MySQL vs PostgreSQL - <AUTHOR> http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/MySQL_vs_PostgreSQL <comment><USER2> I've read many MySQL vs Postgres articles/papers over the years. This one is the best. Not highly opinionated. "Just the facts" mostly. And in a good format. Thanks for publishing!!!

oh yeah, go postgres!!! ;)

<comment><USER3> Great comparison of the most recent features and versions. It's nice to see PostGres get some kudos in the speed department. And, it's nice to hear about the upcoming developments of the Falcon and Maria engines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you're in Portland this weekend and want to learn something about Postgres then you should attend <http://pgcon.us/> Postgres West.

</comment><comment><USER5> We switched from MySQL to PG when mysql suddenly returned different results in a unit test when we upgraded to a newer minor version. Never looked back.

</comment><comment><USER6> OTOH I was thinking about moving my app from MySQL to SQLite. Did anyone else has gone through the same situation?

<comment><USER7> That is a bad idea I think — SQLite locks the database while inserting data, obviously this is bad for a big application. I don't think it was designed for web apps with possibly hundreds of queries a second.

<comment><USER8> You are right. But "hundreds of queries a second" are fine if there're mostly _read_ queries.

<http://www.sqlite.org/faq.html#q5>

<comment><USER7> Yeh I should have mentioned the times I've used SQLite was early in development, or one time when I created a script which would pump tons of data into the database in threads, which resulted in errors and missing data. I'm sure I could have added better error exceptions and keep retrying, but if you translate that to a multi-user app, thats just not going to cut it. A quick change to MySQL fixed it. :)

I do like SQLite, just not for anything where you cant control the writes per second, or need it to be high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is very useful (although I am not qualified to say if it's definitive or not). I chose PostgreSQL based on one single fact that I ONCE crashed a MySQL server with a query (about 4 years ago) and I've never crashed PostgreSQL.

It's a flimsy reason tbh but it's all I had to go on. Having said all that I do really love PostgreSQL now after 4 years of using it (via SQLAlchemy).

<comment><USER10> I tend to chose PostgreSQL because of the query language. It is more comfortable to program in.

As ORMs become more prevalent, things like query language start to become less relevant, but so do relational databases. I really don't care how my data is stored, as long as it's safe and performs well.

<comment><USER11> ORMs are a case of "good enough for most," however, I have seen ridiculously dramatic increases in performance when dealing with millions of DB rows by using SQL and stored procedures. By design, it's pretty much impossible for an ORM to ever reach such levels of performance since they need to be generic enough to work across various RDMS systems and so forth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My preferred DBMS is Postgres, but I have to use MySQL at work. I can honestly say that moving to MySQL after Postgres is a serious downer. What happens when you want referential integrity alongside fulltext indexes? An ugly database.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't understand why MySQL has 9 different storage engines.

Would someone mind quickly posting the benefits of that architecture as opposed to focusing on one 'storage engine' and making it really good?

<comment><USER14> Well, I pose to you this question:

Would you rather have 1 type of car that the government makes that works pretty reliably and is a middle-ground car, or would you rather have a selection of cars to chose from; sports, truck, sedan, minivan, etc. ?

Everyone has different needs. I use MySQL extensively for it's memory-based storage engine, MyISAM for quick & dirty non-escential data i/o, and InnoDB for when data needs to be managed securely for processes.

I would use PG for transaction-based data processing in a high-volume situation with multi-processing clusters. Otherwise MySQL works fantastic for all my needs.

<comment><USER15> The flexibility is great, but only if grouped with consistency. No foreign keys on MyISAM but yes on InnoDB? Thanks but no, thanks.

<comment><USER16> No disk backed storage with heap tables but yes on InnoDB? Thanks but no, thanks.

Uh, the definition of flexibility is lack of consistency between the options. Otherwise, it's a false choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Flamewar in 3... 2... 1...

Oh... This is not Slashdot. Sorry.</comment>


Nielsen ratings: Why has no one disrupted nielsen ratings? - <AUTHOR>

I have a nielsen box and I find it to be a 50 yr technology. I don't understand why they need 5 boxes (For user input box, one cable box, two modems, and some adapter for power) for what one can nowadays do in a simple phone. Its also very user unfriendly.<p>Why do TV companies still use nielsen ratings? <comment><USER2> Disrupt what? Building custom hardware boxes and paying people to gather their behavioral data? I can't see a lot of young hackers jumping on this problem.

Nielsen's actual business is getting data (staggeringly enormous amounts of data - not just TV watching but consumer purchase data, retail POS data, etc), and then leveraging it. If you want to disrupt something, it's the collection and use/sale of this information.

However, there is a strong network effect here. The value of the data you collect is proportional to how established you are and how much participation/penetration you have in an industry. Big companies (like TV/media companies, retail chains, and manufacturers) want big data from big providers. They want large amounts of reliable data that speaks for an entire industry, nationwide and worldwide, to inform their very-high-dollar decisions. If you can collect that, and convince e.g. Walmart that your data is worth buying, go for it!

</comment><comment><USER3> I think a lot of people have, privately at least. My guess for why they are still around is the fact that they have literally become a household name and have the infrastructure to back it up.

As far as technology, you hit the nail on the head. A simple Android / iPhone app could literally replace all 5 boxes. I gasped when I heard they are still using modems, jeeze.

<comment><USER4> Nielsen knows that people lie on TV surveys. They need to monitor and compare that to surveys.

<comment><USER5> Nielsen presumably has also weighted the results from the sample set properly (or picked a representative sample) so that it's indicative of the nation. The results from an Android app would need to be analyzed by a polling firm for them to have the same usefulness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Do you get paid for keeping that Nielsen box? That is a doubt i've always had.

An idea I have for the late Idea Sunday: a mobile app where the user let it on next to him while watching TV and it recognize what is he seeing by the sound. No need for input or action by the user.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. I get paid a princely sum of $25 per month. I been Thinkig on same lines as you but there are some challenges. You need detailed demographics information on per household basis(age sex occupation appliances in home number if cars education etc).also whatever data u have must prove to tv studios and networks to be more useful than existing Nielsen ratings. but since Nielsen only uses 50000 boxes in entire USA, you demographics information those not detailed May be more useful. Anyone interested in brainstorming?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think viggle is trying to disrupt this space. They use audio matching to "check-in" to shows from your phone, which earn you points you can redeem for tangible rewards, all while collecting viewer data at a more granular level than a neilson box.

</comment><comment><USER8> Not sure about the US, but in the UK Sky/Virgin Media set top boxes are internet connected. I'd be very surprised if they didn't send viewing stats home.

<comment><USER9> They can track what the set-top boxes are watching in the US too, but advertisers don't care how many TVs are turned on; they care how many people are watching and what the demographics of those people are. Set-top boxes can't capture that information.

For someone to disrupt Nielsen, they would need to collect demographic information about the people watching, not just the number of devices that are watching.</comment></comment>


FreedomPop "Snowden Phone" privacy policy - <AUTHOR> http://www.freedompop.com/privacy.htm

<comment><USER2> I am not a lawyer, but FreedomPop has one of the broadest privacy policies I have seen for an ISP. This leaves them with a lot of leeway when monetizing your use of the service, especially section 1 and section 4.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly. Among other things: \- We also share your information with affiliates and third parties for their own marketing purposes.

-We may share your information with third parties who perform function on our behalf, such as to process your order and to assist with order provisioning. These service providers also may help us perform technical functions, host our Services, analyze our data, provide marketing assistance, and provide customer service.

\- In each of these situations, the recipients of your data may potentially be located in any country in the world.

etc.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also, they require you to fill in a form providing your email address and zip code to even see details about the phone.</comment>


Ask HN: Who actually enjoys using Facebook products? - <AUTHOR> I've noticed lately on HN there's been a lot of negative attention towards Facebook and their products. This doesn't surprise me and I think it's deserved given their actions, but I find the tendency of HN to dismiss FB's products as "useless" to be narrow-minded.
I personally don't agree with a lot of what FB does, but I still find their products very enjoyable and useful. Contrary to popular opinion here, it hasn't made me unhappier to use FB or Instagram. I've only ever used FB for close friends and I still engage with them regularly on the platform. Furthermore, Messenger has been great for maintaining contact with my closest friend groups throughout the years. I also really enjoy browsing Instagram as a photography and I've made some really awesome and genuine friendships with other people in the community through it.
I'm not trying to excuse FB's actions as a company, but I'm interested if other people on HN also have similar experiences. I can honestly say that my life would be undoubtedly worse if services like Messenger did not exist in it and that it would be much more difficult to maintain some of my most important relationships otherwise. <comment><USER2> Although there's intersection, enjoyable and useful can be quite distinct. Case in point: facebook and messenger apps. I don't _enjoy_ using these but they definitely provide value. A lot of my friends back in my home country do status updates on FB, it's nice to passively catch up with these every 2-3 weeks.

