541–550 of 769 posts
Can we start a list of technological magic that is actually "1000 people in India watching and labeling videos" (or functional equivalent)?
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Lots of services would be phenomenal when you can offload much of the cost to run them to cheap offshore labor. Remember how great Uber and Doordash were when much of the cost of operating was offset by underpaid workers and VC funds? Now that they don't have unlimited piles of money and cities/states are making them pay more fair wages, the cost-benefit of those services has diminished. I was ok paying $5 for $20 of…
"Underpaid" and "fair" is a modern political myth, except in the instances when there is a concerted effort to undermine the semi-natural labor market. Pay will never be enough, as a point of fact. It will always be "underpaid" and "unfair" in discussion. As this is an immortal pressure and negotiating tactic. It is incentivized, and therefore we will get more of it. That works both ways, but at some point there has…
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The local Starbucks over the years has had many turnovers in the staff. It usually takes about 3 days for a new worker to learn the job. That makes it unskilled labor. Skilled labor is something like welding, where it can take a year to get good at it. Or things that require calculus, which take 4 years of specialized training to even get an entry job at it. Or flying an airplane - you can't just flip through the ins…
It usually takes about 3 days for a new worker to learn the job. Starbucks hires juniors and trains them to be good baristas. That takes a long time. Just because someone is able to work a coffee machine after a few days doesn't mean they're not skilled eventually. Your argument is like saying 'it only takes a few days for junior devs to be onboarded, so there's no real value in senior devs'.
It doesn’t take a phd to make a coffee, no matter how fancy the cinnamon/cocoa heart is.
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Lots of services would be phenomenal when you can offload much of the cost to run them to cheap offshore labor. Remember how great Uber and Doordash were when much of the cost of operating was offset by underpaid workers and VC funds? Now that they don't have unlimited piles of money and cities/states are making them pay more fair wages, the cost-benefit of those services has diminished. I was ok paying $5 for $20 of…
Fair warning to all who come after - the children comment for a decent distance below are a battle based on correct/ incorrect/ technical/ personal definitions of skilled labor.
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Target allegedly has such good video capabilities they can recognize repeat thieves, keep a record of what they steal, and wait until it reaches felony level after multiple trips before they flag a person to be detained. All in super duper high definition.
All that money down the drain now that people just wear hoodies and facemasks to shoplift
This is pretty sad to read. Before Covid, the Amazon Go store experience was phenomenal. All the convenience of a 7-Eleven but with the pricing of a normal grocery store. The food options were really good and the BlueApron style meal-kits were amazing. The Alexa integration was also nice for being able to just verbally ask what's the next step on a recipe while you're busy stirring or chopping things. When it rolled…
I'm glad it's gone for good, if the process really works like how it's described in the article. Thousands of poor souls doing terrible pointless menial work just so that a few entitled customers can avoid the clunky self checkout (eww- the horror!). The entitlement of the west has no bounds really.
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That's just playing with words. Putting Gordon Ramsay in the same bucket as "burger flipper" makes as much sense as putting Linus Torvalds in the same bucket as "keyboard monkey".
Perspective actually. And what you perceive to be value.
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These are the worst quality-wise. Yes, you can write a review if something went really bad. But not having customers right there who can complain and might even get an extra or a replacement gives less incentive to keep quality up. "Specialising" in everything, pizza-burger-kebab-china, is also likely a warning sign.
> But not having customers right there who can complain and might even get an extra or a replacement gives less incentive to keep quality up. This is a super good point. I didn't think about that.
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Regular grocery stores have really gone downhill as well. Whenever I shop, there’s at most 1 cashier doing checkout and usually 0 (only self-checkout being open). I consider myself pretty proficient about knowing what sets off the machine but still set it off 60% of the time (about some weight imbalance etc) that requires an attendant to come fix manually. I’ve gotten to dread the grocery store trips as they require…
I live in Western Europe and the self checkouts don’t have scales, except for weighing produce, and even for buying alcohol, they trust you to say you’re over 16. It’s always fast because you wait in one line for 4-8 self checkouts and take the first free one. On the other hand, using the cashier is often frustrating. You have to self-bag anyway and the cashier won’t start scanning your items until the person in fron…
- I never have to weigh anything except produce
- I rarely have to wait on an attendant except for something like spray paint
- I rarely have been to a store with absolutely zero cashiers, especially for a grocery store
- Usually the cashier will bag for me
I’ve had similar experiences whether I’m in an urban part of LA or some rich Orange County suburb.
My only two complaints are (1) finding parking at like a Trader’s Joes or Tokyo Central and (2) when the store is super busy, there are a bunch of cashiers, and yet there are still long lines
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Thanks for that Edit: On thinking about this tangent, it seems that if global regulation is the only solution, it would make sense to enforce regulation from the ship building side (in western countries), rather than the wrecking side (in developing countries) which will only displace the bad practices to less scrupulous countries. A solution might be sizable amount of money that had to be paid to escrow that could n…
Globalization was largely a response to environmental movements in the U.S. We offshored our pollution generation.