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

Amazon hid its safety crisis

revealnews.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 143 posts

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#131

Post by prewett »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #94
prewett wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think all the ML PhD's in the world can fix a system with misaligned incentives. Anonymous seller says this product is the same as that name brand one, oh we believe you, we'll co-mingle them. This right here is undoing the whole point of a brand, that it comes from a known source. You can't ML your way out of that. The system is bad by design: it trusts those who have an incentive to lie. So when people say…

Amazon's approach of letting customers return "shipped and sold by amazon" items and letting an automated system issue refunds proactively for basically any reason is actually one of the more scalable approaches. It just sucks that the system pushes quality control to the customer

And it actively prevents the brand from doing quality control.

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#132

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

tpmx wrote: post #61
programd wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

THe Kiva video is not state-of-the-art I think. Check out this automated grocery warehouse, something right out of Factorio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKrcpa8Z_E Humans would just get in the way and get mangled.

That's a rendered video of the Ocado warehouse system, which I think is a ripoff of the Swisslog Autostore system. There was a lawsuit. Then Ocado hired Swisslog... Btw: This Autostore system is becoming the standard automated warehouse system for Swedish e-retailers, as they prepare for Amazon entering the Swedish market in a month or two. I think there are at least like 10 very large Autostore installations in Swed…

Amazing. Now imagine that combined with something like

[1] http://www.cargocap.com/ or

[2] https://www.smartcityloop.de/ or

[3] https://www.cst.ch/en/

maybe even extended right into your condo via elevator!

edit: Surprise, Surprise! [4] https://www.four-parx.com/en/four-parx-smart-city-loop-for-u...

in my hometown! Yay!

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#133

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

newen wrote: post #109
bsanr2 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> The public pays the bills of these people who can't afford medical care or end-of-life expenses. Just privatize it! The human meat grinder will be perfected.

Yummie! Can't wait for my first soylent green...

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#134

Post by Klinky »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #129
Klinky wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that automation or scale? Doing things on a large scale can be more efficient and require less labor, but McDonald's is still hiring people to do effectively the same thing in the stores as they did 50 years ago. A lot of industrial food tech is not new or cutting edge, and has limits, like you can't freeze dry a fully-made hamburger for later consumption.

Does it matter? There are refrigerated burgers of all sorts available in the supermarkets, you only have to microwave or bake them after unpacking. I think I've even seen some where you leave them in the packaging during microwaving. Never tried them, so far. I really mean fully 'assembled' and prepared burgers, not only the patties. In a box like the ones from the golden M, just printed different.

It does, because large scale lends itself to automation more easily, but even still, you have manual labor with unloading and loading, maintaining and reconfiguring the line, quality control, packaging, and delivery. A lot of these processes are not new, and have been around for decades. The McDonald's store doesn't have a machine make your hamburger, there is still significant manual labor involved, which hasn't really changed in decades.

Even your frozen burger likely had significant manual labor investment in it at the factory it was produced. Also by "fully prepared", try adding fresh ingredients like lettuce, tomato, onion, freezing it and then microwaving it. I am sure it will be enjoyable to the palate. Even without the fresh ingredients, most will find the microwave burger inferior to even the cheapest McDonald's burger.

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#135

Post by shalmanese »

Klinky wrote: post #15
Animats wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> 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.

But this is the majority of jobs that humans have right now globally. There's a reason why it's called "backbreaking labor", it literally breaks down your back.

Everything from agriculture to mining to construction to manufacturing to logistics. The world is full of intrinsically unergonomic jobs that slowly grind human bodies down.

It's just that we've decided that one set of these jobs we arbitrarily care about and the rest, we give a collective shrug to.

Like, if you look at the image at the top of this article: https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-12-29/what-it-s-be-rice-far... this is the reality for hundreds of millions of rice farmers across the globe right now and our collective response ranges somewhere between cringey romanticism of the task to a shrug of "whaddayagonnado?"

