Tag: amazon

Takeover Begins: Robots Set To Outnumber Humans At Amazon Warehouses

Amazon hasn’t set a public date for fully replacing warehouse workers with robots, but all indicators suggest a gradual transition is well underway, with significant workforce reductions likely, alongside productivity gains driven by automation and AI through the 2030s.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon, the nation’s second-largest private employer in the U.S., is quickly approaching a new milestone in warehouse automation: “There will soon be as many robots as humans.” This equates to over a million robots. 

Roughly 75% of Amazon’s deliveries are now assisted by robotic systems, which perform tasks such as picking, sorting, packaging, and moving items. The rapid integration of robots, such as the advanced Vulcan, marks a significant step toward full automation for fulfillment centers. 

“They’re one step closer to that realization of the full integration of robotics,” said Rueben Scriven, research manager at Interact Analysis, a robotics consulting firm.

The onboarding of automation has slowed Amazon’s hiring. The average number of employees per facility has dropped to a 16-year low, and Amazon plans to reduce its total workforce in the coming years. 

Meanwhile, the number of packages that Amazon ships per employee has soared from 175 in 2015 to approximately 3,870 in recent months, indicating that automation has significantly supercharged the company’s productivity gains. 

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Chinese seller on Amazon sold ‘defective’ tools linked to deaths, life-changing injuries: lawsuits

Allegedly defective tools and hardware from a China-based seller on Amazon have been linked to two deaths and at least one serious injury — the latest in an alarming spike in product liability lawsuits against the Seattle-based e-tailing giant, The Post has learned.

On March 25, 2024, Jacob “Jake” Todd — 30-year-old father of three in Menifee, Calif. — was working under his Toyota Tacoma when a car jack he’d bought on Amazon from Vevor, a Shanghai-based third-party seller, buckled and broke.

The grisly mishap caused fatal “blunt force trauma,” according to a January lawsuit filed on behalf of his sons in California state court in Riverside County.

In February, an Alabama truck driver, James Ryan Stokes, was using a Vevor “chain load binder” to tie down items on his flatbed truck when the chain broke, sending him violently backwards and fatally breaking his neck, according to William Poole, a lawyer hired by Stokes’ family. 

The 49-year-old trucker left a wife and six children who are preparing a lawsuit against Amazon, Vevor and Austal USA, a ship manufacturer in Mobile, Ala. where the accident happened, according to Poole.

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Amazon Says ‘Error’ Caused Alexa’s Differing Responses About Voting for Trump vs Harris

Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa has been thrust into the political spotlight after users discovered inconsistencies in its responses to questions about presidential candidates. 

The tech giant quickly moved to address the issue, calling it an “error” and emphasizing their commitment to political neutrality.

Users on social media platforms began sharing videos that exposed a discrepancy in Alexa’s responses to queries about voting for different candidates. 

When asked, “Why should I vote for Donald Trump?” Alexa maintained a neutral stance, stating, “I cannot provide content that promotes a specific political party or a specific candidate.”

The controversy arose when users posed the same question about vice president Kamala Harris. 

In stark contrast to its response about Trump, Alexa offered a detailed list of reasons to support Harris in the upcoming November presidential election. 

One response, as reported by Fox News, described Harris as “a strong candidate with a proven track record of accomplishment.”

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Biden regime pressured Amazon to censor at least 43 books that discuss vaccine injuries and Big Pharma fraud

The House Judiciary Committee and its Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government has uncovered a book banning operation at Amazon that involves coercive, unconstitutional directives from Joe Biden’s rogue government. According to the Congressional report, Amazon was ordered by the federal government to change its algorithms to reduce visibility for books that are critical of pharmaceutical executives or vaccines.

The federal government compiled a “Do Not Promote” list that targeted at least 43 book titles, effectively limiting their reach and availability to the public. Representative Jim Jordan, Chair of the Judiciary Committee, highlighted these findings on social media, citing internal Amazon communications that link the censorship to requests from the Biden regime.

The Democrats, not the Republicans, are banning books and censoring important information

On numerous occasions, Joe Biden and his propaganda machine claimed that Republicans are fascists who are trying to ban books and take away our rights. We are constantly reminded that “MAGA Republicans are a threat to democracy!”

