cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/5806576

Why shouldn't they? You've arranged to have product you didn't create shipped to a warehouse you don't operate to be stored by a system you don't maintain to be sold on a storefront under a brand you made up and that you didn't create to be fulfilled by a shipping apparatus instead of you going to the UPS Store. What exactly are YOU doing here that merits a payday? Mediating a relationship between Amazon and a Chinese manufacturing firm? They already have tons of those.

Maybe your point just sucks because finding some cheap garbage on AliExpress that you can sell with instagram ads isn't actually all that hard, or that much work, which is probably why this exact business model was sold to people who, as stated by people selling it, had low skills and no interest in acquiring them, so they can generate passive income by operating an automated storefront on Amazon.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37668690

Say what you will about their means of getting it, but this person did 100% of the leg work of getting that sale. That sale doesn't exists without them.

What leg work? Customer acquisition? They paid amazon for that. Delivery? They paid amazon for that. Manufacturing? They paid China for that.

The sale wouldn't exist without anyone in the pipeline (Amazon, manufacturer in China, shipping merchant, etc.)

I think it's actually worse than that. The merchant is the only party that is not needed. In fact, calling a lot of these folks "merchants" at this point is probably a little too generous. Amazon is the merchant. Many of these other guys are sourcing and marketing "partners" for Amazon and the manufacturers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37666435

That's literally the meaning of being a monopoly: There are no other distribution channels that can compete with Amazon. They are a distribution monopoly.

There is no monopoly in distribution. The vast majority of items are bought offline. Walmart, Costco, Target, Kroger and on and on and on and on.

The world wide web + google and facebook make finding eyeballs open for all. Fedex, UPS and USPS make shipping products open to all. Stripe makes accepting payments open to all. Cheap 3rd party manufacturing makes making things open to all.

We've probably never been further from a monopoly in any of the areas in question. The reason it's so damn hard to make any money selling random products is that there is just so much competition.

Mastodon discussion

Kbin.social and one lemmy instance with queer furries were mentioned in the article.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/4365037

https://twitter.com/snowmaker/status/1698220809398124978

This is all the information at this time. A VC dropped this thread and another VC responded saying pls delete. May develop into more drama. Big money involved.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/2628014

Charlie Jane Anders discusses KOSA (the Kids Online Safety Act).

If you're in the US, https://www.stopkosa.com/ makes it easy to contact your Senators and ask them to oppose KOSA.

"A new bill called the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, is sailing towards passage in the Senate with bipartisa>n support. Among other things, this bill would give the attorney general of every state, including red states, the right to sue Internet platforms if they allow any content that is deemed harmful to minors. This clause is so vaguely defined that attorneys general can absolutely claim that queer content violates it — and they don't even need to win these lawsuits in order to prevail. They might not even need to file a lawsuit, in fact. The mere threat of an expensive, grueling legal battle will be enough to make almost every Internet platform begin to scrub anything related to queer people.

The right wing Heritage Foundation has already stated publicly that the GOP will use this provision to remove any discussions of trans or queer lives from the Internet. They're salivating over the prospect.

And yep, I did say this bill has bipartisan support. Many Democrats have already signed on as co-sponsors. And President Joe Biden has urged lawmakers to pass this bill in the strongest possible terms."

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/4351466

kbin dev responds again

hexbear chapos

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/3058732

Red site (50-some comments, high): https://lobste.rs/s/l2l1v8/hashicorp_adopts_business_source

Orange site (600-some, decent): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37081306

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/2926894

The developer finally grew a spine and realized he didn't want to do it for free. So he added some code to his library (SponsorLink) that runs in your IDE, reads your .gitconfig, checks if your email address is registered as a sponsor, and possibly slows down your build if it's not.

Reddit reactions:

https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/15m2q0o/moq_a_net_mocking_library_now_ships_with_a

https://old.reddit.com/r/csharp/comments/15m2lg2/moq_now_ships_with_a_closedsource_obfuscated

https://old.reddit.com/r/dotnet/comments/15ljdcc/does_moq_in_its_latest_version_extract_and_send

I wonder if anyone at Microsoft uses this internally 😂.

The Github issue and Reddit threads on this are pretty calm. Maybe there will be more drama in the coming days/weeks, when companies forbid their employees from using this library, and code monkeys have to rewrite all their unit tests. Redditors are trying to reportmaxx SponsorLink but nothing has happened yet.

I have made the painful and necessary decision to undertake a restructuring and we will reduce the size of our team by up to approximately 12%. This comes as disappointing news, as we've all built strong connections with our fellow Hackeronies.