More on Amazon’s devious practices

I posted recently about how Amazon is being sued by the Federal Trade Commission for unfair practices that include tricking people into signing up for its Prime services and then making it hard for them to get out of it. The Prime subscription costs $14.99 per month and accounts for $25 billion of its annual revenue. The Prime subscription gives you ‘free shipping’ though that is an illusion since you have essentially pre-paid for shipping whether you use it or not.

Amazon also provides Prime Video, which is a subscription-based streaming service, at a lower cost but although it is possible to sign up for just that, the company makes it hard to do so. After being informed that they were being sued by the FTC, Amazon made some changes. (You can read the FTC press release here and lawsuit here. Paragraphs 23-79 and 149-216 are heavily redacted.))

The extent of their devious practices is really is quite breathtaking. First up is how they manage to get people to sign up.
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The cruelty is hard to comprehend

Texas gets very hot in the summer, with temperatures rising well over triple digits and making manual outdoor labor not just uncomfortable but downright dangerous. As a result, some municipalities such as Dallas and Austin have passed ordinances that require employers to give a 10-minute water break every four hours. That seems to me to be nowhere close to enough but even that is too much for the governor Greg Abbott who has signed into law a measure passed by the Republican legislature that bans local governments from enforcing such ordinances.

The measure, which will take effect later this year, will nullify ordinances enacted by Austin and Dallas that mandate 10-minute breaks for construction workers every four hours. It also prevents any other local governments from passing similar worker protections.

Just days after Greg Abbott, the governor, ratified the law, officials said a 35-year-old utility lineman working to restore power in Marshall, Texas, died after experiencing symptoms of heat illness. The heat index – which takes into account both the temperature and humidity – was 100F (37C) while he was working.

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Amazon under fire from the FTC and Bernie Sanders

One of the best appointments that Joe Biden made is that of Lina Khan to head the Federal Trade Commission. She is a vigorous enforcer of anti-trust laws and unfair trade practices and the FTC has just announced a new lawsuit against the company for unfair practices after winning another lawsuit.

The FTC, the US agency charged with consumer protection, filed a federal lawsuit in Seattle, where Amazon is headquartered, alleging that the tech behemoth “ knowingly duped millions of consumers into unknowingly enrolling in Amazon Prime” through a secret project internally called “Iliad”.

The lawsuit marks the first time the agency has brought Amazon to court since its chair, Lina Khan, took the helm in 2021. Khan, a former antitrust scholar, has been widely expected to take a harder line on tech firms that have for years enjoyed unabated growth and little regulation.

In its complaint, the FTC said Amazon used “manipulative, coercive or deceptive user-interface designs known as ‘dark patterns’ to trick consumers into enrolling in automatically renewing Prime subscriptions”.

It said the option to purchase items on Amazon without subscribing to Prime was more difficult in many cases. It also said that consumers were sometimes presented with a button to complete their transactions – which did not clearly state it would also enroll them into Prime.
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The rival platforms for 2024 take shape

The conventional political wisdom seems to have gelled as far as the 2024 presidential elections are concerned. It says that serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) will win the Republican nomination but lose to Joe Biden in the general election. If by some chance SSAT drops out of the race (and the only thing that I think of that might cause that to happen is if he dies or is otherwise incapacitated), then whoever takes the nomination has a better chance of defeating Biden. The problem is that if one looks at past elections, conventional wisdom this far out from the election has proven to be extremely unreliable as a predictor of winners and losers.

But what the election is going to be about in terms of policies is a little easier to predict. SSAT seems to be running on a platform of personal grievance, that he is an utterly wronged man who deserves to be elected as president so that he can wreak vengeance on everyone who has worked against him, which by now is a pretty comprehensive list of federal and state governments, the justice system, and those within and outside the Republican party who have had the temerity to criticize him.

