Amazon bans its drivers from moving their own lips too much at work
freightwaves.com
freightwaves.com
The modern mindset prevents that - it's beaurocratic, rigid and extremely oppressive. Technology just helps with that, but if you look at even posts online you'll see that it's the mindset that DEMANDS punishment for any rule breaking no matter how small and how stupid it is.
They are outraged anytime they think "the wrong kind of person" might be getting away with something, while they are mostly fine when people they view as being "higher status" somehow gets away without punishment. They feel like the poor person shoplifting should be shot on sight, but the rich CEO who commits wage theft and illegally hides money in overseas tax havens is a smart business person who deserves to get away with it. I don't know if it's a mental sickness or a moral one, but it's gross and way too common in the US.
Do you have any non-fictional examples (by which I mean factual accounts rather than fictional portrayals) of these beliefs being generally accepted that we can actually have a conversation about? Even some personal anecdotes they could be a useful lens into your perspective?
Or is this an opinion born from listening to the media gone into overdrive during the current political season in the US? If that's what you're referring to, I think you may want to reexamine how much credulity you're giving those sources.
The entire US prison system for one example. Many people will see that prisoners are allowed to rape or beat each other, that they are tortured by solitary confinement, that they are often forced to eat rotten and maggot infested food, that they are used as slave labor by for profit corporations, and those people will insist that these are desirable features and they will even argue that prisoners have it too good/easy and that prison conditions should be worse.
There are countless comments all over the internet demonstrating this, I've even seen them on this website, but if you need evidence that a large number of the population feels that way you can look at the fact that those things continue to be allowed to exist and that reform efforts have been unsuccessful for decades.
Probably not a good approach to take here because there are plenty of examples of everything he said. However there are simultaneously plenty of counterexamples. For example certain west coast cities where shop lifting has been de facto legalized due to non-enforcement rooted in the name of the social cause of the day.
Actually what he wrote appears to match a certain political stereotype in the US while being the opposite of the other one. So I guess it says more about his view of the US than anything else.
> > at least when they want any at all. It's not consistent.
This is because you are treating Americans as a monolithic group, failing to differentiate between various major clusters.
However I will say that at least
> > A lot of Americans are way too into punishment. It's seriously like a fetish for them.
matches what I see around me.
I've had my vehicle stolen, come time with the PROSECUTOR called me they tried to convince me to let them off the hook - like, is this the prosecutor speaking or the defense? That was DC. Never heard anything from that case, no justice provided.
And so that generates a certain hunger.
As far as our punishments, we are very lax. Look at illegal immigration in Singapore. The punishment is a literal beating with a stick. Not a soft beating, a leaves-lifelong-scars beating. Then, deportation. Imagine if the US did that. Singapore also has beatings for many other crimes. They are a "scrappy" country that probably couldn't afford room & board for prisoners, so beat and release it is, more economical. Not to mention anything to do with drugs is a death sentence. If the US believed in punishment like that there'd be a lot less problems. And that punishment system is very humane compared to Sharia law i.e. if you steal, you get your hands cut off. So I personally would support some extreme punishments by way of our punishments being too weak presently.
When George Floyd was killed news stations, independent journalists, and everyday people were trying to find any and all crimes he MAY have committed in the past that would justify his public execution.
As if any past crime could justify a public execution. This is the US, not revolutionary France.
There are certain pockets where some drug offenses and low value shoplifting don't go as harshly punished, but others where they will destroy a person's entire life over it. Only a few states have legalized or decriminalized certain drugs. There are even states that legalized marijuana but left people behind bars who were locked up for doing what anyone outside of prison could now do freely.
Massive crimes tend to go unpunished or punished very lightly compared to minor crimes. Companies like Philips Respironics and Johnson & Johnson are literal serial killers who continued to sell products that they knew would give their customers cancer. They even tried to hide what they knew from the public so that more people would buy the dangerous products and die. Many people were involved in that, and there's no doubt about the guilt, but no one ever saw a single day behind bars for that.
Same with Purdue after they knowingly and intentionally hooked millions on deadly and addictive drugs, or the countless data breaches that go unpunished, or DuPont which managed to pollute the bodies of every last human and animal on the planet. Even the CrowdStrike incident (which resulted in multiple deaths) didn't end with a single person being punished to the extent that a person committing a minor crime would, for example, the purse snatcher who got 45 years in prison (https://www.aclu.org/news/smart-justice/extreme-sentencing)
Comparing that to the US, where if you get caught dealing marijuana, you get a 5 years minimum sentence. That seems disproportionate to me. Maybe police in the US is more compassionate than some militants make it seem, and that's why they don't like catching people for that kind of crime?
Looking at Wikipedia[1] it appears the number of policemen per people is two times higher in the US than Switzerland, and about the same as France. If it is true that "the police are plentiful and they come down fast" in Switzerland (which I would not agree with), it is twice as true in the US.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
That is literally no state in the USA, discounting the states (like the one I live in) where marijuana is legal.
I had Switzerland swat come down hard on me just because I wasn't registered correctly in the apartment I was living in when I was staying in Lausanne. You don't screw around with swiss cops.
immutable rules that apply to everyone reduces that discrimination (but obviously, the rules themselves can also be discriminatory)
This is the sort of basic compassion and humanity that needs to exist. Anything else would be cruel. This has always existed, and is increasingly made difficult by implementing systems that don't allow for these kind of exceptions. This is stripping regular normal people like that bus driver from their autonomy, and by extension, their humanity.
