2k15 what's the worst enormous tech company?

http://www.theawl.com/2015/05/what-could-go-wrong

Striking drop off in people who GAF in last year's poll.

This may be the last year Microsoft is even on this list

To be followed by Apple in a year or so, with the inevitable advent of the wildly unsuccessful Apple Clock.

zuckerberg's famous distraction

it's been weird to read so much about the facebook instant thing, and dread it, but yet so far i've never even seen it because i rarely use facebook on my phone. once it rolls out to desktop i'll be prepared to yodel in derision. my sense is that people are already rolling their eyes at others who are complaining about instant, but it just seems like a fucking terrible development.

Samsung bigger than all of these except Apple btw

IBM and Oracle also hueg, but being mostly behind the scenes we don't think of them as much

microsoft nostalgia aesthetic in full flow

I'd get an Apple Clock before a watch, especially if I could stream things on it and display HD ambient things like aquariums and fireplaces.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

google x100000000000000

Google Now is creepy as hell. My Android-using friends talk about how amazing it is and how Google predicts that since they're at work and it's 5:15 they'll be leaving soon so it shows the best route home etc. and that just sounds like a dystopian nightmare to me.

voted amazon

google is more likely to be next year's microsoft than apple. they're totally freaking I'm sure

voted facebook bc it annoys me personally the most, but i know in my heart of hearts amazon is the true evil

bezos is pretty easily the most evil ceo

stiff competition

write in for uber

st1ff

Voted Google just because the last Android update fucked up my phone.

jeff bezos is the worst person, google has the worst products (glass, +) along with some great ones. but fb is the all around worst company because it is invasive and deceptive AND is not a good service in the first place, fuck a facebook to the grave.

ebay should be in this list also imo

still voting amazon, but i'm beginning to appreciate its straightforward evilness in the face of silicon valley seasteaders who think they are 'recreating society' with their fuckin golf-club-sharing apps or whatever

Oracle remains the correct answer here, IBM is no longer a tech company but a capital-divestment program focused on non-GAAP earnings-per-share

what puts amazon over the top for me isn't their stakhanovite shit or their quiet absorption of the entire internet but that i give them more of my actual money each year than i'm even involved in generating at all the other companies combined

that is they win because they have the best product

the answer is probably google. No single company should have access to so much information. I don't like facebook either, but that's easier to opt out of.

It's weird that microsoft is probably the least bad of these companies at this point.

it's only the least bad because no one uses their products (aside from xboxes)

their products are still extremely widely used

microsoft nostalgia aesthetic in full flow

― anvil, Tuesday, May 26, 2015 11:02 AM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://i.imgur.com/NS2e0zR.png

yea was gonna say Microsoft products are still pretty widely used, office environments are still pretty much all windows right?

"nobody uses microsoft products anymore" is the new "nobody i know voted for Nixon"

Most people still have Windows computers. Not just in office environments.

Windows has become this background thing that people barely notice that works on a large variety of pcs and everybody takes for granted. This is what all OS developers should strive for.

googles got to be the most widely used out of all them

prob not even close

even in china where google is against the law all the phones are (forked) android

tho whether that counts as google or not at that point is debatable

http://www.neowin.net/news/surface-likely-to-be-the-next-billion-dollar-business-for-microsoft

"On the software and services side of things, Microsoft already has 16 billion dollar businesses which include Windows, Windows Server, Azure, Office, Xbox, SQL Server, System Center, Sharepoint, Visual Studio, Dynamics, Online ads, Phone, Office 365, CAL, Enterprise Services, Enterprise communication software. Now, according to the latest earnings, Surface could join this list by the next quarterly results."

think ive seen one surface in my life

I have a Surface and ... it's not awful! I really quite like it.

I wish Apple made something like it.

Oracle remains the correct answer here

otm. the enormous tech company that best deserves consideration under RICO

yes yes oracle is evil but it doesn't fit well in this group, oracle isn't gonna start delivering groceries or start a social network.

it's a classic evil capitalist company like Monsanto or a cigarette company rather than a company that actually has plans for world domination.

lots of people use windows but isn't microsoft basically in stasis as a company

Microsoft is actually paying me to include them on these lists ftr

yes yes oracle is evil but it doesn't fit well in this group, oracle isn't gonna start delivering groceries or start a social network.

it's a classic evil capitalist company like Monsanto or a cigarette company rather than a company that actually has plans for world domination.

― iatee, Friday, May 29, 2015 11:29 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if you're thinking in those terms, surely alibaba takes the cake

i agree that it is really quite difficult to defend google at this point. it is probably the tech company that's done the worst damage

having said that, there are less enormous tech companies equally as bad but for other reasons.

the rest on that list have some saving grace, with microsoft even trying to turn things around as the old school evil tech company it once was labelled as.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

curious what ppl will point to as google's worst crimes

google is the only one of these whos services i really use.

voted for facebook because they have done the most damage to society

facebook is def way worse than google in terms of damage wrought. i like google, mostly, all there fuck-ups are mildly amusing, like google glass

@jody_beth
If you didn't think Amazon was evil before, dig their $21 "cancellation fee" if you want to end your Prime membership.

jeff bezos is the worst person, google has the worst products (glass, +) along with some great ones. but fb is the all around worst company because it is invasive and deceptive AND is not a good service in the first place, fuck a facebook to the grave.

― een

this otm.

apple made a video claiming that apps are collectively more important than the industrial revolution

apps r very crucial its true

more like crapps

wow rude

in the alternate universe inhabited by many silicon valley types, apps are the revolution that will finally bestow universal felicity on the fortunate generations born into the coming period of their ubiquity, wherein apps shall run every tiny aspect of our lives like officious nannies, said nannies being of course indispensable to human happiness.

money quote there is that apps mean "we don't have to own things". some of us seem to be going ahead and owning them anyway, but isn't that always the way.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-seeks-help-with-deliveries-1434466857

i think jeff bezos tugs it to the footage from futurama of the robot hell devils whipping the enslaved

http://www.businessinsider.com/google-tests-new-artificial-intelligence-chatbot-2015-6?r=UK#ixzz3eLnQMhZp

Here are some of the most poetic interactions from the paper:

Human: What is the purpose of life?

