Facebook, Amazon etc....

berbatrick

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mariachi-19 said:
Sorry but as a former Uber Driver, it is not hard to maintain a decent Uber Driver rating. Rudeness and incompetence are literally the only reasons for low ratings.
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I know about what is posted on that paper, which is why I always give 5. But it is a crazy system which penalises a 4 (in my eyes a very good score!). If I didn't know what, I'd probably have given 4 as the default.
 

mariachi-19

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berbatrick said:
I know about what is posted on that paper, which is why I always give 5. But it is a crazy system which penalises a 4 (in my eyes a very good score!). If I didn't know what, I'd probably have given 4 as the default.
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Most Uber drivers dont get the arse until they're 4.0 or lower. There are warnings prior to that, but if you're getting 4 or above and seldom less, they're not going to give you the arse.
 

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Schoolchildren in China work overnight to produce Amazon Alexa devices

https://www.theguardian.com/global-...ork-overnight-to-produce-amazon-alexa-devices


Xiao Fang*, 17, started work at the factory on the Amazon Echo production line last month.

Fang, who is studying computing, was given the task of applying a protective film to about 3,000 Echo Dots each day. Speaking to a researcher, she said she was initially told by her teacher that she would be working eight hours a day, five days a week, but that had since changed to 10 hours a day (including two hours’ overtime) for six days a week.

“The lights in the workshop are very bright, so it gets really hot,” she said.

“In the beginning, I wasn’t very used to working at the factory, and now, after working for a month, I have reluctantly adapted to the work. But working 10 hours a day, every day, is very tiring.

“I tried telling the manager of my line that I didn’t want to work overtime. But the manager notified my teacher and the teacher said if I didn’t work overtime, I could not intern at Foxconn and that would affect my graduation and scholarship applications at the school.

“I had no choice, I could only endure this.”
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kl
 

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Not sure if it's been discussed already, but has anyone seen these weird Amazon "ambassador" accounts on Twitter and Facebook? They are so, so weird, with many problematic comments and accounts often referring to themselves by the wrong names etc. Would be funny if it wasn't so grim.
 

berbatrick

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VorZakone said:
Jeff Bezos comes across as a fecking machine here: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/what-jeff-bezos-wants/598363/

No doubt he's a genius though.
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already gritting my teeth at this point
Bezos is unabashed in his fanaticism for Star Trek and its many spin-offs. He has a holding company called Zefram, which honors the character who invented warp drive. He persuaded the makers of the film Star Trek Beyond to give him a cameo as a Starfleet official. He named his dog Kamala, after a woman who appears in an episode as Picard’s “perfect” but unattainable mate. As time has passed, Bezos and Picard have physically converged. Like the interstellar explorer, portrayed by Patrick Stewart, Bezos shaved the remnant strands on his high-gloss pate and acquired a cast-iron physique. A friend once said that Bezos adopted his strenuous fitness regime in anticipation of the day that he, too, would journey to the heavens.

When reporters tracked down Bezos’s high-school girlfriend, she said, “The reason he’s earning so much money is to get to outer space.” This assessment hardly required a leap of imagination. As the valedictorian of Miami Palmetto Senior High School’s class of 1982, Bezos used his graduation speech to unfurl his vision for humanity. He dreamed aloud of the day when millions of his fellow earthlings would relocate to colonies in space. A local newspaper reported that his intention was “to get all people off the Earth and see it turned into a huge national park.”
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berbatrick

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Reading more:
the thing Bezos considers his primary humanitarian contribution isn’t properly charitable. It’s a profit-seeking company called Blue Origin, dedicated to fulfilling the prophecy of his high-school graduation speech. He funds that venture—which builds rockets, rovers, and the infrastructure that permits voyage beyond the Earth’s atmosphere—by selling about $1 billion of Amazon stock each year. More than his ownership of his behemoth company or of The Washington Post—and more than the $2 billion he’s pledged to nonprofits working on homelessness and education for low-income Americans—Bezos calls Blue Origin his “most important work.”

