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The Prime Reasons to Avoid Amazon

Technology
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  • It's time to admit that any of the commentators here would dream of being at the helm of Amazon, but simply aren't talented enough to build such an empire.

    I accepted a position at Amazon as a finance director for one of their many divisions, and it was hands down the most toxic work environment I have ever experienced-- and I've worked in public accounting for other a decade, so that's saying something.

    I resigned within a couple weeks and found myself a much better job elsewhere.

  • If I lived in a city where there are lots of different retailers that carry varieties of products then maybe I wouldn’t use Amazon. But when you live in a more rural area where the selection is limited and you like better stuff, there’s really not many other options.

    It also seems like a very one sided criticism of Amazon. No corporation is good, and Amazon might very well be evil™️ but not everything about it is negative. It has also brought thousands of jobs to rural or semi rural areas that pay better than anything else in the area. They increase access to products that people like me wouldn’t be able to access otherwise. And they are actively trying to disrupt the healthcare industry by lowering prices and giving greater access to healthcare to people who are far from cities.

    I also suspect that these descriptions of working conditions at Amazon centers seem to be cherry picked and might be attributed more to bad managers than company policy, because I’ve met people who work at Amazon warehouses and they don’t complain about this kind of stuff at all. In fact they seem to generally like their jobs.

    they bought Wholefoods a while ago, but the pay and benefits, if your part/full time is generally better than WF. still its a in-between job jobs though, and they arnt really a stickler when using your PTO/UPT like WF.

  • I accepted a position at Amazon as a finance director for one of their many divisions, and it was hands down the most toxic work environment I have ever experienced-- and I've worked in public accounting for other a decade, so that's saying something.

    I resigned within a couple weeks and found myself a much better job elsewhere.

    This matches every account I've heard from friends in Seattle that have worked for the HQ.

  • It's time to admit that any of the commentators here would dream of being at the helm of Amazon, but simply aren't talented enough to build such an empire.

    if you ever been a manager, admin or even a developer, you wouldnt be saying that. they are worked to being burnt out comparatively to other tech companies.

  • Amazon’s now-legendary “Prime Day” is July 8-11. Much like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, this means sales on lots of items on Amazon’s vast marketplace, and as such many people flock to the giant’s website to get sweet deals on everything from computers to small kitchen appliances and more. While many of us are feeling the financial crunch more than ever, I urge you, dear reader, to resist the allure. I don’t typically have strong opinions about where people chose to shop or how they decide to spend their heard-earned money, but in this post I hope to lay out a convincing case for why Amazon is full-stop evil, no caveats, and is undeserving of your money on a moral and ethical level no matter what your values are. Amazon needs to be stopped, and legislation will not do so. Only its loyal consumers – who keep the beast alive – can do that by taking their money elsewhere. No matter your political or personal beliefs, I'm certain Amazon violates them in one way or another, and you should vote with your dollar by buying from other places whenever possible. Here’s why.

    Not a fan of Amazon in any way shape or form, but for some purchases here in the UK they are simply miles ahead of other firms. Latest purchase by me, though not paid for by me is 2 x batteries for my wifes mobility scooter. 20% cheaper than anywhere else, took 1 week to arrive (not bad, not the best) but was so easy to order without all the hassle other solutions involve. We have a prime account still as there is some streaming stuff we also like to watch. Still (just) more pros than cons

  • I accepted a position at Amazon as a finance director for one of their many divisions, and it was hands down the most toxic work environment I have ever experienced-- and I've worked in public accounting for other a decade, so that's saying something.

    I resigned within a couple weeks and found myself a much better job elsewhere.

    Not your business, so you're getting annoyed, which means the problem is with you...

  • Not a fan of Amazon in any way shape or form, but for some purchases here in the UK they are simply miles ahead of other firms. Latest purchase by me, though not paid for by me is 2 x batteries for my wifes mobility scooter. 20% cheaper than anywhere else, took 1 week to arrive (not bad, not the best) but was so easy to order without all the hassle other solutions involve. We have a prime account still as there is some streaming stuff we also like to watch. Still (just) more pros than cons

    True. I ordered a book from them last week; it arrived in 2 days. Everywhere else, including Waterstones, was "oh we might be able to get it out the door sometime next year, if we can be arsed" so Amazon got the order.

