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Comment by belval | Hacker News Reader

The comments here are disheartening. I get it, a lot of people hate Amazon and that perfectly ok, but why can't we be happy when companies do nice things?

Also for those complaining about the 40hrs/week then you have part-time school on top: this is actually something that a lot of people do. My engineering university is somewhat known for this in Canada, you have classes at 6PM every day of the week + on Saturday. It is absolutely exhausting but everyone in my class that was in that particular situation was more than happy to have the opportunity to do it even if they were +30 years old. At the end of the program they get to be in a much better financial situation and guarantee a better future for their family.

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"Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good.” - Oscar Wilde

Just as America has the bizarre situation of healthcare being tied to employment, we may end up in the same situation for education, where becoming an indentured servant for Amazon or Starbucks takes the place of what should be a public education service.

>where becoming an indentured servant for Amazon

But that's literally not what's happening?

>Indentured servitude is a form of labor in which a person is contracted to work without salary for a specific number of years.

Yeah, but you'd be given room and board rather than a wage. It's indentured servitude with extra steps.

Is all employment "indentured servitude with extra step" since the wages from your employment is used to pay for "room and board"?

I'd argue if you don't have any money left over after paying food and board (and need food stamps), it's functionally the same as indentured servitude. So, not all employment is like this; but only those jobs that do not pay a living wage.

The difference is that you can't decide to fuck off (eg. go backpacking or live with your parents) whenever you feel like it if you're an indentured servant. Furthermore, "food and board" is an imperfect metric, because even though it may seem essential, it has a lot of discretionary components built in. For instance, buying organic or ordering takeout for "food", or getting a luxury condo or a nice school district for "housing". I'm not saying everyone working on amazon living paycheck to paycheck is because they ordered ubereats every night and live in a luxury condo, but it's something to keep in mind when we're narrowing down what exactly "indentured servitude with extra steps" means.

> The difference is that you can't decide to fuck off (eg. go backpacking or live with your parents) whenever you feel like it if you're an indentured servant.

Do you honestly think people willingly work at McJobs that still require them to live on food stamps when they have better options available to them, like living with their parents?!

Amazon's warehouse workers are not buying organic takeout or getting luxury condominiums, they are buying the cheapest (unhealthy) food and living in the cheapest parts of town. What you asking to keep in mind sounds a lot like a rehash of Reagan's incorrect "welfare queen" characterization from the 70's. Or more recently: "Why do poor people need a smartphone for?"

> Do you honestly think people willingly work at McJobs that still require them to live on food stamps when they have better options available to them, like living with their parents?!

Just less than an hour ago I was listening to the radio and they were interviewing someone who literally fits this description: They voluntarily left their parent's house and worked at McDonalds for a bunch of years. Not going to school or anything. Living their own life.

I also personally know someone who did this. Comes from an upper middle class family. Not kicked out of the house or anything. Just didn't like the small town he was in. Moved to another state and worked at McDonald's while doing some art projects when not working.

People do this. All. The. Time.

People here on HN (and especially in the comments for this submission) are showing how way out of touch their world view is from reality. How many of you here even know any Amazon warehouse workers? I know two, and talking to them has impacted my view of Amazon.

Anti-disclaimer: I don't work for Amazon and prefer not to buy from them.

>Do you honestly think people willingly work at McJobs that still require them to live on food stamps when they have better options available to them, like living with their parents?!

Living with their parents is an alternate option, that may or may not be the better option. Maybe it is cheaper and has comparable living standards, but at the same time it might also be in the middle of nowhere. The point is that there's a choice available, which isn't the case for indentured servitude.

>Amazon's warehouse workers are not buying organic takeout or getting luxury condominiums [...]

I specifically said they're not all doing it. I brought that up not to disparage the plight of the average amazon worker, but to point out just factoring in room and board fails to account for certain cases.

This seems like an odd conclusion given how easy it is to get loans even if you are not the strongest academically.

> Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves ... the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good

Exactly, most people don't get this. This is exactly why I am vicious, cruel, and unkind to the employees of my small business - it seems counter intuitive, but I'm actually doing them the least harm this way, and so I'm actually optimizing for their long term happiness. They should be thanking me. /logic

I mean it’s cute quip but this isn’t what that quote means and you know that.

[From the perspective of someone trying to abolish slavery] kind slavers are the worst because they make the situation just tolerable enough that people aren’t motivated to change the system.

[From the perspective of an individual slave] kind slavers are the best because they suffer the least.

Kind slavers force a system settle on a local minimum of suffering rather than a global one.

> [From the perspective of someone trying to abolish slavery] kind slavers are the worst because they make the situation just tolerable enough that people aren’t motivated to change the system.

Who says kind slavers weren't also helping to change the system? It's a pretty big assumption that all kind slavers were only being kind to keep their slaves from being uppity. Re: George Washington

Wow.

I think the assumption is that if kind slave owner wanted to help change the system, they would probably start by freeing their own slaves.

> they would probably start by freeing their own slaves.

Depends on the meaning of "own". Quoting from https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/martha...

> After George and Martha Washington married in 1759, she took many of these people with her to Mount Vernon. As property of the Custis estate, they could not legally be freed or sold, and were inherited by the Custis heirs upon Martha Washington’s death.

In this case, Martha Washington owned the rights to the labor of the people involved until she died, but did not own the people themselves; the Custis estate did.

(Now what she would have done if she did own them outright is a separate issue, of course. Nothing suggests she would have freed them.)

The capital was Philadelphia while Washington was president. Philly had a law that slaves who resided there for a year were freed, so Washington established a rotation system to make sure he had slaves around for help but didn't have to free them.

So to be clear, there were two separate sets of slaves involved:

1) The ones owned by George Washington himself. He did not free these while alive; he did have a will that said that once Martha died they were free. That is, he did not free them until he (1) made use of their labor himself and (2) ensured that what he viewed as his financial obligations to Martha upon his death were satisfied. Obviously this is not a hard-line abolitionist stance, and I do wonder what he would have done if he had living children when he died. As it was, he just had living step-grandchildren (kids of Martha's son from her previous marriage; the son had died earlier and George and Martha had raised his kids).

2) The ones owned by the Custis estate. Those could not be freed unilaterally by either George or Martha. They were inherited by the above-mentioned step-grandchildren when Martha died.

What would happen for people in set 2 if they were in Philadelphia for more than a year is a legal question I don't have an answer for... The most plausible way to reconcile the various legal bits I can think of is that they would be free but then Martha (or George? family property law in 1700s Virginia is not my strong suit) would owe restitution to the Custis estate for the lost value or something like that?

I looked up this law, fwiw: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/pennst01.asp . The actual provision is that non-residents of Pennsylvania could not keep slaves in the state for longer than 6 months. Unless those non-residents were "members of congress, foreign ministers [or] consuls".

The rules were considerably more complicated for Pennsylvania residents; the law basically grandfathered in existing slaves owned by Pennsylvanians and provided for a decades-long slow abolition as the children of existing slaves reached the age of 28.

It's interesting that the law exempted members of congress (and representatives of other countries, possibly for similar reasons) but not the president.

But then are they really slave owners?

Well, they might still be people in a position to significantly affect the quality of the slave' lives. Which should not be conflated with "slave owner".

The point is that it's a false choice, not that you should enthusiastically lean into one side of it or the other.

That's actually a thing people unironically believe. it's called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism

That is left-wing accelerationism, not liberal-accelerationism or right-wing accelerationism. Important distinction cause they are completely different.

I used to say, "It's always darkest before the dawn, so bring on the darkness." My younger self is quite happy with the way things are going, but my present self thinks my younger self is a fool.

Pretty sure the quote has something to do with the prolongation of the status quo (and therefore holding back improvement) instead of the individual slave-owner being better/worse.

I don't think a poet/playwright would ever roll with "the expected utility is less due to preventing a change to the status quo" instead of the original quote.

Plus, it's Oscar Wilde. He's more tongue-in-cheek than the champion of a lengua eating contest.

