the contrary.
With globalized labor markets and aging populations, TFWs and immigrants can boost productivity, growth, and living standards provided that they fill real shortages, receive market-based wages, and complement U.S. workers. It might even be in the national interest to temporarily suppress wage increases for highly skilled workers in short supply. But these decisions should be transparent and made on the basis of evidence, not interest-based assertions. Otherwise, the importation of foreign workers could depress wages, divert Americans from STEM careers, distort labor markets, undermine labor market institutions, and generate social conflict.
An independent professional advisory commission is needed to provide acceptable definitions, better data and research, and objective evidence-based recommendations to the President and Congress about the number and composition of temporary and permanent foreign workers to be admitted each year to promote value-added development. We can learn much about how to structure such a commission from other immigration nations, especially Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom.
Economics and Public Affairs
Secretary of Labor, 1977-1981
MOOCs plus
Thank you for publishing the William B. Bonvillian and Susan R. Singer article, "The Online Challenge to Higher Education" (Issues, Summer 2013). They provide needed perspectives that clarify the rapidly developing pace and place of online education in postsecondary education and, by extension, K-12. Cyber-enabled or online learning environments, built on carefully considered, evidence-based design principles drawn from the learning sciences, are places where new and promising learning ecologies can be found. As Bonvillian and Singer remind us, the structures, delivery, assumptions, and habits of education are changing.
Along with my colleagues, Sarah Michaels (Clark University), Brian Reiser (Northwestern University), and Cynthia Passmore (University of California, Davis), I am involved in the design of what Bonvillian and Singer call a "blended learning" environment. We call our blended model the Next Generation Science Exemplar PD System, or NGSX. Our particular environment is intended for K-12 teachers of science as well as pre-service science education students. NGSX participants have 24/7 access to a highly resourced Web-based platform that supports and supplements 30 hours of face-to-face learning sessions. In these face-to-face sessions, tablets, notebooks, or smart- phones are used to connect to the NGSX Web platform and the instructional units contained in it. Each face- to-face session blends highly interactive physical and virtual space using the NGSX environment. Learning goals target strengthening teachers' understanding of science content and the epistemic practices of science, such as making one's thinking public, model- based reasoning, and using the language of science to begin to transfer both science knowledge and practices to their classrooms.
NGSX comes in response to at least two learner and learning realities of the 21st century. First, we access, visualize, learn, and share information in vastly different ways and for different purposes than we did even a decade ago. Second, the expectations for workforce skills and abilities to support our current knowledge-centric society have changed. As Bonvillian and Singer suggest, knowledge is no longer just acquired; it is acquired with the expectation that an action will follow, whether that is acumen in solving problems, reasoning from evidence, designing models, or undertaking critical assessment. The junction of this knowledge-to-action, action-to-knowledge interface provides fertile ground for envisioning various models of online learning (blended or not).
I agree with Bonvillian and Singer that science or the STEM subjects are a good bet for beginning this envisioning process. There the knowledge-to- action dynamic is more apparent, more visible than in the humanities or social sciences. Virtual learning environments can serve the aims of STEM well with promising functionalities for interactivity, visual representations, data collection and retrieval, model building, and space for "figuring things out." At the same time, in our knowledge- centric world, the humanities, social and behavioral sciences, health sciences, and communication sciences along with other discipline areas are needed in these envisioning conversations. Correctly, Bonvillian and Singer write, "online technologies alone do not improve learning outcomes. Outcomes depend on how the technology is used and placed in a larger learning context."
JEAN MOON
Tidemark Institute
Damariscotta, Maine
Governing geoengineering research
"Time for a Government Advisory Committee on Geoengineering Research" by David E. Winickoff and Mark B. Brown (Issues, Summer 2013) is a welcome contribution to the geoengineering debate. It not only provides a concise overview of the main issues raised generally and from a governance perspective, it is one of the few articles that addresses the institutional side of geoengineering governance and elaborates its rationale for a specific proposal. The following comment is intended to provide food for thought for the further development of these ideas.
The proposal for a standing advisory body is made from a U.S. perspective, while acknowledging that geoengineering raises international issues. Adding international governance to the picture could facilitate acceptance, while an appropriate vertical division of labor between the national [and European Union (EU)] and international levels could address concerns about international micromanagement.
