I have literally never had this problem, in years of using Amazon, and I wonder just what you're buying on there. Amazon's returns dept is also very helpful and will get you a refund no questions asked, unless you're doing more returns than orders.
Honestly, 90% of counterfeits are coming out of the same Chinese factory as the originals anyway. In cases where the IP holder polices their manufacturer, they just hand over the plans to their wives second cousin's brother who owns a factory 3 towns over and have him produce the counterfeits.
I love how Birkenstock's position is that apparently everyone can spell their name properly and if you can't you were looking for counterfeits. Birkenstock themselves should have already had these AdWords pointing to their own store because misspellings happen and they're refusing customers over it, which is honestly a form of commercial elitism I've never seen before, so polite golf clap for you Birkenstock.
Manufacturers can sell to whoever they want, as long as they don't discriminate based against any of the protected groups (race, religion, sex, age, etc.
RETAILERS can sell to whoever they want, as long as they don't discriminate based against any of the protected groups (race, religion, sex, age, etc) as well.
Birkenstock might get to set pricing, but they don't get to dictate customer relationships.
Also, I'm curious if the AdWords campaign is being done by Amazon corporate office, or one of the people who list stuff on their site. If so, it's not really under Amazon's control.
You're, of course, getting it exactly backwards. Companies like Comcast (which you're oddly confusing with being a "monopoly"... despite the fact that are only one provider of such services out of multiple) - especially the big ones like them, Verizon, etc - LIKED Obama's rule. Because it made things harder on smaller, competing providers. Stop pretending you actually believe the crap you're spewing, and stop being a phony troll who's actually shilling for companies like Comcast. They wanted the more complex regulator environment in place, not stripped away. And you know that, and are simply lying with your childish-sounding theatrics.
No, you have it backwards. When Comcast is the only cable provider and high speed internet provider in your county/state, they are a monopoly. It doesn't matter that people in the next county/state have Cox. Multiple providers in the country isn't competition if they don't actually compete for each other's customers. Also they don't want a complex regulatory environment. A regulatory environment gets reviewed by experts in the field and can be changed fairly rapidly in response to abuses. They want laws with plenty of loopholes written by themselves and handed to Congress as a fait accompli instead because getting one of those changed after the fact takes monumental effort.
I'm a conservative, and I hate Comcast, support net neutrality. However I also support tax cuts for corps. I don't have any illusion that all their tax saving will help the CEO's more than the employee's or their customers. But the bottom line is that we have the highest corporate tax rate in the world. If you want to compete we need to lower that.
The USA ranks number 1 in prison incarceration, debt, and taxes. This is not a good thing.
I notice you were quick to snipe on Conservatives, but were you able to criticize your buddy Obama when he gave a huge bone to the corporate CEO's of the insurance companies under the pretense that he was helping poor people. The honest to god truth is there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats. they all support their corporate campaign donors. Conservatives and Liberals need to ban together, find common ground and stop supporting the party oligarchs.
I've never understood the Conservative stance on the US's place in the world regarding taxes.. We're told socialism is teh evil, because high taxes.. but by your constant harping Democratic Capitalism has led to the highest taxes in the world. Yet most socialist countries seem to have universal health care and a pretty enviable quality of life in exchange for their high taxes compared to the US where we get more prisons, economic serfdom to a new Oligarchy and a forever war. And before anyone tosses out Venezuela or another failed dictatorship that cloaked itself in socialism, there's plenty of failed democracy's to pair that against, so don't even bother.
As for the tax breaks for insurance companies, nobody liked it then either, but it was the only way to get wide spread health care without the Republican nuclear explosion that expanding Medicare universally and having single payer would have done, so we accepted it as an at the time necessary mess. Thank a deity of your choice that Republicans are saving us from that, by doing even more to destroy health care accessibility and likely imploding Medicare at the same time, to pay for their cuts to the wealthy.
This is so bleak and depressing that it's painful to think about. But at least we get Luke training Rey as a Jedi, right? Oh no; Luke is bitter, and instead of learning from what happened and moving on, he spent decades in self-imposed exile; he said, in so many words, that he went to that planet to die. And in fact he didn't give Rey any useful training. He promised three lessons, and gave two, and they were great lessons if her big problem was that she was stuck-up and had an inflated sense of her own importance; her actual problem was that she was truly gifted in the Force yet had no idea what to do or how to use the Force, in short that she needed good training.
Luke never claimed he was going to train Rey to be a Jedi. He specifically said he was going to give her three lessons to show why the Jedi should die. The Jedi order itself was flawed, it's constant push for purity in the light side was it's downfall. Pull the Force towards the light, the dark will only grow stronger to match.