> viscous

Is this typo becoming more common? OP, why would you be sticky and slow moving around these people?

You didn't understand the argument, it is about the carrot and stick and how the carrot can materialize. The style is a bit offensive to get people to maybe look for the horizon...

Amazon didn't cause education to get expensive. They at least provide some respite.

A brilliant and helpful quote. Reminds me of the King quote about white moderates. It's a bit different, but what they have in common is emphasizing that when you "do good" on top of a foundation of fundamental injustice you do the most damage. Because you appeal to the most reachable minds (and therefore the most needed as supporters, the most precious resource) and implore them to support the status quo instead of helping.

Is there any path to a perfect world system within one lifetime? I’d be extremely skeptical. If you agree there isn’t, then no matter what the world looks like during our lifetime, it will be imperfect. It will be the wrong system.

The problem with views like the ones being expressed in this thread is that they suggest at every moment that the thing we need is revolution. That there is no way to advance an imperfect system by doing good. And after any revolution, you’ll still be left with an imperfect foundation, so you’re still forbidden from doing good, and you need another revolution.

It is insightful, pointing out where good intentions cause an imperfect status quo to perpetuate longer than it otherwise would. But the status quo will always be imperfect, so we must find ways of advancing it that don’t force everyone through a lower point in order to reach the next maxima (which is sorta what you do when you encourage all those with good intentions to stand down).

Not that I’m saying all revolutions past weren’t valid. When you lose the freedom of movement that allows people to seek out higher maxima, then the only way forward actually is revolution.

The words "perfect" and "revolution" do not appear anywhere in my comment.

Society could look for ways to fund education, as it is quite a sensible investment into the future. This isn't utopia or a perfect world, this is reality in a lot of places.

Countries that have implemented free public education still have contacts to the industry of course and their involvement is under scrutiny for several reasons.

I don't believe you need a revolution, you just need better policy makers. I understand why that feels impossible for many.

It's do-nothing bullshit.

Do good on top a foundation of fundamental injustice? I'm sorry, do you have any other foundations laying around? I surveyed 5000 years of written history and couldn't find any.

The options are try to do some good or don't.

>It's do-nothing bullshit.

Thank you for your opinion on the life and work of Dr. King.

Wasn't a King quote I was repudiating. He never said "you shouldn't try to do good on a foundation of injustice", because he wasn't an idiot.

You're wasting both my time and yours interpreting my comments in some of the most foaming-at-the-mouth bad faith I've ever encountered on hacker news. King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail really was critical of white moderates for reasons I described, despite your furious protestations to the contrary.

We already kinda do with the military; no other options for high paying work? Join the military for a few years, let them pay for school if you survive.

But, Oscar Wilde's quote here is partially right at the societal level, and absolutely wrong on the individual level. Both can be true. Amazon isn't to be lauded as a company for something that is, ultimately, a competitive advantage, in a landscape they don't seek to change, but the change itself can be lauded as a good one in that it's something they can control

But encouraging workers to pursue education, may potentially free them from servitude, to Amazon at least. If you want a company to reform itself you need to stand ready to praise the steps they take toward reform.

You're conflating "being kind" with "empowering" and it causes your point to collapse onto itself like a black hole. An education is a means to escape slavery or indentured servitude, so comparing it to the kindness of some plantation owners is ridiculous.

But what if every company offered free upskilling services to their employees, then that might help free people from this

And so maybe one company doing it can lead to other companies doing it more? Although this is covid related...so not sure it really applies

> becoming an indentured servant for Amazon or Starbucks takes the place of what should be a public education service.

We already have a public education system, and any employee working at Amazon or Starbucks for minimum wage should qualify for Pell Grants that would make community college free anyways.

I agree that this is setting a precedent for perverse incentives to manifest, but I don't see how Amazon is to blame here. The government is failing to provide higher education to those who can benefit from it. Given this void, the free market inevitably would come with a solution of its own, even if it's suboptimal.

