>It sounds all superior and mysterious to quote Feynman here,
It isn't about being superior, mysterious, or clever. The following "nobody understands" type of quips and thought experiments are different ways of saying our intuitions don't help us understand it :
- "God does not play dice with the universe.", Albert Einstein
- "Shut up and calculate", N. David Mermin
- "Schrödinger's cat" being both alive and dead
- various interpretations/analogies explaining quantum physics leading to absurdities or contradictions
Yes, humanity has harnessed quantum mechanics with mathematic frameworks and repeatable experiments to make useful things... but that's a different layer of "understanding" than the deeper levels in the above quotes.
"Nobody understands what gravity is." ... Wait, if nobody "understands" gravity, how did we send people to the moon?!?
Because those are different usages of the word "understand".
"Understand" means "Have a reasonable metaphor for."
Our monkey minds evolved to throw rocks at birds, and our metaphors are based on concepts like position, velocity, and temperature. We added first-level abstractions like energy and cause-and-effect, then built higher level abstractions on those basic concepts.
QM clearly doesn't work like that. It's probabilistic, possibly non-local, possibly subjective, possibly a holographic projection of some underlying reality that is nothing like this one, and its relationship with causality is slippery.
We have a mathematical UI for it, but that's not at all the same thing as understanding the machinery on the other side of the UI.
>"physical media & a Jellyfin install" is going to be more sensible.
Physical media is only cheaper if the user is ok with re-watching the same videos repeatedly. The higher cost of the DVD/Blu-ray discs can be amortized over multiple repeat viewings. (Good example is a 5-year old kid wanting to re-watch Frozen or Shrek cartoons again for the 100th time. A DVD player is cheaper than a Disney+ subscription in that scenario.)
Digital streaming subscriptions are cheaper if the user almost always prefers watching new shows instead of re-runs. That's the viewing habit of the vast majority of subscribers. Trying to only buy physical media to get a constant diet of new shows -- even buying the cheaper used discs from thrift stores -- will cost more than a subscription. Also, the physical discs are not immediately playable on an iPad/smartphone so requires extra hassle of ripping/transcoding that most normies don't want to do. Also, buying harddrives for the NAS server to store the rips isn't cheap either.
I'm all too aware of people preferring brand new shows because I've ripped several hundred DVDs to a stack of terabyte harddrives that nobody ever watches. Instead, they'd rather see what's new on Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+ ...
EDIT to add an update of a previous comment about my friend's defiance against ads added to Amazon Prime Videos by borrowing DVDs from the public library. She lost that battle because she finished all the DVDs she wanted to watch so had to go back to Amazon Videos for new content. She now endures the Amazon's ads. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42388626
She really tried to fight ads by avoiding the platform but couldn't sustain it because she ran out of free DVDs to checkout from the library. This means buying DVDs to get something new to watch if trying to stick with physical media and unfortunately, that costs more than streaming platforms. She deals with the ad interruptions by multitasking on an iPad when they come on.
>We still have public libraries. They usually have a pretty sizable collection
The public libraries in major cities like the New York Public Library have sizable collections. The smaller libraries in the outer suburbs have a much smaller selection. Yes, there's also inter-library loan system for the suburbs to pull from the big city library but there are restrictions such as only having 3 items at a time.
The neighborhood public libraries are wonderful resources but there can be limitations (quantity of titles) that prevent it from being a sustainable substitute for streaming for someone that wants to watch ~2 hours of content every day. My friend tried the public library and it was only a temporary reprieve from the ads on streaming platforms. The library simply didn't have enough content for her to watch.
That sizable collection is often scratched so you watch half the movie and then it skips or fails completely. Just like what used to happen constantly with DVDs from Netflix.
Not in my experience. My library's DVDs and Blu-rays work great. I check one out every week or two.
I'd encourage anyone reading to go to your local library if you haven't been in a while. Check out a book. See if they have a makerspace. Do some remote work there. They're wonderful places. They become more and more important with every passing year.
Not many of those left in my local libraries. They downsized to popular fiction and a rack of magazines to introduce more sofas and space for charity cake stalls. And "mindful colouring-in" if you're around for the 4.5 days of the week that they're open.
Libraries threw away the one thing that made them unique, curated knowledge, in order to compete with Starbucks as a "third space".
