Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a weird take. Cheap wages? Both of your examples paid decent wages, especially in the example of Uber. It was just an unprofitable business model subsidized by VC money or Amazon corporate profits. That sounds like a good thing?
It's bad because it redirects human effort into wasteful activity. Same season communisr central planning is bad.
Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
561–570 of 769 posts
Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
#562this might be my first comment here heh. i've worked on a similar product before. there's no way they were turning a profit. they definitely missed stuff all the time even with a ton of sensors. and sensors aren't the only cost. annotation is by far the most costly operational expense. new product? needs several annotated photos and recalibrated weight sensors. merchant decides to put Christmas branding on the same U…
Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
#563I think this is funny. I worked on this team at Amazon for two years after successfully building an app similar to Dash Cart for another company using Elixir (which is still going). I repeatedly tried to convince Amazon to do Just Walk Out differently, but their toxic culture wouldn't hear of it. I got bored with the project (and a little disgruntled, to be honest) and left after my signing bonus ended. I guess it is…
Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
#564this might be my first comment here heh. i've worked on a similar product before. there's no way they were turning a profit. they definitely missed stuff all the time even with a ton of sensors. and sensors aren't the only cost. annotation is by far the most costly operational expense. new product? needs several annotated photos and recalibrated weight sensors. merchant decides to put Christmas branding on the same U…
If you read the article, it was powered by 1000 cashiers in India, no sensors.
> Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts.
> According to The Information, 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022. This widely missed Amazon’s internal goals of reaching less than 50 reviews per 1,000 sales. Amazon called this characterization inaccurate, and disputes how many purchases require reviews.
> “The primary role of our Machine Learning data associates is to annotate video images, which is necessary for continuously improving the underlying machine learning model powering,” said an Amazon spokesperson to Gizmodo. However, the spokesperson acknowledged these associates validate “a small minority” of shopping visits when AI can’t determine a purchase.
The article is kind of all over the place, but it sounds like there were lots of sensors and also lots of human intervention.
Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
#565Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
#566Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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…
> Pay will never be enough, as a point of fact can you explain this a bit further please? also, what's the storm that's coming?
If I pay a worker $20 per hour to make 20 doodads an hour in my doodad factory and then sell those doodads for $5 a piece, I make $5 for every $1 pay my worker. Of course that extra $4 per doodad has to account for the cost of the doodad factory itself (initial investment, maintenance, material) and the literal cost of doing business (taxes, permits, fees, paying an accountant) and of course market fluctuation (warehousing, building a financial buffer to remain solvent if sales lapse or production has to stop) but if the business is meant to be successful, that needs to add up to less than the extra $4 I'm making. And the bigger that difference is, the more profitable my company becomes and the more spare money I have to expand my business and get ahead of my competition up to the point where I can sell shares in my business to other people and pay dividends from my profits to them.
So in other words not only can't you pay workers exactly "enough" (i.e. 100% of the value they contribute to the company) but you're actively incentivized to pay them as little as you can get away with (and perversely, paying them more by reducing your profit margin may actually be worse for them by making your company less competitive and less resilient). This is before we even get into the politics of what work is overvalued or undervalued (e.g. the idea that CEOs should receive massively disproportionate compensation for their labor, which again creates pressure to compensate for this by underpaying lowly workers).
This, by the way, is why collective bargaining matters. No matter how cool and nice your employer is, the market actively incentivizes them to do the least for you they can get away with and punishes them for doing more. So by not taking advantage of collective bargaining (i.e. using the pressure of all employees to your advantage rather than just yours individually) you're leaving money on the table. Note that is still true if your role is proportionally overpaid relative to other workers in your company unless you literally co-own the company.
Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
#567returning/replacing something at a grocery store shouldn't take hours of overseas phone-calls and arguments.
ask me how I know.
Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> the cashier won’t start scanning your items until the person in front of you has bagged all of their stuff What happens every now and then to me is that the person in front watches open mouthed as their shopping gets scanned and piles up in the bagging area, then they pay and fuck around with their purse (honestly idk what they’re doing) then take forever to pack, while the cashier starts scanning my stuff and mixe…
I feel this. It makes my blood boil. I wish I could flutter through life with such child like absent mindedness.
Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
#569I don't live in a country with anything like this sort of retail experience, but I feel like there is a middle-ground approach which is a fast self-checkout with async payment. Maybe even just dumping your cart on a conveyer and letting the products be scanned in a more controlled environment, or even just QR code stickers.
[1] https://www.rfidcard.com/uniqlo-has-rolled-out-rfid-technolo...
Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure. But the reputable multinational corporations that dominate the industry are easy to recognize and they’re headquartered in developed countries
The ownership structure for ships used in international shipping is anything but straightforward. For instance, for the the MV Dali (the ship that crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge) you might think we can go after Maersk, but in reality they're only chartering it. It was actually built by Hyundai Heavy Industries in South Korea for a Greek company but later sold to a Singaporean company, operated by a differe…