In my experience Americans sort of take for granted the breadth and depth of consumer protection you enjoy. I'd wager that in an insignificant portion of countries Apple expanded to, they have had to significantly cut back on refunds/warrantees they offer to combat fraud and abuse.
> In my experience Americans sort of take for granted the breadth and depth of consumer protection you enjoy.
As a european, it's amusing to hear you say that as the majority of European countries have far, far more stringent consumer-protection regs than the US, such as mandatory 2 year warranties, distance-selling laws, legal rights to a refund or replacement, and so on. Apple's 90 day warranty is a joke when you can buy the same product, for almost the same price after factoring-in VAT, with a 2 year warranty only a 5 hour flight away...
And everywhere in EU sellers have to accept a return within 14 days for any online purchases, for any reason. And no, they can't charge a restocking fee. You can only be asked to pay for the postage back.
And in general, the responsibility for the goods is always with the seller first, manufacturer second. If your laptop breaks and the seller says "oh the manufacturer declined warranty" then sorry, tough luck, it's the seller who has to repair/replace it now.
In the EU however, you generally are paying for that extra protection in the form of higher prices from retailers. There's no free lunch. The market isn't perfectly efficient, but it's pretty damn efficient. It's not like companies operating in countries where warranty is the law will suddenly say "welp, I guess we'll just have to accept less profit in the EU then, hopefully global consumers don't catch on!"
Whether you pay for extra protections via higher prices automatically (EU) or as an a la carte add-on (US) is irrelevant. On a risk adjusted basis, the cost is the same.
The EU simply cuts off the consumer's ability to take more risk for lower cost. They force you to buy the warranty every time.
I'm honestly curious - how so? In all my adult life I have been comparing prices between EU and US and they are always about the same once you factor in taxes. Yes the VAT can make items slightly more expensive, but VAT has absolutely nothing to do with the retailers responsibility for the product, right?
>>On a risk adjusted basis, the cost is the same.
I'd love to see how you came to that conclusion. In EU the seller is always responsible for 2 years after sale for the product, in the US a 2 year warranty will be few hundred dollars on laptops and other expensive items. The difference is definitely not the same.
This has been the subject of numerous academic papers. Again, it's not like the EU government has somehow fooled companies into losing money in the EU.
I highly doubt you're doing true absolute calculations factoring in all the supply chain, macroeconomic, and tax considerations.
The reason you can't easily compare this at a glance is complicated by currency fluctuations, shipping costs, labor costs, embedded VAT in prices vs. taxes added at purchase, VAT rebates, differences in EU warranty law vs. purchased warranties in the US, "discount" marketing tactics of American retailers vs. European retailers, everyday low prices vs. seasonal discounting, etc.
Trust me when I say you're not enjoying some free lunch at the expense of corporate earnings by living in the EU. You're simply restricting consumer and entrepreneur choices, by preemptively deciding what the consumer needs.
Which can be good or bad depending on the item in question. Computer hardware? Not sure we need the nanny state involved, there's healthy competition and you run the risk of stifling new business models from arising (it's no secret that Europe isn't exactly a hotbed of tech innovation). Healthcare? Now that's a different story.
>>Trust me when I say you're not enjoying some free lunch at the expense of corporate earnings by living in the EU. You're simply restricting consumer and entrepreneur choices, by preemptively deciding what the consumer needs.
I mean, I do see your point. But we as a society have decided that sellers should be responsible for a minimum of 2 years for any items they sell. That's just what we (society) require from anyone willing to run a business. We also require them not to dump toxic waste into rivers, and pay their taxes - all enterpreneurs the world over have certain obligations to the state, US just placed the bar lower than elsewhere. I don't mean to say which approach is "right", but I do mean to say that as a consumer I like having greater protections in the EU, even if "perhaps" it means the products bought here cost more.
> This has been the subject of numerous academic papers.
Those papers sound interesting. Can you recommend any?
>it's no secret that Europe isn't exactly a hotbed of tech innovation
When you mean innovation, do you refer to Xerox and Bell Labs? Or to Microsoft and Apple? Cause europe has a lot of the first kind, not much of the second kind. And even when they do, they might end being sold out. Like Nokia and Skype.
Companies absolutely accept and expect different margins in different countries, just look at drug prices. Companies maximize their margins in the markets they participate in.
You are right that it is not a free lunch it’s just a difference in the margin.
You could also argue that two year warranties in the us are priced obscenely (like drugs).
