Amazon soars to more than 341K employees, adding 110K people in a single year

Re:Amazon soars to more than 341K employees, adding 110K peo... by jdreaver on Friday February 03, 2017 @01:32PM (#13561999)

My point is it's never the same. No two technological advances are the same. We should be celebrating the fact that labor-saving tech is freeing us from mundane jobs. The goods produced by those jobs will be cheaper for everyone. Technological progress always brings jobs that require more skill, yet somehow over the last two centuries we have always had room for unskilled workers.

Now, I'm not some heartless jerk who doesn't recognize that the short-term effects of job loss on unskilled workers. It is certainly a hard problem, but I'm still not convinced that we will have some epic labor shortage because all unskilled jobs will vanish too quickly.

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Re:Amazon soars to more than 341K employees, adding 110K peo... by st3v3r on Friday February 03, 2017 @02:29PM (#13562492)

What does it matter that the goods are cheaper if you don't have a job to provide income to purchase said goods?

And while labor-saving tech is, overall a good thing, there are lots of people still counting on those mundane jobs to put food on the table. And so far, no one is willing to think of what happens to them, or prepare for when those jobs go away. And if we don't do that, if we rely on "the market" to do the right thing, we will see that epic labor shortage which leads to the dystopian future.

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Re:Amazon soars to more than 341K employees, adding 110K peo... by maverick_iceman on Friday February 03, 2017 @10:10PM (#13565421)

You realize that you could have made the same argument over the past 200 years? "Who'll buy all the farm produce when there are no fRm workers left?"

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Re:Amazon soars to more than 341K employees, adding 110K peo... by api on Friday February 03, 2017 @10:11PM (#13565427)

The difference is massive economic growth between the industrial revolution and today. Jobs lost to industrialization were quickly replaced as the economy grew exponentially in size and complexity.

Today growth is very anemic owing to market saturation and declining birth rates.

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