you will only find this level of slavish devotion to tech on HN and in the valley. Normal people do not think like this!
I'd say only tech people on HN are gung ho about Amazon's practices and in some sort of an eternal crusade against big corps. We can still criticize big corps for its workers rights and what not, but at the same time praise their technological prowess and incredible work from many thousands of people. They're orthogonal, but HN public does not know how to separate the two. Media fed and bloated minds sometimes.
Honestly, I come to HN for inspiration and motivation. Not activism. There are plenty of places to engage in productive activism on the internet if you wish, but better in person. HN is particularly not suited for it because of downvotes - activism requires people in person debating peacefully to progress and not regress into echo chambers. Activism is a joint affair, not an idealogical war. HN coalesces the worst of both - hive mind idealogical stance + echo chambering through black and grey text colors.
Love faded because Amazon removed the ability to filter search results for items shipped and sold only by Amazon.com, and they commingled inventory, so there is no guarantee of supply chain.
They made the decision to reduce their costs as a retailer, and subject their customers to supply chain risk, in order to increase their margins and sit back and earn commission as a platform.
At this point in time, I don’t see anything remarkable about Amazon’s retail operations. If anything, I would say Home Depot is more impressive, with a nice website showing me where the item is in their store, plus offering me various locations to pick it up or ship it to me. In fact, most retailers do this now (but I like Home Depot’s website the most).
Unlike Amazon, however, I don’t have to worry about resellers garbage on other websites (although Walmart is similar but I can still filter results there and I don’t think they commingle).
I think this is consensus amongst the tech elite crowd on HN including myself.
I’ve spoken to my dad who buys all kinds of stuff from Amazon in his retirement in rural area. He loves it. He is still amazed by the fact that someone delivers whatever you want by the press of a button. People of HN are myopic about their position, education and knowledge of technology and try to project that the rest of the world must be the same. I am guilty of that too.
HN is such a monumentally tiny bubble.
That the lay population does not care or is not as informed about the above issue is probably true.
Although, the lay population is very price sensitive, and Amazon’s prices are much higher than comparable in store prices at Walmart/Costco/Target/Home Depot/etc. Especially if the item is a heavy and/or liquid.
This seems like a stretch. Media certainly fits both of these, but it's hard to claim academia is in decay by most measures, and I have no idea how you could possibly claim American government or military are illegitimate OR in decay without resorting to completely subjective measures, such as how partisan the republic is or how few things get done (of the things you care about, no doubt).
(Note: one could construct a plausible claim that military is in decay based on what percentage of spending goes to operations instead of R&D and acquisition[0], but I'd argue this doesn't mean our military is in decay so much as entering a period of restructuring as a result of a series of unfortunate long-term planning misses)
[0] as seen on HN, https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2021/04/welcome-to-decad...
The decay of the US government is visible in the crumbling infrastructure, the homeless people on the streets and in tent cities, the trash, the shitty COVID response, the partisan bickering. It has no claim to leadership, it is not inspiring to anyone whether in the US or around the world. It is in crisis and it is a cultural crisis which is very hard to fix.
You're throwing a lot of things out here, but they generally fall under being either (a) subjective, (b) deliberate policy choices by a democratically elected government, or (c) emergent properties of deliberate policy choices by a democratically elected government
Ultimately, if the people of this country don't want government spending on the sick and homeless, then it's not a decaying and illegitimate government, it is a well functioning and legitimate government as decided by a cruel populace.
Not to say the the government is perfectly legitimate, I could write an essay on issues with the way our government is structured and how certain design choices diminish citizen's representation in the government (for example: gerrymandering, first past the post electoral college allocation, and the near-permanence of effectively arbitrary state lines). But even the sum of these do not make our government illegitimate.
> it is a cultural crisis which is very hard to fix
I can agree on that much atleast.
In the past, if you wanted to work on cool shit, government/military had plenty of projects, and research was being done in academia.
Nowdays, if you want to work on cool shit, you go to tech companies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Amazon
These are not "trivial stories about evil corporations". They are very real criticisms about the company and its leadership and the lives they have ruined are very real too. To wave your hand and excuse the vast amounts of ethically and morally horrendous things Amazon has done as "trivial stories" is quite frankly one of the most willfully ignorant and disgusting things I've seen posted here - let alone up-voted - in quite some time.
https://www.aspi.org.au/report/uyghurs-sale
A company that benefits from forced labor camps for fucks sake... that is inspiring to you? Jesus Christ.
As for China, to sit from the comfort of your own home and demand that a company act benevolent at a cost to itself is simply ridiculous.
