Guess.
I imagine everyone must have read the NY Times article on the working conditions at Amazon — it’s interesting that the article actually tries to be objective and lay out the good and bad points of working for weird out-of-touch slavedriver Jeff Bezos, yet the reaction from Amazon has been flat denial. Unless they’re going to show that there isn’t high turnover, overstressed executives, and blue-collar workers treated as machines, which I don’t think they can do, the guy at the top declaring that he simply doesn’t recognize the sweatshop he runs is not particularly persuasive.
The Seattle newspaper is clearly in an awkward position: how do they criticize a major employer in the region? Answer: they avoid the issues. This was also Seattle’s curse when I was growing up, having a single dominant employer, in that case Boeing, with every one trembling in fear of criticizing them, while they wrecked lives with a boom-and-bust cycle of hiring surges followed by layoffs.
Geeks, of course, downplay the article. There’s a strong whiff of elitism and libertarianism in the excuses offered, and I’m also kind of dismayed that a news source would interview current employees and not discount their cheerful affirmations of the power of the Amazon way. Most cults don’t have the grip on their acolytes economic well-being that Amazon has.
More interesting, despite its clumsy digressions and clunky dismay, is this article on the effect Amazon has had on Seattle. It’s the angriest, but it resonated with me — I have steered completely clear of urban Seattle on this trip. The horrific traffic, a product of the tightly straitened geography of the region, is enough to scare me away. I was visiting family in the southern suburbs, and seeing the lines of locked-in-place traffic every evening convinced me to stay home, or run away to empty wilderness in the far corner of the state. And to imagine hordes of smug brogrammers taking over south Lake Union…no, thank you.
Capitalism really needs to figure out how to file off the rough excesses of successful businesses. And take those businesses out of the hands of sociopaths.
Video game companies are notorious for this; I was surprised to hear Amazon was, too. Of course, after the hazing ritual is over, things are great for those who stick it out.
PZ,
I have zero compassion or empathy for the poor put upon white-collar workers.
Now the people toiling away in Amazon’s warehouses, that’s another story.
Jeff
There’s been a couple of articles about Amazon’s cutthroat white-collar corporate culture. I’ve got some sympathy for those folks, albeit not as much as I do for the workers in their warehouses – at least the white-collar workers are getting good pay in exchange for the shitty overwork (the description reminded me of Wall Street big bank work culture, which is probably not a surprise when you consider that Bezos came out of Wall Street before founding Amazon).
Damn. I don’t want to support Amazon knowing the shitty way they treat their employees, but how do I avoid doing so? It’s often difficult for me to shop online without going through Amazon.
I work at Amazon (as a software developer). I can say that the NYT article is a hatchet job. Pretty much NONE of it is true. NONE.
Amazon these days is a nice workplace for software developers, with less perks than Google or Facebook, but with higher salary that compensates for it. And it’s inclusive – we have multi-racial multi-national teams. Male/female ratio is still bad, but it’s improving rapidly. Bro culture is not tolerated – sexual harassment or racism are grounds for an immediate dismissal.
And for those hippies that miss old crumbling apartment blocks and empty bars (because nobody sane would want to live in Seattle) – get a fucking life. Seattle is growing, and unlike many other braindead cities (SF, I’m looking at you), apartments are built alongside with office buildings.
And please, none of this “but soulless corporate libertarian drones will turn Seattle into Texas” – Seattle is as progressive as ever. We actually voted for minimum wage increase to $15 per hour.
tbtabby,
The short answer is that doing what is right is not always convenient. Unless what you’re buying from Amazon is life saving medicine and you can’t buy what you need elsewhere, either on line or face to face, then you might simply need to do without.
Jeff
I’ve got mine …
@cyberax – I’ve lived in Seattle’s Capitol Hill since I moved to the city more than 20 years ago. I am watching as a once vibrant, uniquely quirky neighborhood is dragged under by Amazon, Zillow and Facebook, with Alibaba, Oracle, HP, Dropbox and other tech companies eagerly moving in. I am watching as people are thrown out of their homes so affordable apartment units can be torn town and rebuilt as high rise deluxe units that the vast majority of residents will never be able to afford. I am watching as long-established restaurants and bars, all with active clienteles, are having their rates jacked up so the landlord can shut them down and move in generic, overpriced national chains that can pay the inflated rents. I am watching as these bars welcome in over-worked, over-stressed programmers, get them good and drunk, rile them up, then dump them into streets that have stopped being peaceful and safe. In just the last three years, gay-bashing and trans-bashing incidents have dramatically increased and almost all of the perpetrators that have been caught worked for Amazon or some other large tech company.
We had a fucking life. It is being steadily eroded by over-privileged, overpaid assholes who are happy to shit on everyone who is not them.
Gregory in Seattle #8
+ a very large number
.
I’m guessing you’re a hippie not a .
I must be a hippy. I mean, who else but a hippy would live in the same neighborhood for decades, be friends with their neighbors and active in the community? Who else but a hippy would work in the same office for almost as long, with the same group of people, doing a job with decent pay that gives them time to be friends with their neighbors and active in the community? Who else but a hippy would put down roots, welcome new people, feel sad when people move away, and otherwise grow and change as a community? Who else but a hippy would be pissed when someone starts tearing it all up because they feel more comfortable with concrete and tiny planter boxes bought from a national chain store?
Well that might be a problem. If a business is on the stock market it has a, fiduciary, duty to it’s stockholders to behave like a sociopath. And it will be quite a while before other stakeholders in a company will be considered as important to please as stockholders. Especially when the bosses compensation is tied to that stock market.
In the case of Amazon this is compounded by Amazon not making or making a negligible profit while trying to keep the margins on the customers low. Guess who gets squeezed to compensate.
I pretty much hate hippies saying: “We had a fucking life. It is being steadily eroded by over-privileged, overpaid assholes who are happy to shit on everyone who is not them.”
You are as bad as libertardians. No, even worse. At least libertarians are honest about their “I’ve got mine now fuck off” believes. You instead whine “I’ve got such a nice place and now these mean people want to actually LIVE here! Waaah!”. No wonder hippie punching is popular in the US.
Why do you think your desires to have an ‘artsy’ neighborhood with only you and your friend sitting at the bar at any given time should outweigh desires of other people to live close to downtown? Sorry, cities are built not only for your aesthetic self-pleasuring.
You know what? You can move to Detroit. Houses there are dirt cheap (literally) and there’s a great art scene. You can meet unique people there, so unique that you can literally stop dead right on the spot!
cyberax #12
now we know where you fit
“I must be a hippy.”
Yes, you are. I.e. overprivileged whiner.
“I mean, who else but a hippy would live in the same neighborhood for decades, be friends with their neighbors and active in the community?…”
Except for “live for decades” – lots of people. For example, I’m not particularly interested in being friendly with my neighbors or drinking in pubs. Sorry about that. But at the same time I like attending local maker workshops and giving glassblowing lessons to anyone interested. I _love_ to do chemistry demonstrations in summer camps. I’m a member of a project to develop an open source drone.
I’ve become friends with lots of people over the course of many years. Lots of them are in other countries, but I’m still keeping in touch with them (and help them occasionally).
And while I’m not interested in being friends with neighbors, I’m a member of several city improvement civic committees. I donate my time and money to improve Seattle.
So, again, why do you think you DESERVE to live in Seattle and I don’t?
@13: chigau (違う):
Yes, I think that libertarianism is a brain disease.
I’m a socialist pinko-commie. But I still disdain whining hippies.
PSA
Doing this
<blockquote>paste copied text here</blockquote>
Results in this
It makes comments with quotes easier to read.
All the Hippies™ can do it.
Ok, thanks. I’ll use blockquotes from now on.
cyberax
define “hippie”
and stop using mental illness as an insult
…
how old are you?
If I can get an item from anyone but Amazon, I will. If I can’t get it from anyone but Amazon, I’ll do without…
A Hippie
Cyberax: Cool the attitude NOW, or you will be outta here.
@15 cyberax
A socialist-pinko-commie who runs to flatly deny any workplace abuse or problems despite several alleged victims, witnesses and journalists reporting it? Without providing any evidence?
What kind of socialism is that?
I’m sorry, where do you think I deny problems? I fully support trying to make the world better for everyone.
Good minimal wage? Check.
Public transportation? Sure.
Carbon tax? Of course!
Affordable housing for lower incomes? Yes.
However, “it was so nice when no other people lived here” attitude is one that I do NOT support at all. It’s just libertarian “I’ve got mine” attitude masked in hippie clothes.
“Deny any workplace abuse or problems despite several alleged victims, witnesses and journalists reporting it? Without providing any evidence?”
I haven’t read any actual names of abused people, it’s all “one member of a team”. BTW, my name is Aleksei Besogonov, my email is at amazon.com . I _stand_ _by_ _my_ _words_. I’m not anonymous. Feel free to reach me.
PS: The article caused a shitstorm inside Amazon, and every manager had to made it clear that if _anyone_ sees any abuse going, they should report it immediately to HR.
Yet you freely insult people working at Amazon. Let’s see:
So you’ve just accused of being a cultist anyone pointing out that the NYT article is simply one big lie? Nice.
And then called them brogrammers for a good measure. Doubleplusgood.
No, I don’t think I’m going to cool off until other people here stop assuming that every word in a NYT article is a-priori true and every programmer (or even a majority of them!) is a brogrammer libertarian.
Try two. My email is “my nick” at amazon.com
OMG
…
PZ
This is a wee sprout.
Do you think removing his identifiers might be a good idea?
Old cybersax has really come across as a hell of a neighbor and coworker so far. With an attitude like that, I don’t understand why anyone would complain.
