It seems amazon itself is aware of this issue. The linked engadget article even mentions this:
> "The rate at which Amazon has burned through the American working-age populace led to another piece of internal research, obtained this summer by Recode, which cautioned that the company might “deplete the available labor supply in the US” in certain metro regions within a few years."
> It seems amazon itself is aware of this issue. The linked engadget article even mentions this:
>> "The rate at which Amazon has burned through the American working-age populace led to another piece of internal research, obtained this summer by Recode, which cautioned that the company might “deplete the available labor supply in the US” in certain metro regions within a few years."
Agriculture, food processing and handling and everything associated, particularly meatpacking, and that's valid across countries. There's a reason that even if you pay (relatively) obscene wages, there will be no domestic employees willing to pick up these jobs - the work conditions are usually horrible because there are few industries as cut-throat and cost-sensitive as anything related to food.
The root cause is global competition, especially from countries with very low wages - Ukraine, a country in Europe, for example, was a top food supplier for Africa -, and widespread income disparity in many Western countries - 67% of Americans self-report to live from paycheck to paycheck [1], for example. First it's "luxuries" that get the cut - travel, eating out, entertainment - and once everything has been cut, people go for savings in food because that's the last large expenses block that they can meaningfully control.
> About 41% of American workers earning between $300,001 and $500,000—and 40% of those making over $500,000—say they’re living paycheck to paycheck, according to a new report from Goldman Sachs.
Another reasonable conclusion is that many people are foolishly over-leveraged. If you buy the biggest/nicest/best house and the priciest you can possibly manage, you will be living paycheck to paycheck almost by definition, since your house/car/etc payments will be eating up all your paycheck.
I don't know how often this actually happens, but it certainly not an unreasonable conclusion.
I don't think that kind of advertising is directly advertising happiness. Luxury car ads advertise status more than anything. They're more subtle about it than Equinox gym marketing with its weird, sexualized elf people, but the product they're really selling you is being better than your peers.
> but the product they're really selling you is being better than your peers.
Which they suggest will make you happier.
The most toxic high-income advertising is all based around creating a need and then fulfilling it... because it turns out wealthy people tend to already have enough things to make themselves happy, if they looked at them differently.
I don't thing we fundamentally disagree on anything, I'm just saying every product advertisement tries to convince you the product will make you happier, and sometimes it not a bad thing- like Japanese McDonald's (where they don't use hydrogenated oils).
All advertising is based around creating a need and fulfilling it, but not all of those needs are toxic. Imagine getting an advertisement for a concert for some musicians you've never even heard of. You hear their music, and maybe they even have some showmanship. You like what you see and hear, and now you have a need you didn't have before, whether that's going to a KISS concert or whatever kinda music floats your boat.
Toxic ads encouraging you to indulge in toxic behavior, like an Instagram ad making you think you don't matter if you don't publicize every hour of your life, are a different animal.
That's all I'm trying to say, I'm not trying to be pedantic or anything. I just don't think putting out a Disney World ad of a happy family eating breakfast with Mickey Mouse is promoting or exploiting toxic values even though it convinces you that you need something you weren't aware of yesterday.
I suppose my distilled point was that the FI in FIRE stands diametrically opposed to the consumption-growth radiation of advertising.
So in order for FIRE to kill off McMansions and luxury cars most people would have to become resistant to advertising (or advertising would need to be limited).
When you put it that way, I think whether culture is upstream of business or vice versa and whether people have free will or are merely conduits for things their senses receive are unanswerable questions. All I know is this:
"If you treat people as they are, they will become worse. If you treat them as they could be, they will become better.
If we treat people as if they were what they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship
I'm convinced that treating most people as if they have free will is more likely to get them to at least consider my ways.
I'm a bit more ambivalent towards free will en masse -- to what extent it exists doesn't matter to me, if there are still statistically significant trends.
Mostly because there are infinite ways to misunderstand an individual's motivations and thus arrive at a 'should' prediction that conflicts with observed reality.
Versus reasoning in from 'a lot of people ____, do they still after we ____?'
The Maritime industry can run into this too. Tug companies, barge companies. The level of consolidation vs the size of the labour pool is what does it.
} There's a reason that even if you pay (relatively) obscene wages, there will be no domestic employees willing to pick up these jobs - the work conditions are usually horrible because there are few industries as cut-throat and cost-sensitive as anything related to food.
Yeah I am not sure that is true either. People will work at these facilities but we all know the conditions there are horrible because they can get away with it - you can't threaten an American with deportation for whistle blowing. As long as companies get away with abusing immigrants then the labor market will always keep them in demand.
The problem is that these are usually measuring self described rates. And people aren't using the same definition when self describing. Have come across plenty of people who claim to be living paycheck-to-paycheck because they have nothing left over after maxing out 401k & IRA, socking away $1K in a savings account, paying for their posh apartment, and more. But of course that's not what it's supposed to mean.
