A prime post about Amazon

A few years ago, when talking with a student, I asked him about his part-time job.  I knew he worked for UPS for a few hours every week.

He had quit UPS.  Which is when he said something that I found to be interesting.  He said that he would never get hired again by UPS because he quit.  Apparently UPS's policy is comparable to that of the husband who throws out his wife after her first known affair. UPS gave him a chance to work there, but he left.  So, UPS does not ever want him back.

That day my respect for UPS went up. A lot.

And then two years ago, I read this at one my favorite sites:

It might seem strange, but UPS delivery vans don’t always take the shortest route between stops.

Of course it intrigued me.

UPS have moved away from trying to find the shortest route and now look at other criteria to optimise the journey. One of their methods is to try and avoid turning through oncoming traffic at a junction. Although this might be going in the opposite direction of the final destination, it reduces the chances of an accident and cuts delays caused by waiting for a gap in the traffic, which would also waste fuel.

How about that!

Driving and delivering is serious business.  And fraught with perils.

Which is why Amazon uses unregulated businesses that don't care about their drivers or others.

UPS and FedEx, the traditional powers of the logistics world, are deeply invested in safety. ... Both firms are also heavily regulated by the government, and many of their trucks are subject to regular federal safety inspections and can be put out of service at any time by the Department of Transportation.
But Amazon’s ingenious system has allowed it to avoid that kind of scrutiny. There is no public listing of which firms are part of its delivery network, and the ubiquitous cargo vans their drivers use are not subject to DOT oversight.

There is no free lunch--there is a hidden cost to every damn thing.

Amazon denies any responsibility for the conditions in which drivers work, but it has continued to contract with at least a dozen companies that have been repeatedly sued or cited by regulators for alleged labor violations, including failing to pay overtime, denying workers breaks, discrimination, sexual harassment, and other forms of employee mistreatment.

I have always refused Amazon's offer for Prime.  I have never ever felt that I needed to have anything that urgently.  If ever there is an urgency, I drive over to the nearest store for whatever it is that I need it that badly.  When people--family or friends or students--talk up Prime, I nod my head and move on.  No point debating with them.  No point in sharing these kind of articles also with them!

[The] Sprinter-style vans Amazon requires its delivery providers to use weigh several times more than most passenger cars, they fall just under the weight limit that would subject them and their drivers to Department of Transportation oversight, unlike most FedEx and UPS trucks.
In a sign of how business is booming, Amazon last summer bought 20,000 of these vans from Mercedes-Benz to be leased, through fleet managers, to its dedicated delivery companies around the country.

The business of big business is about business--not about humans!  Dumb fucks we are!

The United States of Hoarders!

A few days after my new neighbors moved in a couple of years ago, I was sweeping my garage with the door open, of course.  My neighbors saw me, and in that very American way jokingly said the vast empty space, maybe they could store some of their stuff in my garage.

Ha ha, we laughed.

Whether we live in apartments or mansions, apparently we Americans collect a whole lot of worthless crap.  A few years ago, I wrote about in Planetizen.  I wrote there:

Of course, as many of us have observed, but for which data don't exist, most homeowners seem to fill their garages with refrigerators, freezers, bicycles, treadmills, etc., and then park their cars on the driveways or by the curb. When things have to be put away, households find that they have more stuff for which they need additional space, which is where the self-storage business comes in.

No, don't worry, this post is not about the self-storage industry.

It is about how this American "virtue" of accumulating crap has been made easy by Amazon and the malls-on-wheels revolution. 

Now, to become a hoarder is as easy as simply barking your shopping list at one of those "smart" boxes!

Thanks to a perfect storm of factors, Americans are amassing a lot of stuff. Before the advent of the internet, we had to set aside time to go browse the aisles of a physical store, which was only open a certain number of hours a day. Now, we can shop from anywhere, anytime—while we’re at work, or exercising, or even sleeping.

Ah yes, those old days when the malls were open only for a certain number of hours, and one had to physically get to the stores in order to buy the crap that we did not need.  Now, the stores are available to us 24x7, and we can shop for underwear while in our underwear!

All told, “we are all accumulating mountains of things,” said Mark A. Cohen, the director of retail studies at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business. He sometimes asks his students to count the number of things they have on them in class, and once they start counting up gadgets and cords and accessories, they end up near 50. “Americans have become a society of hoarders,” Cohen said.

I should start worrying that my non-hoarding behavior will be viewed as being un-American and that the FBI will soon come knocking!

