We really need a functioning IRS, FTC and SEC. Just won't happen if repugs are constantly elected.
No, what we really need is to end capitalism, not pin our hopes on one team or another when both exist to uphold the very system enabling this bullshit (hint: their agencies are never going to work for you).
Man, fuck taking any step in the right direction eh? Let's just hope for the entire world to change instead of hoping for a reasonable change that is a big step in the right direction.
"Can't have anything if it isn't perfect"
Ah, yes, incremental change and playing within the rules set by our oppressors, that's worked so well ..checks notes... never.
Lulling the population in to a false sense of security, but more importantly - comfort, is exactly how you not only maintain the status quo, but how you enable fascism.
But sure, to those who are privileged enough not to already be personally impacted, I'm sure voting for team blue feels like a real win.. š
Union wins weren't incremential change for the betterment of worker conditions...?
You really should check the dates on all those achievements... They weren't granted from the beginning of even the young US, nor all at once.
It is ironically your gatekeeping of "progress" that holds back the gains you want to see because of your contempt at the only path proven effective. Sad.
Socialism isn't a switch we flip. We cannot magic away the current systems of power. Like it or not, most people are too dumb, self centered, or just plain busy to consciously change the systems they deal with. It CANNOT be done by telling everyone the world has to be radically different.
Does it have to be radically different to be equitable? Yes. Is that one of the next 20 stops on the way to an equitable society? NO! You cannot jump to the peak of a mountain simply because you can see it on a clear day.
Pretending the previous power structure has magically evaporated simply because you've pulled a revolution is EXACTLY how every socialist movement gets turned in to fascism. Stop feeding that ignorant mindset that we do not have to deal with existing power structures and powerful. We ALWAYS have to deal with existing power structures. Completely. Even literally killing off the old to avoid their toxic influence creates a new power structure with capital punishment powers that not everyone will remotely agree with.
Again, your ignorance to how the real world works is alarming. Fix your perspective or continue to hinder progress. The choice is yours.
"We can't have a revolution against capitalism until after we address all the symptoms of capitalism individually!"
Somebody deeply invested in solving problems and certainly not a beneficiary of this corrupt and broken system
No need to strawman; you already made a good point in the first half of your comment.
No I promise whoever says that definitely fits my description of them. It's not a strawman, it just looks like one because you assume I'm pretending to quote somebody I'm not.
Not necessarilly. They could very easilly be a victim of propaganda; they don't have to be a benefactor of capitalism in order to believe in incrementalism (which keeps capitalism as the main economic force).
Neoliberalism drilled deep into American consciousness a while ago.
Temporarily embarassed millionaires aren't your enemy unless they choose to believe AFTER they consciously observe how fucked up the mindset is.
Before that, they could easily just be ignorant. It's not like US schools teach how fucked up and skewed it all is. They just say, "yep, this is how it works, and that's how it works and why is the history of the stock market and yep we have it now!".
They are presented it as if it's not bad, so unless people get burned, they don't think about it. "Well I'm not that bad off and I'm not that special (despite having the embarassed millionairre's mindset) so everyone else must only be whining."
You are feeding the exact same ignorance from the other side. Stop it.
wait, I thought that it was covid and supply chains and such and actually that the profit motive encourages them to lower prices because competition and so on
You're forgetting one thing, Amazon has no real competition. Do you have a cloud service that makes you profit hand over fist so that you can dump that money into a loss leader service like amazon delivery?
No?
Well then they're going to undercut you to the point of zero profit margin to suffocate your business.
eBay all the way, boys and girls.
Whatās even wilder is that Amazon made no profit for the first 20 years of its existence, something the Feds claim makes Amazon even more dangerous as they spent considerable time building their network and have now turned on full money making mode.
That was just creative accounting so they wouldn't have to pay tax.
Oh... this huge pile of revenue? That's not profit. We're reinvesting it into logistics and executive salaries. We lost money this year. -Amazon
Do you mean Amazon the website? Surely they were making money somehowā¦
It means for the first 20 years they spent all of their profit on expansion / R&D
I'm surprised that there are still people who are surprised about this price hiking algorithm. Have you never seen weirdly fluctuating proves on Amazon before?!
