This is how much Jeff Bezos cares about his workers

[Update: The death toll now reaches six.]

At least six people were killed after an Amazon warehouse collapsed in Edwardsville, Illinois. This has sparked concern among the staff members regarding phones being banned in the workplace. A total of 5 Amazon employees have said that they want access to information, including weather updates through their smartphones, reports Bloomberg.

Two of these employees work across the street from the building that collapsed.
One worker from the neighbouring facility said, "After these deaths, there is no way in hell I am relying on Amazon to keep me safe. If they institute the no cell phone policy, I am resigning."

The employees claim that phones can help them communicate with people and seek help in case of such emergencies.

At least two workers are dead when a tornado collapsed an Amazon warehouse near St. Louis. Dozens are still buried in the rubble. The workers were not evacuated ahead of time eventhough everyone knew of the tornado danger.
Obviously Jeff Bezos was inconsolable after hearing about this tragedy.

Jeff Bezos was blasted Saturday for cheering on his latest group of space tourists while making no mention of the deaths of at least two workers in an Amazon warehouse hit by a tornado Friday.

The Amazon founder greeted former NFL star Michael Strahan and the other five members of the latest crew of his New Shepard rocket after the 10-minute flight landed in West Texas. “Welcome back, guys,” he said, as he opened the capsule door after their return.

Prior to the flight, he posted a photo on Instagram of himself with the space flight crew and the comment, “Happy crew this morning in the training center” — but made no mention on the social media site of the tragedy at the Amazon warehouse in Illinois.

“You should worry about the tornado situation more,” one woman commented.

The billionaire celebrated his space success in the midst of the tragedy unfolding in Edwardsville, Illinois, where search and rescue operations continued at an Amazon warehouse that saw part of its roof ripped off and a sizable wall collapse late Friday. While some 30 workers managed to escape, it was unclear how many might still be trapped in the football-field sized rubble.

“It’s really sickening if you want my honest opinion,” Twitter user Joshua Dyer posted over video of Strahan celebrating after the rocket landed. “Jeff Bezos has said absolutely NOTHING on the lives lost at his facility in Illinois after a catastrophic tornado left numerous workers trapped. But sure, go play wannabe space men for 10 minutes. Unreal.”

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12 users have voted.

Bezos never acts as if he cares about anyone other than himself and his hobbies. He's an asshole but at least doesn't subject the world to fake displays that he cares.

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9 users have voted.

@Marie he cares after all

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos issued a statement late Saturday about Friday night's warehouse tragedy in Illinois, hours after he was blasted on social media for seeming quiet on the topic amid the latest flight of his Blue Origin spacecraft.

"The news from Edwardsville is tragic," Bezos posted on Twitter after 9 p.m. ET. "We're heartbroken over the loss of our teammates there, and our thoughts and prayers are with their families and loved ones.

"All of Edwardsville should know that the Amazon team is committed to supporting them and will be by their side through the crisis. We extend our fullest gratitude to all the incredible first responders who have worked so tirelessly at the site."

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4 users have voted.

@gjohnsit
nobody. Form: issued a statement a day after employees were killed and hours after he was getting shit on the internet. Substance: not many multi-billion dollar companies wouldn't issue such a boilerplate statement within eight hours of a tragic event. Even if the CEO had to approve it before the release. However, Bezos doesn't have to feign caring better than that because he knows the US consumer appetite for cheap crap is much bigger than their credit card lines.

(btw -- I've shunned Amazon since it was only a bookseller. My motto is buy less, local as much as possible, and pay the few extra pennies to more reputable business owners.)

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5 users have voted.

@Marie
"Thoughts and prayers" but not open wallet.
Who does he pray to? mammon?

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3 users have voted.

I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

@Marie
I'm sure that his delay in mentioning the tragedy is based on him being so upset that he couldn't find the words to describe his pain.
And the fact that his response is so boilerplate is because his staff wrote it, and that Bezos will be personally visiting each of the families of the victims where he will invite them to live with him in his mansion.
Yeh, that's the ticket.

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4 users have voted.
mimi's picture

he recognized the potential of the www to do searches.I worked at this time in the National Press Building in DC. It was the first building that got cabled to connect to the www. From day one he crashed all bookstores, who tried to build their own online bookstores and with it almost all real brick and mortar bookstores.