Go around your neighborhood and ask what do people think of Amazons products like Prime with all the shipping advantages and media that comes with it, of amazons return policy, of things like $15 an hour minimum wage, $30/hour of overtime + benefits, and you will find a different story.
In terms of things like poor worker conditions across the board, you would have a point if you actually had any concrete proof, and no, twitter threads don't count as proof. Not to mention that there is plenty of evidence to support the contrary.
I've yet to meet a single one that has anything positive to say about the company.
The point is that Amazon does a shitload of good by providing useful services to a lot of customers.
But even with non-charity non-profit, Bezos wouldn't be so wealthy. Still, that's not your point. Your point is that it operates in a way to advance its business activities rather than to distribute profits, and that's largely true.
What you describe here is how the American right caricatures people who make change in the US. Civil rights activists did more than "complain"; indeed, if they had only complained, it's hard to see how they would have been able to overcome white supremacists in business, law enforcement and government.
Just look at the Montgomery Bus Boycott, or the lesser-known Freedom Riders. These were campaigns organized by a coalition of local folks in the South (mostly, but not entirely Black) as well as anti-racists in the North. These activists were successful because they were strategic (the Freedom Riders forced the Kennedy Administration to enforce existing anti-segregation laws on US highways...) and incredibly brave (...and they endured having their bus firebombed by white supremacists while the police stood by watching).[0]
Much like organized labor, Civil Rights activists created a power base among the disenfranchised in the face of state sanctioned violence, up to and including assassination.[1]
It's fair to say that some progressives caricature the accomplishments of Amazon, which, on a technical level, are tremendous yet difficult for a non-technical person to appreciate. But this comment comes close to saying that ordinary people have no right to criticize the great men of industry like Jeff Bezos and Henry Ford. This is particularly ironic because Ford published and distributed anti-semitic propaganda to the extent that he was personally honored by Adolph Hitler[2]; Ford also hired armed thugs to intimidate and attack union organizers.[3]
There's a particular tendency on HN to lionize successful (rich) founders and CEOs to the point of obscuring their exploitation of labor. This includes Elon Musk, who literally purchased the title of "Founder" for Tesla, and whose factories had, at one point, accumulated more OSHA fines than the next ten car manufacturers put together.[4]
I'm not saying we shouldn't appreciate the staggering achievements of companies like Amazon or Tesla; I personally think Tesla has the only big vision worth pursuing in all of Silicon Valley. But nor should we ignore the human cost of what they do. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are among the two richest men in the world right now, and they got that wealth in no small part through the exploitation and human misery of their most vulnerable employees.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Riders#:~:text=Freedom....
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Assassinated_American...
2. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/henryfo...
3. https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digita...
4. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2019/03/01/tesla-sa...
I agree that Tesla deserves their poor reputation, but Amazon genuinely seems like they care about workers' well-being. People perceive labor to be "exploited" because automation and globalization mean that American workers no longer have a monopoly on labor. It's a simple function of supply and demand. No amount of cherry picked anti-Amazon narratives is going to change that. Increased government spending would, as it does for the Nordic countries. However, nobody cares to detangle the web of perverse incentives baked in, so Americans will always view taxes as a waste of money.
Of course that was never the case. They risked their lives and struggled for years to make progress. But that risk and struggle is minimized; to describe the people who undermined and attacked and killed them would be to indict the same groups of business people, police officers and law makers who perpetuate the same anti-civil rights agenda today. This is how Martin Luther King ends up being described as a Black Santa Claus rather than a radical organizer who was building a cross-racial, class-based movement for civil and economic rights. It's how schools across the country teach whole lessons about MLK for every grade, every year, and never talk about how the FBI harassed and targeted him and other civil rights leaders.
Seems like you would rather drink the kool aid given to you in press releases by companies! Good going!
> Tech companies are the only inspiring institutions
Yes, I do feel inspired to hire vulnerable people and squash all their rights, make them work to the bone, violate all their privacy, and make them pee in bottles.
>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
This type of tone only reduces the quality of HN. :(
> Everything else - government, media, academia, military - is in decay and has lost all of its legitimacy.
If the government is in decay and losing all its legitimacy, what exactly are you doing here and why are we following laws in the first place?
Tech companies are the only inspiring institutions that remain in America today. Everything else - government, media, academia, military - is in decay and has lost all of its legitimacy.
And amidst that sole set of institutions that inspire, thrive and lead us into the future, Amazon is one of the most inspiring.
Jeff, thank you for helping prove that humans can create great things.