That the bus driver could possibly maybe perhaps be racist and wouldn't have extended that kindness if I had been non-white is an entirely separate matter. Forbidding kindness because some people could possibly maybe perhaps be racist is far far worse, and will affect everyone negatively.
1) They are famous for employing people straight from prison
2) Their tills are just calculators, no electronic connections, no stock control
3) The staff are allowed to give out freebies. Fix shoes for free for people who look like they need it. They will give you free dry cleaning if you have a job interview
4) They still somehow manage to be profitable and growing. There are at least 3 in my town alone.
5) The MD is a great prison reform campaigner, who just got given the job of UK prisons minister.
6) The one kpi they measure is an index of employee happiness.
You can be successful without strict rules. He has only two.
Here is his book
HAPPY INDEX HB: Lessons in Upside-Down Management https://amzn.eu/d/1PEfVqc
If you think about manual processes like standing in a line and talking to a clerk, you don’t necessarily have to start again from the beginning if there is a hiccup- the clerk can allow you to leave the line and go get the thing you need and then come back to the front, meanwhile serving other customers.
Computer software almost never even has this basic concession. If you spend 10 minutes filling out a form, and you get to a piece of information that is mandatory but you don’t have, the vast majority of systems will make you start over (sure you could just leave the window open but that logon session is gonna time out).
Flexibility makes the world a much more pleasant place even if it occasionally invites abuse. As a society we typically allow a small baseline of abuse in exchange for this flexibility, and we punish severe abuse to make sure the level stays tolerable.
But the other aspect is that flexibility is often pro-social. If you want flexibility you are strongly incentivized to be easy to deal with. If you are a jerk to everyone you will find a remarkable lack of flexibility.
The same situation with the bus driver would also never happen, they could easily get fired for allowing it. Train conductors even have to apologize for being early. There's also a lot more open racism and discrimination in various ways (example: drinking bar admittance or apartment rentals) and in various parts of their society that goes completely unpunished.
Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world
Their society comes at a heavy cost
The USA has a relatively high suicide rate and is famously not conformist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...
Lots of slack granted to foreigners who aren’t expected to know the rules. Lots of slack granted to Japanese people who are free to be normal, hikikomori, nerdy, NEET, sporty, etc. Slack to be and do whatever unless you bother someone.
It’s just slack you don’t really notice immediately unlike the menu stuff.
Foreigners might have some slack in some ways but in many ways it's quite the opposite... so there's both good and bad IMO.
"Free to be normal etc." I don't consider that slack either, that's just having a generic free society to me.
I think slack as well as rules can be systematically introduced to the system. Software lowers the cost to support "slack rules" (1 ride is free per year per human face).
And yes, giving people autonomy also means they can do bad things. And that's something we can live with, and it's far better than forbidding them from doing good things. Your distrust of people borders on the misanthropic.
This actually sounds interesting and I would be down to help pull off such a Herculean task.
But also no, this is lunacy. Not only 'itake would like to strip people of their autonomy, they'd also like to strip them from their capacity to do good? That's wishing us a fate worse than death.
Not that it's possible in practice anyway. It's a AGI-complete problem, and any lesser attempts are... well wake me up when any software system implements exceptions and slack around their rigid rules.
Ideally with some LLM tech (though I'm old enough to remember when Blockchain would have solved this problem)
/s
https://www.vox.com/2015/2/24/8101289/school-discipline-race
Are Black 3x more likely to break to rules or do white students get 3x more slack?
These demands to eliminate any possibility of discrimination are shutting down institutions and gridlocking the society.
There's always someone that'll feel they're disadvantaged somehow - not just because of race or gender (the big, flashy topics), but also because the district they live in, or some minor accident, or any other reason. You try to equalize all that, you get systems that are hell to live through and don't even give you much for the trouble.
Also, you can hardly talk about kindness or other good traits and behaviors, in a world where you eliminate all space for showing it. Without slack, kindness is meaningless.
The trick to fixing discrimination is to have people not wish to discriminate and exert social pressure on others who might try. Trying to box in people who do evil with more bureaucracy and tighter and tighter rules is not sane.
Rules can only ever be effective if they reflect the culture of a community.
No; the long-term solution, hard as it is, is to gradually push society toward a point where that sort of systemic discrimination is viewed near-universally as anathema to justice and to the health of the society as a whole, and make more rules of the type where a clear principle is outlined, a rule is stated with the principle as its foundation, and the people identifying and enforcing rule violations are assumed to be able to use reasonable human judgement.
You would have to dispense with a lot of rules that seem like obviously good things because of the unintended consequences.
We could replace the term slack with freedom. We all like freedom. We write songs about how much we like it.
We must all be whipped into Utopia.
I'm honestly not convinced by this line of reasoning at all. Most laws exist for a reason and should be followed. Or if they're bad laws, they should be changed.
- encourage turn taking
- help pedestrians in the 1% of urban areas where there actually are any
- bright line rule that's easy for police to enforce
- keep people from getting complacent about cross traffic
The negative effects are
- a complete stop takes more time than is needed to ensure the intersection is clear, which is a constant daily time drain and a reminder that you are following the rule because others will punish you and not because it's a good idea.
Being lax on the rolling stops and just doing enforcement around those busy areas and high-speed stop sign ignorers seems like a nice equilibrium to keep the good effects and minimize the bad ones. Maybe nicer than we could achieve by letting the kind of people who participate in politics revisit the issue.
Do you live in an urban area so dense that you can't wait for cars to clear the intersection before you run out in front?
