That is infuriating corp speak. I'm sympathetic if a business can't fulfill its obligations, nobody wants to fail. If they had admitted they messed up and wanted to fix it then I honestly would be okay with that.
But to try to ditch their responsibility with a technicality is so scummy. I don't have T-Mobile, and with that one line of corp speak I never will
The sad thing is T-Mobile knows this and are banking on the fact that ATT or Verizon or pretty much any carrier you go to, will eventually pull something similar.
We seem to have reached a point where there is effectively no place you can get decent customer service as an ordinary consumer. It's either, have enough money to sue the crap out of companies, or shut your mouth and endure.
Decades of demonization of regulations has led to a point where the Govt's ability to enforce them is effectively null. With the regulators out of the picture, T-Mobile knows the only real recourse you have is the courts and that a vanishingly small percentage of customers will take that path.
For sure, I don't mean to say it's right. Just that they don't seem to be leveraging non-layman definitions of words. The plan's price will never change really doesn't imply the plan's existence will never change even to a layman, I would think, unless their train of thought is more like paying for this line than paying for this plan which would be problematic. This is in stark contrast to things like lifetime warranties of physical goods (where "lifetime" needs some legal definition) since some physical goods do indeed last virtually forever.
This voice sounds like something that Mark Farina should be dubbing into his next album. But it's the first time I've heard this bit. Where did it come from? Is this a classic in engineering circles of some shit Rockwell actually sold to the military?
It's from an old air force training video. Best guess I'be heard it that it's an unsuccessful attempt to explain Kalman filters (or something similar) in layman's terms.
It's definitely floated around for a while, but it grew in popularity in the past few years.
Revenue was cited at around $1bn for Q4 last year in their financial reports and about $2b full year [0]. I have to believe they could easily run the division at break even on $1-2b per year if they were not investing heavily in R&D on future devices and services.
Everyone else in this thread frustrates me, but I understand it. Compassion is ingrained in us, while free market economics is not.
Nobody here is really thinking through what happens if they are successful at boycotting and destroying Amazon. What would they say to these people they're supposedly helping?
"I got you laid off! You don't have to work here anymore! You're free! Maybe you can't feed your family now but at least you can move your lips while you drive!"
Success in a boycott is not necessarily destroying Amazon. Success is making this decision cause enough financial pain to Amazon that they reverse it, and the next time some Frederick Taylor wannabe proposes something terrible along the same lines, everyone else reminds him of how much it hurt when they tried to stop the delivery drivers from singing along to music. Success is this weakening Amazon enough for their low-wage workers to unionize and demand representation on the board of directors and a bigger share of the profits.
If the workers want better conditions they can leave.
If all options are below what we would consider moral then we should change laws. The solution to a problem in a free market is not inside of one company.
Why does change have to come through workers leaving Amazon? Why can’t it change via the workers negotiating with Amazon leadership?
It sounds like you assume that corporations are immutable things, whose contracts and policies may never be changed. But we are having this conversation because Amazon’s policies changed, and the workers it affects are complaining. Why isn’t “Amazon rescinds this policy change” a solution to this problem?
Why are these the only options? Because you said so?
Other truckers have UNIONS. Their cockpit recorders can only be accessed under strict guidance and policy - not willy nilly to piss off the truckers. Plus they get reasonable quotas so they don't have to bust their asses and drive sleep deprived.
> the solution in a free market...
... is to create a fair labor market. The labor market is not a free market, because companies have infinitely more leverage. If you're truly a free market activist, you must be pro-union. Introduce a little competitiveness into hiring practices.
I agree that boycotting Amazon is not the answer, but government action might be. And government action only happens if the politicians think enough of their constituency thinks something is a problem.
> If you're successful at causing amazon to crumble and they lose their job, would you really feel good?
This feels like a bit of a straw man — if Amazon start losing potential sales because people don't like how they're treating their workers, they'll fix their workers rights before they let the company crumble out of spite.
