Walmart Sells Fake 30TB Hard Drive That's Two Small SD Cards
vice.com
vice.com
I’ll throw out an example I’ve noticed lately - furniture manufacturers. Search for any item on Crate & Barrel or West Elm’s website and you’ll first see a handful of exclusive pieces that are clearly built for the brand. Keep scrolling and the search results gradually become a bunch of generic third party items that you can find in a dozen different places, often for lower prices elsewhere.
I get it, Crate & Barrel sees this as an opportunity to monetize their brand without having to do all that much. Unfortunately it leaves me with a lot less trust for a brand that used to represent a quality and reputation.
There are still some retailers who retain some in-house design talent, but they’re few and far between, as it provides little differentiation in the eye of the consumer, who typically can’t tell an in-house from an acquired design - so in-house design is typically an idiosyncratic choice now, as it doesn’t provide a competitive edge over those who claim in-house design.
Of course, it’s possible to choose the wrong supplier, or have mismatched expectations - a clothing retailer I worked with sent an entire range to be shredded because it arrived with appalling quality (like, seams that hadn’t even been stitched) and they weren’t prepared to even put it in outlets - which is where a lot of the misfires end up - it isn’t “oh no our factory had a booboo” or “whoops we made too much”, it’s a calculated “X% of the stock we bought last year was crap, therefore we have Y stock to support our outlet presence”. Some brands deliberately foster relationships with lower quality stock shops in order to maintain stock at outlet, but this is generally waning in popularity as retailers have realised that they don’t actually work very well as feeders, and have to stand alone.
By making everything an open marketplace it places the risk onto the customer. They are responsible for reading the reviews and deciding if they think the item will match their expectations.
I hate it, being back the days of a store that would stand behind its wares as they had actually chosen to sell them!
Apple, of course, are masters at guarding their reputation.
Besides the safari app and a big-name apps that you already know you want/need have been sufficent
Search for anything and you are likely to find the same item with 50 different brand names but all essentially the same garbage from aliexpress/wish.
For example, here's a search for "bike trainer" [1]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=bike+trainer&crid=KCCRWTVZHHQ7&sp...
Right now, Amazon combines the honesty of flea markets with the reliability of a stoned teenager.
I'm back to shopping at physical stores, and am enjoying it, at least at the moment. And when ordering things, I try to go direct or find retailers who care about their reputations.
I really wish online shopping wasn't so messed up.
Of course, they're all working class stiffs compared to Bezos and the rest of the senior leadership.
I am looking at barrier hose crimpers for air conditioning lines. Okay, there's about a dozen identicalish looking ones on amazon with a price from 100-300 dollars, and a reputable united states manufacturer starting at 2500+. How do I know what's the best option?
I really don't care about the price, I want to know if the price is worth it. If these different products are different or just rebranded, I want to know.
[0] https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/1563060250269589505
That's the call where Alexei Navalny tricked an FSB agent into admitting they had poisoned him.
I think often people try to come up with too clever explanations for stupid behavior. Sometimes it's just stupid behavior. Often times this is the catalyst for conspiracy theories - it's a nice explanation for random or stupid events.
To be fair, not all direct-from-China goods are cheap crap. I've received excellent USB cables, noise cancelling earbuds, and much more from various sellers. And the middlemen selling on Amazon are offering the convenience of easy returns, fast shipping, and excellent customer service from Amazon. Depending on the seller, [their profit margins can actually be quite thin because Amazon charges a lot for their customer service, warehouses, and return handling](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Yhc6mmdJC4).
* I know TikTok is quite controversial, for good reasons like data security, lack of ethics, and algorithmic infobubbling/censorship. But I am still a fan and use it because its algorithm was the only thing that was able to string together my liked posts and begin showing content/advice about what mental health disorders I might have. That significantly sped up my diagnoses with my psychiatrist, who confirmed 2 of the 3 disorders.
TikTok is controversial because of the trove of personal data it has and it's a large Chinese company, and large Chinese companies are required to do what the Chinese govt wants, and the Chinese govt does not have the purest intentions with respect to the persons of the USA.