Precisely. This fukuyama dream of corporate liberalism paints exactly such a picture:

that the tax evading Monopoly which has subsumed a significant portion of US capital (stripped from the common man) can be seen as beneficent for merely satisfying their own need for skilled labor in an economic context they helped foment wherein education has been made unreachable by normal means.

Comparing Amazon's fulfillment center's condition to actual slavery on a thread about them offering free tuition to their worker might be the most out of touch HN reply I have seen in a while.

You do understand that these people, regardless of your opinion on how the government should handle education at a state and federal level, will actually benefit from this move? It's not some kind of dystopian agreement, usually the employer pays for your education and you must stay there for ~2 years or reimburse what the employer paid. That's it, you can leave, you can go work anywhere.

> Comparing Amazon's fulfillment center's condition to actual slavery on a thread about them offering free tuition to their worker might be the most out of touch HN reply I have seen in a while.

https://imgur.com/a/BqPzT

I understand what you are hinting at, but it's not just the quote, the commenter I replied to wrote:

> we may end up in the same situation for education, where becoming an indentured servant for Amazon or Starbucks takes the place of what should be a public education service.

Where "indentured servitudes" means "a form of labor in which a person is contracted to work without salary for a specific number of years". Yes there is a difference with actual slavery, but this is still very much the parallel he was drawing.

Ergo I feel very comfortable saying that this is a very out-of-touch comparison.

> ...we may end up in the same situation for education, where becoming an indentured servant for Amazon or Starbucks takes the place of what should be a public education service.

I'm amazed at this criticism. College is and was difficult for many people to handle because it's expensive. It's not lack of will or ability to find time.

I got my bachelor's degree while I was serving in the US Air Force at 40 hours plus per week. Yeah, it was a bit of a grunt. But I got the degree. I'm still grateful for their help in funding tuition as well as the flexibility to attend evening classes. I think most people in that situation would feel the same.

I love Oscar Wilde to bits and regard him as one of the wittiest writers to live, but he was more of a satirist than political commentator, and at any rate, that quote is utter bollocks.

Exactly the comment I was thinking about. The price of education in the US is quite high and with programs like this you cement this circumstance while penalizing everyone not working for Amazon since universities will ensure the educational product you receive aligns with requirements of Amazon and form students in accordance to that.

This is just capturing the offspring, not too different from other strategies to get control of the market.

Disheartening for sure. I'm not sure if this is something that's particular to STEM fields, but there seems to be a far-too-large subset of people who think they're too smart for optimism. Like they've lost the ability to distinguish between pointed, constructive criticism and staunch, irrational negativity. I'm deeply sick of it.

> The comments here are disheartening. I get it, a lot of people hate Amazon and that perfectly ok, but why can't we be happy when companies do nice things?

Because the benefit of the doubt is for people/companies who haven't repeatedly (some might even say enthusiastically) shown that they don't deserve it.

At this point, it's always safe to assume ulterior motives anytime Amazon does something that seems good.

Even accepting that, why go on to assume that it's a zero-sum game between Amazon and the employee? Why can't be what's good value for Amazon also be good value for the employee?

>At this point, it's always safe to assume ulterior motives anytime Amazon does something that seems good.

It's a self-reinforcing cycle

amazon is bad -> therefore when amazon does something good, it's bad -> amazon is bad -> ...

>At this point, it's always safe to assume ulterior motives anytime Amazon does something that seems good.

I assume, in this case, there are tax benefits and that Amazon gets a cut of revenue.

You assume correctly

https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/expert-insights/furthering-...

"As the employer, you may deduct the entire amount that you pay for the employee's educational costs as a business expense. However, only $5,250 is not considered wages and therefore, not subject to payroll taxes. Amounts over the annual limit are subject to income and payroll taxes."