Almost. It does not apply to custom-made products. Apple resellers consider BTO models to be custom-made and thus not eligible for this protection. But at least they warn you upfront.
> Apple resellers consider BTO models to be custom-made and thus not eligible for this protection.
I thought the only get-out for Apple was personalized items, namely those with laser-engraving. BTO/JIT orders where you choose from a narrow set of options (e.g. RAM size, HDD size, etc) in Apple's case probably wouldn't be BTO because they tend to pre-assemble a modest stockpile of all of the different BTO configs.
Lower-volume products, like the $6000 Mac Pro might have a case, but it's not like a returned (but new, even unopened) MacPro isn't resalable...
I was purchasing BTO MBP (I would think a popular config at that) in December and got that notice... Apple itself might not do that, but we don't have them here (not all EU countries have the presence), and they probably don't take the return from the resellers.
Aren’t the customers who don’t return their purchases subsidizing the cost of the ones who do? I’d much prefer to pay a restocking fee (or to have more stringent return policies) if it meant I could pay a little less up front.
I mean...what a weird way to look at it. Yes I suppose you're right but we as a society decided that if sellers want to sell things remotely(online, through post, through telephone sales) then it's only fair that customers have the right to inspect the item and return it if they don't like it. You don't have that right if you bought the item in a physical store because you could inspect the item there.
I used the US Apple website, and the French Apple website in that case (in €, converted to USD using WolframAlpha and accounting for 20% VAT). I've already seen in the past that the Spanish and German Apple websites have similar prices to the French one.
My experience in Europe was that the result of those laws is businesses that operate within the letter of the law, whereas in the US they often operate more generously.
For example Apple in the US let me return a first gen 12.9” iPad Pro after about 4 months and exchange it for the 9.7” version the week it came out.
I would have expected a flat out no from retailers in Europe.
That is why you used to read about Apple's exceptional services. They are and only happens in the state. Such as free repair for certain thing or giving cheaper discount to repair etc. In EU and UK those services are expected.
Now Apple doesn't do it. They push you to buy a new product whenever possible along with AppleCare+. Apple Retail employees dont run on commission in US ( Not sure if that is still the case). I remember someone said Apple Retail Italy runs on commission basis. I also know Apple Retail employees also has KPI based on AppleCare+ they sold in the past few years.
Yes.... the whole Apple Retail experience is going against how Steve Job originally envisioning it. For Tim Cook, it is nothing more than a cost center on balance sheet.
I worked at a chain pizza place growing up that advertised its money back offer if you didn't like your pizza. When they advertised it I just assumed a lot of people would take advantage of it.
Our store was one of the busiest in the US for a single store. One guy ... just one guy abused it regularly. Beyond him almost nobody ever took advantage of the offer at all... Easy enough for the store manager to tell that guy to knock it off and there ya go.
What I assumed was a crazy / unwise policy, effectively cost them nothing, hardly was ever used, didn't require any new processes at all, and amounted to just a advertising slogan.
People are probably more embarrassed to ask for their money back on something they have partially or entirely eaten. I can barely muster up the courage to tell my waiter that my dinner order wasn't quite right but I have zero problem with buying a couple different versions of a product and returning the ones I don't like.
That's interesting - I hate wasting food, I have never complained about my order (and not planning too, unless the food is spoiled I guess). If I don't like the food, I'll just never order again from the same place. I would definitely appreciate a company that offers money refund on food "no questions asked" even if I was never going to use it - it shows respect.
If I were the manager I'd just say, if the guy calls, let me talk to him, and then tell him "It doesn't seem you really like our pizzas, we don't want to ruin your dinner, so why don't you order somewhere else?".
A better manager would figure out how to keep him as a paying customer...
Agreed, but I don't think Americans take it for granted; I think they just don't abuse it. By not abusing a good faith return policy you allow the company to provide one that is consumer friendly.
Eh, look what happened to LL Bean, they had one of the last real good faith return policies, and it was abused to hard they had to reverse lifetime warranty on existing products to two(?) years. And create a list to track individuals making the returns
I hear they'll still honor it in some obvious cases...
I'm not sure what threat model this supposed "Easy Fix" is intended to address. Struggling families already keep food past supposed expiration date. If manufacturers want people to throw away food, changing the way the label is worded won't fix that. And most people are discarding food because they don't plan and/or buy too many.
> Most Americans’ daily routines depend on single-use items and throwaway plastic packaging, much of it flowing into streams and oceans, polluting our ecosystems.
