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Comment by al2o3cr | Hacker News Reader

"In the 19th century, the maturation and standardization of weaving technology finally brought long-overdue raises to textile workers."

Wow. Way to completely write out of the story the PEOPLE who fought tooth-and-nail to get those raises, WaPo....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_Mill_Girls

Of course, acknowledging the real struggle might seriously impact the whole "things will get better by themselves, just keep sleeping" argument of the piece...

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Keep in mind that The Washington Post was recently acquired by Jeff Bezos.

This article makes much more sense when viewed in the light of Amazon's current PR problems due to their treatment of poorly paid warehouse workers. They are desperately trying to automate as fast as possible, and this piece tries its best to spin it as a win-win for everyone.

You of course have evidence that Bezos is interfering in the editorial operations of the Post, right?

It's happened enough with other figures & papers that some people take it as good practice to assume, proof or no, and simply disregard the paper on suspect topics.

Certainly nothing you can take anyone to court over, but perhaps prudent.

The idea that Bezos has already turned the WaPo into Amazon's personal PR factory seems highly unlikely. Esp. when you see articles like this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/01/16...

Bezos wouldn't need to "turn the WaPo into Amazon's personal PR factory" in order to get this published though. You don't have to have a massive conspiracy to get a story published. Everyone in PR knows that.

All he'd have to do is mention the research to a few writers. If you're a writer and the owner of the company mentions a story that sounds interesting to you, you might be just a little etra inclined to cover it.

The first season of House of Cards is a nice illustration of how the combination of powerful people and ambitous writers can lead to a "journalistic" PR campaign without any mass conspiracy. Granted, it's fictional. But it's a plausible mechanism.

Consider Fred, who is paid $1 and produces $10 in value. Every employer would love to have Fred come and work for them. In fact, another employer would likely offer Fred $2 to come and generate $10. Fred, not being an idiot, takes the offer.

Another employer offers Fred $3, and so on, until Fred is making ($10 - opportunitycost).

In other words, Fred being way underpaid according to the value he produces is an unstable situation.

Unless of course there are 10,000 Freds and only 1000 jobs like Fred's.

There's no reason to suspect it's a static system.

People have a history of rushing to start new businesses where there's lots of value being created at little cost.

For a couple examples: the 1849 gold rush, and the current internet startup rush.

The 1849 gold rush was a terrible idea and cost most people more than they got back. Most startups also fail. I feel like that's not a good way to run an economy.

1 9 8 4 rot

Fixed, thanks

Thought experiments cannot be used to prove real points.

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