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A View From Under the Long Tail
An anonymous reader writes "Here's a funny article by James Boyle in the Financial Times on what it really feels like to be part of the long tail economy." From the article: "Where Amazon's normal customer service seems to be run by suspiciously cheerful MBAs from Stanford, who break off from counting their stock options to write apologies and deliver refunds, 'Amazon Advantage', the ironically named system for selling wares, is clearly based on the last days of the Soviet system. The problem with their representatives is not that their native language is not English, it is that their native planet is not Earth."
That sounds like the problem. Everytime I've experienced tech support as egregious and inconsistent as TFA describes, it was outsourced/offshored.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Amazon's service is quite overrated actually. It usually works fine, and if there is a problem they usually fix it, but there are times when talking to amazon's rep is like talking to a wall.
An example: For large orders, Amazons usually splits the items in several boxes - at no cost for the customer. This is usually fine, except for the fact that each box lists the contents of the whole order.
If you are overseas, this means that you will have to pay taxes for the value of the whole order for each box.
Last time my order was split in 3 boxes. I have to pay 16% VAT, so the net result is that I had to pay 48%.
Add to this that UPS has a policy of dealing with customs without talking to the customer first - they pay the taxes (VAT, custom fees, etc), and then you pay them upon delivery. So talking to the customs officials is not an option, since by the time you know about this the boxes are already out for the delivery. Refusing to pay taxes is not an option, since UPS will not deliver. You can't tell UPS to return everything to Amazon, since they paid for the taxes and will keep the stuff hostage.
In the end, I had to pay triple taxes. And still, Amazon refuses to acknoledge that the problem is that they don't write the actual contents of each box in the sleave.
But could you name even one fiat currency that isn't inflating and hasn't been inflating?
The Yen was deflating fairly recently. It has since gone back to very modest inflation, which is a good thing because it means the Japanese economy is finally growing again.
Currencies can inflate or deflate based on a number of factors, and the ability of the government to print more money is only one of them.
Inflation isn't just a function of money supply, its a funciton of velocity - how quickly that money changes hands. You could spend gold coins on ten different items, or you could spend one gold coin ten times on each different item.... but the price per item would remain at one gold coin because the change in velocity has negated the change in money supply.
This is to point out but one reason that the notion that there would be no inflation under a gold-backed money regime is clearly wrong. To pick historical examples of inflation in gold-backed economies, there was significant inflation throughout Eurasia during the 12th to 14th centuries, the 16th-17th and centuries, and the later 18th and early 19th century.
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
I sell my CGI books through Amazon, and I've been quite happy with the Advantage program. They clearly use an automated system to determine how many books to order. If demand is constant, orders are (usually) constant too. When they place a small order (for 2 books, say), I just send it via media mail to save on shipping. Larger orders go by UPS. It's worked out well for me.
Of course, after having gone through the hassle of working with "regular" distributors, Amazon's been a dream. They order consistently, they pay a month after the sales are made, and they never return anything! Compare that to Ingram, who would order WAY too many books, return half of them (most of them damaged), and take forever to pay. No thanks, I'll take Amazon any time.