OTOH, I use Messenger every day to talk to my mom and relatives, again back in my home country. We could also use Whatsapp or some other video calling app but they are mostly old and it's very hard to get them to use another app, however easy its use may be.</comment>


Market Concentration Is Threatening the US Economy - <AUTHOR> https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/united-states-economy-rising-market-power-by-joseph-e-stiglitz-2019-03 <comment><USER2> This is the inevitable result of efficiencies of scale. With computers, databases, instant communications, why would a business be restricted in anyway to expand as far as it can once it has perfected whatever it is selling.

In the long run, it would be beneficial for all consumers to be able to select from multiple sellers, but in the short term, it's beneficial for each consumer to purchase from the whomever is giving them the best value. That means everyone uses one of the top few banks, one of the top few retailers, one of the top few electronic device manufacturers, etc.

<comment> Spartan-S63 I think what it comes down to is the appropriate amount and type of regulation that suits the market. As market concentration happens, those corporations must necessarily become more regulated to ensure consumer choice and employee rights.

The less concentrated the market, the less regulation required because natural market forces will have larger impacts. Once a corporation reaches a significant size, they largely outgrow the market being able to influence them in a large way, hence the need for more (and stricter) regulation.

Monopolies, if well-regulated, aren't as evil as they seem.

<comment><USER3> Do you think monopolies like PG&E in California are well-regulated? If not, could you tell me why this isn't due to systemic difficulties in setting up a well-regulated monopoly?

EDIT: I should put my thesis in here: It is easy for regulatory capture to happen in the case of monopoly and regulator. I would also expect the monopoly plus regulator to perform more poorly than either a competitive company or a public entity.

<comment><USER4> Regulation generally is not the same as regulation specifically related to antitrust. You can create a well regulated monopoly where none of the regulations are designed to prevent negative effects of being a monopoly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The irony of monopoly is that when broken upmitntypically benefits the former monopoly parts. Rockefeller Made more money after being broken up than he had as a monopolist. AT&T has underperformed since being reassembled from its post-breakup pieces, which had flourished with competition.

<comment><USER6> Is that's the case then why don't companies voluntarily break up?

<comment><USER7> Companies break up all the time. Sometimes as a "spin off" where a part is let go on its own. Sometimes a division is sold to someone else who wants it. Companies are in a constant process of changing size based on what they guess is the best place to be next year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Making matters worse, America's low tax-to-GDP ratio – just 27.1% even before the Trump tax cut – means a dearth of money for investment in the infrastructure, education, health care, and basic research needed to ensure future growth._

In comparison to our peers the U.S. is under taxed. The OECD average is 34.2%. What makes the average person feel overtaxed is the combination of federal income tax, state income tax (where it occurs), along with stagnant wages and high medical care costs. The U.S. spends far more per capita on healthcare than any other OECD nation.

It is easy to convince a significant portion of average Americans that taxes are too high. So they vote for politicians that promise to lower taxes. Except they don't lower taxes for average people. In a properly functioning political system this disconnect between promise and actuality would be taken care of at election time. In my lifetime I've not seen this happen and my political memory starts with the Reagan administration.

Due to globalization and the ability of the top 0.1% to easily move money from country to country and to easily move citizenship from country to country one can no longer reasonably make the case that what is good for the top 0.1% is necessarily good for the country. The intersts of the nation as a whole and the interests of the top 0.1% are badly misaligned.

The U.S. is politically unhealthy and until this changes I see no hope for improvement. I think only a shock to the system will really change things.

<comment><USER9> _It is easy to convince a significant portion of average Americans that taxes are too high. So they vote for politicians that promise to lower taxes. Except they don't lower taxes for average people._

Let's be honest, tax cuts may be bad policy, but it is not true that they haven't been lowered for the average person. Rates are down, standard deduction is up.

<comment><USER10> SALT caps really screw a lot of people though. My effective federal tax rate is higher after the tax "cut" than it would have been under the previous tax laws.

It really depends on where you live. Some blue areas have had effective tax increases for a sizable chunk of the population.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The fundamental title and premise of the article is quite inaccurate.

[https://tcdata360.worldbank.org/indicators/hh.mkt?country=BR...](https://tcdata360.worldbank.org/indicators/hh.mkt?country=BRA&indicator=2370&countries=USA&viz=line_chart&years=1988,2015)

Clearly market concentration has been going DOWN worldwide since 1988. It's important to get your basics correct.

<comment><USER12> The linked index is described as "Hirschman Herfindahl index is a measure of the dispersion of trade value across an exporter's partners." Can you expand on how this index relates to market concentration in general, or within a single nation like the US?

<comment><USER11> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herfindahl_index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herfindahl_index)

Named after economists Orris C. Herfindahl and Albert O. Hirschman, it is an economic concept widely applied in competition law, antitrust[1] and also technology management.

The article thoroughly discussed competition and antitrust.

I have not missed the mark on the subject.</comment></comment></comment>


Juicy Startup - <AUTHOR> http://staringispolite.com/blog/2014/10/24/juicy-startup/

<comment><USER2> lol. uh oh.

<comment><AUTHOR> stealin your karma :)

<comment><USER2> Haha I don't mind. Was more worried about having to scale up my little blog server if it took off :)

Do I know you in real life by the way?</comment></comment></comment>


Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-automation-exclusive-idUSKCN1SJ0X1 <comment><USER2> Anyone parading around like this is bad news has never worked in an assembly line or warehouse job. This might reduce the workforce overall long-term, but honestly this is _hard_ back-breaking long-workday labor.

Anything that _improves_ the livelihood of the warehouse workers is a win in my book.

<comment><USER3> I worked for Amazon in what was then a brand new warehouse for a few months in 2015. I worked 10 hour shifts, from 20:00 to 07:00 (the extra hour was for lunch and breaks). My job was picking orders. It seemed easy at first (and it was, but mentally, not so much). All I had to do was stand in one place while robots brought me pod after endless pod of products. There was nothing to it, and that was the problem. The pods were divided into indexed bins containing their random assortment of products and the computer told me to get product X from bin Y. Again and again and again. I was literally just a robot arm with a human brain attached to it, and for what? To torment it [me, the head]? I was in hell.

By the end of each shift I would be in a daze, wondering why the hell I thought this would be a good job, and by the end of my first month I started using heroin again (I had been clean for six months up until that point). Now I'm not saying I would have stayed clean if it wasn't for Amazon, but it definitely made relapse happen a lot sooner. And besides, the drug made me work like a machine. The 10 hour shifts that slogged by in sobriety began to blow by with blissful alacrity, and my numbers were excellent to boot. And eventually, well, I was fucking hooked on heroin again and I knew I had to stop. So I quit to focus on my recovery. It was the best decision I've ever made and I've been clean for over three years now.

That might be a stupid story, but the whole time I worked at Amazon, all I could think was "they are going to automate this job someday, and thank fucking god for that. What is taking them so long?" No human should be made to do such mindless work. It sucks. And for $13.75 an hour, it definitely isn't worth it.

<comment><USER4> "And for $13.75 an hour, it definitely isn't worth it."

A billion of people around the world would be happy to work with that hourly rate.

<comment><USER5> Not at the US cost of living. Nor would those billions of people be paid a that rate if their cost of living is lower than the US.

<comment><USER6> I think it's quite likely, but unknowable, that folks would accept the income:cost of living ratio of the US if it came with the associated sociological benefits. I think you're underestimating how disproportionately impoverished many people around the world are.

<comment><USER7> Well people here keep ranting about 1 percenters without ever realizing that >$100K earners are among one percenters in the world.

<comment><USER8> Actually, the threshold to be in top 1% income bracket worldwide is $32,400

[https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal- finance/05061...](https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal- finance/050615/are-you-top-one-percent-world.asp)

<comment><USER9> This number is both old and in nominal terms. A person making 50k USD in China is likely richer than a person in the US making 100k USD in the US.

[http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/771271476908686029/Segal.pdf](http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/771271476908686029/Segal.pdf) suggests that the number to be in the global 1% is around $50,000 PPP per person in a given household.

<comment><USER10> Except that the Chinese person is a prisoner in their own country, and the American could move to China to have a higher quality of life outside of the polluted cities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm surprised that Amazon still uses boxes. They have the market power to insist manufacturers comply with amazon-specific packaging requirements. Why not just insist that all products be packaged in postal-compatible packaging? Then the amazon warehouse robot need only slap a label on the product and throw it in the shipping bin.

Another answer would be to have products packaged in standard, or at lease square, boxes that could be thrown into larger shipping boxes.

Or do away with the warehouse altogether and have products ship directly from manufacturers. I wonder if anyone has tried that?

<comment><USER12> The vast majority (95%, including lots of oddball pcbs, fasteners, etc) of my recent Amazon deliveries have come from an Amazon van. I'm almost surprised they don't offer a reusable bin or something of that nature. It feels wasteful to throw away so many boxes.

<comment><USER13> Especially with the recent news that a lot of what we thought was recyclable really isn't. I presume that clean brown corrugated is still OK, but I don't know that for sure.

