It's kinda hard to survive when the play yard bully tells the other kids not to play with you or they'll get cooties (which in this analogy is no money/goods).
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Amazon to Retrain a Third of Its U.S. Workforce
- Thread starter entremet
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It's kinda hard to survive when the play yard bully tells the other kids not to play with you or they'll get cooties (which in this analogy is no money/goods).
That's what we call survivor bias. That ignores all of the non-successes in favour of the few successes.
Sanctions and trade embargoes dont cause a country to continuously run below the catchup rate of economic growth for its entire existence resulting in capitalist nations leaving it in the dust economically. The same issue came up in China Vietnam, etc. because the economic systems implemented were just bad.
Just how much RT/Telesur propagnda is out there on this stuff? Good lord.
And the economic system we have right now is destroying the environment, putting millions in prison, perpetuating bigotry and causing starvation and homelessness to many people. Long live capitalism!
Let's not pretend this shit happened in a vacuum. That's just being silly. Whatever economic problems that were present were amplified significantly by hostile outside forces
They weren't, because they were consistent across the board. Vietnam saw success with their economic reforms pretty quickly despite being on bad terms with the US. It's a basic efficiency problem.
We have less people in poverty, lower mortality rates, and less people going hungry than at any other period in history. The bigotry's going to be there no matter which economic system you have (and is the source of the Prison overpopulation issue), as are the environmental concerns. Those both need to be dealt with but neither's unique to a certain system of economics.
I know what you mean but I just wanted to make this joke, excuse me.
Yeah, it's easy to say we have less people in poverty when the definition of what poverty is has changed. Lower mortality rates and less people going hungry are not going to last long when the effects of global warming get more severe, as there'll be more flood, droughts, extinction of species, etc. Bigotry thrives in capitalism because capitalism is a system based on competition, which makes inequality, and thus bigotry, more pronounced. The environmental destruction also coincides with capitalism's need for constant growth.
I know what you mean but I just wanted to make this joke, excuse me.
I know you're joking but I worked on a gaming product that was clear as day was pointless and was going to be a failure. It was clear to everyone at my company that this was true, but we were contracted out by people who were really into it and it was backed by a huge company. The inefficiency that took place in that whole process and the amount of money I saw being dumped into there made me realize that these clearly stupid ideas need to exist because if we ran things as efficient as people think about when they ask, who asked for this, then more people would be unemployed. These stupid projects employ a ton of people and it's a necessary thing in the grand scope of things. Plus, sometimes it leads to something that's big, but we need all these other poorly conceived ideas because in a way it keeps the economy going.
Right. A lot of our economy sustains itself on "useless bullshit". It's more a matter of convincing someone your bullshit "might turn a profit" rather than offering a demonstrably valuable product.
"Success" in capitalism is about marketing yourself, not about raw merit. I get why it is the way it is, so when someone says something along the lines of "just make something useful" it gets a hearty chuckle from me.
OP
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Me, a capitalist: Looking for the 10x engineers in my firm so I can assign them twice the work and only pay them 10% more than their colleagues.
No, I will not, because I'm very aware of the facts here. The reforms started in 1986 were critical for the country moving away from the inefficiencies of the systems they had tried to implement and the improvements to productivity were immediate and substantial. Here's GDP Growth per year for Vietnam starting in '86 contrasted with the US - https://www.google.com/publicdata/e...0&tend=1499918400000&hl=en_US&dl=en&ind=false
In the years immediately following implementations of the reforms, the GDP growth rate skyrockets and stays consistently ahead of the US growth rate every single year since, which is the catch-up rate effect for smaller economies you see under capitalist systems that didn't exist under the communist economies. The idea that the core reason countries moved away from the communist systems wasn't a failure to compete economically and was instead was all due to the sanctions is complete and total propaganda.
Bigotry also had no problem thriving in the USSR too, where it thrived because making a minority group a scapegoat is a tactic used by assholes with power in all economic systems. Bigots seek to inflict cruelty on others and will adapt to use whatever power structures are available regardless of what they are.
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All I could think about was they could pay us half the money they're blowing on this to tell them to cancel it, and we'd be saving them a ton of money. I thought it was so much money wasted, and to the company it was, but to the people working there, it wasn't. So ya, it's more about convincing someone about your bullshit than the real viability. It really was an eye opening experience about how much money is spent on bullshit and yet we need money spent on bullshit.
Nono. We're just going to pretend that the sanctions and embargoes had no effect, and they were essentially implemented for no reason.
Back to the original topic, retraining 1/3 of your workforce is a big ask and $700 million seems like it won't be enough. Plus we have no idea what kind of training this will be. We're only told it's going to be training people to fill more high tech roles. I can't imagine much success in retraining a 50+ year old warehouse picker to learn c# or something of the like, so I doubt it will be something that technically proficient.
When Amazon gave their recent pay increases, they also took away the stock options from the employees. Jeff Bezos and Amazon are terrible.