And like today he crushed his competitors by buying them out and by buying exclusive rights, in order to stop others to compete against him. The Booksellers didn't know who he was and where he came from in 1994.

I remember well that on the Booksellers Association Meeting in New Orleans nobody knew him yet, nobody understood what he was saying. But a couple of months later they understood. And I am sure in hindsight that Biden liked to get his business into Delaware.

I remember chatting with someone who worked in one of his frist distribution centers in Delaware somewhere. You didn't need to listen much, a look at the hands of this worker, told the whole story about the abusive working conditions.

Don't ask me what I wish him. It would be an understatement to say that I am biased. So who cares. What goes up comes down crashing.

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Shahryar's picture

and the powers that be are on his side. "Funny" in the sense of odd, sad, pathetic.

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15 users have voted.
snoopydawg's picture

when I heard about the tornadoes. It was known for days that it was going to happen. Why was it open? Zero hedges said that millions were in their path yesterday. In the link I posted in the OT it was said that no major media covered it. A candle factory was also opened during the storm and many were buried when the roof blew off and fell inside. They should have been home trying to be safe. Look at how much of one town was destroyed in the tweet I posted. Sticks left of many houses.

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14 users have voted.

Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

zed2's picture

You also needed to get hooked up by special agreement of somebody who had access. You needed a special modem, really. A prized modem.. A telebit Trailblazer, actually. Which made a unique sound. Kind of like a moose's mating call. My first exposure to www was via the pre web really having a TCP connection to the web was difficult. My first hoolup was via a protocol much like SLIP or PPP of today, and it multiplex TCP-IP over it. This enabled a generic Unix shell account to be used for TCP-ip, which seemed really magical to me. It was still very slow. So then I could use "WWW" which was the hot new thing. eventually some people got hooked up with the first web ISPs, which slowly emerged. Even big businesses were just starting out, and funneled their entire operations through modems. I remember being invited by a guy named Will Krieth that I knew to go to a party at a nightclub that was run by an old friend of mine, Dave Dean. The magazine was to be called "wired". It was actually "weird" because they seemed to have hired a whole bunch of my friends, quite a coincidence, I thought.. Their new glossy magazine used a printing process that made for a huge amount of flexibility in printing it, and this gave it a unique new look.It was being started by Louis Rosetto and Jane Metcalfe
With the entry of wired, and all their connections to the publishing world it suddenly started to feel that something was going on and people began to congregate in the Bay Area, even people who knew nothing about the internet except that "they wanted to be involved in the next new thing" At this point the first iteration of net users began to have access to real TCP-ip, a real step upward from the ugly hacks many had started out with before.originally, people were often using SLIP or a program called TIA, to tunnel TCP-ip over a shell account. Or UUCP to connect Unix machines to one another. It was like Internet peering today. The early "bang path" email addreses were very long and delimited with exclamation points, does anybody else here remember that? The web's original author was Tim Berners-Lee, an employee of CERN which was the European particle physics lab. TimBL authored www on his work computer, his desktop Next workstation whichof course ran the NextStep OS, Next was Steve Jobs company, which was particularly easy to program. TimBL wrote www, which was similar in spirit to "gopher" but used hypertext markup language, a text based invention based on SGML, a markup language used in commercial publishing toi lay out print pages.. He wrote this in his office as a personal fun project, which was strictly text based with provision only for text, and links, which when clicked would open the linked page, allowing the text to be turned into links. This turned out to be so easy and fun that even children could do it, I think it originally had no graphics, Later it had provision for inline graphics only left to right. And a "blink" tag. And a rapidly growing vocabulary of HTML tags..No real formatting was possible so people used all sorts of ugly hacks to embed graphics The magic of the www was that HTML could embed all different kinds of files and launch helper applications that were appropriate.. graphics, no tables, no frames, and a very abbreviated simple HTML by today's standards, way back in the late 80s or early 90s in the context of a website run as a labor of love by a friend who was a UCB student who shared with me an interest in electronic music.. I originally learned how to make web pages using "lynx" which was another very early, CLI browser. Then I graduated to using Irix 5.2 and 5.3, the very nice, elegant flawor of Unix used by SGI machines. This was a very nice OS to use hat I wish was still around today. The web only became available to the general public bit by bit. There were no commercial ISps until years after it emerged for the scientific and educational communities. Selling things on the early web was forbidden, it seems to me. Then it became okay but was discouraged in its most commercial form..I had a friend who ran one of the very first ISPs in Silicon Valley. The Internet was really in its infancy. The commercially dverse Web of today actually didnt exist until around 1994 At least five years after "TimBL's" A Beginners Guide to HTML was first published and the first graphical web browser, XMosaic which ra under Xwindows on UNix, and later Mac OS and Windows 95 appeared.

