Month: April 2019

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Amazon fired hundreds of workers a year from a single warehouse over ‘productivity’

Amazon’s fulfillment centers are the engine of the company — massive warehouses where workers track, pack, sort, and shuffle each order before sending it on its way to the buyer’s door.

Critics say those fulfillment center workers face strenuous conditions: workers are pressed to “make rate,” with some packing hundreds of boxes per hour, and losing their job if they don’t move fast enough. “You’ve always got somebody right behind you who’s ready to take your job,” says Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Self-Reliance and a prominent Amazon critic.

Documents obtained by The Verge show those productivity firings are far more common than outsiders realize. In a signed letter…

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Podcast startup Luminary’s launch week keeps getting worse

Major creators are continuing to remove their shows from Luminary, the $100 million subscription podcast startup, over its business model, and even more are leaving after the company was exposed for using a proxy server that hides listener data from creators.

Joe Rogan’s popular show was pulled from the platform yesterday, and Barstool Sports CEO Erika Nardini said her network’s shows would be pulled, too. The New York Times was already withholding its blockbuster hit The Daily, and Gimlet Media, Anchor, and Parcast — which are all Spotify-owned companies — also didn’t make their shows available at launch.

Now, smaller creators, including Ben Thompson, Owen Williams, and Federico Viticci, are pulling their podcasts, too. Their withdrawal…

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Army Veteran Goes on All-Beer Diet Inspired By Monks, Loses 44 Pounds

Here’s a diet plan anyone can get behind: beer. That’s it. Liquid bread, all day. Sounds crazy, right?

Okay, it probably is crazy if the guy really did it, but Ohio-based Army veteran Del Hall claims he decided he’d only consume beer for 46 days—for Lent—and lost  44 pounds in the process.

Abstaining during Lent is an act of self-discipline done in the run up to Easter. Fasting and praying is supposed to prep the believer for the holiest day on the calendar (yeah, it’s Easter, not Christmas). 

Del Hall—who works at Cincinnati’s Fifty West Brewing Company and goes by “Beer Influencer” on Instagram—told Fox & Friends that he based his hoppy Lenten liquid fast on something he’d read about the way monks used to make those long days livable:

“Being a beer guy, you always hear this story about the monks in Bavaria, like in the 1600s, that they gave up all solid food for Lent and they only drank this special kind of beer that they called doppelbock. It’s got a lot of nutrients in it, a lot of carbohydrates, and a lot of sugar.”

He added: “And I always wondered: Is that real? Can you really do that or not? So I decided I’d give it a whirl this year and try it out for myself.”

Hall kept track of his progress on social media. He told Fox that the first week was by far the toughest, then he felt like he was no longer addicted to food. 

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Hall indicated that his blood pressure and cholesterol have improved and that he feels like he’s “well educated now, and … ready to go to battle against obesity.”

We gotta admit it sounds pretty appealing. Let’s just hope he doesn’t drive too much while he’s doing battle.