Iāve seen the price go up just by putting it in the basket.
They claimed they stopped using this system a few years agoā¦ pretty sure thatās a technicality where theyāre using a successor.
One of the most annoying things for me is how prices fluctuate on items that canāt possibly have that much fluctuation. The following were all sold and fulfilled by Amazon directly. These bandages I useā¦ one week $8, then $13 next time I look, then $10, then $6. Hot sauce: one time $12, then $15, then $20, then $16. Biscuit mix: one time $24, then $45, then $36. Itās all very opaque. I just want one price.
Why are you buying bandages, hot sauce and biscuits on Amazon?
Unless you live in a suburb hell without safe transportation means, please stop giving them your money.
I live in a country where Amazon cannot deliver and Iām in love because of that. Thanks complicated customs laws that keep Amazon out <3
Without Amazon I would be fucked, my local shops are very expensive and most of the time they don't have what I need, I gave up trying to find something in shops altogether.
For example, the other day I needed a network switch and I went to the local shops, the cheapest I could find was 40ā¬, went on Amazon and bought one for 18ā¬ with free shipping, Amazon and Prime made my life here so much better.
Because these products are not available locally. I have to buy GF biscuit mix because I have Celiac disease. The hydrocolloid bandages are for blood glucose sensors as I have type 1 diabetes and a severe reaction to the sensor adhesive. I'm not a fan of Amazon.
"Biscuit mix"? Like flour? You can just buy flours without gluten and easily make your own. You're already doing most of the work anyway.
No, it's specifically this GF Red Lobster biscuit mix and having had Celiac diagnosed for 7 years, I am pretty aware of gluten free flours. Of course I could also make it from scratch.
So you can get 5c and the lawyers get 95c for each dollar?
No.
Because I don't trust the FTC fines to be enough to discourage Jeff's actions.
An expensive class action would help hold him accountable.
Plus, he got rid of the mandatory arbitration agreement. So Amazon is open to a class action on this as far as I know.
Jeff Bezos isn't even the CEO of Amazon anymore.
Still the largest shareholder
That's kind of moving the goal posts. The shareholders definitely put pressure on the CEO and leadership of a company. And I think they should be held responsible in some cases for the fallout of badly enacted anti-consumer policies. On the other hand though, the CEO is the leadership who is held responsible for enacting policy.
Honestly better than amazon having it
It's probably something they already budget for. I would argue for lawyers fees being capped and the fines being 5x the value of the damage done.
I remember an article ages ago that showed that Amazon, undoubtedly a monopoly, was on the right side of the law because of the "consumer welfare standard".
This was back when they were in growth mode and still unprofitable, but it seems obvious with this and their now record profits that they no longer pass that test. Time to break it up.
That's exactly why I don't understand people defending Steam just because right now they are only using their monopoly against the developers but not against the users. One day that will change and move will have seen it coming.
Same with Google abusing YouTube creators for years but only now when they start pushing against adblock people look for alternatives.
Too many people are just lazy and complicit
Valve isn't publicly traded company, so Gaben is a BDFL.
Who knows what happens after him. But sure, if there is any other game provider with comparable service, nobody will complain.
It's just there aren't any
You're completely right. People suck steams dick are ridiculously hypocritical and blond.
I was mocked for defending Epic trying to compete withs steam.
They're doing great work for Devs and gamers. But sadly, blind gamers (who claim they hate monopolys) aren't self aware enough to see the trees through the forest.
You're right. It's good they're competing. But to say they're doing a good job for gamers?
The thing is horrible (atm) :
Achievments (if even there) are meaningless, you can't even check them. You unlock one and then it vanishes. "my achievos"-page remains empty
no rating-system, No discussions, no guides, no workshop, no nothing
the friends-feature doesn't even work.
shop-browsing is annoying af. No tabs.
you'll get constant questions about a game (if played long enough) but won't see any score/results. You just offer free data.
I hate steam's monopoly. Truly. But at least they're offering a solid framework.
