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'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

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Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#161
post #138
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the catastrophic downsides to real names and verified identities? Those things weren't catastrophic downsides before the internet existed when publishing your opinion in newspapers or books or whatever.

I think the argument is that those systems DO contain significant downsides (ease of censorship, discouraging socially unacceptable viewpoints, etc) that you’d be porting to the web.

censorship and discouraging socially unacceptable views is the upside. What else do you think throwing Amazon shill bots off your platform is? That's the entire point of identity systems. Deciding who stays in and who stays out and sanctioning bad actors. Identity makes it so that harming a community has costs, and helping a community accrues trust. That's all it is.

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#162

Why can't we just have a social network that requires you to sign up using your government ID? No bots, no fake accounts - problem solved. There won't be any anonymity on that network, sure, but there are plenty of other social networks where you can be anonymous.

I mean Bluechecks spread misinformation and harass people all the time. Not sure how verification solves anything.

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#163
post #139

Nearly everyone involved in this debate is "fake". The people railing against Amazon are mostly people who have never done manual labor in their lives and (wrongly) view people who have as little better than slaves. Even the Amazon (or ex-Amazon) employees who speak against the company are doing so in an environment where the only tolerated sentiment is attacking Amazon. There's no room for nuance. Perhaps that's oka…

The (fictional) woman in your story probably wouldn't be so happy if she was constantly being pushed to work faster, take fewer breaks, lest she be automatically fired by some faceless algorithm designed solely to squeeze every last drop of productivity out of her and the other workers. The point isn't that this kind of work is unavoidably miserable, it's that Amazon is doing everything it its power to make it as miserable as possible.

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#164
post #43

Imagine being worth 185 billion dollars and still obsessing about your workers advocating for better pay and conditions? What a miserable existence that must be. Bezos has always struck me as a man who cares about nothing else only his own personal wealth and success. There is no joy in his life.

Imagine building a company from the ground up that is succesfull solely because it produces a lot of value to people, and yet random people on the internet still think all you care about is hoarding money and think they can make better decisions than you.

Here is the summary of the issue.

Firstly, pre-pandemic, unemployment was at an alltime low (and its trending that way to as places are reopening), very close to frictional unemployment rates, while Amazon was still able to roll out things like 2 day deliver and same day delivery. This means that it was able to staff accordingly. This in turn means that the pay that people recieve is worth whatever the working conditions are, and people can quit and go find easier job at any time. This is also true of people that are able to work overtime, for double the pay $30 an hour. Not to mention that benefits are also included, which as far as health insurance is a big plus for people.

Secondly, the number of reports of poor working conditions are far and few in between. For the scale of amazon, its expected that some warehouses are going to be run poorly. There isn't a single shred of credible evidence that this is a widespread problem. Also, with unskilled manual labor, there are people that are going to have a harder time than others. Taller pickers for example, have an advantage over shorter pickers that don't have to use the step stool. But again, 3% unemployment rate.

As far as unionization goes, this is the general gist of it. If the workers unionize, the service capability will undoutably go down. When workers realize they can take it easy and keep their jobs, productivity will go down. While its true that worker conditions will improve, the problem is along will come Walmart thats not as much in the spotlight, and offer better service and shipping while having shit working conditions, and people will just switch over because thats more beneficial to them. In no way shape or form the will continue supporting Amazon just because their workers unionized, out of the "good of their heart".

So Bezos is doing the correct thing by being anti union. Unionization is messing with the free market, which never leads to good outcomes historically.

If you care about the lower income people, then go out and vote for politicains that support higher taxation for the rich, social programs for the poor, so that ones living condition does not depend on ones job.

Also, for your brain health, get of the domapine fix that is the outrage of the internet lefism.

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#165
post #3

I feel like authenticity of online communication is an unsolved problem. The web was supposed to be a democratizing platform: all you need to communicate with the world is an ISP and a keyboard. But if there's no way to control for authenticity, online sentiment will just be an arms race for who can pay for the best astroturfing.

I like both the authenticity and the anonymity of the web. Of course, those two things are often in substantial opposition to each other.

The best solution I can think of at the moment is simply to not pay much attention to political speech on the internet.

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#167
post #3

I feel like authenticity of online communication is an unsolved problem. The web was supposed to be a democratizing platform: all you need to communicate with the world is an ISP and a keyboard. But if there's no way to control for authenticity, online sentiment will just be an arms race for who can pay for the best astroturfing.

>The web was supposed to be a democratizing platform

It is. The problem is that democracy is messy. It means you get to hear from communist and qanon wackos as well as paid shills. Now we're pulling back on this democratization so that we have 'trusted' gatekeepers to tell us what we should and should not be exposed to.

>But if there's no way to control for authenticity,

And that's how it starts ...

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#168
post #75
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how would you respond if people said you were treating your employees unfairly? financial worth has nothing to do with it. if he feels that charge is untrue, he should push back against it. I would not be nearly as measured in my response. no sir, I am not the one

Financial worth absolutely has to do with the fairness or lack thereof. Bezos has created nearly 200 billion dollars (!) of wealth for himself since founding Amazon, so debating the moral value of those gains in comparison to how everyday employees are compensated is well within reason. And if my employees said I was treating them unfairly, I would try to understand their perspective and make changes to improve worki…

It's relatively common wisdom that you don't become a billionaire without fucking over a lot of people. You can be CEO just fine, but billionaire CEO is probably not in the cards for you.

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#169

This old TechCrunch article from 2018 ( https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/23/what-is-this-weird-twitter... ) posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26636153 has a former "Amazon Ambassador" actually explain that job: > An actual former ambassador and three year Florida warehouse veteran Chris Grantham explained it in more detail to Yahoo Finance’s Krystal Hu, who shared the information with TechCrunch: >> When I…

For decades, I never thought people who kiss ass could have been serious. I was sure they were just cynically playing a game of advancement, and I despised them for it. What I've come to learn -- as disappointing as it is to me -- is that some people view this sort of thing as actual, legitimate opportunity, and are acting out of internal integrity. They don't see the hypocrisy of the power imbalance and how the comp…

[deleted]

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they are making it illegal to go the bathroom they are just making it economically awful. If you miss X minutes in an hour, the whole hour doesn't count. You have to deliver X packages per hour everyday and one miss gets you written up, which can lead to firing. You seem to forget that a lot of these workers are unskilled and have few choices. Amazon may be paying $15/hr but they will work you like dogs…

> I don't think they are making it illegal to go the bathroom they are just making it economically awful. If you miss X minutes in an hour, the whole hour doesn't count. You have to deliver X packages per hour everyday and one miss gets you written up, which can lead to firing. It's called disability discrimination. Getting paid less on the sole basis of your disability is generally considered to be disability discri…

>Getting paid less on the basis of your disability is generally considered to be disability discrimination in the US.

I mean, I get what you're saying. I work in Disabilities quite a bit in my profession - and your view is generally correct. But there are literal, specific carve-outs for employers to pay people with disabilities less.

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/39-14c-subminim...

>Section 14(c) of the FLSA authorizes employers, [. . .] to pay subminimum wages - wages less than the Federal minimum wage - to workers who have disabilities for the work being performed.

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