Amazon earned about $11 billion in revenue from services it provided to third-party sellers for the quarter ended in March. About half of the items sold on Amazon are from third-party companies, database firm Statista reported.

Liability for defective products is generally governed by state law, and Wednesday’s decision is based on the laws of Pennsylvania, where the customer, Heather Oberdorf, lives.

“It’s gratifying that the 3rd Circuit agreed with our argument and recognized that the existing interpretation of product liability law in Pennsylvania was not addressing the reality, the dominance that Amazon has in the marketplace,” said David Wilk, Oberdorf’s lawyer.

Oberdorf sued Amazon in 2016 in a federal court in Pennsylvania, saying she was blinded in one eye when a retractable dog leash she bought through the company’s website from a third-party vendor snapped and recoiled, hitting her in the face.

The Furry Gang shipped the leash directly to Oberdorf from Nevada. Neither Oberdorf nor Amazon has been able to locate any representative of the Furry Gang, which has not been active on Amazon’s site since 2016, according to court papers.

In Wednesday’s opinion, Circuit Judge Jane Richards Roth, writing for a 2-1 majority of a three-judge panel, said Amazon may be liable in part because its business model “enables third-party vendors to conceal themselves from the customer, leaving customers injured by defective products with no direct recourse to the third-party vendor.”

“Amazon can be held liable for third-party seller products: U.S. appeals court,” by Brendan Pierson, Reuters, July 3, 2019

Also see “AMAZON, den of thieves and a-holes“

Many alternatives to Amazon, including WalMart, Lowes, HayNeedle, WayFair, Etsy, etc., etc.

AMAZON, den of thieves

amazon scammers – Google search

“Prime and Punishment: Dirty Dealing in the $175 Billion Amazon Marketplace,” by Josh Dzieza Dec 19, 2018, The Verge

VIDEO: “How Scammers in China Manipulate Amazon,” by Jon Emont, WSJ, December 17, 2018

“Amazon Targets Unprofitable Items, With a Sharper Focus on the Bottom Line,” by By Laura Stevens, Sharon Terlep and Annie Gasparro, WSJ, December 16, 2018

“Amazon ran a sting to root out counterfeit textbooks, but some small sellers say they were unfairly targeted,” by Ari Levy, CNBC, December 13, 2018

“An Amazon revolt could be brewing as the tech giant exerts more control over brands,” by Jason Del Rey, ReCode, November 29, 2018

“New Parents Complain Amazon Baby-Registry Ads Are Deceptive,” by By Rolfe Winkler and Laura Stevens, WSJ, Nov. 28, 2018

“The Caesar Of The Amazon Jungle,” by Rod Dreher, TAC, November 15, 2018

“Amazon’s Golden Fleecing,” by The WSJ Editorial Board, Nov. 14, 2018

“Amazon’s Great HQ2 Swindle,” by Daniel Kishi, TAC, November 13, 2018

“Amazon’s HQ2 was a con, not a contest,” by Eric Johnson, ReCode, November 9, 2018

“Amazon’s own published books are quietly taking over the site,” by Thu-Huong Ha, Quartz, October 26, 2018

Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes – Employees, through intermediaries, are offering internal data to help merchants increase their sales on the website, WSJ, September 16, 2018

Amazon is investigating claims that employees deleted reviews and sold sales data to sellers, by Andrew Liptak, The Verge, September 16, 2018

Markets in everything, Marginal Revolution, September 17, 2018

“Amazon’s Antitrust Antagonist Has a Breakthrough Idea,” by David Streitfeld, NYT, September 7, 2018

Amazon wants a key to your house. I did it. I regretted it. – Duluth News, Dec. 17, 2017

Amazon demonetizes conservative website (us), Legal Insurrection, May 23, 2018

IBPA’s Fall 2017 Update on the Amazon Buy Button Policy Change – IBPA, Oct. 5, 2017

How Sellers Trick Amazon to Boost Sales, WSJ July 28, 2018 (On MorningStar)

On Amazon, Fake Products Plague Smaller Brands, WSJ, July 19, 2018

To cash in on Kindle Unlimited, a cabal of authors gamed Amazon’s algorithm, July 16, 2018, The Verge

Just How Bad Is the Fake Reviews Issue on Amazon? Here’s an In Depth Example, reddit, June 2018

FakeSpot – Tired of fake reviews?

