Day: December 25, 2018

📰 Oh, Look, A Package from Amazon

Posted onAuthorcahwyguy

Let’s open another package from the news chum tree, shall we? How about this one from Amazon…

  • Fighting the Marketplace. Increasingly, Amazon is less a seller of goods than a network connecting a buyer and a seller, while pretending that Amazon is doing the selling. I’m sure that you’ve noticed this more and more. But the market isn’t quite so clean as you might think. For sellers, Amazon is a quasi-state. They rely on its infrastructure — its warehouses, shipping network, financial systems, and portal to millions of customers — and pay taxes in the form of fees. They also live in terror of its rules, which often change and are harshly enforced. A cryptic email from Amazon about a purported complaint can send a seller’s business into bankruptcy, with few avenues for appeal. Amazon’s judgment is swifter and less predictable, and now that the company controls nearly half of the online retail market in the US, its rulings can instantly determine the success or failure of your business. Amazon is the judge, the jury, and the executioner.
  • Counterfeits and Amazon. Another big problem at Amazon is counterfeits, which often benefit Amazon. Mixed in with Amazon’s inventory of authentic merchandise are crude copycats. Some look like the real thing but didn’t include a real vendor’s name. Others bear the name but aren’t made by the real company. Often, there is no way for even the savviest Amazon shopper to avoid the threat of counterfeits. The goods may look real online, but there is no guarantee of authenticity — whether sold by a brand, a third-party seller or Amazon’s direct-sales arm. And the reviews don’t help, because of review gaming.

Perhaps brick and mortar has a purpose after all?

Here are a few more technology items of interest:

Share

📰 As If By Plan or Design

Posted onAuthorcahwyguy

Look, there are still boxes under the news chum tree. Take this pretty one. So carefully wrapped, as if there was design aforethought to it:

  • Only the Best. When you think about interesting designed retail in the 1970s and early 1980s, one chain comes to mind: Best Products. I’ve noted a few articles on this subject worth sharing. The first looks at the abandoned architecture of the Best stores. The second explores the nature of the Best Product showroom architecture, incorporating environment into design. As the latter article notes: “The intentionally crumbling brick at that Houston store, known as “Indeterminate Façade,” and the eight other showrooms SITE designed, were simultaneously iconic and controversial, and most importantly for BEST, they brought in customers.”
  • Prime Numbers. Prime numbers are great for many because they are so unpredictable. But — surprise, surprise — researchers have discovered a pattern in prime numbers. Specifically, a team of researchers at Princeton University have recently discovered a strange pattern in the primes’ chaos. Their novel modelling techniques revealed a surprising similarity between primes and certain naturally occurring crystalline materials, a similarity that may carry significant implications for physics and materials science.
  • British Place Names. Ever need to decode British place names. Don’t worry, there’s a pattern there too.
  • ADHD Storytelling. Yes, there’s a pattern to that as well.
Share