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Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

Amazon is so completely irresponsible for their marketplace that recently, shopping for a glass oral thermometer (because the digital ones suck) I stumbled on reviews with photos showing products that had no mercury inside and actual blobs of mercury stuck to the tip that goes in your mouth. These were still for sale.

I feel like even 10 years ago, online marketplaces would have taken measures to prevent stuff like this.

From that perspective, all of these services that rate products still place all the onus on the individual consumer. What would be really "luxury" in the modern context would be an online marketplace that vetted every product and whose primary product was trust, as opoosed to logistics and convenience. I'd much rather pay $150/yr for a service that vetted its products and took a week to deliver them, than to have a bunch of worthless or dangerous junk delivered the next day.

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> Amazon is so completely irresponsible for their marketplace that recently, shopping for a glass oral thermometer (because the digital ones suck) I stumbled on reviews with photos showing products that had no mercury inside and actual blobs of mercury stuck to the tip that goes in your mouth. These were still for sale.

I did wonder about how this kind of thing was handled in the UK, and (a) Amazon will happily offer a mercury thermometer for sale and (b) it has been illegal to sell mercury thermometers in the UK since 2009.

The absolute poster child for ubiquitous illegal toxic products though? Disposable vapes.

I'm convinced the major tobacco companies will do well if the government ever manages to crack down on sketchy and illegal vaping products and stores. But this seems very hard to do.

Amazon is straight up evil at this point. People have pointed out they are selling fake fuses that have most likely gotten people killed, Amazon has done nothing. I am sure the same is occurring across other product categories like your example.

The 'luxury' you are talking about was called Brands, with the idea being that a company's Brand was worth more than lure of profits/shortcuts that could result in ruining the Brand.

>> The 'luxury' you are talking about was called Brands

I dunno. Branding was my gig for a long time. I think brands were a weak substitute for artisans / bespoke makers who had to personally stand by their work. Once upon a time there was a guy named Levi Strauss who made sturdy jeans, some guy named McDonald who made good hamburgers, a couple guys named Johnson who sold talcum powder. And that guy Nobel who invented new ways to blow up the coyote. If any of their products failed, it was on them. Then branding came along and quality declined, but people paid for inferior products because they had the name and stamp of the founder on them. The notion that brands have to maintain the quality associated with their namesake is the central illusion that trillions of dollars spent on branding seeks to create. It turns out that it's cheaper to prop up the name with advertising than it is with selling quality products.

And that doesn't even touch on brands like DuPont or Chevron, where all the positive connotations are purely from brand marketing built as a shroud around selling mass death.

> I think brands were a weak substitute for artisans / bespoke makers who had to personally stand by their work.

Another way to say that is "companies are too big". When companies become big enough that they don't have to worry about the repercussions of screwing over their customers, they're too big.

Right. Absolutely. But then again, everyone can buy jeans now and you don't have to ride your horse across 500 miles of desert and hitch it up to Levi's store. So no one who orders em online now knows what they were worth then. No one's riding horses around in their underwear anymore.

To be serious: I don't think that overpopulation or delivering better things to more people is really the problem. Big companies are indeed a problem. Along with big governments on the other side. They both rely on rent-seeking methods of extracting value while lowering expectations, rather than providing better services. There needs to be a balance of regulation and innovation, that prevents regulatory capture and prevents monopolies without exploding bureaucracies that hamper small businesses. Small businesses are fantastic drivers of prosperity and creativity. That would be the civic ideal I'd implement if I had any interest in getting into government.

> Small businesses are fantastic drivers of prosperity and creativity

That's a huge generalisation. Plenty are every bit as dodgy as the big ones.

I mean wasn't the era of bespoke makers the same as the era of traveling sake-oil salesmen that went town-to-town, disappearing just before the ramifications of their poison "cure-all" became clear? There were tons of scams and grifts back in the day.

Why are they even selling mercury thermometers for oral use when an alcohol one (the red liquid) does fine

I wondered that as well, but they are. I've started to think there's an organized effort by a government with a lot of state-owned enterprises to actually dispose of toxic waste by shipping it to gullible American consumers. Not that it isn't also poisoning people there.

well, the chinese outsourced hog farms (pork production) to the U.S. because the farms are considered too toxic and environmentally destructive for them.

