I hate Amazon and stories like this make me hate it even more. I stopped ordering anything from them and, if anything, this has actually improved my consumer experience.
Most stuff you can buy on Amazon these days is the same garbage that is sold on Wish but you pay ~25-50% more for it to come within a couple of days. Not shopping at either has definitely raised the average life span and quality of goods in my household.
Now I only wish I could find a way to move all our infrastructure off AWS...
> Most stuff you can buy on Amazon these days is the same garbage that is sold on Wish but you pay ~25-50% more for it to come within a couple of days
In my experience, I get most stuff for the same price from other retailers on Amazon, but with fast shipping and the peace of mind that I can return them easily.
If you're buying from Amazon, you're almost definitely getting comingled inventory - which means even the official retailer themselves can't guarantee it's a genuine product.
Your point still stands about easy returns, although personally I've noticed Amazon adding a lot more friction when I have a problem in the past year or so.
I see the commingling thing brought up in every thread like this, but I've never personally, nor has anyone I know IRL, received anything from Amazon that are even suspect of being counterfeit. If they are counterfeit, then they are such high quality counterfeits that I'm not sure I even care.
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 see the commingling thing brought up in every thread like this, but I've never personally, nor has anyone I know IRL, received anything from Amazon that are even suspect of being counterfeit. If they are counterfeit, then they are such high quality counterfeits that I'm not sure I even care.
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.
Like I said, if any of the chargers or cords I have received from Amazon are counterfeit, they're good enough counterfeits that I don't care. My iPhone, iPad, and MBP all charge just fine, still have perfectly fine working batteries, have never had any issues with the electronics, and nothing has caught on fire after years of use. The headphones I've bought from Amazon sound great and have given me no issues. The lightbulbs I bought from Amazon light up my room just fine and last a long time. The SSD I bought is blazing fast and has plenty of space (confirmed by multiple diagnostic checks). The clothes I have bought are comfortable and fit well... And if any of these things weren't true, I am confident it would take me extremely minimal effort to return the item to Amazon and buy a replacement.
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.
If at any point I see any evidence or warning that the products I purchase from Amazon cause any material amount of risk to my person or property, I'll reevaluate. In fact, there definitely are some things that I prefer to buy outside of Amazon for such reasons, like climbing gear or medicine.
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.
For chargers, I've had some seriously laptop-destroying ones. For phone voltages (ignoring fast charging), it isn't that big of a deal, but USB-C PD laptop chargers I am extremely hesitant to buy on Amazon.
Almost every memory card that isn't Samsung EVO PLUS I've received has been counterfeit.
I used to think the same, but I received a sorta dodgy SD card from Amazon last year. By dodgy I mean that the graphics on the sticker seemed off compared to my other cards from Sandisk, and it was slower than advertised. It still worked just fine, and I don't want to imply that this is widespread, but it has happened to me.
Yes, they probably would have given me one, but I just didn't bother as it wasn't a huge issue for me - and also I realized it was dodgy after the return window had closed so didn't want to fight them on that either.
Can you elaborate where do you buy things online from? I want to move away from Amazon, but it's also exhausting to sort through multiple websites for a product, their shipping fees, and make decisions.
Electronics now come to me from Best Buy, Microcenter, and Newegg. Best Buy in particular has faster shipping than Prime. It's frequently overnight for in stock items. At least in my area. And as far as I know, there's no problems with counterfeit goods with them.
Physical books I buy from a small online bookstore I want to support. Oddly enough, they're not much slower than Prime. Even for books not in stock. Plus, they frequently write a nice note, or slip a free zine or custom bookmark into the package. It's a nice touch, and whoever did the packing has equity in the company. They're worker-owned.
Ebooks are still Amazon, though I strip the DRM immediately after purchase so I'm not locked into the Kindle ecosystem. I may try buying a test book from Kobo or Barnes & Noble to see if I can just as easily strip the DRM from them. If so, then I'll probably switch.