Why? Because I have a different opinion from you? And I don’t really respect people who think that city is “ruined” if it doesn’t conform to their narrow standards?
cyberax
If you are quoting you had fucking well better provide the links.
You’re a .
I expect you know how computers work.
Yes, I’ll use blockquotes from now on.
By the literal definition of denial:
I am happy that you haven’t experienced this yourself, but how are you so sure about other people’s work experiences? You wrote “NONE” in all caps for pete’s sake.
Just from my browser’s history: Nichole Gracely’s story last year
I am sure you can find more in Google. This is what I meant by denial. Acceptance of the company’s line without double-checking.
And the HR thing, really… The issue of power imbalance between employer and employees in central in socialism, or in any rational discussion about job conditions. Workers will buckle under abuse if they risk losing their sole income source, espcially disempowered workers.
Yes. Pretty much none of this is true. The article describes the culture in Amazon, and it’s nothing like anything that’s described in the article.
Could there have been incidents like these? Yes. Amazon has more than 30000 employees and it’s statistically inevitable that there are assholes in management positions. Is this a pervasive culture? HELL NO, IN CAPITAL LETTERS.
I worked at many companies and Amazon actually tries to be fair to employees. For example, every interviewer has to undergo training to detect and counteract racial and sexual biases. Brogrammer culture is NOT tolerated. In my team a technically brilliant developer was fired for being socially abusive towards females.
That applies to warehouse jobs, but most of them a require only minimal qualifications. So the pay is not great, though Amazon also has some benefits there. For example, it can help warehouse employees to get better education. But personally, I wish the Amazon packers just start a real union and demand better pay.
Technical workers are highly mobile. And there are many other job opportunities in Seattle, because faceless corporations keep continuing to displace nice artsy pubs.
Additionally, Amazon employees have another powerful tool – it’s very easy to change teams internally. It’s officially encouraged exactly because it empowers workers to stand up to their management.
well you convinced me! Cyberax They made it all up and exaggerated it by cherry picking stories.
Amazon is a good place to work for tech workers but maybe not so good in the warehouse in shipping no union, not so good pay and all.
It has been my experience that in neighborhoods where no one knows there neighbors burglars and sneak thieves have a much better time going un-noticed. Out here or should I say down here in LA out in Venice is much as you describe old working class neighborhood of houses (hippies) turned into an area filled with large apartment houses and plenty of locksmiths, private security and property crime among other things like really horrible traffic.
uncle frogy
Yes, Amazon is a decent place for non-warehouse workers. It has its pluses and minuses, but it’s nowhere near the hellhole that the NYT article paints.
As for community sense – I lived in 3 countries in all kinds of conditions (including an actual war zone). So far I’ve come to conclusion that there’s only one component that defines the safety of the neighborhood – it’s the average income in the local area (city or county-sized).
If you live in a poor location, then it will most likely be plagued with crime. Strong community can help, but more often than not it’s powerless to do much.
If you live in a rich neighborhood surrounded by slums – it’s the worst possible situation.
That’s another reason why I support social initiatives that help to alleviate income inequality and help everybody.
Jesus, that last article was a mess. “Seattle changed and now it sucks” would have had the same content. Even so, I’m happy I don’t have any need of their services.
Oops! Wrong answer! Bye!
Had no issues with the post until the last two sentences, when the authoritarian progressive impulse rears its ugly head.
Assuming the NYT story is more or less correct (a big assumption) or at least correct for a small subset of employees, then I have no problem with exposing this. No issues with airing their stories and letting employees and consumers make up their own minds. Want to stop buying Amazon? Many already have in the wake of the story. Want to quit working for a “sweatshop”? I’m sure there are people who have done that too.
Freedom (used here as a synonym for capitalism) tends to do exactly what PZ desires. To the extent there is truth in the NYT article, consumers and employees will demand change. If they don’t get it, they’ll leave the company. If there isn’t much truth to the NYT article, then not much of anything will happen because people will understand that their own experiences don’t match up with what was written and dismiss it.
As long as they are free to do so, of course.
The idea that freedom/capitalism needs to “file off the rough excesses” and “take those businesses out of the hands of sociopaths” is flat out dangerous. Who is doing the filing? Who is doing the taking? The implication is government, of course. And what does government know about running a business? Not too much. The one thing government does know about is using force.
Is Amazon a horrible company that forces sweatshop like conditions on its workers? I don’t know, and I’m pretty sure no one else here is certain either. Who does know? The people who work for Amazon of their own free will. They certainly know – for themselves – whether they prefer to remain employed for the company or go somewhere else. They – and consumers in general – have the power to take Amazon out of Bezos’ hand if indeed he is a sociopath. It could happen very quickly, if people quit working for or shopping at Amazon. No government needed.
But for some reason progressives need that last part, you want government force involved.
You haven’t shown with evidence your ideology works as you describe it should. You only assert that is the case. Companies need somebody bigger than they are to make them mind. That is government. Historical evidence is available if you care to be refuted.
Jees, Tom Weiss. We know what happens when companies have complete “Freedom” (which is not a synonym for Capitalism). Ten year olds get their hands sliced off in Spinning Jennies and get crushed in coal mines. We’ve done all this before. [i]Unregulated capitalism is monstrous[/i].
How you choose to express your opinion makes all the difference. I’m stunned someone could be so oblivious to that fact. “We’re not jerks, you fucking assholes,” is pretty much a self refuting argument.
Who Cares, up in #11, said:
Which is the basis for my argument that Revelations’ “image of the beast” is referring to corporations that act like a beastly person. The image is given life, as a corporation is considered a person.
Personally, I don’t do any online shopping. I just haven’t gotten set up for it yet, but had been meaning to. I may need to do some more work before I do.
I have worked for companies that did not take care of the workers. I know there were strong defenders, often those who had come from even worse places. I have hand pain from typing this, which came from working, and which no employer ever addressed.
Tom Weiss @ 36;
I think this will be a point of irreconcilable contention between you and pretty much everyone else here. Capitalism is in no way a synonym for freedom. Capitalistic systems can and do oppress the vulnerable and disenfranchised in society, and the means by which corporations use their wealth to subvert the democratic process and ensure that their voice is heard above that of the actual electorate are evident to anyone who pays attention to the problems surrounding campaign funding, especially under the US system.
Total, unfettered freedom for the 1% maintained at the expense of everyone else is not the same thing as a commitment to a politically free society operating under the rule of law where all are truly equal before that law.
I also think that you own post makes a point that you should consider far more carefully;
(Emphasis added)
What leads you to assume that they are free to leave, or even to complain? Jobs are not so easily accessible to all that everyone can afford to give up a job, even where that job has bad conditions. Some – indeed, many – people will just have to tough it out because they can’t afford to lose that job, and the power inequalities between them and their employers means that they also can’t afford to get on the bad side of the company by doing things like insisting on their legally mandated employment rights.
With power inequalities of the kind of magnitude that are common place in the modern workplace, it is naive to suggest that employees have the power to hold their employers to account without the assistance of some outside agency. The general public for the most part aren’t informed with regard to these issues, and in any case would often choose their own convenience over trying to bring down a corrupt company that they don’t work for themselves, so that leaves no options outside Trade Unions – that have for the most part been gutted to the point of near total impotence in many employment sectors by Right wing administrations, leaving the unions a weak option at best – or some application of the law.
Put simply, if the government doesn’t take a hand in regulating business activity and curbing its excesses, then the situation in the workplace will ultimately become wholly intolerable. The current abusive practices (such as zero hours contracts) will worsen to the point of leaving the employee entirely at the mercy of the capricious whims of the employer, which only sounds like a liber-topia to those who don’t actually have work as employees.
From the OP:
That’s not what capitalism’s for. That’s not what it does, nor what it is designed to do.
You can do that to capitalism, by regulating it, but the system of capitalism builds, created, sustains, and accelerates business excess. That’s its entire point.
(That’s not a compliment towards the system, BTW)
Tom Weiss @ 36:
Good point – companies never do, and never have, used force on anyone, especially their own workers.
…wait a sec, I have this terrible feeling I’ve just said something immensely stupid.
With the only tiny fly in that ointment being that the real world almost never actually works that way.
“Capitalism” is based on “capital”, and includes the idea that someone has bankable resources. Most of us worker-types have no capital at all – we are not players in the game. We are tools.
The folks who keep saying that we should just go get jobs, or that we should switch jobs, aren’t even hearing themselves. Having a job is depending on someone else to have set up a business and to be hiring, and to be providing decent working conditions. The free-enterprize people should be telling us to go into business for ourselves. But no, the employer/employee situation has become so normal that the majority of us are simply workers, working for the corporations and the capitalists. Having a job is our purpose.
Well, we are not just workers. We are also the government of this country. To be telling workers to work for others, and to be slagging the government at the same time, is pretty damned corporate/capitalist.
(My apologies for saying “this country” like everyone here is in the USA.)
Two examples of companies hurting their workers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Overpass
These are only two out many, many examples. History shows companies don’t give a shit about their workers, unless they are required to do so.
PZ, in 35 — “Oops! Wrong answer! Bye!”
IMHO, that wasn’t called for. Cyberax was providing useful and specific content in this thread, and his personal feelings on the subject are easily understandable. A lot of folks here are blasting Amazon on the basis of an ideological perspective rather than the facts. In a thread ostensibly about the inside of Amazon, it’s weird to shut down the only person who is speaking from inside experience.
I’ve known people working at Amazon for more than a decade, and, as a publisher and producer, have had the pleasure of doing several projects with the company. From my experience I can tell you that the NY Times article was neither fair nor accurate. (Which is a shame — because I have friends at the Times, too, and it is always sad when the paper’s journalistic standards slip.)
