Borg999

http://www.geekwire.com/2015/full-memo-jeff-bezos-responds-to-cutting-nyt-expose-says-tolerance-for-lack-of-empathy-needs-to-be-zero/ 

Jeff Bezos is the future, a dystopian future, where the "elites" manipulate good people who can't hack the pressure cooker they've created.  Those "losers" should go home and die under a rock.  Die anywhere, just not here; you clocked out first right?  

Jeff will keep screwing over young people who don't know anything about the history of the labor movement in this country.  They can't keep the unions out indefinitely but they might be able to hold them off until the General Industrial-Purposed Robot (pronounced Gipper - in honor of President Reagan) is available.

Dystopia: A dystopia is an imaginary community or society that is undesirable or frightening. It is literally translated as "not-good place", an antonym of utopia.  Wikipedia

Remember it's not the fall it's the sudden stop at the end you have to worry about. 

backs out of the room slowly... 

Just a taste of the sh*t sandwich Jeff and his brethren are serving up:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/22/opinion/joe-nocera-jeff-bezos-and-the-amazon-way.html?_r=0

The bad side is the way he and his company treat employees. In 2011, the Allentown, Pa., Morning Call published an eye-opening series documenting how Amazon treated the workers at its warehouses. The newspaper reported that workers “were pushed harder and harder to work faster and faster until they were terminated, they quit or they got injured.”

The most shocking revelation was that the warehouses lacked air-conditioning, and that during heat waves, the company “arranged to have paramedics parked in ambulances outside” to revive workers who were overcome by the heat. “I never felt treated like a piece of crap in any other warehouse but this one,” said one worker. (After the exposé, Amazon installed air-conditioning in its warehouses.)

In Jeff's defense he noted in a letter to shareholders "It's not easy to work here." Oh, then that's okay then.  We can all look the other way now.  

Good night.

Be it as it may it's at most a temporary problem. Physical warehouse jobs are definitely those jobs that should be replaced by automation. Regardless of how good and jovial the boss is. There simply isn't any reason why a human should do it. Other than him costing less than the robots, that is. Currently. Which is just a matter of time. The automation itself is an easy problem.

There must be now a misunderstanding. I genuinely don't understand why you'd think that offensive. Certainly didn't mean to do that. In no way did I imply that people are "whining" or anything else like that. My point was that they are simply doing the wrong jobs.

Replacing simple low-skill physical jobs with automation is a good thing if we have the technology to do it. It's better for the workers, the business owners, and the society in general. Also, outsourcing the jobs to foreign countries isn't automation at all. You are still putting a human into a job that shouldn't be done by a human in the first place.

Note that humans have brains that are better than our best AI designs by a factor of millions, if not billions. People are very smart whereas robots are generally dumber than a cockroach. It's a horrible, horrible waste of education and brain power to put a human into a job that a standard automatic system can do. This is what I meant when I said humans shouldn't do these kind of jobs. They ought to be employed in tasks that make use of our creativity, intelligence, flexibility, and understanding. Doing otherwise is like putting 100 people into shoveling a ditch when there's a perfectly good excavator available. It wastes human talent and basically makes no economic sense whatsoever. When one man digs the ditch with a machine the 99 others can do something else that is more productive and we are all the richer for that.

I'm sure we have all read enough sci-fi stories to know by now that if a technologically advanced society routinely uses people for low-level physical labor that could be done better, faster, and cheaper by machines, it means that society is either decadent or plain evil, or that the plot sucks.

Utopian dreamland that lacks perspective on people.

Not all of us want to be creative, intelligent, flexible, and understanding.  The day we get rid of grunt work is the day the hobo population explodes.  Hobos already exist for the same reason, they're not self motivated enough to even do grunt work, typically because they prefer being drunk to being sober.  Most grunt workers are capable of far more than they're utilizing, but some aren't actually that capable either.  A pretty significant portion of the population is incapable of doing high tech work, regardless of how well you try to educate them.  Their brain simply isn't wired right for it, the kind of social engineering required to "find" everyone jobs once you've automated out manual labor is scary Orwellian shit.

Ayn Rand was a soulless harpy from hell. I find it funny that some of the most religious politicians love her. She was an ATHEIST. I am pretty much an atheist myself but that doesn't mean you have to be douche bag. Ayn Rand is all about me first and damn everybody else or anybody who gets in my way. Maybe that's how the world is becoming but that doesn't make it right.

Anyway I take the NY Times article with a grain of salt. Amazon employs thousands of people and "over a 100" were interviewed. That's not enough info for me to damn the whole company.

Some of the accusations made are valid if they are true. People with illness or people having to help others in the family for one reason or another being forced out. How can anyone justify that?

Putting in place a system to rat out fellow workers. That sounds like something Hitler would approve of or Ayn Rand for that matter. Tell me how that is right or a good practice?

Providing a safe work place should be a given. Amazon is not a hole in the wall repair shop in Oklahoma. There's no justifying people having to work in a warehouse that is over a 100 degrees inside. Rather than being a good thing, having ambulances in the parking lot is pathetic. There is no excuse for that.

From the 70's to the early 2000's I worked for a newspaper that was so busy that a lot of folks there couldn't hack it. In order to be successful you had to to put in the hours and produce. I become a manager for 20 of those years. It was tough. I'd probably do well at Amazon, the me of those years. I'm 63 now so those days and my ability to be a "mover and shaker" are pretty much behind me now. What happened was that paper got sold to a much larger company that had a lot of other papers as well as mine. The formula used to improve and modernize our organization ruined it and ran it into the ground. Common practice now a days. I was a casualty of that. Coming from that background has colored how I approach any job since. Seeing how newspapers are dying the ones I've worked for since aren't the same as the one I worked for back in the day. You kind of feel like the string quartet on the Titanic. You are still playing but you know the ship is sinking. People aren't motivated because they know there's no future. I still have what I consider a strong work ethic and I've learned to put blinders on because I can no longer change what I see going on around me. I can't motivate useless people or discipline useless people anymore. I've had some frustration in this regard to this day.

Having a competitive and busy environment is good. Those who choose to put in the hours thrive. Those who don't, don't. That's just common sense.

First off as much as I would like to think we are all equal, we are not. Some simply cannot hack putting in 65 to 70 hours a week at a job. Some folks can't work their ass off in a 100 degree warehouse all day. That does not mean they are "weak kneed whinny types". I learned that long ago. There are times when person A simply can't do what person B can do. Person A will probably never do any better. It's up to management to make a judgement that person A is really working at their potential or not. It takes a good manager to determine if person A is slacking and if they are it's the managers fault. Bad management creates a bad work place. Maybe the manager is a weak kneed whinny type. I've worked with other managers who fit that description and their crew usually didn't fare too well. You have to have good managers. Not all managers are equal. So on and on right to the top.

What those people are reporting isn't a matter of hurt feelings. They are bringing up real grievances if those grievances are accurate. 

I think that there is a good case to be made for the fact there is more of a chance that abuses can happen in a meritocracy. It all depends on what sort of people are running it. Any environment can go bad. It depends on the folks running it. There's good companies and bad companies. All are not equal so to say those people are liars is not a valid statement. There are bad corporate policies that exist.  Not all corporations are good. Some are bad and some are good. You can't make blanket statements like that and expect to be taken seriously at least by me. Unless you actually work there you don't know and even if you worked at Amazon, the place is so huge there's no way you'd know what goes on everywhere there.

My statements were tongue-in-cheek....