Ebay's been good for some stuff. For Pi hobby stuff, I've started buying directly from the various small businesses that specialize. The shipping is longer, but that's not a problem so far.
Some stuff I do buy from Walmart / Sams. They're about as bad as Amazon in many ways, but they do pay their warehouse people a decent wage. Or they did last time I checked. So it's at least marginally better in that respect, and there's not much worry about fake goods from them.
De-DRM for Kobo works great. It's basically the same as Kindle, there is just another plugin or two to install. Books are usually a bit more expensive. However, it looks like Walmart actually owns Rakuten now, so it's not like you're helping out the little guy much.
Walmart and Target have improved their web experience a lot, but you still need to avoid the 3rd party sellers there. If you know the brand and the product, ordering direct also works. I also kind of enjoy shopping irl more since it gets me out of the house and basically everything else is closed due to the Rona. I've heard costco has a great 2 hour delivery experience but I don't have a membership.
The effect of Amazon is that at least for now, there's never been a better time to order things online in general. Every website competes with amazon now. Most places ship fast and cheap/free. Sometimes with a minimum order, but same with amazon's add on items. There are exceptions for sure, and I do occasionally still need to buy a thing on Amazon.
Unless you're really into the prime video selection, I suggest everyone cancel their prime and try life without it. I think I got a prorated refund, and you can always reactivate.
I'm not in the US but to me Amazon is something I use maybe twice a year and I buy a lot online and abroad. I even order stuff from the US sometimes and I don't normally use Amazon (or eBay). I don't get why it is so hard to cut out the middleman (Amazon) when it isn't to me when I order from the US. If I find the product on Amazon I just click on to the retailers website and order there.
I'm in the middle of a dense urban area (San Francisco) without a car, and cannot get delivery to home (items are stolen within <60s, carriers ignore all signature requirements and forge their own, mailboxes are crowbarred and broken into).
Amazon is the only vendor with 24 hour lockers for pickup - multiple locations within walking distance. There is no Walmart nearby. There is a Target but the pickup line is basically standing in plague-town for an hour, ~25 min away by bus. Best Buy is about 40-45 min away by bus (you will probably be mugged if you are seen with a BB bag).
For some things, I try to buy direct. Levis for example. After getting a pair from amazon that was very clearly a factory second or straight up counterfeit, I get them from levis.com. Price is a little higher, but knowing I'm getting good product, and the variety/choice is usually pretty good on their site too. I do this for most "branded" items. Everything else is like best buy or target or home depot etc. That said, I still use amazon quite a bit. But still probably <50% of my online purchases at least. Someone with a more hardline stance or more knowledge of other replacement sites could conceivably cut them out completely. Heck Best Buy and target are so close to my house, I just shop online, and go to curbside pickup an hour later.
This isn't intended to sound braggy: I honestly just don't buy that many non-consumable items? Most years I buy more items as gifts during the holidays than I do for myself the entire rest of the year. This isn't some kind of extreme-frugality thing: I simply can't think of additional things I would want to buy. And most of the purchases I do make are things I put thought into, where I don't mind shopping around a bit or paying a little extra for shipping.
I just really don't understand why people have a hard time giving up Amazon retail, at least when it comes to the majority of HN who can absolutely afford to pay an extra $10 for shipping a few times a year.
coctco.com has actually been a good alternative for me. Less selection, sure, but I can usually find everything I actually need. Plus, they seem to treat employees well and aren’t trying to monetize my face/sleep schedule/words/browsing activity/etc.
I've made the same changes in recent months and agree that it's improved my consumer experience significantly. I didn't realize just how much time and energy I was spending sorting through cheap Chinese made junk and counterfeit garbage on Amazon trying to find quality products.
In terms of cloud providers: the major three (Azure, GCloud, AWS) seem to be cut from the same cloth... maybe IBM or Oracle cloud are better options (I don't have any experience with either, but both companies obviously have skeleton filled closets)?
