No, instead they have a dangerous business model where they force their drivers to get to a location in 30 minutes or less causing them to weave in and out of traffic and crash in hopes of getting a tip. Much better than bottle pissing.
Why would you cancel your Prime Subscription to begin with? As someone who gets more than the price of Prime on shipping items alone, all these additional services are just bonuses to what is already an insanely cost-effective subscription.
While I agree with you 100% I think that this isn't a very good argument against lock-in. i.e what if Amazon pricing model changes making it not cost effective, or what if they start limiting their services or what if a better service crops up and Amazon cannot compete etc...
Lock-in is always an issue to consider regardless of how shiny those golden handcuffs are, end of the day they are still handcuffs.
You can pay for a lot of two-day shipping with $100 a year. I don't want all these dubious "value-add" services, like Prime Instant Video, Kindle Library, Prime Music, and now this photo storage service.
I'm pretty sure I get $100/year worth of 2 day shipping out of Prime quite easily, but I'm starting to agree on the other points.
What's been bothering me is that the 2 day shipping has started to turn into 3 or 4 days, and the deliveries have started mysteriously getting statuses such as "customer refused delivery" or "unable to deliver" even when I'm home all day. This is entirely anecdotal, but I'm wondering if there isn't some sort of effect going on with drivers who have started to see more Amazon packages and interpreted as not being as serious as a delivery as other expedited shipments.
Prime packages are treated better than Express; tracked better and always delivered. In my PO nothing is more important. A misthrow of a media mail or regular parcel gets delivered the next day (misthrow = put in the wrong hamper and not noticed until the truck gets loaded; the correct carrier has left); whereas if a Prime parcel is a misthrow, they send one of the "gargoyles" (i.e. newly minted temporary $16.50 hr workers) to deliver it that day.
Sometimes people still don't understand Sunday delivery and don't look for it or expect it.
USPS get ~$1.50 per parcel from Prime. (trying to recall redacted pdf with that figure). EDIT orig reversed
True story> Because 100% prime delivery is required, after checking the nightly report and found one amazon not delivered, a supervisor had to knock on a customer's door after 8pm and ask if he could scan the package. The package was already in the garbage and had to be given to the sup. [This is an extreme case but it does reflect the "emergency" hyper nature given to Prime parcels.]
If in fact the status you receive from your Prime packages are "refused" or "unable" it could be many things.. from bad (they want to stop the "clock") or most likely other things: Dog in yard; no safe and secure place to put the parcel; It is raining like hell and your regular carrier knows you don't want wet diapers (oh, by the way Kimberly Clark Amazon delivered diapers are exposed on the bottom; great for store shelves but not good if you leave them on a wet set of stairs);
> If in fact the status you receive from your Prime packages are "refused" or "unable" it could be many things.. from bad (they want to stop the "clock") or most likely other things: Dog in yard; no safe and secure place to put the parcel; It is raining like hell and your regular carrier knows you don't want wet diapers (oh, by the way Kimberly Clark Amazon delivered diapers are exposed on the bottom; great for store shelves but not good if you leave them on a wet set of stairs);
Unfortunately that's simply not true. I live in an apartment building that doesn't allow pets, and we have dedicated spots for mail to be delivered, particularly for USPS.
What if they need to price hike the service again? Also losing tax incentives in many states starts to swing the value proposition, but features like this will raise it.
Also, this opens the door to amazon tapping into multiple-prime-accounts-per-household, which would be a nice benefit for them.
Since we share it across my family, sure we would likely keep the $100/yr, even on the few purchases a month we make. I have occasionally used Prime video, but wouldn't shed a tear if we had to give it up. I can't name a single other thing I would consistently use from Prime.
More recently, however, Google Shopping Express has taken the bulk of my non-perishable purchases - the pricing on Amazon is no longer favorable compared to GSX or my local store. This pricing issue is magnified when looking at small quantities (i.e., 1 unit, that's not ). Often GSX items (or similar items) will be on sale at one store or another. Also finding the reviews on GSX to be less gamed.
If Google started charging per-delivery for GSX, I would still use it (but less often).