  • Amazon’s now-legendary “Prime Day” is July 8-11. Much like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, this means sales on lots of items on Amazon’s vast marketplace, and as such many people flock to the giant’s website to get sweet deals on everything from computers to small kitchen appliances and more. While many of us are feeling the financial crunch more than ever, I urge you, dear reader, to resist the allure. I don’t typically have strong opinions about where people chose to shop or how they decide to spend their heard-earned money, but in this post I hope to lay out a convincing case for why Amazon is full-stop evil, no caveats, and is undeserving of your money on a moral and ethical level no matter what your values are. Amazon needs to be stopped, and legislation will not do so. Only its loyal consumers – who keep the beast alive – can do that by taking their money elsewhere. No matter your political or personal beliefs, I'm certain Amazon violates them in one way or another, and you should vote with your dollar by buying from other places whenever possible. Here’s why.

    The only reason you need - it's a monopoly. Fuck its all.

    And I also hate with passion that 5 years ago you'd need AWS in your CV.

  • It's time to admit that any of the commentators here would dream of being at the helm of Amazon, but simply aren't talented enough to build such an empire.

    I would dream of coming up with a solution to existence of such monopolies, which is not exactly the same.

    In any case, no. I suppose you are simply incapable of understanding it, but no, not everyone wants to be the biggest turd in the room. There are people who want there to not be turds in human habitats outside of intended compartments and environments.

  • I try to use local stores or other websites, and only use Amazon if I can't find what I need there. But at least half the time I end up having to use Amazon because I can't find what I need.

    It's probably a kind of vicious cycle: as Amazon eats further into profits of other companies they are more limited in what they can offer.

    Know the struggle, just keep trying local stores or other sites first, maybe we can be a small part of change for the better 😉

  • Amazon’s now-legendary “Prime Day” is July 8-11. Much like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, this means sales on lots of items on Amazon’s vast marketplace, and as such many people flock to the giant’s website to get sweet deals on everything from computers to small kitchen appliances and more. While many of us are feeling the financial crunch more than ever, I urge you, dear reader, to resist the allure. I don’t typically have strong opinions about where people chose to shop or how they decide to spend their heard-earned money, but in this post I hope to lay out a convincing case for why Amazon is full-stop evil, no caveats, and is undeserving of your money on a moral and ethical level no matter what your values are. Amazon needs to be stopped, and legislation will not do so. Only its loyal consumers – who keep the beast alive – can do that by taking their money elsewhere. No matter your political or personal beliefs, I'm certain Amazon violates them in one way or another, and you should vote with your dollar by buying from other places whenever possible. Here’s why.

    ITT: "I agree they're systematically fucking us over (and don't get me started on their horrible politics!) but will continue to enable them because it's convenient and saves me a few bucks" this defense doesn't make you look reasonable it makes you look like a clown

  • Thanks to my country here is no amazon

    As someone from Russia, we have Ozon and Wildberries and Yandex and Mail.ru, neither of which exists in all business niches of Amazon, but in the overlapping ones seem close.

    It's not that they are really bad, but I don't like monopolies.

    I think for all of these - marketplaces with delivery, social networks, cloud hosting, - there has to emerge some standard, some global system. Similar to the Internet or maybe to the postal service. Something has to be done, because these unfortunately work in a way encouraging monopoly.

    Even when I was almost unconditionally ancap, infrastructure was a special case (and it still is for most ancaps, theoretically unconditional private property applies to hypothetical things fully created by a person, and for territory, infrastructure, discovered ideas it's closer to the other extreme). These things are infrastructure.

    In the Internet one person can host their stuff on one hosting, another on another, and their email on different providers, but they'll be able to interact. A buyer on Ozon and a seller on Amazon are not.

    That's because email and web hosting require only the Internet the functioning system to exist. A social network requires more (if we want it to be interoperable and global),

    I think the missing part to make such a standard is automated payments in the Internet. The platforms' inner management of resources is hidden from us, but for a global system computing and storage resources are necessary, and they are neither provided by governments nor pooled by enthusiasts, it's impractical to rely on pure altruism for such. And to have a global system with monetary encouragement of providing infrastructure means that we need payment for resources as simple and general as how we pay for landline or Internet service. ISP's no longer provide shell accounts and web hosting, but even when they did, this wasn't quite the thing.

