Not Only Has Amazon Found A Way To Make Cities Beg For Employment Fulfillment Centers

It has made the employees thus snared give up work time whenever it suits their logistical requirements. Which can apparently be quite often. And then they use another wonderful euphemism (much like "fulfilment center"), VTO (or "voluntary" time off) to cache it all in "Newspeak" obfuscation. And heaven help you if you don't "volunteer" to leave before you've had a chance to get a full day's worth of pay in; the restitution you need in order to make getting to the "fulfilment" center worth the cost of travel time in the first place; which is a considerable labor expense for marginal pay workers.

In order to get the full irony of this, though, you need to see it in the proper perspective.

And you need only look to the city of Seattle to find this perspective.

Workers there were made to be pitted against each other by the prospect of Bezos threatening to withdraw jobs because of a measly $20+ million a year employee head tax for the company. Chump change if ever there was such for a company now worth something like three quarters of a trillion dollars. Workers who obviously need jobs desperately. Which is the real point here. Keep the workers needing the jobs desperately. That way, even when the place to do the work has been pimped into your city by whatever giveaways demanded by the company up front for this right (which of course keeps the cities just as desperate for the jobs because of diminishing paths to functional revenue), the actual number of people who will get to work at any one time will likely be quite less, as a matter of operational design. And even worse, it will be these people, made desperate to have work in the first place, who will have to foot the "save the company slack time" costs, being forced to go home before a full days pay, such as it is anyway, is achieved.

Nice trick huh? And to top it off Bezos has the gaul to think that everyone should be thankful for this largess that he so beneficently bestos upon the "little people."

Just another aspect now of "Business As Usual." And you are the one who lets this situation continue.

VTO CAN GTFO
On Amazon's Time

2 diggs Gizmodo Technology

To reduce overhead but continue to sop up performance-based incentives from the local governments it operates in, Amazon has become increasingly reliant on a work scheduling scheme that often coerces workers into leaving their shifts early or turns them away at the door without notice.

See Also:

HQ2 Employees Might Unwittingly Pay Their Taxes to Amazon

[Post Note: If companies like Amazon keep bullying cities into ever more desperate avenues of providing funding streams, what else would you expect them to do? Legalize Sports Betting? ...Oh, wait. Maybe that one is not such a good example now. One does have to wonder, though, what else is left them. And maybe that is the really scary part because you just never know what might suddenly become reasonable when you've come to the seventh chamber of hell as far as commercial entities feeling any responsibility for civil oriented institutions are concerned, and they won't pay their workers enough so the cities can tax them either. J.V.]

A FEW BUMPS IN THE ROAD

Domino's Pizza Is Fixing Potholes Now, And That's Fine

6 diggs citylab.com Cities

Should basic maintenance of public roads be handed off to corporations for marketing stunts?

Even Monkeys Care More For Their Environments Than We Do

Our natural environments. Our social environments. Or institutional environments. They are all interrelated. That is a big reason why they are all going to feces at the same time now.

And what do you do about it? Write a check to ease your conscience? When you know in your heart that it is your refusal to stop doing "Business As Usual" that is the real culprit here.

I guess kicking the "High Fidelity TV Cake" habit, in all of its many manifestations, is a lot harder than you thought it would be.

Orangutan Tries To Take On A Bulldozer Destroying His Habitat

Net Neutrality Is Dead — What Now?

The Supreme Court Just Let States Purge Your Voter Registration If You Don't Vote. Here's What's Going On

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Decimation of reefs would send flood, storm damage costs soaring, study says

When You Live By Market Mentality

This is as close as you are going to get to "Informed," as that relates to the notion of informed choice,  as that relates to the only area of choice our supposed betters would prefer us to have, which is, certainly, the choice of which brand of BS we would like to consume, and believe in.

And since we seem to have become so ill formed of character lately, and therefore so susceptible to suggestion, especially as its practiced now as Recombative Mega Message, in the electro-photonic age (the "Age Of The Absurdity Of Growing Up"), this sort of thing seems to work very well indeed. It must or there wouldn't be so much money involved in either utilizing, or advancing its capabilities.

Don't worry. Just drink the expensively packaged kool-aid and let the hot burn of something wonderfully addictive ease all of your troubles away. Soon they'll have to give the 4K TVs away, as well as the big data link connection. Just small lost leaders to make sure you are channeled in the first place, I can assure you. Channeled to the right pipeline to your brain. The rest will just be software that other software will end up writing. And then we'll roll the dice to see what emerges.