Back in June, as students were vacating their apartments and dorm rooms, we noticed piles of stuff lying near the waste bins.  A mattress had also been discarded, and it looked to be in much better condition than the one on which I plomp down every night.  The ease of buying things also means the ease of dumping things.

 In 2015, the most recent year for which data is available, Americans put 16 million tons of textiles in the municipal waste stream, a 68 percent increase from 2000. We tossed 34.5 million tons of plastics, a 35 percent increase from 2000, according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency. Over that same time period, the population grew just 14 percent.

Keep that in mind the next time some crazy person says that population growth is the greatest problem ever!

Maybe I should think about renting out my garage space!

Malls on wheels

Up until very recently, when we wanted to buy anything, we wore something relatively decent and walked or drove or took a bus to the shopping area.  The mall.  Which, of course, confused me when I was new to the country because the place to buy stuff is a mall, and an important landmark in the country's capital is also the Mall.  I suppose this is America's unique way of saying that business is the politics of the country ;)

Now, the shopping malls are quickly dying. So much so that in a truly American manner, there is a website that is all about dead malls.  You can even purchase dead-mall merchandise; only in America!

Malls are dying because it has apparently become too much of a pain to go somewhere and shop.  Instead, you can be in your underwear at home and placing orders on websites.  Soon, your purchases arrive at your doorstep.  You can even open the door when you are still in your underwear, and pick up the packages.

One can easily imagine the role of goods transportation.  Trucks have now become mobile malls, and truck drivers have replaced the ones at the delivery windows of the old.  "A side effect of the e-commerce boom is a shortage of truck drivers and an overwhelmed shipping industry."

So, what would you do?  Either hire more drivers, or make the drivers haul bigger trucks, right?  Yep! "carriers including Amazon and FedEx have been — unsuccessfully so far — lobbying Congress to allow nationwide use of longer trailers, hooked one behind the other."

Hiring more drivers is not easy:

The number of truck drivers has held steady at between 3 million and 3.5 million over the past two decades, according to the American Trucking Association (ATA). Freight volumes are expected to surge by about 37 percent over the next decade. The trade group estimates the industry now has a record shortage of 50,700 drivers, and expects that number to skyrocket to 174,000 by 2026 if "nothing happens."  

And even when the big trucks transport goods from one city to another, there is the challenge of the last mile--to get to the customer in his underwear waiting for the package.  Amazon tempts the gullible through its Flex program, which sucks the life out of those who sign up to be the last mile drivers.

Meanwhile, instead of walking around in malls, and interacting with fellow-humans, people are sitting at home in their underwear, staring into their blue screens of death and feeling lonely and depressed.

The real winner in all these?  Jeff Bezos, who certainly knew how to make suckers out of us all!

More on us dumb fucks!

In a number of posts, like in this one where I wrote about the dumb fucks that we are, I have been worried not merely about Facebook, but about the the Frightful Five, as Farhad Manjoo so wonderfully described them: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google.

The country and the world have kind of sort of started worrying about Facebook. But, we have not even started looking at the dangers that these five, and other rapidly growing AI companies, represent.

Consider Amazon:

Of the top 10 US industries by GDP (information, manufacturing non-durable goods, retail trade, wholesale trade, manufacturing durable goods, healthcare, finance and insurance, state and local government, professional and business services, and real estate), Amazon has a finger in all but real estate.

Amazon is everywhere.  And knows a lot about you and me.

 What makes Amazon so frightening for rival businesses is that it can use its expertise in data analytics to move into almost any sector.
“Amazon has all this data available. They track what people are searching for, what they click, what they don’t,” said Greer. “Every time you’re searching for something and don’t click, you’re telling Amazon that there’s a gap.”
Amazon knows where you live, who you live with, your current location (if you use an Amazon smartphone app), what TV shows you watch, what music you listen to and what websites you visit.

Remember, for instance, how Amazon swiftly moved in and bought Whole Foods?  It was not a whimsical move.

When Amazon bought Whole Foods, grocery chains’ stock prices crashed. Two months later, when Amazon announced it would cut Whole Foods’ prices, grocery stocks plummeted again. The meal kit maker Blue Apron’s stock price fell 11% after the news that Amazon was filing for a meal kit trademark. A vague announcement from Amazon that it was collaborating with JP Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway on some kind of non-profit healthcare venture sent healthcare stocks on a downward slide.

What's good for Amazon might not be good for us though.

“The algorithms are designed to serve up things that best serve Amazon, steering us to some books and not others,” said Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. “You have a company that can shape whether a particular author is able to find an audience, and whether they can even get published.”

