Buongiorno, direi che è stato un primo Maggio decisamente fuori dal comune :-) "J.C. DE MARTIN" <demartin@polito.it> writes:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/04/tech/amazon-vp-tim-bray-quits/index.html

Fa impressione che dal punto di vista lavorativo Tim Bray abbia praticamente deciso di "suicidarsi", rinunciando di far parte del top dei top delle elites planetarie; questa ovviamente non gliela perdoneranno mai. Ma _evidentemente_ non è solo la pecunia che fa girare il mondo. Fa anche abbastanza impressione leggere il vicepresidente di Amazon usare parole **un filino** anticapitaliste nel suo blog post (citato nell'articolo sopra); sarà stato anche deluso e arrabbiato ma non è certo il primo Napalm51 che passa. (Ma nemmeno l'ultimo contestatore "da dentro", quindi passerà anche lui). https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/04/29/Leaving-Amazon --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19. [...] That done, remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised. So I resigned. The victims weren’t abstract entities but real people; here are some of their names: Courtney Bowden, Gerald Bryson, Maren Costa, Emily Cunningham, Bashir Mohammed, and Chris Smalls. I’m sure it’s a coincidence that every one of them is a person of color, a woman, or both. Right? [...] But I believe the worker testimony too. And at the end of the day, the big problem isn’t the specifics of Covid-19 response. It’s that Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential. Only that’s not just Amazon, it’s how 21st-century capitalism is done. Amazon [...] has a corresponding lack of vision about the human costs of the relentless growth and accumulation of wealth and power. If we don’t like certain things Amazon is doing, we need to put legal guardrails in place to stop those things. We don’t need to invent anything new; a combination of antitrust and living-wage and worker-empowerment legislation, rigorously enforced, offers a clear path forward. Don’t say it can’t be done, because France is doing it. [...] Spot a pattern? · At the end of the day, it’s all about power balances. The warehouse workers are weak and getting weaker, what with mass unemployment and (in the US) job-linked health insurance. So they’re gonna get treated like crap, because capitalism. Any plausible solution has to start with increasing their collective strength. [...] --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- Che impressione, sembra di leggere Friedrich Engels circa 170 dopo: --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- How is it possible that the poorer classes can remain healthy and have a reasonable expectation of life under such conditions? What can one expect but that they should suffer from continual outbreaks of epidemics and an excessively low expectation of life? The physical condition of the workers shows a progressive deterioration. --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- «continual outbreaks of epidemics», nel 1844. Però sì, l'aspettativa di vita in occidente è decisamente migliorata. [...] Saluti, Giovanni. -- Giovanni Biscuolo