Would you accept cheaper rent in exchange for a monthly Amazon purchasing quota? • Hacker News Board

Re: Would you accept cheaper rent in exchange for a monthly Amazon purchasing quota?

#71

Post by quaquaqua1 » Sat, Aug 03, 2019, 12:21 PM UTC

wanderer2323 wrote: post #50

zwkrt wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A more wild and outlandish thought experiment: would you become infinitely indebted for infinite reward? Imagining some cyberpunk wasteland where every commodity, pastime, medication, and media content is wildly expensive but offset by huge subsidies from complicated conglomeration of other corporations and government entities. Every action you take in your life adds wild positives and negatives to a fantastically co…

Haruki Murakami's novel 'Dance Dance Dance' has a character who is in a similar situation. He's a movie star who because of circumstances related to his divorce has acquired a stunning amount of debt. So most of his income goes into covering this debt. He is very bad with numbers and money, this character, and so he cannot ever figure out how much he owes and how long will the situation last. However his movie studio…

Additionally, infinite reward is a risk: what happens when your debtor doesn't pay you?

Your debts don't disappear, but when your Ferrari rental is late to appear, you maybe will realize the hole you've accepted to be dug around you.

Re: Would you accept cheaper rent in exchange for a monthly Amazon purchasing quota?

#72

Post by jacobwilliamroy » Sat, Aug 03, 2019, 12:23 PM UTC

I wish we'd just run out of oil already. At least then I won't have to worry about my senator pimping me out to some faceless suit in a high-rise 4,000 miles away.

Re: Would you accept cheaper rent in exchange for a monthly Amazon purchasing quota?

#73

Post by usrusr » Sat, Aug 03, 2019, 12:32 PM UTC

Basically why I haven't watched season 3 of The Expanse: I'm far from being an Amazon boycottist, but I refuse to enter any form of ongoing agreement that would make them a default choice or bring them closer to becoming one. I have never put even remotely as much thought into this as the author, but the central idea has been clear nonetheless: don't give away your wallet-vote in a bulk transaction, nothing good can come from this.

Re: Would you accept cheaper rent in exchange for a monthly Amazon purchasing quota?

#74

Post by mlthoughts2018 » Sat, Aug 03, 2019, 12:39 PM UTC

usrusr wrote: post #73

Basically why I haven't watched season 3 of The Expanse: I'm far from being an Amazon boycottist, but I refuse to enter any form of ongoing agreement that would make them a default choice or bring them closer to becoming one. I have never put even remotely as much thought into this as the author, but the central idea has been clear nonetheless: don't give away your wallet-vote in a bulk transaction, nothing good can…

I don’t understand this way of thinking. I despise Amazon in a variety of ways, but I think they do a great job in a variety of other ways. Wouldn’t it be reasonable for me to spend money on the parts I think are good, like Prime Video, and withold money from the parts I think are utterly stupid (anything Alexa-related)?

Assuming Amazon reacts to spending habits of its customers, wouldn’t I be more able to effect change that way (and also enjoy good services) than by a complete boycott that doesn’t tell Amazon why I am diverting money from them or which parts of their services I find deplorable?

Re: Would you accept cheaper rent in exchange for a monthly Amazon purchasing quota?

#75

Post by duxup » Sat, Aug 03, 2019, 1:19 PM UTC

megaremote wrote: post #67

duxup wrote: post #17

I would not want a house I own or rent to have microphones and or cameras installed "for" me..... Forget the math about rent, they're bugging my house.

No smart tv or mobile then?

Hard not to buy a smart TV, but I do not connect them to the internet (hopefully they're not up to something I don't know).

A smartphone seems like a requirement in life to some extent, but it isn't added to any given homes that I'm aware of.

I'd love to see some improvements in that space as far as switches that actually power off mics and cameras.

Re: Would you accept cheaper rent in exchange for a monthly Amazon purchasing quota?

#76

Post by kwhitefoot » Sat, Aug 03, 2019, 1:56 PM UTC

Not unless they sold the things I would otherwise buy. And that is unlikely.

Re: Would you accept cheaper rent in exchange for a monthly Amazon purchasing quota?

#77

Post by kwhitefoot » Sat, Aug 03, 2019, 2:00 PM UTC

ggggtez wrote: post #48

TheRealSteel wrote: post #2

No. And I would expect anti monopoly laws legislation to outlaw this in any halfway civilised country (altho I wouldn't hold out much hope for America). "The toaster oven will only accept certain co-branded bread and other marked-up food products: any attempts to cook other food will throw an error message; “Unauthorized Bread.”" Barely fiction: Keurig, Juicero.

Assuming it was in the form of: You pay the total value in rent, and each month $500 is added to your amazon balance (I'm assuming that's how such a plan would feasibly work in practice)... then, yeah sure. Of course, the devil is in the details, but taking the deal just at face value, yeah it's profitable why wouldn't you do it? Even if you bought stuff you didn't need, but you could resell later for a 20% loss afte…

Minus the value of the time it costs you to sell the goods.

Re: Would you accept cheaper rent in exchange for a monthly Amazon purchasing quota?

#78

Post by notyourwork » Sat, Aug 03, 2019, 2:19 PM UTC

chii wrote: post #61

dhruvrrp wrote: post #53

I don't think Amazon even needs experiments like this to increase its dominance. Take the apartment complex i live in as an example, last year there was a marked increase in package thefts that the residents started complaining. The management came up with a few solutions that all got shot down, cameras were a straight no from most people because of privacy implications, increasing rounds by the security was also sho…

> on-site Amazon lockers. why not general lockers that all deliveries could be put in? The pin could be given as instructions to the deliverer.

Because tenets have to pay for those. My building has them and apartment company offloads cost to tenets in form of a yearly fee.

Re: Would you accept cheaper rent in exchange for a monthly Amazon purchasing quota?

#79

Post by notyourwork » Sat, Aug 03, 2019, 2:22 PM UTC

kwhitefoot wrote: post #76

Not unless they sold the things I would otherwise buy. And that is unlikely.

What do you buy that amazon doesn’t sell?

Re: Would you accept cheaper rent in exchange for a monthly Amazon purchasing quota?

#80

Post by geofft » Sat, Aug 03, 2019, 3:28 PM UTC

nexuist wrote: post #47

geofft wrote: post #3

Thought experiment (I don't actually want to go down this road): can you out-market Amazon in this scenario? If you have a $400 committed spend for a $500 rent discount, can you find people who would buy things from Amazon anyway and offer to make purchases on their behalf at a 1% discount (which is, on paper, obviously rational for them), such that you're now getting back $396 of the $400? Now you're spending a mere…

>could purchasers band together and join an organization that negotiates on their behalf, organizes boycotts, etc. for a relatively small fee? I think you just reinvented unions.

Not quite. The fundamental concept of collective bargaining is similar, but unions are for employees to band together and negotiate with their employers, not for consumers to band together and negotiate with their vendors. (In US law at least, unions are very tightly regulated, managers can't unionize, etc. A group of people negotiating what their Prime membership means would absolutely not be called a "union.")