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Comment by zamadatix | Hacker News Reader

This is just a rehash of what their source https://www.freightwaves.com/news/should-truckers-be-allowed... reports which is, itself, almost entirely a rehash of social media commentary on the sourced Reddit post https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonDSPDrivers/comments/1f2y2cp/t...

Just reading the original quoted mid article without the extra commentary it's clear the story is unrelated to listening to the radio in itself and to do with the camera mechanism monitoring for other forms of distracted driving not being able to tell the difference:

> we were told that "a lot of mouth movement will set off the camera" and that we "needed to keep mouth movement to a minimum".

Still a shitty system by all counts... but a lot easier to talk about it directly than via rehashes.

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Ok, we changed the URL to that from https://jalopnik.com/amazon-bans-its-drivers-from-moving-the.... Thanks!

Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Rehashing, in this case, seems to mean communicating.

This isn't a random aggregator, Freight Waves is a well-known industry specific site.

A world where this wasn't rehashed by Freight Waves is a world where you have to read every Reddit board to gain knowledge.

> unrelated to listening to the radio in itself

None of the links you mention, nor any comment or headline, includes the word listening.

I don't see how any of the headlines, on HN, Freight Waves, or Reddit, or content, on HN, Freight Waves, or Reddit, could be read as related to listening.

> but a lot easier to talk about it directly than via rehashes.

What does this mean, exactly?

EDIT: Can't reply due to HN timeout, maybe the HN link was originally to Jalopnik saying they can't listen to the radio, and it's cached in your browser? On my end, it's always been a link to Freight Waves with the headline "Amazon bans its drivers from moving their own lips...(something something, can't see, I'm on mobile)"

All of this completely ignores that the current source is Jalopnik so I'm not sure if I should take that as you agreeing there but just not in the second case. I will say Freight Waves is at least a better source than Jalopnik for this, they attempt some actual direct reporting instead of talking about things like "That’s an opinion shared by many Freight Waves readers".

To be clear, I'm not saying the sites themselves are useless or not - just the wrong thing to post as a source for discussion here. From the HN guidelines: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter". Freight Waves would probably be acceptable enough for that, Jalopnik is pretty poor in this particular case.

> None of the links you mention, nor any comment or headline I see, mentions listening.

Apologies, that is a slip on my part - meant singing along to the radio. A great example of why you should look at the original instead of commentary :p.

> What does this mean, exactly?

When you talk about what an article which talks about what another article talks about what people talk about what someone said it becomes a lot less clear than staging a conversation around what was originally said instead.

I realize this part sounds particularly silly:

> instead of talking about things like "That’s an opinion shared by many Freight Waves readers".

It should read more like:

> instead of things like the Jalopnik reporting "That’s an opinion shared by many Freight Waves readers".

I.e. obviously it's not a rehashing problem for Freight Wave to report what its own user polls say.

You formatted your post, as if you were trying to debunk it, but nothing you said makes it better. Yes, there is technically a reason for that policy/recommendation, but it is essentially a bug in a safety system. Instead of fixing that bug, they've asked the drivers to alter their behaviour, so they don't trigger it. Asking drivers to concentrate on keeping their "mouth movement to a minimum" is actually worse for safety.

Debunk the distraction that is the focus being singing to the radio instead of the focus being what you pointed out here - Amazon using an unreliable safety system which places a lot of burden on drivers, regardless of the radio.

The version of the story (straight to Freight Waves instead of Jalopnik) the link was changed to at the time you made your comment was much better about getting to this point (one less layer of indirection).

Laws agains this kind of workplace environments seem best long term.

Still, with the source being one “we were told” I guess we’re not sure if this is this official; this could be a manager’s threat or someone’s inaccurate understanding of what the camera is actually monitoring.

Ventriloquism, face masks or humming in the meantime then. Or quitting, like the author of the linked post - perhaps best for now.

> Still, with the source being one “we were told”

This is not true.

It makes me very itchy to see 2 comments in a row using innuendo and deconstructing sourcing in an erroneous way.

How do you find those comments erroneous?

Here, there is not one source saying “we were told”

The other handwaves about "rehashing" to wave away Freight Waves, while linking to comments on Reddit. You imply there's only one comment that says "we were told"

The other also implies the claim is they cannot listen to the radio.

It seems you are referring to my comment in some of those (and apologies if you're not) but my comment was not about waving away any point Freight Waves makes or says entirely but about which link the discussion should start around (which itself was far more about Jalopnik than Freight Waves). Nor was it implying anything about how many comments were on Reddit (or elsewhere) about it, just how it started and a recommendation people should read from there out instead of Jalopnik down. Dang has since changed the link to Freight Waves directly which is enough I probably wouldn't have bothered commenting.

As noted elsewhere, I did make a grave error in saying listen instead of sing to when writing the comment and by the time someone mentioned it it was too late to edit the comment. A great example of why you want to base discussion off of sources closer to the original first :).

I commented it elsewhere but it can be tough to balance general laws like that. E.g. right now, if an employer is aware people wear face masks so they can chat on the phone while they drive then the current set of laws allows a lot of liability to be placed on the employer when such accidents occur due to not taking safety seriously enough. Putting a general rule that an employer can't do this sort of thing then runs the risk of employers saying all sorts of things were for the workplace environment compliance, not safety negligence on their part. Putting specific rule exceptions instead becomes daunting to define, keep updated, and understand (for employees as much as employers).

I'm not saying some of this kind of thing can't be better served by some different laws, just it's probably not as easy to solve with a "quick" law or these other approaches as it might seem.

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