The Economy

Cell phones are being affected by this as well.

 

We had a harder than expected time buying a few dozen laptops with GPUs recently.

 

I have spent about 18 of my 59 birthdays at the Miami Open. But maybe never again. These tickets typically could be had for $60-$80.
Two years ago a package for the entire tournament cost $1,500. This year? $5,150.

 

Or it just might be a traffic jam from Asia at western U.S. ports.

 

Odd that I agree with the Amazon VP? Congress talks about a $15 min. wage but Amazon actually has a min. wage higher than that? Odd that Amazon actually has a more diverse workforce that the US Government AND the Democratic Party particularly the Dems in Congress?

You can wealth shame Bezos all you want - and I DO support unions and vow to never cross a picket line - but I'm tired of people taking stands against things things they never have to make a real sacrifice for.

Amazon exec says tech giant is ‘Bernie Sanders of employers’ as senator supports union effort

 

Agreed. They are on the whole a good employer, relatively speaking. My concerns about Amazon are less about wages/workplace and more privacy and monopoly based.

 

My problem with Amazon as a workplace is more about relentless micromanaging and productivity pressure. People pulling orders in their warehouses wear GPS chips, and a computer calculates how long it takes to get from one bin to the next. Everything they do is examined and the workers are scared to go to the bathroom for fear they'll take a minute over standard.

Imagine if everything you did at work *had* to be done at an urgent speed. Finish one and you'd better do the next one just as fast - for everything you do, every day. It affects safety as well. A guy will climb the shelves to get an item instead of wasting a minute finding and moving a ladder. Relentlessly, every day.

I've read about Amazon drivers who carry a bottle to pee in so they don't have to stop and use a restroom.

I'm not an advocate for screwing off at work, but most of us had things that were urgent and needed express turnaround mixed with more routine tasks. Making everything emergency speed status all the time, and knowing exactly how long each task took to accomplish, writing up employees because they wasted 23 minutes at work this week? Screw that, I'd quit.

I understand demanding jobs but the relentless invasive monitoring of their employees makes me wonder about my own data security, such as it is.

 

For us newspaper folks, it's like spending the entire shift under the pressure of being a half-hour (or less) away from deadline.

 

And if/when they sit down on a break, they may be so exhausted that they fear literally not being able to get themselves to get up again. This is why I don't go to work for Amazon. Walmart work is hard, sometimes, but it's kind by comparison. It has goals/ideals and time frames it wants you to meet, which will be cited if you are getting written up for productivity. But unless managers really see or think you're not working, nothing is likely to come of not meeting the unrealistic expectations.

 

On one hand, massive kudos to Jeff Bezos for taking massive financial losses to keep Amazon going when it wasn't in style, when people didn't believe in buying anything online, when big-box stores were still mainstream.

On the other hand, Bezos can pay taxes like the rest of us. Handing tax breaks to the company owned by the richest man in the United States is a HUGE reason this country is in the toilet financially. I fully understand it's about attracting jobs to your region ... but Bezos can pay taxes like everyone else. The guess here is he'll find a way to put food on the table tomorrow.

And until Bezos pays like everyone else, blast him. Repeatedly.

 

Every day.

I've worked hospital x-ray. You are grinding away at a list of chest x-rays and various procedures, and a patient from the ER comes in, post car wreck. You drop everything and get that patient done on the run, because they are no-shit urgent. Then you return to chest x-rays and possibly broken extremities, where when you ask the patient when they hurt it, they say "oh, a week or so ago."

One of these things is not like the other.