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Bye, Amazon

tbray.org

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Re: Bye, Amazon

#671

Post by toasterlovin »

hysan wrote: post #391
stupidcar wrote: post #20

> At the end of the day, it’s all about power balances. The warehouse workers are weak and getting weaker... Whenever I speak to someone working in a "low-skilled" job, I'm always astonished and embarrassed by how different their work environment sounds to the kind of offices I work in. There seems to be a consistent theme of employees being treated with suspicion, condescension and outright hostility. This gets to t…

All the example replies to this I’ve seen so far are where the power imbalance between business owner and worker is huge. So I’ll give my anecdote which is from the other side. I grew up watching, and often helping, my parents as they ran their own business. We were at best lower middle class. The economic gap between us and those we hired was far smaller than any of the examples given here. My parents treated the wo…

> People don’t default to cheating the system.

Some people don't. I think you may be underestimating the degree to which A) your parents were good judges of people, and B) having ownership close to the metal can make things work well.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#672

Post by blueline »

alkibiades wrote: post #450

if he’s so against capitalism he should donate his considerable net worth to amazon workers instead of pointless virtue signaling. but somehow think that won’t happen :)

having money means you aren't allowed to critique capitalism? what kind of logic is that?

Re: Bye, Amazon

#673

Post by praveenperera »

alex_young wrote: post #666

I really wish there was a stand-alone cloud provider to work with. AWS is a part of this unethical beast, GCP is a side project of a huge advertising company, Azure is under the wing of a major monopolist. I guess there is Linode, but their services are more of a traditional VPS than a cloud host. It's kind of crazy that most of the net income of Amazon comes from this business, but we've accepted that a stand alone…

DigitalOcean is quickly becoming just that.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#674

Post by blueline »

chippy wrote: post #131
Infinitesimus wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. It often takes a while for us to internalize and accept how some hard things and maybe he spent years trying to make sense of this problem and finally reached a breaking point.

I really don't see Tim Bray as coming out as an anti capitalist here. That's why this is amusing. To clarify, it's not bad what he did, he is the good guy now. To put him up as an example of anti capitalism in its own right (even discounting the fact that the warehouse workers who were sacked are not) is hilarious. Edits - As most comments in the thread suggest, most people are not seeing this as a form of anti-capit…

literally in the article, in his own words:

>At the end of the day, the big problem isn’t the specifics of Covid-19 response,” ... “It’s that Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential. Only that’s not just Amazon, it’s how 21st-century capitalism is done.

how is it "hilarious" to take this sentiment as anti-capitalist? how could this be interpreted another way?

Re: Bye, Amazon

#675

Post by SamWhited »

alex_young wrote: post #666

I really wish there was a stand-alone cloud provider to work with. AWS is a part of this unethical beast, GCP is a side project of a huge advertising company, Azure is under the wing of a major monopolist. I guess there is Linode, but their services are more of a traditional VPS than a cloud host. It's kind of crazy that most of the net income of Amazon comes from this business, but we've accepted that a stand alone…

I've been sad and wishing for something new ever since Joyent shut down Triton (which was absolutely fantastic, so much easier to use than the alternatives). Now that DigitalOcean has VPCs it might be considered an alternative, but I haven't had the best experience with their portal or customer support in the past, but maybe I should give them another shot. Other suggestions would be welcome.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#676

Post by three_seagrass »

o10449366 wrote: post #635
grawprog wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But as a corporation, every poorly run warehouse reflects on Amazon. It doesn't matter if some of them are good, Amazon is allowing the sweat shop level ones to exist and continue to be run that way. This implies they're ok with this or at the very least don't give a shit about how their warehouses are run or whether their employees are treated properly.

Which warehouses are "sweat shop" level?

https://nypost.com/2019/11/30/amazon-warehouses-are-cult-lik...

>I soon learned that only difference between an Amazon warehouse and a third-world sweatshop were the robots. At Amazon, you were surrounded by bots, and they were treated better than the humans.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#677

Post by morelisp »

oppositelock wrote: post #485
supergeek133 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a two way street. If you've never been involved at a management or ownership level of a business that has "low pay" labor (e.g., food service, warehouse, retail sales). For every 2-3 decent workers there is one that just takes pure advantage of the environment (e.g., stealing product, stealing time, etc). Sometimes this occurs at great cost for a period of time before it is discovered. EDIT: This was…

I can confirm this, having first hand experience with it. We hired many low-skill workers at a big tech company that you've heard of about ten years ago. These workers received a couple of weeks of training, and then were set to do a rather simple, menial, repetitive job. These workers didn't sell products, but did very low level tech work, but the entire operation was mired in drama. For example, we had a strict no…

> we had a strict no drugs policy

I have news that might surprise you about how widespread hard drug use in SV programming, finance, or any "startup" area.

Zero tolerance for the phone banks but not for Elon Musk, right?

Re: Bye, Amazon

#678

Post by alex_young »

praveenperera wrote: post #673
alex_young wrote: post #666

I really wish there was a stand-alone cloud provider to work with. AWS is a part of this unethical beast, GCP is a side project of a huge advertising company, Azure is under the wing of a major monopolist. I guess there is Linode, but their services are more of a traditional VPS than a cloud host. It's kind of crazy that most of the net income of Amazon comes from this business, but we've accepted that a stand alone…

DigitalOcean is quickly becoming just that.

Thanks! I hadn't followed up on DO in a while, it looks like their service offerings are a lot more robust these days.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#679

Post by gnicholas »

> What with big-tech salaries and share vestings, this will probably cost me over a million (pre-tax) dollars

...

> The average pay [in his group, AWS] is very high, and anyone who’s unhappy can walk across the street and get another job paying the same or better.

Not sure how to square these two statements. Is the lost money all in stock vesting? If so, why bother mentioning the salary? If not, how does that fit with his claim about AWSers being so readily employable?

Re: Bye, Amazon

#680

Post by sneak »

> What about AWS? · Amazon Web Services (the “Cloud Computing” arm of the company), where I worked, is a different story. It treats its workers humanely, strives for work/life balance, struggles to move the diversity needle (and mostly fails, but so does everyone else), and is by and large an ethical organization.

I find it very difficult to reconcile this statement with the fact that AWS provides services to the US military to help them perpetrate mass murder more effectively and directly vends to the suborganization inside the US government that operates concentration camps for children. It's fallen out of the news cycle, but this is still happening today, and AWS is still accepting money to help them carry out their crimes.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/training-the-warfi...

https://www.govexec.com/sponsor-content/enabling-the-warfigh...

https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/10/22/139639/amazon-is...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/27/us/immigrant-children-sex...

These are the people AWS collaborates with. That's not ethical under any framework of ethics I've ever heard of.

It's not even like they just happen to serve the military along with all comers: they voluntarily built a special set of datacenters with racist hiring policies just to court government work:

https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/

It's almost as if people have a gigantic ethical blind spot just so long as it's the state doing the mass killings and torture of children.

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