> its algorithm was the only thing that was able to string together my liked posts and begin showing content/advice about what mental health disorders I might have.
this is a feature of TikTok, psychiatric diagnoses? or you were able to use the linked together posts and diagnose yourself?
Twitter tries to algorithmically sort your feed, but some users (including myself) find it buries too many interesting posts, and use the old chronological feed. Twitter is sparing about showing users and posts you don't follow (except for retweets from your followed accounts, of course). This leads to accounts becoming "curators", who you follow because they retweet interesting content. This adds a nice human touch, but also limits discovery to other users' interests. Interactions are generally limited to retweets/quote-retweets, and comment treads, both of which rarely have a deep discussion because the UI isn't designed to promote it. Twitter has small sidebars to recommend other users to follow, but this is a very slow method to discover new content, and these sidebars are smaller or nonexistent on mobile clients. Tumblr is quite similar, so I group its community and discovery dynamics with Twitter.
Reddit is community-based. Subreddits are formed, users follow them, and posts are voted up and down. A subreddit can dominate its hobby, and there is no way to fine-tune the content you see. For example, I like seeing the deals in /r/frugalmalefashion but have no interest in the higher-priced designer shoes that can frontpage. This reduces the signal to noise ratio for my interests, and there isn't another active subreddit that would more closely match my tastes. The comment sections are the highlight of reddit, since discussions can go quite deep and low quality comments are downvoted out of view. Discovery is generally limited to commenters organically suggesting other subreddits, especially in mobile clients where there "isn't room" for algorithmic recommendations.
Facebook is quite different. Your friends feed is very broad-purpose, and groups are very specific. Groups are often smaller than comparable subreddits, and there will be less experts present in a discussion. This can hamper discussions on things like deal-hunting, where more frequent users can summarize community opinion or relay their deeper experiences. In other words, you have to do a lot more reading to find the information you want, giving Facebook a much worse signal-to-noise ratio. Comment sections can be more informative than Twitter but more shallow than Reddit, and communities are less interested in liking informative comments to bring them to the top to discussion threads. There is minimal algorithmic discovery, with only small recommendation sidebars.
Instagram is a mix of all these sites. You follow specific users like Twitter, but reposts are limited to the Stories feed, and are therefore deprioritized. So you generally follow each of these users for their original content (or occasionally curation, if they like to manually repost others' work on their feeds like a "meme page"). Comment sections can be lively but shallow, and I find discussions are generally superficial. There is an algorithmic discovery page that can find some good recommendations, but you browse it by thumbnail, limiting discovery.
YouTube is also interesting. You generally follow creators' channels like Instagram, and there is no easy way for "curators" to promote others' content without making a "meme compilation" video (and getting copyright strikes). Comment sections are second best to reddit, but not quite as good. Discussion is limited by the fact there has to be a relevant video for everyone to comment under - there's no way to make a quick post about a hobby without making an entire video, or making an oft-ignored text post. Discoverability is also very good, with the algorithmic feeds and recommendations being very accurate. But they lack variety and don't seem to try and dredge up old interests. When I watch a lot of automotive content for a week, I find recommendations about my other interests (like architecture) quickly disappear and only resurface for viral videos that don't align with my interests.
Finally, we have TikTok. You can follow creators and access a dedicated feed of their videos, but the primary method of consumption is the "for you page". There's some semi-scientific tests by users A/B testing videos (and comparing feeds to friends with similar interests) that lead to a general description of the FYP algorithm. The algorithm seems to form groups of users that like a particular cluster of videos/creators. Your new videos are shown to a few users in each of your clusters, and if some engage with your video, it is shown to more of that cluster and is tested against adjacent clusters. This significantly improves discoverability by letting obscure users' videos go viral, including one of my own quickly achieving 50k views (while all my other videos remain below 2k views). This is unique because it allows every hobby to have subcultures and nuance. I like car technology and engineering but not street racing or showy designs, and so I am clustered accordingly. It's obvious that there are racing and show-car clusters (some videos appeal to many clusters and the comment sections reflect that), but I am rarely shown that content.
