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Amazon hid its safety crisis

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Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#51

Post by [deleted] »

HenryKissinger wrote: post #43
buildbot wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, I got counterfeit parts for my 3d printer that resulted in it need a lot of repair, and fighting with Amazon only got them to pay half the cost of the repair...It's the last thing I'll order from them for sure. Canceling prime, just done with them.

Some guy below you: > I work at Amazon, we are hiring all the top ML people to work on this problem. Legions of ML PhDs. It doesn't take legions of PhDs in machine learning to fix a basic counterfeit problem on a glorified online shopping store.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#52

Post by heavyset_go »

HenryKissinger wrote: post #43
buildbot wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, I got counterfeit parts for my 3d printer that resulted in it need a lot of repair, and fighting with Amazon only got them to pay half the cost of the repair...It's the last thing I'll order from them for sure. Canceling prime, just done with them.

Some guy below you: > I work at Amazon, we are hiring all the top ML people to work on this problem. Legions of ML PhDs. It doesn't take legions of PhDs in machine learning to fix a basic counterfeit problem on a glorified online shopping store.

Amazon doesn't even let their customers choose the correct reason for returns when they receive counterfeit items. Instead of being able to choose "This item is a counterfeit" or "I believe this item is a counterfeit", the customer must choose between reasons for their return that aren't entirely accurate, like "Inaccurate website description" or "Item defective or doesn't work".

You'd think that a company that claims it is throwing vast amounts of resources at stopping counterfeiting on their platform would at least try to collect data on the counterfeits their customers receive.

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#53

Post by reaperducer »

ColanR wrote: post #16
Judgmentality wrote: post #10

> Jeff Bezos’ 14 leadership principles are famous inside and outside Amazon for vividly articulating what is expected of the company’s leaders. The first is customer obsession. “Leaders start with the customer and work backwards,” it reads. And yet Amazon has no real interest in solving its counterfeit problem, the same way it has no real interest in solving its safety problem. I feel like it's all PR and bullshit at…

> And yet Amazon has no real interest in solving its counterfeit problem I don't get this Amazon hate. Weren't they the ones who originally came up with the idea for putting purchaser reviews with the product, and the 5-star rating system? It seems like their solution was to 'crowdsource' the problem. Now people have learned to game the system, but I buy plenty of electronics from amazon and from ebay, and I'm carefu…

purchaser reviews with the product

No. Companies have been doing this for as long as there has been advertising and mail-order catalogs. Did Amazon do it on the web first? Unlikely, but cannot be proven.

and the 5-star rating system

Also unlikely. The five-star system has been around for at least a century. In digital form, I had it on one of the first web sites I built, around the same time that Amazon.com launched, and even that was cribbed from online review systems that existed before the web.

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#54

Post by reaperducer »

ColanR wrote: post #37
coldtea wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Weren't they the ones who originally came up with the idea for putting purchaser reviews with the product, and the 5-star rating system? Were they? I doubt it...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2009-10-15/amazon-tu... It doesn't say if they were the first, but it looks like they were at least one of the first. Edit: yep, Bloomberg says they were the first to do it.

Maybe first on the web, but not the first online.

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#55

Post by nobody9999 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #25
Animats wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The robots were too efficient. They could bring items so quickly that the productivity expectations for workers more than doubled Here's an old Kiva Robotics video that shows how picking works.[1] It's an utterly mindless job. An automated laser pointer points to the bin from which to take an object. A lighted button shows which box to put it in. A new bin then moves into position, and this goes on. Training time req…

This is why I see capitalism eventually failing. On one hand, I think it's great that these mind-numbingly boring jobs can be automated away. On the other hand, the end result is that more profits go to Amazon, while many more people have fewer opportunities to participate in the economy. For the old predictable arguments of "Well, these people can do something else, do you expect buggy whip makers to still be around…

>all the benefits of capitalism go to very few people while huge swaths of people are made "redundant".

While that's true, it's only true from a short to medium-term perspective.

In the US at least (perhaps some folks from elsewhere can chime in on this), nearly 70% of GDP is consumer spending.

As you automate away jobs, that leaves fewer people with money to spend. The very wealthy, while certainly able to consume vastly more than others, can't make up for this.

Mostly because there's a limit on how many pairs of pants, skirts, socks, sofas, T-bone steaks, homes, cars, half-caf soy lattes, etc., etc., etc. that one person or household can reasonably use.

If current trends continue, eventually there won't be enough demand to satisfy the levels of production over the long-term -- which will cause the economy to crash and burn.

As such, creating incentives to raise wages, employ more people and encouraging real investment by the wealthiest, rather than incentivizing the hoarding of financial resources, could ensure a vibrant economy for the long-term -- with benefits to everyone, including the very wealthy.

Yes, it will mean that someone whose net worth could be hundreds of millions may only be tens of millions, but from the standpoint of living a good life, how would that make a material difference?

Please note that I am emphatically not advocating for "forced wealth redistribution" or "nationalization of private industry."

Rather, I'm suggesting that changing the incentives WRT wages, taxes and jobs in a capitalist system could have a profound positive effect in the near, medium and long-term on those with the least, and a profound positive effect on those with the most in the long-term.

In fact, creating incentives to inject more consumer spending (through higher wages, incentives to innovate and engage in entrepreneurial activities, disincentives to using arbitrage and financial chicanery to increase wealth, etc.) is a market-based way to bolster the strength of the economy for the long-term, increase the consumer power of those with the least and ensure the long-term growth and stability of our economy and society.

