• omarfw@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    313
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    14 days ago

    Now they can replace them without paying unemployment and pay the new workers a lower wage. This is what they wanted to happen. Mega corporations are a problem we need to solve as a society.

    • orclev@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      129
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      14 days ago

      Quality programmers are a finite resource. Amazon chewed through the entire unskilled labor market with their warehouses and then struggled to find employees to meet their labor needs. If they try the same stunt with skilled labor they’re in for a very rude awakening. They’ll be able to find people, but only for well above market rates. They’re highly likely to find in the long run it would have been much cheaper to hang onto the people they already had.

      • omarfw@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        98
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        14 days ago

        The whole problem with companies like Amazon is that hardly anyone in charge of them seems to care about long term sustainability. They all just invest enough effort to squeeze out some short term profits, earn their bonuses and then leave for another company to do it all again. Nobody is interested in sustainability because there is no incentive to. They’re playing hot potato with the collapse of the company.

        • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          40
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          13 days ago

          Now expand that to the entire planetary economy. Unsustainable short term gains is the entire industrial revolution.

          We’re only 300 years in and most life and ecosystems on Earth have been destroyed and homogenized to service humanity. We’re essentially a parasite. It’s not surprising that the most successful corporations are the most successful parasites. It’s just parasites, doing parasitic things, because they’re parasites… from the top down.

          • Wanderer@lemm.ee
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            arrow-down
            2
            ·
            13 days ago

            There has been efficiency gains throughout. Capitalism is amazing for that, far better than other systems.

            The problem is too many people. If standard of living is to increase then the resource requirement is due to massive unsustainable population growth.

            That and the fact the public hate externalities and don’t want them used at all never mind aggressively.

            • WoodScientist@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              13 days ago

              The problem is too many people. If standard of living is to increase then the resource requirement is due to massive unsustainable population growth.

              They’re both important. And crucially, people in developed countries use a lot more resources than those in undeveloped countries. Just look at the resource utilization of our richest people. We have billionaires operating private rocket companies! If somehow, say due to really really good automation, orbital rockets could be made cheap enough for the average person to afford, we would have average middle class people regularly launching rockets into space and taking private trips to the Moon. Just staggering levels of resource use. If we could build and maintain homes very cheaply due to advanced robotics, the average person would live in a private skyscraper if they could afford it. Imagine the average suburban lot, except with a tower built on it 100 stories tall. If it was cheap enough to build and maintain that sort of thing, that absolutely would become the norm.

              • Wanderer@lemm.ee
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                13 days ago

                The only billionaire I know of that is launching rockets is Elon Musk.

                That’s just evidence that capitalism is efficient. Because SpaceX has revolutionised space travel making the only reusable rocket doing something all the government agencies said was impossible. NASAs new unbuilt rocket is using tech from the 1970 that they are going to throe away into the ocean on every launch.

                The rest you say is meaningless. How you expect this robotic skyscrapers to be built? Some MIT masters project or some capitalist experiment?

                • WoodScientist@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  2
                  ·
                  13 days ago

                  Bezos also has a rocket company. Plus there’s Richard Branson. And others.. And then you have private jet travel, massive mega yachts, and countless other extravagances. For a certain class of billionaire, having a private rocket company is a vanity project. These rocket companies are vanity projects by rich sci fi nerds. Yes, they’ve done some really good technical work, but they’re only possible because their founders were willing to sink billions into them even without any proof they’ll make a profit.

                  What you are missing is that as people’s wealth increases, their resource use just keeps going up and up and up. To the point where when people are wealthy enough, they’re using orders of magnitude more energy and resources than the average citizen of even developed countries. Billionaires have enough wealth that they can fly rockets just because they think they’re cool, even if they have no real path to profitability.

                  And no, the hypothetical of the robot skyscrapers is not “meaningless.” You just have a poor imagination. To have that type of world we only need one thing - a robot that can build a copy of itself from raw materials, or a series of robots that can collectively reproduce themselves from raw materials gathered in the environment. Once you have self-replicating robots, it becomes very easy to scale up to that kind of consumption on a broad scale. If you have self-replicating robots, the only real limit to the total number you can have on the planet is the total amount of sunlight available to power all of them.

                  The real point isn’t the specific examples I gave. The point, which you are missing entirely, is that total resource use is a function of wealth and technological capability. Raw population has very little impact on it. If our automation gets a lot better, or something else makes us much wealthier, we would see vast increases in total resource use even if our population was cut in half.

        • circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          13 days ago

          They all just invest enough effort to squeeze out some short term profits, earn their bonuses and then leave for another company to do it all again.

          Amazon is not at all alone in this. Much of 2024 capitalism, at least within the tech space, works like this pretty much everywhere.

      • greenskye@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        23
        ·
        14 days ago

        That’s the next executive’s problem. These executives will jump ship with their golden parachutes before any of that affects them.

        • Jrockwar@feddit.uk
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          13
          ·
          14 days ago

          Well then bring it on. If feels too big to fail, but if (hypothetically) Amazon were to go under, the world would be a better place.