501–510 of 721 posts
We can't. Labor and capital need each other, but they are forever at odds. Good wages and working conditions can only be won through negotiating from strength. Modern America favors capital. Elections have consequences.
> Modern America favors capital The universe favors capital because capital is more mobile than labor.
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Worth it for me, so I continue to buy stuff on Amazon. If the workers don't like it they can work elsewhere or start their own Amazon.
Do you believe there should be minimum standards for working conditions?
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> Modern America favors capital The universe favors capital because capital is more mobile than labor.
That sounds like a king justifying the divine right of kings... The effect of mobility is offset by there being more workers than owners. These outcomes are not inevitable.
It's actually the opposite. The more workers there are the more likely some of them will defect for whatever capital offers.
Are Amazon's margins razor thin? I'm trying to understand what compels them to be so toxic in their work environment. Especially compared to the people I know who work at Costco, I struggle to understand why Costco treats employees so well, and Amazon treats their employees so poorly. It's really sad, regardless.
I don't know about Amazon workers but Costco workers are dang happy as far as I can see. Always jovial, joking, and teasing with each other. They seem to form good friend networks there working side by side and stuff.
That margin is Amazon's opportunity. /s
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/706779-your-margin-is-my-op...
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What software specifically? The AWS cloud is still the leader in most products.
AWS is the leader in the cloud because of its 6-7 year head start on the competition, not because their product is better than their competitors. There was even a company built on top of AWS that made money by creating a reasonable UX on top of that product.[0] walmart.com is better designed that amazon.com. I don't know when that happened but you can take a look at two product pages for the same book and be the judg…
I'd also say that if AWS had a 6-7 year head start on the competition, then that was the competition being lazy. It's not as if Microsoft/Google didn't have the ability to deliver a cloud platform back in 2007, and history shows they were delivering cloud products around this time. Microsoft Azure was announced in 2008 and launched in 2010; Google App Engine launched in 2008, storage in 2010, and VMs in 2013.
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And for some reason one can only buy two sizes of socks. For shoe sizes 6-12 (regular) and 12-16 (large). A sock that fits 6 through 12 shoes sizes? Capitalism failure.
Since we're talking about Amazon and you're talking about sock sizes and I remember Alec Baldwin ordering "Bresciani's" on the first Alexa commercials: https://www.amazon.com/Bresciani-Cashmere-Over-Calf-Dress/dp... In multiple sizes...
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Do you believe there should be minimum standards for working conditions?
To the degree that workers are not your slaves or property, yes. They should be free to decide who to work for, and employers cannot treat people as their property. But as long as there's informed consent, most things are pretty fair.
My fear is that the future of work for most people is not unemployment, but shitty jobs like this. My feeling is that in order to avoid this and prosper, the people need to own the robots that do all the work (Marxism heyy). If robots provide huge productivity gains, then they will provide those gains for their owners. If it’s the big corporations that own them, they will see the gains. But as long as people are trea…
The problem with Marxism is that in many of the places where it's been implemented in earnest, it's killed millions of people. Think of Russia under Stalin, China under Mao, and Cambodia under Pol Pot. People try to rehabilitate Marxism every so often, but the problem of the murderous regime pops up again and again, for a simple reason: when the state arrogates to itself enough power to remake society according to so…
We can't. Labor and capital need each other, but they are forever at odds. Good wages and working conditions can only be won through negotiating from strength. Modern America favors capital. Elections have consequences.
The main problem is the extreme unbalance in the world. Highly develepoed robotic societys meet hungry, poor masses who cam only offer their physical labour. Mst of them in countrys far away, bu also a lot in the industrilized states.
Demand and supply. The demand for unskilled labour goes down, yet the supply of it goes up.
Most politic "solutions" only work by favoring the current residents and walling yourself in. So some better conditions for those in the country. I doubt that this is a longterm solution, when we want to live in an open global world.
So the solution I see is rather ... educating the unskilled masses, instead of fighting for better conditions for the unskilled.
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Judging from some of the comments here, software engineers working in Amazon must either be stupid or irrational to continue working there, given the market for software engineers. Amazon is a highly successful company with significant anticipate growth still to come. All that success doesn't come without talent. So maybe not stupid, maybe just irrational? Tech companies in general, and Amazon in particular, are high…
At the risk of rehashing other comments here, software devs at Amazon are profit centers - when they work the company gains exponentially more value than it pays them. A good engineer retained can often deliver 2X to 10X the value of a new hire. The company treats them them accordingly. Warehouse employees are cost centers. They're replaceable pseudo-robots that are filling in the gaps until the engineers mentioned a…
The turnover rate is generally less than 2 years.