If we care about workers and corporate behavior, we need to be willing to pay a little more for products that are made by companies who's ethics we can get behind. Purism and System76 are good examples of this in the laptop space.
When we do vote with our dollars, the results are often impressive, as seen by the surge in availability of organic meat and produce.
If Amazon wants to run a delivery network it should have to own the trucks, pay the workers a salary, guarantee them basic labor rights, and so on. Foisting all of the legal and financial liability for bad practices onto fragmented and poorly managed subcontractors who only exist to serve Amazon as a single customer is a tremendous abuse.
Federal antitrust action against monopolies and monopsonies would be helpful too.
Individual consumers can’t possibly have full information about the supply chain of every item they buy, and we can’t expect consumers to solve this type of problem.
>Individual consumers can’t possibly have full information about the supply chain of every item they buy
Of course not, however, they don't need full information to hear, at some point or another, that Amazon is a poor place to work.
And it isn't as if the government has a solid track record of producing new regulation lately. Can you name one well-executed regulatory initiative the US Federal Government has implemented in the last 20-30 years? Or better yet, one well-executed major infrastructure project?
I'm genuinely curious, maybe I'm just cynical, but I'm not sure it's even possible anymore for the government to be functional at any deeper level.
One big federal problem with antitrust and other corporate–related law is that we have now had an unbroken half century of “conservative” domination of the US Supreme Court. Over that time consumer, worker, citizen, and small-business friendly interpretations of a wide variety of laws have been steadily replaced by interpretations friendly to wealthy/corporate interests.
That control should have been broken after Scalia died but the GOP-controlled Senate broke with any pretense of good faith or respect for norms or precedent and refused to allow even a moderate compromise candidate to come to a Senate confirmation vote. After regaining control of the presidency the Senate then eliminated the filibuster so it could force radical GOP ideologues through onto the bench.
> I'm not sure it's even possible anymore for the government to be functional at any deeper level.
This is absurd. The US civil service is full of highly competent experts without whom we would all be exposed to grave risks every day. They do their work conscientiously and seriously, largely out of the spotlight.
Let me recommend you read Michael Lewis’s book The Fifth Risk, or at least listen to one of these interviews about it:
https://www.scpr.org/programs/fresh-air/2018/10/02/65410/
https://cafe.com/stay-tuned-what-is-the-fifth-risk-with-mich...
I'm not sure I need to read a biased polemic about how big government is good and the Trump admin is bad.
>The US civil service is full of highly competent experts without whom we would all be exposed to grave risks every day.
I've worked for government agencies, and this is certainly not how I would describe the workers there. I'd say this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21805768 would more closely represent my typical experience with civil servants.. rampant incompetence.
If Amazon wants to run a delivery network it should [be an even larger monopoly]
...
Federal antitrust action against monopolies and monopsonies would be helpful too.
Disclaimer: I am not an expert in Amazon’s delivery network or other business practices. You’d have to ask a labor lawyer for a full account.
Simón Borreo, one of the founders of Rappi, said a few years ago in an interview[1] that the wildfire success of Rappi and other on-demand startups in Latin America and other emerging markets is due to vastly lower labor costs. The unfortunate reality is that by and large pricing for many items is artificially low due to (hyper)exploitation happening somewhere up the pipeline -- if something is cheap and accessible, often it is because somewhere up the chain, wages are lower or labor conditions are poorer. (Incidentally I think Simón's point should make everyone living in countries with strong labor and minimum wage laws who values those things highly suspicious of the on-demand model and the lobbying efforts of unicorns in that space)
It's relatively easy to drive availability for the small subset of the population who didn't notice the apples on their grocery bill cost $5.99 a pound because they were organically grown on a small biodynamic farm in Oregon that treats its workers kindly. It's much, much harder (or outright intractable) to drive availability for everyone else -- under the current system.
[1] https://lavca.org/2016/12/01/entrepreneur-profile-simon-borr...