Customer pressure is a real lever in these scenarios.
This argument is absurd. You can tell how absurd it is because if you just take it to it's logical conclusion, suddenly you're supporting indentured servitude in Dubai.
Do you support that? Almost certainly not. So the only resolution is you don't actually believe this argument.
Indentured servitude prevents switching jobs, so we can't assume its their best option. As long as workers are free to switch jobs, we can assume its their best option, that despite all of the downsides, they think its worth it.
I'm guessing Amazon pays above average and that's why people keep working for them despite their reputation. The people there have a choice. Keep making more at Amazon but be treated poorly, and that's a choice they make.
If Amazon doesn't like a worker, they can fire them.
If a worker doesn't like Amazon, they can quit.
You can hate Amazon, thats fine, you can choose to never work for Amazon, thats fine, but lets not lie to ourselves. The people who choose to work at Amazon want to work there. They all applied, accepted the job, and show up every day.
No it doesn't, you're fully allowed to switch once you've paid off your debt. The debt that people chose to take on in exchange for housing, transportation, a new shot at life.
That's not my argument of course, but it's a hypothetical argument if you want to appeal to the "free market always good" type people.
> If Amazon doesn't like a worker, they can fire them.
> If a worker doesn't like Amazon, they can quit.
False dichotomy, you've run head-first into the hypocrisy of modern Capitalism. These actions do not have equal power because the labor market is not a free market.
Amazon firing a worker can literally cost them their life, whereas a worker leaving does nothing to Amazon. This is because the labor market is almost perfectly tipped, rigged, in the employer's (buyer's) favor.
In order to fix the leverage and create a free market, the employees would need to unionize, which is the correct solution here. Then, if Amazon does something evil, the employees can say "fix it or we walk" and that actually means something.
> The people who choose to work at Amazon want to work there
Your understanding of choice is infantile, almost comically so. You're purposefully leaving out the pressure of life from this decision. I think you'll find starvation a powerful coercive technique.
The question is not whether Apple could make a profitable search engine. The question is whether they could make a search engine more profitable than the billions they are getting paid each year by Google to make Google search the default.
If Apple decides to make a search engine and eats $100 billion out of Google's $500 billion profit (made up numbers), Google will just spend back $100 billion (or whatever constitutes a blank warfare check) for year into completely annihilating Apple's presence. They will literally stop people from finding any page that even remotely mentions their 'AppleSearch' and also deprioritize a bunch of other products too unless if you type out, exact word, 'AppleSearch' or whatever it'd be called.
So now you're Apple, here's a question: Will you spend $200 billion fighting back? When will this stop? You're Apple, and this is a stupid move.
Not as profitable as monopoly. Sharing monopoly profit with Google is more profitable for both and loss for the consumers.
Both Apple and Google make less profits if they compete against each other, but consumers benefit from two search engines trying to compete against each other.
Apple does not like to compete. They would rather call it spatial computing and price their product in an astronomical band than risk being seen as yet another VR headset competitor.
They will never make a search engine.
On the other hand, they have already made a search engine. Which you don’t think of as one, and which provides a boost to their ecosystem tie-in.
It absolutely is much harder to make a search engine (at least a good one). The dominance of Google in that space for so long should have made that obvious.
UBI represented as a progressive tax system would be so wildly different from our current brackets it would be qualitatively different. Some brackets would be negative.
"negative brackets" is a truly great idea and would help many affected by poverty.
but that's not what adherence to UBI is about. UBI is about chasing an impossible utopia and burning ourselves in the process so that we have greater net inequality.
Stick to the plan. Call out anyone who tries to make UBI work by watering it down from our idealized end-goal as nay-sayers. Clutch to random hypothesis'.
It's the only way we can bludgeon them through democratic or revolutionary means.
I wonder how long until we have an AI on our shoulder saying "Hey why are you booking a new flight, there is a better option"
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