Assuming the planet doesn't shuck us off first of course.

Behind the misleading claims fueling America's bourbon boom

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EXPOSE AND AMPLIFY

How Alt-Right Twitter Tricks The Media Into Panicking

2 diggs theoutline.com Internet

@thebradfordfile has been cited as evidence of the rise of the alt-right, but its popularity is faked through power-engagement groups and networks of sockpuppets.

MACHINE YEARNING

The Unbearable Awkwardness Of Automation

2 diggs The Atlantic Design

The machine age is changing the nature of work. In the process, it is also transforming buildings, and making them less hospitable for human use.

WOW, THIS SUCKS

YouTube Stars Get Rich Making Bomb Threats And Streaming It

3 diggs The Daily Beast Internet

Andy Harraz is one of the "IRL streamers" of YouTube, people who take money in exchange for letting their audience say anything through speakers aimed at unsuspecting people.

TFW YOUR BOSS EARNS 4,987X MORE THAN YOU

The 20 Companies With The Biggest Pay Gap Between The CEO And The Average Worker, Charted

13 diggs Work

Don't work for these companies. Unless you're planning to become CEO. But even then, probably bad karma.

[Post Note: It just amazes me how people can take political info from some people as if it were the gospel, totally unsuborned truth, even as these hucksters sell them on all manner of personally branded BS for their personal gain. Using, of course, their controversial personas to create branding notoriety in the first place. Gosh oh golly. What a wonderful way to get rich. Spew whatever extreme nonsense you can cook up in a feverishly perverse, conspiratorial nature, and then rake in the cash. And to hell with the collateral damage you do to the rest of the nation. And why should they care when they can live so well before the end finally comes. Now there's long range thinking for you. J.V.]

HYALURONIC HUSTLE

Why Alex Jones, Mike Cernovich And Joe Rogan Are All Selling Skin Care
1 digg Racked Style
Since skincare is typically considered a vain enterprise for women, it might come as a surprise that the extremely macho Alex Jones sells his own. But interest in skincare is booming, with projections that it'll grow to a $135 billion industry by 2021.

OH WE'RE STUPID ENOUGH

Killer Robots Will Only Exist If We Are Stupid Enough To Let Them
9 diggs The Guardian Technology

As long as humans are sensible when they create the operating programs, robots will bring enormous benefits to humanity.

BROKEN RULES CAN BREAK US BACK

The 'Fiduciary Rule' May Sound Boring, But Its Collapse Threatens Your Retirement
8 diggs Bloomberg Money

The Obama-era rule made financial advisers working with retirement accounts put clients' interests first.

Why one judge's decision could change the fate of U.S. media

And Now Some More Folks Get To Pay The Collateral Damage Tax

Whether they want to or not.

And this tax is paid in a great deal more than money.

The interesting, and also quite terrible, thing now, though, is that you can suffer direct extreme climate effect damage, which is of course a collateral effect of the industrialization of our air, but also suffer much worse after because of the collateral damage a completely broken socio/economic system as it careens along under centuries of built up social interia; doing exactly what it did to create the industrialized air in the first place: focus only on supply, costs, production and distribution efficiencies, and above all else, maximize profits. Only now we have it all electrified and the inadvertent effects are thus amplified across so many boundaries of formerly segmented actors, that we get our own quantum economic, transaction super effects; as key trigger events set off waves of cascading sub events, making things go bad with a lot of social energy behind them, much like the chain reaction of an atomic bomb. 

This is what it means to have a completely new operating environment and still think you can operate in it with a centuries old operating system. This is why you have to take responsibility for yourselves now. The old ways of going about life now simply will not work anymore. Especially as we have to redefine what work really ought to be in the first place. Your choice.

SURVIVING A DYING LAKE

Dust Rising

16 diggs The Verge Nature

As California's largest lake dries up, it threatens nearby communities with clouds of toxic dust.

Nodules Of Metal On The Deep Ocean Sea Beds

Nodules that could start the next gold rush of the 21st century.

And if we don't get a quick handle on negotiating a coordinated, and very careful, way of going about this, with the rest of the world, we will be creating one more, quite huge, and very dangerous competition, with the rest of our fellow travelers on this planet.

Oh, and lest we forget once again, having huge numbers of corporate, and/or state sponsored, players in resource extraction will do, down there, in critical habitat that we know next to nothing about; especially as it relates to all sorts of possible interactions, and circulations, that involve the bottom, and the rest of our deep oceans. All of them down there, jostling and bumping around in mad haste, as only people with a lust for big gain can have.

