2k14 what's the worst enormous tech company?

Ah, yes. Free your mind, sheeple.

She even talks to multiple workers who take pride in their jobs there. Did they not get the memo that their work is demeaning? How come they didn't walk away without giving notice, leaving a bunch of extra work for their coworkers?

when you say 'free your mind sheeple' are you trying to suggest sufjan would say that, because it actually also fits pretty well w/ the rest of your comments

It was mocking "treating people like livestock", no idea what Sufjan is on about.

nobody uses sheeple to talk about people who are actually performing livestock-esque labor

How come they didn't walk away without giving notice, leaving a bunch of extra work for their coworkers?

Because starvation and eviction are not really optimal choices even given the world's shittiest job?

Are you really this dumb?

It was mocking "treating people like livestock", no idea what Sufjan is on about.

― ©Oz Quiz© (Adam Bruneau), Wednesday, July 16, 2014 8:47 AM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'm talkin' bout Beezid, man

i mean, sure, we all love the innovative products that Beezid provides right now. but how long before Beezid goes too far?

http://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2014/july/matt-rutledge-woot-has-a-new-deal-mediocre-corporation?single=1

At length, after a bit of business talk that maybe resembled a cousin of an actual breakfast meeting, Rutledge blurted out a question that had been troubling him: “Why did you buy Woot?”

[...]

So there sat Bezos at the breakfast table, faced with a question for which he was apparently unprepared. Many painful seconds passed without an answer. Rutledge let the pause lengthen as long as he could bear it and was just about to tell his host to forget it, when Bezos finally spoke.

He looked down at his plate. Bezos had ordered a dish called Tom’s Big Breakfast, a preparation of Mediterranean octopus that includes potatoes, bacon, green garlic yogurt, and a poached egg. “You’re the octopus that I’m having for breakfast,” Rutledge remembers Bezos saying. “When I look at the menu, you’re the thing I don’t understand, the thing I’ve never had. I must have the breakfast octopus.”

not rly an important or relevant article, i just havent been able to get that quote out of my head

http://media.bizj.us/view/img/813861/jeff-bezos-01*300.jpg

if you don't think hiring desperate people as contractors, increasing their quotas until they're impossible to meet, then firing them is a shitty labor practice i'm not sure what to say to you? and many people take pride in their work even when they work in demeaning conditions and it's not unusual or dumb b/c being able to take pride in what you do is a normal thing that most humans desire

Ok the 100+ degree warehouses, that is horrible stuff. But the "time theft" stuff is pretty par-for-the-course for blue collar work.

100+ degree warehouses is almost the least offensive stuff - there's relatively little you can do to cool a giant uninsulated building in a hot environment. You can, as a company, however, not engage in time theft and ritual abuse of employees.

Apple products are made in factories where the workers commit suicide. The warehouse this writer writes about only provides 1 (rather than 2) Thanksgiving dinners to workers.

not rly an important or relevant article, i just havent been able to get that quote out of my head

― r|t|c, Wednesday, July 16, 2014 12:38 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it is an amazing quote. breakfast octopus is such a great metaphor.

when they make the citizen kane / social network based on amazon there's no way they'll forget to use that line

bezos single-minded ambition + i eat yr octopus maps better to 'there will be blood'

First off I have 15 years experience working temp/contract jobs, including warehouse work. I feel like I am being realistic about things. I am not saying exploiting workers is good, only that it is widespread. To lay the blame at Amazon's feet is to pretend none of these employment issues were serious problems before 1995.

Also please do not assume low wage/warehouse/temp workers are all desperate individuals oblivious to their demeaning existence. That is some classist concern trolling. At the temp jobs I had many of my co-workers (including me) were working as well as going to school, and the flexibility offered by temporary employment made that possible. I had spent the previous 6 months interviewing for real jobs and whenever I brought up that I would be going to school in the fall, it seemed to be a dealbreaker for the employers. Without temporary employment I would not have finished school.

Of course I was desperate for that job, I was out of work. When you are out of work you are desperate for a job!

Corporate jingoism is bullshit, quotas suck, middle managers suck, Big Business's centuries-long hold on a 3 branches of the US gov't sucks, and the way society is structured so that everyone is pressured to surrender YEARS OF THEIR LIVES doing machine-like work for unfeeling companies sucks. Me saying this stuff is "par for the course" is not me giving it a big thumbs up. If you want to have a conversation about the larger implications of capitalism vs. the human spirit, I'm ready to go, and we will probably find we agree with each other all over the place.