At all levels, academic and political discussion on geoengineering governance should be based on explicit objectives and criteria that any proposed governance arrangements are meant to pursue, balance, and fulfill. For instance, the Oxford Principles mentioned in the article do not include or address the established concept of a "precautionary approach." From a different EU perspective, this approach might well be one of the values to be considered, not despite, but because of, the different connotations and implications it might have from the U.S. perspective. The potential need for tradeoffs between the criteria and objectives pursued also has to be considered.
Regarding the scope of potential governance, not all concepts currently discussed as geoengineering might require an elaborate governance structure or institutional anchoring at this stage. At the present stage of knowledge and existing governance, solar radiation management techniques deserve priority attention, also regarding the international level.
In terms of the mandate and output of the proposed committee, Winickoff and Brown stress the purely advisory function of the proposed committee at the national level. It is interesting that, in apparent contrast, the proposal envisages that the committee could "build norms" in the context of international communication and coordination. This would call for further clarification.
An advisory function makes sense in terms of preserving the political legitimacy of and responsibility for subsequent decisions. Scientific input should in principle be separate from political decisionmaking, as it is essentially a political decision whether pursuing climate protection can justify the potential and actual risks posed by geoengineering activities. This separation is not undermined by the authors' argument that the input provided should take into account considerations that go beyond a mere balancing of safety and efficacy.
RALPH BODLE
Senior Fellow and Coordinator Legal Studies
Basic or applied: Does it matter?
With interest have I followed the dialogue on the linear model of innovation between Venkatesh Narayanamurti and colleagues ("RIP: The Basic/Applied Research Dichotomy" Issues, Winter 2013, and Forum, Summer 2013) and Neal Lane (Forum, Spring 2013). Both parties provide sociological insight regarding the obsoleteness (empirically if not rhetorically) of the linear model and also in their discussion of an alternative model for guiding national decisionmaking for research policy in the areas of energy, health, basic science, defense, and more broadly U.S. competitiveness. It has been refreshing to see what historically has been the most important question for research policy revisited and addressed so directly and thoughtfully. But the discussion thus far, while valuable sociologically (and mostly in a Kuhnian way, addressing discrepancies between the linear model and how innovation actually occurs in the lab), provides no new insight for research policy design and implementation.
This is a fair criticism for two reasons. First, both parties ignore the bulk of the academic literature on the sociological obsoleteness of the linear model (see for example Nelson and Winter, Kline and Rosenberg, Rip, Etzkowitz, etc. in Research Policy, Science & Public Policy, and Science, Technology, & Human Values). Moreover, both parties call for government "experiments" in organizing and managing scientists and engineers in ways that acknowledge the discovery/invention dynamic they promote and ignore the fact that such "experimentation" has long been underway in the national mission agencies.
One only need look at the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Research Applied to National Needs Program (implemented during the Nixon administration), the NSF Engineering Research Center (ERC) program's three-plane strategic planning model (which is neither hierarchical nor linear despite how it sounds), and more recently efforts by the National Institutes of Health to map biological systems at the nanoscale (such as their Nanomedicine Development Centers), NSF's I-Corps and DOE's Energy Innovation Hub programs (both designed to create regional networks of innovation), and DOE's Energy Frontier Research Centers (which employ a model very similar to ERC's).
Although different, what these (and other) U.S. research policies have in common is that they shun the linear model and attempt to coordinate diverse sets of scientists and engineers from across institutions, disciplines, and sectors to address difficult socioeconomic problems requiring nonhierarchical discovery and invention. Accordingly, the most important task for research policy scholars such as Narayanamurti et al. and Neal Lane becomes not moving from rational to descriptive models of innovation but rather developing a predictive understanding of when to support individual investigators versus boundary-spanning research centers or networks and, in the case of the latter, how to get the incentives right to ensure innovation in the national interest.
P. CRAIG BOARDMAN
Associate Director, Battelle Center for Science & Technology Policy
Associate Professor of Public Policy, John Glenn School of Public Affairs
"Forum – Fall 2013." Issues in Science and Technology 30, no. 1 (Fall 2013).