Because the Vice Admiral didn't tell Poe that she actually had a plan, and she went out of her way to let him think she had no plan and everyone was going to die. Was this to "teach him a lesson"? Makes no sense, and that lesson came at a horrific cost.
Generals and Admirals don't have to tell the people under them a thing. That's part of the chain of command. Poe got people killed because of his own recklessness, not the Admirals, and started a mutiny because he can't accept that anyone else knows what they're doing. If he were trustworthy enough, and knew how to follow orders, maybe he would have been included in Hodo's plans, like the pilots of all the transports, the captains of the other two vessels, and everyone else who needed to know.
And those who criticize hardcore fans don't get it. The fans could accept that Luke&Co are no longer the main characters.
No.. no they can't. It's hardcore fans who seem to be unable to accept that Rey doesn't come from some deep mysterious Force bloodline, that the script wasn't just "Luke destroys everything, goes home." and are the most butthurt that this movie wasn't just 2 hours of fan service. Casual fans have been pretty positive because they don't *care* if something is cannon or if it adheres to some made up physics model that says ships do bank turns in space but space bombers are wildly out of bounds.
It's actually cannon in SW that ships have an artificial gravity well projector that will pull a ship out of hyperspace if they're going to collide. Hodo rammed them at light speed, not hyperspace. Likely the only reason it had an effect was because her ship was big enough that the mass of it cracked through the battle-cruiser's shields, where a lighter missile would bounce off or be disintegrated by the deflectors.
Or, you can remember that it's a movie and they don't have to explain a damn thing to you so just enjoy it and quit being pedantic.
Amazon has an Android app store where you can buy apps for your Android phone or tablet. So you can buy any Android tablet or phone now and go to an Amazon website and download the apk file for their 'store app,' install it and have an Android device that you can buy and get free apps for, without ever connecting that device to Google. That is sort of a big deal for people who want as little connection to Google as possible. It's highly unlikely a similar store could be opened for Apple devices, but it would be fun to see Amazon try.
Personally I'd be delighted if Amazon sued Apple for being a monopoly on their app store and fought to get an Amazon app store for iPhones as an option. Apple has already used their app store to try to fix ebook prices after all, which effected Amazon's business.
That's kind of my point. Apple & Google want to complain that their competitor doesn't want to carry some of their products but there's no reason, really, that they can't carry Amazon's stuff. Especially Google. They want to be exclusive on their sites, fine, don't cry if Amazon feels the same about their branded products too.
A lot of people seem to be throwing shade at Amazon for not carrying their competitor's products, but weird, I don't remember seeing Kindles or Alexa's for sale on Google Play or Apple ever allowing Amazon to put a competitive Amazon app store on their devices. So really, who's being the shady one here again?
What's that? Amazon didn't want to sell competing devices once they provided their own? Too bad Amazon isn't as trustworthy as Comcast and Verizon who will absolutely not prioritize content that they are personally invested in.
Tell you what, when Apple lets you install an Amazon app store on their devices and Google sells Alexa's through the Play store, then you can bitch about who's trustworthy and treating their competitors fairly.
What percentage of them are running around with a smart phone? The cheapest data plan per month will buy a sack of flour, a bag of sugar, and some beans. You can live on that. I have to believe some of this is a matter of priorities
This is 2017, you need a phone to work. Especially in a techie wonderland like San Francisco. So no, the phone isn't optional. Also, we're talking about people living in cars and garages without stoves/refrigerators, wtf good is a sack of flour and some beans going to do them?
Yeah, because people living in their cars have refrigerators and access to a wall socket at all times.. I can see it now, a bunch of semi-homeless hipsters each with a laptop and a crockpot taking up a table at the local Starbucks.
Why, precisely, is it immoral to spy on the Russians and Cubans? Do you think they don't spy on us? Everybody spies on everybody, sometimes it's the only way to really know if you can trust each other.
Considering these mystery weapons, we need to up our spying.
So if you think having laws to prevent a warehouse full of people from going up in flames actually work, I have a number of recent examples of this not being true, in the USA even.
You get out of Government what you put into it, and frankly, in this country, we stopped putting in about 20 years ago. Listen to yourself, you automatically assume the worst return from it so you don't even bother looking for better from it. Why should we be surprised if inspections don't get performed on businesses if you've cut your tax base to the bone? We could transition from taxes to straight fees and I guarantee you that corporations will complain about them, while simultaneously taking advantage of every subsidy and break to ensure they have a zero burden, just like they currently do. If anyone gets pinched by unfair taxes it's the middle class, who've had to pick up the slack from all the Apple's and Exxon's who avoid their commitments. The amazing thing is all conservatives can chant is LOWER TAXES and not PROSECUTE THE CHEATS.