Very few other singular companies have Amazon's rate of growth. I joined in 2012, they just crossed 95k employees worldwide. By the time I left in 2017 they were over half a million. These days they seem to have plateaued around 1.5 million... that's just a ridiculous number of employees
Whether you're in the tech industry or the warehouse, everything I've heard about Amazon is that they work you as hard as they possibly can until you burn out and then they replace you with someone new. At least on the tech side you get options though.
An honest answer that you didn't consider yourself to be lucky used to be a no-hire dealbreaker for Anazon. I wonder if their emigrés still view themselves as lucky.
I swear these typos like to sneak in after I've posted, and HN doesn't allow edits. Spellcheck in the "compose a comment" process would be appreciated.
Yeah, It's an infamous strategy. Rotate out staff so and maximize turnover to minimize pay and potential uprisings.
It ran into the problem that workers are in fact a finite resource. And of course that at some point the juice ain't worth the squeeze. People aren't going to do part time work being ground to death and still not be able to pay rent. At least ridesharing and delivery is done on and around your own schedule
That's one reason for the corporate backing of globalism. It's sold as "mobility", but what it actually means is having the upper hand. It's not about a lack of "talent". It's about a lack of a pool of people who will put up with their crap.
Consumerism rewards this process, because the glut of mediocre goods remains cheap.
That's essentially the entire reason illegal immigrantion and the H1b program exist. They are both in precarious positions that allow them to be treated as indentured servants, forcing them to tolerate conditions Americans never would.
None of it is about talent, it's about giving companies the ability to abuse employees, with a nice side of wage suppression.
I thought that was one of the reasons why several US states are loosening child labor laws, they will put 14 year olds to work in Amazon warehouses and on the assembly lines.
That’s an interesting topic. In most states, homeschooling is almost meaningless because there are no required assessments to demonstrate student proficiency in any subject. And 11 states don’t even require a parent to simply notify the state that they’ve pulled their kid out of school.
That's because there are roughly two types of home schoolers, and they're at opposite ends of the achievement spectrum. The high achiever cohort are the ones you see who outperform students in their GPAs, SATs, and get into highly selective colleges. The others don't even finish HS much less apply to college so you don't hear about them.
Sure, I don't contest that. Parents can definitely fail to educate their children properly at home. Students in government schools suffer from the same problem though.
The point is that the average result appears to be better.
My point was that the average result doesn't account for the lowest performers because they're not even included in those scores that are being averaged. It's skewed towards the high performers.
> And yet home-schooled students widely outperform government-schooled students, both during homeschooling and in college GPAs.
I'd love to see your citations on that.
Because my impression is that, precisely because of the lack of regulation in many states, homeschooling has bimodal outcomes.
Some children turn out better (read: those of wealthy, educated parents with extra time to spend on educating) while some children turn out much worse than even the worst public schools (read: kids of religious/political-indoctrination parents and/or ones of limited socioeconomic means/time).
At minimum, it seems pretty reasonable to have homeschooled kids take the same milestone tests as public school kids, in order to objectively measure if their teachers are doing the job well.
You know, considering (a) it's a decision children aren't empowered to make for themselves, (b) there are a lot of crazy-as-fuck parents out there, and (c) it's something that will define the rest of kids' lives.
"Oops, my bad" in the event of poor outcomes won't put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
If you look into these you'll see people arguing against Ray's studies saying "the population is overly white, overly married parents, and overly Christian, it doesn't represent potential results for the wider population". That's definitely true, but it's also a fact of the home-schooled population that those groups are wildly over represented, and the results of that actual population being called "meaningless" is what I was responding to.
It is fair to argue that home-schooling isn't a panacea, and wouldn't work for everyone. I never intended to say it would. I did include the second study which is specifically about black American home-schooled students and their results.
As for the rest of your post, I understand your opinion, but don't share it.
The guy you're replying to only posts simple takes to derail conversations. He doesn't have citations.
Comparisons like his don't make sense. There's no dividing line between government-schooled and home-schooled in real life, there's a range of connections and dependencies. There is no friction or animosity between Government Education as an institution and people who homeschool. Their goals align.
> Comparisons like his don't make sense. There's no dividing line between government-schooled and home-schooled in real life, there's a range of connections and dependencies. There is no friction or animosity between Government Education as an institution and people who homeschool. Their goals align.
I'm not sure what I said that made you think I'm arguing against this point. Government Education is absolutely necessary and a common good. It's a bare minimum that keeps a lot of children from a life of total ignorance and squalor.
I do think that government education has some pretty major flaws, but I didn't say anything to setup some zero-sum competition between the two approaches. I was
replying to the statement "In most states, homeschooling is almost meaningless because there are no required assessments to demonstrate student proficiency in any subject", which is a bit ridiculous and, in context, is trying to paint home-schooling as some backdoor approach to child labor.
Put the 14-year-olds on shift after school, put the adults on shift during the day. The teenagers won't have time to do homework but the schools aren't funded well enough to ensure a quality education anyway.
