Comments

2

Next time I think "god my in laws are the pits" I am going to remember Timothy and be grateful for small mercies.

3

In regards to the creepy stuffed mouse family: typically these kinds of really brazen quirks/eccentricities are covering up dark and uncomfortable secrets and realities within a family. Usually tied to some kind of past abusive/unacceptable behavior, or death, and the family's inability to communicate or get over this event.

Be wary of these types of families, as well as families that put way more importance on the "family unit" than the individual members themselves. These are often called "enmeshed families," and there is often overlap between the two. Very unhealthy relationships, often with blurred, bizarre, or nonexistent boundaries.

https://www.newhavenrtc.com/parenting-teens/understanding-enmeshment/

4

Nobody gives a shit about the Pebble mine? Its going to completely fuck commercial and sport fishing. Oh well, everyone can go work for Amazon I guess.

10

Does the whole "talking through a figurine" thing remind anyone of Bubbles vs. Conky on Trailer Park Boys?

11

Well to be fair, Amazon REALLY needs hundreds of thousands of new coders since they're helping ICE with facial recognition technology and all.

13

The Mouse Family made my day! Full disclosure: I have a mouse puppet, (whom I creatively named Mr. Mouse), that I've been photographing on any and all adventures we've had since my first husband bought him for me in the 90s. Wine tastings, roller derby matches, with the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, Burning Man; you name it.
THIS family has taken it waaaaaaay to far. When I got the part where her FIL was screaming at her AS TIMOTHY THE MOUSE....holy shit.
One of the suggestions on Twitter was that she fight fire with fire and start brining over cat figurines which I guess would end in some kind of epic battle for possession of the either the living room or the souls of all involved.

14

While @1 is correct, there is a trend to moving to robotic automated warehouses, and one of the prime skills for that is coding for the robots. But it's just like the "car share" thing that increases traffic congestion 40 percent, you end up with a lot fewer people.

15

@7 If companies can travel the world, crossing borders, to find wages that keep labor competitive, why can't people? How is it ethical or "free market" to say that people must stay within their national borders and only compete with each other for the jobs that come to them while companies can go abroad and look for cheaper labor confined in those borders? Who gets to sponsor visas? Oh yes, the same companies. Why do they get to set the rules?

@Blip, the more people they can teach to code (or rather, since this is likely a PR stunt and will have minimal effect on overall employment trends) the more tax payer funded schools they can get to teach people to code, the cheaper their labor costs will be overall. Also there are various levels of "writing code" jobs and plenty of people are not problem solvers or high level thinkers and can simply perform the tasks required. A lot of these people are coding their way out of jobs in fact since they will soon be automated.

@12 That was response to an article about Amazon and ICE so the poster wrote about Amazon and ICE. We can be concerned about many things at once- they are not equally relevant to the immediate conversation.

16

Alaska Chokes on Wildfires as Heat Waves Dry Out the Arctic

So far this year, wildfires have scorched more than 1.2 million acres in Alaska, making it one of the state's three biggest fire years on record to this date, with high fire danger expected to persist in the weeks ahead.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11072019/arctic-wildfires-alaska-climate-change-heat-wave-2019-university-funding

17

@8: Anyone who can understand an 'if statement' has an aptitude for learning to code.

20

"We are truly Icarus flying too close to the sun." Brilliant!

21

@12 if you think people being rounded up by ICE are being given due process by this administration and it's minions, I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn. ICE has been arresting AMERICAN CITIZENS if they have a certain skin tone and violating their rights, so you can be certain there is no fucking consideration of the rights of anyone ICE is rounding up. Proof is what is happening at the border. ALL HUMANS HAVE RIGHTS AND IMMIGRATING AND SEEKING ASYLUM ARE NOT CRIMES, NOT EVEN SHOWING UP AT THE BORDER, UNANNOUNCED. Every single person in this country, regardless of status, has rights. Our government is ignoring the rights of the people as they choose. Our government is blatantly and willfully and intentionally and cruelly abusing, caging, kidnapping, trafficking, raping, and murdering people showing up at the border. Get a fucking grip on reality.

22

@12 Immigrant court is not real court. They have no due process nor right of habeas corpus, no public defenders, no free one phone call, nada. They get lost in the nebulous (usually for-profit) immigrant system- some of them in detention centers for months. I have met some that were in it for years. And since a lot the detained (in the camps, not the prisons) are asylum seekers, they didn't even break the law in the first place.

@19 This article isn't about that. If you want to make a post about that or about the disproportionate media coverage, then do so, but don't come to an article about something else and complain to people that they aren't taking about some thing you care more about. It's obvious why stories involving ICE get more coverage. People have more sympathy for families fleeing violence and workers seeking to escape poverty who are being rounded up and detained in prisons and camps around the country than they do for shoplifters being profiled and then not being allowed to shop. I think there are all sorts of reasons to worry about both profiling like this and facial recognition software, but it's stupid to say that law enforcement & military use of it isn't extremely high on the list of most people's concerns, if not #1.