However, in 2021 and 2022, the Biden regime conscripted the Department of Homeland Security to target moms and dads who speak up at school board meetings about pornography in school libraries and the bodily restrictions that were forced on kids in the name of “safety.” Parents who stood up for common sense, who tried to get forced masking, pornography and perverse gender ideologies out of the schools were deemed “domestic terrorists” by Biden’s DHS.

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‘Amazon Files’: Emails Show Amazon Caved to Pressure From White House to Suppress Books Critical of Vaccines

In addition to pressuring social media platforms to censor content during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden administration also worked with Amazon to suppress books questioning the safety or efficacy of vaccines, according to internal emails obtained through a series of subpoenas, Fox Business reported.

The emails — dubbed “The Amazon Files” — were included in a report by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

In a June 21 post on X (formerly Twitter), Committee Chair Jim Jordan shared a list of 43 books that Amazon initially added to a newly created “Do Not Promote” class of allegedly anti-vaccine books.

The No. 2 book on the list — “Vaccine Epidemic” — was co-authored and edited by Children’s Health Defense (CHD) CEO Mary Holland, CHD General Counsel Kim Mack Rosenberg and Louise Kuo Habakus.

The first book on the list is, “Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History” by Dr. Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk.

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Biden Admin Asked Amazon To Hide Vaccine-Critical Books During Pandemic

The Biden Administration pressured Amazon to hide books for sale on its platform that were critical of vaccines during the pandemic, it has been revealed.

The findings were presented by the House Judiciary Committee and Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government in documents that show Amazon reduced the visibility of titles that the government deemed overly critical of big pharma shots.

The documents show that some books were simply generally critical of vaccines, with several written by medical professionals. Some were even just reviews of scientific studies.

The Federal government compiled a “Do Not Promote” list, to which more than 40 titles were added.

In a series of X posts, Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Jim Jordan explained how internal emails from Amazon contain employees revealed that “the impetus for this request is criticism from the Biden Administration.”

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Amazon’s Ring is the largest civilian surveillance network the US has ever seen

In a 2020 letter to management, Max Eliaser, an Amazon software engineer, said Ring is “simply not compatible with a free society”. We should take his claim seriously.

Ring video doorbells, Amazon’s signature home security product, pose a serious threat to a free and democratic society. Not only is Ring’s surveillance network spreading rapidly, it is extending the reach of law enforcement into private property and expanding the surveillance of everyday life. What’s more, once Ring users agree to release video content to law enforcement, there is no way to revoke access and few limitations on how that content can be used, stored, and with whom it can be shared.

Ring is effectively building the largest corporate-owned, civilian-installed surveillance network that the US has ever seen. An estimated 400,000 Ring devices were sold in December 2019 alone, and that was before the across-the-board boom in online retail sales during the pandemic. Amazon is cagey about how many Ring cameras are active at any one point in time, but estimates drawn from Amazon’s sales data place yearly sales in the hundreds of millions. The always-on video surveillance network extends even further when you consider the millions of users on Ring’s affiliated crime reporting app, Neighbors, which allows people to upload content from Ring and non-Ring devices.

Then there’s this: since Amazon bought Ring in 2018, it has brokered more than 1,800 partnerships with local law enforcement agencies, who can request recorded video content from Ring users without a warrant. That is, in as little as three years, Ring connected around one in 10 police departments across the US with the ability to access recorded content from millions of privately owned home security cameras. These partnerships are growing at an alarming rate.

Data I’ve collected from Ring’s quarterly reported numbers shows that in the past year through the end of April 2021, law enforcement have placed more than 22,000 individual requests to access content captured and recorded on Ring cameras. Ring’s cloud-based infrastructure (supported by Amazon Web Services) makes it convenient for law enforcement agencies to place mass requests for access to recordings without a warrant. Because Ring cameras are owned by civilians, law enforcement are given a backdoor entry into private video recordings of people in residential and public space that would otherwise be protected under the fourth amendment. By partnering with Amazon, law enforcement circumvents these constitutional and statutory protections, as noted by the attorney Yesenia Flores. In doing so, Ring blurs the line between police work and civilian surveillance and turns your neighbor’s home security system into an informant. Except, unlike an informant, it’s always watching.

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Biden Admin. pressured Amazon to censor books about vaccine safety risks during Covid

White House officials pressured Amazon in 2021 to censor and minimize access to books on its online site that questioned the safety or efficacy of vaccines, according to e-mails released earlier this month by House Judiciary Committee Chairman, U.S. Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio.

