It's interesting that Congress is talking about sunsetting section 230 which provides protection for web sites that display user generated content from being responsible for what that content says, and what Amazon wants here is apparently the equivalent for drop-ship/forwarding sales companies and the products those companies ship through them. But the argument is that safety agencies are unconstitutional?
For me, this suggests a high level of dysfunction in the Government if people asking for things from the Government do so using the biases of the people in power as the basis for their argument rather than reasoning to it by some set of principles. I don't know how much of this article was inferred by the person writing it and how much accurately reflects Amazon's position, so I can't draw strong conclusions from it but it's an interesting reflection on the extreme 'buyer beware' attitude of cut throat businesses that take no responsibility for the harms they inflict on their own customers.
That just kinda follows from democracy. Principles are for voters. Elected officials do what they think the voters want (as affirmed by getting re-elected). If they went back to first principles, and disagreed with their constituents, they'd lose.
The closest thing you get to principles are civil servants, who are hired for their domain expertise. But voters grumble because those civil servants aren't elected; they are basically self propagating by hiring their successors.
That actually used to kinda work. There was enough inertia to keep elections from making everything about people's moods, and enough input from Congress, SCOTUS, and POTUS to keep it competent.
But the mood has shifted to extreme distrust of those institutions. So they're getting wiped out in one fell swoop. There is a principle in place, but it's the principle that the government itself is irreparable.
> Elected officials do what they think the voters want (as affirmed by getting re-elected).
There was a time when I thought this. Some observations cast strong doubt on it. Primarily:
how close congressional votes track with major campaign contributions and
the revolving door where major donors later reward officials who voted for their interests
It's difficult to see how voters can compete with this, particularly while info about these routine arrangements rarely reaches voters.
I agree with you. In the United States, the Citizens United ruling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC) basically legalized the corporate takeover of government and buyout of elected government officials in the name of free speech.
"Elected officials do what they think the voters want (as affirmed by getting re-elected)."
should be:
"Elected officials do what corporate sponsors want and say that they are doing what voters want (as affirmed by getting campaign finance donations by corporate sponsors to help them get re-elected)."
> It's difficult to see how voters can compete with this, particularly while info about these routine arrangements rarely reaches voters.
Exactly. This puts elected government officials in the role of the Dungeons and Dragons Warlock class:
"Warlock patrons are powerful entities that grant mortals access to their power in exchange for a pact that binds the warlock to their patron's will." [1]
They serve at the pleasure of their patron which means they are not serving "we the people".
It is legalized corruption that puts profits and power above people and the good of the nation.
Thing is, what CU enables is advertising. They can't give money to a candidate, or even to a PAC that the candidate controls.
CU buys candidates by buying voters. In the end, the voters have a choice to turf out the politician. They don't.
Maybe that's not what voters "really" want deep in their hearts. But they vote, and that's all anybody can really know. I care about that more than I care about what they tell pollsters.
It literally pays campaign in slight disguise. Simply, in politics you can't compete without campaign. Simple as that, you get corporate takeover because of corporate ability to pay much more.
> the Citizens United ruling … basically legalized the corporate takeover of government and buyout of elected government officials in the name of free speech.
No, it didn’t: it said that the First Amendment protects the right of American citizens to air movies and advertisements critical of political candidates. The First Amendment literally says, ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press’: a law which abridges the freedom of speech and of the press is thus blatantly unconstitutional.
Yes it did and then it slapped barely believable excuse on it. Like common, this had zero to do with freedom of speech or freedom. It was about power and that is it.
Right, and when people rightfully criticize the Cit United ruling, they are specifically and emphatically speaking only about "movies and advertisements critical of political candidates", no other reasons. /s
At some point I saw some material that purportedly computed "Voting Power" as a function of population scaled by economic demographics.
