30 ms·

Not an Amazon Problem

TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
> the fabric of society is in danger of breaking Really? That is hyperbolic to me, and I was not as interested in reading the rest of his article after that.
- djrobstep 6y ago
  If you think that's hyperbolic, consider that current levels of inequality are not dissimilar to that of pre-revolutionary France.
  - jjsdflkjsdkkk 6y ago
    Did they have Walmart in pre-revolutionary France? Or maybe that comparison is rather misleading?
    - OpieCunningham 6y ago
      “Walmart is my Soma” would make an excellent t-shirt.
    - djrobstep 6y ago
      I have no idea what you mean.
- jsiepkes 6y ago
  > Really? That is hyperbolic to me, and I was not as interested in reading the rest of his article after that. That's a shame because if you had continue reading you could have judged if it was really hyperbolic or if there was some truth to it. Besides why even care about some of the conclusions in the piece if you can also absorb the information and form your own conclusions?
  - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
    I did finish the article.
    - bigiain 6y ago
      So you saying "I was not as interested in reading the rest of his article after that" was "exaggerated statement or claim not meant to be taken literally" then?
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
- bonestormii_ 6y ago
  This is a pervasive perspective on HN. Everyone here is so erudite in their mindset, yet they can't observe that a trend of exponential wealth inequality ends with many people being crushed and a few undeserving winners. The language "is in danger of breaking" is frankly dialed down because he is obviously self-conscious about sounding like some wild-eyed radical. The fact is, if this trend isn't checked, there certainly will be a violent break down, which is a corresponding trend that is also growing before our very eyes in the form of BLM protests and the corresponding government response. Violence is not condoned in our society. Therefore, it follows that manifestations of violence are a form of breakage. If such manifestations erupt directly from power/wealth/legal disparities, I'd say Bray's language is a rather mild flavor of perfectly accurate.
  - sdfsdsddsddssd 6y ago
    "crushed", "undeserving winners" - people can still be better off than people in the past, despite there being more richer people than them. And what makes you think the winner's wins are "undeserved"? PG literally wrote an essay about it. http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html (not sure if it is the one I meant, but it touches on many of the subjects here. Including the "pie fallacy") In that light, it is more surprising that so many people on HN are in favor of socialism.
    - jazzyjackson 6y ago
      Look up any lectures by Hans Rosling to understand why wealth inequality is bad. Unequal societies are less trusting and have all kinds of bad outcomes in healthcare and education. Besides, what's the use of being a billionaire if you can't enjoy a night out on the town without fear of being robbed and killed by the jealous proles? Note this does not imply socialism or expanding safety nets -- I was thinking more of very progressive taxes that fund public infrastructure, green energy, public transportation, public parks and water catchments, the kind of thing that makes the world better for everyone - rich folk inclusive.
    - cycomanic 6y ago
      Well there is sufficient evidence that the pie is not getting bigger for everyone (see e.g. Thomas Piketty's research amongst others). Inequality is increasing and that is dangerous to society. To give you another example, in the 1920s 1930s economists (Keynes amongst others) made projects that by 2020 we would only work 15h a week or less and there was discussion if this would become a problem for society (because people typically want to work). However, this did not happen, why? Because the benefits of improved efficiency etc. flowed to fewer and fewer people. Regarding the winners being undeserved: 1. It can be shown that just using chance (or slightly unequal starting conditions) simple economic systems develop into a state where there is one player who essentially owns all (I linked to the article earlier [1]). So yes it can be just chance. 2. Once the winners have sufficient power they will game the system in their favour. There's lots of evidence for this, just look at the Panama papers for example. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465446
- emptyparadise 6y ago
  I suggest taking a look at American news for the past couple of months - the protests, the rising unemployment, continuing political polarization. I believe that is what the author was referring to. It is a US-centric take, but one that can be forgiven given that it is a blog post about an American developer dealing with American companies and American journalists.
- Lazare 6y ago
  That's your concern? Really? I'm not sure I agree with the rest of the article; it made some bad points and some good ones. And I certainly don't think it's clear that the fabric of society is in danger of breaking for the exact reasons the author listed, and that this can be solved by adoption the exact solutions the author advocates for. (Again, I'm not saying it's not true, just that I remain unconvinced.) But... ...it's pretty god damn clear that the fabric of society is in danger of breaking down, certainly in the context of the US, and arguably in the context of the West as a whole. Glance at the news, fill in your own list: Covid, antivaxxers, Portland, deficits, pension crisis at state and local government level, the increasing partisan divide, the collapse of the business models of traditional media, rampant conspiracy theories, BLM riots, anti-protect violence from the police, the balkanization of the news people consume, Trump, collapsing trust in institutions, increasing politicization of the courts, the stunning lack of Senate confirmed appointees in the current administration, etc., we could go on. At some point we're going to get a Covid vaccine, and we're going to need to launch a massive nation-wide vaccination campaign, but in the current climate literally everything is partisan, a decent chunk of the population has convinced themselves Covid is a hoax, people are resorting to violence when asked to wear a mask. How's that vaccination campaign going to go? Meanwhile the economy is lurching towwards a cliff. When Covid hit the US, it was at the end of the longest economic expansion in US history, but rather than store up resources for the inevitable contraction, the US was running unprecedented deficits. Now Covid has hit; what happens next? Especially if societal dysfunction prevents a coordinated response? And so on, and so forth. I mean, obviously everything could be fine, but if your concern is that "the fabric of society is in danger of breaking" is just too hyperbolic, I think you need to open your eyes. You can point fingers where you like (and we do, which is a big part of the problem!) but regardless of who is to blame, things are not good.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > Glance at the news, fill in your own list That's the point of "the news" though: to keep you engaged by providing a daily crisis for you to worry about, because that makes you watch thew news. If one crisis goes away, or viewers get bored of it, a new one pops up and the old one is gone. Remember how we were supposedly "this close" to ww3 in February or March because of Iran? Monster Of The Week Shows need monsters or they lose their audience.
- whymauri 6y ago
  We are currently in: (1) A global pandemic. (2) A massive protest movement. (3) The wake of what will soon be millions of evictions, not to mention the current unemployment rate and the effects we're seeing on wealth inequality. (4) On the inevitable track of climate change displacing tens of millions to hundreds of millions of people. This branch will also lead to some supply-chain and food management issues I cannot even fathom. (5) A concerning increase in polarization and even fascism. Increasing distrust in science and decreasing certainty in our news sources. Just off the top of my head.
tracer4201 6y ago
Page doesn’t load for me. Can anyone summarize?
- ciprian_craciun 6y ago
  Basically it's a reaction to an NY Times article (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/technology/amazon-critic-tim-bray.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/technology/amazon-critic-...) that (according to Tim) misleads the reader into thinking he's "anti Amazon". In the "reply" for Tim he states both positive and negative things about Amazon. However his main issue is with the monopoly of big tech-giants. If the original link doesn't open, then you can use the Internet Archive's copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20200728052705/https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/07/23/Not-an-Amazon-Problem https://web.archive.org/web/20200728052705/https://www.tbray...
- thomasmeeks 6y ago
  Basically Amazon is a symptom of global wealth inequality. He’s making the point that no company the size of Amazon, and no person as rich as Bezos, should exist. The bulk of the article laments the reality that the media, writ large, wants to report on “Tim vs Jeff”, not on “wealth inequality is out of control and we need to at least break up tech darlings, maybe much more.”
deanCommie 6y ago
I admire Tim Bray's contributions to our industry, his tireless pursuit to use his privilige and status to advocate for improvements to diversity and inclusion. I also believe in his genuine reasons and motivations for resigning, and the integrity it showed. (Obligatory: yes, he's in his 60s who's made millions, at some point you gotta retire, and it's easy to show integrity when you clearly don't need to work again) Having said that, I'm kind of surprised he's surprised by the overall reaction that he got when he quit, and in interviews since then. It's popular, easy, and desirable to dunk on Amazon. It's the best form of mainstream journalistic clickbait because it brings in and unites the left (who want improved worker rights, and Jeff B is a poster child for wealth imbalance) and the right (who are mad at Jeff's perceived left-leaning politics and criticism of Donald Trump via the Washington Post). It is NOT popular to question the very fabric of our western capitalism. Overtures about unsustainable wealth inequality do not resonate well in the mainstream. At the fringes, the right blames the rest of the world, and looks to isolate; the left is readying the guillotines. I think Tim should have known that his message would be misconstrued by both other Amazonians who remained and wrote defensive blog posts, and the rest of the world who's holding him up as some Anti-Amazon Crusader. I believe his mistake was to immediately start talking about worker's rights when his actual ethical qualm was about the chilling effect of silencing whistleblowers. But...then he wouldn't have had the NYTimes writing follow ups months later.
