I believe W_Z has almost written a book about the horrible working conditions at Amazon.

One of my friends who was an executive his entire career and worked most of it at one company that went out of business is winding up his working years packing boxes at Amazon for insurance purposes. He assures me that Amazon barely knows who its best employees are. This guy is way more experienced and educated than most of the managers at his facility. He tells me he sees stuff that could be improved for more efficiency all the time, but he rarely says anything and just packs his boxes for ten hours and goes home. He likes one of his managers so he'll occasionally whisper suggestions in her ear to try to make her look good (and make shit easier for himself). Basically, his take isn't much different from Zach's, the place is an exploitative mess.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Amazon constantly burns through workers. It's essentially what Marx's worst nightmares of dehumanizing work could not come up with. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... s-labor/4/

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Why are only 14 percent of black CPS 11th-graders proficient in English?

If mom and pops can't pay enough for employees to clothe, feed, and shelter them then I guess they won't survive like the millions of others that didn't survive with a low rate.

The free market has failed to help low income workers for decades whether times were good for bad. Why would it suddenly happen now?

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Even they think workers deserve more!

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

I would assume that for small companies under a certain number of employees their might be a waiver for the $15/hr. There are ways around it.

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Why are only 14 percent of black CPS 11th-graders proficient in English?

yep, taking a somewhat recent quarter (Q4 2017):




Amazon sorta stumbled into AWS (Amazon Web Services).

Eschewing their fellow Seattle-ites MS products, Amazon from the beginning built an internal *nix-based IT infrastructure to handle internal IT tasks/running Amazon.com.

Eventually they realized they could scale up their internal IT infrastructure and sell off the excess capacity at a tidy profit with minimal effort.

They already had the devops systems in place to automagically spin-up new capacity on demand. The containerization/docker/kubernetes revolution of the last few years has only made that process cheaper/easier/more profitable; while skyrocketing demand for cloud-based IT infrastructure hosting like AWS or Google's Firebase competitor or even Microsoft's Azure offering.

Once people get comfortable with using virtualization/containers within their own IT departments, on their own hardware, it makes a world of sense to stop buying expensive-but-short-of-life and costly-to-maintain-and-host hardware every year and simply off-load your IT infrastructure to the cloud.

Bonus: once you stop buying and maintaining your own hardware, you can fire the neckbeards you were paying six-figures + benefits to write/babysit clunky bash/powershell scripts to keep the network and "boxes" up.

Larry Ellison was a man ahead of his time.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

How the heck has Ellison escaped being #MeToo'd. Maybe having your own island makes you untouchable. Same for Richard Branson.

Amazon keeps saying they're going to ween themselves off of Oracle's database products and shift to their homegrown Amazon Aurora database product...but then I see they have ~3 dozen standing orders for various flavors of Oracle DBA's across their various locations. Doesn't sound like a company about to stop writing $60 million checks to Oracle.

Every person should make $75 per hour. That equates to roughly $150k per year, so that way every person in America can afford nice food, great car, good housing. Perfect world.

You have yet to answer. What should the minimum wage be?

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

What the market dictates.

That means no minimum wage at all?

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

I’m ok with a floor of some sort. But the Panda Express by my house has a sign up for $12 an hour, so I don’t think we need the government saying Panda should be paying $75 per hour, although that would make their employees very happy, temporarily. Of course, no one could afford Panda anymore, so they would go out of business.

It’s weird that you are clearly intelligent, but cannot see the folly of artificial wage supports.

I already tried to teach him about Adam Smith and all that but he doesn't bother to understand.

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

Where is this $75 an hour straw man coming from? I'm asking a simple question. If you don't like $15 then tell me what it should be.

What is the folly?

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

The minimum wage should be $75 per hour so everyone can live happily with nice cars, a house, and vacations. The entire economy would benefit.

