There are countless situations in which Congress tries to punt its responsibility to the other branches. If they want to be a responsibility-free elected TV pundit class that lives high on the taxpayer hog, then let's amend the constitution accordingly. Congress just tries to delegate responsibility to the other two branches so it can get back to fundraising, "investigating," and grandstanding.
Anyone who saw these offers and did not expect the strings attached in terms of government meddling and/or decentralized witch-hunting for taking the money offered was foolish. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
There are good arguments in favor of taking away section 230 immunity and probably better arguments against it, but the best possible argument for getting rid of the immunity is to get rid of social media forever regardless of the other consequences.
Right now peoples twitter feeds are[0] 49% spam, 49% rage-bait, and 2% legitimate content. If that changes to[1] 99.98% spam, 0.02% rage-bait, and 8.16e-4% legitimate content, most people will probably stop using twitter, thus contributing to the goal of:
> to get rid of social media forever regardless of the other consequences
0: 103% of statistics on the internet are made up.
> Right now peoples twitter feeds are[0] 49% spam, 49% rage-bait, and 2% legitimate content. If that changes to[1] 99.98% spam, 0.02% rage-bait, and 8.16e-4% legitimate content, most people will probably stop using twitter
That's assuming the spammers can't figure out how to effectively troll the people who came for the rage bait into propagating their spam, but they can, because spammers are Turing-complete.
Obviously the people who came for the legitimate content will be destroyed. Or take up spamming.
Which just means you don't build the features that are spammable: you end up with friends lists (where users have moderated their own feeds by choosing who to follow) but no discovery (which is where a lot of the dangerous stuff is coming from anyway; good riddance) and no ability to message people who don't follow you (which is the default these days anyway as frankly it is already mostly spam). This sound a like a better world, not a worse world.
Systems that only work to converse with your "friends" (which I put in quotes, as we use that term so liberally online; just like, an opt-in follow mechanism where you can't be spammed by random strangers) are still "social".
It only dies if it's out-competed by something else. When you make a change to the law that everybody has to follow, you can end up just turning everything to shit because nobody is allowed to do better.
Near a small town there was a small lake. Many people loved to swim in the lake. One year, a terrible accident resulted in harmful pollution spilling into the lake. No one swims in the lake anymore.
They haven't stopped swimming because of some better alternative. They stopped swimming because swimming conditions have changed and now it is a bad idea.
If section 230 is repealed and social media becomes too toxic for most people to use, of course people would not stop communicating. The vast majority of human communication doesn't even occur on social media.
Having an obkom would be helpful -- it's really hard to tell what you are allowed to say. It'd be nice also to have a grace period so there is some fair warning when certain ideas or words will become banned. Orderly authoritarianism is preferable to random, chaotic outbursts of censorious violence. But even just an official obkom rather than unofficial 'volunteer' versions of it would really reduce confusion here.
The Saudi Arabian religious police enforcing public edicts are preferable to ISIS pulling you out of a truck, giving you a theology pop quiz, and then shooting you when you get some answers wrong. The Anglican sacramental Test Act is preferable to a fake regime of toleration.
Uh, for you. Some of us live near farms -- it's neither out of sight nor out of smell (heh).
The US is the most agriculturally productive nation in the world by a fair margin. Food and fuel are two of the things that the US is unlikely to run out of even under conditions of global nuclear war.
It's more different than you think because there are many permutations of search terms. There are products that rank really well for odd phrasings of a product search term but not well for the most popular variations. There is also virtual shelf space for weird, niche items with additional features that are not that popular. Amazon aggregates hundreds of thousands of small businesses globally and also tailors search results to FBA warehouse availability. So for example if the warehouses near you are well stocked with product A and not product B you will see product A ranked relatively higher than product B would if you are a prime subscriber, but you will get neutral results when logged out or a non-prime subscriber.
Then you throw in Amazon Shopping ads (aka Sponsored Products) and the shelf space metaphor gets muddled further, because it's like as if every store visitor saw unique and different endcap displays and shelving ordering. There is less individual tailoring to search results than you might expect on Amazon (especially compared to information search engines like GoogleBingBingGo) but it is still a factor.
Then there is the factor of endemic counterfeiting in some categories, so the sketchier the listings are the more likely you are to just buy a counterfeit product, which would never happen in a typical brick and mortar retail shop.
IMO Amazon's private labels are so minor and make up such a small portion of store sales that it ranks very low on the scale of things that Amazon does that are morally/legally questionable.
Shouldn't the headline say "Three Small Cities..." because it implies that "rural cities" as a category have overtaken New York City in per capita Covid-19 cases, which is false.
A lot of services weight unit velocity highly in determining product search ranking and other ranking methods that involve pay per click advertising. This creates some incentives to under-price for extended periods of time.
They will inflate the number by just citing their revenue similar to pyramid schemers. You can write a bot that will generate lots of revenue, and any idiot can generate lots of revenue with dropshipping. The trouble is risk and the cost involved in turning a profit from such a business.
I am confident that any 10 year old could sell $100k+ per month online with about a week of training if that was the only requirement and they were allowed to spend $120k. Actually earning significant profits is the difficulty here, and that only gets easier with the standard toolkit of running a successful online retail business: understanding the products, knowing the market, and understanding all the legal hurdles.
I think the biggest issue here is barrier to entry. The barrier to entry is so low in eCommerce. The required skills are not that difficult to obtain, you don't need years of schooling, you don't need to know how to code, you don't need much of anything. For most people the level of competition is obscene because of how easy it is to get into. It's extremely difficult to reach the top tier because of the unreal amount of competition and very little competitive advantage available to leverage. I look at it the same as I do with YouTube and Social Media Influencers. Incredibly easy to start, incredibly difficult to "Make it".
> I am confident that any 10 year old could sell $100k+ per month online with about a week of training if that was the only requirement and they were allowed to spend $120k.
This 10 year old sounds like they're ready for the next YC batch lol.
This is not actually mainstream dropshipping. Not all dropshipping is from China or international in general because of the unpredictability and latency. It makes more sense to dropship from stable and predictable suppliers for products that you don't have to spend a lot to create demand for. This article could have been written in 2005 and I think a lot of the reason why many of the people mentioned are expats selling to international markets is because ad rates in the US are generally too high to support this kind of business model in the US currently in 2020.
In the US the dropshippers I work with and am very familiar with use mainstream sources with predictable shipping times as do I when I dropship a selection of items very occasionally. The course sellers would generally not be selling courses if they could be scaling their business instead. Dropshipping is not generally a high margin business whereas course selling is. A scaled dropshipping business can make a lot of money but it is not a laid back type of operation really -- it's labor intensive and generally requires some in house automation to make sure that your offers for products match the offers you have from your suppliers.
GRQ dropshipping seems exciting and sexy because you never have to take possession of the inventory and you don't need to put a lot of cash up front if you get paid fast enough. Normal dropshipping is as boring as a wrench or a hammer. Also this article sort of conflates private label dropshipping with dropshipping more generally. They are really quite different things. The typical private labeler takes possession of products here in the US and probably does not dropship the bulk of their stuff just because customer expectations are pretty high for delivery speed and predictability. If you are sourcing from AliExpress or what have you, it's just a lot easier to suck up the unpredictability as the seller and then to sell it to the final buyer with more predictable fulfillment without dropshipping.