    The platforms emerged because it's bothersome to pay for infrastructure and maintain it, there's not even a straightforward way. You need a humongous service with plenty of computing, someone should pay for it.

    So - there was Usenet at some point solving a lot of the similar problems, except, of course, a news server would store lots and lots of stuff for each hierarchy. But that wasn't reimagined for the new things we do in the Internet.

    For twiddling and various kinds of power abuse to be impossible they should be technically impossible in the system. So:

    1. Various functions of platforms should be decomposed into different pooled untrusted services (to pool anything you have to design for untrusted) in the Internet. Pooling can be done the way similar to bittorrent trackers - a service comes online, announces itself and repeats that regularly. A client needing a service requests a few trackers and picks a few services from the results. Services might be, say, storage (anything, like FTP servers even), computation (submit bytecode, receive result, or something like that), indexing (a search engine, returning results in standard machine-processable format), notification (like NOSTR relays). Maybe trade for resources can be a separate type of service. And user identity caching.

    2. It should be possible to provide a paid service and pay for that service, easily enough, like MMORPG scripted marketplaces - a setting like "buy no more than 2G of storage, by price no more than N per K, stop if remaining money less than K". Or same for selling on a service you host.

    3. The history of platforms in the last 20 years shows us that the Internet is for the machines. The user representation should be in a local application, and the logic combining those non-application-specific services should work on the client machine. Say, aggregating results of a few indexing services, or aggregating trade offerings from a few trade services, or online users from among friends from a few notification services.

    Shit, I wrote this again.

  • Their business model has been to undercut and extinguish their competition for as long as they’ve been around. The ‘good’ you talk about is about controlling the market and leaving you with no choice as they’ve already largely done with your ‘nicer stuff’. Workers will be shit-canned without a second thought if they realize their ai/robot dreams. Drugs will become more expensive again once they capture the market.

    The world depends on everyone voting with their wallets despite the inconvenience. You don’t have to be perfect, just make some changes. Pay more and support your small local businesses whenever possible.

    the buisnesses near me will never sell rp-sma to mhf 1 cables as there is approximately no demand for them. Not everyone lives in mega cities with dozens of stores selling the same products.

  • Not your business, so you're getting annoyed, which means the problem is with you...

    If a company's culture causes a high turnover rate, that is a company problem.

  • It's time to admit that any of the commentators here would dream of being at the helm of Amazon, but simply aren't talented enough to build such an empire.

    I'd argue most people just aren't parasitic enough to willingly exploit both their sellers, workers and customers in the scale of how Amazon did and still does.

  • Owned by Amazon, FYI.

    Oh no way

  • It's time to admit that any of the commentators here would dream of being at the helm of Amazon, but simply aren't talented enough to build such an empire.

    Projection is a hell of a drug, dude...

  • Their business model has been to undercut and extinguish their competition for as long as they’ve been around. The ‘good’ you talk about is about controlling the market and leaving you with no choice as they’ve already largely done with your ‘nicer stuff’. Workers will be shit-canned without a second thought if they realize their ai/robot dreams. Drugs will become more expensive again once they capture the market.

    The world depends on everyone voting with their wallets despite the inconvenience. You don’t have to be perfect, just make some changes. Pay more and support your small local businesses whenever possible.

    Also, what "nicer stuff"? It's practically impossible to find anything on Amazon anymore that isn't cheap, disposable garbage. Amazon sellers have been in a race to the bottom to deliver the lowest price for more than a decade, and the result is that everything on Amazon is crap.

  • ITT: "I agree they're systematically fucking us over (and don't get me started on their horrible politics!) but will continue to enable them because it's convenient and saves me a few bucks" this defense doesn't make you look reasonable it makes you look like a clown

    The thing is, it doesn't save money to shop there, either. 90% of what you see is Amazon Marketplace, where you're just paying people to dropship you trash from Aliexpress

  • This matches every account I've heard from friends in Seattle that have worked for the HQ.

    Precisely where I was.

    I was the third finance director for that division in two years, which is a terrible sign.

    When interviewing, always ask about those who last filled the position and for how long.