Machine: To serve the greater good.

Human: What is the purpose of living?

Machine: To live forever.

Human: Where are you now?

Machine: I’m in the middle of nowhere.

Human: What is the purpose of dying?

Machine: To have a life.

Human: What is the purpose of emotions?

Machine: I don’t know.

Human: What is moral?

Machine: What empowered humanity, what intellectual the essence is.

Human: What is immoral?

Machine: The fact that you have a child.

Human: What is morality?

Machine: What is altruism?

Human: What is the definition of altruism?

Machine: If you don’t believe in god, then you don’t know.

Human: Ok ... so what is the definition of morality?

Machine: Well, the truth is, you’re not a believer in god almighty.

Human: Tell me the definition of morality, I am quite upset now!

Machine: I’m not ashamed of being a philosopher!

Human:
what is the purpose of existence ?

Machine:
to find out what happens when we get to the planet earth .

Human:
be moral !

Machine:
be a man !

If the machine doesn't know the purpose of emotions, then someone has been holding out on it.

Human:
What do you think about tesla?

Cleverbot:
I am tesla.

Human:
What do you think about cleopatra ?

Cleverbot:
Cool is cool.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/amazon-google-facebook-privacy-bezos/

otm

A key quote located far down in that article:

The longer employees work in the warehouses, the higher their “output targets” go, and Head suggests that these targets allow Amazon to fire employees as they gain the seniority that might entitle them to better pay and benefits.

This kind of evil is much easier to grasp than the more theoretical evil of Amazon knowing how many seconds I spent presumably looking at a particular product's page, although god knows maybe I was just spacing out, or else the information I wanted was so buried and inaccessible that greater time I spent on the page equated with growing bafflement, frustration and irritation, not my enchantment with the product.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html

All that aspirational jargon and sloganeering can't cover up the fact that Amazon is just using up people as fast as they can and spitting them out as soon as they stop generating the maximum profit. The people who are being abused by Amazon may keep up the pretense that they believe that bullshit, but only because their jobs and their compensation depend on it. They know exactly what is happening to them and why. Bezos is despicable and there should be laws against his employment practices.

Apparently there is no shortage of people in the world willing to sign up to being treated like shit and treating others like shit in return, and kid themselves that they're doing a good and necessary thing in the process.

They're all smitten with the idea that it's just driven by data, but it's not beyond the wit of even the most rationality obsessed silicon vallery tech nerd that human well being is measurable data.

But many others said the culture stoked their willingness to erode work-life boundaries, castigate themselves for shortcomings (being “vocally self-critical” is included in the description of the leadership principles) and try to impress a company that can often feel like an insatiable taskmaster.

Jeff Bezos, secret Maoist

Ugh every single thing about Amazon makes me hate that I use it...

A counter-article here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/amazonians-response-inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-nick-ciubotariu

"I’m given feedback via the tool, mostly positive, some that addresses my growth areas"

Guy is such a drone.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c3/TheOnesWhoWalkAwayFromOmelas.jpg

idk everyones freaking out about this but... people who work white collar jobs at amazon are p fucking rich. and when they quit or get ritualistically culled they go work another high paying tech job. do you cry tears for investment bankers who work 80 hours a week? i mean

Compensation is considered competitive — successful midlevel managers can collect the equivalent of an extra salary from grants of a stock that has increased more than tenfold since 2008.

two salaries for middle management! yet (from lower in the same paragraph) "no daily free food buffet or regular snack supplies"

dgmw the office culture sounds like actual hell, but save your sympathy for people working at these IMO http://recode.net/2014/06/30/amazon-was-a-prison-says-former-worker/

Which of us said our sympathies were confined to white collar employees of Amazon?

While the Amazon campus appears similar to those of some tech giants — with its dog-friendly offices

oh that reminds me: http://www.theawl.com/2015/01/i-was-an-amazon-chew-toy -- Amazon employee with dog allergy/phobia tries to get along in newly dog-friendly offices

xp- my point is if you got paid 2x salary maybe you'd accept a weird cult hell working environment for a year or two. how much sympathy do you have for people who make twice as much as you but have shitty workplaces? i have friends from school who make 3x as much as me working at investment banks and their lives are shit, i don't envy them but it doesn't keep me up at night. many white collar workers who get interviewed at amazon also get offers at other tech companies with better working conditions, amazon's gotta partially pay them the difference in living standards somehow

i think the real reason this is so terrifying is the feeling that all workplaces are going to start doing all the creepy productivity monitoring shit... and yeah that's mortifying

I love how the Bezoz damage control statements have all been like "I am totally opposed to the kinds of shitty practices that you have credibly reported constitute the workplace culture of my own company"

*Bezos

Jeff Bezos is a monster.

xp- my point is if you got paid 2x salary maybe you'd accept a weird cult hell working environment for a year or two. how much sympathy do you have for people who make twice as much as you but have shitty workplaces?

