Category: Economics

How to quit Amazon

Posted on by rchapin

I have considered quitting Amazon over the past few years, however Jeff Bezos recently kowtowing to Trump was the last straw.

Will it end up costing me more money to purchase some items and will it take longer for me to get them? For sure, but I am willing to live with that.

The first thing that I wanted to do was to get my purchase history. Often time, I will search through it to remember something that I bought in the past. It seems that Amazon offers a way to download a CSV of that data.

How to download all of your purchase history

  1. Login to Amazon
  2. Rollover Accounts & Lists and towards the top of the list select Account
  3. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and look for the Manage your data or similarly titled section. The YouTube video that clued me into this was only a year old and the verbiage on the page was different in the video
  4. Click on Request your data
  5. Click on Your Orders
  6. Click Submit request
  7. You will then be sent a confirmation email in which will contain a link that you will need to click on to start the process

The web page to which the confirmation email took me read

We will provide your information to you as soon as we can. Usually, this should not take more than a month. In exceptional cases, for example if a request is more complex or if we are processing a high volume of requests, it might take longer, but if so we will notify you that there will be a delay.

So, it could take up to 30 days to receive an email from them with the link to download your data.

Alternatives

Part of the problem of Amazon is that it is so good at aggregating products and has become the defacto product search engine. The fact is that most of the products on Amazon can be found through other online retailers.

Just search for what you want online and scroll past the Amazon links :).

There are also other “product aggregation marketplace” retailers

  • ebay: ebay used to be primarily for used and hard to find items that people would bid on, but there are now many retailers that are selling new products there.

I will expand this list as I find and use them.

Could AgroBusiness Be One of the Next Big Things In America?

Posted on by rchapin

Currently, the US is not participating in the carbon trade.  Interestingly enough, we posess some of the most fertile ground in the world and have, historically been able to grow an abundance of agricultural products.

What if we started an initiative, whereby, instead of paying our farmers to sit idle, we actively encouraged the growth of any number of fast-growing, fibrous plants that we could use to generate food, fuel, paper, cloth, and . . . create a carbon-sink business, on a huge scale?
It seems clear that global warming is a valid theory.  That the continued burning of fossil fuels, coupled with the ongoing destruction of the worlds forests is adding to the amount of free carbon (in the form of CO2) to the atmosphere.  Moreover, it also seems clear that without intervention that the continuation of this course of action may lead to a catacylsmic shift in the earths biosphere.

Simply put, (and I’ll elaborate more on this later), what if we started not only cultivating fast growing plants to use a food and fuel, but also took a lot of that fixed carbon and buried it?  Literally.

Depending on the volume of production the US could enter the carbon trading markent with the ability to literally fix the equivalent amount of carbon emitted from other countries and industries.

Is is possible that this sort of agro-business could put our nations farmers back on top?

© 2005 Ryan Chapin