Amazon needs to stop with inventory comingling. They know it and refuse to stop, so they are culpable. I'm sure it would hurt their logistics to stop, but it also hurts cigarette companies to not advertise to children and we made that a law.
It is ridiculous that you can order a supplement where it says "sold by Proctor and Gamble, fulfilled by Amazon" on the product listing, and then receive a counterfeit product that was sent in by a different company. If they received it from a different company, then it wasn't "sold by Proctor and Gamble."
At the very least they need to give brand owners the tools to protect their brands- an option to put non-authorized resellers' shipments into a separate comingled bin, and have all the authorized resellers in another.
Right now the only option for a brand with a popular product to protect from counterfeiting is to not sell anything through Amazon and sue everyone that tries to list your products on Amazon- which might not even work and really hurts your market reach.
Amazon are playing a very dangerous game with their brand.
I buy a lot of stuff from AliExpress. I know that there's a fair chance that I'll get some kind of junk, but it's cheap enough that I'm often willing to take the gamble.
Until very recently, Amazon offered the lowest-hassle online shopping experience by a considerable margin. I'd often buy from Amazon without bothering to compare prices, because the convenience of one-click ordering was worth it.
Almost entirely because of Marketplace, Amazon is regressing from a premium retail experience to an AliExpress-style flea market. Every time I click the buy button, I worry about getting a counterfeit product, I worry about the hassle of returning it, I worry about getting banned from Amazon by an algorithm for "abusing" their returns policy. Buying from Amazon isn't a no-brainer any more.
Amazon were so very close to having a total monopoly on my online spending, but they squandered it. They could have secured a loyal and price-insensitive customer, but instead they're driving me away from their platform. Maybe they don't care about being a retailer any more, maybe they're all-in on AWS, but if I were an Amazon shareholder I'd be getting pretty damned nervous.
Same. In fact, I basically only use Amazon as an AliExpress with free 2 day shipping. For anything that could be counterfeited (which is really anything these days!), I won't touch them anymore. B&H is the same price and I can always show up at their store and be annoying until they fix my problem.
B&H is certainly better, but I've occasionally gotten something that was obviously open box from them and its always a bit of a pain to convince them this is a problem. It came to a head recently complete with a salty response from their social media guy on Twitter and a complaint to Anton Bauer about used product being sold as new.
I'm in the same place -- Amazon sold me a counterfeit charger.
Well, not counterfeit, but with a fake ETL/Intertek -- a UL competitor -- mark. I told their CS and they refunded me, then continued selling the charger with the fake ETL mark.
I moved $40k/year of IT spend from my company off Amazon to BHPhoto.
I also stopped buying any makeup / food / supplements / dog food / dog toys on Amazon.
Hell, I bought my dog's new leash and collar straight from the manufacturer!
We make speaker wire and sell it primarily on Amazon, so I have some experience on the manufacturer side of UL/ETL marks. My advice is to never buy any product with an ETL mark. As an organization, they are way less stringent about enforcing the integrity of their mark. And I would also never buy anything at a low price tier that bears a UL mark, since it’s probably counterfeit. If you want quality, pay for it. When you pay for a brand which markets on quality at a higher price point, there’s a pretty
good chance you’re getting something legitimate. The reason is that it’s hard to compete at a higher price point, so honesty is probably the only reason a brand would willingly choose to scale that kind of a barrier.
If you’re buying from the manufacturer and there are no other sellers, then you’re fine on Amazon. Where you have to watch out is when there are multiple sellers on an item.
It seems like a lot of things that sound an awful lot like fraudulent practices from a lay perspective don't actually reach a useful or provable definition when it comes to legal liability.
But saying something is sold by a specific party which I then choose to do business with, then substituting goods that are likely to be from any of numerous other parties, some of which I may be explicitly trying to avoid doing business with...I would at least be interested in hearing why that doesn't count as fraud or false advertising or some such, or maybe some trademarks issue.
