That seems more like a values thing than a process thing. I doubt that this process would produce terrible work conditions if Amazon actually cared about their employees well-being.
Capitalism is a game of extracting as much labour surplus value as possible. By definition an article praising Bezos' success must have employees not realising anywhere near their value add.
Bezos does not do the actual work, he facilitates the labour of others. And if he can do that and underpay them more than someone else would then we have a winner.
Implying that skillfully faciliating and organizing other's labour isn't work? Well, early on, soviet government and their 1918 predeccessors thought the same. They ended up with a lot of 'liberated' workers and farmers, and no managers and business owners.
Strangely, they had to restore capitalist system and then to invite foreign specialists and managers to make the industry even a little bit operational. Turns out, there isn't much you can do with dumb labour alone.
It is work but workers are not in a position to bargain for their value added. Bezos keeps it.
We should tax land not income and stop forcing people to under-sell their labour.
Spare me the "Russia" extreme example. This isn't quantitative, we can dislike that extreme and also the extreme celebrated by the USA which fails so many.
It's harder to sympathize with "it's ok to write shit code if failure doesn't mean a literal explosion or being literally stranded on Mars" after a completely preventable identity theft...
Its especially hard when that mentality doesn't account for future feature requests or maintenance. The original developer happily moved on to botch another project while you're the one fixing up the mess.
Also, how come software is either a "web app" or a "rover". There's a huge spectrum in between. Not everyone writes CRUDs; even if these types of applications are usually the worst to maintain because they are developed so carelessly with little regard for simplicity.
Right but randomly posting in a link to Veblen good on Wikipedia because it's one example of when raising prices doesn't lower demand doesn't mean it's in any way relevant to this discussion. Almost no one would argue that this kind of travel is a Veblen good.
Right. And in some cases, that would be apt, but here it's not because travel is almost never a Veblen good.
> unqualified assertion that raising prices lowers demand
An inverse relationship between price and demand is normal. Veblen goods are noteworthy precisely because they are exceptional. The demand of assertion, then, should fall on the poster of the Wikipedia link.
A lot of English words have been drained of their meaning in the past 150 years[1]. Now when people say "virtue" they almost exclusively mean "some morally positive quality" like patience, kindness, or diligence. But the word virtue comes from the Latin word "vir" meaning "man", and had meanings like "valor, merit, moral perfection". You can sort of already see just by the fact that it started at the word "man" that it was associated with actions that men (humans) can perform. And the words "valor" and "merit" come from Latin words respectively meaning to be strong, and to get what you earned. Putting these together, it's sort of clear that the original deeper meaning of the English word "virtue" had a lot more to do with earning via hard work. It's evident that things like patience and kindness need to be "worked for". You can also see this in the phrase "by virtue of", meaning "be-cause of" (or "caused by"), that virtue is associated with cause and therefore action.
[1]: on archive.org I found a book that I wanted so much that I converted it to a black and white PDF and printed a hard cover copy for myself on lulu.com; but first I had to find the right version, since the original book was written in Spanish; so I compared the various English translations ranging from the early 1800s to the early 1900s, and at some point in the middle 1800s, the words it chose when translating were wayyyy less accurate than alternative ones. It seems that they chose what we would call more "modern" words, or at least words with more modern definitions to our own sensibilities, to translate these words, and then it just kept snowballing. I still don't know the cause of this, but I'm pretty annoyed by it. Because dammit, affection is a way different noun than love or even charity, and you completely miss the meaning of a sentence from the original author's perspective when it's not translated accuratel.
Posts like this are why I always check the comments. I don't think I would have had this thought shared with me anywhere else. Having said that, I'm still unsure how to interpret the Oscar Wilde quote.
Are certification, accountability, and unions really the defining characteristics of engineering?
Directly from wikipedia:
In 1960, the Conference of Engineering Societies of Western Europe and the United States of America defined "professional engineer" as follows:
A professional engineer is competent by virtue of his/her fundamental education and training to apply the scientific method and outlook to the analysis and solution of engineering problems. He/she is able to assume personal responsibility for the development and application of engineering science and knowledge, notably in research, design, construction, manufacturing, superintending, managing and in the education of the engineer. His/her work is predominantly intellectual and varied and not of a routine mental or physical character. It requires the exercise of original thought and judgement and the ability to supervise the technical and administrative work of others. His/her education will have been such as to make him/her capable of closely and continuously following progress in his/her branch of engineering science by consulting newly published works on a worldwide basis, assimilating such information and applying it independently. He/she is thus placed in a position to make contributions to the development of engineering science or its applications. His/her education and training will have been such that he/she will have acquired a broad and general appreciation of the engineering sciences as well as thorough insight into the special features of his/her own branch. In due time he/she will be able to give authoritative technical advice and to assume responsibility for the direction of important tasks in his/her branch.
Your comment added nothing because it was responding to a straw man rather than the article itself.