Amazon hid its safety crisis

Post by ColanR » Tue, Sep 29, 2020, 11:40 PM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #53

ColanR wrote: post #16

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> And yet Amazon has no real interest in solving its counterfeit problem I don't get this Amazon hate. Weren't they the ones who originally came up with the idea for putting purchaser reviews with the product, and the 5-star rating system? It seems like their solution was to 'crowdsource' the problem. Now people have learned to game the system, but I buy plenty of electronics from amazon and from ebay, and I'm carefu…

purchaser reviews with the product No. Companies have been doing this for as long as there has been advertising and mail-order catalogs. Did Amazon do it on the web first? Unlikely, but cannot be proven. and the 5-star rating system Also unlikely. The five-star system has been around for at least a century. In digital form, I had it on one of the first web sites I built, around the same time that Amazon.com launched,…

Post by zaroth » Tue, Sep 29, 2020, 11:58 PM UTC

Post by ci5er » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 12:18 AM UTC

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #35

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #25

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This is why I see capitalism eventually failing. On one hand, I think it's great that these mind-numbingly boring jobs can be automated away. On the other hand, the end result is that more profits go to Amazon, while many more people have fewer opportunities to participate in the economy. For the old predictable arguments of "Well, these people can do something else, do you expect buggy whip makers to still be around…

That’s why we have a government, to adapt society to an ever changing world. You can postulate as to _if_ government will step in an enact the requisite policies (UBI, Retraining, ect) but it doesn’t take a big imagination to see a world post-automation. There’s even a whole TV series set in such a world: Star Trek.

Post by sasaf5 » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 12:29 AM UTC

qppo wrote: post #39

Animats wrote: post #8

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The robots were too efficient. They could bring items so quickly that the productivity expectations for workers more than doubled Here's an old Kiva Robotics video that shows how picking works.[1] It's an utterly mindless job. An automated laser pointer points to the bin from which to take an object. A lighted button shows which box to put it in. A new bin then moves into position, and this goes on. Training time req…

> It's an utterly mindless job I worked as a picker/packer one summer. This is an understatement, even before the robots did the walking for you. It's interesting that the only thing left is to make a robot that can handle the objects to be placed, currently they cost more than minimum wage human labor unless the thing being picked is designed to be handled by a machine. Ultimately that's what I think will happen, th…

Post by newen » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 12:41 AM UTC

bsanr2 wrote: post #97

Klinky wrote: post #15

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Well, until it's fully automated, human safety is still important. I think the problem we have is that destroying a human body with mindless repetitive tasks is often still "cheaper" than engineering an automated solutions. It is simply cheaper to feed off desperation than to value human lives, and there is the engrained notion that humanity cannot be productive without putting humans into positions of desperation. T…

>It is simply cheaper to feed off desperation than to value human lives When the inherent costs are externalized, of course. The public pays the bills of these people who can't afford medical care or end-of-life expenses. My last job was a late-night warehouse position, where the hazard pay of 50¢/hr in no way covered the health consequences of a disturbed and atypical sleep schedule (driving heavy machinery, in my c…