The algorithms effectively create a world in which you don't even know what you are missing.  “Amazon is just getting started,” said [ Tuck School of Business professor Vijay] Govindarajan.

The manner in which we politically govern the problems is not equipped to deal with the rapidly evolving technologies.

Amazon’s business strategies and current market dominance pose anticompetitive concerns that the consumer welfare framework in antitrust fails to recognize.

Instead of addressing such complex issues, we have a narcissistic megalomaniac who tweets about Amazon and the US postal system.  What dumb fucks we are!

The dumb fucks we are!

One of my go-to technology columnists, Farhad Manjoo, has gotten me worried about the "frightful five" for a while now.  As if I needed more to ad to my near-paranoia!  In one of those columns, Manjoo wrote:

This is the most glaring and underappreciated fact of internet-age capitalism: We are, all of us, in inescapable thrall to one of the handful of American technology companies that now dominate much of the global economy. I speak, of course, of my old friends the Frightful Five: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google.

There are a gazillion posts in this blog where I have expressed my worries about all these companies.  The worries have not ever abated, but get louder and louder and louder and ...

Yet, the public is apparently not worried.  What’s going on here?

Why are people still so unafraid of the world’s richest corporations, even as those corporations collect fine-grained data on almost every aspect of our lives and shape the way we work, communicate, and spend our free time?
One relatively obvious factor may be that the big tech companies make things that people love: iPhones, Gmail, Instagram, and other flagship products have hundreds of millions of loyal users. The warm feelings those devices and services engender may blind people to the industry’s darker undersides of mass surveillance, targeted advertising, and addictiveness.

Those dark sides.

Now add domestic and international politics to all those, and you get a pitch black darkness.  The Darkening Web is the book that is the context for an essay in the NYRB.

The interests that now guide what technologies they produce are not entirely commercial ones. The national security community has exploited the private sector to help develop America’s immense cyber-capabilities. In doing so it has placed an extraordinary array of potential cyber-weapons in the hands of unaccountable private companies.

"unaccountable."

That should worry you, too. A lot.

And keep in mind that there is a lot of mutually beneficial crossover between the unaccountable frightful five and the unaccountable national security interests of the government.

the development in Silicon Valley of a hybrid public/private economy in which the government assists in the creation of new technologies it needs for national security operations by investing in companies that can also commercialize these technologies.
Government agencies have mitigated risk and even helped to create markets for companies whose products, while ostensibly strictly civilian and commercial, satisfy their own needs. The driverless car industry will incorporate, test, and improve technologies devised for missile guidance systems and unmanned drones. Facial recognition software developed by intelligence agencies and the military for surveillance and identity verification (in drone strikes, for example) is now assuming a friendly guise on our iPhones and being tested by millions of users.

In short, the "direction of technological development in the commercial sector, in other words, is influenced by the agenda of government agencies in ways largely unknown to the public."

Zuckerberg, in a well-known incident he now surely regrets, was asked in the early days of Facebook why people would hand over their personal information to him. He responded, “They trust me—dumb fucks.” We’re finally starting to appreciate the depth of the insult to us all. Now we need to figure out how to keep the corporations we have supported with our taxes, data, and undivided attention from treating us like dumb fucks in the future.

The dumb fucks we are!

Nothing beyond the profit motive or self-interest?

I think I have been to Whole Foods stores three times.  Maybe only twice.  Even those trips were only because of the unique circumstances in a city that I was visiting.  A few months ago, a Whole Foods store opened in town; I don't go anywhere near it.

The founder of that business, John Mackey, has always interested me though.  Because, he seemed to offer a political vision through his business.  A libertarian, Mackey articulated his socio-business philosophy in Conscious Capitalism.  In a blog-post on this more than four years ago, I quoted from an essay:

In Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business, Mackey and his co-author, Raj Sisodia, make a case that businesses are at their best when reaching for a higher purpose that ranges far beyond any simplistic notions of the profit motive or self-interest.

The business as a higher purpose that is "far beyond any simplistic notions of the profit motive or self-interest."  This is why even the anti-libertarian limousine-liberals embraced Whole Foods.

Mackey has now sold his business to Amazon, whose socio-business philosophy does not have anything "far beyond any simplistic notions of the profit motive or self-interest."

After initial enthusiasm for Amazon, I have been trying to avoid buying anything through that behemoth.  Because, it is a ruthless business that couldn't care about anything other than to be the biggest and baddest of them all.  I have been increasingly worried about its tentacles into various aspects of life--the more a person shops at Amazon, the more the big-data driven profile of that customer.  My data becomes their dollars, and I am their raw material!  I way prefer to keep my preferences about books and rice-cookers away from those businesses.

