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IF there's such a thing as a deserving billionaire, Bezos comes closest in my mind. Remember when Amazon was nothing but an online bookstore? It's been an amazing journey from those times to today, when I can order a thing and have it in hand within 3-days, tops. If that thing doesn't suit me, for whatever reason, returns are free and simple.

Then came COVID. Since then, I buy most everything from Amazon. It's too convenient, saves me gas and time, saves me from the Walmart crowd. Plus, I get a 1% kickback using my Amazon card. You gotta admit, from an environmental standpoint, relying on their delivery service is like taking a bus vs. everyone driving out in their own cars. Not to mention wear and tear on a fleet of like vehicles vs. all our thousand different vehicle models, that's gotta cut down on manufacturing emissions.

They brought a LOT of innovation to online retailing that we now take for granted. Seen stories over the years, don't remember enough to talk about it in detail. Simple ordering, no-questions-asked returns, fulfillment speed, stuff like that. I will say that the business side sucks compared to the consumer version. Prices are higher, fewer goods available, harder to review past purchases, all kinds of nonsense that the consumer side perfected. WTF?

With all this praise, there's the elephant in the room, treatment of employees. We've all heard the horror stories, no need to recount. It would take QUITE some time. Given the maturity of the systems, and wild profits, it seems a no-brainer to start hiring more and kicking more back to the ground troops.

"But it's necessary with capitalism!" No it ain't. I'm aware of at least 4 companies, 2 of which I've had involvement with, and 1 I'm employed at, that pay extraordinarily well, give extraordinary benefits and treat people as humans first, employees second. (Funny enough, 2 are convenience store chains of all things.) These companies also make extraordinary profits for their owners and/or shareholders. All the greed and evil we see is NOT necessary to practice capitalism, it just more often works out that way.

Now how about AWS? Outside of the IT crowd, I very much doubt anyone realizes what a monster they are. AWS IS the cloud. Unless you're balls deep in Microsoft's ecosystem, I'm not sure why you would pick Azure. (I'll admit much ignorance here.) Every other cloud provider is miles behind.

Even if you don't need the flexibility, scalability and horsepower of AWS, their scale and size (help me with the word I want) allows them to price on par with smaller outfits. I shopped some cloud services at my last job and the sticker shock was worse than AWS. LOL, if you can believe that.

The platform is mature to the point where if you imagine it, they're probably already doing it. "Sure wish AWS would..." "They do." It's called <confusing_name_that_sounds_like_20_other_products>." Having a solid grasp of all the services/offerings is a career unto itself.

My only complaint is that small timers like me can't affordably dabble. I've got a web server and a Pi-hole in Lightsail, $11/mo. or so? But fuck me, play much beyond that and you'll get handed a $500 invoice. (There's some entry level stuff that's free and cheap, but don't slip! I added a directory service I never used or configured, $65/mo. and it was painful to kill and get refunded.)

Unlike another tech billionaire, who shall remain unnamed, at least Bezos keeps his mouth shut. Also, he quietly throws around a good bit of charity that he doesn't talk about and you won't hear about. Could he do more? Certainly. I'd like to see him pledge the same as Gates and Buffet, maybe he will when he gets old.

Someone will come along to call me a bootlicker, ask why making fun of Bezos tRiGGerEd me. I just happen to (mostly) admire Amazon's success, and to lesser extent, the man himself. (Plus, I'm dodging work and felt like writing something.)