Corporations SHOULD pay more in taxes, they are a bigger burden on society. They can wipe out the savings of millions overnight, they can send out dangerous products, they need military intervention to protect their supply lines and they drop their used up workers onto the social safety net for everyone else to carry the burden. They destroy the environment, poison our food supplies even as they bring us the products we want.
Also, we live in a nation of 50 individual governments with thousands of governments under them.. some are just gonna be better than others. Maybe they'd improve if people gave a damn and voted on performance rather than who's sleeping with whom and where or if you pray.
There's this thing called "History", you may have heard of it? Read up on things like the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, or perhaps investigate company towns, or just look up workplace abuse.
You turn to YOURSELF.. What part of build something better don't you get. If businesses insist on mistreating their customers, even if they collude with all the others providing the goods or services in question, then YOU build a business that DOESN'T and you will win the game...
What part of the business you're competing against will just have you killed if you don't play along do YOU not get? That's what bugs me about people like you, we've been here before, yet you keep wanting to redo the past. Read up on the Pinkertons sometime. Private militia group that giant conglomerates and industrialists used to push their workers into line, kill off their competition and ensure that their particular boats didn't get rocked.
When business becomes over intrusive into our lives, who else can you turn to but the government? When business says it's more profitable to lock it's workers into a warehouse with poor ventilation and no fire safety equipment (that costs $$!), who else can you turn to but the government? When business feels they can sell you a product that they know will either kill you or it does nothing at all, and feels it's your problem for buying it, who else can you turn to but government?
Government is what it is because it's been cleaning up Capitalism's messes since we started this country.
Part of the reason Uber fights having their drivers designated as employees, is that if you require an employee to have certain equipment to perform their job, then you have to provide it to them.
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I have literally never had this problem, in years of using Amazon, and I wonder just what you're buying on there. Amazon's returns dept is also very helpful and will get you a refund no questions asked, unless you're doing more returns than orders.
Honestly, 90% of counterfeits are coming out of the same Chinese factory as the originals anyway. In cases where the IP holder polices their manufacturer, they just hand over the plans to their wives second cousin's brother who owns a factory 3 towns over and have him produce the counterfeits.
I love how Birkenstock's position is that apparently everyone can spell their name properly and if you can't you were looking for counterfeits. Birkenstock themselves should have already had these AdWords pointing to their own store because misspellings happen and they're refusing customers over it, which is honestly a form of commercial elitism I've never seen before, so polite golf clap for you Birkenstock.
Manufacturers can sell to whoever they want, as long as they don't discriminate based against any of the protected groups (race, religion, sex, age, etc.
RETAILERS can sell to whoever they want, as long as they don't discriminate based against any of the protected groups (race, religion, sex, age, etc) as well. Birkenstock might get to set pricing, but they don't get to dictate customer relationships.
Also, I'm curious if the AdWords campaign is being done by Amazon corporate office, or one of the people who list stuff on their site. If so, it's not really under Amazon's control.
You're, of course, getting it exactly backwards. Companies like Comcast (which you're oddly confusing with being a "monopoly" ... despite the fact that are only one provider of such services out of multiple) - especially the big ones like them, Verizon, etc - LIKED Obama's rule. Because it made things harder on smaller, competing providers. Stop pretending you actually believe the crap you're spewing, and stop being a phony troll who's actually shilling for companies like Comcast. They wanted the more complex regulator environment in place, not stripped away. And you know that, and are simply lying with your childish-sounding theatrics.
No, you have it backwards. When Comcast is the only cable provider and high speed internet provider in your county/state, they are a monopoly. It doesn't matter that people in the next county/state have Cox. Multiple providers in the country isn't competition if they don't actually compete for each other's customers. Also they don't want a complex regulatory environment. A regulatory environment gets reviewed by experts in the field and can be changed fairly rapidly in response to abuses. They want laws with plenty of loopholes written by themselves and handed to Congress as a fait accompli instead because getting one of those changed after the fact takes monumental effort.
They were also simultaneously suing the community ISP to delay their build out while they were rushing to put in their own wire.
I'm a conservative, and I hate Comcast, support net neutrality. However I also support tax cuts for corps. I don't have any illusion that all their tax saving will help the CEO's more than the employee's or their customers. But the bottom line is that we have the highest corporate tax rate in the world. If you want to compete we need to lower that.
