101–110 of 261 posts
Fortunely crushing unions is not a legal in many countries. As for everyone that gives money to Amazon, and praises their FOSS offerings, this is what evil companies do in practice.
Unfortunately, some companies like Amazon seems to simply include "break labor laws" on their balance statements in the end of the year, as they keep breaking the laws in order to save short-term costs.
I hate Amazon and stories like this make me hate it even more. I stopped ordering anything from them and, if anything, this has actually improved my consumer experience. Most stuff you can buy on Amazon these days is the same garbage that is sold on Wish but you pay ~25-50% more for it to come within a couple of days. Not shopping at either has definitely raised the average life span and quality of goods in my househ…
> Now I only wish I could find a way to move all our infrastructure off AWS... I've moved to Linode and never looked back. [UPDATE] Wow. Downvotes for a shout-out to Linode. Didn't know there was so much Linode hate out there. What's up with that? What's wrong with Linode?
I didn't downvote your comment but it reminded me of an old comment about Linode which is still a mystery to me:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10999397
To this day, I have no idea what that was about. Does Linode not do backups?!? Is one of the founders a pedophile?!? Whatever it is, is it unmentionable because of fear of lawsuit?!?
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If only they were competitive.
They're not? I've always seen AWS as the most expensive of the cloud providers. e.g., GPU instances on AWS EC2 vs GCP.
AWS has a lot of neat, domain-specific products and managed services, but it's important to recognize those come with vendor lock-in and that's by design.
If possible, build out your stack to avoid dependence on AWS-only stuff. It's worth it to ask "if I wanted to transition away from AWS in six months, is this addition going to help or hinder that goal?" It's a lot easier to migrate something that uses generic technologies like VM instances, vendor-neutral containerization, and managed databases versus something super specific. And AWS has a lot of super specific stuff, just look at their ever-expanding product list [1].
Once you get away from the specialized domain-specific products, you start to realize that AWS pricing is really nothing special, particularly for VM instances as you've noted.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/20/21228324/amazon-whole-foo... "a “diversity index” represents the racial and ethnic diversity of every store. Stores at higher risk of unionizing have lower diversity"
For reference, Amazon's anti-union site: https://www.doitwithoutdues.com/
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> Most stuff you can buy on Amazon these days is the same garbage that is sold on Wish but you pay ~25-50% more for it to come within a couple of days In my experience, I get most stuff for the same price from other retailers on Amazon, but with fast shipping and the peace of mind that I can return them easily.
If you're buying from Amazon, you're almost definitely getting comingled inventory - which means even the official retailer themselves can't guarantee it's a genuine product. Your point still stands about easy returns, although personally I've noticed Amazon adding a lot more friction when I have a problem in the past year or so. https://www.redpoints.com/blog/amazon-commingled-inventory-m...
It's obviously a problem to some extent, but I can't help but think news articles like that blow it way out of proportion.
As for returns, I've notice the opposite: it takes me considerably less time and effort to return an Amazon purchase than, for example, a Target purchase. I actually did both this weekend: for Amazon, I walked into a UPS store, handed them the unpackaged product, they scanned a barcode from my Amazon app, and I walked out. The whole thing took no more than 30 seconds. At Target, I had to wait in a line for 20 minutes at the Returns counter, had to show them the receipt, also had to show them the card I used to purchase, and then the system wasn't refunding the correct amount so a manager had to be called over and re-do the entire process with some sort of override. The entire process took, at minimum, 30 minutes.
I hate Amazon's bullshit union tactics like in the OP, but they are still the undisputed king when it comes to overall shopping experience, IMO. And it's not necessarily because Amazon is actually great, it's more because the other companies are still really far behind.
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I've made the same changes in recent months and agree that it's improved my consumer experience significantly. I didn't realize just how much time and energy I was spending sorting through cheap Chinese made junk and counterfeit garbage on Amazon trying to find quality products. In terms of cloud providers: the major three (Azure, GCloud, AWS) seem to be cut from the same cloth... maybe IBM or Oracle cloud are better…
Well at least one of the latter definitely has skeletons... [0] But in all seriousness, Oracle at least has very good free tier to get started. You basically get two free okay-provisioned VMs (lite on the CPU to say the least, but mem and desk okay). Very good for self-hosted your own stuff for free! [0] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/bl...
Its redeeming feature is having a free tier that isn't Google. The problem with using Google's cloud is that if someone hacks your account and runs up infinite charges as a personal user, you can't file a credit card dispute without disrupting your entire relationship with Google.
The cloud market still has healthy competition - eg Linode, DigitalOcean, Vultr, and innumerable smaller companies. Patronize them, rather heading than to a different behemoth.
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It's in the union's interest to keep the company alive too.
But then what is its purpose? Management has no reason to oppose changes that cost them nothing with or without a union. In an industry with thin margins, anything that does cost them money puts them out of business. Meanwhile a union that can't achieve meaningful concessions is collecting dues for no benefit, requiring the company to pay more to retain talent and thereby putting them out of business just by existing…
It's funny how the US is often presented hyper innovative, and economically dynamic, while at the same time it is claimed that basic issues like universal health care and workers rights - problems that are solved in many other developed countries - are intractable in the US because of "thin margins" or "the deficit".
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If only they were competitive.
Azure is about 2/3 of the size of AWS based on market share. Almost 70% of the market uses something other than AWS. What is it that you know that all those other well-paid professionals don't?
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/microsoft-keeps-hiding-...
G Cloud was rumored to have to be #2 by 2023 or they'd shut down, and currently they are trailing quite far behind.
Stuff like this always comes to mind when the media celebrates the richest people in the world. This often comes at the expense of low level employees who do dangerous and underpaid work so a few guys can become very rich. And the worse they treat these employees the more the rich guys get celebrated. That’s why the slogan “run the government like a business” doesn’t work. It would mean to ignore the weakest in socie…
> who do dangerous and underpaid work so a few guys can become very rich If it's underpaid, why do it? If you do it, what makes it "under" paid? By taking the job, you confirm the wage is right.
Yes, by pure math and market economics, I guess you might be right. But by hearth, I'm sure even you realize that it's not that black and white in reality.