A friend of mine was a manager at a fairly upscale women’s clothing store.
She said that even at 95% discounts, they could turn a profit.
In Belgium we have a law stating that no commerce can ever sell at a loss. Yet we still see 70% discounts, in stores for every budget range.
Yet we still see 70% discounts, in stores for every budget range.
I bet those stores also claim that prices need to go up “because of inflation”. Fraudsters.
I work for a commercial airliner (regional) on the ramp and cleaning planes (regional and mainline - 737, 738 etc).
Don’t drink the coffee. The coffee pots rarely get switched out and are only cleaned with water from a water bottle, after an agent used the same gloves to clean other parts of the plane (assuming they don’t start with the galley or taking out the trash).
The last company I worked for has both NDA’s and arbitration agreements, which would keep me from spilling company secrets and would screw me over if I did. But here is a secret - they use online PDF forms and <whispers> don’t check what text is entered into the signature.
Health insurance company I worked for would automatically reject claims over a certain amount without reviewing them. Just to be dicks and make people have to resubmit. This was over 25 years ago, but it’s my understanding many health insurers still pull this shit. They don’t care if it’s legal or not. Enforcement is lazy and fines are cheaper than medical claims.
Obviously this is in the USA.
We need a whole branch of government dedicated to fucking with insurance companies. They basically generate free money by having money, they don’t actually provide any net positive outside of just having money
We need to move to single payer healthcare and just eliminate the need for insurance companies.
That’s pretty much the only BDG video I couldn’t finish. Too dark. Everything else has been delightful
I did finish it but I need like at the beginning without understandong anything. Lucky for me I am not in USA.
I don’t think I’ve finished it either tbh
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=-wpHszfnJns
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
How does this work? Had someone already uploaded it to an instance of peertube?
From what I can understand, it’s just youtube with another frontend (i.e. it’s an app that shows youtube content)
I work in pest control and 99% of the shit we use. You can buy without having a license. The license just covers us to use the products on other people’s houses responsibly. If you really want to do pest control, you only need a few chemicals and they are all easily obtainable on Amazon.
Nice try fbi
Yes, in the mid 1990s, large banks in the USA were being electronically compromised so often that they wouldn’t investigate or pursue a loss if it was under $50k.
The building, used by several hundred employees, had a security systems with 4-digit codes. I’ve been part of group of people who liked to work late times, and the building would lock at midnight – the box by the door would start beeping and you would need to unlock it within a minute or so, or “proper alarm” would ensue.
However, to unlock the alarm you did not need your card – all you needed to do was to enter any valid code. Guess what was the chance that, say,
1234was someone’s valid code? Yes.We’ve been all using some poor guy’s code
1234, and after several years, when he left the company we just guessed some other obvious code (4321) and kept using that.By the way, after entering the code to the box by the door, it would shortly display name of the person whom the code “belonged” to. One of our colleagues took it as a personal secret project to slowly go through all 10000 possible codes and collect the names of the people, just for the kick of it.
(By the way, I don’t work for that company anymore, and more importantly, the company does not use that building anymore, so don’t get any ideas! 🙃 )
One of our colleagues took it as a personal secret project to slowly go through all 1000 possible codes and collect the names of the people, just for the kick of it.
Just an FYI it’s 10,000 codes, not 1,000. 0000-9999
I did some IT work at a hospital, patient records including names, addresses, conditions and doctor’s notes (inc mental health notes) were stored in the database in plain text. You had to have admin access to the database (which I did), but I was stunned that I could browse anyone’s entire medical information. A few weeks after I left I sent an anonymous email to a couple of people letting them know how bad it was - I didn’t use my real one just in case they may have come after me for looking at the records.
I worked for a company that had an expensive San Jose lease during the .com bubble. When they decided they needed to get out of that lease, they folded the company - “fired” everyone, then re-hired everyone under an independent second company that was owned by the parent company. Sketchy, but not really surprising…
When they re-hired me, they didn’t have me sign any NDAs. All the old NDAs were with the company that folded, not the parent company. Some days I wish I had been unethical enough to sell off their source code to a competitor.
Every time we notified anyone about a potential illegal breach of gdpr that could get us fined or sued, admin pretended they had never been informed because the changes would take too long and collide with their plans to “revamp everything, reinvent the platform, and rebrand”.
I should have whistleblown them myself if it were not for the fact that doing so would probably get some previous employees fired rather than hurt the company.
There is a million times more counterfeit/fake items at amazon than you think, and they dont care one bit to fix the problem
I think there’s a lot, yet I also don’t doubt you.
'Course, at this point so much of the stuff is the same randomly-generated-brand-name Chinese shit as EBay and Aliexpress have anyway that it doesn’t really matter anymore most of the time.
they dont care one bit to fix the problem
Who is they? Warehouse workers? Because without getting into too many details, I know someone fairly high up at Amazon corporate, and if I recall correctly her colleague runs a whole…divison? I don’t know, largish multi-person unit…and their whole job is addressing the counterfeit problem. I think it’s just really hard to do.
It’s not hard to do it, its hard to do it and make the same amount of money…
Well the easiest solution is to go back to having Amazon be the seller of products on Amazon, but we all one that ship sailed.
