eschaton posted:

you just need to call what you're selling "supplements" rather than food or medicine

then you p much get a free pass on any testing, efficacy, or even accuracy-in-labeling requirements

FMguru posted:

the 1906 pure food and drug act was really really strong about regulating the purity of drugs and food, but as long as you call something a nutritional supplement (not food) and dont make any specific medical claims (not a drug!) it doesnt apply to you

its a loophole that needs to be closed but the nutritional supplement industry is a big multibillion dollar rolling scam that has several senators from dicklefuck states in their pockets, hatch being the main one (this is your daily reminder that mormons are terrible)

theres one other weird loophole in the act. the doctor who wrote it was a clear eyed rationalist who put in extremely strong restriction against quack medicines and treatments - with the exception of homeopathy, which he was a big believer in

quote:

On Monday mornings, fresh recruits line up for an orientation intended to catapult them into Amazon’s singular way of working.

They are told to forget the “poor habits” they learned at previous jobs, one employee recalled. When they “hit the wall” from the unrelenting pace, there is only one solution: “Climb the wall,” others reported. To be the best Amazonians they can be, they should be guided by the leadership principles, 14 rules inscribed on handy laminated cards. When quizzed days later, those with perfect scores earn a virtual award proclaiming, “I’m Peculiar” — the company’s proud phrase for overturning workplace conventions.

At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”)

Main Paineframe posted:

payday loans can be helpful to people too, but that doesnt make them charity

HAIL eSATA-n posted:

microloans are 0% interest

FMguru posted:

the 1906 pure food and drug act was really really strong about regulating the purity of drugs and food, but as long as you call something a nutritional supplement (not food) and dont make any specific medical claims (not a drug!) it doesnt apply to you

its a loophole that needs to be closed but the nutritional supplement industry is a big multibillion dollar rolling scam that has several senators from dicklefuck states in their pockets, hatch being the main one (this is your daily reminder that mormons are terrible)

theres one other weird loophole in the act. the doctor who wrote it was a clear eyed rationalist who put in extremely strong restriction against quack medicines and treatments - with the exception of homeopathy, which he was a big believer in

Pinterest Mom posted:

pro click

Pinterest Mom posted:

pro click

FMguru posted:

gawker has actually had really good coverage of amazons awfulness for the last year or two

its impressive how badly they treat everyone, from the temp agency unfortunates who work in their warehouses all the way up to the engineers and managers who work in their corporate headquarters. its a culture of unrelenting abuse and extracting 110% from every worker before they burn out and are discarded

welcome to the future of american employment

qirex posted:

does someone have the pastebin of their multi-year discussion of not having enough toilets? I can't find it [thradium]

Dixie Cretin Seaman posted:

so what's stopping pepsi from selling "mountain dew xxxtreme synthetic amphetamine edition" as a nutritional supplement and side stepping regulation then? why isn't there a twinkie supplement made entirely of transfat with no requirement to list ingredients or nutritional info? seems like food companies would be all over this poo poo

Nintendo Kid posted:

it's not a loophole so much as a huge gaping wound that was created only in the 90s by orrin hatch's legislation that revoked a ton of prior usda/fda powers to regulate. before that legislation, it was a lot easier for the fda to roll up on some quack selling something as a supplement or whatever, investigate it, and make them stop selling it, this hurt orrin hatch's investments so he sponsored the bill that made it so basically a bunch of people need to be dead or severely injured before the fda can step in

also you're confused. it wasn't the original sponsors of the 1900s and 1920s pure food and drug acts that were homeopaths, it was some random important senator who threatened to do everything he could to block passage unless they included homeopathy, because he was the homeopath.

Dixie Cretin Seaman posted:

so what's stopping pepsi from selling "mountain dew xxxtreme synthetic amphetamine edition" as a nutritional supplement and side stepping regulation then? why isn't there a twinkie supplement made entirely of transfat with no requirement to list ingredients or nutritional info? seems like food companies would be all over this poo poo

quote:

A dietary supplement is a product intended for ingestion that contains a "dietary ingredient" intended to add further nutritional value to (supplement) the diet. A "dietary ingredient" may be one, or any combination, of the following substances:

• a vitamin
  
• a mineral
  
• an herb or other botanical
  
• an amino acid
  
• a dietary substance for use by people to supplement the diet by increasing the total dietary intake
  
• a concentrate, metabolite, constituent, or extract
  

Dietary supplements may be found in many forms such as tablets, capsules, softgels, gelcaps, liquids, or powders. Some dietary supplements can help ensure that you get an adequate dietary intake of essential nutrients; others may help you reduce your risk of disease.