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


If you haven't yet listened to episodes 1 through 17, you'll find them on this page. And if you have a question for Dr. Price that you'd like him to answer in a future episode, there is an email form there as well.
Cool Price was excited about the Legends of Cthulhu figures. I backed the kickstarter campaign and have the full line on my bookshelf. Very cool. Great job Warpo!
This is one of the highlights of my month. Dr. Robert M. Price doesn't debate how many of the invisible Old Ones can dance on the head of a pinhead – he knows! Having been steeped so deeply in the their Lore. We of the eZine community are blessed that, through the auspices of Mike Davis, we have this National Treasure of the Lovecraftian Nation, who calls the Lovecraft eZine one of his literary homes on the web. Thanks Mike!


text:
Home Business Airline Viva Air announces Medellín as new hub, expands flight offerings
Airline Viva Air announces Medellín as new hub, expands flight offerings
Colombian airline Viva Air announced this week that the José María Córdova International Airport in Rionegro, which services nearby Medellín, will become the company's strategic hub. It also announced a number of new international routes.
According to Viva Air, in an effort to "decentralize" flights in Colombia, the company has chosen to adopt the country's second-largest city as its hub, while at the same time aiming to help decongest Colombia's main airport, El Dorado, in Bogotá.
José María Córdova international airport. Image courtesy of Duty Free Information
El Dorado is the fourth-busiest airport in Latin America and according to International Airport Review, it served over 35 million passengers in 2019. By contrast, José María Córdova ranks 24th on a list of busiest Latin American airports and serviced just over 9 million passengers in 2019, according to Air Mundo. Colombia shut down international air travel for much of 2020 to help stop the spread of the novel coronavirus.
"As an airline we understand that aviation in Colombia cannot depend solely on a single airport, Bogotá," said Félix Antelo, President and CEO of the Viva Air Group. "Therefore, we seek to make air connections from Medellín just as important as those from El Dorado."
Félix Antelo. Image courtesy of LinkedIn
The executive said that he hopes the move will help promote tourism and development as well as contribute to the economic reactivation of Medellín and the surrounding region, helping to dig the country's tourism industry out of the hole that COVID-19 has left it in.
"Despite the challenges that the pandemic brought with it, our plans to connect Colombia domestically and internationally don't stop," said Antelo. "The inauguration of four new international routes ratifies our expansion plan and strengthens our commitment to the country's connectivity."
Viva Air has resumed its international expansion plans that were put on hold in 2020 the company said in a statement. Passengers will soon benefit from four new international routes connecting Medellín to Mexico City; Medellín to Cancun; Medellín to Orlando, FL; and Bogotá to Mexico City. Most new routes are expected to begin hauling passengers in June 2021.
Image courtesy of Finance Colombia
These additions bring the total number of routes the budget airline offers to 26 domestic routes to 12 national destinations and seven international routes to five destinations in Peru, Mexico and the United States.
The airline also announced that it has resumed 90% of its operations with a load factor of over 85% on its flights. The country's aviation authority, Aerocivil, re-opened international flights slowly beginning in September 2020. In December, flights from the United Kingdom were suspended due to fears of the spread of a new variant of COVID-19 from the country. The country's largest airline Avianca, announced in late January that it had resumed 100 routes.


text:
Feinan, Feynan or Faynan may refer to:

Punon, one of the stations of the Exodus mentioned in the Bible
Wadi Feynan, a seasonal river valley in southern Jordan
Khirbat Faynan, the ancient town of Phaino, now an archaeological site in the Wadi Feynan

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Q: Cookie if statement does't work correctly Goal
I am using the lightweight cookie plugin from carhartl. What I am trying is to set a cookie, when the user is clicking on a close button of a notification bar. When the user close this message, it the bar should be hide, until the time is expires.
The problem
Below is my script. So when the user clicked on the class .notification-bar the bar should be hide and set a cookie. If there is no cookie found, show the bar until the time is expired.
Unfortunately below code doesn't work. I get no error message, but when I close the notification bar, and refresh the page, the message will appears again. The cookie is not been set after this.
var notifyBar = $('#notification-bar')

                if($.cookie('demo_cookie') == null) {
                    notifyBar.css( "display", "block" );
                };

                $(".notification-close").click(function() {
                    notifyBar.css( "display", "none" );
                    $.cookie('demo_cookie', 'Demo Cookie', { expires: '<?php $expiry_date ?>', path: '/'});
                });

[UPDATE]
JSFIDDLE: http://jsfiddle.net/cddhez75/8/
The code for let the notification bar working, when there is a new post published on the WordPress site looks like this:
the Functions.php file
Hook in the transition_post_status function of WordPress when there is a new post published.
add_action( 'transition_post_status', function ( $new_status, $old_status, $post ) {
    //Check if our post status then execute our code
    if ( $new_status == 'publish' && $old_status != 'publish' ) {
        if ( get_option( 'new_post_notification' ) !== false ) {
            // The option already exists, so we just update it.
            update_option( 'new_post_notification', $post );