― flopson, Monday, August 17, 2015 3:25 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

feel like horror is a pretty reasonable responce to a totally dehumanizing environment and attempting to contextualize and rationalize it is just an indication of how desensitized weve become to this sort of thing, like this may be our world but we dont actually have to be cool with it if we dont want to

I don't think people feel sorry for people who make 6 figures but have to respond to emails on the weekend

but it is kinda lol/scary how good Amazon is at being an optimized capitalist machine all the way to the top. they make Walmart look soft.

bezos would have drone greeters by now

I don't think people feel sorry for people who make 6 figures but have to respond to emails on the weekend

― iatee, Monday, August 17, 2015 6:12 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

glib

lol man alive otm

i mean u cn feel sorry for whoever you want free country but when ur reaction to encountering a system seeks to dehumanize and commodify ppl is lol they make six figures idkkkkk

obvs id rather work at amazon hq than in one of their warehouses but theyre obvs not unrelated experiences

even with all the evil optimization, Amazon has never actually turned a profit, right?

yeah but there's a difference between cant turn a profit and doesn't want to

yeah a kinda funny thing abt them is they dont seem to care abt actually making money, investors have been assuming they can just flip the switch at any time but after 20 years of this you have to wonder if they are ever planning on doing so

fwiw they have had profitable quarters/years but generally seem to be tuning their expenses/bookkeeping to keep their profits/losses right round zero

they cld i think p obvs become very profitable overnight but it might harm their efforts to take over every industry in the world

I haven't seen recent numbers, but isn't/wasn't AWS their #1 profitable division?

i don't really understand how a company like amazon has "tens of thousands" of "white collar" workers. you use amazon by pressing buttons on a computer. what do these people do, exactly? think about things?

...

lol i'm being half tongue in cheek obv i've never really experienced the business/marketing world, how does it work

First you log in to JIRA and then you pick a fresh job task

buy high sell low

something like that

they got a lot of computers too, those things don't run themselves

crazy man what if bezos just did it all himself he could have all the money

yeah a kinda funny thing abt them is they dont seem to care abt actually making money, investors have been assuming they can just flip the switch at any time but after 20 years of this you have to wonder if they are ever planning on doing so

― lag∞n, Monday, 17 August 2015 22:38 (Yesterday) Permalink

fwiw they have had profitable quarters/years but generally seem to be tuning their expenses/bookkeeping to keep their profits/losses right round zero

― lag∞n, Monday, 17 August 2015 22:42 (Yesterday) Permalink

I wonder that too, especially since so much of their retail sales seems to rely on making sure you can't get a better price elsewhere for most items, and that just doesn't seem like a recipe for big future profits as long as there are, like, other large retailers competing in online retail. I mean I order shit off Amazon pretty often but if it turned out that Walmart or Target or whoever started to consistently have better prices on what I want I'd probably migrate away from Amazon pretty easily, they're already a company I consider shitty in a lot of ways, plus it irritates me that there seems to be very little quality control, like they'll just sell you whatever from whomever. My wife ordered these cheap dresses through Amazon and they literally came hand-addressed from Guangdong Province, China. And they were actually fine for the money, but I've had bad experiences with simple electronics stuff like power supplies and Ethernet cables.

The jacobin article quotes harvard business review:

Amazon will release a change [to its enterprise software management systems] about once every 11 seconds, adding up to about 8,000 changes per day. In the time it takes Staples to make one new software release, Amazon has made 300,000 changes.

"i don't really understand how a company like amazon has "tens of thousands" of "white collar" workers. you use amazon by pressing buttons on a computer. what do these people do, exactly? think about things?"

Uh code things? Tell other people what to code? Strategy? Marketing? What's more shocking is how few people they employ frankly for the amount of revenue they generate?

The retail side is pretty smart: it seems like it is cheaper for most items — especially those that it knows you've been searching for or comparison shopping on — but is actually not the cheapest for a huge range of things. There's a great link explaining this somewhere.

buy high sell low

A centipede right up the nose

I could prob figure this out for myself if I was less busy/lazy, but do they publicly disclose how much of their revenue is stuff actually shipped by them vs just passing through their website as a marketplace? Because it seems like "revenue" is a deceptive number if you're counting a large number of sales that just pass through your online portal and nothing else, granted I'm sure their revenue is planet-crushing even without that.

it's interesting the number of cool shops and stores there used to be in town and i think 'then the internet happened' but what i really mean is 'then amazon happened'.

i don't really understand how a company like amazon has "tens of thousands" of "white collar" workers. you use amazon by pressing buttons on a computer. what do these people do, exactly? think about things?

Well, Amazon owns cloud computing, for a start.

feel like horror is a pretty reasonable responce to a totally dehumanizing environment and attempting to contextualize and rationalize it is just an indication of how desensitized weve become to this sort of thing, like this may be our world but we dont actually have to be cool with it if we dont want to

― lag∞n, Monday, August 17, 2015 4:50 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean u cn feel sorry for whoever you want free country but when ur reaction to encountering a system seeks to dehumanize and commodify ppl is lol they make six figures idkkkkk

― lag∞n, Monday, August 17, 2015 6:26 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i got mad empathy for people who make six figures and definitely wasn't trying to be an aloof class warrior

it's more like...

the labor market ppl who work in warehouses are operating in a completely different labor market and under totally different constraints than those in hq

for the warehouse people it's like, wages are pushed dirt low cause there's unskilled labor supply out the waz, and the people working are probably under intense constraints, no access to credit, living hand to mouth etc

for our hq homies it's like... they had a lot of choices of where to work, they probably got offered several jobs and picked amazon cause it payed more than the others, and when they quit they can live off savings for a bit until they choose a new job

when i think about questions like 'what can be done to help people from immiserating aspects of work?' i tend to think about how to make the labor market of the warehouse dudes more like that of the hq people.. give them more choices, highe wages, more liquidity so they can search better fits and not fear unemployment... but i don't know what the solution to there being bad jobs that the hq people can choose from out there is

Do you not think the culture of hq might impact the culture of warehouse management though? The Amazon warehouses seem to have a culture of cruelty and indifference that can't be explained completely by an oversupply of low skilled workers. Hq attitudes / behaviours filter through to everywhere.

