> What cash back do you get on your credit card? 2.625%? High yield savings account? Money market fund? 4.6%?

None of these actions by me directly result in the loss of livelihood or uprooting of lives of other people.

If you told me that by moving my money to a high yield savings account, it would result in my friends or family members losing their jobs, you bet your ass I wouldn't do it, "personal profit" be damned, and that isn't a hard decision to make in the slightest.

Twitch's leader are making a conscious decision: profits over people.

That's not what "directly" means.

As far as having an axe to grind goes… if wanting to protect others is grinding an axe, I guess I’m guilty of that. I don’t feel like a handful of topical messages warning people of a legitimate and clearly ongoing problem is some abusive behaviour on my part, but maybe I’m wrong. I’m happy to learn from others’ perspectives, since I’m sure I could be a more effective communicator.

[0] I suspect he was the one who replied to my vulnerability report since the same attitude was on display in those messages too, but I don’t know since that account was just named “bbqa”.

Some very serious survey results in there. It's apparently a very small sample size (13 first years), but life sounds like absolute hell for those 13.

At least analysts can bail to the buy side and have a +EV path out.

London folks have it way worse too, I hear. Same jobs, 60% of comp, London isn't cheaper than NY.

But for more common things like an annual wellness exam, or blood tests, mending a broken arm, treating the flu, or even doing surgery on a burst appendix, those are things that I think can reasonable be commoditized across any healthcare providers.

Water, for example, is a commodity. It doesn't matter where you get it, because water from one tap is mostly indistinguishable to water from a different tap. When you need water, you simply just go to the closest tap and you can be happy that you're getting the same quality water as anywhere else. That's exactly what you want with healthcare, too.

In fact, commoditization of healthcare is probably one of the best steps towards making it a public utility. So if that's what you want, then you probably do want healthcare to be commoditized.

I don't think so. AWS is still very much in "we want to get as many people onto our platform as possible" mode, not "milk every cent possible out of existing customers" mode (yet). AWS account managers and solutions architects will go to great lengths to help you reduce your costs (and are actually incentivized to do so), because making you happy with AWS and recommend it to others is their top priority above all else. The docs may be confusing, but if you ever have any interaction with their enterprise account teams, you'll find that obfuscation could not be farther from their intentions.

The fact that S3 pricing isn't simple is just an unfortunate side effect of market segmentation taken to an extreme. And in some ways, it's a good thing. The current pricing structure allows people that have different use cases to only pay for what they need: someone using S3 for storage but not making a lot of requests will only pay for storage, while someone using S3 to store relatively little but accessing it often will only pay for accessing it, etc. If pricing were to be simplified, you would lose that ability to segment, which would be a huge loss.

I do think there is room for something like a Lightsail version of S3, where you just pay a flat fee per month for a certain GB and bandwidth allocation. But I think that should be a separate product or S3 storage class, not replace the current pricing.

ERCOT is not responsible for power generation or for natural gas availability. The PUC is broadly responsible regulating power generation (not withstanding the responsibility of the companies actually operating power generation plants). The Texas Railroad Commission is broadly responsible for natural gas pipelines (again, not withstanding the responsibility of the natural gas extraction companies).

ERCOT is the entity that told many power distributors to shed load (including the one that feeds my house). So many people have gotten mad at ERCOT. I'm sure it's fine to be mad at ERCOT, but it's kind of like getting mad at the manager of a grocery store who tells you they're out of food. They may not have done all they could to keep the place stocked, but they can't magically make trucks with food appear.

ERCOT sets prices. The dispute is that they set them dramatically higher than necessary to "incentivize" maximum supply. Because the supply was structurally constrained on a very short-term basis and distribution and consumption was already completely unhinged from market forces, it was predictable that such extreme pricing would have done diddly squat to change the supply or demand curves. What it did was unnecessarily shift money from the pockets of consumers to the pockets of those holding supply contracts.

And it's also beyond dispute that the people enjoying this windfall are simply going to walk away w/ their money. Nobody is under the delusion that they're going to invest that windfall into upgrading the infrastructure; least of all Arthur D’Andrea, who literally said on the call that paying (directly or indirectly through surcharges) for infrastructure improvements was an entirely separate, future concern, mostly on the part of the legislature. That's because it's not the suppliers enjoying the windfall, but those holding the contracts.

Most of the time ERCOT's price control powers are merely nominal; they seem to act as a market clearing house, resolving bids and asks into a single, set official price. But in this case the market wasn't functioning at all, so ERCOT's nominal powers devolved into the discretion to set an effectively arbitrary price, and they stupidly choose to set the maximum possible and for a longer time than was prudent if they had any concern for consumers' (i.e. Texans') welfare.

This is what you get when people adopt "free market" principles as a religion, rather than understanding them as a set of dynamic, natural forces. In this case, our devout believers set some absurdly high price (the maximum allowable under the law) ostensibly according to their understanding of the kindergarten model of supply & demand, where every increment of price increase should marginally lessen demand and marginally increase supply. But, again, it was obvious that principle was irrelevant in context and they should have exercised their judgment as administrators holding public trust rather than as priests performing scriptural commands.

D’Andrea's interest in reassuring investors--who are otherwise important for a well functioning, highly liquid market--would be understandable but for the context of it all, including the fact the price was at ERCOT's discretion both at the time and (presumably to a more limited extent) afterward. Part of the whole point of a regulator building that trust is to be able to leverage it during emergencies; to reassure investors that they (along with everybody else) will come out the better so long as they cooperate during the emergency rather than run for the doors. But if you show that you'll simply give away the store at the drop of a hat, you haven't earned any trust or respect, you've invited greater volatility in the future.

https://www.puc.texas.gov/agency/resources/pubs/news/2021/PU...

It's obviously a problem to some extent, but I can't help but think news articles like that blow it way out of proportion.

As for returns, I've notice the opposite: it takes me considerably less time and effort to return an Amazon purchase than, for example, a Target purchase. I actually did both this weekend: for Amazon, I walked into a UPS store, handed them the unpackaged product, they scanned a barcode from my Amazon app, and I walked out. The whole thing took no more than 30 seconds. At Target, I had to wait in a line for 20 minutes at the Returns counter, had to show them the receipt, also had to show them the card I used to purchase, and then the system wasn't refunding the correct amount so a manager had to be called over and re-do the entire process with some sort of override. The entire process took, at minimum, 30 minutes.

I hate Amazon's bullshit union tactics like in the OP, but they are still the undisputed king when it comes to overall shopping experience, IMO. And it's not necessarily because Amazon is actually great, it's more because the other companies are still really far behind.

I wouldn't be so sure, since it's not always easy to spot a counterfeit. Take a charger for instance. A counterfeiter can get the case and packaging perfect, but have substandard & legitimately dangerous electronics inside. I don't have the links handy, but I've seen numerous tear-down comparisons that show examples of this.

Obviously counterfeiting is a problem and in an ideal world there would be no counterfeiting at all, but I remain unconvinced that it's something I have to worry about materially affecting my experience as a customer buying stuff from Amazon.

Yet. When one burns down your house, you'll care.

Most people try to head off possibilities like that, rather can just shrug their shoulders and say, "But I saved three dollars!"

But as for stuff like chargers, I've had more experience that the easily-frayed genuine Apple Lightning cables, or the classic exploding Samsung phones, are more of an electrical fire risk than anything I've bought from Amazon, counterfeit or not.

Almost every memory card that isn't Samsung EVO PLUS I've received has been counterfeit.