This FYP algorithm can also help discovery about adjacent clusters. If you like videos about hikes, it will test videos about other activities like camping, and adjacent hobbies like environmentalism. This isn't hard coded - those are all just naturally occurring, adjacent clusters that each have overlap with hiking enthusiasts. So when I kept liking content about mental health condition "A", it because steady component of my FYP. Also interestingly, having a different condition "B" puts you at a 30% chance of having condition "A", despite the two having very separate communities on sites like reddit. So content from people with both condition "B" and "A" also appeared on my FYP, and I watched/liked the videos most relatable to me. As I began to see more content exclusively about condition "B" (and found some of it to be relatable), I began to consider if I also had that disorder. This wouldn't have been possible on other sites, since the subreddit for disorder "B" is quite heady and difficult to be easily introduced to. And I have a subtype of disorder "A" that is less common, so its community was less useful too. The communities on sites like YouTube or Twitter is so scattered to be practically useless.
Once I had a strong list of symptoms for each disorder, and some new vocabulary to help describe certain symptoms, I found a very qualified psychiatrist to evaluate me. The TikTok algorithm isn't perfect - I though I also had disorder "C", but after evaluation, it was determined that my symptoms don't match and may actually be from an unrelated issue.
No other social media app/site has the ability to navigate a large and varied community to find the parts that best fit each user. And no other social media app is as good at finding overlaps between communities and allows users to navigate them simply by interacting with content. For those reasons, TikTok is the best site for my browsing style, since I like to hop between communities and discover new ones that best suit me. It accelerated my exploration of existing thoughts and feelings so I could explore them to their fullest and see if each disorder's community matched my experiences, without requiring the effort of reading hundreds of posts and comment sections.
It's still the best for pricing, and is pretty close to the sources (unless you're hardcore enough to translate Taobao listings and get your own mail forwarding). For example, I got a new smartwatch and wanted some bands in specific colors, and a screen protector. Listings with the exact same images on Amazon were $9-12 instead of $3-4. (And when you compared reviews and pictures, they were probably from the same factory.)
Some small notes about AliExpress:
- Although most of AliExpress's lower prices come from lower cost warehouses and less middlemen, some of it comes from exploiting discounted postage. [That has been improved since 2019](https://www.parcelandpostaltechnologyinternational.com/opini...) but I still get a ton of Kyrgyzstani-labeled parcels that originated from Guangdong or Shanghai/Hangzhou. I don't know if that's above-board or not.
- Sellers can sometimes be deceptive. When I was shopping for LED interior lights for an old car, some lumen ratings seemed accurate and even had videos of it being tested. Others had obviously inflated brightnesses despite having a similar number of LEDs are power consumption. In addition, some sellers will sneak an unrelated cheap item into variants of another item, so the listing has a lower price in search results.
- Packages now take a few days to be consolidated. This is great for efficiency and often means you get slightly faster delivery in your home country. But these packages can still get lost, so you may have to dispute up to a dozen items at a time. I might have to do this soon with all my smartwatch accessories, and in the meantime, pray my screen doesn't get scratched (or eat the inflated Amazon/eBay price).
- Compared to Amazon, they have fewer customer reviews, and don't stack listings for the same item. In disputes, customer service won't always favor you or offer a complete refund for bad items.
- Compared to eBay, they have much worse search filtering. You may wish to consider eBay for a balance of cheap prices and faster shipping, especially when you filter for sellers within 100 miles. Sometimes Chinese eBay sellers are cheaper than AliExpress sellers.
Things that are drop shipped haven't passed any third party scrutiny and nobody involved in the sales process is held to your local legal requirements. They can ship you an unsafe product that may burn your house down or poison your children, and your local legal processes have no power to make you whole again, nor any affect to discourage sellers from cutting those corners for profit.
This is a case of the middlemen removing value instead of adding it.
The _other_ Amazon CDN
A real life for-example:
There's a specific kind of cat treat I used to buy on Amazon, at some point various (or maybe the same under different names, who knows) resellers began to sell that treat in a way where they would break up the retail packaging and sell single pouches for the same price as the MSRP for a whole case (the way the manufacturer sells it).
Technically not exactly fraud because they mention the size in the item description fine print, but because of the pricing and the way Amazon tends to just mix different SKUs from both themselves and resellers willy-nilly into different options of the same listing, its incredibly easy to just assume you are buying the full retail product as packaged by the manufacturer.