Every now and then I bump into someone like this who realizes that they're breaking the law and in the wrong, then tries to tell me I should still change my behaviour because they might kill me anyway.
It is asinine to force arbitrary stops at random intersections that have no time-of-day or traffic sensitivity (i.e. am I alone on the roads at 2AM, or are children walking to school at 8AM). Or to put them at intersections with clear cross visibility (what exactly is the stop for?). Or the 4-way stop sign mess.
It is totally reasonable to require full stops in the latter case, but silly in the former. Unfortunately, stop signs make no distinction between the two.
The only reason to fully stop at stop signs is actually the a pillar / b pillar blind spots, or obstructed view from the road. If you were hypothetically driving an open top car in an open neighborhood (or a motorcycle, bike, scooter, moped), there's no new "information" you'll gain by fully stopping rather than slowing down (where as if you have an A/B pillar blind spot, a full stop can give someone time to appear from behind it).
See also: "Stop Signs suck and we should get rid of them" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42oQN7fy_eM&t=1s
A minor inconvenience to increase safety. It's also a time drain that your speed is limited but you see clearly the benefits of that, you are just against completely stopping because of a perceived sense of lost efficiency with your time.
> Being lax on the rolling stops and just doing enforcement around those busy areas and high-speed stop sign ignorers seems like a nice equilibrium to keep the good effects and minimize the bad ones.
This is what creates complacency over time, a driver gets used on doing rolling stops because they judge the intersections they cross as not so busy, over time they keep pushing that and normalising it, until complacency sets in and one day they do a rolling stop at the wrong time/place. If one is strict about doing it as often as possible it just becomes second nature and not a conscious decision.
It's unfortunate that America needs to drive so much and educate its drivers so little, traffic in the USA is just a little bit better than places like Brazil, and absolutely nowhere close to the civilised traffic I experiece in Sweden, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Germany, etc.
Germany and its very car-centric society does a much better job on educating responsible drivers than the USA.
It's a bad idea according to you. Do you have actual data that proves rolling stop provides sufficient utility that a stop sign is supposed to provide?
There does not exist a single society today or in history where every single member of the said society agrees with every single rule governing them. If you are only prevented from following your society's various rules because of 'fear of punishment' then you sir are a frustrated anti-social. It's not supposed to be because of "fear".
> time drain
Ridiculous. Traffic safety is more important that your illusory 'loss' of whatever handful of minutes per day.
There is absolutely no reason what so ever to even stop at the stop sign during the __off hours__ when on the main road with the right-a-way. It shouldn't even be there if not for school hours. There are 2 main 4-way crossings a few streets to either side of the main junction for anyone wanting to cross at a cross walk in a sleepy suburb on the outer edge of a metro area. A rolling stop is more than generous at that time.
In the UK, Stop signs are only used when there is limited visibility/blind corners, so if you see one, you know that you definitely need to stop. Once you step and creep forward, you'll realise why a stop sign was needed.
AEB is the system you're asking for and it's slowly rolling out.
Technology that enforces full stops at every stop sign won't be smarter than human drivers. It won't know if you're not stopping because you need to get away from a tornado/serial killer/car accident/literally any other hazard, or you need to rush through in order to get a hospital/save a life/keep your bus above a certain speed or else it will explode/etc.
Brain-dead enforcement of any rule is a disaster waiting to happen. Life is complicated and full of edge cases. People should be allowed to use their brains when it comes to operating cars just like they should be punished when they fail to. Don't be so quick to give up everyone's freedom just so that you can feel a little more safe when jogging.
IMHO yield sign is a better solution then lax enforcement of stop signs. And all-way stop can be replaced by roundabouts and mini roundabouts (I'm not a fan of high traffic multi-lane roundabouts but in places with low traffic, where all-way stops usually are used they work great).
It's trivial to make a roundabout have yield signs. Some roads here are like that, where every 4-way intersection of stop signs is now a yield + roundabout. You can theoretically get all the way through without stopping.
But you can't have yields at a 4-way stop. Connecting 2 perpendicular roads at low speed is an incredibly common problem - the US chooses to do it in a stupid way.
The real danger is from proceeding without looking around, but there's no way to enforce looking around. Coming to a complete stop doesn't change it. Someone who's going to proceed without giving proper attention is going to do so whether or not they come to a complete stop.
Why do people roll through stop signs? Complaints about acceleration and uselessness.
I easily see two fixes for acceleration. Make stopping and starting less jarring on occupants and reduce the need for the driver to switch from gas to brake pedals.
Uselessness can be resolved by a number of ways, make the area around the stop more open for better visibility, but we can definitely use technology to prevent people from rolling through stop signs. Set up sensors so that only one roadway has an active stop sign, when the sensors detect a single vehicle the stop sign on their way can be disabled. When the sensors detect intersecting vehicles both stop signs are activated.
Because coming to full and complete stop at a four way intersection when the area you are in is entirely deserted and there are zero other cars or people is stupid. We know why stop signs exist. They are very useful when there are other cars and people around. They keep people's behavior predictable and that makes us safer. They are pointless when nobody else is around though. It's still good to slow down just to be safe, but there's no reason to come to a full stop.
And yet people still get hit rolling through stop signs.
Not when there aren't any other people around they don't.
Stop signs are good things to follow when they are needed, and pointless to follow when they aren't. People who roll through when they shouldn't are just as bad as people who don't stop or slow down at all and laws do and should exist to punish them. There's no need for enforcement in all cases though. Consideration of context is justice. Brain-dead enforcement regardless of circumstance or outcome is just oppression.
