https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract#Consideration
>Anything of value promised by one party to the other when making a contract can be treated as "consideration": for example, if A signs a contract to buy a car from B for $5,000, A's consideration is the $5,000, and B's consideration is the car.
A failure of a contract for lack of consideration would be if there’s no exchange of value contemplated, ever. For example if I made a promise to provide you a valuable service for nothing in return.
In this situation both sides agreed to exchange something of value so there’s obviously consideration.
They could make an argument that no damages have occurred and claim you have no credible allegation of being harmed, but that’s a different thing and far from automatic.
If this wasn't the case then every single financial futures contract or swap would be null and void. These contracts incur no cash flow on day one. They're merely a promise by one part to pay another based on some event in the future. If your legal theory was true, then one party could simply cancel any losses by voiding the contract as soon as the position moves against them.
Business systems are a chain of events. Every event has x% chance of happening and leading to the next one. If the next event makes money, it's optimized up. If it costs money, it's optimised down. Efforts to pay unclaimed rebates are never as enthusiastic as efforts to claim unpaid receivables. Thus is life.
No, such is full-blown neoliberal capitalism, where the only thing that is considered worth optimizing for is profit.
Once you accept that there are other variables that deserve consideration and cannot just be abstracted by price and profit alone (most prominently customer and workforce satisfaction), other optimizations will come into play, which will reduce the amount of crap people have to deal with, and will ultimately lead for a better experience for everyone involved - except for the very few at the top, which are currently reaping all the profits.
Whatever your definition of capitalism, I'm sure you can find examples outside of it. There are an infinite number of variables besides profit. Profit isn't the only possible motive for such systems, and it only takes one.
A system of people is a system of people, whether it is a church, company, municipality, whatever.
Different systems of people behave very differently with different kinds of motivations, stimuli and sanctions, on the individual and collective level.
And while there are many variables besides profit, it is money (and capital in particular) which enables most activities of a commercial corporation - not voluntary willingness to work or serve for some purpose; and it is Amazon's profit which the organization is designed to promote and maximize, over anything and everything else.
In almost all cases though, they're not going to be as motivated to pay as they are to receive payment. Take subscription antipatterns for example. Charities do this too. They both also create similar self deceptions to justify the more onerous examples. It's not even just about money, convenience is a pretty big motivator.
Again, I'm not saying that everything is the same, or being reductive. Quite the opposite. I'm saying that reducing everything to "capitalism," "greed" or whatever is meaningless. It's just normally the case, that people and groups are more cognizant of their own goals and wants than they are of others'. Altruism exists, but it's not uniformly distributed across everything an altruist does.
That really depends on your point of view. For the average person on HN, upper middle class income or above? Sure thing, 100% agreed. Especially in the US however, if you're not part of that group, it would have been better to live 40-something years ago. Yes, you did not have all those fancy devices and cool tools that we have nowadays, but neither did anyone else, irrelevant of income.
> the remaining problems tend to be around choke points where there is some kind of monopoly power and proper competition is missing
Irrelevant of whether this might be true for Amazon - what about health care? Telco? Public transport? Basic utilities like water, electricity?
The US is a prime example on why "neoliberal capitalism" (at least if we're speaking about it in the Reagan/Clinton sense) is a complete and utter failure - it is the only developed country with a declining life expectancy, the richest country on earth with a sizeable amount of the population having multiple jobs and still living from paycheck to paycheck.
Don't get me wrong, I get your point. But it is really important to try to take the perspective of those who are the losers of the system, and for those people the current time is _for sure_ not the best to be alive. They are so desperate, so disassociated from the current state of affairs that they're willing to listen to snake oil peddlers like Trump, that they're willing to storm the Capitol or at least look the other way when others do, to disparage Science in the face of a pandemic because the class of the educated has left them behind earlier already, so why not this time?
> Amazon got to where it is today because overall the customer experience is so much better.
Relative to what? Compared to the "old experience" of having to go to a physical store - sure. But that's a damn low bar; everyone who can write a webpage can beat that these days. Amazon got where it is today because they straight-up ate the market, but not by being the best, but by being the ones who had the capital to sink everyone else before they went belly-up themselves (for how long is Amazon actually turning a profit? Not that far back, I reckon). In short, they played the market instead of letting the market play. And that's exactly my main gripe with what I'm calling 'neoliberal capitalism' here: The way Amazon played is not a bug of the system, it's a feature. It will continue to happen, until regulators kick in and set boundaries that go beyond anything what we can call neoliberal capitalism. It might still be a 'free market', it still allows for competition, but most definitely not in the barely-regulated sense that the neoliberal capitalism envisions.
The majority of people making over $100k a year voted for Trump, and those numbers jump even higher if we look at race and income, where white people making over $100k were much more likely to vote for Trump.
Similarly, look at the economic demographics of the people who were able to afford to travel to DC on or before January 6th, and the people who attacked the Capitol. I saw a lot of relatively wealthy business owners break into the Capitol, even some IT company owners.