Bad enough that I use their services and like the tech they develop. Would be nice to have a larger handle to penalize them for their exploitation.
Survey sent in the email: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZSJH2G3
340 whole workers?
Total number of amazon employees : 750,000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)
So 749,660 employees did not protest? Shouldn't that be the real news?
I could understand this from the AMZN shareholders point of view: as an employee of the company you are paid to defend private interests, not public interests.
So all that "stakeholder capitalism" recent discussion was pure BS? [1]
[1] https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/investor-relations/larry...
That aside, the whole business of Amazon is dependent on oil. Logistics, packaging, ...
Maybe it is wrong not to protest, but it just feels... off.
Nothing is large enough by itself to alleviate climate change. We can all cleverly rationalise why this or that action has little effect and watch the world burn in our smart inaction. Or we can do our bit where we have some influence.
No, they are not. Maybe it is true for a select group of people (computer programmers, some lawyers, some medical professionals), but the vast majority of people are not "free to work" and choose any company that matches "their values". Which makes protests like this one even more important and noteworthy, as those people protesting are risking a lot more compared to the "privileged" professions I mentioned above.
The profession doesn't matter at all, because anyone can go to the streets and protest to defend public interests. But attacking your own employer is not a solution. Why not to look for a job at NGO, or get involved in a non-profit startup instead? Oh, it doesn't pay well enough? Then you have to come into an agreement with yourself.
You're seriously asking why a lowly-paid Amazon employee doesn't look for a NGO or a non-profit startup job instead? No offence, but is this satire? It seems like a Silicon Valley episode to me.
As an EU citizen from a country with an average personal income of less than 1000€ / month, I don't see any problem with not working for a company that stands against what I firmly believe in. It doesn't necessarily have to be an NGO or a non-profit. If you care about climate change more than about anything else, get a job at TSLA.
Took me a tour in the military to change my overall chances in life.
And there aren't enough NGOs and startups to absorb thousands of Amazon workers anyway... hence having to get the warehouse jobs in the first place.
If employees aren't allowed to lobby / strike / speak out for better behavior of their own employer, no one else is going to have better leverage to encourage change either.
> More than 340 tech workers at Amazon used the hashtag #AMZNSpeakOut in public statements that condemn the company for not taking sufficient action on the climate crisis.
I'm sure that tech workers at Amazon are compensated quite handsomely. And even if those protesters were low paid warehouse staff (unlikely, protesting climate change is something that only those very well off can afford) do you assume that NGO would pay even less?
This does confer some benefits with respect to safety net, etc. Working for an NGO might mean your kid not getting adequate health care.
Also, I don't believe TSLA is in a position to hire everyone who might like to work there (and they're not perfect themselves considering Elon's opposition to public transport that actually works, like buses)
Sure, it does, but we are talking here about highly paid Amazon's tech employees, not about lowly paid warehouse workers:
> More than 340 tech workers at Amazon used the hashtag #AMZNSpeakOut in public statements that condemn the company for not taking sufficient action on the climate crisis.
AWS is really only good for projects where the importance of the compute is not quite enough to justify setting up your own infrastructure, but important enough to be willing to throw money at to make the location part of your system go away by throwing more OPS people at it.
We can be a nation that believes in war
And still tells the world that we don't
Let the flag for Hypocrisy
Once I understood this contemporary activism made much more sense.
As a point of comparison, there are roughly 3.4 million Venezuelan refugees, 3.4 million worldwide deaths from waterborne illnesses, 3.4 million people in the U.S. along with epilepsy, 3.4 million people on food stamps in the U.S., 3.4 million people in the U.S. with a bachelor's degree in psychology …
Yeah I do actually, often people pay NGOs to be able to work under an NGO.
Microsoft is delighted to announce we are the digital transformation partner of #IPTC2020, the International Petroleum Technology conference, that kicks off tomorrow in Dahran until the 15th of January
https://twitter.com/Microsoft_Saudi/status/12162861906530508...
Oil companies don't need to worry, MS will be happy to provide equivalent services for similar rates.
Maybe, if you only measure gain/loss for society in terms of money.
But if you care about leaving a habitable planet for the next generation, having oil and gas companies become pariahs that are expensive, so that people switch to carbon-friendly alternatives, would be a net gain for society.
Does your country provide healthcare and/or housing while you are unemployed and looking for non-profit work based on your values? Or does you country also have 500,000 homeless and 44 million without health insurance?
1. Consequentialism requires us to model reality in order to predict consequences. Thus two consequentialists with different models of reality might prescribe different actions even if they have the same goals. From the outside, it's impossible to understand their model of reality entirely, so you can't assume that they aren't consequentialists just because they have different prescriptions from you.
2. Virtue ethics isn't always an ethical belief system in itself. Virtue ethics can be a strategy of using social pressure to reach consequentialist goals. From the outside, you can't tell whether they're using virtue ethics as the basis for there beliefs, or merely as a strategy for implementing a consequentialist ethic.
Combining these two, it's almost always premature to assume that people are virtue ethicists just because they prescribe different actions from what you would prescribe, on what appears to be a virtue ethics.
