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The Bezos backlash is bigger than Blue Origin’s success
- fireball_blaze 5y agohttps://archive.ph/SEFQz https://archive.ph/SEFQz
- PaulHoule 5y agoIn the last month it seems that Amazon has incessantly asked my opinion about every product and service I use (e.g. the store, Amazon Music, ...) My answer is always some variant of "I don't like the way you treat the help"
- kjaftaedi 5y agoIf you honestly don't like it though you should stop using their services, otherwise the message you are sending is that you care, but not really that much. I know I'm in the minority, but I stopped shopping with Amazon long ago, closed my audible account, and have slowly been migrating my current workplace off our/their AWS infrastructure. A handful of people have mentioned this is too much of a hardline stance, but personally I think it's important to take some actions if you truly want to see change in the world.
- HWR_14 5y agoThere is cutting back on their services while still using them. If your sales on the site halve as you complain, that also sends a message.
- PaulHoule 5y agoMy prime subscription runs out in April. I have a ways to go before reaching the natural point to not renew it.
- JohnFen 5y agoHere's what I learned when I cancelled mine: when you cancel, you will still have full use of Prime benefits for the time remaining until the subscription runs out. So if you really want to cancel, there's no reason not to just do it now. You'll still be able to use Prime until April regardless.
- HWR_14 5y agoIn other words, you can cancel the renewal without cancelling the current year
- ddingus 5y agoTo be frank, it all counts. Avoiding their services is one way, educating the public is another, speaking out is yet another, it all matters.
- trenning 5y agoI really don't understand why people have such a hard time weening themselves off Amazon products. It's not even like a physical constraint like having to drive a little further to a different store. Just visit a different website it's the bare minimum of effort needed.
- PaulHoule 5y agoIt amazes me how Best Buy, Staples and other physical retailers refuse to compete. For instance you can't buy a quality headset from Plantronics or get a USB NFC reader from either of those firms. Best Buy will sell you a Sony Alpha 7 camera but forget about any lenses other than the kit lens. Don't get me started about how Dick's Sporting Goods sells mostly men's athletic shirts that will show your nipples which would be fine if I wore a bra but I don't know many men that do. I asked the people there, "Do you want to sell any clothes or do you want to make excuses for why you aren't selling any?"
- HWR_14 5y ago> I asked the people there, "Do you want to sell any clothes or do you want to make excuses for why you aren't selling any?" They probably just want to be left alone. They get shipped the stuff someone higher in the chain of command ordered. Why are you bothering the sales staff with things outside their control?
- PaulHoule 5y agoFunny I wrote wegmans supermarket asking if a product packed in type 7 plastic could be packed in 1, 2, or 5 (recyclable) and got a nice reply in 30 min. Does Amazon really care what answers people give? Would dicks sporting goods? Wegmans at least wants to look as if they care. Planet fitness once told the NYT that they’d never gotten customer feedback on an issue but they make it so hard to find the form that they obviously don’t want you to use it.
- HWR_14 5y ago
- JohnFen 5y ago> If you honestly don't like it though you should stop using their services Agreed. That's what I did. What I found amusing is that when I cancelled the services, Amazon (unlike pretty much every other company) didn't ask me to tell them why. It seems that they want to know everything about everybody -- except for why someone would want out.
- jaytaylor 5y ago"My dad got to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. I get to watch the guy who killed book stores ride a giant dick into space." https://ibb.co/t2tcN3p https://ibb.co/t2tcN3p
- minikites 5y agoImagine if we taxed the enormous wealth of billionaires and used it for the good of many in society instead of inflating the ego of a single person. Our society is sick and I don't think people will stand for this level of inequality much longer.
- Traster 5y agoI don't think it's productive to talk about tax. Our economy should be designed in a way that workers capture a good proportion of their work. The problem at the moment is that when there are successful companies, a handful of investors and senior management capture practically all the gains. Amazon is an incredible company, and it's even more incredible that practically no one working at Amazon benefits from that. Just letting that system persist and then hamfistedly grabbing the gains at the end and redistributing them is difficult for a huge number of reasons including both fairness and regulatory capture.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoWhat you describe is equity distribution. It is a tax, but simply implemented as inherent ownership through citizenship or similar constraints. https://blog.samaltman.com/american-equity https://blog.samaltman.com/american-equity
- Traster 5y agoI think shared equity is one way of solving that problem, but if you look at other social democracies, regulatory regimes that favour workers and collective action can have similar effects.