Since Amazon isn't talking about outsourcing within the NAFTA zone, it's irrelevant. Why can't Chinese laborers come here to compete for jobs? Why can't we go there and do the same? If we let companies cross the borders and also set the rules for when laborers can, then you are just letting them keep cheap labor confined in places where they need it.

23

@21: That's a xina comment I can agree with and has minimal hyperbole - perhaps none actually.

24

Nathalie: will we see a follow up article on how many of the Amazon employees find they actually like coding and do well enough at it to pursue a career in it? If not - why not?

25

Two data points on Amazon:

1) Amazon places all it's fulfillment centers (just Google the one here in Kent) adjacent or close to public and KOA campgrounds because it pays its workers wages below market housing rates and it's FC workers can't afford even sum rents.

2) Amazon is also diligently working on automating it's base coding jobs and investing millions in machine learning that will do most that coding work they are supposedly offering the training for fulfillment workers to do.

26

@7

The people in developing nations who can take on those outsourced IT jobs are members of the upper class in their societies. They're bilingual, they're university-educated, and they would have far better earning opportunities than the lower class in their respective nations even without American contract work.

@8, @12, @15, @17

There is a crucial trait that a coder for a typical tech firm needs to have, but it has nothing to do with "problem-solving ability."

The most important thing a coder needs is the ability to withstand crunch. If they can't work 60+ hours per week under perpetual deadline pressure for years at a stretch, without vacation and without complaint, then they're not going to last. Most don't. Tech companies retain coders for ~18 months on average before burning them out, and there are a lot of kids with impressive academic STEM records in the wreckage.

Those who last, often as not, picked up coding informally somewhere in life, don't have any particular analytical genius, and are good at doing what they're told. It also helps to be under 35 and single, and it goes without saying that they shouldn't have any children they want to spend a lot of time with.

27

OK, Seattlites - those of us who don't know the weather yet or by now: Don't even think summer is here. I remember many Julys calling for sweaters at night. Summer doesn't arrive in Seattle until the very end of July and then continues through most of October. Stays nice and warm, but the days grow shorter, of course. It's the trade-off for living here. The summers might be kinda short, but they're in Technicolor. Oh, and don't plan a coastal weekend until August. The water's freezing until then.

28

@25: Oh please elucidate. What hourly wage would you want paid to an Amazon fulfillment worker to meet a 'market housing rate' in the Seattle area?

29

@26: Software engineers and testers don't have it quite so bad as you describe even in the beginning of their careers. The worst is they get a little out of shape from long hours at the keyboard and have to be diligent about going to the gym.

30

@29

Ah yes, QA have it a lot worse, they're just as crunched, they're often contractors instead of real employees, and they're not paid anywhere near as much as the developers. Good of you to remind us.

~18 months industrywide, raindrop. It's for real.

31

Oh, the joys of working with “the patriarchy” instead of with corporations.

I mean, there are a few large clients here and there, but otherwise no one believes they have any right whatsoever to say you’re supposed to be anywhere at a certain time.

32

@30: I'm aware of where you're getting the 18 month figure from. It's not an average "lets burn them out rate" but the length of time a contractor can work at Microsoft and other corporations without the employer being required to hire the worker full time. It's become less strict however, given managed service contracts and using public repositories (GitHub). But I fully grant you, it is an annoying mess that never recovered from the PermaTemp fiasco.

33

@32

It's not a precise 18 months, it varies across employers, and it's got nothing to do with contractors or Microsoft or WA state lawsuits over the past few decades. It's industry-wide, across the US:

https://www.paysa.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/DisruptorsA8.png

36

Sounds like Robert Foster is just trying to do the right thing. He apparently knows 100% that he'll sexually assault any woman he is alone with, and unlike most of the other Republicans in the administration, is concerned enough to try to stop himself.

37

@5, Far too many of the "three strikes" lifers are in for drug crimes like possession, "intent to distribute" if they possessed more than some arbitrary amount, or other property crimes. Very few if any are in for actual violent felonies under three strikes since those types of crimes already have a long enough sentence attached.
I'm not saying that I'm a particular fan of these guys (yes, mostly guys), but at some point the punishment should fit the actual crime and then there should be a push to rehabilitate and reintroduce them to society. Most of these guys have already aged enough that they are unlikely to be much of a problem on the outside given even half a chance. But, no. That's not what we've got now. Punish, punish, punish, and then if they do live long enough to get out we make sure that there is no possible path for most of them to succeed in the world.
The other issue here is that if you have a bunch of geriatric former weed dealers taking up space in prison, where are you going to put today's violent offenders?

38

Amazon would like to make sure its coders know they can easily be replaced by others drawn from a large pool, so they lack leverage to effect change? Color me shocked.

39

Shit, I gotta agree with raindrop today. Robotslave, that data with 1.5 - 2 year average tenure does not say what you're saying. First, it's different from how long people stay at a company, because most of these are growing. Second, the average is not a ceiling, it implies plenty of 3 and 4 year tenures. Third and biggest, people typically leave a company not because they've been chewed up and destroyed, but because it's a better way to get a promotion and a raise than to wait for it internally.

Some companies and some industries are horrible to work for (video games), but most big-tech workers are not the ones to pity. Their bus drivers though.


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