For the record, Seattle rush hour traffic sucked long before Amazon got this big. The city has never had a transportation infrastructure sufficient to its size. People who have to pass through Seattle on their way to somewhere else, like me, have been timing our trips to avoid Seattle’s morning and evening rush hours for the last 20 years.
Finally, some math. Sources vary, but it’s reasonably safe to tag Seattle’s population at around 650,000. Amazon’s Seattle employee count is just under 25,000. Even if all of those people magically appeared at the same time (which obviously they didn’t, and equally obviously many of them commute in from outside the city) a 3.8% increase in population would not have enough impact to justify the quasi-apocalyptic tone of some of the comments here, or some of the material you linked to in your original post.
And, of course, a good number of those 25,000 Amazon employees are native to the city, so they represent no net gain in the population at all. But the percentage of locals versus imports is not readily available data.
What Anri quoted in #42, is saying that people could quit working for, or shopping with, Amazon if they chose to. But the quoted person is all upset that a news story is showing folks why they might want to quit.
If I were working there, I might just think that I had a bad boss person, and that the lack of a union was just happenstance. If I shop through Amazon, especially online, I have no idea how the employees are treated, and how the city is affected. The only way to know is through a free press. Yes, critiquing the press is necessary, but acting like an investigative report is automatically a wrong thing to have happen, well, that’s wrong.
Connorfc:
Oh yes, don’t know what I would have done without Cyberax’s enthusiasm for Hippie Punching, or the sheer assholism towards anyone talking about their experience living in Seattle, because they must be a hippie.
Ryan Cunningham @ 39
As an outsider here, watching the whole exchange, I found Cyberax’s anger perfectly understandable. In this post (and the included links, and a lot of the comments) the internal culture at the company he works for has been seriously misrepresented, and the company itself singled out and blamed for the downfall of a major American city. More specifically, a lot of the stuff being written and linked identifies the category of employee he falls into (male, programmer, not-originally-from-Seattle) as a kind of a cancer on the city. That’s pretty vile stuff.
You’re smuggling your conclusion into your argument by redefining words. This is equivocating while begging the question. Two logical fallacies in one incomplete sentence is impressive, but not in a good way.
Caine @ 48
Both sides of that particular exchange were being insulting. One side got banned. Should have been both or neither.
I prefer to look past the emotions on both sides and look at the facts being shared. In that respect, banning Cyberax for what took place upthread isn’t a lot different than Bill O’Reilly cutting off a liberal’s microphone because the liberal’s information doesn’t fit the Fox narrative.
@connorfc #51 – The “side” that got banned was the one engaging in personal attacks and threats of violence, and the “side” that escalated that rhetoric when called out for it.
Not to mention dismissed Gregory’s concerns about longtime city residents and businesses being priced out of their neighborhoods and increasing gay- and trans-bashing as a difference of opinion.
As far as opinions go, I’ll take that of dozens of current and former employees of Amazon over its billionaire overlord any day of the week.
Gregory in Seattle @ 52
Quoting you…
And there were plenty of others.
Cyberax was not the only person being insulting. I get that you feel your position is justified, but that doesn’t make your own language any more temperate than his.
connorfc @ 54;
This isn’t really an issue of ‘temperate’ language. The quote from Gregory in Seattle expresses anger at a situation and the people considered by the author responsible for that situation. Conversely, Cyberax stated @ 12;
(Emphasis added)
Where Cyberax specifically identified Gregory from Seatle (and perhaps other commenters on the thread) as hippies and then went on to imply that personal violence against them would be justified given the beliefs and character Cyberax ascribes to them. The qualitative difference between those two positions is clear.
Also, this was not what actually lead to Cyberax being banned. @ 20 PZ gave Cyberax fair warning to moderate their language and attitude;
To which Cyberax responded @ 23;
(Emphasis added)
It was only at this point that PZ banned Cyberax. This is PZ’s blog, and blatantly ignoring an injunction from our betentacled overlord in order to try to continue to score points only ever ends one way. Cyberax’s attitude toward the acceptability of violence toward ‘hippies’, and dismissing the increased incidence of gay bashing and transphobia as a mere difference of opinion, are extremely problematic in their own right, but they were not the cause for the ban; being fool enough to try to bait Cthulhu in R’lyeh was.
Rey Fox @ 53
So — serious question here — how many positive statements about Amazon by current employees would it take to sway your opinion? Because I can drive down there tomorrow and collect 500 glowing, honest, completely sincere, no bullshit I-am-thrilled-to-be-working-here-and-could-not-be-happier statements just by standing outside the Starbucks at 442 Terry Avenue North with a clipboard for two hours.
“Billionaire overlord?” Over-the-top language like that indicates that your attitude may be coloring your analytical abilities.
Gregory’s statements provide anecdotal data. Data is testable. But I don’t see any of that happening here, whereas I do see a lot of confirmation bias.
It is ludicrous to blame Amazon or Amazon employees for an increase in Seattle’s rate of LGBTQ-related violence. Show me a causal link that makes sense. Show me arrest records demonstrating that the gay bashers are people with Amazon paychecks. Why single out Amazon when similar increased violence has been happening elsewhere as well? Isn’t it more likely that this is a combination of (a) increased reporting and (b) an unfortunate but unavoidable shaking out of sweeping cultural change? Historically, violence against a previously-repressed minority population always upticks in the period after that population gains mainstream acceptance, because the active haters are now more frustrated and angry than before. Acknowledging this doesn’t excuse the violence in any way, but it does let you come up with a way to do something about it that is realistically targeted.
It is also ludicrous to blame Amazon for city, state, and federal economic policies, and nationwide demographic trends, that have resulted in raised local rents in every American city with a growing economy. Especially when Seattle’s cost of housing has gone up much less than in a bunch of other places, and Amazon is actively supporting the construction of thousands of units of affordable housing in order to proactively help their employees and the city with this problem.
Riiiight.
Gregory Greenwood @ 55
I think you are reading a LOT more into the statement “No wonder hippie punching is popular in the United States” than is actually there. It’s a big leap to say that Cyberax was either condoning or advocating such violence, as opposed to rhetorically expressing frustration over a very real bias that was on display.
And as I said in my first comment, I think PZ made a mistake here. Two people were using aggressive, over-the-top language and getting heated with each other. One got lectured and banned. The other did not get lectured at all. If PZ had lectured both it might be different. But he didn’t.
I don’t have any trouble understanding Cyberax’s refusal to cool down if other people are going to be allowed to freely (and inaccurately) insult him and the company he works for.
He was asking commenters here to do two things: (1) Stop assuming that something is accurate just because it was in the New York Times, and (2) stop assuming that all Amazon programmers are asshole sexists males with libertarian political beliefs. Those are perfectly reasonable requests.
Ryan Cunningham @ 57
My use of the term “outsider” was meant to indicate that I have never posted on this board before (or, at least, have done so infrequently enough that I can’t recall the last time).
But it counts in other ways, too. My work with Amazon represents less than one-thousandth of my business’s income in the last 10 years, so money is hardly coloring my opinion here. Your sarcasm is unjustified.
Please present evidence, other than your word, that the requests are reasonable. I don’t see your arguments as reasonable without such evidence, just defense of Amazon and their policies and their effects on the community.
Connorfc, if you are collecting your opinions outside of a Starbucks, especially one in a particular location, you have pretty much selected your population. Part of the complaints that you are not comprehending are about businesses like Starbucks taking over from local cafés. The kind of people who would find Starbuck a good place are the kind of people who would find Amazon a good place. Us hourly drudges with our own matters of taste are not going to be at the Starbucks that you assume is the place to be.
Gregory @ 55:
Indeed. You are, as usual, ever eloquent. Thank you. Y’know, back in the ’70s, I heard more than enough of slings, slurs, and arrows of the “filthy, dirty hippie!” type. All these decades later, and it’s Bash, bash, bash those filthy, dirty hippies, and those icky gay and trans people, too! Gad, every time I go thinking that people must have learned better by now, along comes a Cyberax.
Nerd of Redhead @ 60
Oh, come on. The statements ALL THINGS PRINTED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES ARE FACTUALLY ACCURATE and ALL PROGRAMMERS ARE MALE SEXIST ASSHOLE LIBERTARIANS are, on their face, false logical propositions. Asking a group of commentators at a Famous Skeptic’s blog to deal in facts instead of fallacies is absolutely reasonable.
I’m happy to attack Amazon for things they deserve to be attacked for, such as their warehouse operations. I’m just asking all of us here to use our neurons and not reach false or incomplete conclusions (however emotionally satisfying they may be) based on weak logic and faulty fact sets. This place is supposed to be better than that. It’s why I’ve been reading it for years.
Connorfc, you keep acting like folks here have made statements and assertions that they actually, in fact, never made. And you keep getting more pissed that they don’t acknowledge what they, in reality, never did. It’s odd.
For instance, in the OP, PZ mentioned Seattle traffic. He didn’t blame it on Amazon. He seemed to be saying that it has always been bad, because of geography, even. But you start quoting numbers regarding population, as if that refutes PZ blaming Amazon. But he never blamed Amazon for the traffic.
And you keep doing that. Which is familiar behavior for the rabid-defender type.
Menyambal @ 61
The question at hand was whether or not the New York Times article on what it was like to work in Amazon’s offices was accurate, and specifically Rey Fox’s contention that he would take the statements of the current and former employees quoted in that article over the statement made by Jeff Bezos. The point I was making to Rey Fox was simply that the overwhelming majority of Amazon office employees would strongly disagree with the negative statements in the article (and not just, as PZ implied in his post, because their paychecks are biasing them, but because they are legitimately thrilled by their jobs). I could just have easily mentioned standing outside the Veggie Grill or the Specialty’s Cafe or the Top Pot Doughnuts or the Blue Moon Burgers in the area. I happened to pick the Starbucks because I knew the physical address from memory, having once met a friend there (for reasons that had nothing to do with Amazon, I hasten to add). In short, preselecting Amazon employees was the whole point, because the opinions of Amazon employees were what was being discussed.