Pinterest Mom posted:

"(emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered)"

computer parts posted:

Dixie Cretin Seaman posted:

But that literally describes any food ever except maybe water? Perhaps my diet needs caloric supplement in the form of ultratwinkies, why should big govt regulate them to death?

Dixie Cretin Seaman posted:

so what's stopping pepsi from selling "mountain dew xxxtreme synthetic amphetamine edition" as a nutritional supplement and side stepping regulation then? why isn't there a twinkie supplement made entirely of transfat with no requirement to list ingredients or nutritional info? seems like food companies would be all over this poo poo

Pinterest Mom posted:

pro click

Improbable Lobster posted:

how can anyone work like that for more than a week

Pinterest Mom posted:

pro click

Soricidus posted:

lol if you have to think about work outside office hours (unless you're getting a really good on-call bonus)

Dixie Cretin Seaman posted:

so what's stopping pepsi from selling "mountain dew xxxtreme synthetic amphetamine edition" as a nutritional supplement and side stepping regulation then? why isn't there a twinkie supplement made entirely of transfat with no requirement to list ingredients or nutritional info? seems like food companies would be all over this poo poo

Pinterest Mom posted:

pro click

quote:

In 2013, Elizabeth Willet, a former Army captain who served in Iraq, joined Amazon to manage housewares vendors and was thrilled to find that a large company could feel so energetic and entrepreneurial. After she had a child, she arranged with her boss to be in the office from 7 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. each day, pick up her baby and often return to her laptop later. Her boss assured her things were going well, but her colleagues, who did not see how early she arrived, sent him negative feedback accusing her of leaving too soon.

“I can’t stand here and defend you if your peers are saying you’re not doing your work,” she says he told her. She left the company after a little more than a year.

Ms. Willet’s co-workers strafed her through the Anytime Feedback Tool, the widget in the company directory that allows employees to send praise or criticism about colleagues to management. (While bosses know who sends the comments, their identities are not typically shared with the subjects of the remarks.) Because team members are ranked, and those at the bottom eliminated every year, it is in everyone’s interest to outperform everyone else.

Craig Berman, an Amazon spokesman, said the tool was just another way to provide feedback, like sending an email or walking into a manager’s office. Most comments, he said, are positive.

However, many workers called it a river of intrigue and scheming. They described making quiet pacts with colleagues to bury the same person at once, or to praise one another lavishly. Many others, along with Ms. Willet, described feeling sabotaged by negative comments from unidentified colleagues with whom they could not argue. In some cases, the criticism was copied directly into their performance reviews — a move that Amy Michaels, the former Kindle manager, said that colleagues called “the full paste.”

...

Each year, the internal competition culminates at an extended semi-open tournament called an Organization Level Review, where managers debate subordinates’ rankings, assigning and reassigning names to boxes in a matrix projected on the wall. In recent years, other large companies, including Microsoft, General Electric and Accenture Consulting, have dropped the practice — often called stack ranking, or “rank and yank” — in part because it can force managers to get rid of valuable talent just to meet quotas.

The review meeting starts with a discussion of the lower-level employees, whose performance is debated in front of higher-level managers. As the hours pass, successive rounds of managers leave the room, knowing that those who remain will determine their fates.

Preparing is like getting ready for a court case, many supervisors say: To avoid losing good members of their teams — which could spell doom — they must come armed with paper trails to defend the wrongfully accused and incriminate members of competing groups. Or they adopt a strategy of choosing sacrificial lambs to protect more essential players. “You learn how to diplomatically throw people under the bus,” said a marketer who spent six years in the retail division. “It’s a horrible feeling."

quote:

Molly Jay, an early member of the Kindle team, said she received high ratings for years. But when she began traveling to care for her father, who was suffering from cancer, and cut back working on nights and weekends, her status changed. She was blocked from transferring to a less pressure-filled job, she said, and her boss told her she was “a problem.” As her father was dying, she took unpaid leave to care for him and never returned to Amazon.

“When you’re not able to give your absolute all, 80 hours a week, they see it as a major weakness,” she said.