To Amazon's somewhat-credit, they've refunded me when this situation occurred, but to their shame they've never done a single visible thing to stop this practice from happening and I've proactively reported it to them repeatedly.
End result is there's a whole bunch of categories of products I won't buy from Amazon anymore because I don't want to have to do in-depth detective work every time I make a purchase. I get my pet stuff from Chewy now as I've yet to run into a similar scam on that website.
So yeah add light fixtures to the list.
In 2022 if you aren't buying "Sold by <insert trusted retailer>" on one of these market places then I think you should know what you are getting into.
I'm not american, but I was very surprised that Walmart had gotten into that business. It would surprise me if similar retailers in my country started this too.
Normal users don't understand this. They think they're shopping at Amazon, not at QUBAGZI's storefront on Amazon's website. That concept doesn't even make sense to most shoppers. If they typed in "amazon.com", they think they're getting something from Amazon in Seattle. (I mean they don't literally think that every item is coming from Seattle, but they assume that Amazon vets their products like Trader Joe's or Kohl's down the street does.)
Obviously you can't do everything at once, and people want choice in things like fashion. A kitchen store would be great. One toaster, one oven, one coffee grinder.
Of course, they themselves may be subject to quality control issues. Although perhaps the thing that you're talking about that would be different is the manner in which the curated selection is organized and the overarching purpose.
For instance, I feel like I need only one toaster, one oven. But I have 3 different high-quality coffee grinders that I use for different purposes.
[0] https://www.costco.com/my-life-costco-grocery-online-deliver...
For things that aren't fasteners or drill bits, people kind of like having something different than their friends. ("Oh hey I have the same table! Oh, and pots and pans! Oh, and wall art! Wait, your house looks exactly like mine.")
If that isn't profitable, make the warranty storage/customer service advocacy a yearly subscription where they take care of the full return process.
It's essentially converting reputation to cash
My question is, why is this happening now and why didn't it happen before?
Is it because Amazon is simultaneously wildly popular and a total trash fire, so customers are becoming gradually inured to their bullshit and so other companies are thinking they can slip under the radar with this ploy?
Was there an industry conference where this idea was presented and nobody ever explicitly agreed to collude, but there were nods all around the room and everyone knew what they were expected to do?
So the answer to "why now?" would be, because they only recently began failing thanks to Amazon/COVID/insert your favourite recent civillisational change.
You didn’t notice it as much earlier, because it wasn’t the high end ‘stuff you went there for’ that people stopped buying, it was all the other random things they bought when they went there to buy something, and the marginal customers.
Now the core customer base is eroding, and they’re getting desperate.
I think it dilutes a brand. I don't know that Walmart has any worthwhile reputation as a brand though (at least in my eyes) to dilute so they're probably selling these things and don't care.
When I search on local chain retailer websites, I try to use the "In Store" or "Same day pickup" filters to get actual products they sell. The nice thing is sometimes they indicate the inventory level.
Meanwhile, you have no problem finding devices that should have FDA/Health Canada/FCC/IC approval and do not.
It's harder and harder to find the good products from decent brands, even with a direct search. Many times the decent brand product seems to be someone independent who is buying the product elsewhere and shipping it on amazon for a markup.
Then there's the word-jumble brands for products - they all seem to be fly-by-night products that only seem to exist as long as the product entry has enough stars to get traction.
sigh.
I was shopping for a particular weightlifting belt that is out of stock on the manufacturer's site. You can find them on Amazon but most likely they are not genuine.
I believe even without regulation (not that I disagree with regulating Amazon) once a critical mass of customer think its shady place to buy good quality stuff. It is downhill for Amazon from there.
I can no longer trust any products or reviews on Amazon, for example, so I prefer not to shop there.
Did they make some short term gains in profitability? Probably. Not sure it will be worth it in the end
For a while, I used Walmart.com to stock up on name-brand staples cheaply and conveniently, but it got to be such a pain in the ass that I went back to Costco.
Other retailers will also sell ads on their sites which are additional revenue. Amazon proved this out being the 3rd highest ranking company in terms of advertising revenue behind Google and Meta/FB.
