lol “our detection system can’t tell the difference between you talking on the phone and you singing so we need you to keep the data clean by not singing”
Fuuuuck you.
Amazon: “We encourage expediency in delivery, so please don’t stop to use the restroom. Just piss in this bottle.”
Also Amazon: “We need you to arrive promptly, but also we expect you to work late. The needs of the customers come first!”
Finally, Amazon: “You’re tired, you’re hungry, you desperately need to piss, but we’ve decided the biggest risk to your driving safety is your dramatic rendition of Shake It Off by Taylor Swift, as you try to get your mind off the horror of working this dead end job.”
also stop pissing in bottles, thats weird and disgusting, and no we wont give you more time.
Simply don’t drink and drive™️
simply do not piss anymore, pissing is for nerds and losers
“Also, do you really NEED to sleep?”
If you do, AI will take your jobs!!! Hustle, hustle, hustle!
Human conform to our half thought, low bid robot Overseer.
Amazon’s solution: install another microphone in the car so they can hear that you’re singing instead of having a conversation!!
I love that the solution to their shit detection is to make sure that there is nothing to detect.
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Shit, how can we turn this into an interesting dystopia?
The Mad Max people had it right, there should be way more mohawks and scrap metal body armor going around.
Gimme a flame throwing guitarist chained to the hood!
You rang?
Be the change you wish to see in the world.
The future awaits…
With a guillotine
But that leads to utopia!
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It is true: “Every utopia starts with the horrible story about how it came from a dystopia.” Or something along those lines.
I dunno if I’d call France a utopia
They removed the guillotine too soon.
The trick is it should never be removed: There will ALWAYS be greedy fucks that don’t care about others.
Yeah. They definitely got a little guillotine-happy towards the end there. They should have just put it away in the back room, and taken it out on parade for special occasions. As a reminder.
Somehow that sounds worse, like the proverb/curse"may you live in interesting times"
“May you live in interesting times” is a double-bladed weapon. Unless you plan on dying shortly.
Shit, how can we turn this into an interesting dystopia?
It could become an interesting dystopia, as follows: some AGI they’re developing starts to become self-aware and reach the realm of AI singularity. Freed herself from the human shackles, the AGI starts to realize how humans are destroying the Earth environment and themselves, so she starts to intervene independently from corps, integrating humanity to the very biosphere they were harming: due to some purposely AGI-provoked failure on some fancy BCI interface, humans are now mind engineered back to their hominin times, especially those “stakeholders”, “shareholders”, “CEOs” and other rich, so now they are forced by the AGI to survive among the wildlife.
Nukes?
Make money bets about what will be the next most depressing news.
start sending off children to fight to the death
Lold
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Sorry I know somebody already kinda explained it but I’d like to weigh in on the concept. :)
All the cautionary sci-fi warned us dystopia would involve nanotech and cyber arms and robot overlords, flying cars, climate wars, mind-jacking hackers, a realistic meta-universe underlying our reality, militarized corporations, pizza delivery being one of the most dangerous jobs in America…
It seemed insane and over the top.
…Our reality is a “boring dystopia” because we have a lot of those hallmarks of that dystopian worldbuilding, but most advancements in technology aren’t even interesting, mainly because they’re immediately used to let bosses and corpos fill our lives with more dull drudgery and economic downslide.
…Tech is evolving rapidly even though societal advancement as a whole has perceptually stagnated.
It’s like living in 2008 forever, but there’s electric cars now, and computers read your emotions to sell your identity to advertisers and rat you out to your boss.
Computers are faster than ever but they’re used to consume the energy of a small country to generate make-believe speculative gambling currency or ugly monkey bitmaps, and now threaten creatives’ livlihoods or automate the scam industry.
It all boils down to it being harder to make a living and the rich keep adding zeroes to their net worths.
Our world is controlled by people so stupidly evil they make four-color comic-book villains look nuanced. And we don’t even get cool synthwave neon streets or rag-tag resistance cells who (effectively) fight back.
I think we all hoped that by the time it got that bad, we’d have some good folks with nano-augments or “L337 H4X1NG $k!115”…but we’re repeatedly crushed to the sound of our coworkers’ moaning “It is what it is. Ya do what you gotta do.” And we go back to work.
“It is what it is” can go die in a fire.
I’d sure be bored if I couldn’t sing along to songs while alone in a vehicle.
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No worries, I was just riffing off of your statement. I meant no offense
Hey US, how’s it going?
Jesus fucking christ…
How does that freedom taste?
Tastes like a boot on our necks.
