661–670 of 721 posts
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I work at an Amazon warehouse. I'd rather be able to do that and write code on the side than be unemployed and have to live with my parents in the middle of nowhere. My parents don't even have an internet connection.
That's the problem with the current labour market. A job sounds almost like a favor, because it's better than nothing, but workers (should) have rights too. There will always be someone who has less and is therefore satisfied with less, and companies will capitalize on that to offer the bare minimum to get the job done. Ultimately the person who'd do the job for more gets no job, the person doing the job for less doe…
(Well, "crappy". Aside from the low pay and bad hours, it's alright. I haven't seen any of the abuses that get talked about, although I'm sure they happen elsewhere.)
Over half of new hires quit or get fired - I'm not sure which, but probably both - in their first two months, and they mostly hire for 20 hrs/wk part-time schedules. So it's not hard to see why Amazon is an easy place to find work at.
I've applied to a few hundred jobs in my life, ranging from software development to slinging lattes, and Amazon is the only company that's ever even given me an offer. Most of my male friends are in similar positions: they're pretty smart, but they can't get anything better than FC, retail, truck driver, that sort of thing. (Truck driver was, in terms of pay, the best outcome I know of, but that was one guy and he killed himself over it last year.)
The impression I get from my (generally more successful) female friends is that the only things that matter nowadays are networking and credentials, and most public job postings are only put up as formalities.
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> I look forward to capital peeing in a bottle in solidarity with labor. :) It does. Capital evaporates in risky endeavors all the time. It rusts by itself as well. Sure interests arent perfectly aligned, but fighting capital is like fighting your brother for inheritance. Meanwhile, landowners see all that from afar, evict people into the streets, and those same people go pay taxes to get their food. Capital is not t…
Capital in the US currently seems more along the lines of private profits and socialized losses. You don't see labor getting handouts in the form of welfare and then pulling millions of dollars in bonuses the next year. Fighting capital is like fighting your brother for inheritance when your brother won the lottery, you are on welfare cause of a disability, and your brother decides to sue you for the family heirlooms…
Depends on what you consider social expenditures in the us like food stamps, social programs, medicaid , medicare and social security.
> Fighting capital is like fighting your brother for inheritance when your brother won the lottery, you are on welfare cause of a disability, and your brother decides to sue you for the family heirlooms because they feel they deserve it more
Who is paying welfare in this analogy. And who is the court that makes the rules for sueing.
> Look at the article your even commenting on! The workers had to pee in bottles because they couldn't even take care of biology. What did the workers do to the capital owners in this case? Deprive them of a few more dollars in profit because they had the gall to not be perfectly efficient machines?
The workers, as bad as they have it, would have it worse without this option. The best guarantee to improve the conditions of workers is to get more competition going, not to put some rules that can be skirted or worse, will do damage if they are followed. While amazon treats its workers like this, Seattle has expanded is expenditures two-fold, raised taxes and increase the salaries of all its public officials. Why doesnt the washington state, in all its taxing glory help workers directly instead? Because they will make more money if people ask for regulation instead of relief.
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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.…
Expand the limits of democracy as a way to vote expropiation? 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 pro…
I'm suggesting that we can create a new form of governing that further decentralizes power.
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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…
> A good engineer retained can often deliver 2X to 10X the value of a new hire. The company treats them them [sic] accordingly. The turnover rate is generally less than 2 years.
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Slaves are held against their will. Workers submit voluntarily.
I love to voluntarily choose between working for a capitalist and starving, personally
The only difference is that the modern slave owners are smarter and so they use a form of coercion that is more efficient. That is the only advance they have made past the plantation.
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I don't think this is so normal anymore. Now that electronic log books are mandatory, drivers have to take breaks and for the most part should be able to pee.
The existence of littered bottles found along major highways tells a different story. Nobody throws out that many bottles of orange crush.
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…