General > General Technical Chat

Amazon: the shittiest, most ghastly company on earth

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tooki:

--- Quote from: dmills on June 28, 2021, 11:08:25 am ---The first of the Macs to have built a in dac for actually plying audio as opposed to beeps, had a start up chime the filename for which was sosume, SoSueMe.

Yea there was a lawsuit back in the day.

--- End quote ---
FYI, all Macs ever made have a DAC — Macs don’t have, and never have had, a beeper. The sound named “sosumi” was added, IIRC, when they added an audio input.

Same era that had one machine with the internal code name “Carl Sagan”, and when he found out and threatened to sue, they changed it to “BHA”, which Sagan later found out was short for “buttheaded astronomer” 🤣

tooki:

--- Quote from: Raj on June 28, 2021, 11:34:59 am ---
--- Quote from: voltsandjolts on June 28, 2021, 11:32:37 am ---Industrial scale manufacturing has always been bad news for the environment, because all products are put there at the end of their useful life. In more or less damaging ways. My mind boggles just at the volume of cleaning chemicals that go down the drain and straight out to local water courses or rivers. Every supermarket on the planet has shelves full of chemicals labelled damaging to aquatic life, and that's exactly where it ends up!

Anyway, I digress.

Amazon is simply another player, helping us along our fast track to environmental destruction.
On the plus side, at least some folks are getting rich along the way :-\

--- End quote ---
Reminds me of a tv show, with a person yelling something along the lines of, "these chemicals are messing up with frog's brains"   :-DD.  ;)

--- End quote ---
You mean Alex Jones frothing at the mouth that chemicals are turning the frogs gay?

Raj:

--- Quote from: Rick Law on June 29, 2021, 03:08:50 am ---This is probably shocking to many: Apple made more profit in three months than Amazon has generated during its lifetime!

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/11/apple-made-more-profit-in-three-months-than-amazon-has-generated-during-its-lifetime.html

--- End quote ---

As they say, Amazon is playing the long game. Making stuff cheaper until competitor dies out.
They've already defeated all book sellers out there.
But I don't understand the appeal of apple at all.
How come people are paying so much for a mediocre devices that are expensive to buy and repair. And they also go obsolete quickly.

I've never seen an Iphone or android that can even play a YouTube video without bugging out after 5 years of use.


--- Quote from: tooki on June 29, 2021, 07:48:31 am ---You mean @lex J0nes frothing at the mouth that chemicals are turning the frogs g@y?

--- End quote ---
Yup, the one who shouldn't be named.

T3sl4co1l:

--- Quote from: tooki on June 29, 2021, 07:48:31 am ---You mean Alex Jones frothing at the mouth that chemicals are turning the frogs gay?

--- End quote ---

It's an interesting phrase, there's some nuance behind it actually:



The reaction clip, of course, is just mimetic gold; but it's based on a true story, of suppressed science, distilled over the years through a conspiracy-theoretic lens, down to the simplest possible description.  They're not "gay" of course, that's an abuse of language, but hermaphroditic deformities -- intersex is the proper term(?) -- were found; the effects were causally proven; and the science was discredited by big agro as well as they could muster, because obviously, they have a financial stake in this.

So it's interesting to see the phrase used here, understanding how it came to be.  It's the perfect case of a phrase that sounds like a joke, while hinting at a dark, disturbing situation.


Another, albeit less extreme, statement comes to mind: "the solution to pollution is dilution".  Now, it's perfectly true -- see, it's easy to laugh at this statement, or question it morally -- and rightly so; but it works because it works.  The problem is not that a company is releasing toxic chemicals per se, it's that enough of them are doing it, in great enough quantities, that, over anything from local areas to entire ecosystems, concentrations rise to dangerous levels.  And often those levels are unimaginably small (~ppb, even ppt for PFAS, dioxins, etc.), and the effects on various species are unpredictable.

It's not that a resource is being exploited, it's that it's being exploited too aggressively for the number of users of that resource -- it's the tragedy of the commons, and the only solution is through cooperation, whether as a self-regulating industry, or by government action.

So, even outside of pesticides (and their production byproducts, or of myriad other chemical products), just say, the sheer disposal of plastic waste is troubling (e.g. microplastics entering food chains).  Never mind the sheer amount of greenhouse and other gasses fed into the atmosphere.  It's not about whether we are making an impact, it's absolutely the case that we do; the question is, are we using up the resource faster than it cleans itself, or than we can clean it?  And wasteful practices such as highlighted in this thread, clearly aren't helping in that regard.  It's a problem consisting of myriad actors, subject to diverse externalities; it's not a problem that can be solved by the individual, or a company necessarily, or even a country; it requires massive and effective cooperation by all stakeholders of the respective resource, of whatever size that resource is.



--- Quote from: Rick Law on June 29, 2021, 03:08:50 am ---Amazon often is grouped with companies like Google, Apple, and the likes.  But Amazon isn't exactly a high profit company.  Amazon's on-line sales and fulfilment operates on much thinner margin than say Google's ad sale and Apple's HW/SW (apps) lines.  They don't have as much room to maneuver as you imagined.
--- End quote ---

I mean, it's not like Bezos is exactly strapped for cash or anything.  He could float them personally for years with his war chest.

Anyway, that doesn't matter -- they can raise prices to compensate.  Note this is only possible when regulations are applied uniformly across the market, where everyone is required to incur the same added cost.  Making adjustments for barriers-to-entry or weighting judiciously by company size, or impact or overhead or whatever.

It would be ludicrous of course to single out just one company.  Again, it's not just one, there are many actors to blame!

Heh, a possible consequence might be making brick-and-mortar stores relatively more profitable; that would seem to hint at the tradeoff of local supply versus delivery, under such a [environmentally responsible regulatory] regime.  I mean, if it worked out that way, I can't say I'd be disappointed!  But it may well be the case that delivery is better, I don't know.

But anyway, I'm not a policy wonk, I don't know what's being discussed, if anything like this, right now.  There's probably something.  I'd suggest go reading about that directly, to see some better circumscribed, actually studied, proposals.



--- Quote ---This is probably shocking to many: Apple made more profit in three months than Amazon has generated during its lifetime!

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/11/apple-made-more-profit-in-three-months-than-amazon-has-generated-during-its-lifetime.html

--- End quote ---

I agree wholeheartedly, they need to be regulated as well!  They're aggressively anti-repair, as are many other manufacturers that are dependent on a captive-service or recurring-sales model.

Tim

Gyro:

--- Quote from: Rick Law on June 29, 2021, 02:16:49 am ---
--- Quote from: aix on June 24, 2021, 04:50:02 pm ---I really don't get the economics of this, especially for higher-valued items.  Rather than destroying the stock, would it not be advantageous for whomever owns it to sell it at a deep discount?  Or is that harder to do than it sounds?

--- End quote ---

The destruction like likely the cost of selling, fulfillment, plus book keeping exceeded the profit of the sale.  So rather than throwing good money after bad, the wise choice for the seller might well be just path of minimum additional lost.

--- End quote ---

The logical (and ridiculous) extension of this is telling Amazon 'I don't want this item, but give me a refund and I'm prepared to dispose of it at no further cost to you'.

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