<comment><USER14> oh it is "recyclable", just (for several materials) takes more energy to recycle it than toss it in a landfill. You get to feel good that cardboard gets a "new life", instead of a new one (which extracts more carbon from the atmosphere) being created, we can burn _more_ CO2 to have a second truck travel down your street to pick up renewable cardboard and haul it around town till it eventually gets cleaned and processed (at the cost of even more energy).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As someone in consumer-goods warehousing and distribution, automation is the only way forward.

The seasonality of demand and inherent monotonous nature of the work itself makes it near-impossible to scale and retain the workforce required to fulfill orders.

You have to automate what can be automated, and continue to aggressively hire just to keep up with order growth.

</comment><comment><USER16> Video of the CarltonWrap mentioned in the article: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1yw05mWnXw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1yw05mWnXw)

It's actually pretty neat - creates boxes to size on demand.

Doesn't seem like this would be possible with humans at a store, and could really cut down on box inventory.

<comment><USER17> Absurd how most of the items on the belt are already in a cardboard box. Seems so wasteful.

<comment><USER18> Part of it could be privacy too. I ordered a computer monitor that was in its own cardboard box. However, that box had clearly printed "Gaming Monitor" on the box. This item was sitting on my porch for a few hours before I got home.

Amazon put it in one of their boxes, which did not have any labels about the package contents. Thieves are more likely to steal a box that says "expensive computer part" versus an unlabeled box.

Not to say that's always the case, but it depends on what the products box is like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is a minor improvement in packaging. It's not automated picking, which will be a big deal if Amazon cracks that. They've been trying and failing for years now. Amazon gave up on their robotic picking challenge after 2017. Here's the winner of the last challenge.[1] Way too slow and not reliable enough.

Amazon has about 100,000 robots now. Most are Kiva machines, moving storage racks to human pickers. Here's what that looks like.[2] The pickers stay in one place, take things out of bins brought to them, and put them in outgoing bins. A laser pointer tells them what to pick. That's almost 10 years old, but Amazon has not yet been able to replace humans in that job.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AljePt7Mh6U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AljePt7Mh6U)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UxZDJ1HiPE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UxZDJ1HiPE)

<comment><USER20> Here's a vid of the actual packing machine noted in the article: [https://youtu.be/0eqtqKDbV1Q](https://youtu.be/0eqtqKDbV1Q)

It is pretty slick, and an obvious improvement to packing things in over- sized/generic boxes.

<comment><USER21> Yo that's crazy! custom sized packaging regardless of what's being packed? impressive

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Articles about Amazon are quick to mention the workplace conditions or robots automating something. Rarely do they mention that machines equal lower prices for the consumers 9 times out of 10.

You can think what you want about Amazon but I'm not complaining that I have 100's of options for my phone case, all for 1/5 the price of the previous days buying them at Verizon or Apple.

Edit: would be awesome to hear about Amazon's pricing practice from an employee

<comment><USER23> >machines bring lower prices

Do you have any source about this? If the costumer is already willing to pay a price there would be no point in lowering the price just because you automated the process. Or better said, theres no point in investing in machines if your profit margin is not going to get wider.

<comment><USER24> It's worth expanding on this. Because I think it gets lost in the rhetoric, whether deliberately or by accident.

A profit-maximizing firm sets prices that maximize its expected profit. This seems tautological, but it's important and I think it's implications aren't appreciated.

If your prices are already beating the competition, and you already have a solid reputation for low prices, there is no incentive to continue lowering prices, even as you cut costs. This is why monopolies are considered "bad", because they eliminate incentives for firms to care at all about the welfare of consumers.

In undergrad economics classes, you might learn that prices are set equal to marginal cost (including opportunity cost). But that is only true under specific and relatively strong equilibrium conditions, which I don't believe apply to Amazon.

<comment><USER25> The reason that this tends to lower prices for consumers is that these innovations rarely stay confined to the companies that invent them. If this lowers costs for amazon to fulfill orders, then these techniques tend to get adopted by their competitors.

And once adopted by competitors, when everyone's margins have increased, these companies do compete on price.

This process doesn't happen immediately but it does happen.

<comment><USER26> Who are Amazon's most likely competitors?

<comment><USER27> Walmart, alibaba, jet.com, Target, and ebay all spring to mind

<comment><USER28> I believe jet.com is owned by Walmart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The industrial revolution helped spur the Progressive Era and the modern welfare state, the current technological evolution will likely bring about the next wave of Progressive actions. The US is more conservative than Europe, but sooner rather than later we are going to have to reckon with the fact that employment based health care doesn't cut it when the blue-collar jobs of yesteryear are eliminated by automation.

It's not Amazon's role to provide jobs for Americans, it's their job to increase profits -- it's the government role it tax Amazon appropriately and use those funds to support Americans disrupted by the changing landscape. It's time for all of us to accept what the future brings and act appropriately.

</comment><comment><USER30> Contrarian (and biased) point of view based on our current success serving Fortune 500 customers - automation in warehouses is not a near-term solution, and acquiring and retaining talent is still a huge pain.

Reuters only 12 days ago published, "Amazon dismisses idea automation will eliminate all its warehouse jobs soon." [1]

Automation will continue to increase, but we're still seeing numerous job openings in warehousing. [2]

For now, it looks like robots in warehouses are displacing work, not replacing jobs. We do believe that automation and robots will eventually lead to the creation of more stable jobs with less turnover.

[1] [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com- warehouse/amaz...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com- warehouse/amazon-dismisses-idea-automation-will-eliminate-all-its-warehouse- jobs-soon-idUSKCN1S74B9)

[2] [https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm)

</comment><comment><USER31> About time!

I visited either YYZ4 or YYZ3 a few months ago and I was incredibly disappointed. For a technology company, their warehouses were anything but sophisticated.

Their storage robots were surprisingly lackluster, their outbound/cubiscan conveyor belt was incredibly slow and often stopped.

Of course, I am just an outsider looking in, and I have no visibility into the underlying software that optimizes these process, but when you look at companies with fulfillment tech like JD, you really wonder how Amazon's retail arm is able to survive at all.

<comment><USER32> It was YYZ4. YYZ3 doesn't do tours.

If you're interested in helping make it better, Amazon's got an office full of developers here in Toronto[0] working on these problems. It's a lot of fun, the pay is better than most in Toronto, and the 7 years I've been here have almost always involved me being mentored by really great folks. Feel free to reach out[1].

[0]120 Bremner, between the ACC and Rogers Center.

[1]This alias at company name dot com.

<comment><USER33> Off topic, but you're literally the first Amazon developer I've ever seen say anything positive about working there. Do you feel that the work culture is unusually good for your office compared to Amazon as a whole?

<comment><USER32> The hiring bar at Amazon is high enough that anyone unhappy would have little trouble getting a job elsewhere. Plus, there's an internal policy that any dev in good standing is welcome to join any team that wants them. So most managers treat their devs very well.

I had a coworker join in January. Very talented, great to work with. Wasn't really into what we did. So he found a team doing what he was interested in and transferred last week. Sorely missed, but better to have him happy in the company than unhappy until he leaves.

The culture itself is something special. The leadership principles mean something here. For certain types (of which I am one) it really works well. My only displeasure with the culture is the times the company makes choices that seem to go against the LPs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It's awesome that the boxing machine is not patented by Amazon but is owned by an independent (? for now?) company. It means that others can access this tech and that Amazon won't close it before competitors. If it works, I believe Amazon won't wait for long with the takeover though.

It's great because Google et al tend to keep a lot to themselves, not offering hardware on the market (for example full version of the TPU).

<comment><USER35> I would like to remind you such machines are not built because it requires some genius touch in design, they are not built because there is little demand for them. But yeah, tool being not locked under some patent by some monopoly or the other is a good thing.

<comment><USER34> Do you have any pointers for articles stating that this is the case? I'd love to read more about such solutions - I thought that machines stealing our real jobs is still a matter of tech not being good enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> "That would amount to more than 1,300 cuts across 55 U.S. fulfillment centers for standard-sized inventory." ... "removing at least 24 roles at each one, these people said. These facilities typically employ more than 2,000 people."

I'm surprised that number is so low. There's only a couple dozen people out of 2000+ that actually put orders in boxes?

<comment><USER37> I guess 24 roles could also mean 24 roles like lead packer, junior packer etc ...

<comment><USER38> It's no stretch to assume by "role" they might mean a job title, and that each role could possibly be being filled by 3 people (3 * 8 hour shifts for a 24 hours continuous operation), so now you're looking at 72 jobs. I've no idea if Amazon does run 24 hour operations though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Is there a field of study associated with job creation?

The answer is not actually obvious. There's a lot of research into efficiency, which is almost synonymous with job destruction.

Edit: Thanks for the answers below. I was thinking of academic areas of research. For example, Macroeconomics, Labor Relations, Governance, Management Theory etc.

<comment><USER40> Automation means some people are richer (mostly the machine sellers and end- consumers), with more to trade for the products of some other kind of job.

People create new jobs about as fast as they destroy old ones, and that has little relation to the kind of jobs and technology involved. There are some second-order factors that create the bad kinds of unemployment, but the ones that currently are relevant have little relation to automation.

