641–650 of 721 posts
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.
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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 least one reason is that the stock has done so well. A typical software engineer hired 4 years ago is incredibly well compensated at Amazon because of this. Consider a mid-level software engineer hired 4 years ago, on April 16 2014, with a salary of $100k. A typical stock grant at hiring for a mid-level software engineer in 2014 might be $400k over 4 years, backloaded so most of it comes at the end; on April 16 20…
I think growing housing costs are much more scarier for a worker than an idea that some engineer gets 200-300k less.
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Stagnant wages are the cause of multiple effects, many of them that are extremely localized. The US has had this effect, but the world has had it go extremely upwards in the last 5 decades. And along lower wages, have come increased value. The internet, for example, is super cheap and might not count as much into the budget of a person todaY: but tv and entertainment was a much higher cost between cable, newspapers,…
So "stagnant wages" was what you called an inaccurate catchphrase? >housing and healthcare, are the defacto most intervened and regulated markets of all. It is the state, in its magnificent regulatory capture, that its pushing poverty unto people. I won't defend much of anything about the state of housing or healthcare in the US. The government is certainly a huge part of the problem, I have no issue accepting that.…
When democracy is used to plunder, there is no way back. It will be living for the purpose of robbing others, and the poor have never fared well in such systems.
We live in a world with relative freedom but still very constrained. Look at the US spending 25% of its GDP through the state. And european countries reach 40 and even 50%! Half of every thing produced consumed by the state. The State is the enemy. It really is.
The most positive effect I can imagine is people being stroung enough to resist the powers of states and pit them against each other. The most scary future I see is the collaboration of countries. Concentration of capital is bad, but concentration of power is the true danger. And the State garners its concentration with the power of might.
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Maybe it's changed since I lived there, but I don't really think Seattle is "one of the highest cost of living cities in the world". It is (or was) quite a bit cheaper than NYC or SF, for example.
Seattle might not be the most expensive city to lie in but it is right up there. Same price as LA accoring to this data: https://www.nerdwallet.com/cost-of-living-calculator/compare... And depending on how you break this list down (Exclude Bermuda from North American cities,bundle Bellevue/Seattle, Brooklyn NYC) it's in the top 10 https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/region_rankings.jsp?ti...
Is this worth it? Is this worth having the ability to pick between 10,000 different toasters via internet and have them delivered to your doorstep in 2 days? Sometimes I look at society as a complete organ, with a hypothetical ability to make cohesive decisions for itself. And I think, it is making extremely self-destructive choices. All for the sake of satisfying the urge to buy more, at lower prices, with more conv…
Cause to me this is the logical outcome of your comment unless you can explain what else you mean.
You don't mean for instance a universal income, it has nothing to do with toaster choice.
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> They prefer calling it 'customer-centric' If they'd like to be actually customer-centric, they can start by implementing a search that doesn't rank counterfeit products with a single 5-star review over real ones with 5000 reviews and an average rating of 4.9. I feel like Amazon's reputation for being "customer-centric" doesn't actually reflect their current practices, but instead it leans heavily on past reputation…
Next you gonna ask for something crazy like "sort by number of reviews" and "consistant UI on product pages"? The technology is not there yet man!
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sortem-for-amazon/...
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I don't think it is a problem that can be changed with different politics or labour unions. 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. M…
It's entirely power imbalance, and that can be addressed by policy. Fundamentally, Capital needs Labor as much as Labor needs Capital. There's no economic reason a capitalist contributing nothing should not expect to starve, but a laborer who contributes nothing should expect to, it's just the current market climate and political policy that these are the case such that the imbalance of power perpetuates itself. It s…
A capitalist who contributes capital should expect investment returns, and a laborer who contributes labor should expect the agreed-upon compensation. Beyond that, the details of who should expect how much come down to supply and demand, of both labor and capital.
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We can have both. Amazon isn't going to implode if they pay some extra pennies for reasonable working conditions.
I don't think we can, companies like Amazon can't stop thinking about costs, it's in their DNA, it's what they live and breath. Distribution is all about margins, if you can't keep costs low then you are toast, they are always utterly miserable places to work.
Is this worth it? Is this worth having the ability to pick between 10,000 different toasters via internet and have them delivered to your doorstep in 2 days? Sometimes I look at society as a complete organ, with a hypothetical ability to make cohesive decisions for itself. And I think, it is making extremely self-destructive choices. All for the sake of satisfying the urge to buy more, at lower prices, with more conv…