It defined someone with a full time job and the option to take some time off to vote on a Tuesday without economic cost a voting power of 1.0V (i.e. One Vote) and went on to define people with full time hourly job where it 'cost' them to vote as .85V, down to single caregivers and unhoused people at 0.5V. On the other side of the scale people in management as 2V (they influence people who work for them to vote like they do), senior leadership at 10V (they have "extra" money to fund additional campaign activities to drive votes), and above that 50V for people who aren't constrained by "work." I would guess billionaires would be 100V or something.
This was in response to a anti-gerrymandering legislation where defining a district to have more voting power for your party while still having an even distribution of individuals representing different parties. Pretty evil IMHO.
Voters vote for free. If they want something different they can vote for it.
They can tell pollsters whatever they want. And what the candidates hear, and what I hear, is how they vote. If they're sending that politician back, then they can't disapprove all that much.
> Elected officials do what they think the voters want (as affirmed by getting re-elected).
Elected officials do what their corporate contributors want. They then convince a small minority of voters that that's what they want and then their party redraws voting districts to ensure that their votes have a disproportionate effect on the outcome of the next election.
> The closest thing you get to principles are civil servants, who are hired for their domain expertise. But voters grumble because those civil servants aren't elected; they are basically self propagating by hiring their successors
It’s a principle-agent problem. Civil servants have principles and act on them, but they’re not necessarily the principles voters share.
I recently started reading a great book called "Democracy for Realists". Voters may believe that they are electing someone who will represent their principles, but that is not how it works.
That's a property of democracy with very small districts. With larger districts (and proportional elections or something similar), it's enough that a few percent of the voters support you. Carving yourself a niche and sticking to it then becomes a viable strategy for re-election.
"Tyranny of the majority" and "paradox of tolerance" are both problems for Democracy. And solving for both creates a tension that is almost a paradox itself.
So elected officials also need to be able to manage their constituents, push back on the masses, and explain why compromise / commitment to values / etc are important in society. As you say, this requires some level of trust in officials which sadly has deteriorated.
Even if you’re deluded to the point where you’re convinced government can’t work, what is your end game? People who can only criticize never offer solutions, but are always happy to profit from the work of others. Like Ayn Rand who was dependent on social security handouts. Even if you drive over roads that were built because of government programs, you’re a hypocritical profiteer in my book.
> Even if you drive over roads that were built because of government programs, you’re a hypocritical profiteer in my book.
Tangent maybe, but talking about where the rubber literally meets the road gets pretty interesting. Because government programs focus on politically important places, those places that are not politically important tend to have worse roads. Lots of people in those places do not care much, because they have big trucks with big tires. But once politically unimportant people are paying for bigger tires for decades, and getting hit with inflation on those tires, and still paying for other roads in other places that don't benefit them.. they get fed up eventually and this leads to the rise of angry populism and the desire to tear down road-building institutions. Doing this seems like it can't make anything worse, and will only help them be able to pay for their next flat tire, and they know that the flat is going to happen regardless of whether city-dwellers get to enjoy a new turnpike.
This is an oversimplification, but on the other hand, it really is pretty simple.
Labeling anyone as a hypocritical profiteer since they "benefit" from crappy roads that were actually paid for in full many years ago and neglected since then is one way to think about this I guess. But you could also say that it's natural for rural people to object strongly to that part of the wealth pump that actually affects them, and it really is more likely to be a function of government itself rather than corporatism. (This is because they have no disposable income to throw at corporations when there's not enough left after taxes.)
Whereas urban people are just more likely to object to the part of the wealth pump that affects them, and that's less about government and more about corporatism. The rural/urban divide will only be cured when everyone agrees that all wealth pumps are unsustainable, instead of spending all their energy fighting about how to get on the most of profitable side of the pumps.
I'm not saying the rural people in this scenario are not misguided.. but if you're completely baffled by support for things like MAGA and DOGE, then it's probably worthwhile to reflect on this.
Well the acronyms I mentioned are definitely US-centric. But if you don't see the rise of populism world wide, and you don't see the right/left dialectic being driven in large part by rural vs urban tension.. then I'm afraid you don't get out much either.
