the rate at which Amazon is burning through workforce vs it’s rate of automation is starting to look like the balance is diverging fast. They’ll collapse before they automate
As much as I loved Sam Kinison, I doubt they chose to live in a place that is sand today and will still be sand in 100+ years. But when someone chooses to live in SF, Seattle, or now Austin in exchange for taking a low wage job, they need to own that they are creating their own personal hell to subsidize the lifestyle of the top 5% or so. You can do better than that. This is not a binary problem. It's analog. If enough people leave SF, there will be much furrowing of brows and bellyaching of the wages, but things will improve. That FOMO keeps things status quo is exactly why that's not going to happen. Too bad. I passed on SF for exactly these reasons myself and I'm a techie.
America is literally composed of people who came here for work. The trope that people have their feet nailed to the ground and can't move is just not reality.
Given how bad most US cities are at building sufficient housing, it wouldn't actually shock me if a well-planned company town was short-term financially much better for their employees than average... at least Amazonville won't have NIMBYs complaining about new high-rise condos ruining the neighborhood.
And like it or not (not, probably), housing is 40+% of low-income worker living expense, so even fixing rent could turn a worker's life around...
There are plenty of places in the United States where there is little resistance to building more housing and the local government would love for people to come there and start businesses.
But they are not considered desirable places and they often end up on 100 worst places to live in the United States lists made by the same sort of people rationalizing their high cost of living. Amazon has apparently taken notice of this and decided to monetize it. But if it becomes a broken Orwellian dystopia like this camera system, that's a made for TV horror movie.
And if you suggest someone in an expensive place like San Francisco who is sinking into debt should move to a place like that and bootstrap you will hear an unending stream of profanities from them. Because the people who are willing to do that sort of thing have mostly already done so. Your priorities are not their priorities. They'll take the NIMBYs if they're close to their friends and family.
Those undesirable places are partially that way because a community is not just housing. It is good infrastructure, good governance, good society among many other things.
Look at all this anti-vax nonsense...look they are free to act the way they want but it does scare away investment into those communities.
Low taxes could mean less red tape but it can also mean non-existent governance and investment into infrastructure. People are starting to realize this scam for what it is.
I remember an earnest soccer mom sort asking me what she could do to stop Trumpism in 2017. And I replied that she should move to a blue city in a red state before the 2020 election. She bristled and responded with profanity at the very thought of that. And then walked away in a huff.
So I conclude people are unwilling to walk their talk. You're not wrong though, but all those really cool communities were built by pioneers who did something exactly like the above. The only way to beat the stupid is to infiltrate and vote their insane representatives out of office. As long as the educated are corralled and contained to the coasts, this will just keep getting worse IMO.
> So I conclude people are unwilling to walk their talk.
You are holding that person to a ridiculous standard. They talk to you about wanting to do something, and if they don't uproot their entire life just to shift a single vote around you're going to pretend they were speaking some enormous talk and now refuse to back it up?
Its is happening but the people who are moving to these places seem like those who cannot make it in the more competitive markets. At the same time, you only live one life so people who can afford to thrive in the expensive markets don't want to spend their time not living their best lives. So this catch-22 exists.
The sanders approach had hope: Invest in all these communities to help bring those people up to the same level of quality society as the coasts and the hope was that enough would abandon Trumpism as their prospects improved. Instead we are repeating the mistakes of the Obama years and I guess after Biden, the only way forward is more pain and suffering when the next demagogue makes it to the white house.
Amazon has adverts on TV saying how wonderful it is to work for Amazon. My first thought when seeing them is, that's a PR campaign, and the truth is almost certainly the opposite.
Will they, really? Their workers would not work at Amazon if they had other choices.
The real problem is that there is no Amazon delivery and logistics equivalent. Workers would leave for it. There would be price competition on wages.
Perhaps antitrust split of Amazon should divide the company down the middle in each state, creating two logistics and delivery companies nationwide, evenly and randomly splitting their assets.
There are plenty of retail jobs. If you haven't seen the news recently, there's a record shortage and large wage increases happening in that entire sector. The reason people still work Amazon is because Amazon pays better than the competition. For example, a lot of restaurant workers have left that sector for better choices. You don't see that happening in Amazon but I would think that workers in both sectors are somewhat overlapping (unskilled labor).
Im not sure where you have been for the last year and a half, but a lot of retail workers and restaurant workers have been laid off or suspended on reduced pay. Shops were empty, restaurants were empty. Thats still mostly the case. Thats why there is a shortage.
Its those same companies that laid people off that are now trying to tempt them back with increased wages. Chipotle, for example.
My local Chipotle is advertising $17.50/h wages and $750 signing bonuses. My local Amazon starts at $19/h. The market for entry level unskilled labor has never been better in the last decade.
Maybe you live in Europe or another country where growth is stagnant?
I keep feeling companies should only be permitted to operate in a single trade category.
What we call 'anti-competitive' behaviour now is basically down to deep pockets being able to subsidize projects unrelated to the core business (whatever the hell that is).
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-09-16/amazon...