        } else {
            add_option( 'new_post_notification', $post );

        }
    }

}, 10, 3 );

and the Header.php file
<?php

// Get the new_post_notification which holds the newest post
$notification = get_option( 'new_post_notification' );

if( false != $notification ) {

    //Get the post's gmt date. This can be changed to post_date
    $post_date = strtotime( $notification->post_date_gmt );

    //Get the current gmt time
    $todays_date = current_time( 'timestamp', true );

    //Set the expiry time to two days after the posts is published
    $expiry_date = strtotime('+10 minute', $post_date);

    if( $expiry_date > $todays_date ) {
        // Display your notification if two days has not been passed
        //echo 'New post published';

    ?>

X

                                    Geachte leden, er zijn één of meerdere nieuwe berichten toegevoegd. Ga naar login pagina >

    <?php

    }

}
?>

A: Aside from the errant close quote, you have a couple small issues:

*

*You are missing is logic to hide the notification-bar when the cookie exists.

*It seems like the expires value must be a number not a string.

Edit: snippets tool does not want to play nicely with the cookies, so see the Working Fiddle

$(function() {
    var notifyBar = $('#notification-bar');

    if($.cookie('demo_cookie') == null) {
        notifyBar.css( "display", "block" );
    } else {
        notifyBar.css( "display", "none" );
    }

    $(".notification-close").click(function() {
        notifyBar.css( "display", "none" );
        $.cookie('demo_cookie', 'Demo Cookie', { expires: 7, path: '/'});
    });
});
#notification-bar {
    height: 50px;
    width: 200px;
    background-color: blue;
}

<input type="button" class="notification-close" value="Close" />

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


And as you'll quickly discover, Japanese cuisine has great regional variations. The shinkansen bullet train network now runs all the way from the southern tip of Kyūshū the southernmost of Japan's major islands up to Hokkaidō its northernmost , and reasonably priced rail passes make it affordable. Ease of Travel Japan is incredibly easy to get around: you can do a whole trip using nothing but its immaculate, efficient public transport. The problem is that once you have gotten your nifty new product, the japan travel complete profile world trade press gets a brief glance, maybe a once over, but it often tends to get discarded or lost with the original packaging. The problem is that once you have gotten your nifty new product, the norway travel complete profile world trade press gets a brief glance, maybe a once over, but it often tends to get discarded or lost with the original packaging. Register a Free 1 month Trial Account.
United Arab Emirates Travel Complete Profile World Trade Press can be very useful guide, and united arab emirates travel complete profile world trade press play an important role in your products. Register a Free 1 month Trial Account. Japan Travel Complete Profile World Trade Press can be very useful guide, and japan travel complete profile world trade press play an important role in your products. Norway Travel Complete Profile World Trade Press can be very useful guide, and norway travel complete profile world trade press play an important role in your products. Malawi Travel Complete Profile World Trade Press can be very useful guide, and malawi travel complete profile world trade press play an important role in your products.
. The problem is that once you have gotten your nifty new product, the malawi travel complete profile world trade press gets a brief glance, maybe a once over, but it often tends to get discarded or lost with the original packaging. Food Wherever you are in Japan, it seems, you're never far from a great meal. But if getting off the beaten track and outside your comfort zone is what you're after, you can have that experience, too. In the winter, all this is covered with snow and the skiing is world class. In the warmer months there is excellent hiking, through cedar groves and fields of wildflowers, up to soaring peaks and ancient shrines the latter founded by wandering ascetics. Register a Free 1 month Trial Account.
From the splendour of a Kyoto geisha dance to the spare beauty of a Zen rock garden, Japan has the power to enthral even the most jaded traveller. Meanwhile in the southern reaches, there are tropical beaches for sunning, snorkelling and diving. Register a Free 1 month Trial Account. It's over two-thirds mountains, with bubbling hot springs at every turn. Traditional Culture On the surface Japan appears exceedingly modern, but travelling around it offers numerous opportunities to connect with the country's traditional culture. Spend the night in a ryokan traditional Japanese inn , sleeping on futons and tatami mats, and padding through well-worn wooden halls to the bathhouse or go one step further and sleep in an old farmhouse.
It's also intensely seasonal, meaning you can visit at a different time of year and experience totally new tastes. The problem is that once you have gotten your nifty new product, the united arab emirates travel complete profile world trade press gets a brief glance, maybe a once over, but it often tends to get discarded or lost with the original packaging. Outdoors Japan is a long and slender, highly volcanic archipelago. Restaurants often specialise in just one dish — perhaps having spent generations perfecting it — and pay close attention to every stage, from sourcing the freshest, local ingredients to assembling the dish attractively. Meditate with monks or learn how to whisk bitter matcha powdered green tea into a froth. The hearty hotpots of the mountains are, for example, dramatically different from the delicate sushi for which the coast is famous. Major cities have subway networks that are signposted in English and these days we're seeing and hearing more English all over.
And if you've never paired hiking or skiing with soaking in onsen, you don't know what you've been missing. . . . .


