I don't know where to put this in the comments, but I wanted to say that a lot of stuff on Amazon is not cheaper than at your local retailer. Especially the kind of stuff you'd get at a grocery store or pharmacy. Most of the times when I price something out, Amazon is 30-50% more expensive, which makes sense given the shipping costs involved. So you are paying for that convenience and selection.
1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee
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Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee
#392I’m not sure why everyone continually romanticizes brick and mortar retail. Its terribly inefficient, and wasteful of time, energy, space etc. Think of all the Walmart, Dicks, Big Lots parking lots and strip malls that could be converted into better space. Think of how much waste there is when you have to pack, unpack, stage and repack merchandise. Amazon’s distribution is a superior business model which is why it is…
Amazon is putting in a new warehouse near where I live. They bought up farm land and are converting into a crazy large building that spans the distance between to major roads. Its going to impact traffic on both of those roads, construction already has. We'll probably need a bigger bridge on one of those roads too. It will also have a huge parking lot for the people that will work there. This building is bigger than…
>Its going to impact traffic on both of those roads, construction already has.
You think that big box stores and/or malls don't impact traffic on nearby roads?
Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee
#393I’m torn badly with Amazon. After read The Everything Store, and what has been written all over the place, Jeff Bezos is a massive turd. Employees are horribly treated, wages suppressed, and all sorts of terrible and abusive practices. Then it comes time for me to buy something. I needed a new pair of size 14 sneakers. I drove to Adidas, Footlocker, dicks, and a few other stores but I just couldn’t justify $100 sneak…
A company hiring near 1% of the workforce is not suppressing wages, it is a massive demand for wages.
Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
The vast majority of those other workers won’t be flexible enough to be able to just drop and work for Amazon. This is a problem inherent to neoliberalism, you’re right, I’m just not sure I’d agree that it requires a nation state level shift in politics to make Amazon pay their fare share in taxes and wages.
Are there no federal corporate taxes? Or would the US be discluded since it's not a nation state?
With the correct arrangement of holding companies, etc… in various countries around the world, corporations usually get away with paying virtually no taxes themselves. They might have to collect local sales taxes or some such, but going through Ireland, the Netherlands, and various other tax havens, the company itself pays effectively no taxes.
And that’s assuming they choose to make a profit. Amazon intentionally makes virtually no “profit”, because they take the revenue that would otherwise have become “profit” and spend it in a way that counts as “re-investing”.
So, Amazon shows billions and billions of dollars of revenue, but relatively little profit. And it’s only profit that would get taxed at the federal level.
Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee
#395I’m torn badly with Amazon. After read The Everything Store, and what has been written all over the place, Jeff Bezos is a massive turd. Employees are horribly treated, wages suppressed, and all sorts of terrible and abusive practices. Then it comes time for me to buy something. I needed a new pair of size 14 sneakers. I drove to Adidas, Footlocker, dicks, and a few other stores but I just couldn’t justify $100 sneak…
Amazon is Amazon because they didn't let size dull their edge. Unfortunately, that cuts both ways. There are a lot of ways to be exploitive, to your and your customers' benefits, when you're a $113 B revenue/quarter company, that simply aren't available when you're a startup. Hell, Walmart pioneered the "How'd you like to sell in our stores?" + "You need to reduce prices, or it'd be a shame if we, your biggest custom…
I don't want a return to having to go to a million little overpriced stores sending me stuff with 2+ weeks shipping in the name of competition. Seems like Wal Mart is gearing up to compete with Amazon anyway.
The only government responses we need here are better labor laws and maybe a few tax code changes.
Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we still don't have a robot that can take out the trash Because it's hard to justify the $$$ on a robot to automate a job that takes 30 seconds once a week. Modern people don't realize it, but an awful lot of household drudgery has been automated. I'm old enough to remember life before the microwave. What a marvelous time saver that is! You can even buy one from the thrift store for $10. I remember them being $1000…
Yeah, I'm old enough to remember that era, too. My first encounter with a microwave was at far Bob's in Pasadena. Finals had just ended at Cal Tech and I walked to far Bob's to decompress. I had no knowledge of microwave ovens. I ordered a piece of cherry pie. Waitress decided to warm it without telling me, using their then-new microwave oven. The plate was ice cold when she passed it to me. When I bit into a piece o…
Nice to see a fellow techer here!
The fastest tech revolution I ever saw was in the fall of '75, when I was a frosh. At the beginning of the semester, the Caltech bookstore had slide rules for $125. By December, they were on closeout for $5. Never saw them again. The calculators had arrived!
Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
Um the pentagon didn't have the world's largest supercomputer, and neither did walmart. walmart wouldn't buy a supercomputer to do logistics, as supercomputers are super expensive for modest speed improvements and you didn't need them to do supply chain optimization, and anyway, product tracking is a DB problem, not a supercomputer problem. What's sad is that there probably is some interesting IT story behind Walmart…
In this context it sounds like supercomputer would more analogous to mainframe.
In 1985, they did have mainframes at the Pentagon. But they dated from the 1960s.
My first job out of college in 1989 was to go to work in the basement of The Pentagon for the Defense Communications Agency, as an Analyst/Terminal Operator for those old pre-Multics Honeywell WWMCCS mainframes. One of my first jobs there was to help modernized the classified Airfields database from COBOL 66 to COBOL 77.
At the beginning, we used glass tty terminals that were wrapped in faraday cages, and all local printing was done via a screen print function to local thermal paper printers. We could use the line printers, but those were not directly accessible to us, and we had to go up to the Operator window to ask for our output.
They later upgraded the terminals to EMF-hardened IBM PC XT computers with removable 5GB hard drives, known as WIS-CUC terminals. That was like 1991. Note that this was PC XT technology from like 1984, not PC AT.
The unclassified PC AT type computers we used outside of the classified environments probably had more RAM, larger hard drives, and more I/O capacity than those ancient Honeywell mainframes.
So, no, there weren’t any supercomputers at the Pentagon in 1985.
Now, if you want to talk about NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, then that’s a different story.
Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
Um the pentagon didn't have the world's largest supercomputer, and neither did walmart. walmart wouldn't buy a supercomputer to do logistics, as supercomputers are super expensive for modest speed improvements and you didn't need them to do supply chain optimization, and anyway, product tracking is a DB problem, not a supercomputer problem. What's sad is that there probably is some interesting IT story behind Walmart…
It would be funny if everyone thinks they used this sophisticated technology or supercomputer when in reality it was just someone with an excel workbook at ton of vba code /s
An Excel spreadsheet with VBA would have been a huge improvement. I figure the Pentagon probably did that about twenty years later.
Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee
#399This couldn't possibly have negative consequences.
Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One solution can be for a union, government, Amazon etc, is to put aside money for a fund that will invest in training these employees so they could one day not depend on these kind of low-leverage jobs. Unions have negotiated with companies that outsource or automate its members' jobs to secure compensation for the workers who were affected. However, I think this is a problem that requires a larger solution. There…
> We're heading towards a world where most work is done by machines, and only a handful of people will own, control and profit from them People keep saying that but we are no closer than we were 50 years ago. A lot of jobs have been replaced but new jobs have been created and society has absorbed the increased productivity (cheaper goods, foods, and much more complex high end goods (iPhone, airplanes, etc).
Yep. Back in the hand-written letter days people must have thought “think how much time we would save if all this was automated and letters were delivered instantly!” Nope. We just send 10x more.