Amazon wants a product safety regulator declared unconstitutional
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
"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.
[1] https://www.thegamer.com/dungeons-and-dragons-dnd-roleplay-w...
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is a good summary of the book: https://sppe.lse.ac.uk/articles/52
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.
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.
It’s a principle-agent problem. Civil servants have principles and act on them, but they’re not necessarily the principles voters share.
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.
ref:https://www.techdirt.com/2019/03/19/rep-devin-nunes-sues-int...
Modern attacks on 230 are more likely to enabled by major platforms, who are the only ones who can afford to defend legal attacks on user speech.
ref: https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
https://populistpolicy.org/doge-analysis-of-the-consumer-pro...
Genuinely curious: if “under government oversight” is an acceptable option for critics, what is the CPSC currently doing that is disagreeable?
So these other companies only pay Amazon for the shipping and nothing else, do they?
Just like Target, Walmart and other physical retailers often work with recalls on products sold through their stores.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/selling-tools/ebay-authent...
That goes straight at the "product information isn’t even accurately known" problem.
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.
Just in case.
Seems like an easy, cheap fix. Amazon makes a single tweak in its listing code, and buyers know where they stand.
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.
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.
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.
Where did you take that from? None of the notifications need to come from the seller directly to the buyer.
That’s why you would need to collect buyer information.
To deliver the notification to the buyer.
The way these marketplaces work is to facilitate in-person meetups. FB doesn’t have buyer info. They would have to have sellers collect it.
In reality every seller would just cancel their listings and pretend it never sold.
Regardless of what you think of the idea itself, the notification part would by very easy to implement.
Maybe Amazon can compromise. They can stop selling their own things on their platform.
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.
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.
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.
Those are two very different arrangements.
Whenever i interviewed there, i felt they actually abide by these and somehow this move seems to contradict their top one: Customer Obsession.
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.
In most companies with shareholders, public or private, that's a written rule, right in the corporate founding documents.
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.
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.
I’ve never heard of them, but I guess they are doing good work.
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
As in, amazingly and horrifically awful behavior.
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.
It's much like the Wall Street Journal, which is a highly regarded source of information packaged with an editorial page that reads like 4chan.
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.
According to the fundamental dictates of capitalism, you have this backwards.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.