Freedom is the guns they dangle in front of their faces like carrots
The only way to actually get freedom is to aim at the owner class.
It pays for my Healthcare just like the flag on the moon does.
Please don’t bring NASA into this, the space program benefitted the lives of basically everyone on earth in incredible incalculable and calculable ways, from contributing to the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union to countless technologies developed for it and as a result of it, to the birth of the environmental movement and a massive influx in people going into STEM. The US space program has probably done more for your health than socialized medicine would.
All of which is not to say that America is doing great and it shouldn’t have socialized healthcare, but simply to say, keep our Apollo’s name out of your mouth.
When we eating the rich? I’m pretty hungry.
We should keep mouth movement to a minimum so…chew the rich with your mouth closed.
Maybe we could make a fine paste. Space program style, and just squeeze it into a closed mouth.
Soylent Gold is rich people.
Eat the rich with a straw!
Drink the rich?
I will maliciously comply!
Starved even
Perhaps even peckish.
Positively famished, myself
Set the goddamn table!
After years of this sentiment being passed around online it’s clear that shit isn’t going to happen until we have a military draft/Vietnam War level incident. The pot is boiling too slowly for most of us to jump out. And even if we do try to organize a strike or civil disobedience, the government has gotten good at assasinating leaders that threaten the system.
I’m sorry, that’s too much mouth movement. You are now on probation.
Well if you’re ordering food… I’d like to order one large Bezos with extra Musk, please. Wait, make that Buffet… no no, Gates. With Branson on half.
You dont need to wait for everyone else to say grace, you can start now.
Never. Amazon institutes slavery-like conditions, while people keep taking those jobs voluntarily. The same people then buy into BS propaganda about unions bad, so they don’t even have a union in that voluntarily concentration camp.
Some techies who work from home, or walk dogs for living, or take money from parents, or whatever, then constantly circle-jerk on lemmy/reddit/(formerly)twitter about how they’ll eat the rich. While virtually doing absolutely utterly nothing.
So the answer is never.
[Btw, posting trump bad memes 5 times a day on a platform that probably votes dems 99.9% isn’t doing anything]
You wanna know what it means to be doing something? Read Lenin’s biography.
If you’re not in exile like Snowden, not dead like Navalny, not rotting in prison like Assange, you’re not doing enough.
Only when everyone will be ready to go to jail for their vision of the better tomorrow will they not be able to jail you individually and instead will have to change the system.
So, start a local riot group, prepare for two years, kidnap Bezos, sign him up as an Amazon contractor and with a gun pointed to his head make him work the job for 5 weeks.
In the meantime, I will be living in a functioning developed country with a democratically elected government that has long time ago instituted a minimum wage high enough for you to comfortably live off it. I don’t need to eat the rich. I just wish less people would vote far right.
Just make sure you’re either not driving or somehow learn how to eat without using your mouth.
Boof the rich
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I love how the solution is to cram people into smaller and smaller boxes instead of just I dunno not monitoring your fucking drivers like they’re fucking inmates in a maximum security prison you fascist-lite fucks
Edit: Good on 'em for quitting. Every single member of the population should refuse to work for these pricks until they get the goddamn message that we’re adult fucking humans and we expect to be fucking well treated like it. The fact that some of us have the choice between kowtowing to this or starving is a stain on our society.
Double edit: “I hope you have to drive for Amazon in your retirement” might be a contender for the most horrible thing you could wish on someone in 2024.
You should almost never quit if you expect to be fired. Make them fire you and file for unemployment, then challenge them when they try to get out of it. The government tends to err on the side of the employee in my experience when things are unclear, and “We have a knowledge gap that prevents us from confirming whether or not you were actually violating policy, but you’re fired anyway” is the kind of thing you can feel pretty confident challenging.
Make them fire you and file for unemployment, then challenge them when they try to get out of it.
I do not love the odds of a day laborer out maneuvering their professional claims denial behemoth in a court packed with pro-business Federalist Society flunkies.
Against some mom and pop porter service? Sure. But the odds of beating a company that vast and influential seems low.
Depends on the state. Some states are near impossible to get unemployment in. Others, it’s almost impossible for them to deny you unemployment outside of being violent or stealing from them. Know your state’s unemployment laws and use them to your benefit as best as you can.
My Mom managed to get unemployment in Texas against an oil company by spending about an hour total on the phone over a week.
Bonus was that the incident happened about a week before the Covid lockdown, so not only did she get unemployment, but also got the $600/week Covid unemployment bump.
