3098

Ah, I thought you were talking about Musk. My bad.

3099

It can be true both that there are 150 million Prime customers and that Amazon is overrun with shit products and shit sellers. It’s like e.g. the book market; you can buy good books from Amazon, but there are probably 10,000 or 100,000 shit books for every good one. The Prime customers are sorting through the shit looking for the good stuff.

I know this because 1) I am a Prime customer, and 2) I sell shit books on Amazon lol.

3100

I haven’t bought from Amazon for years, and yet my wants and needs are met. There is nothing about the Amazon shopping experience that provides more value to me than by buying from small sellers. Have you shopped with Amazon lately?

Amazon is full of fake products that look more legit because they can have the Prime logo on them - Amazon has no scruples about promoting them. There is an entire industry for paid positive reviews; sometimes Amazon tries to crack down on those, but they don’t seem to be trying that hard (and really, why would they? If people are buying the stuff, Amazon’s getting their cut, so they’re not exactly incentivized to take action). Sellers constantly circumvent Amazon’s returns process by imploring customers to reach out to them directly.

Even Prime Day has been recently referred to more widely as “Amazon’s Garage Sale”. It’s dystopic as fuck.

image

Yeah, I’m just a dude online. We’re just buds talking the politics and morality of wealth. I’m not writing a fuckin’ thesis here.

But I’m also a millennial college dropout who has been forced to work harder than the generations before me to ultimately end up with less wealth and opportunity than those generations. Daily, I navigate the treacherous economic system that has been dropped on me by decades of conservative and neoliberal policies and indoctrination. So yeah, I’m resistant to slob the knob of any given billionaire because I reject the premises that 1) the accumulation of wealth is an inherently good thing, and that 2) wealth is in any way a measure of goodness or positive social impact.

3101

Honestly I find Amazon to be an awful storefront in comparison to most B&Ms and the trend of retailers (Target, Walmart, Newegg, Sears off the top of my head) moving to be more of a marketplace like Amazon instead of a website for only their products is making eCommerce worse. Amazon simply has too many products to browse effectively. Even if you know exactly what you’re looking for you may come across 5 or 6 different listings for the same item - especially bad in tech and computers where a single model numbers has a bunch of different configurations. Sometimes they’ll be grouped with options and sometimes not.

3102

Preach, brother.

3103

I notice you didn’t say that when a CEO makes a bad decision, it costs the CEO anything. They’re playing with borrowed money and other people’s livelihoods. I’m not sure I see what’s so noble about that. If Trump is any indication, there is no amount of failure that can eliminate massive generational wealth for an individual, but it can sure harm a lot of individuals and society along the way.

What I’m getting from you guys is that CEOs/billionaires/whatever are 1) good at convincing people to invest in them, 2) good at convincing workers to work for them and generate far more value than the workers receive in compensation, and 3) able to make decisions about the directions of their companies that result in a higher salary/share price/whatever. I’m not able to make the same leap from there to say that those CEOs/billionaires/whatever are solely (or even primarily) responsible for their success, nor am I able to make the same leap to say that their wealth should not be taxed heavily beyond some high (albeit arbitrary) number.

3104

Since this specific email came up recently, the scenario of Jobs being “scared into actually supporting apps” was a four-point email from Bertrand Serlet, talking about all of the user protections and developer support required, and Jobs’ one-sentence response: “Sure, as long as we can roll it all out at Macworld on Jan 15, 2008.”

3105

When an engineer ships a product that has a bug, it doesn’t cost the engineer anything. When a cook burns a piece of chicken, it doesn’t cost the cook anything. When a waiter drops a glass of water on a customer, it doesn’t cost the waiter anything. There must be some job where this is true, but I can’t imagine what job you’re talking about where a bad decision by an individual employee has to be paid for by that employee.

3106

These retorts are terrible. The Jobs letter transparently says I don’t care about these goals, I care about my date. The way that employees pay for errors and CEOs don’t is that employees get fired.

3107

You kind of forgot grammar there, but I get what you’re saying. But

Apple board member Art Levinson told Isaacson that he phoned Jobs “half a dozen times to lobby for the potential of the apps,” but, according to Isaacson, “Jobs at first quashed the discussion, partly because he felt his team did not have the bandwidth to figure out all the complexities that would be involved in policing third-party app developers.”

The article defense that (American) carriers would fight it makes sense, though, but it would be a stretch to say it’s the whole the story. YMMV, I guess, I just think the point of a bold 5 year perfect plan for a market upheave l to be silly; emphasis on perfect there.
And, TBH, the ability to change his mind is actually a pretty good and rare quality for a CEO. Not so much the subpar API and stress on his workers, but, oh, well.