I’m convinced at least in Europe populism has peaked. With Trump as an example, the counter campaigns write themselves. It’s democracy vs fascism now, not woke vs coke.
The headlines about French or Dutch farmers dumping loads of manure at the front door of their own institutions have probably peaked. But these things are cyclic and fascism masquerading as populism is just part of the standard playbook. For related reading I suggest Turchin[1], who tries to strike a balance between US-centric commentary and looking at international trends. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62926960-end-times
EDIT: Near the top of BBC-world today is a related article about villagers in Romania, highlighting once again that this is very much an ongoing thing, and that populism, fascism, and decline in quality of rural life are so entangled that it probably makes no sense to speak of them separately https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g7w3v5vw7o
It is an oversimplification, because those people were getting more federal money. They voted for lower taxes in their local states and thus underfunded own infrastructure. Then they got angry about crumbling infrastructure they were not willing to pay for. Frankly, the economics is just an excuse here.
Republicans never voted for better roads, never asked better roads. They don't want that. They will punish politicians trying to improve infrastructure. They have available free vaccines, but they don't want them. Instead, they actively go around villifying them trying to carve more legal ways to avoid vaccinations. They don't want to improve healthcare or make it cheaper, they actively rejected any such attempts for years. They don't want better school system, they want women to stay home and homeschool. They will actively work on trying to make schools worst.
Making up rationalizing motivations when those people actions are consistently and clearly saying "I don't care" is loosing proposition. Yes, it makes them sound better, but no, you are not closer to understanding them.
> It is an oversimplification, because those people were getting more federal money. [..] They voted for lower taxes in their local states and thus underfunded own infrastructure.
You cut what you can when you're strapped, and Kansas and Louisiana can't control their federal tax obligations, or federal contributions to things like the Big Dig or the post-collapse Baltimore bridge building projects. They just hope that when the tornadoes / hurricanes come and the levee breaks that the rest of the country will be keen to pay for something that benefits them. This doesn't always pan out though. As an example.. it doesn't get more federal than the army corps of engineers, but they argued for sovereign immunity.
We'll see whether the LA wildfires get handled better or worse than climate catastrophes in the flyover states or the south east, but naturally California will probably do better and get more help than a politically unimportant place would. Without getting way into the weeds on details, perhaps we can agree that the optics of this stuff just aren't great. Without "rationalizing motivations" or "making people sound better".. basically you can choose to either double down on the other'ing or you can at least try to listen and empathize.
For a long time I’ve tried to not give in to the thought that republicans, at large, are actually that short-sighted. It’s the literal guy sitting on a tree gleefully sawing off the branch they sit on. It felt like I was missing something, a change of perspective, but no. I’ve come to accept they really can’t look further than their own noses length, or at least won’t vote for more capable representatives.
In other words, they lack empathy. And they’re unable to grasp that if someone benefits from something, that it doesn’t mean it automatically disadvantages them.
Government can work. All it needs is for voters to not actively hate each other. Democracy works when the politicians all agree that the good of the community as a whole matters.
That works in a lot of places. It's not perfect but it really is the best option.
If your citizens do hate each other, there really isn't any system that can work. I don't have an end game in that scenario, except to wait for it to collapse and hopefully be replaced by something else.
While I broadly agree with your point, I think it's easy to say that the end game for many is a change in sovereignty — who gets to define what "OK" even means.
> It's interesting that Congress is talking about sunsetting section 230
Congress will never stop talking about Sec230. Early on it was because 230 hampered thin-skinned congress people from disappearing speech they didn't like.
A very short scroll indeed to find Amazon in the crosshairs, and for good reason too. Baby stuff is always overpriced poor-quality garbage, but if you've been saying to yourself "Gee I wish it was also a suffocation hazard" then Amazon wants you to know they are here to help by a concerted effort to deregulate anything and everything.