As these massive online marketplaces continue to allow third party sellers their reputation will continue to suffer, people will be less and less likely to get what they ordered, and eventually look for a way to identify good products. Eventually some sellers and marketplaces will end up being identified as only having good quality products and people will start to buy from them.
Honestly a lot of the discussion around Amazon seems a lot like the arguments and discussions I heard around Wal-Mart in the early 20's like almost all the arguments are the exact same to a large degree, right down to the discussions of labor issues and the effect of their monopoly on smaller retailers.
It seems eventually Amazon, Wal-Mart and online marketplaces that allow third party sellers will end up like the Aldi's, Dollar Tree, Wal-Mart, type stores, with a cheaper price and expected quality, and people will know there are other online marketplaces to go to when they need quality or something that lasts.
The retail company has people called 'sourcers' who find other companies that sell a product, test those companies can handle the retailer's scale and the product meets quality standards, and then sets up a white label agreement.
If I buy 3 mule team borax from a Walmart reseller, I have no idea where it is sourced from or how much those entities care about reputation. It could be from 3 mule team, it could be counterfeit.
But who knows what is happening behind the scenes. Amazon removed the wording that made it clear they commingled inventory, but I am sure they still do.
Think of Rudolph in front of the eight other reindeer :)
Amazon is earning a huge profit margin with no liability by letting random entities sell using their website.
Do we want to earn more money too?
Yes.
"Competitor?"
entire board room bursts into laughter
But the reason Amazon probably does not care about that because they have much better profit margin opportunities (AWS, Prime Video and Music, warehouse infrastructure as a service and delivery as a service).
Sorry Walmart, if you let your brand get polluted with 3rd parties selling garbage you will quickly start to lose whatever brand loyalty you have.
I never expected top end merchandise from Walmart. They are a discount retailer and that's fine. But I do expect to get genuine merchandise that is as advertised, not counterfeit or fradulent crap.
I dont like third party sellers either but obviously it makes financial sense for these companies to do this.
And regardless, I'm on walmart.com so it reflects on them when some third party seller sends me shit.
It is true that I am not a frequent shopper there.
One positive remains though: If you buy from Walmart you get it from Walmart and their supply chain. With Amazon because they "mingle" inventory from third parties, you can order shipped & sold by Amazon.com and still get a counterfeit product, because a third party slipped it in.
And, yes, that has happened to me personally by the way.
So no, ordering from Walmart does not guarantee anything is going through their supply chain.
I’m not exactly sure how they make money as the prices are often nearly identical.
It worked well for several years with millions in sales, all automated. It became untenable though as Cryptocurrency facilitated people buying Amazon gift cards with stolen credit cards and cashing them out at 30-50% of face value.
So the market became saturated with scammers selling considerably cheaper than Amazon. For a time maybe 6-4 years ago you could get pretty much anything from Amazon on eBay for around 20% less and shipped direct from Amazon via prime.
Amazon eventually shut it down though and if you meet some very strict gift card threshold they will just steal your balance. People still do it, but large scale automation isn't really worth it any longer.
I've been doing this with the Walmart+ delivery service for $100 a year. I even applied for their 5% cash back credit card. It saves me a good amount of time and money, and I am overall very happy with it.
If Walmart ever starts mixing 3rd party reseller crap with their "in-store" inventories, they will ruin a fantastic product and lose me as a customer.
As far as I'm aware they don't comingle 3rd party inventory like "Sold and shipped by Amazon.com" does.
https://www.amazon.com/Portable-External-high-Speed-Interfac...
> SSD Mobile Solid State Drive Mini Portable External Hard Drive high-Speed USB3.1 Type-C Interface Notebook PC Expansion Upgrade Hard Drive (Color : Red, Size : 30TB) Brand: Generic. $36.15 $ 36. 15. Coupon: Save an extra 10% when you apply this coupon. Terms. Capacity: 30TB . 1GB. 500GB. 1TB. 2TB. 4TB. 6TB. 8TB. 10TB. 12TB. 14TB. 16TB.
Even with the 10% off coupon, it was more than Walmart was charging. Gotta give Walmart credit where credit is due!