> The higher cost of the DVD/Blu-ray discs can be amortized over multiple repeat viewings.
For now. Physical media is being phased out. Sony just quitted the blu-ray player business after others also did and Disney already stopped releasing new discs in Australia.
That's why I stopped buying physical media years ago. Once I watch a movie, I've seen it. I don't really want to watch it again. And each viewing is a diminishing return, where I feel more and more like I'm just wasting time by doing it.
Music somehow is different, but movies, sporting events, dramatic series, etc. where the hook is that you don't know what's going to happen I can really only enjoy watching once.
I get most my physical media from the library. It really doesn’t get any cheaper than that.
A smaller portion comes from used bookstores. For TV series in particular it’s still very cost effective on a money per viewing hour basis. Especially for kids’ media because my kids do want to watch the same thing over and over.
I also do some à la carte rentals. Maybe 3-4 movies per year, so the total cost is low.
That said, you’re absolutely right, this only works for me because I don’t particularly care about new shoes and streaming exclusives. If you’re willing to take the view that media doesn’t need to be new to be good then we currently live in a post-scarcity society where video entertainment is concerned. Which isn’t to say that people who prefer new things are wrong, but I am genuinely impressed by the amount of enshittification that people will tolerate (maybe after some grumbling, but still) in the service of that preference.
>a database small enough to be served from a computer from the 90s?
Putting ~170 million .com records into a RDBMS on a 90s computer is not enough infrastructure to serve ~746 billion DNS queries a day : https://www.verisign.com/about-us/
They don't use off-the-shelf Redis/PostgreSQL/MySQL and they have more uptime reliability than Github, AWS us-east-1, Anthropic Claude, etc.
Verisign may still overcharge for what they do but nevertheless, the computing infrastructure isn't trivial.
>I frequently have to return clothing because there's absolutely no way of figuring out which size will fit you since nothing about sizes is standardized.
I used to take advantage of Amazon's return policy by deliberately buying 3 sizes of the same item (1 below and 1 above my expected size) because clothing manufacturers are not consistent with their sizing. I can then try them all at home to choose best size and return the other 2 that don't fit. I did this for pants, shoes, etc. This really seemed great because I hate going to the store and changing clothes in fitting rooms.
However, I stopped doing this many years ago because I found out that some online retailers like Amazon do not restock the returned items for re-sale and instead, throw it away so it eventually ends up in a landfill. In those cases, the sellers just eat the cost of unsold goods that got thrown out.
It seemed illogical to throw away perfectly good clothes that are still NEW but somebody explained that Amazon does this because they're paranoid about bodily fluids etc tainting the returns. So to play it safe, they just throw away the returns.
I have no more insider knowledge of how Amazon operates than you do, but judging on the amount of items I’ve received that were clearly used (stains, other people’s hairs, dust, dirt…) but sold as new I’m fairly certain they’ll resell everything that gets returns without even looking at the items.
I've returned clothes on Amazon and they told me just to keep it. I assume that's the equivalent of them just sending it to landfill. At least I can donate it to a local charity.
Also Zappos was clearly founded on the idea of ordering 3 pairs of shoes and keeping the one that fits. They say the returns go back for sale unless used and then go to charity/reuse, but happy to see other sources you have. I think a lot of that Zappos dna went into Amazon's policies.
I hate to break it to you, but this is true of returns across a lot of companies and product categories. If you return unopened wine to Costco, for example, they throw it out because they can't guarantee that you stored it properly.
>If you return unopened wine to Costco, for example, they throw it out
The food and groceries I already knew about. However, Amazon throwing out returned clothes was a surprise because I've seen clothing retailers like Macy's just put the returned items right back on the rack for re-sale. When you go to a shore store, they don't throw out every pair of shoes that customers tried on and didn't buy. So I just thought Amazon just did the same thing at their warehouse. I've also returned car wax to an OReilly's Auto store and I watched the clerk just put the bottle right back on the shelf for the next customer to buy.
It was disconcerting to find out I was adding to the landfill just because I returned clothes to Amazon. Nowadays, I don't order clothes from them unless I'm 100% sure I won't be returning it.
