Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon Must Be Stopped

newrepublic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–106 of 106 posts

Re: Amazon Must Be Stopped

#101

Post by tsotha »

walterbell wrote: post #9
tsotha wrote: post #5

>Amazon has left a trail of destruction—competitors undercut, suppliers squeezed... We normally call that progress. That "trail of destruction" is leaving money in the hands of millions of people who used to be captive to the local brick and mortar retailers.

Are those the same people whose jobs were lost due to Walmart and Amazon? Or who prefer to have a vibrant local downtown?

More efficiency always results in lost jobs. But the money consumers are saving is going somewhere, so there will be new jobs in other sectors. Creative destruction and all that.

The Luddites were upset because of job loss to automated looms, but in the end everyone was better off.

Re: Amazon Must Be Stopped

#102

Post by lsaferite »

thelettere wrote: post #44

Amen. Most of Amazon's nearly 100k large workforce are warehouse workers, running around all day like rats in a maze with no real break, no opportunity to connect to other humans, no autonomy and no final product to be proud of. If that isn't a recipe for misery, I don't know what is. "We have much studied and much perfected the great civilised invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. Truly…

Funny you mention "running around all day like rats in a maze" as I have a good friend that just did an Amazon warehouse tour this week. He's the CTO for a company that runs several warehouses and he commented on the fact that the pickers were actually quite slow compared to what his pickers and others he's seen do. I was surprised because I too had read many times about how the warehouse pickers have to basically run everywhere all day.

Re: Amazon Must Be Stopped

#103

Post by ende »

ende wrote: post #90
dkarapetyan wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an entire field of mathematics dedicated to answering such questions and the answer is a lot more complicated than your simple quip. In fact the way most democracies are set up they are theoretically much less optimal than they could be and in some cases are as good as dictatorial systems because of susceptibility to being rigged. As usual wikipedia is a pretty good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/w…

Would you mind slapping a name on said field of mathematics, because I dig that stuff but only ever stumble upon smatterings of it here and there. I'd love to get to the core of that field. Its like game theory + lots of other stuff. (Sorry for off topic)

Awesome. Thank you both!

Re: Amazon Must Be Stopped

#104

Post by tsotha »

marbletiles wrote: post #38
facepalm wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want a job, why not just dig a hole in the street and try to get paid for it? That would not be different from keeping a job that is not needed anymore alive just for the sake of the job. If you feel bad about Amazon, donate 10% of what you buy at Amazon to a "hole digger foundation" which pays people who lost their jobs because of Amazon to dig holes.

There's a tragedy of the commons at work here. Amazon is playing in a new global marketplace, and the unquestioned assumption is that the lower prices that result for consumers are an overall good for society. But there are plenty of indications that's not true, and that minimally higher prices spread across millions of customers that in turn support millions more local jobs may be better for society overall. Arguing…

>But there are plenty of indications that's not true, and that minimally higher prices spread across millions of customers that in turn support millions more local jobs may be better for society overall.

I doubt that's actually true. The problem is job losses are easy to attribute to Amazon's influence, whereas job creation is not. But that doesn't make it any less real.

Re: Amazon Must Be Stopped

#105

Post by lotsofcows »

tsotha wrote: post #101
walterbell wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are those the same people whose jobs were lost due to Walmart and Amazon? Or who prefer to have a vibrant local downtown?

More efficiency always results in lost jobs. But the money consumers are saving is going somewhere , so there will be new jobs in other sectors. Creative destruction and all that. The Luddites were upset because of job loss to automated looms, but in the end everyone was better off.

Almost everyone¹

¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite#Government_response

Re: Amazon Must Be Stopped

#106

Post by onsalenow »

netcan wrote: post #88
emotionalcode wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I am saying that the collective unconscious belief system of a system itself (here, I am calling a collection of humans, or a society - to be a system) is what can direct it. This means all those side thoughts you think you ignore. When you choose to listen to analysis over intuition, but you might not consider the effect of ignoring intuition in favor of analysis, or you may even deny the existence of intuition…

We're getting into tricky territory with words :) I think it's important to make a distinction between clever emergent processes that people are involved in but aren't in control of and those that people made and are in control in. The distinction is vague, and arguable. I'm generally pretty down on systems (politics and economics are really burdened by these) which overreach by overstating our understanding of thing…

You guys are beating around the bush! Just get fucking spiritual. You know you want to.
Post reply on HN