- I couldn't care less about the video offer - and it is mandatory, useless, unusable and increases the price
- I don't care about 'bonus' features I didn't sign up for. I signed up for (mostly) free shipping
Given that, I am happy to leave that service behind and if shipping becomes to expensive I might reconsider the default 'go to Amazon and check there' behavior.
There's always the possibility that you won't necessarily always want to direct so much of your shopping on Amazon as to recoup that Prime cost. A new player may enter or a current one change such that price, selection, service, etc. makes it more compelling to direct more of your commerce through them. There is also the possibility that Amazon itself changes to be less attractive as a commerce option.
This move by Amazon is absolutely about lock-in. Get their tentacles into as much unrelated to commerce as possible and you will likely keep your commerce with them too.
Not everybody is you. We let our Prime subscription lapse as we don't buy enough stuff from Amazon to justify it. This photos offering has my wife reconsidering rather strongly.
Don't forget that shipping is still free if you are willing to batch your purchases so that they total at least $35. Amazon also ding non-prime members on shipping speed.
Twitter is a private company so they should continue to do whatever they please. If you want to create a decentralized Twitter go for it... my guess is it would be about as popular as Diaspora but all the praise to you if you can disrupt them.
They can do whatever they please. I can wish that they would do something else. They obviously won’t. It’s not in their own self-interest.
Saying they should remain this cynical monopoly that does shitty things just seems nonsensical to me. No, they should not. They can. They do. I think they shouldn’t.
I mean, none of this will actually happen. Twitter will continue to have a monopoly and I see no realistic way to change that. I don’t think there will ever be Twitter as a protocol. I’m just saying there should be. It did work out for email. And, yeah, email is imperfect in so, so, so many ways, but at least it isn’t under control by a single company.
You're allowed to think whatever you want obviously; my point was that stating you'd wish they'd gone a different direction is much different than seemingly positioning an argument for what they should and shouldn't do as realistic or in any way beneficial for Twitter. I'm glad you cleared that up but your personal opinions on their direction seem in contention with your admittance that it wouldn't be possible or advantageous for them to follow what you'd like them to do. In regards to email, the oligopoly of decent clients act in a way really no less perverse than Twitter does (which I don't think is much at all mind you).
No, it's not ads. Sponsored tweets will likely get the same treatment but this is the start of a two-sided marketplace where users stay on the site to buy an item from a tweet of someone they're following, rather than the old method which was to follow a bitly or gumroad link.
It's because so often they leave it reluctantly, hoping to finish it sometime in the future. I also think there's the gaming community in general has a culture that puts ideas on a pedestal as this great commodity that's inherently valuable.
>. if a project raises over 50k, they're obligated to hire a qualified and independent 3rd party to verify their project plan before any money is released.
Ya, that would be a complete logistical nightmare. It's simple: the more failures there are the in the market the more backers will react to projects with skepticism. The creators themselves then must go to greater lengths to prove the viability of the deliverable. If you end up getting sold vapourware then you learn a good life lesson for 50 bucks - caveat emptor.
It would only cost a small fraction of the money raised to prevent huge losses. Why shouldn't a project owner be obligated to spend a few percent of their total raised? The burden of logistics falls to the project owners. If they can't even be bothered to create and verify a project plan, then they don't deserve a single cent of the money they've raised anyway!
The amount of people I know who use functional frameworks (say Underscore) to build things but don't really know much about functional programming is astonishing. To be fair, a lot of frameworks that espouse "functional programming" do so just because it's popular and really push imperative concepts instead so it's easy to be confused on the "right way".
I love Underscore (and Haskell), but I wouldn't consider Underscore an FRP framework at all. It's functional, yes, in the sense that it provides some of the most common FP operations like map, filter, etc, using lambdas. But I don't see the reactive part. Maybe there's some kind of reactive feature tucked away in Underscore's rather large feature set, but I haven't seen it, and it's certainly not core to the library.
We are able to subvert WPF databinding mechanisms to allow bindings to expressions as well as functions. The act of binding itself is still very imperative (and so, not very FRP-ish), but beyond that the programming styles are quite similar.
