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The Amazon tax

seths.blog

601–610 of 731 posts

Re: The Amazon tax

#601
post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Burning reputation looks great on quarterly reports until the death spiral begins. There’s a great number of products that I used to like that have been replaced and that’s fine as a consumer but stock holders are generally better off when the stock is still valuable in 10 years vs a slightly higher dividend today.

Why worry about how a stock will look in a decade when you can buy and sell in microseconds based on AI, tweets, and vibes. Screwing over users makes people money today. Long before the consequences kick in investors can jump ship to the next corporation victimizing their userbase. Google's probably too big to fail at this point though. If they push away users and the AI bubble bursts taxpayers will be footing the bi…

Becoming wealthy and maintaining wealth are very different mindsets.

Constantly jumping from unstable stock to unstable stock is a great way to suddenly be down a great deal of money. Offsetting a 50% drop takes doubling your money afterwards and in that period you haven’t made anything so the next 50% drop puts you into a deeper hole.

As to too big to fail, the top of the market has a surprising amount of churn with many companies falling very far very quickly.

Re: The Amazon tax

#602
post #449

This has been true for years on Amazon and is true for most big services now. Over time the concept of search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looking for' to 'show me a list of semantic search results'. Somehow nobody noticed. Oh and of course those are not random results - you can literally feel how the platform is trying to nudge you into buying what IT wants, not what you wanted. The search is just pur…

Kagi is comparable to pre-semantic, no-ad Google. Because they don't have ads you just pay for the product. It's great.

"With Kagi you are the customer, not the product."

Re: The Amazon tax

#603

I see the exact same thing on Play Store, and I think Google is outright complicit in fraud. The top result when you search for an app, even if by exact name, is always, literally 100% of the time, not the app you are looking for, but some other ad-infested knockoff spyware shit whose developer paid Google to be placed before the real thing.

I saw a google authenticator copy (using the old icon but named Authenticator) about two weeks ago. It was the top result but an ad and not by Google. Sad I didn't screenshot it, couldn't find it when searching Google Authenticator again.

Re: The Amazon tax

#604
post #451

> Amazon makes enough in search ad revenue to give every single one of their employees a $35,000 cash bonus and still have change left over. There was study not too long ago that showed that 48% of Amazon's employees were paid so little that they were forced to depend on some form of public assistance to meet their basic needs. Not only would an extra 35k a year prevent amazon employees from needing foodstamps and ho…

I've long felt that there needs to be a bill passed to charge companies $x additional tax each year where $x is the amount of government assistance their employees required in order to meet food/housing minimum standards. One way or the other, the companies that are making the rest of us pay for their employees to survive need to be funding these programs.

Isn't it actually the government's fault for setting minimum wage below food stamp wage?

Re: The Amazon tax

#605
post #592
post #208

> The highest-yielding ad my publisher has tested so far is the search “Seth Godin The Knot“ I think it would be interesting to see legal action here. I’m not a lawyer, but I feel like there should be at least three ways to go after this: 1. Trademark infringement. If Amazon is using someone’s search that is clearly searching for a specific product, possibly trademarked, it seems inappropriate for them to serve up an…

These are creative, but you haven’t thought them through. Do you really want brands to own trademarks on their keywords? So that when, to pick a random example, you search the internet for “1-800 Contacts,” nobody else is allowed to show an ad that says “Hey Amluto! We sell the same thing cheaper!”[1] 2 is just being bad at business. Which is why I’m skeptical it happens. 3, I hate to break it to you, basically happe…

seems they've ruled the practice is ok:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/warby-parker-fends-...

Re: The Amazon tax

#606

> Amazon makes enough in search ad revenue to give every single one of their employees a $35,000 cash bonus and still have change left over. There was study not too long ago that showed that 48% of Amazon's employees were paid so little that they were forced to depend on some form of public assistance to meet their basic needs. Not only would an extra 35k a year prevent amazon employees from needing foodstamps and ho…

Force means "coercion or compulsion, especially w the use of threat or violence". If "not paying someone x dollars" = force, then at this moment, I'm forcing 6 billion people to do something.

The force comes in at the other end, where we beat up people for not having X dollars. If you beat up and murder people for not having foo and we all just take this for granted and pretend there's nothing we can do about it, then we have no choice but to assign blame to the part we can actually comprehend - the choice of who gets foo.

Re: The Amazon tax

#607
post #208

> The highest-yielding ad my publisher has tested so far is the search “Seth Godin The Knot“ I think it would be interesting to see legal action here. I’m not a lawyer, but I feel like there should be at least three ways to go after this: 1. Trademark infringement. If Amazon is using someone’s search that is clearly searching for a specific product, possibly trademarked, it seems inappropriate for them to serve up an…

> Someone should file the multi-hundred-billion-dollar class actions Incidentally, last week Amazon changed their TOS [0] and now all disputes with them are to be resolved via Arbitration; class action waiver when you use their services, etc. [0] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/amazon-reinstates-b...

in california you can opt out of binding arbitration within 30 days of signing the contract.

Re: The Amazon tax

#608
post #36

It's amazing how poor on-site search has gotten, while at the same time the capability to have better results and more relevancy has gone way up. I normally use Google and/or DuckDuckGo to search YouTube and Amazon, because if I'm looking for a specific video/product, that one will be 3-4 pages in (maybe not even shown). Brand name products are buried 3+ pages deep on Amazon, while the first 2-3 pages are always drop…

Enshittification is such a perfect word for all this. Cory Doctorow is a word magician.

There's also the less neologistic phrase "worse on purpose"

Re: The Amazon tax

#609
post #309

I'm in the UK, and I've found that pretty much anything I can get on Amazon I can also get at John Lewis. It's probably more expensive - I'm in the lucky situation that I'm not particularly price-sensitive - but I much prefer the feeling of buying from JL. Very occasionally I'll buy something from Amazon like photo paper or some small gizmo that's difficult to find elsewhere. The one kind of physical shop I really mi…

> The one kind of physical shop I really miss is the kind of place where you can buy one screw, nail or picture hook etc. So much nostalgia for these shops. A man with a posh, sparkling clean apron knowing exactly what you need or mean. In and out in under a minute or two having parted with just 30p Screwfix are actually pretty close in terms of service. Their staff are pretty patient with people and quite helpful. T…

Spending 30p in a minute means the store's gross revenue including cost of goods sold is at most $18.00 per hour, which is already less than a living wage for one person.

Re: The Amazon tax

#610
post #71

> The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place). The ads make the search worse. "The best" is not a static product. If Amazon had no way for vendors to showcase their product, the best would be a stale product that accumulated decades of reviews. Maybe it's still the best , maybe not. Bu…

If "the best" was stuck in 2005 it probably actually would still be better than what it says "the best" is today.
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