sorry about the inevitable nitpick but no. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workhouse
on edit: evidently pointing out an egregious factual error which actually downplays the horrors of Victorian poverty by supposing a workhouse was something like a bad warehouse job gets the downvotes.
on edit 2: probably shouldn't have complained but was annoyed at the quick slapping I received.
“a total institution where those unable to support themselves financially were offered accommodation and employment.”
is not the direct superclass of an Amazon fulfillment center?
One click off the one you provided is Wikipedia’s take on a “total institution”:
“A total institution is a place of work and residence where a great number of similarly situated people, cut off from the wider community for a considerable time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life.”
So as Futurama’s writers would say you are technically correct, the best kind of correct: even the fucking villains who ran Edwardian and Victorian Britain at least gave you lodging for your slavery-like labor that you were basically born into.
Retro is perpetual, what’s old is new again at all times. Bell bottoms here, feeding the poor to each other there. Pretty soon we’re vacationing on Mars.
>the infamous Victorian workhouse, an institution that the editor of the medical journal the Lancet claimed could kill 145,000 people every year
I'm pretty sure the workhouse was significantly worse than being employed at Amazon.
>gave you lodging for your slavery-like labor that you were basically born into.
this was in Poland, a country that being in Europe I suppose has a functioning welfare system. The workhouse was in effect the Victorian welfare system.
conditions in Amazon's warehouses are bad enough that hyperbole does not help in the fight against it.
Rich people have gotten a lot of mileage out of convincing everyone that they’re a temporarily impoverished millionaire. The body politic is starting to get wise to this hustle (again) and the last bastion of dumbass Ayn Rand “socialism for me, but not for thee” tripe seems to be the temporarily impoverished tech billionaires on HN.
What was worse about that poorly-lit box perfumed by long-chain polymers where you have to hold it until your assigned bathroom break and you’re timed down to the minute on repetitive, physically stressful tasks?
The fucking WiFi?
For better or worse most of it was JS, so I have a deeper grasp of what “.prototype” means than the average hacker.
I’m not dissing web devs. I’m calling out all hackers, myself included, who looked the other way.
But as a person with a fair dose of the autism spectrum in the woodpile, I am nonetheless consistently unsettled by the inevitable nitpick argument that whatever dystopian trans-meta-corporate optimization that happened to wander into the spotlight today is in fact supported by such and such figures, and obviously we’re doing rigorous work here because we have links to web servers that send a little textual prose as an amuse bouche for the megabyte of JavaScript actively trying to defeat the already feeble attempts of our browser to send something less than our genome to some IP address somewhere.
Amazon fulfillment centers are what Dickens was talking about when Scrooge asked if there were any workhouses.
I’m not a financial accountant, but I gather that a balance sheet has a line on it called “goodwill”, that it is important to a company like Amazon, and likely something shareholders care about.
So being in the news for literally working people to death is quite possibly suboptimal for the shareholders.
Kinda sucks for the dead guy’s family too.