> because I found out that some online retailers like Amazon do not restock the returned items for re-sale and instead, throw it away so it eventually ends up in a landfill
This was essentially false, and FUD spread by the anti-Amazon crowd.
You will observe official Amazon Resale listings for many items, which is precisely Amazon restocking the returned items. For goods of any signficant value, it is bizarre to suggest that Amazon wouldn't be reselling them. Like, it's ludicrous to suggest they're tossing a $50 shirt instead of reselling it, as long as the return is in resale condition.
What Amazon sends to landfills is when items (mostly third-party seller items) aren't selling and the seller doesn't want to keep paying for warehousing or to have them shipped elsewhere so Amazon sends them to landfills. Because nobody is buying the items, there's no demand for them. Not everything sells.
Wherever you got the idea that they're paranoid about body fluids, that's somebody who doesn't know what they're talking about. People make up all sorts of things. That's why that have a small army of people inspecting returns.
>You will observe official Amazon Resale listings for many items, which is precisely Amazon restocking the returned items.
To clarify, I'm already aware Amazon re-sells returns. I often buy "Used Like New" electronics from Amazon Resale which are obviously customer returns that Amazon re-boxed. However, the category of clothes is different where it customer returns are often thrown out.
>What Amazon sends to landfills is when items (mostly third-party seller items) aren't selling and the seller doesn't want to keep paying for warehousing or to have them shipped elsewhere so Amazon sends them to landfills.
No, that's not the full story. What's also happening is that a seller has different options for Amazon's reverse logistics and they have different costs.
E.g. pay $1.50 for Amazon to inspect and resell or pay a lower $0.52 to throw it away. A lot of sellers just pay 1/3rd less and let Amazon throw it out.
That possibility of me inadvertently adding to landfills is enough to stop me from buying 3 sizes and returning 2. Maybe in some circumstances the other 2 returned items won't be thrown out -- but I can't know for sure so I won't do it. I'll continue to buy clothes from Amazon but only do so when I'm 100% sure I'm going to keep it no matter what.
If you're talking about some $4 item then sure. But most clothing on Amazon isn't $4. If you're buying $30 or $60 items then they are most definitely having them inspected.
Because it's not about $1.50 for inspection vs $0.52 to throw it out.
It's about -$1.50 + $8 profit = $6.50 gain for inspection vs. -$0.52 + $0 profit = $0.52 loss for throwing it out.
You're missing the entire resale price on the return. Companies aren't leaving money on the table. They are looking to maximize profit and minimize losses. In most places, sending resellable stock to the landfill isn't doing that.
On the surface of it, it would appear not to make sense. Why would Amazon take on the cost of handling a return item that they will have to dispose? They could just indicate to the user to keep the item --- and that in fact does happen! I had a return like that just this past week.
However, there is an obvious incentive to minimize these no-return refunds and require users to print labels and go through the motion of returning items that won't be restocked.
It discourages fraud: people abusing the no-return refund as a way of getting free stuff!
The no-return refund has to be a kind of perk for the customer who rarely returns anything or whatever.
I would say that it would be astonishing if Amazon pretending to accept returns and then throwing away is a thing that absolutely does not happen, and honestly cannot blame them for it. We are a throw-away-stuff society, and Amazon is not outside of that society.
> We are a throw-away-stuff society, and Amazon is not outside of that society.
What Amazon does with returns doesn't have anything to do with what kind of "society" you think we are.
What it does with returns is determined by the profit motive.
And in most cases, the more profitable thing to do is to resell returned merchandise. Yes, return inspections cost money, but usually less money than what is gained by reselling the item.
Returned merchandise has value, and businesses don't make profit by throwing value away when they can make money with it or reduce losses with it instead.
I genuinely don't understand all the people who think it's more cost-effective for Amazon to send a $50 shirt to the dumpster rather than resell it. That's not how anything works.
What individuals do is also motivated by profit or profit-adjacent motives. Saving money is a profit motive; so is saving time and convenience.
> It's more cost-effective for Amazon to send a $50 shirt to the dumpster rather than resell it.
It's not a $50 shirt. It's like a $5 shirt to them, which some sucker is willing to pay $50 for. Used, it becomes a $10 shirt.
A dumpster can be found right in the neck of the woods of where the returning customer lives, whereas it may have to travel far and pass through more processing if it goes to another customer elsewhere.
