tidepod12

> By getting that shiny Chase sign up bonus, your are directly contributing to the firing of front line customer service workers.

That's not what "directly" means.

Lots of false equivalence here.

> What cash back do you get on your credit card? 2.625%? High yield savings account? Money market fund? 4.6%?

None of these actions by me directly result in the loss of livelihood or uprooting of lives of other people.

If you told me that by moving my money to a high yield savings account, it would result in my friends or family members losing their jobs, you bet your ass I wouldn't do it, "personal profit" be damned, and that isn't a hard decision to make in the slightest.

Twitch's leader are making a conscious decision: profits over people.

Wow. After reading about the FB tracking I was wary about Backblaze but teetering on the edge of willing to give it a pass if they fixed it. But after reading brianwski's comments in that thread, the arrogance and unprofessionalism (especially in his last comment) just completely turned me off. That attitude goes beyond a technical fuckup or bad marketing move. I'm moving my backups out of Backblaze today and won't be looking back.

First year analysts at a bank like GS make more like $100-150k, including bonuses. That's a lot for a fresh grad, but is a far cry from $300k.

Being a public utility or not has nothing to do with commoditization. You keep saying you're against commoditization but then make arguments in favor of it.

In fact, commoditization of healthcare is probably one of the best steps towards making it a public utility. So if that's what you want, then you probably do want healthcare to be commoditized.

There are definitely parts of healthcare that are unreasonable to expect to be commoditized. A heart transplant or brain surgery are probably things where centers specialized in those areas will be higher quality.

But for more common things like an annual wellness exam, or blood tests, mending a broken arm, treating the flu, or even doing surgery on a burst appendix, those are things that I think can reasonable be commoditized across any healthcare providers.

Exactly, which is why you want it to be a commodity, so that there isn't even the need to do something like shop around. If healthcare was a commodity, you just go to the nearest hospital and can rest assured that you're getting the same care you would get anywhere else.

I think you're misunderstanding the word "commodity". If healthcare were commoditized, then "what's the closest ER" would be the only thing that matters. You are actually advocating for commoditization.

Water, for example, is a commodity. It doesn't matter where you get it, because water from one tap is mostly indistinguishable to water from a different tap. When you need water, you simply just go to the closest tap and you can be happy that you're getting the same quality water as anywhere else. That's exactly what you want with healthcare, too.

>I’m sure they know though and this is a deliberate obfuscation technique, a dark pattern by marketing people.

I don't think so. AWS is still very much in "we want to get as many people onto our platform as possible" mode, not "milk every cent possible out of existing customers" mode (yet). AWS account managers and solutions architects will go to great lengths to help you reduce your costs (and are actually incentivized to do so), because making you happy with AWS and recommend it to others is their top priority above all else. The docs may be confusing, but if you ever have any interaction with their enterprise account teams, you'll find that obfuscation could not be farther from their intentions.

The fact that S3 pricing isn't simple is just an unfortunate side effect of market segmentation taken to an extreme. And in some ways, it's a good thing. The current pricing structure allows people that have different use cases to only pay for what they need: someone using S3 for storage but not making a lot of requests will only pay for storage, while someone using S3 to store relatively little but accessing it often will only pay for accessing it, etc. If pricing were to be simplified, you would lose that ability to segment, which would be a huge loss.

I do think there is room for something like a Lightsail version of S3, where you just pay a flat fee per month for a certain GB and bandwidth allocation. But I think that should be a separate product or S3 storage class, not replace the current pricing.

This title is incorrect. ERCOT is not the same thing as the PUC, and the PUC Chairman is the person who is the focus of the article.

If at any point I see any evidence or warning that the products I purchase from Amazon cause any material amount of risk to my person or property, I'll reevaluate. In fact, there definitely are some things that I prefer to buy outside of Amazon for such reasons, like climbing gear or medicine.

But as for stuff like chargers, I've had more experience that the easily-frayed genuine Apple Lightning cables, or the classic exploding Samsung phones, are more of an electrical fire risk than anything I've bought from Amazon, counterfeit or not.

This is probably true, but such a laughably small number of people use Workmail that I doubt it has any material difference to AWS's reported numbers, so while they might not reflect the true AWS marketshare sans-Workmail, it's probably still in the same ballpark. The reason people bring it up in regards to Azure is because it does likely artificially inflate Azure's reported numbers a material amount and makes them harder to trust.

Like I said, if any of the chargers or cords I have received from Amazon are counterfeit, they're good enough counterfeits that I don't care. My iPhone, iPad, and MBP all charge just fine, still have perfectly fine working batteries, have never had any issues with the electronics, and nothing has caught on fire after years of use. The headphones I've bought from Amazon sound great and have given me no issues. The lightbulbs I bought from Amazon light up my room just fine and last a long time. The SSD I bought is blazing fast and has plenty of space (confirmed by multiple diagnostic checks). The clothes I have bought are comfortable and fit well... And if any of these things weren't true, I am confident it would take me extremely minimal effort to return the item to Amazon and buy a replacement.

Obviously counterfeiting is a problem and in an ideal world there would be no counterfeiting at all, but I remain unconvinced that it's something I have to worry about materially affecting my experience as a customer buying stuff from Amazon.