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Reminds me of Thought Emporium's video about negative ion bracelets: https://youtu.be/C7TwBUxxIC0

The product pictured featured in an exposé of such junk in a pair of Thought Emporium videos a year ago [1] [2], the former of which apparently resulted in several of the products being pulled from Amazon (as reported in the second video).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7TwBUxxIC0

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BA5bw1EV5I

These and similar products have been around for years, and can often be purchased through Amazon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7TwBUxxIC0

5G is just the new excuse.

> If you can't trust the origins of pottery on Amazon, why can you trust the origins of anything on Amazon?

Because many (most?) categories of goods are consolidated into an effective oligopoly of reputable brands, where these brands push competitors out of the market in basically every respect — in brand-recognition, in advertising payments, in number of reviews, in review score, in "link juice", etc.

So even when there are garbage Shenzhen e-waste products being marketed on the same website, in the same category as the thing you're looking for, you won't see them if there are real products to be had, because the first five pages are all the real products. (Unless you're doing very specific searches, using very unusual keywords that the well-known brands would never think to buy.)

This is why the experience of shopping on Amazon is a different experience than shopping on a site like Wish or AliExpress: Amazon has both the e-waste and the stuff from well-known brands, and if you stay "on the happy path" of using the site, you'll end up mostly seeing stuff from well-known brands.

The only time this falls down is when there are no reputable brands in a category. Such as in the category of kitsch stoneware. For those categories, Amazon and Wish/AliExpress become effectively the same site.

> And if you can't trust the origins of anything, you can't count on safety regulations and standards that you take for granted.

I mean... most of the things I buy on Amazon, I'm not putting in my mouth. What's the worst a christmas ornament is going to do to me? Get glitter on the floor?

I do understand the cases you're referring to — electronics and such — but in those cases, there are import regulations that actually prevent things like "burns your house down" electronics from coming into the country, with actively-maintained blacklists of products. Some few dangerous items might slip through the cracks and get imported anyway (especially at first, in unusual+novel categories like "negative-ion wellness products"), but one email to US Customs is usually enough to get these things sorted out, and the whole category will disappear from the store the next day. (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7TwBUxxIC0)

⬐ VRay

What the hell are you talking about? No-name Shenzhen manufacturers rocket to the #1 slot all the time, through a combination of being cheaper and literally paying for 5 star reviews

Just search for anything on Amazon right now and you can see what I mean. I ran afoul of this when I needed a humidifier last year, but just now I searched for "phone charger" and the front page was mostly brands that exist solely on Amazon and some tiny Facebook page

⬐ derefr

> just now I searched for "phone charger" and the front page was mostly brands that exist solely on Amazon and some tiny Facebook page

This query betrays a certain level of naivety about the game theory of keyword-advertising.

Individuals who are shopping for a phone charger, don't tend to search for "phone charger." Instead, they look at the particular phone they already have, and decide they want a charger (or more likely, a second charger) that's compatible with it and guaranteed to make it charge as fast as it can. So they search e.g. "iphone charger" or "samsung galaxy charger."

We reductionist engineering-minded people might think "those are both just USB-A -socketed 5V1A DC switching-mode power supplies; and what do people call those? Phone chargers!" and so search "phone charger" — but that's a mistake.

The above individuals, because they're the majority, are what the brands are all competing over with their keyword-advertising spend. So when you search e.g. "iphone charger", Apple has paid to be there at the top; and the up-market third-party vendors like Anker who want to snatch your sale away from Apple have also paid to be there at the top.

But no individual is really just looking for an unqualified "phone charger", so when you search that, you get to see a page of stuff that nobody has paid Amazon for placement on; where instead, it's all ranked by how much scummy heuristic keyword SEO manipulation each listing can pull off.

(I say "individual", because there are institutional buyers who are really trying to buy unqualified "phone chargers", because they are buying them to install in e.g. hotel rooms, without any knowledge of what kind of phone a customer is going to have. So you might notice that there are some reputable brands in among these listings, but that the listings are for ugly unbranded flush-mount phone chargers, rather than consumer chargers. Commercial phone chargers, per se. Electronics that are components of a build, rather than standalone products.)

-----

As a tangent: the "happy path" for Amazon is actually all about browsing, not searching.

How do most people get to an Amazon listing? Not by typing words into Amazon's search box. For most shoppers, typing a keyword search into Amazon is done about as frequently as asking a clerk to help you find an item in a grocery store. And as with that flow, while it's certainly supported as a customer-service mechanism, it's never been intended as the primary item-discovery mechanism. Amazon isn't Google; they don't have a "so make a freeform text field for it, and let some ML find it in an index" view of the world.

Instead, people find things on Amazon mostly through these three paths:

• Searching a product category on Google, and then clicking through a paid keyword advertisement placed by one manufacturer that takes you to an individual Amazon listing for that manufacturer's product

• Clicking an Amazon affiliate link embedded in a review webpage/video, or as the target of an ad in Facebook/Instagram/etc.

• Clicking around on the Amazon website itself, starting on the home page; going into various "departments", looking through "Hot New Releases" and "Top Sellers", etc.

Approaching Amazon through any of these flows will land you on listings that somebody, at some point, paid to take you to. And that means that the category the listing sits upon is valuable, and is worthwhile to fight over. So in turn, all the "More items to explore" listings linked from that page will be that product's keyword-advertised rivals, trying to lure you away from the original listing.

The best way to shop for a humidifier on Amazon isn't to search Amazon for "humidifier." It's to search Google for "humidifier"; click through to a review site listing the best humidifiers (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/the-best-humidifi... ); click through the first Amazon affiliate link you see on that page; and then look at all the humidifiers that are fighting over your known-high-value eyeballs on that listing page. Try it! I promise you it works. (The speedrun version of this process, if you already know a popular brand of humidifiers, is to just search "[popular brand] humidifier" on Amazon. All that brand's rivals will also be paying to show up there.)