At least, I'd love to hear a less rage-inducing justification for putting up with allowing this behavior than "it was buried in a ToS somewhere that lying about who my goods came from is okay, actually."
That phrasing is part of the problem, not the solution. You're conflating the idea of a manufacturer (Proctor & Gamble in this case) with a reseller. Amazon tells you both, but since the retail products are (should be) identical, neither they nor you really care whether or not this particular box came from "Joe's Nutrition" or "Sally's Supplements", and worrying about that distinction is like arguing against the fungibility of money (did that dollar bill in your pocket, which you got from an ATM, "come from" your job or your side gig?).
It's not the comingling that is the root cause here, it's the fraud. It doesn't matter whether or not Amazon buys their pills from Joe or Sally, what we care about is that they're not selling fake pills. Focusing on comingling seems to be missing the point. We have even less ability than Amazon to detect the fact that Joe is selling fake pills, so they'd still make it into people's mailboxes.
>Amazon tells you both, but since the retail products are (should be) identical, neither they nor you really care whether or not this particular box came from "Joe's Nutrition" or "Sally's Supplements"
Sounds like it is time for a "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Retail Products" with the first entry being that every item with the same SKU is identical to every other item with that SKU.
You would think at the very least Amazon would need to maintain a chain of custody for each individual item that is meant for human consumption. What happens if there is a Tylenol poisoning [1] like scare with one of these supplements? Would Amazon legitimately have no way to track down the source of the contaminated product? If they can, what would be the possible explanation of not displaying the source to the user beyond "it is cheaper if we don't"?
It's not just products for human consumption that can cause injury. A shoddily made counterfeit phone charger can start a fire and burn down your house.
> worrying about that distinction is like arguing against the fungibility of money (did that dollar bill in your pocket, which you got from an ATM, "come from" your job or your side gig?)
That's an interesting argument except for the fact that the source of money is extremely important for fraud and tax purposes. Money laundering is specifically the co-mingling of "inventory" to hide the source. Amazon is product laundering.
When the product comes from "Sally's Supplements" then if there is an issue with the product then that's first and foremost Sally's problem. It might go up to Procter & Gamble or maybe it doesn't get that far.
The source of the product and who supports it is very important.
Counterfeiting is going to happen. Typically you deter it by detecting it and punishing the counterfeiters. Commingling defeats this. I guess we can make Amazon inspect everything they receive from third party sellers thoroughly enough to reliably detect counterfeits themselves, but that seems much less likely to happen.
2. Supplier A buys the unit from supplier B (and pays the balance by transferring another unit A => B).
3. The now supplier A's unit gets sent to you.
I.e. somewhat similar to e.g. dropshipping and other such practices which are traditionally perfectly legal.
It seems it would be quite hard to argue false advertising on that (as you got the item from A - generally it does not matter who A got it from, unless A claims to be the manufacturer), which I guess is why it has not happened yet.
But I could still see it happen, especially if the counterfeiting problems worsen. Maybe the fact that Amazon does it automatically for the sellers (with their approval) could be considered a factor that makes this different from the traditional stock supply cases.
There’s a huge and fundamental difference between what you describe and what Amazon is doing. What you describe involves both A and B. A is figuratively putting their name on the product, and they have an incentive to make sure that everything is above board. You are getting it from A, by way of B.
The way Amazon does it, A isn’t involved in the choice of who supplies the product, they just receive the money. They don’t even know who supplied the product, if I understand things correctly. You’re just buying from B, while Amazon says you’re buying from A.
I'm a former marketplace seller. There is a way brands can accomplish this: marketplace items must contain all the features that the original brand provides. So the brand can create, say, a warranty that only applies when purchased form an "authorized seller". Since the company controls who is authorized, no other seller is able to include the warranty, and their offerings are not identical.
The difficult part in all of this is dealing with Amazon and their terrible marketplace back end.
> marketplace items must contain all the features that the original brand provides
Why should a buyer be expected to trust either Amazon, or the fulfiller, to decide which bait-and-switch sales don't count as bait-and-switch?