He considers the work so important because the threat it aims to counter is so grave. What worries Bezos is that in the coming generations the planet’s growing energy demands will outstrip its limited supply. The danger, he says, “is not necessarily extinction,” but stasis: “We will have to stop growing, which I think is a very bad future.” While others might fret that climate change will soon make the planet uninhabitable, the billionaire wrings his hands over the prospects of diminished growth. But the scenario he describes is indeed grim. Without enough energy to go around, rationing and starvation will ensue. Over the years, Bezos has made himself inaccessible to journalists asking questions about Amazon. But he shares his faith in space colonization with a preacher’s zeal: “We have to go to space to save Earth.”
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Reminds me of this:
According to Mark Fisher, the quote "it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism," attributed to both Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, encompasses the essence of capitalist realism. Capitalist realism is loosely defined as the dominant conception that capitalism is the only viable economic system and thus, there can be no imaginable alternative. Fisher likens capitalist realism to a "pervasive atmosphere" that affects areas of cultural production, political-economic activity, and general thought.[3]

Capitalist realism as I understand it cannot be confined to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions. It is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.[4]

Capitalist realism propagates an idea of the post-political, in which the fall of the Soviet Union both solidified capitalism as the only effective political-economic system and removed the question of capitalism's dissolution from any political consideration. This has subverted the arena of political discussion from one in which capitalism is one of many potential means of operating an economy, to one in which political considerations operate solely within the confines of the capitalist system. Similarly, within the frame of capitalist realism, mainstream anti-capitalist movements shifted away from targeting the end of capitalism and promoting alternative systems to an aim of mitigating its worst effects.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism:_Is_There_No_Alternative?

and

https://www.monbiot.com/2014/05/27/the-impossibility-of-growth/
 

berbatrick

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This is an interesting article! Next section:
As World War II drew to its close, Hayek wrote the essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” a seminal indictment of centralized planning. Hayek argued that no bureaucracy could ever match the miracle of markets, which spontaneously and efficiently aggregate the knowledge of a society. When markets collectively set a price, that price reflects the discrete bits of knowledge scattered among executives, workers, and consumers. Any governmental attempt to replace this organic apparatus—to set prices unilaterally, or even to understand the disparate workings of an economy—is pure hubris.

Amazon, however, has acquired the God’s-eye view of the economy that Hayek never imagined any single entity could hope to achieve. At any moment, its website has more than 600 million items for sale and more than 3 million vendors selling them. With its history of past purchases, it has collected the world’s most comprehensive catalog of consumer desire, which allows it to anticipate both individual and collective needs. With its logistics business—and its growing network of trucks and planes—it has an understanding of the flow of goods around the world. In other words, if Marxist revolutionaries ever seized power in the United States, they could nationalize Amazon and call it a day.
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That 2nd paragraph is also the argument made here. I don't think so. Amazon (and Walmart and others) exist within a sea of prices/market information, which allows them to set prices and make decisions accordingly. They show that internal planning would be easier with computing and data, not that markets can be supplanted.
 

berbatrick

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The middle of the article is less interesting, at least for me. It could equally be about Stalin or Jack Welch.

Given Trump’s motives, it’s hard not to sympathize with Bezos.
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Quite the opposite, I was cheering for Trump and fecking Marco Rubio, an equally un-human ghoul, when they appeared as the anti-Amazon in the article.

Good ending:
That Donald Trump has picked Jeff Bezos as a foil is fitting. They represent dueling reactions to the dysfunction of so much of American life. In the face of the manipulative emotionalism of this presidency, it’s hard not to pine for a technocratic alternative, to yearn for a utopia of competence and rules. As Trump runs down the country, Bezos builds things that function as promised.

Yet the erosion of democracy comes in different forms. Untrammeled private power might not seem the biggest threat when public power takes such abusive form. But the country needs to think like Bezos and consider the longer sweep of history before permitting so much responsibility to pool in one man, who, without ever receiving a vote, assumes roles once reserved for the state. His company has become the shared national infrastructure; it shapes the future of the workplace with its robots; it will populate the skies with its drones; its website determines which industries thrive and which fall to the side. His investments in space travel may remake the heavens.
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I think one very big thing that the article glossed over is that his real innovation was in the field of online data storage - it mentioned AWS but not that AWS profits carried the loss-making retail business for many years. So when people say he wants to take over logistics, that is after already owning all significant online storage.

I know Warren (and probably Bernie) will have an anti-trust response to Amazon, and that will be useful in some ways (the data server and retail business aren't necessarily linked) but it should not be broken up any more than that. It is almost a pefect corporation*, that is very good at what it does. Going back to the line in the article about Marxists -it is indeed a perfect target for nationalisation ecause that concentration of power in private hands is both unhealthy and doesn't allow any actual competition anyway.