Epic, just like gog galaxy, had an initially cool start and then... Nothing. All the years and they're still as horrible as bad then. No effort. I can understand gog, but not epic.
Windows would still be the only viable option for most PC gamers if not for the investment Valve has made in proton/wine. You can say it's self-serving (steamdeck) and you would likely be right. But we have two (three if you count standard Linux desktops as distinct from steamdeck) viable PC gaming platforms thanks specifically to Valve.
I'm sure the fact that that happened at the same time as Microsoft pushing their Game-Pass and their own Store is just by chance...
don't kid yourself and think that they did that just for the benefit of the users and not to be able to get games and users away from Microsoft if that's necessary...
The whole point of the conversation is that the other platforms arent doing any work for the consumer.
To this day, epic doesnt even launch on linux officially, and requires a 3rd party launcher to even play its games. Epics first party games are on the list of games that dont work on linux.
There's clearly one company who puts more effort onto the consumer front than the other. Epic doesnt even need to make a custom OS like valve does, it just needs to get their own launcher working, and their own games working, which they dont and refuse to.
To say that Epic is doing better for the consumer is disingenuous (however it does better for the developer though)
It's as if you didn't read what I wrote.
You can say it's self-serving (steamdeck) and you would likely be right.
Doesn't matter whose benefit it was for. It's here now. I can use proton without Steam if I want to. If Valve goes full satan tomorrow, they still enabled viable PC gaming platforms where before there were none, and someone else can take the source and run with it.
Lots of us refused to run Windows just for games even before the MS store. We made do with what we could get. Now we (mostly) don't have to. Plus, people who were staying with Win solely due to gaming have a better chance of being able to ditch MS. Given where MS is headed in recent years, that's a win for personal freedom.
Does this mean there will be another penis shaped rocket? š
Well I didnāt think that they LOST money using it!!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
WASHINGTON, Nov 2 (Reuters) - Amazon.com (AMZN.O) used a series of illegal strategies to boost profits at its online retail empire, including an algorithm that pushed up prices U.S. households paid by more than $1 billion, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission detailed in a new court filing on Thursday.
... Amazon used Project Nessie to extract more than a billion dollars directly from Americans' pocketbooks," the FTC said.
Amazon spokesperson Tim Doyle said the FTC "grossly mischaracterizes" the pricing tool and the company stopped using it several years ago.
Amazon paused the algorithm during its Prime Day sales events and the holiday shopping season when there was more media and customer attention on the online retailer, the FTC said.
The FTC called Nessie's algorithm an "unfair method of competition" because it manipulates other online stores into raising prices, allowing Amazon to do the same.
In the complaint, the FTC noted that Amazon does not allow other big online stores such as Walmart.com to sell on its platform.
The original article contains 661 words, the summary contains 167 words. Saved 75%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I feel like proprietary software should be open for auditing for reasons exactly like this.
"Amazon extracted $1 billion of wealth from Americans through secret price aising algorithm."
aaah, innovationā¢
wow they might get a slap on the wrist and a 50 dollar fine for this.
Itās just bait and switch anymore.
They offer you a plan that has āx y zāfeatures, then they make new plans with āv w zā features that are lesser that what baited you into accepting the first plan and charge you the same - or more.
Bait and switchā¦just with a sufficient gap to make you not want to leave.
robots keep paying me my return in things I didnāt want to return and even giving them a notice about it I just get a robotic response where they just ignore me,,, but ok. Iāll just keep the money and the product then since they donāt seem to be counting their losses against whatever āschemeā wins they think they got going on. stares at giant hole in the ship
What?
He keeps returning rocks and telling Amazon they're products and claiming amazon is just kind of doing jt. And doesn't know he gon get caught
We really need a functioning IRS, FTC and SEC. Just won't happen if repugs are constantly elected.
No, what we really need is to end capitalism, not pin our hopes on one team or another when both exist to uphold the very system enabling this bullshit (hint: their agencies are never going to work for you).
Man, fuck taking any step in the right direction eh? Let's just hope for the entire world to change instead of hoping for a reasonable change that is a big step in the right direction.