3108

Every one of those people would lose their jobs. Obviously.

What you seem to be saying is that a CEO deserves a higher rate of compensation and wealth because they are responsible for the livelihoods of potentially thousands of employees. And that responsibility must, like, weigh on them something fierce, or something. But history shows that if a CEO makes a good decision, the CEO gets rewarded, not the employees. While if the CEO makes an oopsie, the employees lose their jobs. Nothing about that indicates to me that a CEO is so much more deserving of extra compensation or wealth.

3109

No. You’re wrong. Saying “sure” means that he’s approving "let’s pull whoever we need in SWE to focus on shipping the SDK asap. If he didn’t care about those goals, he wouldn’t have approved a project of such a wide scope.

  1. CEOs get fired too.
  2. Even if an employee gets fired for a mistake, they don’t actually have to pay the costs that result from that mistake.
3110

You have not read enough CEO mails, trust me.

Generally, they do not, and when they do, they get paid fortunes to leave. Employees get fired.

3111

It’s a long sentence, but grammatically it tracks. Fight me.

3112

You don’t understand how Steve Jobs worked when it came to decision making. And you can argue all you want about whether or not Steve Jobs cared about those goals, but if he said yes to the engineering VP who believed in those goals, and those goals were communicated down to the team, then that was what shipped.

If they get fired, they still don’t have to pay (in dollars) for the cost of mistakes they made. That’s the point you keep missing.

3113

I think you’re wasting a lot of your argumentative energy on a too-literal (and wrong) reading of the word “cost” here:

3114

Have you ever actually worked a job in your life? No, employees generally don’t get fired for making a simple mistake, and they definitely don’t have to pay for that mistake (in dollars) in either case.

Exactly.

That’s a very gross and inaccurate generalization. What generally happens when the CEO makes a good decision is that the company is more successful, they hire more employees, they expand to new locations, sales grow, customers are more satisfied…you know, all the thousands of extra jobs and wages that come with a company being more successful.

3115

Boy, do they.

They also bounce back pretty quickly (see: Fiorina).

3116

My mistake. When you were talking about “playing with borrowed money”, I thought you were literally talking about money. If you’re talking about a CEO’s decisions being reviewed and scrutinized and possibly costing them in very specific ways? Then yes, it does cost a CEO when they make a bad decision. The Board of Directors literally exists to evaluate the CEO and make sure he is held accountable for his mistakes. Including, as Perky_Goth pointed out, the CEO getting fired.

3117

Absolutely it can be both, and what is a shit book or product to you and me may be different to someone else. What differentiates Amazon is the makes it pretty easy to filter down to what you want. It is far from perfect and I’m not saying it is even the best e-commerce site. But compared to the vast majority of websites, it is very easy to find things. Just this week my sister wanted me to hook up the soundbar of her TV. Her sick husband’s, hearing aids connect directly to the TV using a Bluetooth device. The soundbar also needed the Digital Audio signal. So I needed a splitter so both devices could be connected. But I couldn’t remember the word splitter, in less than 5 minutes on Amazon.com. I found what I was looking for. For $12, including shipping a Digital Audio Optical splitter, will be at her house in a couple of days. I tried the same search on Best Buy.com (the only place on the island I could buy such an item) it produced garbage, although the word splitter was a suggested search item.

Now, I’m not bitching about living in Hawaii, it is great. However, one of the downsides of the place is local merchants have jacked by prices by 20-50% and everything takes between three weeks and 3 months to arrive. First, Costco and then later Walmart showed that “shipping is so expensive” excuse local merchant used was bullshit. Then Amazon and Amazon prime showed it doesn’t take 3+ weeks.

Yes, I’ll be buying something Prime day, and guess what lots of other companies are following suit. I’m not much of a consumer, but the only two times I get the shopping bug is the Steam summer sale, and Amazon Prime day.

BTW, just because there is a clever meme doesn’t make it true. Actually, because something is popular is a perfectly valid argument that it is good.

I don’t know about you but when I see a review for a game, movie, book etc on the forum and I’m in a distinct minority of not liking it, I don’t assume that you all are stupid and don’t know what the fuck you are talking about, and I alone am right. Just this week it was the Carrier Command 2 demo. Last year it was the Netflix series Queen’s Gambit.

Sometimes the crowd is wrong, e.g.Donald Trump, but generally there is wisdom in crowdsourcing things. However, there are certain individuals who are blessed with great intelligence, insight, vision and know more about what the crowds want/need then we know. Now plenty of these people are just egotistic idiots (e.g. Trump), some are crazy, and even the best of them like Jobs, are often wrong. In the late 90s, I thought Bezo fell into the wrong category.

Perfectly understandable, you’d have this view.