yz453

Fwiw, Amazon also offers sellers return as a service. Sellers do not need to onboard to Amazon logistics to use the return service. Ofc someone has to pay for that.

Taking returned items from customers is only the beginning of the process. The real difficulties show up after that. Which of the returns can be sold as new, which can be sold as-is, and which can be repaired / refurbished. What if a unit is returned once again? Did the customer return counterfeit? How to detect bad-faith actors (which may be the seller)? Who is to blame for damages? What if the item requires special handling (household chemicals, batteries, etc.)? And how to safely dispose / liquidate inventory while being compliant to all the regulations? And, imagine adding taxes, revenues, fees, on top of all that.

A lot of these questions are very labor-intense. It may be possible to automate some bits here and there, but the complexity is inherent to the problems.

It'd be really hard to imagine a random startup can handle returns half as well. Amazon's regulatory compliance team is probably many times larger than a random average startup. Here the economies of scale is really in favor of the big players.

It is totally possible that on the second day of launch someone realized the problem, truly thought this being wrong, and deeply cared about all the impact on consumer and seller. Yet, it took them 10+ years for the circumstances to be right to get this fixed.

Commingling must have been someone's big, successful project, with all the benefits, probably faster shipping, lower cost, etc.

Once a big project got launched with all these benefits materialized, it is really hard to undo it. When a problem is identified, higher-ups usually ask to address it, rather than undoing the whole project. Anyone pushing to undo a project would be claiming the entire team up to whatever level making that original decision made a huge mistake. In other words, committing a political suicide.

It may take some mix of the following to trigger such drastic changes:

- Some fundamental assumptions changed (for example, one may claim that the logistics got so much better that the original benefits on the delivery speed can be achieved now without commingling).

- Multiple attempts at addressing the problems without killing the project proved unsuccessful.

- The ppl who original launched the project moved, to other domains or other companies.

- Some external triggers (new regulation, a large chunk of partners / stakeholders complaining, the company literally dying, etc.)

In all, there has to be someone for whom the incentive to undo it overcomes the hurdle, political or otherwise to reverse course on a huge project. After that, there need to be the usual logistics, including convincing, budgeting, prioritization, and a million other things you do at a big company to get a thing done. Now, 10 years have passed and it is finally making news.

Or, I can be totally wrong and it's just a bunch of privileged dumbasses who don't give a fork and randomly making one project after another, while pointing at some graphs and numbers claiming successes regardless of what really happens. ;)

Not OP. IMO the recent Java changes, including pattern matching (especially when using along with sealed interface), virtual threads (and structured concurrency on the way), string templates, are all very solid additions to the language.

Using these new features one can write very expressive modern code while still being interoperable with the Java 8 dependency someone at their company wrote 20 years ago.

To me it’s fair to say that while the moral duty might fall equally among nato nations, the geopolitical one leans heavily towards Europe.

Does this imply European nations should be contributing to the war effort more than the US? Does this shift match what the current situation leads to?