The USA ranks number 1 in prison incarceration, debt, and taxes. This is not a good thing.
I notice you were quick to snipe on Conservatives, but were you able to criticize your buddy Obama when he gave a huge bone to the corporate CEO's of the insurance companies under the pretense that he was helping poor people. The honest to god truth is there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats. they all support their corporate campaign donors. Conservatives and Liberals need to ban together, find common ground and stop supporting the party oligarchs.
I've never understood the Conservative stance on the US's place in the world regarding taxes.. We're told socialism is teh evil, because high taxes.. but by your constant harping Democratic Capitalism has led to the highest taxes in the world. Yet most socialist countries seem to have universal health care and a pretty enviable quality of life in exchange for their high taxes compared to the US where we get more prisons, economic serfdom to a new Oligarchy and a forever war. And before anyone tosses out Venezuela or another failed dictatorship that cloaked itself in socialism, there's plenty of failed democracy's to pair that against, so don't even bother.
As for the tax breaks for insurance companies, nobody liked it then either, but it was the only way to get wide spread health care without the Republican nuclear explosion that expanding Medicare universally and having single payer would have done, so we accepted it as an at the time necessary mess. Thank a deity of your choice that Republicans are saving us from that, by doing even more to destroy health care accessibility and likely imploding Medicare at the same time, to pay for their cuts to the wealthy.
This is so bleak and depressing that it's painful to think about. But at least we get Luke training Rey as a Jedi, right? Oh no; Luke is bitter, and instead of learning from what happened and moving on, he spent decades in self-imposed exile; he said, in so many words, that he went to that planet to die. And in fact he didn't give Rey any useful training. He promised three lessons, and gave two, and they were great lessons if her big problem was that she was stuck-up and had an inflated sense of her own importance; her actual problem was that she was truly gifted in the Force yet had no idea what to do or how to use the Force, in short that she needed good training.
Luke never claimed he was going to train Rey to be a Jedi. He specifically said he was going to give her three lessons to show why the Jedi should die. The Jedi order itself was flawed, it's constant push for purity in the light side was it's downfall. Pull the Force towards the light, the dark will only grow stronger to match.
Because the Vice Admiral didn't tell Poe that she actually had a plan, and she went out of her way to let him think she had no plan and everyone was going to die. Was this to "teach him a lesson"? Makes no sense, and that lesson came at a horrific cost.
Generals and Admirals don't have to tell the people under them a thing. That's part of the chain of command. Poe got people killed because of his own recklessness, not the Admirals, and started a mutiny because he can't accept that anyone else knows what they're doing. If he were trustworthy enough, and knew how to follow orders, maybe he would have been included in Hodo's plans, like the pilots of all the transports, the captains of the other two vessels, and everyone else who needed to know.
And those who criticize hardcore fans don't get it. The fans could accept that Luke&Co are no longer the main characters.
No.. no they can't. It's hardcore fans who seem to be unable to accept that Rey doesn't come from some deep mysterious Force bloodline, that the script wasn't just "Luke destroys everything, goes home." and are the most butthurt that this movie wasn't just 2 hours of fan service. Casual fans have been pretty positive because they don't *care* if something is cannon or if it adheres to some made up physics model that says ships do bank turns in space but space bombers are wildly out of bounds.
It's actually cannon in SW that ships have an artificial gravity well projector that will pull a ship out of hyperspace if they're going to collide. Hodo rammed them at light speed, not hyperspace. Likely the only reason it had an effect was because her ship was big enough that the mass of it cracked through the battle-cruiser's shields, where a lighter missile would bounce off or be disintegrated by the deflectors.
Or, you can remember that it's a movie and they don't have to explain a damn thing to you so just enjoy it and quit being pedantic.
Yeah, I hate to agree with an AC, but this is nothing more than organized theft and should be punished as such. Throw the CEO and the board into jail.
There needs to be a vote to reinstate Net Neutrality and to never allow another vote/bill to get rid of it ever again.
There's no such thing. Even a Constitutional Amendment can get overridden by another amendment later.
Amazon doesn't directly compete against the providers of that 55 gallon drum of lube and doesn't sell Amazon branded horse head masks either.
Amazon has an Android app store where you can buy apps for your Android phone or tablet. So you can buy any Android tablet or phone now and go to an Amazon website and download the apk file for their 'store app,' install it and have an Android device that you can buy and get free apps for, without ever connecting that device to Google. That is sort of a big deal for people who want as little connection to Google as possible. It's highly unlikely a similar store could be opened for Apple devices, but it would be fun to see Amazon try.