Amazon Says More Than a Million U.S. Small Businesses Sell on Its Site, WSJ, May 3, 2018

Update On My Stolen Book (and Job) on Amazon, ExtremeTech, April 25, 2018

Why All My Books Are Now Free (aka A Lesson in Amazon Scams and Money Laundering), Meb Faber Research, April 18, 2018

Someone Stole My Entire Book (and My Job) and Is Selling It On Amazon, ExtremeTech, April 13, 2018

The Book Thief, Amazon Edition, WSJ, Feb 26, 2018

How an Amazon Self-Published Book May Be the Latest Money Laundering Scam, Fortune, Feb 23, 2018

Amazon warning: Beware of deliveries you didn’t order, Clark Howard, Feb 23, 2018

Going Off-Topic – Amazon made me a victim of tax fraud & potential money laundering and I want answers!, CTRMCenter, Feb. 23, 2018

Money Laundering Via Author Impersonation on Amazon? Brian Krebs, Feb. 20, 2018

Amazon tries to snuff out a bunch of Kindle publishing scams, CNet, Sept. 7, 2017

Amazon Scams On The Rise As Fraudulent Sellers Run Amok And Profit Big, Forbes, Jan. 2, 2017

Amazon – Amazon report listing abuse or violation

Amazon- Claim Copyright Infringement

email: copyright@amazon.com

It’s critical to appreciate the history of policing, to understand that what we now see as normal and inescapable wasn’t always the case. For most of our history, this country did not have a group of people with shields and guns who wandered the streets ordering people about. The fall from grace, If you perceive it as I do, came fast and hard.

American attitudes toward police were built on images of Andy Griffith, strolling the streets of Mayberry to save random cats and, an allusion Radley employs, serving as guest umpire in the occasional baseball game. Good. Honest, One of us. This was the police officer upon whom we relied, and the one we pictured as we told our children that they were here to help us; they were our friend.
. . .
The book contains required caveat number 3, mentioned numerous times that this is not an anti-cop book. And indeed, Radley pays homage to those within law enforcement who recognized the developing schism between police and the public that would lead us to blur the line between soldier fighting a foreign enemy on the battlefield and police fighting a domestic enemy on the streets of America, using the same clothing, weapons and attitudes.

Book Review: Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop

Radley Balko’s column

There’s certainly a lot of overlap between the war on drugs and police militarization. But if we go back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were two trends developing simultaneously. The first was the development and spread of SWAT teams. Darryl Gates started the first SWAT team in L.A. in 1969. By 1975, there were 500 of them across the country. They were largely a reaction to riots, violent protest groups like the Black Panthers and Symbionese Liberation Army, and a couple mass shooting incidents, like the Texas clock tower massacre in 1966.

At the same time, Nixon was declaring an “all-out war on drugs.” He was pushing policies like the no-knock raid, dehumanizing drug users and dealers, and sending federal agents to storm private homes on raids that were really more about headlines and photo-ops than diminishing the supply of illicit drugs.

But for the first decade or so after Gates invented them, SWAT teams were largely only used in emergency situations. There usually needed to be an immediate, deadly threat to send the SWAT guys. It wasn’t until the early 1980s under Reagan that the two trends converged, and we started to see SWAT teams used on an almost daily basis — mostly to serve drug warrants.

How Cops Became Soldiers: An Interview with Police Militarization Expert Radley Balko

Ozymandias

Unfortunately, it seems that the future Aldous Huxley predicted in 1932, in Brave New World, is arriving early. Mockery, truculence, and minimalist living are best, then enjoy the decline. However, we do need a Revolving Door Tax (RDT), learn what Members of Congress pay in taxes, and prosecute politicians and staff and their “family and friends” who profit from insider trading.

“Robust Political Economy: Classical Liberalism and the Future of Public Policy,” a review by Donald J. Boudreaux

Buy book here

“Congress is a busy place and very little happens by accident. The [Chinese-American] community acted, organized and Congress looked at it, and was willing to act. It is a sad story with a happy ending, but nobody would bother to tell the story if it didn’t matter to the community itself.”

“Act of honor,” by Tan Yingzi, China Daily, June 20, 2012

Gold, Martin B. Forbidden Citizens: Chinese Exclusion and the U.S. Congress: A Legislative History. TheCapitol.net. 2012. c.550p. bibliog. index. ISBN 9781587332357. $29.95. REF

“This landmark volume on the subject of exclusionary policies against Chinese and Chinese Americans is the culmination of lengthy research conducted while attorney Gold (Senate Procedure and Practice) represented a number of Chinese American groups. Divided into 11 chronologically ordered chapters, the book opens with an exploration of initial Senate debates over exclusionary measures and concludes with details on the repeal of such legislation. Congressional member quotations illuminate period sentiment. An appendix offers primary-source texts, document facsimiles, and discussion questions, and this makes for a valuable teaching tool.

VERDICT Expanding on the views in Erika Lee’s At America’s Gates (2007), this is an exemplary subject reference.”

— Library Journal, July 2012

For the past four years, I’ve been ordering the most unappatizing sounding item on the menu when I eat at nice restaurants. This counterintuitive advice from Tyler Cowen’s 2007 book Discover Your Inner Economist has worked surprisingly well. Cowen’s newest book, An Economist Gets Lunch, is a combination of practical eating advice like this, and also a history, economics, and science book about food. If there is one overarching lesson it is that looking at food through the framework of supply and demand can help you both understand our food system better, and also help you be a smarter consumer and get more out of every meal.

