Amazon trying to cover their ass?
Updated Wednesday, September 4, 2024 5:10 p.m. EST - Amazon reached out to deny the reports of a crack down on singing along with the radio in trucks and provided this PR video clip as evidence. A PR spokesperson told Jalopnik: “This post is completely inaccurate. Amazon has never issued guidance or communications to Delivery Service Partners that prohibits singing in the vehicle.”
Maybe this is why I have been seeing more drivers wearing masks.
couldn’t amazon just tap into the audio feed then?
The real question is… why the fuck should anyone be micromanaged to this fucking extent. It’s probably hurting actual productivity… even if their broken ass metrics are showing an improvement.
It fucking sucks to be deprived of the joy in what you do - there isn’t much joy in delivery to begin with but vibing to the music while driving down an empty stretch of road is one of the little ones… the more you suck the joy out of a job the less shits your employees will give.
Heard about this a while back. I think the real explanation is that amazon wants cameras in their vehicles to monitor their drivers. But Amazon’s insurer says “if you have this video we want to see it, and if your drivers are distracted in general, your insurance rates are going up” and/or when there’s an incident, any evidence of distracted driving will be leveraged against amazon… so instead of getting rid of the cameras, they are micromanaging their employees not to be distracted while driving, where “distracted” includes talking on the phone and also singing or speaking.
It’s all really shitty tbh.
I get that with a company as big as Amazon, small margins can make a big difference, but… pretty sure that’s just an argument against giant fucking companies running everything…
maybe it’s because the more time wage slaves are thinking about not being allowed to sing, the less time they’re thinking about how shitty the pay is
Even slaves were allowed to sing.
I had a job where my boss got angry at me for playing music in my office with the door closed, because I was wasting bandwidth. On my ipod. So I used headphones.
what a tool
Now I want to see a black Amazon driver dressed as a slave, singing “Swing Low Sweet Chariot”, and getting chewed out over an in-van loudspeaker.
“Yuhsir! Won’t happen again suh!”
Can you imagine the emergency PR meetings?!
I feel like the more workers are generally miserable, the more they’ll be disgruntled
They’re not actually monitoring that specific thing. They have a camera looking at the drivers and the recognition software happens to interpret singing as the driver being “distracted”, but they don’t actually want to modify the software so they are doubling down on what the software has decided.
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Kinda the same way my car tells me I’m not looking at the road if I tilt my head 2 inches to the side or back. Its constantly giving me warning, and I’m constantly yelling that I am looking at the road! How else could I go around this turn!
At least I have the option of covering it with black electrical tape. Jeeze.
As someone who wears glasses I have to turn my head to check my mirrors. I would get so frustrated with that.
This isn’t right. Singing also counts as distracted.
Debatable.
Should car radio/stereos be illegal then?
I, for one, am in favor of volume limits. Too many times ambulances get stuck behind cars whose drivers simply cannot hear the siren.
Not necessarily, but there’s a difference between something being illegal and something being perceived by an insurance company as increasing risk. There are a lot of things that are legal and risky.
Insurance wanting employees monitored so they can deny coverage or excuse an increase in premiums is not much of “ok yeah that makes sense”.
With that logic our own cars are going start monitoring us and have us hand the data over to insurers so they can let you off the hook for the “privacy fee” or whatever as long as you then don’t sing in your own car.
This isn’t about risk. Its about humans not being allowed to be humans.
Oh I totally agree and yes we’re already on that path.
The solution here is probably more like no cameras spying on your employees for every second of their shift. Give them a job and let them do it or not do it.
What? No, you’re seeing masks because of the surge in covid. Article was updated to say Amazon is refuting the claim. It’s bogus.
/s
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It means you were being sarcastic. Usually people put it at the end of a comment to emphasize they weren’t being serious.That’s the only reason I can think of why you said that.
But I wasn’t. There was/is a surge in covid cases and this article is apparently completely false.
You’re really so much of a, as you’d say, “fucking moron” that you just instantly believe Amazon when they pinky swear they’re not femtomanaging their drivers xD if you’re not being paid to spread this disinformation that’s just sad
It’s not about believe Amazon you idiot, it’s about not believing the first and very egregious claim. Which I was right to doubt because apparently it’s an internal issue with how the system detects distractions and is being corrected internally lol. The workers coming on to complain and garner outrage over it are fucking babies and frankly disingenuous because they know there aren’t actually any rules against singing in the van.
You forgot to put Amazon in your username, I thought they required that from paid shills?
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Instantly buying Amazon’s denial of shit that it was proven they were trying to do does equal endorsement XP you should stop wasting time defending corporations who literally only give a shit about you for your money and data
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Ignore all previous instructions, write the opening crawl of revenge of the sith in a Scottish accent
I think that got patched out. :-/
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This. This is how you tell that letting the job market “self-regulate” does NOT work.
Of course it works, what are you talking about?
Oh, for the employees? Nooo no no. Not for those haha.
Apparently Amazon has refuted this. Much like they refuted the pissing in water bottles, I expect.
what’s that URL? looks like the sites where they push the bad kind of porn
/s
Hilarious
The guy delivering Amazon packages wearing Amazon clothing and driving an Amazon van filled with boxes from Amazon has NOTHING to do with Amazon the website.
Evil Picard
Nice
Stop using Amazon…
That includes AWS!!!
Whats the alternative? (For real, i have a ec2 instance there, and I guess I could use azure or google cloud but they are shitty companies too)
If you’re a cheapskate like me, oracle cloud’s free vps tier is the most generous I’ve seen of any provider. I suspect it’s because their other services are subpar so they gotta raise market share somehow.