This is unsubstantiated sensational bs. Plastics do end up in landfill or incinerator, but the US does not have waterway pollution problem.
Sure there is, but there is a huge difference between dumping plastic waste into rivers like it happens in India, Africa etc and then being able to measure trace amounts of microplastics in the environment. Of course plastics left in nature will eventually find its way into the water streams.
Most American and European plastic waste finds its way into landfills.
"In the chart below we see the global distribution of mismanaged plastic waste aggregated by world region. The East Asia and Pacific region dominates global mismanaged plastic waste, accounting for 60 percent of the world total.
There is a wide gap between East Asia and the other regions — South Asia ranks second but contributes around 5 times less with 11 percent of the total. This is followed by Sub-Saharan Africa (9 percent); Middle East & North Africa (8.3 percent); Latin America (7.2 percent); Europe and Central Asia (3.6 percent) and North America (1 percent).
If we aim to address the ocean plastic problem, an understanding of this global picture is important. It highlights the fundamental role of waste management in preventing ocean pollution; whilst countries across North America and Europe generate significant quantities of plastic waste (particularly on a per capita basis), well-managed waste streams mean that very little of this is at risk of ocean pollution. "
Where does your recycling go? To nations with the fewest environmental controls. Where does it mostly come from? From the West. So much it breaks down their ability to cope meaning local waste now doesn't get recycled much any more either.
Now that Asia has mainly stopped accepting recycling - much of which is too contaminated before it gets out of the bale or container to recycle so gets illegally dumped or burned - even more goes to Africa instead. Except all countries that have had some part in recycling and try and stop or restrict it find they have a major problem of illegal imports and illegal processing - which is easier to stop than the containers. See for instance the Philippines vs Canada recently.
so the West is exporting what seems to inevitably become an illegal industry to every country stupid enough to join in.
If we just banned export and dumped it all in landfill again the world would be better off.
It's unfortunately not typically discussed. If you really want to solve the problem, being even more careful about plastics in the West really isn't going to move the needle. Knowing this is important.
Ironically, the extra care such as banning plastic bags, straws, etc. in the West does lead to this very conversation becoming normal across lay people rather than just those who "really want to solve the problem," which probably does have significant value as well. Like a raising-awareness event.
They say "much" ("a large amount") of it ends up in waterways, which is substantiated. As one tiny example, look at Mr. Trashwheel. It collects ten tons of trash on a rainy day. If you don't believe me, here is a sped-up video of it collecting plastic, styrofoam, and other single-use trash items[1].
And here are statistics on the trash gathered[2]. 649,236 plastic bags, 880,646 plastic bottles, and plenty of other miscellaneous plastic pieces. All of this disrupts natural ecosystems, and is ingested by animals who then get sick, and later gets into us as microplastics when we ingest the animals. This is the reason nearly all of our food and beverages contain microplastics.
If this doesn't seem that bad, the above example is from a single stream into a single harbor in a single city. Now imagine the national scale.
But plastic isn't the only pollutant of US waterways. Bacterial matter, nutrient excess, and industrial toxins regularly find their way through the watershed into main waterways, affecting marine life as well as humans. Waterway pollution is a big issue in the US.
I mean they do accurately describe one of the major mechanisms for ocean plastic pollution but it is absolutely innacurate to say that the source of this plastic is from US waterways.
So you're saying _USA_ waterways are not a sink for plastic pollution (and source of ocean plastics)? Or you just think a professor of USA history should point out parallel issues in other countries?
Plastic pollution is a general problem for everyone, including in the USA.
If we're talking specifically about plastic pollution in waterways, the USA is nowhere close to the top of the list for that particular problem.
In the USA, we have the means to recycle most plastics, but there needs to be political will to get it done. Merely relying on industries to make a profit off of plastic recycling is not nearly sufficient.
We need to enact more regulations to ensure that more products are make with recyclable materials, that the products themselves can easily be recycled, and provide incentives to actually do the recycling. We have a lot of work ahead of us, and in the current political climate, little political will to get it done. This is a big problem in the USA.
90 percent of all the plastic that reaches the world's oceans gets flushed through just 10 rivers: The Yangtze, the Indus, Yellow River, Hai River, the Nile, the Ganges, Pearl River, Amur River, the Niger, and the Mekong (in that order). [1]
[1] Christian Schmidt, Tobias Krauth and Stephan Wagner (2017), Export of plastic debris by rivers into the Sea
Ahh, the places receiving so much in US, and to a lesser extent other Western imports, their own putative systems for dealing with the waste and recycling it break down completely. Leading to entire towns built on processing the West's waste meaning it's everywhere.