It needs to be inspected, repacked.
There is a risk in every returned item. Sometimes people return a perfectly good item. But sometimes it's because there is something wrong with the item, such that the next buyer is also likely to return it, even if they get it cheaper.
Basically returned items are entirely outside of the profit-optimized delivery path. They incur costs and risks, at a reduced revenue.
I'd never return an item which matches the description and isn't damaged.
If it isn't damaged in any way but does not match the description, that's a problem; if it is sold with the same description, the next customer will also see that it doesn't match. A new listing has to be created for that product. Not gonna happen, or not in the processing time frame of that particular return.
Not wanting to throw away is sunk cost thinking, which represents how emotional consumers operate. Not businesses like Amazon.
How a business operates is:
1. Going forward, ignoring the prior costs associated with the item, is there an expectation that the item will bring in more revenue than what it costs to further handle and move it? (Taking into account its adjusted price, and the probability that it will be returned again by a new buyer?)
2. Is that profit good enough to justify taking away logistics resources from some new item? In every situation in which a returned item is being moved or handled, it displaces a new item that is not being moved or handled.
The point of the $5 is not to discuss a sunk cost, but to point out that producing a new item isn't expensive. If producing a replacement item is expensive, that means that a new item is less profitable than if it were cheaper to produce. If a new item is less profitable, then the returned item has a lower bar of profitability to pass in order to be viable.
But a returned item is likely not even compared to an identical item anyway, but to some average profitability of moving any item whatsoever which has around the same size and weight.
>If Amazon is selling a shirt for $50, then they are probably acquiring it for $25-30. Believe me, they don't want to throw away that $25-30.
The key you're missing is Amazon didn't have to spend that ~$25 in the first place.
I'm guessing your assumption of Amazon's out-of-pocket cost is the source of your insistence that Amazon is determined to restock and re-sale instead of throwaway. That mental model of how big retailers operate is incorrect.
The giant retailers like Amazon/Walmart/Target don't pay upfront for merchandise. Instead, they use a complicated "chargeback model". They just deduct customer returns from the ongoing rolling invoices "net 90" etc.
So, Amazon doesn't really "lose money" for customer returns if they don't re-stock & resell. It's the manufacturers and sellers that take the financial hit. (Which would be the much lower ~$5 instead of $25.) The above chargeback model is why Amazon was so nonchalant about throwing away perfectly good items that were returned by customers. Amazon wasn't incentivized to bother trying to re-sell it. Instead of taking a risk with a tainted customer return, just mathematically deduct it from the next vendor's payment. No ~$25 wholesale cost needs to be "recovered" because Amazon never spent it.
>That's not how businesses operate.
It is (or was) how they operated. That isn't FUD. Canada, France, Germany did investigative reports with hidden cameras and GPS trackers to discover that billions in Amazon merchandise was being dump at landfills and/or burned at incinerators. (What Amazon euphemistically calls "energy recovery"). This includes lots of expensive items that were more than ~$4 such as new coffee machines. The public relations backlash at Amazon destroying so much product was so bad that France passed a new law targeted at Amazon to stop doing it: https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+france+passes+new+law...
That's when Amazon started a more earnest "re-sale or donate" and reduce the destruction of customer returns.
You seem to be greatly confused. Amazon most certainly does not generally operate on a consignment model nor does it avoid paying manufacturers for returned merchandise.
It is true that it may pay suppliers only 90 days later or something, but this doesn't change the fact that they still have to pay suppliers.
I genuinely don't know where you are getting your information from, but it is quite wrong.
And as I said before, the stuff that Amazon sends to landfills, has a little to do with the fact that it has been returned (except for things that are so damaged they cannot be resold), and everything to do with the fact that there is no longer demand for it and they need their warehouse space for products that sell better.
>Amazon most certainly does not generally operate on a consignment model
No, not a consignment model. A "chargeback model".
>, but this doesn't change the fact that they still have to pay suppliers.
Not for the returned items. The returned items are deducted from the next unpaid vendor invoice. (The "vendor chargeback" or "vendor clawback" in industry parlance). All the big retailers with leverage such as Walmart/Amazon/Target/HomeDepot/BestBuy etc do this. It makes the financial hit from customer returns mostly the vendors' problem instead of Amazon's.