When I read this, I always think of Congressman Floyd Spence:

The American reaction to a Russian SALT treaty during the Cold War is one well-known example of naïve cynicism in history. Political leaders negotiating on behalf of the United States discredited the offer simply because it was proposed by the Russian side.[1][9]

Former U.S. congressman Floyd Spence indicates the use of naïve cynicism in this quote:

    "I have had a philosophy for some time in regard to SALT, and it goes like this: the Russians will not accept a SALT treaty that is not in their best interest, and it seems to me that if it is their best interests, it can‘t be in our best interest."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_cynicism

This is intellectually lazy. You assume everything good is done in bad faith by people you've labelled "bad" and then judged them to be bad based on acts you've assumed were done in bad faith.

...it's the epitome of bias.

I believe people can always redeem themselves, but corporations need to be held to higher standards since they're 90% of what determines the quality of life in this country.

> You assume everything good is done in bad faith by people you've labelled "bad" and then judged them to be bad based on acts you've assumed were done in bad faith.

I assume what Amazon does is bad by default, but I'm perfectly willing to accept that it's good if I'm proven otherwise (maybe someone convinces me, or I do my own research and come to that conclusion). I'm just always going to assume the worst, and that's going to put them at a permanent disadvantage when competing for my patronage. That's like, peak capitalism: penalize bad behavior through the market.

Idk why I need to explain this, since I'm pretty sure everyone understands the concept of a reputation. Is it "intellectually lazy" to not invite a registered sex offender to your child's birthday party? This is basically the same thing, but less dramatic.

It's always interesting to see people who think other people should be held to a higher standard, and seldom think they themselves should be held to those standards.

It reminds me of the protesters happy to destroy other people's property, but then signal outrage when their own property is destroyed.

How does that apply here? To what standards am I not holding myself to? I don't lie[1] and cheat[2] and try to exploit everyone in my life[3]. Hell, I even pay my taxes![4]

Plus, again, I'm talking about corporations, not people. Corporations are not people. For example, Microsoft is a rotten company and I will never be their customer if I can avoid it. But I have absolutely nothing against Microsoft's employees (except maybe some of the C suite)

[1] https://nypost.com/2020/05/01/jeff-bezos-may-have-lied-to-co...

[2] https://www.bookweb.org/news/aba-releases-report-detailing-a...

[3] https://time.com/5629233/amazon-warehouse-employee-treatment...

[4] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/biden-singles-out-...

> I don't lie[1]

You've never lied? If someone found a lie you once said and put it in a comment like this, what would it signify?

I'm pretty sure Amazon doesn't always lie, just like you don't always lie.

> and cheat[2]

Same sentiment as above.

> and try to exploit everyone in my life[3]

Pretty sure Amazon doesn't try to exploit everyone. Lots of Amazon employees feel that way too.

> Hell, I even pay my taxes![4]

You don't take deductions when you can? If you do, how are you different from Amazon?

As an example, for years, I never deducted charitable contributions even though I could. How about mortgage interest?

Unless you willingly do not take tax deductions that you are eligible for, I don't see a difference between your behavior and theirs.

You are a complex person, as is a company like Amazon. Throwing absolutist statements about them is as problematic as throwing absolutist statements about you.

Do any but an extremely small handful of companies do anything for its employees that isn't self-serving on some level?

Does it really matter that giving employees benefits like this is in Amazon's best interest when it is also in the interests of the employees themselves? Should we decry Amazon providing warehouse workers with a parking lot as some cynical ploy to get workers to come to work?

Not every benefit given to employees is bad just because it also benefits the company.

> it's always safe to assume ulterior motives anytime Amazon does something that seems good

You don't see how that attitude, if held by more people, creates the situation it holds in contempt?

If I'm working with someone who responds like that to acts of goodwill, I don't have an incentive to be nice. Being a human, I'll likely be spiteful. (And goodwill doesn't have to be purely altruistic to be good. Win-wins exist.)

> 40hrs/week then you have part-time school on top: this is actually something that a lot of people do

I did my master's degree this way and actually did better than when I was an undergraduate with no other responsibilities.

Ah, but did you do better because of that condition?

I was a way better undergrad student at year 4 than at year 1 (normally it takes 5 years to complete a BSc where I'm from).

Maybe so!

> I get it, a lot of people hate Amazon and that perfectly ok, but why can't we be happy when companies do nice things?

