Amazon is my gross secret. I find much of what they do disgusting, but I still have Amazon Prime, still shop Amazon a fair bit. As abhorrent as it is, it's also just too convenient.
That's why I also own shares in the company. They are just too damned sticky and too damned good at so many things.
It reminds me of that scene from Clerks II. It's the most disgusting company I've ever seen... but I can't make myself move away.
Anything you can buy on Amazon can be bought somewhere else online. Usually you can buy products directly from a companies website and cut out all the middle men.
And its not even much effort to do so. Finding an alternative place to buy a product takes just a single Google search
> Anything you can buy on Amazon can be bought somewhere else online.
The problem with other sites is often (still!) I have to deal with annoying setup. Then once I create an account, I end up with yet another damned weekly newsletter[1]. Then I opt out, but I still get changing terms of service emails for the next 100 years.
There are some sites where I don't have these issues, but it is common enough that it makes me averse to signing up for new sites.
It is almost a perfect prisoner's dilemma. If every single site on the net stopped doing this, I'd be more likely to use more sites and they would all benefit. But individually, sites find it more profitable to spam/ newsletter the hell out of their users by default.
Also, often I get thing cheaper on Amazon then on the third party seller's own site. Just recently I was shopping for bike parts and recognized the seller's name and went directly to their site. The product was the same price, but on Amazon I get a 5% rebate plus I use smile.amazon.com so a few pennies goes to the charity of my choice as well... plus I didn't have to deal with setting up and account and dodging an email newsletter.
So yes, lazy, plus tired of the gamble of dealing with user-hostile sites.
[1] I know most sites let you avoid the newsletter sign up, but too often they use dark patterns or opt in by default.
Of course I can, but then I need to create several different accounts on different sites to place different orders when I can just order everything in one order on Amazon.
Who else has an install base like Amazon in their Alexas and Rings? No TinyCorp could just decide to roll out a service like this. One of the few upsides of having giant companies is seeing the work of their equally big R&D departments
> Who else has an install base like Amazon in their Alexas and Rings?
a company like Arris that sells DOCSIS3/3.1 cablemodems and GPON end user CPEs to big ISPs like Shaw, Comcast, Charter, Wave/RCN, etc. The main problem with that concept is that if a manufacturer of residential CPEs such as Arris made a unilateral decision to incorporate the tech into their cablemodems and other devices, their $BIGISP customers might not be pleased about it and would buy elsewhere.
yes, one of the reasons why I recommend anyone with a comcast connection go buy their own modem and run it as a dumb L2 bridge, into a separate user owned router. For technical people who know what they're doing I'm really not a fan of the idea of the modem also being a router and wifi AP.
You can imagine that instead of always being sent to Amazon the network could just pop out regular IP on the other end which would be routed to the service of the origin device's choice. Of course this does add more complexity such as abuse prevention but it would make the protocol attractive even if it was designed by Amazon.
That would require the capability to reliably and automatically push firmware updates out to existing devices, not something that I'd traditionally associate with home router manufacturers.
Also, at least in my experience, most private households just use the (usually horrible) ISP supplied CPE.
I'm surprised more hobbyists haven't developed public mesh networks. There are so many wireless routers and devices that this seems like a great opportunity. I would think makerspaces would be all over this idea.
Back in the dark ages, there were hobbyists who would order alarm circuits ($6/month) and pay for the DSL equipment on each side. This let them connect to the internet back as it was in 1992 or so.
The problem with this was that you had to know somebody who would be willing to be the other side of your connection. That obviously didn't scale very well.
Portland tried having a [free WiFi](https://www.oregonlive.com/breakingnews/2008/06/portlands_wi...) setup with antennas mounted on streetlights. The goal was to have 95% of the city covered but most people needed a signal booster to reach the antennas and very few people did that. My guess is that even if they did that the bandwidth would have been really slow.
There have been a couple of attempts to do a mesh network in Portland with hobbyists but it's really hard. People have moved from computers to phones, tablets, and dedicated devices like Rokus or smart TVs.
A tech support manager I worked with said "these people don't want to be taught how to catch a fish. They want us to catch the fish, cook it, and serve it with a smile."
Some people are OK with amateur performance - there's no internet because Betty went away for the weekend and isn't there to re-boot the router - but most people aren't.
Building and running a network that is useful (fast and reliable enough) for home internet use is a full time job, and is hard work. This is why most hacker space mesh networks have not achieved anything close to this. NYC mesh is the one notable exception, but this is because it is someone’s full time job, and it is run in a pretty professional manner, like a small wireless ISP.
The alternative, a network that is not fast and reliable enough for home internet use, is another option. But in that case, what IS it useful for? These efforts usually just end up turning into weekly hack nights / hangouts for the mesh group, since there’s no real point in putting up hardware.
A third hurdle is that if you put together 12 random nerds in a hacker space, the odds that any of them can see any of the other nerds houses from their house is basically zero. Since wireless internet radios require line of sight, it’s very hard to even create the first link in the network in this scenario. Getting critical mass to form any kind of network in a neighborhood requires door to door sales, something that most mesh networking nerds are very bad at.
You lay out some really good challenges for establishing a decent public net
1) Maintenance. What are the challenges of maintaining? Hardware? Balancing network? Software integration?
2) Speed. What are the barriers for making fast and affordable?
3) Distance. What are the hurdles for last mile?
This has been telecom's unicorn for a long time. Fiber, wireless, satellite, cable where all promised to deliver. I think there is something with mesh networks and free software that can break this barrier. I don't know exactly what it would be but it still seems like a possibility to me.
Infrastructure is another issue. There's a lot of it between me and my nearest hacker space and while it would be possible to bridge it with guerilla relay transmitters that means deploying a lot of quasi-illegal radio units that are going to need battery changes and the cost could mount quickly. I feel like $10/unit is the magic price point for potential orphan hardware.
I think there's a strong argument to be made in California for having community-operated communications infrastructure in case of earthquake or disaster but it's got to be completely turnkey, with something people can just take home, plug in, and forget about.
That's why I also own shares in the company. They are just too damned sticky and too damned good at so many things.
It reminds me of that scene from Clerks II. It's the most disgusting company I've ever seen... but I can't make myself move away.