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Jeff Bezos’ Dystopian Legacy Goes Far Beyond Amazon

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Re: Jeff Bezos’ Dystopian Legacy Goes Far Beyond Amazon

#161

Post by southerntofu »

jseban wrote: post #126
southerntofu wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the ideologies of those "communist" countries, they'll tell you communism is a stateless/classless society based on freedom as it was envisioned by Marx. I'm not using a personal definition to say they're not communist, i'm using their own. According to their vocabulary, such states are dictatorships of the proletariat, which is supposedly a step towards communism, but is NOT communism.

So how many large scale experiments with communism have we had during the last 100 years, and how many of them have ended in success? It's starting to get pretty ridiculous to argue against that kind of body of evidence. I have full respect for anyone trying to question and improve our society and economic system, but to just wind back the clock to 1968, pretend like nothing happened and start ranting about communism…

> So how many large scale experiments with communism have we had during the last 100 years

To my knowledge, only a handful. Workers self-organization in Catalonia during the Spanish revolution (1936-1937) is one, Community-oriented democracy in Chiapas (since 1994) and Rojava (since 2011) is another.

The other examples you think of (unless i'm mistaken) are precisely dictatorships of the proletariat that have nothing to do with communism and never intended to build power for the people.

> wind back the clock to 1968, pretend like nothing happened and start ranting about communism?

In 1968, the situation in regards to communism was already as it is today. The counter-revolutionary crimes of marxist-leninists and their State capitalism date from 1917, not after 1968. In 1917, the revolution was one aiming for people's liberation until Lenin, Trotsky and their cliques made a coup d'État and murdered everyone who disagreed with them.

> Sorry, that's just a bit too much

What is? Do you think free food, free housing, free education and free healthcare is too much? Do you think power to the people (not parliaments) is too much? What about libertarian communism (anarchism) disgusts you?

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Dystopian Legacy Goes Far Beyond Amazon

#162

Post by alibarber »

nightcracker wrote: post #101
johnchristopher wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the EU is a big place and people are free to pick which country they live in. There are limits though. You have a 3 months period where you can stay in another UE country then the national authorities can ask for your leaving. There are statuses that allows you to stay longer (work, studies, retirement, etc.) but those statuses have requirements and obligations. You can't take your tent, set it up somewhere in…

> You can't take your tent, set it up somewhere in another country and declare you live there without some fiscal authorities coming for you at some point. The only 'requirement' is that the government (may) want to see you can provide for yourself in the form of capital, a job, a retirement pension, etc. This is because most countries in the EU have a social safety net, and some have a very strong one. Without this…

I think it doesn't need the rule more because it's a single federal republic and its citizens are citizens of the entire nation not just a single state.

Whilst it's great to make generic EU vs. US statements the EU(/EEA) is still ~30 different sovereign nations with their own citizenships.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Dystopian Legacy Goes Far Beyond Amazon

#163

Post by MikeUt »

whitepaint wrote: post #110

I've read similar articles so many times but they all lack one thing - solutions. Seriously, what should we do about it? Yeah, I agree that workers shouldn't be working so hard that they can't even go to the bathroom. Would we have a better world if Amazon didn't exist? I personally doubt it. So, it's not Amazon per se, it is the system, isn't? So, what are the solutions? How do we make it better? How do we minimize…

How quickly we forget. This is not the first time workers have faced inhumane working conditions. Unions worked as a solution before - why wouldn't they work again?

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Dystopian Legacy Goes Far Beyond Amazon

#164

Post by southerntofu »

RalfWausE wrote: post #136
southerntofu wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you don't need a Joker-style nihilistic attitude to cause as much damage as possible to everyone without distinction. This can also be achieved in a meaningful way following the workers tradition of sabotage and direct action. Hurt or destroy those people/structures making our lives hell. That makes sense. Just don't drag random people into it.

Yeah, this is what i have thought... in german there is the saying "Mach kaputt was euch kaputt macht" (more or less "destroy what destroys you").

I like it even though i don't speak german. Thanks for sharing!

