How come nobody's buying Brawndo the Thirst Mutilator? Aw, shit. Half the country works for Brawndo. Not anymore! The stock has dropped to zero and the computer did that auto-layoff thing to everybody. We're all unemployed!
1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee
491–500 of 549 posts
Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's also the other option similar to what happened after the New York Elevator Operator Strike in 1945 -- the total elimination of a profession. https://www.inc.com/thomas-koulopoulos/100-years-ago-we-fear... "It wasn't until the middle of the twentieth century that the tipping point came along for the driverless elevator as the result of a strike by the elevator operators' union in New York City in 1945. The str…
"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…
1) I think we can automate the janitor now. We just don't because it's cheaper to pay minimum wage for 25-30 years.
2) The CEO, and CEO pay, is already more of political action.
Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee
#493Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's also the other option similar to what happened after the New York Elevator Operator Strike in 1945 -- the total elimination of a profession. https://www.inc.com/thomas-koulopoulos/100-years-ago-we-fear... "It wasn't until the middle of the twentieth century that the tipping point came along for the driverless elevator as the result of a strike by the elevator operators' union in New York City in 1945. The str…
There's not enough high-value jobs to go around. We can either automate and share the wealth, or automate and have a class of useless poor people and some factory owners. Historically the former tends to end in violent ways. And so far, we haven't experimented enough with sharing the wealth in ways that also didn't turn incredibly authoritarian and also oppressive with violent ends...
Key comment of the thread
Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee
#494Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is your vacuuming done automatically? You mean with a Roomba robot? Have you found those working? All my friends that have one just end up storing them somewhere never to be used again.
Not the parent comment, but I think it depends on the house you have. I find huge american houses with 3-5 rooms are unsuitable, except when you limit the robot to one or two rooms. My apartment in Europe is suitable for it, as I do not have many rooms, so that it does a decent job on cleaning. I do not use the regular vacuum very often.
On the other hand my old European apartment isn't very suitable as my robot gets stuck on high door thresholds and under radiators. It's great anyway, just can't be left alone as I need to save it every now and then.
Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee
#495Earlier quoted context omitted.
No reputable brand is going to sell even half decent shoes for $35. This is a good example where you can see how much people are really willing (or able) to spend on “local” or “quality” goods that can help pay for a store’s staffing needs and other expenses.
https://www.everlane.com/products/womens-forever-platform-sn... Everlane shoe on sale for $35, with the actual cost breakdown at the bottom for info. $7.02 materials, $2.16 hardware, $6.35 labor, $3.11 duties, $3.00 transport. (true cost, $21.64) They even give you a description of the factory. https://www.everlane.com/factories/forever-sneaker
It's worth noting that the difference between $21.64 and $35 is not all profit. I see they've left out marketing, which is generally one of the biggest expenses, and there's also inventory risk (sometimes they'll make products and be unable to sell them).
Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee
#496Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ironically Barnes And Noble was also a significant computer user in the 80’s and 90’s. They put a lot of local bookstores out of business with superior inventory, prices, and generally being data driven. Then they were one of Amazon’s first casualties!
> Then they were one of Amazon’s first casualties! They're still in business. I browsed one last month. I was amused that one entire rack, 6 shelves, was filled with "Trump is Evil" books. Somebody at that store doesn't like Trump :-)
Same here - went into the shop for the first time in a few years about 3 years ago, and was shocked to see two rows of "self-help"-type books. Amazing. It seems many people have outsourced our friends and familial support structures to random writers.
Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason why I'm personally okay with buying stuff from the Everything Store is because [1] retail is a brutal business, [2] _everyone_ in retail (except perhaps the executive leadership) is treated like shit, and [3] Amazon, for all of their failings, is still absolutely obsessed with customer satisfaction. Amazon is still one of few companies that has a completely seamless, no-BS return policy, for example. The "…
No, they’re not. They’re obsessed with taking your money and then giving you no avenue of recourse if you’re not satisfied. Order a three pack of cat litter and get only two packs in the box because one never got included in the first place or the box was opened during transit and the re-taped closed with obviously non-Amazon tape? Gotta ship that box back with two bags of cat litter in it, before you can get a repla…
I’ve never had Amazon not offer me some recourse on the ~0.5-1% of shipments that had an issue.
Sometimes that recourse is stupid (“ship back an entire desktop CNC because it’s missing a spring”), but it’s Amazon’s dime not mine. Other times (alternator mounting flange machined incorrectly by 1/16”; “we can send you another one that’ll get there in 6 days”) I had to make do and modify the part to fit because I can’t be without a car for a week (and the local parts stores were 2 days out at 2-5x the Amazon price).
Order another 3-pack, ship back the 2-pack. If you need to use one bag now, use it, and when the new one comes in, ship 2 of those back. Amazon’s giving you something workable and fair-to-you, but appears stupidly inefficient. So what? It’s their money, their choice; not my job to protect them from themselves. (I do suspect a 2-minute chat with A2Z and asking for a 1/3 refund and ship nothing back would also be granted.)
Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We're heading towards a world where most work is done by machines, and only a handful of people will own, control and profit from them People keep saying that but we are no closer than we were 50 years ago. A lot of jobs have been replaced but new jobs have been created and society has absorbed the increased productivity (cheaper goods, foods, and much more complex high end goods (iPhone, airplanes, etc).
> A lot of jobs have been replaced but new jobs have been created and society has absorbed the increased productivity. Not in every case. You can look at workers in the Rust Belt. Their well paying jobs with benefits were "replaced" and new jobs never came, unless you think working at Walmart for close to minimum wage is one of those new jobs. Even when, say, manufacturers come back and produce domestically, they've…
> It isn't "society" that's absorbed absorbed increased worker productivity, but employers and those who own the automation.
What society has "absorbed" is an expectation that stock markets will continue rising at a pace that significantly outstrips inflation and (related) wage increases. Pension funds and individual retirement savings (401k, RRSP) heavily rely on employers pocketing the bulk of productivity increases for themselves and continuing to exploit labour. It'd be interesting to see the chaos that would arise if governments decided at some point that workers should get an equal share of that.
Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Then they were one of Amazon’s first casualties! They're still in business. I browsed one last month. I was amused that one entire rack, 6 shelves, was filled with "Trump is Evil" books. Somebody at that store doesn't like Trump :-)
I want to quickly emphasize that they are data driven enough to understand that lots of people buy those books because about 51-54% of the country doesn’t and never did like him.
The last barnes and noble I went to had a liberal shelf and a conservative shelf (not labeled as such, but clearly separated). I live in a county that biden won by <1%. It's clearly a data-driven decision and both sides of the aisle love buying books from their tribe.
Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
And Amazon will over time or they'll get squeezed. I get my groceries from Ocado in the UK. Their warehouses are almost entirely automated, including increasingly picking and packing groceries that often include soft or easily breakable products into bags. They're moved from focusing on growing their own direct sales to increasingly licensing that platform globally.
You say that, but you know how many people that "fully automated" warehouse in the UK employs? Around 800 per shift . It was mentioned in the last incident report when one robot caught fire. Yeah a big part of the work is automated. But these warehouses still need people.
They still need people, but far fewer, and dropping rapidly as a proportion of goods shipped. The number of workers is a distraction - what matters is product shipped per worker.
E.g. a few years ago the packing into bags was still done by people across the board from trays brought by robots. They've systematically automated more and more of it at a pretty astounding pace.