Shinycroak

The wildly successful internet economy firms mostly operate by evading laws. New technology which has allowed firms to move their business to less-regulated jurisdictions and a generation of deregulation and favorable court decisions have allowed these firms to be bad places to work and bad places to do business with. Here’s a catalog of some of their abuses: Evasion of local laws through national operations . Amazon notoriously picks jurisdictions with lax labor laws for its warehouses. Uber simply ignores local laws until penalized. When penalized, they initiate political campaigns to get the laws overridden at the state level. Extortionate business practices . Doordash infamously underpays its workers. Grubhub notoriously overcharges restaurants . Uber has the resurrected long-illegal practice of raising taxi rates when demand is highest. Monopolistic practices . Enforcement in this ...

Newscaster Zach Rael (KOCO, Oklahoma City) tweets : Just got an email from Amazon’s PR team with a pre-edited news story and script to run in our shows. They are selling this as giving our viewers an “inside look” at the company’s response to COVID-19

There are widespread reports of SARS-nCoV-2 infections in warehouses and grocery stores. It is time to bring in the industrial hygienists and work out infection-control protocols. OSHA? Are you there? OSHA?

There's wildcat strikes ; since the NLRB has been non-functional for 35 years, wildcat strikes are all that is possible. So far, one leader has been fired . I expect this will escalate to a full lockout. How are they going to find people to work in coronavirus hotspots? Additional reporting, as of May 22, 2020: Karen Weise of the New York Times reports on Amazon's Hazelton warehouse: In the less than two months since then, the warehouse in the foothills of the Pocono Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania has become Amazon’s biggest Covid-19 hot spot. More employees at AVP1 have been infected by the coronavirus than at any of Amazon’s roughly 500 other facilities in the United States. A 60 Minutes television report by Lesley Stahl, How Amazon is handling the coronavirus pandemic , Amazon's Senior Vice President “Dave” Clark interviewed, along with several Amazon employees and contractors. Mr. Clark claims that the infection is not spreading at Amazon, refuses to ...

I was going to write a post critical of Uber and the other transportation network companies (TNCs), but I have so much material and don’t want to spend all the time needed to make a thorough job of it. Instead, I am going to write a short summary, listing my criticism and citing links. I do have a few positives; we’ll start with those, and move on to the negatives which, I regret to say, are many. The overall picture is in some ways similar to that of Enron and Worldcom, firms which failed due to fraud. There is, however, some hope that the TNCs will ultimately find a sustainable business model. The amount of money invested in the TNCs is staggering and the losses are equally staggering. In the first three quarters of 2019 Uber lost some 2.52 billion dollars. This is apparently a result of the appalling gullibility of investors and the failure of the securities regulatory system. The Positives ·       The TNCs provide a convenient and useful service. ...

Or at least its app is. Just bought two different color-changing lightbulbs, one from Philips and one from LIFX. Both have appalling privacy policies. The LIFX policy says: “For example, we may collect: Hardware model, IMEI number and other unique device identifiers, MAC address, IP address, operating system version, and settings of the device you use to access the Services.” – https://www.lifx.com/pages/privacy-policy The Philips policy, though less explicit in its language, is similar in meaning, and their Android app will not operate unless granted permission to track the smartphone's location. Apparently the new design process for consumer electronic hardware is: Figure out what data you want to gather on the user and how much money you will make from gathering it. Provide some functionality that requires one to install a data mining app. Boize moi!

"The car seat broke into pieces in a 30 mph crash test commissioned by CNN, failing to meet the basic standards set by US regulators." – Fake and dangerous kids products are turning up for sale on Amazon . Fk Amazon.