It wrongs both the buyer, who doesn't get what they ordered, and the original manufacturer, who is being subjected to something akin to 'passing off' in trademark law. You aren't allowed to hijack someone else's brand to sell your product. [0]
Yes.[1] At least in Pennsylvania. This decision is based on state law. Amazon claims to be insulated from product liability claims because it is not the "seller". The Third Circuit says Amazon is the "seller". "Amazon not only accepts orders and arranges for product shipments, but it also exerts substantial market control over product sales by restricting product pricing, customer service, and communications with customers."
Amazon can in turn sue the party who provided the product to recover what they have to pay out to the end customer, if they want.
Amazon allows their product providers to be somewhat anonymous. That weighed against them in the court decision. To the court, that looks like a retailer-wholesaler relationship. An actual seller has to disclose the actual name and address of the business in some states, including California. (B&P code section 17358).
> At least in Pennsylvania. This decision is based on state law.
Only in part. Section B @ page 21 is the Court outlining their reasoning under the Second Restatement of Torts which has been adopted in some form or another in most states. The court could have ended with the Pennsylvania four-factor analysis but the ruling would have definitely been limited in scope. Instead, the 3rd Circuit has anticipated this case going to the Supreme Court and went through the effort of detailing the logic for a SCOTUS ruling that would hold Amazon accountable beyond the boundaries of Pennsylvania as well.
> At the very least they need to give brand owners the tools to protect their brands- an option to put non-authorized resellers' shipments into a separate comingled bin, and have all the authorized resellers in another.
As a brand I think you can stop others listing your products. I tried to sell something a while back and was refused because I was a third party seller.
I should have known this would be used as an excuse to even further expand corporate control at the expense of individuals. Now they're trying to use it to restrict the second-hand market.
Instead of making it clear you're buying second-hand goods, or from a non-authorized seller, they are deliberately conflating what you're buying, with who you're buying it from. This way their anti-counterfeit efforts will conveniently squash the second-hand market.
On the flip side, for
many brands, if it’s being sold by someone other than an authorized reseller, it is almost certainly counterfeit. We have a private label brand that sells on Amazon. If anybody else is selling our products at the same prices we sell them for, then it is almost certainly a counterfeit, since we only sell at retail prices. The only exceptions would be somebody selling one of our products used. But then we offer a lifetime return policy.
And believe me, as a seller I have some insight into the bullshit black hat tactics at play in the Amazon marketplace. Amazon needs tools to fight the bad guys. For the sake of consumers.
Aside from counterfeiting, it's become a hassle to buy from the marketplace. My last experience was buying a small piece of furniture. There was a problem and it could have been resolved more easily than it was, but as inconveniences came up I had to deal with both Amazon's and the vendor's customer service. And each blamed the other. Ultimately I had to pack up something heavy to be shipped back which I didn't want to do, and if I had to do it it would have been less hassle to take it back somewhere local. Which is how I wish I had made the purchase.
They could require all suppliers to put up a surety bond. Make the amount high enough to filter out suppliers unwilling to sell long-term and also attempt to filter out anyone intending to sell counterfeit goods. Any suppliers who hit a certain threshold of failing to meet Amazon's standards of product authenticity would forfeit their bond. This isn't a new idea, it works well in other industries.
There's a whole class of items I won't buy from Amazon. Supplements are one of them, I buy direct. Given how easy it is to set up a Shopify store I can't see how this is good for Amazon.
Or at least require a deposit for sellers of a non-insignificant amount, a hold on new seller payouts for up to 30-60 days and per-seller stickers on intake inventory so sellers of counterfeits can be rooted out better.
Also, allow product manufacturers who sell directly, to block other sellers on the platform for their products and handle reports for alike-named and-or brand confusing products.
Amazon does very little to actually do anything meaningful to limit counterfeit products.
> Note: Amazon ensures that the initial source of the commingled units can be traced throughout the fulfilment process.
