'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter
bbc.com
bbc.com
> An actual former ambassador and three year Florida warehouse veteran Chris Grantham explained it in more detail to Yahoo Finance’s Krystal Hu, who shared the information with TechCrunch:
>> When I was there they just got an extra paid day off and a gift card after Peak [pre-holiday season]. This is what I got. A paid day off (that expired in 3 weeks lol) and a $50 Amazon gift card. Plus, they gave us lunch. Coldcuts and sandwich bread. I absolutely did not get paid more to train people.
>> Ambassador isn’t a ‘job’ you do every day, its just something you are trained to do. You go to a 4 hour class and they teach you how to teach others to tie a knot using a set of instructions. This is how new hires a supposed to be taught. You are supposed to teach them right from a script using a set protocol. Becoming an ambassador was a way to get out of loading trucks, or packing boxes for 10 to 12 hrs. You may ambassador 1 day then unload trucks for the next 3.
>> I stopped doing it after the first year I was there because it didn’t pay more. It’s voluntary. Your manager picks them. Generally speaking ambassadors are the “kiss asses” of the department.
> In case it isn’t obvious, Chris is no longer at Amazon and is happy to speak his mind. Thanks for helping us clear this up, Chris.
(edit: It was wrong of me to evoke Nazism due to its emotional connotations. I was reminded of the psychological systems of coercion that have been used all through history to efficiently keep oppressed people in line--which Amazon's actions reek of--but could have more effectively expressed my thoughts by saying "that sounds like a psychologically abusive system", or something of the sort.
I don’t think it’s fair to compare this to genocide camps.
Higher-ups look for these suck-ups, of course, but I see now that the "real" ones are the ones that really advance because of it. The process optimizes for what I call the "true believers." They wind up in positions where they can, and often do, impede the progress of people who want to make significant contributions to the bottom line.
The remaining open question in my mind is to what percentage the "true believers" actually occupy positions of serious power in a Fortune 500 -- say, at the highest 3 levels -- and how many people promoting them are just knowingly using them and their precious lack of objectivity.
This is a fantastic read.
The things described happen at toxic organizations but the author leaves no room for honest positive and meaningful work, and at risk of pointing out the obvious, there's a lot of meaningful work to be done.
To the author of this post, finding meaning in your employment means that you're necessarily a sucker or a psychopath. Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly help their patients?
And God forbid you find the real nobility in doing your workaday job and doing a good job at it, and feel good about yourself. According to the Gervais Principle that makes you the ultimate sucker.
Adopting this philosophy is dooming oneself to a neverending feeling of being exploited and the argument that this is what is actually happening in totality is all philosophical opinion so why would I adopt a philosophy that is so personally ruinous, demoralizing, and demotivating?
In fiction?
Back on the original topic, Erik Dietrich's "Developer Hegemony" has a less extreme view of the corporation; worth reading IMO.
The opportunists see the corporate world for what it is and do what is best for their careers, the idealists believe in the shared corporate myths and put in the hours to uphold the values they're taught, and the pragmatists value being home for dinner more than climbing the ladder. It describes the broken system without implying all the people in it are broken, and since the focus is really on the incentive systems that create this situation I think that's a better take.
I don't think the subjects of the Gervais categories are broken people so much as dangerous ones, careerwise (and possibly mental healthwise).
The research on linguistic relativity focuses on sensory perceptions that differ across languages. It's not applicable to the decision to claim that most of the managerial structure have a diagnosable mental illness when they clearly don't, by an English speaker in an essay read by other English speakers.
Of course it is. That's what comedians do: they take something with enough basis in reality that people will recognise and identify with it, and then caricature and exaggerate it to extremes.
This cartoon prepares you for life in large-corp environments. I've seen so many (real life) scenarios play out exactly as some of Dilbert's (and the other chars) stories.
Edit: for clarity, the article does refer to "The Dilbert Principle".
I have been down this cycle myself becoming almost nihilistic and seeing it all as a pointless game of machiavelian diplomacy.
These days I'm much more optimistic, and doing much better overall but in hindsight your explanation is exactly what I went through at my worst.
the standard promotion/development path is primarily designed to maneuver the Clueless into position wherever they are needed
However it feels like a profoundly different claim to Dr Peter's.
Not a doctor, but a college professor. I love my job, take pride in it, and work hard at it. But I think of myself as working for my students, my collaborators, and my immediate colleagues. I pay little attention to my university as a whole, don't view it especially positively, haven't learned how to work its bureaucracy, and feel little loyalty to the institution in general.
It seems that, according to the article, I'm a "loser". As such, "it is clear that I am an idiot". Probably true lol. But a fairly happy idiot.
Thank you.
> leaves no room for honest positive and meaningful work, and at risk of pointing out the obvious, there's a lot of meaningful work to be done.
There's plenty of meaningful work to be done, but most of it doesn't generate profit, so it doesn't get done. That which does get done, often pays poverty wages. Raising good citizens, caring for the elderly, educating our children, producing high quality nutritious food, cleaning our streets of litter - all meaningful and vital, all pay buttons. Many more jobs pay so little, we dont even bother doing in the West anymore and give those jobs to other countries.
> Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly help their patients?
What percentage of the workers Doctors ? Bonus : why isn't everyone a doctor ?
> Adopting this philosophy is dooming oneself to a neverending feeling of being exploited and the argument that this is what is actually happening in totality is all philosophical opinion so why would I adopt a philosophy that is so personally ruinous, demoralizing, and demotivating?
Pretending you are happy and contributing to society while you are required to piss in a bottle is to concede all human dignity. To pretend that giving up 70 hours a week crunching numbers so a Corporation pays less tax that is to sell your soul and work to the detriment of society. To think anything else, means it's already too late for you.
tldr : meaningful jobs exist, but are rare as rocking horse shit and great swathes of us never get to experience meaningful jobs, because our culture needs obedient workers to make profits ahead of anything else.
Making positive contributions to society doesn't change the fact that you're being exploited. It's become increasingly clear that Doctors (at least where I'm from) have low pay early in their careers, unsafe working conditions, and have almost no life outside of work. On top of that they have a stressful job involving interacting with members of the public.
Both me and my girlfriend were majors of our promotions and had more than enough in the way of academic achievement to become doctors, but the insane workload was a very effective deterrent.
I'm in Tasmania, so here's the a PDF from the Tasmanian Department of Health Services explaining what a Nurse Practitioner can do, including prescribing some medication and interpreting diagnostic test
https://www.dhhs.tas.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/6408...
A friend of mine was an ICU nurse in Canada before moving to Australia. It was a long and painful process to get qualified again, and when she did, she found out she had been demoted from being able to meaningfully improve patient care (eg the prescriptions and diagnoses you mention) to a robot carrying out orders.
Or if we must have them, please keep the confined to the minute clinics at the drug store and bar them from billing themselves as real GPs.
I'm sure they'll BOTH figure it out.
But why not be discontent with your reality? That's typically a sign to enact change and willingfully settling is an acceptance of how things are.
I think the problem lies in the way that capitalism treats companies and labour. Im not proposing we abolish capitalism but selling our time at a loss* to our employer doesn't "feel" good. Maybe you feel rewarded by your work and maybe you don't but you shouldn't destroy that feeling for the sake of complacency.
*Loss is possibly controversial, but an employer does seek to get more value out of an employee than they pay them.
Most companies make 'reasonable' profits or even losses. You could say normal range for profits is -5% to +10%. When the company is people intensive, it basically means, that revenue is paid in salaries.
For better salaries to be paid, profits must grow first. For profits to grow, existing people must perform better. If profits don't grow, salaries can't follow.
Now when profits grow, we face a decision on how to split the new profits, and it does not always fall on the existing employees. Sometimes profits go into hiring new people, sometimes they go into pockets of the owners. But I have also often seen in my 25 year career, that performers are compensated.
I have also always seen the costs rise, and the costs been mostly salaries. So profits eventually go to the pockets of the employees.
So actually it is good idea for everyone to perform, because if the profit growth stops, salary growth stops as well.
Anyway, my bottom line is that this 'sociopath, clueless, loser' is flawed thinking, but probably something people genuinely believe in just like many people believe that vaccines are bad.
My company is so far down the article's referenced lifecycle that there are several large groups of people who copy information from the mainframe into Excel sheets, and then hand this over to another group who take that information, and put it back into the mainframe. And the "Clueless" have fought me, tooth and nail, to try to improve these kinds of barbarous workflows.