See confirmation bias comment, earlier. You come into this matter with your mind strongly influenced, at least, and possibly already made up.
Do you live in Seattle? Do you know the statistics for the opening and closing of local Seattle businesses, especially in the Lake Union district where Amazon has its campus? I don’t, so I don’t have an opinion yet, and am unwilling to accept purely anecdotal testimony as evidence. But I’m happy to spend some time looking up the stats and seeing what they actually indicate. Facts over feelings. That’s science, right?
Menyambal @ 66
I’m guessing you didn’t read the lengthy article that PZ posted to try and bolster his case.
EDIT: “posted a link to”
Menyambal @ 66
And I am in no way “pissed.” Mildly bemused at best.
Amazon may be taking things to extremes, according to testimonies in the article, but a lot of those practices are as far as I know standard for tech companies. Why should I disbelieve something that is supported by people’s testimonies, given example of similar practices in other big companies and aligns with my own experiences?
(I write, as I check my work email – on a Saturday evening, on the first day of my vacation. Or as my colleagues would joke, first day of my vacation is technically on Monday so there’s nothing preventing me from working today. Not that anything will prevent me from working on Monday if someone from work calls.)
@65 Connorfc — “legitimately thrilled by their jobs”. Oh my. Which club do you do your stand-up in? Cuz I’ve never met a single human being who could ever say that. That’s good stuff, comedy gold. But thank goodness you’re not shilling for that one one-thousandth of your income.
No, seriously, that’s some good shit. Tip your waitresses, folks, Connorfc’s here all week!
You might want to pay attention to what cyberax got banned for — not disagreeing, but for flatly refusing to heed an order by the blog owner. Try telling me that you get to ignore me because you are so righteous.
I am also amused by the sudden influx of long-winded apologists for the horrible practices of a modern capitalist corporation. It always amazes me how defensive you guys (and it’s almost always “guys”) get at criticisms of your obscenely overpaid management. I read your turgid rationalizations and all I think is … fuck you, too.
Oh, yeah:
Funny how you can indignantly defend your rationality by assigning false propositions to the people here.
Did I say “Fuck you” already? I did. Worth repeating, though.
anbheal,
I don’t know, there are moments when I’m “legitimately thrilled by my job”. There are far more moments when I’m just content with it but no matter what current situation makes me feel about my job, I can recognize that some aspects of it that I have accepted are not healthy and should not be present in a healthy society .
I’m the kind of person who won’t have a problem spending my Sunday afternoon in front of a computer screen working, not just because I have to but because I really want the job to be done well and in time, but that doesn’t mean it should be standard practice or something anyone should encourage (or require) me to do.
Caine @ 62;
Being born in the early Eighties, I missed the peak of the hippie bashing trend, and caught only the tail end of the ‘Reds under the bed’ paranoia that painted anyone left of Ghengis Khan as evil incarnate, but even so I have plenty of memories of knee-jerk sentiment revolving around the notionally detestable character of hippies, with the term regularly used as an insult. Homophobic and especially transphobic ‘humour’ was also even more common than it is today.
I too have from time to time dared to hope that society may be getting passed various types of bigotry – from homophobia and transphobia, through misogyny and ableism, to racism – and am also invariably disillusioned. There is always someone eager to share their oh-so invaluable wisdom (usually born directly from their possession of a penis and other forms of cis/het, White middle or upper class privilege) that it is really no big deal, and that there are more important things to discuss. Or that the marginalised need to grow a thicker skin. It is all so depressingly expected and par for the course.
Connorfc, you are again assigning opinions to people, and those assignments are not backed up by the facts. And again, we have seen visitors to this blog do exactly that, time and time again. It’s a standard with creationists, for example. (By the way, your next move is to say that I said that you are a creationist, and to attack me for that.)
I did not come into this discussion with set opinions, other than that Starbucks sucks. And even that is just my preference – I don’t despise people who go there – but it is a chain franchise, and I feel about chain franchises the way some folks feel about government.
As for Amazon destroying Seattle, well, I don’t think it ever registered with me that Amazon was based in Seattle. And no, I didn’t read the linked articles. I have no opinions on the matter. I am just arguing about PZ’s original post, and the way some folks have twisted it into a straw man.
To be clear, I do care about Seattle. I lived there several times, and have visited it from far away. I spent much time around Lake Union, even sleeping in Gasworks Park a few nights, and in a boat docked near there. The Center for Wooden Boats at the south end of Lake Union was another of my favorite spots – I remember when the new kind of buildings started coming in to that area. And much more of that wonderful city is dear to me.
So if someone was tearing up Seattle, I’d be pissed. But if someone were bringing in good jobs, so I could move back, I’d be thrilled. I took no opinions from the original post – I’d do a lot more research before moving. But if I moved back, I would not go in a Starbucks.
Why should I take your word for it??? That was my point, which went “whoosh” over your head. As a skeptic, your word is questionable until proven otherwise….
We get way to many concern/tone trolls around here….You are concerned. Which makes me skeptical.
PZ @ 71 & 72
Two kids are fighting. Both are, in their different ways, being idiots. An adult comes out into the yard, tells one of the kids to cool it, ignores the other. Perhaps by coincidence, perhaps not, the adult happens to be the same color/religion/nationality/affiliation/pick-your-category-qualifier as the kid who isn’tbeing given a draconian ultimatum as a first-ever warning. Kid on the receiving end quite understandably says he won’t cool it as long as the other side doesn’t have to cool it, too. In response, adult kicks the kid out of the yard. Seems a bit much, actually.
He wasn’t ignoring you, PZ. he was engaging with you — and in pretty much exactly the same way you engaged with him. (Which is also understandable. Anyone dealing in dispute resolution would find all three of the participants in that exchange at fault, in different ways.) This is your blog, so you can do as you please. But this observer, at least, still doesn’t think it was the right thing to do. Your mileage obviously varies.
I apologize for the long-winded aspect. Like Mark twain said, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
That said, you are making seriously faulty assumptions about who I am and what I do. You don’t know me at all. And the straw man you have chosen to address bears no particular resemblance.
Also, I’m not an apologist for Amazon. As stated elsewhere, I’m happy to attack them for practices which deserve attack (and there are plenty of those). It’s just that most of the things you and others and slamming Amazon for in this post and thread don’t hold up under cursory analysis. Perhaps I’m being too idealistic here, but all I’m really asking is that people in the skeptical community apply the same rigor to social and economic commentary that they do to scientific questions. We shouldn’t be making sweeping generalizations based mostly on our emotions.
I’ve never insulted anyone here, nor have I rationalized anything. Your leap to personal attack is unjustified.
I’ve been a writer and editor for 40 years (over two million words published in three continents), have won one national writing award, and have essays in use in three different University English courses. I also spent three years as an on-air technology journalist for the BBC. On the basis of that professional experience as a communicator I can safely say that nothing I’ve written here can be accurately described as “indignant.”
Clearly I upset you, though, which is fascinating.
As for assigning false propositions, let’s recap:
1) I accurately summarize what Cyberax was asking of people here, in one quoted comment, and state my opinion that these were reasonable requests (which I still firmly believe).
2) Nerd of Redhead says “Please present evidence, other than your word, that the requests are reasonable.”
3) I use a technique straight out of Freshman Logic 101 to examine the factual content of the requests. And what do you know — it turns out that they really are reasonable, on their face, because statements asserting the opposite of the requests are transparently false.
Like I said, fascinating. I’m not angry, nor am I saying angry things or using aggressive language. But I’ve certainly pissed you off. In all possible seriousness: why? Surely it can’t be just because I think there are some flaws in the fundamental premise of this post?
Vulcans.
What can you do?
Yawn, concern trolling script #2. Still no link to evidence that the article is wrong, Just concern about about our methods, which makes me utterly and totally skeptical of your methods.
Nerd of Redhead @ 76
No, it didn’t go whoosh over my head. But you did make a weak choice of something to challenge. Just because this is a community of skeptics doesn’t mean you’ll get much mileage out of challenging a statement which was pretty much the equivalent of saying “Cloudless daytime skies are blue.”
My only concern is the facts. You are entitled to believe that or not as you please, but it does happen to be the truth.
There are more than two sides here. Amazon = Utterly Bad is no more accurate a statement than Amazon = utterly Good, and I wouldn’t support either position. The world is more complex than that.
connorfc:
Well, that’s not true, is it? This rather bizarre performance of yours had to do with rushing to the defense of Cyberax, apparently for no particular reason, outside of saying you thought / felt it was a bit unfair. That’s not a fact, and yet you concerned yourself enough to dig a rather spectacular hole.
You seem to have fallen prey to a common misperception, thinking that all those previous words of yours magically vanished. They haven’t. We can still see them, y’know.
It is perfectly possible for a company to be ‘mostly good’ to the higher level employees and shit upon the lower levels. I used to work for a corporation. The higher ups thought the company was great; all glowing roses and that the employees were happy. At the level where I worked, we were pretty much all miserable. And I’m not talking about just my location, but also the 5 different locations that I helped out at, and I’ve gotten pretty much the same story from others farther away when I’ve encountered them.
We had a ‘town hall’ style meeting… once. Corporate had the district managers and district medical directors run the things to collect feedback from the ‘lay staff”. No managers, no supervisors. Just us plebs. Our district manager was pretty much feared and hated by everyone except a few brown nosing managers and supervisors. Despite this… there were many of us who took corporate at its word and we brought a list of grievances. There was lots to go over, and then we got to the part of ‘what do you feel is not going right at your location’ and hands shot up and the complaints went on for well over an hour across 13 locations. When it came to ‘what do you feel IS going right at your location’…. it took about 5 minutes.