>, has a little to do with the fact that it has been returned (except for things that are so damaged
The new law in France was trying to stop Amazon from destroying undamaged products because of investigative reports. Again, Amazon didn't care about sending undamaged returned merchandise to the landfill by the truckloads because of the chargebacks above. In other words, Amazon never "bought" the items the customers returned.
If it was expensive items like electronics, they would ship it back to the supplier or a liquidator for resale but that often didn't happen for clothes because it wasn't worth it the extra costs to the supplier. That's why a lot of it went to the landfills.
The chargeback model does not operate the way you are describing.
Yes, major retailers have various agreements with manufacturers. Sometimes it's return-to-vendor, because the manufacturer wants the returned items back in order to refurbish and resell itself, etc. Sometimes there are return allowances, such as a 3% rate, meant to cover an expected return rate regardless of return reason, or they negotiate with Amazon for it to determine which returns are genuinely defective, and then those and only those get effectively reimbursed.
But it is completely false to say that Amazon is generally able to pass on the cost of all its returns to manufacturers, that this makes returns zero-cost for Amazon, and that it therefore just tosses returns in landfills. That's not how anything works. Neither manufacturers nor Amazon have any kind of financial incentive to just dump returned merchandise that can still be profitably resold.
>But it is completely false to say that Amazon is generally able to pass on the cost of all its returns to manufacturers, that this makes returns zero-cost for Amazon,
The vendor agreements say if the returns are Amazon's fault, they will not deduct from remittances. If you're a vendor/seller, you use the Amazon Vendor Portal to look at the account status of invoices, purchase orders, inventory, returns, payments, deductions, etc: https://vendorcentral.amazon.com/
When a customer returns something, they can pick from a menu of reasons such as "not as described", "changed my mind", or "wrong size", etc. For those reasons, the amount is always deducted from the seller's account because none of those reasons are Amazon's fault. (Again, Amazon didn't spend the ~$25 for $50 shirt that they're desperate to recover as you're claiming.) In many cases, the seller doesn't want to pay extra to ship the returned items back so they just let Amazon throw it away. That's how a high volume of perfectly resellable items end up in the garbage -- especially before the bad publicity in 2019. Amazon has reduced the environmental pollution of customer returns by giving more options to sellers to restock and resell but it's still not totally eliminated.
EDIT to reply: >Under first-party, Amazon is still purchasing the goods wholesale. Amazon absolutely spent the $25 for the $50 shirt. That is just how it works.
In a 1P relationship (not 3P), Amazon will deduct the wholesale $25 amount caused by customer returns from the next payment to the vendor/supplier. That's how it works. Yes, Amazon acting as 1P buys wholesale -- but they can also deduct the wholesale amounts owed to the supplier for customer returns that are not their fault.
I can't copy&paste the Amazon 1P vendor agreement but here's a similar one from Costco and notice the verbiage:
>14. CUSTOMER RETURNS. Costco may pursuant to Section 13.1 reject or revoke acceptance of and return to Supplier any Product returned by Costco’s customers. For any Products returned by customers, Costco reserves the right to return such Products to Supplier or to salvage, donate, dispose of, re-use, refurbish or recycle such Products at Supplier’s sole cost and expense.
Similar wording for the big retailers like Walmart, Target, etc.
>Nobody on either side is throwing away perfectly good, sellable merchandise just for the fun of it.
You keep repeating this but the investigative reports with GPS trackers put inside new items immediately returned to amazon to trace where they go and hidden cameras at landfills and industrial shredding facilities that receive truckloads of Amazon customer returns shows otherwise. The volume of it has been reduced somewhat, but not eliminated. Amazon doesn't throwaway all resellable items, but they still throw away a lot of it.
OK, so you're clearly confusing two entirely separate things.
When you talk about being "deducted from the seller's account", you're talking about its third-party marketplace business. But when you talk about Vendor Central, you're talking about Amazon's first-party wholesale business.
Under first-party, Amazon is still purchasing the goods wholesale. Amazon absolutely spent the $25 for the $50 shirt. That's just how it works. That's the main discussion we're having. For you to claim otherwise is just flat-out wrong.