Which is why I was really surprised to see this both on Vice and ArsTechnica[0].
A quick web search for "4TB external SSD" shows prices in the USD$400-600 range. So 30TB for ~USD$40 seems too good to be true. Actually, it strains credulity well past the breaking point.
And as the old saw goes, "if it seems to good to be true, it probably is."
Then again, I guess a lot of folks haven't been paying attention (as I have) to storage prices. But even so, 16TB spinning rust drives are an order of magnitude more expensive than the price quoted by Walmart for this "30TB SSD".
It just goes to show that Joe Bessemer (and/or someone else) was right[1].
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/walmart-lists-a-30tb...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There's_a_sucker_born_every_mi...
And so they did.
How does that old saw go? "It is useless to argue with a man whose opinion is based upon a personal or pecuniary interest;"[0], and/or something similar.
Please enjoy an early example of mastery of this technique
If you sell a scam device that seems like plausibly real deal, you might have a bunch of buyers who actually know what they're doing, intend to use the space, and will subsequently complain and return the devices.
That's quite possibly true]0]. Presumably Joe Bessemer would agree.
[0] But not too good to be!
Edit: Added snark as footnote.
There used to be hard drives on ebay that were simply SD cards with scrap metal glued down for weight back in 2012ish.
Imagine you poured a year of work into finding product/market fit and creating a truly great product. You put it for sale on Walmart/Amazon, and what happens next? Amazon's algorithms find you among 100s of less successful sellers, your product gets knocked off as "Amazon basics", produced at scale you cannot afford, so you end up taking all the risks, and Amazon takes all the profit.
So the only business models that not vulnerable under these rules of the game are small-time grift, semi-automated Aliexpress resellers, very niche products and huge established brands that can compete with the platform owners in terms of scale.
The better answer is that marketplaces should have to have reasonably consistent return policies. Push the risk back onto them so that it stops the fraudulent products.
Keep the part that lets basically anyone start up a business and attach themselves to the marketplace at what should be the market price. There are plenty of good things coming from these marketplaces.
A good return policy is insufficient. Amazon is very good about accepting returns. Amazon also co-mingles their own inventory with that of their marketplace sellers. In the past, I have ordered items from Amazon, being careful to choose "Shipped and Sold by Amazon", and have received items that are obviously provided by a marketplace seller. It's great that I was able to contact Amazon and have them issue me a refund. They didn't even want me to bother shipping the item back. But that process still incurred a cost to me, namely:
* extra time not having the item I wanted and could trust
* time and effort to acquire a replacement item from a different retailer
* physical waste, since I discarded the item I received from Amazon because I couldn't trust it
* frustration
Personally, I think the better answer is a system that doesn't put this (minor but non-zero) cost, and its alternative of accepting an inferior and/or less trusted item, onto many, many consumers.
EDIT: formatting
It's not like people are complaining about a new super-cheap tier of products but rather about being ripped off by paying about the same for less quality. And that's before you consider knock offs that have the potential to kill your or burn your house down. For me, nothing that goes into my body or into a 120v mains comes from Amazon. The risk is just too high.
...and then to reduce that risk the marketplaces will start curating what they sell.
I only use it for a family member but they have intentionally continuously degraded the ui/ux to make it so you fall into these traps and have even basically made it so all of the filters reset every time you search.
I don’t recall if they upcharge for more expensive substitution now - before it was free, which was a bit abuseable.
Is that what the mark is called, "ride or die"? That would be very un-corpo-like, but I would welcome it.
However, Walmart itself did recently sell me an OEM 'not for resale' labeled hard drive, so there is some strangeness going on in their warehouse just like at Amazon
I literally do not care what back-end contractor of theirs is doing.
My transaction is conducted on walmart.com , my credit card transaction goes to a walmart account, and my credit card bill shows a walmart line-item.
This "redirecting responsibility" to somewhere else is the fraudulent grift going on there. Walmart wants to put their name on transactions? Make them live with the repercussions dealing with fraud. (Same goes for any online retailer that has a primary presence, and intertwines back end contractors or 3rd party sellers.)
Exceptions are for ebay and etsy, since it is blatantly clear that individuals open their own shop and ebay/etsy only provide a basic framework.
