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Comment by chiefalchemist | Hacker News Reader

> "For one thing, Amazon should pay its workers more and give them better working conditions. It’s laughable that the workers get a 15-minute break when they have to spend it walking to the break room. It’s completely insane."

Perhaps the rest of society should be more aware of the darkside(s) of the business models they are supporting?

Plenty of multi-nationals - Nike comes to mind - have been pressured into making changes to practices that were not socially acceptable.

Why isn't Amazon being held to the same measuring stick?

Editorial: Why is the public still so naive about the "hidden costs" of cheaper? Certainly, Walmart (for example) and its darkside would be fresh in the minds of the American public. Instead, it seems, the perception is Amazon is the saviour (from Walmart), when the new boss is really the same as the old boss (sans the glossy high tech paint job).

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Because structural problems can not be solved on the individual level.

We will not end world hunger by eating less. We will not stop climate change by turning off the light more often. And we will not fix exploitative employment practices by voting with our wallet.

The cynic in my thinks that the "vote with your wallet" slogan has been coined by those who want to prevent better regulation.

All these things CAN be solved by passing laws and regulation and by building a society that supports and enforces those.

The cynic in my thinks that the "vote with your wallet" slogan has been coined by those who want to prevent better regulation.

Upvoted for that sentence alone. We have government because I can’t build a road by myself. I also can’t individually smack a company upside the head and tell them “cut it out, this isn’t the society I want to live in”.

Globalization means passing the laws you’re talking about amounts to protectionism. That’s not very popular with anyone but Trump.

I think the bigger idea is that there should be a broader system of international mutual aid. We can't drag down our own labor standards because someone else's is terrible. We need to help raise them up. Only international cooperation can prevent us from accelerating in a race to the bottom.

We can't build a road by ourselves.

We as individuals CAN decide where we spend your money.

Two very different scenarios. You very different level of civic duty.

Could regulation help? Sure, Uncle Sam gets lucky from time to time :) But it is never as powerful as the market. Until the market says "screw Amazon" Amazon will continue to do what rewards it and its shareholders.

>We as individuals CAN decide where we spend your money.

Yeah, but then most people just don't care.

I'm just really glad nobody is asking me to boycott slave-produced southern cotton if I really want slavery to go away.

> "Yeah, but then most people just don't care."

Well, there ya go! :)

People don't care about where they spend their money. They don't care about their own people health. But the problem is Amazon, the ACA, etc.

If most people don't want to be held responsible for their own decisions, with what logic do they argue holding someone else responsible.

To be clear, there certainly are things gov / legislation can do. But that doesn't give individuals a free pass on their civic duties.

"I don't want to live in a society where people have to $thing, so let's ban $thing and punish the companies involved in it" is approximately the most destructive fallacy of our time. Making upper-middle-class the minimum allowable lifestyle doesn't give everyone an upper-middle-class standard of living. It just punishes those who don't already have it.

We're going to keep ratcheting up the minimum allowable job, housing, food, etc. until a tiny minority of liberal elites are congratulating each other for having eradicated exploitation and all the liberated victims of exploitation are unemployed, homeless, and starving.

I don't want to live in a society where people have to live in RVs and work in Amazon warehouses. But banning Amazon warehouses (or RVs) isn't going to help.

We need redistribution, retraining, a real social safety net, healthcare, etc. so that people actually have better options than exploitative employment situations. Then it isn't even necessary to ban them, because no one would want them anyway.

More destructive than, "oil companies can spill oil anywhere" (Nigeria) or "let's kill everyone from the 'wrong' ethnic group" (Rwanda) or "let's exploit orphans" (Ireland)?

Those things are clearly evil and clearly demand a response.

The "let's ban symptoms and coping mechanisms" bandwagon, on the other hand, gives citizens who are concerned about a situation the feeling that they're helping, disarming and distracting them from actually constructing a better world. The collective loss to society of the solutions that could be built but aren't is quite large.

Imagine if we had single-payer health care instead of more regulation on employer-employee relationships. Imagine if we had public housing instead of regulation stonewalling private development. Imagine if we actually built world-class public transportation systems instead of just starving out the parking. Etc, etc.

Agree with you.

I think the whole ObamaCare fiasco is one of those things that the typical millennial liberals on HN have gotten entirely wrong.