And then my worries about the worker-bees at Amazon.

Amazon’s grand proclamations, on the other hand, tend to focus on domi­nation, not on providing any sort of abstract benefit to society outside the lowering of prices and the delivery of goods. The company has never put forth a rosy vision of the future of service labor. Amazon warehouse work is hard, often subcontracted and kept out of sight of consumers. According to a 2015 investigation by The Times, even at the corporate office, the work culture is unapologetically ruthless.

Ruthless is the word!

It is not merely the contemporary situation that Amazon that worries me.  Nope.  What really worries me is that Amazon might be the model as we rapidly enter into a future service economy, in which most humans become easily replaceable workers in a ruthless business environment that helps a very,  very few accumulate all the benefits.

Amazon’s attitude toward labor is emblematic of the culture it grew out of — and an augur of the service economy that’s on the rise today. Other tech companies, in particular platforms like Uber and TaskRabbit, have helped regular consumers grow comfortable with a software-mediated system wherein jobs are sliced into an endless series of assignments, with compensation negotiated wordlessly, instantly and without room for a second thought. Even Starbucks — once a champion of compassionate capitalism — recently began experimenting with pitiless automated scheduling software to assign shifts, before backing off after public outcry.

Yep, it is for these very reasons I have not ever used Uber either.

I wish more people thought about these rapid transformations.  But, apparently most humans do not care for anything "beyond any simplistic notions of the profit motive or self-interest." Even the uber-religious evangelicals who voted for a horrible human being, despite the message of selflessness from Jesus himself!

We are screwed!

Just burn the damn books. Who needs them anyway!

Fahrenheit 451 is one of my favorite books that I like to discuss with students.  In my initial years of teaching it seemed like quite a few students were aware of the book.  Now, it is increasingly rare for a student to know what I am referring to.  And it worries me all the more that we are getting closer and closer to the society that Ray Bradbury described in that profound story.

Back in the day, it was relatively easy to know which books would make me think more about life, and which ones would merely entertain me. I loved those potboilers, too.  But, perhaps it is because I am getting old that I worry that everywhere I turn it is nothing but potboilers that are read, if at all books are being read. 

Reading this New Yorker essay by George Packer on a rainy and cold winter day does not help either.  Maybe I should not have thought about reading and, instead, as in Fahrenheit 451, I should have simply been watching television.  After all, it is reading that makes one agitated and depressed, right?

Packer's essay is all about Amazon, which Jeff Bezos started as an online bookseller. One might think that Amazon did wonders to book selling and reading, by making available a gazillion titles at the click of a mouse button and at low prices, and with the Kindle reader that gets a reader the book within minutes of buying it online.  One would think that such a democratization, where the middlemen are axed out and one could even self-publish books, would be nothing but a win for the consumer. Right, George?

Bezos is right: gatekeepers are inherently élitist, and some of them have been weakened, in no small part, because of their complacency and short-term thinking. But gatekeepers are also barriers against the complete commercialization of ideas, allowing new talent the time to develop and learn to tell difficult truths. When the last gatekeeper but one is gone, will Amazon care whether a book is any good? 

In the old model, publishers, editors, and consumers too, cared about what was being printed and read. An army of people, so to speak, celebrated the good quality ones, and people like me then knew that Fahrenheit 451 was a must-read. Now, Amazon has been nuking those elitist gatekeepers.  "Will Amazon care whether a book is any good" as long as the widget it sells brings in the dollars and cents?

Several editors, agents, and authors told me that the money for serious fiction and nonfiction has eroded dramatically in recent years; advances on mid-list titles—books that are expected to sell modestly but whose quality gives them a strong chance of enduring—have declined by a quarter. These are the kinds of book that particularly benefit from the attention of editors and marketers, and that attract gifted people to publishing, despite the pitiful salaries. Without sufficient advances, many writers will not be able to undertake long, difficult, risky projects. Those who do so anyway will have to expend a lot of effort mastering the art of blowing their own horn. “Writing is being outsourced, because the only people who can afford to write books make money elsewhere—academics, rich people, celebrities,” Colin Robinson, a veteran publisher, said. “The real talent, the people who are writers because they happen to be really good at writing—they aren’t going to be able to afford to do it.”

I have had a love-hate relationship with Amazon, as I do with most corporations, for a number of reasons, including the worry that its model might really push us into the dark world where nobody reads books and even if they do, well, Fifty Shades of Grey is no Fahrenheit 451.