- pm90 6y ago
  The ability to not be punished for speaking out as a worker is precisely one of the worker rights that he is seeking to protect.
  - deanCommie 6y ago
    Technically the fired whistleblowers were cushy whitecollar office workers. Yes, i know i just said "worker" but that's not really what we all imagine when we think about Amazon workers that need more protections.
    - kennywinker 6y ago
jjsdflkjsdkkk 6y ago
"It was called the Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal consensus, and it was wrapped up with lots of high-flying rhetoric about this freedom and that dynamism and those flexibilities, but you don’t have to be that cynical to see it as good old-fashioned class war. It’s obvious who’s winning." Since Reagon was president, the US population has grown by 82 Million people (32% increase). At the same time, jobs went to China and so on. Is it certain that Reagan is to blame, and how? What if poor people just stopped having kids? Why is it assumed that there are good paying jobs for everybody, no matter how many people there are? Where do they come from?
- malka 6y ago
  People like having kids. Unemployment, especially future one is not a concern with this.
  - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
    Are you saying it is wise to have a child if you are unemployed? I dont understand your point.
    - malka 6y ago
      No i say for a lot of people it is not a factor. They want kids. Because having a kid is an experience most human seem to want. If bad socio economic situation prevented people from making kids, humanity would have been extinct for quite a while.
  - nine_k 6y ago
    People who like having kids usually plan well ahead, because they care about the kids' future life. But some people can't help but have kids, because contraception is either not uniformly applied / accessible, or due to religion prohibiting contraception. I bet that the lower is one's socioeconomic status, the harder it is to control childbirth, just because it's expensive. So even if having (one more) child would make life obviously hard(er) for the parent(s) and the child alike, there can just be not enough money to prevent it.
thomasmeeks 6y ago
So I agree with Tim, and in a way he’d probably find too radical. But for the hacker news crowd, I’d point to this: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/the-real-class-war/ https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/the-real-class-wa... TL;DR the income growth of the 0.1% is having a chilling effect on mid-level executives at Amazon and Google, too.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  Interesting breakdown: 1% eponymous class 9% professional elite 90% working class That's actually more skewed than the society described in 1984[1]: 2% inner party 13% outer party 85% proletariat Note that the 2% keeps the 13% toeing the party line (they don't have to amongst themselves, and proles are explicitly said to be free) to avoid any sort of Manor Farm pigs[2] getting funny ideas. IngSoc only had one party, but if one allows two outer parties, nominally opposed to each other, one may discover they each spontaneously self-police their own thought criminals. [1] I've always thought of 1984 as being a very anglophone sort of dystopia, but now I believe Orwell was writing therapeutically, cathartically imagining a world in which the social constructs of his second-rate english boarding school applied to the whole of society. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23825457 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23825457 [2] if Orwell had channelled PG, his labels would be: dogs pigs aggressive sheep donkeys passive orthodox heterodox
lvs 6y ago
Capitalism is just an algorithm. It's only an ideology if you make it one. It's just a system of allocation and ownership that has clear tendencies and side-effects, well understood for many decades. The experiment has shown that, as the system evolves, it doesn't have a stable state. One needs to bolt on additional controls to try to keep it in a stable state, or else one gets concentration of wealth and power. All the symptoms of that are pretty obvious with endless spilled ink. I really don't think this stuff should be controversial to people who are normally thinking about the behavior of complex systems.
- pm90 6y ago
  Most people aren’t thinking about the behavior of complex systems and to those this presents a good perspective. Anti Government propaganda is pretty widespread today and one of the ways to counter it is by espousing the benefits of the principles which a healthy, functioning Government provides to society.
  - kennywinker 6y ago
    Anti-gov sentiment is also there in part because at this point the government is usually in the position of siding with and protecting corporate interests, rather than serving the people.
- parkersweb 6y ago
  Given that Monopoly was invented in 1903 to illustrate that exact point we’ve been living with that knowledge for some time. Problem is - those is a position to enact changes are generally those benefitting most from it and therefore the least willing. What seems to have changed in UK and US politics in recent years is those who have benefitted most from the current system have persuaded those who have most to gain that they’re on the same side.
- blargmaster33 6y ago
  WORNG!! You are just makeing up excuses for government power.
- cycomanic 6y ago
nurettin 6y ago
> The company is working hard on Diversity & Inclusion As a foreigner, I am trying to understand this statement. You've got a bag with 100 marbles. 50 blue, 40 red, 10 white. HR needs to pick 15 marbles. Does the HR try to pick all marbles equally? So 50% of whites, 10% of blues, 12.5% of reds is chosen. Doesn't seem fair to blues and reds.
- Ivoirians 6y ago
  The real-life goal is closer to "HR picks 7 blue, 6 red, 2 white instead of 10 blue, 5 red, 0 white".
- deanCommie 6y ago
  This assumes that hiring is random. It's not. If hiring was truly random, and the percentages of the population reflected the makeup of the workforce, we wouldn't have a problem. But hiring is based on subjective evaluations of the marble's merits. And it turns out that there are inherent implicit bias in how we evaluate these marbles. One other important detail is that hiring isn't a one step process - you see 100 candidates, and you pick 15. Instead it's more like you see 10,000 candidates. You pick 1000 from that based on high level non-data driven heuristics, resume reviews, gut feel, and tea leaves. You put the 1000 through an impersonal online test to whittle it down to 100. Then you actually think about who to hire. A massive Part of Diversity and Inclusion initiatives is to question how we whittle down those marbles, and if it is essentially random at the start, but with some anti-racial bias, what would happen if we gave the chance to let people who have been historically disenfranchised an opportunity to get deeper in the process. The last step would still always be ultimately entirely merit based, but up until that point there are variables to play with. But my dude, it's 2020, if you're still asking these questions it's because of deliberately willful ignorance - all this information is out there. You don't have to come in with such basic misunderstandings of how this works.
  - nurettin 6y ago
    I am aware how HR works, the question was about the whittled down 100. Appreciate the word salad, though.
emptyparadise 6y ago
The promise of capitalism for the average person (as opposed to an economist or a business proprietor) was the ability to vote with your wallet, be it through deciding what to buy or who to work for. You still often hear that message from people who are less aware of the dark clouds up above: "just buy a different product" or "just quit and get a new job" - but centralization and monopolization make either impossible. Monopolies have an unfair amount of leverage in this game that must be dealt with. Bring in corporate breakups, bring in increased leverage for the workers (it's time to say the u-word), and maybe, just maybe, we can salvage this system yet. I don't know about you, but it was the dream of making the world better for everyone and not just a handful of CEOs that sold me on the tech industry. I sure would like for that dream to come true, no matter how many zeroes in valuation it costs.
- luckylion 6y ago
  And when everyone is fed, housed, clothed and given a smart phone, somebody will still stay "but is the world actually better? Look, inequality is still a thing, that guy has a much better smartphone." You can't remove capitalism from the last few centuries of massive progress and just say "it would have happened without it as well".
  - Apocryphon 6y ago
    Why don't we first work to make that future into a reality, and then argue?
    - luckylion 6y ago
      We have been for quite a while, and we're getting closer every year. Come join us and help.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - emptyparadise 6y ago
toohotatopic 6y ago
How do you create planetary structures but with super-companies and rich people? People don't innovate by themselves. The workers and/or engineers of the US or the world could have pooled their money and built AWS or space rockets, or electric cars. But they haven't. It takes money and actions from few people to get stuff done.
- praptak 6y ago
  They have, in the form of government programs. Moon exploration or the internet didn't need super-companies or ultra rich people.
  - function_seven 6y ago
    And private programs can still succeed without extracting every last bit of margin for the owners. Governments can create and fund programs to do these large-scale projects. They can also leave it to private industry to do so as well, but with strong protections for workers, the unions they may want to form, and the living conditions of all participants (employee, supplier, miner, etc.), domestic and foreign.
  - callamdelaney 6y ago
    Didn't NASA pay private companies billions to build and provide a significant proportion of the hardware, software and science required for these missions?