> Important: Amazon ensures that the exact same units from two sellers, participating in the commingling programme, are always physically segregated. This means that Amazon storage logic does not allow same ASINs of different sellers to be stored in the same bin in our warehouse if they are commingled.
In other words, Amazon ensures that commingled items are never physically commingled.
> The system is purposefully designed so that similar products are not placed next to or near each other, and Amazon can also track the original seller of each unit.
As far as I understand it, that just means that sellers have the option to opt in/out of the commingling program (Settings => Fulfillment by Amazon =>
FBA Product Barcode Preference).
Yes, there is a cost for the seller if opting out - they need to apply their own barcodes to the products in that case.
> Also, allow product manufacturers who sell directly, to block other sellers on the platform for their products and handle reports for alike-named and-or brand confusing products.
The doctrine of first sale means you can't keep people from reselling your branded products and if you don't offer your products on Amazon at this point others will offer fakes and with Amazons cooperation acquire your customers while offering them cheaper competitors products.
Its a lovely situation to say the least. All strategies are sub optimal. Logically we need a law forcing them to divulge who your actual product is coming from on the page before you buy effectively ending comingling.
The issue is selling fake products as a branded products. Amazon makes this easy to do by commingling inventory and not matching/tracking sellers to inventory items.
This fact by itself would probably make Amazon liable for product liability claims in any court in the US, it's traditional CDA liability sheild notwithstanding.
EDIT: Products liability law is complicated, but generally even if Amazon wouldn't be treated as a seller, they could still be held liable for their negligence in providing the wrong/defective item out of their (commingled) inventory. Amazon doesn't match sellers to inventory items so they have literally no way to defend themselves from such a suit especially if the seller can show that they provide products straight from the manufacturer but Amazon commingled with other sellers' inventory. (I'm aware of several such suits that were almost immediately settled by Amazon with NDAs attached.)
> Amazon makes this easy to do by commingling inventory and not matching/tracking sellers to inventory items.
That is not correct. Amazon's seller help pages and Amazon spokesperson comment on e.g. this FT Alphaville article https://outline.com/4R7fp6 say that Amazon tracks the original supplier:
> The system is purposefully designed so that similar products are not placed next to or near each other, and Amazon can also track the original seller of each unit.
I.e. commingling only means that any sellers' inventory can be used for fulfillment, not that the inventory is physically commingled.
Amazon "says" they can track the original supplier.
In practice, they clearly don't. I've had a client that was the only manufacturer of a product receive fake versions of their own product that was part of Amazon's commingled inventory. This happened last year.
Also, unless Amazon removes tags prior to delivery, there is no mechanism on many items that would allow them to track goods short of maintaining physical separation, which it is abundantly clear that they do not.
If this physical separation exists, it is useful only to Amazon if buyers can still be fulfilled by any of the sellers.
When evidence builds for fake product, Amazon can halt use of a particular seller's inventory...but prior to that you might get a fake, regardless of the seller's reputation.
I think it would be challenging to keep track of who the original trademark owner is for every single item and creating a system for them to prove it. There are hundreds of thousands of businesses with thousands of products. And sometimes companies re-brand their products, or buy other companies, etc, etc. Or sometimes the original vendor doesn't ship in a particular country, its always through a distributor, etc, etc.
It's not clear that you can limit a buyer's ability to resell it on any market without a contract with the buyer that may or may not be legal or enforcable based on jurisdiction. It also doesn't seem likely that people willing to defraud people with any agreement.
I slightly disagree. The item was sold by Proctor and Gamble. They got the money I paid, and I got a product back. Proctor and Gamble happened to use a third party for fulfillment and as a marketplace for handling the sale, and they are to blame for choosing a fulfillment company which may occasionally send me fake products that Proctor and Gamble didn't make.
We should fault the sellers for using Amazon in the first place.
You're not wrong, but why does the seller get a pass? If I get a catalog in the mail labeled "Bob's Swimsuits for Portly Gentlemen," and I call the 800 number and order one, and instead I get an angry bobcat, my beef is with the folks at Bob's Swimsuits.
