I agree with you, the earlier post says people only do things out of self-interest, and I was surprised that nobody else had disagreed or mentioned it’s an unfortunate way to see the world.
I think that mindset is held by most people, most of the time. But not all people at all times. If you're in that mindset, however, the mindset itself may taint your perception of how often others are in the same mindset, which I suspect (hope?) may be the case for the person who wrote the original statement. I suspect (hope?) that person has done at least one selfless ethical/nice/kind thing at some point in their lifetime.
One nice thing about designers is their tie-breaking ability for non-designers. Design, being something we all think we’re right about, is easy to lose lots of time going back and forth on with non-specialists, while it’s much faster to send to a pro.
But I generally agree with you, I think the world would be better if everyone was more thoughtful about this sort of thing.
This seems like short-run thinking winning. I don’t want to have to think about if companies I interact with are going to slowly diminish the product. This sort of thing undermines that - it’s a rare good thing for companies to be trustable, and a bummer when it doesn’t hold.
It’s pretty common for there to be a ‘minimum advertised price’ (MAP) where a brand can cut retailers off if they advertise a price below it - this is why so many stores will have the exact same price on a given product and why you’ll sometimes see the ‘lower price in cart’ message.
It sounds like the issue here is that Walmart managed to get Energizer to have a higher MAP price, but I’m not sure how much more collusion-y that is than MAP prices in general.
The article makes a direct reference to "price at checkout" though it's not quite clear to me if that wording was intentional. If they really mean "price at checkout" then we are talking about blatant price fixing that goes beyond MAP and is quite serious.
>Walmart rivals allegedly risked higher wholesale prices or being cut off by Energizer, the largest U.S. disposable battery maker, if they charged less at checkout than Walmart, the world's largest retailer.
There are all sorts of games brands/retailers play with these. It also wouldn’t surprise me at all if Walmart avoided language that went as far as collusion, but did make clear they needed a certain margin and were willing to pay a higher price.
A question for any bee experts: there have been a few times I’ve been eating a sandwich or sushi in a nearby park in NY, and a bee has flown over, found the meat in whatever I’m eating, spent some time cutting a piece off, and flown off with it. Would anyone know what sort of bee this could have been, or any other info on what was going on?
Anecdotal - I've seen yellow jackets take an interest in deli meat on multiple occasions. Apparently it has something to do with the time of year. I want to say it's springtime when they crave the protein, but, not sure.
There was a line from Jeff Bezos, ""One of the early examples of this is customer reviews. Someone wrote to me and said, 'You don't understand your business. You make money when you sell things. Why do you allow these negative customer reviews?'
"And when I read that letter, I thought, we don't make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions."
The incentives are different at different levels of the business. There could be someone with a shorter-term outlook making these decisions, or (more likely imo) it was a very quick misapplication of the policy based on skimming the review. Acting as a first reviewer actually seems like a great application of LLMs, where attention won't flag + they can hopefully be tuned to only focus on the policy-relevant pieces.
That Bezos quote is insightful. For companies that just help people pick which product to buy, steering customers away from bad products will increase satisfaction and repeat business.
> We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions
If those reviews help you decide to buy from someplace other than Amazon... perhaps in short term or narrow circumstances it still helps Amazon (reduced refunds/etc).
If the fraud were evenly spread out, and if all advertisers had the same goal, the equilibrium bid just adjusts for less valuable clicks/interaction/etc (in line with what the earlier commenter mentioned), and the advertisers pay the same amount as in a world without fraud. Fraud isn't evenly spread out though, and advertisers are sometimes unaware, so it probably does hurt them.
The other loss is from honest publishers (think newspaper websites, etc.) - they're having to split payments with fraudsters, even though they're providing all the value to the advertiser. Downstream effects mean the publisher is probably producing less, showing more ads, or using other ways to replace ad income.
I hope not - for projects with any complexity, knowing I’ve got a checkpoint means I don’t need to think hard about doing risky things. I wonder if Microsoft keeps stats on how many Office users use auto save.
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