j-c-hewitt

There are countless situations in which Congress tries to punt its responsibility to the other branches. If they want to be a responsibility-free elected TV pundit class that lives high on the taxpayer hog, then let's amend the constitution accordingly. Congress just tries to delegate responsibility to the other two branches so it can get back to fundraising, "investigating," and grandstanding.

Anyone who saw these offers and did not expect the strings attached in terms of government meddling and/or decentralized witch-hunting for taking the money offered was foolish. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

There are good arguments in favor of taking away section 230 immunity and probably better arguments against it, but the best possible argument for getting rid of the immunity is to get rid of social media forever regardless of the other consequences.

Having an obkom would be helpful -- it's really hard to tell what you are allowed to say. It'd be nice also to have a grace period so there is some fair warning when certain ideas or words will become banned. Orderly authoritarianism is preferable to random, chaotic outbursts of censorious violence. But even just an official obkom rather than unofficial 'volunteer' versions of it would really reduce confusion here.

The Saudi Arabian religious police enforcing public edicts are preferable to ISIS pulling you out of a truck, giving you a theology pop quiz, and then shooting you when you get some answers wrong. The Anglican sacramental Test Act is preferable to a fake regime of toleration.

Uh, for you. Some of us live near farms -- it's neither out of sight nor out of smell (heh).

The US is the most agriculturally productive nation in the world by a fair margin. Food and fuel are two of the things that the US is unlikely to run out of even under conditions of global nuclear war.

It's more different than you think because there are many permutations of search terms. There are products that rank really well for odd phrasings of a product search term but not well for the most popular variations. There is also virtual shelf space for weird, niche items with additional features that are not that popular. Amazon aggregates hundreds of thousands of small businesses globally and also tailors search results to FBA warehouse availability. So for example if the warehouses near you are well stocked with product A and not product B you will see product A ranked relatively higher than product B would if you are a prime subscriber, but you will get neutral results when logged out or a non-prime subscriber.

Then you throw in Amazon Shopping ads (aka Sponsored Products) and the shelf space metaphor gets muddled further, because it's like as if every store visitor saw unique and different endcap displays and shelving ordering. There is less individual tailoring to search results than you might expect on Amazon (especially compared to information search engines like GoogleBingBingGo) but it is still a factor.

Then there is the factor of endemic counterfeiting in some categories, so the sketchier the listings are the more likely you are to just buy a counterfeit product, which would never happen in a typical brick and mortar retail shop.

IMO Amazon's private labels are so minor and make up such a small portion of store sales that it ranks very low on the scale of things that Amazon does that are morally/legally questionable.

Shouldn't the headline say "Three Small Cities..." because it implies that "rural cities" as a category have overtaken New York City in per capita Covid-19 cases, which is false.

A lot of services weight unit velocity highly in determining product search ranking and other ranking methods that involve pay per click advertising. This creates some incentives to under-price for extended periods of time.

They will inflate the number by just citing their revenue similar to pyramid schemers. You can write a bot that will generate lots of revenue, and any idiot can generate lots of revenue with dropshipping. The trouble is risk and the cost involved in turning a profit from such a business.

I am confident that any 10 year old could sell $100k+ per month online with about a week of training if that was the only requirement and they were allowed to spend $120k. Actually earning significant profits is the difficulty here, and that only gets easier with the standard toolkit of running a successful online retail business: understanding the products, knowing the market, and understanding all the legal hurdles.

This is not actually mainstream dropshipping. Not all dropshipping is from China or international in general because of the unpredictability and latency. It makes more sense to dropship from stable and predictable suppliers for products that you don't have to spend a lot to create demand for. This article could have been written in 2005 and I think a lot of the reason why many of the people mentioned are expats selling to international markets is because ad rates in the US are generally too high to support this kind of business model in the US currently in 2020.

In the US the dropshippers I work with and am very familiar with use mainstream sources with predictable shipping times as do I when I dropship a selection of items very occasionally. The course sellers would generally not be selling courses if they could be scaling their business instead. Dropshipping is not generally a high margin business whereas course selling is. A scaled dropshipping business can make a lot of money but it is not a laid back type of operation really -- it's labor intensive and generally requires some in house automation to make sure that your offers for products match the offers you have from your suppliers.

GRQ dropshipping seems exciting and sexy because you never have to take possession of the inventory and you don't need to put a lot of cash up front if you get paid fast enough. Normal dropshipping is as boring as a wrench or a hammer. Also this article sort of conflates private label dropshipping with dropshipping more generally. They are really quite different things. The typical private labeler takes possession of products here in the US and probably does not dropship the bulk of their stuff just because customer expectations are pretty high for delivery speed and predictability. If you are sourcing from AliExpress or what have you, it's just a lot easier to suck up the unpredictability as the seller and then to sell it to the final buyer with more predictable fulfillment without dropshipping.