The district manager was *pissed* because this was making her look bad in front of the new district medical director. And then came the part where the district manager proudly declared that 2011 was the only year they had not given raises. Again, dozens of hands shot up and those of us who were old farts in the company, who had stuck it out because the employee discount was great, and because we liked our coworkers, proceeded to announce how long it had been since they’d seen a raise. 5 years for me. 8 years for another.
The look of horror on the district manager’s face was priceless. The Medical director was horrified for *us* and look very angry at the DM. We all got raises the next year, courtesy of the medical director. Woo, 25 cents.
Said district manager is the one who directed my manager to transfer me with 2 days warning to another location back in 2013. I’m grateful for her hatefulness though, because where I work now I make twice as much between the significant pay increase and increase in hours.
So, the thing that makes a company ‘good’ or ‘bad’ isn’t how the elite are treated, it’s how the peasants are treated. If the warehouse employees at Amazon are treated like shit, then the company is shitty.
And just to clarify, I no longer work for that corporation. I left 4 months after being voluntold about my transfer and spent those 4 months perpetually irate. I’d worked for that fucking company for 12 years at that point, and that was how I was treated. I was, in fact, so happy to be leaving when I got hired at my new place that the manager asked me to not come in for the last week of my 2 weeks notice. I was ‘negatively affecting morale’ by being ecstatic that I was escaping that company. And it was an escape.
I can’t believe that these reports about Amazon are still considered news. This article, republished by Seattle Weekly in 2006, originally came out in 1997. http://www.seattleweekly.com/1998-07-15/news/how-i-escaped-from-amazon-cult/
evasivemaneuver
That’s a certainty.
By the way. With regards to the happy campers who’ve suddenly popped up here praising Amazon and damning the New York Times: Way back in the 1990’s Amazon was accused by lots of people of spamming. This was being discussed in the news.admin.net-abuse.email newsgroup when there came a sudden influx of brand new newsgroup participants, all praising Amazon. In those early, naive days they had taken very minimal precautions to cover their tracks (registering throw-away email addresses) and a simple lookup of the IP address of the NNTP Posting Adddress showed them to be coming from Amazon.com servers.
Thanks for pointing out Amazon’s horrific practices PZ.
This comment thread is pretty depressing. Not all programmers are evil, libertarian brogrammers. A lot of us are liberals and generally decent people. We just happened to get really lucky in that people are willing to pay a lot of money for us to do something we love.
The last link in the original post was just insulting and gratuitous. I’ve been reading Pharyngula for at least six years, but I think this is it for me.
Nerd of Redhead @ 79
The reason I am concerned about your methods is as follows:
1) This contents of this post and this thread are mostly written by people who have no direct experience of the inside of Amazon at all.
2) Two people who do have inside experience have spoken up, in different ways, to say that the NY Times article is decidedly inaccurate and that the lazy criticisms of Amazon being voiced here don’t actually gibe with reality. (We’ll come back to one of those below.)
3) The response? The hardcore insider has been banned, and the semi-connected guy with working acquaintances on the inside has been labeled a concern troll.
That’s not exactly an advertisement for rational thinking. We should be better than that. We really should.
So here goes. Back in comment 8, Gregory in Seattle said…
Let’s start by saying what should be obvious: gay-bashing and trans-bashing are horrible things and they shouldn’t be happening anywhere at all, ever, for any reason. Stipulated.
BUT…is it true that these incidents have “dramatically increased” in the last three years? And is it true that “almost all of the perpetrators that have been caught worked for Amazon or some other large tech company?” If you are being skeptical about me to the point of asking me to prove it is reasonable to say that the NY Times is not always factually accurate, surely you will be just as quick to question the basis for Gregory’s flat and undocumented assertions, yes?
The Seattle Police Department keeps a record of everything it considers a “bias crime.” There are no published records for 2015 yet, but we have easy access to official stats from 2010 through 2014 through the city’s website.
In all of Seattle (population 650,000+), here are the “bias crime” numbers for those years. Please note that the Seattle PD splits these into two categories (“crimes” and “non-criminal bias incidents”) and that they keep detailed breakdowns by bias category. In the numbers below, the first number in each pair represents incidents involving LGBTQ individuals, and the second number is for the total incidents of that type, within all the different “bias subject” categories the city keeps track of.
2010 — Crimes: 15/48, Non-Criminal Bias Incidents: 2/12
2011 — Crimes: 25/77, Non-Criminal Bias Incidents: 12/26
2012 — Crimes: 20/67, Non-Criminal Bias Incidents: 10/33
2013 — Crimes: 17/65, Non-Criminal Bias Incidents: 10/45
2014 — Crimes: 31/103, Non-Criminal Bias Incidents: 5/23
These numbers do not show the kind of “dramatic increase” Gregory was implying — i.e., it used to be one way and now it is consistently and dramatically worse. Was 2014 bad compared to 2013? Yes. But 2011 was a lot worse than either 2012 or 2013, and had more total incidents than 2014 (though the spread was different). We are in the realm of statistical noise here, not reliable trend analysis.
These numbers do, however, show that the LGBTQ community is not experiencing a greater increase in the incidence of bias crime than all the other groups the SPD also keep track of, and that there is no correlation in any way to the number of Amazon/high-tech employees working in Seattle.
As for Gregory’s assertion that “almost all of the perpetrators that have been caught worked for Amazon or some other large tech company,” in 30 minutes or so of Googling news and arrest reports, I found plenty of arrested perps for various bias crimes, but so far I haven’t found any high-tech employees among them. Which is not to argue there are none, because I haven’t seen all the arrest reports. But after more than a dozen attackers turned out to be The Usual Suspects In This Stuff — i.e., low-education people, religious fundamentalists, former soldiers who haven’t found a good post-military life, jobless people, and people with demonstrated degrees of mental illness — I think it’s safe to go do other things and conclude that Gregory is just wrong on this particular point.
I’ve lived in Seattle almost as long as the Seattle native who wrote the Gawker piece. (He was born in 1988, and I’ve lived here since ’92.) I understand how this works, but I think nostalgia is coloring his perspective.
When we wanted to buy a house, in 1997, we were priced out of Ballard and the north end, and we’ve been in the Central District ever since.
Yes, Seattle has changed. But everything has changed. That’s what everything always does. Amazon might be screwing with Seattle now, but Seattle stopped being the Seattle of the late 80s and early 90s a couple decades ago.
There was a piece on some NPR show about it discussing how policy from the top means nothing if the culture says otherwise. Apparently it’s fairly common for CEOs to have wonderful policies about medical leave, vacation, family issues, etc. , and think they’re doing something good, but at the same time they’re promoting a culture wherein working hard and never leaving is the only thing that matters, so the informal culture is that even if the policy says your staff get leave, you downgrade them when they take it, and they know it, and staff are scared to take that leave with good reason.
Caine @ 81
No, it’s definitely true.
I freely state that my feelings about what PZ did are just my opinion, and I’ve said exactly that. But everything else I’ve been dealing with here has to do with trying to get past mere opinion to measurable fact. Are you okay with someone misrepresenting crime statistics and accusing a certain type of employee of being responsible for “almost all” the hate crimes committed against the Seattle LGBTQ community? I’m not.
The article gives testimony of workers. That is evidence (facts). Where is your evidence that they are wrong? Not one link in sight….
Long hours aren’t that productive:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2014/05/14/u-s-productivity-putting-in-all-those-hours-doesnt-matter/
http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/stop-working-more-than-40-hours-a-week.html
http://www.cnbc.com/id/46881039
http://lifehacker.com/5894523/how-many-hours-do-you-work-per-week-hint-if-its-over-40-you-may-have-a-problem
Good companies are aware of such facts.
@ #89
I’ll second that. Especially depressing, in my opinion, was the way PZ muddied up the thread. This must be an example of the new comment policy in action.
Nerd of Redhead @94
Two people with direct experience have provided contradictory statements in this very thread, and you dismissed that testimony out of hand. Why should I believe you’ll give credence to anything which contradicts your already-formed conclusion, just because it happens to be at the other end of a link?
But there is this thing called Google, and lots of Amazon employees are speaking up against the article. They are easy to find. I spent more than an hour going through Seattle PD arrest reports and crime analysis to check whether Gregory was telling the truth or not (conclusion: not). Your turn to do a little work for a change, if you are up to it. Enjoy.
Chigau @ 78
Thanks for the compliment!
Back to my own business. Thanks for the fun and education, all.
connorfc #97
Have another.
Bless your heart.
I see Amazon’s shills are out in force.
Connorfc, thanks for taking the time to look up the crime stats. But please understand that I didn’t take the original statement as fact. You acting like we all should have gone and looked it up is kinda my complaint here. You are still ranting against a gullibility that only exists in your mind. Why do you suppose you are projecting that?
I used to work at a factory that had a single owner. Well, his family owned pieces, but he ran the place. He had an office, of course, but it had a built-in gym, and a built-in garage for his car. I don’t know if he had a dining room, but I do know that the factory-floor employees did not. The workers ate their lunches sitting on their machines (he did not allow chairs), or outside in their cars. (It was actually kind of sweet to see how many young families drove in to have lunch with Dad, sitting in the car.) The owner insisted on being called “Mr. Smith”, and seemed to be all about being the big executive. His dad, who had founded the company, was more about being a good employer.