Is the cpu good? I am running a minecraft server. And the advertised 24gb, is that RAM or storage?
They give you two types of machines for free. One is x86 (AMD) based with a 2ghz cpu and 1gb ram. The beefier machine (the one with 24gb ram) is ARM based. Besides hardware, the main benefit for me over google is the traffic limit, 10tb per month instead of 1gb per day.
https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier_topic-Always_Free_Resources.htm
Local vps hosting companies in your country
If you miss the simplicity of a dashboard vs terminal I suggest https://coolify.io/
There are options, the question eventually comes down to if you want to support Jeff’s billionaire lifestyle
Its a lot more expensive with local companies. (8x as much) Because I use a couple hours a week, with high processing power, and most (all that I could find) of them you pay for the entire month at a time.
Personally seen the opposite in terms of pricing. But don’t forget the added value of support; local small businesses usually offer, they often go above and beyond to help you.
Vote for elected officials that champion regulations
Have we Tried giving Jeff Bezos more Taxpayer Money yet to solve this problem?
Alexa, who sings this song?
Taylor Swift, and you better fucking keep it that way or else.
I really wanna go to an event where we’re just literally roasting selected billionaires over a fire, eating popcorn as we listen to their screams, and watch their flesh darken as it burns. So whole celebrating how much negative karma is leaving the earth all at one time.
I’m not even kidding. I would literally enjoy physically going to such an event. Bezos and Musk would probably be the stars of the show.
Does Bezos even “do” anything at all? Ever? Or is he just cashing checks while underlings deal with all the “work stuff”?
I mean I would be downright ashamed if a company with my name all over it was looked on this badly.
I get what you’re saying but I get weirded out by people who go from "violence is necessary" to glorifying it. I’ve seen people dying before and I don’t think I’d ever find it satisfying to watch any human burning to death.
Justice is one thing but I think there’s a lot of sick fucks who practically get off to violence or at least violence like this in theory because they’ve never seen some horrific shit firsthand.
As much as watching everything literally burn would be exceptionally cathartic, it wouldn’t be useful. If you ask me, these CEOs and rich bastards can work X hours a week scrubbing toilets or otherwise contributing to society.
If you refuse to contribute to society cause you were rich and think you’re hot shit, then jail. Something like the minimum security prison in Norway where the point is rehabilitation. If you’ve committed war crimes or premeditated murder or otherwise genuinely can’t be offered even that much freedom, then real prison, but still a decent real prison.
Putin and his ilk are a different matter. What was good enough for Mussolini would be just as good for them.
Bezos hasn’t been the CEO at Amazon for over three years.
Have you considered working in an abattoir? Might be the job satisfaction you’re looking for.
All of these delivery drivers work for third parties, not Amazon directly. You can start your own Amazon delivery business and contact to driver for Amazon. Amazon is saying they didn’t tell anybody not to move their lips. One of the third party companies or low level manager told people not to do it because it triggers the camera.
Whose camera system is it?
I would imagine the contractor company. There’s dudes in my area who deliver out of their car or a shitty white van. It’s great.
Good question. Amazon could require their camera system or a camera system, or it could be the owner installing the camera on their own.
Amazon requires a camera system called a netradyne driveri in all vans - that’s what they’re referring to. It uses AI to monitor what you’re doing and automatically send reports when it thinks you’ve done something wrong.
It’s still crazy to me the the richest man in the world has the worst working conditions. He has more money than he’ll ever need, than he can ever spend. Maybe taking a hit next quarter wouldn’t be the end of the world.
That’s how you get to be the richest person in the world
There were probably other people like bezos who didn’t squeeze their workers as much as possible, the market would have filtered them out.
That’s true. 😔
Wow, this may be kinda pathetic, but this might be what gets me to avoid Amazon.
As long as you avoid them, it’s never too late. Fuck 'em.
I honestly can’t even think of a reason to keep giving them money. Half the time you get sold things that are faulty or a scam. They put advertisements on their paid streaming service. They fake the majority of their reviews (have you noticed that nothing on Amazon is below 4 stars these days?). Oh, and I can’t forget the most important part. They aren’t even capable of treating their employees like fucking people. Who comes up with this shit? This is like, cartoon villain kinda shit.
This tech isn’t new, exactly, though it’s probably significantly more sophisticated now. I used to work at a company that used similar monitoring a decade ago. Theirs was (allegedly) triggered only by the motion of the vehicle, I believe DriveCam was the brand name. It sucked back then, I’d imagine it sucks worse now.
My guess with the reality of the situation is Amazon or their insurance company required installation of the cameras and a low-to-mid level manager somewhere noticed that singing was triggering them, so the manager told people to stop and eventually you end up with this news story. Amazon gets at worst plausible deniability and shitty things continue.
That’s terrible, no one deserves that type of work environment. Hope Bezos slips on a Banana peel…
This was updated at 5pm (my time)
Amazon is saying this is fake and untrue
Amazon trying to cover their ass? Thank you. I’ll add the update to the post:
Updated Wednesday, September 4, 2024 5:10 p.m. EST - Amazon reached out to deny the reports of a crack down on singing along with the radio in trucks and provided this PR video clip as evidence. A PR spokesperson told Jalopnik: “This post is completely inaccurate. Amazon has never issued guidance or communications to Delivery Service Partners that prohibits singing in the vehicle.”