Also, since we are discussing exploitation, it is ironic that in every article on Mother Jones about this stuff there are banner ads to the Kindle edition on....you guessed it, Amazon.com. So the workers are being exploited twice over (at least)!

20 years ago people probably said things like "Walmart can't be any worse than Sears or K-Mart." They were, and so is Amazon. I have 25 years of shitty jobs, so I know.

god what the fuck is wrong with you xp

every one if your posts is worthless. i hope you keep working temp jobs for the rest of your life. you deserve it.

though honestly you sound like the kind of asshole who has family to fall back on in dire straits so whatever

ok i'm over the top. anyway, this kind of investigative journalism of shitty labor practices has real effects. it may seem like plugging holes in the dam. there are people out there who use it as an excuse to feel good/ok and do nothing. but if you want to get all challops about it and throw your hands up in the air about capitalism, you're being self-indulgent and a reactionary. but iirc you're christian so i shouldn't exactly be surprised. still, why do you post here? so much and so often? with so many contrary opinions? you aren't doing anybody any good. you aren't provoking thought. it has to take up a lot of your time. you sound too self-righteous to be simply bored. are you just a giant narcissist? i was sounding a little unhinged there with "i hope you keep working temp jobs for the rest of your life," as that's just plain illogical and malicious. and not what i really hope. i actually hope for your own good and the good of people around you you stop being such a self-serving jackass. please! at least on here. maybe you're different irl, i don't know.

That's the third personal attack thrown at me today. Some real valuable discussion going on here. I say something, back it up with facts, someone comes in and calls me an asshole, asks me if I'm dumb, then someone else calls me an asshole, says everything I say is worthless. Fuck you guys, I never said a single thing about you personally.

My opinions are valuable to me, and I would respect yours if you just presented them rather than saying "Oh this guy sucks, fuck you LOL". You realize there is more than one way to look at an issue?

you aren't doing anybody any good. you aren't provoking thought

You're right, I'm provoking bullying. Peace out :-/

good fucking riddance!

good fucking riddance!

― mattresslessness, Wednesday, July 16, 2014 4:30 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

go find another forum to pull this bs on

who even gets that mad about something online?

all kinds of ppl tbh

for the record, adam, i recalled that you were plenty familiar with working shit jobs, so i did find it curious that you were so dismissive of the story about the amazon warehouse workers, but i figured you were coming from a place more or less like 'work is work, and yes it's shit but it's doable, principle is a different thing'.

i don't see the need for all the excitement

not rly an important or relevant article, i just havent been able to get that quote out of my head

― r|t|c, Wednesday, July 16, 2014 12:38 PM (7 hours ago) Bookmark

I saw this very well done still life photograph the other day and I felt ashamed because

http://i.imgur.com/NFDnFgZ.jpg

the only thing I could think of was "I must have the breakfast octopus"

good fucking riddance!

― mattresslessness, Wednesday, July 16, 2014 4:30 PM

go find another forum to pull this bs on

― Forks I'd Clove to Fu (silby), Wednesday, July 16, 2014 4:47 PM

this month's harper's has a cover story on amazon "workampers" btw—subscribers only, unfortunately. been putting off reading b/c it is sure to be depressing as hell: http://harpers.org/archive/2014/08/the-end-of-retirement/

agree or gtfo such a refreshing attitude on nunuilx i find

gtf

― blap setter (darraghmac), Tuesday, 15 July 2014 10:46 (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

gtf != gtf in gtfo fyi

this month's harper's has a cover story on amazon "workampers" btw—subscribers only, unfortunately. been putting off reading b/c it is sure to be depressing as hell:

Search around on "amazon campforce" and you'll come up with lots of hits - investigations, video bloggers, diaries from workers, etc. Some good, some bad - my gut reaction all a vague "so it's come to this." Worried about the long-term effects of cheap crap distribution being staffed by New Economy serfs/RV gypsies serving a giant Amazon warehouse in the great nowhere.