For years, the mantra here has been that all those red state deplorables who were wary about government health care were voting against their own interests, and ignorant for not wanting it.

Trust us. We know better than you.

Well now we've seen what's happening. Premiums have skyrocketed for average workers and everyone has been moved to high deductible plans that pay for nothing.

My own insurance had gone from decent to worthless, and it costs twice as much. As a single guy who makes a high income, it's no big deal. For many of my coworkers who have a spouse and 3 kids, it has been devastating. And it's getting worse as more states drop plans.

Agree. But to be fair to ACA is was very ambitious legislation. It would be naive to expect any such thing to be even close to perfect out of the gate. It should be evolving. It is not. Given their oath this falls on both parties. They don't work for their parties as soldiers against the other party.

They. Work. For. Us.

I don't care who is in charge. I want results. Where is the fine tuning? Where is the sense that they work for us?

That being said, and not to get too off topic, but there isn't a healthcare system in the world that can support our collective dietary and lifestyle habits. Obama blew it becausr he failed to tie (personal) health to health. He failed to explain how there are things that can be prevented (e.g., Type 2 diabetes) that we all but refuse to address.

Furthermore, these preventable gateway diseases - again let's stick with diabetes - significantly increase the risk of cancer, Alzheimer's, etc.

Cost are increasing...as are waistlines and age. How are costs going to decline if more people are in need of more and more serious treatment? They fact that a fair amount is in fact preventable only makes the current disconnect even more confusing.

The problem with the ACA isn't that everyone can get coverage, the problem is that insurance companies are still involved. The idea of designing a solution where private companies are free to profit from the basic operations of a public service is bonkers. They add nothing of value, and will only push prices up. I could've told you from the start that the ACA was doomed to failure, and I come from a country that has socialised healthcare and has benefited from such a system.

Take health insurance companies out of the picture, and address price gouging by pharmaceutical companies, and you'll almost certainly see costs come down. I'm pleased to see there has been some momentum for single payer, so the US can scrap the ACA.

On a side note, ACA was similar to a plan proposed by Republicans back in the 90s:

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2013/nov/15/...

Yes. But they also charge more because they can. Healthcare is not special. It's like any other limited resources. That is, increase demand and the price goes up.

On the other hand, lower demand and prices will fall.

As it is we're getting older and intentionally living a more unhealthy lifestyle, but expecting prices to fall?

No doubt there are vast disfunction in the current system. However, the biggest - literally - component of that system are the humam seeking / needing care. What's more unhealthy, those people or the insurance companies? I can't see the line between the diabetes dot or the smoking dot and the insurance companies.

> "Yes. But they also charge more because they can. Healthcare is not special. It's like any other limited resources. That is, increase demand and the price goes up."

If you're talking about pharmaceutical prices, there are ways around that. For example, drugs that are FDA approved and available elsewhere in the world for a lower price should be able to be legally imported and sold at that lower price. To give an example of how this could be implemented, there was a bill that was proposed to allow drugs from Canada to be imported and sold:

https://www.pharmamanufacturing.com/articles/2017/senators-p...

This bill was for the same drugs that legally available in the US, but sold at a cheaper price in Canada.

https://twitter.com/sensanders/status/819404681806016513?lan...

By increasing competition from imports, drug prices can come down. Also, allowing generics to come to market faster for the most commonly used drugs (i.e. cutting down the time for which a single pharmaceutical company has a monopoly on producing a drug) is another approach that can stop pharmaceutical companies from over-inflating drug prices in the US.

> "We need redistribution, retraining, a real social safety net, healthcare, etc. so that people actually have better options than exploitative employment situations. Then it isn't even necessary to ban them, because no one would want them anyway."

What we (aka The Market) needs is choices. We willingly got ourselves into this. We bought into the idea that cheaper (and disposable) is best - a la Walmart - and then rotted our communities from the inside out. The local mom & pops replaced by a browser and a UPS truck.

So while Widget X was/is less expensive we're still at the end of the year out of pocket for just as much, if not more, in order to yield all the intangibles the more expensive widget supported.

Yes the solution legislation? It might be. The question is will that help to solve the root problem, or simply create another gov program that creates long term dependency, instead of working towards an enabled citizenship; a society where better individual decisions matter.

It seems to me we've bought into the idea the price is the only thing that matters, and then we wonder why we're treated as human resources.