In a more general sense, that feeling of smug superiority I feel when I think someone is just virtual signaling is a sign of bias in my own thinking. To quote Scott Alexander[1]:
> I will make a confession. Every time someone talks about the stupidity of creationists, moon-hoaxers, and homeopaths, I cringe.
> It’s not that moon-hoaxers, homeopaths et al aren’t dumb. They are. It’s not even that these people don’t do real harm. They do.
> What annoys me about the people who harp on moon-hoaxing and homeopathy – without any interest in the rest of medicine or space history – is that it seems like an attempt to Other irrationality.
> It’s saying “Look, over here! It’s irrational people, believing things that we can instantly dismiss as dumb. Things we feel no temptation, not one bit, to believe. It must be that they are defective and we are rational.”
> But to me, the rationality movement is about Self-ing irrationality.
> It is about realizing that you, yes you, might be wrong about the things that you’re most certain of, and nothing can save you except maybe extreme epistemic paranoia.
TL;DR: Don't dismiss people because they appear to be implementing a virtue ethic; they may actually be implementing a consequentialist ethic.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/15/the-cowpox-of-doubt/
The problem is not Amazon or other large companies continuing to do business as usual. The problem is the people who stand in the way of using normal political mechanisms to regulate carbon emissions.
In the EU, it's very hard to lose the job. It's even harder to lose healthcare benefits. Therefore, people have much less pressure and even somebody working at the Booking.com call center in Berlin can take half a year off to decide what he wants to do next.
However, "hundreds of workers" who "defy Amazon rules" to "protest company's climate failures" are not lowly paid warehouse employees. They are tech workers, who probably make 200-500k / year, and have plenty of options in their lives.
These protesters are far from becoming homeless overnight.
And H.R. 763 has strong support of both climate scientists and economists as an effective way to reduce our emissions and mitigate climate change.
The point is that these companies (more specifically: their operations related to fossil fuel extraction) are already, intrinsically, a net loss to society.
As such should they be shut down. It doesn't matter whose cloud their operations are running on.
These climate protesters are not warehouse workers – they are Amazon's tech employees, making hundreds of thousands per year.
People working for a minimum wage are far too busy fighting for their own survival. In fact, many blue collar workers in the US are concerned that any new environmental policies might reduce their jobs and income.
It's the highly-educated white collar workers, who are protesting against climate change. And they have more than enough options in choosing whom to work for.
More than "implementing a consequentialist ethic" that sounds as a cynic "the ends justify the means".
The only reason people view that phrase as cynical is that it is often used in a context where the complete ends aren't being considered.
This is what I dislike about activists. The whole "any action is better than in action" attitude. Actions are only good if the positive value they produce outweighs the damage they cause.
For example, if we were to shut down all of industry everywhere, we might reduce our fossil fuel usage to a minimum, but it will not help the millions of people who would die in the aftermath of such an action.
In this instance, insisting that Amazon kicks oil and gas companies off of its cloud services is an empty gesture. There are plenty of alternative services (Google and Microsoft come to mind and they are not the only ones) the infrastructure re-build cost will be absorbed into the pricing model and in the end nothing will be gained and you will pay for the change with your heating and gas bills. But hey, at least you can wear the "I did something" t-shirt or whatever
When I hear "consequentialism", I think in discarding absolutes and favouring frank discusion about practical measures. So exactly the opposite.
It's expected in a "brigadable" topic - anything to do with climate change, veganism, china, gender, etc. My original comment was downvoted within a second of being posted. So it couldn't have been a human reading and downvoting.
This is an example of exactly what I mean when I say "the complete ends aren't being considered". Perhaps your ends are "I want everyone to be fed" but if part of your means to get there is lying to everyone, then part of the ends that results from that is disfranchisement and a lack of informed participation by everyone (to use your terminology: a lack of truth).
> When I hear "consequentialism", I think in discarding absolutes and favouring frank discusion about practical measures. So exactly the opposite.
I think ultimately it's pretty hard to avoid absolutes. Consequentialism at some level requires you to have some target consequence. Look at your own post: you're concerned with "truth"--that's certainly an absolute value that you're targeting. I'm sure there are situations where you'd be okay with lying, but I'd venture that's only because there's some other absolute you value more. Consequentialism doesn't avoid absolutes, it just constrains the absolutes within a framework of result-oriented actions within reality, rather than actions for their own sake.
I'm concerned with hypocrisy and fanaticism. I've seen what a tyranny looks like: a mandatory mindset with strong social pressure to conform, free thinking as a public sin and people becoming hypocrites, the ones not dumb enough to be fanatics.
It sounds like you want to distance consequentialism from tyranny. As a consequentialist, I can see the draw, but I think that it's vital that we admit that consequentialism, improperly applied, can be used to justify tyranny. If we pretend that can't happen, then we won't "notice the skulls"[1]--that is, we won't notice when consequentialists are supporting tyranny in our midst, because we've been arguing all along that that can't happen. It's vital that we see where consequentialism can go wrong so that we can take steps to prevent it from going wrong.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-th...