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Top-level
 But none of this is "Amazon" - it's all run by an "entrepreneur," whom Amazon can cut loose without notice, leaving them with unfairly terminated employees, outstanding workers' comp claims, a fleet of Amazon-skinned vehicles and unbreakable facilities leases: https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/ 12/ 4 comments
As Amazon spokesperson #JamesDrummond says, they use "industry-leading tools to prevent genuinely unsafe products being listed." But the only industry-leading tools in evidence are tools to bust unions and screw suppliers. In her landmark *Yale Law Review* paper, #AmazonsAntitrustParadox, FTC Chair #LinaKhan makes a brilliant argument that Amazon's alleged benefits to "consumers" are temporary at best, illusory at worst: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox 14/ In Butler's documentary, Khan's hypothesis is thoroughly validated: here's a company extracting hundreds of billions from merchants who raise prices to compensate, and those monopoly rents are "invested" in union-busting and countermeasures against investigative journalists, while the tools to keep you from accidentally getting a bottle of piss in the mail are laughably primitive. Truly, Amazon is the apex predator of the platform era: https://pluralistic.net/ApexPredator 15/ There are just three days left to back the #Kickstarter campaign for the audiobook of my next novel, *The Lost Cause*. These kickstarters are how I pay my bills, which lets me publish my free essays nearly every day. If you enjoy my work, please consider backing! eof/ |
Gregory's Server
Speaking to #Wired, Amazon denied that it forces its drivers to piss in bottles, but Butler clearly catches a DSP dispatcher telling drivers "If you pee in a bottle and leave it [in the vehicle], you will get a point for that" - that is, the part you get punished for isn't the peeing, it's the leaving.
Amazon's defense against the FTC is that it spares no effort to keep its marketplace safe.
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