5 ms·

I think GP believes that if too many people are effected by a dumb policy the policy will be revoked (perhaps true)... if this is the case no one would be screw

by dlss 10y ago

I think GP believes that if too many people are effected by a dumb policy the policy will be revoked (perhaps true)... if this is the case no one would be screwed over.

cptskippy 10y ago
If you run a business through Amazon or rely on the money generated by these links, then you're in a very dire position if your account gets suspended until Amazon fixes the issue. How would you feel if someone had a gripe with your cellphone provider or bank and got your accounts suspended until their issue was resolved? How would that impact your life? What if it took weeks or months to resolve?
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  You can't innocently be part of someone else's bad actions. Amazon is doing bad things to the market and wantonly destroying lives. It's their choice to align with an entity seeking monopoly control of a market, and using their status to arbitrarily ruin lives. These people are materially supporting that entity, so they're fair game for fallout from retaliation.
  - jhayward 10y ago
    No, no, wrong. Just because someone lives in a firetrap doesn't mean you can set their house on fire while they're sleeping. Your position is completely amoral, evil.
    - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
      I would argue that's a false analogy: they're much more like manor owners serving a particular liege. They could change allegience easily, they'd just rather benefit from the behaviors, because it benefits them personally. Lesser nobles have always been valid targets in combat. No one is forced to use Amazon, they're choosing to.
      - cptskippy 10y ago
        So you're endorsing Feudalism?
        SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
        Well, I actually do think some kinds of neo-feudalism would be interesting experiments for city or county level governments, with an overarching government based around republicanism (and is probably closer to reality than we like to admit), but that wasn't what my comment was about, at all. Rather, my comment was that a useful conceptual model for understanding a corporation and its supporting players is feudalism, though there are obvious differences, such as that a "manor" can be picked up and moved to another "kingdom", or even serve two "kingdoms" at once. It was meant as an imperfect analogy to their social relationships, as they actually exist, by drawing on our knowledge of older social relationships, ie, the relationship is closer to a manor owner serving a liege than a tennant in a firetrap, because of the willful support of their business practices, that they are receiving benefits from their service, and the (mostly) voluntary nature of their association. My point was that merchants using the platform being hurt is no more important than staff supporting the platform being hurt, and that we can't simply abide evil "kings" just because some of their voluntary supporters would lose their privileges (or even be actually hurt) if we stopped them.
        cptskippy 10y ago
        We were discuss the ethics of harming an affiliate to gain the attention of a merchant, not about harming the merchant or it's staff. I would agree that it's equally bad to harm both an affiliate or a merchant's staff just to bring attention to an issue with the merchant. To use your feudalism analogy. It's like destroying a freeman's crop because the lord failed to secure the land. In the end it's the freeman who is harmed and not the lord because the freeman must still pay rent to lord even if he has no crop to sell at market. The same holds true for getting an affiliate's account banned because the links to Amazon still work and customers can purchase items using affiliate links, the affiliate just receives no credit for the traffic. It's only the affiliate who loses out. Using your reasoning, it becomes permissible to poison an aquifer to demonstrate that a city doesn't do enough to protect a customer who received a high water bill because a gardener broke their water line digging in the yard.
- AJ007 10y ago
  The flip side is if no one does a blanket policy attack, then it will be easy for a malicious actor to target individuals for suspension. If those individuals are not tech savy, they then have zero chance of ever getting their money. In fact, this was a previous attack vector for Google Adsense accounts. Eventually Google added a whitelist for your owned websites. Before that, someone could just snag a few simple lines of Javascript and put them somewhere that would get the account owner banned the following day. These companies know what they are doing. They have a set of policies in place that allow them to boost their margins by not spending too much money on policy enforcement, while at the same time pruning accounts below some classification threshold daily. They don't pay out but they get to keep the earnings. Small companies do this too when they find their cashflow inverted. It is a very dirty game.

by dlss 10y ago

I think GP believes that if too many people are effected by a dumb policy the policy will be revoked (perhaps true)... if this is the case no one would be screwed over.

cptskippy 10y ago

If you run a business through Amazon or rely on the money generated by these links, then you're in a very dire position if your account gets suspended until Amazon fixes the issue. How would you feel if someone had a gripe with your cellphone provider or bank and got your accounts suspended until their issue was resolved? How would that impact your life? What if it took weeks or months to resolve?

SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
You can't innocently be part of someone else's bad actions. Amazon is doing bad things to the market and wantonly destroying lives. It's their choice to align with an entity seeking monopoly control of a market, and using their status to arbitrarily ruin lives. These people are materially supporting that entity, so they're fair game for fallout from retaliation.
- jhayward 10y ago
  No, no, wrong. Just because someone lives in a firetrap doesn't mean you can set their house on fire while they're sleeping. Your position is completely amoral, evil.
  - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
    I would argue that's a false analogy: they're much more like manor owners serving a particular liege. They could change allegience easily, they'd just rather benefit from the behaviors, because it benefits them personally. Lesser nobles have always been valid targets in combat. No one is forced to use Amazon, they're choosing to.
    - cptskippy 10y ago
      So you're endorsing Feudalism?
      - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
        Well, I actually do think some kinds of neo-feudalism would be interesting experiments for city or county level governments, with an overarching government based around republicanism (and is probably closer to reality than we like to admit), but that wasn't what my comment was about, at all. Rather, my comment was that a useful conceptual model for understanding a corporation and its supporting players is feudalism, though there are obvious differences, such as that a "manor" can be picked up and moved to another "kingdom", or even serve two "kingdoms" at once. It was meant as an imperfect analogy to their social relationships, as they actually exist, by drawing on our knowledge of older social relationships, ie, the relationship is closer to a manor owner serving a liege than a tennant in a firetrap, because of the willful support of their business practices, that they are receiving benefits from their service, and the (mostly) voluntary nature of their association. My point was that merchants using the platform being hurt is no more important than staff supporting the platform being hurt, and that we can't simply abide evil "kings" just because some of their voluntary supporters would lose their privileges (or even be actually hurt) if we stopped them.
        cptskippy 10y ago
        We were discuss the ethics of harming an affiliate to gain the attention of a merchant, not about harming the merchant or it's staff. I would agree that it's equally bad to harm both an affiliate or a merchant's staff just to bring attention to an issue with the merchant. To use your feudalism analogy. It's like destroying a freeman's crop because the lord failed to secure the land. In the end it's the freeman who is harmed and not the lord because the freeman must still pay rent to lord even if he has no crop to sell at market. The same holds true for getting an affiliate's account banned because the links to Amazon still work and customers can purchase items using affiliate links, the affiliate just receives no credit for the traffic. It's only the affiliate who loses out. Using your reasoning, it becomes permissible to poison an aquifer to demonstrate that a city doesn't do enough to protect a customer who received a high water bill because a gardener broke their water line digging in the yard.
AJ007 10y ago
The flip side is if no one does a blanket policy attack, then it will be easy for a malicious actor to target individuals for suspension. If those individuals are not tech savy, they then have zero chance of ever getting their money. In fact, this was a previous attack vector for Google Adsense accounts. Eventually Google added a whitelist for your owned websites. Before that, someone could just snag a few simple lines of Javascript and put them somewhere that would get the account owner banned the following day. These companies know what they are doing. They have a set of policies in place that allow them to boost their margins by not spending too much money on policy enforcement, while at the same time pruning accounts below some classification threshold daily. They don't pay out but they get to keep the earnings. Small companies do this too when they find their cashflow inverted. It is a very dirty game.