2022 LC Thread—New Year, New Thread

amazon is a rainforest bro

nature

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its so he has some plausible deniability when the guillotines come

not sure if serious. amazon isn’t exxon, right?

:vince1:

They burn a lot of fossil fuels. Even on a “per $ of revenue generated” basis their carbon footprint is bad compared to other retail companies. Delivery at your door item by item is a fossils fuel disaster.

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aws is a big polluter as well

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I don’t even answer calls from numbers I do know.

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This is probably ~impossible to measure, but those other retailers aren’t getting dinged for the fossil fuels burned to drive back and forth to their stores, right? It seems very plausible that me getting a coffee maker delivered from Amazon is more efficient than me driving to the closest Bed Bath & Beyond to get it.

amazon makes a sort of half-assed effort to get you to schedule multiple deliveries at the same time but they don’t incentivize it at all. Presumably your “amazon day” is the same day of the week for your whole neighborhood?

They actually sometimes incentivize it with digital credits if you choose slow-shipping. They should be doing that more though, and using it to pool deliveries to the same day. I use the option all the time as the digital credits can be used for books, movies, and tv shows.

yeah, for me that is “no incentive” and the fact that I’ve never taken them up on the offer should indicate that to them and maybe they should take the hint and try a different incentive

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You really have no need/use for books, movies, tv shows, video games or computer software? It can be used for a lot of different downloadable content.

I stopped buying books a while ago and just get everything from the library, I already have more TV content than I can handle.

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It’s very hard to measure but people try.

Kind of like measuring GDP, it’s very difficult and requires a model and assumptions and is imperfect, bit it’s still worthwhile.

Amazon doing this is certainly plausible.

Everything about the work culture is extremely wasteful though.

I find claims they are destroying thousands of packages very credible.

Yes, in addition to the how of their delivery model, there’s also the broad fact that their existence as a company is kerosene on the runaway consumer culture fire. “Click a button and the thing you want gets packed on a box and driven to you” isn’t purely substitutive. It also adds to overall consumption.

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the conditions for this question are likely changing every year or so. but this isn’t true on a bigger scale. a truck making deliveries for a thousand customers is better than a thousand customers driving to the mall.

i can’t comment on cloud carbon footprint, but it also hard to imagine large data centers would not pay attention to energy prices, and not building their own renewable sources simply due to cost.

Right but the incentives are all wrong. If I want to go to the mall and buy things, it costs me my personal time and fuel to go to the mall so I dont go 10 times to buy 10 things, I plan to go and get everything at once. With Amazon the personal investment in delivery is nil so people will just click buy and ship. There may be 2 or 3 or 7 deliveries for those 10 items. And probably there will actually be 12 items because Amazon is going to push push push advertising at me while I’m trying to buy things.

There are some websites that try to evaluate all this stuff. I would need to go dig up some of those reports to add more. I would encourage you to go dig as well, there’s some good information out there.

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ok, personal buying habits are of course important, but i can also tell you that on average a customer’s purchase history also isn’t an exponential step up in consumption. brick and mortar retail is likewise incentivized to push impulse buying all the wrong things, and it also worked on some portion of the consumer base.

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For sure. There are numerous push and pull forces at play.