HN user
This is not true. You're completely pulling this out of your ass.
Your job isn't paying less and outputting more because video games exist. When cars were introduced pay didn't suddenly stop tracking productivity.
The top 10% of taxes should go up radically. They've been MUCH higher in the past.
I'll say it again because apparently no one's listening.
We're working more and getting paid less for that work. This isn't because of the standard of living. Standard of living can still increase while pay tracks productivity, and it does in other developed countries.
This is the most frustrating HN discussion I've seen in a while. People are coming here to peddle this "quality of life" argument with zero evidence. You're not even stopping for a second to consider that the US isn't the only country in the world.
If you compare the American GDP to other countries, the average individual is getting very little bang for their buck as far as quality of life goes.
You're working more and getting paid less than people did, 10, 20, 30 years ago... meanwhile the wealth gap has increased dramatically. Where do you think it's going? It's not hyperbole whatsoever.
This is false. I do not understand how so many people are coming in here peddling this theory with 0 sources. It doesn't even follow basic logic. You're positing that we're spending more while also earning less? Where's that money coming from then?
It's objective that productivity has increased while pay and leisure time have decreased. This isn't a result of any increase in material goods. People are spending less because simply because they're getting paid less.
In 1956 the federal minimum wage was $1 (roughly $10 adjusted for inflation). Today it's 3/4 of that at 7.25.
This is not true.
I'm talking about worker productivity within the US. Hour for hour we're outputting more and getting paid less. Before overseas labor you weren't less productive because you had to make your own clothes or something. That time had already long passed. I'm talking about what has happened since the 1950s, not the 1850s.
child labor still exists, literally kids operating sewing and mining machines
Walter You can go on and on, but you're talking about an illusion. You are literally working more and getting paid less than previous generations. It's objective data. People had cars and televisions. Your cellphone doesn't cost the lifetime of productivity gains that are being stolen from you.
Ouch, that's kind of like the lottery. Sorry you worked your ass off waiting for retirement, here's some cancer.
The thing is... you can have the choice. Sometimes you need the choice, things can go south for any of us. The choice can also free you to take risks... it makes it easier to start a business, it makes it easier to fail.
I've been literally working without an unemployment gap since I've been 14. I worked 60+ hours a week through most of my 20s. I didn't have a choice. It took me half of my life to reach financial stability and normalcy. I still get stressed about healthcare costs despite being healthy. It doesn't have to be this way for anyone.
Even if you want to work all the time, most people aren't being paid appropriately for the time they put in. None of us are really experiencing the benefits of society's dramatically increased productivity.
Why give free school to everyone, libraries? Clearly a rich person doesn't need those either?
Public services should be public. There's extreme social value in equal access and you reduce an extreme amount of bureaucracy and debate in the process.
If I got free money I wouldn’t increase spending, I would reduce work.
WE SHOULD ALL REDUCE WORK.
Sorry for the caps but we need to collectively get into this mindset. We're more productive than ever with very little to show for it. We've been having labor outright stolen from us for decades.
Having nearly unlimited free garbage removal is probably more than a problem than people realize.
UBI means you can actually evaluate the system you live in and determine what's necessary (and then pay more for it). At the moment it's all "jobs jobs jobs" - we have entire federal agencies that are essentially jobs programs (Homeland Security is a great example... they've done almost literally nothing).
Right not a bad point, but I was making the comparison to demonstrate Amazon's scale within ecommerce... not to compare the volume of sales across all commerce.
I personally think the distinction matters, but maybe I'm wrong.
Ah there it is. That makes a lot more sense... honestly at their scale I don't think they should be able to do this, aggregate or not.
They're about 50% of all online sales in the US, where compared to brick-and-mortar, Walmart gets a lot of flak as a small-business killer despite only accounting for 15% of all physical retail sales.
Before the Journal’s report came out, Amazon had told Congress that it doesn’t access sales data to help guide the launch of its own products.
This is insanely hard to believe. Amazon just started selling batteries and other random goods under their Basics brand based on ZERO inside sales knowledge? I'd love to see how they enforce that.
