Amazon Blog

I find the body fat measurement tech interesting: https://blog.aboutamazon.com/devices/a-better-measure-of-health Basically you take some pictures of yourself and they build a 3D model, then use a neural network to analyze and predict bf%. They claim "is as accurate as methods a doctor would use" and "we tested accuracy using Dual-energy X-ray Absorptiometry (DXA)" but they're not saying exactly how accurate it is compared to DXA, so I suspect the number isn't great.

> Would be great to see Amazon's support. From one of the links on the left of the article: https://blog.aboutamazon.com/policy/amazon-donates-10-million-to-organ… > Update, June 9: Since announcing our $10 million donation, we’ve heard many employees are making their own contributions—and we’ve decided to match their donations 100% up to $10,000 per employee to these 12 organizations until July 6, 2020.

Hey, there you have a few references that could be of some help! Google: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-blind-google-engineer-writes-code-… Visual Studio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94swlF55tVc Forzano (Amazon) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57P_dCEPtRw, https://blog.aboutamazon.com/working-at-amazon/blind-since-birth-writi… Wishing you the best, J

[EDIT] Excellent points were made that while amazon IS creating a fund, this particular web page may very well not be the actual implementation of said fund. Proceed with caution. It is mentioned in a post on the amazon blog: https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/amazons-actions-to-help-empl…

This isn't the best source, but the claims are there: https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/product-safety-and-complianc… Only difference from what OP suggested is it doesn't seem they manually look at all initial listing. Apart from that it seems they claim having exactly the described system by OP in place.

Capitalism isn't perfect but I'll take this over the other options that I've seen. https://blog.aboutamazon.com/working-at-amazon/our-pledge-to-amazons-w… That's a subjective opinion. Amazon started out as a book store and I love books, so I naturally stuck with them from the late 90's til now. It's an incredible story to go from next to dead to where they are today. Only bigger 'comeback' is probably Apple, another company you probably hate. Right? Facebook is the next AOL or Yahoo, just a matter of time now. People are loyal until they aren't, then they'll leave in droves. The reverse 'early adopter' stage is already happening...

Maybe they figure that people who like dogs enough to want to see more will also click the link [1] to find out more about the "Dogs of Amazon", which seems to be unaffected by their problems. There they will find a story about Amazon's dog-friendly offices, 30+ pictures of Amazon dogs, and a video showing many of them. The time to consume all that is time the person is not hitting refresh on the shopping site, so maybe is a net win for Amazon. [1] https://blog.aboutamazon.com/working-at-amazon/how-much-does-amazon-lo…

You're talking about District Heating[1], and that's been around for decades in hundreds of cities. It's the source of the steaming manhole covers that are a fixture of noir imagery. Denver's got the oldest continually operating system in the world, and within the last decade or so, they added a cooling loop, as well. Instead of a boiler and a cooling tower, you can subscribe to a steam loop and a chiller loop. The problem is once again of gradient. It makes thermodynamic sense to pipe steam around, because of the large gradient between steam and ambient. But servers don't make steam. At best they make warm water only a couple of dozen degrees over ambient... and warm water doesn't have enough energy to heat buildings very effectively. That said, and as someone already mentioned, people are doing it anyway. Seattle's internet exchange pipes its water across the street to the Amazon towers[2]. BTW, Seattle's Georgetown steam plant might not be making steam any more, but the one down by the market is still operating as Emwave Seattle[3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating [2] https://blog.aboutamazon.com/sustainability/the-super-efficient-heat-s… [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Steam_Company

They don’t go into details; but they claim it’s “as accurate as methods a doctor would use” and that they tested accuracy against DXA. https://blog.aboutamazon.com/devices/a-better-measure-of-health

The fat measurement bit seems interesting. It seems entirely dependent on CV.[1] It does acknowledge that people gain fat differently but I am very apprehensive of this feature. Definition of muscles unless you go sub 10% BF looks very different among people. Also, clicking full body pictures and uploading it in a third party service even though this is Amazon feels very violating for some reason. I think traditional home/gym scales use electrical impedance to measure this like this Inbody one. [2] They also claim to have been validated by studies. I would rather want these devices to become more portable and affordable. [1] https://blog.aboutamazon.com/devices/a-better-measure-of-health [2] https://inbodyusa.com/products/inbody770/

FAQ on Tone component: https://blog.aboutamazon.com/devices/a-new-tool-to-help-you-understand… "Once you’ve opted-in by creating your voice profile, Tone will run passively and intermittently in the background so you don’t have to think about it. Throughout the day, it will take short samples of your speech and analyze the acoustic characteristics that represent how you sound to the people you interact with. This gives you a simple way to reflect on your interaction and communication throughout the day." Aka "Look, Amazon found a reason it needs to record your voice all the time. For science." Facebook must be fuming.

