Every time I shop at Amazon I have a bad conscience about supporting such a worker-hostile company. Well the turnover they get from me has been well under 100 € / yr. for many years. And I have monthly AWS bill over $5 for some Lightsail stuff. Should move to some smaller player, but it's more work.
Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire
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Re: Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's both. The money supply grew enormously to fund the Corona shutdowns. You can see it clearly on a graph of M2. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WM2NS Such a fast increase in such a short amount of time is extremely unusual, perhaps unprecedented. There's nothing even remotely close to that instant increase since the dataset begins at the start of the 1980s. And then the COVID jump didn't only make a huge increa…
Since you seem to know your stuff, can you give me a slight tl;dr on the consequences of M1 and M2? M1 also shot way up: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL
Well, these are measures of the money supply. If the Fed "prints" money, then M1/M2 go up to reflect that. And they went up a lot. M2 went up by 40%, M1 it's harder to say because they adjusted the definition exactly at the time they started printing tons of stimulus money (what a coincidence). But it's definitely grown by a vast amount.
The consequences of money printing are extremely basic and well known since antiquity. You get both inflation and, less well discussed but more important, consequent distortion of production in the currency zone as resources are reallocated to wherever the newly printed money enters the economy. The Edict of Diocletian was an example of this from Roman times [1].
Unfortunately, in the last few years we've seen something very disturbing. Central bankers, who are theoretically chosen for their command of economics, have become delusional about this and started arguing that actually money printing doesn't create inflation at all [2]:
"But the current Fed chair, Jerome H. Powell, has dismissed claims that the Fed’s money-printing is fueling today’s price spiral, emphasizing instead the disruptions associated with reopening the economy. Like his most recent predecessors, dating to Alan Greenspan, Powell says that financial innovations mean there no longer is a link between the amount of money circulating in the economy and rising prices."
This is economic illiteracy and sets us on the path to absolute ruin. If it were true then after the economy had "re-opened" (whatever that means) we'd experience deflation as prices re-adjusted back to their pre-pandemic norms, but no such deflation will ever happen, because inflation is "always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon".[3]
In my view it's all a part of the same package of social phenomena you might call "government expertise failure". Anywhere you have the perception of expertise (whether justified or not), you create people who are incentivized to abuse that perception. Governments are filled with technocrats who claim to fully understand and control large systems, but their statements and beliefs seem to have been departing from what's actually correct at an ever higher rate. We are now all paying the price for their delusions at the checkout.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_on_Maximum_Prices
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/02/06/federal-r...
[3] https://www.heritage.org/budget-and-spending/heritage-explai...
Re: Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In what world does it make sense to pay your workers $20k (or whatever), so they can spend $20k on products that your company makes? A world where you're raising the floor so that everyone else's workers can also spend on the products your company makes.
...except that won't happen because supply/demand drives prices, not the inflated wages that you're paying. Your competitors will continue to pay their workers the usual wages, and laugh all the way to the bank with the extra money that they're not spending on wages, or undercut your prices.
Supply and demand also applies to the labour market. If you pay more, the best people want to work for you and you can hire the best people. Humans are not fungible, no matter how much businesses try to treat them that way.
Re: Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire
#324I heard a rumor that Amazon is flying people in from out of the country to work for $15hr. However, I did a search and cannot find any documentation on this. 22mins into this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1dBTcY8nvg
That person is not reputable, a fact that was easy to confirm in minutes just by googling their name and finding them peddling 'Obama's birth certificate is fake' nonsense as recently as 2 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJTmIDuCMFk&t=2s
Re: Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then every non bancrupt company would be exploiting the staff. The definition is no good.
true. why does that make it a bad definition? it is a material relationship, it is okay to call it accurately.
I'm not a native speaker, but to me exploitation has a negative moral connotation. I think it's possible for companies to make use of their employees to make a profit without exploiting them.
Re: Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
We’re also living in a volatile time. It might end up meaning a potential civil war is a lot more likely. Desperation creates extremism. I don’t think the US is prepared for the monster it may unleash.
Have you seen how obese we are? Only civil war happening will be for the last packet of Schezuan Sauce at Mcdonalds.