That's not saying that automation unemployed can not become relevant. It certainly can, and has done so a few times in history, with results varying from bad to disastrous. I'm just saying that job creation and destruction aren't different phenomena, and you delude yourself if you think somebody can study one without also studying the other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Looks like it's not just Amazon "JD.com Inc and Shutterfly Inc have used the machines as well, the companies said, as has Walmart Inc. Walmart started 3.5 years ago and has since installed the machines in several U.S. locations"

And they are faster too "They crank out 600 to 700 boxes per hour, or four to five times the rate of a human packer"

</comment><comment><USER42> I was debugging firmware for a Dutch supermarket chain as a summer job while in high school in the 80s and at that time they were 'very close' to replace all packing jobs with robots. Did Amazon pull it off finally?

</comment><comment><USER43> I'm all for this as soon as we change the laws so companies pay payroll taxes on automation commensurate to the number of paid positions taken by the equipment.

Automation is what we should be striving for, but only if workers and society see material benefits from it. ("Your labor potential can be reallocated to a position of higher need"/"You now have the opportunity to retrain" isn't a material benefit.)

<comment><USER44> That seems tough to determine. Does an autonomous bulldozer count as one employee because you would have had one person driving it? Or does it count as five employees because you run it 24/7? Or does it count as five hundred employees because that's how many people you'd need if they were using shovels?

<comment><USER45> Similarly, this also leaves open a big loophole - if you implement a tax on jobs eliminated, the incentive shifts to starting companies that that don't have jobs in the first place. Then you quickly arrive at the sub-contracted functions shell game where a company pays for a service rather than for specific workers to avoid the automation tax, and the fulfillment companies shuffle around as new automation tech allows them to eliminate more jobs.

I don't think taxation on automated labor really gets us anywhere. Wealth tax makes a lot more sense with fewer loopholes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Considering how badly Amazon treats their employees, I'm surprised they haven't allocated vast amount of resources already to automating everything in their warehouses. The number of times they've appeared in the news in the past regarding their treatment of employees, you'd think they despise humans and want to replace everyone with robots and that they would have done it already.

<comment><USER47> Well, if they could they would. They're keeping the workers they absolutely need and automating everything else possible. The endgame is a dark warehouse (no lights, the robots just sort of know what to do) but the workers still need some money so they keep working even though their numbers keep dropping.

This box robot saves material (little wastage of cardboard) and labor costs, and doesn't ever call in sick. Why wouldn't they want robots for everything?

<comment><USER48> > This box robot (…) doesn't ever call in sick.

Any machine eventually calls in sick when it undergoes maintenance and failure. Of course the failure modes are different than with human labor, but the point is machines also fail.

<comment><USER47> >Any machine eventually calls in sick when it undergoes maintenance and failure. Of course the failure modes are different than with human labor, but the point is machines also fail.

I think that robots are more fungible and predictable in failure than humans. You can plan around that, like plugging in spare hard drives and machines when they fail so throughput is not affected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I should go back and read some older books on the wondrous future of automation. The idea always was, of course, that machines would do the boring part of a job. What people actually bring to the picnic is a subset of a job that is hard to do with a computer and/or machine manipulation, so you end up with deskilling of supermarket cashiers or bank teller gigs.

It always seemed to me that you could wipe out far more jobs than Amazon is likely to by simply removing the need to weigh items in grocery stores (like our local discount market). Generally, supersizing retail and the underlying supply chain has changed matters far more than laying off some warehouse employees.

I suppose that outsourcing has already 'automated' scads of US jobs in any case. The interesting automation will hit people who type for a living. Dunno how it will all it turn out, but I've got my comfy chair and a cocktail waiting.

</comment><comment><USER50> "...builds boxes to size..."

That is a major feature. The inability of human packers to properly size boxes is merely wasteful for many products that come in their own packaging, but damaging and costly for Amazon's original product, books.

We've had so many book orders arrive damaged that we hardly ever shop at Amazon for books. They just toss them in a box that is too large, with some wadding material, and sent them off. Almost every time, the corners, covers and pages are damaged or torn. Returns more than once are frequent.

So, I'm very glad to see this on a micro level, and also on the macro-level of reducing waste, both in packaging material per box, and repeat shipments for shipping-damaged goods.

</comment><comment><USER51> So the 'pick' part of 'pick and pack' still needs humans. This machine glues a cardboard box together removing the need for the guy with the tape. The article stresses that this is about efficiency rather than reducing head- count. This is a good thing as that means more optimally packed items being ferried around the country. However, for other online sellers that do not have this semi-automated packing this is not so good news, they don't have the scale Amazon does to have the robot support engineer on site. They have to pack the old ways, with lots of labour.

<comment> cadence- I think it's safe to assume that this machine will be getting improvements. The "pick" part will surely also get automated at some point. It's quite obvious to anybody who is willing to think about it for a while, to deduct that these kind of jobs will eventually all get automated. What the various governments should be doing now, is to start preparing the society to a new reality in which no-skill and low-skill jobs are gone. This will happen at some point. What do we do about it? The only thing that is happening so far are various timid Universal Income pilots. But those often hit substantial political pressure and are being labeled as socialist or even communist, and therefore unacceptable. So how do we prepare?

<comment><USER40> Picking things is surprisingly hard. It will by automated at some point, but it may be one of the last jobs to disappear from warehouses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Video link of the packing machine that Amazon is using:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rP1wjEsbak](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rP1wjEsbak)

</comment><comment><USER53> This story started me wondering whether hardware, in this case Amazon order packing automatons, or wetware has a smaller net lifetime carbon footprint, assuming both are as green as possible. (Ignoring, of course global over- population and/or mass over-consumption of essentially disposable goods.). These days I am having a hard time imagining that technology could ever have the negative carbon footprint required to mitigate climate change.

</comment><comment><USER54> I suppose the hope is that such eliminations come gradually enough that displaced workers are able to find other accommodations without too much difficulty, maybe with a little extra up-skill that gradually increases the necessary skill level for the average job. I think the doom & gloom "automation is killing jobs" narrative presupposes a sudden shift from manual to automation, which really hasn't been the norm.

</comment><comment><USER55> This seems to simply wrap each item in a cardboard shell, is that protective? Also whenever someone complains about receiving a tiny item in a large box, the answer is usually that Amazon does so to optimize the filling of its trucks so that all the boxes are densly packed (no room for them to fall), wouldn't having each item its own custom sized box hinder that optimization?

</comment><comment><USER56> "The new machines, known as the CartonWrap from Italian firm CMC Srl, pack much faster than humans."

Here is the product link: [https://www.cmcmachinery.com/portfolio- item/ecommerce1-cmc-c...](https://www.cmcmachinery.com/portfolio- item/ecommerce1-cmc-cartonwrap/)

<comment><USER57> [https://youtu.be/0eqtqKDbV1Q](https://youtu.be/0eqtqKDbV1Q)

Here's the YouTube link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> This is going to be a shock to all of those people who were willing to give tax incentives for Amazon to build distribution warehouses in their city in exchange for "jobs."

Though, this is only the beginning. A few thousand jobs now, the majority of them later.

<comment><USER59> How do you know overall jobs will decrease?

It's also totally possible that each warehouse will be made twice as efficient per employee... but also deliver twice the merchandise... maintaining the same total number of jobs.

Kind of the same way that automation of the past 100 years across the economy has still resulted in record-setting employment right now.

<comment><USER60> Curiously, what does the homelessness & (true, ie not unemployment) jobless rate look like in that graph? Of course though, they're tough metrics.

More importantly though, we're on the cusp of some pretty hairy water. Imagine we drop all of the truck drivers, taxi drivers, Uber and Lift drivers tomorrow. How many millions of people will that be - where can they go?

I'm not against automation in the slightest, but to think it won't have an impact on employment seems farfetched. Imagine a robot tomorrow, humanoid capable of basic tasks. How many millions of people would that displace almost instantly?

I don't think the past 100 years even remotely indicates how we'll handle this as a society. We aren't talking about taking away one job. We're talking about taking away a _skill category_. No more drivers. No more basic manual labor.

And that's not even talking about how growth would need to expand to handle the increase in workforce. Imagine our workforce doubles tomorrow - who is going to consume it all? Do we even _want_ more consumption?

I don't think it's as cut and dry as looking at the street cleaners and how they handled it when horses stopped being used transportation. We're talking about fundamentally categories of work becoming obsolete, and having no jobs that _some_ people qualify for.

With that said, I'm curious to live in a world where the population is _forced_ to be educated. No low skilled jobs might have a benefit of _(basically)_ no low educated people. However I am worried about how it will affect the current populace.

<comment><USER59> > _I don 't think the past 100 years even remotely indicates how we'll handle > this as a society. We aren't talking about taking away one job. We're > talking about taking away a skill category._

We did it with farmers. 80% of jobs in early 1800's, close to 40% in 1900, 20% by 1930, 5% by 1965, and 1.7% now. A whole "skill category" like driving doesn't even come _close_ to farming.

Automation, and even displacing drivers, is going to continue happening gradually, not overnight. E.g. only the easiest driving jobs in the easiest areas are automated first, then gradually more difficult ones... There's no "overnight". It'll take many years, and it will be fine just like it has each decade over the past century.