The drop-down about the return reasons, and about a seller choosing what to do with returned merchandise, that's about the third-party marketplace. That's a totally separate discussion, but it has nothing to do with the chargeback model you were talking about, and those are decisions sellers are making, not Amazon. And sellers are still making those decisions based on what is most profitable. If an item is "perfectly resellable", then they're still being restocked and resold. Nobody on either side is throwing away perfectly good, sellable merchandise just for the fun of it. If they think there's value in it, it gets resold.
Also:
>> Nobody on either side is throwing away perfectly good, sellable merchandise just for the fun of it.
> You keep repeating this but the investigative reports with GPS trackers put inside new items immediately returned to amazon to trace where they go and hidden cameras at landfills and industrial shredding facilities that receive truckloads of Amazon customer returns shows otherwise. The volume of it has been reduced somewhat, but not eliminated.
Just because it happened once with some items doesn't mean it's a pattern. Obviously, journalists are looking for a "gotcha" here. They're focused on finding the times when Amazon misclassified returns, or when the item is no longer selling, or whatever. They're not writing up stories when their GPS trackers showed that the items got resold.
You're trying to push an agenda here, and I'm done talking. You are falsely mischaracterizing how Amazon returns work and the financial incentives. I'm not saying Amazon doesn't throw out some returns that aren't worth reselling -- literally all retailers do this -- but this narrative that it's somehow magically cheaper for Amazon to just throw out otherwise resellable returns as a matter of standard practice is just false.
No agenda. I've been a Amazon customer for almost 30 years and not trying to run a smear campaign. I buy from them every week. I'm just explaining why I've revised my thinking about the "shopping hack" of buying 3-and-return-2 that I used to think was harmless and supposedly a "win/win" for both me and Amazon. My intuition thought Amazon would always restock and resell the other 2 was wrong. Maybe they will but there's a good chance they won't and I'm not interested in being the cause of more environmental pollution. So I try to be more conscientious and avoid frivolously returning things.
Several reasons combine to cause the "illogical" disposal of undamaged returned goods:
- delayed vendor payments (NET90) and how Amazon can deduct the cost of customer returns. That the hidden "perverse incentive" that reduces Amazon's "skin in the game" and motivation to resell it. They're no longer financially on the hook to pay wholesale costs for those returns.
- vendor calculates it's not worth the cost of re-inspecting and re-stocking the merchandise. If the NEW item is now OPEN BOX and must be priced much lower, it negatively affects the ROI calculation even further.
- vendor decides that the extra risk of customers tainting the returned items and causing the next customer to leave a 1 start review (which lowers future sales) is not worth it
The above factors are especially relevant to clothes. I'm ok buying and then returning a Bosch power drill for $200 because I'm confident that the reverse logistics will go through a liquidator instead of the landfill. However, I don't have the same confidence for a $50 shirt. It's the ~$5 vendor's cost not the $25 wholesale cost that must be used as basis for calculating ROI of risk-vs-resale and we have to be realistic that will often favor the landfill.
It's as if you're starting to understand that trying to peddle the returned item is not profitable, given all the costs involved. Recovering it from the user: cost. Sending it to new user: cost. Probability it will be returned again: cost. Reduced retail price: revenue hit.
Say Amazon projected a $25 profit on the item originally based on a revenue of $50. Meaning their total cost had to be $25: procuring the item and shipping it. That didn't work out; so at that point they have a loss of $25.
That doesn't matter; it's all sunk costs at that point.
They have an opportunity to recover the item from the user. How profitable will it be? Let's say there is 60% chance that the item is junk that the next user will also return. Let's say it costs $5 to ship it back to Amazon, and another $5 to ship it to a new user. Let's say it can only be sold for $35 and not $50.
The probability of keeping the $35 revenue is 40%, and so the expected revenue is 0.4 times 35 or $14. We have to subtract the shipping both ways, leaving $4.
Thus the new business venture of recovering the item and reselling it has an expected profit of $4.
This is a waste of time, even though the profit is nonzero.
It is better to procure a new item and make $25.
A truck full of items that make $25 is better than one full of the same items that make $4.
It's as if you continue to double down on not understanding.
