maym86

I understand economics of scale. Amazon could order a million machines without raising workers wages.

It is absolutely useful if you're trying to measure the size of a football field. What in the article precisely does your analogy refer to?

Raising the wages of humans so they are the same cost as machines doesn't make the machines cheaper. Amazon could keep workers wages low and still buy machines and create the market. One doesn't necessitate the other.

That video looks like a demo/marketing video. Are there any videos of the factory working at full load?

Robots will be able to do the jobs for $15 hour sooner than they'll be able to for $7 an hour

This doesn't make sense. Increasing workers wages doesn't change the rate a which automation technology becomes available. The bottle neck is the availablity of capable automation systems which is unrelated to workers wages.

Even if there was a technology available that cost $15 an hour and worker wages were $7, increasing the workers wages doesn't decrease cost of the technology.

I specifically mean wearhouse workers. The automotation technology isn't good enough and whether or not they implement it has little to do with these wage changes.

Exactly, and Amazon is still growing so even as some jobs are gradually replaced by machines the total number of workers is still increasing.

This is a problem with Amazon PR misrepresenting a salary increase that isn't actually what they protrayed it as originally.

The point of the article is that people behave in a civil manner in a disaster and the behavior during 9/11 seemingly supports this.

Cause trouble and a mob sets on you.

Do you have anything to support this statement?

The original article contains links to the studies it is citing. If anyone has a serious criticism they can start here.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0002716205285589

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.453...

http://dspace.udel.edu/bitstream/handle/19716/590/PP205.pdf?...

https://europepmc.org/abstract/med/27438961

The point of the article is that your assumption, the assumption that people often make, has been measurably shown to be incorrect.

This is a good podcast breaking down the reporting errors and myths that are repeated after large storms:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/summer-series-episode-1-us...

Because men are statistically more likely to cause auto accidents. There is no evidence that women are not statistically more likely to be bad at getting good work done at companies like Amazon. It's pretty simple.

- If you hired this male candidate you may be interested in this identical male candidate.

Every story is a twist. "This one thing you thought you knew isn't actually true". Great for telling friends in the pub but misleading through selection bias as they don't tell all the stories where things aren't different to what was expected.

"Why all the wasteful discussion about gender politics? Read the last sentence of the abstract"

Other comenters seem to be making wild statements about gender differences, extrapolating from a small result, and using this to support their other unsubstaiated biases.

It's interesting. Take all new results with a grain of salt. Replication needs to happen before trusting this result, let alone understanding what it means.

I don't think it's a solution to climate change, it's just a personal choice. The solutions are out of my reach and ideling the SUV is much less of a problem than selling the SUV in the first place.

I don't think we're doing a good job handling the issue on a policy level so creating a child who will potentially have to deal with the worst of these problems directly seems unnecessary, avoidable and selfish.

On a personal note, don't have children. I'm not being facetious. It seems like we've had opportunities to do the right thing and consistently haven't so until the outlook looks better and we start taking action it's not a great idea to create offspring that will have to deal with the consequences.

I highly doubt it. I don't think Banksey is worried about a print being damaged.

From my experience the people writing the most glowing positive reviews are doing it to get you to work there as they are somehow involved in hiring and do so to counter any of the genuine negative reviews. I have seen this happen first hand as a push by a recruitment team once a few honest negative reviews appeared.

There are enough people within a company with a vested interest in having a good image on glassdoor to create a strong inventive to make it look better than it is.

Right now everyone has a proof of concept demo and people are pouring money in. It's going to take a while and I really can't see a company like comma.ai being a serious player given their approach but maybe I'm wrong. Good luck to them, I hope nobody gets hurt.

I work in the industry and am scptical of even the big players ability to deliver on the promises they made 3-5 years ago including waymo and cruise.

As far as quality goes it's way more reliable. Most of the "advanced" driver assistance systems would kill you within a minute if you left the car to their control.

Do you have any evidence/studies for either of these statements?

It's really the only option for hobbyists and enthusiasts to get self driving capabilities today without 50k+.

Right. It's not a serious automotive grade safety system.

Comma.ai has the same constraints. No monocular camera system works without careful user supervision. Even lidar based systems are not that reliable yet that you could trust them to the point of not paying attention.

They have built a single, forward looking, camera system on an Android platform and are using python for the control system. No serious auto manufacturer would trust a system like that for vehicle safety.

It's a less reliable version of the lane keeping systems that the automotive manufacturers already have and nothing close to the autonomous system that George Hotz was promising would be easy a few years back.

I also doubt automotive manufacturers want to deal with the drama around comma.ai and its publicity given they have a reputation to maintain as serious, safety conscious, organizations.

Why did MTA agree to it? They were involved in writing and bargaining the contract too.

I doubt a private sector union at Amazon would have the power to get such a deal.

This would be bargained between management and the union and is not automatic. Maybe it's a threat but not necessarily an issue Amazon would face even with the formation of a union if this is something Amazon really wanted to keep out of a contract.

At the end of the day both the company and the workers/union have to agree on the terms and people may not be willing to strike over this single issue if the rest of the deal was good.

There are plenty of other reasons for Amazon to want to prevent a union from forming including increased pay, benefits and time off but a union's ability to prevent automation may not be huge issue as Amazon is still growing and hiring workers faster than the jobs are being automated.

Agreed. Capitalizm works best when the incentives are not all in one direction. It appears in this case some other incentives are at play be they looking for good PR, the threat of workers organizing or government regulation. It helps when the workers have some leverage on their side.

I don't think it's a "knee-jerk" suspicion. It's from experience and knowledge that companies don't generally behave altruistically. Amazon historically has not acted altruistically. There is a considered business reason for this and I was trying to understand it. Suggesting that they likely have a strategic reason is in no way "knee-jerk".

Why would he bother raising wages then? No need for him to raise wages to do that. He isn't doing it for the sake of it. There is some other incentive involved. Automation happens either way and they have been gradually doing it for years without raising wages significantly.

Jeff Bezos in the announcement. “We’re excited about this change and encourage our competitors and other large employers to join us"

Is this an attempt to pressure its competition with less money in the bank to do the same, loby for a higher minimum wage and drive them out of business?

Maybe it's a reaction to the union organizing taking place a whole foods and they think this will be cheaper in the long run.

I don't buy the "automation is just around the corner so we can afford to raise wages for a smaller workforce" argument I've seen here because that remains the same even if they kept the wages at the same level.

Happy with the result but I'm curious what the motives are. Bezos wouldn't do this unless he saw a benefit for the business or his hand was being forced somehow.