The simplest solution is often the best. In this case, Sam did something that was so dramatically bad resulting in a high level of legal peril, which created an existential risk for OpenAI and Microsoft, or something in his personal life came to light that was beyond the pale. I love the AGI theories but in all likelihood it’s probably a boring thing: he made a terrible choice in his life somewhere and it’s caught up to him, with major consequences.
Context: I was a UPS drivers helper during college during the holiday seasons. This job entailed running large amounts of holiday volume packages to houses from the truck.
I speculate that this is because the role of driver is a high-trust and critical operations role. This person has to reliably execute package delivery every single day regardless of the highly variable problem spaces that emerge. Without the last X mile capacity that a driver brings, all of the infra at UPS doesn’t provide value. For example a driver wakes up early every day, rain or shine (or sleet), and is accountable for making sure a truck is loaded correctly at the dock, and every package on the route is delivered. This can include packages of diamonds insured for 10’s of thousands, to hundred plus pound boxes.
I only rode shotgun for a few weeks a year and it was hard work. From that POV it a seems like a fair wage for the role.
Drivers with consistent routes doing pickups for businesses end up being the most important customer facing people for the delivery company.
You can call your UPS rep and get results in a month (or your FedEx rep and get results in a year IME lol) but your daily driver can make an extra pickup or make a timeframe adjustment same-day if you ask and it’s doable.
The tracking part is more telemetry for their delivery optimization algorithm. (Think the classic traveling salesman problem.) For example, UPS drivers are generally prohibited from making left turns because it's considered less efficient to do so.
UPS drivers are personally held responsible for packages placed in their custody.
> For example, UPS drivers are generally prohibited from making left turns because it's considered less efficient to do so.
No, they aren’t “generally prohibited from making left turns” - that’s a misrepresentation. The truth is that their routing-engine is optimised for reducing idle time waiting at lights which meant that _consequently_ their navigation+routing instructions given to the driver will avoid left-turns. That’s all it is.
(When the media references this they make it sound like eliminating left-turns is the objective, rather than the end-result)
It's definitely used for checking and evidence of delivery. For instance, GPS coordinates are logged when parcels is marked as delivered so that know exactly where this happened, not only when.
Same reason pizza delivery (a fairly dangerous job, more likely to die on the job than a cop) makes less - It’s not as hard to train and retain armored car drivers. Armored cars make routine deliveries of exactly one product to a fixed number of regular commercial clients. General package delivery is pretty much the opposite of all of that.
It’s a hard work, yes. And people should get paid for hard work.
But you’re a delivery man, that’s it. In each job you need to wake up in the morning and have responsibility to do your work well. And very often you’re handling equipment/goods that exceed not only your monthly salary but your lifetime income.
That's exactly why they should be are so highly paid. You don't want your delivery man to be texting their friends that they just dropped off a high value package somewhere.
Delivery, aka logistics, is one of the most important jobs in our economy.
Twitter demonstrates that companies and systems could survive for months without programmers. As the early days of the COVID lockdowns demonstrated, society would collapse within days or weeks without deliverymen.
It means he thinks people should be paid more than UPS drivers to sit in a fabric box all day developing fart apps for iPhone.
Or WFH whilst waiting for said delivery man to show up with the box from Amazon with more unnecessary Chinese garbage he didn't need.
All kidding aside, I've experienced just about every delivery company and UPS is the only one where the drivers take their jobs seriously. In comparison, I once caught FedEx performing an Ace Ventura-style penalty kick of my package onto the porch.
I think the theory is that “importance” shouldn’t really drive salary. The ability to find someone to do the same job for less money should.
If the industry cannot reliably deliver packages with proper security, safety, reliability, humanity, etc. without this level of compensation, then it’s the right number.
The interesting thing about this salary is that if you can actually earn that much without an expensive education or hard-to-attain skills, then there would likely be a lot of people saying, “heck I’ll do that for less! It sure beats massive debt and this shitty job I have.” And salaries would correct… unless there’s more to this story, or a union stops the system from correcting.
Ah yes, because the market is perfect but for those pesky unions and government interventions. The economy totally prices things efficiently on its own— managers and executives would never abuse their power to extract more than their fair share. Must be nice to live in that simplistic Econ 101 fantasy camp.
"That's it" it suppose to mean, that it's a hard work, but there's tons of hard jobs around, that are essential. And the requirements that op presented of having to wake up in the morning, check that your work place is ready to work and then do your work - if someone is impressed by that, I'd say, they it's first time they face an "honest" day of work.
Coal mine? Farmer? Factory worker? Construction worker? Oil rig workers?
Some of the best reporting on this with actual data is coming from social media (as usual), versus from official sources. Here is someone reviewing the manifest of chemicals and number of spilled train cars: https://www.tiktok.com/@nickdrom/video/7199486059212868910
Some of the best reporting on this with actual data is coming from social media (as usual), versus from official sources. Here is someone reviewing the manifest of chemicals and number of spilled train cars: https://www.tiktok.com/@nickdrom/video/7199486059212868910
Like many others this feels bad to me. I was previously forced to upgrade to 7 so the Chrome extension worked and as a result purchased (again!) separate Windows and Mac desktop licenses. In trying to navigate the site to find out how to buy a desktop only client I encountered the multiple dark patterns to make this nearly impossible. It is no wonder that “97% of people prefer the subscription” since standalone was basically hidden. I love the product experience 1Password provides, I simply prefer managing my own vault (via Dropbox). Based on feedback here I’m going to evaluate Bitwarden. Sigh.
Please, if you haven't already, fill out this 1Password survey. They are considering self-hosted vaults but want more data on who/how it would be used:
