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Comment by wombatmobile | Hacker News Reader

'I'm not going to put productive energy into anything that doesn't improve civilization. Why would I? What would I be trying to do?”

Um, help workers get off food stamps?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-12-17/amazon-am...

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The article says that's 4000 employees out of 1.3 million on government assistance. The only way they are still qualifying at $15 an hour is if they're a single mother with multiple children, or particularly disabled.

If you want companies to not have any employees like that on government assistance, they'll just stop hiring single mothers and disabled people. Their skills aren't suddenly worth $25/hr just because they have children.

The government subsidizing their pay is a good thing, and I hope it happens to more people like those 4000 at Amazon.

> The government subsidizing their pay is a good thing

The government is really subsidising the money into Jeff Bezos's accounts.

The skills aren't considered worth $25/h because they are not paid according to the value they are providing, which is evident by the grotesque profits that Amazon is making.

Amazon arguably has monopoly power over this type of job, which means there isn't competition for the workers, and they aren't paid correctly.

That should be corrected, rather than subsidised.

Amazon's "grotesque" profits come from AWS. Probably not many $15/hr workers contributing there.

Also, Amazon does not have anything near a monopoly on warehouse work. Are you kidding with that?

> Amazon arguably has monopoly power over this type of job, which means there isn't competition for the workers, and they aren't paid correctly.

How is that true? The pool of workers that Amazon employs for warehouse jobs is unskilled which Amazon certainly does not have a monopoly on. Walmart & McDonalds are in this category and are two of the largest employers in the world.

Who's to say that those jobs are providing the value though? You'd have to do a much deeper analysis than looking at Amazon's profit margins given the fact that they have all sorts of automation their employees didn't pay for.

> You'd have to do a much deeper analysis than looking at Amazon's profit margins given the fact that they have all sorts of automation their employees didn't pay for.

If I understand correctly, you are saying that the value delivered by the robots that perform the automation has nothing to do with Amazon's minimum wage workers. That value can go straight into Jeff Bezos's bank account, and justice will be served, because he is the lawful owner of the robots. He created the company that earned the profits that were reinvested in the R&D that developed and paid for those robots, so he deserves the profits from them.

If you look a little closer, you'll see that every dollar of those profits over time came from the actual work that each minimum wage worker put in for every hour they worked. What they got back was $12 per hour, or $15 per hour even, but what they contributed to Amazon was more like $25 per hour, or $50 per hour, or $200 per hour - it depends on the profit margin of the goods they were transceiving.

The economic system you are familiar with awards all those profits to the owner of the capital, and even demands of him less tax for earnings than it does of the hourly labourer. The minimum wage workers get a fixed amount per hour, whilst the owner of capital gets a variable amount per hour.

That doesn't make it right, or fair, or just. To be fair and just, all of those thousands of minimum wage workers over the last 20 years would have received equity that was proportional to the share of the effort they contributed to build the business.

But the workers received no equity. At least, the unskilled workers received no equity. Equity was only offer to workers higher up.

Why? That's the system.

Why is that the system? It would take a longer discussion than we are having here, in a broader context to really shine a light on it. We can have that discussion whenever you like. In the meantime, don't assume all the value came from Jeff Bezos's sweaty hands. The truth is not as clean as that.

There's no objective measure of value and the amount the workers are paid is more a function of their (very little) power: if those types of workers vanished, Amazon would not have any value.

Well I'm glad we're in agreement there's no objective measure of value of these workers.

> if those types of workers vanished, Amazon would not have any value.

I disagree, in a world with only higher wage workers, a business like Amazon's would be even more important since they have such a focus on automation. Look at what happened during COVID. A lot of low wage work was shut down and who took their place in the economy? A few large companies.

"Yeah, those workers are only a temporary problem that will be gone when we have the automation in place."

The sarcasm may not be too far off. I used to have ambitions to build a company, but now the future plan is to pick up the task of being a solo developer. Why? people are the worst and I have no desire to have anyone on payroll.

Those workers are definitely a temporary problem until those warehouses are 100% automated. Once all the people are gone, all the labor concerns are gone as well. No more safety. AC costs are minimized to what is needed for product safety. No more restrooms with no more plumbing. Just machines which ingest goods and distribute goods.

>Why? people are the worst

No offense intended. But do you classify yourself as part of humanity? Or one of the good ones?

I mean, I know one or two people who profess to think this, and they admit they themselves are just as disgusting, so at least I can have some respect for their self-reflection.

Not the OP, but I share hir antisocial attitude. But here's how I frame it: humans are a result of an undirected design process whose only quality metric is reproductive fitness. As a side effect of this process, we ended up with brains that care about things other than reproductive fitness, things like beauty and mathematical elegance and self-actualization and discovery for its own sake. As a consequence of this, we ended up inventing birth control. That invention is distinguished among human inventions because it is an immediate existential threat to our short-term reproductive fitness: genes that make brains that choose not to have children don't reproduce as well (in the short term) as genes that make brains that, say, have an instinctive revulsion against using birth control, and which (say) take seriously the idea that the Creator of the Universe commanded them to be fruitful and multiply. The problem is that those people still have access to the leverage provided by technology, and so now they pose an existential threat to civilization by way of carbon emissions.

