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Comment by throwaaskjdfh | Hacker News Reader

> The report would be a lot more useful if there were some context for this data.

I disagree with this, or at least the implication that there should have been more information gathered before publication.

If the data is surprising against a common-sense set of expectations, it's Amazon's burden to provide a context for interpretation where the surprising information makes sense, not the report.

Assuming the report's facts are in order, reporting accurate facts and leaving "contextualization" to someone else is good journalism, especially if the facts themselves are not widely known or actively hidden.

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> reporting accurate facts and leaving "contextualization" to someone else is good journalism

How is that good journalism? If you're writing a piece about something that you feel people should be outraged about, you need to provide context. Otherwise, any number will seem absurd when talking about operations at an industrial scale. People have zero grasp of how much garbage and waste is created. Providing that context is key to the story.

It would be useful but it would probably require Amazon’s cooperation. I agree that it doesn’t mean the reporter did anything wrong to run the story with the info they could gather. Maybe someone from Amazon will explain in response to this story?

But there is a mystery at the heart of this story. Amazon’s decisions seem hard to explain. We should let it remain a mystery until we learn more, without either assuming they’re evil villains or speculating that there must be a logical explanation.

(And it might have been good for the story itself to say this.)

> Amazon’s decisions seem hard to explain. We should let it remain a mystery

This gets back to what I disagree with. If Amazon's decisions seem hard to explain, the decisions should be brought to the public's attention and Amazon should explain them. There is no reason for it to remain a mystery. And they'll never explain it unless there is a price to be paid for not explaining, e.g. being perceived as wasteful.

Acknowledging a mystery doesn’t mean you don’t try to solve it. But you are making an assumption of political power we don’t have, as a small number of people commenting on Hacker News.

We can hope this story blows up enough that someone else, perhaps at Amazon, reveals some interesting information. But we’re not in control of whether that happens.

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