The fault may be with the company Bob hired to manufacture swimsuits, or maybe the shipping company for confusing boxes, or maybe Bob's catalog contractor got some model numbers switched around, but I'm just the customer. None of that stuff is visible to me, and I have no control over it. If the catalog company or the fulfillment company or the manufacturer part of the pipeline is known to occasionally produce bobcats, it's Bob's job to fix it.
Yes, this is Amazon's fuckup, but it's not the customer's job to conduct the postmortem. The customer has the privilege of blaming the entity they do business with.
I stopped buying books from amazon after getting few "new" books visibly used. Scribbled notes or giant greasy hand mark etc. If I need to drop off book for return anyway then I can make as well trip to normal bookstore (learned about very nice local one).
If Amazon instead sends a counterfeit product from someone other than P&G when I buy a product that is advertised as sold by P&G, the should be fraud, if it isn't already.
They need to show you who you're buying from if they aren't going to accept liability for selling it.
I can't help you with the why some SD cards are short lived, but if you want a longer lasting SD card, try the "endurance" versions. Most of the big brands have a version. They are a bit more expensive, but promise 25x the write life of a standard SD.
They are typically marketed toward video surveillance systems and dash cams. I'm not sure how the rest of a Raspberry Pi's performance would be effective.
“with only a primitive GPS to indicate the right direction”
... so these kids are more at risk of being kidnapped than they are of getting lost.
I’ll admit that I think it’s a bit weird to make kids walk home in the night, but the author does a terrible job of making it sound suspenseful. This activity has gotten a lot safer since GPS became widespread. I kind of feel bad for anyone that went through this in the 80’s, they might have actually gotten lost and had to knock on a farmer’s door for directions.
Kids being kidnapped is not the first thought of Dutch (and Belgium?) parents.
Example:
We were at the Zoo with friends from the US and one of their small kids was out of sight for minute at the very large playground.
My first thought: Will show up, but is there any water nearby? Their thought: he's kidnapped!
(kid did show up few seconds later)
I guess you're far more likely to drown than to get kidnapped in The Netherlands... (Most children learn to swim before they are 6 years old here)
Droppings were really cool by the way and in the eighties when I grew up we only got a compass or nothing at all (no gps or cell phone). I was no boy scout, it also happens at school trips and birthdays.
I just got back from visiting a friend in Amsterdam, and it was a delight to see how much everybody just assumed kids would be safe on their own.
I'm pretty sure the US had the same attitude when I was growing up; I know I spent the bulk of my summer days roving the neighborhood. It's weird to me how much that has changed. Especially given that kids can be constantly tracked and contacted via cellphones, you'd think that they'd be roving farther!
In the 80s we were sent out to knock on farmer's doors to ask for a place to sleep, and we did it just over the German border so we had to ask in a foreign language too. I actually want to reintroduce that (but farms have fewer places fit for a few sleeping bags).
The fact they are in groups makes it super safe anyway.
a group from germany did that on a regular basis. all the trips were by bike. for weekend trips the whole group would stay on a farm. for holidays it was two weeks into the netherlands or denmark. groups of 3 would walk door to door to ask for a place to sleep.
i then adopted the idea for trips on my own travelling through europe. but instead of knocking on any door i'd search for local scout groups and ask them.
PlaidML is not what most people want. PlaidML is pretty much only for neural network based machine learning, plus it's primarily a backend for models written in Keras. But it is an option for the narrow use case of neural networks.
Contrary to what buzzword happy SV types would have you believe, most "real" HPC work isn't machine learning (r/gatekeeping, I know). Particle physics, computational fluid dynamics, network simulations, etc. Lots of it is already written in CUDA. HIP, using hipify, can translate the already written CUDA code to HIP, which is GPU-agnostic.
Plaid is just one of 01org's projects. There are dozens of other projects (and compilers), which when combined can be used to build very intricate HPC applications and pipelines. Though for some core projects, most of the tuning development is only available on Intel platforms.