As you say, there are exceptions, but a lot of managers are there because they've "played the game" well - they're good at networking, know the right people, say the right things at the right times, and when they think it will help them, they don't hesitate to throw other people under a bus.
As Joel Spolsky puts it, The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
The poor or middleclass aren't the only ones mind you. You find willing lackeys at every paygrade.
Gamers find it easier to be up in arms about journalists being bad at video games and women having too many opinions on their hobby than the fact that they are getting actively screwed over by the hyper-predatory monetisation tactics of the game publishers and the fact that a company like Activision let go of more than a hundred employees on the same week as they gave Bobby Kotick a $200 million bonus.
Why lump real concerns in with blatant sexism?
Yes, it's pretty pathetic that somebody who's job involves playing video games got stuck on the tutorial of Cuphead but then again, who cares? I don't consider it a real concern simply because outlets like IGN are waning in influence anyway.
A far more insidious concern that bears barely no attention is the fact that publishers practice shady shit like deliberately withholding review copies to overly critical reviewers or how journalists are incentivised to prioritise officially mandated press releases over reports of abuse. Notice how the very recent case of the rampant sexual and racial abuse in Ubisoft has been nearly forgotten by video game journalism.
Movements like Gamergate failed because aside from the rampant sexism within their ranks, their focus was narrowly on individual bad actors in video game journalism when the real problem is more systematic than that.
Besides, you're comparing apples and oranges. It would be a better comparison if there were loads of attack articles on specific employees of Amazon instead of a giant multi-national company engaging in aggressive union busting behavior that is one of the largest employers in the world.
There is also no actual objective problem that feminism has caused to gaming that gamers can point to and I would argue that the vehement backlash against it is as driven by the "invasion of political activists into the hobby" as Anita Sarkeesean and other feminist pundits.
Activists have an incentive to be as incendiary as possible to gain media attention, smaller PR departments if any, and little to no control over what other activists say.
It's an unfortunate reality that if my local supermarket fires a bunch of workers for trying to unionise, but my neighbour gets in a screaming match with me because he thinks I scratched his car's paint, then I'll be mildly disappointed by the supermarket but frothing mad about my neighbour. It doesn't even matter what the confrontation is about: I'll be frothing mad about any topic that my neighbour brings up if he's screaming it at me, the medium is the message.
It's not about the medium or even the message here. It's all about the product. As long as you control the product, it doesn't matter how much grumbling gamers do under their breath, they will still fork over their cash.
Activists on the other hand do not have a product to offer. Instead they make you think uncomfortable thoughts and try to get you to reconsider or reflect on your viewpoints or biases. That's a lot harder than buy and consume product. That's a difference that even god-tier PR is not going to easily be able to overcome.
Gamer care about opportunistic women's study majors who know nothing about gaming insulting their favorite pastime to try and justify their wasted lives.
https://youtu.be/lLcpcytUnWU?t=173
"If you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you are sitting"
The incentives for each layer are geared towards maximizing shareholder value. First layer managers aren't trying to soley optimize box throughput, else they could give raises to incentivize employees better. They are trying to get as many boxes through as possible while keeping costs low. They cut hours to avoid paying OT and sometimes Healthcare. They rule with fear. This forces employees to fight for scraps and do other things they normally wouldn't do like become an ambassador to try to better provide for their families. The moral managers don't advance their careers while the ones good at exploitation do and are promoted. It's a darwinian survival of the most vicious and cunning.
Now it's gotten much weirder. There are fake accounts that, looking at them, you're not sure who they actually benefit. I think a bunch just got purged. No one took them seriously anyway, so navigating the motivations in the space is super difficult. It's fascinating in some ways but in others I just want to ignore the whole thing.
Perhaps there is something in this about internet communications coming/going full circle with more episodes like this Amazon fiasco.
Perhaps one angle to tackle the problem is to educate the group(s) of people who continue to believe whatever they read on Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Unfortunately this isn’t just limited to the over 40 crowd. People are willing to believe whatever affirms their beliefs. Growing up on the Internet does not change this.
Any propaganda from more than a couple of decades ago seems immediately corny to kids.
The impersonation can be more damaging than the content, because it's a variety of toxic mental pollution - a form of betrayal - that lowers the SNR of the entire Internet.
It's gotten to the point that I don't really trust anyone on Facebook in certain contexts - although I'm more likely to trust someone if their position shows some flexibility and avoids purely tribal thinking, and also if they show some evidence of background knowledge and general thoughtfulness.
I'm less likely to trust anyone whose position encourages extreme polarisation, who appears to be disguising intent, whose posts are repetitive, and who tend towards inflammatory emotive language and insinuation.
This isn't infallible and I know I've made mistakes in both directions. But I hope it's better than just getting astroturfed.
Edit: I don't think critical thinking skills help as much as they should. This isn't about assessing evidence, it's about assessing intent - which is a different problem.
This is news to me. What countries are you referencing?
Teaching critical thinking skills is not some revolutionary idea and it's not like educators want to avoid teaching people how to do it.
Since we're just comparing anecdata at this point (or at least I am), if you have any data/studies or anything like that it would be appreciated.
People claim that critical thinking is not taught in schools because it's an easy claim to make when you perceive that so many other people are thinking uncritically. But, make a claim they disagree with and watch how good they become at it. Everyone falls into a trap of thinking that society at large lacks 'common sense' or 'critical thinking' because we all assume our worldview is true and anyone who disagrees must have deficient thinking. Ultimately I think people are taught how to think critically, but the real problem is when they choose to think critically. And that, I think, is a result of human nature, not lack of education.
I remember when I was dating a doctor being appalled by her complete inability to think through a problem, and I later learned medical school is basically mass memorization. I am obviously cherry picking medicine here, but if doctors aren't even taught that by the time they're practicing in the United States I think it's fair to say critical thinking is sorely lacking in our education system. She was a neurologist who was unable to help me with my migraines, and I later figured them out on my own using ~drumroll~ critical thinking. I also saw at least a half dozen specialists at prestigious hospitals, all of whom were equally unhelpful in solving my problem. They were all very quick to prescribe pain medication though, in fact it seemed to be the only thing any of them were ever interested in doing. Some of them accused me of lying about my symptoms, and some told me I shouldn't even bother trying to get better.
If US doctors - some of the best educated and most highly trained professionals in the world - aren't good at thinking critically about medicine, I'm not confident that it's being taught in the US. In fact I'm quite confident it's not taught in the US (or at least it wasn't). I was never taught critical thinking in a classroom setting, and I have multiple degrees from the US.
Sure, it’s not every doctor. But throw a dart at a map and you’re bound to hit one who’s like this more often than not.
"Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."
Page 13: https://web.archive.org/web/20120629111643/http://s3.amazona...
One would think if it were integrated with other studies it would be mentioned somewhere other than Edutopia and Walden adverts.
I did, in a very rural, very underfunded school district - all of those things are critical thinking.
It is integrated into other studies. But there tend to not be "This lesson is critical thinking" sorts of headers on the lesson plans.
Look for the phrase "lifelong learner". That tends to be where the "critical thinking" lives for many schools.
It’s been awhile, but would wonder how unbiased today’s history books are. I can’t see the State of Texas board being nuanced about the Alamo.
I can see a rural district where teachers/schools have much more control over curricula, so enlightment or indoctrination is easier to influence. I dont see this scaling to large administrative/measurement bound districts. How does one test to CT outside perhaps secondary effects of STEM or AP results? It does appear that higher percentages of students are taking AP tests though.
Being educated by Jesuits, we started with Socrates/Plato. But looking at my classmates FB feeds I don’t see any evidence of sober CT skills. Skepticism is a synonym of conspiricism in today’s generations. Biases are polar bound.
Young minds know how to deal with the polluted informational space and learn to get value out of it one way or another.
The informational gems that we need to hold up with high regard are examples of sincere discussion and debate between those who disagree with each other and yet have a genuine goal to hear and be heard by the counter-party, a deep reluctance to deploy rhetorical tricks, and a willingness to support controversial views if they are supported by uncontroversial fact.
for instance people insist the election was stolen, not because they literally know it to be true, but rather because the outcome, that democrats control national politics, is somehow unacceptable. a productive discussion would start here, with why that’s unacceptable, not quibbling over whether the election was actually stolen or not (it wasn’t).
also, those false projections are 99.9% of the content on twitter, facebook, etc.