Just as an FYI, Amazon will pay for college education for its warehouse workforce.
It's one of the core benefits for hourly workers.
It's one of the core benefits for hourly workers.
I'm not a tankie, I don't defend what the USSR did. Guess what though? We don't live in the USSR. It doesn't exist anymore. It collapsed. So, it makes little sense to go "well look what the USSR was like!" in response to the atrocities of current states and economies. The USSR also existed in a competitive economy, which was pretty clear via its wars and foreign aid used to garner political support to ensure access to other markets and their resources.
I'm not saying "look what they were like", I'm saying that horrible people exist everywhere and deliberately manipulate whatever power systems are available to inflict cruelty.
The USSR economy was not competitive. Instead of the gap closing, as is what happened with lower-GDP capitalist countries relative to higher GDP ones in the period, the GDP gap widened. https://artir.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/usasov1.png?w=640 That was the fundamental inefficiency that doomed the economic system.
I'm not sure how that disputes what I said. In competition there are winners and losers. The USSR were the losers.
Ah, different definitions at work, competitive as in competitive market and competitive as in "could keep up with", I gotcha now.
Yeah, competitive market is exactly what I was talking about. The USSR didn't exist within a vacuum, they had to compete against the USA on a global scale. And despite the fact that many people view the Cold War as ideologically driven I personally view it much more as an economically-driven one.
You didn't dispute a damn thing I said. But leave it to you to stan for child labor and sweatshops that destroy the local environment for some worthless measure of economic success for the sacrificial altar of capitalism.
Why don't you tell us again how Korea deserved to be bombed back into the stone age.
Ok, but when are they going to be able to take advantage of it? And what if they have kids? It's nice, but ultimately useless except for a select few.
GDP is not a "worthless measure of economic success" when higher GDP per capita results in very real, tangible improvements in quality of life for people.
You become eligible for it after a year of employment with the company and they will make accommodations on your work schedule. I believe you can go down to 30 hours a week or maybe even as low as 20 hours a week of work while enjoying full-time benefits, except 40 hours of pay. You just have to get it approved a couple weeks in advance of the semester.
User banned (5 days): inflammatory accusations and hostility, misrepresenting another poster; prior bans for similar behavior
You're absolutely right. A 10 year old kid is better off making a few bucks a day gluing soles to Nikes than starving on the streets. Let's just eliminate child labor laws and minium wage because that'll definitely be good for GDP. The fuck is wrong with you.
This...doesn't prove me wrong? How is someone going to take a 25-50% pay cut when they're making $15 an hour? The cost of insurance or any other benefits they need to pay for don't scale down. The whole thing is a work for jabronies.
Absolutely nothing is wrong with me. Increased labor protections were a big part of why the TPP was being pushed recently. There are big growing pains from the industrialization process- you also can't really avoid them. We went through all this same stuff here child labor laws, min wage, etc. already- and on some of these issues, other countries are hitting that point much later due to the world not being even across the board on economic development.. I mean, f you actively desire a pre-industrial farming economy, what are you doing on a video game message board?
The Idea that pointing out that GDP is a useful measure means "oh you support maximizing GDP at all unethical costs" is ridiculous.
The cost of insurance as an Amazon employee is incredibly low for high quality insurance with a very low deductible. Having seen the insurance costs of a number of higher paying careers and several ACA plans over the years Amazon coverage costs less for more benefits.
You say it is a work for jabronies but I say that it is a good benefit for those who want to use their time at Amazon to springboard themselves towards something better. You can be a full-time student with at least 12 hours of classes a semester, have what becomes a part-time job that will pay you more than most other part-time gigs pay, and enjoy low cost, high quality health, dental, and vision insurance along with a number of other benefits. You will also save several thousand dollars thanks to Amazon paying for 95% of tuition.
That isn't the only way. Take some lessons from the reset members who happen to be professionals.
Welcome to the future of Automation. There won't always be a job for a person to do.
The 1/3 are the lucky ones. As for the rest... Well there is a reason people have been screaming about Automation and our need of vastly reformed welfare systems (UBI) for awhile now.
Nah, there definitely is and why you need to keep Vietnam out of your proverbial mouth when it's coming from a place of utter ignorance. You couldn't even take the easy out and doubled down on defending child labor as if France and the US aren't directly responsible for keeping Vietnam from industrializing for over 100 years. If you can't be honest with us, at least be honest with yourself in terms of you being pro-imperialist and pro-exploitation because that is the shit that you're pushing in this thread when you talk about Vietnam.
Your math doesn't work. Rent doesn't scale down, car insurance doesn't scale down, the cost of food doesn't scale down, or any of the costs associated with living don't scale down. Any adult that doesn't have their living expenses subsidized will more than likely not be able to take advantage of this program. It doesn't matter if health insurance is cheap if you can't afford to feed yourself for the month and cover rent.
Again, my point is that hardly anyone can take advantage of this benefit, especially the lowest paid workers. You can't escape marginal utility.