French court upholds order limiting Amazon deliveries amid coronavirus risk | Hacker News Reader

French court upholds order limiting Amazon deliveries amid coronavirus risk

politico.eu

39 pointsQuanttek43 comments

> the court of appeal extended the list of allowed items to include, among other things, high tech and IT goods. The court also significantly reduced the fines in case of non compliance from €1 million to €100,000 per unauthorized item "received, prepared and/or shipped."

That still sounds high enough and vague enough that I expect Amazon will keep their French distribution centers closed for now.

How are you able to derive from the article's summary that this is vague?

Beyond that, we all know that "vagueness" was just an Amazon pretext to force France to allow them to operate unchecked, i.e. without providing the demanded protection and deliver any item.

If I order a collectors item XBox controller, is that an IT or high tech item? (Maybe I’m using it for Skype with patients)

What about a kid’s “computer” toy, or a fart noise button?

What about a fidget spinner? A stress relief toy for autistic kids? A fidget spinner incorrectly marketed for autistic kids?

They have 10’s of millions of items, and for each one where their answer is different than the court’s, they get fined $100,000 * number of times they ship it.

Of course they can’t open the warehouse under these terms. Perhaps elected officials need to step in and pass a law that will invalidate this ruling.

You are completely ignoring my point: you can't go by a one-sentence summary in an article to infer that the Court's ruling on allowed items is vague. You'd actually need to look at the written deicision instead of spending your time pre-judging and coming up with a bunch of hypothetical examples.

Additionally, most goods sold are already classified as a certain type of item for regulatory purposes in the EU, so that work has already been done.

The point of the GP was that the actual order might not actually be this vague, which another comment [1] appears to corroborate.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22978228

The order specifically singles out Amazon categories for products. I am not a software engineer, but something along the line of:

> if item.category is not in authorized_categories then do not sell

Does not seem too hard to do.

They extended the closure until Tuesday.

But I believe the general public doesn't really notice it because orders are still being taken and delivered via, I suppose, distribution centers outside France.

Friend ordered multiple things last Saturday (supposed to be closed) and he received some packages the next Thursday and today too (Saturday).

Yup, everything is normal, some prices are even cheaper than normal since they're being filled by centers in the Netherlands/UK. All of my orders arrived within 3 days even though the estimates were longer.

It seems rather odd that the order would not apply to things delivered from outside the country.

Is this a general way to avoid regulations? (i.e., France only receives from Netherlands, and Netherlands only receives from France)

How is that odd? The issue was the safety of its French employees, and therefore the order from the French court relates to the Amazon facilities in France.

It seems odd because of the moral hazard. Basically, the court is saying, "Treat your employees as you will, just make sure they're not French.".

Is this really any less of a problem if French deliveries are packed by abused Belgian peons?

No, but unless the French decide that they can force others countries to follow their laws, the only choice is between [French protection laws applied in France; French protection laws not applied abroad] and [French protection laws not applied in France; French protection laws not applied abroad].

Also what is odd is that we seem to have gone from “social distancing and lockdown to slow down the progression of the disease to within the capacity of the healthcare system” (flattening the curve) to “this virus is the new ebola and anyone who doesn’t have extra protection is putting their life at risk”. While at the same time the additional testing and antibody testing are confirming that the virus is marginally more lethal than the common flu.

Now I understand why medical staff would need extra protection as 1) we badly need them healthy now, and 2) they are facing heavy viral exposure which apparently really increases the risks. I can understand why clerks in grocery stores, bus drivers, anyone with frequent contacts with the general public would also want extra protection, as they may have much greater exposures than anyone else. But employees in a warehouse? Really?

> additional testing and antibody testing are confirming that the virus is marginally more lethal than the common flu

15,411 people have died of covid in NYC, though excess death numbers suggest that this is an undercount and it's more like 19,200. [1] The population of NYC is 8.4M. If everyone in NYC had been exposed this would give a death rate of ~0.18%, or ~0.23% after adjusting for excess deaths. Antibody tests say ~21% [2] of the population has had it, so multiply by 5 and it looks like if everyone got it about 1% of people would die. That's about 10x more deadly than the flu.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/nyregion/coronavirus-anti...

If you cite numbers from Cuomo’s presentation why did you leave out his estimate of a mortality rate of circa 0.5% [1]?

[edit] also these rates are heavily skewed against 70+ years old and people with existing conditions. The risk to a random warehouse worker is really immaterial.

[1] https://youtu.be/TisDYYWJgBA?t=967

Five times worse than the flu is “marginally” more?

Five time a tiny number may still be a tiny number. The odd to win the UK lotto is one in 45m, the odd of winning Euromillion is one in 140m, the UK lotto is 3 times higher! Either way you won’t win either.

The odd of dying from this virus for a warehouse employee worker under 40 with no serious medical condition is not something they should worry about.

Yes but it’s very contagious, asymptomatic while contagious _and_ many people who aren’t at risk of death do come into contact with those who are. There are tens of millions of people in the UK who are vulnerable to severe consequences if they catch the disease.

> Five time a tiny number may still be a tiny number.

A tiny proportion of a gigantic number is still a massive number.

Plus, most of the population has some level of immunity to the flu. Meanwhile, for coronavirus, every human being on the planet can be infected except the tiny number who have already survived it.

