Don’t Bother Changing Minds

I’ve been talking to people about the idea of paying to get people vaccinated. There are some interesting arguments _against_ — that it might be coercive (!!), that it removes the moral significance of the choice to get vaccinated (!!!). Frame matters!

Anyway. One friend is basically like, companies should make their employees get vaccinated. And to be fair, a few companies are doing this. But there are also companies that are run by people who are opposed. Tricky situation.

Different friend said, timely thing you have brought up! I just got a notice from HR saying if I am an employee in good standing on date X, then I get an extra $300 in pay on date X + 5. Doesn’t matter if you got the jab before you got the job! Kinda cool — answers the conundrum of, doesn’t this just reward people for waiting?

My husband got into the whole, people feel the pain of losing X dollars more than the joy of gaining X dollars. And that set off a new set of ideas in my head.

What if we just went straight to the timeshare deal: pay people to sit and listen to the presentation, and then hard-sell them? Have a nurse on site to do the jab immediately. (Tricky bit: how do we make sure the already-vaccinated don’t try to get in on this deal?)

In addition, could we Let’s Make a Deal them? Say you show up to get your $20. Ya gotta stick around for the pitch (could be a video that plays), side door to the nurse for the jab, you can leave at any time by getting the jab, but otherwise, there’s a clock. After 15 minutes or so of pay for an hour of their time (or whatever numbers are chosen), it becomes Let’s Make a Deal. I have a $100 here. Who wants the $100? Get the jab, get the $100 bill. No takers? Double until you get a taker. But once you get a taker — and you could publicize how this works, or just let it ooze out over YouTube or Reddit or whatever — the next offer is lower, and if no one takes it, they get to watch the video again until it is time to leave. Someone _much_ more clever than me can figure out the optimal way to create the Fever of making a deal, and if that includes tickets to the local game or Applebee’s gift certificates or whatever, that’s fine, too. The idea is to get people thinking in terms of do I want the $100 or the gift certificate or the whatever enough to get the jab — not thinking in terms of magnetization, microchips, and hypothetical years into the future random side effects. Maybe hire a comedian to make some jokes. Maybe have a sign up that shows a list of all the people locally who have died of covid over the past few days. Whatever.

We keep thinking of this as Serious Business and for whatever reason there are people out there thinking in terms of Coercion is Bad and Paying People to Do What They Should Want to Do, even in the face of a lot of reasons to think that maybe those ideas are not helpful at this point in time. I once thought that we wouldn’t need to worry about convincing people to get the shot — I figured that just watching everyone else fall all over themselves to get the shot would be pretty convincing. I see now that I — once again! — misunderstood adoption curves and trends.

Maybe we should turn this over to the people who are really good at getting people to do stuff that they wouldn’t have thought they would ever do.

(I do understand that public health folks around the country are doing on the ground really awesome work by connecting with local leaders to get reluctant folks vaccinated. Basically, talk to the pastor, pastor talks to the flock. And that is great! Definitely do that.)

Recalls and online marketplaces

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-22/amazon-s-battle-against-product-recalls-is-on-after-safety-regulator-sues

Forever ago, Amazon did not used to collect sales tax in states where it did not have a “nexus” (seems so quaint now, doesn’t it?). We went through years of Well Maybe We Should Rationalize Sales/Use Taxes, but eventually, we got to a point where it wasn’t just going to be Amazon having to collect all the annoying sales / use taxes, but everyone else doing online sales and we were finally through that hump (without, I might add, rationalizing all those sales/use taxes. So, not only are taxes, along with death, and absolute certainty, but we can probably conclude that even negotiation the details of taxes is pretty damn hard).

Amazon also went through a few rounds of scandals associated with counterfeit goods. That seems to have been resolved — I’m still a little unclear on the details, but it looks like a whole lot of new seller tools were created, and some crackdown on sellers occurred. The Cracked-Down-Upon sellers squawked, but didn’t successfully get much traction.

And now we are onto the Safety / Recall problem. I’m honestly surprised it took this long to get here. Hoverboards were so ridiculously dangerous, and that was years ago now. Amazon and various regulators have been in talks forever, and there is now frustration. And what, exactly, does Amazon seem to be trying to get? Something very familiar.

“ Amazon offered support for that bill if it would encompass all marketplaces, spreading around the costs of compliance that Amazon is well positioned to bear. Amazon’s smaller rivals, and a trade group representing EBay Inc., Etsy Inc and Shopify Inc., opposed the measure.”

I know that Wal-Mart isn’t mentioned here, but Wal-Mart has been working very hard the last couple years to get their third-party sales game competitive with Amazon. My sister has noticed that they are almost as good now, to which I responded, yeah, if you don’t mind having to sort through all the skeezy listings that Amazon won’t allow any more. Poor Wal-Mart. They finally get their third-party marketplace big and broad, and the window before all those compliance costs land on them is going to be pretty short.

Probably.

Revisiting the Seeds

Recently (https://walkitout.dreamwidth.org/1922023.html) I blogged about an Atlantic article about the seed thing from last year.

Summary of the seed thing: During April 2020 +/- some weeks, many locked-down people in the United States went on Amazon and ordered seeds so they could plant a garden. Seeds were sold out in many places; the would-be seed acquirers were relative newbies to buying on Amazon and Not Awesome at recognizing that they were buying from a third party seller who was doing the shipping themselves; and finally, Amazon at that time did not make transparent where, geographically, the third party seller was located (that’s changed since, and I think the pandemic is why, but I don’t have any inside knowledge). The seeds did not show up on their doorsteps until some months had gone by, and they had come directly from China and were intentionally mislabeled as jewelry to evade regulations on shipping seeds internationally. When they arrived, customers had forgotten that they ordered the seeds or, in some cases, the seeds were gifts and it was difficult to figure that out. News coverage and social media discussion of the phenomenon came up with numerous theories for the mystery seed packets (terrorism, brushing scams) but Amazon described it as I have above. The Atlantic piece was written by someone who did not believe the Amazon story and tried to disprove it and … failed.

We’re all caught up now! Yay!

On another platform, a friend posted a picture of campaign swag that included a sealed package of dried cherries. A mutual acquaintance said she would not eat or plant food that arrived from an unknown person in the mail. I say acquaintance, because I have known this person since the late 80s, and this is as far as I’m prepared to go in acknowledging any relationship with this person. I’ve felt pretty bad about how I have felt about this person. I felt things like, does this mean I am anti-particular-identifiable-group until another person from that group cut loose some vitriol about the acquaintance. I felt things like, fellow woman in tech! Must. Support. Each. Other. Until other fellow women in tech cut loose some vitriol about the acquaintance. I could never quite tell _why_ I had such negative feelings about her (<— an unusual problem for me!).

But she also said: she was a victim of the seed thing herself.

Oh. Dear.

Look, we all forget things. We do! The mother of my niece and nephew (convoluted, sorry!) is forgetful and has some pretty significant executive function stuff she has to live with. I love her to pieces! She’s the easiest adult to love that I think I have ever met. And she’s easy to love, because when something wildly random happens or she forgets something or there is an accident, she doesn’t respond with paranoia and suspicion and accusations of bioterror or whatever. She responds with laughter and love and a sense of camaraderie that gets through even to me.

That’s the difference here. Basically, if you order seeds (or a friend sends you seeds) and they arrive confusingly packaged from another country, with the wrong label on them, do you go, hunh, that’s odd, and track back through your purchases and ask all your friends if maybe they sent you seeds — or do you fall into a moral panic.