Personally I'd be delighted if Amazon sued Apple for being a monopoly on their app store and fought to get an Amazon app store for iPhones as an option. Apple has already used their app store to try to fix ebook prices after all, which effected Amazon's business.
That's kind of my point. Apple & Google want to complain that their competitor doesn't want to carry some of their products but there's no reason, really, that they can't carry Amazon's stuff. Especially Google. They want to be exclusive on their sites, fine, don't cry if Amazon feels the same about their branded products too.
A lot of people seem to be throwing shade at Amazon for not carrying their competitor's products, but weird, I don't remember seeing Kindles or Alexa's for sale on Google Play or Apple ever allowing Amazon to put a competitive Amazon app store on their devices. So really, who's being the shady one here again?
What's that? Amazon didn't want to sell competing devices once they provided their own? Too bad Amazon isn't as trustworthy as Comcast and Verizon who will absolutely not prioritize content that they are personally invested in.
Tell you what, when Apple lets you install an Amazon app store on their devices and Google sells Alexa's through the Play store, then you can bitch about who's trustworthy and treating their competitors fairly.
What percentage of them are running around with a smart phone? The cheapest data plan per month will buy a sack of flour, a bag of sugar, and some beans. You can live on that. I have to believe some of this is a matter of priorities
This is 2017, you need a phone to work. Especially in a techie wonderland like San Francisco. So no, the phone isn't optional. Also, we're talking about people living in cars and garages without stoves/refrigerators, wtf good is a sack of flour and some beans going to do them?
Yeah, because people living in their cars have refrigerators and access to a wall socket at all times.. I can see it now, a bunch of semi-homeless hipsters each with a laptop and a crockpot taking up a table at the local Starbucks.
Why, precisely, is it immoral to spy on the Russians and Cubans? Do you think they don't spy on us? Everybody spies on everybody, sometimes it's the only way to really know if you can trust each other.
Considering these mystery weapons, we need to up our spying.
So if you think having laws to prevent a warehouse full of people from going up in flames actually work, I have a number of recent examples of this not being true, in the USA even.
You get out of Government what you put into it, and frankly, in this country, we stopped putting in about 20 years ago. Listen to yourself, you automatically assume the worst return from it so you don't even bother looking for better from it. Why should we be surprised if inspections don't get performed on businesses if you've cut your tax base to the bone? We could transition from taxes to straight fees and I guarantee you that corporations will complain about them, while simultaneously taking advantage of every subsidy and break to ensure they have a zero burden, just like they currently do. If anyone gets pinched by unfair taxes it's the middle class, who've had to pick up the slack from all the Apple's and Exxon's who avoid their commitments. The amazing thing is all conservatives can chant is LOWER TAXES and not PROSECUTE THE CHEATS.
Corporations SHOULD pay more in taxes, they are a bigger burden on society. They can wipe out the savings of millions overnight, they can send out dangerous products, they need military intervention to protect their supply lines and they drop their used up workers onto the social safety net for everyone else to carry the burden. They destroy the environment, poison our food supplies even as they bring us the products we want.
Also, we live in a nation of 50 individual governments with thousands of governments under them.. some are just gonna be better than others. Maybe they'd improve if people gave a damn and voted on performance rather than who's sleeping with whom and where or if you pray.
There's this thing called "History", you may have heard of it? Read up on things like the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, or perhaps investigate company towns, or just look up workplace abuse.
You turn to YOURSELF.. What part of build something better don't you get. If businesses insist on mistreating their customers, even if they collude with all the others providing the goods or services in question, then YOU build a business that DOESN'T and you will win the game...
What part of the business you're competing against will just have you killed if you don't play along do YOU not get? That's what bugs me about people like you, we've been here before, yet you keep wanting to redo the past. Read up on the Pinkertons sometime. Private militia group that giant conglomerates and industrialists used to push their workers into line, kill off their competition and ensure that their particular boats didn't get rocked.
When business becomes over intrusive into our lives, who else can you turn to but the government? When business says it's more profitable to lock it's workers into a warehouse with poor ventilation and no fire safety equipment (that costs $$!), who else can you turn to but the government? When business feels they can sell you a product that they know will either kill you or it does nothing at all, and feels it's your problem for buying it, who else can you turn to but government?
Government is what it is because it's been cleaning up Capitalism's messes since we started this country.
Part of the reason Uber fights having their drivers designated as employees, is that if you require an employee to have certain equipment to perform their job, then you have to provide it to them.