You think the average HN employee works shifts at Wal-mart? No, it's people here cheering other's exploitation (in the name of the mythical "freedom").
And your assumption that employee is even allowed a cost/benefit option is based on... ?
All of this hypothetical except for the fact that Wal-Mart is known for a) ruthless schedule management like keeping workers locked in warehouses b) a known price-cutter both on vendors and employees to the point their employees often qualify for state aid for under-employed / under-paid (i.e., welfare benefits).
Given that, it'd be surprising if an non-exploitative option will be available for the workers who will be doing these deliveries.
> And your assumption that employee is even allowed a cost/benefit option is based on... ?
I'm not assuming anything, I'm giving Walmart the benefit of the doubt. As you said, "we'll see", no need to shit on them providing their employees with an additional revenue stream before the program is even implemented.
Are you operating on old assumptions? The average hourly wage is $13.38 for full-time workers and $10.58 per hour for part-timers [1]. Not bad for unskilled labor.
Is this sarcasm? "Of course" makes it sound like it is, because it's certainly not obvious, but you know, Poe's law, and you linked to it.
If it's not, I'm curious why this theory holds so much sway for some people, given its glaring flaws. Maybe I'm just misunderstanding what it's saying, but just because an engineer can add $1M in marginal revenue to Google's bottom line absolutely does not mean they deserve $1M in salary, because they can only do that using the construct that was created by the other engineers at Google in order to make that much money for Google. If they couldn't make that $1M on their own without the rest of Google's help - the existing brand, infrastructure, and ideas when they join - they're not being "exploited", especially if they're also shareholders. And the longer you spend there, the larger a shareholder you become (unless you choose to sell your share to someone else, which many do).
And to say that the value of a product can be based on how much labor it took to make is completely insane - mud piles can take tons of labor to make, but they're usually also completely useless. The amount of effort expended did not imbue those mud piles with any sort of value to anyone.
This isn't to say that I think the current ownership structures of companies is ideal and can't be improved upon, I don't think that. But I find what you linked to be filled with such flawed reasoning that I'm curious what people see in it. Or maybe it requires operating under different axioms.
Walmart has not earned that benefit of the doubt. Given that it is Walmart, the default is to assume that it will be exploitative until proven otherwise.
I've only heard good things about Costco. I wouldn't give Costco the benefit of the doubt. Every company (except nonprofits) exists to accrue profit. There's no other factor. They do not have any interest in mind than profit. I definitely assume the worst from Walmart.
I know you couldn't resist injecting an anti-car barb in there but it makes no sense - the problem in the US isn't our "abusive relationship" with cars, it's insufficient infrastructure. Your magical public-transportation future will be ever bit as bad or worse than cars today if the government similarly underfunds it. Which they will.
In addition to what someone else who replied to you said about number of games, I also was listening to something recently talking about how much energy had to go into building one device that could beat humans at one task. Today and for the near future it's not a sustainable model at-scale.
I'm developing a theory that America's thoughts on what technology is capable of swings wildly between two poles (possibly with every generation?): A strong luddite streak that pooh-pooh's technology, followed by a ridiculous fantasy that technology can do everything. We're firmly entrenched in cycle "B" right now; their Martian colonies is our true AI.
We think everything is just around the corner because so much has changed over the last few decades, without realizing that those changes have only come in certain areas, while the rest of the technical world is proceeding along at a much slower, more methodical pace.
I saw an ELI5 post the other day from someone on Reddit asking what air traffic controllers did, that software couldn't do better. I actually had to sit for a moment and ponder the person (almost certainly a youth, admittedly) who thinks we're already at the point on the futurism curve where the task of safely coordinating air (or any!) traffic is better done by a computer than a person. They just couldn't wrap their heads around the idea that a group of trained people, in 2017, with advanced software and visualization tools at their disposal, might be better at that than a computer acting on its own.
The example fits elegantly because I do think AR is in our future (and our present) and I'm absolutely thrilled about what it's going to bring to the world. But the idea that we're going to replace (waste) the meat computer in our heads - let alone that we can - within the next few... What, years? Decades?
Anything in that timeline seems ridiculous to me, and not because I can't imagine such an incredible and future, but because I know how the technology works, I know how far away it is from replacing (not augmenting, which again is today and I think has a rich future ahead of it) human brains and senses. Yes, automation is going to replace all our jobs, and also the sun is going to burn up someday. We need to prepare for both - arguably the former more adroitly than the latter - at a pace that makes sense both for humanity today and humanity in the future.
I think you might misunderstand the statistic. He's saying one out of every 70 deaths. If there were only 70 deaths a year, one would be from a car accident. Far more would be from
suicide, cancer, and heart disease.
I grasp that. ~1.5% of deaths is a significant number. People worry about getting brain cancer or being struck by lightning more than they worry about the risk of being annihilated by a machine, despite the latter being more common.
Agreed. Japan is the size of California, demographically dying, and can't even feed itself as it's a net importer of food / energy. It's also basically a protectorate of the US.
Globalization, the rise of China, and the dismantling of the West's manufacturing (and now intellectual) supremacy in exchange for quarterly profits is a real problem.
I love suburbs. They get lots of hate here but I'd take one over a city in a heartbeat. I like doing things that require garages and back yards and sheds.
What are you talking about? Every time I've lived in a suburb, I've had neighbors with incessantly barking dogs. Suburbs have been some of the noisiest places I've ever been between all the stupid dogs, the constant noise of lawn mowers and leaf blowers, and all the idiots with noisy motorcycles and big trucks and modified compact cars.
I'll take an occasional dog bark or lawn mower noise (usually during the day time) instead of traffic noise, sirens, yelling, loud music, wondering if my car will be vandalized, etc. And aren't modified compact cars more of an urban thing? Mostly SUVs and minivans around here.
It wasn't occasional dog barking, it was constant, going on for hours.
Add to that one neighbor who had a stupid pit bull that got out a lot, and bit two people.
On top of that, at one place I had neighbors across the street who had some stupid friends who drove up every day to pick up someone and honked their horn until that person came out of the house.
No, modified compact cars are a suburban thing. It's hard for a young person to modify their car when they don't have a garage. You can't modify your car with some POS muffler in a high-rise.
My girlfriend lives in a high-rise in a city. While there are occasional sirens and the regular sound of the subway train, there's no real traffic noise (not close enough to the freeway for that, this is pretty low-traffic residential), and certainly no yelling or loud music, and with the parking being in a parking garage with keycard access there's no worry about car vandalism either. I don't see any shitty modified compact cars there either. Overall, she seems to have less annoying noise than I had to deal with in my suburban homes that I used to live in. I'll take train noise over barking dogs any time. I don't know what the problem is with so many Americans that they just love the sound of dogs barking their heads off for hours and hours. But I only have seen this in suburbs and rural areas, never cities.
