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Amazon to Add 100,000 Full-Time Jobs in the U.S.

posted by mrpg on Friday January 13 2017, @11:20AM   Printer-friendly

takyon writes:

Amazon has announced that it will create 100,000 new full-time jobs in the U.S. over the next 18 months, mostly in warehouses (fulfillment centers) and call centers. Many of the jobs will be added in Texas, California, Florida, New Jersey, among other states:

Amazon has quickly ramped up its workforce over the last few years, as it pushes to open up more fulfillment centers to get packages out to its customers more quickly. In 2011, Amazon had 30,000 full-time employees in the U.S. At the end of last year, it employed 180,000 people. [...] Amazon has seen "tremendous" demand for their retail service as well as a fast-growing cloud business, says Edward Jones analyst Josh Olson on why Amazon is hungry for more workers. Amazon is increasingly emphasizing convenience of its retail service, such as Same-Day Delivery options, as its edge on pricing dulls with the introduction of state sales taxes.

President-elect Trump's incoming press secretary Sean Spicer helped his boss to take credit for the news:

"The president-elect met with heads of several of the tech companies and urged them to keep their jobs and production inside the United States," spokesman Sean Spicer said in his opening remarks in a press call on Thursday.

Also at CNN, and Amazon.

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @11:25AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @11:25AM (#453241)

    But those are mind numbing jobs which should be done by robots.

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @11:39AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @11:39AM (#453242)

    Iain M Banks had a solution for this problem. Subsentient machines did all the mind numbing jobs in The Culture, leaving sentient machines and people to do whatever they wanted. But of course Banks was a hypocrite as well because his sentient machines and people characters were constantly scheming to manipulate each other into situations where they would be compelled to do things they did not want to do. Utopia was flawed for the sake of drama.

  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @11:57AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @11:57AM (#453245)

    > mind numbing jobs which should be done by robots.

    Are you saying they are perfect for Trump supporters?

    • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @12:01PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @12:01PM (#453246)

      You make an intriguing point, that some humans might not find such jobs to be mind numbing. We need equal rights for smart robots and dumb humans to work together side by side.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @12:06PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @12:06PM (#453247)

        AC here, I was actually trying to make a joke...but I like your interpretation better!

      • (Score: 2) by looorg on Friday January 13 2017, @12:15PM

        by looorg (578) on Friday January 13 2017, @12:15PM (#453253)

        ... We need equal rights for smart robots and dumb humans to work together side by side.

        So we need to learn or program the robots to be less efficient and slack off more?

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @12:38PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @12:38PM (#453260)

          As a robosexual I want to date a robot who has time for me outside of work.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @02:16PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @02:16PM (#453305)

          Is that you Bender?

    • (Score: 2, Flamebait) by Gaaark on Friday January 13 2017, @06:57PM

      by Gaaark (41) on Friday January 13 2017, @06:57PM (#453403) Journal

      It seems that a robot could have done as bad a job as Hillary did and is doing now:

      1. two robots marry. one who doesn't like people and is a robot in person, the other who likes to put stains on dresses and make COMPLETELY INAPPROPRIATE tarmac meetings.

      2. completely fuck up your election after stealing the leadership from the person who deserved it, but you and your robot friends fucked him bad.

      3. lose the election and show ABSOLUTELY ZERO LEADERSHIP SKILLS BY COMPLETELY ABANDONING YOUR PARTY AND GOING INTO HIDING, leaving the robot you and your friends fucked to do the press run, trying not to answer questions like "would you have won if Hillary hadn't fucked you over?".
      I mean, COMPLETELY DISAPPEARING! Where is she? Was Hill-bot recommissioned as a toilet?

      Yep, Hillary the great presidential candidate fucks up completely and disappears. GOOD LEADERSHIP SKILLS THERE, HILL!

      Trump may be an ass, but Hillary is a complete and utterly useless person who deserves the loser of the year award for this century, in my 'humble' opinion.

      --
      --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @10:25PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @10:25PM (#453520)

        Didn't you know, she's been busy painting portraits of Putin and cute puppies!