His recent speeches following his arraignment on federal charges painted a very dark picture of the state of the country and warned that if he loses in 2024, the country will be destroyed and taken over by evil forces. He paints himself as a messiah, the only one who can save the country. His competitors for the nomination have had no choice but to echo his alarmism but distinguish themselves from him by claiming that he is going to lose and that they have a better chance of winning and saving the country.
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When victims of bigotry are bigoted towards others

While I am generally optimistic about humanity’s capacity to do the right thing in general and over long time scales, one thing that I have been disillusioned by over shorter time scales is how people who have been subjected to discrimination and persecution when they are are in the minority, discriminate against other minorities when they gain political power. You would think that their own experience of being treated badly would make them feel empathy for other discriminated minority groups. But not so. One sees this switching from being the victim of discrimination to the perpetrators in many different contexts, be it religion, ethnicity, or nationality.

One recent example is that of the city of Hamtramck, Michigan where Muslims, who are often discriminated against in the US, became the dominant group in the city council. Now they have turned against the LGBTQ+ community, banning the pride flag on city properties.
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Bye, bye Boris (again!)

Boris Johnson resigned from the UK parliament before the release of a report that would say that he had violated norms by lying to the House of Commons. Such an action would trigger a 90-day suspension and Johnson clearly did not want to face that ignominy so he quit.

Boris Johnson deliberately misled parliament over Partygate and was part of a campaign to abuse and intimidate MPs investigating him, a long-awaited report by the privileges committee has found.

In an unprecedented move, the cross-party group said he “closed his mind to the truth” and would have faced a 90-day suspension from the Commons had he not quit in rage at its conclusions last week.

Johnson was also found to have knowingly misled the committee itself, breached Commons rules by partially leaking its findings last Friday, and undermined the democratic processes of parliament.

As a result, it was recommended Johnson be banned from getting the pass granted to ex-MPs that allows them privileged access to the Westminster estate.

Johnson was originally set to face a suspension from parliament of 20 days – enough to trigger a recall petition that would have probably led to a byelection. But the committee said his blistering attempts to intimidate it last Friday would have increased the punishment to 90 days.

Two MPs on the committee – one Labour and the other from the SNP – had pushed for Johnson to be expelled from parliament. But the final report and punishment was signed off unanimously by all seven members.

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Glenda Jackson (1936-2023)

That wonderful actor has died. She had a striking presence on screen and was a consistent voice for progressive causes, and served as a member of the British parliament from 1992 until 2015, after which she went back to the stage to appear as King Lear in 2016.

Sir Michael Caine has described actress and former MP Glenda Jackson as “one of our greatest movie actresses” following her death aged 87.

Jackson won two Oscars, three Emmys, two Baftas and an Tony in an acting career which spanned six decades.

Sir Jonathan Pryce said he believed she was “the greatest actor that this country has ever produced”.

Back in 2018, I posted a clip of her delivering a blistering attack in parliament on Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism when Thatcher died. Not for her the bogus pieties that people feel obliged to give to awful people when they die. A conservative lawmaker tried to get her censured for attacking Thatcher instead of paying a tribute but the Speaker shot that down.

What’s next in SSAT’s legal travails

Serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) was arraigned yesterday in Miami and pleaded not guilty on all counts. His valet Waltine Nauta was present but did not have a local attorney and so did not enter a plea and will do so June 27. While SSAT sat and scowled during the proceedings, Nauta apparently looked confused. No tentative date was set for SSAT’s trial, maybe because his codefendant Nauta could not enter a plea.

In federal criminal cases, the defendant has a right to a speedy trial within 70 days of entering a plea. But the defendant can waive that right and the trial can be much later. It is expected that SSAT and his lawyers will try and drag this out as long as they can with all manner of procedural motions so that it does not occur before the elections. If SSAT wins the presidency, he can order the justice department to drop the case and even pardon himself. This would be an incredible misuse of presidential power but when has that stopped SSAT? While his devoted supporters keep saying that the justice department has been weaponized against him and that what is happening to him is making the US look like a banana republic, it has always been the case that SSAT is the one who had made a mockery of many of the institutions that constitute a functioning democracy.
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