rcanzlovar.com

Articles Recipes Blog Events Information Wordpress Projects Feeds Now

voting choices, or letter to a friend

In a recent Facebook post, I talked about “choice” in a “democracy” (the one we live in). I stated that when we spend dollars, we are voting for things. In particular, I mentioned that when I have a choice of where to buy, I choose something other than Amazon. In our last conversation, I personified Amazon as Jeff Bezos. At that time, the conversation was in response to a meme. This one came through my feed recently, and I shared and added some comments:

I have a recurring argument with a friend about the consequences of shopping Amazon-first. If I can, 
I prefer to do business with someone who is nearby, or, if online, not part of the Amazon machine. 
I buy my computer things from newegg, books from abe books. 

His argument is that the local businesses are probably getting their stuff from Amazon. I bought 
something online recently and it was (possibly) shipped by Amazon. That's on them, I suppose. 

I'm usually not in a big hurry to get things. Frankly, it's kind of a nice surprise when a package 
arrives because by the time it gets here I might have forgotten about it. 

In this "democracy", you cast votes every day when you drop dollars somewhere. I still buy a 
few things from Amazon, but it's typically because I can't find it elsewhere or the elsewhere (online) 
has onerous shipping costs. I usually wait until I have enough in my Amazon cart to get free shipping anyway.

My friend saw this and felt that he needed to respond. He sent me a private text rather than to the Facebook post.

Re: $'s spent with Amazon.

I presume you are not a fan of the oil and gas industry and how they are squelching 
green energy, fracking in our suburbs, and raping our open lands.

Going to disconnect from Xcel?

There is infrastructure. Amazon, the sales website, is infrastructure. AWS is infrastructure.

Hello, Friend!

I had hoped that our arguments about my choices regarding Amazon ended when we concluded our conversation by yelling some unfortunate things at each other. You chose today to respond to my public description of my logic and reasoning behind my choices. I didn’t respond to your text immediately because I didn’t have time then to write it up. If i was smart, I’d just leave it on read, but perhaps I’m not smart and this is my response.

My point is about expressing choice: I have some choice of who derives benefit by my buying decisions. I can buy from a local merchant if I want to. This affords the side effect of creating relationships with small business owners, but i can also examine the products before I buy them.

A recent example of this in my life was when i bought some accessories for my banjo. I needed picks, strings, a case and an electronic tuning widget. Someone pointed out to me that i could find those on Amazon, but I said that I kind of like the idea that my town has a guitar store, so I bought them there. You might point out that they got these items from Amazon anyway. As I say in my facebook post above, that’s not my choice, but theirs. In any event, they probably buy them wholesale and perhaps a little chaper than I would pay in single quantities, so part of my purchase helps to ensure that there is still a store, contributing to rent on a nice showroom where I can look at guitars, banjos, as well as the pay for the nice people that work there, etc.

If I want to buy books online, I can buy from several sources: directly from the author, from a local bookseller, Barnes & Noble, or I can go online to places like Abe Books or Amazon, etc. Buying directly from the author gives, hopefully, the largest possible share to the author. Buying from that local bookseller has the benefit, like buying from the guitar store, of making a small contribution to the existence of a local business. Buying from Amazon might get the book sooner, and maybe a couple dollars cheaper, but it contributes to a large corporate entity whose predatory policies bother me (it’s not just about Mr Bezos and his cozying up with the authoritarian powers that be, but that is also part of my calculus, as we’ve discussed, sometimes in heated tones).

It’s a zero sum game: if I buy from Amazon, then I’m not buying from the bookstore over on Main Street (which happens not to be a Barnes & Noble). I don’t think it’s an exaggeration that the collective buying decisions of people shopping at Amazon (and to a lesser extent Barnes & Noble) has contributed to local bookstores becoming more scarce. It’s a large movement of the business environment, but I still have some choices.

If I want to buy electronics, I have choices, as well. I have a friend named Hawker who has invented a specialty guitar pedal. If I decided I wanted to buy one of them, I could buy it from the local guitar store, I could buy it from Amazon, or I could buy it directly from his website. Depending how much Asheville Music Tools charges for shipping, I might go with one of the other ones. Hawker might want me to buy from Amazon anyway, especially if I leave a review for him.

