The Many Poisonous Animals of the Amazon

[Thad]

Local Broadcasters Forget Journalism Ethics, Air Amazon PR Fluff Instead

[Mongrel]

I didn't know Amazon had a MMO in the works, but I guess they do. I would have assumed it'd be super generic. But apparently not: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2020/0 ... ext-month/

“New World is an Open World MMO that pits players against the haunted wilderness of Aeternum, a mysterious island during the twilight of the Age of Exploration,” it says. “Success in New World ultimately depends on a player’s ability to conquer not only rival players, but Aeternum itself as it unleashes undead legions, hell-bent on purging them from its shores.”

bold choice to cast the players as the bad guys from Spirit Island.

"All we have to do is make the natives into undead zombie ghouls! It'll be fine!" (just don't ask what killed them all).

[Blossom]

yeah it's incredibly racist, it's literally Colonialism: The Game

[Brantly B.]

I dunno mowing down waves of zombie conquistadors sounds like a good what do you mean you play as the conquistadors?

[mharr]

I have to wonder if they're intentionally positioning this as a Culture War property in order to siphon easy money from the gator swamp.

[Thad]

Protesters set up a guillotine outside Jeff Bezos' mansion and demanded higher wages for Amazon workers after the CEO's net worth surpassed $200 billion

[Mongrel]

YES. YES.

OH MY GOD YES.

[Niku]

don't cheer until they put the fucker in it

[Mongrel]

don't cheer until they put the fucker in it

I have not yet begun to cheer!

[Mongrel]

[Mongrel]

In discussing Bezos elsewhere, the subject of value for labour came up. Basically, if you take the average value created by one man-hour of labour, how much value do you think an elite employee can create in the same amount of time?

Given the average net worth of an American in their 50's ($115,000) (compared net worth rather than salary because using Bezos' wages would be pointless as he's mostly a rentier), we determined that for Bezos to legitimately "earn" what he makes, he would need to produce a labour value equivalent to approximately 1,739,130 hours of labour per ordinary man-hour.

[atog]

I don't think it's so much "he's sitting on a GDP worth of moola" as it is

"hey many Amazon employees still need to apply for food stamps and welfare because of how stingy and precarious working for Amazon is"

He's stolen their wages to line his portfolio and buy back his stocks and spread his tentacles into ever more and more industries that only bear a superficial resemblance to the e-commerce sector he started with. He's filled warehouses full of death robots that put quantitation of volume ahead of the personal safety of the human labourers who have to work in these places.

I don't know all the facts. Ignore what I'm saying to you. The system works... I guess. As long as you're far removed from it and refuse to look closely or ask too many questions.

[Thad]

Price gouging and defective products rampant on Amazon, reports find

While complaints about Amazon's third-party vendor marketplace are by now commonplace, the new reports find that not only did Amazon itself price-gouge customers during the height of the pandemic, but also that many of its white-label, Amazon-branded products are just as likely to be dangerously defective as third-party goods.

TBF the price-gouging is most likely a natural result of Amazon's automatic algorithmic price adjustments, not the result of direct and deliberate manipulation. But that result was still entirely foreseeable.

The other takeaway seems to be "don't buy Amazon-branded products."

Amazon's own sales, however—the other 40 percent of its retail empire—increasingly rely on and promote Amazon's hundreds of private-label brands. AmazonBasics is one of the most successful of those brands. It sells the kind of product lines you'd expect to find store brands of in a Target, Walmart, or other big-box store: home goods, bed and bath products, kitchen accessories, luggage, lightbulbs, charging cables, and so on.

You might think that bringing all of those products and brands in-house and listing, selling, and shipping them as a first-party merchant would allow Amazon to exercise much tighter quality control over those goods than it does in the Marketplace. According to a new CNN report, however, you'd be wrong.

CNN identified more than 1,500 consumer reviews of AmazonBasics products that described products overheating, burning someone or something, or outright catching fire. About 30 items with "three or more" reviews describing how a product caught fire were still available for sale at the time CNN published its story. Another dozen vanished while CNN's story was in progress: "Some became unavailable after CNN began its reporting, and at least four product pages were removed from the retailer's site entirely—leaving behind dead URLs known by employees as 'dog pages,'" CNN wrote.

There are a lot of stores where store brands are quality products -- for example, Costco's Kirkland Signature-branded batteries are just Duracells with different stickers -- but this is one more reason not to buy Amazon brands, in addition to the "putting their thumb on the scale to recommend their own shit over competitors'" reason and all the other general "it's Amazon" reasons.

[Mongrel]

I was really annoyed at how much Google digging I had to do the other day to buy a somewhat-uncommon battery for my bike to find a Canadian supplier that wasn't an Amazon.ca listing.

Especially considering that most things on Amazon are overpriced compared to any third party supplier, at least on the .ca domain. Amazon a threat because it's undercutting the competition? My ass it is.

[Thad]

But that's how anticompetitive behavior works: you undercut the competition until you dominate the market, and then you jack up the price.

I can't speak to the specifics of amazon.ca (what's the website for that?), but if it's anything like it works down here, the fact prices are higher on Amazon than competitors is a result of the fact that those competitors have become so hard to come by.

[Mongrel]

But that's how anticompetitive behavior works: you undercut the competition until you dominate the market, and then you jack up the price.

Right, but in this case there's still plenty of competition, it's just that Google is complicit in either letting Amazon's SEO warp their results, or they're actively working with Amazon to achieve this deliberately. Why bother undercutting when you can effectively write your competitors out of existence?

I really need to stop defaulting to Google as my search engine because it's really become such trash for, y'know, actually finding things.

[mharr]

[Friday]

every day I wake up and I think about a conversation I had in 2009 with Arc about how things were gonna get really bad soon and he said "divorce rates are down"

[Mongrel]

That second one has to be intentional, right?

[Thad]

Bezos is stepping down as CEO.

Don't assume this will be an improvement. It can get worse.