I have no idea whether Amazon's proposed purchase of iRobot was a good idea, but they did put up some serious money for it. And people deciding how to spend their own money? I'm for that.
But anyway, it won't happen, and the pain started immediately, as reported by Ars Technica: Amazon’s $1.4B Roomba bid fails, leading to iRobot layoffs and CEO resignation.
"Fails"? This is kind of like a 1915 headline saying
Lusitania Fails to Arrive in Liverpool
In fact, the bid was torpedoed.
Amazon will no longer pursue a $1.4 billion acquisition of iRobot, maker of Roomba robot vacuums after the companies announced today that they have "no path to regulatory approval in the European Union."
On the same day, iRobot announced an "operational restructuring plan" in which 350 employees, or 31 percent of iRobot's workforce, will be laid off. CEO Colin Angle, one of the company's cofounders, will also step down, and the company has hired a chief restructuring officer for its "return to profitability." The company will refocus on its core cleaning product lineup, pausing efforts in air purification, robotic lawn mowing, and education.
Well, darn. I'd kind of like a robot lawn mower.
But the EU wasn't the only one with its fingers on the "Fire" button, as reported by Joe Lancaster at Reason: iRobot Lays Off 350 Employees as Amazon Kills Merger Elizabeth Warren Opposed.
While the companies blamed regulators in the European Union for the termination, meddlesome U.S. lawmakers played their own part in souring the deal.
In August 2022, Amazon announced its intent to buy iRobot for $1.7 billion. The acquisition would complement Amazon's growing stable of smart home products, like Echo Hub control panels and Ring video doorbells.
The following month, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) began an investigation of the merger, and lawmakers weighed in soon after. In a letter to FTC Chair Lina Khan, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) and five Democratic representatives recommended that "the FTC should use its authority to oppose the Amazon–iRobot transaction" as the acquisition "could harm consumers and reduce competition and innovation in the home robotics market."
Hurrah! Competition is saved, thanks to Lina and Liz! Except that iRobot will have to "compete" in the future without those 350 employees and its CEO. And without any of that nasty innovation they were planning on.
The WSJ editorialists are even less impressed, and they make a point of asking: Cui bono?: Elizabeth Warren’s iRobot Gift to China.
One might say Elizabeth Warren got her robot. The Massachusetts Senator has prodded antitrust regulators to block Amazon’s acquisition of Roomba manufacturer iRobot. On Monday the two companies called off their deal amid opposition from competition regulators. What a coup—for the Chinese.
Progressives opposed Amazon’s $1.7 billion bid for iRobot the moment it was announced in August 2022. They claimed without evidence that Amazon would undermine Roomba rivals selling in the company’s online marketplace and use the smart vacuum to spy on American homes. But they mostly worried that the acquisition would make Amazon more powerful.
It wasn’t a secret that Amazon wanted to hoover up iRobot’s engineering talent. Expanding its use of robotics could make Amazon’s retail operations more efficient and help expand in new markets. But progressives want to stop big tech companies from growing.
There are no Chinese versions of Warren and Khan. They are smarter than that.
Also of note:
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"Help us, Nikki-Wan Haylobi. You're our only hope." George Will observes that Nikki Haley is the last candle fending off darkness. And she’s fired up. He is cautiously (GFW is always cautious) about Nikki's chance for a South Carolina upset:
Calling herself a “happy warrior,” looking inexplicably rested and exuding an exuberant pugnacity, she is wagering that Trump cannot keep his composure for four weeks. And that a majority of voters, already embarrassed and exhausted by Trump, will be more so if he has a testosterone spill when she relentlessly needles him about being afraid to debate someone with two X chromosomes.
President Biden’s handlers cannot allow him out campaigning for nine months because they know what voters will see. Trump’s operatives cannot know what he does not know: what he will say next. One of Haley’s tasks is to trigger him.
I dunno. Trump has been saying some pretty wacky stuff of late, and his voters seem to not care.
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Big news: Taylor Swift is good for something. And Benjamin Seevers knows what that something is: Taylor Swift Shows Us Why We Need to Shake Off Intellectual Property.
Taking on Taylor Swift, a recent documentary on CNN, tells the story of Sean Hall and Nathan Butler, a pair of songwriters for the early 2000s hip-hop group 3LW. Hall and Butler sued Taylor Swift in 2021 over Swift’s hit song “Shake It Off” for allegedly violating their copyright for the 3LW song “Playas Gon’ Play.” Hall and Butler allege that the phrases “haters gonna hate” and “playas gonna play” in Swift’s song are ripped straight from the 3LW song.
This accusation is simply dishonest. The phrase “haters gonna hate” predates both of the songs and appears to have arisen spontaneously rather than having been coined by any particular person or group. The same could be said for “players gonna play.” Assuming that a copyright, a form of intellectual property (IP), is a legitimate form of property, Swift clearly did not “steal” these phrases because they were already common phrases at the time of the composition of both songs.
One of the saddest, and truest, song lyrics is a Spinners oldie: "It takes a fool (yes sir) to learn that love don't love nobody". That should be in more songs.
Not that it matters, but I don't think I've ever listened to a Taylor Swift song.
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An example of uncreative destruction… as described by the NR editors: Biden Policy on Natural Gas Exports Destructive.
Rarely does a policy change make no sense on its own terms, contradict other policies of the same administration, and harm America’s domestic and foreign interests. But the Biden administration has managed to do all of that with its decision to stonewall approval of new liquefied-natural-gas export terminals.
The White House statement on the decision begins with a high-school-freshman opening sentence (“In every corner of the country and the world, people are suffering the devastating toll of climate change”), and the quality of analysis doesn’t improve from there.
It's boob bait for the bubbas, specifically the fossil-fuel haters.