CPSC is a great follow: came for the gonzo photoshop collages, stayed for the relevant product safety info. Every time I see them post I have a little hope for our government.
> The CPSC’s budget of $140 million annually supports oversight of thousands of products. Critics argue that many safety inspections could be handled by private organizations or manufacturers under government oversight.
Genuinely curious: if “under government oversight” is an acceptable option for critics, what is the CPSC currently doing that is disagreeable?
And recent history shows how well private inspections with government oversight works too. Boeing has proven it’s a superior model and private companies would never try to game the system.
> The company argues that it merely ships these goods for others — similar to UPS and FedEx — and should not be required to cooperate with the CPSC on recalls if those products are found to be unsafe.
So these other companies only pay Amazon for the shipping and nothing else, do they?
If they are able to reach out to folks who have purchased on their platforms and mark offending items as recalled due to safety issues, I don't see why not. It doesn't even seem like that onerous of a task. They're not _responsible_ for the items sold, but they should be doing _some_ level of footwork making sure that items that are recalled are labeled and/or delisted.
Just like Target, Walmart and other physical retailers often work with recalls on products sold through their stores.
> I don't see why not. It doesn't even seem like that onerous of a task
It’s a hugely onerous task because it requires mapping every listing to a known product.
If someone sells a “green couch” then how do you track recalls for that?
You either force everyone selling anything to look it up in a big database you maintain and disallow generic sales, or everyone is just going to list things generically anyway to avoid the hassle.
It’s an idea that sounds easy when you assume everyone’s making perfectly formed listing, but sounds like a waste of time when you look at real listings.
EDIT: Replaced high chair example with a couch because people were pointing out that a high chair listing would be deleted. Though that proves my point, that any item covered by regulations wouldn’t be allowed on the platform, so if you extend regulations to cover every product ever made then you can forget about being able to buy things second hand. I’m guessing Amazon would actually love that, but you wouldn’t.
Hard to say. Raising risk and lowering supply might make it more profitable to do fly by night grey market operations that disappear before enforcement.
Ok, so how do you think it should be done? If a product is sold and it turns out it is dangerous, there has to be some way to reach the people who have bought it. Amazon is the company that has that data and can reach the consumer.
Well, no. In an ideal world yes. But that's not our world. There doesn't have to be some way to reach everyone that has ever purchased a product. For the vast majority of the history of things being sold that has not been the case. It wasn't even in the realm of possibility.
It would be nice. It would save lives and avoid tragedy. It is not required, and failure is an option. We've been failing for a long time already.
If we have to do it, it's a simple matter of finding who has the capability to do so and force them to, as you say. But we don't. Forcing someone to do only because they can is a tricky proposition.
If Amazon doesn't want to value customer safety, that's absolutely fine, as long as all listings have a big "Buy from this seller at your own risk, it's nothing to do with us" popup.
Just in case.
Seems like an easy, cheap fix. Amazon makes a single tweak in its listing code, and buyers know where they stand.
Almost everything sold to California has a big label telling you that you might get cancer, and no one cares or even takes note anymore. The manufacturer puts it because it's cheaper than proving it doesn't cause cancer. And your warning is weaker than that.
Consumers sensitive to this kind of thing can be captured with independent private testing instead of CPSC. UL is well situated for stuff like that.
It’s an interesting question. The bar would be the least they could possibly do, obviously (as it is now), so is there a case for raising that bar at all?
You do realize there is a difference between cooperating with the CPSC on data that one has, and implementing a centralized top-down tracking regime and forcing individuals to conform to it, right?
You also do realize that there is a difference between a business selling many copies of the same item repeatedly, and individuals selling things one off, right?
If you don't, then maybe you need to learn about these things in the context of existing regulations before spouting off nonsense comments bashing strawmen.
Another big one that should make this whole topic moot: A corpo is a government created liability shield. The tradeoff of getting that liability shield is extra regulation to prevent easily-knowable liabilities. And remember, the sine qua non of a corpo is itself compelled speech.