> "We will not end world hunger by eating less. We will not stop climate change by turning off the light more often. And we will not fix exploitative employment practices by voting with our wallet."

Voting with your wallet does work, it just works slowly, so it doesn't satisfy those who are waiting for revolution.

To give an example, let's say you choose to become a vegetarian. What difference does that make? The more vegetarian food you buy, the more profits go up for vegetarian options, the more options become available. It's a slow change as the impact is minimal at first, but look at what it's lead to. 50 years ago the idea of a food company specialising in vegetarian-only food would've probably seemed quaint, now it's normal. It's also normal to find multiple vegetarian options in restaurants, and even restaurants that specialise in vegetarian food. You may think of this as not noteworthy, but I'd suggest it only seems inconsequential as the change was so gradual.

Now imagine if all would-be vegetarians had continued to eat meat, but had lobbied the government to cut down on meat production, are we likely to have seen a quicker change?

This is spot on. I've been vegetarian for a long time. I have seen a drastic change in the availability of vegetarian options at restaurants and grocery stores. It makes it easier for someone who isn't vegetarian to choose to have a vegetarian meal.

All the people that bought the original Tesla Roadster paved the way for the Model 3. The people that originally created a market for energy efficient bulbs enabled economies of scale to allow those bulbs to become mainstream.

I wouldn't diminish the role of early adopters in shaping culture and the economy.

So Nike (and others) de-swearshop'ed itself because of legislation? More and more food companies are cleaning up their ingredients because of legislation?

We all know Uncle Sam's track record: great for wars and the MIC, subpar for just about everything else.

If people can give a shit about how Nike makes a pair of kicks, certainly Amazon can be held to the same standards.

Uncle Sam can't get the food pyramid right. It's not going to save us from the likes of Amazon. There's little evidence that it's up to the task. Ideally, yes. Realistically? Too doubtful.

> We all know Uncle Sam's track record: great for wars and the MIC, subpar for just about everything else.

I'm not everyone does. What's Uncle Sam's track record on:

* rural electrification

* school lunch program

* DARPA's satellite positioning research

* law that started Amber Alert

* Microbead-Free Waters Act of 2015

(I'm curious myself about that last one.)

Most of those are small acts in comparison with the power that the US government has, and one of those acts was linked to the MIC that GP mentioned (DARPA is part of the MIC).

Let's say you were in charge of government spending, would you be spending $584 billion a year on the military? Just think about how much good you could do for your country with 50% of that (the US would still have the biggest military budget even if cutting spending by half). Do you think the best you could do is a school lunch program and paying electric companies to extend the electric grid?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/CBO_Info...

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jan/...

> Most of those are small acts in comparison with the power that the US government has, and one of those acts was linked to the MIC that GP mentioned (DARPA is part of the MIC).

Thanks. I take back that bullet point.

Still, you've shifted the argument. If we take the commenter I responded to seriously, then "food pyramid" must be an example of what they mean by a federal program being "subpar." The food pyramid is a failure-- citizens' tax money went to fund a program that delivered inaccurate and unhelpful information back to them.

In response, I enumerated a few federal projects that popped into my head which most reasonably people would deem successful.

So I think we both disagree with the commenter's assertion that everything other than military spending is subpar by the measure their own example suggests. Even in your own assertion about gov't spending, you rely on a well-respected agency-- the CBO-- whose success at their role gives further evidence against the commenter's assertion.

edit: clarification

> "So I think we both disagree with the commenter's assertion that everything other than military spending is subpar by the measure their own example suggests."

I don't disagree with GP, but I don't live in the US, so all I have to go on is what I'm told in the media, which I'm aware is open to manipulation. However, what I can say, based on the statistics available, which have been backed up by official sources, is that military spending seems much too high, which is a sign that the US government does not seem to have its priorities in line with what the people want (on the assumption that most of the US population is anti-war). With that in mind, the services you receive for your tax dollars can be seen as subpar as your government is spending a high proportion of the money you gave them in taxes on services that you neither benefit from nor desire.

For what it's worth, I'm from the UK and the priorities of the current UK government is far from aligned with the general public (cuts to the health, cuts to education, tax breaks for corporations that are already engaging in massive tax avoidance, etc...) as well as government programs being hugely wasteful (this was an older example, but it does make me wonder how things managed to get this bad before it was stopped https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/18/nhs-records-... ). I just wanted to make it clear that I wasn't just criticising the US government, any country that has big issues surrounding wasting tax payer money is providing subpar services. There should be a way of making governments more accountable for their fiscal decisions, but I don't know how to best implement that. Suggestions welcome!

