> The number of packages that Amazon ships itself per employee each year has also steadily increased since at least 2015 to about 3,870 from about 175...
But shipping about 0.5 packages per employee per day is not impressive to start...
It's no wonder Amazon didn't make money for a very long time.
I'm also under the impression that most of the Amazon delivery drivers are contractors, and wouldn't count in "per employee" metrics.
He has no vision beyond what is best for him personally. Other people aren't humans.
I think there's a non-zero chance of 95% unemployment within the next 20 years.
I can't imagine this would last long with the social instability that would follow.
That also seems like a gross overestimate for many industries. Many supply chains are nowhere near able to be automated to the extent this ratio would imply.
With that said, there is probably also a non-zero chance that something like that wouldn't be negative but something positive instead. I suppose that'd be the ideal scenario.
This is being accelerated by the bill passed the senate literally today.
Is there any reason to believe we will drastically reverse the trend?
I do agree that wealth is not distributed particularly fairly but I don't understand the idea that it's mostly going to a select few. There are almost 20 million more jobs in the US now than there were 20 years ago, that's a lot of productivity right there.
Amazon employs 1.4 million people. Bezos has spent maybe the equivalent to a couple of weeks worth of Amazon payroll so far in his life. His yacht was the equivalent of a few days, his wedding maybe one hour. That money didn't come from Amazon either, it came from people wanting to own Amazon.
Leaving aside whether that's fair or not, surely it means that most of the productivity and money is going to the employees?
What am I missing here? How was this better before, what has changed recently that makes this such a big talking point now?
Many people seem convinced that the problems in society are caused by billionaires hoarding money, when they clearly aren't hoarding any relevant amounts of money. The problems with housing, healthcare and such are very obviously caused by other things (Home mortgages being a huge cornerstone of the entire economy for one, millions are placed in a situation where cheaper housing would be a catastrophe - including banks).
Maybe our parents, who were able to buy a house for like 5 years of a worker's salary, were just the luckiest generation? It sure hasn't been that easy to get a home before or after at any time in history.
Right now is one of the runner ups though, but we're comparing the situation with the best ever.
I had the privilege of working with him for a little over a year.
He was respectful, analytical, and only thought about what is best for Amazon and Amazon's customers.
I don't think his own aggrandizement or what's best for him enters into the calculus of his day-to-day work one itoa.
He's an untiring as well. I realized I had gone far beyond my peter principle when I was working with him.
He's a robber baron, not a captain of industry.
Don't have to look much past his "gobble gobble" email to see that, nor his announcement of RTO the day after an all hands where remote work was touted as the future.
Arguably these are synonyms :P
At least he walks the walk. He was in the office 100% of the time.
Case 1: I drive to the store to get a widget. There is a low chance Store-1 doesn't have it, and I have to keep shopping. Regardless, I am driving about 30 minutes total, conservatively.
Case 2: I order a widget from Amazon. The Amazon driver organizes their stops to minimize travel time, and it's undoubtedly less than 30 minutes driving from the previous stop.
Both cases require transport of goods from factory to the final storage location (shopfront or Amazon warehouse), so the difference there is negligible.
It would be interesting to quantify the carbon emissions from those two systems (they're not fully independent variable) I wouldn't be surprised if my intuition is wrong. Or yours
92% of the people in the US have access to at least one vehicle
https://www.fool.com/money/research/car-ownership-statistics...
And this is worldwide
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/vehicles-per-capita-by-coun...
The average driver in the US drives 40 miles per day
https://www.kbb.com/car-advice/average-miles-driven-per-year...
No most people don’t walk to the store
I literally just got back from a trip to London and Paris a couple of weeks ago.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44412439
Let’s just say I’m Platinum Medallion on Delta (also from racking up miles on partner airlines Virgin Atlantic and Air France) , for 3 years in a row…
Are you trying to really say that cars aren’t popular outside of the US?
Did I miss the statistic you cited where most people in first world countries walk and ride bikes every where?
Capitalism might not be perfect, but communism did not function at all. You can have the best of both worlds in socio-capitalist system.
Let Amazon automate everything. Does anyone here really want to do the manual labour in their warehouses?
Also the regular yada yada that non-robot automation offset people, non-automated tools also reduce number of people needed.
Robot is a term with such a wide range of capabilities that a simple count is meaningless. Just like a tiny 4 bit micro that monitors a single sensor isn't comparable to a computer running a large LLM.
You can tell what the Wall Street Journal's true feelings are about automation by reading an article about retirement and dividing the number of times they use the term "AI" by the number of times they use the phrase "demographic/retirement crisis" e.g. in https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/blackrock-larry-fink-a...
What’s that you say? People with nothing left to lose tend to put the heads of Capitalists on pikes for all to see? Well maybe you should have thought of that before pillaging the commons and treating people like slaves? But “fiduciary duty to shareholder value” you say? You made that shit up in the 1950s and have been pushing it like it were true ever since. Saying a thing doesn’t make it true.
However what would be interesting is if they ever have a situation where the number of humanoid robot employees outnumbers human employees. Once someone is able to run an entire large corporation with no humans at all it will be a big milestone I guess.
But there's no real driving force for this to happen, because the humanoid form factor is not necessarily ideal for most kinds of industrial applications. And a lot of the "Automation" will be AI Agents, which have no form factor at all, being purely knowledge based.
Standing in the same bread line creates an awful lot of solidarity.
Some people might argue that wealth concentrated in the top 1% is a net benefit if you look at it as one big pool of resources. But will the remaining 99% actually see any of that benefit? Or will the 1% simply tighten their grip, keeping the rest dependent on their “generosity”?