Unlike the old elitist gatekeepers of this literary world,

A former Amazon employee who worked in the Kindle division said that few of his colleagues in Seattle had a real interest in books: “You never heard people say, ‘Hey, what are you reading?’ 

Maybe it is that I am fast becoming an old curmudgeon. But, I like to believe that I am worried about all these not because I am getting old but because these are issues we--as a people--are not thinking through.

And so the big question is not just whether Amazon is bad for the book industry; it’s whether Amazon is bad for books.

Do us all a favor: get yourself a paper-copy of Fahrenheit 451 and read it. Now.

Source

THEY know what you read. The e-book publishers, that is!

It's no secret that Amazon and other digital book retailers track and store consumer information detailing what books are purchased and read. Kindle users sign an agreement granting the company permission to store information from the device—including the last page you've read, plus your bookmarks, highlights, notes and annotations—in its data servers. 

That's right--everything from where you highlighted to what kind of notes you scribbled along.  Aren't you thrilled! Not just Amazon, but any e-book version (ht). 

Book apps for tablets like the iPad, Kindle Fire and Nook record how many times readers open the app and how much time they spend reading. Retailers and some publishers are beginning to sift through the data, gaining unprecedented insight into how people engage with books. 

Downright creepy!

Some privacy watchdogs argue that e-book users should be protected from having their digital reading habits recorded. "There's a societal ideal that what you read is nobody else's business," says Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that advocates for consumer rights and privacy. "Right now, there's no way for you to tell Amazon, I want to buy your books, but I don't want you to track what I'm reading."
Amazon declined to comment on how it analyzes and uses the Kindle data it gathers.

I am shocked, shocked, that Amazon declined to comment :)

EFF has pressed for legislation to prevent digital book retailers from handing over information about individuals' reading habits as evidence to law enforcement agencies without a court's approval. Earlier this year, California instituted the "reader privacy act," which makes it more difficult for law-enforcement groups to gain access to consumers' digital reading records. Under the new law, agencies must get a court order before they can require digital booksellers to turn over information revealing which books their customers have browsed, purchased, read and underlined. The American Civil Liberties Union and EFF, which partnered with Google and other organizations to push for the legislation, are now seeking to enact similar laws in other states.

 Oh well ... between all these gadgets, Facebook, and the government, and all the security cameras all over the place, the only thing that is a secret for now is when exactly I shit. I am sure that soon the toilet manufacturers will come up with a smart toilet that might even give me a digital examination, in more ways than one, when I am on the mighty throne!

Worry about Facebook. A lot. And about Amazon, Google, ...

Yes, yet another entry on my love-hate relationship with Facebook, primarily, and, to a lesser extent, with others too.  As this piece at Slate puts it:

Facebook's monetary policy runs on just one simple idea: You can either give up your privacy and embrace the world of entertainment abundance—or you can fight to protect it and risk living in entertainment poverty. You choose.

That is the essence of the problem.

In the old days, well, just a couple of years ago, I could listen to any radio station I wanted to, read any book I cared about, watched ... well, you get the drift. But, such a level of anonymity seems to be rapidly evaporating:

What can compete with the seemingly infinite libraries of music available from streaming services like Spotify? Nothing—but try getting there today without a Facebook account and you would not advance very far: Spotify demands that new users already have an existing Facebook account—which they can't get unless they are prepared to register on Facebook with their real names! This is how listening to music anonymously becomes deviant; gradually, it may also become technologically difficult and expensive. Reading anonymously doesn't look deviant yet—but things will change as we bypass public libraries and start borrowing books from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The former would never think of selling our data to third parties; the latter wouldn't think twice about it. In fact, they would give us coupons for sharing our reading habits.
...
It's time that citizens articulate a vision for a civic Internet that could compete with the dominant corporatist vision. Do we want to preserve anonymity to help dissidents or do we want to eliminate it so that corporations stop worrying about cyber-attacks? Do we want to build new infrastructure for surveillance—hoping it will lead to a better shopping experience—that would be abused by data-hungry governments? Do we want to enhance serendipitous discovery, to ensure exposure to new and controversial ideas, to maximize our ability to think critically about what we see and read on the Net? Or do we want to build computers that would conduct autonomous searches on our behalf—only to pitch us the latest sales deals, recommend restaurants in the neighborhood, and feed us one answer instead of many? Do we want the Internet to remember everything that happens online, or do we want to introduce some noise and decay into our digital archives as they—and we—age?