12.02.13
Empire of Bezos Misdirection Play
Classic Culture of Lickspittle. When the bad press starts piling up about digital sweat-shopping, underpaying and overworking labor in the fulfillment warehouses until they drop, air out some absurd thing, yell “innovation,” and hope it will distract everyone from all the crap reality.
On 60 Minutes, which I don’t watch, but you couldn’t miss the spillover — Bezos Delivery Drones for Amazon!
An “image of ingenuity,” a journalist who’s recently published a book about the E of B, calls it:
Dispatching an aerial vehicle for each individual order does not seem very efficient, particularly in high-density urban areas or during peak shopping seasons … Many customers this holiday season are considering the character of the companies where they spend their hard-earned dollars. Amazon would rather customers consider the new products and inventions coming down the pipeline and not the ramifications of its ever-accelerating, increasingly disruptive business model.
Put less diplomatically, it’s bullshit.
Disruptive. I’ll tell you what’s disruptive. Mass mechanizing work for dimes and then authorizing the employers to pay slow, or not pay at all, if they don’t like the cut of it.
Just think how well the Christmas season would work if retailers unilaterally turned off some checks for staff if they didn’t like how shopping was going during the season?
And I still haven’t been paid for my four hours of Thanksgiving weekend work (averaging 45 cents a job, 90 cents — or a third of what it should be — 2 of 6 — in the bag on Mechanical Turk which doesn’t authorize any cash transfers until over a dollar, one big dollar, is accumulated). The employers, er — the “requestors” — all took the holiday off.
Bothersome to do that one-click micro-payment stuff.
Hilarious! Excuse me, I gotta tell someone who earns seven figures a year a good story.