I was being over the top ;)

As for this list. Yes, nice. Thank you. But all in all small potatoes, if not terribly obvious.

Yes. They count. But these are light-weight things compared to climate change, globalization, and such. That's why the military reference matters. It's the one big budget thing Uncle Sam does well.

>> Why is the public still so naive about the "hidden costs" of cheaper?

Because it is not true. Apple products are considered luxury goods and the company is known for the horrendous treatment of their workers in Asia. And ALDI is a very cheap supermarket chain in Germany but pays and treats their employees better than some more expensive ones.

There might be a correlation but that means nothing for each individual purchase.

shouldn't you be quoting examples from within the same society? it seems a bit suss to quote a German budget chain acting reasonably responsibly towards its employees as a counter point to an American one. last time i looked labour laws were vastly different between the US and Germany...

> last time i looked labour laws were vastly different between the US and Germany...

Exactly.

Companies operating in the United States (like ALDI) are going to be subject to all the same labor laws as any other company operating in the United States.

(I believe ADLI is owned by the same parent company as Trader Joes.)

ALDI has stores in the US, and it looks like they pay higher than the prevailing wage in the US too: https://www.glassdoor.com/Hourly-Pay/ALDI-Hourly-Pay-E7337.h...

> last time i looked labour laws were vastly different between the US and Germany...

Labour laws in the US seem to boil down to "should have pulled yourself up by your bootstraps harder" .

The Apple example is accurate. But it's also an outlier, and in the context of the discussion even worse.

Agreed. Aldi is a great outfit and gets more of my business because of that. It IS possible to live without Amazon. I don't think it's unreasonable for more people to consider trying a bit to consider that.

The reason ALDI pays employees really well is because the entire store is run with only a few employees at a time. A significant portion of the value you get from the store (cheap prices) is because their labor costs are low. I'd go as far to say that the real thing you are buying at ALDI is products that don't have a lot of labor waste built into the price. I've heard most places have 2 to 4 working at a time, but I've seen stores where a single employee is running everything.

Every employee I've seen there is working very hard the entire time. Before they added scanners, they were required to memorize the price of every item in the store. They pay more because they will not get the type of employee they need by paying less. While most of the people who are a good fit for ALDI like it there, you can find many reviews saying the work was too hard and that there was too much pressure.

If you look at retired RVers who have written about working at Amazon.com, you'll find many who felt that while the work was hard, it was good work and paid well (especially with holiday overtime) but you had to be willing (and physically capable) of doing hard work.

Like you say, the cost of each individual purchase from a company has little to do with how much they pay their employees. There is a much stronger correlation between employees who are doing hard things that add significant value and higher pay.

I find it hard to support Amazon in any way knowing how it treats its employees, both in the warehouses and at corporate. For it to span such different contexts suggests how systemic it really is.

I've stopped impulse buying on Amazon last year and haven't looked back.

Perhaps search “amazon sweatshop”? They are not hidden at all.

Nikes outsources manufacture to contractors outside the US where countries with horrible labor practices and labor laws and enforcement.

Nike now does regular audits of their factories to ensure compliance of good working condition requirements. They've improved since their factory fiascos in the 90s. Don't think they're perfect, but they seem to be trying.

https://about.nike.com/pages/transform-manufacturing

NIKE’S COMMITMENT TO TRANSPARENCY

Transparency and accountability are fundamental to Nike’s sustainable business approach. The Nike Manufacturing Map discloses the names, locations and demographic information about the workforce at the factories we contract to make our product, and holds us accountable for our chosen source base.

When i see "...Amazon sweatshops..." on Good Morning America then I'll consider it out in the open.

I never said Amazon's practices were hidden. The question is: Why don't most people care about Amazon's practices?

I worry about this daily. More so, does my lifestyle necessitate others being taken advantage of?

Is it even be possible to live a moral life?

I think if you're aware and you're trying that's about as moral as you can get.

If I didn't have aging parents to consider I'd go live in a cave, with a massive stack of book.

We may be kindred spirits. My dream is a cabin in the woods with nobody around. Nobody. Wish I'd realized that before I had kids :)

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