wow, they seem to also have fired the head of the Food and Drug Administration's drug division (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/02/health/fda-drug-unit-chief.html)

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but it only costs $50 a month for the newest and best unit available! What will people think if I have last year's $2k phone?

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They certainly are…reality is ASTS will not last in this space. This business has existed since the 50s and the economics are pretty much the same - what has democratized is the capability of building and sending these to orbit. Unit economics is unchanged - you are still a low margin HW business which needs an ecosystem to make it work. Needless to say Amazon has that going for it for sure.

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>The Trump administration has fired about a dozen officials within Fannie Mae’s ethics and internal investigations unit, removing some guardrails meant to address and head off misconduct What could go wrong?!

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Na it’s a 5 unit articulated weiner

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lol. I basically just sold all my tech as 1 big unit today - all of it. I didn't pick winners or losers. Was up quite significantly. That's unluck, oh well. Congrats!

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$AMZN | Amazon Q3’25 Earnings Highlights 🔹 Net Sales: $180.17B (Est. $177.82B) 🟢; +13% YoY 🔹 EPS: $1.95 (Est. $1.58) 🟢 🔹 AWS: $33.01B (Est. $32.4B) 🟢; +20% YoY - Growing at pace haven't seen since 2022 Q4 Guidance 🔹 Net Sales: $206.0B–$213.0B (Est. $208.45B) 🟢; implies +10% to +13% YoY; ~+190 bps FX tailwind 🔹 Operating Income: $21.0B–$26.0B (vs. $21.2B in Q4’24) Segment 🔹 Online Stores Net Sales: $67.41B (Est. $66.93B) 🟢; UP +9.8% YoY 🔹 Physical Stores Net Sales: $5.58B (Est. $5.56B) 🟢; UP +6.7% YoY 🔹 3P Seller Services Net Sales: $42.49B (Est. $42.05B) 🟢; UP +12% YoY 🔹 Subscription Services Net Sales: $12.57B (Est. $12.49B) 🟢; UP +11% YoY 🔹 North America Net Sales: $106.27B (Est. $104.96B) 🟢; UP +11% YoY 🔹 International Net Sales: $40.90B (Est. $40.77B) 🟢; UP +14% YoY Other Metrics 🔹 Operating Income: $17.42B (Est. $19.72B) 😕 🔹 Operating Margin: 9.7% (Est. 11.1%)😕 🔹 Fulfillment Expense: $27.68B (Est. $27.49B) 🔴; UP +12% YoY 🔹 Seller Unit Mix: 62% (Est. 60.7%) 🟢 🔹 Operating Income includes special charges: ~$2.5B (FTC settlement) and ~$1.8B (severance); ex-charges OI ≈ $21.7B 🔹 Net Income: $21.2B (vs. $15.3B YoY) 🔹 TTM Operating Cash Flow: $130.7B; UP +16% YoY 🔹 TTM Free Cash Flow: $14.8B (down YoY, driven by higher capex) CEO Commentary 🔸 “We continue to see strong momentum across Amazon as AI drives meaningful improvements in every corner of our business.” 🔸 “AWS is re-accelerating to ~20% YoY with strong demand in AI and core infrastructure as we add capacity.”

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This is somewhat true, but this reasoning often fails to consider the rest of the market, marketing, customer acquisition, customer loyalty, etc. A lot of these factors are hard to put a number to, which is why they can go overlooked, but they matter. When you raise prices well beyond what you need to make a profit per unit, you’re leaving room for a competitor to steal your customers by offering the same quality product at lower (but still profitable) prices. This doesn’t happen immediately, but it will happen eventually. Add in the social dynamics, and the optimal pricing strategy for the long-term health of a business is to go reasonably below the price that maximizes profit this year.

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>Meta's Virtual Reality unit hits $73B in cumulative losses #LMAO🤌

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Surprisingly enough, this is a viable and socially beneficial economic behavior. You *want* to raise prices and reduce revenues until the actual revenue per unit exceeds your costs. Raising prices is a way of rationing goods to the point where you're not *losing* money, and it factors in both fixed and variable costs. So, there are plenty of times where you *should* keep on increasing prices, even though revenues go down because you're reducing your loss on each unit. In the example above, if the fixed costs of production are $100 and the per-unit production cost is $3.50, then you're losing money at $5, only breaking even at a price of $6 and would actually want to raise the price further if you actually wanted to profit. And to a certain point profits can be increased further by increasing prices more even though total revenues decrease.

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