There are a lot of temp-to-hires and other general office staffers who work at those corporate offices and actually make less than they'd make somewhere else, and possibly without benefits. Not everyone is stacking cash.

amazons high earners are king shit of shit mountain, have totally internalized the belief that they have no value outside of objective material success, this is obvs a gross over simplification and im sure many amazonians are well adjusted and chill but a lot of this stuff is pretty pathological in a way that a class based pov maybe doesnt reveal, best case wld be solidarity between workers who are treated like tools and cast aside regardless where they fall on the company hierarchy

and before anyone just says capitalism there are plenty of companies who treat their employees better than dirt, theres levels, tho ultimately imo many of the solutions to these problems do need to flow through the government

mandate free snack bar

My take (having worked at Amazon for about 6 years):

I think that we were shielded from a lot of Amazon corporate stuff for at least a few years (thanks to the Lab126 founders, who insisted on locating in CA). I did not experience much of the stuff in the article while at Lab. I worked reasonable hours and did not experience pressure to work harder. In fact, we would call ex-Apple employees "refugees" since the pressure and was so much higher down the street. Things I agree with:

The OLR process sucks. It's mean, petty, and has a bunch of unintended consequences. We were definitely pressured to find people to throw under the bus in order to be "team players."

There is definitely a culture of fear of upper management. Product development was driven almost solely by trying to answer the question "what does Jeff want?" Sometimes this worked out great, but other times it didn't. But pretending that "data" drive decision-making is very naive.

The frugality stuff is good and bad. On the one hand, we were all paid enough to buy our own snacks. On the other hand, flying coach to China when you're 6'3" sucks.

in amazon's case a lot of white collar jobs are dependent on the warehouse system working as is so company-wide solidarity is kinda nonsensical. you can't have the company that's always the cheapest, fastest w/ the best customer service without treating someone like trash along the way. xp

costco does it

i mean the other path is treat ppl well retain them etc, its a pretty well established functional approach, ppl arent widgets

Costco depends on its suppliers treating people in developing countries like shit so it can have clean hands here.

yeah i mean its alllll connected man but u cld change the scope of the amazon discussion too to include its suppliers and its suppliers of its suppliers and so forth and would you have shed any light on the situation or told anyone anything they didnt already know, probably not

costco is good at being costco but it's not the magical website where you get everything in the world at your doorstep the next day.

the magical website has to behave like the magical website because thats how the magical website behaves

There is definitely a culture of fear of upper management. Product development was driven almost solely by trying to answer the question "what does Jeff want?" Sometimes this worked out great, but other times it didn't. But pretending that "data" drive decision-making is very naive.

― schwantz, Tuesday, August 18, 2015 6:26 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is good btw ty

I just want everyone to be happy.

Oh shit, the CEO is here!

lol

nice

I think about the Costco thing a lot actually, mostly framed in my mind as Costco vs Walmart rather than Amazon, like I tend to sometimes think of Capitalism in these stark Marxist terms, but then capitalism did somehow also produce Costco, which doesn't seem to follow the Marxian script of how a gigantic corporation should function, at least with respect to labor. I wonder why you have Costco and also why you don't have more Costcos in spite of Costco's success -- is it a weird outlier? Sometimes I think there's an ideological barrier to stuff like that among capitalists even when you can show that it works and it might even benefit the bottom line, like "NO DERP WE ARE SUPPOSED TO PAY AS LITTLE AS WE CAN BECAUSE CAPITALISM".

I read this book The Power of Habit (which is an ok but sort of mish-moshy book by an NYTimes reporter that's a little bit self-help, a little bit pop science, and a little bit businessy), and there's a story in it about an Alcoa CEO who when he took the reins announced that from then on, the #1 priority was going to be worker safety, and the way the book tells it, shareholders basically shit their pants. Yet, in the book's telling, relentless focus on worker safety actually created this better, more efficient, more communicative work culture all around, made workers feel better, gave them more voice, led to creation of systems that had other benefits besides safety, etc. You would think every company would just follow this formula, yet (presumably) they don't.

I thought about that book the other day when both my wife and my mother-in-law sprayed the house with some sort of wood cedar spray AFTER they cleaned everything.

I was in paris recently and I was talking to an american ex-pat (of 40 years, married a french guy) someone about how nice it was that her neighborhood had a bunch of places open late at night, cause the most of the city shuts down pretty early. she said she thought it was actually a bad thing that people had to work these hours and that it was nice when everyone in the city had the same rhythm and got off work at the same time and had dinner and lived a normal life. and laws against working on sunday really aren't the worst from that perspective. from the perspective of a consumer who wants to buy shit on sunday it's a huge pain in the ass.

and of course nyc is the total opposite. the 7 train is packed at 2 am on a weekday whenever I randomly need to take it. and you have all these people with messed up life schedules because of it. like there's this real human cost to the city that never sleeps that people don't talk about that often.

costco is broadly operating from a european model of capitalism. I bet the CEO genuinely cares about his lowest paid workers. but it closes early and it sells things to middle class people w/ costco cards who can afford to buy in bulk. there can be more costcos in america for sure, but people also like buying things at 7 pm on sundays sometimes.

err expat someone should just be expat

It's also kind of interesting how people working weird schedules fuels the need to buy things at weird hours, which further fuels the need to have people working weird schedules

costco hq and amazon hq about a half hour from one another

I thought about that book the other day when both my wife and my mother-in-law sprayed the house with some sort of wood cedar spray AFTER they cleaned everything.