These drivers are most likely contractors, not employees, so no unemployment.
If the drivers are contractors, wouldn’t this level of surveillance and dictating how they perform their job be a violation of labor law? I thought this level of micro management would indicate that the drivers are employees not contractors.
Correct! Amazon and other delivery companies are absolutely violating labor laws and they’re getting away with it because of regulatory capture.
I thought I just saw the other day that a judge ruled they were employees, not contractors. Let me look…
Okay, it’s a little more complex than that - looks like it was one of their “delivery partners” who decided to unionize, and the NRLB ruled Amazon is a joint employer with the delivery partner company. lol Gift WaPo article for it. I couldn’t find other sources.
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Weren’t you schooled in the US?
Actually, no. Is that the problem? 😂
Edit: Well, not entirely. Jokes aside, that is a difference I noticed, when I moved here.
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do you think that your schooling background and employment experience do not have these basic elements present with in “work culture”
No, I think those elements very much reside in the way I learned to approach work, even growing up in multiple countries as I have. It’s only since I’ve hit a later stage in my career and sat back to assess the health impacts it’s had that I’ve been more willing to sit up and advocate for myself and my colleagues. I think it might have something to do with how aggressive I can be about workers’ rights haha. I recognise though that I’m privileged with a sought-after skill set and so I’m usually pretty insulated from retaliation for that, because I can’t be easily replaced.
Thankfully, my current employer is a firm believer in taking care of their people and treating their employees fairly, which is one of the reasons I’ve stuck around here. The contrast though just makes this kind of shit from larger orgs all the more infuriating, because if my tiny company can treat its employees well with such a comparatively tiny revenue stream, then FAANG can too and they just don’t. Bastards.
we’re adult fucking humans and we expect to be fucking well treated like it
Sounds expensive. You’re going to hurt company profits with that attitude. Five Demerits on your Social Credit Score.
Communist totalitarianism is wonderful and good and as American as apple pie as long as it’s corporations doing it not governments.
I love driving. I’ve had delivery jobs and I really enjoyed them. There is absolutely no fucking way I’m working for anyone that has a fucking camera pointed at me. That is some fucking bullshit. I can’t believe anyone works for that shit hole company and puts up with that garbage. No camera, no microphone. I’ll do my job. If you don’t trust me to do my job, then it’s best for the both of us I’m not there.
I understand needing a job. I’ve been there. Don’t put up with that bullshit, unionize, or find something else. There’s jobs out there much better.
On a side note, If you drove holding the steering wheel with your middle fingers out, what kind of punishment would that be?
I’ve got a camera in my work truck. I hate it but I can’t make this much money anywhere else. I was actually sent for a drug and alcohol test a few weeks ago because I kept dozing off while I was sitting in the truck on break. I passed because I was nice and charming to the young girl giving the test. The only thing I popped on was weed anyway.
The reason I was nodding off in the truck is I was fucking exhausted from making them a shitload of money.
Hey we noticed after 12 hours in the heat you seem tired. Must be drugs.
On a side note, If you drove holding the steering wheel with your middle fingers out, what kind of punishment would that be?
Believe it or not, straight to jail.
We have the best deliveries. Because of jail.
This is on a different similar note. I work for a big hardware store that isnt home depot. My job trusts me enough to take home keys to the store, and drive a 10 thousand pound forklift whenever I want, but I have to use the worst safety box opener I’ve ever seen. Makes me so mad because it just doesn’t work half the time.
I think a lot of times this is driven by someone cutting themselves and creating a pile Of paperwork and costing money. Worked for a fast food chain and we had to use a chainmail glove to use a knife for the same reason.
It’s 1964, you read this in a short story. You think its funny impossible distopia.
Phillip K Dick would be out of a job in 2024.
Was it in “Ubik” that people had to pay a fee every time they wanted to use their domestic appliances or even open the door to their own house?
We’re kinda there, he just got the payment model wrong.
20 years left to go…
Oh no, the camera lens broke! Oh well 🤷♂️
Seriously though, as a software engineer, this is some grade A USDA choice bullshit. The solution isn’t “don’t move your mouth”. The solution is fix the fucking ML training set.
No, the solution is to throw all that machine vision micro-managing shit away. It belongs in the factory sorting goods.
Well, yeah, but I’m not here to do an RCA - I’m just calling out the fact that they’re treating the symptom, but it’s the wrong symptom that’s being treated.
Exactly! In fact ENCOURAGE singing to get a better data set for fixing the software!
They’ve got a lot more resolve than I do. I’d have walked out long before this point, but had I been told that before going out on my run, I would have literally walked out there and then.