Mercury has higher thermal conductivity than alcohol. The temperature reading stabilizes faster with mercury.

For sure but I haven’t seen one for home use in nearly 40 years. The risk of having mercury in the hands of Joe Schmoe or his garbage is probably not worth it

There are plenty of stories around this

The old mercury ones were a lot easier to read. And faster.

I've thought about that too, but in the end, price always wins - this is why the Amazons and Walmarts of the world have out-competed local small businesses.

The major flaw in your example is that you have a site saying product X is good and trusted, but people will then go look online for a competitor that sells it for cheaper.

This is where capitalism clashes with consumer rights / safety. What should be the case is that all products sold on all stores are safe. That's what consumer safety organizations are for, but it seems like they have lost the battle against the flood of Chinese crap coming in.

At least in Europe, this is mainly because these companies ship for cheap directly to customers. Customs and the like can check a container full of the same USB chargers easily and efficiently, but if that container full crosses the border in 10.000 individual packages it's impossible.

Thankfully they're putting the brakes on it, but it took forever.

>The major flaw in your example is that you have a site saying product X is good and trusted, but people will then go look online for a competitor that sells it for cheaper.

Product X is good and trusted, except:

  - due to mixed inventory you were sent product Y, which is poison

  - product X has a complex supply chain, and it was previously good and trusted, and now it's poison and you had no idea anything changed

Product X had decent sales but not good enough profit margins, so the brand was sold to a company that sells a cheap, dangerous look-alike under the same name.

> I've thought about that too, but in the end, price always wins - this is why the Amazons and Walmarts of the world have out-competed local small businesses.

The Amazons and Walmarts of the world are only able to offer those cheaper prices because they engage in practices that were, are, and/or should be illegal. Practices like violating the Robinson–Patman Act, collusion, exploiting workers, knowingly selling dangerous goods, and outright bribery are the real reason why they have out-competed local small businesses, and a large part of why so many people are only able to afford goods sold at the cheapest prices in the first place.

Getting rid of Chinese crap wouldn't solve anything. We need strong regulations with very sharp teeth to be consistently enforced in order to give consumers protection and allow small businesses to stand a chance to grow and thrive.

Amazon is rather like the Silk Road[0] of old. You're buying cinnamon from some guy in Europe who knows not even the vague direction it came from, let alone what's in it or how it came to be. This could be considered irresponsible today, or it could be considered efficient, depending on your perspective.

I also feel like Amazon should take more responsibility, but then I get angry when my ISP or government "takes responsibility" for online content. What's the difference between Amazon and an ISP? One could argue an ISP is a natural monopoly and therefore should always be a neutral carrier. But maybe Amazon is a natural monopoly too? Could the economy really support ten different Amazons? That would be like having ten different Silk Roads, but there's only one way from Asia to Europe.

It does seem odd to me that Amazon gets a free pass as a common carrier while ISPs seemingly do not. Probably because taking responsibility would affect Amazon's bottom line, while ISPs don't really care.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road (The ancient trading route, not the darknet marketplace).

> I stumbled on reviews with photos showing products that had no mercury inside and actual blobs of mercury stuck to the tip that goes in your mouth.

I played with mercury a bit when I was a kid, as did every kid who could - it was COOL! From that I learned: mercury is almost omniphobic. Oil avoids mixing with water. Mercury avoids mixing with, holding on to, and generally touching anything.

So how could a blob of mercury stick to a glass tip???

Sincere question.

In the photo I saw, the tip was metal and had a blob resembling an amalgam on it so it may not have been pure liquid mercury there.

It's inside the tip.

Bulb of mercury. Fine tube extending up from it. Thermal expansion of the bulb produces a big effect on how far up the tube it goes.

They work. They're safe unless you break them. But they can break.

Isn't this a new concept of this era ?

We profit from letting others be free to harm you but we cannot be held responsible.

disruptism ? platformism ?

Sameasitalwayswasism.

Consumer protection had a brief heyday, but is far from status quo in even the last century of history.

> I feel like even 10 years ago, online marketplaces would have taken measures to prevent stuff like this.

By now the market has "matured" to pure profit orientation. Health or even survival are irrelevant. /s

Why do you think mercury blob is going to the mouth?

Those are usually rectal thermometer, with 0.1°C precision or better. Also sometimes used to measure body temperature in armpits.

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