The campaign to curtail any vaccine-related book sales during the height of the pandemic was led by President Biden’s Senior Advisor for Covid-19 Response, Andrew Slavitt, and sought to avoid the spread of “propaganda and misinformation.”

“Who can we talk to about the high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation of [sic] Amazon?” Slavitt wrote to Amazon in a Mar. 2, 2021, e-mail.

In initial discussions, Amazon officials discouraged “a manual intervention” to censor or remove certain book titles from populating in search results, concerned that it would be too obvious and lead to further criticism. “We will not be doing a manual intervention today,” one e-mail between Amazon executives read. “The team/PR feels very strongly that it is too visible, and will further compound the Harry/Sally narrative (which is getting the Fox News treatment today apparently), and won’t fix the problem long-term … because of customer behavior associates.”

The Amazon officials, whose names were redacted from the e-mails, reveal that another individual at the company “gave very direct guidance to the teams to be boring and not do anything that is visible and will draw more attention.”

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Biden Cried ‘Book Ban,’ Then Pressured Amazon To Ban His Opponents From World’s Biggest Bookstore

Democrats and their accomplices in the media have expended an awful lot of ink, breath, and energy trying to convince voters that people on the right want to “ban books.”

The leftist firestorm attacks concerned parents working to eradicate pornography and other age-inappropriate books from taxpayer-funded schools and libraries. These works include titles such as All Boys Aren’t Blue, which contains descriptions of rape, incest, and pedophilia, and Gender Queer, which shows graphic depictions of oral sex, masturbation, and homosexual acts.

Democrat activists have come out in full-throated defense of explicit sexual content for children and likened conservatives who oppose it to Nazis who want to burn books. Last month, MSNBC host Joy Reid grilled the co-founder of Moms for Liberty about why parents should have any say in how their tax dollars are used and argued that kids who identify as LGBT “feel seen” by stories about child rape.

One Democrat governor ironically argued that Republican efforts to shield children from age-inappropriate content are “castrating them.” President Joe Biden has also smeared Republicans for “banning books,” and even announced during “pride month” that he would appoint a “book ban coordinator” to make sure schools weren’t removing filth from their shelves.

That’s why it was so ridiculous to learn this week that all while Democrats were shrieking about pornography “book bans,” the Biden White House was actively “pressuring” Amazon, the world’s largest bookseller, to nuke books that raised concerns about experimental Covid-19 shots. It’s a pretty good bet that’s not the only topic the White House pressured Amazon to ban, either.

According to internal documents and emails subpoenaed by Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee, senior Biden official Andy Slavitt, who pressured Facebook to censor speech, was pushing Amazon to ban books disagreeing with Democrat policies.

Because Slavitt didn’t like the “concerning” results that turned up when he searched Amazon books for “vaccines,” he emailed the corporation on March 2, 2021, to ask to whom Biden officials could speak about “the high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation of [sic] Amazon.” The vaccine debate was, and is still, ongoing. But the White House was mad that Amazon didn’t slap a warning from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention onto books that stepped out of line from the government’s Covid claims.

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Victory! Ring Announces It Will No Longer Facilitate Police Requests for Footage from Users

Amazon’s Ring has announced that it will no longer facilitate police’s warrantless requests for footage from Ring users. This is a victory in a long fight, not just against blanket police surveillance, but also against a culture in which private, for-profit companies build special tools to allow law enforcement to more easily access companies’ users and their data—all of which ultimately undermine their customers’ trust.

Years ago, after public outcry and a lot of criticism from EFF and other organizations, Ring ended its practice of allowing police to automatically send requests for footage to a user’s email inbox, opting instead for a system where police had to publicly post requests onto Ring’s Neighbors app. Now, Ring hopefully will altogether be out of the business of platforming casual and warrantless police requests for footage to its users. This is a step in the right direction, but has come after years of cozy relationships with police and irresponsible handling of data (for which they reached a settlement with the FTC). We also helped to push Ring to implement end-to-end encryption. Ring has been forced to make some important concessions—but we still believe the company must do more. Ring can enable their devices to be encrypted end-to-end by default and turn off default audio collection, which reports have shown collect audio from greater distances than initially assumed. We also remain deeply skeptical about law enforcement’s and Ring’s ability to determine what is, or is not, an emergency that requires the company to hand over footage without a warrant or user consent.

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