Just vote with your votes for fair wages instead of tax breaks for Bezos.
Do we need HFT trading? Did we need traders in the pit? In any case, this resulted in the elimination of good jobs.
We could “automate” much of sports and just have fantasy leagues, why not?
Automating transportation, same thing. It will eliminate meaningful jobs. We are all contributing to this acceleration.
So we’re destroying jobs in many ways. From preferring auto checkouts to buying from amazon to putting services “in the cloud”.
Mentioned offhand in https://www.jstor.org/stable/2591872
At the moment we’re automating low hanging fruit and some arduous manual things (with agricultural automation and factory automation), but it will keep on creeping up.
There is only a certain percentage of people with aptitude to go further and further up the value chain. What do we do for the many who just don’t have what it takes? We’ve taken all their jobs away. A baseline UBI isn’t an answer. People will want more. People have _some_ ambition. Not everyone is made out to finding things to do at home all day (we need only look at retirees for data). What are they going to volunteer for? It’ll all be automated.
I don't know if this is true. Sure, if you grow up in a society where work is an important part of your self-worth for much of your life, it makes sense that upon retirement it's hard to see things differently.
But suppose you're raised in a society where this is not the case? Where for some, there isn't the often almost traumatic transition from play to school and school to work?
I'm inclined to believe that in such a society there will be different kinds of people, some who enjoy the tedious work, some who focus on art, and some who mostly fart around and remind the rest of us to take a break, so to speak.
As a child, I was always busy starting activity groups. I enjoyed learning for its own sake (preserved in part by not having to go to high school until I was around 17). I read voraciously. I explored. I learned a degree of diligence and discipline by other means that, in hindsight, felt a lot more natural than "do your homework". If I didn't 'have' to work I would probably still be doing the kinds of stuff that we now call work.
I've kind of become less certain that this is true for everyone, because other children seemed to mostly enjoy socializing and relaxing in various ways. But I can imagine there's a use for that too, and if we do manage to automate everything it's not like we can't afford these types of people too. I still suspect that with these other children perhaps they just hadn't yet found what innately motivates them.
I wouldn't blame Amazon's logistics group for this, but simply the rise of delivery shopping (in large part fueled by Amazon). It's really hard to scale that, especially at the low (or zero) shipping prices customers have been trained to expect.
This should be required reading.
To me, it’s these little moves which capture an inch of mindshare at a time that really bring home the power of marketing.
There are towns near me teetering on bankruptcy, while the police and firefighters can retire after 20 years of service with a pension equal to 80% of their last 3 years of pay. Any effort to reform what is obviously an unsustainable agreement that never should have been struck in the first place is meet with a wall of resistance and veiled threats to public safety.
In the private sector, unions have had a long history of opposing environmental regulations out of fear that it would affect employment in heavy manufacturing. Auto workers unions have repeatedly opposed any effort to invest in public transportation and reduce auto dependency.
I've heard that Scandinavia has had better luck with unions, but here in the U.S. unions have been every bit as self-serving and bullying as the corporate overloads they're supposedly a counter balance to. I'd love to see better restraints on corporate power, but I'm not holding my breath for unions to be anything but one more moneyed interest.
And yet, if there are moneyed interests promoting the goals of big business and the rest of the ruling class, isn't it better to balance that out with whatever imperfect form of unionism is currently available while advocating for the necessary reforms? An anti-worker imbalance in money and power seems worse than that.
What I'd like to see is simply more decentralization of power, something like the "trust busting" under Teddy Roosevelt. When any organization gets past a certain scale it seems to lose touch with basic values and decency. You see this with countries too. Small states like Singapore or Denmark don't often start needless wars or meddle in the affairs of others, the way superstates like the U.S., Russia or China do.
I often get "I don't know", "I need to call my boss", "this is not my route", etc... They don't have the master key for my mailbox or entry hall, they don't have a drop off point where I can pick the package later, I can't even go to the warehouse and pick my package there, tracking events are inaccurate, times are highly irregular ... None of that happen with other delivery companies.
