She didn’t realize the Holocaust was bad? It’s good she’s educating herself I guess.
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The word has a weird etymology. It is very strange that at least some in the military have taken a word that means “crackhead” as a word for “elite force member” because of a throwaway line in Pulp Fiction involving torture. I’m not sure how widespread it is.
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“Sacked by the Telegraph for being too racist” has to be a first.
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Mo Brooks, complete tool.
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Sour grapes. He’s just really embarrassed that his wife didn’t have a gun at hand to shoot the process server, like a good Republican wife always will for her husband.
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It would be good if she were educating herself, but we are talking about MTG here.
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That is… another level of dumb.
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A 06/15/2021 NYT article about Bezo’s Amazon and the hell-world he’s set up there.
Good morning. The Times is publishing a new investigation of life inside an Amazon warehouse.
An employee sorting items at JFK8, Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse.Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
‘Our nature as humans’
In his drive to create the world’s most efficient company, Jeff Bezos discovered what he thought was another inefficiency worth eliminating: hourly employees who spent years working for the same company.
Longtime employees expected to receive raises. They also became less enthusiastic about the work, Amazon’s data suggested. And they were a potential source of internal discontent.
Bezos came to believe that an entrenched blue-collar work force represented “a march to mediocrity,” as David Niekerk, a former Amazon executive who built the company’s warehouse human resources operations, told The Times, as part of an investigative project being published this morning. “What he would say is that our nature as humans is to expend as little energy as possible to get what we want or need.”
In response, Amazon encouraged employee turnover. After three years on the job, hourly workers no longer received automatic raises, and the company offered bonuses to people who quit. It also offered limited upward mobility for hourly workers, preferring to hire managers from the outside.
As is often the case with one of Amazon’s business strategies, it worked.
Turnover at Amazon is much higher than at many other companies — with an annual rate of roughly 150 percent for warehouse workers, The Times’s story discloses, which means that the number who leave the company over a full year is larger than the level of total warehouse employment. The churn is so high that it’s visible in the government’s statistics on turnover in the entire warehouse industry: When Amazon opens a new fulfillment center, local turnover often surges.
By The New York Times Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, Quarterly Workforce Indicators; MWPVL International
Workers without power
The new Times story — by Jodi Kantor, Karen Weise and Grace Ashford — is full of fresh details, including internal company statistics, posts from internal message boards and interviews with Amazon workers and executives, both current and former. The story focuses on JFK8, a sprawling Staten Island warehouse, as it coped with the coronavirus pandemic and the surge in demand for online shopping.
If nothing else, I recommend you read the article to hear the story of the Castillo family. While Alberto Castillo, a 42-year-old husband, father and Amazon worker, was in the hospital suffering from Covid-related brain damage, the company sent him an email ordering him back to work. “Haven’t they kept track of what happened to him?” his wife, Ann, wondered.
My goal in today’s newsletter is to highlight a larger economic trend that Amazon reflects: Many Americans today are strikingly powerless while they are on the job. Their employers treat them as “an expendable work force,” to quote a phrase used by an Amazon employee in the story. They often lack the leverage to demand higher pay or different working conditions.
At Amazon, workers sometimes find out about a new shift only the day before, scrambling their family routine. When workers want to get in touch with human resources by phone, they must navigate an automated process that can resemble an airline customer-service department during a storm. Employees are constantly tracked and evaluated based on their amount of T.O.T., or time off task. One employee who had earned consistent praise was fired for a single bad shift.
Even so, work at an Amazon warehouse is often better than the alternative. JFK8 now pays at least $18.25 an hour, which translates to about $37,000 a year for a full-time worker. After decades in which pay has failed to keep pace with economic growth — except for the upper middle class and above — many blue-collar workers do not have a better option.
There is no reason to think American workers’ lack of bargaining power is on the verge of changing. Labor unions have a long track record of giving workers more power, but most Amazon employees have shown little interest in joining a union. A booming economy can also help workers, but its effects tend to be more fleeting.
‘Earth’s best employer’
In recent months, as Bezos has prepared to step down as chief executive, he has suggested that he wants to change Amazon’s workplace culture. “We have always wanted to be Earth’s most customer-centric company,” he wrote to shareholders in April. Now “we are going to be Earth’s best employer and Earth’s safest place to work.”
In response to The Times, Amazon said employee turnover was “only one data point” and that its internal surveys show high worker satisfaction. The company also said it was changing its policy so that workers would never be fired for one bad day.
Still, it is not at all clear that Amazon will change its basic approach to blue-collar work, because that approach has brought the company many advantages. The constant churning of workers has helped keep efficiency high and wages fairly low. Profits have soared, and the company is on pace to overtake Walmart as the nation’s largest private employer. Bezos has become one of the world’s richest people.
Many people want to believe that being a generous employer is crucial to being a successful company. But that isn’t always true.
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That’s a very hugely lot of words to say “dystopia.”
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The Devil’s in the details. 
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The Capitol Insurrection was an FBI false-flag, because . . . derp.
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Somebody’s running for President.
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To be fair, I think this was a trend that most certainly predated Bezos. I have no doubt that he exacerbated the problem, but I think the shift to people being less likely to stay with a company for the long term came out of larger shifts in the 1970s… so he was more a part of a larger set of influences happening long before he even started Amazon that Silicon Valley in general kicked into high gear. The 70s was where you started to see wages stagnate, sustained attacks on labor, another round of runaway factories, etc., all under cover of Nixonian stagflation and the oil shocks…
Yep.
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Somewhat related, from the NYT Morning Briefing re: inflation:
One reason to be skeptical about dire inflation warnings is that economists have repeatedly overestimated the risks of inflation in the 21st century. And several features of the modern American economy seem to restrain inflation. Global competition is one, Powell has argued. Another is American workers’ relative lack of bargaining power, which means that companies can often wait out temporary price spikes without increasing wages.
So I guess the lack of bargaining power is really a good thing. /s
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Amazon, which for years has struggled to curb fakery and fraud on its e-commerce platform, has blamed social media companies for undermining its integrity efforts.
In a post associated with its anti-counterfeiting Project Zero initiative, launched in 2019, the computer rental and gifts biz celebrated its focus on customers while chiding unidentified social media firms for failing to take action against peddlers of fake product reviews.
Coincidentally, Amazon lobbying is said to have helped nix the Inform Consumers Act, which proposed anti-counterfeiting legislation that would have required Amazon to authenticate third-party merchants on its platform. The company claims the legislation favored brick-and-mortar businesses.
[…]
Also, they ran out of gas! And got a flat tire! And didn’t have change for cab fare! And lost their tux at the cleaners! And locked their keys in the car! An old friend came in from out of town! Someone stole their car! There was an earthquake! A terrible flood! Locusts! IT WASN’T THEIR
FAULT, SWEAR TO GOD!
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Interesting in terms of what parts of the world will have problems with this. Kinda opposite to the stated purpose overall.
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Kind of a morality play in three headlines:
Cover up the seriousness of a situation, and no one will believe it is serious.
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