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#136

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

Klinky wrote: post #134
LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it matter? There are refrigerated burgers of all sorts available in the supermarkets, you only have to microwave or bake them after unpacking. I think I've even seen some where you leave them in the packaging during microwaving. Never tried them, so far. I really mean fully 'assembled' and prepared burgers, not only the patties. In a box like the ones from the golden M, just printed different.

It does, because large scale lends itself to automation more easily, but even still, you have manual labor with unloading and loading, maintaining and reconfiguring the line, quality control, packaging, and delivery. A lot of these processes are not new, and have been around for decades. The McDonald's store doesn't have a machine make your hamburger, there is still significant manual labor involved, which hasn't rea…

Hm. I don't know. Bakeries for the buns are highly automated. The 'assembly' and packaging could be too, like for deep frozen pizza.

Also Sri Racha helps with almost anything! ;> Have you ever tried to 'tune' a quarterpounder, double-cheese, or simple cheesburger with mild (green cap/Huy Fong alike) Sri Racha? Just a few small splotches.

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#137

Post by solidasparagus »

gamblor956 wrote: post #127
solidasparagus wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> than spend the money on QC/QA staff that could snuff the problem out in days or weeks even with relatively little training and in a way that can't be easily gamed by counterfeiters. This is the kind of "I don't know any details about the problem but I am certain it is simple and easy to solve" mindset that I hate. Do you seriously think that, if Amazon could snuff out the problem in days or weeks by hiring some peo…

Do you seriously think that, if Amazon could snuff out the problem in days or weeks by hiring some people, they wouldn't do it? Yes, I do. Because that is the choice they have actually made. What i suggested is SOP for Amazon's competitors and indeed the retail market as a whole due to product liability laws in the US and UK. Not hiring QC is therefore a deliberate choice. My guess would be that if you could actually…

> They could hire over 25000 qc staffers for 1 billion. They don't need that many, a few hundred will suffice based on SOP qc processes

How exactly would you do this? In the last year 3.4 billion items were sold by American SMBs alone on Amazon. That is 110 items per second. If you hired 25000 QC staffers working at perfect efficiency, they would need to each handle over 1 item per minute. And ensuring that something, often inside of packaging, is not counterfeit is not exactly trivial work that can be pumped out like this. Or you could approach it from the supply side. 45 new sellers join Amazon every minute, and many of those packages never even go through Amazon's hands. And catching a fraudulent seller does not solve the problem - they will just rebrand and reenter the platform.

Comparable marketplaces like eBay have the exact same problem. You are applying principles from a completely different business model - retail - to any online marketplace and pretending they are the same when they are absolutely not.

Please, show me how a few hundred QC people are going to solve this problem. If you have a real solution, Amazon will pay hand over first for it - but actually want to dig into the details of the problem is so much harder than standing on your soapbox and yelling about how Amazon is crippled by greed and stupidity.

Curation at scale is hard.

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#138

Post by MattGaiser »

xmprt wrote: post #118
MattGaiser wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I routinely get offers to buy a review from me inside the actual Amazon product itself. The system is being gamed under the nose of Amazon.

How often are you buying stuff from Amazon that this happens? I probably buy something at least 1-3 times a month and have never gotten a counterfeit or review request. I almost want to get one just to see what it would look like to be honest.

Seemingly every time I purchase cables or accessories.

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#139

Post by causality0 »

an_opabinia wrote: post #12
causality0 wrote: post #7

Amazon's abysmal safety standards are no secret. There's an expose about them every six months. So far nobody with the power to change anything cares. What would it take to get actual change? Even politicians who hate Amazon don't seem to care about their workers.

Maybe the public isn’t wrong and correctly ascertains that it’s exaggerated.

I believe the people who work there over "the public".

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#140

Post by xmprt »

MattGaiser wrote: post #138
xmprt wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How often are you buying stuff from Amazon that this happens? I probably buy something at least 1-3 times a month and have never gotten a counterfeit or review request. I almost want to get one just to see what it would look like to be honest.

Seemingly every time I purchase cables or accessories.

I can see that happening (most of my returns are cables or accessories). But how do you know whether it's a counterfeit when you buy it? Most of the time, I'm not even looking at the brand that I'm buying.
Post reply on HN