But if the problem is shared bin storage, the solution isn’t free, but it’s also not as expensive as lots of buyer confidence:
Tag every item with a QR code indicating its source when it comes into the distribution center. Use that code to identify the bad actors when there are returns and ban them.
“But what about products not shipped by Amazon?”
In that case, you know who sold and shipped the product, and if they can’t get their shit together they shouldn’t be allowed to work with Amazon.
Amazon has a policy of binning items with the same UPC together, regardless of the source. What this means is if you buy a valid product and any vendor who is part of their warehouse storage system sells counterfeits, then there is a chance of you getting a counterfeit part, regardless of who you buy from. This reduces the number of locations required for a given item. It just requires that you trust your vendors to not counterfeit. If they were kept separate you could easily see who is selling counterfeits, but it would require more space.
So Amazon has traded the ability to sell parts from verifiable vendors for short-term profits. At this point in the game, your best assumption is if there is any knock-off company selling the product you wish to buy you have no way of knowing it it’s legitimate or counterfeit. This is currently diluting their brand and will ultimately impact their sales, if not their profits.
Amazon makes something like 80% of their profit off of Amazon web services. They have no reason to give the tiniest crap about any physical product they will ever sell ever again.
This is not a secret
I wrote a review about a counterfeit item I received. They never approved that one. I haven’t bought cologne from them since.
I bought a bicycle light set (front and rear) a few years ago. They work fine (in fact, I still use the headlight; the rear still works, but it was replaced by a radar light), and I wrote a review. More recently, I was looking back through my purchases, and I came across the review I’d written, but the lights they were now selling on that page were a completely different design than the ones I had.
I edited my review to note that the current lights didn’t match the ones I had, not that it’ll do any good with a million other reviews of those lights. I know Amazon doesn’t really care, but I very often see “There is a newer version of this item available here” links, so I’m surprised that this was possible.
I’ve gone through reviews where it’s not even the same product. 🤬
One of the major issues is counterfeit baby products, specifically sleep products. In the US, sleep spaces for babies are highly regulated. The terms “bassinet, crib, and playard” are terms that can only be used for products that pass rigorous ASTM testing. If something doesn’t complete that testing then they are not allowed to use one of those terms in ads or on their manual. This is why you’ll see many products listed as “loungers” because they’re not safe for sleep. There are hundreds of products online that are horribly made and steal manuals of actual approved products. Amazon is notified (groups I’m in notify them) and they don’t care. There are also products that aren’t knock-off versions of things but just flat out lie and say a product is safe for sleep when it isn’t and will use one of the protected terms - which makes the sale of them illegal.
I always thought there’s exactly 0 counterfeit/fake items at amazon, so … 0 times million … phew…
/s
I recall watching a video about the nature of how things are stored at Amazon warehouses - basically if there are multiple sellers offering the same item it all goes in the same bin. Even if you are providing a genuine product, there’s a very good chance one of the other sellers is not, and that counterfeit gets sent out attached to your seller ID. Then you get a complaint for selling a counterfeit item someone else provided.
Then when that seller is caught and booted, they just register another trademark with 5-10 random characters and do it again. This is causing a massive headache for the US Trademark Office as well.
I bought a pepper grinder called the Pepper Cannon. Yes, its wonderfully overengineered and costs a fortune. But it’s made in the USA, and they’ve been pretty open with their startup process for making it.
Few months ago I was browsing across amazon and lo and behold, some pepper grinders that look identical to the pepper cannon came up. They were all cheaper knockoffs, selling for a fraction of the cost, and outright stealing PCs industrial design. I didn’t buy one, as I don’t need one and didn’t really care enough to test if the mechanism was the same as the one I bought, but I did drop a line to the pepper cannon guys so they can try to get em delisted
Now I want a Pepper Cannon. Would you recommend getting it, before I ruin my hype by looking up the price or what is actually is? :D
Its really great if you like pepper. It puts out an absolute ton of it, and you’ll find yourself going through way more black pepper than you thought you ever could. And the grind settings are unrivaled; you can get tiny little faerie dusts of pepper, all the way up to big honkin flakes that work great on a steak. Whenever I’m doing a brisket or similar on the smoker, its great to have on hand
Its milled out of a single billet of aluminum, the grinding mechanism js custom built, and the whole thing just screams quality.
And you pay for it. They’re around $200
There’s also a salt cannon, if you want the same sort of thing but built for salt. I got it because I like the matching pair, but you don’t strictly need it; salt is salt, regardless of where it was ground.
It’s what happens when it turns into a marketplace where 3rd party vendors can sell to.
Exactly why I only buy from Amazon when I can’t find it after searching elsewhere for a while.
About 25 years ago I worked in a small town KFC franchise. Owner was, well, what you’d expect in a small town franchise owner - there was lots of pressure to cut costs and the manager had their job threatened at least once a month due to cost overruns (which cut into the owner’s profits).
Manager quote, “I don’t care if it’s green, cook it anyway, nobody will tell once it’s breaded and fried.”
My boss was high 99% of the time he was at work.
Or awake.
We didn’t investigate an online theft from any bank account unless it was over US $100k.