- starfallg 6y ago
  You are conflating innovation with disruption. Space rockets - done before by the state. Commercialising it is disruption. Electric cars - done before and lost in the market due to battery tech (lithium tech research has been funded also publicaly) AWS - co-opting open source software and turning it into a service isn't exactly innovation. But scaling it up to such a degrees is market disruption. You don't need huge amount of capital to be innovative, people naturally are. But you need a system to roll-out innovations and when you do this at scale, it becomes disruptive. VC and tech giant funding brings this forward but societal change is mainly driven by technology, not by capital.
Animats 6y ago
In fact, life for the US working class these days is shitty, and it’s not by accident, it’s by design. It was called the Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal consensus, and it was wrapped up with lots of high-flying rhetoric about this freedom and that dynamism and those flexibilities, but you don’t have to be that cynical to see it as good old-fashioned class war. It’s obvious who’s winning. Yes. Back in the 1970s, the working class was winning. Working class wages were going up 3x faster than CEO wages. The average employee at an auto factory could afford a house, a car, a non-working wife, a college education for his kids, and a good retirement. That had to stop. So a plan was put together by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell.[1] This is the actual memo.[2] It's worth reading. Before this, businesses did not lobby much, except over narrow issues. This got the U.S. Chamber of Commmerce into lobbying for business vs labor on a broad front, with funding from big companies. It worked. Near total victory over union power in the private sector has been achieved in the US. The 8 hour day, the 40 hour week, and the minimum wage have been made ineffective. Funded retirement plans are history. "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever." became national policy. Marketed as "individual rights" and "opportunity", of course. [1] https://billmoyers.com/content/the-powell-memo-a-call-to-arms-for-corporations/ https://billmoyers.com/content/the-powell-memo-a-call-to-arm... [2] https://d1uu3oy1fdfoio.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Lewis-Powell-Memo.pdf https://d1uu3oy1fdfoio.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/201...
- whymauri 6y ago
  >Marketed as "individual rights" and "opportunity", of course. This is what happens when the concept of "individual rights" is directly substituted for the "individual right to choose what you consume" without any regard for any other individual rights, even those which are supposedly hallmarks of the U.S. like voting rights. The more I think about this, the more I'm reminded of Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent.
  - amatecha 6y ago
    Precisely... for example, how about the right to privacy? It feels practically non-existent in North America (not so sure about elsewhere). As far as I've observed, it's essentially ignored in the vast majority of situations, to the degree that people treat you like you're paranoid if you even raise the subject.
bawolff 6y ago
I feel like this isn't terribly compelling. I have heard the whole corporations are evil and primarily look out for their own best interest before. I think people have been talking about this for over a century now. I don't even disagree (at most, i might say the truth is more complicated, but it always is). I guess the article leaves me thinking, so what do you want to do instead? Communist revolution? Anarchist utopia? The article posits that we should break up some specificly named corporations, but doesn't even give a criteria as to why those corps, other than i suppose the author dislikes them. Why them and not others? What's the objective criteria?
- kuu 6y ago
  You know that between the capitalism now working in the US and the "Communist revolution? Anarchist utopia?" there is a wide range of options, right? Based not only in your comments, I feel that you in the US are really afraid of the socialism and communism that you're not going to progress at all in the direction of such ideologies which care more of the people in general than the specific individual. You have the example of Europe, with several countries with social democratic parties that are doing much better than you in social justice and well being, and still you're with the US cold war mentality. You still think the 'commies' are coming... With that attitude/mentality I feel you cannot change much.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    I am not in the usa. I agree there are lots of options. The article would be compelling if the author picked an option and argued for it. Vauge negative statements about the status quo that nobody disagrees with are not compelling. Positions that can be defended and argued for/against are. Anyone can preach to the choir.
    - 082349872349872 6y ago
      The author is in the US, where (if the online world can be trusted) there are many, if not a majority of, people who disagree with his position. I recently got a letter from a centre-right party president reminding everyone about the part of our constitution which says a society is judged by how it treats its weakest members. I believe that'd be considered pinko-commie talk in the states. Bray left AMZN on 1 May. I gather that date is significant to US people, because he's calling for potential legal reforms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Day_(United_States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Day_(United_States)
wayanon 6y ago
People won’t pay more if there’s a choice.
OrangeKnucles 6y ago
Poor Americans are the envy of the rest of the world. They get paid $15 plus tips for filling up a glass with beer. Boomers were lucky because their parents won the war and the rest of the world was either rebuilding or was hobbled by communism/socialism. Once China and other Asian countries opened up their economies, everything which could be done there was done there. In the long run, Asians and Americans will earn the same money for the same job.
ghostcluster 6y ago
Breaking up US tech companies will cede power to their Chinese competitors. Alibaba will have the advantage. And breaking up the phone company didn't improve anything. We just got AT&T again from their well-performing Texas shard. Companies need to be regulated to provide the services the author is looking for.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- baq 6y ago
  Chinese companies aren't competitors because the playing field isn't even. For all intents and purposes Chinese companies are Chinese government.
- scollet 6y ago
  Why?
- WalterBright 6y ago
  Every country in the world would do a great deal to get a FAANG company native to their turf. But here in America we want to wreck them. Sigh. Now that fractional shares can be bought with no commission, essentially everyone who wants to can invest in those FAANG companies and get returns on capital. They're better than lottery tickets (a popular "investment" for the poor).
  - TMWNN 6y ago
    > Every country in the world would do a great deal to get a FAANG company native to their turf. But here in America we want to wreck them. Sigh. Harry Truman said in 1945 about the atomic bomb, "We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies". I feel the same way about FAANG and Silicon Valley as a whole (and Wall Street, and Hollywood, and SpaceX/Tesla, and the Ivy League), that they are in the United States. That doesn't mean I approve of everything they do. That doesn't mean I can't or won't decry their putting thumbs on scales toward a certain type of bien-pensant ideology. That does mean that, overall, I am very, very glad that they are American instead of Russian, Chinese, or even British, French, or German.
ridaj 6y ago
> [With] all his billions, Jeff is rounding error in the big picture. He’s not the problem; the legal/regulatory power structures that enable him and his peers is. > Amazon is a perfectly OK company, to the extent that planetary-scale sprawling corporate behemoths can be perfectly OK in 2020. Which is to say, not OK at all. Very well put - if Amazon wasn't around, the system all but guarantees that some other company would play the same kind of role. "Hate the game, don't hate the player"
- scollet 6y ago
  Or multiple players. That's empty.
silvestrov 6y ago
> the Google/Facebook ad cartel is rapidly destroying publishing business models that have been essential to civilized human dicourse and > every reporter I’ve talked to has tried to get me to say awful things about Amazon and in particular about Jeff Bezos. But at my last job they taught me to think big and, with all his billions, Jeff is rounding error in the big picture. This sounds like the media business needs a reboot and that we only ascribe such a high value to it because we didn't get a look into the sausage factory before. We belived the nice stories the journalists told about themselves. Today we can read what Tim Bray thinks about his interaction with journalists. Before the internet he would never had been able to communicate this to people in the rest of the world.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
WalterBright 6y ago
> carbon-vomiting oil extractors Language like that discredits the whole article as a hysterical piece. In any case, oil extractors are in business only because ordinary people want gasoline to drive their cars.
- blub 6y ago
  A single phrase does not justify dismissing an entire article, unless one is looking for excuses for doing so.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    That isn't the only such phrase in it. As a general rule, people use such phrases to cover for a weak, poorly argued case. It's a tell. It's like what a lawyer told me once: 1. If the law is on your side, argue the law. 2. If justice is on your side, argue for justice. 3. If neither the law nor justice is on your side, call the other party names. Yet I did read the whole article, and found it weak and poorly argued. His specific point about vomit was also weak and poorly argued, as I pointed out. A word to the wise - if you want thoughtful people to read an article, don't use such phrases. I'm hardly the only person to point this out.
    - java_script 6y ago
      OTOH all he had to do was throw in a quick throw away phrase and it was like a tarpit for you. You were so hung up on it you never got to explaining why his post was poorly argued.