"Their fault, nothing to do with us"
This is blaming the recipient of the bullet for the shooting.
Should we be more specific? Very few cities in my state have ever had recycling programs of any kind, so we can't be blamed for this harm that "coastal elites" have inflicted on China.
Actually I tend to think less specific - it's a global problem of globalisation and global supply chains. That rather makes it everyone's problem - those that created it, bought it, disposed of it and possibly recycled some of it. Recycling aimed to make the problem better and ended up so broken that it's making it worse. Pointing the finger at someone else to escape in each and every piece on the matter isn't particularly helpful.
I've slowly ended up thinking that simply dumping it in landfill is less harmful, but not as good as producing less in the first place. Which is still a point in favour of your state's reluctance to recycle.
No one ships plastic waste unless you mean E-waste... The OP was about the fact that no western country just throws household plastic waste into the water, it goes to landfills or is very often incinerated, plastic is a pretty good carbon source for combustion you know...
Ok, we apparently still ship plastic waste to India and Malaysia. Though about 85% is incinerated, at least here in Denmark. Crazy really. Most plastics can't be easily recycled, it actually makes sense just to burn it really.
Yup, people in UK carefully wash plastics, use separate bins, special collection trucks .. then the waste is shipped for sorting and recycling, only it's much more profitable to dump the plastics and take the extra money paid to "recycle" it. Richer nations have companies who know what's happening, but the people think "we're recycling, saving the planet", and the companies get more money, and the poor people make much more money than they would have. Everyone wins!
I assume this is still happening but there have been several exposés, leading some people to no longer bother recycling. As a reaction to that some city/area councils will fine you for not separating recyclables; our city vastly reduced the size of our bins (trash cans).
Most of our family waste seems to be unrecyclable plastic packaging.
That washing part always gets me. Its consuming more resources, perhaps more than the bottle or can is worth. My mother in law used to put empty bottle and cans (trash!) into my dishwasher and run it with soap. My god, the waste, the damage to the environment.
It reminds me of eco-tourism. Its fun/satisfying to be part of 'recycling', so folks make up steps they can do to participate more, and end up torpedoing the whole point of it.
Most of our plastic "recycling" is shipped. Thousands and thousands of container loads full of milk cartons, bottles etc compressed into bales.
The US exports by far the most. Much is poorly washed or sorted, regardless of which nation sent it, often so it's not suitable for recycling - plastic recycling is very easy to contaminate.
When countries push back and restrict imports they find they have an illegal industry that starts mislabelling containers, and illegal factories spring up.
So you are telling me someone offers recycle services and they just dumb it in 3rd world rivers? How is that not "their fault" ?
Australia ships toxic waste to Denmark, is that problematic in it self? No! Because a danish company offers services for safe disposal. If that company just dumbed the barrels of toxins in the ocean, would Australia be responsible?
We used to ship a lot of plastic waste back to China in what would be otherwise empty shipping containers. The movie "Plastic China" shows what the other end of that looks like:
I honestly don't think anything in that post 'demolishes' the criticism or even advances some sort of argument.
It's just a huge wall of text full of weird analogies which is quite typical for these 'rationalist' community posts.
People like Bostrom or Yudkowsky have one thing in common. They are not engineers and they stand to gain financially (in fact it is what pays their bills) to conjure up non-scientific pie in the sky scenarios about artificial intelligence.
In Bostrom's case this goes much further, he has given this treatment to anything including nuclear energy and related fields. Andrew Ng put it quite succinctly. Worrying about this stuff is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars, and there's maybe need for one or two people in the world to work on this.
I really wish we could stop giving so much room to this because it makes engineers as a community looks like a bunch of cultists.
> Worrying about this stuff is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars, and there's maybe need for one or two people in the world to work on this.
When something is shown to be doable in principle, it's often not clear how difficult it will be in practice.
In 1932, Ernest Rutherford thought nuclear energy would not be a viable source of energy, let alone weaponized. In 1933, Leo Szilard filed a patent on the concept of the neutron-induced nuclear chain reaction. At this point in time, nuclear fission was not yet known and actually making nuclear energy viable was a pipe dream.
As we all know, in 1945, the first nuclear weapons were used. Until the day that the weapons were used, German physicists thought that nuclear weapons would not be used in the war because, while possible in principle, the actual construction of a working device would require a herculean effort that no nation would expend in time for the war.