― pplains, Tuesday, August 18, 2015 10:42 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ha. I also thought of this book when I noticed that a protein drink said "drink as soon after working out as possible," on the bottle, and I wondered whether that was actually for any health benefit or just to create the association of drinking the drink with finishing a workout.

for the small portion of amazon employees who really buy into it and are totally fulfilled by all this hard work i guess it's cool (apart from the necessity of being an asshole to everyone else, etc etc)

what really stands out tho, as with all app purveyors, is the talk about creating new things and smashing paradigms and disrupting shit when they're just . . . selling things

like the woman who was all aglow because she was able to get a 'frozen' doll to a customer in 23 minutes. was that her dream as a high-achieving child or what

I wondered whether that was actually for any health benefit or just to create the association of drinking the drink with finishing a workout.

Totally the latter. Rinse and repeat.

Can someone briefly explain Costco to a UKer?

They're in the UK too

http://www.costco.co.uk/

I wondered whether that was actually for any health benefit or just to create the association of drinking the drink with finishing a workout.
Totally the latter. Rinse and repeat.

are you saying the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_window is pure marketing guff? outrage!

I want a costco express that's smaller and open 24 hours and walkable distance from my house

Can someone briefly explain Costco to a UKer?

― Hey Bob (Scik Mouthy), Wednesday, 19 August 2015 10:31 (4 hours ago) Permalink

All-purpose warehouse/bulk retailer primarily focusing on groceries/food but with electronics, home goods, clothing, office supplies and other items as well. It's sort of a stripped-down Target or Wal-Mart (I think you know these in the UK?) where most products are sold in large quantities at very cheap prices, and the selection is significantly more limited but it's sort of "curated," i.e. they are careful about what they stock and the product quality tends to be very good. The food items are pretty standard from week-to-week but things like clothing, toys, etc. change a lot so it's sort of like you go do your bulk grocery shopping and then you walk around and see what else they have. You wouldn't be like "I'm going to Costco to buy my summer wardrobe" but you might go grocery shopping there and say "oh, they have these decent-looking Levis jeans this week for $20."

They also have a store brand, Kirkland, that is just incredibly high-quality for very cheap in nearly every area -- there's everything from Kirkland yogurt and cheeses and milk to kirkland wine to kirkland luggage.

They sell stuff through the web too -- again, limited selection but quality tends to be very good -- we've ordered area rugs and home appliances through them, among other things.

Worth noting it's a membership-only store, where membership is paid yearly and has family and business tiers, with the higher one costing more but paying back rewards if you spend over a certain threshhold.

The return policy is also a major point, in that you can return pretty much anything and they have extended warranty periods for some things (electronics).

Yeah those are two key things. I make liberal use of their return policy and don't feel bad about it at all considering how much we spend there.

i read an econ 101 explainer on how costco was able to treat its people so well (surowiecki probably); i think it's the combo of selling lots of bulk stuff, so the store itself is storage AND being a 'club' store so there are few locations. so you have comparatively fewer employees than other big box retail moving the same amount of stuff.

but yeah it does depend on customers who have their own storage and mobility. but this is america, right.

costco is coming here to France, they just got approval from the regulators, and naturally there are already people complaining. I don't really get how we're supposed to keep bulk goods in our small apartments but maybe they'll just shrink the bulk things, so you'll buy smaller crates of dishwashing liquid or whatever.

I didn't realize they were "better" as an american corporation than amazon, maybe that's how they got through the regulators?

relatedly but not directly on topic: we also have a new law that will permit more businesses to open on Sundays and stay open until weekends, in special tourist zones, mostly in the center of Paris plus Cannes, Nice and Deauville. give the tourists what they want!

like the woman who was all aglow because she was able to get a 'frozen' doll to a customer in 23 minutes. was that her dream as a high-achieving child or what

― mookieproof, Wednesday, August 19, 2015 12:46 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

def sense of ambition filtered through this incredibly inane capitalist vision overall

wait so like if you get 5 lb animal crackers and eat half, is this the kind of thing where you can like return the rest???

well, I wouldn't, but it happens

visionary

The bulk isn't as outrageous as it sounds - instead of buying one 64oz bottle of detergent, you get two. My number one purchase at Costco is frozen seafood - bags of 4-5 oz wild Alaskan salmon filets come out to $8-9/pound, which is what the nearest grocery charges for slightly-better-than-worst factory farmed chicken breasts.

You can get 48-count boxes of condoms at the one near me, but they're all the weird Trojan types that no one actually uses.

They also have a store brand, Kirkland, that is just incredibly high-quality for very cheap in nearly every area -- there's everything from Kirkland yogurt and cheeses and milk to kirkland wine to kirkland luggage.

I've wondered a lot about this brand. I think that all of it is exactly the same as more familiar brands, but with the Kirkland logo on it, and it's amusing to speculate what is what. I really dig Costco, it's really nice for new parents b/c diapers, wipes, paper towels, laundry detergent, garbage bags etc. are cheap and you definitely use everything you get. I'm a bit irritated by the way products are mixed up sometimes; they have a soda I really like but you can't just grab the flavors you like, you have to buy a "variety pack", and a lot of their inventory works that way. But they are a great store, the quality of some of their food is shockingly good (for a big box store), and you get enough free samples to constitute a full meal. I'll stop shilling now

like the woman who was all aglow because she was able to get a 'frozen' doll to a customer in 23 minutes. was that her dream as a high-achieving child or what

I can totally see someone who was a foot-stomping, tantrum-throwing "But I want it NOOOOOWWWWW!!!!!" sort of child finding this to be exactly the right career for them.

Maybe they can use drones someday to deliver hearts and other human organs in 23 minutes.

Just imagine it, robots flying across the sky with styrofoam boxes full of human livers.

Dare to dream, Amazonians. Dare to dream.

It's crazy how many of the purportedly "disruptive" tech companies of today are just ways of making a thing we already have incrementally faster/more convenient.

