A fair enough opinion, and a worthy discussion. But this particular issue of Trump’s Twitter suspension is clearly about not giving delusional lunatics more fodder for their actions, rather than silencing Trump.
Edit: I’m not siding with or against Twitter here. Whether their decision was wise or not certainly needs to be discussed. I’m just pointing out that “silencing the lunatic in the White House” isn’t the only potential explanation for their suspension of Trump’s account.
I think it's dangerous to start banning politicians from using a public (even if privately owned) platform, especially when it plays into their narrative of oppression. Let him incriminate himself further until he's no longer a public official, then ban his personal account.
I especially don't agree with their decision to hide all of his past posts. If they allowed it to stay up for so long, it should remain permanently as part of the political context of this time period.
And you think that banning him didn't do that? I am supposed to believe that they were so considered that he might say something that might cause some actions, but they didn't considered at all what their action of banning him will cause?
That’s worthy of discussion. I’m not siding with or against Twitter here. Just saying the issue isn’t as one-sided as many might like to believe it is.
My issue here is that while I agree Trump is goofy and id like to see him go, the definitions of what is and is not dangerous ultimately is up to a handful of unelected corporate employees. Those definitions are and will more so align with corporate strategy and a bottom line. And while its not a freedom of speech issue in the strict legal sense, it is by a practical matter.
"But this particular issue of Trump’s Twitter suspension is clearly about not giving delusional lunatics more fodder for their actions"
I believe that the effects of this permaban (and the seemingly coordinated effort to purge the Internet of Parler) will be pretty much the opposite, reenforcing paranoia about unelected tyrants more powerful than any office holder in the U.S.
Yet they didn’t suspend him for the specific example provided.
Also, I don’t think it’s so clear that threatening a defensive act could be called “inciting violence”.
If a group of criminals were parading through a neighborhood performing home invasions, I do not think it’d cross the line to warn them off with a public declaration of “our house has guns and we will protect ourselves”.
Most of the time people would look at from a legal or illegal standpoint
Trumps calls for Law and Order, to use legal remedies to clamp down on disorder in society, ethical or not, would not be considered by most a "Call for Violence"
However calls for protestors to "burn it all down" would be a "call for violence"
//for the record I do not think either should be censored, but I am a free speech absolutist so...
I agree that Trump’s banning from Twitter is concerning, and that he did not incite violence. But that isn’t the underlying issue behind the suspension.
The problem is that a small but very eager group of fanatics have latched on to Trump’s Twitter postings as an excuse to react in violent, deluded ways. It no longer mattered what Trump said, the fanatics would twist its meaning and use it as an excuse for mayhem. (The media clearly have some culpability in this, as they intentionally put out outrageous interpretations in order to whip up controversy. But that’s another issue.)
And so, Twitter felt allowing the situation to continue would not be responsible. They weren’t attempting to silence Trump, but rather to deprive the delusional maniacs of fodder.
People also tend to give trucks a wider berth, or at least notice you more and respond more readily to your actions.
I’ve only ever owned small cars, and in the handful of times I’ve needed to drive a U-haul truck or similar the trip started with trepidation. But I quickly discovered that other drivers have a strong tendency (self-interested, of course) to help big trucks out.
The only reason they’re finally banning him is because his worth runs out in 12 days.
Dumping him now allows Twitter to virtue signal and avoid looking like an enabler of literal violence, all while giving up virtually nothing in return.
Kind of like how his cabinet members are now resigning. No big loss for them, as they’ll be out of a job shortly anyway. Might as well “stand up to him” while they still have the opportunity to reap political kudos.
Speculation and accusations are distinctly unhelpful.
If you have any evidence of Twitter's motivations, please post it. A leak of the internal e-mail traffic on this decision, if published, would be fascinating.
If not- If you're just asserting as fact your own assumptions about a company whose decision you don't like, then please go troll elsewhere.
The idea was for the shelf scanning robots to send messages when they found a low stock item or a mess, and then a human could just load up a cart with stock from the back room and head directly to the problem areas.
This would be in contrast to having people regularly walk every aisle and examine everything personally, going back and forth to get stock repeatedly. Much time was wasted.
As a former Walmart employee I was actually excited to see these proposed.
But now with so many people walking the aisles collecting items for pickup, I guess they’re just going to have them send “problem detected” messages instead of the robots. Which is fine I guess. Shopping there has become an even greater hassle with all the employees and their pickup carts, but that’s a whole other issue.
This doesn't make sense: WalMart doesn't really have a backroom. It comes off the truck and goes onto the shelves. The backroom is too small (compared to the size of the store) to have spares of everything on pallets that are moved to the shelves as needed. This is by design - spares in the backroom are excess inventory which needs to be paid for. I'm sure there exceptions for a few things that sell in large numbers and take up a lot of space (bulk packs of toilet paper for example, keep them on a high shelf and move a few down as needed), but for the most part WalMart is against inventory.