2. The parent comment was about translating existing code written in CUDA to be used on an AMD GPU, not about developing new software- if it were about developing new software, they'd be starting from scratch with 01.org tools, which is what everyone wants to avoid. 01.org doesn't have any translation tools for this.
In this case Iran denies that it lost a drone so it couldn't be an act of war. You have to admit to getting shot before retaliating.
Also, we have seen multiple manned aircraft shot down during the Syrian civil war from multiple countries, and so far neither Syria, Russia, nor Turkey are at war with each other. It would seem that what determines an act of war heavily depends on whether the victimized country wants to go to war in the first place.
Iran wants to speak aggressively, but they do not actually want to fight the US. They have seen neighboring Iraq get steamrolled multiple times by the US Army and are currently sandwiched between thousands of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and most other countries in the region would be more than willing to allow the US to set up logistics paths through their countries. They are in a horrible position to fight the US.
Edit so I don't create another comment: One of the reasons (but not the only one) why it is more appropriate to shoot down a drone instead of a manned aircraft is that a drone is easily turned into a kamikaze attack. Manned aircraft are much less likely to turn a hull run (flying close to a ship) into an attack, and are mostly for intel collection. Manned aircraft typically need to get their tapes back to base before analysis can start, and most pilots won't willingly kill themselves. While it kind of sucks to let the enemy snap pictures of everything on the deck of your ship (and record radar frequencies and waveforms), you aren't in any real danger and probably isn't worth killing them. Most drones could radio back its intel and then fly right into the side of the ship before the crew can react. Because of this, ships need to keep drones further away, and if the drone doesn't respond to radio calls they really have no option but to down it.
Yes, mostly just analytics and standard fare from all websites. For the most part, it's just the regular "Share on Facebook/Twitter/Etc." buttons that you see all over the internet. All of the social media have trackers embedded in those buttons. It's always confused my why anyone would actually share what porn video they were watching with their friends on social media.
The one thing that isn't standard for porn sites is ad serving/tracking. They usually don't use ads served from Google and Facebook, probably because most people don't want their "regular" ads being served on a porn site. So most major porn sites have their own ad system.
Yes. For those not familiar, KyoAni is not a "huge" studio, in that it usually only produces one show per season, and often none at all. They are highly respected due to the shows that they do make are very high quality (the animation is nearly always great, and stories are usually hand selected now as part of a competition). If you want to watch one of their recent series that received lots of acclaim, the show Violet Evergarden is on Netflix. Very hard to understand why anyone would want to attack them.
An attack with over 20 dead with more injured could mean over half of their employees are dead/hurt.
It might be misleading, but it's not uncommon. Apple MacBook Pros have thermal throttled at high loads for the past several years. It has throttled for so long that reviewers were surprised that the latest version seems to be using a decent thermal paste and throttles much less.
So if Apple got away with it for years on computers that mostly sold for over $2k, then I think the RPi foundation will probably get away with it on a $35 board.
If Apple can get away with it then the RPi will also get away with it, but it is still a highly deceptive and fraudulent practice.
I spent $2000 on a XPS 15 and peripherals two years ago; if I had known about the thermal throttling I would not have purchased it. Dell literally robbed me of a thousand dollars - had I known that all the 'ultrabook'-style laptops had throttling issues, I would have bought a cheaper and sturdier and higher-specced gaming laptop which beats the XPS in every category except battery life and Thunderbolt. Instead, I spent more and got a substantially worse product.
Collectively laptop manufacturers have defrauded people to the tune of hundreds of millions (even billions?) of dollars. That's not OK.
All portable laptops throttle. What we are vaguely talking about is a firmware bug in the 2018 MacBook Pro i9 that was patched within the first week of release.
It's only a problem if throttling takes them below the advertised base clock under normal conditions. There is absolutely nothing deceptive about this.
A gaming laptop is not really a laptop at all by comparison. They still get less than 4 hours of battery life under load, they're an inch or more thick, they're heavy. Many of them do not fit in backpacks. Gaming laptops are essentially designed for plugged in operation.