I have turned the wrong way down a one way street one too many times, even after living there for several years:) surprisingly easy to do when not on GPS (not all one ways are properly marked)
Speeding does happen and it does kill people - https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
Just to be clear, I don't like red light cameras either, but if you are gonna put on a mask and fuck some shit up, why don't you wait outside of a bar and wait for drunk drivers?
I don't think it's speeding itself that causes crashes, but aggressive driving, and speed merely exacerbates aggressive driving. It is possible to speed without being aggressive, and in those scenarios, I don't consider speed to be a significant risk.
The German Autobahn have HALF the driver fatality rate as USA highways despite have wide sections with no speed limits.
Speed is fine. Keep right except when passing and you won't force faster drivers to constantly change lanes to get around you.
because one is damaging equipment that shouldn't exist, and the other involves ambushing a person on baseless suspicion. Presumably by force, given we're trying to fuck some shit up...
I'm going to pretend to ignore the whataboutism distraction
this isn't a thought experiment, it's a simple rhetorical argument. But does calling it a thought experiment as if it was something wearable normally work?
But to answer your argument, I already agree that it's ethical to use force, even if it rises to the level that causes harm. But only if you're correct that you're preventing impaired driving. Humans are famously bad at making solo judgments like this to the standard I'd require to consider it acceptable. I wont advocate for someone to do something when I believe a negative outcome is more likely than a positive result.
But given violence means physical force with the intent to cause harm, I strongly disagree that the ethical way to behave involves intentionally causing injury. unintentional injury as an unfortunate byproduct is permissible in the is permissible in the "thought experiment" you propose, but only when it is actively avoided never when it's intentional.
I.e. I think you meant to say physical force not violence.
In addition to standard car safety features, there are cars that will engage breaks automatically if they detect imminent and unavoidable collision.
Also we have technology like traffic lights and red light cameras if stop signs are not good enough for the scale.
In the case of this Amazon thing, what I hope is that the inefficiency of it strangles itself to death. For example, if I tried to start a restaurant and I decided that the people working in the kitchen had to keep their mouth closed or get fired, then my restaurant would quickly go out of business.
I don't think it prevents it, the modern mindset encourages more individualism, individualism is the final frontier of slack
> that DEMANDS punishment for any rule breaking no matter how small and how stupid it is
I think small and stupid is sort of the point. And I don't think there's anything modern about it. In the middle ages, people were getting burned at the stake over super niche differences in Christian doctrine
If you catch every road traffic offence, the only people who will still have a licence will be people like me who don't have a car.
If the UK tried to fully enforce its drug laws, it would bankrupt itself with all the extra prisons it would have to build.
Even if the governments of the world don't care to use surveillance tech to catch all criminality, blackmailers will use it because it's already cheap and getting cheaper, which forces the governments to change anyway. (Though perhaps GenAI will get good enough fast enough that any image will be assumed fake by default).
But I really do mean radical decriminalisation (civil law offences are not criminal offences) not merely the illustrations of decriminalising hard drugs and reducing the penalties for speeding.
If they go down the route of "everyone is guilty, let's find out what for when they cause problems for the elite", it's often (but not always) followed by rebellion and uprising — I think not usually the people themselves (though that can happen) but rather because the elite don't necessarily agree with each other and build factions of supporters. Even the Stasi fell, despite all their efforts.
When failure can be graceful instead of painful, I think that's better. I hope I'm right and that's not just wishful thinking.
If they get as far as actually publishing whatever it was, that means they never got paid.
The UK also allows private prosecution, but that's going to be more of "personal vendettas between non-elites also get prosecuted" rather than "blackmail" given the latter is also a crime.
I think this is a huge issue with respect to both enforcement of the law as well as surveillance and privacy. Sure, in the 1960s, a cop could sit on the side of the road with binoculars outside of town and watch for a half dozen blacklisted plate numbers associated with known criminal suspects. But today, automated license plate readers can do that 24/7/365 on every major road into and out of an entire city, tracking millions of people with an opex of just a couple kilowatts of compute.
When laws and norms written before computers say that certain activities are searches of private information and require warrants, while other activities are just observation of public information like your face and license plate, that implicitly granted a high probability of anonymity and privacy because of the cost of that observation and low value of the information relative to its cost. In the past couple of decades, those observations have become so much cheaper that the information can now be worth more than the cost of gathering it.
Amazon employee monitoring has a similar cost: Sure, human managers could discipline employees who were less productive; if someone has a problem with taking excessively frequent or long smoke breaks, lunch breaks, or bathroom breaks eventually an attentive manager will notice and talk to them about it, but it's not normal to track KPIs to the second. I suppose these aren't "key" performance indicators, they're barely relevant performance indicators, but when they're cheap to scale Amazon can monitor them.
Economics, not regulations, guaranteed your privacy and freedom: it was somewhere between irrational and impossible to employ an army of human observers to do what computers now do cheaply and easily. When that economic landscape changed, we should have made those regulations concrete.
Mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution.
- St. Thomas Acquinas
Just reading the original quoted mid article without the extra commentary it's clear the story is unrelated to listening to the radio in itself and to do with the camera mechanism monitoring for other forms of distracted driving not being able to tell the difference:
> we were told that "a lot of mouth movement will set off the camera" and that we "needed to keep mouth movement to a minimum".
Still a shitty system by all counts... but a lot easier to talk about it directly than via rehashes.
Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This isn't a random aggregator, Freight Waves is a well-known industry specific site.
A world where this wasn't rehashed by Freight Waves is a world where you have to read every Reddit board to gain knowledge.
> unrelated to listening to the radio in itself
None of the links you mention, nor any comment or headline, includes the word listening.
I don't see how any of the headlines, on HN, Freight Waves, or Reddit, or content, on HN, Freight Waves, or Reddit, could be read as related to listening.
> but a lot easier to talk about it directly than via rehashes.
What does this mean, exactly?
EDIT: Can't reply due to HN timeout, maybe the HN link was originally to Jalopnik saying they can't listen to the radio, and it's cached in your browser? On my end, it's always been a link to Freight Waves with the headline "Amazon bans its drivers from moving their own lips...(something something, can't see, I'm on mobile)"
To be clear, I'm not saying the sites themselves are useless or not - just the wrong thing to post as a source for discussion here. From the HN guidelines: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter". Freight Waves would probably be acceptable enough for that, Jalopnik is pretty poor in this particular case.
> None of the links you mention, nor any comment or headline I see, mentions listening.
Apologies, that is a slip on my part - meant singing along to the radio. A great example of why you should look at the original instead of commentary :p.
> What does this mean, exactly?
When you talk about what an article which talks about what another article talks about what people talk about what someone said it becomes a lot less clear than staging a conversation around what was originally said instead.
> instead of talking about things like "That’s an opinion shared by many Freight Waves readers".
It should read more like:
> instead of things like the Jalopnik reporting "That’s an opinion shared by many Freight Waves readers".
I.e. obviously it's not a rehashing problem for Freight Wave to report what its own user polls say.
The version of the story (straight to Freight Waves instead of Jalopnik) the link was changed to at the time you made your comment was much better about getting to this point (one less layer of indirection).
Still, with the source being one “we were told” I guess we’re not sure if this is this official; this could be a manager’s threat or someone’s inaccurate understanding of what the camera is actually monitoring.
Ventriloquism, face masks or humming in the meantime then. Or quitting, like the author of the linked post - perhaps best for now.
I'm not saying some of this kind of thing can't be better served by some different laws, just it's probably not as easy to solve with a "quick" law or these other approaches as it might seem.
This is not true.
It makes me very itchy to see 2 comments in a row using innuendo and deconstructing sourcing in an erroneous way.
The other handwaves about "rehashing" to wave away Freight Waves, while linking to comments on Reddit. You imply there's only one comment that says "we were told"
The other also implies the claim is they cannot listen to the radio.
As noted elsewhere, I did make a grave error in saying listen instead of sing to when writing the comment and by the time someone mentioned it it was too late to edit the comment. A great example of why you want to base discussion off of sources closer to the original first :).
> The life of the American worker is inherently undignified [0]
Also, if you Google "Hacker News Undignified" you will find a bunch of posts related to work, even though there is nothing in the query that is inherently related to work.
I don't know the first thing about making documentaries, but a documentary simply titled "Undignified" that covers the bullshit workers have to go through would hit hard I think. Just give voice and documentation to the extra burdens so many workers have to endure; can you go to the bathroom when you need to? If you have a stationary job, can you sit? Or do you have to stand for 8 hours straight? Can you sing to the radio, or will a computer algorithm punish you for it? Etc. All of these burdens are optional, our society could accomplish its work without these hardships, but we choose not to. The delivery driver can both deliver packages and use a restroom, and a grocery store checker can scan items while sitting on a stool.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36264363 and https://dirt.fyi/article/2023/06/bad-waitress
If everyone banded together tomorrow and didn't show up for work for 1 day, these problems would be solved. But, again, you can't even attempt such things as you'd be fired on the spot.
Do y'all just ride absolutely silent when you have passengers or...?
A few US states, Singapore, Japan, UAE, South Africa .. some AUS states.
Pretty much everywhere else in the world, this is considered "normal behavior"
In addition, laws often contain compromises for feasibility. I expect many jurisdictions permit hands-free conversations partly because it's difficult to prohibit them.
If you want to argue that phone-conversations while driving are safe compared to quiet driving, you should be pointing to experiments rather than popular belief.
I think that the main problem is if they were in the car with you then they'd be able to modulate the conversation in line with parts of the drive which are more or less demanding. It's much harder to do this successfully on the phone.
_________
If the delivery-person is walking, the potential impact of being distracted by their phone conversation is negligible. In that case, I sympathize and respect their efforts to conduct two jobs at once.
However the situation is very different when operating a delivery vehicle, where errors have a greater impact. In that context, their multi-tasking is no longer something to respect, but instead recklessness that should be condemned.
This is especially true if it leads to the death of a pedestrian, which might be a serious crime known as manslaughter.
I asked if hustling via hand free driving was what you took umbrage with.
Again, I am not that user. Insofar as I have "umbrage", it's that I don't think anything should need this much explaining.
> hustling via hand free driving
I believe that their concern is over dangerous driving, which includes but is not limited to cases where it is being caused by "hustling" with a hands-free device.
Is there a problem with that?
Okay we have to stop with this "huh???" nonsense. You knew what he meant, stop trying to make people seem unreasonable (yes, that is the purpose of this "huh?" even if you don't realize it)
This isn't Reddit.
The point of the article is the bluntness of the tool, not that they are trying to reduce dangerously distracting phone calls, and understanding the true objective doesn't undo that.