      - WalterBright 6y ago
        > OTOH all he had to do was throw in a quick throw away phrase He did it repeatedly in the article. > why his post was poorly argued I pointed out that he neglected to account for why the oil companies existed - because people want gasoline. It isn't the oil companies emitting CO2, it's the gas consumers.
    - 6y ago
jariel 6y ago
It's maybe worth considering that the surpluses generated from globalism are not being distributed evenly. It doesn't mean that the standard of living of any group is going down. I rarely go to Walmart, but every few years I do in the USA, and it constantly blows my mind. The quantity, price and quality of 'stuff' in there ... you can live extremely well compared to anyone in 1970 just off Walmart. I submit that the surpluses are going to consumers, but because we don't price them (i.e. the added value to you in savings or quality doesn't go on the books), it's not part of the equation. At least in most material ways, the Western World's 'cup runneth over with stuff' ... a lot of which we do not need and is therefore luxury. The financial profits stack up in the top 10%. It's unsustainable, but it's not all bad news. The other 'Elephant in the Room' nobody will talk about are the surpluses to middle class yielded form undocumented workers. The US has 10-20M people 'off the books' working for crap wages, no health insurance. That is a huge part of why everything is so cheap in America. Particularly food and restaurants (the whole value chain is migrant workers it seems). The #1 thing America could do to reduce inequality would be to force companies to pay a real minimum wage. 1/2 the undocumented workers would be out of a job, the others would see pay increases. All jobs have to come with healthcare, or at least pay enough such that the income can cover a basic healthcare.gov package or else - what's the point? Collect taxes and redistribute via medicare? Taxation at the high end could be increased somewhat. Pushing some of those surpluses into the hands of working people would be a massive boon for the economy.
- blinkingled 6y ago
  > The US has 10-20M people 'off the books' working for crap wages, no health insurance. That is a huge part of why everything is so cheap in America. You assume that middle class Americans are willing, available and able to do those jobs when paid higher wages and benefits. In my many years I have yet to find “Americans” doing roofing jobs for example.
  - dillonmckay 6y ago
    This just depends on the area.
  - SuoDuanDao 6y ago
netsectoday 6y ago
What did I just read? An ex-Amazon employee 'lashing out' by saying that regulators should break up Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, then leave Amazon alone because they will probably 'do the right thing' by spinning-off AWS? That Big Tech shouldn't exist, however, Jeff Bezos is a rounding error? It really sounds like he got paid to write this.
- mcherm 6y ago
  What you just read is an ex-Amazon employee who quite under protest over a principle and has since been hounded by reporters all trying to get him to say that Amazon or Jeff Bezos are the problem (and printing that even if he won't say it) when he actually believes that the entire system is the problem and that Amazon and Jeff Bezos are just symptoms. This essay was written in response to yet another reporter characterizing him as an "Amazon critic".
  - Ghostt8117 6y ago
    He is an Amazon critic. He left the company due to issues with the company but also wants everyone to know that this is not an issue solely with Amazon. To be upset that you are called a critic of a company you criticized is strange. The reporters were writing a story on his criticism of Amazon - not on his views of society. And they included his statement that it is the entire industry to be clear of his opinion. I liked his essay and agree with it as an additional statement of clarifying in his own words, but I do not think the reporters have done anything wrong here.
    - netsectoday 6y ago
      This whole situation seems off. I have quit and been fired in my tech career when taking a strong moral stance against my employers behaviors. To me; this piece was written in an attempt to get his job back. I'd put him closer to the realm of a film critic who only gave the movie one thumb up.
nuker 6y ago
> .. what well-done cloud computing is like. The IT world likes it. Yep, to the extent that its a deal breaker for new jobs. AWS API is awesome. 10yrs cloud engineer here.
woodhull 6y ago
Tim in this piece cites the climate pledge as being an admirable Amazon policy. Unfortunately, it's all lofty language and Amazon lags behind its peers on real action. For the AWS cloud business Amazon lags far behind its peers at Microsoft and Google. Of the three main public clouds AWS is the only one still using coal power (coal is a big part of the power mix for the grid used by their largest point of presence in Northern Virgina). Microsoft and Google have run their data centers completely on renewables and have done so for years. We're stuck on us-east-1 in Northern Virginia for legacy reasons and to make up for the dirty way that Amazon runs its cloud we buy feed-in RECs for the grid where our AWS instances run. AWS could be doing this themselves (there are RECs available! we're buying them!) to help jumpstart the transition to renewables in the energy markets where they operate but they're simply choosing not to spend the money. Microsoft and Google deserve credit for their work in this area and they're doing a much better job. It's just too bad that AWS is a better technical product for our workload.
- somethingwitty1 6y ago
  This feels a bit misleading. Both Microsoft and Google still use fossil fuels for their data centers. I understand the "value" of RECs, but it definitely doesn't mean your data center is actually powered by renewable or "clean" energy, despite it allowing you to claim that. I really wish these companies had to publish the real numbers. That would demotivate them to buy RECs though...so here we are. The climate pledge has started to make an impact: https://climatepledgearena.com/ https://climatepledgearena.com/. And there are plenty of articles that seem to indicate the climate pledge is doing things: https://www.forbes.com/sites/moorinsights/2020/06/30/amazons-climate-pledge-gains-crucial-momentum/#30ff9ef82c82 https://www.forbes.com/sites/moorinsights/2020/06/30/amazons... These might be puff pieces, but at least from reading them, it seems like Amazon is actually moving towards doing things. Not only that, but they are getting other companies to sign the pledge and take action.
  - woodhull 6y ago
    what? Google has been running on 100% renewable electricity since 2017. Microsoft has reached that milestone as well, but I can not find a date for when they achieved it. AWS aspires to eventually reach that goal by 2025. One of the clouds is dirtier than the others.
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
I am so relieved, and happy, to see Tim Bray (of famed XML) tackle this problem with such wisdom and long term view. Yes, Amazon is a problem, and no, it's by far not the only one. I am quite not sure that breaking up big businesses like Amazon and Google will change things much, by the way. And I am not sure that unionizing Amazon would solve much, either. To be honest, I am quite pessimistic about our ability, as a society / human specie, to really solve the inequality problem Tim is mentioning. Sorry I don't have better words to say.
hypertexthero 6y ago
> Every single person in America could be lifted above the poverty line with a one-time cash subsidy of around $10,000 per impoverished family (and about $7,000 for impoverished individuals). The total cost would be $170 billion, a little under 5% of the wealth currently controlled by 400 individuals. From [Wealth, shown to scale](https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/)
- john-shaffer 6y ago
  Although I think UBI might be a good idea, I feel like this talk about "lifting above the poverty line" is meaningless in practice. The poverty line is constantly moving. If everyone got a $10,000 check, the poverty line would be quickly redefined, and not many people "lifted above it" would actually stay above it.
peterwwillis 6y ago
This focus on business and capitalism is just one part of a larger jigsaw puzzle, which is an economy based on American exceptionalism and the American dream. The former states that we must be unique and the best, and the latter states that everyone is able to have a castle, a good job, leisure time, retirement, etc. But they don't explicitly state how we get those things. At no point in the American story does it say that wealth is to be distributed fairly. The past century has shown that as popular revolts upended the old ideas of aristocracy and monarchy, the US elite became extremely fearful of the idea of a more equal society. Communism was the worst specter of this potential loss of personal wealth for the elites, but its modern forms are also increased taxation, universal health care, increased public education/transporation/housing, etc. The more you distribute wealth to the rabble, the less wealth you can have as an individual, and Americanism is all about personal wealth (personal freedom comes largely from personal wealth; you can't even be the king of a puddle if you don't own the land it sits on). It's similar to ancient Rome. The citizens can live quite comfortably as long as they have soldiers, slaves, and foreign riches. The big corporations of today are a modern-day Roman army: roving the world to capture and bring home cheap goods. The generals, senators, and merchants get the majority of the loot, and the citizens get fresh bread and garum, fruit, and the occasional exotic spice. And much like the circuses of Empire, as long as the rabble are kept in bread and games, they'll put up with anything. No health care, no education, 3 jobs? Keep them in bread and games and they'll be satisfied. Netflix provides the circus, Wal-Mart provides the bread. Why would the rabble want them broken up when they're getting exactly what they want? So this notion of fighting the status quo is really anti-American. You can't get far with the argument without butting heads against the fact that people would have to give up their cheap t-shirts, and that some would always have to work hard and live poor their whole lives. There's no way around it: somebody has to pay for our wealth, surplus, and convenience. If it's not us, it'll have to be someone else.
GoodJokes 6y ago
Ex CEO praises Amazon. Lol