Welcome to Lexus of Pleasanton, home of the latest new and used Lexus models in Pleasanton, CA. Serving Danville, Dublin, and the East Bay Area, our Lexus dealership in the offers a large inventory of new Lexus cars, SUVs and hybrids, as well as pre-owned models. Visit our Lexus dealership near Livermore, Danville, Dublin and all of Alameda County, and our helpful sales and finance teams can put you in the right luxury model for you.
Click the links below to learn a little more about our Lexus dealership.
Have you been looking for a Lexus in the East Bay Area and still haven't found precisely what you're looking for? Pay a visit to Lexus of Pleasanton and look through our large inventory of new Lexus models and pre-owned vehicles. We are just a short drive away in Pleasanton, and we are sure that your experience and our selection here will demonstrate to you why we are worth the trip.
Our large selection, personable sales team and devotion to serving our customers' particular needs have resulted in us being the preferred car dealership for many drivers in the area. It is as simple as prioritizing our customers first while offering honest recommendations about which vehicle is best for you. Make the short trip and see for yourself why we get so many returning customers from the East Bay Area, including Danville and Dublin. We are known for our low-pressure method of sales, cutting edge auto repair center, and high-quality selection of the newest Lexus models, colors, and trims. Give us a call at (925) 401-3565 with any questions you may have.
We get choosing an automotive repair shop isn't the easiest thing to do. Lexus of Pleasanton will not try to take advantage of you like some other dealerships . We will be upfront with you regarding our diagnostic, repair and part pricing because we know trust is earned. Whenever you let us, Lexus of Pleasanton will earn your trust.
One way to make the most of your time at our Lexus dealership is to apply for financing from the comfort of home. This will give you more time to research models and learn more about the features and options that you need. Complete the brief form, submit it, and we will have it on hand when you come in for a test drive.
Experience a new way of car buying.
Shop our huge inventory and find the perfect match. Once you've made your selection, you'll get to do the deal from the comfort of anywhere.
Tell us a few key pieces of information to determine your monthly payment. Enter your down payment, trade in value, and figure taxes and fees. You'll see your monthly payment instantly. No hassle or haggle involved.
Simply submit your desired deal to us. You're the driver after all.
Schedule a time to sign the paperwork and pick up your keys. No fuss. No muss. It's that simple.


CELA is excited to announce the new Exceeding The National Quality Standard masterclass with Jennifer Ribarovski. Jennifer has over thirty years' experience in the education and care sector, including playing a key role in the implementation of the NQF for both the Regulatory Authority and ACECQA. Jennifer has trained authorized officers across Australia to assess against the NQS and developed curriculum support documents to assist educators in their pedagogical journey.
Jennifer will guide you through providing evidence on how exceeding themes are reflected in your practice.
Who should participate? This Masterclass is for educators, educational leaders, providers and managers of services across LDC, OOSH, Preschool and FDC.
Completing Exceeding The National Quality Standard Masterclass, will contribute 3 hours of NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) Registered PD addressing 6.2.2 from the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers towards maintaining Proficient Teacher Accreditation in NSW.
"Jennifer's knowledge and understanding of all aspects of the National Quality Framework is incomparable. What she is particularly good at though is making this information accessible to educators of all levels.


