Mastodawn

mcc May 27, 2025

Airlines are like "instead of all those agents, we'll make a sort of assembly line manned by customers. Check in with one machine, drop your baggage off with another."

Then literally anything happens with the computer network requiring an elevated number of customers to need manual intervention, and suddenly you have an enormous immobile line while every single customer lines up before the two (2) remaining agents.

Corporations don't care about "efficiency" they just wanna fire people

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mcc May 27, 2025

I really believe this. We were told capitalist entities will act to minimize costs and maximize profit. But what corporations actually seek to do, for whatever reason, is minimize *labor* cost. They prefer to bear any other kind of cost. They will minimize labor costs even if it increases overall costs and/or hurts profits

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curtmack May 27, 2025

@mcc More generally, I've seen it referred to as "soft cost blindness."

Firing people has a hard, objective value. Slowing down your business and frustrating your customers has a murky, intangible cost. Analyzing that sounds hard, so let's just 🪄🎩 hey look at that, the costs are gone, it's all upside now!

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maya🌻

@curtmack @mcc its bc a corporation just does not want to rely on people, in spite of them being the reason it is able to exist. It’s like the primary contradiction of free market ideals. You need people to create value and you need people in the world with purchasing power, but you somehow want to externalise both. It’s no coincidence that all trendy businesses love llm and cryptocoins, it lets them potentially cut out the “middleman” and externalise more costs.