[1] [https://azizonomics.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/farmjobs.jpg](https://azizonomics.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/farmjobs.jpg)

<comment><USER60> So I take it your view is we should not plan / discuss how to handle it? Take it on good faith that it'll be fine?

<comment><USER59> My view is that the loss of driving jobs can be handled normally, via existing free market and education institutions -- that it's no different from the loss of other job categories over the past 50 years.

That this isn't special, that we're not "on the cusp of some pretty hairy water", but rather that this is just par for the course.

I just don't see any statistics that suggest the scale or rate will be anything close to larger/faster than our economy can normally handle. If someone can show those comparative statistics exist, then I'll change my mind.

<comment><USER60> That's fair. It would be interesting to have data that compares all of the job classes out there and the number of workers out there, against the worker education.

Ie, how many millions of food service workers, manual laborers, and drivers _(for trucks, taxis, etc)_ could move upward in career depth? Where would we expect them to be absorbed?

I definitely think this is hairy waters, in the sense that I want to see studies done. Planning for how it can be handled. Etc. Calling it fine in my view would suggest we don't even need to study it - which seems unfair. This degree of automation, assuming we can get over some AI hurdles of course, seems unparalleled - at least enough to warrant real data.

<comment><USER59> Just a quick point: they don't necessarily need to move upward. They can move laterally. They can work in package delivery, in restaurants, at Starbucks, in health care, in tourism, in solar panel and home battery installation, in environment cleanup sites, in converting homes to greater energy efficiency, and so on. Honestly a lot of the new jobs 20 years from now we have a hard time guessing what they'll even be (if you magically know, you'll make billions investing), which makes "planning" for it a bit handwavy anyways. (Remember, nobody "planned" for web developers to be an exploding new career.)

<comment><USER60> Well that goes back to the original point though. Which is, that no education jobs will theoretically dwindle. If we have machines capable of handling all, repeat all no education manual labor jobs; things like picking fruit, delivering boxes, etc. Where will those people go?

They will be forced to acquire more education or skill oriented trades.

The concern is if humanity will be able to adapt to something it has never seen. Where creativity and thinking oriented jobs become more and more required.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> They really need to wrap the books with a piece of butcher paper or something. I keep getting books that slid around and got scuffed to heck by contact with the boxes. Since I have been buying more pricey collection quality books, I have been sending them back :|

<comment><USER62> Isn't that what the bubble wrap is for? Although they don't fit well in the smaller standard book boxes that Amazon uses...

<comment><USER61> Well, I didn't see any bubble wrap in that video :) My recent return and its replacement had zero protection between the book and the cardboard.

<comment><USER62> I've bought two books in a reecent box and they weren't padded either.

I never had any scuffs or damage on the hundreds books I've bought through Amazon though. How bad are the scuffs? My apartment is close to an Amazon outlet factory so it doesn't have to very far to arrive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Is it odd that the headline and article imply Amazon created the tech, then halfway through it's clear they are implementing a solution many other competitors have?

Seems like marketing copy regarding Amazon, possibly being behind in implementation of a common solution.

</comment><comment><USER64> If we taxed robots, this would be easier for more people to embrace as a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER65> Is it me or does it feel like the door to economic advancement is closing faster and faster every day?

In this thread people are suggesting UBI, but I can't see that as anything more than an economic uncertainty (trying to predict how market forces will respond and adapt), which will be exploited by the oligarchy that is _already_ exploiting the systems we have now (as you might expect anyone to). To think we could successfully create a good UBI system despite the fact that we can't get other very important pieces of governance right in many parts of the world seems ludicrous.

People are suggesting that new jobs will be created as jobs are automated but there's no proof of that except history and this time seems _different_ \-- humanity has _never_ had the tools it has now, the step change in ability/utility over the last few decades is insane. In a world with high levels of automation, where does advancement come from? Up until now, it's mostly been differentiation through some form of work. Do creative endeavors become the new work/only way to differentiate if we spend most of our time on leisure? But then what if someone automates that away too?

It seems like once we evolve past work the economic system and the big & small players in it will freeze in place. If you had enough capital to be on the right side of the split then you get to stay on that side, but if you didn't you seem all but condemned. Dystopia seems inevitable. I'm not saying that I think work is good in and of itself but it's disconcerting to happens when that particular music stops -- it's run so much of the world up until now.

Another thought -- the good 'ol revolution/riot path is going to get closed down in a few decades I think. Weaponization of autonomous machinery will happen, and the efficiency of oppression will reach untold heights. Security will be a highly sought skill and those most able to pay for it (with resources/money/whatever) will be able to purchase it.

Sure hope I'm wrong about all/most of this.

</comment><comment><USER66> amazon is on a downhill decline for me. their scale and automation of both humans and machine yields a disconnected service. a large percentage of books i receive from them, which is substantial, are damaged upon arrival. but what do they care? they just initiate a replacement with no questions asked, but now i have to repack the material and go to ups or an amazon locker. i am now working for them for free! my time and effort is explicitly being used as quality control, and this is undoubtedly factored into their statistics.

</comment><comment><USER67> In related news, Amazon has announced it will give $10000 to any employee that wants to start a delivery business. Seems like a reasonable move, from packer to delivery person.

</comment><comment><USER10> Now I will tell my small children that they won't have a box filling job waiting for them when they graduate middle school.

</comment><comment><USER68> Is anyone complaining about this? These are mindless, terrible, Taylorized jobs.

If machines can do it, they should.

</comment><comment><USER69> Bezos goads competitors to raising wages while developing machines to eliminate wages.

<comment><USER70> As mentioned in the article, Amazon's competitors such as Walmart are also doing trials with the same machine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> I will start using Amazon again if they replace their dehumanized workers with robots

</comment><comment><USER72> Workers of the world, rejoice! Amazon will now be exploiting fewer workers.

</comment><comment><USER73> more people loosing their jobs will be unable to buy products, no matter how cheap, from amazon, hu?

</comment><comment><USER44> I wonder if this means I'll stop receiving boxes the size of a small house containing a single small item, or if it'll be even worse.

<comment><USER74> That's usually due to delivery/packing requirements, not a human unable to find the smallest possible box.

<comment><USER44> Can you elaborate? I routinely get smaller boxes, but I also routinely get boxes that are comically oversized and contain an item that would easily fit in one of the smaller sizes. What requirements are making that happen?

<comment><USER45> In a lot of cases it's optimization for a truck loadout. The loading setup is usually automated to maximize the number of packages in a truck while minimizing empty space, so you can easily end up needing a larger box to fit a specific gap in the truck.

There are also some products that are marked as "fragile" and require a minimum amount of empty space in a box to prevent them from getting smashed. The exact definition of "fragile" and amount of space required is some kind of arcane black magic.

<comment><USER44> These items aren't fragile and usually come with totally inadequate padding, so that's not it. The truck loadout thing seems likely though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> andrew yang 2020. no brainer. Surprised why more candidates are not discussing the automation gorilla in the room.

there are not enough low-skilled, difficult to automate jobs that can sustain the population.

<comment><USER76> Candidates are discussing immigration, tariffs and outsourcing because that's actually affecting jobs in the US and people who work on the factory lines know it.

Automation is a scary specter off in the distance but it's not as actively harmful to people's livelihoods.

<comment><USER77> > Automation is a scary specter off in the distance but it's not as actively > harmful to people's livelihoods.

[http://nber.org/papers/w23285](http://nber.org/papers/w23285)

> According to our estimates, one more robot per thousand workers reduces the > employment to population ratio by about 0.18-0.34 percentage points and > wages by 0.25-0.5 percent.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/opinion/trump-robots- elec...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/opinion/trump-robots-electoral- college.html)

> No single factor such as tech-driven worker anxiety determines local > political behavior. But there's no mistaking that districts that voted > Republican in the 2018 election are subject to higher levels of automation > exposure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> Amazon's push to reduce costs always ends up going after the obvious, but their cost structure is more like an iceberg, and they're going after the least effective parts. The majority of the costs have little to do with direct labor, but rather planning. Inventory costs, logistics costs, warehouse utilization, sales forecasting, etc.

There is far more to shipping costs than distance. A split shipment (two items in two boxes) will typically increase costs for an order by $3-6, whereas receive/stow/pick/pack labor costs are only on the order of $1/unit. And yet, nearly every order I place comes in multiple shipments.

Kiva has O(n^2) efficiency degradation with respect to the size of their fulfillment centers. They solve this problem by having smaller fulfillment centers. But that also means more fulfillment centers, which means more split shipments, and much higher shipping costs. They're literally spending dollars to save pennies.

Reverse logistics are _incredibly_ expensive. I'm talking $10-20/unit in some cases. The Amazon marketplace, and their associated quality control problems with fake reviews and counterfeit products, have increased their product returns by several fold over the last decade.

15 years ago, Amazon's inventory turns were something like 17, now they're 6. That directly translates to increased holding costs...for every sqft of storage space they needed in 2005, they need three today to ship the same amount of product.