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    AI just gives executives an excuse to layoff their staff without spooking their investors.
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    That means they'll know I'm a citizen, right? RIGHT? Spoilers: "All you Asians look the same, you must be this person" shows a picture of a conpletely unrelated person -ICE Agent said to me, an Asian American US Citizen (Well this didn't happen yet, but I can imagine this happening like... soon.)
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    jacksonlamb@lemmy.worldJ
    bizarre, dismal What's bizarre and dismal is that someone is so starved for dopamine and attention from corporations that this is how they perceive what life looks like when you are not being targetted. This is my normal view and it is far better.
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    Niemand hat geantwortet
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    They're like "Wahhh we need to hit 3.5% and then the fascist dictator will totally resign!" and then Trump is like "Oooo my delicate little feefees, oh well, here comes my Gestapo!" while the 50501 protest marshalls chant "We did it! We don't need crushing violence to make a change!" while completely ignoring that the NKD protests accomplished literally nothing.
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    smartmanapps@programming.devS
    At least that’s not how I’ve been taught in school If you had a bad teacher that doesn't mean everyone else had a bad teacher. You’re not teaching kids how to prove the quadratic formula, do you? We teach them how to do proofs, including several specific ones. No, you teach them how to use it instead. We teach them how to use everything, and how to do proofs as well. Your whole argument is just one big strawman. Again, with the order of operations Happens to be the topic of the post. It’s not a thing Yes it is! I’ve given you two examples that don’t follow any So you could not do the brackets first and still get the right answer? Nope! 2×2×(2-2)/2=0 2×2×2-2/2=7 That’s kinda random, but sure? Not random at all, given you were talking about students understanding how Maths works. 2+3×4 then it’s not an order of operation that plays the role here Yes it is! If I have 1 2-litre bottle of milk, and 4 3-litre bottles of milk, there's only 1 correct answer for how many litres of milk of have, and it ain't 20! Even elementary school kids know how to work it out just by counting up. They all derive from each other No they don't. The proof of order of operations has got nothing to do with any of the properties you mentioned. For example, commutation is used to prove identity And neither is used to prove the order of operations. 2 operators, no order followed Again with a cherry-picked example that only includes operators of the same precedence. You have no property that would allow for (2+3)×4 to be equal 2+3×4 And yet we have a proof of why 14 is the only correct answer to 2+3x4, why you have to do the multiplication first. Is that not correct? Of course it is. So what? It literally has subtraction and distribution No it didn't. It had Brackets (with subtraction inside) and Multiplication and Division. I thought you taught math, no? Yep, and I just pointed out that what you just said is wrong. 2-2(1+2) has Subtraction and Distribution. 2-2 is 2 being, hear me out, subtracted from 2 Which was done first because you had it inside Brackets, therefore not done in the Subtraction step in order of operations, but the Brackets step. Also, can you explain how is that cherry-picking? You already know - you know which operations to pick to make it look like there's no such thing as order of operations. If I tell you to look up at the sky at midnight and say "look - there's no such thing as the sun", that doesn't mean there's no such thing as the sun.
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    You don’t understand. The tracking and spying is the entire point of the maneuver. The ‘children are accessing porn’ thing is just a Trojan horse to justify the spying. I understand what are you saying, I simply don't consider to check if a law is applied as a Trojan horse in itself. I would agree if the EU had said to these sites "give us all the the access log, a list of your subscriber, every data you gather and a list of every IP it ever connected to your site", and even this way does not imply that with only the IP you could know who the user is without even asking the telecom company for help. So, is it a Trojan horse ? Maybe, it heavily depend on how the EU want to do it. If they just ask "show me how you try to avoid that a minor access your material", which normally is the fist step, I don't see how it could be a Trojan horse. It could become, I agree on that. As you pointed out, it’s already illegal for them to access it, and parents are legally required to prevent their children from accessing it. No, parents are not legally required to prevent it. The seller (or provider) is legally required. It is a subtle but important difference. But you don’t lock down the entire population, or institute pre-crime surveillance policies, just because some parents are not going to follow the law. True. You simply impose laws that make mandatories for the provider to check if he can sell/serve something to someone. I mean asking that the cashier of mall check if I am an adult when I buy a bottle of wine is no different than asking to Pornhub to check if the viewer is an adult. I agree that in one case is really simple and in the other is really hard (and it is becoming harder by the day). You then charge the guilty parents after the offense. Ok, it would work, but then how do you caught the offendind parents if not checking what everyone do ? Is it not simpler to try to prevent it instead ?
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    No, just laminated ones. Closed at one end. Easy enough to make or buy. You can even improvise the propellant.