Jeff Bezos will do what some of the grocery and other industries did when approached by legitimate union rumblings: create an effectively in-house union that negotiates in bad faith against the interests of their employees.

UFCW was quite complicit in creating a faux-union for Kroger which does very little for Kroger employees besides shave $1/hr off their paychecks. And employees which do not want to be part of the union still pay some union fees which go to UFCW. IIRC, union membership is a requirement to get regular benefits at Kroger.

It's not so much compliant as unified in personality -- monocultural, or a super-majority predominant culture which everyone else follows. Sweden and South Korea are the easy examples where such is working.

The US should have the harshest restrictions because we have way too many asshats screaming and thinking they have earned / deserved their freedoms. Go through any European nation's rural countryside or impoverished city areas, and the people who fall into the nasty combination of uneducated and not naturally smart or talented -- those people know they shouldn't have a voice when it comes to politics and policy. The US by contrast socially lets any idiot think their voice *deserves* respect when it doesn't. A huge part of this is our engagement with social media. You can't get either extremist side of any issue to shut up, and moderate views just stopped participating in discourse.

Funny, every probation and parole office has signs up that it is illegal to use recording devices in the offices. And I think we all know why that is...

That said, when I was on probation for a youthful indiscretion, I recorded every meeting on my phone. Most probation officers were fine, but I moved at one point and was transferred to the local county (Travis to Collin in TX), and the guy I dealt with in Collin County had the whole slightly retarded, so always paranoid people were trying to pull a fast one on him thing going on. He would go out of his way to be creepy, invasive, and obtuse about regular work activities (I worked retail). And multiple times he threatened to have my probation extended or community service hours increased for no other reason than to lob a threat. I would come in having done my required community service hours, but he would threaten me because I did them all in 2 days the week prior instead of spread out over the last 4 weeks (working retail, it was easier to do 2x 8-12 hour days when I had days off since my schedule varied a lot). I eventually called his bluff, and he just got flustered, more angry, but had nothing to do except bump my next meeting to 3 weeks out instead of a month. Still had the next month's hours done.

It sounds a little like censorship, but I have a genuine, modest proposal: Social media should not be allowed to carry news information. Not in the form of ads, user posts, links, videos, and any other post type until they can demonstrate 5 9's (99.999%) filtration of fake, false, and misleading news. We created the FCC within 4 years of the first TV broadcast because the reach of TV had the potential to be dangerous to society, both from the perspective of advertising and news content, and that was at a time where single digit percentage of the country *owned* televisions.

Hell, I'd be fine with them labeling the measures as for the protection of public health, even if we didn't have COVID-19 to deal with.

I can't wait to see all the Instagram and other social media influencers disappear... Such frivolity with no economic contribution won't survive. Companies are going to demand their marketing dollars *gasp* produce measurable results on the sales side.

AT&T has been lying and committing fraud regarding broadband for 2 decades.

They were required under the Southwestern Bell and Bell South merger to provide broadband to every address where either was the ILEC. Yet you can find hundreds of homes in AT&T's back yard of DFW suburbs where old SWB tagged boxes still don't provide any broadband.

The corporate officers belong in prison for fraud. Is it still Carol Tacker signing the false affidavits?

Except the other sciences stagnate without the physicists and mathematicians providing them new and useful tools.

Doctors wouldn't wash their hands until we handed them a microscope. It's been a repeating, consistent pattern since The Renaissance.

Well the big issue is productivity scoring at an Amazon FC / DC is out of step with the rest of the retail logistics industry. They expect to get flat out running performance from every worker every minute. In the blue collar world, generally you have 2 work pattern regimes: A) Boom-Bust and B) Steady but safe speed.

Easy examples would be (A): restaurant work -- you always have stuff to do, but there is a clear concentration of flat out top speed work for 2-4 hours at a stretch, surrounded by slower work hours. For (B), consider manufacturing and similar line work jobs where the production line workers are expected to work at a steady pace, but not so frantically as to incur significant safety risk.

Amazon follows neither of these -- this is why they sometimes park ambulances outside FC/DC facilities, because they know the required pick-rate is going to cause some people to have coronaries. Heck, they've had people die, because everyone is zooming around so fast, nobody notices or cares about the poor sap on the floor. While I am sure their computer vision systems for preventing theft and for Amazon cashierless stores will eventually be trained to recognize employees who just had an asthma or heart attack, I suspect that will only be so the computer handles the paramedic dispatch and pay docking, while the earpieces reroute employees away from the crisis and tell them to carry on.

Let's all keep in mind boys and girls that Amazon's hirings don't cover 1/5 of the already furloughed employee headcounts of big $B non-essential retailers which have already furloughed their workforces (e.g. clothing like Macy's, Kohl's, JCP; or sporting goods like Dick's, REI, Bass Pro).

This crisis is playing out all too well for Amazon. The expectation in retail was this would be the final heavy slimming down year of bankruptcies, after which the rest of the industry would flourish with healthier competition. Instead shortages and other made up reasons will allow Amazon, Wallmart, and Target to start resetting consumer pricing expectations and start really ripping some margin on traditionally low margin daily needs. Amazon is already infamous here for charging much higher prices than your local grocer on cleaning supplies and toiletries because they aren't cost effective on shipping (e.g. the "shipping friendly" smaller than normal toilet paper rolls they had custom made by major brands).

Oh and these silent forms of necessary consumer goods inflation will eat up every dime of household stimulus and / or Universal Basic Income being discussed.

This is the case at every company heavily leveraging IT or even just IT Operations on contractors out of Southeast Asia. If you're using a large number of warm bodies from the big 4: Infosys, Tata, Wipro, and HCL; then you are guaranteed to have massive organizational dysfunction. They simply don't have the quality of people for the price paid, rarely even for the price the person earns after the cut the firm takes. They provide "specialists" with no bigger picture thinking than the limited scope of tests they passed or cheated on.

Yes, I have met some excellent engineers from Wipro or TCS from time to time -- the brilliant guys who are transitioning off H1-B and into citizenship, but those guys are 1 in 10 and on their way to permanent positions at better non-contracting firms. The other 9 I couldn't see being worth > $40k / $20/hr in an actual competitive job market, despite them being positioned as counterparts to locals who earned their way in IT to 6 figures from the help desk up.

Wait are you saying I can't just loop samples of a dozen actual artists and get rich from my fire beats which I set them to?

A 24 hour test for merely $200 sounds like an excellent opportunity for hospitals.

- Hostage taking medical fucks in the US.

It should also be noted that the timing of Call of Duty Warzone was probably a bad call. The ISP networking folks I've talked to have had more issues around day 1-2 of these massive dumps some games are taking on bandwidth for updates the last couple years.

I was going to say, Contagion is the weakest of the pandemic movies. I usually like Soderbergh, I'm a fan of Jude Law, Matt Damon, and Lawrence Fishburne; but I just found the whole movie weak and almost childish. It tried to be realistic, but came across immature.

Outbreak is better drama if a bit over the top. The Stand has better twists. 28 Days Later is more enjoyable. Both of the latter despite the disease being prologue rather than focus still do a better job with the spread and aftermath.

This move is a revenue hedge for internal projections showing slowing iPhone and iPad sales. Same reason they rolled out a touchpad for the iPad. Though a move this egregious and in opposition to Apple's constant song of user / customer protection means the internal projections look really bad. Maybe the adjustments for supply chain issues from COVID-19 as well as related depressed economic activity have them spooked.