> the fabric of society is in danger of breaking Really? That is hyperbolic to me, and I was not as interested in reading the rest of his article after that.

djrobstep 6y ago
If you think that's hyperbolic, consider that current levels of inequality are not dissimilar to that of pre-revolutionary France.
- jjsdflkjsdkkk 6y ago
  Did they have Walmart in pre-revolutionary France? Or maybe that comparison is rather misleading?
  - OpieCunningham 6y ago
    “Walmart is my Soma” would make an excellent t-shirt.
  - djrobstep 6y ago
    I have no idea what you mean.
jsiepkes 6y ago
> Really? That is hyperbolic to me, and I was not as interested in reading the rest of his article after that. That's a shame because if you had continue reading you could have judged if it was really hyperbolic or if there was some truth to it. Besides why even care about some of the conclusions in the piece if you can also absorb the information and form your own conclusions?
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  I did finish the article.
  - bigiain 6y ago
    So you saying "I was not as interested in reading the rest of his article after that" was "exaggerated statement or claim not meant to be taken literally" then?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
bonestormii_ 6y ago
This is a pervasive perspective on HN. Everyone here is so erudite in their mindset, yet they can't observe that a trend of exponential wealth inequality ends with many people being crushed and a few undeserving winners. The language "is in danger of breaking" is frankly dialed down because he is obviously self-conscious about sounding like some wild-eyed radical. The fact is, if this trend isn't checked, there certainly will be a violent break down, which is a corresponding trend that is also growing before our very eyes in the form of BLM protests and the corresponding government response. Violence is not condoned in our society. Therefore, it follows that manifestations of violence are a form of breakage. If such manifestations erupt directly from power/wealth/legal disparities, I'd say Bray's language is a rather mild flavor of perfectly accurate.
- sdfsdsddsddssd 6y ago
  "crushed", "undeserving winners" - people can still be better off than people in the past, despite there being more richer people than them. And what makes you think the winner's wins are "undeserved"? PG literally wrote an essay about it. http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html (not sure if it is the one I meant, but it touches on many of the subjects here. Including the "pie fallacy") In that light, it is more surprising that so many people on HN are in favor of socialism.
  - jazzyjackson 6y ago
    Look up any lectures by Hans Rosling to understand why wealth inequality is bad. Unequal societies are less trusting and have all kinds of bad outcomes in healthcare and education. Besides, what's the use of being a billionaire if you can't enjoy a night out on the town without fear of being robbed and killed by the jealous proles? Note this does not imply socialism or expanding safety nets -- I was thinking more of very progressive taxes that fund public infrastructure, green energy, public transportation, public parks and water catchments, the kind of thing that makes the world better for everyone - rich folk inclusive.
  - cycomanic 6y ago
    Well there is sufficient evidence that the pie is not getting bigger for everyone (see e.g. Thomas Piketty's research amongst others). Inequality is increasing and that is dangerous to society. To give you another example, in the 1920s 1930s economists (Keynes amongst others) made projects that by 2020 we would only work 15h a week or less and there was discussion if this would become a problem for society (because people typically want to work). However, this did not happen, why? Because the benefits of improved efficiency etc. flowed to fewer and fewer people. Regarding the winners being undeserved: 1. It can be shown that just using chance (or slightly unequal starting conditions) simple economic systems develop into a state where there is one player who essentially owns all (I linked to the article earlier [1]). So yes it can be just chance. 2. Once the winners have sufficient power they will game the system in their favour. There's lots of evidence for this, just look at the Panama papers for example. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465446
emptyparadise 6y ago
I suggest taking a look at American news for the past couple of months - the protests, the rising unemployment, continuing political polarization. I believe that is what the author was referring to. It is a US-centric take, but one that can be forgiven given that it is a blog post about an American developer dealing with American companies and American journalists.
Lazare 6y ago
That's your concern? Really? I'm not sure I agree with the rest of the article; it made some bad points and some good ones. And I certainly don't think it's clear that the fabric of society is in danger of breaking for the exact reasons the author listed, and that this can be solved by adoption the exact solutions the author advocates for. (Again, I'm not saying it's not true, just that I remain unconvinced.) But... ...it's pretty god damn clear that the fabric of society is in danger of breaking down, certainly in the context of the US, and arguably in the context of the West as a whole. Glance at the news, fill in your own list: Covid, antivaxxers, Portland, deficits, pension crisis at state and local government level, the increasing partisan divide, the collapse of the business models of traditional media, rampant conspiracy theories, BLM riots, anti-protect violence from the police, the balkanization of the news people consume, Trump, collapsing trust in institutions, increasing politicization of the courts, the stunning lack of Senate confirmed appointees in the current administration, etc., we could go on. At some point we're going to get a Covid vaccine, and we're going to need to launch a massive nation-wide vaccination campaign, but in the current climate literally everything is partisan, a decent chunk of the population has convinced themselves Covid is a hoax, people are resorting to violence when asked to wear a mask. How's that vaccination campaign going to go? Meanwhile the economy is lurching towwards a cliff. When Covid hit the US, it was at the end of the longest economic expansion in US history, but rather than store up resources for the inevitable contraction, the US was running unprecedented deficits. Now Covid has hit; what happens next? Especially if societal dysfunction prevents a coordinated response? And so on, and so forth. I mean, obviously everything could be fine, but if your concern is that "the fabric of society is in danger of breaking" is just too hyperbolic, I think you need to open your eyes. You can point fingers where you like (and we do, which is a big part of the problem!) but regardless of who is to blame, things are not good.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > Glance at the news, fill in your own list That's the point of "the news" though: to keep you engaged by providing a daily crisis for you to worry about, because that makes you watch thew news. If one crisis goes away, or viewers get bored of it, a new one pops up and the old one is gone. Remember how we were supposedly "this close" to ww3 in February or March because of Iran? Monster Of The Week Shows need monsters or they lose their audience.
whymauri 6y ago
We are currently in: (1) A global pandemic. (2) A massive protest movement. (3) The wake of what will soon be millions of evictions, not to mention the current unemployment rate and the effects we're seeing on wealth inequality. (4) On the inevitable track of climate change displacing tens of millions to hundreds of millions of people. This branch will also lead to some supply-chain and food management issues I cannot even fathom. (5) A concerning increase in polarization and even fascism. Increasing distrust in science and decreasing certainty in our news sources. Just off the top of my head.

tracer4201 6y ago

Page doesn’t load for me. Can anyone summarize?

ciprian_craciun 6y ago
Basically it's a reaction to an NY Times article (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/technology/amazon-critic-tim-bray.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/technology/amazon-critic-...) that (according to Tim) misleads the reader into thinking he's "anti Amazon". In the "reply" for Tim he states both positive and negative things about Amazon. However his main issue is with the monopoly of big tech-giants. If the original link doesn't open, then you can use the Internet Archive's copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20200728052705/https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/07/23/Not-an-Amazon-Problem https://web.archive.org/web/20200728052705/https://www.tbray...
thomasmeeks 6y ago
Basically Amazon is a symptom of global wealth inequality. He’s making the point that no company the size of Amazon, and no person as rich as Bezos, should exist. The bulk of the article laments the reality that the media, writ large, wants to report on “Tim vs Jeff”, not on “wealth inequality is out of control and we need to at least break up tech darlings, maybe much more.”

deanCommie 6y ago

I admire Tim Bray's contributions to our industry, his tireless pursuit to use his privilige and status to advocate for improvements to diversity and inclusion. I also believe in his genuine reasons and motivations for resigning, and the integrity it showed. (Obligatory: yes, he's in his 60s who's made millions, at some point you gotta retire, and it's easy to show integrity when you clearly don't need to work again) Having said that, I'm kind of surprised he's surprised by the overall reaction that he got when he quit, and in interviews since then. It's popular, easy, and desirable to dunk on Amazon. It's the best form of mainstream journalistic clickbait because it brings in and unites the left (who want improved worker rights, and Jeff B is a poster child for wealth imbalance) and the right (who are mad at Jeff's perceived left-leaning politics and criticism of Donald Trump via the Washington Post). It is NOT popular to question the very fabric of our western capitalism. Overtures about unsustainable wealth inequality do not resonate well in the mainstream. At the fringes, the right blames the rest of the world, and looks to isolate; the left is readying the guillotines. I think Tim should have known that his message would be misconstrued by both other Amazonians who remained and wrote defensive blog posts, and the rest of the world who's holding him up as some Anti-Amazon Crusader. I believe his mistake was to immediately start talking about worker's rights when his actual ethical qualm was about the chilling effect of silencing whistleblowers. But...then he wouldn't have had the NYTimes writing follow ups months later.