My concern about younger folks is that the world is shrinking as large corporations try and squeeze as much revenue as possible out of markets - the movement of Apple to lock down the app store and force people into safe walled gardens just so they can control the revenue stream might be one of the worst blows of tech literacy of the modern world. Instead of young folks getting devices and struggling with malware and hacking at programs to make them do what they want. They're growing up in a sterile environment full only of buttons: this button causes "A" to appear on the screen and this button plays a movie. God forbid you ever want to try and see if you can get "A" to appear over the movie - doing that is hacking and very naughty so you should never do it.
I remember programming solitaire for an introductory java programming course in uni and hacking a BufferedImage to force some cards to be overlaid by writing in the different card images at different offsets that is not the right way to do that but it works - we need to make sure that new generations are brought up empowered to hack things in creative ways.
this. My friends (I'm in highschool) that aren't as experienced in technology (use it as you describe, "God forbid you ever want to try and see if you can get 'A' to appear over the movie") are genuinely terrified of opening the terminal and using anything just slightly out of how it was meant to be used because they don't want to 'hack anything'.
> we need to make sure that new generations are brought up empowered to hack things in creative ways.
also this. Unfortunately, much easier said than done.
I'm not sure kids who grew up with an iPad appliance are really more generally technically literate on average than GenXers who entertained themselves trying to write Choose You Own Adventure-type stories in BASIC on their Commodore 64s ... or who, at least, managed to get their pirated copy of Stellar 7 to run.
It used to be the GUI was basically the same as a CLI but with clicks instead of typing out "cp" "mv" etc. Now the GUI to CLI relationship is severed. You have an iPhone and the GUI it runs is basically running on top of the underlying CLI that apple hides from you (and you need to jailbreak the phone in order to gain access).
Imagine if Apple just gave these kids root and a terminal app, and the files app actually showed you the directory structure of the device. They could be scripting on these machines and learning about how they function same as we did growing up.
Instead, apple things we need to hold these kids hands and should learn Swift and other low code efforts instead. IMO these kids don't need an easy bake oven to learn to cook, they need a kitchen and the freedom to learn how to burn themselves like we had. Apple is afraid of letting their customers operate the stove they bought.
Did you once have a myspace page or live journal where you said very controversial things or vented angst in a manner that you'd rather your co-workers didn't see? Well sorry but all that stuff now goes into your facebook feed where it will be with you forever.
It takes real determination to stay actually anonymous on the internet today and someone trying to stumble into it is likely going to screw it up - when we millennials were growing up that personal data you accidentally leaked onto a forum (maybe during a spicy exchange of direct messages) can't follow you since that forum no longer exists - it was probably hosted on PHPBB and either an admin accidentally deleted the DB at some point or the whole server was chucked in the trash - even if someone had access to those messages it would be harder to definitively tie it back to someone since user fingerprinting was so non-existent.
That all said, I was in the middle of University when folks were learning that bong-shots on your facebook page might hurt your long term job prospects so we did get to see it start to emerge as a concern.
Just go browse reddit for 10 minutes if you don't believe me. I recommend the /r/GME cult for instance, but there are many others. People will gladly listen to anybody if they tell them what they want to hear.
When you make your age distinctions, you might be talking about people who are non-technical.
Early Internet techies predicted situations like this before they happened. (Pre-Web, we had all kinds of sci-fi predictions, awareness from historical analogues, etc. Post-Web, I talked with startup founders 20 years ago, who would also be 40yo+ by now, who predicted that their company's accounts would be used for shill identities for things like manipulation, and the implications of that.)
Passive consumers, of your under-40 group, who grew up in it never knew anything else, have had things framed for them, and are just starting to realize the situations we're now in.
No, this isn’t the reason, you’re missing some crucial context about the early to mid 90s Internet - most people were using institutional accounts. It was very clear that someone with a whatever.ac.uk or .edu or .mil or even most .com that weren’t ISPs were who they said they were, and anons were explicitly anons. Many people even had phone numbers and addresses in their .sig blocks posting on Usenet, or on their homepages. There was a pretty high degree of trust, it was comparatively civilised!
The problem is that people got stuck in that assumption.
I really don't think that's the case. The issue isn't knowing how to use a computer or not, it's being able to vet sources. That is taught at few schools and actually applied by fewer still.
Digital natives are even more susceptible to internet propaganda imo, since listening to obscure internet voices (with no real credibility beyond the size of their flock of sheep of subscribers/followers) has become so normalized over listening to actual domain experts. A lot of people like to get their current events from some talking head on youtube who selectively explains these topics in a biased way, rather than reading primary sources and developing their own interpretation themselves.It's not geriatrics and baby boomers buying this dropshipped junk from all these influencers, after all. Plus look at all the millenials who stormed the capitol a few months ago based on some conspiracy theory. No, being able to use gmail and microsoft office do not make you tech savvy or immune to propaganda.
I have previously downvoted comments on my opinion on some instances of this on HN lol
People need to be trained to be skeptical of voices online.
I swear I'm one step away from asking for a chili recipe and someone responding 'blockchain?'. It's beyond parody at this point - I feel like I'm in some Kafkaesque reality.
> People need to be trained
But, hmmm, I don't think a call for education is a solution. That's basically whack-a-mole. Stupid people are born every minute, there's no stopping stupid. Better to put bumpers on them and keep the rest of us safe.
Misinformation is like a virus, and it spreads through a population easiest when they accept and share it. All that takes is for it to confirm some preconceived idea or to flatter them. Critical thinking, or at least base line skepticism, seems like the only inoculation.
You're not wrong that that may be too much to expect from people though.
Not a whit.
It's been a hobby horse of mine for the last two decades. From Mk Ultra to Potempkin Villages to Contemporary Psyops, propaganda has provided nearly limitless dark entertainment for me. In fact I've sculpted my own aphorism:
"Intelligence has the ability to construct reasonable sounding reasons for anything." It might have been pithier in an earlier iteration, but that's the gist.
In the end education is expensive and there's no end run around that. In the end there's no algorithm for the truth and there's no end run around that either.
Less free stuff. Free online stuff does not feed quality. Money is the tie that binds. And free stuff binds us to advertisers. Youtube, twitter, facebook, etc, all go to paid tiers and registered accounts.
Eradicate the widespread use of comments. I hate to sound like an old, but go back to established gatekeepers for commentary like well educated editors at newspapers and magazines. Everyone doesn't need a publishing platform.
If that sounds class-ist I guess it kinda is, in a way. Everyone will still have access, but not everyone needs a voice because the structure to support that is corrosive as we've seen.
What I think is possible:
Like everything we learn mostly by making mistakes. Eventually we'll bang our heads against enough walls to find our way out.
In a generation or two people will discount online speech. Already the youngs are discounting facebook.
There will always be bullying, in person or online. There will always be fraud, in person or online. "Education" isn't a magic wand to sprinkle smart dust over the population. Again, even smart people make fundamental and sometimes existential mistakes.
The best we can do is make it harder for those shitty things to happen by performing tourniquets to the flow of free channels that feed online malignant cancer.
IMHO we'd need what we can't easily have, single-confirmed-identity-accounts for everyone. If Tim Berners Lee had been more of a pessimist, a historian, and a psychologist he might have baked in some end to end encryption with public/private key pairs and account centrality. But he didn't. I'm curious if the USA or any state power could have required an SCIA for everyone. Maybe it could have come from Apple? I could see some kinda of pre-AOL online thing being baked into MacOs, maybe.
But yea, Facebook tried it and people made a fuss. We really kinda need it. It being a lack of wide spread anonymity for online personas. Invisibility really does bring out the worst in people.
IMHO getting rid of free twitter bots would be a good first step. And yes, I know lots of them do good. But does it balance out? Likely not. Maybe tie them to registered accts? There must be some way to clean house. And, no house is 100% clean, but 80% is better than 5%.
a) You can mobilize/pay people to astroturf and create very vocal minorities
b) You can dismiss and discredit actual movements/majorities as a)
At the same time though authenticity (as in no anonimity) is also undesirable given how the companies in charge can't be trusted with it.
If you strike the word "online" this statement works for most of history.
The only things that have changed are the sheer scale, speed, and cost of it. We have small teams that can generate more noise than a nation state could have prayed for just a generation ago.. and they're doing it faster and cheaper than ever before.
Unfortunately, most of the proposed solutions - real names, verified identities, fighting "disinformation" - come with catastrophic downsides.
Everyone has 1 million different opinions that are going to be controversial to someone out there.
I don't want it to be easy for anyone who disagrees with people, on anything, to track down someone physically, in real life.
> Deciding who stays in and who stays
Ok and I don't want you to be able to decide who stays in and stays out.
It should be very difficult to keep others that you don't like out.