I'm a little confused at what's "sturdier" about a gaming laptop as well. Did you break your XPS 15 physically? Gaming laptops have tons of flex and plastic-ness, see MSI.
What benchmark did Dell promise you exactly? Dell didn't rob you of anything. Your own unrealistic expectations did.
> It's only a problem if throttling takes them below the advertised base clock under normal conditions.
Seems like a bit of a contradiction?
Dell said that my laptop would have an i7-7700HQ at 2.8 GHz + turbo to 3.something, and a GTX 1050m.
The laptop Dell sent me behaved like this under load: it goes to the max turbo speed, overheats within a few seconds to a minute, and then throttles to 800 MHz.
It's like if someone advertised a car as having a 280 HP engine, but the engine controller limited it to 100 HP because it had an inadequate cooling system and would overheat at any more load. It is deceptive.
With the laptop, underclocking can fix the CPU throttling - mine can now sustain the max turbo speed forever at 70 degrees. But that's like buying the 100 HP car and modding it to get to 280 - you were sold a faulty product. In the case of the laptop it's fixable in software so that's not as big of a deal, but how many normal people do you think would be willing to mess with their CPU voltages? Or even be aware of the throttling?
Even after underclocking the CPU, I cannot use it at the same time as the discrete graphics card. If I do, the combined heat makes the CPU once again go to 800 MHZ.
Expecting to be able to use the hardware my computer was advertised as having is not having unrealistic expectations.
> I'm a little confused at what's "sturdier" about a gaming laptop as well.
In my experience most gaming laptops are made of metal or thick plastic and seem more durable. I actually had a MSI laptop, it was a tank - like the revered Thinkpads, but better. Dropped it from a few feet and it only got a scratch on the surface.
> A gaming laptop is not really a laptop at all by comparison. They still get less than 4 hours of battery life under load, they're an inch or more thick, they're heavy. Many of them do not fit in backpacks. Gaming laptops are essentially designed for plugged in operation.
That's why I got the XPS 15. Had I known that its performance was a fraction of what was advertised I would have ignored this whole category of deceptive laptops and bought a gaming laptop, even though they have all these downsides.
Whereas I am aware of thermal throttling issues across most thin-and-light laptops, and kept that in mind when purchasing it. I was not defrauded. Perhaps though, I'm more sensitive to it, as I used to write my own throttling scripts for my weird AMD APU "netbook" years ago.
Just to clarify here, all laptops of reasonably small size throttle. Throttling below base clock is the only problem, and it was only a temporary one that was patched out with new firmware on 2018 MacBook Pros.
A lot of these things are assuming a traditional model of well-being (that being fit and smart and long lived makes you happier). This is stuff that doctors say I need, but I don't actually need them like air and water. What if our model of well-being is wrong?
An obese person can be happy as long as they don't peg their happiness on being able to do a bunch of physical activities. Plus, all the time spent not working out can be spent on pursuing other interests.
A dumb person can be happy. There are billions of us.
A short lived person can be happy- it's more about the quality of life than the quantity.
So if I can live in a world in which I don't have to do a bunch of physical activity, can play with the screens that I want, and can enjoy my life? I don't actually need a lot of the things that a doctor says I need. To be fair, an obese person has a higher chance of being hospitalized, which sucks, so being dumb and obese will probably lead to me being less happy.
Are you sure you're not just looking for a rationalization saying that you can live any way you want and still be "happy"?
Of course I'm not ruling out that this is possible. An obese smoker might live to 101 and laugh about it. An athlete might die of Leukemia at age 21. Life is uncertain, you can make of the odds whatever you want.
On the other hand:
Obesity is associated with lower self-reported happiness
You also need to count in all the ailments that can result from obesity and lack of exercise, none of which are going to contribute positively to one's level of well-being. Of course it's not all about the length of a life, but the things that cut lives short tend to be quite unpleasant.
> This is stuff that doctors say I need, but I don't actually need them like air and water.