And fulfillment costs aren't the only place they're making dumb mistakes with priorities. They did their whole HQ2 search shenanigans, only to settle on the two cities that offered the highest tax subsidies. But if they chose to instead prioritize lower cost of living, they could have saved an order of magnitude more, considering the fact that they are planning on having several tens of thousands of high paid workers in their HQ2 cities. The COL increases alone from locating in expensive cities with obstructive housing policies will eat up far more than those tax subsidies are worth.

In the funniest of ironies, Amazon's growth-first mindset that defied Wall Street expectations has led to an invariably laser-focused expectation on revenue growth that they are now a slave to. The P/E premium that Amazon has relative to its industry competitors, carries an implied expectation that Amazon will one day be ~10x bigger than it currently is. And Amazon's equity- first compensation philosophy means that their compensation budget inherently relies on the stock price. Therefore, any decision that may be in the long term best interest of the company (such as dumping the brand perception nuclear bomb known as the Amazon Marketplace) is now no longer feasible: it will cut revenue, killing growth expectations, lowering stock prices, and forcing Amazon to pay more cash compensation, which will just cause prices to tank further.

If we were to judge how Amazon is doing based off of how well their PR releases jive with wall street ideas of what good business decisions look like, they are doing everything right. Unfortunately, wall street ideas are shit for actual profitability. And Amazon is suffering for it.

</comment><comment><USER79> A couple weeks ago, I toured the Amazon fulfillment center in Tracy, CA. Some observations:

It was very impressive. Watching the yellow plastic tubs flying around on conveyor belts, being sorted into different tracks automatically. It reminded me of the scene in "Monsters, Inc." where are the bedroom doors are flying around on different tracks.

Work was divided into different stages:

1\. Taking delivery from supply trucks, checking that contents were correct and in good shape. Contents placed into tubs that were conveyed to multiple different areas of the warehouse.

2\. Storing items. Tubs of incoming items were delivered to a storage station. Robots brought storage pods (6-7 feet tall) with many cubbies up to the station. Different pods had different sized cubbies. A storage worker would scan each item from the tubs, and choose some cubby to put the item into. It looked like a camera watched which cubby they stored into to record it. cubbies could hold multiple different items. Apparently they are careful to never put two similar items in the same cubby, to make it easier for the next stage:

3\. Picking items from storage. When an order needs to be fulfilled, the robots would bring a line of pods up to a person who would pick the needed item out of the correct cubby of each pod. All the items would go into a tub, to be conveyed to somewhere else for packing.

4\. Packing the items for shipment. A person gets the items out of the tub, puts them in the correct sizes box, adds the air pockets for protection and seals up the box, which is then conveyed to another machine that weighs them and labels them for shipment.

5\. Outgoing shipping distributed to different trucks based on geo location to ship to.

We walked around the warehouse with a few guides, and headphones to be able to listen to them. Our guide was excellent in being able to explain things and genuinely enthusiastic about the whole process. At the end they gave us branded water bottles too.

I asked our guide what he thought would happen as they began to automate more and more of the jobs. He said that they would shift people over to new roles and gave an example of a time in the past when they automated some job and instead split up roles to have a separate person do QA / checking of orders where before the same person had to fill an order and check it. He also spoke of another fulfillment center in Southern California where they automated a job, then later reversed course and went back to all manual because the people at that center decided that it was done better that way for them. I was surprised that decisions over automation were made locally at each center.

We hung around the building afterward, and bought lunch from a taco truck outside, and ate at some picnic tables where many employees also ate. I talked to some of them to try to get a less biased perspective from the employees. When I asked them how they liked working there, the most common answer I got was "It's a job." They said that expectations were high and they had to work hard. Some shifts were more desirable than others. One man said that it was tough, but he was very loyal because a year before Amazon had chosen to pay for his cancer treatment and he said they didn't have to. I left with a positive impression of the operation.

I'd recommend taking the tour if there's a fulfillment center nearby. You need to register in advance for a time, but it's all free.

</comment><comment><USER80> Cool. After all Amazon's product isn't "jobs". It is customer service, and robots are better.

<comment><USER81> Such a shame that this is the top comment here. People at that level are watching their job options shrink at an incredible place. Qualify your statement; robots are only "better" because they are cheaper.

<comment><USER82> Well, Robots may be cheaper, but they may also be more accurate. In my 20 years shopping with Amazon, I have very occasionally received the wrong items, so maybe robots will combat that, or reduce the need to double check, etc.

I agree, low-skill jobs are shrinking, but we should not expect companies to solve that. We have a government and we vote. Ideally, we should all be asking the government to propose solutions to this problem, not expecting it to be inside the corporate charter.

<comment><USER81> With the current political gridlock voting is not enough. Workplaces -- the very entities that provide the jobs we need to earn a living -- need to shoulder more of the burden they inflict from the zero-sum game that they're paying. They hold a disproportionate amount of the world's wealth and they need to take responsibility for it.

<comment><USER83> The economy is not a zero-sum game, nor are corporate profits. Increases in productive efficiency create objectively more wealth overall, and those benefits diffuse out to every socioeconomic class (the classic conservative snark that even poor people have cars, refrigerators, and air conditioning, living better than medieval kings in many ways, is not inaccurate). We are living in an era where megacorporations and their related efficiency gains will rapidly increase the "standard of living" for a population which is (nonetheless!) going to get more miserable over time.

Stepping past the "zero-sum" claim, though, I agree that corporations should take responsibility for their incredibly powerful role in modern society, but I don't see a mechanism by which this could happen. The entire point of a regulated liberal democracy is to create a legislative landscape which modifies the incentive structures of businesses to "coerce" them into providing more social benefit than cost.

There is also nothing wrong with some level of redistributism, _as long as it doesn 't blindly ignore economic reality_ (a la communism). Many of the right- leaning nerds here on HN are in favor of universal basic income for that reason.

<comment><USER81> If that is true then why is wealth inequality so high? I have a hard time believing the argument that that wealth manifests as tech toys and amenities when the amounts of money that are in question here outweigh technology a million-fold.

UBI's an option -- one that I'm in favor of -- but as long as it is an idea and not reality there are still millions of people getting shafted without a lot of recourse, short of restructuring one's entire life and starting over in a new career. An expensive and emotionally draining transition that weak-ass severance packages fail to adequately compensate for.

If corporate tax payers were actually paying taxes and not sitting on a dragon's hoard of cash I might be more in favor of increased automation, but the fact is reserves being as high as they are means that automation is not so necessary in many sectors short of unreasonable and unethical shareholder demands.

<comment><USER82> Wealth inequality is because capitalism. We collectively permit a very large share of wealth to return to owners of capital. Frequently, this is concentrated because of a variety of financial realities (e.g. large amounts of liquid collateral make it easier to gain leverage, which can increase returns, etc.). OTOH, this return to capital has made the retirement funds and investments of many people's pensions possible. After all, Vanguard and others like them are probably the biggest beneficiaries of the great return on capital (who do you think "Shareholders" are?).

Balancing that return, is of course the relatively lackluster returns on cash. Companies sit on cash not because they enjoy counting it, but because they cannot find appropriately productive uses of it. They also hold it because it helps them cope with uncertainty (of economic reality, regulation, opportunity, etc). Taxing cash is fine, but companies will just change how they balance their uncertainty with other methods.

It sounds like what you are concerned with is that labor is not receiving an equal share of the output, compared with capital. this is likely because true labor productivity has not been great ([https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/below-trend-the-us- pro...](https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/below-trend-the-us-productivity- slowdown-since-the-great-recession.htm)) and also because capitalists (including pension fund shareholders, often the workers themselves) are engaged in rent-seeking on behalf of their capital. I think in many cases this reflects a shift in the role of savings from the employee to the employer. In eras past, the employee received relatively more pay compared to shareholders, but was required to save for themselves. Corporates that offered pensions had to set aside money to managed those obligations directly. In modern times, corporations tend to create retirement benefits that come from an employee's salary and the company's money, but which have been underfunded due to the assumption of future returns. This "optimistic" assumption about rate of return on the 401k/retirement fund/pension funds of today drives a lot of capital into the role of rent seeking from corporations. Corporations respond by trying to meet their shareholder demands, and corporate officers tend to be the beneficiaries of generally capital friendly activity, since they themselves are shareholders.

There's a lot to unwind here, and a lot more that I haven't written, but I think it is best to not assume that there can be a single solution to a very complex problem which results from a system built of many interacting components.

<comment><USER81> I'll agree that individual pension-holders and retirement-account holders create something of a perverse incentive, since decisionmaking about capital markets generally improves them less than they think and incentivizes their demise, but how many private-sector jobs nowadays even offer a pension? I imagine the pensioners' argument will hold less and less weight going forward as these populations retire and die off.