And for the very extreme situations, that are exceptionally bad, we have the police and court system.
You should only be able to "keep people out" of engaging in speech if their actions are so bad that you are literally willing to lock them up in prison for it.
That's not the same as having a consistent identity on the internet. You can easily think of an identity provider on the web that doesn't expose who you physically are, think of like a crypto wallet, or something like Urbit attempts. Having a consistent identity is what matters with an incentive to be a good member, we don't need to expose your real world name at all.
>It should be very difficult to keep others that you don't like out.
No, it should be very easy to keep people out, because that's the fundamental mechanism behind any community, defining its borders and limits. That's what freedom of assembly is. There should be many different communities and they all should easily be able to set differentiated rules for who can participate and who can't. This is the basis for pluralism.
A sort of free-wheeling over-connected hivemind like Twitter where it's either call the police or post what you want doesn't work precisely because it is not a community at all. The reason discourse has gone to hell is because there literally is only one and everyone's part of it.
That's why we're having a somewhat sane conversation on hackernews right now. Because this community is smaller, it's moderated, and we can to a degree escape from the shitstorm of mass social media. And that's only because the rules here are much more strict than they are on Twitter.
Sounds like you oppose Inclusion.
For your sake, I hope no one finds that controversial.
Its effectively the same thing, for most people.
If someone is only allowed to have 1 identity on the internet, then people would have to link it to their real life identity, for practical reasons. How else would people find me, when I want them to?
Most people have a public identity, and other private ones. If I am only allowed to have 1 identity, then most people aren't going to give up the ability to have a public one, because there is large practical value to having a public identity.
People only having 2 choice, choice 1 being to give up their public persona completely, or choice 2, having everything on the internet that they do, permanently linked to their public identity, is a horrible choice, that will have a huge chilling effect.
> There should be many different communities
Oh, if you want to participate in your own community, that require people to give you their government ID (Or crypto identity, or whatever) in order to participate, then I have no problem with that.
What I have a problem with, is the authoritarian crazies, who want to take away other people's right to participate in the communities of their choosing.
If most other people choose to participate in the normal internet, where most websites do not require you to have a singular ID, then leave us alone and let us do that.
Go ahead and participate in your government ID facebook. (Or I guess that is just facebook already?) Just don't going around saying that no other communities, that value privacy more than you do, should be able to exist.
> That's what freedom of assembly is.
Freedom of assembly also includes people choosing to participate in communities where singular IDs are not a requirement, and alt accounts are allowed.
"Humans have always produced CO2 and cut down trees. The only things that have changed in past 1000 years are the sheer scale, speed, and cost of it."
Someone else pointed out Voice.com in this space, which at least is trying to do it. Although if you read the fine print, the seem to require you to send them a "selfie", I'm not sure how that solves anything.
Whatever unwritten structures that used to prevent that kind of thing have broken down, and it's not just social media doing it. Trump was a perfect manifestation of this problem - he was able to lie about everything and everyone in the most trivially contradictable ways, but faced no consequences for that. Instead, some professional media organizations backed him up.
Only now are we finally seeing lies crest into the territory of legal action, and only with the most extreme cases - like the Dominion lawsuits.
For every smaller kind of dishonesty, it seems like there is no consequences to brazenly lying. Anybody can lie about anyone as long as it's crafted such that the victim isn't in the position to sue (particularly if the victim isn't an individual but an amorphous group, and so showing standing and damages is functionally impossible).
I mean, we've basically left it up to the social media companies like Twitter to enforce basic social contracts like "lying about a global disease in ways that encourage the spread of disease is a bad thing", and their users are bristling at that.
The best solution I can think of at the moment is simply to not pay much attention to political speech on the internet.
The main way I've tried to achieve this is by largely limiting what I read to:
1. Authenticated contributors, either people I know personally or hired by companies I trust (e.g. NYT).
2. Anonymous contributors with heavy moderation and filtration (e.g. Twitter, but with O(100) muted words and accounts. My feed is basically just art now and it's delightful).
Again, that's hard to do. I'm still on here for instance.
I would think it would be better to just scroll past the content you are not interested in engaging in. It certainly will be better to know of something happening, even if in brief terms, than to be completely in the dark of it.
If you don't filter, best case scenario your SNR is going to be too low. There's also a pretty good chance that you will end up with a GIGO situation because all you hear about is whatever cable news, Cambridge Analytica, and Amazon's twitter astroturfing squad are pushing today.
If you do filter, you're correct that it opens the door to all kinds of biases.
> It certainly will be better to know of something happening, even if in brief terms, than to be completely in the dark of it.
I don't think so. It's impossible to hear about everything and I feel whatever is newsworthy enough to hit the sources I read is important enough for me.
It is. The problem is that democracy is messy. It means you get to hear from communist and qanon wackos as well as paid shills. Now we're pulling back on this democratization so that we have 'trusted' gatekeepers to tell us what we should and should not be exposed to.
>But if there's no way to control for authenticity,
And that's how it starts ...
The wooly part of the Internet is still out there. But it's not what you're going to see in "polite conversation" as much, because the whole thing has passed the critical mass point of too much information for anyone to know. Much as with books before it, expect the equivalent of Reader's Digest to come along and a whole generation of consumers who are not only tolerant of, but in the market for, such curation.
The Internet has given all speech a larger platform and more reach, which means that both authentic and inauthentic voices are amplified. Maybe the inauthentic voices gain a comparative advantage to non-Internet worlds, since they gain more attention via outrage or exaggeration. Does the fault lie on social media, content websites, or users?
So do we modify the Internet, or do we attempt to modify ourselves, or both?
Heck, the same mostly happens in your community center in really small towns, without care.
The solution he found in the book basically involved signing everything with your own personal identifier and putting it into a blockchain so everyone could verify it.
#1 - stop using the internet to gauge what popular
#2 - stop using what is popular to dictate law and how everyone has to act.
I have bad news for you, but there's no way to control for authenticity.
Issues like astroturfing are just expressions of this imbalance of power.
You have to solve for the gross imbalance of power if you want to solve for anything else.
I had written a much more scathing comment about the Amazon side of the business but I'm not sure what is allowed under hacker news's community guidelines.
1. Create fake accounts supporting amazon 2. tip your hand that they're fake 3. BBC reports on amazon creating fake accounts
I don't think even twitter can verify who made those accounts because it's so easy to vpn and use google voice numbers. You can choose what to believe, though
Their employees would likely be the ones creating cheap profiles.
https://theintercept.com/2021/03/29/amazon-twitter-hack-unio...
I guess you haven't seen this tweet:
https://twitter.com/amazonnews/status/1374911222361956359
Real people work for Amazon. They can be just as stupid as the rest of us.
In addition to Amazon itself, what if it's:
1. A huge investor in Amazon (like some hedge fund) who is doing it on amazon's behalf 2. A media outlet who wanted a scoop, so they manufactured one 3. A random 4chan troll looking for giggles 4. A foreign entity with some vested in sowing chaos into the discussion 5. A competitor of Amazon making them look bad through this easily debunked fake
I really can't believe your comment contains both of these quotes: "What's not believable about that?" and "People are emotional enough on issues that they never vet a source or fact check something that validates their own world view already"
Perhaps check yourself
False flag is a thing.
My favorite (https://www.amazon.com/Evaluation-Astroskin-Behavioral-Self-...):
"Wow!!!!! this product exceeded all my expectations. When I travel through space, I have always wished there was a way to measure my vital signs without bulky hardware and uncomfortable wires! Arun's project report taught me everything I needed to know about the benefits and limitations of astroskin! Now I can purchase this system for myself and my crew with confidence that I did not have before. I highly recommend this report to anyone wanting to measure their blood pressure in space or other extremely harsh environments."
The product is being sold for $169.43 on Amazon, and is actually a PDF available for free via NASA.gov. See: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20150021842/downloads/20...
As for the peeing in bottles thing, Amazon is not that smart. There are people that look completely normal, that experience life-threatening autonomic dysreflexia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomic_dysreflexia) from having to hold their bladder, even if it is just for seconds, like me. Perhaps I should try working in a US Amazon warehouse. It would be perfect lawsuit material and the ultimate power play against their inhumane policies around toileting breaks.
From a technology standpoint, the actual hardware and materials for an Astroskin system cost around $175-$200 (clothing set + processing unit) to produce, so they really are making bank.
You seem to forget that a lot of these workers are unskilled and have few choices. Amazon may be paying $15/hr but they will work you like dogs. Some people will accept that because they need the money and McDonald's just doesn't pay enough. It will be interesting to see what Amazon will have to pay if some of the minimum wage increases start to pass.