Plus, the vast majority of people have a significant need for social contact. Working an eight hour shift alone in a car without any contact with any social contact (except a quick sign off when dropping a package), 5 days a week, is inhuman.
Curious why you state that so confidently when every study I'm aware of has found the opposite.
(e.g., https://www.nsc.org/getmedia/2ea8fe8b-d7b7-4194-8ea5-306d30a...)
This is not true, because people physically in the car have the context of what's happening on the road, and can be aware enough to pause for a few seconds while you navigate a difficult situation that requires your full attention.
It measurably impacts my own ability to concentrate, I have noticed. We should dispense with such absolutist claims; there is no doubt that any action not directly related to driving a car has potential to impact safe operation of that vehicle.
The function of the law is to discover and enforce tolerances, balancing freedom with safety. We don't have to ignore even minimal safety implications in order to secure freedom, an honest conversation is better for both sides.
It is definitely inhumane to expect drivers to not move their lips or talk while working in solitude for 8-10 hours a day. Instead, we need to design our various systems such that they are capable of withstanding such a tolerance without severely impacting safety.
It seems to be less so for people without ADHD in my experience, but we can't just say it has zero effect. It's better to discuss the threat to safety in terms of potential, since that accounts for individual variance.
It's not like amazon is making it up. Studies have shown that music can have an adverse effect on driving.
What studies? The only quality meta-analysis I could find showed mixed results, "It was concluded that, in some indicators, listening to music has adverse effects on driving. However, in many indicators, music has a positive impact on improving driving safety." [1]
Personally I find music can help me focus - both when driving and at work.
From the link you posted:
On the other hand, listening to music while driving could raise the driver’s mental workload index and, thus, impair their driving performance. In fact, both driving and listening to music compete for the driver’s limited cognitive capacity.14 According to a study by the American National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in-vehicle driver distraction, such as listening to music, is responsible for 25% of traffic accidents.15
I for one listen to music at full blast and tend to drive spiritedly which requires full 110% concentration. So I would agree that there are bigger fish to fry than listening to music while driving. But I'm going to be honest and say I've seen folks who don't listen to music and do bonehead things on the road because they're distracted. So yes, let's bad roadside billboards. I'm with you on that.
And if every healthy driver (old,young, strong or weak) before you could move and complete 200 stops in a day but you can only do half of that. Does that mean the expectation is unrealistic or is it something else?
Sure, previous driver Bob made 200 stops in a day, what does that have to do with safety? Especially considering Bob was forced to pee into a bottle to make his numbers:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/selling-bottles-of-amazon-dr...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Truckers/comments/qd1l4x/how_many_o...
And then it seems the manager failed to articulate that point (or perhaps they did, but people are the meeting were so upset that they weren't quite listening anymore).
that is an insane overreach by the employer. They should be outraged!
https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/distracted-driving
The concern here is most likely people diddling with their phones (which tends to accompany such conversations but may be harder for the cameras to detect), followed by the distraction of zoning over a long conversation over any kind of device. Not singing along with the radio, obviously (which is what people seem to be reacting to so emotionally here).
You don't have to like it, and I would never work with Amazon in any capacity anyway (not for this, but for a whole bunch of vastly more important reasons).
But it's definitely neither insane, nor overreach on their part.
If you think this is strict, have a look at what UPS requires of its drivers. They have very specific rules for how to do everything related to delivering packages and operating the vehicles. And not that I've specifically focused on it, but I can't recall ever hearing music playing in a UPS truck.
For the most part, we have the freedom to do most anything we want. However, we’re not supposed to waste company time (going to pick up a friend) and there’s specific rules that prohibit non ups employees from being on the package car. As for music, yes. Different drivers use different methods, I personally use earbuds, some drivers use a speaker.
I listen to audiobooks and a couple podcasts once I'm done with my commercial stops (ie: not talking to customers anymore). Sometimes when I want to finish work faster, I'll put on some high energy music to keep me motivated, but that's only occasionally because it's harder on the body.
Granted, these posts were from 5 years go and UPS may have cracked down since then. But if their posts are to believed, they've no need keep that gun in the glove box in case they ever need to find a speedy way to check out, just yet. As to the drivers stuck working for Amazon -- we can't be so sure.
Do they get to keep a gun in the glove box? You know, for when they need to kill themselves?
This doesn’t have to be true. I cancelled prime and haven’t shopped at Amazon in years.
A lot of Internet services are on AWS
But I would not, personally, deal with the royalty of dark patterns
Seriously. Drive to the store. Find parking. Walk to the general location where item should be. Item isn’t there. Try to find a clerk (there are 2 in the whole store). Get item or settle for whatever is there. Wait in line. Self checkout (we were told this would reduce wait time). Pay more because store is more expensive. Drive home. The whole thing took an hour of your time and you didn’t even get the exact thing you wanted. Also, good luck if you have kids or are busy or don’t have a car or are disabled.
The solution is labor laws. Voting with your wallet. Doesn’t. Work. It has never worked. Voting with your wallet is the solution companies want you to try because they know actual regulation would actually work.
Yes I sometimes shop online but these days I try to go direct to the manufacturer's own web store, or I'll buy it on a product-niche site such as bhphoto.com that isn't chock full of anonymous sellers hawking made-in-china garbage.
I know this is a common complaint, but I haven’t experienced it personally. A lot of the things I get on Amazon are name-brand items I would’ve bought in a store anyways (e.g. paper towels or mouthwash).
Someone may say similar words about shopping at Amazon and they wouldn't be wrong.