WalMart already knows how much of something they have because they get everything scanned at the register. Sure there is a hour delay between it leaving the shelf and it being subtracted from inventory, but they need more than an hours worth on inventory on the shelf anyway because it takes time to load a truck with whatever they need more of. Shoplifting is a problem that mucks with this (I could actually see this being a useful help to that problem, but I'm not sure if it is useful enough)
Doing inventory isn't just how counting how much of item A exists in a store for accounting purposes. More importantly it is making sure that the there enough items on a shelf for customers to purchase. This is known as "on shelf inventory".
An item in the backroom does not count towards the on shelf count. An item that is on a high shelf to be moved down as needed (overstock) does not count. And there isn't just a bit of overstock, most aisle the top shelf will be overstock. Also Items can get damaged, meat can expire ect. A customer can pick up an item decide he doesn't want to buy it, and throw it back on a random shelf.
The job involves going to an aisle, scanning the items on the shelf, and if the shelf count is not full either moving items down from overstock or from the back room.
But once again you get that data from the register sales. there is a delay, but for the most part there are enough items on the shelf to last through the delay, or you would have sent someone to move items to the shelf anyway. Only when someone buys all of something is there are problem.
All items are scanned on the way out anyway - you should be able to get an idea when an item is low on stock from that alone, no? Sure there will still be things like people in the store that haven't checked out yet, but...
When an item comes in from a truck it either goes directly onto the sales floor, into overstock (a high shelf above the other items), or into the backroom. People put things back in random places, stuff get destroyed (think of dropping a can on the ground), stuff get stollen, cashiers make a mistake, people make a mistake in self checkout, probably other stuff I am missing. It is a store, things are chaotic.
Let's take the journey of some cans of Goya black beans. 12 come in on a truck. The shelf capacity for them is 4. The person unloading the truck takes beans to the sales-floor, puts 4 on the shelf, puts 4 into overstock puts 4 into the backroom. Joe walks in takes a can, drops it and it bends. Jane comes along takes a can, continues shopping, the changes her mind and leaves it somewhere in the cereal aisle. Janet comes along and takes a can, takes it to self checkout but forgets to scan it. Jacob comes along takes a can, takes it to the checkout, and 1 can is subtracted from inventory. Inventory shows 11 cans, but there are actually 0 cans out on the sales floor. And I haven't even gotten into stuff being misplaced in the backroom ect.
I work (transitively) for a very large grocery retailer that rhymes with "Broger". Live inventory data is mostly junk -- it's sorta reliable in broad strokes, but you can't rely on it for determining out of stock events. There'd be all sorts of false positives and false negatives.
Like 20 years ago I worked at a grocery store when they were introducing "live inventory". Goods got scanned when unloaded from truck, and of course the register.
One day a customer complained we had no more washing powder of the most popular brand. Boss came, said they just got some the previous day, checked the inventory system and saw there should be three "trays" left, each with 12x packs of 1.2kg. He went to check the back, nothing there.
After a bit more searching he had a hunch, and checked the cameras. Sure enough, someone had loaded the three trays into a duffel bag earlier that morning and walked right out.
So yeah, even with all the normal human elements in the logistical chain, kinda hard to keep track of blatant theft.
As someone who has had to clean and analyze inventory data, I can't agree with you enough.
In every company I've worked or consulted for, inventory reconciliation is always an ongoing headache for every business with a retail component. It is unbelievable how much waste and loss comes about from this.
Are their any companies achieving some level of automation? I would be very interested in learning more.
Theft, misplaced items, etc. Employee grabs it to use for the store, damaged items, etc etc.
With only using in-out the inventory system thinks there are plenty to sell and won't reorder, but if it's wrong the shelf is empty and can't be reordered. There are posts from Walmart people online complaining about this exact problem.
Affects me as a customer, hit their website says they have 10 in stock for pickup today, drive over and the shelf is bare. Ask, they say the inventory is probably wrong, check another store because they can't reorder.
Now they are missing x items + y lost sales. That's why place do inventory.
Not sure two weeks really work anyway. In a large household with lots of space and people living different lifestyles, if someone was infected at the start of the lockdown, not everyone is guaranteed to get infected at the same time. We could end up with someone being infected near the end of the lockdown and they then go out into public and spread it around while thinking everything is safe because of the lockdown. My brother's mother-in-law lives in a basement suite in his house. She has her own small kitchen, bathroom, and external door. She's the type who could end up getting infected and be contagious at the end of the lockdown. Then one trip to the grocery store and now the town has a cluster of infections despite the lockdown.
And there are animal reservoirs. Even if we temporarily eradicated the virus from all humans we would just catch it from animals again and the pandemic would start all over.
Edit: I’m not siding with or against Twitter here. Whether their decision was wise or not certainly needs to be discussed. I’m just pointing out that “silencing the lunatic in the White House” isn’t the only potential explanation for their suspension of Trump’s account.