5 ms·

This kind of thinking is poisonous. I know it's in good fun and it's fun to look for connections in things, but it is actually preposterous to think that Amazon

by macrael 14y ago

This kind of thinking is poisonous. I know it's in good fun and it's fun to look for connections in things, but it is actually preposterous to think that Amazon would purposely disrupt wide swaths of highly paying customers for much of a day to bury one story about bad customer relations. My guess is there are a lot of people working very hard to try and solve this problem right now, let's not belittle their efforts because of a conspiracy, let's belittle their efforts because of bad systems design.

Angostura 14y ago
It was a joke. I made the same joke earlier today. No-one is seriously going to believe this.
- tuple 14y ago
  actually, there's probably some few idiots who will believe it.
- RegEx 14y ago
  HNers are extremely bad at getting jokes. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4677335 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4677335
- run4yourlives 14y ago
  I'd like to think the smiley face would make that obvious, but I guess not.
  - macrael 14y ago
    When I commented the two other comments replying to yours were taking it seriously, so I decided to take it seriously too. Text is a pretty bad medium for hearing tone, sorry I misinterpreted yours; for some reason the "the cynical side of me" bit made me think your comment wasn't entirely in jest. Cheers
- xenophanes 14y ago
  He knows you were joking. It's a bad joke. "It's a joke" is not a magic bullet that means you can do no wrong. Poisonous ideas spread as jokes. That is one of the ways they spread. A person thinking well about the issue wouldn't find the joke funny because it doesn't make sense. The joke relies on some poisonous, bad thinking to be understood. It has bad assumptions, and a bad way of looking at the world, built in.
  - Angostura 14y ago
    Let me explain to you why it is a funny joke. It is funny because it involves Amazon undertaking massive technical measures, with huge reputational damage in order to try to kill a story which is primarily not spreading via Amazon-hosted sites anyway. It's akin to a man with athlete's foot deciding to remedy it by discharging a shotgun into his leg.
    - xenophanes 14y ago
      It's easy to understand shooting a leg with a shotgun. That's a simple thing. The Amazon thing in question is far more complicated, and far harder to understand. Thinking they are "akin" is a mistake. It shows you're thinking about it wrong and failing to recognize how completely different they are. One isn't going to confuse anyone or be misunderstood, the other will confuse most of the population and be misunderstood by most people. One, if someone misunderstood, only involves one individual being an idiot. The other involves a large company being evil and thus can help feed conspiracy theories. I'm not sure if you are aware of the difficulty of Amazon doing this. Suppose Jeff Bezos wants to do it. He can't simply order people to do it because they will refuse and leak it to the media and he'll look really bad and then he'll definitely have to make sure to try super hard for there to be no outages anytime soon. Shooting yourself in the foot is stupid but easy. Doing this is stupid and essentially impossible. To think it's possible requires thinking that Amazon has a culture of unthinking obedience, or has an evil culture that all new hires are told about and don't leak to the media. Totally different. Casually talking about impossible, evil conspiracies by big business, as if they are even possible, is a serious slander against those businesses, capitalism, and logic. Slandering a bunch of really good things -- especially ones that approximately 50% of US voters want to harm -- and then saying "it's just a joke, it's funny" is bad.
deleted 14y ago
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by macrael 14y ago

Angostura 14y ago

It was a joke. I made the same joke earlier today. No-one is seriously going to believe this.

tuple 14y ago
actually, there's probably some few idiots who will believe it.
RegEx 14y ago
HNers are extremely bad at getting jokes. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4677335 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4677335
run4yourlives 14y ago
I'd like to think the smiley face would make that obvious, but I guess not.
- macrael 14y ago
  When I commented the two other comments replying to yours were taking it seriously, so I decided to take it seriously too. Text is a pretty bad medium for hearing tone, sorry I misinterpreted yours; for some reason the "the cynical side of me" bit made me think your comment wasn't entirely in jest. Cheers
xenophanes 14y ago
He knows you were joking. It's a bad joke. "It's a joke" is not a magic bullet that means you can do no wrong. Poisonous ideas spread as jokes. That is one of the ways they spread. A person thinking well about the issue wouldn't find the joke funny because it doesn't make sense. The joke relies on some poisonous, bad thinking to be understood. It has bad assumptions, and a bad way of looking at the world, built in.
- Angostura 14y ago
  Let me explain to you why it is a funny joke. It is funny because it involves Amazon undertaking massive technical measures, with huge reputational damage in order to try to kill a story which is primarily not spreading via Amazon-hosted sites anyway. It's akin to a man with athlete's foot deciding to remedy it by discharging a shotgun into his leg.
  - xenophanes 14y ago
    It's easy to understand shooting a leg with a shotgun. That's a simple thing. The Amazon thing in question is far more complicated, and far harder to understand. Thinking they are "akin" is a mistake. It shows you're thinking about it wrong and failing to recognize how completely different they are. One isn't going to confuse anyone or be misunderstood, the other will confuse most of the population and be misunderstood by most people. One, if someone misunderstood, only involves one individual being an idiot. The other involves a large company being evil and thus can help feed conspiracy theories. I'm not sure if you are aware of the difficulty of Amazon doing this. Suppose Jeff Bezos wants to do it. He can't simply order people to do it because they will refuse and leak it to the media and he'll look really bad and then he'll definitely have to make sure to try super hard for there to be no outages anytime soon. Shooting yourself in the foot is stupid but easy. Doing this is stupid and essentially impossible. To think it's possible requires thinking that Amazon has a culture of unthinking obedience, or has an evil culture that all new hires are told about and don't leak to the media. Totally different. Casually talking about impossible, evil conspiracies by big business, as if they are even possible, is a serious slander against those businesses, capitalism, and logic. Slandering a bunch of really good things -- especially ones that approximately 50% of US voters want to harm -- and then saying "it's just a joke, it's funny" is bad.

deleted 14y ago

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