"the hell that is shopping at Amazon's counterfeit infested online store"
They should drop all the restrictions on 'distracting' activity and just fire poor drivers rather than trying to make poor drivers into good ones.
I’m honestly surprised they can still find people who want to work for them.
The slow and steady eradication of middle class jobs + the lack of a humane and dignified safety net + the need for food, clothing and shelter. I think very few people want to work as an Amazon warehouse worker or driver, as in make a career of it. It's one of the USA's many Jobs Of Last Resort.
Driving is dangerous, period. I don't think we'd object as much to Amazon trying to make sure that drivers don't text and drive. Talking and driving isn't as distracting, but it is at least somewhat distracting. I've definitely seen cab drivers chatting away, driving aggressive, and missing little cues that could have easily led to an accident.
Amazon is pretty understandably trying to limit liability and disruption here. The drivers are not on personal time in personal vehicles. They're on company time in company vehicles, and employers almost universally regulate employee behavior to some degree or another.
Now, maybe this isn't effective, or a step too far, and they should certainly improve their talking detection, but I wouldn't personally dismiss the intent and approach out-of-hand. It could realistically actually save a life.
edit, to clarify the question I have here: What behavior is reasonable for Amazon to monitor and regulate for drivers? Any? Something just less than this?
I would. Every time I've seen an Amazon driver they're busting ass, sprinting across lawns. Of the drivers I've talked to it's incredibly stressful, and to make your quota you have to drive a bit more "confidently". And let's not even get into the piss bottle stuff.
If their intent was truly safety, they would probably want to start there. But they're not. Because keeping high quotas is important for the bottom line. Hiring employees, scaling vans and infrastructure is expensive. So it follows to optimize cash you squeeeeeeze each employee as far as they can go.
Now, the particular way Amazon is going about enforcing this is creepy as hell, and well into the “I’m not comfortable with the privacy trade-off” zone for me.
1: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199702133360701#t=...
https://teamster.org/2024/08/teamsters-win-groundbreaking-jo...
unionize, boycott, strike
https://teamster.org/2024/08/teamsters-win-groundbreaking-jo...
Thousands of people have stopped buying anything from Amazon, and the only change in the world is that those people don’t get the convenience that Amazon provides; Amazon is still doing all the same things.
As an individual, your only two choices are: shop at Amazon and get the benefits and Amazon still exists exactly as it does today, or don’t shop at Amazon, don’t get the benefits, and Amazon still exists exactly as it does today. The only person that suffers if I stop shopping at Amazon is me, it doesn’t make one persons life better.
This is a Collective Action Problem, and it can’t be fixed by consumer choice.
If a boycott is organized and specific, with an obtainable demand, it can work. A general “we don’t like Amazon’s business practice so don’t shop there” won’t work, but a “everyone in our 2 million member group won’t shop there until you grant workers X benefit, and we will also boycott any partner company until it happens” has an actual chance of success, since there is a specific thing for Amazon to base a choice on (is the cost of the lost business more than benefit x). If I just don’t patronize them but don’t have a specific demand, Amazon isn’t going to be put into any sort of position to make a trade off decision.
A boycott is never going to put a company out of business.
I know this is an unpopular opinion on HN but it always comes back to governments being the ones who need to regulate industry because literally nobody else has both the incentives and the power to enact that kind of change. You either have industry self regulate, but as we’ve seen, the incentives just isn’t there for them to behave. Or the customers boycotting a business, and has been discussed already, customers can’t agree on a collective action large enough to make any difference at all.
Prices on things you'd actually want to buy, well known quality brand, are often the same price else where. With unknown brands you're usually better off paying more else where to make sure you get something that someone somewhere in the company decided wasn't totally terrible and worth selling instead of AliExpress drop seller garbage.
Which is funny because one step I've had to adopt to avoid fraud is going to the manufacturer's website to find where to buy the item. I can't trust the amazon listing that comes up on a search.
It's less about wanting cheap crap now and more about amazon having a huge market presence that makes avoiding them difficult.
But even before that, I feel like there is enough information on working at Amazon at this point that anyone with the ability to choose between Amazon and another job should pick the latter. Worker strikes are just as effective.
If you're successful at causing amazon to crumble and they lose their job, would you really feel good?
Imagine telling them they don't have job anymore because you know better than them whats good for them
This feels like a bit of a straw man — if Amazon start losing potential sales because people don't like how they're treating their workers, they'll fix their workers rights before they let the company crumble out of spite.
Customer pressure is a real lever in these scenarios.
Do you support that? Almost certainly not. So the only resolution is you don't actually believe this argument.
I'm guessing Amazon pays above average and that's why people keep working for them despite their reputation. The people there have a choice. Keep making more at Amazon but be treated poorly, and that's a choice they make.
If Amazon doesn't like a worker, they can fire them.
If a worker doesn't like Amazon, they can quit.
You can hate Amazon, thats fine, you can choose to never work for Amazon, thats fine, but lets not lie to ourselves. The people who choose to work at Amazon want to work there. They all applied, accepted the job, and show up every day.
No it doesn't, you're fully allowed to switch once you've paid off your debt. The debt that people chose to take on in exchange for housing, transportation, a new shot at life.
That's not my argument of course, but it's a hypothetical argument if you want to appeal to the "free market always good" type people.
> If Amazon doesn't like a worker, they can fire them.
> If a worker doesn't like Amazon, they can quit.
False dichotomy, you've run head-first into the hypocrisy of modern Capitalism. These actions do not have equal power because the labor market is not a free market.
