The old system was sometimes confusing as heck. A sane design would have maybe three suggested configurations, but each one would be just setting the values, and you could then tune it further. Instead, with their old setup, what you chose at the beginning also determined which options you could select, which meant that configuring a machine with a particular amount of storage or RAM or CPU speed could require you to go back to the top and try again.

So here's hoping whatever they are doing now is more straightforward.

Or require roadside parking to be at least two lanes wide so that you have several feet from where pedestrians become visible beyond the cars to where they are actually in the driving lane. That would also solve the "My door just got ripped off" problem. And it would not be a great way to solve the bike lane problem, but it would at least be better than nothing.

What we need, to be brutally honest, is a nationwide ban on roadside parking. It is dangerous for pedestrians who come out from between cars to get into the car. It is dangerous for cyclists who are then forced out of what should be a bike lane and shoulder and into the driving lane because of cars parked in that area.

And what we need, by extension, is a ban on developers building housing units with inadequate parking and then causing all of their residents to overflow into area bike lanes because they can get away with it. Federal standards for minimum parking per dwelling unit. Allow exceptions only for high-density urban areas with certain thresholds of public transit usage, and provide strict requirements for the amount of documentation required to get such exceptions.

The entire notion of parking a few inches away from moderately high-speed vehicles is bonkers.

That or they fire most of the employees and bleed the company until it is a husk, extracting the last vestiges of potential profit until everything of value has been fully depleted.

American makes up words. Germany chains up words. It's the difference between creation and concatenation. :-D

Untrue. You have one more option, which is to set a higher price for iOS users. Sadly, you cannot customize it, e.g. adding an extra $10,000 on iOS to discourage anyone from signing up in that way. All you can do is charge the actual difference. However, the actual difference ends up being well over 40%, so if every creator does this does this, then unless the iOS users are complete idiots, this should not have a meaningful impact on Apple's revenue.

Yeah, there's no way this doesn't end with Patreon dropping their app.

First, Amazon is primarily an e-commerce company and always has been. The Internet infrastructure company merely is Amazon selling access to the technology that it had to build anyway to do its core business, which is e-commerce.

Second, again, one critical dividing line is whether the contracted company appears to be Amazon or is strongly controlled by Amazon. Sears contracted out its sales, but it did so by using an existing shipping service, paying the going rate for shipping. At most, it negotiated a deal to ship in bulk for less money.

Amazon is hiring companies to paint their vans in Amazon grey with a Prime logo. Amazon is requiring delivery within a specific timeframe. Amazon is exercising enormous control over the contracting companies to such an extent that to the outside observer, they appear to be part of Amazon.

These are very, very different situations.

Sorry, to clarify, I meant that they really don't have a case for patent infringement. The antitrust concern from a phone maker taking some of the best third-party apps and incorporating them into the base product without buying those third-party apps is a different matter.

Definitely not new. NewTek had virtual PTZ in their Tricaster in 2018, two years before the first version of Camo, and even farther before Continuity Camera.

If so, then they *really* don't have a case. Sony had auto-framing available for their cameras in 2019. Camo added the feature in 2023. I'm impressed that they managed to slip that past the patent examiners when it clearly wasn't a new invention. Whoops.

The fact that it is being massively abused doesn't change the correctness of the original statement. One of the pillars used when determining whether someone is misclassified as a contractor is whether they are doing an essential core function of your business on an ongoing basis.

The only reason Uber or Uber Eats has managed to get away with their gross misclassification for as long as they have is because the federal law appears to never get enforced, practically speaking, except when someone sues, and they managed to trick the people of California into voting for Prop 22, which explicitly reclassifies rideshare and delivery drivers as contractors at the state level, reversing laws passed by the California legislature the year before.

But the GP is absolutely correct that delivery is a core part of Amazon's business. Without some form of delivery, Amazon would literally not exist. That strongly weighs towards employee status. As long as they were contracting with companies like UPS and FedEx that had their own branding, the lack of control and the ability to deliver other packages outweighed that factor, but I'm pretty sure all of the Amazon deliveries are done by vehicles with Amazon Prime branding on the vehicles, which tips that balance towards employee status.

IMO, there is a high risk of these drivers being found by the courts to be misclassified.

Where I live, it's 100% Amazon delivery. Where my mom lives, it's 100% UPS and USPS. Amazon handles cities, leaving UPS and USPS to cover the more expensive rural routes. Those services wanted more money because Amazon stopped giving them the cheap-to-deliver city packages. Unless they get fully automated delivery working, at some point, Amazon is likely to run headfirst into reality and be forced to work with outside shippers again and eat the higher costs.

Google is, in fact, way better. It is still not great, because Google search picks up all of Amazon's garbage content like "People who bought this product ultimately bought" and "People who bought this product also bought" and thinks that the product page contains your search terms, but at least Google lets you hard exclude search terms, which gives you some chance of finding what you want. Amazon doesn't even do that, which makes its search borderline useless unless your needs are very, very, very simplistic.

The more time I spend digging through random garbage, the more I search for products with Google, and the more sales Amazon ultimately loses to other companies.

I would prioritize the customer buying a product from them over a customer buying a product from someone else.

When I specify that I need a 100-foot Ethernet cable, I'm not going to say, "Oh, but Amazon is suggesting a 10-foot cable. That seems like a good enough alternative." To within the margin of error, nobody is going to do that. And yet this is the quality level of Amazon's dogs**t search results.

Amazon search results are such total garbage that roughly one in four searches causes me to leave Amazon and search on Google, where I am exposed to other buying opportunities. More and more of these purchases are now coming from non-Amazon companies as a direct result of those other companies having significantly better prices. So at this point, Amazon is actively losing my business because their search is so bad.

Prioritizing search quality *is* prioritizing the stockholders. Prioritizing products that yield higher margins inevitably leads to customers shopping elsewhere because they can't find the product that they are looking for at Amazon, which leads to fewer sales, not higher profits.