Anyhow, when one of the machines ate a worker, there were many people who flocked to the owner’s defense. Many of them were just sure that he was a good man, and that he had taken all safety precautions for the workers safety, even though they had never been there, worked there, or met the guy. I had seen the machines, and the lack of safety guards, and I knew the owner as well as any lower management person could know him. His policies had killed that fellow, and the poor guy had had no choice but to keep working there.
So I don’t know that Amazon is treating its employees terribly, but I am not going to say that it just cannot be. I reserve judgement. I don’t have to decide about boycotting, as I am not a customer.
(That place in the factory where the guy was killed, was a very impressive place, from a non-safety point of view. Big machines, flashing metal, visible production, and brawny men with beards and wild eyes standing calm amidst the danger. I called it “The Cave of Trolls”. I didn’t recognize the name of the man who died, as I had been gone a few years, and didn’t work with that area. But I knew that I had not done enough to make it safer. In whatever Valhalla there is for men who wrestled metal, there is a soul there too soon.)
Man… Fucking sea lions, eh?
Tom Weiss wrote:
Are you kidding? Alright, I can play along.
So, redefining words with emotional significance to score cheap points is rather unconvincing, and I hope my redefinition of the word “love” to mean something other than just love actually reminds you of another group that happens to do the same.
I have to be completely honest, I distrust those who idolise and mythologise a single tool like capitalism. It’s a lesson most modern socialists learned decades ago, as they adopted a more pragmatic approach, but capitalists/libertarians are still so sure that their way is the one true path. There are good uses for capitalism, just as there are good uses for socialism. Declaring that one must be used at the complete exclusion of others just results in human misery.
carlie @ 92
An example of that is common in new and trendy tech companies is boasting about the unlimited vacation policies. In practice the companies with unlimited vacations are the ones where taking ANY days off is considered to be disloyalty and/or laziness. It’s always a good idea to ask when interviewing with a company claiming unlimited vacations for the average number of days taken by people at your level, and the actual number of days taken by the interviewer. It will always be a tiny number of days out of the office.
So you’re not the disinterested third party Vulcan observer you were pretending to be? I’d say my sarcasm was right on target.
Female dev here. I don’t work for Amazon (which apparently puts me in the minority on this thread?), but I’ve worked for other large tech companies. I actually find larger companies have less issues with “brogrammers” because by that point they have a functioning HR. Academia and small companies tend to be the worst offenders on that front, in my experience.
The described workplace culture doesn’t sound outside the norm, at least on the software engineering side. Nothing in there is a red flag. As others have mentioned, devs are ludicrously in-demand. An average software engineer gets unsolicited recruiters at a rate of about 1 per month. And that’s ignoring the “join my sketchy consulting firm” ones. “They can just leave if they don’t like the workplace environment” is an accurate statement, for once. I can’t speak to the warehouse side, of course.
I do agree that larger companies have weird effects on tech hubs. I work in the Bay Area, and while it’s painful to read about people complaining about “techies” in my area, I can understand the frustration. Driving up housing prices, driving out flavorful hole-in-the-walls for overpriced sandwiches, retreating into private bus systems instead of paying into the goddamn public transit infrastructure…
I’m not sure what I can do to minimize my negative impact on the area, but it’s something I worry about. Any suggestions? :)
@Gregory #55
Hippie punching does not mean actually punching hippies, it is a colloquialism that basically means to denigrating progressives in an attempt to win over a (probably imaginary) center. It is common practice among DNC types. While I (mostly) disagree with cyberax they were not advocating physical violence, they were merely stating why establishment Democrat types rhetorically beat up on bubble progressives in an effort to make inroads with the political center.
So ‘hippie punching’ is just a milder form of ‘lynching’?
Good to know.
Learn about your community. Learn its history and geography. Don’t dictate to long time locals. Listen to them. Make your peers listen to them. Try to minimize your footprint until you know what impact you’re having.
In other words, all the usual advice we get as privileged people trying to be better allies.
@chigau #108
Only if mockery is a ‘milder form of lynching.’
as I recall back in the day the term hippie was often paired with dirty and commie. As it was used here by our “friend” it sounded like it had a very similar implied meaning.
it is remarkable that those defenders of ” unregulated Capitalism” and the market place as the true arbitrator of truth, justice and the American way and the only path toward security and prosperity only acknowledge the winners of the competition as being real identifiable heroes while the losers the wage slaves and the poor and unemployed are at best an abstraction if they are acknowledged at all.
In their sermons there are only success stories, only winners. they do not seem to consider the truth all sports fans know that for every winner there are losers.
uncle frogy
BTW, for an excellent example of hippie punching read any of cyberax’s posts. They epitomize the term. It is lazy, fatuous, and far more often than not wrong; but it isn’t an exhortation to actual physical violence Any comparison to lynching is just as lazy, fatuous, and wrong.
Other excellent examples can be found in many David Brooks columns and in defense of many a Clinton triangulation strategy.
And those two people who worked at amazon have admitted that they didn’t work as packing workers but as developers. Difference being, as developer you can (almost) pick and choose your company. As a packer, the company can pick and choose you or someone else. It’s all about supply and demand. Low level workers are dime a dozen, their power and, therefore, freedom is low. There’s bigger supply of that “labour” than is demand; you can lay off one and there’ll be dozen fit to replace him, you only have to reach with your hand (and not go through grueling hiring process either). And sometimes, those people don’t have any choice.
Developers are not dime a dozen. They’re expensive and there’s always some place else they can go. And you can be damn certain that companies are working hard to make that not be the case, by training more developers and programmers, opening development center’s oversea etc. So, in short, I’ll tell you what my good friend once told me: Your privilege is showing.
And what Rowan vet-tech said is true:
It’s not only possible but probable. I once worked as an intern at the (small) company where I sat in the same office with a person who had 10 times my salary (and 4,5 and 5 times my salary, respectively) and, office next door, there were people ranging from half my salary to 5 times my salary. You see those people every day, you see the way it changes their thinking. And, when you remind yourself that the person you’re talking with has half your salary, despite being there for 5 years and you being a just-hired wet-behind-the-ears newbie, you realize how warped your point of view really is.
And it gets worse as the company grows. It becomes against company policy to discuss your salary. This was a small company, so we all shared the same space; in large companies, you probably won’t even see people not on the (about) same level as you. Yeah, you’ll see managers, but it is considered OK for them to have much higher salary than you because of much higher responsibility and yes, you’ll see rookies, but they’re just starting, once they get the skillset, their salaries will grow. It’s easy to forget that there are other people working for the same company who are stuck, who have no growth perspective because they can always be replaced by someone else with minimal cost for the company.
My brief stint at Amazon was by far the worst working environment I’ve ever encountered in my career as a software engineer. After I left I heard over and over again that Amazon has a reputation in the local tech sector for burning people out quickly.
All of this is for relatively privileged employees, who actually do have lots of other options. It’s obviously much worse for many others, such as those who work in the warehouses.
That doesn’t mean everyone hates it there. I have known at least one developer who loved working there and stayed for many years. Still, the stuff in the article doesn’t come out of nowhere.
Perhaps the right way to do this is for consumers to stop buying things from companies who don’t treat their employees fairly. I am prepared to pay more to a company that does this for the simple reason that the more companies are compelled to treat their employees fairly by the market, the more chance I have of getting a job where I will be treated fairly.
I have worked for a company with a very aggressive culture and even though I love my work, I hated it there. The atmosphere sucked all the job satisfaction out.
I guess what worries me is that a lot of the “techie” effect is a big question mark. I don’t know if I’m (for example) driving up housing prices when I move to a new area, because as far as I know that’s the price of apartments there. And I don’t know whether to patronize cheaper or more expensive restaurants – on the one hand, expensive places tend to pay their staff a fairer wage, but if every restaurant sells $15 sandwiches then less people can afford to eat out. A single engineer can do something that has a positive impact when they do it, but a negative impact when everyone else does it.
By the time I understand an area, it’s time to relocate again. Sometimes I feel like my profession is inherently disruptive, and short of “don’t relocate, ever!” there’s nothing I can do. Well, maybe encouraging more people to go into STEM, so demand stops being so inflated. But that’s decades down the road.
pickledoranges, I have been in the IT business for more than 30 years now and at least from my perspective the number of women programmers has actually declined in that period. I think the workplace ethos in development has become more prejudiced since then.
By the way, though you might think that “devs are ludicrously in-demand”, but you will find the situation will become very different once you are over fifty. I would advise saving and investing as much money as you can now.
Grewgills @ 107;
You could be absolutely right on this, but I am not sure that this interpretation really fits the context of Cyberax’s original post back @ 12.
Cyberax wrote;
(Emphasis added)
Why isn’t ‘hippie punching’ in quotation marks if it doesn’t relate to a the actual act of physically striking people identified as ‘hippies’? Then there is the use of the word ‘popular’, which seems to me to be an odd word to use when describing a political stratagem used to appeal to a real or imagined centre vote. A different formulation, like ‘no wonder hippie punching is so effective in the US’ would seem to convey the meaning much more clearly.
Even being generous and assuming that Cyberax used the phrase with the meaning you suggest (despite the strange sentence formulation), at the very least there is the potential for an ambiguity of meaning in the use of this phrase (I doubt I am the only person on Pharyngula who is unfamiliar with the finer points of American political slang), and that failure to communicate effectively lies at Cyberax’s door.
@Gregory #118
It is a rather common term in American politics, Axelrod was regularly accused of hippie punching in defense of Obama. Cyberax might not realize how international the commentariat is here. On a US political blog I don’t think there would have been any confusion as to what he meant by that term. Then again, he was hippie punching in his comments. I don’t have much use for that tactic as it is far too often used to denigrate ideas that I not only support, but that are supported by a plurality or even majority in the US as ‘far left’ in support of more ‘centrist’ ideas.