Let's do capitalism right and create a better world for all of us.

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#56

Post by wyxuan »

ColanR wrote: post #16
Judgmentality wrote: post #10

> Jeff Bezos’ 14 leadership principles are famous inside and outside Amazon for vividly articulating what is expected of the company’s leaders. The first is customer obsession. “Leaders start with the customer and work backwards,” it reads. And yet Amazon has no real interest in solving its counterfeit problem, the same way it has no real interest in solving its safety problem. I feel like it's all PR and bullshit at…

> And yet Amazon has no real interest in solving its counterfeit problem I don't get this Amazon hate. Weren't they the ones who originally came up with the idea for putting purchaser reviews with the product, and the 5-star rating system? It seems like their solution was to 'crowdsource' the problem. Now people have learned to game the system, but I buy plenty of electronics from amazon and from ebay, and I'm carefu…

Oh gosh, the purchaser reviews are even worse. Either they're for a different product, or as I found out when I ordered a pair of earbuds and found a small leaflet claiming to provide a free gift card for a 5 star review, paid for.

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#57

Post by djsumdog »

reaperducer wrote: post #49
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I see capitalism eventually failing. On one hand, I think it's great that these mind-numbingly boring jobs can be automated away. On the other hand, the end result is that more profits go to Amazon, while many more people have fewer opportunities to participate in the economy. For the old predictable arguments of "Well, these people can do something else, do you expect buggy whip makers to still be around…

The response to this is usually, "Well, then people should be retrained." It's kind of an elitist, SV bubble trope at this point. There are millions of people who simply cannot be retrained. Yes, pick-and-pack is mind-numbingly boring for many people. But for others, it's good. Or even challenging. I've worked on an assembly line three times in my life. I found it tedious and pointless, and to keep my mind busy, I mo…

I think we'll see more low/mid scaled jobs. Capitalism is about continually innovating. The problems of course, are the finite set of resources, and the fact that you can't have infinite growth.

We need to businesses around reuse and recycling. We need a ton of people who can find new ways to disassemble and dismal complicated parts, quickly, so they can be turned into new resources; so we're not shipping all our e-waste to kids in Africa who get heavy metal poisoning for a little bit of copper or lead.

There are lots of things that still need innovation. You throw UBI and people, and you won't get that.

UBI would work if we didn't have resource scarcity. We do not have Star Trek style replicators. We are far from being scarcity free.

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#58

Post by programd »

Animats wrote: post #8
Aperocky wrote: post #4

> The robots were too efficient. They could bring items so quickly that the productivity expectations for workers more than doubled, according to a former senior operations manager who saw the transformation. And they kept climbing. At the most common kind of warehouse, workers called pickers – who previously had to grab and scan about 100 items an hour – were expected to hit rates of up to 400 an hour at robotic ful…

The robots were too efficient. They could bring items so quickly that the productivity expectations for workers more than doubled Here's an old Kiva Robotics video that shows how picking works.[1] It's an utterly mindless job. An automated laser pointer points to the bin from which to take an object. A lighted button shows which box to put it in. A new bin then moves into position, and this goes on. Training time req…

THe Kiva video is not state-of-the-art I think. Check out this automated grocery warehouse, something right out of Factorio:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKrcpa8Z_E

Humans would just get in the way and get mangled.

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#59

Post by Klinky »

Aperocky wrote: post #23
Klinky wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, until it's fully automated, human safety is still important. I think the problem we have is that destroying a human body with mindless repetitive tasks is often still "cheaper" than engineering an automated solutions. It is simply cheaper to feed off desperation than to value human lives, and there is the engrained notion that humanity cannot be productive without putting humans into positions of desperation. T…

When I was a graduate student, the lab next door was working on robotic arms and picking challenges, their PhD grad was then hired by... Amazon. I don't think it's cheaper, it's just that a solution has yet to exist. Once it start working, it will go out at breakneck pace.

I'd imagine hiring PhDs to work on hard problems is not cheap, and I doubt Amazon would invest unless they believed that the long-term investment would result in a cheaper outcome than what they have now. The problem is that human labor has been so cheap that automation is often not even worth any R&D effort for most companies. If human labor cost more, this would cause more impetus upstream to find automated solutions.

Also the burger-flipping robot and self-driving car have been just around the corner for the last two decades. Although the end solution to those issues may very well be that we need to stop eating so many burgers and stop designing cities around cars, rather than robots coming in to allow even more consumption.

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#60

Post by Analemma_ »

reaperducer wrote: post #49
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I see capitalism eventually failing. On one hand, I think it's great that these mind-numbingly boring jobs can be automated away. On the other hand, the end result is that more profits go to Amazon, while many more people have fewer opportunities to participate in the economy. For the old predictable arguments of "Well, these people can do something else, do you expect buggy whip makers to still be around…

The response to this is usually, "Well, then people should be retrained." It's kind of an elitist, SV bubble trope at this point. There are millions of people who simply cannot be retrained. Yes, pick-and-pack is mind-numbingly boring for many people. But for others, it's good. Or even challenging. I've worked on an assembly line three times in my life. I found it tedious and pointless, and to keep my mind busy, I mo…

> It's kind of an elitist, SV bubble trope at this point.

I agree with the "elitist" part but not the "SV" part. "Well, they'll just get retraining" has been the orthodox economist's standard dismissal of any and all concerns related to automation and/or globalization for decades, long before Silicon Valley became economically or culturally influential. In fact, SV is more likely to support UBI, which is still a handwavy way-too-hopeful solution, but it's a step in the right direction.

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