FWIW, I like McClelland writing. Her series of articles on PTSD are harrowing.

http://amazonfulfillmentcareers.com/opportunities/camper-force/ fwiw

http://depts.washington.edu/depress/images/hoovervilles/Hooverville_June10-1937_Lee399.jpg

http://andrewhickey.info/ :

Amazon have announced a new feature, Kindle Unlimited. This feature allows Kindle owners (so far only in the US) to download as many books as they want, one at a time, for a $9.99 per month flat fee — it’s a “Spotify for books”. Authors get paid as soon as the Kindle owner reads more than 10% of their book.

This is, in theory, a great thing, but in practice it’s evil. That sounds harsh, but I think it’s fair. And there are two main reasons it’s evil.

The first is that it requires participation in “KDP Select”, Amazon’s exclusivity programme. If you sign up for this, you can’t have your books available digitally anywhere else. I’d have to pull my books from Smashwords, iBooks, Kobo, Barnes & Noble and the rest, take down the PDF versions on Lulu, and remove the blog posts they were based on from here.

This would not be too terrible for me financially — I sell barely anything through any of those bookshops, and because I’m not good at sorting out tax stuff I haven’t even collected the money I’m owed for most of the sales (it’s all accruing in my Smashwords account, and I’ll get it eventually).

But it would mean that anyone with a non-Kindle e-reader would be unable to buy my books, making it bad for other readers like me (I have a Nook, and mostly buy from the Kobo shop and smaller ebook stores owned by publishers like Obverse or Baen).

It would also be one more tiny step towards Amazon being the only ebook retailer around, which would be bad both for readers (because monopolies are very bad for consumers) and for writers (because monopsonies are even worse for suppliers).

So I would consider it immoral to be involved — in the sense that the most moral action is the one which, should everyone take it, would improve the world the most, not in the sense of judging authors who decide differently. But that’s not actually the worst thing.

The worst thing is that, as with the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (which also requires participation in the KDP Select programme), there is not a flat fee paid to the author for each book read, but instead there’s a pot of money chosen by Amazon (at the moment $2million, as a promotional thing — normally closer to $1million, but offered at their discretion; they could make it ten cents if they wanted) which is split between all the authors according to the proportions in which their books are borrowed.

This is what makes it evil rather than just normal nasty corporate capitalism, because it turns what should be a positive-sum game into a zero-sum one.

If they made payments by number of books borrowed, say a dollar a book, that would be great. I could encourage you to read my book, and I’d get a dollar, and also encourage you to read, say, Andrew Rilstone’s latest book, and he’d get a dollar too.

But with the system where you’re paid by proportion of books borrowed, if I encourage you to read Rilstone’s book, then that means I’m getting a smaller share, so the incentive is for me to discourage you from reading any books by anyone other than myself. It’s a neat and nasty way of breaking any sense of community for authors (and one which would incidentally make collective action much more difficult should Amazon’s terms become more onerous).

This is not only classic divide-and-rule, pitting suppliers against each other, the worst kind of monopoly capitalism, but it’s also a catastrophic thing for readers. One of the most important ways people find new books is when authors reference or acknowledge each other’s work. But if you’re signed up to KDP Select, then you can’t tell readers about those other authors, who might make your share of the pie smaller.

And look at what that pie is. $2,000,000 . Sounds a lot, doesn’t it? But how many subscribers are they going to get at $10 a month? I’d guess quite a lot more than 200,000.

But more importantly, the number of books in the programme is “over 600,000″. Break that down, and that means that the mean payment per book — in this special promotional period where they’re paying more — is $3 per month. Obviously some will get more, but only because others will get even less.

The worst thing imaginable would be if this was a success, undercutting actual ebook sales to the point that it was the only way writers could actually make any money. And I can see that happening if something isn’t done about Amazon’s monopolistic practices (of which this is just one of many).

Thankfully the Big 5 publishers are staying out of this evil, and so long as they are, people will still buy books.

Because I don’t know exactly what the price for my soul is, but I do know it’s more than $3.

bump

http://images.pcworld.com/images/article/2012/02/google_evil-11211499.jpg

Amazon vs. Hachette: The Astroturfing

http://www.quartzcity.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/facebook_toughtimes-789x1024.png

worst enormous tech asshole retires on top http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-09-18/larry-ellison-steps-down-as-oracles-ceo

wow amazon is really downplaying the existence and availability of books on its new frontpage redesign

huh, you're right, but the truth is, i don't think i'd seen amazon's front page in like 5 years, who goes to amazon except via links to a product?

http://cdn.mhpbooks.com/uploads/2014/11/B1spUCKCQAEuVKV-572x649.jpg