The thing is, I have posted on this before in connection to building my design for a sea based Hypertube, mass driver, space launching system.

In my view there might be no better way to do both space launch with this system, and provide a means to incentivize a global partnership to do both launching as a world public service, but also do the exploration of the deep sea beds, together, so that we can not only find the nodules in a structured way, we could agree to bring them up in a fashion to not do any more harm to the ecosystems down there; as well as to then share the extraction fair and equitably with all of the participating nations.

If we don't come up with something like this you just know what will eventually happen. It will turn into a gigantic cluster intercourse of a world disaster. And aren't we already dealing with enough those?

THE RACE TO SEND ROBOTS TO MINE THE OCEAN FLOOR

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HAPPY WORLD OCEAN'S DAY

It's Time For The Next Wave Of Ocean Exploration And Protection

5 diggs Wired Oceans

Reigniting exploration of the world's oceans is essential to protecting our natural resources and promoting scientific advancement.

Another Example Of How Everything Affects Everything Else

Even when you are trying to do the right thing recycling wise.

Turns out that some legacy materials, designed initially for one thing, then used in newer things for some time now, and subsequently being recycled into new products, because we want to try harder to be responsible for the whole lifecycle of an item of course; that because of these legacy materials, you can have recycle come back to bite you in the ass.

Case in point, black plastic. Something that started with older electronics, inherited their need to not burn too easily, but now get recycled into new products where the "not so burnable" property comes with a chemical component you don't want to be part of any food container, or child's toy, for that matter. But how would an ecycler know unless informed of this new concern. And maybe a new way should be found to insure electronic devices don't burn so easily as well.

Black plastic is killing the planet. It’s time to stop using it

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THE TEARDOWN INDEX

How Energy-Efficient New Homes Can Lead To Increased Carbon Emissions

1 digg anthropocenemagazine.org Energy

Replacing old houses with new ones can actually result in more carbon emissions than doing nothing.

TODAY'S THE DAY, CONSIDER A BIDET

Stop Wiping Your Butt With North America's Temperate Rainforests

1 digg earther.com Nature

Most of America's toilet paper is made directly from fresh pulp, from tree farms and virgin forests, because the industrial process that makes each sheet soft enough for sensitive human posteriors requires long fibers that simply don’t survive recycling.

Keeping Something Going That Should Have Died Some Time Ago

Sound familiar?

It should. It is what we've been doing with Capitalism for at least fifty years now; now that electrons and photons moved in the right way can get anyone more and more of anything they want. Regardless of what that might do to the rest of us.

It is also interesting that Capitalism got so good, a while back, at doing the very same thing to those new developments that showed promise; the ones that threatened to do what made the technologies depicted here become so obviously not worth the bad effects they create; because the new ones didn't have that old bagage of bad effect. Market competition being the chaotic thing it is, though, you do get things leaking through from time to time. Leaked through and put forth out of your control. You can see where people who put a lot of counters into the old way of doing things might have an incentive to resist such change.

And now we have an expert at Demented Clown Car driving helping out the poor folks who got stuck with very troublesome tech.

Poor dears. Making all of that money only to have it taken it away from them? Can you imagine how thankful they'd be if a special kind of champion were there to take up their cause? As opposed, of course, to taking up the cause of the rest of us, because, though we might be grateful as all heck, we just aren't going to be able to show our affection to nearly the degree as the poor dears who have most of the counters already. I mean, all they want to do is simply keep making a lot more after all. Is that really so bad? Once you get to really know them?

Trump energy plan would prop up failing coal and nuclear plants

See Also:
[Post Note: And let us also remember that this abuse of waste is just as unacceptable as making the starving amongst our own species swallow the idea that it is more practical to let food rot than pay the cost of getting it to people who need it; any more than it's easy to swallow the fact that the information that would allow a lot of people to feed themselves is also a commodity, for which a profit must be made. J.V.]

Dead whale found in Thailand with 17 pounds of plastic in its stomach

[Post Note: Yet another example of how we are gaining new forms of instrumentality on an ever increasing basis. J.V.]

MUSCLE UP

Watching A Robot Use Living Muscle To Lift Objects Is Actually Super Unnerving

3 diggs Technology

Japanese researchers have managed to graft lab-grown muscles unto a robotic finger, thus making our robotic overlords one step closer to ruling us all in the near future.