In this case perhaps paper where you don't see anything, but that will trip up the scanner. You only need to have votes declared invalid. Of course, preferably just a random subset of them. You can choose for districts you don't like and distribute that paper there.
> You provide a good depiction of the current state but that still does not explain why some person that has as much as 100'000 others do is inherently a bad thing.
Is it really that hard to see that people having more wealth than they can spend in a lifetime while others can't afford healthcare is an issue?
"Is it really that hard to see that people having more wealth than they can spend in a lifetime while others can't afford healthcare is an issue?"
Yes, because it lies on assumptions that I'm not sure I'd understand or agree on. Let me try. "More wealth than they can spend in a lifetime" could mean that financial independence or life of opulence is the assumed reason for that wealth. If that is your assumption, then I'd say that for taking on some enterprise that (at least for me) would serve insufficiently as a driving force long term. What would serve adequately would be gaining enough leverage to be able to eventually do some meaningful change in the world (for the better according to my values), i.e. to make as much as I can out of my existence. That may mean gaining more than I may require personally in my life and would be hard to understand for people with less potential (which consequently can afford to aspire only to some lesser goals). Do we, in the name of equality, have to limit the fruition of our potential? Do we have to limit the amount of wealth we can create as well? (The last two questions are society-wise.)
EDIT: Regarding the sustainability and the potential social disturbance resulting from inequality, there was a sibling comment (that I've answered to) here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19330811
You do realize that there will be 100,000 poor people that are pissed right? And they will start rolling out the guillotines. Last I remember guns are still legal in this country and poor people have a lot of them.
One of the reasons we have a society at all is to prevent us hunting each other for whatever reason, all for the common good. When that stops working, the society falls apart. Good luck going through a communist revolution better than others though.
The optimal price will be calculated accordingly (considering "temporary local monopolies", personal profile, and purchase history), no need for the customer to deal with pesky numbers. /s
This is why I rarely shop amazon now. I became an amazon customer because I am cheap and want to get the best deal. However, I have been remodeling my house for the last 8 months. I found that many things are just more expensive on amazon. People create businesses around buying cheap and reselling on amazon.
I also started to prefer actual physical stores. I am not dependent on amazons mercy when it comes to returns. Some items I can return for free at Kohls, some items I had to pay shipping and amazon customer service could not tell me WHY. Some representatives told me they no longer work with kohls, some told me "not all items are eligible", yada yada. In other words amazon is not a good company with clear guidelines.
To be honest now that I wrote this I will probably just cancel my membership.
I still find it handy for some things like: ebooks, physical books, some [small] electronics, odds and ends. And frankly just plain niche stuff that is difficult or time-consuming to find locally.
I went out on the weekend to find a replacement for a sink drain stopper lift rod's ball rod part (ours rotted at the end and failed) at my local hardware store. They only sold an entire assembly for $24 (plus whatever ancillary plumbing materials I don't have like putty).
The entire drain assembly would have cost me over an hours work—if I didn't make a mess of anything. The part isn't urgent. Just until we get it we have no sink drain stopper. I was able to find the single part I needed online for less than half the price of the entire assembly, it will arrive on Friday, and replacing that part will take me all of five minutes.
Now if I wanted a replacement assembly, I'd probably shop locally. The same assembly on Amazon ranged from around the same price to $100.
You really want to know what you're looking for! For what it's worth, I'd never consider a dash button, either. But the online shop still suits me for some items. Also quite looking forward to them advertising similar sink parts to me for the next few years...
- Brick-and-mortar retail store: basic necessities. Cheaper for easy-to-find items. Relatively small selection.
- Amazon: Books and other items where selection trumps price, to an extent. I can get all sorts of books on Amazon that I couldn’t at a bookstore. I wouldn’t buy a perishable good on Amazon and they likely don’t have more niche items.
- eBay: Rare or used items. Compared with Amazon, used items are a lot cheaper (compare ‘ThinkPad X220’ on both Amazon and eBay). The largest selection comes from eBay, but it is also the most variable in quality.
I noticed the following trend: 98% of my shopping is done at brick-and-mortar stores (mostly groceries). 1.5% comes from Amazon. The remaining .5% from eBay is usually just what I can’t find from Amazon.
Mine diverges a bit. Because of the hours I work and the fact that I don't have a car, Amazon is more convenient even for a lot of small items.
So for us Amazon us probably closer to 20%.
eBay is maybe 0.0005%. I'm fortunate there's a reasonably priced local dealer for used/refurb computers. One who even has been dealing in Macs for ~15 years!