I don't think you get it. If someone took a big shit on my lawn every morning and refused to stop or clean it up but I found out they were paying for some kids college I'd still their they were a giant asshole.

Amazon is doing far worse in the world than shitting on my lawn and isnt doing this out of the goodness of their heart. They are doing it for good pr and because its hard to hire workers like these long term without dangling long term benefits over their heads.

>I don't think you get it. If someone took a big shit on my lawn every morning and refused to stop or clean it up but I found out they were paying for some kids college I'd still their they were a giant asshole.

But many people here aren't simply expressing their discontent at amazon in general, they're expressing their discontent at amazon for doing this specific action. You can think amazon is doing a good thing here, but still think that amazon is a bad company. Thinking "amazon is a bad company therefore everything they do is bad" is the wrong attitude to have here.

Yes, because instead of just paying higher wages and letting individuals decide what they'd like to spend their money on, they have this PR stunt. Amazon gets some free marketing, another tax write off, and they can use this as evidence that workers don't need protection from their constant scheming. They can continue to exploit their workforce to the maximum extent of the law while they lobby to get more worker rights removed because their workers can potentially jump through a few dozen hoops and get a college degree. Amazon will absolutely use this empty posturing to try and cover up their dismal labor record.

"Why should our workers be allowed to take bathroom breaks or even think about forming a union? We gave them free college*!"

*Some conditions apply

What, specifically, should Amazon do to make you truly happy with them?

How much pay is enough? How many benefits are enough? I am genuinely curious.

They could start by ceasing their union busting efforts.

Last year they posted a job looking for a senior intelligence analyst to gather info on "sensitive topics that are highly confidential, including labor organizing threats against the company." Later that day they claimed they had made a mistake in describing the job.[1]

There is no single answer on what pay and benefits should be, or how well they should treat their workers. That's the whole point of unions: they provide collective bargaining where employees can decide how much their local area can reasonably support.

That's why organized labor is a threat to them. Their business model depends on squeezing wages and benefits, which is exactly what they did when they bought Whole Foods. They removed medical benefits for part time employees[2], and have recently cut paid breaks from 15 to 10 minutes, which now includes the time it takes to walk to and from the break room.[3]

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/01/amazon-seeks-intelligence-an...

[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/09/14/amazon-whole...

[3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/whole-foods-cuts-some-workers-p...

They also increased the pay of all Whole Foods workers which according to the ones I’ve talked to they all really liked.

'The Illinois-based worker explained that once the $15 minimum wage was enacted, part-time employee hours at their store were cut from an average of 30 to 21 hours a week, and full-time employees saw average hours reduced from 37.5 hours to 34.5 hours. The worker provided schedules from 1 November to the end of January 2019, showing hours for workers in their department significantly decreased as the department’s percentage of the entire store labor budget stayed relatively the same.

“We just have to work faster to meet the same goals in less time,” the worker said.'

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/06/whole-foods-...

But you can at least admit that it's better than them not doing it?

That is an impossible feat for ideological partisans to undertake.

Please clarify how Amazon is shitting on your lawn every morning. What specifically does Amazon do to target you to your detriment. Are you upset by their carbon footprint? Do you work for Amazon?

I just don't see the logical progression here. Amazon can still be an asshole and also be doing something positive. Elon Musk is widely known for being an asshole yet most people would say that SpaceX and Tesla are net positives. So it's clear that life isn't so black and white where an entity can only assume one role at a time (Good/Evil). Instead, we all partake in good and evil activities in the micro.

And if the bottom line drives a business then what does it matter if PR drives this decision so long as its a positive move? Why do people have this obsession with purely altruistic acts that don't exist?

" I get it, a lot of people hate Amazon and that perfectly ok, but why can't we be happy when companies do nice things?"

I think we have touched the hot stove enough times to know that corporations don't act altruistically. If they do something "nice" it's because it benefits them.

It's possible for situations to be mutually beneficial which looks to be the case here.