I guess Target doesn't (yet).
It's frustrating to explain to older parents, "You have to pick, "Sold by [Walmart|Amazon]", or it could be anyone!" and not have them understand.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/marketplace-best-buy-test-1...
Examples: https://www.ebay.de/itm/374176058730 https://www.ebay.de/itm/234648959915
After you made the payment, you will realize that you have been cheated. I guess lot of the people got cheated by this method.
So we'd buy the external, take the IDE drive out, and have a cheap 5g IDE drive. And we liked it.
I assume whatever flag factory in china is cranking out $10 flags doesn't care about the content of what's printed on them.
How can a piece of dyed cloth be "morally reprehensible"?
I don't think books should be banned, nor should flags.
If that's how folks want to express themselves, then so be it.
That doesn't mean I need to be chummy with people who hold views in accord with the misogynistic, hateful rhetoric of the Taliban.
That said, I'd expect that folks elsewhere (e.g., Iraq or Iran) might find the US flag to be "morally reprehensible."
As such, shouldn't you also deride folks who sell US flags too?
Just because you don't agree with the ideas and ideology represented by a flag, it doesn't mean that making and selling such a piece of cloth is "morally reprehensible."
Don't like it? Don't buy it. It's called "voting with your wallet." And if enough people do that, then folks will stop making/selling it.
your position seems to be from the free-market/libertarian angle that people can print and publish anything they want, sure, okay, whatever... the logical conclusion of this in the free market is that amazon as a private entity is also able to pick and choose what products they choose to sell and associate with their brand name.
Which is their prerogative. And fine with me. Not that I have any say in the matter.
As for whether I "feel very strongly" about such things, that's not so relevant, IMHO.
What is relevant is that morality is not a team sport. It's individuals making moral choices. Whether we agree or disagree with those choices is also an individual thing.
>your position seems to be from the free-market/libertarian angle that people can print and publish anything they want, sure, okay, whatever... the logical conclusion of this in the free market is that amazon as a private entity is also able to pick and choose what products they choose to sell and associate with their brand name.
That's not how I would phrase it, but essentially correct.
A fair point. Although I expect you'd be just as effective if you'd just catted it to /dev/null.
I'll paraphrase what I said in my original comment: "Just because you don't agree with the ideas presented by others, it doesn't mean that those others are angry and their presentation of such ideas is a 'screed'."
That some folks don't get that is unfortunate, but not all that unexpected.
On a practical level, caveat emptor is a good principle for buyers to live by, especially in this era of pervasive cheating. But pushing to enshrine it as an acceptable norm is morally bankrupt, and in the long run, it will lead to the collapse of society.
If people choose to trust a hard drive made by "XGeek", well, that's on them. This is exactly why branding is a thing. Just stick to Seagate or WD next time.
My 70 year old uncle might just -reasonably- assume that buying from walmart.com is the same as walking into the store, and comes with the same return and quality guarantees. Stuff in the store is very much vetted, and individually chosen. Shelf space is an incredibly valuable commodity and any retailer knows not to just give it away. I don't know why e-store search results aren't seen as equally valuable.
That same uncle might not care, or even know, about the brands that make commodity computer hardware. I built my own gaming PC, and, beyond the processor I would have to double check the brand names on the other components (AMD GPU, but I don't know who made the card off the top of my head).
And that is exactly the deception the Walton family wants out of this.
They might make a $6 commission on a sale like this. After you get done dealing with the labor cost of handling an angry customer, return shipping, and the loss of future business you start start losing money that even the most short sighted of execs can understand… er… should understand
One my my close relatives recently purchased a "new" Dell computer from Amazon. I noticed the performance was very slow when I happened to be using it. I looked up the service tag, and sure enough, the parts inside of it were not the parts that Dell originally put into it in the factory. Turns out a third party seller made quite a business out of parting out Dell computers, replacing their innards with junk, and reselling them.
Also, there's plenty of fakes and counterfeits that I've received from Amazon/eBay/etc. They're almost trivial to find.
maybe good fodder for raid with capital R and I
ofcourse nowadays you've got to dodge those shingled drives...