⬐ VRay

"Google Pixel 6 charger" -> Google, Looptimo, "Superer", "color rokk"

I guess you could just admit you're completely wrong about Amazon search rather than change the subject to Google search

⬐ jimbob45

I think his point was that the Shenzhen stuff only rockets up like you say when you’re buying niche items.

For example, if you search for a good mixer, you’re going to get reputable brands at the top like KitchenAid, Cuisinart, etc. Conversely, when I went to buy a pull-up bar last year, there were only Shenzhen knockoffs because there are no big-time players in the pull-up bar industry.

There’s probably a nice parallel to be made between this subject and first-party and third-party games made for certain gaming consoles.

⬐ VRay

Amazon search for "Good Mixer"

Top results:

Hamilton Beach

KUCCU

VIVOHOME

Cuisinart

Vospeed

CUSIMAX

Aucma

Reminds of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7TwBUxxIC0 where the maker went to debunk the negative ion energy bands, only to discover some of them had highly dangerous powdered thorium coating them.

⬐ rainbowzootsuit

The exact product that the government is warning about here is covered in the video that you linked, which was published Feb 18, 2020.

⬐ kibwen

In the next video in this series he mentions how he was encouraged to reach out to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission about these products which resulted in their sale being banned.

⬐ im3w1l

Who would manufacture such a thing and why? Who even has access to thorium?

⬐ oneoff786

Thorium is abundant and has mundane uses.

⬐ ineedasername

>Thorium is abundant

That seems incorrect, or least depends on where you draw the line on "abundant" Thorium, at atomic number 90, is one of the rarest elements. [0] It falls middle of the pack in terms of presence in the Earth's crust, but after the first dozen or so, most elements are-- relative to that first dozen-- extremely rare. Thorium is about 6ppm.

>and has mundane uses.

Lots of things have mundane uses while being extremely dangerous if misused. Chlorine is about 20x more abundant, has plenty of mundane uses, and is also poisonous. Thorium is a cancer-causing element, and over the past decades thorium has been systematically removed from any product or industrial process that does not require it.

I think it's safe to say that it's a bad idea, and presents a least some risk, to include it in consumer product worn on your body.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium

⬐ fulafel

Full quote: "Estimated abundances of the 83 primordial elements in the Solar system, plotted on a logarithmic scale. Thorium, at atomic number 90, is one of the rarest elements."

Later: "In the Earth's crust, thorium is much more abundant: with an abundance of 8.1 parts per million (ppm), it is one of the most abundant of the heavy elements, almost as abundant as lead (13 ppm) and more abundant than tin (2.1 ppm)."

⬐ foxfluff

I'm wondering the same. Is it accidental contamination or are they doing it deliberately? Out of malice or out of ignorance? Or is it someone else upstream putting radioactive materials in the products that end up being used as a coating? Again, why, ignorance or malice or something else?

It's very confusing.

Here's a video about the subject - as usual, Amazon was (and might still be involved) in selling such products: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7TwBUxxIC0

> This is how a free market works.

Said free market tends to create weird customs that are not necessarily good for the most of us.

Someone once said radiation has healing properties and last radioactive items for healing appeared, oh well, on Amazon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7TwBUxxIC0

and before that, there's a museum of the same stuff

https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/radioa...

Note that I am not saying the regulator can not or will not abuse their rights. This is a big issue and I'm not competent enough to say where I'm leaning there.

I only disagree with "free market will lead to the best solution by itself".

Justin Atkin on his Thought Emporium Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7TwBUxxIC0 and the followup https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BA5bw1EV5I

Yes, radon is pretty hilarious and spreads in very unexpected ways. Completely wrapping sources of radon like uranium or thorium minerals (or these bracelets containing some of that), only holds back the diffusion process for some time unless the shielding is really thick and very dense. That's why radon accumulates so well in household cellars, it penetrates concrete walls easily.

If you look closely in thought emporiums video (link below), the thick clouds - representing each the full paths of individual alpha particles (from the point of decay until full absorption in the air) - don't originate right at the surface of his shielding materials (paper, chicken skin... whatever). Instead, the alpha particle clouds stand by themselves in free space and can only really stem from radon that decided to decay at those positions somewhere outside of the shielding (transforming to "solid" polonium in that process and sticking itself to the next closest lump of molecules/dust). If the alpha particles would penetrate the shieldings (which they can't because of too much material/density), we would see clouds stemming directly from the shielding surfaces which I don't see happening:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7TwBUxxIC0&feature=youtu.be... You may find and like my comment there, maybe it helps to fight some misconceptions about natural radioactivity. ;-)

⬐ polishdude20

Awesome thanks!

Mildly related, here’s another instance of harmful things you can buy on Amazon: “negative ion” trinkets that are actually radioactive [1].

[1]: https://youtu.be/C7TwBUxxIC0

⬐ fortran77

I'm amazed that a person making "negative ion wellness bracelets" would go to the effort and expense of putting a radioactive material in there to actually generate negative ions! Why not just put a copper-colored thread in there and claim it makes negative ions?

⬐ jimmaswell

Maybe they're actually deluded and believe their product works instead of just a scammer, and they think the radioactive material is necessary.

> In this video we go through all of the testing I did over the last few months to determine what's in these products and if they're dangerous.

I wish for something important like this they would just say the result in the description. Gotta get that ad money I guess.

⬐ billconan

saw a report in Chinese recently about these products’ radioactivity https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/rIa5bFkSt4tffYDWuNyB1w

Should really let amazon remove them

⬐ garyng

This things should really be banned...