Amazon firing a worker can literally cost them their life, whereas a worker leaving does nothing to Amazon. This is because the labor market is almost perfectly tipped, rigged, in the employer's (buyer's) favor.
In order to fix the leverage and create a free market, the employees would need to unionize, which is the correct solution here. Then, if Amazon does something evil, the employees can say "fix it or we walk" and that actually means something.
> The people who choose to work at Amazon want to work there
Your understanding of choice is infantile, almost comically so. You're purposefully leaving out the pressure of life from this decision. I think you'll find starvation a powerful coercive technique.
Choice. Not having it makes you a victim.
We should not blame victims
> amazon to crumble and they lose their job, would you really feel good?
That is a false dichotomy
Amazon crowds out alternatives
Yeah cause there’s long pauses I guess.
I get the impression they’re talking to their wives.
Maybe just talking to family/buddies.
Perhaps these long running low intensity conversations are what Amazon wants to stamp out.
Or did they not think about that at all because this is somewhere between lip service (heh) to driver safety and an abuse tactic?
Sure they could pull over on a road trip but when you're working for Amazon the company known for piss bottles... The option is to, I guess, fall asleep at the wheel?
Or the drivers could protest by wearing masks over their mouths.
And the singing merely gives false positives?
I've been in Ubers where the driver was constantly on the phone. While they do it handsfree, actually calling on the phone, whether handheld or handsfree, massively increases the risk of an accident.
(I've always wondered why handsfree calling is considered safer than handheld calling when you drive an automatic).
Really gotta remember to check back in this thread and see if there’s any new accounts claiming to be someone involved in this and talking about how they got to the point where this feels like a sensible business decision.
And no, the builders of this don't feel bad. They feel "excited" to be blessed by some 0.1%er's capital and get that FAANG experience on their CV.
This kind of allegation really calls for a better source than "Reddit users are saying". I'm not saying it can't be true, but there's any number of ways that an anonymous commenter's report of what an unspecified person said in their morning briefing could give a false or misleading impression of Amazon policies.
Artificial robots if you will
Who is "we"?
Not me.
GDPR is a bit more than just cookie notices. I'm pretty sure that this would be a textbook case and if a company tried to continue such a program after being told to stop it, they'd have a good chance of paying the 4% of global revenue max fine for it.
Labor laws in many countries would also have an opinion on such a system.
Well, if you want to sing out, sing out
And if you want to be free, be free
'Cause there's a million things to be
You know that there arePlus I'm guessing the best data driven safety change would be a reduction of package delivery load if Amazon is really doing data driven safety changes.
Self aggrandizing midwit (middle or upper middle management): “I need a project to demonstrate “leaders are right a lot and invent & simplify” principle come feedback time.”
Self aggrandizing midwit to their team: “Remember we have cameras in delivery vans go figure out what else we can do with them”
Shaking in the boots middle manager or IC: “Hey remember the drivers occasionally hit the curbs because they don’t have time to pee, we should look at their faces use our awesome Rekognition stack to bang this out”
Midwit: Great I will write a PRFAQ !
IC: Here it it boss, i banged out the PoC without going to the bathroom all day!
Midwit: I am glad WE ALL WORKED TO GET THIS OUT.
Nothing wrong with that unless they're driving.
1. It's distracting, truly distracting. 2. It's a possible means of working while at work.
It's actually good that Amazon didn't just record the convos and reprimand people based on an AI oversight of whether it breaks the above rules.
Because they keep working there. So the workers think the conditions are worth it in exchange for their paycheck. If I disagree and shop elsewhere I'm effectively disagreeing with the workers and telling them I think they are making a bad deal and I don't want to contribute to their livelihood. But I don't actually know that they can make a better deal elsewhere.
Before I move my purchase to Newegg or whatever should I first make sure that their working conditions are better? Or just judge by how often I see each company mentioned in the media?
I think that the voluntary nature of employment is a sufficient circuit breaker. If it gets bad enough we can and do leave for better opportunities elsewhere. It wouldn't be the first, second or third time for me, and that includes minimum wage jobs. So I don't feel the duty to investigate the working conditions of each business I deal with.
The fact that you can't order a product with any certainty that what you get won't be co-mingled fake trash from a third party is the best reason to stop ordering from them tbh.
You are probably also taking for granted a lot of the labor rights which were won over the last 100 years. For example, blacklisting used to be a thing, and it certainly did prevent job mobility, that was the whole point.
You are also right that you as a CONSUMER should not have to check every company's credentials before doing business with them. But you as a CITIZEN might want to have your government do this through things such as minimum wage laws and overtime laws.
Nobody here is really thinking through what happens if they are successful at boycotting and destroying Amazon. What would they say to these people they're supposedly helping?
"I got you laid off! You don't have to work here anymore! You're free! Maybe you can't feed your family now but at least you can move your lips while you drive!"
It sounds like you assume that corporations are immutable things, whose contracts and policies may never be changed. But we are having this conversation because Amazon’s policies changed, and the workers it affects are complaining. Why isn’t “Amazon rescinds this policy change” a solution to this problem?
Other truckers have UNIONS. Their cockpit recorders can only be accessed under strict guidance and policy - not willy nilly to piss off the truckers. Plus they get reasonable quotas so they don't have to bust their asses and drive sleep deprived.
> the solution in a free market...
... is to create a fair labor market. The labor market is not a free market, because companies have infinitely more leverage. If you're truly a free market activist, you must be pro-union. Introduce a little competitiveness into hiring practices.