Otherwise, generic electronics can be found at Micro Center, or Best Buy, or online at places like Newegg. You asked in our last conversation about this whether I would still buy from Newegg if it turned out that the CEO had been making contributions to a presidential library or other slush fund. I don’t honestly know, but can say that I’ve not heard of this happening, and if I did find out that it was, then yes, I would reassess my sourcing options.

There is another realm in which I have some choice: do I run Apple software on my computers, or Microsoft computers, or are there other optios?

Bill Gates has rehabilitated his reputation since leaving the lead role at Microsoft, but I still remember what a rapacious businessman he was, crushing potential infringers to his products. Vaccinations are cool and all, but this is how monopolists go: The Carnegie libraries and Rockefeller museums were created in a similar fashion, using the money earned in business which were the reason why anti-trust laws exist (at least up til recently, anyway).

I don’t buy Apple things for various reasons, among which is the fact that they tend to cost more, and do their best to lock you into their ecosystem.

As it turns out, there are other options: I run Linux on nearly all of the computers in my house. Even within Linux, I have choices. I can run some variant of RedHat, some variant of Ubuntu, or maybe even something like Arch or even FreeBSD.

Recently I have been using a particular flavor of Arch Linux called Omarchy, which was built by a guy named David Hannemeier Hansson, aka DHH. He is known primarily as the person who created Ruby on Rails. He’s a rather colorful person, and his Omarchy is described as an “opinionated” take on Linux. Recently, he has made some scribblings on the internet that are considered somewhat problematic.
Do I want to support this? I’m not alone in having this internal dialog, as there are now articles with subject lines like “The Ruby community has a DHH problem”. Once again, in this realm there are choices, and as it happens, there is an alternate take, even, on Omarchy called CalOS which describes itself as a slightly less opinionated take. I’ve installed CalOS on several of my systems at this point, and it’s likely just a matter of time before I overwrite the one system which is running Omarchy.

When you have a choice, how you express that choice in the marketplace of commerce and ideas has small effects in the overall zeitgeist. Does my one-off choice make a measurable difference? Perhaps it doesn’t, but if I express my opinions where others can interact with them, it might have a larger impact. Who knows, maybe this post will go viral.

How I make my thoughts known on the Internet is another area in which I have a choice. I’ve received… um… feedback… for my choice to post on Facebook. By doing so, goes the argument, I am providing free content for the Zuckerberg machine. I don’t disagree, but for the moment, there are people that I would only hear of, and would only hear from me on that platform. I also post on BlueSky, and I have my own blog site where I write what I want without worrying about
Facebook’s decisions whether my posts are visible. My Twitter/X account has been wiped of any content because fuck that other guy.

You mentioned about Xcel energy and how it props up the vast infrastructure of resource extraction with its environmental and other consequences. As it turns out, this is an area in which I don’t have a lot of choice. Who provides the pipes and wires leading to my house are kind of baked in. I am not a homeowner, so getting solar panels or putting up a wind farm really isn’t a practical choice for me. I could get a cabin in the woods, build an earthship on a piece of land (assuming i could afford that), live in an RV or outfit a cargo shipping container with solar panels for my day to day energy needs. These are options which I have investigated; they’re not entirely off the table for me.

Just because infrastructure has been built doesn’t mean that I have to use it. There is a system of public transportation, a vast infrastructure that has been built, at least partially, at our expense. I don’t use it exclusively, but I do use it. I don’t shame those who choose to use things like Uber, Lyft or their own private vehicles.

When 0.97 (the result of evaluating the mathematical expression 45/47) criticized Amazon for using the postal service, Bezos’s Amazon built its own delivery infrastructure. That sounds rather Carnegie-esque to me.

My friend, when we had our last in-person discussion about this, I hoped that was the end of it. I didn’t like how it turned out, and I had/have no wish for it to recur. I kind of backed away from engaging further because I didn’t want to come to blows over what comes down to a personal choice. I don’t really get why my choices around Amazon bother you so much. As a small business owner who is incentivized to get parts so that his customers can get their services completed in a timely matter, Amazon makes a lot of sense to you. I don’t argue that, and at the end of the day, you have as much choice in how to spend your money as anyone else does.