> the schools aren't funded well enough to ensure a quality education anyway
The US spends more per pupil than every other OECD country except for Luxembourg, and exceeds the average by over 50%. If US schools aren't funded well enough, essentially no one is.
Educational spending in the US is individual to the state, and even more locally within school districts within states, so it makes no sense to look at it from a national average
Correct me if I’m wrong but I thought in America there’s no obligation to attend school ever, because you can just be homeschooled and then take the GED? I think it’s dumb but I don’t know for sure.
It's complicated. There's a broad requirement that you receive a K-12 education. There's also a huge amount of pushback against most things that would infringe personal freedoms, so "I'm handling that myself, go away" is permitted but the exact details vary between states.
At least where I grew up if you drop out and don't file all the necessary homeschooling paperwork the police will visit you.
It's a sort of a grey area, and varies a lot by state and which way the political winds are blowing.
Miss too many days of government school because your family are poor and you had to help your parents put bread on the table? The truancy officer may show up to arrest you.
Announce you are homeschooling your kids to avoid liberal indoctrination? Sending your kids to work in a factory? A-ok in a number of states.
Anything intelligence enough to find us, or be putting out signals we can find with instructions on how we can reply in a reasonable number of human lifetimes, is intelligent enough to stay well hidden for us lest we infect them with our stupidity!
Slightly tangential: there's an excellent Norwegian TV series based on the premise of suddenly appearing immigrants from earlier time periods, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beforeigners.
Some entire industries have this problem, eg trucking. There is this shortage of truck drivers. The quiet part is that it's at the rates trucking companies are willing to pay. That rate is based on what they can charge to customers plus a thin profit margin. Because trucking is too easy to get into, companies can't simply raise their rates because other companies will undercut them (in their own desperate bid to survive). This kind of market competition is healthy for the "market", perhaps not healthy for workers.
The depletion of tech workers for Amazon is similar. The part that isn't said is: at the salaries Amazon is willing to pay. Amazon has a different market to worry about, the stock market. They can't just increase their HR spend 25% without taking a hit in the stock market. And I guess they aren't willing to change the work environment to be more attractive. Maybe they can't at their size, as it can be hard to avoid dead weight.
Google doesn't hire in the US for some PAs, for similar reason. Salaries are capped (artificially) by stock market demands. But Google doesn't call it worker depletion.
Shortages always exist at a given price. If people demand their iphones cost only $100, there would be a massive shortage of iphones.
Same goes for labor: if you pay shit, demand for that job is going to be shit.
Of course on the labor side, part of the "price" is job satisfaction, working conditions, etc. Many more people would rather be receptionists at $17/hr than working in a warehouse or factory for the same rate.
i think another part of it is whether there's any meaningful difference in value for a mediocre vs good employee.
let say you ran a trucking company and decided that you'd pay more to ensure you cornered the market on 'good' drivers. but... it turns out that your customers don't care if you have good drivers or mediocre drivers, so you can't justify charging a higher rate.
> Because trucking is too easy to get into, companies can't simply raise their rates because other companies will undercut them.
How are they going to undercut them without drivers available to actually do the work?
This narrative is absurd. Per mile domestic truck shipping rates have gone up dramatically in recent years, and are generally quite variable. Trucking profit margins were until quite recently way up, the fall driven by high fuel prices and interest rates (which increase the costs of equipment financing and insurance) and reduced demand.
The truth is trucking is currently going through a recession with freight demand down and empty miles up. Trucking companies most certainly could raise rates and pay pay to attract more drivers; right now they don't want more drivers.
Total US retail sales are over $700 billion per month, which is more than twice what Amazon does in a year. Amazon isn't even #1 in the US; that prize belongs to Walmart.
Both facts could be true, if the previous post was referring to the cardinality of sales not combined value and the average Amazon sale is lower than the average sale overall.
The average Amazon sale would have to be ~25x lower than the overall average, seems rather unlikely. Not to mention that counting sales only makes sense within a product category.
60% may be true in some random product category, but clearly not across all of retail. Maybe that’s what’s being remembered, but missing the surrounding context.
It might be a sign flip of their share of online sales. They account for about 40% of online sales (yes, in-person retail still vastly outweighs e-commerce), so 60% of online sales are not Amazon.
>“deplete the available labor supply in the US” in certain metro regions within a few years.
AWS Manager interpretation. "Few years?, not my problem"
So I'm guessing things will get worse. It took a long time but I remember when "cloud" started getting big lots of people voiced concern about being at the whim of Amazon/Bezos for your business critical infrastructure. Took longer than most people though but we are getting there.
Edit: I see its from 2022, so maybe it is the end stage?
> "The rate at which Amazon has burned through the American working-age populace led to another piece of internal research, obtained this summer by Recode, which cautioned that the company might “deplete the available labor supply in the US” in certain metro regions within a few years."