Fun fact: a building in the Seattle campus of Amazon, "lowflyinghawk" is named after a particularly vocal early days customer of AWS: https://blog.aboutamazon.com/amazon-campus/the-surprising-stories-behi…

Disclaimer: I work at Amazon, views are my own. Delivery trucks: 100,000 trucks at $70k each = $7 billion investment over 5 years. [1] Datacenters: 80% renewable energy by 2024, 100% by 2030 [2] For boxes, I'd agree that there's a lot of room for improvement in reduction in cardboard use and packaging reuse. Everyone should come to their own conclusions about whether companies are doing enough in each area. For delivery trucks in particular I'd call the investments happening there much more than "spare change". [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/19/20873947/amazon-electric-delivery-v… [2] https://blog.aboutamazon.com/sustainability/reducing-carbon-by-moving-…

Amazon drew attention to themselves with this press release https://blog.aboutamazon.com/policy/amazon-donates-10-million-to-organ… and I think holding them accountable for not actually doing the thing they want credit for doing is fair.

> Forcing people to show up to work under these conditions is murder. Nobody can be forced to show up, and no, that's not murder. > A starting point would be... Amazon has a page listing their pretty thorough adjustments for health & safety: https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/how-amazon-prioritizes-healt…

Direct from the source, here is what Amazon is doing: https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/how-amazon-prioritizes-healt… > We’ve extended the increased hourly pay outlined below through May 16. We are also extending double overtime pay in the U.S. and Canada. These extensions increase our total investment in pay during COVID-19 to nearly $700 million for our hourly employees and partners. In addition, we are providing flexibility with leave of absence options, including expanding the policy to cover COVID-19 circumstances, such as high-risk individuals or school closures. We continue to see heavy demand during this difficult time and the team is doing incredible work for our customers and the community.

> Things like healthcare, paid sick leave adequate for the situation (so at least 4 weeks for proper quarantine), good PPE, in-depth infection combat strategies, and so on. They are already doing all the things you suggested: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employee-benefits-2017-8?op=1 https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/amazons-actions-to-help-empl…

Reuters is restating the "April 13" update at Amazon's press blog post here (which is updated each day without changing the URL): https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/amazons-actions-to-help-empl…

Amazon has already increased both normal and overtime pay for these workers, and instituted lots of reasonable changes in their stores and fulfillment centers. See https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/amazons-actions-to-help-empl… These strikes just seems opportunist. For those saying “workers should get PPEs” - how? There’s a shortage and medical workers are a higher priority since they’re more likely to be infected. And clearly, online shopping is popular these days and important to keep operating while there are shelter in place orders. Grocery stores are also important to keep operating. These workers are free to forego their jobs and go home. Amazon should just replace them and move on. There will be many others who are willing to work.

Amazon is actually defined by long-term thinking, which was heavily criticized for over a decade while their stock remained flat. It's hard to imagine now, but people didn't really believe in the company until about 2009. Jeff Bezos' letter to shareholders, 1997: It's All About the Long Term Because of our emphasis on the long term, we may make decisions and weigh tradeoffs differently than some companies... We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions. https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/amazons-original-1997-letter…

Some sort of virus or something I think. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/15/coronavirus-amazon-says-items-out-of-s… Amazon warned it’s experiencing Prime delivery days and running out of stock of popular household items amid the coronavirus outbreak. Also here's a related blog post by Amazon https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/amazons-actions-to-help-empl…

Sort of related, but Amazon is hiring for 100,000 roles: https://blog.aboutamazon.com/operations/amazon-opening-100000-new-role… I just read this; it blew my mind.

Jeff didn't say Amazon is at Day 2, but he did outline what that would look like: https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/2016-letter-to-shareholders Employees frequently use that framework to discuss how they think Amazon (or the org they work in) is truly done for.

I do not know where you get these ideas from. Working for Amazon as a white collar guy also nothing like working for Google or any other company in California. The save money on you wherever they can. This includes getting shitty used laptops as your first device, not having extra monitors, working on a door desk, and so on. https://blog.aboutamazon.com/working-at-amazon/how-a-door-became-a-des…

Amazon’s corporate statement has more detail than you claim: > Amazon today announced the order of 100,000 electric delivery vehicles from Rivian, the largest order ever of electric delivery vehicles, with vans starting to deliver packages to customers in 2021. Amazon plans to have 10,000 of the new electric vehicles on the road as early as 2022 and all 100,000 vehicles on the road by 2030—saving 4 million metric tons of carbon per year by 2030. https://blog.aboutamazon.com/sustainability/the-climate-pledge

I recently lost the one-day Prime shipping option too... seems to have happened sometime around the early June announcement [0] of "expanded" one-day shipping for Prime customers. https://blog.aboutamazon.com/amazon-prime/prime-free-one-day

See for example this blog post: https://blog.aboutamazon.com/working-at-amazon/blind-since-birth-writi…

This is the company that famously turned doors into desks. [1] 1 https://blog.aboutamazon.com/working-at-amazon/how-a-door-became-a-des…

https://blog.aboutamazon.com/transportation/a-drone-program-taking-fli… Lots of talk about vision, no mention of LIDAR. Computer vision is getting better faster than LIDAR is getting cheaper, expect a lidar-less future.

They just launched project zero, so at least they seem to be addressing the issue. https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/amazon-project-zero