You don't have to be that fit to pull a trigger. Conversely, look at all the wars that continue to happen in places with severe food insecurity. In theory starving people shouldn't be able to fight, in practice those most willing to fight get enough of the limited food supply to keep fighting.
Re: Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your analysis overly simplifies the matter. For one, this assumes that there is a replacement solution available for the role the employee fills with a cost less than the cost of an employee. This is trivially falsifiable in the large majority of employment situations, if so you would see these solutions already being implemented in places with higher minimum wages. Businesses prefer making some amount $x over $0. So…
An employee that earns an employer $8 in revenue but gets paid $9 is a net loss of $1 to the employer. If x is -1 then $x is not better than $0. If the employer could raise prices and still be in business, then they would already be doing it. Same thing with lowering costs. As for employee efficiency, yes, if you're forced to pay someone $9 then you will want to get at least $9 out of them. That means you won't hire…
> This isn't a nuanced problem. If you raise the price of something, demand drops. Whether the price in question is for things or labor is irrelevant.
There's a little nuance.
Some anecdata: When I tried charging $0 to get my feet wet in consulting I had zero takers. Raising my hourly rate to $100 drastically improved my success rate (nothing else changed, I was still just some kid in high school with a knack for programming at the time).
The real world doesn't have perfect information and is more than happy to use imperfect signals to save time and effort (in any constant-bounded time that's provably required to hit any fixed desired epsilon of error). The price somebody is asking for is often enough a useful signal that demand need not be monotonic.
Re: Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire
#328This is specifically in reference to warehouse workers, not the tech side of things. Though I've heard from many recently ex-Amazon engineers that they're having real trouble recruiting engineers now too
From what I have heard, they are a terrible company to work for (even for SWE). I could be wrong but that reputation alone has made me ignore most job postings and recruiters reaching out. Even if they could offer me a 20+% pay rise.
I've heard mediocre feedback about their research groups as well, although they do pay pretty well.
Re: Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire
#329> Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos saw his warehouse workforce as necessary but replaceable, and feared that workers who remained at the company too long would turn complacent or, worse, disgruntled, according to reporting by the New York Times. Wow. Think about what this is really saying: Amazon adopts the explicit policy of not wanting their workers to stay on long enough to figure out that they are getting…
This is not unusual at all.
My first job as a developer was with a big consulting firm. Undergraduate seniors were hired en masse every year as entry-level staff consultants. The expectation (not stated, but not hard to figure out) was that many would leave within a few years. Some would remain and get promoted, even fewer would stick around long enough to be considered for partnership.
The work hours were long (50 hour weeks normal, more was not unusual) but the pay was good and it was good experience to cite when applying for other jobs.
Amazon warehouse work is not a career. It's a job, that has minimal if any prerequisite skills other than being strong enough to move boxes around. It's not the sort of thing someone does for a lifetime.
Re: Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
i mean, if Amazon is getting more out of the worker than it costs to keep them around, that's by definition exploitation. it's silly to avoid the word, it's purely material. how you feel about it is up to you, but the more it sucks for the worker the less they'll like it. it's important that for most people, "voluntary" in this situation involves the threat of fairly immediate homelessness, hunger, and family separat…
It's not, and the entire reason why markets exist is because two people can walk away from a trade better-off than they were before. It's exploitation if Amazon is tricking workers into working for less than their time is worth, or if Amazon is breaking labor laws. "Voluntary" means that out of the incredible number of open job postings these days, workers picked Amazon's. Acting like the alternative to Amazon is hom…
sure. if the relationship was 100% downside it would be hard to convince anyone to do it. everyone understands this. of course there is an element of choice.
but you are underestimating how immediate and real the threat of homelessness appears to the class of people who work warehouse jobs.
>It's exploitation if Amazon is tricking workers into working for less than their time is worth, or if Amazon is breaking labor laws.
these are both literally happening.
if Amazon wasn't getting more utility and value out of their resources than they spent, Amazon would not be profitable. it is okay to call that exploitation. it doesn't require tricking anyone.
as for labor laws, that's still under litigation, but the NLRB agrees.