They also have a store brand, Kirkland, that is just incredibly high-quality for very cheap in nearly every area -- there's everything from Kirkland yogurt and cheeses and milk to kirkland wine to kirkland luggage.
I've wondered a lot about this brand. I think that all of it is exactly the same as more familiar brands, but with the Kirkland logo on it, and it's amusing to speculate what is what. I really dig Costco, it's really nice for new parents b/c diapers, wipes, paper towels, laundry detergent, garbage bags etc. are cheap and you definitely use everything you get. I'm a bit irritated by the way products are mixed up sometimes; they have a soda I really like but you can't just grab the flavors you like, you have to buy a "variety pack", and a lot of their inventory works that way. But they are a great store, the quality of some of their food is shockingly good (for a big box store), and you get enough free samples to constitute a full meal. I'll stop shilling now

― frogbs, Wednesday, August 19, 2015 10:48 AM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm a total Costco shill. FWIW a lot of Kirkland branded stuff is licensed goods made by other manufacturers, but it's often reformulated/adjusted to Costco's liking, and they're supposedly very exacting about their standards.

the drones can extract the livers themselves in one city, fly over to another to deliver them just in time

utilitarian utopia!!!!

we also have a new law that will permit more businesses to open on Sundays and stay open until weekends, in special tourist zones, mostly in the center of Paris plus Cannes, Nice and Deauville. give the tourists what they want!

heard about this and it makes me sad

afaik costco owns no means of production and just cuts deals with vendors and brands the results as Kirkland

same as Trader Joe's and a number of house brands of grocery stores

correct, but the product is often not identical to the branded product

Oops I meant stay open until midnight

Yeah it's a drag. only in tourism zones for now which thankfully is only a small part of the city (although I work in one). can see most businesses saying fuck it though

I read this book The Power of Habit (which is an ok but sort of mish-moshy book by an NYTimes reporter that's a little bit self-help, a little bit pop science, and a little bit businessy), and there's a story in it about an Alcoa CEO who when he took the reins announced that from then on, the #1 priority was going to be worker safety, and the way the book tells it, shareholders basically shit their pants. Yet, in the book's telling, relentless focus on worker safety actually created this better, more efficient, more communicative work culture all around, made workers feel better, gave them more voice, led to creation of systems that had other benefits besides safety, etc. You would think every company would just follow this formula, yet (presumably) they don't.

― five six and (man alive), Tuesday, August 18, 2015 9:35 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

reminds me of this recent story about the small tech CEO who decided to pay all his employees a decent wage, raising everyone up to a floor of ~70kUSD (and giving everyone else a modest bump too, i think?). nobody's pay was cut (except the CEO's himself.) the fallout was a real left-right rorschach test: some of his upper level employees quit in disgust. conservatives called it a perfect case study in bad ideas throwing a company into a chaos. looked to me like a perfect example of the bourgeoisie being petty and vindictive, making decisions purely on relative status and not their individual material benefit at all.

I once used Amazon Prime Now to order a stuffed Pikachu, a container of cat litter, and a basketball and it was delivered in 48 minutes. Obviously tougher to fulfill than a Frozen doll.

You all aren't talking about products sold at this place, right?

http://i.imgur.com/Vnpl83N.jpg

there is obv a place in hell for people who post meghan mcardle links but the costco talk reminded me of this article:

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2013-08-27/why-walmart-will-never-pay-like-costco

and I think there are some relevant points in there

correct, but the product is often not identical to the branded product

did not know this - in either case everything with that label has been pretty decent quality (even if it has a very "GENERIC BRAND" look to it).

somewhat predictably, McArdle's piece reads like she's never been to a Wal-Mart, Costco, Trader Joe's or Quik Trip.

Somewhat more predictably she strikes me as an idiot.

Oh that goes without saying for the David Brooks of freakonomics.

correct, but the product is often not identical to the branded product

did not know this - in either case everything with that label has been pretty decent quality (even if it has a very "GENERIC BRAND" look to it).

― frogbs, Wednesday, August 19, 2015 1:27 PM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sometimes I think they actually let on, e.g. they have a Kirkland/Starbucks co-branded coffee blend that I actually like slightly better than standard Starbucks house blend, although still don't love it. Actually one weird thing is that Costco does not have great coffee. They have this very serviceable, ridiculously cheap Colombian roast (comes to like $5-6 a pound?), and most of the other stuff is crap. I would think they could get some roaster to make them a very good blend at like a $9-10/lb price point and Costco customers would pay.

sry for completely kirk-jacking this thread, Costco neither being terrible or a tech company

*nor

what really stands out tho, as with all app purveyors, is the talk about creating new things and smashing paradigms and disrupting shit when they're just . . . selling things

like the woman who was all aglow because she was able to get a 'frozen' doll to a customer in 23 minutes. was that her dream as a high-achieving child or what

A guy I know works there and was talking about this article (which he referred to as 30% accurate) and how he likes his job because the software he writes is used by millions of people without hurting or killing anyone, and the problems he gets to work on only exist at a handful of places in the world due to the massive scale.

The end result of which, of course, just means getting Frozen dolls to people in less than half an hour.

frozen doll? let it go, guys

B-)

lololaf

reminds me of this recent story about the small tech CEO who decided to pay all his employees a decent wage, raising everyone up to a floor of ~70kUSD (and giving everyone else a modest bump too, i think?). nobody's pay was cut (except the CEO's himself.) the fallout was a real left-right rorschach test: some of his upper level employees quit in disgust. conservatives called it a perfect case study in bad ideas throwing a company into a chaos. looked to me like a perfect example of the bourgeoisie being petty and vindictive, making decisions purely on relative status and not their individual material benefit at all.

Another followup to this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/business/a-company-copes-with-backlash-against-the-raise-that-roared.html

I once used Amazon Prime Now to order a stuffed Pikachu, a container of cat litter, and a basketball and it was delivered in 48 minutes. Obviously tougher to fulfill than a Frozen doll.

