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This article is misleading and wrong in some of its ideas. Every company wants to employ as little expensive and unreliable-relative-to-a-machine human labor a

This article is misleading and wrong in some of its ideas. Every company wants to employ as little expensive and unreliable-relative-to-a-machine human labor as possible. Trying to cut down costs is in fact not short-sighted or somehow "wrong", it's efficient and great (as long as you're not treating people unethically or polluting the environment, etc.). Amazon is simply growing tremendously quickly...it's not that they're trying to create jobs. In the past 200 years there's been a tremendous increase in leisure for most people (except perhaps ironically for the best paid but that's a lot by choice), and also there has to date been no end to human desire. It used to take 80% of the labor force just to create food, now it's around 4%. It used to be 150 years ago the average American had 1 pair of paints and 2 shirts. Today the average American has 20 pairs of blue jeans. What's creating new jobs is not that a company is trying to create jobs but that human desires keep expanding.

bamboozled 9y ago
In the past 200 years there's been a tremendous increase in leisure for most people My anecdotal observations don't align with that statement, most people I know work more than ever. It's almost madness. I would love to see some hard evidence to suggest otherwise. While technology is supposed to be making things more efficient (and sure it can do that), it's also making certain things more complex, and I'm not sure most humans have the desire to cope with the complexity very well (nor should they). This can create a time consuming quagmire of technical debt, I deal with it daily. A simple example of this growing complexity in society is food and beverage packaging. It's become too complex for most people to know how recycle things properly, and it's not really something people go out of their way to understand so it rarely gets done correctly, thus creating new problems.
- golergka 9y ago
  How many people you know are from third world countries?
  - bamboozled 9y ago
    Funny you should ask because I would say, more than you might imagine. I've actually spent time in third world countries volunteering and travelling and made some longer term friends out of it. The biggest problems they face are fallout from mass manufacturing and consumerism (rubbish dumps literally overflowing with western companies mess), deforestation (for palm oil) and climate change. Apart from being less materially well off, there are a lot of happy people in the third world who seem to be living a way more relaxing lives then people I know in the developed world who are up to there eyeballs in debt and working for high profile tech companies. But I think people just see what ever they want to see to justify their views and beliefs.
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  >My anecdotal observations don't align with that statement I can't find it right now but I did see a paper recently that showed a correlation between wealth and hours worked, rich people really do work the longest hours.

bamboozled 9y ago

In the past 200 years there's been a tremendous increase in leisure for most people My anecdotal observations don't align with that statement, most people I know work more than ever. It's almost madness. I would love to see some hard evidence to suggest otherwise. While technology is supposed to be making things more efficient (and sure it can do that), it's also making certain things more complex, and I'm not sure most humans have the desire to cope with the complexity very well (nor should they). This can create a time consuming quagmire of technical debt, I deal with it daily. A simple example of this growing complexity in society is food and beverage packaging. It's become too complex for most people to know how recycle things properly, and it's not really something people go out of their way to understand so it rarely gets done correctly, thus creating new problems.

golergka 9y ago
How many people you know are from third world countries?
- bamboozled 9y ago
  Funny you should ask because I would say, more than you might imagine. I've actually spent time in third world countries volunteering and travelling and made some longer term friends out of it. The biggest problems they face are fallout from mass manufacturing and consumerism (rubbish dumps literally overflowing with western companies mess), deforestation (for palm oil) and climate change. Apart from being less materially well off, there are a lot of happy people in the third world who seem to be living a way more relaxing lives then people I know in the developed world who are up to there eyeballs in debt and working for high profile tech companies. But I think people just see what ever they want to see to justify their views and beliefs.
tonyedgecombe 9y ago
>My anecdotal observations don't align with that statement I can't find it right now but I did see a paper recently that showed a correlation between wealth and hours worked, rich people really do work the longest hours.