Your figures are all extremely exaggerated. If it's a normal piece of clothing, there isn't a 60% chance the next user will also return it. It costs nothing close to $5 to send something back when it's dropped off at Whole Foods or Staples or whatever, and Amazon's shipping costs are also much less than $5. Many items are resold at full price as well. You're also double-counting -- new items have a risk of getting returned as well (obviously), and there's the same shipping price in sending out returned items as used items.
Obviously when it is no longer profitable to resell a return, it gets discarded. Obviously, this happens when the return is too damaged or defective.
But you also have to realize that there are a lot of people who are willing to buy an open-box scratched item for 60% off, who simply can't afford the full-price item new. And a lot of people who will never buy the open-box scratched item under any circumstances. Selling returns allows Amazon to make money off both.
Just think about it this way: once we write off the sunk costs of a return, Amazon basically has zero-cost merchandise on its hands. If you think of it that way, then they can make more profit off the returned item than off the original. They're no longer making their expected $25 profit, they're making $50 profit, in your example. It would be business insanity to throw those items away instead.
>Why is a purchase ever in such a hurry? Short delivery only really encurrage impulse purchases.
We never do impulse buys for frivolous throwaway consumerism junk but fast ~2 day delivery is still very helpful because... Life Happens ... such as stuff unexpectedly breaking and you want to have a replacement to quickly fix it.
Example of 2 events just in the last month: (1) garage door screw coupler broke. It's the piece that connects the motor shaft to the screw drive. You cannot buy this type of oddball part from Home Depot or Lowes. Amazon had it and delivered it the next day so I was able to repair the door immediately. The alternative of waiting a week+ for slower delivery means the door has to be disengaged from the track so it can be manually raised and lowered. This is not acceptable because I don't have the specific key to the garage locking mechanism from the outside. Why don't I have a key?!? Because life happens. I guess I could manually lock it from the inside and leave the car outside the garage for a week but I didn't like the idea of leaving a catalytic converter exposed to drive-by theft.
(2) was my Skechers work boots had the sole separated from the shoe. I bought the same model shoes from Amazon for $59.99 and had it in 2 days. I could drive to the local Skechers store but they charge $79.99. So either wait a week+ for slow delivery or pay $20 extra plus round trip gas money to buy at the local store.
Amazon quick delivery acts as a JIT (Just In Time) inventory system to take care of unexpected things that happen in life. That's a more sane alternative than holding a bunch of inventory of random parts for things that might go wrong.
Btw, Amazon often offers extra reward points credited to your account if you voluntarily choose slow delivery instead of 2 days. This is what we do the majority of the time. I assume Amazon does this pseudo "cashback" incentive as a way to consolidate as many customer orders as they can to optimize their delivery routes and reduce costs.
If you're in a Nielsen "A" market like 40% of the population you have a Sketchers store in your area. I'm in a "C" market, a college town with post-material values, and the local stores suck. (Great thrift stores and vintage clothes but if you want something new it is Target or Wal-Mart or the overpriced Haberdasher that will get you something appropriate for a wedding but 'not special' in my mind)
4k? That might have something to do with it. Though given a big enough box that too shouldn't be an issue. But I'm using a decade+ old thinkpad driving a fairly high res dell and it works well enough.
I sometimes have difficulty with YouTube 4K on Firefox on my Mac Studio (M2 Max with 64GB). I don't really care though, because 1440p is always well and truly good enough. (And really 1080p is more than good enough except that the default bitrate is absolute dogshit. Most of the time I'm choosing 1440p is because it's bitrate is not dogshit.)
One of the motivations is to have a "master controller and dashboard" for the (smart-) home that's conveniently always attached and connected to the house itself.
Consider that many houses already have wall-mounted control panels in the main hallway or kitchen for the burglar alarm or thermostat. Replace that with an all-in-one smarthome touchscreen that configures the same security system as well as everything else ... HVAC, lights, blinds, door cam video feed, etc.
Examples of that concept from other home automation companies such as Crestron, Savant, Control4, etc:
Apple's product marketing pages for HomeView at the moment don't heavily promote the idea of customized programming for home automations (HomeKit API) to compete with Crestron/Savant but many observers think Apple wants to expand into that space. (https://www.apple.com/home-app/)
A lot of homeowners don't want to be locked in with Crestron/Savant. Yes, Apple is itself also a "walled garden" but it's a more palatable lock-in situation than the ridiculous re-programming fees that Crestron dealers charge for every little change.
