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Reasons not to buy from Amazon

stallman.org

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Re: Reasons not to buy from Amazon

#51

Post by adventured »

theVirginian wrote: post #26

Sabotaging Customers: I have no reason to believe that they would ever sabotage me. Restricting and Shafting Customers: I have never had a problem with my kindle or any other media from Amazon. If I ever do I'm sure I can find an alternative source in a matter of minutes. Censorship: They are Amazon's servers and it is their right to enforce their rules on them. If Wikileaks believes that they were unlawfully cut off…

Further, Amazon's solution to workers is going to be robotics: the elimination of as many manual labor jobs as possible. This is something Walmart will not be able to pull off easily because their workers are out front, higher profile; Amazon's workers can disappear through firings and few will notice. At a minimum Amazon is going to leverage robotics to drastically stretch (reduce) how many workers they have per dollar of sales.

In ten years Stallman will be telling us not to buy from Amazon because they use robots instead of human labor.

Re: Reasons not to buy from Amazon

#52

Post by amyjess »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #47
gopher2 wrote: post #33

This is not exactly nuanced. It reads like he disliked Amazon for some reason and then went out and googled around for a while to come up with more reasons to support that belief. Personally, I like Amazon... so of course I'm just looking for reasons to dismiss his arguments without considering their merit. Ha!

It's kind of hard to imagine Stallman googling for anything.

OK, so he used a script to wget duckduckgo for a while and then email the results to himself.

Re: Reasons not to buy from Amazon

#53

Post by doodpants »

angersock wrote: post #8
basseq wrote: post #2

Stallman raises some interesting points, but calling the Kindle a "Swindle" doesn't make for a very rational argument.

s/Swindle/Kindle/g and you're back. Just because somebody picks abrasive plays-on-words doesn't make their rhetoric any less rational. Unpalatable and annoying, yes, but that's got nothing to do with the argument structure and statements themselves.

When people revert to name-calling it really rubs me the wrong way, and makes me less likely to take their objections seriously. Like when people write "Micro$oft", "Microshaft", "CrApple", etc. If you have rational objections to something, you don't need to resort to such childish tactics.

...Frankly, I'd prefer more rationality from Richard Trollman. ;-)

Re: Reasons not to buy from Amazon

#55

Post by meepmorp »

cgag wrote: post #44
specialk wrote: post #16

> "Amazon cut off service to Wikileaks, claiming that whistleblowing violates its terms of service. It had no need to go to court to prove this, because if you rent a server from Amazon, you have no rights." I find it highly amusing that RMS doesn't seem to agree with Amazon's restrictive ToS agreement but his GNU software license is one of the most restrictive licenses out there. If I include a GNU licensed library…

Restrictive in that it prevents you from fucking people over. This is like saying laws against slavery restrict freedom (freedom to own slaves). https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-power.html

> Restrictive in that it prevents you from fucking people over.

Restrictive in that it controls how you must license derivative works and release source code. It imposes an ideology on others.

> This is like saying laws against slavery restrict freedom (freedom to own slaves).

No, really, it's absolutely nothing like saying that, and if you care about free software (however defined, but in particular along the lines RMS endorses), you should stop using such a fantastically stupid analogy.

Re: Reasons not to buy from Amazon

#56

Post by dman »

andrewguenther wrote: post #50
ucaetano wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"GNU software license is one of the most restrictive licenses out there" But those restrictions are in place to protect your freedom!

So its like the Patriot Act of licenses? Everything you do must be done in the open for the sake of freedom!

In all seriousness - do you see an equivalence between the Patriot act and the GPL?

Re: Reasons not to buy from Amazon

#57

Post by jarin »

adventured wrote: post #51
theVirginian wrote: post #26

Sabotaging Customers: I have no reason to believe that they would ever sabotage me. Restricting and Shafting Customers: I have never had a problem with my kindle or any other media from Amazon. If I ever do I'm sure I can find an alternative source in a matter of minutes. Censorship: They are Amazon's servers and it is their right to enforce their rules on them. If Wikileaks believes that they were unlawfully cut off…

Further, Amazon's solution to workers is going to be robotics: the elimination of as many manual labor jobs as possible. This is something Walmart will not be able to pull off easily because their workers are out front, higher profile; Amazon's workers can disappear through firings and few will notice. At a minimum Amazon is going to leverage robotics to drastically stretch (reduce) how many workers they have per dol…

Which is silly, because instead of putting people to work doing meaningless jobs that can be done by robots, we should be focusing more on how we can take advantage of that efficiency to make life more meaningful as a society.

Re: Reasons not to buy from Amazon

#58

Post by eonw »

most of what he is saying... could apply to any corporation. If the government wants to inspect mail and possibly install malware, for instance, that could happen with any vendor, amazon or manufacturer, as they wont have a choice presented to them. the purpose of the corporation is to make money at the expense of the customer, vendors and anyone else... why pick of amazon alone?

Re: Reasons not to buy from Amazon

#59

Post by forthefuture »

cgag wrote: post #44
specialk wrote: post #16

> "Amazon cut off service to Wikileaks, claiming that whistleblowing violates its terms of service. It had no need to go to court to prove this, because if you rent a server from Amazon, you have no rights." I find it highly amusing that RMS doesn't seem to agree with Amazon's restrictive ToS agreement but his GNU software license is one of the most restrictive licenses out there. If I include a GNU licensed library…

Restrictive in that it prevents you from fucking people over. This is like saying laws against slavery restrict freedom (freedom to own slaves). https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-power.html

That's a strawman. It could also be like saying laws against gay marriage restrict freedom. You aren't making a point about reality, you're just comparing two things that have one thing in common.

You lose your rights to your code if any of your code includes GPL code. Many people who write code necessarily avoid the GPL because of this.

Re: Reasons not to buy from Amazon

#60

Post by amyjess »

adventured wrote: post #51
theVirginian wrote: post #26

Sabotaging Customers: I have no reason to believe that they would ever sabotage me. Restricting and Shafting Customers: I have never had a problem with my kindle or any other media from Amazon. If I ever do I'm sure I can find an alternative source in a matter of minutes. Censorship: They are Amazon's servers and it is their right to enforce their rules on them. If Wikileaks believes that they were unlawfully cut off…

Further, Amazon's solution to workers is going to be robotics: the elimination of as many manual labor jobs as possible. This is something Walmart will not be able to pull off easily because their workers are out front, higher profile; Amazon's workers can disappear through firings and few will notice. At a minimum Amazon is going to leverage robotics to drastically stretch (reduce) how many workers they have per dol…

> This is something Walmart will not be able to pull off easily because their workers are out front, higher profile

Even then, they're cutting staff by increasing the number of self-checkout lanes. You still have to have somebody supervising, but you can just have one person watching 6-8 lanes.

At my local Walmart, the self-checkout is far more convenient than the regular lanes. They have more self-checkout lanes open than regular lanes, and people tend to scan their stuff and get out much faster than the cashiers would (seriously, the regular lanes move so slow...). I never use the regular lanes anymore, because they're always so busy compared to the self-checkouts.

I think the main thing holding Walmart back from further mechanization is that their aisles still have to be human-traversable. Amazon can use really efficient layouts when converting their warehouses to 100% machine-stocked because then there will be no reason for a human to ever walk down the aisles. At Walmart, customers still have to make their way through the aisles, and they have to be laid out to a) allow humans to walk through and take stuff off the shelves and b) arrange items in order to maximize purchases (e.g. put the milk in the back, impulse items at the checkouts, etc.).

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