I agree that the pandemic cuts both ways though!
I also do not believe that there were no changes made at Amazon's warehouses in response to the coronavirus. Their blog mentions many of these changes and the seem reasonable and practical: https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/how-amazon-priorit.... Obviously, there are limits to what a company can do with a physical operation like this. There are limits to the distancing that can be practiced. Equipment like PPEs are facing huge shortages right now and so obviously it isn't reasonable to expect that Amazon magically can summon up hundreds of thousands of N95 masks that should likely be going to healthcare workers first.
Ultimately, if people don't want to take the risk of working during this time, that's up to them - they are free to leave voluntarily. All this outrage seems falsely amplified, and it comes off as opportunistic activism to leverage this crisis to push a nakedly leftist political agenda.
[1]https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/16/coronavirus-worker-at...
Edit: or maybe not.
It's not like these people would walk out if an email would make their point just as well.
Incidentally paid sick leave, which warehouse workers don't have and this protest is in favor of, is estimated to actually save money, not cost it. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5649342/
As best I can tell, there's evidence that everything these workers are advocating for would have no effect on or better for the company long term through people liking the brand more reducing hiring and training costs by increasing worker retention, reducing the lost of productivity associated with sick workers getting other workers sick, etc.
https://medium.com/@amazonemployeesclimatejustice/amazon-sic...
But I guess some people think well paid executives always know better then regular employees.
Personally if I had a say at Amazon, I'd suggest given the 47.3B they had in cash on hand as of nov of last year and how they've been raking it in since people have begun sheltering in place that they at least could afford to experiment.
Some political overlap is inevitable [1], but political battle will soon take the site over if we allow it to, so we don't allow it to. The reference to fire in the word 'flamewar' is not by accident. These things consume and destroy an internet forum the way that fire does.
It isn't that the issues you're posting about aren't important. On the contrary, they're more important than most of what gets discussed here, like someone's basketball hoop side project, for example, currently on the front page [2].
The issue is the kind of site Hacker News is trying to be. We're trying to be a site for intellectual curiosity [3]. That means a place where smaller, more obscure, more delicate topics get a chance to flourish. It's not possible to be both that and a forum where people bash their enemies about current affairs.
If you want further explanation about how we handle this on HN and why, I've written about it extensively—see [1] and [4]. In the meantime, you're contributing (unintentionally, I realize) to destroying this place for its intended purpose, and we need you to stop doing that.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22898653
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
p.s. I flagged your comment for a different reason: the first sentence breaks the site guideline against name-calling: When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Other of your recent comments have been devolving into the flamewar style also. That tends to be what happens when people use the site primarily to fight political battles.
Intellectual curiosity depends on how repetitive a topic is. The more repetitive it is, the less curious—curiosity withers under repetition: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
When there's a major ongoing topic (MOT), HN gets flooded with many follow-up submissions about that overall story. The test we apply in such cases is to ask whether a submission contains significant new information (SNI): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
When a follow-up story doesn't contain significant new information, it falls on the repetitive side and tends to produce repetitive, generic discussions. Those are worse for intellectual curiosity: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
Worse, repetitive and generic discussions tend to devolve into flamewars. It's as if the mind resorts to conflict to amuse itself when there isn't any material for curiosity to play with: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The key thing is whether the comments in such a thread are about interesting new information contained in the new article, or whether they could be copy/pasted from any other recent thread about the topic. HN thrives on diffs: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... Basically the question is: where's the SNI?
All: if any reasoning here is wrong or unclear, have a look at the above links. Then if there's still some question that hasn't been answered, I'd love to know what it is. These principles have built up over many years of operating Hacker News. The same situations and questions come up repeatedly; you'll notice that as we've posted explanations over the years, the answers have slowly been converging. That's I link so often to past explanations: in addition to giving more information, it lets readers see how the answers have developed and why they are the way they are.
The question of how to treat politics on HN is a hard puzzle. It has constraints that make a solution nearly impossible. Worse, without a solution, the site will destroy itself. My answer here (plus the links) is our best attempt at a solution. If anyone thinks they have a better solution, I'd love to hear what it is—but please familiarize yourself with the material first, because if it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just leave the threads alone", I've answered many times already why that won't work.
p.s. If anyone doubts that the current topic is a MOT, I pasted a dozen links to major recent threads here: >>22902685 . Look through them and you'll find plenty of generic discussion.
"As the geographical pattern of work has shifted, so has that of wages. Economists have long acknowledged the existence of an urban wage premium: workers in more densely populated places earn more, in part because of the productivity benefits of crowding together that nurture urban growth in the first place. This pay premium used to hold across the range of skills. In 1970 workers without any college education could expect to get a boost to their earnings when they moved to a big city, just as better-educated workers did (see chart). Since then the urban wage advantage for well-educated workers has become more pronounced, even as that for less-educated workers has all but disappeared.
[...]
Most jobs in the first two of these categories are located in cities, open mainly to holders of college degrees and decently paid (frontier work is particularly lucrative). Only the last-mile jobs are occupied disproportionately by workers without a college education. They are better than nothing, but only just. Both wages and the quality of such jobs are typically low, which is just as well, since they are unlikely to avoid the creeping tide of automation for very long."
Bifucration of the economy, automation and the shift towards ever increasing knowledge sector and endemic housing shortages have largely destroyed the benefits of moving towards economic clusters for uneducated workers. This is not a solution in this day and age, it's a romanticised fiction. It may have worked for mom and pop who came to the US with nothing else but their clothes, but this is history. The world today is a different one, and it has largely left this segment of the population behind.
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2019/01/10/t...
I do not mean this as a dismissal of the issue! It's an important issue that workers be treated fairly. The question I'm talking about is much narrower: what do we do on Hacker News with MOTs (major ongoing topics) like this one? They will dominate the site entirely if allowed to (along with indignation-inducing posts generally). We can't simply let them go unmoderated—that would turn HN into a completely different kind of site, and not the kind that people currently come here for.
Amazon employees plan ‘online walkout’ to protest treatment of warehouse workers - >>22900119 - April 2020 (135 comments)
Amazon fires two UX designers critical of warehouse working conditions - >>22868054 - April 2020 (380 comments)
Dear Jeff Bezos, instead of firing me, protect your workers from coronavirus - >>22770092 - April 2020 (132 comments)
Leaked Amazon memo details plan to smear fired warehouse organizer - >>22763057 - April 2020 (131 comments)
Amazon begins temperature checks and will provide surgical masks at warehouses - >>22759575 - April 2020 (213 comments)
Amazon fires worker who led strike over virus - >>22738592 - March 2020 (345 comments)
Amazon warehouse workers are walking out and Whole Foods workers are striking - >>22736512 - March 2020 (76 comments)
Amazon fires warehouse worker who led strike for more coronavirus protection - >>22733938 - March 2020 (9 comments)
Amazon, Instacart delivery workers strike for coronavirus protection and pay - >>22729819 - March 2020 (276 comments)
Amazon raises overtime pay for warehouse workers - >>22647605 - March 2020 (226 comments)
Amazon to hire 100k warehouse and delivery workers - >>22597200 - March 2020 (318 comments)
Hundreds of workers defy Amazon rules to protest company's climate failures - >>22167858 - Jan 2020 (65 comments)
Amazon threatened to fire employees for speaking out on climate, workers say - >>21939451 - Jan 2020 (87 comments)