It's called disability discrimination. Getting paid less on the sole basis of your disability is generally considered to be disability discrimination in the US. Having to use the toilet every hour or so for 1-3 minutes to take care of business in this case is a reasonable accommodation legally mandated in US law. Considering that it is /immediately life-threatening/ and /immediately quantifiable/ (via blood pressure readings-continuous, spontaneous, or otherwise), it is very clear that Amazon would have an extremely difficult time weaseling their way out of trouble with their strict enforcement of a zero-tolerance, all-or-nothing, policy.
> You seem to forget that a lot of these workers are unskilled and have few choices.
Congratulations for pointing out the obvious. There are a ton of people who have ended up with UTIs and other health consequences from having to not only hold it at Amazon warehouse, but also being forced to purposefully dehydrate themselves, in the short term and long term. The toilet issue is so ridiculous that somebody who can should take them for a ride and fight for the people who are less fortunate. I would look to it as an adventure and a "summer job". I have legal authorization to work in both the US and the European Union on a long-term, permanent basis, so why not test the waters?
As I said, the condition I have is immediately life-threatening, so it's pretty clear cut that they would be putting my life in danger (strokes, seizures, retinal detachment, etc.) by "punishing" me for using the toilet.
I mean, I get what you're saying. I work in Disabilities quite a bit in my profession - and your view is generally correct. But there are literal, specific carve-outs for employers to pay people with disabilities less.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/39-14c-subminim...
>Section 14(c) of the FLSA authorizes employers, [. . .] to pay subminimum wages - wages less than the Federal minimum wage - to workers who have disabilities for the work being performed.
The law you mention above is exploited by companies utilizing sheltered work environments (i.e. Salvation Army) for people who typically have severe disabilities that are often both developmental and intellectual, with respect to classification. Obviously companies that exploit human labor in this particular context are morally bereft.
The key concept here is reasonable accommodation. It is not some abstract concept or use-case, like the one you pointed out above.
Honestly, though, I am not familiar with the application process as we refuse to use it.
That being said, I was genuinely just trying to point out that it is, in fact, legal to pay individuals with disabilities less than an individual without a disability.
Language is important. Claiming that trying to pay individual b (who has a disability) any less than what you would pay individual a (who does not) for any work is automatically disability discrimination is just wrong. I've been sued several times by people who believe that fact, and have been proven right in my statements by the courts.
I don't like it, but I don't control the law.
Please note, I am not saying your needs wouldn't be an appropriate accommodation from Amazon. Please note that I am not saying it is morally okay to pay individuals with disabilities less.
Maybe I'm being too pedantic. But honestly, the number of people who genuinely believe that they are entitled to get literally whatever they want however they want it, regardless of any other factor, simply because of their disability is just astounding.
Reasonable is the important part of accommodation.
As I said, it's life-threatening, and I can assure you that autonomic dysreflexia is one of the worst feelings that one can go through as a human. This issue is solvable via a basic reasonable accommodation, that I have a right to get. I also have a decent work ethic, and I understand that I am paid to work--and that is the only thing that I should be doing at work.
This is about common decency and basic human rights, not about entitlement. The fact that you are conflating the right to use restroom (a basic human need), at a consistent, non-excessive time interval (so that I do not experience a life-threatening state) to be some sort of entitlement is absolutely ridiculous. I hope you are not a lawyer, because if you are, you really need to change your perception around disability related matters. However, I will be mindful about the language I use, so thank you.
And no, I would not be looking for some settlement, which would be ridiculous, foolish, and incredibly short-sighted. The issue I am trying to address here, besides the matter of disability rights, is just human decency and respect towards others. Amazon does not exalt such values as a company, but especially so by how it treats its employees.
I really want to be clear. I am not doing that. I am genuinely not saying you are one of those people, and I apologize for my words if that's how it sounded. Your case sounds pretty straight forward - just make sure there's a bathroom somewhere close.
My experience is that many individuals in the disability world (keep in mind I work with youth and young adults and their parents/advocates) are very entitled. They believe there are no boundaries on what is an acceptable, and reasonable accommodation. That is what I was getting at.
That statement legitimately had nothing to do with you. It was a statement. I get defensive about this because I genuinely get sued three or four times a year for access complaints that are completely unfounded. I am a huge advocate for disability rights, and believe the current system of basic access is inadequate. But I am also sick of being accused of discrimination because I don't treat every individual that I work with like a small doll made of crystal.
The post-ADA people never had to truly fight for their rights against people that had true actual contempt against their existence as disabled human beings. On social media, it gets weird. The disabled identity online is completely incongruent with any semblance of a professional life, so if one wants to be successful in real life, it is best to run away from it if you are a disabled person. The disabled culture online scares normal and typical people, and for good reasons: people rage post about the indignities and injustices that they face as human beings on a regular basis. It makes normal people extremely uncomfortable at minimum.
I have self-respect so I don’t have social media accounts besides HN and a Reddit account, which I use to assist others. Of course I could post horrible injustices that have occurred to me. But what would that do? Nothing, besides cause outrage. That is the problem right there. The post-ADA generation often does not realize that there are people out there that have absolute contempt just for your existence as a human being, and to win, you have to fight a nasty battle, take the high road, and chances are, you will lose and lose again. Eventually you may win, but you will probably be dragged in the dirt during the whole process. There are consequences but taking risks and doing the right thing ultimately prevail.
Listening to her story about life in the 50's and 60's and her experience with being (in her words) "institutionalized in hell" was just startling. It really put things into perspective for my professional career, and honestly, I can say that one day had more of an impact on my personal and professional trajectory than most other things I've done.
It's still socially acceptable to mock and discriminate based on disability. People do it all the time. It's just. I don't know what the word is. Terrible doesn't seem strong enough. It's ridiculous.
I don't know that there is a reason for me telling this story, other than to agree with your last sentence.
The problem that I've run into, though, is that those individuals who really could make a splash - in my profession (higher ed), these tend to be folks on the autism spectrum who do not fit into stodgy, higher education 'conventional' expectations - do not have the know-how or the tools or the want to make a real flashy impact. They're afraid of social and economic consequences for speaking up. About half of my job is working with these folks to change systems and modify work/study spaces to implement universal design; for me, neuro-atypical universal design is the hardest to pin-down.
That's what makes being sued all the time such a pain in the ass. It's always by someone who is self-diagnosed, and someone who leans into the 'perceived' part of disability definition. Maybe I'm getting too in the weeds here.
Anyway. Not really sure what the point of all of this was, other than to say, thank you for the discourse. I appreciate it.
The previous post that you made reminded me of this post, so maybe you can see where I was coming from in the previous response (written by a disabled university professor): http://badcripple.blogspot.com/2013/04/shane-burcaw-laughter...
While I am not as "vocal" as the author of that blog, William Peace, I do agree with him 100% on the issues he brings up, along with his discourse. I say this as an adult in my early 30s, who has seen a lot.
It is definitely possible that I could be autistic (this is the first time that I have written such a statement ever, and I have never, not once, claimed that I am autistic ever), but it is not my place to claim that diagnosis or identity. Plus, it is fun to throw people off. Of course I have read books about females and autism (I am female) and books about autism in general. Such diagnoses are the responsibility of doctors, and it is not my place, nor appropriate, to make that claim, as there are professionals capable of making that assertation. (I did have a doctor who knows me really well ask me if I was autistic, though, kind of like a compliment.) From an accommodation standpoint, academically, I would need none for that disability as I am already on the record for 2 rare neurological diseases affecting my peripheral nervous system plus type 1 diabetes (autoimmune and insulin dependent), and I have enough help. One of those conditions is an autoimmune form of autonomic neuropathy that I have lived with since I was 3 or so, and it is believed that it caused the autoimmunity that caused my type 1 diabetes. The autonomic nervous system affects all sorts of things like even your propensity to socialize. Also, people with ASD often have autonomic dysfunction. Sorry to go off on a ramble, but I hope you found that interesting. This is the disease I am talking about, by the way: https://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/diseases/11917/autoimmune-...
As for the autistic identity, I don't see the point. I know who I am, so I do not need to claim it as an identity. So, those people who make an unnecessary huge deal out of it being their identity are taking it too far. Yes, it is part of who they are, but it is only a part.
