I work in an Amazon warehouse in West Sacramento

When I was young I did agency employment for a few years between leaving school and figuring out what I wanted to do.

A lot of that was in warehouses (I also worked in greenhouses harvesting cucumbers 45C and 100% humidity, a paint factory moving 15l paint tins all day - never eaten so much or been so fit, 15l tins of bitumen are heavy to handball all day, steel plant that powder coated so hot tanks of acid and full PPE and a cardboard box factory) and almost nothing I’ve read about amazon surprises me much.

Warehouse work is often physically demanding and rote, same thing over and over again, I never had a problem with that because I’d just go on autopilot and the day would pass in a blur - never had an issue with hard work and got multiple full time offers, I’ve always been a naturally hard worker, I always figured I’m here for 8-12 hours day goes faster when you are busy.

It was an interesting experience and after moving into enterprise software development served me really well when it came to producing things operatives actually got a benefit from.

It also makes me think that TUI’s with shortcut keys are often massively more efficient than a pretty GUI but I digress.

I don't see how this contradicts the argument above.

> If job roles are arranged like a pyramid (wide base of lower paid jobs, with lower number of higher paid jobs above) - the largest benefit is always going to be automating away the high number of low paid jobs.

Not quite. If you can automate a CEO you might cut a million dollars out of the budget -- maybe even ten or a hundred million in some companies. But if you can automate 500K people making $15/hour, that's over fifteen billion dollars a year. Plus benefits and employment overhead. So yes, there's more incentive to automate the larger number of people.

But if the same number of people made $25/hour, then it would be over 25 billion a year. So it's both.

This has actually played out in practice with both automation and outsourcing. The auto workers were some of the first to go, specifically because there were both a lot of them and they had high wages, resulting in a very large incentive to reduce those costs once they had real competition from Japan.

It's not unreasonable for people to be willing to accept less money as one of the ways to stay competitive. The problem is when that amount of money isn't enough to make a living -- but it's not automation that makes stuff cost more. Automation makes stuff cost less. The problem is the high cost of the things that haven't been automated, and the barriers to entry preventing all of these people from doing those jobs, which should in turn bring down those costs -- unless we're dealing with artificial scarcity like zoning regulations. In which case we've identified the real source of the problem.

The source you just linked to, claiming to be an unbiased arbiter, is itself immediately biased.

On Quillete:

> they report favorably on Jordan Peterson who has made several anti-Feminist statements and has called for “enforced monogamy”

Eric Weinstein absolutely destroyed this position. The New York Times initially criticized Jordan Peterson for the usage of the term "enforced monogamy," only for Weinstein to dig up multiple instances of the Times using the exact same phrase to describe exactly what Peterson meant. Enforced monogamy is literally a phrase that means "the social pressure to engage in long-term monogamous behavior." He used it in the context of describing why there was an uptick in "incels," essentially destructive men who are reproductively unsuccessful and increasingly unhappy with society. He wasn't even advocating for enforced monogamy, he was literally stating that the social move away from monogamy increases the number of involuntarily celibate men, which is empirically true. Every dating site has converged on the now infamous 80/20 statistic that demonstrates precisely this.

So please, check your own sources. What they've criticized Quillete for is a well debunked criticism of one of their contributors.

typically there's a sick and vacation subset for "PTO". like you get 2 weeks vacation and a week of sick days. Sometimes they're interchangeable sometimes not. It all depends on where you work. My employer only deals in vacation days, sick days are basically "don't abuse it and we don't care" similar to your setup.