Well at least one of the latter definitely has skeletons... [0]
But in all seriousness, Oracle at least has very good free tier to get started. You basically get two free okay-provisioned VMs (lite on the CPU to say the least, but mem and desk okay). Very good for self-hosted your own stuff for free!
Oracle's administration interface is horrible. It's an obtuse nonsensical hierarchy, probably specified by someone non-technical writing a requirements document in a vacuum. It'll take you an afternoon to figure out how to get your instances set up, upload your initial image etc. Also your instances will always be behind NAT (having internal IPs), which is odd.
Its redeeming feature is having a free tier that isn't Google. The problem with using Google's cloud is that if someone hacks your account and runs up infinite charges as a personal user, you can't file a credit card dispute without disrupting your entire relationship with Google.
The cloud market still has healthy competition - eg Linode, DigitalOcean, Vultr, and innumerable smaller companies. Patronize them, rather heading than to a different behemoth.
Oh yes, I wasn't saying Oracle was good. It was the usual mess of conflicting systems (e.g. two different ways to do network ACLs...that conflict?).
I personally wouldn't consider them for anything serious. If folks need a free box for something lightweight, those free tier VMs on Oracle are pretty much the only good thing about it. (I have a VPN and a few small services running on it for my own consumption)
Same here! I pay for servers that I care about, but having another vpn bouncer / exit node is nice. Once you've got some sort of devops setup, it's easy to add more machines. The main bummer was finding out the "two instances" have to be in the same datacenter.
One thing I have noticed is their network seems to have high jitter.
Haha yes they certainly do. One great thing they have is unlimited bandwidth (though I'm sure they throttle after some point), whereas the free tier on Google starts charging you after you reach the 5GB egress mark iirc.
Turning to IBM or Oracle for moral reasons is about the funniest thing I've read in a long time. One enabled the holocaust and the other made 90s-era Microsoft seem downright communist.
I know Oracle has a bad rep and is generally perceived as a corporate monstrosity, but honestly what is actually so bad about their business model? Sure they make a ton of cash fleecing other enterprises but at least it doesn't seem like they're mistreating workers or tracking users. Honestly, it always seemed kind of old-fashioned but not necessarily bad compared to the 'new era' internet giants
Think pragmatically: who would we help by trying to "get back at" an abstract corporate entity for bad things "they" (not even the same people) may have done nearly 100 years ago?
What we're talking about with Amazon is taking steps to actually fight transgressions that are happening right now.
Amazon is doing some rather creepy stuff with the CIA [0]. Can you elaborate on what Oracle did that was so bad? Is charging for software and enforcing license terms somehow worse than what Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc. are doing?
I don't really see how selling facial recognition tech is "rather creepy". Facial recognition has legitimate uses, and the CIA/FBI using it to track criminals seems to be a legitimate use case to me. The article you linked seems to be making a hypothetical leap to "well what if they choose to use it nefariously in the future??" And to their credit, Amazon at least seems to be interested in trying to limit its use to good causes: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/10/amazon-bans-police-use-of-fa...
And of course, Microsoft, Google, and others have their own facial recognition software and they all have large contracts with government entities, too. This article mentions the CIA using AWS, but the CIA also has multi-billion dollar contracts with GCP, Azure, and even IBM and Oracle: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/cia-awards-multib...
Yeah, that's all incredibly troubling to me. I'm shocked that so many people fail to see the parallels to historic misuse of technology by states, e.g., IBM and the holocaust as outlined above:
"Mankind barely noticed when the concept of massively organized information quietly emerged to become a means of social control, a weapon of war, and a roadmap for group destruction." [0]
Is it unreasonable to desire that your dollars don't go to organizations involved in war, oppression, corruption, etc.?
There are legitimate use cases for technology like facial recognition, and I see nothing wrong with using it in that way. Of course society should be cautious about unwarranted uses of such technology. But decrying all uses of it, even legitimate ones, because of a hypothetical "what if someone in the future uses facial recognition to start another holocaust?" is just a slippery slope fallacy.
Buying direct from producers, Costco, Costco.com, and I'm consciously buying less stuff that I don't actually need (stuff that I would have previously purchased from Amazon).