THis story is very much out of sequence, its not in chronological order a all, sorry about that. But its fun, I hope.

I actually went to some of the first WWW conferences and still have their Proceedings. There were only a few ISPS in the world. I was the 300th customer of one of them., AT my job I was very interested in making the best use of the Web. One of the projects I was involved in way back then actually won major kudos for its usefulness and unlike almost any web sites that were around back now, still exists! And is still super useful and relevant. I also helped develop a policy that is still being used to ensure that scientific information thats published is credible and is accountable in terms of its accuracy. It is also still being used. A very very long time later. Today obviously everything is so very different. Especially, computers have become so very much more ffordable and powerful. By many orders of magnitude at least. This has made things possible or even easy that would have been out of the question then. Back then powerful computers were huge power hogs and cost astronomical sums of money. They required a lot of technical expertise to use. Now a $35 credit card sized Raspberry Pi of today probably carries more computing power and memory than a whole roomful of powerful graphics workstations did then, (and produces a LOT less heat). It can address 64 bits which means terabytes of memory and disk, which is still a lot in terms of its usefulness.. What this means is that even little kids can afford a machine with which they could do, if they want, serious science. And they can be very productive if they are motivated to be so.

The key to doing this is to free your mind of limitations that box you in with ideas of what can and can't be done. So you can reach your full potential.

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snoopydawg's picture

I doubt any of the CEOs that made their workers stay working during deadly tornadoes will be held accountable for it. Again we see profits before people’s lives. One bright spot might be that they will be covered under worker’s compensation insurance and it will have to pay death benefits. That’s if the company had any.

I rarely hear anything about how people affected by natural disasters do after everything they own has been destroyed. People are lucky if their insurance covers the losses, but many people can’t afford it or it’s not offered. After Katrina many homes were declared unoccupiable and were demolished. I don’t know if people were reimbursed for it. How about Texas when many people’s homes were damaged by water from broken pipes? Anyone know if they got help?

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10 users have voted.

Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

Lily O Lady's picture

@snoopydawg

that the workers were there making candles for the busy Christmas season. Kinda like Santa’s elves. As though they were sacrificing their lives. There was no hint that they could have been allowed to take shelter even though TV weather people always encourage viewers to take shelter when a tornado is near.

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11 users have voted.

"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"

snoopydawg's picture

@Lily O Lady

Of course the media put a happy spin on it. Like when little Susie spends her life savings on something that any normal society would. It’s beyond reprehensible that they did that for people who shouldn’t have to risk their lives for a company’s profits. I’m damn sick and tired of how ghoulish capitalism is!

It’s good to see you here again. I’ve been wondering how you were.

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7 users have voted.

Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

mimi's picture

@snoopydawg

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Lily O Lady's picture

@snoopydawg

because one eye still needs my glasses lens and the other doesn’t. So reading and writing are tough. It’s good to see you, even if I am seeing cockeyed.

I thought the 21st Century would be so cool when I was a kid, but it has turned out to be a dystopian novel. Who’d a thunk it?

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7 users have voted.

"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"

Socialprogressive's picture

@Lily O Lady

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6 users have voted.

I woke up this morning determined to drink less, eat right, and exercise.
But that was four hours ago when I was younger and full of hope.

zed2's picture

Specifically to enable use of use (presumably Mosaic) in the library? That sounds about right.

Because the web uses TCP-IP so likely they upgraded your Ethernet to be faster. That sounds about right as the earliest 10 MBPS or 100 MBPS Ethernet was much slower than the gigabit Ethernet thats common today. Some people even have faster service, but one needs a faster NIC than is common to see. Gigabit Ethernet began to become possible around 1999-ish.

There is a good chronology of networking speeds increasing and how and why in "Computer Networks", 5th ed by Tanenbaum and Wetherall. One of my favorite books on the subject for readability.