The "invisible hand" just so happens to use that hand to suppress wages down to the point where you can work a full time job and not feed, clothe, and shelter yourself. As I said before, why don't we let the invisible hand also handle all environmental protections? The invisible hand will eventually figure out that black water and lead in the water is bad for business.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Oh, by folly you meant made up arguments used to avoid answering a question that should be pretty simple. Well, I was using the first definition of folly.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Those are well covered issues in Economic Theory. It happens because no one individually owns the air. But that might be a good idea.

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

Sorry. The minimum wage should be $100 per hour so everyone can drive an eco-friendly Tesla.

Oh, an ECON 101 response.

For as long as we as a people have to take the burden of the poor who can't feed, clothe, and shelter themselves it should be viewed the same way as we have to take the burden of polluted lakes and air.

Now, as I've argued before, a good alternative solution would be to make it illegal for any company above 50 employees to hire someone on any sort of government welfare. Let the "invisible hand" compete with that.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Using the minimum wage to leverage private industry as redistributors of wealth and achievers of social justice seems like a less-than-optimal/bad way to go.

One thing I've noticed even free-market economist types (e.g., uber-Adam Smith-ian Russ Roberts) supporting is some form of universal basic income. And they sometimes do so logically as a substitute for jacking up the minimum wage. After all, what good will a minimum wage hike do for a taxi driver replaced by a self-driving uber/lyft; or a mcdonald's cashier/grocery store checkout girl replaced by a computerized kiosk. etc.

For those not yet replaced by robots, the idea is that a low-wage worker who makes say $10 stocking Wal-Mart shelves with cheap chinese crap might also get the equivalent of $10 an hour in EITC (Earned Income Tax Credit), or whatever implementation of basic income. Of course, then smart, cheap companies like Wal-Mart might then build that government subsidy into their compensation plan and leave people at $10 an hour ad infinitum.

Who knew the evil meth man was this easy to rattle?

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I respect your dedication to being disingenuous.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

My dad had a job like that at Panera for 15 years, not for the insurance as he was already in his late 60s when he started, but just to get out of the house and talk with customers. He had owned restaurants for 40 years, and was willing to work for $13/hour out in front for a few hours most weekdays for some spending money - he refused to take cash because he felt their register management system was too easy to abuse in somebody else's name. It was a real challenge for him to not try and put in operational improvements. But the first year he worked there, the location blew every other location out of the water in bakery sales and the regional managers had to come talk with him to find out how he was upselling the customers while they were waiting in line or sitting finishing their meals. [My dad grew up peddling tomatoes on a donkey in the countryside to people who could only pay in olive oil, so convincing a bunch of DuPage residents to buy a mediocre cinnamon roll wasn't exactly a challenge.]

So then one of the regional managers would make it his business to come sit with my dad every couple of months for about 30 minutes and let my dad give him an honest appraisal of what was working and what needed fixing. Said regional manager told the various store manager(s) over time to leave him the fuck alone, and all but one manager followed that advice.

Good organizations keep learning from their best minions, even when they get big.

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"When people want their version of the truth, they go find it, no matter how baseless their beliefs." -- Ken Rosenthal

Good point. While we're at it, why not eliminate all taxes since lowering taxes is believed to be a benefit to the economy.

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“Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office.”- JD Vance
“My god, what an !diot.”- JD Vance tweet on Trump
“I’m a ‘Never Trump’ guy”- JD Vance

I would be fine with that. Like I've tried to explain (fruitlessly) many times before, when you raise the price of something (workers), less of it is purchased. That is a fact. Cannot be denied. If you want to hep poor people, just give them the dough and let them figure it out.

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

In olden times, when the elders of an area decided that they had too many poor stupid people, they would start a war to conquer another area. A side benefit was that many of the poor stupid people would get killed in battle, and you didn't have to pay them enough to have their own cow and candles, and you could distributed the dead peoples' cows and candles to others and they'd think their lot in life was improving.

Then electricity and the Internet came along and fucked it up for everybody.

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"When people want their version of the truth, they go find it, no matter how baseless their beliefs." -- Ken Rosenthal

That isn't a fact, and one page from your ECON 101 book doesn't make it a fact. So, is this move going to really hurt Amazon? Why are they doing it?

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!