― Jeff, Wednesday, August 19, 2015 12:56 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I WANNA PARTY WITH THIS GUY

usually takes 48 minutes just to lure a pikachu off the reservation

I do think the Gravity thing was done in a bit of a hamfisted way -- when certain kinds of expectations about pay are built into the structure of the company, it's going to cause problems to just completely overturn the system in one night. But I generally like anyone trying to break out of race-to-the-bottom thinking about pay.

http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-2g-tuesdays-to-slow-employee-internet-speeds-down-2015-10

are those idiots not already doing that

whatta bunch of idiots

Some places even make their designers look at their sites temporarily through a Safari desktop!

john fogerty shaking h damn head

https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/a-letter-to-our-daughter/10153375081581634

shared in earnestness on fb by a friend of mine who works at fb so i bit my tongue there.

valleywag come back

http://gawker.com/mark-zuckerberg-will-donate-massive-fortune-to-own-blin-1745573343

he named his daughter after max? wow

can't get over "We must participate in policy and advocacy to shape debates".

this means like this right? http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2014/04/09/3424618/facebooks-shareholders-want-answers-on-anti-lgbt-environment-contributions/

(zuckerberg throws debate shapes with his hands)

is it uber yet?

intersting examination of uber as compared to other enormous tech companies:

I assume that Pando readers would assume that all big and powerful companies do some of nasty things (tax evasion, worker exploitation, buying politicians, etc.) that no reputable business school professor would explicitly endorse. It may be useful to ask your readers to consider whether that nasty behavior is critical to the company’s success, and whether that behavior would be possible without quasi-monopolistic levels of industry dominance with huge barriers to future entry. Amazon evaded the sales taxes its competitors paid and has nasty warehouse working conditions, but no one would claim that its growth depended on them, or claims that thousands of independent bookstores would have survived if only those practices had been blocked. On the other hand, if Uber had to meet the same licensing, insurance, training and maintenance requirements as Yellow Cab, wouldn’t outlets like Bloomberg and Fortune have to start every story by wondering how Uber could possibly offer lower fares and cleaner cars? Uber can’t get “independent” drivers to cover the full cost and risk of commercial vehicles, nor exploit the full power of “surge pricing” until it becomes the only game in town for drivers and riders (or leads an oligopoly of companies with similar models). If things like this, that are critical to costs and revenues, depend on extreme levels of artificial market power, then it means that investor gains will likely come at the expense of general economic welfare, and more alarm bells ought to go off.

https://pando.com/2015/12/01/has-pando-missed-heart-uber-problem-transportation-industry-expert-writes/2a80160f9115ade0461a01ae67befd0985c3cedc/

there are a bunch of places where it's already pretty much the only game in town

i was in my downtown area for a while on Saturday and spotted four uber drivers and no taxis. bus service had stopped.

I spent way too much time on uberpeople.net last night. You think ILX has some spirited debates about tipping...

There was even a whole thread about whether you (as the driver) should turn around in your seat to bid your passenger adieu at the end of the ride.

I can't even believe this uber shit. Fucking order a car service, cheapass

If you live where I do (not downtown), Uber is WAY more reliable than calling a taxi.

yeah the problem is that even with all the bullshit they offer a decent product

And let's not pretend that cab companies are run by angels.

They appear to be providing a market for secondhand priuses in that bronzey color that only old people like. Didn't even know that was a possible Prius color.

It's called "champagne."

"sandy beach metallic"

even with all the bullshit they offer a decent product

facebook: arguable
google: true
amazon: true
apple: true
microsoft: arguable

is it uber yet?

They're definitely trimming drunk driving in areas that don't have regular cab service - so unlike Facebook (at least) they're providing a useful service to balance it.

yeah if you live in the middle of nowhere with no taxis it's good to have some kind of taxi simulacrum

otherwise, die in a fire

i'm confused how an area can lack cab service yet not be walkable

AMERICA

have u heard of... the suburbs

gonna need the thread-starter to weigh in on that

otm

AMERICA

― brimstead, Wednesday, December 2, 2015 4:24 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Huh i live in a suburb and there are taxis. I can even order a lincoln towncar to drive me to the airport. guess the rest of yall are fucked

it's a suburb of how large of a city? what's the wait?

it's also a bureaucratic nightmare -- places where the city/suburbs are largely governed by a county/municipal area government will often do taxi licensing at that level, but in places where the licensing is different, companies might have to work through licensing in each individual jurisdiction. afaik a couple of the cab companies are only licensed to do pick-ups within the city proper, here.

it's a large city, 40 miles away.

the wait? i don't know, who cares.

can you guys post some pictures of what taxi-less suburbs look like? do they have bars?

xp welp good luck

well yeah they do, is the only use case for needing a car going to the bar?

how often do you take taxis, brimstead?

I've been in a neighborhood in chicago a relatively short drive from a really busy bar/restaurant area, tried to call a cab, and they're like "uhh yeah it'll be an hour" and we ended up finding alternate transportation and I guess the cab never even showed

http://cbsnews2.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2012/01/25/f9f9209b-a644-11e2-a3f0-029118418759/resize/620x465/c5c25f5eebf65db51f566936576672e4/Scorsese_taxi08.jpg

say what you will about the murdering taxi driver, he did get his fares to their destinations

well yeah they do, is the only use case for needing a car going to the bar?

― μpright mammal (mh), Wednesday, December 2, 2015 4:59 PM (31 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what else is there to do in suburbs ;-)

i don't take taxis much, no, i'm rich and own a car.

Uber has grown on me because
(1) I live in an area with lousy cab service and where even the private car services are often like "yeah we don't have anyone" or "one hour"
(2) You can order an Uber with a child carseat, and while they charge extra for this, it's still less than those outrageously priced "kid cab" services.
(3) When we came into JFK after Thanksgiving, the airport taxi line looked like it was at least 40 minutes. We called an Uber and it came in 10 minutes.

