71–80 of 511 posts
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Bezos’ pockets.
And from there?
Or, stated with less emotional rhetoric: Funding 1$ to the wealthy returns 0.7$ to the economy. So, from 'there' nothing, because Bezos' pocket is keeping it.
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I'm not an expert, but regarding your last question, I believe it's an industry-standard practice: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drop_shipping And something that Amazon does as well. If you're a third-party seller: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/201808410 But this more-or-less hidden from the customer if Amazon is the seller.
The article wouldn't apply to drop-shipping situation. Drop-shipping means the upstream provider delivers directly to the downstream consumer, but that means it never goes through Amazon's warehouse and is thus not packaged or re-packaged by Amazon.
Isn't that drop shipping?
This sounds like good news. I've read lots of negative stories about the working conditions in Amazon warehouses. It would be great if all the jobs could be automated.
be careful what you wish for, automating manual labor jobs just pushes the value of such labor lower which can further put these people behind. as labor costs rise automation will continue to push people into positions that are not easily automated or the cost doesn't suit them but I doubt the workers will always be better off.
unlike industrialization we are not bring people in to do new jobs but instead displacing people this go around. so the real work that needs to be done is to find jobs that we can train people for that have some longevity fully taking into account that many may not be able to train to do them
Fantastic, less human labor in one sector means new opportunities in another.
This is a platitude that is said often, but there is no evidence to support it. There is no law of the universe that says whenever a job gets automated, a new type of work pops out of the aether to employ displaced people. It is wishful thinking at best.
However I think the problem is we're at a point where things are churning so rapidly that many are being left behind. Your 50-year-old truck driver is not in a position to learn a new skill every 5-10 years to stay afloat, or uproot his life and move to a new city where they need workers.
Furthermore, there's conceivably a point when we won't need very many unskilled workers at all -- when we finally run out of things for average people to do -- and humans don't tend to treat other humans very well when they aren't needed. However, that's further off than the churn economy we have right now.
About time! I visited either YYZ4 or YYZ3 a few months ago and I was incredibly disappointed. For a technology company, their warehouses were anything but sophisticated. Their storage robots were surprisingly lackluster, their outbound/cubiscan conveyor belt was incredibly slow and often stopped. Of course, I am just an outsider looking in, and I have no visibility into the underlying software that optimizes these pr…
If you're interested in helping make it better, Amazon's got an office full of developers here in Toronto[0] working on these problems. It's a lot of fun, the pay is better than most in Toronto, and the 7 years I've been here have almost always involved me being mentored by really great folks. Feel free to reach out[1].
[0]120 Bremner, between the ACC and Rogers Center.
[1]This alias at company name dot com.
It always seemed to me that you could wipe out far more jobs than Amazon is likely to by simply removing the need to weigh items in grocery stores (like our local discount market). Generally, supersizing retail and the underlying supply chain has changed matters far more than laying off some warehouse employees.
I suppose that outsourcing has already 'automated' scads of US jobs in any case. The interesting automation will hit people who type for a living. Dunno how it will all it turn out, but I've got my comfy chair and a cocktail waiting.
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> It would be great if all the jobs could be automated ... If all the capital could be distributed.
What do you think is going to happen with that capital?
Increasing wealth concentration in certain desirable areas where prices will continue to skyrocket because the people there can afford it (those that receive the most return on capital vs. those just working on return on their own labor). Meanwhile the majority of the population decays alongside them, but at a distance that can be kept by well paid security forces.
There is the possibility of some philanthropy, perhaps. Maybe even some government policies that help change this, but I'm not sure if those are the most likely outcomes.
I guess there's always the guillotine / riot approach to bring things into check if it gets really bad, but typically that requires some sort of middle class to get things going. We also have not seen this occur at large scale in places where this already happens on earth.
EDIT: Please do not mistake my use of the word "labor" and "capital" for me identifying as some form of communist. Those are actual terms used by reasonable people (including economists!) I'd say most students of history and present day sociology might agree that this is a possibility for how wealth manifests in the future given large scale automation and no public policy changes.
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Is this where you try to claim trickle down economics works despite the top 20% of people owning more than 80% of the financial assets? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
You didn't answer the question.
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I think HN's tune would be quite different if someone came up with a technology that eliminated half of all programming jobs. Not quite so many people would be saying, "This is great! I for one look forward to technological advancement." I do think the future should involve more automation, I just think we should be -- I dunno, a little less gleeful about it and think about the people it's impacting.
UBI. Then we can be gleeful about more automation.
This sounds like good news. I've read lots of negative stories about the working conditions in Amazon warehouses. It would be great if all the jobs could be automated.
Amazon's warehouse workers were abused because Amazon, not because those jobs should have been automated. They could have had more break time. They could have had lower targets. Pay them more. Paternity leave. So many things you can do to improve working conditions.