The market provides a pretty damn diverse set of job opportunities. It turns out that shuffling boxes doesn’t require any intelligence and therefore doesn’t pay well. The problem is not that there are entry level jobs to shuffle boxes. Take those away and then this guy doesn’t just have a loser job, he has no job at all.
Make Amazon pay humans more to shuffle boxes and they’ll just have more incentive to buy better robots. Pay humans what it’s worth to shuffle boxes and the smart and motivated ones won’t be shuffling boxes for very long at all. Because it turns out if you have a brain you decide it’s better to learn a marketable skill in your off time instead of playing video games.
This guy has no need for current income. He says his expenses are about 100/mo. He should be working his 50 hours a week and then putting another 50 hours into coursework if he doesn’t like the job he’s got.
His government benefits which he doesn’t want to lose would (or should) not lapse if he has 40 hours of work AND/OR accredited coursework. If he loses benefits for choosing schooling over labor then that is a policy that should be fixed.
There are a lot of societal pressure which is putting 24 year old males in their parents basement working dead-end jobs and playing video games. But very very little of the blame sits on Amazon’s shoulders if you ask me. There are a lot of controversial social theories on the way we’ve been talking to and about adolescent men are driving them into these low self esteem self-defeating positions, and it’s certainly a growing demographic and a big problem. Look at labor participation rates for 20-30 yr old men, for example. Again, Amazon is providing a service here, not the villain of the story.
What do you do for a living, may I ask? Do you have a college education in your field of work? Who paid for it? Who paid your rent, food, and other expenses while you attended school?
Right, because a degree is worthless if you didn’t learn something applicable to the job you want afterwards. To many kids these days go to college, party and have fun, get a b/s degree, then wonder why they are basically screwed afterward and in a mountain of debt. Not everyone should go to college, trade schools have a bad stigma when really they are the right avenue for many young people.
> Do you have a college education in your field of work?
Yes
> Who paid for it?
Me, and without loans too. Admittedly I went in the mid 90s when prices were more realistic, but I also chose to go to a not big name state school and I worked my ass off in a job while in school to pay for it.
> Who paid your rent, food, and other expenses while you attended school?
Me, myself, and I. It wasn’t easy, but I also was raised with a strong work ethic and realized if I wanted to advance I had to do more than others, not just be average.
While GP’s tone was a bit confrontational, I feel yours is just as toxic. Putting in 50 hours in classes on top of 50 hours work is unrealistic for most, but 15-20hrs isn’t. Yes, it’ll take longer to advance, but it’s still doable. Many of the points GP made re: how young male generations were raised are sadly very on point and you should try to have an open mind and not just snap back.
They were nonesense then too.
Yep, the '90s were "gangsta" as the kids say...
My company paid for a portion of my tuition, the rest I paid myself as I went. A semester of courses cost, by my recollection, about $10k. But that would be regardless of if you took 3, 4, or 5 classes. So naturally I went to the Dean and got special permission to take 6 classes per semester. Combined with transferring half my credits from dirt cheap online classes I graduated after only paying for 4 semesters, about $50k total, $20k of which was expensed on the corporate card, all spread over 5-6 years.
My job at the time was technically an “internship” at Cisco Systems, paid $14/hour. I would typically log about 80 a week though, and it was all time-and-a-half after 40 and double-time after 60 hours a week, so effective pay was higher.
My GPA was shit, but it didn’t matter. No one has ever asked, and I got the degree. The amount of learning from being in the labs at Cisco working with core routers and coding IOS dwarfed anything I learned at college anyway.
Everyone told me I needed the diploma. But since then I’ve never had to so much as write a resume, after that first fluff piece I wrote to get into Cisco. In my case the degree was a massive waste of time and money, but so it goes.
Obviously I was massively lucky and privlidged to get into Cisco at 18, but staying there full time for several years and having them pay part of my tuition was because I worked my ass off for that $14/hr and was one of the most productive members of my team. By the time I left they had all but shut down the internship program and HR was afraid I was going to sue them for misclassifying me, but I was very happy to have had the opportunity.
I was just responding to the GP, who was wondering why Bezos doesn't just pay him more.
Socrates :-)
Makes the WWI peeps (who literally lost a generation) problems pale in comparison.
Consumers are largely drawn to low-cost products, which require the exploitation of masses. It is fundamental to capitalism, but not to humanity.
Capitalism enables global wealth re-distribution. Thus were 500 million Chinese lifted out of poverty from 1981 to 2012 (World Bank figures) thanks to consumers who've bought the products of their industry. Most of us have helped in that respect.
Almost all of humanity lived for thousand of years in miserable and degrading poverty; the life of even the very rich two hundred years ago and later would be considered a low grade existence by a great majority of ordinary people today and not just in the West.
That’s just not the Titan of Industry mentality. And the Titan of Industry mentality is required to build a company like Amazon. And everyone buys from Amazon because they offer the lowest price and the greatest convenience.
It’s got nothing to do with whether he could hire more people. It’s that whether it’s the Pyramids or Versailles or Amazon, humans are largely drawn to these things that represent or require the toil and suffering of invisible anonymous masses. It’s weird, but it seems fundamental to humanity. It’s always made me question the compatibility of humans with “human rights.” We fundamentally don’t value these things. At least we prioritize symbols of collective greatness to individual human experience.