They're building a terrifyingly thorough, 1984-like surveillance network and actively pursuing govt contracts to use it for law enforcement.
If you want to create a weapon that could be used to control a populace quickly, it would look a lot more like this (and autonomous drones) than it would a human army.
A huge fear of mine is in 20 years the competitive landscape is so homogeneous that I won’t even have that luxury.
You can get 2-day or same-day shipping from them now, and you can return directly to their store. They don't do inventory comingling, so you don't have to worry about things like getting bed bugs from sheets you buy or counterfeits.
You do lose the massive AliExpress-like selection of nonsense-branded Chinese products that Amazon has, but I find that I don't miss those.
The amazon marketplace is filled with scams and counterfeits.
I would rather pay a little more and get the product from a trusted source, or just go to a local store and buy it.
Glock could afford to do it because Glocks are cheap to make due to the brilliantly simple design, with a manufacturing cost lower than the resale value of the used guns they were accepting.
Soon Glock owned the US police market, and that gave them the credibility to win in the US domestic market at full price.
A classic example is Post-It notes. It sounded like something that nobody wanted. And it wasn't until 3M gave it to companies for free and found that 90% of them reordered that it began to see adoption. So the fact that a company hands out samples for free may just be a good marketing technique, and not bribery.
See https://www.ideatovalue.com/insp/nickskillicorn/2017/04/true... for a random link verifying the Post-It story.
Amazon's target audience for Ring is homeowners, so they gave them away to... not randomly selected homeowners. It sounds like they specifically gave them to police.
:(
There are many interactions with government agents that can expedited with more money, as long as that is codified in law
It isn't functionally different than payments outside of due process
It's not a bribe if you don't ask for anything in return.
Should the police have regulations about this sort of gift? Should, they probably do, and those that don't should.
The strategy seems to be, "run the process in secret and present the result as a fait accompli". It's working.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndil/pr/former-redflex-ceo-plea...
[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7exem/banjo-ai-company-utah...
Patagonia and Keen send freebies and coupon codes to their influencers, the forest service.
> The Patagonia Pro Program is a membership program for qualified outdoor professionals, environmental grant recipients, and outdoor industry partners.
The forestry service is a very strange example to call out because their employees aren't at all prominent and most well-off consumers will visit national/state parks instead of national forests (which are awesome, but much lower profile) so I doubt many of them ever see forestry service people wearing the gear.
Personally I am not convinced by the slippery slope argument that Ring cameras will lead to broader unrestricted general surveillance. Ring customers can choose to voluntarily share footage with the police, or not - it's up to them. That's not the same as a dystopian ever-present dragnet. And even if we have cameras on every corner run by the government (rather than Ring), we can establish legal controls such as needing a warrant or reasonable suspicion of a crime to examine footage or perform facial recognition matches.
There are of course the extremely rare cases where they’ll pretend to press charges and use a grand jury to get them dropped (e.g. Torgalski & McCabe), and the even more rare case where the murder gains so much publicity that they’ll have to pursue a real case (e.g. Chauvin) or is so incredibly heinous and brutal (e.g. Michael Valva) but by and large police will never face prosecution.