"Can't have anything if it isn't perfect"
Ah, yes, incremental change and playing within the rules set by our oppressors, that's worked so well ..checks notes... never.
Lulling the population in to a false sense of security, but more importantly - comfort, is exactly how you not only maintain the status quo, but how you enable fascism.
But sure, to those who are privileged enough not to already be personally impacted, I'm sure voting for team blue feels like a real win.. š
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/22/american-democracy-was-never-designed-to-be-democratic-eric-holder-our-unfinished-march-nick-seabrook-one-person-one-vote-jacob-grumbach-laboratories-against-democracy
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/14/liberalism-and-fascism-partners-in-crime/
https://truthout.org/articles/fascism-is-possible-not-in-spite-of-liberal-capitalism-but-because-of-it/
https://nyanarchist.wordpress.com/2019/01/23/scratch-a-liberal-a-fascist-bleeds-how-the-so-called-middle-class-has-enabled-oppression-for-centuries/
Union wins weren't incremential change for the betterment of worker conditions...?
You really should check the dates on all those achievements... They weren't granted from the beginning of even the young US, nor all at once.
It is ironically your gatekeeping of "progress" that holds back the gains you want to see because of your contempt at the only path proven effective. Sad.
Socialism isn't a switch we flip. We cannot magic away the current systems of power. Like it or not, most people are too dumb, self centered, or just plain busy to consciously change the systems they deal with. It CANNOT be done by telling everyone the world has to be radically different.
Does it have to be radically different to be equitable? Yes. Is that one of the next 20 stops on the way to an equitable society? NO! You cannot jump to the peak of a mountain simply because you can see it on a clear day.
Pretending the previous power structure has magically evaporated simply because you've pulled a revolution is EXACTLY how every socialist movement gets turned in to fascism. Stop feeding that ignorant mindset that we do not have to deal with existing power structures and powerful. We ALWAYS have to deal with existing power structures. Completely. Even literally killing off the old to avoid their toxic influence creates a new power structure with capital punishment powers that not everyone will remotely agree with.
Again, your ignorance to how the real world works is alarming. Fix your perspective or continue to hinder progress. The choice is yours.
"We can't have a revolution against capitalism until after we address all the symptoms of capitalism individually!"
No need to strawman; you already made a good point in the first half of your comment.
No I promise whoever says that definitely fits my description of them. It's not a strawman, it just looks like one because you assume I'm pretending to quote somebody I'm not.
Not necessarilly. They could very easilly be a victim of propaganda; they don't have to be a benefactor of capitalism in order to believe in incrementalism (which keeps capitalism as the main economic force).
Neoliberalism drilled deep into American consciousness a while ago.
Temporarily embarassed millionaires aren't your enemy unless they choose to believe AFTER they consciously observe how fucked up the mindset is.
Before that, they could easily just be ignorant. It's not like US schools teach how fucked up and skewed it all is. They just say, "yep, this is how it works, and that's how it works and why is the history of the stock market and yep we have it now!".
They are presented it as if it's not bad, so unless people get burned, they don't think about it. "Well I'm not that bad off and I'm not that special (despite having the embarassed millionairre's mindset) so everyone else must only be whining."
You are feeding the exact same ignorance from the other side. Stop it.
wait, I thought that it was covid and supply chains and such and actually that the profit motive encourages them to lower prices because competition and so on
You're forgetting one thing, Amazon has no real competition. Do you have a cloud service that makes you profit hand over fist so that you can dump that money into a loss leader service like amazon delivery?
No?
Well then they're going to undercut you to the point of zero profit margin to suffocate your business.
eBay all the way, boys and girls.
Whatās even wilder is that Amazon made no profit for the first 20 years of its existence, something the Feds claim makes Amazon even more dangerous as they spent considerable time building their network and have now turned on full money making mode.
That was just creative accounting so they wouldn't have to pay tax.
