Informative story. Mod parent up.

I just submitted your link as a Slashdot story: https://f6ffb3fa-34ce-43c1-939d-77e64deb3c0c.atarimworker.io/firehose....

What I put together circa 2010 is becoming more and more relevant:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpdfernhout.net%2Fbeyond-...
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

which they posted here: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fit.slashdot.org%2Fcommen...

The Koch Brothers paid a bunch of scientists to prove the figures being released by the IPCC and clinate scientists wrong. The scientists they paid concluded (in direct contradiction to the argument that scientists say what they're paid to say) that the figures were broadly correct, and that the average planetary temperature was the figure stated.

My recommendation would be to look for the papers from those scientists, because those are the papers that we know in advance were written by scientists determined to prove the figures wrong and failed to do so, and therefore will give the most information on how the figures are determined and how much data is involved, along with the clearest, most reasoned, arguments as to why the figures cannot actually be wrong.

...Then there's an inefficiency in the design.

You should store in the primary database in the most compressed, compact form you can that can still be accessed in reasonable time. Tokenise as well, if it'll help.

The customer should never be accessing the primary database, that's a security risk, the customer should access through a decompressed subset of the main database which is operating as a cache. Since it is a cache, it will automagically not contain any poorly-selling item or item without inventory, and the time overheads for accessing stuff nobody buys won't impact anything.

If you insist on purging, there should then be a secondary database that contains items that are being considered for purge as never having reached the cache in X number of years. This should be heavily compressed, but where you can still search for a specific record, again through a token, not a string, then add a method by which customers can put in a request for the item. If there's still no demand after a second time-out is reached, sure, delete it. If the threat of a purge leads to interest, then pull it back into primary. It still won't take up much space, because it's still somewhat compressed unless demand actually holds it in the cache.

This method:

(a) Reduces space the system needs, as dictated by the customer and not by Amazon
(b) Purges items the system doesn't need, as dictated by the customer and not by Amazon

The customers will then drive what is in the marketplace, so the customers decide how much data space they're willing to pay for (since that will obviously impact price).

If Amazon actually believe in that whole marketplace gumph, then they should have the marketplace drive the system. If they don't actually believe in the marketplace, then they should state so, clearly and precisely, rather than pretend to be one. But I rather suspect that might impact how people see them.

That is the most disgusting thing that I've read all week.

"The government" might have a pretty good idea of what it wants, but the Pentagram has no clue and has amply demonstrated this hundreds if not thousands of times since the turn of the century. It's no more able to control its impulses than our toddler president, and any sort of long term planning was rejected long ago.

IMO, RFK jr thinks he is part of a "ruling class" that will continue to get great health care regardless of how poor the care given to (or even expected by) the "proles", who are actively being shoved down the class structure from middle class, to lower class, to slaves

Here is where you fall off the cliff

Children are given vaccinations not only to protect them, but to also protect those vulnerable people who they come into contact with

I n addition, while there are risks to any vaccine, they are far outweighed by the risks that COVID19 expose to pregnant women and their fetus

The problem with going against FDA recommendations, is that insurance companies will not pay for treatments not specified by the FDA, these are referred to as off-label use and come out of your pocket

Aside from being really bad choices for individual health, they are applying mis-information to fracture people's belief is things that serve us in providing a safe and healthy society.

*sigh*

Logic and easily verifiable evidence will always be trumped by religious belief.

I worked at Amazon for nine years, it was extremely interesting. The company has so much cash that "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" is a valid business model. Anywhere else that I have worked the motto 'Every day is Day One' would be mindless executive-speak, but at Amazon that's the way that big chunks of the company works. Current CEO Andrew Jassey took AWS from the days of "Let's try this, hold my beer!" to the 800-pound gorilla of cloud computing. It was an incredibly interesting job, and I worked with some of the most scary-smart people I've ever met.

Having said all that, it also does have chunks which have descended into useless bureaucracy, but eventually those sectors under-perform and get ripped apart and re-orged.

Is bandwidth, processing and storage free in your universe? Because it's not in the universe where Amazon operates.

Fire up a Wireshark session on your router's connection and watch the traffic (the devices' MAC address is helpfully printed on them.) There will be regular pings back to the mother ship, until it hears the wake word. Then it buffers the next phrase it hears and sends the encrypted compressed bundle to be analyzed. After that it's back to pings until a response comes in.

Perhaps if you were one of the top high mucky-mucks of business or politics your daily communications might be worth monitoring, but no one really cares about your conversations with the cat. (Not even the cat cares, really.)

That only works if there is excess labor laying about and the tariffs are high enough to make manufacturing wages competitive with working at McDonalds (which IS a manufacturing job)

Most available labor is already soaked up in America

Um, no

There used to be a lot of fabric mills and clothing manufacturing in Massachusetts

They were Union jobs, and you could raise a family on those wages, with one working parent

Those jobs got destroyed by Republican, anti-Union, states creating "Right to Work" laws, which convinced manufacturers to move their operations to Southern US states

However, once those companies figured out they could easily relocate to reduce costs, they moved to Central and South America, abandoning those US workers

Eventually, they all moved to South Asia and will likely stay there until yet another region proves themselves to be a less expensive option

You would have to drop US wages to starvation levels in order to convince companies to move back here, or have tariffs of 10,000% to offset for US wages

It amuses me how people who make a lot of money think they can drop everybody else off of a cliff and get by themselves

The six figure welding jobs that you are referring to are welding pipes in remote areas where you have to live in drug-filled man camps and use amphetamines to stay awake on the job

90% of welding jobs in the US pay about $20/hour, where you can work on a shop floor welding trailer frames.