> When there are plenty of ads, the maker of the best air fryer now has to bid on ads as well, if only to protect the sales they were entitled to in the first place.
No business is entitled to any customers.
The Amazon tax
681–690 of 731 posts
Re: The Amazon tax
#682It doesn't have to do with Amazon. It is just how ads work. Of course when you buy a product that is heavily advertised you know that you are paying for it, Amazon or not. That's why, when I see an ad campaign for a product I may want, it is a signal for me to look elsewhere. Some competitor may use what would be ad budget towards offering lower prices or better quality. As for Amazon, it is not cheap! It is convenie…
> As for Amazon, it is not cheap! To be fair, I am not doubting this statement for your experience. However, I will say my experience is the opposite. Amazon, where I live, is regularly cheaper and/or more convenient (1/2 day shipping for nearly everything). This makes me ask the question: What is the "PPP" (purchasing power parity) of Amazon for each region? It seems logical that Amazon would be (in some regions): (…
> Amazon, where I live, is regularly cheaper and/or more convenient (1/2 day shipping for nearly everything).
And where I live, which is not a first-tier dense city by any means, I regularly get 3 _hour_ shipping for common things. Often cheaper than I could get those items at walmart.
Re: The Amazon tax
#683I 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.
Apple does the same thing. It makes all the nonsense about the App Store protecting users plain lies, because Apple could easily protect users by removing scam apps, but they don’t because they generate revenue for Apple.
Re: The Amazon tax
#684It doesn't have to do with Amazon. It is just how ads work. Of course when you buy a product that is heavily advertised you know that you are paying for it, Amazon or not. That's why, when I see an ad campaign for a product I may want, it is a signal for me to look elsewhere. Some competitor may use what would be ad budget towards offering lower prices or better quality. As for Amazon, it is not cheap! It is convenie…
It's confusing to me that amazon is in the ads business at all though. They're a retail service, not an ad business and it seems that all the ad business does is burn goodwill. They do have goodwill to burn, but it cheapens the entire experience.
The ad business makes more money than the retail business.
Re: The Amazon tax
#685This 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…
> There are no '0 search results' anywhere.. each search yields thousands of results. My biggest frustration with google search is that it doesn’t. Keywords that I know are on millions of pages only return a handful of results.
Yeah, like for another example, I'd stumbled across some (probably somewhat obscure) blog/podcast series about Bob Dylan songs some time ago, but had forgotten to bookmark it. A few month later, I tried to find it again using the same search terms, but nothing turned up anymore (only dozens of various song lyrics pages, but not the blog I was interested in). Luckily I eventually managed to retrieve it from some older backup of my browser history…
Re: The Amazon tax
#686I 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.
App Store search is so bad that I won't use their search at all anymore. I search the web and grab the link from the app maker's website.
Re: The Amazon tax
#687Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no rent seeking or monopolistic or technofeudal or enshittifying aspect of Amazon at all. The people who made their names beginning twenty years ago by marketing these expressions are losers who have simply been proven wrong. It is monotonous middle brow repetition See eg the left wing expose of the above mentioned brain death in Maher Aquanno https://archive.ph/YJaZr better in their academic papers like Mon…
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-antitrust-training-wa... > There is no rent seeking or monopolistic or technofeudal or enshittifying aspect of Amazon at all. How so? Amazon search is almost probably worse than 10 years ago.
He's not rejecting the claim, he's rejecting the terminology and probably the concepts. It's not a point of view I understand.
Re: The Amazon tax
#688Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't scare you that $store can decide to double their lrice because they detected a brand new phone in your pocket? This isn't even a little hypothetical- bluetooth had to anonomyze the MAC address to stop this, and it still fails sometimes.
If a store does this, they will eventually be caught and lose business
_every_ chain store does this- from 7/11, to Hermes, to Aldi.
It's just not usually that blatent.
Offhand- things I expect they do: 1) as many impulse items as possible by moving freqently bought together items to opposite sides of the store. 2) overpriced items are seen first, then whatever version they want to sell (eg, Overpriced boutique chips then regular lays) 3) Send somebody over if you dwell somewhere too long so they can foist the expensive version on you.
They'll use every method they can, and they have more methods than you can imagine. Every time I look theres a new one. And don't forget a ton of Stores are the same company and can share the data.
Re: The Amazon tax
#689It doesn't have to do with Amazon. It is just how ads work. Of course when you buy a product that is heavily advertised you know that you are paying for it, Amazon or not. That's why, when I see an ad campaign for a product I may want, it is a signal for me to look elsewhere. Some competitor may use what would be ad budget towards offering lower prices or better quality. As for Amazon, it is not cheap! It is convenie…
It does have to do with Amazon. Their original mission was to be the best place to buy things. And for a long time they were. But now they've parasitized themselves. They make more money by making things worse for buyer and seller.
Re: The Amazon tax
#690Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re aware IBM was not just complicit but essentially made the Holocaust possible with their counting machines? Had technicians permanently staffed in the fucking camps ? The the numbers on people’s arms corresponded to IBM punch cards? Are you aware of the world you live in?
I wasn't aware of that, no. I can say that it wasn't a feature of our history lessons in school, nor in various Holocaust documentaries I have watched, nor something that came up in conversation with friends and colleagues, nor have I personally seen it when it's been posted to HackerNews (if this is anything to go by: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=IBM%20holocaust&sort=byDate&ty... ). I only learned about Oracle's co…
Perhaps like Oracle you reconsider the use of all their products? You don’t need Red Hat linux right?
But perhaps too, consider that the information you receive in history lessons, documentaries, hell even conversations are steered by forces who would conceal the truth from us at any cost. Consider that the entire system is broken and not worth fixing because of the evil it perpetuates.
I don’t know what to do with this information either. What it has done is forced me to recede from life in out society. I no longer wish to participate.