@mailliw #117
It would be great if there were an independent rating agency that graded companies on working conditions and offered a certification that could be stamped on products. If only we cared as much about workers as dolphins.
@Grewgills #120
Maybe an ISO standard could be developed? Certification would be a compelling reason for me to buy from a particular company.
PZ, you directly responded to #73, which stated:
with:
when you’ve got people in this thread saying things like:
I’m no fan of Amazon, but I’m rather less a fan of that kind of trusting skepticism. “You must
disprove what the New York Times says!” is not a defensible argument.
YMMV.
Why not? Who should be trusted? NYT, or some unknown poster just throwing out doubt on the internet? Why is the unknown poster more trusted than the NYT with evidence?
This is some Classic NoR right here. Enjoy.
Just because your skills are highly in demand doesn’t mean your boss won’t take advantage of you. The warehouse packers may get it worse, sure — not relevant to determining whether the developers face abuse. And if your personal experience was great, that’s also not proof that there are no problems. Amazon is a big company!
Does the name Judith Fucking Miller ring a bell? Do I need to go into the many, many more instances that the NYT is not a reliable source? Since when are newspaper articles primary sources? I’ve seen you, personally argue against that proposition.
Look, I’m not saying discount the purported evidence. I’m saying view it critically. PZ banned someone with (claimed) insider knowledge for refusing to “cool it”. Isn’t the community here supposed to be against tone trolling? His blog, his rules, but dayum.
Finally, Nerd, the fact that the NYT is providing support for your position is not a reason to be uncritical of sources. That’s just bad analysis. It’s not rude of me to point that out, is it?
Classic.
Meaning?
Sometimes, PatrickG, it’s not about you.
Sometimes, chigau, it would help to be less ambiguous. :)
(You leave a one-word comment 10 minute after mine, I think it’s on you to be clear!)
Urp. Misread timestamps, 58 minutes after mine!
jeeuz
Scroll up two comments
or control-f “classic”
I’m picking a fight with Chas, not you.
Well, I’d suggest you pick your fights more … clearly? :) I’ll bow out now.
Well, I’d suggest that you comment when you have something other than whinging.
.
.
.
:)
Pretty sure I made a substantive complaint against people demanding rock-solid refutation of weak assertions (because New York Times! is not justifiable) @ #122.
Also fairly sure I made a good complaint against one-word, highly ambiguous comments @ #130.
You call it whinging. I call it BATMAN. Or something. In any case, I’m off to bed. Sorry I was touchy.
I’ll remember that the next time you admonish someone for lacking clarity when replying to someone. You know, like you did at #16 in this very thread.
This is how aristocracy arises. Where is Pollyanna when she’s needed?
That needle’s been swinging in the right direction in the past couple years. Most of the bigger companies are very intentional about purging bias from hiring and making sure they have a diverse group of engineers. Women make up half the population. It doesn’t make good business sense to develop products in a woman-free vacuum.
That said, I’m concerned about academia. I worked for a while before going back for my masters, and that was quite a culture shock. It was like getting rocketed back a few decades.
To your other point, age is definitely a thing, though. I’m well aware of the issue and am budgeting/investing for early retirement (it’s part of the reason I relocate so much – need that job-switching pay bump). It’s a shame, too, because the few 50+ engineers I’ve worked with were exceptional. Experience makes a huge difference in this field.
@103 Irate Lump, et al.
I didn’t ‘redefine’ any words – freedom is in fact a synonym for capitalism (http://capitalism.org).
Your riff on love is equally unconvincing. Capitalism/freedom has been responsible for lifting more people out of poverty than any other economic system in the history of the world. I’ve cited the work of Deirdre McCloskey here before, which is absolutely definitive in my view (her background would also be of interest, I would imagine, to LGBT advocates here).
So your – and progressives/socialists in general – concept of ‘love’ is an interesting one. It almost guarantees that the poor remain impoverished. It would solidify an economic/class structure whereby the ‘elite’ – the 1% – get to dictate the rules of the game. Where there is freedom, the poor have a chance to succeed. Where there is socialism, the elite and the entrenched interests always prevail and the poor get screwed. How else does someone like Hugo Chavez’s daughter amass a fortune of some $4 billion while the rest of the country lives in relative squalor?
http://www.latinpost.com/articles/71424/20150812/maria-gabriela-chávez-net-worth-hugo-chávezs-daughter-richest-woman-in-venezuela-worth-4-2-billion.htm
@connorfc
I’ve been tilting at this particular windmill for a while now. In general, skepticism here ends where politics begins. It is a completely untenable position – one can’t demand facts and reason in one context and then eschew it in another. Especially when the topic is economics, magical thinking and woo dominate the posts here. As a result, the mainstream media in this context is infallible, but when they report on science are fully capable of grand failures (see for example, the octopus post of 10 days ago: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/08/14/i-repeat-octopuses-are-not-aliens/).
The Amazon article didn’t really surprise me; I’ve not worked there but have worked for tech companies, both startup-size and monster-size. All the stuff they describe differs only in degree, not in kind, from every tech company. They all have expectations of loyalty and dedication that are, frankly, insane in the modern workplace given its lack of job security.
I eventually landed at a non-tech company (industrial conglomerate) doing firmware development and the culture’s a much better fit for me. Some folks thrive on constant panic and high pressure; I just crack.
@139 Tom Weiss: “Especially when the topic is economics, magical thinking and woo dominate the posts here.”
True of (macro) economics in general, for several reasons. By the nature of the field, it’s inextricably tied up with politics (thereby gaining all the usual mind-killing properties of politics), the data quality is poor, and repeatable experiments are hard to come by.
Tom Weiss @ 139.
I find it difficult to take overly seriously the assertions of the page your first link leads to – anyone who can create (apparently in all seriousness) a webpage with a banner boldly proclaiming capitalism to be ‘the moral ideal’ probably isn’t the authority on politics, economics or word definition you seem to take them to be.
Also, did it occur to you that Irate Lump @ 103 was mocking the redefinition of words to prop up a flawed argument, and was showing how it could be done with a nebulous concept of ‘love’ in the same manner as with capitalism? Acting as if this usage of love is some kind of political platform Irate Lump actually espouses, or is an accurate reflection of socialist political thought, is a mite disingenuous, don’t you think?
Also, if you think that socialism and progressivism are deliberately structured to promote the power of the elite, and it is only capitalism that pursues equality and breaks the chains of the disenfranchised, then how do you explain the truly dismal records on social equality of Right wing, highly pro-capitalist administrations both today and historically? How exactly do things like single payer universal healthcare systems advantage the elite at the expense of the poor and yet insurance based systems don’t? If socialism is so great for the elite, why aren’t more people like Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch avowed socialists? Oddly enough, the richest and most prosperous in our society, those who benefit most form deregulation and social iniquity, all seem to lean hard toward the political Right – why on Earth would that be the case, if your analysis holds?
You don’t get to redefine progressivism and socialism any more than you get to redefine capitalism, you know. You also don’t get to redefine ‘the elite’ and ‘the 1%’ to cover only the political elite of socialist countries and conveniently exclude the wealthiest individuals and corporations of capitalist societies. Words still have meanings, even if you find those meanings inconveniently incompatible with your argument, and citing individual instances of corruption by people or groups commonly associated with the political Left does not invalidate all political thought Left of Ayn Rand.
The fact that some other dickwad once used the same spurious conflation of terms that you did does not at all mean that the two are actually synonymous.
Tom Weiss
Weird. I have a degree in Economics and tried to engage you in actual arguments related to economics theory in the pasts. You simply ignored those posts. It was clear form your posts that it was in fact you who is ignorant about economics.
Thumper
You are arguing with someone who thinks “freedom” means it is perfectly acceptable that a manager threatens to fire an employee unless this employee gives him a blowjob. Tom Weiss has a twisted definition of the word freedom, a freedom in which the powerful are free to do as they please.
the only freedom some are advocating here is that of a unregulated winner take all competition. The magical belief they are selling is that there will be no losers, we will all be rich and powerful in this perfect free market world.
I also like how they think or at least imply that all socialism is the dictatorship of the proletariat soviet style.
That thinking is the stuff that mushroom are grown in!
uncle frogy
Oh, that Tom Weiss! He’s just a barrel of laughs, isn’t he? ::wipes away tear::
Pity he just has the one routine and keeps on repeating the same material, though. (I mean, he rearranges and paraphrases a bit, but still …)
But you have to admit “freedom is in fact a synonym for capitalism” is a real thigh-slapper!
What next, Tom? “war is peace” “freedom is slavery” “ignorance is strength” … arbeit macht frei, maybe?
I have contracted as an IT worker with several tech companies in the Seattle area (Microsoft often) although not with Amazon specifically. Several acquaintances who have contracted at Amazon over the last decade have told me about working long hours (not because they wanted to) and high stress levels trying to meet project goals sometimes with supportive managers, sometimes with abusive asshole managers. Drawing upon my own experiences, I have no doubt this does occur for many of the Amazonians and the NYT article isn’t as off the mark as some of the Amazonian fan boys make it out to be.
However, my evidence is all anecdotal. So here is a job resource that has employee reviews for a huge amount of companies: Glassdoor.com .
For Amazon Seattle which has 5900 employee reviews, it gets a rating of 3.4/5 (and this is for all types of jobs, both white and blue collar) and 63% would recommend working there. For Amazon India (Bangalore) which has 254 reviews on file is rated at 3.6/5 and 72% would recommend working there.
So from this, I conclude it is not a Nirvana for significant amount of people who work there, but not the hell hole either. I suspect like many that the blue collar workforce fares poorer then their white collar peers, but this would be true of most tech companies that don’t have a union (are there any that do? I suppose there’s the Teamsters that the warehouses would have to deal with, but that’s not the same as a workplace union ).
