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Comment by oski | Hacker News Reader

TL;DR: starting next week, Amazon will start:

1) taking temperatures of employees, fever >100.4°F to be sent home for min 3 days

2) giving surgical masks to employees once it receives shipments of orders of “millions”

3) using machine learning-powered video software to monitor social distancing

(Shameless plug for a little site I made to help spread the word that we need #masks4all: https://shouldiwearafacemask.com)

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Is there any reason you couldn't just write "Amazon"? I see people do this thing often on HN, for instance "At $DayJob, we do...". Is it like a sign of belonging to a tribe?

Edited. Thanks for the feedback. I used $AMZN to abbreviate it, but I can see how it is distracting.

Reminiscent of the Micro$oft days of yore at Slashdot.

Yes!!! :) I miss that Bill Gates borg image: https://lurkertech.com/bill-the-borg/

> 3) using machine learning-powered video software to monitor social distancing

Ughhh... Never let a good crisis go to waste. How about we ban machine learning systems to monitor people's movement at scale?

This is Amazon's entire warehouse solution, in some sense. Pickers are "optimized" by software. It's probably relatively trivial to teach the system to keep people further apart, at the cost of optimal routing.

They're not monitoring the public, they're monitoring their supply chain system.

They are monitoring human movement, at scale. This is dangerous.

* video feeds + machine learning system for monitoring warehouse workers.

* video feeds + machine learning system for monitoring shoppers.

* video for monitoring entire neighborhoods.

Hmmm, I wonder what their business plan might be.

Isn't covid still contagious before you even get a fever?

Yes! You can be contagious without showing any symptoms (asymptomatic transmission). Recent data shows that up to 25% of people who have it are asymptomatic!

I like the site! One question - is the graphic of mask/no mask[1] correct? I've heard good arguments that this is correlation!=causation, and shouldn't be relied upon.

[1] https://shouldiwearafacemask.com/static/images/uploads/masks...

Would they have implemented any of these steps without collective action taken by employees and the threat of strike?

No, absolutely not and this is a trend in the media reporting on these actions. Companies are credited for implementing safety measures that were first demanded by workers organizing, often without any reference to that organizing.

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