> The odd of dying from this virus for a warehouse employee worker under 40 with no serious medical condition is not something they should worry about.

Until we have longitudinal studies showing that there's nothing to worry about in the long term, this is a reckless assumption.

It seems you’re saying death is ok because it’s a small amount. Any death is bad if it could’ve been prevented.

> If you cite numbers from Cuomo’s presentation...

I didn't watch Cuomo's presentation, and don't generally consume news via video. The two links I gave were to the NYT.

How do you get a mortality rate of 0.5% when you think 0.2% of the city has already died and 20% of the city has been exposed?

> the virus is marginally more lethal than the common flu

That's simply not true, and I don't understand how people keep repeating it. If you take the current New York study as the best available evidence, you get a symptomatic infection fatality rate of somewhere between 0.5% and 1.5%. That's an order of magnitude more dangerous than the flu.

I think some are looking at the step function on the IFR. With 90% of the deaths here in WA being people above 60, it is very misleading to look at a single population summary metric.

Put simply, this is more contagious than the flu, likely due to it being novel. It is vastly more deadly than the flu for elderly. Probably more than just an order of magnitude. That is, if you take out the people under 40 from the case rate, the IFR shoots way up. At a frightening level.

The order from the court of appeal (linked in the article, although it's in French) is much more specific. It lists specific product categories on Amazon's website, and says that only things that were in those categories as of April 21 can be shipped.

Thanks! That does sound much better!

The ruling has never been vague, except for the HN commenters who didn't read the ruling but a summary of it.

Seems fair enough - the courts are saying that Amazon has to restrict deliveries (in France) to essential items such as food and medical supplies until a risk assessment has been done on they way the are running things at the moment. To me that doesn’t seem to me to be overly burdensome. Perhaps the stumbling block is finding someone willing to be the one signing off on it.

Is equal protection under the law a thing in France?

If so, they presumably need to apply the same standards to all warehouses and distributors, right?

As mentioned elsewhere in this discussion: 42 companies have received injunctions.

The linked document from the court clarifies exactly which categories are opened for sale.

It's a list of 7 exact Amazon categories. Like they appear in the search bar and the left sidebar that you use to filter items. There is really no doubt possible about what's allowed.

sounds like there is still extreme room for question. like how 3p sellers are now putting electronics like flash drives into the kitchen item categories?

It was items in those categories as of a specific date.

Amazon might be worried sellers will turn to usual tricks of reusing ASINs, somethingAmazon is really wink agains wink wink nudge

https://sellercentral-europe.amazon.com/forums/t/to-many-sel...

How do other deliverers handle this?

By following the official recommendations. Unions are making sure they do.

Note that what courts are blaming Amazon for is not to deliver unnecessary goods, but to not care enough for the security of their employees in their warehouses.

So basically, it's not a problem for other delivery services who took stricter safety measures.

If anything, telling them they can still continue deliver necessary goods is a bit lax, because their employees are not safer processing those.

The Amazon answer is quite unbearable, to be honest. Basically, it's "people can't live without us, so we should be above the law". It's time to show them we can live without them.

Do you have any evidences about other delivery services taking stricter safety measures?

Well Amazon has been sued by its workers' representatives, lost in the first trial and lost again in the appeal trial.

It is of course possible that other delivery services have similar safety measures and have not been sued yet, or have more lenient workers, or whatever; but still, it offers _some_ evidence that Amazon might have worse practices than others.

This is the responsibility of the DIRECCTE, which handle inspections.

They've been asked by the ministry of work to intensify their inspections during the covid-19 crisis, and they've notified 42 companies they should put themselves in conformity (this is the first step before any legal action to give companies an opportunity to avoid problems, which Amazon ignored).

So all the other companies who did not got problems during their inspection had better safety measures than amazon.

Source [fr] : http://idf.direccte.gouv.fr/Inspection-du-travail-elargissem...

Translated: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%...

https://help.patagonia.com/s/article/Learn-More-about-Our-Op...

Amazon answer according to the article is :

> Unfortunately, [the ruling] means we have no other choice than to extend the temporary suspension of activity in our French distribution centers while we assess the best way to operate with regards to the court of appeal’s decision

So I'm not sure how it's related to what you say. There are a lot of similar businesses that can continue shipping as usual and I would be very surprised if the Law has checked all of them for safety measures respect. It is highly probable that many of them don't do things correctly yet nobody cares. In the end this is typical of the French government hypocrisy that is going for the big (foreign) one just for the sake of symbolism. Cdiscount is a huge French Amazon clone that can still operate as usual, I can bet some of their employees are also at risk.

This is just the latest of their comments. Here is an article from earlier this month: http://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20200416-amazon-close-french-dis...

The relevant part:

> The company said the closure would affect “millions of clients who use our services to have products delivered to their homes during this confinement period” as well as "employees and small and medium sized businesses" that use the company.

Regarding inspection of other companies, please refer to my answer to js4ever in the same thread.

EDIT : also, "others do just as bad" is never a good defense.

No their answer is “Fine. We don’t like the law and we will shut down entirely instead of breaking the law”. That’s a more correct choice than what Uber does - flagrantly break the law.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com