Come to think of it—most of our shopping at all comes from groceries. I can't bring myself to use any of those delivery services or pre-set meal services. I like to select my vegetables and meat myself as I grew up learning how to do.
Eh, sure, they want to lower the cost of friction. But I don't think their goal is to ramp up prices. For many things (toilet paper, detergent, etc), it's really nice to not have to think about it.
Reminds me of an anecdote I heard about the response from a billionaire when some startup founders were pitching their sports tracking app to him: "I don't really get why the business case needs to be so fancy - I made my first million selling toilet paper". Never underestimate the value of selling something that people need to buy on a weekly or daily basis.
Toilet paper and detergent are prices that my wife watches like a hawk and then buys in bulk with BOGOFs or othet offers. They have incredible markups otherwise.
I trust Costco to have appropriate price/quality ratios. Not so low that manufacturers are cutting quality, and not so high that it would be a good use of my time to research elsewhere.
I dunno if this is still true, but it used to be the case (10+ years ago?) that Costco's pricing model was transparently "charge X% over cost", with X constant over all items.
This meant some items at Costco were expensive relative to what you could find elsewhere on sale, but it also meant it was phenomenally useful to figure out what items other retails were making obscene amounts of profit on.
You put a lot of trust in multinational corporations. Given the history of price fixing, cutting corners, etc to make an extra buck, I'm not sure I'd be so trusting.
If your assertions are correct, then competition is unnecessary since costco or any company would have the appropriate price/quality ratios. So we should only have 1 monopoly in every industry.
What's the point of having other large warehouse retailers when Cost is going to have the right price/quality? It's just redundant and wasteful.
I didn't mention any company other than Costco. They have built their trust with me over a few decades of consistent service and objectively cultivating better working environments than other similar establishments.
I also know all of their net income comes from membership fees, which means the margins for their products is likely going into essentials (I haven't heard of their organization indulging on lavish pay and parties and whatnot).
Of course, as a buyer, it is in my interest to have multiple vendors around to keep them competing. Unfortunately, I don't have the resources to go to other wholesalers also. However, technology does tend to reward the most efficient with all of the gains, so we seem to be inevitably going towards a future with fewer competitors and at most 2 or 3 businesses dominating each field. I don't know how to solve that problem, since as a buyer, I greatly benefit from the conveniences the efficiencies of scale afford me, but I know in the long term, the tables can turn and the seller can gain power over the buyer.
Amazon prices fluctuate wildly depending on myriad things: user/IP (can jump on tor and see prices change), stock levels, time of day, A/B price testing etc etc. viewing the price graphs at camelcamelcamel.com are really eye opening
Basically I’d never be able to trust I was getting a fair price at the instant I pushed the button.
That's interesting, I haven't ever noticed that (not suggesting it doesn't happen, I'm sure A/B testing must happen).
I use camelcamelcamel a lot and haven't seen any discrepancy between what I Amazon shows me and what camelcamelcamel alerts. Maybe I'm mostly tracking slightly higher priced items and they're less subject to change?
The Dash buttons always sent an email with the price and a cancel button.
Price transparency seems to be a part of why they are discontinuing Dash buttons. Amazon here is recommending users swap to Alexa voice devices (and suggests many Dash users already have), which has a voice flow for checking the price before buying.
Not that Amazon is the most trustworthy company in all respects, but this announcement certainly isn't because Amazon wanting to make people avoid checking item prices.
I'd be okay if they redid the thing with an eInk display. You press once to activate the device and retrieves the current price, and you have to press it once more to confirm the purchase.
To be honest I'd still buy one just to tinker with it and see how far I can customize it to do something else, but Amazon wouldn't benefit from it so they'd have an incentive to block people from doing so.
I think the single button with no screen is actually kind of a nice idea. you buy a few, put them in strategic places (sponge button by the sink, paper towel button by the paper towels, etc), and just hit the button when you're running low on something.
the main deal breaker with the current setup is that the price might shoot up unexpectedly, but this could be fixed with the ability to set a price limit when you configure the device (eg, don't spend more than $5 on a pack of paper towels).
Summary of the story: Government knowingly passed retarded children - who destroyed several marriages and familys- simply because that sort of damage is not fixable with love and understanding. You can only tolerate it and adapt your lifestyle to the new member of the family.
I read somewhere (I don't remember where) that when you're a CEO and all your friends are CEOs, you start to compare yourself to them and want to make as much as they do.
My "conspiracy" theory is that tech companies would be like this too, except it would literally be impossible to fully staff your CS team on elite bigshots.