Yeah, UDL is extremely difficult and I imagine that your specific type of UDL is really just starting to emerge. I guess for neuro-atypical people it comes down to UDL of curriculum, UDL of the physical spaces (arrangement and what is used physically in the space), and UDL of the environmental features of that space (ie temperature, lighting, humidity, etc.), which you likely all do. Also, how to deal with interaction utilizing UDL between neuro-atypical and neurotypical individuals is next-level difficult, which is probably the most crucial component.
But, you really are amazing! :-)
Which is actually worse. Doing it that way gives Amazon and its apologists deflect the blame back onto the victim (e.g. the worker made voluntary choice to work at Amazon, and a voluntary choice to take the break and accept the cost, Amazon fully supports the voluntary choices of its workers, if the worker is in a shitty situation, it's their fault for making those choices, etc.), even though Amazon is actually responsible for creating the situation and its consequences. If they made it "illegal," at least it would make their responsibility clear.
Why is it better for Amazon to pay $15/hour and work you like dogs, vs. paying a much lower base rate but a bonus that makes it work out to $15/hour if you work yourself like a dog, and less if you're less effective? Is overhead so high that having more, cheaper but less effective workers doesn't work out?
- Paying $15/hour guarantees a steady supply of replacements for people quitting. Paying closer to minimum wage does not.
- At the scale and level of service demand of Amazon, it's probably better to have predictable headcount and per-employee performance than to try and play the fast food game where finding replacements might take weeks and even when you do, there's a good chance they'll be rather bad employees.
- It's probably a self-selection filter at this point. Pretty much everyone knows that working for a fulfillment center or DSP will be a shitty grind, but the pay is better than 90% of other unskilled jobs. People who can't handle the work will largely self-select out of even trying to work there in the first place, which saves Amazon a lot of time and cost.
Snark aside, OP never said it was the union doing it. It could just be someone outside the potential union members who just supports unions in general, or doesn't support Amazon, who is doing it.
What other explanation is there? Do you think there is some die-hard Amazon supporter who goes out of their way to generate fake profiles and then post messages that wouldn't sway anyone?
If you want snark, have some back: where did the big bad union boss touch you?
> What other explanation is there?
Hired a shoddy offshore bot-writing and astroturfing outfit who are obviously not up to the job. It's a very simple, and one of the most likely, explanations. Occam's razor comes in handy occasionally if you just take the time to think a bit.
> Occam's razor
Amazon has an ambassador program, where they basically pay workers to post on twitter about how good their job is. You're saying they have a program for workers to post on twitter, and they also hire astroturfers to make fake posts of the same thing on twitter, using photos of moderately known celebrities as their backgrounds? I don't buy it. Amazon made the mistake of creating a system where accounts are "verified" merely by a prefix of their name - "@AmazonFC...". Therefore anyone can make an account that looks like "@AmazonFC...", not just Amazon. What amazon should have done is have a single official account, or even a single official account which links to other official accounts.
Occam's razor tells me that the most likely creator of these accounts is a troll who browses reddits ABoringDystopia sub, and is just having fun.
It's about as plausible as you being a galaxy brain suggesting that the unions are behind the posts in order to undermine amazon's credibility, in order to undermine the union's credibility.
I'd guess it's neither Amazon or pro-union employees but rather random people trying to make Amazon look bad.
People aren't rational, we are inherently emotional. Reason and logic need to be taught, and controlling your emotions is one of the hardest things you can do as a human. These propaganda just play into our basic primal fears of safety and the unknown at its root. It's not hard to engage with these emotions, especially if what you are sharing already goes along with this established worldview that some have, cultivated by years of past propaganda.
I'm not sure how you reset this, given so many people live in lives where they aren't exposed to other perspectives nor seek them out.
I don't think it's that people aren't exposed to other perspectives -- it's that people have been programmed to be vitriol of other perspectives. It's the ever growing polarization of world views.
I'm not sure how to reset it either.
> It is unclear whether the accounts are real employees, bots or trolls pretending to be Amazon Ambassadors.
> “It appears that this is a fake account that violates Twitter’s terms,” the spokesperson said. “We’ve asked Twitter to investigate and take appropriate action.”
The author is making it clear that they are not the one who called the accounts fake. This implies uncertainty because if the accounts were objectively fake, there would be little need to add the quotation marks.
Which obviously a real box packer isn't going to have a sprinklr acct so you know at the very best someone is getting a 15 minute break while a pr rep looks over their shoulder and more likely they all work at the same desk in a corporate office.
Send txt to: 555 ** *8 Email : na*****@g**.**
What a miserable existence that must be. Bezos has always struck me as a man who cares about nothing else only his own personal wealth and success.
There is no joy in his life.
I would not be nearly as measured in my response. no sir, I am not the one
And if my employees said I was treating them unfairly, I would try to understand their perspective and make changes to improve working conditions. But maybe that's why I'll never be a CEO.
If the Amazon job is so bad then there must be plenty of better options?
Bezos' employees have created nearly 200 billion dollars of wealth for Bezos
How much wealth would Bezos have created without his employees? I sort of imagine one guy with a computer running an online bookstore running fulfillment out of his garage.
I bet he could make an okay living if he's smart and hardworking and lucky but it's a pretty inconsequential fraction of 200 billion.
I worked at Amazon for 6 years. I don’t think that’s true at all. Nearly any other professional manager would have been too tempted to turn the mighty river of free cash flow into profit rather than reinvesting in the business.
If Bezos didn't need those workers - if he genuinely created every cent of value in his empire on his own, picked and boxed and delivered every book himself - why did he ever hire anybody?
And with your line of reasoning I should be mad when my doctor spends 30 seconds checking me and makes a diagnosis and then receives the lions share of the pay. He couldn't do his job with his nurses, office workers, and other employees. But I'm not mad, because he's doing something they can't.
Just like Bezos did something no one else could do at the time.
If they were working somewhere else, they wouldn't be generating 200 billion dollars of wealth at all
Not sure how "richest man in the world" version of myself would react. Certainly I wouldn't use my corporate Twitter account to attack (badly) US politicians.
Hopefully anyone with that level of wealth would look into fixing the actual problem instead of trying to cover it up with fake testimony. The point is, he has the money to build a working culture where people can feel like they are treated fairly, he just chooses not to
I'd cry myself to sleep every night on my pile of billions of dollars. Poor Jeff.
A union will not break Amazon, many companies with unions still are plenty profitable.
Easy:
"I have $185 billion less than Bezos to spend on treating my employees better, but I've also spent $0 on propaganda against my employees interests."
In corporate America, responsibility is on senior leadership, and the CEO is at the top of that chain. If they want to have the W's of that system, they get to take the L's too.
Here is the summary of the issue.
Firstly, pre-pandemic, unemployment was at an alltime low (and its trending that way to as places are reopening), very close to frictional unemployment rates, while Amazon was still able to roll out things like 2 day deliver and same day delivery. This means that it was able to staff accordingly. This in turn means that the pay that people recieve is worth whatever the working conditions are, and people can quit and go find easier job at any time. This is also true of people that are able to work overtime, for double the pay $30 an hour. Not to mention that benefits are also included, which as far as health insurance is a big plus for people.
Secondly, the number of reports of poor working conditions are far and few in between. For the scale of amazon, its expected that some warehouses are going to be run poorly. There isn't a single shred of credible evidence that this is a widespread problem. Also, with unskilled manual labor, there are people that are going to have a harder time than others. Taller pickers for example, have an advantage over shorter pickers that don't have to use the step stool. But again, 3% unemployment rate.
As far as unionization goes, this is the general gist of it. If the workers unionize, the service capability will undoutably go down. When workers realize they can take it easy and keep their jobs, productivity will go down. While its true that worker conditions will improve, the problem is along will come Walmart thats not as much in the spotlight, and offer better service and shipping while having shit working conditions, and people will just switch over because thats more beneficial to them. In no way shape or form the will continue supporting Amazon just because their workers unionized, out of the "good of their heart".
So Bezos is doing the correct thing by being anti union. Unionization is messing with the free market, which never leads to good outcomes historically.
If you care about the lower income people, then go out and vote for politicains that support higher taxation for the rich, social programs for the poor, so that ones living condition does not depend on ones job.
Also, for your brain health, get of the domapine fix that is the outrage of the internet lefism.
It’s really sad how many people get super invested in defending mega corporations. I hope it’s just employees trying to move up but you never know.
https://labor411.org/411-blog/warehouse-worker-turnover-rate...
It’s a gestalt, you can see it two ways and I have no clue why someone would want to see it as a “good practice” unless that view was beneficial to their job and career advancement.
True
>probably because the conditions are so cruel.