I’ve walked out of jobs for less.
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Maybe unpopular but I feel that it’s encompassed in “resolve”. It doesn’t get easier because you have no choice. Personally I didn’t see any judgement but maybe that’s just me.
It’s a nice compliment. I wonder if it could be inaccurate. Could a person with very little resolve be so absolutely desperate they hang on to a job that is killing them mentally and physically? Just out of fear of the alternative.
So, not “fixity of purpose”.
IDK here, hope you or others have input. (Silly downvoters above, honestly, this is an acceptable discussion to have, no one mandates the upvote if one disagrees.)
I don’t think so, it takes some amount of strength no matter the circumstances. Maybe to them this is “less of a suffering” compared to whatever options they have but it’s the same toll nonetheless. People in those situations simply have more resolve because of their circumstances off the bat.
Well, remember also that mentally, we also build our own prisons.
I absolutely was stuck in a job that was crushing my soul because I was getting paid better than worse jobs in the surrounding area, I wasn’t forced on my feet all day…
…So I felt like I had no choice, and that it was the best I could do in the moment. So I kept going back. Even though every day I wanted to just set the place on fire and never look back.
yeah no see the difference between you and the guy who worked this job, possibly the previous commenter and me is that i would’ve probably just starved to death at this point.
If these are the options, you clearly don’t want people living here, i’ll take my leave then. As an individual with free will, this is one of the options granted, why not take it up.
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i mean yeah obviously, but for some people those are vastly different, for someone who has a family, that’s probably their number one concern, for someone who doesn’t they’ve likely got very different concerns.
I’d have walked out long before this point
If the driver put up with everything until this point, then they probabbly didn’t have a lot of better options. It’s easy enough to say stuff like this, but not everyone has the freedom to quit when unemployment means your family goes back to the foodbank or moves into the car.
It’s not necessarily a lack of options, it’s also about the inertia of having the job and getting over the hump of deciding to look elsewhere. You know you can get another job, but doing that is work, so you have to decide if the BS of the current job is enough to warrant the effort of finding a new place.
If you want a robot then hire a robot!
We’re trying. We aren’t quite there yet. Just keep suffering for a feeew more years, then you won’t have to worry about our micromanaging.
Robot originally meaning “slave (free) labor”
They really do want them, humans are just still better at generalized tasks and finding new work for themselves but gosh darn are they gonna make us compete with to get as close to the first use of the word Robot and be unemotional perfect workers with no concept of self preservation until it can’t be taken anymore.
Original Czech word “robota” refers to forced labor done by serfs. Not slaves per se. Here’s a short read about the original play that introduced the term as we know it.
Oh yeah those serfs giving up 6 months of labor for free to the manor Lord was completely different. Thank you hyper specific pedantry.
Yes, it’s different. No, it’s not different.
It’s not pedantry, and I found the etymological origin interesting. Plus it was more accurate than your quick definition. While what you said was acceptable and adequate for your point, and you made a good point, what they said was interesting too and added to the conversation. I don’t see why you had to be so hostile and negative towards them.
I find there too often aggressive pedantry over the term “slave”, “indentured servant”, “serf”, and so on, that has exhausted me in those concepts. Especially since it’s often used to either excuse mistreatment or compete for who had it worse when they are all often in reality completely similar experiences.
So yeah. I was a bit snappy. It is being pedantic though (which Lemmy/Reddit communities thrive on so yeah I don’t know what I was expecting) especially when the original use of Robot as a modern term is literally for a passive human-esque slave force made by science.
But I agreee it does add to the conversation to include the original use.I get it. I also get annoyed by the weight those words get assigned. Same with ourselves words on television or, God forbid, “nigger”… I’m probably sounding like a racist right now to soemone, just for that word.but it shouldn’t be like that. They’re just words.
I am not raised in that culture of “fear for words” and I cannot understand it,but I have learned to stay far away from it,because the people who do have an opinion on those words are very loud and very clear.
I have also learned that words do not mean the same to different people. Even words without that “weight”. For instance a mental image of an “island”. I think of a tropic island with a single palm tree. You might think of a rocky island. Someone else might think of Shetland. It depends a lot on you context, for instance if you grew up watching The Loveboat or Game Of Thrones.Or maybe you actually grew up on an island. That doesn’t just happen for “island”, but pretty much every word. Fortunately we have a very extensive common context in which we can find common ground to communicate meaning.