On the flip side, it'd be interesting to know how many AWS instances are primarly VMWare instances hosting Microsoft Server solutions (or just directly hosting Microsoft Windows products)?
So does AWS. They include revenue from AWS Workmail and other SaaS offerings. Too bad MSFT or GOOG make more money than AWS with their SaaS or "Productive" offerings.
This is probably true, but such a laughably small number of people use Workmail that I doubt it has any material difference to AWS's reported numbers, so while they might not reflect the true AWS marketshare sans-Workmail, it's probably still in the same ballpark. The reason people bring it up in regards to Azure is because it does likely artificially inflate Azure's reported numbers a material amount and makes them harder to trust.
I don't know for sure, but I'd guess MS Office makes up most of the revenue for their cloud offerings. Honestly I think their cloud is mostly a service to push MS Office harder, and they seem to be doing quite well for that.
My point is every cloud vendor needs to break up revenue by IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS. Each one looks strong and bad across segments and hence such a breakup will never happen. But saying AWS or MSFT is #1 misses the dominant segment where they are leading, hides where they are struggling, and gives an incorrect impression.
I think a big objection to moving off AWS is a result of enterprises locking in to AWS-specific technologies.
AWS has a lot of neat, domain-specific products and managed services, but it's important to recognize those come with vendor lock-in and that's by design.
If possible, build out your stack to avoid dependence on AWS-only stuff. It's worth it to ask "if I wanted to transition away from AWS in six months, is this addition going to help or hinder that goal?" It's a lot easier to migrate something that uses generic technologies like VM instances, vendor-neutral containerization, and managed databases versus something super specific. And AWS has a lot of super specific stuff, just look at their ever-expanding product list [1].
Once you get away from the specialized domain-specific products, you start to realize that AWS pricing is really nothing special, particularly for VM instances as you've noted.
In my experience a lot of senior ops people are still hesitant about Google's cloud services having been burned by them in the past. Google seems to have some reputation problems, however true or untrue they may be.
I'll give you some ideas, but you might already know why as you been around for some time.
- Lack of support for your statement. You simply say that you moved there, not why and what made you move, what's better and so on
- You're complaining about down-votes, leading you into the spiral of downvotes as you'll get more down voted by it
- You're talking bad about AWS and Amazon. HN famously have a ton of AWS/Amazon employees here who are quick to downvote any negative sentiment about AWS/Amazon. No, I don't have any proof, but anything mentioning either in a negative way WILL be downvoted, happened time and time again
To this day, I have no idea what that was about. Does Linode not do backups?!? Is one of the founders a pedophile?!? Whatever it is, is it unmentionable because of fear of lawsuit?!?
Um, like, duuuuh. If you're gonna buy cheap Chinese junk, skip the Amazon middleman and go straight to Alibaba.
With so many "Amazon" sellers just rebranding cheap Chinese stuff, it really is better to just go backward in the chain. I suspect that you probably get fewer "counterfeits" since you are looking for "Thing that does <X>" instead of "Brand <Y> thingit."
I'm seeing food delivery places like uber eats, globo etc able to become pickers for local stores (at least here in Europe). Now I only need some way to order online from local stores and have it automatically sent to me via bike courier.
I honestly can't understand how anybody sleeps at night writing software for Amazon, at this point. Maybe it's easier to justify to yourself if you work at AWS and not directly on the retail side of things, who knows.
I'm not going to try and cast judgement on individuals' circumstances, I just experience genuine confusion that Amazon can (apparently) still attract top-ish talent.
Walmart has been doing this around here (car not bike). Too bad they will substitute a "similar" item when their stock is not correct, which is always.
The "similar" item is not similar enough in my experience.
Most stuff you can buy on Amazon these days is the same garbage that is sold on Wish but you pay ~25-50% more for it to come within a couple of days. Not shopping at either has definitely raised the average life span and quality of goods in my household.
Now I only wish I could find a way to move all our infrastructure off AWS...