Maciej Cegłowski is a generally clever and entertaining guy. Check out his (mostly unrelated) blog too... it's very well written.
Oh wow that's even better than analytics referrer spam.
Yeah you have to assume that if a user can input anything, someone will use it to spam. Text, photos, video, audio... literally any form of user input.
Right, they can send millions at very little cost... and in some places throughout the world a single successful scam could be equivalent to the average annual income.
What drives me crazy is that this will happen even if the email with the invite never hits your inbox and goes straight to spam. Outright insane to not patch that ASAP.
They have not fixed it.
I wish I could turn off the feature entirely, but I still occasionally get Russian spam events on my calendar. They also try to notify me at ~3am (fortunately I turn notifications completely off at night).
The emails themselves land in my spam folder... but no one said "hey, maybe calendar events shouldn't be created from the spam folder" at inception, so I guess it'll never be implemented.
I report them as spam when I get them, but I also discovered that I can't report calendar events as spam in the mobile app.
A mix of politics, bureaucracy, and cost. For example, there was a fatal derailment back in 2017 in the US, and an automated safety system that may have prevented it was delayed.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42421417
From the wikipedia article on Positive Train Control (PTC):
In December 2010, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that Amtrak and the major Class I railroads have taken steps to install PTC systems under the law, but commuter rail operators were not on track for the 2015 deadline.[14] As of June 2015, only seven commuter systems (29 percent of those represented by APTA) were expecting to make the deadline. Several factors have delayed implementation, including the need to obtain funding (which was not provided by Congress); the time it has taken to design, test, make interoperable, and manufacture the technology; and the need to obtain radio spectrum along the entire rail network, which involves FCC permission and in some cases negotiating with an existing owner for purchase or lease.[15]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_train_control
So needless to say... the technology likely exists today, but implementing anything significant to existing infrastructure in the US is a monumental feat.
The above example is just a safety system, but once you start removing employees you also start running up against labor unions... which is yet another layer holding things back.
Also... wouldn't the bandwidth of streaming back all that video be pretty obvious? Seems like it would take a lot of resources for data they probably already have anyway.
Yes making mass-emailing too easy is a footgun. It's incredibly easy to get blocked by common email providers entirely if you make a simple omission or mistake. Third party senders do a fair amount of work to ensure deliveability is maintained (because it's critical to their business). If you don't have a workflow to deal with spam reports and list management then you'll very likely be sending your emails into a void.
Spam has effectively ruined DIY mass-emailing, whether you like it or not. There are multiple other providers if you don't like mailgun.
There are a lot of ways for organizations and non-profits to save money, and I wouldn't recommend doing so with email if it's important to them.
There's not a cheap off the shelf solution because most companies offering comparable mass-email services spend a significant amount of resources to fight spam and care about deliverability rates.
Nice to have the option available, but making this too easy can be an organizational footgun if someone doesn't know what they're doing.
the operative word here is "valid"
Diversity in suburbs is a very recent development. Look at the historical demographics of the suburb you probably live in. It's great that it's changing but suburbs are not a product of seeking to preserve diversity.
Yes. It's very normal to not have any business within a 30 minute walk (or more), and even if you did want to walk there... it's also normal for there to be kilometers of roads without sidewalks. They just don't bother.
Often the businesses get crammed together on some busy streets with fast-moving traffic, large parking lots, and few sidewalks.
It's weird in our context but there's followable logic there.
Being absurdly protective of the person who did the work is at least erring on the side of protection.
It's not impossible to imagine a world where the internet could have social media platforms with some attempt at media attribution functionality...
...instead we have the wild west where the vast majority of content is shared without acknowledgement, let alone attribution or permission. Even EXIF attribution data is stripped whether you like it or not. You have incredibly successful artists trying to protect their work with watermarks and JS-disabled right-clicks. Seems silly.
Well of course, who can afford the rent? It's not like a little four-employee computer repair shop can show up and fill the space.