I think people forget just how precarious the ever growing precariat class is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precariat

I suspect is the future of employment for everyone without organized labor fighting back for their own interests.

Money. Lots and lots of money.

Amazon also operates at a scale unimaginable for most of us, which I imagine is enough of an interesting problem for some people to look past everything else.

I'm starting to agree with this as well.

It used to be that organizations were made up of vast bureaucracies with a thinking, breathing, human being at every level making decisions. Institutions could be imposing and callous, but there was always a "flexible" human element to things. They never had the level of completely monolithic, soulless, hyper-optimized determinism that modern technologically driven corporations have become. Google was the pioneer here, with their default customer service stance of "go away, we don't care, there's another billion where you came from". But more and more the world has become an automated meatgrinder with no room for people beyond their immediate economic utility. The machines alone determine your worth as a human being, and unsupervised, uncaring algorithms can make or break your entire life.

If technology is simply used to displace and concentrate wealth and power through private ownership without adequately sharing the benefits of growth in technology with everyone (reduced labor, more free time to pursue personal goals, etc.) then yes, it absolutely isn't helping (basically the situation we have now).

Can a Star Trek like economy ever exist? I'd love to be apart of one, but it seems unlikely given many underlying human behaviors.

And a huge number of people just don't care about these issues like you do.

But if you’re working around minimum wage then it’s even more ludicrous to suggest they have the ability to turn down work for ethical reasons. I don’t think you have any idea how little money that really is.

And prices might be in CAD, but Canada has a higher cost of living than the USA. Some examples with prices in USD -- Rent on a dingy 1-bedroom apartment in a medium-sized city in Ontario will be about $800 USD/month. Gasoline is $3.90 / gallon currently. Chicken breast costs about $4 / lb.

And that's to be afforded on a $10 USD wage. The minimum wage here is not a living wage. Workers have every right to be upset with that.

>They are on the lower end of big tech salaries.

Amazon pay may be slightly lower than FB, Google, or Netflix. But the $150k entry-level starting pay that most of the corporate workers get is still so so so much higher than the vast majority of companies pay that it's laughable to imply that Amazon doesn't pay them well.

>And the vast majority of their employees are warehouse workers, and they are paid very poorly.

Amazon warehouse workers get $17/hour minimum and amazing health insurance (probably better health insurance than most of the American posters on HN) for a job that requires no experience, education, or really any prerequisites.

When compared with a SWE job like most HNers are familiar with, it's really easy to look down on $17/hr as "paid very poorly". When compared with skilled manual labor like oilfield workers, $17/hr is low. But when put into perspective that this is a job available to almost anyone, even those unable to get job elsewhere, $17/hr is a huge amount to someone who was previously homeless or to a 16 year old getting their first job.

Again for perspective, McDonalds pays on average half of what Amazon's minimum pay is. And yet I can't even recall the last time I saw a post lambasting McDonalds as being an evil company for how it treats its cooks and cashiers.

As for the rest; 17/hour to break your back is not a lot. And people have been lambasting the minimum wage for decades, and companies that pay it.

This is for most people a life-changing fortune.

Amazon loses pretty big on relative pay & ethics.

Also, as a general note "be humble oh employee for the gift you receive from your benevolent overlord" is a big part of the philosophy that's utterly breaking America right now - we need less of it.

Ideally the government would also be willing to step in and make sure ethical business practices are in place but they're out for lunch.

It isn't. Taking a job that will pay off your child's college costs vs taking a job that will leave them saddled with the debt is not an 'empowered' choice.

And, I feel like this is sort of what we get as a society and marketplace that doesn't value ethical or enforce business practices. There is no penalty for acting unethically and there is a profit penalty for acting ethically - so the top performing companies are likely to be those that decided to ignore ethics and pursue the dollar.

Google, for a while, was an exception to this rule by pure luck - they so fully dominated search when it was just becoming a thing you could actually monetize that they had bails of money they could use to operate ethically and at a large scale... but they've since course corrected to be an unethical as anyone else.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/19/18681845/facebook-moderat...

If we're going on "what is the most offensive thing I can point to about a company", it seems like Facebook and most hardware suppliers have that beat.