I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

Post by onemoreact » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 2:59 PM UTC

chii wrote: post #110

kijin wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there are two different issues at hand: 1) Will there ever come a day when people can produce value merely by living? That really depends on what "value" is, and as you said, the standards of the day may differ from ours. Under some circumstances, merely being a consumer might be enough to contribute to some overall good. If energy becomes cheap enough, even a tiny benefit might be enough to offset a person's e…

1) I dont believe being a "consumer" can by itself have any value 2) The real question is, whether the left over capacity could be put to better use, instead of keeping alive those not pulling their weight (when they could've). Would science and tech be that much more advanced because there'd be money to put into research and development? Would infrastructure be better because money isn't "wasted" on people who other…

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 3:02 PM UTC

ars wrote: post #130

scarmig wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's assume that you would need 1000 machines to have as much throughput as 4000 people. WAG, but I'd wager that each of those machines would cost $500k. That means 100 million in immediate outlays. WAG 2: fuel/electricity/maintenance is $200/month, and you need a team of 20 engineers to watch over them at $10k/engineer/month. So recurring costs come to $400k. Which brings us to: 100M/1.3M = 77 months, or between 6…

> Let's assume that you would need 1000 machines to have as much throughput as 4000 people. I think your assumption is way off. For one each machine works 3 times as long as a person (24 hours a day vs 8).

Post by cdzombak » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 3:10 PM UTC

roel_v wrote: post #165

potatolicious wrote: post #37

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Diapers is not a seasonal business. The problem with full automation is that your capacity has to be whatever peak load is - and peak load can be two orders of magnitude above your normal steady-state. That's a lot of robots sitting around doing nothing, whereas manual labor can be just as seasonal as the demand they are meant to fulfill.

Only if everybody has their own warehouse. Why would you want that though? It would be better to rent WaaS (Warehousing as a Service - you heard it here first folks) so that specialized companies can have warehouses build right next to the harbor the goods came in from, and spread load across many completely automated warehouses are required. In December store Santa hats, in July swimming trunks. As a seller you don'…

Post by ficho » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 3:46 PM UTC

temphn wrote: post #11

lukifer wrote: post #6

These conditions aren't unique to warehouse jobs; the customer call-center industry is similar in many ways. Time is tracked down to the second, you are being recorded and/or monitored at all times, tardiness and absenteeism are ruthlessly enforced with no excuses, and there is relentless pressure to "hit your numbers", which are often nearly impossible. And of course, you're still expected to "always put the custome…

> costs of corporate capitalism But under non-capitalist systems such as in the USSR you were machine gunned or bayoneted for refusing to work (starting with the Kronstadt Rebellion and ending with Solidarity), and had no option to quit or leave the country. Capitalism hasn't yet completely eradicated all drudgery from the world, but Mother Jones isn't about to acknowledge that it's better that 4000 marginal workers…

Post by rsheridan6 » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 4:15 PM UTC

chii wrote: post #77

kijin wrote: post #70

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Machines have been replacing jobs for over 200 years now, but I don't think there's been a huge increase in unemployment over that period. We've always managed to invent more meaningless and repetitious tasks for ourselves to do. One might say that most office jobs nowadays are like that, too. Factories replaced farms, cubicles replaced factories. But usually this happened over generations, so people had a chance to…

"we might finally get a chance to rethink the age-old rule that a person must work in order to survive." i m a stern believer that people has to produce value. And until a person can produce value merely by living, people will have to work to survive. Value right now is measured by money, and money has a limited capability in measuring things that are very subjective (how do you measure the value a nice person brings…