They really look like amateurs doing their best with limited means, it is difficult to imagine they are backed by one of the biggest and most technologically advanced companies in the world.
Why would you expect someone to have your keys? That’s not a reasonable expectation.
> they don't have a drop off point where I can pick the package later, I can't even go to the warehouse and pick my package there
They’re a delivery company, not a pick-up company, that why.
Totally common in the US. It's not the keys to your house but to the common areas of your building, such as the lobby and hallways where packages can be left.
The mailboxes are inside the building. How else would they access to them?
>They’re a delivery company, not a pick-up company, that why.
That means I will never receive my package.
How do other delivery drivers do it? You can't tell me every possible delivery driver has a key to every possible building?
Even UPS sounds.. not great. I have a friend who's a delivery driver for UPS and especially this time of year he has days where his truck is loaded with 250-300 parcels and they're basically all supposed to be delivered by evening. They even hire temp guys as runners who ride along in trucks to help the drivers get the packages dropped off quicker. Not only that but if they do clear their truck and they have fellow guys in their route who still have a load to clear, they tend to be asked to stick around and help take that load. But it means 10-12 hour or more shifts in some cases.
It's the Amazon/online shopping craze, and seems like it isn't a very easily scalable problem.
What sucks about the job is how brainless and repetitive delivering packages is. It is nice that everyone is typically happy to see you, but conversations typically don't get very far past "hello" and "goodbye"
I don't know what it's like working for Amazon, but if it's typical gig economy BS, they are getting shafted by hidden costs and have bad incentives to make rushed and sloppy deliveries while overburdening themselves
We are in a (or entering a) transitionary period where said workers are soon to be literally replaced by robots. The current market expects robot-like efficiency from these jobs, but the robots aren't ready to fully take over yet, which means people get stuck filling the gap with jobs that require more and more of them. Transitionary periods always suck for the people caught in the churn.
On one hand, once the robots are more widely deployed for warehouse work and delivery, there will be less stories about overworked, tired humans. On the other hand, there might be more stories about less availability of low-skill jobs, and these same humans now being underemployed.
Society's creation is a pie, and what % of GDP goes to labor vs capital classes is not fixed. It fluxes and wanes. Over the last 50 years labor's percentage of GDP has fallen consistently.
There are a number of objective measures that support this idea, none of them are perfect, but they tend to show a clear trend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_share
We're moving to a point where all low-value jobs will be replaced by either self-service or automation.
The question is what happens to the people who filled those jobs?
I can recall working in retail as a HS student and observing some of the full time staff and wondering what the heck these people would do without their job as cashier, now 25 years later that same store has replaced most cashiers with self checkout. What happened to those people? What job do they have today?
Then there is the old remark IIRC "deflation is the easiest problem in the world to solve -- just print money."
It may be that the current pair of low interest rates and low inflation are just from such money printing for just such deflation.
Then with the low interest rates, businesses can afford to borrow to do the R&D for the (more) robots.
Also generally with the money printing, there is more money sloshing around which tends to result in more hiring, more jobs, and lower unemployment, and sometimes even training new workers.
So we've got five together: (i) More automation (robots, computing, the Internet), (ii) low interest rates, (iii) low inflation rates, (iv) high stock market, and (v) low unemployment rates. With tariffs and trade deals, we may have more jobs for low skilled workers.
I'd like to know in more clear terms just what Amazon is using cargo planes for: The usual idea is to use boats and trucks to move products to a retailer's warehouse and then use something like FedEx, UPS, or USPS from the warehouse to the end of the last mile.
A guess: Amazon wants a warehouse in each major city, maybe 100 - 200 in the US. From each such warehouse, they deliver to the end of the last mile by small trucks. For the popular items, they stock these warehouses via trucks. Then they also have a huge central warehouse, stocked by truck, that has all the rare items and each day have their planes fly at night moving the rare stuff that has just been ordered to the city warehouses for delivery by truck during daylight. Maybe.