I used Craigslist and FB marketplace and equivalents for a while for a lot of things.
The average listing is garbage. Devoid of useful information. You have to know exactly what you’re looking for and search broadly because people don’t make an effort to describe things.
LLMs absolutely will not solve this. If the only details are “table saw” and a dimly lit picture of a dust-covered table saw that looks like any number of generic table saws, AI isn’t helping you.
Iirc Facebook has dealt with this for lots of children's stuff by banning it's sale. Certain items (forgot which, maybe car seats etc) you have to look up creative misnamings to find them, although maybe Ai has crushed that by now.
What will actually happen is this stuff just becomes less accessible to poor people and now their child had no safety equipment at all instead of a 1/100 chance of a recalled item that probably still would be better than nothing.
Exactly. If you make the regulations cover a wider range of products, the only response is to ban those products from sale.
If the regulations cover everything, well then either the marketplaces all shut down or they cost $10 per listing and require you to agree to a lot of legal consequences if you provide wrong info in your listing.
Ideas like this only sound good to people who imagine no consequences will ever reach them, just billion dollar corporations.
The regulation has to be cheaper than the value add of the service. Nobody wants to get sued for a gazillion because one time in 100 million a child flies out the recalled car seat and gets chopped up by a telephone pole, which of course will be all the fault of Facebook with deep pockets and not the drunk or exhausted parent that is driving. They're just going to say no thanks we will ban this item.
Or a random person gets a post-crash or faulty child seat on an offer, even though they would buy a new one instead if they were aware. The issue goes both ways and we don't seem to have enough information to post anything better than a random 1% guess.
The main value add of buying a brand new seat has always been that unless someone repackaged and returned one (which does happen), there is 0% chance it is post crash. That is the whole point of used car seats, if you are too broke to buy a new one it is almost always better than nothing and the proposition is you assume some risk but less risk than before.
I'm not sure this is true. I buy used stuff all the time, even though I can afford new stuff. All my clothes are second-hand.
The reason I do that is because I can ascertain the quality of the clothing and determine that, despite them being cheaper and used, they are just as good if not better.
I'm sure there's a lot of parents who assume, incorrectly, that a used and relatively clean car seat is just as good as a new one. So, they save a few bucks because why not?
I think the number of people oblivious to the fact that stuff like helmets and car seats have the hazard of being compromised from a crash is low enough to not distort the market much. That's part of why these items have such a discount used. Meanwhile you can sell stuff like durable name brand tools commonly for near new price.
Unfortunately when a new child arrives finances tend to be at a minimum and this deep discount works out as a almost always better than nothing and for super cheap.
Plenty of people make a business out of advertising on those platforms, so I don't see why not.
You could make an argument that Facebook doesn't really sort or categorise products by their properties, but eBay definitely does. You could also make an argument that Facebook isn't a middle man in the transaction because payment doesn't go through Facebook (unless you pick a payment option that does, of course).
I think you can defend Facebook Marketplace, but not eBay. When I use eBay, I don't wire money to John Stevens, I pay eBay directly.
eBay wants a cut, that means eBay gets part of the responsibilities too. Not for everything, of course, and they can always hold the seller accountable when those responsibilities become a problem.
FB marketplace listings are free and for a single item.
Ads are paid and meant to run for a very long time.
They’re not comparable in any way. If you forced marketplace sellers to the same review standards as ad buyers, it would become expensive and difficult to list things. The number of listings would collapse. People would be frustrated because they can’t buy cheap things second hand like they did in the past.
These ideas are attractive to a lot of people who don’t imagine any second order consequences.
They become much less popular when people are faced with the realities, like if Facebook marketplace sellers were required to collect your information and register you as the buyer (can’t have anonymous sales if they have to track buyers), higher prices, and overall reduced availability of things for sale because it’s increasingly painful for anyone to sell or buy on these marketplaces.
