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Comment by koboll | Hacker News Reader

There are certain swaths of items that you literally can't buy anymore because they are completely overrun with counterfeiters. Perfume/cologne and board games are two big ones.

Amazon is, at this point, undoubtedly one of the largest enablers of open counterfeiting in the world. It needs to be met with a massive investigation and crippling fines. That probably won't happen until we have a federal government that is no longer slavish prostituted to business interests, unfortunately.

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> until we have a federal government that is no longer slavish prostituted to business interests

If you lend an ear to some contemporary ideas about how technology changes our societies, there might be a chance we will see this happening in our life times. Current government models, democratic and authoritarian alike, seem to grow ever less capable of coping with technology and how it reshapes society. Yuval Noah Harari has a section devoted to it in Homo Deus.

I suppose Angela Merkel's famous "Das Internet ist für uns Neuland." [1] (engl. "The Internet is uncharted territory for us.") shows off just how overwhelmed even G7 economies are with a technology that became common 30 years ago. We generate tons of information which is barely translated to knowledge, especially if you leave out ad tech.

[1] http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/merkel-neuland-g...

> democratic and authoritarian alike

Those aren't opposites, they are entirely different concepts. Any law that mandates behavior is authoritarian, which is not inherently good or bad. Are democracies incapable of producing such laws? Criminalizing murder is authoritarian, for example, but unobjectionably desirable. Freedom of speech is actively anti-authoritarian, as an alternative, as it is a restriction placed on the state.

Democracy and authoritarianism are both forms of government, and that is the sense of the words being used in the sentence ("Current government models, democratic and authoritarian alike, …"). You've chosen to reinterpret one of them as an adjective unconnected to the thing it describes (government models) and then criticized the parent for a category error.

At least Merkel has a sense of humor about it: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/06/europe/angela-merkel-shit...

:-D

Board games are completely overrun you say? But I buy at least a half dozen big board games per year from Amazon and have never had a problem.

I haven't had a problem either, but Asmodee did make a big stink about this last year: https://icv2.com/articles/news/view/39296/icv2-interview-asm...

What an interview. The whole time, there's this strong subtext that Amazon is the primary vector here, but they never come out and say it -- and dance around the issue of what corrective legislation would actually look like -- because they're evidently afraid of getting on its shit list, despite the massive harm its negligence is enabling.

Would you even know if they are good quality?

They can also be secondary runs, where the actual printer for the game does a second run after hours, with lower-quality components but original assets.

Here a couple examples I came across recently of games which have multiple recent reviews, on the first page of reviews, that either outright state they received a counterfeit or describe quality control issues that almost certainly describe a counterfeit:

Catan https://smile.amazon.com/Catan-Studios-cantan2017/dp/B00U26V...

Splendor https://smile.amazon.com/Asmodee-SPL01-Splendor/dp/B00IZEUFI...

Ticket to Ride https://smile.amazon.com/Days-Wonder-DO7201-Ticket-Ride/dp/0...

Ticket to Ride: Europe https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B000809OAO/

7 Wonders https://smile.amazon.com/Asmodee-5511788-7-Wonders/dp/B0043K...

Azul https://smile.amazon.com/Plan-Games-Azul-Board-Game/dp/B077M...

They're not hard to find -- popular games from smaller publishers with high prices but relatively simple (cardboard/plastic) components seem to be what counterfeiters target.

I there anyone who is keeping track of the "probability of counterfeit" for various categories on Amazon?

I've heard that phone chargers almost always are fake, and perfume doesn't surprise me. I'd assume brand-name clothing is suspect. Would not have guessed board games, the market doesn't strike me as big enough to be worth it (though I'm not into board games so I could be wrong).

The only major online store worth buying fragrances from is Aedes de Venustas.

> That probably won't happen until we have a federal government that is no longer slavish prostituted to business interests, unfortunately.

If you're referring to the Trump administration, he hates Jeff Bezos and Amazon (and the failing Washington Post, which JB owns)

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