I am not saying there is a single solution to the complex problem of low-level work disappearing. However, there are many countries where the business culture is more willing to hold on to labor (non-english-speaking western europe, the specific example I am thinking of is big-box retail in France and Germany, though I've also seen this with the lack of self-serve gas stations in parts of South America); these are still successful businesses doing well in their sectors and in many cases out-competing American entrants to their markets. (And yes the reasons for their success are often better cultural fit than foreign entrants versus comparing where the spend their money) Yet the American zeitgeist seems to be heading full-on into mass automation with its eyes wide shut, when there is already so much money floating around that it doesn't really seem necessary. What labor crises are there that _necessitate_ the deployment of automation? (I don't think rising minimum wages nor increasing threat of unionization count as they do not raise costs above what can be absorbed by capital hoarding)

<comment><USER82> Agree that there are fewer pensions, however, I think the incentives for rent seeking in 401Ks are still quite strong, and the 401K is quite common for professional jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> Fantastic, less human labor in one sector means new opportunities in another.

<comment><USER85> This is a platitude that is said often, but there is no evidence to support it. There is no law of the universe that says whenever a job gets automated, a new type of work pops out of the aether to employ displaced people. It is wishful thinking at best.

<comment><USER76> Well, if you look at history it keeps happening. Imagine if you said in 1900 that almost all farm jobs would be eliminated in 100 years. The future would be almost unimaginable, but we've turned out okay.

However I think the problem is we're at a point where things are churning so rapidly that many are being left behind. Your 50-year-old truck driver is not in a position to learn a new skill every 5-10 years to stay afloat, or uproot his life and move to a new city where they need workers.

Furthermore, there's conceivably a point when we won't need very many unskilled workers at all -- when we finally run out of things for average people to do -- and humans don't tend to treat other humans very well when they aren't needed. However, that's further off than the churn economy we have right now.

<comment><USER85> It doesn't "keep happening", it's happened exactly twice, in the two industrial revolutions, in each case the new type of work that needed millions of human hands was obvious. There is no guarantee that it will happen again, especially given that new industrial inventions require no human intervention at all.

To fall back on an example that is not my own, imagine a conversation in 1900 between two horses:

Horse 1: I'm worried about these new automobile things, they might take our jobs

Horse 2: Don't worry, every technological development that displaced horse work in the past has led to more newer and better jobs for horses, there will always be work for us. Just look at trains, we don't have to pull big loads anymore, now we just draw carts and support riders, who knows what great jobs are just around the corner.

The world's horse population peaked in 1915, and is now down by 70% in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> This sounds like good news. I've read lots of negative stories about the working conditions in Amazon warehouses. It would be great if all the jobs could be automated.

<comment><USER87> Honestly the best proposal I've seen for slowing down such automation is to add a tax on these machines. That'll make the cost-benefit equation less obvious. These machines won't pay for themselves in a year and then be practically free. They'll continue to cost a lot. This kind of tax would help slow the progress of such automation to a speed where society can better adjust.

And I say this as someone who absolutely loves all this kind of automation.

<comment><USER88> I was going to (very slightly) disagree, but the idea that society is slower than technology is an angle that needs to be stated out loud a lot more. We can't out pace machines and its a fair reason to tax them for the time being.

That said, I don't necessarily believe "society is slow to catch up" should be a long term problem. It should be something the government mandates for x years -- so that it has a timeline to get its act together and build society towards the future.

<comment><USER18> > It should be something the government mandates for x years -- so that it has > a timeline to get its act together and build society towards the future.

Be careful what you wish for. Social Security was supposed to be temporary too, but here we are, 50 years later. As Milton Friedman put it:

> Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> Surprised to find so many modern Luddites in comments. History lessons says that new professions will appear.

<comment><USER90> But that's the whole point though. We're creating bs jobs to replace the bs jobs we automated. What's our goal as a society ? Shouldn't we think about working less, better spreading wealth, figuring out a plan so people don't have to work multiple jobs to barely survive ?

Right now almost everywhere in the world we're heading for longer work week and increased retirement age. So much for "automation will deliver us from work" we've heard over and over again for the last 60 years.

<comment><USER89> > better spreading wealth

I grew up in a country where communism has won - I know for sure that it's an utopia. I really hate communists, socialists and other imbeciles who believe that people/business should give their money to lazy people just to make everybody "equal". No, people are not equal - somebody is smarter, somebody works more, somebody is a great artist, somebody is just a lazy alcoholic.

So no, we should not think about "spreading" wealth, we should think how to train people for new skills/professions, required by the market.

<comment><USER90> > I grew up in a country where communism has won - I know for sure that it's > an utopia.

I don't think communism is the answer either.

> I really hate communists, socialists and other imbeciles who believe that > people/business should give their money to lazy people just to make > everybody "equal".

That's a very individualistic point of view, I used to hold a similar one a few years ago but traveling made me change my mind. Look at the US for example, people are dying of diabetes, in 2019, because they can't afford insulin. That's in the #1 country in the world according to "the market".

It might be lazy people, it might also be disabled people, people born in the wrong place / at the wrong time, people who didn't get the opportunity to develop, &c. The question isn't even "why are these people failing?", but "how do we handle them humanely?". It's life, shit happens, your parents die prematurely, you get sick, your company declares bankruptcy and you get fire out of nowhere.

The day you'll have kids or, hopefully not, a car accident, a cancer or other high impact disease, you'll be happy that all these "imbeciles" paid a bit of your hundred thousand dollar bills you'll owe to the hospital / schools.

> just to make everybody "equal". No, people are not equal

Sure they're not, nothing is. It's not about making people equal, it's about not letting people go down too far. You can shift the blame on people all you want ("somebody is just a lazy alcoholic"), but in the end we're products of our environment. Individuals shape society, society shapes individuals. There are people having full time jobs who won't be able to live when they retire without public pensions, what do you tell to these people ? "Too bad you were too lazy, go die somewhere else" ?

When I'm talking about spreading wealth I'm not talking about the average worker giving even more of his money, I'm talking about the top 10%, the people who game the system going through every loophole available to avoid paying tax.

> we should think how to train people for new skills/professions, required by > the market.

We're already doing that, and in a perfect world yeah, it might work. But I don't see that happening, we'll always have people less capable than others, people who chose or get pushed on different paths.

Also, idk where you live but (moderate) socialism brought us weekends (yeah before workers started to unionize in europe we were workin 10 hours a day 7/7), vacation days, sick days, health insurance, social security, work insurances, maternity/paternity leave, unemployment benefits, <40hrs work week, &c. so it's not all bad. I care much more about what I and my close community requires than what "the market" requires. By the way, isn't "the market" supposed to serve the people and not the other way around ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> Something tells me people will find a way to complain about this. And that those people will be the same people that think Amazon's warehouse policies are oppressive.

<comment><USER92> IMO the best "counterargument" here is that those were jobs which paid folks who then paid into their local economy. That goes away with robots and becomes more revenue.

Lots of folks are in favor of a "automation tax." I'm not sure how I feel.

Note I'm not arguing these points, but merely pointing them out.

<comment><USER93> The problem is that as we move forward and keep automating this will become a major issue in our society. I'm not sure if I support automation tax but it makes me uneasy.

I work at a manufacturing company. We are slowly chipping away at data entry, manual processes. It only improves efficiency now, but eventually we will need less people.

<comment><USER94> I am in the same boat with my unease of the situation. Entitlements are already putting the US in crippling debt, however, I am worried that automation will destroy so many jobs that we need a universal basic income.

Which I am personally not advocating. I am unsure of how I feel about it.

<comment> cadence- Universal basic income seems to be the only viable way forward. So far I have not heard any other good solution to the societal problems automation is causing. The other alternative would be to slow the progress, but that's even worse. We need to let people learn new skills, and universal basic income makes that possible. There will be obviously freeloaders, which is the main issue with this approach. This is extremely difficult problem to solve, and the current political climate makes it even more difficult to find acceptable solution Are there any other viable alternatives? How can we help people who don't have marketable skills get back to work and contribute to the society?

<comment><USER95> The other solution I've heard is shorter work weeks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER96> The fact that rising automation is an issue bothers me. Automation is miraculous! Its has steadily been removing the necessity for humans to engage in drudge work.

The solution is simple and obvious. Most people no longer _need_ to work. This has probably been true for decades and is only becoming moreso. With automation, a small number of people can provide the food / water / electricity / etc. for 1000's. Everyone should be provided with the food, shelter, etc. they need for free. Thats it.. The actual problem here is remediating our obsolete society and cultural values so they are once again practical in the light of these automation developments.

I'm not saying it'll be easy, there will be plenty of wrinkles, some people (eg. farmers) will still need to work. Do they get more? Do people take turns? But these are just wrinkles.

Overall its very clear what the actual problem is and what we need to do.

The fact that so many people now are still slaving away engaged in pointless bullshit white collar jobs is a tragedy. Such a waste of potential happiness. Also we are wasting massive amounts of resources carrying out all this pointless work, and furthering the destruction of the environment for no reason.

<comment><USER97> It would be great if the automation were in the hands of individuals. you need to farm? Invest in an automated tractor, combine, whatever and it will take care of your crops. Now you have free time, food to eat, and can work a second job for anything else. Instead the automation goes in the hands of large corporations and there's no relationship between what the machines produce and what people need to live. An automated boxing machine doesn't build houses or farm food for individuals. There's no more abundance to go around. You could create the relationship by taxing machines or taxing the wealthy that own them and spending that money on food and housing, but maybe people don't want to live off food stamps in government housing. Then you have economics that come into play. Are people going to have more kids since they get more food and bigger houses? Will there be an increase in crime? Will prices increase now that everyone can afford food? I'm optimistic, but it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

<comment><USER33> >Invest in an automated tractor, combine, whatever and it will take care of your crops.

