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>Tesla eliminated: > Gas stations (home charging) > Oil changes (no engine) > Dealerships (direct sales) > Annual maintenance (software updates) > Price negotiations (fixed pricing) Excuse me? Software updates cannot replace maintenance for mechanical wear and tear. No one is sending out over the air updates that rotate your tires.
>Tesla eliminated: > Gas stations (home charging) > Oil changes (no engine) > Dealerships (direct sales) > Annual maintenance (software updates) > Price negotiations (fixed pricing) Excuse me? Software updates cannot replace maintenance for mechanical wear and tear. No one is sending out over the air updates that rotate your tires.
You are correct that mechanical wear and tear cannot be fully eliminated. No one can OTA a new set of wiper blades.
But the amount of control that software has over a car absolutely can shrink the basket of maintenance that needs to be performed.
I don't know about you but I dread looking for products on AMZN. If I know exactly what I am looking for it is not too bad but it seems AMZN has been overwhelmed with "AI Slop" quality product listings since before there was Generative AI. One step on my quitting Prime journey was contacting AMZN about an obviously fraudulent product listing and them telling me they didn't want to hear any complaints about a product…
This 1000%. The number of fly-by-night Chinese “brands” with inscrutable names selling garbage-tier products makes Amazon’s search almost useless without a ton of extra filtering. More often than not, I end up on Amazon product pages by way of The Wirecutter or other product review sites.
It wouldn’t be so bad if you actually could filter out slop, but no!
Search results show random crap with no relation to search terms and even changing the display order changes what products you see!
It all feels very intentional and a prime example of enshittification.
I don't know about you but I dread looking for products on AMZN. If I know exactly what I am looking for it is not too bad but it seems AMZN has been overwhelmed with "AI Slop" quality product listings since before there was Generative AI. One step on my quitting Prime journey was contacting AMZN about an obviously fraudulent product listing and them telling me they didn't want to hear any complaints about a product…
I don't know about you but I dread looking for products on AMZN. If I know exactly what I am looking for it is not too bad but it seems AMZN has been overwhelmed with "AI Slop" quality product listings since before there was Generative AI. One step on my quitting Prime journey was contacting AMZN about an obviously fraudulent product listing and them telling me they didn't want to hear any complaints about a product…
Amazon is an infinite cornucopia of worthless shit. A good shop is one that offers a variety of products in each category, where each has been selected by someone who knows enough about those products for me to be confident that buying the cheapest option will still be a good buy. Also, waiting for delivery is more friction for me than walking to the shop.
Tesla has a design philosophy that I fundamentally disagree with, which introduces friction into operating the car. I have no off-street parking, so an electric car is less convenient for me than a petrol one. Maintenance in the form of physical objects ensures that I have control over what features my car offers.
Netflix provides less variety for me than the old video rental places did. Having all of the tapes lined up made it easier to browse for an unexpected gem than the standard streaming site menus. Producers not being obsessed with metrics meant that series were made to their natural conclusions.
Physical input controls provide a better interaction with devices (consider the obsession with mechanical keyboards). Thanks to integrated cameras, people go to concerts and watch them through their phone screens rather than enjoying the actual performance.
Traditional taxi services (at least where I'm from) offered varying levels of service quality through easily-identified and well-known brands. Government regulation ensured passenger safety and made sure drivers were able to make a living.
Spotify - see Netflix.
When books were only published on dead trees, the cost of doing so ensured that whole teams of people were employed to ensure that what was published was of a reasonable quality and, in the case of non-fiction works, accurate. Now bullshit and humanity's greatest works sit side-by-side with little to indicate which is which.
I don't want to be that person going on about how things were better in 'the good old days', but an awful lot of people simply can't cope without all the guardrails that the pre-Internet businesses imposed on the market. Sure, I can successfully navigate the complexity, and can even thrive in it, but I live in a society, which means that I end up paying for other people's incapability somewhere.
It's called "Vertical integration". It's not about eliminating things.
I don't know about you but I dread looking for products on AMZN. If I know exactly what I am looking for it is not too bad but it seems AMZN has been overwhelmed with "AI Slop" quality product listings since before there was Generative AI. One step on my quitting Prime journey was contacting AMZN about an obviously fraudulent product listing and them telling me they didn't want to hear any complaints about a product…
I want the check box that says, “Show only brands that GenX would recognize”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want the check box that says, “Show only brands that GenX would recognize”
I would love a version of Amazon that worked like this. And also "show me brands with a headquarters inside of the US that isn't just someone's house."