If it's necessary during COVID times, it could still be beneficial during non COVID times. Even if COVID goes away, there are plenty of other viruses lurking around that kill lots of people each year.

Is your point that there should never be a job displacing technology or that retail workers are a special class that should be protected from automation?

My point is that our fellow citizens deserve dignity of work and an ability to feed themselves. This is but one example of automation displacing workers, but there are plenty of other examples that also include non automation related job eliminations.

So you're arguing the first one, never implement technology to save labor because people deserve the dignity of work. How far should we take this? Should we burn the tractors? We could create lots of new jobs for agricultural laborers. Or perhaps the government, instead of handing out welfare, could pay people to dig holes and fill them in again.

As above, you use a straw man argument. I said nothing of the sort, and your jumping to that conclusion is rude.

You’re welcome to ignore the questions I raise, but hungry people won’t give a shit about your philosophy when they upend the systems that have abandoned them.

They have Amazon stores in the US. There's one I know of in downtown Chicago. I don't know if it did particularly well but it wasn't robbed bare every day.

The Amazon Go stores in Seattle and (even before full auto was outlawed) in SF are more heavily staffed than a normal store.

This makes sense since they're not "in full prod" so to speak, unless that's changed.

Not to mention they're just fucking annoying to listen to all day in the summer.

I think it depends on what the Scrum/Agile process looks like and what it is replacing. For example, I think its pretty useful to have an iterative forecast of achievable work rather than a huge BRD and a solid deadline.

So, in other words, they became multi-millionaires. I think your reading too much into it, just take the words as written.

Charles Manson In His Own Words is a-OK though!

Thank God I have ebay to protect me from reading Doctor Seuss! Now please excuse me while I go bid on a vintage copy of "Charles Manson In His Own Words".

“very racist books“

Really? Very racist? You don’t think you’re exaggerating with the “very”?

If “what I saw on Mulberry street” counts as “very racist” where do you put “Huckleberry Finn” or “To kill a Mockingbird” with their colorful language?

I mean you have two great American classics unapologetically using the n-word vs a cartoon of a Chinese kid dressed as he did a few decades before the book was written.

N-word vs. kid dressed as he dressed.

Don’t you think “mildly discomforting depiction of a foreigner?” is more proportional?

On Beyond Zebra was one of my favorites as a child, one of the first I bought for my own children, and its message makes banning it very sadly ironic. make no mistake - this is a massive loss of american culture.

IDK I think it's quite cowardly if ebay is not willing to be consistent in what they are willing to sell. For example, if they can find a few people that are offended by violent video games, then all violent video games should be taken down from eBay. If I'm offended by the Communist Manifesto then it's time to take all copies of it off the site.

In fact they could even automate this. They already have a report item button. Whenever someone clicks that and marks the item offensive they could remove that whole class of items.

Ideally through a carbon tax which, unfortunately, current politicians seem too cowardly to even propose.

Will people be taxed for exhaling CO2?

No. Actually, technically yes but very indirectly. The fossil fuels would be taxed which are agricultural inputs for the food which we eat and then exhale.

IMO it should be the place where you live and use the roads and schools and police and firefighters.