Ugh, thats the crap I am talking about in the last sentence of my original post.
There is nothing wrong with high turnover at a minimum wage manual labor job. Amazon hires seasonal workers that happily work overtime for $30 and then quit. Nobody is making a career out of being a warehouse associate.
Um.
I worked a warehouse one summer in college.
A whole lot of my coworkers were, in fact, making a career out of it.
It was a crappy career compared to the easy, high-income gig I was working towards in software development, but it was a career, nonetheless.
I currently work with someone who was career warehouse until he caught a lucky break and was able to move into white collar work.
(Interestingly, his last warehouse job before going white collar was with Amazon, after several others, and he said it was by far the best warehouse to work in.)
The majority of people on Hacker News, yourself included (I can tell from your comments) have privilege that means we never had to consider something like making a career out of working in a warehouse. But this is absolutely a reality for alot of smart, hard working people, because they didn't have the opportunities you and me had.
If unionization didn't lead to better outcomes for workers, Bezos wouldn't care about it. If it was going to be so bad for workers, he would just let them do it and let them fail. The fact that Amazon is doing anything about it is proof that it will benefit workers.
There are definitely some true, fair, and pertinent points in your comment (though, to be clear, they're not strong enough to actually make a compelling point, and I still disagree with your conclusion and position), but this is just nonsense. Every single social welfare program is "messing with the free market", and while I do concede that some of them have been failures and some have been inefficient, they are overall a net positive to _human quality of life_, even while they may reduce a business' productivity.
If you modified your statement to "which never leads to good outcomes for a particular company", or even "for the economy", then it would be a truer statement - but it is possible for a company or for the overall economy to take a small hit, while actual real humans (who are, after all, the ones that we should care about) enjoy a far greater quality of life.
I mean, saying that a human life is worth something so you can't just treat people as expendable labor is "messing with the free market" technically, but thats a very low boundary. Social welfare addresses the lower tiers of income, specifically to aid people in basic needs of housing, food, healthcare and education. Those people aren't putting any significant money into the economy.
Unionization on the other hand is selective inflation of labor value in certain areas. Thats definitely messing with the free market. Didn't work for France very well, not going to work for US.
EDIT to be more clear-and-explicit and less snarky - taxes are an interference with the free market. I am making the claim that a high-functioning society that cares for its citizens and ensures a good quality of life must necessarily a) impose taxes, in order to b) provide social welfare programs. In particular, I claim that no purely-free-market motivated company will address social welfare needs as comprehensively as public programs would (though I do concede that, for some subsets of society, some companies will often do so more efficiently than public programs would, at the cost of non-universal coverage).
Right. Living in France sucks! /s
You can make a good argument without devolving into "us-vs-them" tribalism.
For example, Im big into mountain biking, and here is a recent example of this (read the comments)
https://www.pinkbike.com/u/jamessmurthwaite/blog/slack-rando...
2) Turning "woke" into an insult for everything progressive completely removes all nuance from a bunch of political positions that while frequently shared between similar people are completely unrelated. "Woke" was a term that came about with regards to social and specifically RACIAL justice.
The fact that the internet left is full of people so far extreme as to be actually Stalinist (and by that i mean would support guillotining the rich or sending them to gulags), does not negate the value of discussion of unions, or social inequalities between the races.
I would urge any sensible-minded individual to dismiss using "woke" from their lexicon as an insult because it immediately devalues your opinion (see also: SJW, Feminist, etc)
3) "For example, Im big into mountain biking, and here is a recent example of this (read the comments)"
I'm super not clear about your point here. Amazon ripped off an independent seller's design. Is that not a problem? Do people not have the right to be upset?
Wait so, should the unionize too? Or were they not fully staffed during the record low employment before?
One of these must be true, or you are making incompatible claims.
Just selling cheap shit with no regard for those who produce and deliver your products doesn't equate to "produce a lot of value to people"...
Tell that to Sweden, with its 80% unionization rate and productivity (GDP per hour worked) at 97% of that of the United States.
And since you said "historically" - it's not a recent change of affairs. In the 1970s Sweden's productivity (GDP per hour) was 90% of that of the United States.
Feel free to compare other European nations:
https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Labor/Trade-... https://data.oecd.org/lprdty/gdp-per-hour-worked.htm
Sweeden also has more homeless people per capita than US, and higher unemployment, and lower GDP/capita, and different labor laws.
Its also not really a good excersize to compare against other countries. With full analysis, you quickly get into weeds of things like cultural values, homogeneity, hysteresis in policy, all of which affect the economy.
Saying that an economic policy works in one country has no relation to whether it works in another. For example (albeit a dumb one, but it illustrates the point) - in most of EU, there aren't really 24 hour grocery stores or food places, unlike in US. Is it better to enact a policy stop economic trade in late hours, with the assumption that people are more productive if they have time with their families, or would you rather have a free market that allows the night owls to make money if they want to?
The answer is that it solely depends on the population. General labor class with more traditional values would probably prefer the former. Younger techies that aren't concerned with families and love what they do and willingly work into later hours would prefer the latter. E.t.c and so on.
By what definition of "free market" is unionization fairly characterized as "messing with" said market? Isn't the idea of the free market that actors within that market have the opportunity to use resources and organize resources the way they see fit? It seems your definition of "free market" only permits corporations latitude in making meaningful choices, but employees and consumers none whatsoever.
[1] https://www.nlrb.gov/search/case/AMAZON.COM%20SERVICES%20LLC
If you are going to post any proof, at least read the stuff that you posted. 16 cases of complaints with extremely vague information in them is hardly proof.
Don't bother looking for actual evidence though, because you won't find it.
>A National Labor Review Board (NLRB) investigation has now found that Amazon illegally interrogated and threatened Jonathan Bailey, a lead organizer of the Queens Amazon walkouts, and has issued a federal complaint against Amazon, according to official NLRB documents...
>The case was settled before it went to trial, but the issuing of the complaint means that an NLRB investigation found Amazon broke the law.[1]
Perhaps we could look at another:
>Last month, the National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint in Bowden’s case, meaning the agency found merit in her allegations that Amazon threatened, suspended, and ultimately terminated her because she had been talking with coworkers at an Amazon warehouse in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, about pay and other workplace issues, which is a legally protected activity.[2]
Then of course, there is the article that is the subject of this post. Call it speculation, but a corporate astroturfing campaign is not a convincing indication Amazon is on the right side of morality, law, or the facts here.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy8ngk/amazon-interrogated-w...
[2] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/amazon...
Sounds easy but I assume it isn't so much. Applying regular market rules to the job market is misguided. First, people need a job to live. If all available offers are starvation wages, people can't just say "well I won't work for this". Second, changing job is a big risk regarding healthcare and job security. Some people might prefer lower pay but higher stability rather than slightly higher pay but with a high risk of being fired. Third, different people have different jobs available. For unskilled labor there will always be more people than jobs, and there will always be people that need a job now doing whatever so they don't lose their home. That will push wages down even in an environment of low unemployment.
> Secondly, the number of reports of poor working conditions are far and few in between.
There are quite a lot of reports in multiple countries and outlets. Taking into account that it's not easy for workers to put their story out there and that they take a risk by doing so, I wouldn't dismiss the evidence so quickly.
> When workers realize they can take it easy and keep their jobs, productivity will go down.
Or go up. Evidence is mixed and depends on the setting. It's not "undoubtely".
> While its true that worker conditions will improve, the problem is along will come Walmart thats not as much in the spotlight, and offer better service and shipping while having shit working conditions,
Walmart employees could make an union too.
> Unionization is messing with the free market, which never leads to good outcomes historically.
Things unions have historically done (some of them haven't reached yet the US precisely because of the lack of unionization):
- Limit weekly working hours. - Weekends - Paid vacations. - Protect workers in bad situations (pregnancy, disability, injuries).
That's just in general. Go into actual unions and see what things they do.
Also, they're not messing with the free market. The job market is not a free market, there's an extreme asymmetry of power and information between a worker and a company. Most workers can't afford to lose their jobs, most companies can afford to lose a worker. By splitting workers they can apply individual pressure to gain an advantage that they couldn't get if workers actually coordinated. Unions restore the power balance and give workers the power to negotiate the conditions in an equal setting.
Free market efficiency + redistribution via taxes+coupons is the way to go.
Milton Friedman approves.
Edit: It's an interesting admission when you basically say that Amazon's worker productivity depends on coercion.
Nope. Injecting money into lower end income levels, through things like raising the minimum wage to $10-11, or social welfare programs, causes every company paying minimum wage to slightly bump up their salaries - thats a market correction.
