561–570 of 572 posts
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I’m all for universal benefits and doing away with means testing but doing so without fixing our regressive tax system it truly is just a gift to the wealthy.
It's not. Fixing the tax system is a good idea that I'm all in favour of, but universalising benefits and eliminating means testing is a good idea even if we don't wait to do that first.
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Consider the first star as an award for technically qualifying as a “movie” in much the same way as tree bark qualifies as food.
It’s actually the pith between the bark and the sapwood that is edible.
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What does it mean to be “the only seller left standing”? If somebody’s out there making big margins because they don’t face competition, competition is likely to emerge!
Yes, but the monopoly seller has already demonstrated that they will operate at a loss until their competitors go out of business, which is a pretty big deterrent to any new market entrants. They've also demonstrated that no one will be making any money until either the monopolist or the new entrant is out of business, so who would actually launch a new business in that environment?
Even Amazon had to eventually find its way to profitability.
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Yes, but the monopoly seller has already demonstrated that they will operate at a loss until their competitors go out of business, which is a pretty big deterrent to any new market entrants. They've also demonstrated that no one will be making any money until either the monopolist or the new entrant is out of business, so who would actually launch a new business in that environment?
“Imagine profitability doesn’t matter to ownership, and investors will accept losses—and less losses than a more efficient competitor—indefinitely.” Even Amazon had to eventually find its way to profitability.
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It's great that they faced essentially no consequences for this. A sure sign that we have a functional and sane market.
Why would they face consequences? Every store has video surveillance that can be reviewed. They trusted their tech enough to accept the false-positive rate, then worked to determine / validate their false positive rate with manual review, and iterate their models with the data. From a consumer perspective the point is that you can "just walk out". They delivered that.
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It’s autonomous 80% of the time. That’s significant. Put another way, they only had to hire 1000 people instead of 5000.
It only takes 1 employee to staff 20 self checkouts for comparison. For a full fat grocery store. With zero change or adjustment to the rest of the grocery store. And customers weirdly like self checkouts even when they are a dramatically worse outcome (compared to the highish bar of well trained cashiers)
An idle self-checkout machine costs the store almost nothing. An idle cashier costs the store wages. So the stores will always skimp on cashiers, leading to lines, wasting my time.
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“Imagine profitability doesn’t matter to ownership, and investors will accept losses—and less losses than a more efficient competitor—indefinitely.” Even Amazon had to eventually find its way to profitability.
Yeah, it is theoretically possible to have a marketplace where "predatory pricing" is an accepted though aggressive business strategy, and I'd say that we are roughly there in the US. But the original intent behind the law on the books was to make markets friendly to new entrants, even if that meant sometimes constraining what large participants were allowed to do.
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> It appears to be reasonable for a technology worker to be able to perform a sustained strike. I don't think the strikes are done by tech people at all. Just normal workers.
and it was an absolutely made up number. The real numbers would be so low it was insignificant. That number was only reported in global outlets, and that strike had zero practical impact in India. It was so uneventful, almost all of India except select pockets that has communist party influence didn't even know about the whole thing - let alone felt the impact of the strike.
This is a fact.
I think they might have added all the trade union workers across India and came up with that number.
Amazon Fresh provided lots of good jobs in my community. Family members worked there. Good pay and they employed locally (or can walk to work). Same with whole foods. Too bad Amazon couldn't make it work. Interesting timing with their push for more online grocery offerings.
Actually knowing Amazon they'll give the staff a huge gimme and nice bonuses. People crap on Amazon but they are a good employe for the little guy. They can't rewrite society so go for that take. Otherwise people are bummed they lost good jobs.
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Huge queues
Automats don't have to have huge queues. One employee as a stocker/chef can support higher throughput in automat style than in counter style fast food service because you have a much more focused task (put food in empty cubby, repeat) than the normal process of "Take order, take money, get order, give customer, deal with mistakes" They can have an entire wall full of panels for the same item, so that purchases are he…