pm90 6y ago
The ability to not be punished for speaking out as a worker is precisely one of the worker rights that he is seeking to protect.
- deanCommie 6y ago
  Technically the fired whistleblowers were cushy whitecollar office workers. Yes, i know i just said "worker" but that's not really what we all imagine when we think about Amazon workers that need more protections.
  - kennywinker 6y ago

jjsdflkjsdkkk 6y ago

"It was called the Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal consensus, and it was wrapped up with lots of high-flying rhetoric about this freedom and that dynamism and those flexibilities, but you don’t have to be that cynical to see it as good old-fashioned class war. It’s obvious who’s winning." Since Reagon was president, the US population has grown by 82 Million people (32% increase). At the same time, jobs went to China and so on. Is it certain that Reagan is to blame, and how? What if poor people just stopped having kids? Why is it assumed that there are good paying jobs for everybody, no matter how many people there are? Where do they come from?

malka 6y ago
People like having kids. Unemployment, especially future one is not a concern with this.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  Are you saying it is wise to have a child if you are unemployed? I dont understand your point.
  - malka 6y ago
    No i say for a lot of people it is not a factor. They want kids. Because having a kid is an experience most human seem to want. If bad socio economic situation prevented people from making kids, humanity would have been extinct for quite a while.
- nine_k 6y ago
  People who like having kids usually plan well ahead, because they care about the kids' future life. But some people can't help but have kids, because contraception is either not uniformly applied / accessible, or due to religion prohibiting contraception. I bet that the lower is one's socioeconomic status, the harder it is to control childbirth, just because it's expensive. So even if having (one more) child would make life obviously hard(er) for the parent(s) and the child alike, there can just be not enough money to prevent it.

thomasmeeks 6y ago

So I agree with Tim, and in a way he’d probably find too radical. But for the hacker news crowd, I’d point to this: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/the-real-class-war/ https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/the-real-class-wa... TL;DR the income growth of the 0.1% is having a chilling effect on mid-level executives at Amazon and Google, too.

082349872349872 6y ago
Interesting breakdown: 1% eponymous class 9% professional elite 90% working class That's actually more skewed than the society described in 1984[1]: 2% inner party 13% outer party 85% proletariat Note that the 2% keeps the 13% toeing the party line (they don't have to amongst themselves, and proles are explicitly said to be free) to avoid any sort of Manor Farm pigs[2] getting funny ideas. IngSoc only had one party, but if one allows two outer parties, nominally opposed to each other, one may discover they each spontaneously self-police their own thought criminals. [1] I've always thought of 1984 as being a very anglophone sort of dystopia, but now I believe Orwell was writing therapeutically, cathartically imagining a world in which the social constructs of his second-rate english boarding school applied to the whole of society. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23825457 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23825457 [2] if Orwell had channelled PG, his labels would be: dogs pigs aggressive sheep donkeys passive orthodox heterodox

lvs 6y ago

Capitalism is just an algorithm. It's only an ideology if you make it one. It's just a system of allocation and ownership that has clear tendencies and side-effects, well understood for many decades. The experiment has shown that, as the system evolves, it doesn't have a stable state. One needs to bolt on additional controls to try to keep it in a stable state, or else one gets concentration of wealth and power. All the symptoms of that are pretty obvious with endless spilled ink. I really don't think this stuff should be controversial to people who are normally thinking about the behavior of complex systems.

pm90 6y ago
Most people aren’t thinking about the behavior of complex systems and to those this presents a good perspective. Anti Government propaganda is pretty widespread today and one of the ways to counter it is by espousing the benefits of the principles which a healthy, functioning Government provides to society.
- kennywinker 6y ago
  Anti-gov sentiment is also there in part because at this point the government is usually in the position of siding with and protecting corporate interests, rather than serving the people.
parkersweb 6y ago
Given that Monopoly was invented in 1903 to illustrate that exact point we’ve been living with that knowledge for some time. Problem is - those is a position to enact changes are generally those benefitting most from it and therefore the least willing. What seems to have changed in UK and US politics in recent years is those who have benefitted most from the current system have persuaded those who have most to gain that they’re on the same side.
blargmaster33 6y ago
WORNG!! You are just makeing up excuses for government power.
cycomanic 6y ago

nurettin 6y ago

> The company is working hard on Diversity & Inclusion As a foreigner, I am trying to understand this statement. You've got a bag with 100 marbles. 50 blue, 40 red, 10 white. HR needs to pick 15 marbles. Does the HR try to pick all marbles equally? So 50% of whites, 10% of blues, 12.5% of reds is chosen. Doesn't seem fair to blues and reds.

Ivoirians 6y ago
The real-life goal is closer to "HR picks 7 blue, 6 red, 2 white instead of 10 blue, 5 red, 0 white".
deanCommie 6y ago
This assumes that hiring is random. It's not. If hiring was truly random, and the percentages of the population reflected the makeup of the workforce, we wouldn't have a problem. But hiring is based on subjective evaluations of the marble's merits. And it turns out that there are inherent implicit bias in how we evaluate these marbles. One other important detail is that hiring isn't a one step process - you see 100 candidates, and you pick 15. Instead it's more like you see 10,000 candidates. You pick 1000 from that based on high level non-data driven heuristics, resume reviews, gut feel, and tea leaves. You put the 1000 through an impersonal online test to whittle it down to 100. Then you actually think about who to hire. A massive Part of Diversity and Inclusion initiatives is to question how we whittle down those marbles, and if it is essentially random at the start, but with some anti-racial bias, what would happen if we gave the chance to let people who have been historically disenfranchised an opportunity to get deeper in the process. The last step would still always be ultimately entirely merit based, but up until that point there are variables to play with. But my dude, it's 2020, if you're still asking these questions it's because of deliberately willful ignorance - all this information is out there. You don't have to come in with such basic misunderstandings of how this works.
- nurettin 6y ago
  I am aware how HR works, the question was about the whittled down 100. Appreciate the word salad, though.

emptyparadise 6y ago

The promise of capitalism for the average person (as opposed to an economist or a business proprietor) was the ability to vote with your wallet, be it through deciding what to buy or who to work for. You still often hear that message from people who are less aware of the dark clouds up above: "just buy a different product" or "just quit and get a new job" - but centralization and monopolization make either impossible. Monopolies have an unfair amount of leverage in this game that must be dealt with. Bring in corporate breakups, bring in increased leverage for the workers (it's time to say the u-word), and maybe, just maybe, we can salvage this system yet. I don't know about you, but it was the dream of making the world better for everyone and not just a handful of CEOs that sold me on the tech industry. I sure would like for that dream to come true, no matter how many zeroes in valuation it costs.

luckylion 6y ago
And when everyone is fed, housed, clothed and given a smart phone, somebody will still stay "but is the world actually better? Look, inequality is still a thing, that guy has a much better smartphone." You can't remove capitalism from the last few centuries of massive progress and just say "it would have happened without it as well".
- Apocryphon 6y ago
  Why don't we first work to make that future into a reality, and then argue?
  - luckylion 6y ago
    We have been for quite a while, and we're getting closer every year. Come join us and help.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- emptyparadise 6y ago

toohotatopic 6y ago

How do you create planetary structures but with super-companies and rich people? People don't innovate by themselves. The workers and/or engineers of the US or the world could have pooled their money and built AWS or space rockets, or electric cars. But they haven't. It takes money and actions from few people to get stuff done.

praptak 6y ago
They have, in the form of government programs. Moon exploration or the internet didn't need super-companies or ultra rich people.
- function_seven 6y ago
  And private programs can still succeed without extracting every last bit of margin for the owners. Governments can create and fund programs to do these large-scale projects. They can also leave it to private industry to do so as well, but with strong protections for workers, the unions they may want to form, and the living conditions of all participants (employee, supplier, miner, etc.), domestic and foreign.
- callamdelaney 6y ago
  Didn't NASA pay private companies billions to build and provide a significant proportion of the hardware, software and science required for these missions?
starfallg 6y ago
You are conflating innovation with disruption. Space rockets - done before by the state. Commercialising it is disruption. Electric cars - done before and lost in the market due to battery tech (lithium tech research has been funded also publicaly) AWS - co-opting open source software and turning it into a service isn't exactly innovation. But scaling it up to such a degrees is market disruption. You don't need huge amount of capital to be innovative, people naturally are. But you need a system to roll-out innovations and when you do this at scale, it becomes disruptive. VC and tech giant funding brings this forward but societal change is mainly driven by technology, not by capital.

