WaPo going after its owner ? Interesting.
Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad
471–480 of 510 posts
Re: Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We need voters that vote for candidates that would support the human right to freedom from manipulation from corporations. Donate $3 to the Presidential Election Fund every year on your US taxes. It costs you nothing, is a single checkbox, and redirects $3 of your taxes into the fund. Candidates that take money from the fund have additional (mostly good) limits placed on their spending. It's not perfect, but it's f…
> Candidates that take money from the fund have additional (mostly good) limits placed on their spending. From the "Public funds received 1976-present" on this page[0], usage of these funds has steadily declined, likely because "To be eligible to receive public funds, the presidential nominee of a major party must agree to limit spending to the amount of the grant and may not accept private contributions for the camp…
Yes. The last campaign that took them was apparently McCain.
But better to be a part of a solution, if the opportunity cost is $0.
Re: Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad
#473Earlier quoted context omitted.
My process for getting usable results on Amazon is to simply not use it. For any item you can think of there is an online shop dedicated to the specialty that is: - cheaper - easiest to search - do not sell knockoffs, counterfeits and fake products I know some people will raise the "you need to create another account for it annoyance" but it is not that annoying when you are using a password manager and the additionn…
Where do you find cheap, good quality printers? I found Amazon pricing to beat my local Microcenter website.
The printer in staples/fedex/local print shop down the road. Unless you print a lot (like business/university department amounts), or have some high levels of paranoia about your documents, you're way better off letting someone else deal with the capital costs of the printers.
Re: Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad
#474Amazon is unusable at this point, and I don’t get how they have so many customers. Free and fast shipping is no longer exclusive to them, and there are others out there with far nicer websites and no shitty ad listings.
> Amazon is unusable at this point, and I don’t get how they have so many customers. At least in Germany, using Amazon is often the easiest way to buy copies of foreign-language (often, but not always English) textbooks about scientific topics.
Literally every other Bookstore has them listed too, with overnight delivery
Re: Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad
#475This is probably how most of us imagine Amazon still works. But today advertisers are driving the experience.
Story continues below advertisement
Re: Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad
#476I had to allow JavaScript execution in order to read this rant about ads, and the website used that to present the "Black Friday starts now" modal popup/ad (which managed to get past uBlock Origin). Briefly wondered whether it's a part of the rant/article, but apparently it wasn't. Not exactly the same thing as it rants about, but still an odd combination.
Re: Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had to buy a replacement USB cable in a pinch the other week. Probably the first time since pre-COVID where I could justify next day delivery (where I would normally be happy to just wait however long it takes from a more local retailer). I knew exactly the kind to look for but I couldn't just search for that and pick the first item on the list. I could have easily bought the wrong thing in one click and not known…
If I'm buying USB cables now I pretty much only go with anker unless it's something that doesn't need to be a necessarily good (like a printer usb cable).
Monoprice is excellent as well
Re: Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad
#478Is it just me or does it feel like the major tech companies have completely lost the war against bots/spam? Search results are regressing across multiple online services[1] - Google, Amazon, and app stores are all filled with junk and scams. Reviews for products are generally filled to the brim with bots or paid reviews. [1] I've noticed the re-emergence of Experts Exchange style sites on Google recently. For technic…
Is it just me or does it feel like the major tech companies
have completely lost the war against bots/spam?
Re: Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
> what is daily commute in GTA used to be a yearly vacation pilgrimage in my childhood :) This is something Europeans also overlook. I use to commute to Toronto every day. 100KM return trip daily, 500KM a week... I think Most Europeans would be surprised to know we have a train system which basically travels back and forth from Hamilton to Oshawa all day long.. 127KM one way. Basically the Width of England at the mor…
100km return, or 30 miles each way, that's not far at all. I used to drive 50 miles/80km each way into London 4 days a week when I worked in an office. My wife still does a 100km return trip to work. I have colleagues that commute 7 days in 14 on a 250km round trip into West London. Your 127km one way train is about the same as the new Reading-Shenfield Cross London service which runs 6 times an hour 18 hours a day (…
> "Greater London Area", although that term is of course steeped in politics.
Is it? What's politicised about this term? "Greater London" and "Greater London area" have pretty clear definitions; I'm not aware of anything that's controversial about it.
Re: Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad
#480Amazon is the third largest advertising company after Google and Meta. Its ad revenue is $32B (and growing fast, the run rate is $40B). That is half the revenue of AWS, which is worth 70% of Amazon's market cap. The inescapable conclusion is that Amazon's advertising is worth the remaining 30% of Amazon's market cap and Amazon's e-commerce arm is deemed worthless by Wall Street , its only purpose being to support the…
It’s an accounting trick. Retail is profitable via ads and more. Retail also pays huge infrastructure sums to aws. It’s all a trick to make amazon stock pump
Not merely accounting.
Cultural as well, it forces the e-commerce coders to take infra cost seriously and alleviates cost center toxicity from infra teams.