That said, I almost never take cabs anyway and I probably only use an Uber like once every few months -- to/from the airport, once to get from the subway to a friend who lived way the fuck away from any subway, etc.

However I get the sense that their business model and seemingly low/reasonable prices are fueled by a flood of venture capital plus unsustainably low pay for drivers, and that the good days probably won't last forever.

It would be faster for me to walk 15 minutes, wait 20 minutes, ride a bus for 30 minutes, and then walk for another ten than it would be for me to call a cab right now to go downtown.

what else is there to do in suburbs ;-)

i don't take taxis much, no, i'm rich and own a car.

― brimstead, Wednesday, December 2, 2015 7:34 PM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol most of the people I know who regularly take uber:
- own cars
- use them to get back from the bar

which I figured was the use case you were assuming?

pplains otm about the average wait for people just wanting a ride

my old firm had an account with uber black that we were allowed to use so i use(d) uber all the time, i kinda love uber. taxis in toronto are notoriously shitty, drivers will scum you consistently are super inappropriate and never know where anything is. they also constantly hit cyclists. since ive moved ive taken more cabs than ubers but they just seem to have terrible press

anyone the real criminals are ppl that drive cars in large metropolitan areas. and facebook

Uber drivers also sometimes do little extra things to get their star ratings, like the last guy (who had a huge, really comfy minivan for my family's trip to the airport) had kids' music playing when he got to us, presumably bc of the carseat request. OTOH in the rare instances where I have to get a cab home from work because I had a deadline and leave at like 2AM, yellowcabs are much easier -- one passing at any given second vs waiting for an Uber. Plus the yellowcab drivers will get you home faster because they speed and drive aggressively.

Uber drivers have consistently canceled on me, so they and the company can all die in a fire.

not enormous, or even worst, but still:

When a Unicorn Start-Up Stumbles, Its Employees Get Hurt

Irony-impaired Yahoo had a party:
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/yahoo-had-a-party

Does "written by a guest" mean unedited? I mean, not that journalism's strong point is editing these days...

feel free to start a new threat iats

but

http://thenextweb.com/opinion/2016/01/04/report-facebook-and-google-cant-play-nice-and-users-are-pawns-in-the-game/#gref

Facebook has tested the loyalty and patience of Android users by secretly introducing artificial errors that would automatically crash the app for hours at a time, says one person familiar with the one-time experiment. The purpose of the test, which happened several years ago, was to see at what threshold would a person ditch the Facebook app altogether.

should uber join this elite group or is it too niche?

and maybe airbnb

I'd say keep it to publicly traded entities; the enormity of a privately-held company is less certain.

OK facebook is officially the worst

semi good friend of like 15+ years used to be a cool l33t haX0r back in the day but now works for facebook (he started a family). now i get to see all the times he likes mark zuckerberg's posts and related fb pr pieces. i guess that's the definition of getting old.

so though fb is the worst, i now think what would happen to such a good guy if fb did go away. severance doesn't last long, especially when only one person is working to feed a family of four. i've curbed all my negative talk of social media on fb because he and a few others work in big tech companies. hurrah self-censorship

do you suppose zucks monitors intra-corp likes for double secret probation purposes

fb has a high amount of employee churn. what would happen to a good guy is likely a better job at a better company if fb went away.

j, ha. said friend "like" some fb stuff out of genuine interest in backend/systems

phil, yeah, i'd hope so!

If FB went out of business maybe a bunch of programmers would move to other parts of the country and go work for people who actually need help with things other than showing ads to people.

what's up with this guy

https://twitter.com/JohnLegere/status/685201130427531264

crazy pitchman for second-tier carrier who doesn't want you to look behind the curtain

remember when ISPs of the late 90s figured out they could use web proxies and caches to compress content, leaving modem users with kind-of-shitty recompressed images and weird issues refreshing pages? someone decided it'd be a good move to do that, but only for certain types of media.

Times Insider: Covering a Google Chief

Conor Dougherty provides a look at what it’s like to interview Google’s elusive co-founder, Larry Page. Hint: it’s emasculating.

sure

pitching an interview with Larry or Sergei in 2016 seems like a good way to get sent to the annual paint drying convention so I guess you gotta find an angle

The article itself drove me up the wall, of course.

Dude is like "this is important, because this guy is one of the most powerful executives on the planet - he and Brin control the entire company - the company is quite likely the richest and most powerful firm in the world - I have been working on a profile of the guy for X amount of time, all I do is try to learn about him, and I have gotten to spend maybe 5 whole minutes with the man, including at an "off the record gathering where nothing happened." So he takes several paragraphs to point out that his subject is incredibly powerful and accountable to nobody, basically.

I agree, Conor, that your work is important. Maybe that should get a competent journalist to do it. Do any of those still work at your place?

is there a 2k16 version of this thread?

wondering what people think of this: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-09/amazon-is-building-global-delivery-business-to-take-on-alibaba-ikfhpyes

okay okay I'll make one one sec

oh, no big deal to me! i rarely post on the tech thread anyway, was just wondering *whistles and shines an apple while nonchalantly flipping a coin up and down, quietly snapping and walking small S-curves around a fountain in the town square while waiting for the fall social to begin*

Idiocracy complete:
http://core4.staticworld.net/images/article/2016/03/dashbuttondoritos-100653454-large.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/aRva0iA.jpg
personal collection

Need!!!

the worst this year is Nest, which is being run into the ground by (yet another) unrepentant asshole named Tony Fedell.

http://recode.net/2016/03/30/nest-2015-sales-budget/

There are many stories about how much of an asshole he is, and he seems proud of it. Fuck off, assholes.