A woman who had thyroid cancer was given a low performance rating after she returned from treatment. She says her manager explained that while she was out, her peers were accomplishing a great deal. Another employee who miscarried twins left for a business trip the day after she had surgery. “I’m sorry, the work is still going to need to get done,” she said her boss told her. “From where you are in life, trying to start a family, I don’t know if this is the right place for you.”

A woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a “performance improvement plan” — Amazon code for “you’re in danger of being fired” — because “difficulties” in her “personal life” had interfered with fulfilling her work goals. Their accounts echoed others from workers who had suffered health crises and felt they had also been judged harshly instead of being given time to recover.

A former human resources executive said she was required to put a woman who had recently returned after undergoing serious surgery, and another who had just had a stillborn child, on performance improvement plans, accounts that were corroborated by a co-worker still at Amazon. “What kind of company do we want to be?” the executive recalled asking her bosses.

The mother of the stillborn child soon left Amazon. “I had just experienced the most devastating event in my life,” the woman recalled via email, only to be told her performance would be monitored “to make sure my focus stayed on my job.”

Main Paineframe posted:

“When you’re not able to give your absolute all, 80 hours a week, they see it as a major weakness,” she said.

A woman who had thyroid cancer was given a low performance rating after she returned from treatment. She says her manager explained that while she was out, her peers were accomplishing a great deal. Another employee who miscarried twins left for a business trip the day after she had surgery. “I’m sorry, the work is still going to need to get done,” she said her boss told her. “From where you are in life, trying to start a family, I don’t know if this is the right place for you.”

A woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a “performance improvement plan” — Amazon code for “you’re in danger of being fired” — because “difficulties” in her “personal life” had interfered with fulfilling her work goals. Their accounts echoed others from workers who had suffered health crises and felt they had also been judged harshly instead of being given time to recover.

A former human resources executive said she was required to put a woman who had recently returned after undergoing serious surgery, and another who had just had a stillborn child, on performance improvement plans, accounts that were corroborated by a co-worker still at Amazon. “What kind of company do we want to be?” the executive recalled asking her bosses.

The mother of the stillborn child soon left Amazon. “I had just experienced the most devastating event in my life,” the woman recalled via email, only to be told her performance would be monitored “to make sure my focus stayed on my job.”

Korean Boomhauer posted:

this?
http://pastebin.com/7RpXneAV

quote:

Tagged this and related tickets with "toilet-interest".

quote:

“This is a company that strives to do really big, innovative, groundbreaking things, and those things aren’t easy,” said Susan Harker, Amazon’s top recruiter. “When you’re shooting for the moon, the nature of the work is really challenging. For some people it doesn’t work.”

triple sulk posted:

i hope bezos gets cancer and tries to cure it by making his employees work longer hours

Pinterest Mom posted:

pro click

quote:

SeattleGuy Seattle 11 hours ago

Work is not daycare for adults. This country was not built on 40 hour work weeks and treating the office like a social club.

America needs more companies like Amazon that demand more from employees and rewards them accordingly. Our nation's Silicon Valley culture isn't perfect and can burn people out, but is also the reason we have Apple, Microsoft, and Google keeping us competitive. Tesla is on the brink of kicking our oil addiction that has crippled us with years of war and environmental catastrophes. Should we force them to work forty hour weeks and keep us in the automobile stone age for another generation or two?

Yes, Amazon clearly could afford to make tweaks to their work/balance culture, but it is not mandatory for anyone to work there. Workers aren't being tricked off the farm into boarding a bus to sew zippers onto jackets for pennies a week, they are at the top of their skill sets and aware of the achievement culture.

Stack-ranking and the ability to have your feedback about management taken seriously by management might force out a few employees before their time but is infinitely preferable to having dead wood in the office watching soccer games all day while managers run a department into the ground.

Readers need to understand that for a company to offer six months of paternity leave, Christmas parties, and free snacks, it must have someone in the office actually doing the work. We should be thankful a few companies in America are still putting in the hours.

triple sulk posted:

http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/11/markhor-takes-the-middleman-out-of-designer-shoemaking/

Dixie Cretin Seaman posted:

lol innovative groundbreaking moonshots, from the company that cornered the market in ordering poo poo by pushing a single button

HAIL eSATA-n posted:

microloans are 0% interest