But Cowen is not an apologist, and he doesn’t argue that we can just deregulate our way to a better food system. In fact he has many words of support for policies and values often supported by progressives. To help improve both the long-term budget gap and the growing environmental problem, he advocates ending subsidies for big agriculture, and argues for a carbon tax. In addition, he believes that meat should be “taxed” for environmental reasons, and that one easy way to do this is to enforce more strict animal welfare laws.

“Why American Food Used to Be So Bad and Other Lessons From Tyler Cowen,” by Adam Ozimek, The Atlantic, April 12, 2012

Recommended

More at Tyler Cowen’s Ethnic Dining Guide.

Semi-related:

In 2008 I got a book advance of $200,000, of which my agent took 15% and the IRS took approximately one-fourth. Still, that’s a lot of money, even paid out in quarters over the course of several years, and for a few months after I got that initial check–for the first time in my adult life–I mistakenly assumed that I didn’t have to keep track of how much money I was spending. Because surely this good fortune was the beginning of more good fortune to come!

There would be foreign rights sales, audio rights sales, fat old-school magazine payments for first serial rights when the book came out, maybe a film or TV option — not to mention all the paid teaching and speaking opportunities that having written the kind of book that a publisher would pay a six-figure advance for would undoubtedly bring my way. And then, too, there would be another payment of the same amount or more money for another book, a book I couldn’t quite imagine and hadn’t even started writing, but would definitely be able to write in a year or less after the first book came out because what was I, lazy? No, I was quick, quick like a blogger!

Without whining or belaboring, I will just say briefly that precisely zero of these rosy fantasies came to fruition.

“It Was Here And Then It Was Gone: More Than $1K Worth of Clothes I’ll Never Wear Again,” by Emily Gould, The Billfold, April 10, 2012

ALEXANDRIA, VA – Irrespective of which party controls the majority, existing congressional practices will remain in place. Without significant change to those practices, they will produce the same old results. Those same old results have driven the country into a dire situation. It is time to correct for this. It is time — and it is possible — to turn things around. Congress needs to reform its own ways of doing business.

Joseph Gibson’s newest book, A Better Congress: Change the Rules, Change the Results, proposes a completely new approach to running Congress. Call it a radical return to basics. Radical? Yes, but doable. Gibson, a congressional insider, knows what can be accomplished. He also knows how to make it happen.

A few of his radical, yet workable ideas:

• Limit the number of bills members can introduce, limit the number of pages per bill, and require each member who votes to read the bill.
• Ban fundraising when Congress is in session.
• Make serving in Congress a part time job with the expectation that members would hold other full time jobs.
• Allow the minority party to control some part of the agenda.

In Gibson’s view, the reforms in his book would lessen the partisan divide, limit the time wasted on frivolous legislation, keep the members focused on wise policymaking rather than simply winning elections, and increase the pool of worthy candidates who will actually run for office.

Gibson has served as House Judiciary Committee chief minority counsel, chief legislative counsel, chief antitrust counsel, parliamentarian—and Chief of Staff to a prominent Texas Congressman. He is also the author of Persuading Congress: A Practical Guide to Parlaying an Understanding of Congressional Folkways and Dynamics into Successful Advocacy on Capitol Hill, published earlier this year by TheCapitol.Net.

Two Seas Media and TheCapitol.Net are privately held, non-partisan publishing and training companies based in Alexandria, VA. For over 30 years, TheCapitol.Net and its predecessor, Congressional Quarterly Executive Conferences, have been training professionals from government, military, business, and NGOs on the dynamics and operations of the legislative and executive branches and how to work with them.

Journalists: To request interviews, contact Sandy Trupp at Planned Television Arts, trupps@plannedtvarts.com or 202-974-5002. To request review copies, contact the publisher: publisher@thecapitol.net or 703-739-3790, ext. 0.

Professor Solomon’s book, Coney Island, is a “history and profile of the amusement area (which is about to be leveled for condos and such).”
Prof. Solomon’s book is available as a free PDF download.

A playful journey through Chinese culture, language, and cuisine … In “Swallowing Clouds”, A. Zee

invites us to a veritable Chinese banquet full of charming explorations of food, language, and culture. Beginning with simple dishes from a typical restaurant menu, Zee launches into an engrossing voyage of discoveries about Chinese language and cuisine. With folklore and anecdotes, he uncovers the roots of Chinese characters in ancient pictographs, giving an absorbing and effortless introduction to written Chinese.

… why eating “won-tons” is like swallowing clouds … he traces the origin and legend of the dish “Ma Po To Fu” pages 174-179 … you will be able to recognize the Chinese characters on menus … did you know that red hot peppers were imported by the Portuguese from Central America to Sichuan, China! Ay caramba …

Also see “eating in chinese” for a good overview of Chinese characters on menus and restaurants