Sellers are more profitable and less risky overall because Amazon does not need to buy the inventory and they make a profit off of every interaction with the seller from transaction fees to storage fees to PPC ads and more. Amazon's vendor business sucks and is overall shrinking proportion of marketplace revenue.

They do stuff like this all the time. Large sellers are treated like subhumans that do not deserve attention from an intelligent person at Amazon. You get bots and contractors making very expensive decisions.

>Why would Amazon, in the middle of a pandemic squeeze a business such as ours so hard that we cannot get ANY of our funds for goods sold or to pay our people. I understand risk mitigation, but this is over the top. Please mods, help us!

Amazon considers sellers to be a renewable resource that can be disposed of haphazardly at the whim of an automated system or a low level employee. Note that they also pay for an account rep, covering a significant portion of that rep's fully loaded salary, yet they are still unable to get timely information. You have to understand that even if you are on the larger side, in the top 10% of sellers, that Amazon still considers you expendable.

Paid reps are very helpful but the cost is sort of absurd for what they wind up doing in high pressure suspension situations for nebulous or stupid/incomprehensible reasons.

Unfortunately, they are trying to write to "Amazon legal" which does not exist to field seller problems. Writing to "Amazon legal" is indeed a black hole. The way to force a response is to file for arbitration.

There are masks to buy. The FDA also lifted the import restrictions on KN95, but those would not even necessarily be needed by a warehouse work force. If you can get the freight to the US and you are willing to pay for it, you can buy masks that would be good enough to equip a warehouse workforce.

Other small warehouses I have personal knowledge of have been equipping their workers with masks and gloves daily in addition to hazard pay. It is just lack of attention to the issue that has caused the problem at Amazon. 99 out of 100 times I would support Amazon in any labor dispute. However, in this case, Amazon has not acted intelligently and the demands were very reasonable. The cost of equipping employees is much lower than the cost of more warehouse shutdowns due to illness and the comparison is so ridiculously in favor of "equip the employees" that even the hardest-hearted, self-interested Scrooge of a manager should be able to see the utility in equipping employees appropriately. As other even larger employers like Walmart have moved to make protective equipment available to all employees, Amazon is left looking stupid/evil/self-destructive in its approach here.

They already do this. You will get flagged for unusual activity if it is not already in your history, much like you get flagged by a credit card company for unusual purchasing behavior. While there isn't a formal probationary period various systems do get tripped more easily for new accounts with no history.

Considering the amount of fraudulent reports that already go on with Amazon, this would not be tenable. Remember Amazon Marketplace wants to grow as well. It is also important for big brands to have the ability to create lots of new listings at scale. For example, every year or every fashion season, brands release entire slates of new products. It is important for Amazon to function to allow sellers and agents of brands to be able to create lots of new listings at once. Manual review would greatly delay that process and create a lot of unnecessary frustrations.

A lot of things that one might think of such as "well, whitelist the big brands" or "use enhanced reviews on sensitive, regulated categories" is already built in to Amazon's policies, protocols, and automated systems.

If you want a zero fault option, buy direct from brands. I often do that myself.

You can create hundreds of thousands of listings almost instantly through the API or by uploading a spreadsheet to Amazon. It's not possible for manual review for all of them because of this. That is why they lean so heavily on both automation and armies of cheap contractors.

There are a lot of hospitals directing employees to sew them by hand.

There is a simple and reliably repeatable method: having a factory. Not sure what is needed but there are lots of suppliers on Alibaba for this type of item. There are lots of rumors about export controls in China, denials of the same from Chinese officials, and rumors of seizure by US customs.

Never imported medical stuff but anecdotally many US sellers are being solicited by Chinese factories looking to sell masks and other PPE into the US.

There are regulatory and IP issues to consider as well. Redundancy is not necessarily as straightforward as it seems.

Kicking off any sellers for the specific products in the catalog not using Transparency, providing assurances to buyers that the products are authentic. Making money for Amazon because they charge a fee for every unit.

https://brandservices.amazon.com/transparency

(Not employed by Amazon, but work with many Amazon sellers, am an Amazon seller)

Amazon has a program for this called Transparency. It has some other purposes but this is one of the features of it. It's not a perfect way to track the chain but it is vaguely like what you propose.

That's rather how a lot of Amazon reviewers are. Vine-rs are also now the only group of reviewers that can officially review products for free. Naturally when you are getting something for free, it's hard to really take value into account. A lot of 2-star $100 products might be "5-star" if you pay $0. That's something Amazon recognizes in its own policies towards normie non-Vine reviewers.

I don't think most people who aren't Vine reviewers are happy with how it works ('cause they get free stuff). I have seen Vine reviewers leave bad reviews, and I know because I've been yelled at over it.

Sure. The tricky thing about this is that there isn't much stopping anyone from starting a US shell or paying an associate to do it and then logging in to the account from anywhere. There are plenty of super functional countries that disobey court orders.

China for example does have a functioning court system. Like many countries, they don't cooperate with US court orders as a matter of sovereignty. Not even when Nike is trying to collect a couple billion dollars from counterfeiters: https://www.thefashionlaw.com/home/in-18-billion-case-over-c...

As you note though it's actually an important distinction about the retailer, because the retailer carries most of the product liability. Amazon makes people fill in a check box stating that they have liability insurance once the seller gets to a certain size, but they do not really check this at least to my knowledge. I encounter a lot of people who should have liability insurance, certified to Amazon that they did, but do not. There's not much wrong with a seller located in a country that cooperates with the US selling into the US because they can be held liable for any bad stuff that they do. They at least have a stake and can be held accountable. Not so when they are retailing from a safe haven.

They do, but it's not a job nor is it compensated except by delivery of the products. It's called the Amazon Vine program. There is also something called the Early Reviewer Program which is different. Sellers opt in to the ERP for new products. People who participate in the reviews sometimes get a tiny incentive from Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/vine/help https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

One way in which Amazon has restricted this type of gaming is by restricting the ability of sellers to apply extreme discounting. Even legitimate attempts to do this such as liquidation can result in a warning from Amazon about rank/review manipulation.

However, real crooks just compensate verified buyers by paying them via Paypal, Payoneer, etc. You can't protect against that except through court order or by private sting investigation. Amazon does sue organizers of these schemes and has untangled some in that way, but that is challenging to scale.

They do very frequently ask sellers to provide supplier documents. Amazon does very frequently do their own independent investigations into suppliers. There are probably hundreds if not thousands of Amazon employees and contractors requesting supplier documents and following up with investigations all day every day.

However, Amazon also permits sellers to operate from countries that ignore US court orders. It is also possible to run 100s or even 1000s of Amazon seller accounts at the same time in contravention of Amazon's rules on this. It is also possible through fictitious entities for citizens of countries under US sanctions to operate Amazon businesses.

There is no way to enforce a judgment beyond grabbing any US based assets. You cannot, for example, extradite, prosecute, and imprison a Chinese citizen for poisoning US kids by selling Tas-T-Lead counterfeit Pbikachus.

This general type of problem is just more acute with Amazon and other ecommerce platforms than it is for other things like web media. If a Belorussian bot network embezzles $2 million from a US ad network, no one dies. When you sell dangerous physical products, people can and do die. Problems of addressing hackers and the like who are hiding in judgment-and-extradition-proof countries become more obvious and serious in the eyes of the public when the harms go beyond just businesses suffering abstract financial harms.

They didn't really need the investment to plant the spies. He just applied for a job and got it. Any foreign spy can do the same and nothing will change.

Why would a serious government not walk through the open door and take what they needed while their agents collect two salaries? It's just a win-win for foreign intelligence. They would be negligent in their duties to NOT infiltrate US companies with open doors and permissive, trusting internal policies about user data.

Then the company can do the liability minimization dance when the FBI comes and points out that they are running a cheap data service for foreign spies. "We, uh, had no idea..."

You can delegate your concern to a political party, which is essentially all you are able to do as a citizen in a country like the US particularly if you live in a state that does not have a lot of referenda.

If you want to learn more you can spend more time on researching the issues. Otherwise you could vote on a single issue, or just pick the party that is supposed to represent people like you with a similar hierarchy of values.

The US also doesn't have mandatory voting, so declining to vote just signals that you have delegated concern over civic issues to other people who are willing to make that (sometimes significant) sacrifice of time, energy, and money.

95th percentile of the Overwatch ladder is also not the same thing as 95th percentile of competitive tournament players. This entire article is just full of category fallacies to try to support a vague subjective assertion.

Gaming ladders with automated ELO systems are also not run like tournament ELO systems in more controlled environments like competitive chess. Games like Overwatch, WoW, Starcraft, Hearthstone, etc. will not dynamically update when the player is inactive in order to not discourage players. You have to lose games to lose your ELO category rank, although obviously you can go up and down the leaderboard without playing games. There are some gaming rank systems like CSGO that have some rank decay for inactivity but it is just at a flat rate.

So, "95th percentile" in these systems is not actually indicative of that unless it is based on the precise rank on the leaderboard. In many of these seasonal games rank inflation happens towards the end of the season because of this lack of passive decay. It means that at the beginning of the season, the top rank is very competitive, but as people become less active as the season goes on, it becomes easier to attain rank.

In a lot of domains, if you are 95th percentile, you are extremely competitive. You may be noncompetitive with the 99%ile cohort and the bottom of the 99%ile may be noncompetitive with the 0.1%ile, but to argue that that's not "very good" is just goofy perfectionism. The fact that the author is using goofy noncontrolled systems as an example to support his weakly-defined subjective argument only undermines his own case.