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Right, so the burden of proof is on me to prove that selling on Amazon was in fact unprofitable. Would you like to see my receipts?

Or maybe you could just take my comment as an idea that sparks interest in your brain, and then you can go Google around for stories that confirm what I'm saying?

Wasn't aware that I was being held to such standards of academic rigour on this site where so many others get a free pass, if they're saying the right things that confirm HN's biases.

Right, so if we downvote (literally censor) comments based on style and not content, but we also do it anonymously, it's all good, right?

People like you make this site so very unbearable.

I enjoyed reading this article and all your behavior does is censor relevant and interesting info.

That you announce it for kudos is even more infuriating.

Amazon requires zero interaction? I didn't know, it's been a few years since I have interacted with them, and I always remember my friends and family having to call Amazon to fix some issue, which, good on Amazon for handling that process efficiently.

Any seller who is willing to automate returns and eat costs is good in my book. Sadly, as a small shop, I couldn't automate that process and couldn't eat many costs whether I was in the right or in the wrong. So it was a big problem when Amazon would just automatically side with the customer, no matter how hard I tried to work with them and prove my credibility.

Like I said, I try to avoid issuing chargebacks wherever I can, 99.9999% of my purchases are just fine. But I've charged back 2 plane tickets and 2 parking tickets, believe it or not, and my credit card company was just absolutely stellar in handling the situation for me, since the companies involved were totally corrupt and non responsive.

So the net net of all of this is, unless you have deep pockets to fund your customer service ops (an increasingly large cost center), you will probably get burned on chargebacks and returns.

This will only increase the centralization around Amazon and Walmart, which I would define as "not always a good thing".

I don't know if I'm wired weirdly, but I vert rately return things. I really don't like dealing with customer service, and I kind of live by a "buyer beware" motto. One time amazon shipped me a broken AmazonBasics mouse. For $6.88 I said screw it, literally not worth my time, and just stopped doing business with Amazon.

On larger problems, I would issue a chargeback with my credit card company. I have won 4 of those for between $25 and $1500!!!

I used to have an Amazon seller account where I would ship video games and books. People who tried to return items and complain to Amazon were literally the death of my business. One chargeback wiped out the profits from 100 successful sales.

So like I said, I'm not sure if I'm wired differently, but I don't like this phenomenon and avoid it 99.99999% of the time.

Thank you for this. I agree that they are cowards. Damore is completely right, certain members of our society are shaming others into silence for supposed psychological safety.

I also feel that money and political power are on the line too, which just heightens the needs for shaming others into silence, in their minds.

Let's see what happens to our posts.

EDIT: also Damore was attacked non-stop during his interview with Siliconbeat if I remember correctly.

That donation becomes "speculation" if the token received from donating (i.e paying a price for a token) becomes tradable to other people.

Of course it is a questionable medium to speculating in, since there is no real mechanism holding the ICO-offerer to any obligation to deliver what they say they will deliver.

At least with a traditional stock market that is slightly more regulated, transparent, etc, we can reasonably expect that everyone from Apple to Zapos will attempt to deliver on what they say they will, with theoretical criminal charges being the price to pay for those who deliberately defraud investors.

Plenty of things could be manufactured or coded in these areas. Cheap housing and materials in general mean you could make a really awesome hacker house or even factory for physical goods.

Of course the real problems are:

1) VCs don't invest here

2) A startup's success is usually based on its ability to sell itself (using networking contacts) to a larger corporation

3) who then REALLY don't want to have an office in Nowhere, Alabama

If they did want to do it, they would have done it already. Lord knows they have the money.