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 14 2017, @12:47AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 14 2017, @12:47AM (#453636)

        re 2/ He did not deserve it. It was her turn!!

        • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday January 14 2017, @03:13AM

          by Gaaark (41) on Saturday January 14 2017, @03:13AM (#453688) Journal

          Her turn to lose badly??? ;)

          --
          --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 14 2017, @01:16PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 14 2017, @01:16PM (#453778)

        Did you really want Hillary sticking around? It's just a shame she didn't disappear before the primaries.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by takyon on Friday January 13 2017, @12:37PM

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Friday January 13 2017, @12:37PM (#453258) Journal

    Here's Bezos'ss''s' subtext:

    Ok, look. Trump hates us. He hates WaPo. He's low-key threatening us. We're going to have our hands full with the Trump Administration for the next four to eight years, unless Pence makes his power play. As you know, we've been aggressively expanding into same-day delivery and grocery over the last two years. Millennial pukes will pay the same-day delivery surcharge instead of renting a Zipcar and having to rub shoulders with poor people at Whole Foods. But we need more labor to move the billions of damn boxes. Our R&D robots are still crap and need another 5 years of research.

    So I'll go to Trump's little tech summit instead of Tim Cook. And we'll announce the expansion of our workforce by tens of thousands. Fuck it, we'll hire a hundred thousand new workers. We'll let Trump say it was his idea. Of course, the fulfillment center conditions will be as bad as they ever were. Worse, even. Any news blitzes about our crap working environment will get absolutely no coverage in WaPo.

    Over the next decade we will buy more robo patents. We'll watch and wait as the unis do the heavy lifting and make more dexterous robots. We'll acquire a few startups. Then, Trump will leave office and a Democratic successor will come in, who will happen to be a Gay-American. A white male, not a lesbian, mind you. We'll wait until the next Inauguration and then we'll spring the trap. All those workers will be sent directly to the gutter to die, as we unveil Amazonk Prometheans. Amazonk Prometheans will be capable of doing all of the jobs that a poorly paid American or overcompensated German can do. They could even fix toilets, but we won't have any of those in the new transcendence centers. The Democrats will be paralyzed as usual and moan about labor rights while doing absolutely nothing. We'll license the technology to everyone else, and become unstoppable.

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]

    • (Score: 2) by lgw on Friday January 13 2017, @06:13PM

      by lgw (2836) on Friday January 13 2017, @06:13PM (#453385)

      Amazon is building skyscrapers in Seattle at a rate of one a year, and filling them with software developers. I wouldn't be surprised if half those new jobs were high-paying tech jobs. Sometimes it's not an evil conspiracy you know - sometimes business are just successful.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @01:08PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @01:08PM (#453268)

    Eventually they will. And so will yours.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @02:11PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @02:11PM (#453300)

    Don't worry they'll turn you into a robot.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @06:23PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @06:23PM (#453389)

    As a developer I feel like you just described my job.

  • (Score: 2) by AnonTechie on Friday January 13 2017, @08:45PM

    by AnonTechie (2275) on Friday January 13 2017, @08:45PM (#453449) Journal

    Just read this article. Thought it might be relevant to this discussion. Whether you do, or do not, trust McKinsey is another story !!

    Here’s a scary thought or a reason to rejoice, depending on which side of the equation you belong. Half the work people do in their jobs can be automated, shows a McKinsey Global Institute study released today.

    Instead of assessing the impact of automation on specific jobs, the study went to a more granular level by looking at the activities involved in various jobs. The logic is that every occupation has a range of activities, each with varying potential for automation.

    McKinsey found that 49 percent of the activities people are paid to do in the global economy can be automated with “currently demonstrated technology.” That involves US$11.9 trillion in wages and touches 1.1 billion people.

    https://www.techinasia.com/work-people-automated-mckinsey-study-shows [techinasia.com]

    --
    Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @10:22PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @10:22PM (#453516)

      If they could get the robot to sit in meetings and look bored, they'd be golden.