Or the reality could be holding some person on Facebook to the same standard as a company making hundreds of billions of dollars is absurd. This is an absurd argument against this.
Fb already has chats attached to the listings and asks whether you sold on or off marketplace. A change to "which person did you sell to" would be trivial at this point. Prevent posting phone number or address in the listing and you'll be required to go through the chat.
Regardless of what you think of the idea itself, the notification part would by very easy to implement.
The case between Amazon and the CPSC concerns products that are using "fulfilled by Amazon". They come from an Amazon warehouse and are shipped by Amazon. If you return the product you send it back to Amazon and Amazon refunds your money.
With Facebook Marketplace Facebook just provides a way to bring buyers and sellers together and provides payment processing. The product is shipped by the seller from someplace that is not Facebook. If you return the product you send it back to the seller, and the seller handles issuing refunds.
> Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.
I don’t see a contradiction at all. Their customers want to consume cheap products and get those products instantly if possible. If removing regulation lets them sell those products cheaper, ship them faster, that’s pretty aligned with the leadership principle it seems.
Customer will continue to “trust” Amazon because that trust isn’t that the product will be good. It’ll just be that Amazon will take it back and dispose it for them and send them something different.
Amazon has treated their warehouse employees poorly for years. Poor pay. Limited breaks. Frequent injuries.
And meanwhile it's gotten harder to find good products on Amazon, while goods there have become more expensive, and Amazon uses its might to force sellers into exclusivity deals where they can't charge lower prices elsewhere.
Amazon lobbying the government to abolish a consumer rights law, or a few, seems consistent with past behavior.
Unfortunately, the unspoken rule in all publicly owned companies is that the shareholders matter more than anything else. No longer are we in the days of the customer is always right. The line must always go up.
At the size of Amazon that principle is meaningless. Not because people don't care, but because there are too many conflicting constituents anyway. Which one do you prioritize to obsess over?
Some might care about safety and recall notices, others just want things as cheap and fast as possible (as a sibling comment explains).
There are probably product categories that Amazon would rather not bother with (because of high return rates or low margin or what have you) but they keep it around in order to attract and retain customers who are overall more profitable.
To be fair, "obsession" often has a negative or even sinister connotation. I mean, Merriam-Webster's definition [1] includes the words "disturbing" and "unreasonable"...
My team built automation for the product recalls in 2011. The process roughly was: 1. Pull the listing off. 2. Inform warehouses to pull the product off the shelves and move them to a separate area. 3. Try and get shipments stopped. 4. Notify all those who bought the product about the recall. None of these were a technical challenge.
One of my favorite business managers managed this and she would scan reviews for potential dangerous products even if CPSC has not issued any recalls.
The real problem is why do you do with the recalled products. If it is expensive enough, the seller will take it back. With the flood of really cheap goods, they need to be destroyed and it is expensive. A lot of overseas sellers will just ghost Amazon since the cost of recall might be larger than their profits from that account.
The
This sort of cutthroat litigation is getting too much. Once upon a time corprations actually did stuff when told by government. If a product or service was declared dangerous, it stopped. If a regulator said every room needed a fire extinguisher, the company bought fire extinguishers. Now, every little thing becomes a case for the supreme court, often literally. Insist that safety signs be in spanish? Thats heading to scotus as a profound constitutional crisis at the root of democracy, "Stop selling bombs" ... well that impacts state's rights to regulate non-lethal weapons. Im all for testing constitutionality, but this isnt about that. This is about delaying each and every tiny reg because doing so saves a buck on next week's earnings report. I dont like seeing constitutional issues used as a cover for blatant penny pinching. Amazon sells stuff. Like every other "person" selling stuff they have an obligation not to sell dangerous stuff. It isnt right that they can ignore every warning as they wait out 10+ years of litigation.
How about this: Dont think this is constitutional? How about every profit derived from the sale of anything dangerous be put in escrow until the litigation is over? Many states do this with traffic tickets.