- eyelovewe 5y agoI’m personally rather bored with the hobbies and tastes of these modern tech billionaires like Jeff and Elon. A few years back, there was a total global circumnavigation of the world in a solar powered 2 person airplane based in Switzerland, I forget the project name. This thing did not have to land to charge batteries but could stay aloft indefinitely, albeit at a very floppy wing surface area to weight ratio, and the resulting vulnerability to wind and low speed. Such a project or something that presents and actual investment that only a billionaire could provide are eschewed in favor of juvenile pissing contests like Mr. Branson and Mr. Bezos pursue
- minikites 5y ago>juvenile pissing contests like Mr. Branson and Mr. Bezos pursue This is really all it is, it's rich guys performing for other rich guys while the rest of us fight for scraps. It's sickening to me that so many people defend the honor of rich CEOs like Bezos, Branson, Musk, Gates, etc because they truly think that more money = better than.
- inglor_cz 5y agoMusk might be a weirdo, but SpaceX as a whole is not smoke and mirrors. Falcon rockets and Dragon capsules are a tested, reliable technology developed for reasonable money. When in doubt, compare their development budgets, timetables and flight record to those of the Space Launch System.
- 908B64B197 5y agoSpaceX is a profitable business, especially with StarLink. They essentially got rival satellite operators to buy the rockets they then re-use to launch their payloads. And they managed to underbid everyone in the space launch business for government contracts (Even factoring in R&D costs the Dragon is incredibly cheap). Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are just hobbies for the rich, but SpaceX might bring real benefits to "average joes" (just like the GPS system did).
- skissane 5y ago
- ddingus 5y agoOf course it is. Big successes do not erase equally big failures. And the failure here, not on Amazon alone, is far too many Americans not earning enough from their labor the fund continuing to exist reasonably and show up to work.
- pylua 5y agoThe problem is so obvious it’s amazing that people even debate what the real problem is . Maybe the government is too far out of touch.
- ddingus 5y agoI do not find it that amazing anymore. Roughly a third of us have few worries. Media, business, a whole lot of news and opinion bolsters that third, the assumption is things are fine. Like two different worlds. Yeah, govt is out of touch, but so are many others, all oh whom dominate the national dialog.
- datarock 5y agoI don't think a single person I know has said anything OTHER than jokes about Bezos and his mission, and how much of a dorky tool he is.
- btown 5y ago> The real shame is that, as Bezos pointed out, hundreds of people worked incredibly hard to design, test, and operate the New Shepard rocket booster and space capsule. Blue Origin has refused multiple requests to interview these engineers and let them share the challenges they surmounted to create this vehicle; no executives joined the crew for a post-flight press conference. SpaceX very much branded its initial launches as "we are what NASA should have been." Countless appearances and interviews with people who were very clearly "engineers' engineers" excited out of their minds to be working on the project. It was clear that there was overflowing passion given a very "shiny" space to dream, and that was the guiding light. You could disagree with Elon Musk and still admire his ability to build, inspire, and fund such a team. You could see the light in their eyes and want to contribute like them some day. Blue Origin was very much starting from a disadvantage, not being the first private-industry movers. But - and I think this is critical - they also made an unforced error by insulating the public from the passion their engineers undoubtedly have. It makes it very much the Jeff Bezos Show, which makes the whole venture much more susceptible to public opinion about Bezos personally. His tone-deaf remarks on customers "paying" for the venture dug that hole even deeper. Setting aside emotion, whoever paves the way for space exploration in the coming decade needs to inspire. I'm going to root for the team that understands what it means to inspire. And that makes it impossible for me to root for Blue Origin.
- inglor_cz 5y ago"Blue Origin was very much starting from a disadvantage, not being the first private-industry movers." Wasn't BO incorporated in 2000, two years earlier than SpaceX? Whatever delay they incurred is not caused by them entering the field later.