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This is a personal project by @dellsystem. I built this to help me retain information from the books I'm reading.

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meh/analysis

Ellen Pao, Alex Kantrowitz, Eula Biss, Natasha Brown, Noam Cohen, Emily Chang, Douglas Coupland, Jaron Lanier

Amid the change, one thing remains constant at Amazon: the determination to invent. Automating so much labor has freed Amazon’s corporate staff to concentrate on its invention process (they no longer have to work peak season, packing boxes). And it gives Amazonians inside the FCs the time to invent on their own. In EWR9, Virdi showed me a “continuous improvement” kiosk where employees enter ideas for new products, processes, and minor FC tweaks. Every Wednesday, Virdi and his senior staff review the best ideas for forty-five minutes. When they like what they see, they give their associates time and resources on their scheduled workdays—paid—and ask them to turn their ideas into reality. Associate feedback, to give one small example, led Amazon to make its bins yellow to help them more easily spot products and work more effectively.

this feels like corporate mythmaking rather than a realistic understanding of why corporate staff no longer 'have' to work peak season

—p.36 by Alex Kantrowitz 3 years, 3 months ago

Bezos’s joy in life comes from his work, specifically the inventive parts that make him feel like he’s back in the nineties, trying to figure out how to sell books on the internet. For many ultrasuccessful CEOs, living the good life means spending your days on private islands or coasting around the globe on a boat. For Bezos, the good life is work, and coasting is “excruciating, painful decline, followed by death.”

two things here:

  1. that does make sense: the dream of being the perpetual underdog in a big to stave off death
  2. is he not also living the good life? how many mansions does he have?

pano idea - N idolizes bezos because of this quote?

—p.46 by Alex Kantrowitz 3 years, 3 months ago

Next door, in the house just like ours, lives an actual African American grandmother, the wife of the retired postal worker. We’re getting paid to have our house made over to look like what a set designer imagines their house looks like so that Walmart can try to sell things to people who look like them. John tells all this to his friend Dan, who says, I think that’s the definition of white privilege.

if it is then it's a stupid concept. not load-bearing at all. wtf

—p.12 by Eula Biss 2 years, 8 months ago

New York Sunday night, London Saturday morning. You fly the round trip regularly for work. But the attendant stops you. At Heathrow, Sunday afternoon, the attendant lunges into your path before you can reach the business desk. Places a firm hand against your upper arm. The attendant’s fingers – who knows what else they’ve touched? – now press into the soft, grey wool of your coat. You look down at this hand on your body; at the flecks of dirt beneath its fingernails, the pale hairs sprouting from its clammy skin. And then its owner, the attendant, points and speaks loudly, as though you won’t understand, says: Regular check-in is over there.

The attendant won’t acknowledge your ticket, no, just waves you over to the long queue. It winds back and forth, penned in between ropes, all the way to the regular check-in desk. The attendant says: Yes, there’s your line, over there.

what the fuck lol. is she deliberately trying to write a highly unsympathetic character? are we supposed to feel sorry for her that she's not getting the privileges her profiteering employer pays for?

—p.83 by Natasha Brown 2 years, 2 months ago

I later told Dusty Michael’s theory of history being dead and she went goggle-eyed. Dusty said conspiratorially, “Michael may be a crypto-Marxist.” (Oh God …) She kept blabbing, and it’s so weird to see Dusty’s mouth moving and genuine political words emerge. It just doesn’t mesh with her computer image. I get the impression she should be discussing exfoliation or tanning factors instead, but then, bodies are political, too. Or so Dusty has informed the office.

I surprised Dusty. I said that, “Since Marxism is explicitly based on property, ownership, and control of means of production, it may well end up being the final true politik of this Benetton world we now live in.” She said, “Hey, Danster—I underestimated you.”

It was interesting to briefly enter the political realm—as such.

what???

—p.255 by Douglas Coupland 1 year ago