Oh... this huge pile of revenue? That's not profit. We're reinvesting it into logistics and executive salaries. We lost money this year. -Amazon
Do you mean Amazon the website? Surely they were making money somehowā¦
It means for the first 20 years they spent all of their profit on expansion / R&D
profit =/= revenue
I mean Amazon the company:
https://www.ibtimes.com/amazon-nearly-20-years-business-it-still-doesnt-make-money-investors-dont-seem-care-1513368
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2017/05/23/the-amazon-era-no-profits-no-problem/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/business/amazon-earnings.html
https://qz.com/987559/charted-amazons-amzn-profitless-path-to-world-domination-over-the-past-20-years
https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/9/4/why-amazon-has-no-profits-and-why-it-works
Happy reading
I'm surprised that there are still people who are surprised about this price hiking algorithm. Have you never seen weirdly fluctuating proves on Amazon before?!
Iāve seen the price go up just by putting it in the basket.
They claimed they stopped using this system a few years agoā¦ pretty sure thatās a technicality where theyāre using a successor.
One of the most annoying things for me is how prices fluctuate on items that canāt possibly have that much fluctuation. The following were all sold and fulfilled by Amazon directly. These bandages I useā¦ one week $8, then $13 next time I look, then $10, then $6. Hot sauce: one time $12, then $15, then $20, then $16. Biscuit mix: one time $24, then $45, then $36. Itās all very opaque. I just want one price.
Why are you buying bandages, hot sauce and biscuits on Amazon?
Unless you live in a suburb hell without safe transportation means, please stop giving them your money.
I live in a country where Amazon cannot deliver and Iām in love because of that. Thanks complicated customs laws that keep Amazon out <3
Without Amazon I would be fucked, my local shops are very expensive and most of the time they don't have what I need, I gave up trying to find something in shops altogether.
For example, the other day I needed a network switch and I went to the local shops, the cheapest I could find was 40ā¬, went on Amazon and bought one for 18ā¬ with free shipping, Amazon and Prime made my life here so much better.
Because these products are not available locally. I have to buy GF biscuit mix because I have Celiac disease. The hydrocolloid bandages are for blood glucose sensors as I have type 1 diabetes and a severe reaction to the sensor adhesive. I'm not a fan of Amazon.
"Biscuit mix"? Like flour? You can just buy flours without gluten and easily make your own. You're already doing most of the work anyway.
No, it's specifically this GF Red Lobster biscuit mix and having had Celiac diagnosed for 7 years, I am pretty aware of gluten free flours. Of course I could also make it from scratch.
I've had items show different prices of an item on 3 different devices all logged into the same account.
So, where do we sign up for the class action?
So you can get 5c and the lawyers get 95c for each dollar?
No.
Because I don't trust the FTC fines to be enough to discourage Jeff's actions.
An expensive class action would help hold him accountable.
Plus, he got rid of the mandatory arbitration agreement. So Amazon is open to a class action on this as far as I know.
Jeff Bezos isn't even the CEO of Amazon anymore.
Still the largest shareholder
That's kind of moving the goal posts. The shareholders definitely put pressure on the CEO and leadership of a company. And I think they should be held responsible in some cases for the fallout of badly enacted anti-consumer policies. On the other hand though, the CEO is the leadership who is held responsible for enacting policy.
Honestly better than amazon having it
It's probably something they already budget for. I would argue for lawyers fees being capped and the fines being 5x the value of the damage done.
I remember an article ages ago that showed that Amazon, undoubtedly a monopoly, was on the right side of the law because of the "consumer welfare standard".
This was back when they were in growth mode and still unprofitable, but it seems obvious with this and their now record profits that they no longer pass that test. Time to break it up.
That's exactly why I don't understand people defending Steam just because right now they are only using their monopoly against the developers but not against the users. One day that will change and move will have seen it coming.
Same with Google abusing YouTube creators for years but only now when they start pushing against adblock people look for alternatives.
Too many people are just lazy and complicit
Valve isn't publicly traded company, so Gaben is a BDFL.
Who knows what happens after him. But sure, if there is any other game provider with comparable service, nobody will complain.
It's just there aren't any
You're completely right. People suck steams dick are ridiculously hypocritical and blond.