The site is useful for also looking at specific job titles (e.g. software engineer) to further refine the search results to help a job perspective determine if the job one is interested in applying (interviewing with) is something that matches with one’s expectation, salary requirements, etc.
Tom Weiss @139:
Given your childlike understanding of capitalism (and love of selfish ideology of libertarianism) I think you’re going to find it difficult to convince anyone around here that freedom is a synonym for capitalism.
@Tom Weiss
That “riff on love” was so obviously Reductio ad absurdum that I’m surprised you didn’t notice it and actually thought that was what Irate Lump was advocating.
Here’s the thing: socialism in certain quantities is not bad (from which follows that state and government in certain quantities is not bad). Capitalism in certain quantities is not bad. They all have their advantages and their flaws. Think about them as natrium(potassium) and chlorine. Alone, they are caustic, very reactive substances. Take either one of those alone, eat it, drink it, rub it on your skin and it will go very bad for your human body. Together, they make NaCl, salt, which is not that bad for your body and is actually needed for it to function properly.
You were obviously self-taught about economics. It’s the difference between knowing about the thing and knowing the thing. I know about biology; I like to read about it on the internet, about evolution, development paths etc and I find it fascinating. But I’m not a biologist. I know about medicine too. My sister is a doctor and I caught some snippets here and there. But I’m not a doctor. But here’s the thing: both of those professions (and many others) have their own language, have their own terms. It is easy to notice when somebody doesn’t belong to those professions; those that do not belong don’t speak the lingo and, even when they do, it’s easy for the professional in the field to notice when they’re talking out of their arse.
Economics are not that simple. Economists use common language and give it it’s own spin; you think that there’s a confusion in the minds of the public about scientific meaning of word ‘theory’ and common use of it? You’ve got nothing on terms used in economics. And every single person meets with those terms constantly. And if you go around giving medical advice and doing brain surgery, it’s considered very not-ok if you’re not a doctor at the same time. Non-medical professional doing brain surgery? Arrest that guy. Non-economists spouting economic advice and making economic decisions that affect the whole country, maybe even world? Let it slide.
And biology and medicine are quite exact sciences. You can do experiments, you can do double blind studies. Economics are not an exact science.
In short, Tom Weiss, you have no idea what you’re talking about. You live in the world that was created by deaths of many, deaths of people who fought for their rights, rights that you enjoy now. And you’re quite ready to give up those rights because you lack understanding of the issues and of the consequences. You’re like an antivax activist in that matter; a person who fights against the solution to the problem because that solution worked and you can’t see the problem it was intended to solve in the first place. Lasses faire capitalism created a host of problems and labor movement and government solved the lot of them, but you don’t see that. You’ve forgotten or you never knew in the first place.
Meanings of words aren’t facts. We could redefine “capitalism” to mean freedom whenever we want. The problem is that “capitalism” then doesn’t mean capitalism anymore.
Tom Weiss:
Let’s go to Roget’s, shall we?
No, no freedom there. No freedom in the continued reading, either. You can also input ‘freedom’ into Roget’s, and while there is a very long list of synonyms, capitalism cannot be found anywhere.
Caine
It’s the word ‘free’.
It confuses them.
I think I see the chain. See, they have democracy in there so the reasoning chain goes capitalism = democracy = freedom. Will ignore the fact that democracy =/= freedom for a little bit. By this chain of logic. …. human = mammal = cat, therefore humans are cats in the way that capitalism is freedom.
Except humans are necessarily mammals, whereas capitalism isn’t necessarily democratic. Though I suppose TW and his mates think it must be.
@142
Whenever government picks winners and losers, instead of the free market, it always benefits those who are politically connected. Uber is the best example – state and local governments are clamping down on the company because it is disrupting entrenched, politically connected, cab companies. In health care, since the passage of Obamacare the health care industry has gone through a massive consilidation – larger companies are massively benefiting at the expense of smaller start ups. You see this in the financial industry following Dodd-Frank as well. Why has no start-up on the order of Uber or AirBnB disrupted either of these sectors? Because of massive government regulation, which exclusively benefits the rich and the politically connected. There is a reason that the counties with the highest avergage income in the US are clustered around Washington, DC, and there is a reason why Hillary Clinton makes $400,000 a speech: because Washington has incredible power to dole out favors.
Trump is not much of a conservative, for the record, and I notice you didn’t include the Koch brothers in your analysis, probably because they are on record saying that their libertarian-leaning views are detrimental to their bottom line. You also don’t bring up people like George Soros (how much has his net worth increased under Obama?) or Tom Steyer or any of the CEOs of the largest companies in the US who routinely meet with and curry favor from the President. You’ve got your analysis exactly backwards – the 1% WANT government regulation and intervention because it raises the barriers to entry and increases the costs of their smaller, more entrepreneurial competitors.
Socialism is fabulous for the elite, providing they are well-connected politically. It’s pretty shitty for the common person, just have a look at any socialist country ever. If you are concerned at all about the plight of the poor, you need to be an advoate for freedom/capitalism.
Side note for all of those misreading my positions – I am not an advocate for anarchy. Regulation is of course a requirement for a free, open, pluralistic society. But if the history of the 20th century taught us anything it is that less regulation is preferable to centralized control (China in the last week or so is a glaring example of that). Those socialists among you have an incredibly high burden of proof if you want to argue that centralized control is preferrable to a (lightly regulated) free market. If you’d like to argue what the meaning of ‘lightly’ is, then I’m all ears.
Tom Weiss,
what are you categorizing as a socialist country?
or what is socialism? what are the principles that define for you what socialism is?
are any of these things socialistic?
strong social safety net
universal health care
free or very low cost education
strong worker rights
high minimum wage regulation (living wage)
uncle frogy
Tom Weiss @156
And yet again, you show your ignorance, by equating communism and socialism. But, in the cause of continuing this discussion, it is a good time for us to agree on the same terms. What is, to you, socialism? Define the term as you use it. Answer unclefrogy, because otherwise your positions are not clear.
As for your other points:
No. They’re clamping on the company because it is doing the same job as cab companies do but it doesn’t follow the same (stricter) regulations as they do. Cab companies must guarantee safety of their vehicles, a certain “quality” of their workers and, also, certain benefits to the same workers. What Uber is doing is going around the taxi/cab rules and raking cash by cutting all sorts of corners, which, while not necessarily illegal per se, is unfair competition. Once all the other cab companies are down, Uber will become a monopolist and then it will jack up the prices and then there will be a lot of gnashing of consumer teeth.
Because, and here’s huge surprise for you, there’s a huge barrier for entry into those sectors. And, healthcare and financial industry companies have been consolidating their capitals naturally for decades, Affordable Health Care Act or not, which lead to current state. For decades, health insurance companies have been jacking the price up, playing the game with their lawyers and hospital lawyers. Hospital asks for X amount money (let’s say, real cost of surgery), insurance company says “I’m not paying for this. Talk to my lawyer.”, so hospital has to add lawyers’ fee and extra costs of bureaucracy and time lost to X (let’s call that Y). So, next time hospital does that surgery, they automatically ask for X+Y, only to get the same response (only, this time it’s: “I’m not paying X+Y. That’s too much! Talk to my 2 lawyers. Oh wait, better yet, let’s go to court over this!”). So, next turn, they ask for X+Y+Z (probable costs of going to court + time lost + extra bureaucracy). So the insurance provider says… You get the idea.
So, there’s a risk, on both sides. Insurance companies – risk you’ll have to pay huge (inflated) hospital bills. And court expenses and lawyers’ fees etc. Hospitals/ healthcare providers – risk that they’re not going to get paid. And have to pay court expenses and lawyers’ fees etc.
And, the thing is, capital doesn’t like risk, like, at all. So, here’s the kicker: to mitigate that risk (and all the other risks, and to provide more services, and to make higher profit from volume) small healthcare providers and small insurance companies join up, either horizontally (hospitals with hospitals or insurance companies with insurance companies) or with each other (some insurance companies allow you to only get healthcare from certain hospitals). It is natural as sunrise: the larger the capital is, the higher the chance the owners of it will decide to cooperate instead of compete. Now, tell me again, knowing all this, how can a small company compete? Let’s say I won a lottery, 50.000$, and decide to open an insurance company and sell health insurance. First time one of my clients gets sick, I’ll have to pay inflated price for his healthcare. Being a small company, I have no leverage to lower those costs because the hospital (who has to pay lawyers anyway, because of having to do business with the big guys) has more power than me. I can’t challenge them. If I challenge them in court, they’re going to burry me. Hell, they’ll just have to wait me out, wait until my cash runs dry and I can’t fight them in court any more, so I’ll have to settle.
Let’s say I open a small clinic instead. The first time I ask a huge insurance provider to pay up and get taken to court by him, I can lock my clinic and not open it ever again.
The same principle goes with financial sector – you can rise, you can soar high like an eagle, but the risk is huge and the way to mitigate that risk is to get large and dispersed. Other players are stronger and more experienced than you. And, if some of the big guys get worried, they can always buy the little company wholesale. And the first thing a company does when they get big enough is buy political influence so someone can’t do the same thing that they did. They pass the laws against their competitors. It’s called lobbying and Monsanto is the greatest example. And, if you try to fight that, you get to fight huge capital already entrenched. Capital and politics, mix them up nice and you can subvert democracy quite nicely. So, how’s that for capitalism = freedom?
Fixed that for you. (nah, not really. Just showing how empty your statement really is).
Tom Weiss,
You know nothing, Tom Weiss. I mean, really, your entire understanding of how economics works seems to be based on those stupid ‘I have two cows’ memes.