>Didn't even occur to me to look for a purpose-built smart home console.
Sorry for not being clear. The Crestron/Savant panels are not typically purchased separately as 1 item. They're installed by certified system integrators as part of a total package where they wire up the whole house (often new construction).
There have been rumblings and predictions that Apple could expand HomeKit's capabilities to eventually be a real alternative to Crestron/Savant. The previous iterations of HomePod and Apple TV acting as a home hub really wasn't a credible threat but a new product like HomeView is a step closer to the "professional smarthome automation" space. E.g. Apple offering a wall-mounted PoE option is evidence of that.
Yeah, a lot of people are using old iPads for this sort of thing. That seems to be the biggest competitor to HomeView is "old iPad mounted somewhere". The multi-user Face ID seems a big differentiator in that competition and might for some be a good reason to upgrade that old iPad to something newer.
>, it means that even if Photopea moves to server based (which it should have been in the first place),
It's a 1-man operation so it may have not have been financially viable to architect the app as server-based.
- server-based : must invest a lot more money in server farms and extra disk storage, or pay high AWS cloud fees. E.g. if a million users do a blur or denoise filter, all that cpu processing has to happen on the servers, and massive disk space to hold the intermediate files, and extra bandwidth costs to send the changed bytes back to the client.
- client-based : just ship Javascript blobs to end users' web browsers because the blur/denoise/etc filters happen on the desktop.
Also, this type of pixel-editing software still needs a ton of client-side Javascript to behave like a Photoshop clone because users want to see interactive changes as they dynamically slide the blur/noise/etc settings. Round-tripping that with extra server latency is not a fluid UI experience.
We can't confidently replay the past and say that starting it as server-side app from the very beginning means he'd have the same $million in revenue today. Instead, the extra server costs and UI jankiness could have doomed the project.
It's a business decision, and I'm not sure if they made the right decision. Most client-only web applications are open source because they know there is no business in selling it as a service. Photopea somehow is an exception, but its business model is getting questionable which is not a surprise at all.
It's also possible to use a combination of cloud based and local computation. Figma is doing quite well in that regard, especially with the use of WebAssembly. No doubt that potentially means more work, and potentially forcing users to create account etc. But hey, that's a business decision as well. If you don't do anything but just keep everything in JavaScript, this was going to happen.
>, we fork the universe in 3. In one, Bob continues his work and solves the open question.
To not lose sight of the discussion subtleties, the gp was saying that in this 1st scenario, Bob still didn't "solve it (totally) on his own" because he still depended on the previous work of others to build on. Likewise, we can say Andrew Wiles "solved Fermat's Last Theorem" but Wiles acknowledges that seeing Ken Ribet's proof of epsilon conjecture was a breakthrough he used.
>In another, Carbon-based Charlie breaks into Bob’s lab, copies enough of Bob’s notes to understand Bob’s work, and provides the final insight to solve the open question. In this world, it’s fair to say that Charlie and Bob both contributed to solving the open question, but I think also fair to say that Charlie didn’t have the capability to solve it on his own.
Again, using gp's framing, Bob also didn't have the capability to solve it on his own. By omitting the previous papers and prior works that Bob built on, it makes your hypothetical scenario incomplete when judging Bob vs Charlie.
We don't have an objective standard of how much the "standing on the shoulders of giants" applies to each breakthrough. There was a blog post (might have been Terence Tao) that said society unfortunately awards the fame to the person who solves the last step of a proof and forgets about the people who solved the intermediate steps that led up to it.
It isn't about being superior, mysterious, or clever. The following "nobody understands" type of quips and thought experiments are different ways of saying our intuitions don't help us understand it :
- "God does not play dice with the universe.", Albert Einstein
- "Shut up and calculate", N. David Mermin
- "Schrödinger's cat" being both alive and dead
- various interpretations/analogies explaining quantum physics leading to absurdities or contradictions
Yes, humanity has harnessed quantum mechanics with mathematic frameworks and repeatable experiments to make useful things... but that's a different layer of "understanding" than the deeper levels in the above quotes.
"Nobody understands what gravity is." ... Wait, if nobody "understands" gravity, how did we send people to the moon?!?
Because those are different usages of the word "understand".
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