Meanwhile, in France
http://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20200414-amazon-france-must-limit-shipments-until-it-can-protect-employees-health-court
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52285301
Amazon has fired another three employees who have been critical of the biz, including two tech workers in Seattle and a warehouse worker in Minnesota. All three have raised concerns about the working conditions at the online giant’s warehouses during the coronavirus outbreak. Two Seattle-based staff, Emily Cunningham and Maren …
Do not worry.
Due to amazon's relentless competitive skills, in a few years time you will either be working for amazon or a place just like it.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
But brought up to early 21st century standards where no one person is stamping, just a lot of people making up rules and following them, who all think they are doing the right thing.
(which, on reflection, was one of the points of the book)
"[I] a few years time you will either be working for amazon or a place just like it."
By then they'll have merged with Walmart, rebranded itself as Buy-N-Large, and start rolling out the WALL-Es.
(Joke aside, having one global megacorp like BnL is what we need to keep Amazon, Walmart, etc. from becoming.)
You wouldn't now be known as 'Human Resources' if you weren't meant to be strip-mined.
[sorry, can't link to the relevant strip at freefall.purrisa.com from my work computer - ICT seem to think it's not a work-essential site! :-( ]
Jeff Bezos once believed that Amazon's low-skill worker churn was a good thing as a long-term workforce would mean a "march to mediocrity." He may have to eat his words if an internal memo is accurate.
First reported by Recode, the company's 2021 research rather bluntly says: "If we continue business as usual, Amazon will deplete the available labor supply in the US network by 2024."
Some locations will be hit much earlier, with the Phoenix metro area in Arizona expected to exhaust its available labor pool by the end of 2021. The Inland Empire region of California could reach breaking point by the close of this year, according to the research.
Amazon unveiled its first "fully autonomous mobile robot" and other machines designed to operate alongside human workers at its warehouses.
In 2012 the e-commerce giant acquired Kiva Systems, a robotics startup, for $775 million. Now, following on from that, Amazon has revealed multiple prototypes powered by AI and computer-vision algorithms, ranging from robotic grippers to moving storage systems, that it has developed over the past decade. The mega-corporation hopes to put them to use in warehouses one day, ostensibly to help staff lift, carry, and scan items more efficiently.
Its "autonomous mobile robot" is a disk-shaped device on wheels, and resembles a Roomba. Instead of hoovering crumbs, the machine, named Proteus, carefully slots itself underneath a cart full of packages and pushes it along the factory floor. Amazon said Proteus was designed to work directly with and alongside humans and doesn't have to be constrained to specific locations caged off for safety reasons.
In the latest episode of Black Mirror, a vast megacorp sells AI software that learns to mimic the voice of a deceased woman whose husband sits weeping over a smart speaker, listening to her dulcet tones.
Only joking – it's Amazon, and this is real life. The experimental feature of the company's virtual assistant, Alexa, was announced at an Amazon conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday.
Rohit Prasad, head scientist for Alexa AI, described the tech as a means to build trust between human and machine, enabling Alexa to "make the memories last" when "so many of us have lost someone we love" during the pandemic.
Updated Amazon has blasted a proposed antitrust law that aims to clamp down on anti-competitive practices by Big Tech.
The American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) led by Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and House Representative David Cicilline (D-RI) is a bipartisan bill, with Democrat and Republican support in the Senate and House. It is still making its way through Congress.
The bill [PDF] prohibits certain "online platforms" from unfairly promoting their own products and services in a way that prevents or hampers third-party businesses in competing. Said platforms with 50 million-plus active monthly users in the US or 100,000-plus US business users, and either $550 billion-plus in annual sales or market cap or a billion-plus worldwide users, that act as a "critical trading partner" for suppliers would be affected.
The party is over for PC makers as figures from Gartner suggest the market is on course for a breathtaking decline this year.
According to the analysts, worldwide PC shipments will decline by 9.5 percent, with consumer demand leading the way – a 13.5 percent drop is forecast, far greater than business PC demand, which is expected to drop by 7.2 percent year on year.
The PC market in the EMEA region is forecast to fare even worse, with a 14 percent decline on the cards for 2022. Gartner pointed the finger of blame at uncertainty caused by conflicts, price increases and simple unavailability of products. Lockdowns in China were also blamed for an impact in consumer demand.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has doubled down on his company's stance on working from home and flexible working, that great pandemic debate.
Following widespread WFH enforced by global COVID-19-related lockdowns, opinion is divided between those welcoming the new normal of work-where-you-like and those who see numbers coming through the office door as a proxy for productivity.
Those in the latter camp include Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon – who has taken several opportunities to insist that his staff get back to the office full time – and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who insisted the temptation of coffee and cheese presented a serious threat to the nation's post-Brexit economic success.
Alibaba Cloud offered a peek at its latest homegrown silicon at its annual summit this week, which it calls Cloud Infrastructure Processing Units (CIPU).
The data processing units (DPUs), which we're told have already been deployed in a “handful” of the Chinese giant’s datacenters, offload virtualization functions associated with storage, networking, and security from the host CPU cores onto dedicated hardware.
“The rapid increase in data volume and scale, together with higher demand for lower latency, call for the creation of new tech infrastructure,” Alibaba Cloud Intelligence President Jeff Zhang said in a release.
Concern is growing that a World Trade Organization (WTO) moratorium on cross-border tariffs covering data may not be extended, which would hit e-commerce if countries decide to introduce such tariffs.
Representatives of the WTO's 164 members are meeting in Geneva as part of a multi-day ministerial conference. June 15 was to be the final day but the trade organization today confirmed it is being extended until June 16, to facilitate outcomes on the main issues under discussion.
The current moratorium covering e-commerce tariffs was introduced in 1998, and so far the WTO has extended it at such meetings, which typically take place every two years.
More than two years after England launched a COVID data store, keeping details of National Health Service (NHS) patients, the country's National Data Guardian (NDG) remains unsatisfied with who is accessing the data.
The COVID-19 data store was launched in March 2020, and would pull together medical and operational data about the spread of the virus across the country.
AWS is trying to help organizations migrate their mainframe-based workloads to the cloud and potentially transform them into modern cloud-native services.
The Mainframe Modernization initiative was unveiled at the cloud giant's Re:Invent conference at the end of last year, where CEO Adam Selipsky claimed that "customers are trying to get off their mainframes as fast as they can."
Whether this is based in reality or not, AWS concedes that such a migration will inevitably involve the customer going through a lengthy and complex process that requires multiple steps to discover, assess, test, and operate the new workload environments.
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