I was mocked for defending Epic trying to compete withs steam. They're doing great work for Devs and gamers. But sadly, blind gamers (who claim they hate monopolys) aren't self aware enough to see the trees through the forest.
You're right. It's good they're competing. But to say they're doing a good job for gamers? The thing is horrible (atm) :
I hate steam's monopoly. Truly. But at least they're offering a solid framework.
Epic, just like gog galaxy, had an initially cool start and then... Nothing. All the years and they're still as horrible as bad then. No effort. I can understand gog, but not epic.
Windows would still be the only viable option for most PC gamers if not for the investment Valve has made in proton/wine. You can say it's self-serving (steamdeck) and you would likely be right. But we have two (three if you count standard Linux desktops as distinct from steamdeck) viable PC gaming platforms thanks specifically to Valve.
I'm sure the fact that that happened at the same time as Microsoft pushing their Game-Pass and their own Store is just by chance...
don't kid yourself and think that they did that just for the benefit of the users and not to be able to get games and users away from Microsoft if that's necessary...
The whole point of the conversation is that the other platforms arent doing any work for the consumer.
To this day, epic doesnt even launch on linux officially, and requires a 3rd party launcher to even play its games. Epics first party games are on the list of games that dont work on linux.
There's clearly one company who puts more effort onto the consumer front than the other. Epic doesnt even need to make a custom OS like valve does, it just needs to get their own launcher working, and their own games working, which they dont and refuse to.
To say that Epic is doing better for the consumer is disingenuous (however it does better for the developer though)
It's as if you didn't read what I wrote.
Doesn't matter whose benefit it was for. It's here now. I can use proton without Steam if I want to. If Valve goes full satan tomorrow, they still enabled viable PC gaming platforms where before there were none, and someone else can take the source and run with it.
Lots of us refused to run Windows just for games even before the MS store. We made do with what we could get. Now we (mostly) don't have to. Plus, people who were staying with Win solely due to gaming have a better chance of being able to ditch MS. Given where MS is headed in recent years, that's a win for personal freedom.
You are arguing with a point I haven't made.
Does this mean there will be another penis shaped rocket? š
Well I didnāt think that they LOST money using it!!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
WASHINGTON, Nov 2 (Reuters) - Amazon.com (AMZN.O) used a series of illegal strategies to boost profits at its online retail empire, including an algorithm that pushed up prices U.S. households paid by more than $1 billion, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission detailed in a new court filing on Thursday.
... Amazon used Project Nessie to extract more than a billion dollars directly from Americans' pocketbooks," the FTC said.
Amazon spokesperson Tim Doyle said the FTC "grossly mischaracterizes" the pricing tool and the company stopped using it several years ago.
Amazon paused the algorithm during its Prime Day sales events and the holiday shopping season when there was more media and customer attention on the online retailer, the FTC said.
The FTC called Nessie's algorithm an "unfair method of competition" because it manipulates other online stores into raising prices, allowing Amazon to do the same.
In the complaint, the FTC noted that Amazon does not allow other big online stores such as Walmart.com to sell on its platform.
The original article contains 661 words, the summary contains 167 words. Saved 75%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I feel like proprietary software should be open for auditing for reasons exactly like this.
"Amazon extracted $1 billion of wealth from Americans through secret price aising algorithm."
aaah, innovationā¢
wow they might get a slap on the wrist and a 50 dollar fine for this.
Itās just bait and switch anymore.
They offer you a plan that has āx y zāfeatures, then they make new plans with āv w zā features that are lesser that what baited you into accepting the first plan and charge you the same - or more.
Bait and switchā¦just with a sufficient gap to make you not want to leave.
robots keep paying me my return in things I didnāt want to return and even giving them a notice about it I just get a robotic response where they just ignore me,,, but ok. Iāll just keep the money and the product then since they donāt seem to be counting their losses against whatever āschemeā wins they think they got going on. stares at giant hole in the ship
What?
He keeps returning rocks and telling Amazon they're products and claiming amazon is just kind of doing jt. And doesn't know he gon get caught