441–450 of 475 posts
One of the reasons I hesitate to use Amazon Now is that big "suggested tip" field. I don't tip the UPS delivery person, why should I tip my Amazon Now delivery person? What's been the norm for you all?
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Most people are smart enough to understand the significant categorical differences between an ice cream stain and cigarette smoke. Also, "foul" is completely subjective in this case. Guess what: I hate the plasticy/industrial smell of certain types of clothing packages. But I'm not gonna go around claiming the item is "damaged" simply because I don't like the way it smells out of the box.
What is the categorical difference between an ice cream stain and cigarette smoke? Because I honestly don't understand what distinction you're trying to make.
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> I think most people would be perfectly happy to walk to the street Then it's a worse service and you might as well to the local post office if that's the case.
It depends on the kind of housing and street layout. If you're in suburbia, walking to your street vs walking to your front door is a difference of 20 feet. Also note that for many neighborhoods in the US, picking up the mail is a PITA - there's a collective mail box somewhere in the neighborhood that you need to walk to, usually a several minute walk. Door-to-door mail delivery only exists for houses that are severa…
Amazon is a global company and they would need to address the local differences everywhere.
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Inequality is bullshit. Inequality even starts at birth, what are you going to do about that? the only remedy to inequality as a whole is a Communist Paradise, and God we know that people do not like the idea of everyone being as equally poor as everyone else. Inequality, again, does not matter as long as everyone gets richer, including the poorer ones. Which has been the case. Mass starvations have stopped around th…
History has shown time and time again that societies can only survive if the difference between the rich and poor stays within certain bounds. The French revolution didn't happen because people were thrilled by the prospects of a democratic system. It happened because the difference between the aristocracy and the peasants grew so large that a few years with a poor harvest were reason enough to topple the whole state…
Pff, looks like you have no idea what you are talking about. Disclaimer, I'm French and what happened is nowhere as simple as you make it sound like. '
> If a society wants to survive and remain stable some of the benefits rich people have must also be accessible to the general public (for example health care and education)
The poor people have never had as MUCH opportunity as NOW to get education and health care compared to the previous centuries before us. Wake up, seriously.
> otherwise social unrest is inevitable (remember occupy wall street?).
Yeah looks like OWS changed a lot of things : a bunch of hipsters camping in NY with no real agenda, big deal.
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> Wealth redistribution Well you spelled it, you need a communist like system to do that (i.e. take money through taxes, redistribute it through massive inefficiencies, and make sure politicians get their hefty share when the money flows). Inequality is a false problem. It's a problem if people get poorer, but all indicators for the past 50 years show that everyone is getting richer, while rich ones are getting riche…
> redistribute it through massive inefficiencies Actually, if a state does any welfare , it probably has this problem already. Basic income offers significant reductions in those inefficiencies by simplifying the process of selecting eligible people (and retiring the required bureaucracy). > and make sure politicians get their hefty share when the money flows That you have under every system, from despotism to social…
Never been proven that UBI would reduce the inefficiencies. The State find ways to be inefficient even when it's not supposed to be.
> That you have under every system, from despotism to socialism to capitalist democracy.
Nope, if you did not have a Big government doing wealth redistribution in the first place you would not have much money being lost in such transactions because the flow would be very limited. Look at the US Federal budget, how humongous it has become.
> Inequality will be a false problem when the bottom level of society won't be starving to death or due to lack of basic health care.
Oh come on. Mass starvation is a thing of the past, check Wikipedia, the last starvations happened more than 30 years ago and the only recent ones are due to conflicts mainly - poor people do not die anymore of hunger anywhere - we have large amounts of excess food, even in the poorest places of the world, like the countrysides of China.
> Again, basic income proposes turning inequality into a non-problem by securing a decent, humane minimum level for everyone.
The advocates of UBI fail to understand that by raising the minimum earnings to everyone, you will probably make prices go up everywhere (increased taxes + prices adjustments based on purchasing power) so it won't result in any meaningful difference.
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It's actually a pretty good example because bread making can be completely automatized starting from ingredients mixing, to baking, packing and delivery to your supermarket. yet bakers do not disappear. What's not valid about this example?
> yet bakers do not disappear. What's not valid about this example? They transform. "Bakeries" become just a pick-up point, where you buy bread that was baked in scale (probably in industrial ovens) and delivered to the store. Bakery employees nowadays have less to do with baking than McDonald's employees with frying fries (they still do something to them).
Q: Where can I deliver with Amazon Flex? A: Amazon Flex is available now in Seattle. It will be available soon in New York, Baltimore, Miami, Dallas, Austin, Chicago, Indianapolis, Atlanta and Portland. Smart move by Amazon to refrain from making any Bay-area city one of its test markets. It's like Amazon is saying "we don't need to prove this will work in the bubble; let's base our test data set on realistic markets…
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The owner taking their tips is punishing the driver. It's not my responsibility to insulate the driver from that. I am paying a surcharge for delivery. That's reasonable. If the driver doesn't get the cut of that he feels he deserves, he can work somewhere else.
...said someone who has obviously never worked for tips.
I don't like tipping, I do it when I'm in the US because it is a norm but overall it feels like a scam; as I don't get any better service or quality than anywhere else in the world where the wait staff gets a decent wage.
I get the feeling lots of tip workers hide behind the argument that they "don't get paid enough" because they simply make more money that way. Meanwhile, kitchen staff generally work harder and longer hours and don't often get their share.
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> Wealth redistribution Well you spelled it, you need a communist like system to do that (i.e. take money through taxes, redistribute it through massive inefficiencies, and make sure politicians get their hefty share when the money flows). Inequality is a false problem. It's a problem if people get poorer, but all indicators for the past 50 years show that everyone is getting richer, while rich ones are getting riche…
Got some sources on the 'everyone getting richer' claim? I have never seen a single statistic suggesting that, after accounting for factors such as inflation... maybe I have some selection bias, but everything I have read shows that the middle class has gotten steadily poorer over the last 30 years or so. Also, not every form of redistribution is automatically 'communist'... I don't see many people who advocate basic…
Then you are not looking very hard:
http://ourworldindata.org/data/growth-and-distribution-of-pr...
> Also, not every form of redistribution is automatically 'communist'...
Well UBI is a welfare kind of policy and needs basically a strong State to actually work in practice. Most strong States lean towards socialism and communism because they justify their existence this way ("if we were not there, you would not have welfare, so let us increase the government budget size further") - a common trope to get folks elected.
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I have not seen many robots which can walk stairs without falling at 99.99% confidence yet for door-to-door delivery. Investment of the systems you mention are high-investment, not worth it vs the cost of a human operator per hour. this may change as new buildings are being built with such facilities in mind, but I have not heard of anything like that yet. So human deliveries have a pretty good future for the time be…
There's a reason blocks of flats have mailboxes on the ground floor. I predict we'll see a rise of better, automated mailboxes, probably loaded from outside. After solving self-driving there is zero reason to employ a human - are companies really going to keep paying decent salary to dead weight that is occasionally useful to go up the stairs? I don't think so.
Probably, but then it will take time, again.