Does it matter if it benefits them if it also benefits the workers? Sure, it probably benefits Amazon. And honestly, it may be keeping more radical changes from happening. However, it's still an improvement over how things were going. Let's accept that this is a positive step, while still recognizing that Amazon still has a lot of work left to do.

I think one reason that people hate it, is that "a positive step" does nothing to further radical solutions, and in many cases, harms it.

To use a computer analogy, it's like: the problem is SQL injection. The "positive step" is disallowing special characters in user names. The radical solution is parameterized queries.

Adding in shitty character sanitization technically makes the situation better, but the bandaid-solution might make management less likely to sign off on fixing the actual problem.

(Note: radical in this sense basically means "addressing the root of the problem, transformative, fundamental" and not "fringe ideology," because everybody knows you should use parameterized queries.).

But what part does Amazon have to play in radical change here? Is the radical change that Amazon should help push for free college federally? Like what specifically is the radical change being blocked by a private company paying for its employees college? We could sit here and create hypotheticals but unless there is something directly actionable, what more can we expect?

This might be a bandaid but this issue existed before Amazon, it's not created by Amazon. And many other companies have done this before Amazon. If the issue is the cost of education, there are so many factors causing that how can we expect a single private company to lead that change?

So what is the actual proposed solution that Amazon is making less viable through this change, and how could Amazon have enabled that radical change better? And once we derive what that action could have been, we have to evaluate the value it has to Amazon because at the end of the day they are operating a business not a social justice non-profit.

One would imagine that the richest man in the world, who rules the largest private employer in the nation, has some amount of power to influence others.

An obvious solution is to make secondary education free.

> And once we derive what that action could have been, we have to evaluate the value it has to Amazon because at the end of the day they are operating a business not a social justice non-profit.

This is a rather myopic view of society. If you believe that the status quo is unquestionable (that businesses should only prioritize their self-interest), then of course you can't believe in any radical change to it.

Bezos isn't Amazon. What he chooses to use his wealth on be called into question without conflating it with Amazon the company.

And yeah they are one of the largest employers in the world. You have yet to define what specific action Amazon should have taken to produce radical change. Maybe it would have just been a flat out increase in salaries, but with the lens of education, it seems like this is a positive move.

> This is a rather myopic view of society. If you believe that the status quo is unquestionable (that businesses should only prioritize their self-interest), then of course you can't believe in any radical change to it.

No, THIS is a myopic view of society. Entities are always going to work towards the social reward system established, and Amazon/Bezos are acting exactly as you'd expect for our reward system. If the issue is a broader society problem then by definition it cannot be exclusively Amazon/Bezos fault.

And this brings us back to what SHOULD they be doing in this scenario? I am not saying don't question the status quo. But how does questioning the status quo change anything about this scenario? We can question the status quo while also accepting that people live inside the status quo, and thats not inherently bad. I fail to see how it's inherently bad that Amazon is paying for employee education. What SPECIFICALLY does it block in terms of radical change? How do these two things become mutually exclusive in this scenario, not some hypothetical scenario?

Do you not understand that the critique is with the system?

>The radical solution is parameterized queries.

Using parameterized queries is trivial, so it's not comparable here. A better analogy would be like arguing we should keep the SQL injection bug there, in the hopes that the hacks will convince management to rearchitect the whole app to using ORMs. Alternatively: we shouldn't use memory safety mitigations like ASLR/stack cookies/W^X, because that would impede the radical solution of rewriting everything in rust.

Nah, you're missing the point entirely.

This is the media breathlessly reporting "Amazon bravely fixes SQL injection bug by disallowing special chars!" while every person who's thought about this for more than a minute goes "why the hell are y'all celebrating, that doesn't fix anything."

It's not hard to fix. It just requires the will do to it.

>This is the media breathlessly reporting "Amazon bravely fixes SQL injection bug by disallowing special chars!" while every person who's thought about this for more than a minute goes "why the hell are y'all celebrating, that doesn't fix anything."

but it does? It's not the ideal fix, but it does prevent sql injections.

>It's not hard to fix. It just requires the will do to it.