So it's not so much "good one" vs "bad ones" as brains that optimize for short-term reproductive fitness vs ones that don't. It's not an epic struggle between good and evil, it's just, quite literally, evolution in action. Like all living things, I want "my side" to win. The tricky bit is deciding where "my side" ends and "the other" begins. Everyone has to struggle with that.

It's more practical than that.

I have no problem hiring people, but I want to them to do work rather than other shit. However, people need so much care that it is so draining.

The crazy thing is that these problems don't manifest until a business is reasonably successful and the medium growth spurt happens. That's when you need to get HR, and at the moment the business becomes a prison.

A charitable reading is that there are many parts of running a business, but managing employees/contractors is definitely one of the most difficult to get right while also being perceived as peripheral to the core goal; if you can still accomplish a mission you care about without bringing in all that extra work, it might be preferable.

As an engineer, this reading resonates for me to some degree. I'm naturally more interested in engineering problems than I am by payroll, performance management, and hiring.

Yes, I am no saint.

I accept that I'm a dumb dirty primate.

The problem now feels that we have a minority of very loud people that cause expensive problems.

I can't wait until I have AI to amplify myself.

Yea, I think it’s a consistent view to think that dealing with people is hard, and knowing that one would also find it hard, or even harder, to deal with oneself as colleague or employee

There is not anyone to build the pyramid if all the slaves are dead ... more absolute civilization value is produced by humans with aligned interests than humans being dominated ... capitalism is a prisoners dilemma stuck at backstab

You may be interested to read this article I saw the other day that claims that slave labor being used to build the pyramids was a myth. [0] I wonder if at some distant point in the future a similar mistake will be made by internet commentators under the impression that Amazon's workers were slaves because there's a few extant references to it, even though the reality is they make over minimum wage.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jan/11/great-pyramid-...

As my daughter once mentioned to me, Jeff Bezos wakes up every morning and decides not to end world hunger.

> As my daughter once mentioned to me, Jeff Bezos wakes up every morning and decides not to end world hunger.

World hunger is a distribution problem related to the shape of the global politico-economic system, and the politico-economic systems in the places experiencing the most serious hunger; the problems in the latter are the main short-term problem, but they are anchored by the problems in the former which tend to make solutions both difficult and temporary.

Jeff Bezos is rich, but not “overthrow the international politico-econonic regime and institute a just world which would solve the problems creating hunger durably through simple amplication of wealth” rich.

> Jeff Bezos is rich, but not “overthrow the international politico-econonic regime and institute a just world which would solve the problems creating hunger durably through simple amplication of wealth” rich.

United Fruit Company did not have a carismatic CEO but still managed to overthrow governments and create banana republics.

The main reason that Bezos doesn't end world hunger is that he can't even end Amazon worker's hunger, and he controls them with an iron fist. I agree he should stay off politics and just pay his back taxes.

I do find it odd how many people would apparently support Bezos or another random billionaire raising a private army and taking over 20-odd african countries with it (you know, the necessary prerequisite to _actually_ ending world hunger), but it takes all sorts I suppose.

You (your daughter) overestimate the power of a hundred billion USD. The US Government has invested multiples of that and still hasn’t managed to end “world hunger.”

I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

I think it's *likely a motivated mega-billionaire would be far more effective with 100B than a self-interested bureaucracy.

You assume all it takes is money to end world hunger.

Don't think that's the assumption. But it's a start. And since no one is throwing money to end world hunger, no one can even start. Hence Jezz Befos does indeed wake up every day and decide not to do anything about ending world hunger.

What planet do you live on where there is no one throwing money to end world hunger? Western Governments provide billions in foreign aid to poorer countries to assist with development programs, there are hundreds of charities dedicated to teaching farming techniques and providing food to those who need it, and if that isn't enough, the Gates foundation is working on eradicating hunger in Africa by 2030. To say that no one is working on ending world hunger is not just wrong, it makes the original point look ridiculous by association.

That’s the kicker, beautifully put.

It’s pretty much impossible to get our human minds around $185 billion, but any which way you spin it, it’s an insane amount of money. His $2bn altruistic fund is sort of like the equivalent of me giving away £1000. It’s a bit generous, but really not very much. Plus, that sort of altruism is utterly skewed to your benefit when you’re that wealthy.

If he gave away 99.99% of his net worth, he’d still have $18.5 million, a figure that’d make anyone on the planet - and their family - blissfully comfortable for the rest of their lives.

Details aside (yeh, I know it’s not actual money, it’s in stocks, yada yada), the point is it is an absolutely obscene amount of money for any individual to possess. I have no understanding how he sleeps at night knowing the world around him is full of appalling poverty that he could help solve.

I think it helps to view people as charitably as you can. I think Jeff, like most capitalists, is looking for leverage. So he wants to change the future, rather than mitigate the present.

There's certainly good faith arguments to be made against his choices. But I don't think one needs to imagine he's selectively blind or a hypocrite when different positive values and different time horizons serve to explain.

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