@ai6yr never buy ANYTHING safety critical from Amazon, unless you have verified that it is being sold by the manufacturer's verified store page. Amazon identifies products based on SKU only, which means there's a potential one-to-many between listings and actual products; all a seller has to do is ship Amazon a product with the same barcode and they're in the running for sales of "that product", even if their version has none of the safety certs.

@gsuberland @ai6yr amazon has become the US's version of alibaba

@Viss @ai6yr I'd say that's bordering on being rude to Alibaba.

@gsuberland @ai6yr or was i thinking aliexpress? which one is shadier?

@Viss @ai6yr AliExpress has more crap by volume but also a lot of good stuff and you typically get what you ordered. Alibaba is typically direct factory sale but if you buy from the West and don't have a local liaison to check quality and verify it before it goes out you are at high risk of being scammed.

@gsuberland @ai6yr it also doesnt help that broadly speaking, americans are happily dumbing themselves down at the behest of popular culture, media, the news and various other factors that reward the stupid and either neglect or overtly punish anybody with a clue, so scamming americans is definitely a thing now. there are whole economies built on it

@gsuberland @ai6yr like, we famously came up with the tide pod challenge, for example

@Viss @gsuberland (man makes strange gesture at Washington, DC)