The German physicists weren't too far off in estimating how difficult nuclear weapons were. They just failed to predict that the US would throw 130,000 people, including most of their top minds, at the problem for years.
Now, we have no idea how difficult superintelligence will be. But the possibility that we're a couple of breakthroughs and a Manhattan project away from superintelligence is real, and I want a hell of a lot more than one philosopher and an eccentric fanfic writer working on this.
EDIT: No offense to Yudkowsky. I thought the fanfic was fairly good and, more importantly, achieved its purpose.
So you agree there is room for them to work on this, yet you feel they are making engineers generally look like cultists?
Maybe you’re just being oversensitive. The hype wave on AI danger is completely over, and there’s nothing wrong with people studying the question if that’s their interest.
You know we've been here before, right? I mean, lighthill report, Ray Kurzeweil is a serial offender for over thirty years, the singularity is around the corner thing, outrageous claims for fMRI, self driving cars. Over hyped ibm Watson which now health professions are talking about misdiagnosis problems.
Sure. We have google image match and better colorisartion and some improvements in language processing, and good cancer detection on x-rays. These are huge. But hype is, alas, making engineering increments look like cult.
> Consider, for example, an old doctor; suppose they’ve seen twenty patients a day for 250 workdays over the course of twenty years. That works out to 100,000 patient visits, which seems to be roughly the number of people that interact with the UK’s NHS in 3.6 hours. If we train a machine learning doctor system on a year’s worth of NHS data, that would be the equivalent of fifty thousand years of medical experience, all gained over the course of a single year.
Doctoring is just like playing Go, right? Just increase the CPU cycles on it and pack more data in there, it's more or less the same.
You can make that assumption but I don't think it'd be based in fact or reality, because Go has far fewer inputs and states than treating humans does. And you don't get to test every hypothesis and then rewind either.
Most answers there are like this, making unfounded conclusions into supposedly insightful rebuttals.
Let's try another.
> If we then take into account the fact that whenever one Einstein has an insight or learns a new skill, that can be rapidly transmitted to all other nodes, the fact that these Einsteins can spin up fully-trained forks whenever they acquire new computing power, and the fact that the Einsteins can use all of humanity’s accumulated knowledge as a starting point, the server farm begins to sound rather formidable.
Or maybe they tell each other fake news so quickly they can't tell what's right and what's wrong, like we do whenever we find a more efficient way to communicate?
Anyone can make unfounded assumptions about anything; I just did it. It's up to you to decide if you care whether these assumptions are based in reality or not. But if you consider yourself "rational", I think it'd be in your best interest to care.
Well the assumption is that AI will be able to learn similar amounts of knowledge from access to the same amount of data as a human would. That is of course totally wrong for almost all problems for today's algorithms, but that might change in the future. Alpha Go for example improved a lot by playing against itself without outside input.
It's not as much time lost as extra effort spent handling the denominations and counting changes. When I take a taxi in Bangkok, I need to pay cash to the toll booths. Uber just bills them directly to my card.
This is so appalling. If your wife is in labor and needs to rush to the hospital, the cab driver ought to charge you outrageously because you're richer than him?
The cab driver is a really bad example because the cab driver isn't providing a service that people argue is a human right. In terms of healthcare I think that it's reasonable that those who can should pay more to cover for those who can only afford to be grateful. That is usually how the cost of public services is distributed using taxes.
If you read my post again I am sure that you will understand that the predicament of my wife is irrelevant to my argument. Economically rationally the taxi driver will charge according to the perceived value of his service, which in terms of money means more to a rich person. Of course other factors weigh into this equation, especially competition and the fact that people aren't economically rational.
Should the can driver charge you outrageously because you are richer than he is?
Only if you are outrageously rich and the driver did an excellent job of emergency transportation and only by billing you after the fact. The first priority should be on saving lives, then sort the logistics out later.
And that is a problem because...? The "reactionary" NSA bill that was introduced a few months ago to combat the NSA's practices almost passed. Do you have a problem with that too?
Bitcoin is able to facilitate transactions because of the power put into the computers running the Bitcoin network. Mining Bitcoin provides the functionality for validating the block chain. So, power into the network provides the value of security.
Bitcoin happens to currently use power that way, other coins don't; mining is not the only way to facilitate transactions and facilitating transactions is where the value is, regardless of the method used to do it. Power is but one of several options so the value can't be there.