Animats 6y ago

In fact, life for the US working class these days is shitty, and it’s not by accident, it’s by design. It was called the Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal consensus, and it was wrapped up with lots of high-flying rhetoric about this freedom and that dynamism and those flexibilities, but you don’t have to be that cynical to see it as good old-fashioned class war. It’s obvious who’s winning. Yes. Back in the 1970s, the working class was winning. Working class wages were going up 3x faster than CEO wages. The average employee at an auto factory could afford a house, a car, a non-working wife, a college education for his kids, and a good retirement. That had to stop. So a plan was put together by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell.[1] This is the actual memo.[2] It's worth reading. Before this, businesses did not lobby much, except over narrow issues. This got the U.S. Chamber of Commmerce into lobbying for business vs labor on a broad front, with funding from big companies. It worked. Near total victory over union power in the private sector has been achieved in the US. The 8 hour day, the 40 hour week, and the minimum wage have been made ineffective. Funded retirement plans are history. "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever." became national policy. Marketed as "individual rights" and "opportunity", of course. [1] https://billmoyers.com/content/the-powell-memo-a-call-to-arms-for-corporations/ https://billmoyers.com/content/the-powell-memo-a-call-to-arm... [2] https://d1uu3oy1fdfoio.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Lewis-Powell-Memo.pdf https://d1uu3oy1fdfoio.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/201...

whymauri 6y ago
>Marketed as "individual rights" and "opportunity", of course. This is what happens when the concept of "individual rights" is directly substituted for the "individual right to choose what you consume" without any regard for any other individual rights, even those which are supposedly hallmarks of the U.S. like voting rights. The more I think about this, the more I'm reminded of Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent.
- amatecha 6y ago
  Precisely... for example, how about the right to privacy? It feels practically non-existent in North America (not so sure about elsewhere). As far as I've observed, it's essentially ignored in the vast majority of situations, to the degree that people treat you like you're paranoid if you even raise the subject.

bawolff 6y ago

I feel like this isn't terribly compelling. I have heard the whole corporations are evil and primarily look out for their own best interest before. I think people have been talking about this for over a century now. I don't even disagree (at most, i might say the truth is more complicated, but it always is). I guess the article leaves me thinking, so what do you want to do instead? Communist revolution? Anarchist utopia? The article posits that we should break up some specificly named corporations, but doesn't even give a criteria as to why those corps, other than i suppose the author dislikes them. Why them and not others? What's the objective criteria?

kuu 6y ago
You know that between the capitalism now working in the US and the "Communist revolution? Anarchist utopia?" there is a wide range of options, right? Based not only in your comments, I feel that you in the US are really afraid of the socialism and communism that you're not going to progress at all in the direction of such ideologies which care more of the people in general than the specific individual. You have the example of Europe, with several countries with social democratic parties that are doing much better than you in social justice and well being, and still you're with the US cold war mentality. You still think the 'commies' are coming... With that attitude/mentality I feel you cannot change much.
- bawolff 6y ago
  I am not in the usa. I agree there are lots of options. The article would be compelling if the author picked an option and argued for it. Vauge negative statements about the status quo that nobody disagrees with are not compelling. Positions that can be defended and argued for/against are. Anyone can preach to the choir.
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    The author is in the US, where (if the online world can be trusted) there are many, if not a majority of, people who disagree with his position. I recently got a letter from a centre-right party president reminding everyone about the part of our constitution which says a society is judged by how it treats its weakest members. I believe that'd be considered pinko-commie talk in the states. Bray left AMZN on 1 May. I gather that date is significant to US people, because he's calling for potential legal reforms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Day_(United_States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Day_(United_States)

wayanon 6y ago

People won’t pay more if there’s a choice.

OrangeKnucles 6y ago

Poor Americans are the envy of the rest of the world. They get paid $15 plus tips for filling up a glass with beer. Boomers were lucky because their parents won the war and the rest of the world was either rebuilding or was hobbled by communism/socialism. Once China and other Asian countries opened up their economies, everything which could be done there was done there. In the long run, Asians and Americans will earn the same money for the same job.

ghostcluster 6y ago

Breaking up US tech companies will cede power to their Chinese competitors. Alibaba will have the advantage. And breaking up the phone company didn't improve anything. We just got AT&T again from their well-performing Texas shard. Companies need to be regulated to provide the services the author is looking for.

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baq 6y ago
Chinese companies aren't competitors because the playing field isn't even. For all intents and purposes Chinese companies are Chinese government.
scollet 6y ago
Why?
WalterBright 6y ago
Every country in the world would do a great deal to get a FAANG company native to their turf. But here in America we want to wreck them. Sigh. Now that fractional shares can be bought with no commission, essentially everyone who wants to can invest in those FAANG companies and get returns on capital. They're better than lottery tickets (a popular "investment" for the poor).
- TMWNN 6y ago
  > Every country in the world would do a great deal to get a FAANG company native to their turf. But here in America we want to wreck them. Sigh. Harry Truman said in 1945 about the atomic bomb, "We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies". I feel the same way about FAANG and Silicon Valley as a whole (and Wall Street, and Hollywood, and SpaceX/Tesla, and the Ivy League), that they are in the United States. That doesn't mean I approve of everything they do. That doesn't mean I can't or won't decry their putting thumbs on scales toward a certain type of bien-pensant ideology. That does mean that, overall, I am very, very glad that they are American instead of Russian, Chinese, or even British, French, or German.

ridaj 6y ago

> [With] all his billions, Jeff is rounding error in the big picture. He’s not the problem; the legal/regulatory power structures that enable him and his peers is. > Amazon is a perfectly OK company, to the extent that planetary-scale sprawling corporate behemoths can be perfectly OK in 2020. Which is to say, not OK at all. Very well put - if Amazon wasn't around, the system all but guarantees that some other company would play the same kind of role. "Hate the game, don't hate the player"

scollet 6y ago
Or multiple players. That's empty.

silvestrov 6y ago

> the Google/Facebook ad cartel is rapidly destroying publishing business models that have been essential to civilized human dicourse and > every reporter I’ve talked to has tried to get me to say awful things about Amazon and in particular about Jeff Bezos. But at my last job they taught me to think big and, with all his billions, Jeff is rounding error in the big picture. This sounds like the media business needs a reboot and that we only ascribe such a high value to it because we didn't get a look into the sausage factory before. We belived the nice stories the journalists told about themselves. Today we can read what Tim Bray thinks about his interaction with journalists. Before the internet he would never had been able to communicate this to people in the rest of the world.