Amazon needed a lot of computing for their Web site so setup their server farm(s) and also provided such computing to anyone via AWS. Well, Amazon needs lots of warehousing and small truck delivery so maybe wants to provide that to every other business that needs warehousing and small truck delivery.
In some cases there're big efficiencies there: E.g., for a lot of items, it comes out of the factory for, say, 10 cents but the consumer pays maybe $2. The $1.90 goes for advertising, order taking, warehousing, shipping, payment, and some earnings. Well, Amazon can save a big chunk of the $1.90 which for the US, and much of the world, would be one heck of a big increase in economic productivity and a lot of deflation needing still more money printing! My guesses!
For more, why do people need private cars? Sure: A big reason is for shopping, e.g., getting groceries. Well, do warehousing and small truck delivery well enough and can replace a lot of the need for private cars, even for refrigerated grocery items, milk, butter, cream, eggs, lettuce, ready to bake pizza, and maybe even ice cream!
- Bezos, almost
I boycotted Amazon for the better part of a decade over the one-click patent. Result: they lost some amount of money they didn't notice, I lost out on all the convenience and options. They changed nothing I was boycotting about.
I boycotted Blizzard over the bnetd response for 5-10 years. Result: They lost out on me buying Warcraft 3. I lost out on playing WC3, on the related social activities, on being part of DOTA being born, etc. They changed nothing I was boycotting about.
I revisited the boycott on blizzard after the Hong Kong mess, but this time I said I'd time box it if nothing seemed to be changing.
Is this cynicism? My unwillingness top accept some minor inconveniences to be part of a group trying to prevent human abuse? Should I care that my efforts are unsuccessful if they are nonetheless the right thing to do?
Maybe I shouldn't care about sacrificing but failing, but I do. And not just because I don't want the inconvenience, but because I want the problems to be fixed. Stopping the spread of soul-crushing (and in the case of warehouses at least, body-crushing) labor is GOOD, and way more important than promoting technological equality. I want success at this!
If I'm making life harder and doing nothing to actually stop that, I want to shift my sacrifices to a more successful area.
I just have no idea how. Right now my options are: Suffer a little without helping those that suffer a lot, or don't suffer while still not helping those that suffer a lot.
I had problems with their service back in 2008. Long story short, my internet connection dropped frequently (20+ times per DAY), and not only were the techs unable to find the problem, but wanted to charge me for the visits since they assumed that it had to be a problem with my computer, even though it was the lights on the cable modem showing a loss of signal. After that debacle, I swore off Comcast and said I'd never use them again.
I doubled down on this boycott as net neutrality debates heated up.
But these days, my choices for Internet service are Frontier FIOS or Comcast. I'm on Frontier, paying $40/month for 30 mbps, but only get 20-25 mbps. They supposedly offer up to 500 mbps, but won't tell me what the off-promo pricing is. Comcast at least includes it in their fine print.
Having only 30 mbps is starting to be a drag. I'm a gamer, and having to wait an hour or more to download a game that my friends are inviting me to check out is lame. I'm starting to consider Comcast, even though I hate them so bad.
In the early 2000's I knew people that worked as delivery drivers for UPS or FedEx and it was a decent job. They seemed happy. Now I see the Amazon delivery people, and they look majorly stressed out as if they are on the edge of collapse. Many times they are delivering things at 10pm desperately trying to meet their quotas.
I think a lot of the same thing happened in the retail as well. I see the salespeople at malls or brick and mortar retail stores. Even though it is stressful, at least they get to be somewhat human in that they talk to people and have some degree of freedom to move around. Compare that with the Amazon warehouse workers whose every second has been planned out with maximally efficiency and who so afraid of losing their jobs that they are afraid to go to the bathroom.
It seems the "decent" jobs are going away, replaced by ones that turn workers into robots to better extract value from their labor.