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Two Portland delivery companies revolt against Amazon, shut down

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Re: Two Portland delivery companies revolt against Amazon, shut down

#301

Post by Robotbeat »

missedthecue wrote: post #238
Robotbeat wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty obvious, isn’t it? Doesn’t it kind of go without saying that we should progress as a society beyond high water marks set over 50 years ago? Heck, I’ll do one better. Why not pick 1890? “Workers should be paid less today than in 1969” is a sort of crazy thing to say out loud, but here we are.

You take a statistical outlier, apply a metric like pay/productivity, and then tie that to the minimum wage, and make a moral statement that therefore, it should be at xyz level today. That seems like tortured analysis. If you take 1989 which was 20 years after your date, the minimum wage adjusted for today would be $6.78. And there is no reason whatsoever that pay has ever been or should be tied to productivity. Hum…

1969 is not a "statistical outlier." It is the high water mark in terms of policy. Lawmakers chose that in 1969 the minimum wage would be set to $12.21/hour (in current terms). We've seen eroding of the minimum wage due in part to worker-hostile politics ever since then (including in the 1980s).

"Humans haven't evolved to become better", and neither have CEOs, even though their pay has soared.

As far as "should," yeah, I think pay ought to be on that level. I think it would probably lead to faster growth.

The only tortured analysis is the idea that workers, who are trained for and use more advanced technology, should not get paid according to the productivity they bring in, but their bosses (who didn't invent that technology) should. There's no logic there, either. It's just bargaining power. And if you (as a--hypothetical?--employer) see no reason whatsoever that workers should be paid more when their productivity is higher is exactly why we need a minimum wage to require it.

Re: Two Portland delivery companies revolt against Amazon, shut down

#302

Post by robertlagrant »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #160
robertlagrant wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Capitalism demands relentless and permanent profit No it doesn't. Plenty of companies go years without making profit.

Because they're failing at capitalism, usually because their competitors are better than them at it. Not because of kindness to employees or somesuch. Capitalists fighting other capitalists as ruthlessly as possible doesn't change my argument. Also capitalisms demands are just that, demands, its not a guarantee. If company x can't compete, it will quit. If it thinks it can weather a storm because it will be able to c…

No, sometimes it just takes years to get going. That's not failing at capitalism. You just have a poor definition of the word.

Re: Two Portland delivery companies revolt against Amazon, shut down

#303

Post by rightbyte »

viro wrote: post #84
fuzzer37 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not getting paid to care, why should they?

Because it's a crime to intently destroy other peoples property?

I guess the ones that cared got fired for not meeting KPIs. Amazon is selecting for neglect and recklessness.

Re: Two Portland delivery companies revolt against Amazon, shut down

#304

Post by zouhair »

toast0 wrote: post #242
wtf_is_up wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is destroying other people's stuff a reasonable response for you being disgruntled at your employer?

If amazon would learn how to pack things, maybe stuff wouldn't get destroyed when boxes are tossed. I've seen so many packages where the box is two sizes too big, and then a smattering of air pillows is added, leaving most of the space empty.

I assume packing has to take only seconds.

Re: Two Portland delivery companies revolt against Amazon, shut down

#305

Post by zouhair »

wtf_is_up wrote: post #47
zouhair wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And throw packages like they don't care, as they should.

How is destroying other people's stuff a reasonable response for you being disgruntled at your employer?

If an action takes you 5 minutes to do correctly and your boss force you to do it in 1 minute, how the hell can you do it right and not lose your job?

Re: Two Portland delivery companies revolt against Amazon, shut down

#306

Post by zouhair »

IncRnd wrote: post #182
nooneknows wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is the intention.

But, the results are the same in either case. People's property gets destroyed. If the results are the same, what is the actual, real-world difference?

That's not the workers problem.

Re: Two Portland delivery companies revolt against Amazon, shut down

#307

Post by zaroth »

emptyparadise wrote: post #299
zaroth wrote: post #241

I work closely with someone who runs one of these Amazon DSPs. He has 70 employees who love working there. In the last 6 months he has had only 2 people leave, and one due to their family moving. He has a military background and he protects his people like they are his own unit. He deals with all the shit that Amazon throws down at him and builds his own processes and procedures to deal with things like day-to-day ro…

>He will go in every morning and tweak the routes that the AI designs so that they can finish their 10 hour route in 8 hours, he still pays them for the full 10. Amazon definitely wouldn't like to optimize that away.

There’s a huge mythology apparently in the groups that the DSPs frequently discuss these sorts of things around exactly the “right amount” you should tweak the routes, because apparently the changes are fed back into the model and can impact in strange ways what it will spit out in the future.

A lot of managers swear if you take too heavy of a hand in making changes it will screw up the model and you get worse and worse routes each morning.

There is apparently an art form to making these tweaks each morning that gently optimizes the routes in a way that doesn’t perturb the model.

I couldn’t tell if this was just mysticism surrounding the black box algorithm or if the manual route changes are actually being saved and perhaps being over-fit in subsequent runs of the route solver.

Re: Two Portland delivery companies revolt against Amazon, shut down

#308

Post by IncRnd »

zouhair wrote: post #306
IncRnd wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, the results are the same in either case. People's property gets destroyed. If the results are the same, what is the actual, real-world difference?

That's not the workers problem.

People aren't responsible for their own actions?

Re: Two Portland delivery companies revolt against Amazon, shut down

#309

Post by cartoonworld »

WalterBright wrote: post #280
cartoonworld wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Don't start a business where the business plan is to have only one customer, or at least if you do, don't complain when they realize they have you over a barrel. This is great advice, such good advice that it should be given over and over. Unfortunately, there is someone out there who hasn't heard it yet. Amazon will just shop and shop until they find that person.

It's a rookie mistake. I signed a couple bad contracts before I learned that lesson.

I like to think of this as the "un-lucky 10,000"[x]

[x] - https://xkcd.com/1053/

Re: Two Portland delivery companies revolt against Amazon, shut down

#310

Post by kjs3 »

WalterBright wrote: post #261
kjs3 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly it. You get sold on "You get a slice of the amazing growth of Amazon", but are buying into the fact Amazon can cut you out at any time, for any reason, and you have no recourse.

> the fact Amazon can cut you out at any time, for any reason That's why you READ THE CONTRACT before signing it, because they can't do that unless it is in the contract . It's the whole point of a contract. Now, if you don't like the terms in the contract, negotiate. Yes, you can negotiate. Yes, you are entitled to negotiate. Yes, you are a sucker if you accept the other party's opening default contract.

Having negotiated thousands of contracts in my career, and litigated several dozen times when things didn't work out, I hope cruel experience never dulls your enthusiasm for how contracts should work, as opposed to how it all does work in practice.
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