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1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

businessinsider.com

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Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

#341

Post by iamthepieman »

ProAm wrote: post #242
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they killed off all other options Is it that difficult to imagine the amount of value it created for those communities, too?

Walmart is known as a town killer, Amazon is an industry killer.

The "big town" (8000 residents) near my town (2500 residents) rejected Walmart on these grounds 25 years ago. The town that accepted Walmart has grown tremendously whereas my big town has 14 empty storefronts on the two main streets which is about 25 percent of the walkable storefronts. It's probably a confounding factor more related to my town's resistance to change and growth than the fact that Walmart isn't there but that's my anecdata.

Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

#342

Post by tomrod »

snowwrestler wrote: post #319
foobiekr wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with the bet-the-house guy. I've worked for huge organizations since 1990 and I really think that even a mid-grade student project could make decisions as well as the management I've known, which includes multiple Fortune 50 CEOs. When I say "known" I mean "known" and not "been ten layers under." What I think will happen is CEOs will be glorified actors that are tasked with delivering the decisions some ML system…

ML systems don’t make decisions. I feel like a lot of comments about what ML will do start with a misunderstanding of what ML actually is. Saying ML will make a CEO’s decisions is like saying Excel will make CEO’s decisions. Neither is anything more than a system for keeping track of correlations.

ML models don't make decisions, but there certainly are ML systems, within which are ML models embedded with data flows, business logic, etc., which make "decisions" or "adjudications" or "classifications" or whatever term you are trying to avoid here.

Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

#343

Post by 8note »

polote wrote: post #66
cs702 wrote: post #59

That makes Amazon #3, after the federal government and Walmart: Entity US Employees 1. US Government 2.7M 2. Walmart 1.6M 3. Amazon 1.0M If Amazon continues to grow at current rates, it will surpass Walmart's figure within 2 years. Looking at these figures, it's evident that these three entities are far larger, wealthier, more connected, and likely more powerful than the vast majority of US cities, the vast majority…

> likely more powerful than the vast majority of US cities, the vast majority of small countries Indeed there are not a lot of countries/cities that are wealthy/powerful enough to send people in space

Very few companies are wealthy/powerful enough to do so.

I'd guess that there's a similar number of cities and companies that could send people to space

Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

#344

Post by katbyte »

adt2bt wrote: post #312
WalterBright wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add to that the cheap-as-dirt popcorn maker. My mom would make popcorn in a frying pan. The machine is sooo much easier. There are the mothers of kitchen automation: 1. refrigerator 2. garbage disposal 3. dishwasher 4. electric / gas stove and oven These are really marvelous inventions. It seems I spent half my childhood washing dishes by hand. Ugh.

I'll be honest: I do think frying pan popcorn legitimately tastes better. That said, it can't be argued it's far easier to use the machine.

pretty easy if you use a steel mixing bowl covered in foil with some holes poked (unpopped kernels pool towards the Center)

Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

#345

Post by katbyte »

8note wrote: post #315
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"being a temp for future robots" While everyone was predicting that the dirty jobs would get automated, instead its a lot of midlevel jobs are getting automated, but we still don't have a robot that can take out the trash. I am willing to bet my house thay we can automate away the CEO but not the janitor, and it will be hilarious. Management is just analysis of data, we can do that. But the physical works requires de…

Don't we have robots that take out the trash? The garbage trucks pickup the garbage and put it in the truck. Also, the vacuum now empties itself

forget if it empties, the fact 90%+ of my vacuuming is done automatically is incredible! I can live with the 30 seconds to empty the bin every couple weeks

Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

#346

Post by wyre »

vmception wrote: post #206
underseacables wrote: post #72

I’m torn badly with Amazon. After read The Everything Store, and what has been written all over the place, Jeff Bezos is a massive turd. Employees are horribly treated, wages suppressed, and all sorts of terrible and abusive practices. Then it comes time for me to buy something. I needed a new pair of size 14 sneakers. I drove to Adidas, Footlocker, dicks, and a few other stores but I just couldn’t justify $100 sneak…

> So aside from “just stop buying from Amazon” what can we do There are two issues here: One is that you want to boycott a company that treats its employees bad, and two is that you buying local makes money circulate in the local economy. Make sure to decouple those. I like to play a game of "how is this retail employee going to lie to me today" when I walk in any brick and mortar establishment. Its entertainment.

> "how is this retail employee going to lie to me today"

That’s easy. Just ask them how their day is going.

Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

#347

Post by 8note »

morelandjs wrote: post #160

I’m not sure why everyone continually romanticizes brick and mortar retail. Its terribly inefficient, and wasteful of time, energy, space etc. Think of all the Walmart, Dicks, Big Lots parking lots and strip malls that could be converted into better space. Think of how much waste there is when you have to pack, unpack, stage and repack merchandise. Amazon’s distribution is a superior business model which is why it is…

Brick and mortar retail is an advertising scam from the last century. It's built to waste people's time by making them walk by different products to get to the things they want.

Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

#348

Post by alephnan »

hattmall wrote: post #293
underseacables wrote: post #72

I’m torn badly with Amazon. After read The Everything Store, and what has been written all over the place, Jeff Bezos is a massive turd. Employees are horribly treated, wages suppressed, and all sorts of terrible and abusive practices. Then it comes time for me to buy something. I needed a new pair of size 14 sneakers. I drove to Adidas, Footlocker, dicks, and a few other stores but I just couldn’t justify $100 sneak…

Don't stop buying, keep buying, start returning. Buy things that are sold by Amazon and return them make accounts for free trials, buy things and return them, become unprofitable then figure out how to circumvent their bans!

Seems like a massive waste of resources and hurting the planet, and also hurting the merchants

Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

#349

Post by alephnan »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #170
mcguire wrote: post #85

Burying the lede: " Amazon is still a distant second to the country's largest private employer, Walmart, which employs nearly 1.6 million people in the US, or one out of every 91 workers. "

It's the derivative that matters.

There are many startups that double is size every year or even a matter of months.

Derivative matters in the context of size

Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

#350

Post by 8note »

inglor_cz wrote: post #21
handmodel wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its all a spectrum but I think in practice the above statement is meaningful. In the USSR the government set ranges of wages that different firms/administrators could give out. I guess in practice you had some choice but not if you had one entity with practically unlimited negotiating power.

There were political differences, though. At least in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic where I grew up. First of all, there were some collectively owned enterprises (cooperatives), which were a tiny bit more independent than directly state owned business. They could deviate a little from the strict, centrally directed price and wage norms etc. Second, even in the state owned sector, there was some diversity among…

Letting people be homeless is a grand success in western countries, by comparison
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