*About the perfect corporation part - neither Bezos nor Amazon pretend. You can shout at it on twitter to stop ads that finance 8chan and it won't move an eyelid. Bill Gates gives half his fortune, often to projects with ideological or material benefits to him; Bezos hoards more and more, not bothering with charity or even taxes. Google talks about do no evil while helping the NSA and Chinese firewalls; Amazon openly sells facial recognition technology to help round up undocumented immigrants. I think Google and its PR exercises are a step beyond the simplest economic Marxist analysis, while Marx would immediately recognise Bezos and Amazon.
 

oneniltothearsenal

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"(Amazon disputes the methodology CNBC used to tally women in its senior leadership ranks. “There are dozens of female executives that play a critical role in Amazon’s success,” a spokesman told me in an email. He cited the company’s generous parental-leave policy, a commitment to flexible scheduling, and the fact that more than 40 percent of its global workforce is female as evidence of its pursuit of gender equity. He also said that its Leadership Principles insist that employees “seek diverse perspectives.”)

The meritocrat’s blind spot is that he considers his place in the world well earned by dint of intelligence and hard work. This belief short-circuits his capacity to truly listen to critics. When confronted about the composition of the S-Team in a company-wide meeting two years ago, Bezos seemed to dismiss the urgency of the complaint. According to CNBC, he said that he expected “any transition there to happen very incrementally over a long period of time.” The latest addition to the group, made this year, was another white male."


"That Donald Trump has picked Jeff Bezos as a foil is fitting. They represent dueling reactions to the dysfunction of so much of American life. In the face of the manipulative emotionalism of this presidency, it’s hard not to pine for a technocratic alternative, to yearn for a utopia of competence and rules. As Trump runs down the country, Bezos builds things that function as promised.

Yet the erosion of democracy comes in different forms. Untrammeled private power might not seem the biggest threat when public power takes such abusive form. But the country needs to think like Bezos and consider the longer sweep of history before permitting so much responsibility to pool in one man, who, without ever receiving a vote, assumes roles once reserved for the state. His company has become the shared national infrastructure; it shapes the future of the workplace with its robots; it will populate the skies with its drones; its website determines which industries thrive and which fall to the side. "

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/what-jeff-bezos-wants/598363/
 

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What does Zuckerberg even get out of this ?

The guy is worth billions of dollars, help create one of the most popular sites on the internet and still has to act like a child being told off by a teacher. Not only do these people have a disgusting amount of wealth(That should be forcibly took away from them), they aren't even remotely interesting. Christ with the money Zuckerberg has, he should be a super villain, he should walking into the housing hearing wearing a cape made of gold and throwing bloody diamonds at the politicians. The monopoly man wouldn't take this amount of shit.
 

Traub

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Sweet Square said:
What does Zuckerberg even get out of this ?

The guy is worth billions of dollars, help create one of the most popular sites on the internet and still has to act like a child being told off by a teacher. Not only do these people have a disgusting amount of wealth(That should be forcibly took away from them), they aren't even remotely interesting. Christ with the money Zuckerberg has, he should be a super villain, he should walking into the housing hearing wearing a cape made of gold and throwing bloody diamonds at the politicians. The monopoly man wouldn't take this amount of shit.
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They’ll never win against the government, so they’d rather be seen by the government as being cooperative. That way they can try steer the conversation.
 

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Traub said:
They’ll never win against the government, so they’d rather be seen by the government as being cooperative. That way they can try steer the conversation.
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I guess. Although Facebook is already in with the government in regard to the spying/prism stuff(Plus the whole the state is nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the etc etc). At best Zuckerberg has to worry that maybe one day Warren or Sander could possibly to something if the get elected and the circumstances are right(And even then its a long shot). It just seem such as waste to have all this money and to be such a utter bore.
 

crappycraperson

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Don't get the hysteria around facebook being forced to fact check political ads. IIRC US SC already ruled that politicians can lie as part of their political ads in media. Why differentiate between ads on social media and old media?
 

berbatrick

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crappycraperson said:
Don't get the hysteria around facebook being forced to fact check political ads. IIRC US SC already ruled that politicians can lie as part of their political ads in media. Why differentiate between ads on social media and old media?
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i think it's because ads are better integrated into the net (especially ones which adblockers don't catch). on tv and newspaper, you can usually see the divide.
 

SteveJ

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Sorry for the crap question: is there a way to stop Amazon emailing me product recommendations? I get about six each day.
 

SteveJ

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Brilliant. Thank you very much! :)
 
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