I'm sorry, but you do need to be physically healthy for a long life, and it does help with your mental state. You need good blood pressure, you need coronary arteries that aren't blocked, you need a liver that functions and you need kidneys that work.
You missed the point. You don't need to live a long life to be happy. That's you trying to impose your worldview on other people.
A lot of people confuse things that are correlated with being happy with things that make you happy. Being fit does not make everyone happy, it makes some people happy. Eating cheesecake makes some people happy, but not everyone.
What if the things that are correlated with happiness change over time? What if instead of idolizing pro athletes the next generation idolizes pro esports players? Will physical fitness start to see less of a correlation with happiness, playing second fiddle to something else?
I agree that you do need unblocked arteries to stay alive. So increasing obesity may lead to more hospitalizations (and unhappy people that way). But could it be offset by increased well-being in other areas of life?
It only hurts kids as much as it hurts everyone else.
My 60 y/o mom is on social media for hours per day. That's harmful.
My 80 y/o grandma plays Pokemon Go four hours per day, which we initially thought was good because it got her to go walking. Now we can't take her anywhere without slowing us down. It's become harmful.
My 6 y/o nephew will totally tune out the world if you let him play Angry Birds, ignoring his parents until someone physically removes the screen from his hands. That's harmful.
I hosted a field trip for pre-teen middle schoolers and in our downtime between activities there was zero social interaction because they all buried their heads in their phones (okay, I did observe one student ask another for a charger). That's harmful.
Screen time is hurting everyone and singling out kids is just old people refusing to accept that screens changed humanity at all ages. I don't think that our current old-timers lacking screens when they were kids made them any better at life. It only made them worse at using modern technology. The current crop of youngsters may miss out on face-to-face interaction, or maybe their eyes will be shaped poorly for long distance sight. But they'll be better at navigating the digital world, which seems to be where we spend a lot of our time regardless of age.
>My 6 y/o nephew will totally tune out the world if you let him play Angry Birds, ignoring his parents until someone physically removes the screen from his hands. That's harmful.
> I hosted a field trip for pre-teen middle schoolers and in our downtime between activities there was zero social interaction because they all buried their heads in their phones (okay, I did observe one student ask another for a charger). That's harmful.
I did the exact same thing with books and nobody said it was harmful. To the contrary, I was mostly praised. I'm not saying it wasn't harmful, it clearly was in some respects. But the benefits outweighed the costs and everybody could see that. Why can't we do the same with phones?
Books have many clear benefits, like generally increasing reading and writing ability and in particular, expanding vocabulary.
What are the benefits of extended phone use?
I'm not saying there are none but I'm hard pressed to think of a way staring into a phone benefits me. 90% of the time I and the people around me seem to be consuming drivel on social media (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit) which usually has none of the benefits of books and especially for young people, seems to have very serious downsides, like depression and a feeling of social isolation.
> Now we can't take her anywhere without slowing us down. It's become harmful.
That sounds like a mild inconvenience, but certainly not harmful. Staying active (even if that means just walking around, especially at the age of 80) is important.
Your point is not my point. Your point is that social media isn't as harmful as people make it out to be. My point is that older people need regular physical activity.
I could have easily included myself in my above list of anecdotes. But more importantly, look at all the "harmful" things I listed. My mom interacts with her friends. An old lady slows down a group of people. A kid gets in trouble with his parents. Middle schoolers are socially inept.
None of those things are really that harmful, they are mostly expected and regular parts of life.
It is ridiculous that you can order a supplement where it says "sold by Proctor and Gamble, fulfilled by Amazon" on the product listing, and then receive a counterfeit product that was sent in by a different company. If they received it from a different company, then it wasn't "sold by Proctor and Gamble."
At the very least they need to give brand owners the tools to protect their brands- an option to put non-authorized resellers' shipments into a separate comingled bin, and have all the authorized resellers in another.
Right now the only option for a brand with a popular product to protect from counterfeiting is to not sell anything through Amazon and sue everyone that tries to list your products on Amazon- which might not even work and really hurts your market reach.