text:
Whether it's the feeling of summer sun on your face as splash along the shores of Lake Erie, the pure joy in the eyes of your child during her first trip to the Columbus Zoo or memorable moments spent hiking through Hocking Hills with your dad, there's nothing quite like a great Ohio getaway. Here's a look at some of the memorbale moments visitors share daily on Instagram with #OhioFindItHere:
I totally agree. This page is full of ads. and the reason we were all sucked in to this page was its title. T he whole time I was on this page, ad were loading and trackers were loading in the background. And while my Internet connection may not be gigabit, it's right around 70 mbps. The title may not be click-bait, but it's damn close. Seems like I've read other puerile anti-Google rants VERY similar to this on other sites - sure seems familiar. I had to laugh at the author's suggestion that Wolfram|Alpha is a good substitute for Google. Makes me wonder what the hell he's smoking!
Can you attach a screenshot? *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screenshot *https://support.mozilla.org/kb/how-do-i-create-screenshot-my-problem Use a compressed image type like PNG or JPG to save the screenshot. ---- *http://kb.mozillazine.org/Unable_to_install_themes_or_extensions *http://kb.mozillazine.org/Uninstalling_add-ons *http://kb.mozillazine.org/Uninstalling_toolbars
How can you build or rebuild your credit if you can't obtain credit? While it can seem like a vicious cycle and huge hurdle for many people with no credit, little credit, or even damaged credit, there are ways around it! A BHPH dealership like AutoMax, reports to the credit bureaus, which not only provides its customers with the transportation they need to live, but can also help them establish credit or rebuild damaged credit. A car retail installment loan is one of the best and fastest ways to improve a credit rating.
We use cookies to optimize and personalize your experience, provide relevant content and analyze online traffic. We also share information with our analytics and website partners, who may use it to inform decisions about current or future services. By clicking "Agree," you consent to use cookies if you continue to our website. You can manage your cookie settings by clicking the "cookie preferences" button.
Putting information on finance and outcomes in context is more relevant than simply listing that information, he said. And students already have more interesting places to go for that context, he added, such as College Confidential, where they can see what students are saying about a college, or Niche, where they can view rankings and read deep write-ups, or U.S. News, where they can browse the most widely recognized rankings.
The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics makes "Find a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist" available to the general public to provide access to basic information about participants. The use of "Find a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist" for commercial or any other purposes, such as making compilations or mailing lists, is prohibited, as is the download and/or establishment of independent data files and the republication, resale, or duplication of the data in whole or in part.
I do like the fact that Epic is making these search between challenges a little more involved. This was one they set up from the initial planning of the season, and would definitely be one of the more difficult ones if…you didn't have guides like this to look up so you can skip calculating where exactly six statues are looking for yourself. With a few more weeks to go, I wonder if there are any other elaborate hunts like this in the cards, like some secret in Viking Village people haven't figured out yet. I'm also hoping for more map additions like the village and the stone heads, but here in week 6, we really have not seen any significant additions like that all season long.
Is it time to leave Google search behind Which Search Engine Should You Be Using Today? Which Search Engine Should You Be Using Today? There are many search engines out there, but which one is the best for you? Read More ? I think the real question to ask yourself is, "Can you live without Google services?" Including YouTube, Docs, Sheets, Maps, your Android powered smartphone Here's How You Can Use Android But Ditch Google Here's How You Can Use Android But Ditch Google Want to use your Android smartphone or tablet without Google? Want to use open source software? Here we take an in-depth look at exactly how to do that. Read More , and so on. It's a lot to let go.
Deciding what to search for and interpreting your results can be complicated. There are many factors to consider in determining likelihood of confusion. We can't advise you on how to do a clearance search for your mark, do one for you, or interpret your search results. However, a private trademark attorney can do all of these things and advise you throughout the application process. See why hire a private trademark attorney to learn more about what an attorney can do for you and how to find one.


text:
function str = dumptree(obj, nodeFunc)
%% DUMPTREE  Dump the contents of the tree to a string.
%
% Each line of the string (lines terminated by newline) is one node.
% Each line is in the format:
% node_index , node_parent , node_contents
%
% If the node_contents is a string then the it is simply printed.
% If node_contents is anything else, then the user must supply
% a function handle (nodeFunc) that tells dumptree how to handle
% the data.
%
% Examples
% myTree.dumptree(@(n) sprintf('%d,%d,%d',n.xVoxel,n.yVoxel,n.zVoxel))
% myTree.dumptree(@treeDumperFncInPathSomewhere)
% myTree.dumptree()
% dumpTree(myTree)
%
% Rob Campbell, Basel, 2015

if nargin<2
    nodeFunc=[];
    if ~isstr(obj.Node{1})
        fprintf('Node data are not a string but nodeFunc was not defined.\nAborting\n\n')
        return
    end
end

str= '';
for ii=1:obj.nnodes
    if isempty(nodeFunc)
        nodeData =  obj.Node{ii};
    else
        nodeData = nodeFunc(obj.Node{ii});
    end

    str = [str,sprintf('%d,%d,%s\n',ii,obj.Parent(ii),nodeData)];
end

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub