Count to five in your head before answering any good questions.

They get trained to get you to misspeak, and they ask you questions that if you answer them like a normal human you give up rights...

Duh, they have to destroy it to be indemnified.

Fifth amendment compensation doesn't happen cause the courts are corrupt. No blame no problem.

37.8 seems low, I suspect the "shipped goods" percentage is higher.

The measure of these services shouldn't be if you can sell a new product and make money.

It should be that you can sell a cheaper, better version of an Amazon basics product and overtake it.

If there is literally no way to do that... Amazon is clearly a market manipulator.

It's going to come out that Amazon calls the manufacturers for their basics goods, sends them the leading competing item and has them make it with slightly less expensive components to undercut the cost of the competitor.

It's so blatantly obvious if you've ever done a side by side in things like lamps, backpacks etc and other super simple designs.

Walmart has been doing that for decades. And they probably were not the first. It is not a novel strategy.

And Walmart has been repeatedly sued for doing it, just like Amazon is being sued now.

My biggest issue with the way Wal-Mart (and most other retail) did it is that it was... scammy.

Want an HDMI cable? Here's an overpriced Monster cable. Oh, don't want to pay absurdly high prices? Save money by buying one that is only 300% more than it should be instead of 400%!

The nice thing about Amazon was that it broke this model. Suddenly you could buy Anker or (insert small third party here) at very reasonable prices.

Amazon destroying those competitors is doing some damage to this, though.

> It's going to come out that Amazon calls the manufacturers for their basics goods, sends them the leading competing item and has them make it with slightly less expensive components to undercut the cost of the competitor.

They won't need to even call. Most FBA product listing inventory can be received directly from the factory (so Amazon knows exactly where it's made) and they can just go to the factory and offer to do 10x the volume for the exact same item (at a much higher discount).

Truth, the primary impact was the ability to arbitrarily inflate the cost of soft goods dramatically inside the terminal.

It's such a good racket Hudson News...a little news stand company inside a few dozen terminals was able to go public on the NYSE...

The public perception that security is "doing it's job" is non-existent since everyone knows it's at best a jobs program and in practice another group of people measurably stealing travellers things.

Hudson News is a brand for its Swiss parent company, Dufry.

Dufry existed prior to the invention of the airplane…

Haas is still selling parts to Russia for their CNC mills even though they're sanctioned. They do it by selling to a Chinese middleman.

NSO Group probably uses an Indian intermediary (my first guess) and does the same thing.

What makes you think they care? They don't sell their spyware to anyone who might use it against Russian officials, which tells you a lot.

No, they are not selling their software specifically to the Ukraine and Baltic states. They do sell it for UK, for example. UK spies definitely actively working against Russia.

By the way, Pegasus doesn't work against US phone numbers.

Social media removed the corrective elements of previous mechanisms. There's no longer a "trusted party" who helps you when you're in the wrong, there are "enemies" who "dunk on you."

The purpose of broadcasting isn't the same as conversation. People want the result of a positive interaction, but they do that by chasing hundreds of negative ones.

The negative interactions are actually better for the platform as they are (in some studies) almost 10x as effective at driving engagement. So the companies looking for "the most engaging" communities, drive more negative interactions.

The people looking for the most clicks, chase the "dunking" and "counter dunking" interactions, and it becomes at best 90% of the platform, at in reality like 99% of what you see while you're doom scrolling.

Social media is awful, and draws out our worst impulses as a business model.

Agreed. Take something as simple as a "quote tweet".

The physical analogy is that you're listening to somebody, then turn around to speak to a group of "friends" about it whilst the other person can hear you do it. And you'd likely misrepresent what was said and receive an applause for it.

It's a deeply anti-social behavior that in the real world would make you wake up in a hospital pretty soon.

Or how about a retweet of a hot take? Imagine going all over town and plastering walls with a low effort opinion.

Or how about digging into somebody's past to find something offensive from a decade ago? What would the physical analogy look like? Following somebody for 10 years, taking notes, making pictures, interviewing your friends and family? Which would amount to what normally would be a deep criminal investigation, yet here we do it just for kicks?

Social media has normalized deeply anti-social behavior and the consequences are severe.

He was childlike in his pranksterism. He never seemed to lose his wonder or his ability to make you feel like a jackass.

The man who could whistle the nuclear codes has passed away. And now maybe I can strike the social engineering village before the sun comes up.

So it's funny, when they first started rolling these out folks were interested, intrigued even. Folks walking would give them deference, mostly not run in front of them if they saw them, very unlike how they treat regular drivers. But now folks are getting sick of them.

So they were modeling all their behavior and driving around cooperative pedestrians and cars (mostly) now they have to model for an adversarial public.

Good fucking luck.

They are MUCH more aggressive now. It used to be that if you saw one, you could be 99% sure it would stop and wait for the path to be fully clear. Now, they will buzz right by you within a foot or two. Very alarming how quickly they progressed to being careless.

Google will optimize minimizing deaths/accidents vs maximizing trips/revenue. So it seems that buzzing closer to people is optimal for Google.

That's the "AI Alignment" problem we've heard so much about recently.

The AI alignment problem for a decade used to be that AGI doesn't end humanity as a side effect. Now that the mainstream has caught on, it's been diluted.

Ha we don't even have "alignment" among humans. In the Kantian style of "humans are an end in themselves, not a means toward the ends of others" kind of way.

Again, that's a much more subtle version of alignment than what the term originally was used for. It used to refer to things like the paper clip maximizer and the strawberry problem which are much worse and fundamental.

Do you have anything beyond anecdotal evidence to support this?

Would be easier to change the paint job. Just disguise them as regular taxis.