If we taxed robots, this would be easier for more people to embrace as a good thing.
Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs
271–280 of 511 posts
Re: Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs
#272I'm all for this as soon as we change the laws so companies pay payroll taxes on automation commensurate to the number of paid positions taken by the equipment. Automation is what we should be striving for, but only if workers and society see material benefits from it. ("Your labor potential can be reallocated to a position of higher need"/"You now have the opportunity to retrain" isn't a material benefit.)
I find this notion ridiculous. There are many industries like farming and mining which are now highly mechanised and employ a tiny fraction of what they did. As a result, food and minerals are cheap, fewer workers have to put their lives at risk doing dangerous jobs, and the labour force for other endeavours is increased.
Mechanisation delivers benefits to society at large, although I agree that at an individual level redundancy is harmful. This harm is a humanitarian issue, which the whole of society is responsible for, not an ill which employers should be specifically penalised for.
Re: Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe something called 'communism' which addresses that. Snark aside, automating shitty jobs is a Good Thing. Finding new and better jobs for those impacted should be a major political priority. Education is one aspect, but comes too late for those already on the workforce. Places like Japan keep unemployment low by having many low skill jobs, like mall greeters and whatnot. This may be better than unemployment,…
> Places like Japan keep unemployment low by having many low skill jobs, like mall greeters and whatnot. This may be better than unemployment, but is possibly not the best use of human versatilty.. An interesting aspect is that those jobs are low technical skill, but can require good to very good social skills to be done well. Without joking, greeting an elderly entering a bank and guiding them to the section they ne…
In some ways the very low social skilled worker is better at the job than the person with higher technical skills. I know some people with Downs Syndrome, their employers hire them for greeter type tasks because they obviously unsuited for anything: it makes thing move fast when the public realizes they won't get anything out of the greeter so they have to read the signs to figure out what they should know. The public likes to know that otherwise "useless" people have a productive job and so public opinion of them goes up. The greeter like the feeling of doing something useful, plus the money in their pocket. Everybody is better for this. Of course someone has available to handle trouble makers.
Re: Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Is there evidence to say the contrary? I imagine instead of Amazon paying 11 dollars an hour, a small business has the opportunity to pay 11 dollars an hour. Before Amazon's size and HR department sucked up local labor.
I don't need evidence to the contrary, what I said is the null hypothesis. If there's proof that every job lost to automation will necessarily mean one additional job opening in a different field, you are welcome to provide it. In absence of such evidence, I'm going to stick with the default belief: a job lost means a job lost, period.
And what is stopping that small business from starting up right now? Considering how terribly Amazon treats their workers, people should be lining up around the block to apply.
Dollars to donuts, the answer is the small business can't afford to start up because Amazon uses its monopolistic power to crush it, and that power will only grow as they continue to automate.
Re: Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's usually due to delivery/packing requirements, not a human unable to find the smallest possible box.
Can you elaborate? I routinely get smaller boxes, but I also routinely get boxes that are comically oversized and contain an item that would easily fit in one of the smaller sizes. What requirements are making that happen?
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Re: Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs
#276About 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…
It was YYZ4. YYZ3 doesn't do tours. 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 ali…
Off topic, but you're literally the first Amazon developer I've ever seen say anything positive about working there. Do you feel that the work culture is unusually good for your office compared to Amazon as a whole?
Re: Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mentioned two processes that have been in place with Amazon Vendors/Manufacturers for many years. 1. Amazon Direct Fulfillment (dropship): Order is shipped directly from the manufacturer to the customer. Amazon pays for the shipping label and contractually "own" the item once it leaves the MFR doors. Amazon incentivizes Manufacturers by paying the freight and loosening shipment deadlines. [1] 2. Ships In Own Cont…
> Ships In Own Container (Amazon SIOC) certification puts the responsibility on the manufacturer to certify their products can be shipped without extra packaging. Sorry, but how can this be a good idea? I'd hate if I ordered something expensive, for example a digital camera, and every porch pirate (or shady parcel delivery subcontractor) immediately sees "this thing is worth a couple grand", compared with the usual A…
I've usually seen an option to select the kind of packaging at time order is placed.
Re: Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly the best proposal I've seen for slowing down such automation is to add a tax on these machines. That'll make the cost-benefit equation less obvious. These machines won't pay for themselves in a year and then be practically free. They'll continue to cost a lot. This kind of tax would help slow the progress of such automation to a speed where society can better adjust. And I say this as someone who absolutely…
So how would you tax my cordless drill? It saves a ton of time versus the old bit-and-brace method. Or does the tax only apply to things that replace new jobs, not old ones?
Did the cordless drill result in tons of jobs vanishing overnight? Or did it slowly happen over many years? Is your cordless drill able to walk over and automatically do the job you would've done, firing you overnight? Since it doesn't do any of those things, seems like it wouldn't necessarily be taxed.
Re: Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren’t the tax breaks often tied directly to the number of jobs? I believe that’s how the incentive structure for Amazon’s new NoVA headquarters works for instance. If the company doesn’t create the job, the tax break is reduced by a certain percentage per job.
> Aren’t the tax breaks often tied directly to the number of jobs? Usually, no, though the public justification for the tax breaks is usually in terms of expected jobs.
This is false, there are almost always specific job number requirements that must be met to be eligible for tax credits or the credits are tightly tied to hiring. The Joliet, IL Amazon warehouse incentive deal is a typical example. Amazon can credit employee withholding taxes against corporate income tax. If there are no employees hired, then there is no withholding tax, and no tax credit.
Re: Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
UBI supporters always seem to forget that the money has to come from somewhere.
I'm a UBI supporter in theory. It's the practical math that always leaves me hung up. Even $600/mo/adult citizen is a seemingly prohibitive amount of money (works out to approximately the entire amount of all individual income tax payments, or about half of total receipts, including FICA). And of course, $600/mo/adult is an extremely meager existence.
Current social security spending gives us $9k per household.
Cutting military spending in half (utopian, but so is UBI): $3200 per hh.
Raising income tax to a simple flat 50% rate gives us extra 0.7 trillion or $7k per hh.
Single payer would give us about $1k per hh plus free healthcare for everyone. No more insurance payments.
That is already about $21k per year per household.