Now you have a huge loan to pay every month to pay off your farming equipment. You now _need_ a second job and you're no better off than when you went and bought your groceries at the supermarket.

I'm basically a Luddite trapped in a software engineer's body at this point. I'd like nothing better than to buy a hundred acres and become a farmer/rancher, but after taking a serious look at the financial side of things I gave up that dream. The capital costs to start up are so high that there's basically no way I would be able to do it without a loan big enough to mean that one bad year in the first decade would likely sink me financially.</comment></comment></comment>


Anyone wanna help me learn Python? - <AUTHOR>

Well, I've wanted to get back into programming for years, but just haven't found a need.  I've been playing with Java and Python tutorials for a few months but haven't ventured out and written any real code yet.
Today, an opportunity presented itself for me to write what I assumed would be a quick little script, yet it has turned into a few hours of frustration.  This is something I used to be able to do in Basic/VB in a few minutes, but I can't even get Python to open a file.
What I've got: large plain txt document space delimited
What I need: Import the text, line for line, and output to another file with HTML tags.
Simple, right? I understand the theory of how to do this, but can't get it to work.
Open the original file as read.  Open the output file as append.  I can't even get past that basic concept.
Then, for loop for each line of original? make string variable for line w.write to output file with my HTML code and text from original file?
I believe I'm on the right track, but have no idea how to write this dang thing.  Documentation isn't helping as I can't even seem to get the dang open command to work.
Any help? <comment><USER2> opening and reading a file:

        in_file = open("/path/to/file.txt", mode="r")
        out_file = open("/path/to/file.html", mode="w")

        out_file.write("<title>my doc</title>")

        for line in in_file.readlines():
            line = "
" + line + "

            out_file.write(line)

        out_file.write("")

        in_file.close()
        out_file.close()

a few tips:

getting the attributes of anything at all: dir()

using the file object above:

        >>> dir(in_file)
        ...
        ['__class__',
         '__delattr__',
         '__doc__',
         '__enter__',
         '__exit__',
         '__format__',
         '__getattribute__',
         '__hash__',
         '__init__',
         '__iter__',
         '__new__',
         '__reduce__',
         '__reduce_ex__',
         '__repr__',
         '__setattr__',
         '__sizeof__',
         '__str__',
         '__subclasshook__',
         'close',
         'closed',
         'encoding',
         'errors',
         'fileno',
         'flush',
         'isatty',
         'mode',
         'name',
         'newlines',
         'next',
         'read',
         'readinto',
         'readline',
         'readlines',
         'seek',
         'softspace',
         'tell',
         'truncate',
         'write',
         'writelines',
         'xreadlines']

getting the doc string: help()

        >>> help(in_file.write)
        ... Help on built-in function write:

        write(...)
            write(str) -> None.  Write string str to file.

            Note that due to buffering, flush() or close() may be needed before
            the file on disk reflects the data written.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I figured out the open problem.. which was some sort of unicode issue where I had the file saved in c:\Users\\.. and I guess when it hit the \U it generated an escape. that's a pretty weird function. So, moved the file and renamed and fixed that issue.

So, on my own, I had gotten as far as starting the for loop and I was unaware that 'line' actually gave me a workable string. What I was working on was this:

      for line in in_file:
         tx = in_file.readlines()

because my output needs to be pieces of the line instead of the whole line at a time-- so something like this:

      for line in in_file:
         tx = in_file.readlines()
         out_file.write("
"
         out_file.write("" + tx[1,10] + "	")
         out_file.write("" + tx[12, 23] + "	")

and so on.

<comment><USER3> This is more a question for StackOverflow, but here goes...

Since Windows paths use backslashes, you should either escape all of them (not just the \U), or use raw strings:

      filename = "c:\\Users\\foo.txt"
      filename = r"c:\Users\foo.txt"

As it happens, Unix-style forward slashes usually work fine too on Windows:

      filename = "c:/Users/foo.txt"

This way, you don't have to rename your files and directories. :-)

Also, if the contents of the line are delimited by spaces, consider the split() method:

      "a b c".split()
      => ["a", "b", "c"]

If the format isn't actually as easy as that, take a look at the re and csv modules.

<comment><AUTHOR> Too awesome. As a linux user, I feel ashamed that I never tried to use forward slashes in Windows.

I really like that split thing. I'll have to do some more research into it. Figuring out how to do that and assign each split to its own variable and all...

Thanks a ton!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a ton for the help guys! I have officially written my first Python code to save me a day of typing and I can't thank you enough. Not only have you saved my fingers, you have helped to spark the proverbial fire under my butt with regards to learning Python. I've been removed from programming for so long that I forgot how neat it was to write something and watch it go.

Here is the final script for anyone who cares. Can it be optimized?

      in_file = open('c:/WVASA/original.txt', 'r')
      out_file = open('c:/WVASA/output.txt', 'w')

      for line in in_file.readlines():
          county = line[:11].rstrip()
          email = line[12:42].rstrip()
          name = line[43:72].rstrip()
          street = line[73:98].rstrip()
          city = line[99:117].rstrip()
          zipcode = line[118:].rstrip()

          out_file.write('
bgcolor="#006699">\n')
          out_file.write('    ' + county + '	\n')
          out_file.write('    ' + name + '	\n')
          out_file.write('    ' + street + '	\n')
          out_file.write('    ' + city + '	\n')
          out_file.write('    ' + zipcode + '	\n')
          out_file.write('    ' + email + '	\n')
          out_file.write('
\n')

      in_file.close()
      out_file.close()

<comment><USER4> \- readlines() is redundant for filehandle objects, you can omit it.

\- Prefer Python's string formatting operator. I even prefer the extended dict-compatible syntax.

\- close() is called automatically when the filehandles are garbage-collected; you can usually omit it for tasks like this.

\- ranges (like those in brackets) are exclusive, not inclusive. So I suspect you have an off-by-one error there.

Thus:

        in_file = open('c:/WVASA/original.txt', 'r')
        out_file = open('c:/WVASA/output.txt', 'w')

        template = '''

                %(country)s
                %(name)s
                %(street)s
                %(city)s
                %(zipcode)s
                %(email)s

'''
        template = template.strip()

        for line in in_file:
            out_file.write(template % {
                'county': line[:12].rstrip(),
                'email': line[12:43].rstrip(),
                'name': line[43:73].rstrip(),
                'street': line[73:99].rstrip(),
                'city': line[99:118].rstrip(),
                'zipcode': line[118:].rstrip(),
            })

<comment><AUTHOR> As far as the ranges issue, that took some tweaking, but there was a good deal of white space between columns, so I got it tweaked by trial and error. I had no idea it was exclusive though. Is it exclusive on both ends?

I love the template thing. I've got to read up on that!

On close() - I found that if I didn't execute a close, and I opened the output in a text editor and attempted to save it I got an error that it was being accessed by another process.

I love this community, you guys are awesome. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Alright, I'm so dang close. With just the issue of write. Here's what I've got so far:

      in_file = open('c:\original.txt', 'r')
      out_file = open('c:\output.txt', 'w')

      for line in in_file.readlines():
          out_file.write('
 bgcolor="006699">')
          out_file.write('  ' + line[0:12] + '')

      in_file.close()
      out_file.close()

There will be more text written per execution of the loop, but I can handle that coding. :)

What I can't grasp is why write doesn't start a newline and what I can do to remedy that. Currently this is just making a huge line of text instead of individual lines.

Thanks a ton!

<comment><AUTHOR> Ugh. Forget I wrote that. :) Amazing what a \n can do!

Okay, so, stripping spaces from string values. Easy? If I import my line, I have 6 strings I need to segment out of it and my file uses spaces. So, in my previous line:

      out_file.write('  ' + line[0:12] + '\n')

I'd like to strip the spaces from line[0:12]

Thanks!

<comment><USER3>
      line[0:12].strip()

but see my other comment about str.split().

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hang in there, it will be worthwhile!

I too had similar problems getting a hang of Python. "Dive into Python" was a help. But once it 'clicked' it became hard to write anything that didn't work. One thing that I still marvel is at, that you can often just make a guess and it works! The collection of 'batteries' is very useful. Typing help(some_function_or_class) at the command prompt is often very useful.

NB: if you are writing for Windows _and_ Linux and OS/X, then you should use the functions in os.path module to avoid hard coding the directory and filename conventions.

<comment><AUTHOR> I played with Dive Into for a while. The problem has been that I just haven't had anything I've needed to code for a long time. Being a once-programmer, I've always arrogantly assumed that I could just jump back into coding, what I'm finding though is that nearly 10 years off was just a little too much. :)

This was a one-off for that particular task, so no cross platform writing, but I'm certainly use os.path in the future. Thanks for that!</comment></comment>