Fixing the soaring cost of education is a non-trivial problem.

Yes it does matter, because if it does not benefit them they will end it.

People's lives and families are worth investing in, no matter if a company deems it a benefit for itself or not. Such investments should not be coupled to company's bottom line.

It really depends. The problem is the public benefit is being advertised, while we can only speculate about private motives. I'm not against corporations choosing reform to stave off revolution, but I am rightfully suspicious of it, especially in the current era.

For example, if a major shoe or clothing retailer provided a benefit for its (western) retail employees in order to preempt Congressional action into overseas sweat labor, then it's a really complex moral question, not just "it's better than nothing".

I think the issue here is that a lot of people come at Amazon's decision from the lens of "This is actually a bad thing," when it's clearly a positive benefit.

Let's say that Amazon is using this college benefit to avoid raising wages for their front-line workers. One could argue that the college benefit is "bad" because it allows Amazon to ignore the root cause. However, this ignores the fact that Amazon could have just kept wages down without the college benefit. The front-line worker still benefits, even if not in the way they would have wanted.

There could also be the argument that Amazon is offering these college benefits to avoid unionization by their employees, legal action in the form of new laws about warehouse work, or some other action I haven't mentioned. This would mean that the college benefit is "bad" in that it has prevented a larger, more beneficial change. Depending on how likely one thought the larger change was, this could even be seen as a decrease in the expected utility for these workers.

I think this situation is what you mean by a "complex moral question" and I honestly agree with that point. However, I think that most people would rather take a smaller guaranteed benefit over a larger, uncertain benefit. This is primarily because well-being tends to rise with log(income), so a small benefit vs a medium-sized benefit has a much smaller well-being difference than it would initially seem.

I do agree that it ultimately depends though, and that suspicion is warranted. I just think that the moral question is too complex to immediately assume that Amazon is acting in bad faith like some commenters seem to indicate.

Basically nobody does anything altruistically, and it's naïve to think otherwise. Does that matter, though?

> If they do something "nice" it's because it benefits them.

As it is with most acts of kindness by most people.

> If they do something "nice" it's because it benefits them.

This is true for literally everyone and everything

I think this is caused by a cognitive bias. The more positive things about company X we hear that matter to us, the more we view anything they do in a positive light and the less weight we give to anything that counteracts that belief. Conversely, the more negative things about company X we hear that matter to us, the more we view anything they do in a negative light and the less weight we give to anything that counteracts that belief. Once a trend starts, it gets harder and harder to change people's minds.

Some people, in an otherwise disadvantaged situation, will benefit from this; that is completely fine in isolation. Still, it's wholly naive to assume that Amazon is doing this out of some sense of looking to do a "nice thing".

Most obviously, it is clear that this is being pushed as a pathway to IT education. Amazon, as a business, has massive vested interests in, one, increasing the size of the IT labor force, and two, promoting buy-in to its own IT infrastructure. It is irrational to not initially assume that this initiative is being conducted primarily to pursue such interests.

My criteria for being "happy" with the actions of a corporation like Amazon hinge on them doing something utterly unimaginable: going against the interests of their shareholders for the ultimate benefit of society at large. If, for instance, Amazon starts advocating for meaningful and equitable worker representation in business decisions that affect said workers, I'll be "happy".

Agree, wondering if we swap Amazon with some other no name company, would the responses be the same?

Obviously it would be different… context matters.

By "context" do you mean your personal bias?

Different companies being shitty in different ways is not "bias"

When something has achieved some threshold of 'political-ness' online discussion defaults to being tribal crap.

There's sometimes still some interesting discussion buried in comments somewhere, but you can almost predict the entirety of threads on these kinds of topics without reading it. GPT-3 could probably generate HN comments for these topics and be pretty convincing.

I remember when Amazon said they'd pay my college tuition back around ~2012 to pursue my graduate degree. Turns out, there are a lot of strings attached. Who'da thunk it?

Yes, while it is true that Jeffery Epstein had a rape island, he also gave a lot of money to charity! Can't people just be happy when good things happen?

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