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WalterBright 6y ago

> carbon-vomiting oil extractors Language like that discredits the whole article as a hysterical piece. In any case, oil extractors are in business only because ordinary people want gasoline to drive their cars.

blub 6y ago
A single phrase does not justify dismissing an entire article, unless one is looking for excuses for doing so.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  That isn't the only such phrase in it. As a general rule, people use such phrases to cover for a weak, poorly argued case. It's a tell. It's like what a lawyer told me once: 1. If the law is on your side, argue the law. 2. If justice is on your side, argue for justice. 3. If neither the law nor justice is on your side, call the other party names. Yet I did read the whole article, and found it weak and poorly argued. His specific point about vomit was also weak and poorly argued, as I pointed out. A word to the wise - if you want thoughtful people to read an article, don't use such phrases. I'm hardly the only person to point this out.
  - java_script 6y ago
    OTOH all he had to do was throw in a quick throw away phrase and it was like a tarpit for you. You were so hung up on it you never got to explaining why his post was poorly argued.
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      > OTOH all he had to do was throw in a quick throw away phrase He did it repeatedly in the article. > why his post was poorly argued I pointed out that he neglected to account for why the oil companies existed - because people want gasoline. It isn't the oil companies emitting CO2, it's the gas consumers.
  - 6y ago

jariel 6y ago

It's maybe worth considering that the surpluses generated from globalism are not being distributed evenly. It doesn't mean that the standard of living of any group is going down. I rarely go to Walmart, but every few years I do in the USA, and it constantly blows my mind. The quantity, price and quality of 'stuff' in there ... you can live extremely well compared to anyone in 1970 just off Walmart. I submit that the surpluses are going to consumers, but because we don't price them (i.e. the added value to you in savings or quality doesn't go on the books), it's not part of the equation. At least in most material ways, the Western World's 'cup runneth over with stuff' ... a lot of which we do not need and is therefore luxury. The financial profits stack up in the top 10%. It's unsustainable, but it's not all bad news. The other 'Elephant in the Room' nobody will talk about are the surpluses to middle class yielded form undocumented workers. The US has 10-20M people 'off the books' working for crap wages, no health insurance. That is a huge part of why everything is so cheap in America. Particularly food and restaurants (the whole value chain is migrant workers it seems). The #1 thing America could do to reduce inequality would be to force companies to pay a real minimum wage. 1/2 the undocumented workers would be out of a job, the others would see pay increases. All jobs have to come with healthcare, or at least pay enough such that the income can cover a basic healthcare.gov package or else - what's the point? Collect taxes and redistribute via medicare? Taxation at the high end could be increased somewhat. Pushing some of those surpluses into the hands of working people would be a massive boon for the economy.

blinkingled 6y ago
> The US has 10-20M people 'off the books' working for crap wages, no health insurance. That is a huge part of why everything is so cheap in America. You assume that middle class Americans are willing, available and able to do those jobs when paid higher wages and benefits. In my many years I have yet to find “Americans” doing roofing jobs for example.
- dillonmckay 6y ago
  This just depends on the area.
- SuoDuanDao 6y ago

netsectoday 6y ago

What did I just read? An ex-Amazon employee 'lashing out' by saying that regulators should break up Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, then leave Amazon alone because they will probably 'do the right thing' by spinning-off AWS? That Big Tech shouldn't exist, however, Jeff Bezos is a rounding error? It really sounds like he got paid to write this.

mcherm 6y ago
What you just read is an ex-Amazon employee who quite under protest over a principle and has since been hounded by reporters all trying to get him to say that Amazon or Jeff Bezos are the problem (and printing that even if he won't say it) when he actually believes that the entire system is the problem and that Amazon and Jeff Bezos are just symptoms. This essay was written in response to yet another reporter characterizing him as an "Amazon critic".
- Ghostt8117 6y ago
  He is an Amazon critic. He left the company due to issues with the company but also wants everyone to know that this is not an issue solely with Amazon. To be upset that you are called a critic of a company you criticized is strange. The reporters were writing a story on his criticism of Amazon - not on his views of society. And they included his statement that it is the entire industry to be clear of his opinion. I liked his essay and agree with it as an additional statement of clarifying in his own words, but I do not think the reporters have done anything wrong here.
  - netsectoday 6y ago
    This whole situation seems off. I have quit and been fired in my tech career when taking a strong moral stance against my employers behaviors. To me; this piece was written in an attempt to get his job back. I'd put him closer to the realm of a film critic who only gave the movie one thumb up.

nuker 6y ago

> .. what well-done cloud computing is like. The IT world likes it. Yep, to the extent that its a deal breaker for new jobs. AWS API is awesome. 10yrs cloud engineer here.

woodhull 6y ago

Tim in this piece cites the climate pledge as being an admirable Amazon policy. Unfortunately, it's all lofty language and Amazon lags behind its peers on real action. For the AWS cloud business Amazon lags far behind its peers at Microsoft and Google. Of the three main public clouds AWS is the only one still using coal power (coal is a big part of the power mix for the grid used by their largest point of presence in Northern Virgina). Microsoft and Google have run their data centers completely on renewables and have done so for years. We're stuck on us-east-1 in Northern Virginia for legacy reasons and to make up for the dirty way that Amazon runs its cloud we buy feed-in RECs for the grid where our AWS instances run. AWS could be doing this themselves (there are RECs available! we're buying them!) to help jumpstart the transition to renewables in the energy markets where they operate but they're simply choosing not to spend the money. Microsoft and Google deserve credit for their work in this area and they're doing a much better job. It's just too bad that AWS is a better technical product for our workload.

somethingwitty1 6y ago
This feels a bit misleading. Both Microsoft and Google still use fossil fuels for their data centers. I understand the "value" of RECs, but it definitely doesn't mean your data center is actually powered by renewable or "clean" energy, despite it allowing you to claim that. I really wish these companies had to publish the real numbers. That would demotivate them to buy RECs though...so here we are. The climate pledge has started to make an impact: https://climatepledgearena.com/ https://climatepledgearena.com/. And there are plenty of articles that seem to indicate the climate pledge is doing things: https://www.forbes.com/sites/moorinsights/2020/06/30/amazons-climate-pledge-gains-crucial-momentum/#30ff9ef82c82 https://www.forbes.com/sites/moorinsights/2020/06/30/amazons... These might be puff pieces, but at least from reading them, it seems like Amazon is actually moving towards doing things. Not only that, but they are getting other companies to sign the pledge and take action.
- woodhull 6y ago
  what? Google has been running on 100% renewable electricity since 2017. Microsoft has reached that milestone as well, but I can not find a date for when they achieved it. AWS aspires to eventually reach that goal by 2025. One of the clouds is dirtier than the others.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

I am so relieved, and happy, to see Tim Bray (of famed XML) tackle this problem with such wisdom and long term view. Yes, Amazon is a problem, and no, it's by far not the only one. I am quite not sure that breaking up big businesses like Amazon and Google will change things much, by the way. And I am not sure that unionizing Amazon would solve much, either. To be honest, I am quite pessimistic about our ability, as a society / human specie, to really solve the inequality problem Tim is mentioning. Sorry I don't have better words to say.

hypertexthero 6y ago

> Every single person in America could be lifted above the poverty line with a one-time cash subsidy of around $10,000 per impoverished family (and about $7,000 for impoverished individuals). The total cost would be $170 billion, a little under 5% of the wealth currently controlled by 400 individuals. From [Wealth, shown to scale](https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/)

john-shaffer 6y ago
Although I think UBI might be a good idea, I feel like this talk about "lifting above the poverty line" is meaningless in practice. The poverty line is constantly moving. If everyone got a $10,000 check, the poverty line would be quickly redefined, and not many people "lifted above it" would actually stay above it.

peterwwillis 6y ago

This focus on business and capitalism is just one part of a larger jigsaw puzzle, which is an economy based on American exceptionalism and the American dream. The former states that we must be unique and the best, and the latter states that everyone is able to have a castle, a good job, leisure time, retirement, etc. But they don't explicitly state how we get those things. At no point in the American story does it say that wealth is to be distributed fairly. The past century has shown that as popular revolts upended the old ideas of aristocracy and monarchy, the US elite became extremely fearful of the idea of a more equal society. Communism was the worst specter of this potential loss of personal wealth for the elites, but its modern forms are also increased taxation, universal health care, increased public education/transporation/housing, etc. The more you distribute wealth to the rabble, the less wealth you can have as an individual, and Americanism is all about personal wealth (personal freedom comes largely from personal wealth; you can't even be the king of a puddle if you don't own the land it sits on). It's similar to ancient Rome. The citizens can live quite comfortably as long as they have soldiers, slaves, and foreign riches. The big corporations of today are a modern-day Roman army: roving the world to capture and bring home cheap goods. The generals, senators, and merchants get the majority of the loot, and the citizens get fresh bread and garum, fruit, and the occasional exotic spice. And much like the circuses of Empire, as long as the rabble are kept in bread and games, they'll put up with anything. No health care, no education, 3 jobs? Keep them in bread and games and they'll be satisfied. Netflix provides the circus, Wal-Mart provides the bread. Why would the rabble want them broken up when they're getting exactly what they want? So this notion of fighting the status quo is really anti-American. You can't get far with the argument without butting heads against the fact that people would have to give up their cheap t-shirts, and that some would always have to work hard and live poor their whole lives. There's no way around it: somebody has to pay for our wealth, surplus, and convenience. If it's not us, it'll have to be someone else.

GoodJokes 6y ago

Ex CEO praises Amazon. Lol