Andrew Tannenbaum is the author of Minix so he's quite knowledgeable.

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zed2's picture

@lily-o-lady

Distilled water with a tiny bit of carnosine in it. 1% or less by weight. Make sure the distilled water and eye dropper you use is kept sterile!

It has been known for a long time. Carnosine really works wonders for the beta-cystallin protoglycans in the eye. The clear proteins in the lens of the eye.

It was discovered in the former USSR and was published, but seems as if the older articles never made it into PubMed. Note I am talking about plain old l-carnosine. Not n-acetyl-carnosine which is insanely expensive. Carnosine is quite affordable as a little bit of it can last years taken this way. Ive been taking it for years - every couple of days for a few years. It seems to have arrested the progress of a very destructive and common eye condition to some exent. It clarifies cloudiness in eyes, if its not too bad. Look it up. Just keep in mind that plain l-carnosine works too. Not just the expensive kind. This really should be publicized all around the world. It helps dogs too. Dogs seem to be helped a real lot by it. It would likely help a lot of old elephants too, I suspect. Eye drops are not very invasive.

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zed2's picture

They return home safe and sound. Overtime check in hand.

The best I can find is a feed of the (rolling thunder) weather in Tennessee Valley

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zed2's picture

Its because people, especially children, have to be fed and eat.
Bezos should at least give his underpaid workers a hefty discount on food at his food store.
But I don't think they do. There may not even be a "Real Foods" or any kind of health oriented supermarket in many parts of the country, because they could't afford the high prices for healthy food now as the food supply is being monopolized by the land grabbing.

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zed2's picture

Automated everything. Thats "sustainable" in their eyes.

Living wages are not. On the other hand the workers in the high yield countries need the jobs so they will stay "on our side".

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2 users have voted.
zed2's picture

Thats the biggest question for me. I hope people are okay safe somewhere, get out safe and that its not freezing cold. People who are pinned under huge fallen racks of products to be shipped and debris are definitely under severe risk of hypothermia. So glad the disaster wasnt an earthquake on the New Madrid Fault. (which could be a vast multi state catastrophe)

In a best case scenario, I would say that there may be a serious safety and structural conflict between their business model and extreme weather. As well as coronavirus.

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1 user has voted.
zed2's picture

Crocodile tears.. Seems this deceased worker was not allowed to use their cell phones or leave wnen his shift ended, according to this report. Now he leaves four children without any father or quite possibly, benefits, since he was not married, his partner will probably be left without help because of their lack of marital status.

"She said she doesn’t “really” blame Amazon for his death, “But it’s that what-if situation: What if they would have let him leave? He could have made it home.”

She said Virden considered himself lucky having survived a missile that blew up just 200 yards from him while he was serving in Iraq. “When he was over there, he made his peace with the maker so he was prepared to die. But we didn’t want him to die now,” she said, her voice rising.

Jones said the couple had three children together between the ages of 9 and 12. Virden had a grandchild and other children as well."

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zed2's picture

They are "no longer looking for people". (whatever that means, I couldn't figure out what they meant). The building was very new and was peeled open by the 150+ mph winds..
At least 40 people are verified as survivors, At least six died. Several subcontracting companies worked there for Amazon, but the workers for these companies may not be Amazon employees???

Numbers of potential fatalities are not known. I dont know if there are many injured? They are for photos, asking familiy members for pictures of the possibly involved to facilitate identification of people who may not have been carrying ID when the storm hit.

Re the candle factory, there are familiy members on the site hoping that their family members were among the survivors, 40 people out of 110 were accounted for, not necessarily alive or dead.. There are a lot first responders who want to help until their help is no longer needed and everybody, living hopefully is found..there are also many coroners from several counties.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ncdjSgNNsA]

Pray for these families whose homes look like many of them have lost everything as well as families and loved ones. Warm clothing and housing would be helpful. Pray!

Kentucky state government is setting up a fund for donations for survivors.

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zed2's picture

The dividends. Bezos makes more as he shits than those poor working people make in their entire lives.

Life is good for Jeff Bezos. The system works great for him. Amazon is the future of work. We're all now competing with everyone from everywhere for everything. He's taking over the world of selling, ending small inefficient businesses.

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