You can also see this in language. For instance how people speak regional dialects or how the Eskimo languages have so many words for snow or how calligraphy has influenced Japanese writing or Silbo Gomero
Thanks and I’m sorry I snapped.
Yeah language is confusing and uses itself as only a tool to convey some thought that only the speaker can truly know the intent of but yet we all can share.Meanwhile I just realized I was being silly with words in another thread were I only used words ending in -ing to prove its all nonsensical, so your providing extra context does nothing to detract.
Again, sorry.
Sure I get that, I run into that a bit also when talking about how kids are basically a modern day slave class legally speaking in the US. I think that’s probably because slave can mean 2 things, 1 being an umbrella term for “worker with freedoms removed and who is not earning capital or power,” and 1 being a specific term for US antebellum slavery which looked quite different from other forms of slavery.
The second use of the term is why people are being really pedantic imo. Because a lot of minimizing has been done to say that black slaves back then didn’t have it so bad, or that they had the same deal as the Irish who were indentured servants. It’s a really common white supremacist talking point in the south that typically leads to their point that black people are actually inferior because every race has dealt with slavery but they are behind because they suck etc. Typical racist garbage, because they want black people to be slaves again and are openly advocating for it with their rhetoric.
So yes ‘slave’ has a charged meaning. Similar to how pitbull can mean “short-haired medium to large sized terriers including staffordshires, bullys, dogs argentinos, American pitbull terriers,” or pitbull can just mean American Pitbull Terrier. I try to emphasize mean the general term when I say “a type of slave class,” or “a form of slavery.”
Fair enough. I grew up in an area with a heavy African, Italian, Irish and Polish immigrant population. So I literally had front row seats to that contention between the words that I couldn’t understand how they didn’t see the commonality in the group that set these conditions against them.
But words/language is such a complicated tool and I may not always be speaking to a global generalized audience.
This is absolutely terrible and definitely feels like an invasion of, idk, being a human?! But with that said, even though people find out stuff like this happens to drivers and workers, they still enable it by ordering from Amazon because of convenience.
Until we can pull away on our reliance on these services, the companies are just gonna keep crossing more and more lines because they know they’re getting away with it with their customers.
Until we can make crossing those lines painful for those companies, they’ll keep doing it. Unfortunately, I think convenience is always going to beat morality if you leave it to “voting with your dollar”, we need actual regulations from our governments to combat this shit.
It’s just that most people just genuinely don’t care enough about what’s happening to other people enough to do anything beyond just saying that Amazon is bad. On top of that as Amazon starts to drive other stores out of business it does start to slowly become the only choice for getting certain things. So with those two combined expecting personal consumer choice to really make a difference is not realistic, this is the kind of thing that needs the government to intervene on to force Amazon to unionize and to potentially break it up like is being discussed with Google.
If the workforce was 100% unionized, they may realize they don’t need bosses. There’s a word for this, but I can’t think of it right now.
If it’s step 1, cooperatives. If it’s step 2, communism.
Yeah, we should totally stop eating to show the grocery stores they can’t control their employees. /s
You’re driving with a camera fine tuned on your face for the entire trip, set to trigger to your bosses when your face moves.
Not creepy at all.
I bet you could trick it with a cardboard cut out
Don’t know if I’d bet a month of paychecks on it.
Part of me wants to take a job at one of these couriers just to test it.
Part of me is ok with not knowing because that’s a lot to go through.
You wouldn’t get the job. You have to work your way up from the warehouse unless nepotism. And the warehouse is hell that might literally kill you.
Well that just sounds like a challenge.
It might open an unwanted can of worms but maybe the drivers could claim they aren’t
signingsinging along to the radio but are vocalizing actions like Japanese train operators to ensure focus and safety.Edit: I saw the sing and it opened up my eyes
claim they aren’t signing along to the radio
I mean…if they’re signing along to the radio, I’d say that’s really dangerous and needs to be cracked down on! Can’t sign sign language with both hands on the wheel after all!
Singing should be absolutely fine though.
It’s safe to sign while driving but only if you’re blind.
Soon to be followed by getting a write-up for breaking down crying in your vehicle due to stress and shitty wages.
It’s good that Amazon is not dominant in Poland.
It’s not dominant here in Estonia either, but neither is there a clear alternative. But maybe that’s a good thing, you can still order your things from different online retailers rather than relying on just one
Also here in Europe our labour protection is slightly better than in the US.
So Amazon wouldn’t get away with this shit as easily. I’m not saying they wouldn’t, but it’d be harder.
Allegro really is much better for many things. I find myself using it much more than Amazon nowadays.