Unionization is economically equivalent to rent control, which is not a market correction.
The reason why rent control doesn't work is you basically people who cannot otherwise afford to live in an area, and artificially increase their net worth. Of course they want to stay in the area, which decreases availalbe housing supply, prevents building of new housing supply, e.t.c and so on with cascading effects.
With unions is the same thing. People who are not worth $15 an hour because are slow are artificially inflated, and now they get put into a job that is hard to fire from, which then in turn leads to companies less likely to hire people, which decreases labor supply, and has other cascading effects.
>It's an interesting admission when you basically say that Amazon's worker productivity depends on coercion.
As is the case for any non-protected unskilled labor position, of which there are plenty. Amazon perhaps does more metric collection and expects a higher throughput, but they also pay accordingly. And people don't have to work at Amazon if they don't want to.
Its interesting though that people chose to focus on Amazon when talking about this, instead of all the companies that share similar working conditions. Kinda shows you where your priorities are, which is not in discussion of things that could benefit the lower income class.
You're right that Walmart should be in the overall discussion, but they aren't the ones in a unionization vote happening at this very moment.
And it's weird to conveniently act like the discussion of issues that benefit low income workers haven't been core political topics, like the $15 minimum wage you keep bringing up.
To be fair, plenty of huge companies hire all kinds of people that provide zero or negative value to the bottom line. Most of these positions are white collar, well paid and non-unionised: purchasing officers, university administrators (with the exception of that one person who actually does everything), sprawling HR departments, "Agile" project managers that can't code, the "management class" as a whole etc. Interestingly, the more "dead weight" employees a company has, the faster they will hire more.
Using your own brand of "individual actors maximising value" economic theory, it's pretty easy to see how this is the case. The people making these hiring decisions don't actually have any rational incentive to increase the profitability of the organisation, but will receive both increased job security and political power through appointing dead weight hires. So that's what they do.
Your conception of what "free market" means is wrong, and the thing you're imagining has never existed.
Anyway, here's a few other things that mess with "the free market" as much as unionization:
- Workplace safety laws
- Environmental protection laws
- Minimum wage laws
- Accounting regulations
It's like saying "people are boycotting product x because they disagree with company policy" isn't allowed because "cancel culture is messing with the free market".
Unions have things like the ability to force someone to join a union and pay dues. From the point of view of the union, you ofcourse want that in order to stop the union from loosing power to non union members.
And also, if you think that unions are market forces because they represent the interest of workesrs, so are anti union measures because they represet the interests of companies, so by definition you should be ok with what Amazon is doing.
Only if we're on the side of definitions, I guess.
Not in the US, not since 1947. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 banned closed shops:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_shop#United_States
It's literally the first line of that section.
Where are all the comments about Walmart unionization?
You would probably see more of these in regular times, when there isnt an absolutely massive push for Amazon unionization at this very moment.
I think the 8 hour week, and ending child labour are good outcomes.
> people can quit and go find easier job at any time
There's no basis for this, by your own observation. Offering bottles of water in the desert is not a fair trade of value. You have a hostage negotiation.
> There isn't a single shred of credible evidence that this is a widespread problem
Except for all the evidence you want to ignore or have laid before you to dismiss.
It's tiring at how poorly this rhetoric is thought out. I'll skip to my favorite part.
> Unionization is messing with the free market,
What does free market mean in this context? Oh right, whatever you think works because it makes sense in a closed system with immediate feedback. Reality does not match this. Major Airlines don't hire less people because they have unions (white collar and blue collar, typically).
Most of the post is some strange worldview using open language that has no weight or typical strawman theorycrafting.
On the contrary, he is probably very happy with the way things are. You may be buying into the "Just World fallacy"; there are plenty of people you may find despicable who are leading happy, fulfilling lives, by their standards.
I think the antipathy towards workers a combination of 2 things: it takes a fair amount of conceit/self-belief to dare think you can change the world (statistically speaking). The second thing is, even if you didn't start of with that mindset, success usually brings a certain post-hoc justification in the vein of "Clearly, I have been successful, therefore I'm better than most", which easily morphs into "My needs are more important; the little people are too focused on short-term goals and yet I have to compete with them for the same resources to achieve even more important goals I have planned". As someone from a low-income background, I have noticed that the more successful I have been, the less empathy I have, and I'm only middle-class. I don't know if it's because of my increasing income, increasing age, or combination of both.
Of course, I (and you) say this from the position of people who don't know the man in person. It's all baseless backbiting.
Obviously this isn't dispositive to say he's happy, but I don't think it proves he's unhappy either. Not wanting your workers to unionize hardly seems like proof of an unhappy life.
Most ultra rich buy news companies. It's part of your portfolio to ensure you have maximum say in the political decision process.
See "Manufactured Consent", there's a cool animated video explaining it on YT.
> Not wanting your workers to unionize hardly seems like proof of an unhappy life.
Indeed. It just shows you are above the law, and a authoritarian/oppressive.
We were actually "highly encouraged" during new hire orientation to go on glassdoor and leave a good review - that was the first hint I made a mistake in accepting the job. It was a pretty awful place to work.
Certainly seems like there should be. I would love to see Amazon slapped with a billion dollar fine for these shenanigans.
While it's obvious that the accounts were created by corporate you don't know if the tweets are those of real workers or not.
There won't be any anonymity on that network, sure, but there are plenty of other social networks where you can be anonymous.
Or why would I want to use a social network with onerous signup terms?
That's exactly why. It would allow ideas and speech with psychological safety to proliferate while everything else is shut down. It's bad enough already due to voluntary censorship (cancel culture).
However, I ultimately don't think requiring IDs would be effective and it would probably expose at-risk and vulnerable groups to greater retaliatory action. It's arguably a bit classist as well, since only those who are sufficiently rich and powerful enough to protect themselves would be able to participate with impunity.
Phase 1: "Okay, it's a Real Names social network, seems probably fine."
Phase 2: "Oh no, some sort of token economy. Well, maybe it--"
Phase 3: "Nevermind, it said the word 'blockchain,' abandon ship, this is doomed."
1. https://i.imgur.com/JlZIpAI.jpg
2. https://www.backstage.com/u/alisha-elaine-anderson/
3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/22/uber-pr...
The people railing against Amazon are mostly people who have never done manual labor in their lives and (wrongly) view people who have as little better than slaves. Even the Amazon (or ex-Amazon) employees who speak against the company are doing so in an environment where the only tolerated sentiment is attacking Amazon. There's no room for nuance. Perhaps that's okay and reasonable new provisions for Amazon employees will come out of all this or perhaps the debate will get less and less rational.
This situation makes me think of Ikiru, a Kurosawa movie. The main character is dying. He looks around for meaning in life and eventually settles upon a former employee of his, a young girl. He spends time with her and buys her things just to be around her, not out of any romantic of sexual motive, just because he's drawn to her liveliness, her attitude toward the world. Eventually she gets tired of this situation and no longer wants to see him. As she leaves, he begs her to tell him how she's so happy. She explains that she now works in a factory making toys for Japanese kids and this gives her life meaning. The main character decides that he can make his life meaningful by creating something durable in the world for other people before he dies.
My point is that we often view workers as oppressed but an Amazon warehouse worker contributes in a very real way to billions of people getting things that they need. I write code for a living and I'm not convinced that I contribute any more to the world than an Amazon warehouse worker. And don't think the workers are unaware of this, some of them take pride in it, whether or not they express it on twitter, and they should.
A lot of this comes down to your attitude toward the world. Are you a pessimist? Do you view human interaction as oppressive, is it mainly comprised of corrupt, powerful people manipulating kind, weak people? Or are you an optimist? Do you find it remarkable that things work as well as they do, do you take pride in your part, no matter how small, in keeping civilization afloat?
Neither of these sentiments is wrong but only one is taken seriously in certain circles.
Personally I would wait for more evidence to judge (which seems unlikely to happen). It's not so hard to operate a false flag on platforms like Twitter.
How does civilised society survive if 90% of our communication go online to platforms like this?
This cannot continue, there must be real consequences for puposeful mass deception.
I have recently gone through some of my old tweets where I replied (respectfully) to some climate deniers and fairly far right-wing accounts. All those posts are now deleted or the accounts have been closed. Where they all fake bot accounts? Who did I reply to? Did it even matter?
But if you want to keep your job, you don't speak out publicly ( https://thetyee.ca/News/2020/05/18/Fired-Amazon-Designer-Pun... )