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Dystopian Legacy Goes Far Beyond Amazon

#165

Post by whitepaint »

MikeUt wrote: post #163
whitepaint wrote: post #110

I've read similar articles so many times but they all lack one thing - solutions. Seriously, what should we do about it? Yeah, I agree that workers shouldn't be working so hard that they can't even go to the bathroom. Would we have a better world if Amazon didn't exist? I personally doubt it. So, it's not Amazon per se, it is the system, isn't? So, what are the solutions? How do we make it better? How do we minimize…

How quickly we forget. This is not the first time workers have faced inhumane working conditions. Unions worked as a solution before - why wouldn't they work again?

Can't they already organize and associate with unions but choose not to?

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Dystopian Legacy Goes Far Beyond Amazon

#166

Post by smhost »

syshum wrote: post #152
zopa wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People have historically complained a lot about firings not being based on an objective formula. Now the complaint is an objective formula is being used. Cute line, but obviously people have always wanted criteria to be objective and fair . If the rule was "take the ordinal value of each letter in employee's name, sum mod 365, and if the result matches the day of the year, they're fired!" -- that's completely objec…

>> objective and fair. You do understand that the is a logical impossibility, as "fairness" is a subjective standard... What is "fair" to me, likely will not be what you believe is "fair" thus something can not be objective and "fair" > "take the ordinal value of each letter in employee's name, sum mod 365, and if the result matches the day of the year, they're fired!" My Objection to this standard would not be "it i…

When you introduce the notion of "logical sense", you're already deviating from an objective standard. For example, Amazon's warehouse bathroom policy is logical from a profit-maximizing perspective, but it's illogical from the perspective of the health and wellbeing of its workers.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Dystopian Legacy Goes Far Beyond Amazon

#167

Post by social_quotient »

yanderekko wrote: post #71
fxtentacle wrote: post #50

Reading this, I'm so glad that in all of the EU it is illegal to fire someone purely based on a software decision. There's a minimum level of humanity that we should extend to everyone. Letting a known faulty AI decide if someone will have money for food tomorrow is way across the line. I'm not surprised that treating humans like cattle on their way to slaughter is hugely profitable. But I'm not sure we want to opera…

>Letting a known faulty AI decide if someone will have money for food tomorrow is way across the line. So is the implication here that humans are less faulty, or that there's something intrinsically wrong about an AI making this decision rather than a human? If the former, then this is an issue that the technology will probably eventually solve. If the latter, well... that doesn't seem very justifiable, to say the le…

I kinda agree. We also have the mounting pressure for getting unconscious bias out of the hiring process. It would seem if we think people are fired also for bias and unfair reasons that the ai would be the likely only way to save the situation.

Seems here with amazon we are quick to suggest humans are the best way but in nearly all other inclusion/diversity posts we are fighting against the humans being faulty.

Interesting problem for sure

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Dystopian Legacy Goes Far Beyond Amazon

#168

Post by turbinerneiter »

heurisko wrote: post #65

I am a fan of Amazon's digital products and devices (the Kindle e-reader, Fire TV), but have noticed I buy fewer and fewer physical products from Amazon. This is in part, because of ideological reasons, but also because other online shops offer a better service than Amazon, and are also reasonably priced. In particular, I dislike that it seems to me more and more products are sold by third party sellers. I don't mind…

I think Stripe is disturbing Amazon.

I used to order a lot of stuff from Amazon, because it was very convenient.

Now it's a mess of 3rd party resellers, when I search an item I drown in indistinguishable copies of copies.

In the other hand, there is small online shops or companies who have their own shops and sell directly. These sites just look better and you buy a specific brand or product.

Stripe (and similar providers and other developments) made ordering from random Webshops as convenient to me than going to Amazon.

It's like going to Apple, Bose, Levi's store instead of Walmart.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Dystopian Legacy Goes Far Beyond Amazon

#169

Post by whitepaint »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #155
TFYS wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is to go beyond a competition based society. No matter how good the people running these companies are or want to be, competition will force their hand to create things like this. If it's not them, it'll be someone else. I'm sure we could find a way to encourage innovation without this competitive system.

> The solution is to go beyond a competition based society. I'd frame the problem as follows: "Capitalism is a powerful tool, but fails as the sole guiding principles of a society's values. Christianity, a former enabler of pro-social norms on a massive scale, is dead. Wat do."

Are you suggesting that the problem lies in people losing faith in a god and in a church? Were people happier when they were more religious and when a church told them what's good and bad? And now we don't have that? And we should seek to replace it and the problems will lessen?
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