Moreover, Bezos actively interferes with publications he dislikes. This isn't just an "investment company led by billionaires happens to own newspaper to extract profits" situation, the WP has become completely unreliable due to Bezos' meddling.
Amazon needs to breakup its own sales vs warehouse/shipping business if it wants to be able to do things like that.
Otherwise it can do sly things like sell things to itself for distribution and then not be responsible.
Is "Amazon Resale" then not responsible for recalls?
One thing about Walmart, if there's a recall for an item they sold, you just bring it back to their customer service desk and they do a full refund. There was a DVD player I had bought a decade earlier that was apparently bursting into flames for some people so recalled, I just brought it back there used and worn out and full refund.
Of course if Amazon wins this, well Walmart is going to also stop doing it.
> Of course if Amazon wins this, well Walmart is going to also stop doing it.
Usually in the event of recalls, the store gets 100% credit back when we ship the item. I'm not sure how it goes at a company level, but if the store is getting full credit, then usually that means the company isn't footing the bill, and probably the manufacturer is.
The only thing that'd come of Walmart stopping it would be bad press.
>According to the fundamental dictates of capitalism [...]
And what's that? vertical integration? that's hardly a "fundamental dictate". A few decades ago vertically integrated conglomerates (think GE) were going the way of the dodo, with "core competency" being the new MBA buzzword.
Larger companies with more profit have more political influence. This is fundamental. The fads you describe are just that. Tides of destruction are inevitable, but the fundamentals remain true. You're missing the forest for the trees.
This is fundamental to a frame you made up. Then you wax on with more nonsense about a nihilistic "Tides of destruction are inevitable". This stance is not insightful or constructive. Figuratively throwing your hands up and walking away because the sun eventually goes out, is a personal choice. Plenty of economies lasted a lot longer than the US one or continue on after crises.
You're missing the trees for the forest of regular commerce that all people navigate and benefit from, including you.
Almost as if the company is run by sociopaths for whose empathy is a foreign, malign concept. Money and power is the only goal worthy spending energy on, greed is good. Bezos is well known for at least some of that.
Damn, we all knew that modern free egalitarian society stands on rather weak legs, 7 days to the wolves and all, but to see it happening in real time is quite something. Like traveling and overall security before 9/11 and after.
I'll tell my kids about these times, in Switzerland we are pretty well shielded from current US madness but no shield is strong enough, US became simply too central, about time to shift balance. I realize bipolar orange man is probably trying to keep the balance in favor of US in upcoming future, but that elephant in porcelain shop approach is just speeding up things against what US should want for itself as a global player. But what do I know, maybe fascist oligarchy dictatorship is a good way for US long term.
Well, tell that the American constituents, who apparently want just that. That’s what they were promised, what they voted on, it is what they are getting now, and most seem to be fine with it. They don’t care how the rest of the world is affected, they don’t care about the planet they inherit their children, they don’t care their president behaves like the worst bully in school towards foreign leaders and neighbours just alike… maybe that is just what the USA looks like, if the educated folks don’t have enough support anymore to pretend otherwise?
They usually know, but they also know that their opposing party is willing to use bad faith tactics or outright violence to defend their position, and they are scared to some level.
Yeah it was sarcasm, a bit. The fact is, we don't know future and whats awaiting 100 years down the line, world is simply too complex to estimate.
Maybe losing freedoms in US will shift things in US favor as a country overall in future. But common men like we all here will suffer in some ways, thats inevitable, in US and elsewhere.
For me, this suggests a high level of dysfunction in the Government if people asking for things from the Government do so using the biases of the people in power as the basis for their argument rather than reasoning to it by some set of principles. I don't know how much of this article was inferred by the person writing it and how much accurately reflects Amazon's position, so I can't draw strong conclusions from it but it's an interesting reflection on the extreme 'buyer beware' attitude of cut throat businesses that take no responsibility for the harms they inflict on their own customers.