Right after I submitted my blog post yesterday I realized I had unfinished business.
I really wanted to see if I could make it through peak season because right after peak they offer you a crazy deal in January. They'll basically pay you to resign, like a couple thousand dollars, but you can NEVER work for them or any other company they acquire ever again. It's pretty crazy and I wanted to do it but with only 40 hours of unpaid time off (10 shifts) there was really no way I was going to make it six weeks without running out of hours and getting fired.
So I don't get the $2000 or whatever but if I happen to need a job I can reboot my position there and even get my time off back. Not the worst deal ever. Also it was just too poetic to officially quit on my birthday to not take advantage, so I did.
I'm glad you asked! Before quitting I made sure to look at my paystubs. I worked 2 shifts in June (8 hours) and 2 more in May. It wasn't until all the way back in April that I saw I was working 3 shifts a week, which still is only 12 hours a week.
I've been able to skate by for over six months without even losing half of my unpaid time hours (capped at 80 hours max, +20 hours per fiscal quarter). That's pretty crazy when I think about it. Essentially I was able to take Voluntary Time Off (VTO) for every single one of those shifts except for about 5-10 of them, and a lot of the shifts shifts I was forced to spend hours on came in right at the end when I realized I wouldn't make it past peak and I needed to quit before January.
So out of 126 shifts over six months I was was given the option to take the day off over A HUNDRED TIMES. I believe this is due to Amazon ramping up their automation and tapering off their hiring while letting employees quit and take time off without replacing them.
It's important to note here that companies like Amazon take a lot of heat especially from states like California. The city of Vacaville let them set up shop under very specific conditions (that I am not fully aware of). However, I do know that the goal of a city and state allowing Amazon to operate there is to bring "good jobs" to said city or state with safe working conditions.
Ah, those were the days; good ol' sort-slide.
They are very good at manipulating the numbers. When Amazon installed their $37M auto-sorter to SMF5 sorting center, the maximum throughput went from 125k packages a day to 500k packages a day. We can't actually clear those numbers, those are just best-case scenario estimates. However, that's not the point.
The point is that when the auto-sorter got installed, SMF5 was able to push four times the volume, which means that even though the custom sorting machine they built cost thirty seven million dollars, that didn't matter, because they saved themselves the hassle of needing to set up 3 other fully operational warehouses.
By turning one warehouse into a MEGA-warehouse, they avoid the need to convince three new cities to allow them to operate. They also save a ton of money on labor, especially for Operations, the full-time employees that actually run the place. Instead of needing to hire x4 more employees they only needed to hire like 50% more. On top of that, the logistics become centralized and they don't need to coordinate communication between 3 other warehouses.
They act like they are creating 50% more jobs because of the automation when they are really increasing volume by +300%. Isn't it obvious that they are actually eliminating jobs from somewhere else in the grand scheme of things? Fortunately for them the politics of the issue allows them to dance around like heroes rather than the blood-sucking time vampires that they are.
I quit! Fuck um! I know I haven't actually worked there for real since like April, but somehow now that it's official things feel different. Also it was fun to respond to their questionnaire about how I quit. I was definitely supposed to enter, "Personal reasons not related to Amazon." Instead I put, "My commute is too long." lol such a troll. Sorry Amazon, I'm not willing to cross ten state lines to come into work. Peace.
I also apparently received a raise without even realizing it. Last I checked they were paying me $16 an hour but somewhere in the mix they bumped that up to $19.30. Not sure if they gave that to everyone or people that had been working their for years like I had been. But I never received a raise from them other than the floor level increasing for everyone (as far as I know).
They shut my account down instantly but didn't even send me an email confirming that they got my resignation. Not surprised, as SMF5 is one of the most lax Amazon facilities in the country. Operations breaks every rule in the book there and no one gets in trouble for anything. Funny how none of the rules that get broken seem to matter and SMF5 runs just fine without Operations breathing down everyone's neck. Turns out authoritarian leadership has extreme diminishing returns. Go figure.
In fact it is not outlandish to say that my job at SMF5 was the best job I ever had by quite a wide margin. Unlike all the horror stories you read about online, things are very chill at this warehouse (California labor laws are quite strict and violating them comes at high legal cost). Do your work at your own pace and everything works out just fine. There are no enforced quotas or high-strung operations managers running around worrying about database numbers and taking it out on the grunts, surprisingly enough.
That being said even though the job had a lot of perks it was still shit pay in a city with a very high cost of living. I couldn't believe how many people worked there that commuted like an hour from Sacramento to get there. Mind blowing. Meanwhile it took me 10 minutes and it was either one freeway exit away (or more often I just took the 45 MPH frontage road going 55). I definitely wouldn't have driven longer than 20 minutes to get to such a bottom feeding job, but apparently I hate commutes more than 99% of the population.
On the actual crypto news side of things, the Bitcoin network implemented its biggest soft fork ever since 2017's Segwit upgrade. I am referring of course to the Taproot upgrade. I wrote about this in June when the network actually approved it. Only now (on my birthday no less) does the upgrade actually go active.
From what I understand this upgrade adds an option for "Schnorr signatures", a very complicated version of cryptography that will allow less information to be stored on the Bitcoin blockchain, allowing more privacy and more scaling with the same piece of code, which is normally unheard of in crypto. Normally adding privacy would increase bandwidth and reduce the ability to scale. With Taproot, this is not the case. It's a win/win, which is the only reason it was accepted by the network in the first place.
Many maximalists are also convinced this upgrade will pave the way for smart-contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain. If I had to guess I'd say they were smoking crack and Bitcoin should just stay in its lane as the most secure and deflationary asset out there.
In fact, I don't think normal people will be able to capitalize from this upgrade. It seems more like it helps centralized exchanges to more cheaply make large batch operations with multiple outputs. When an exchange sends Bitcoin to 100 different wallets in a single transaction, this upgrade should help quite a bit with that, so indirectly everyone wins because fees should decrease.
Speaking of fees, you may have noticed when you transfer Bitcoin on-chain it only costs like $2-$3, but when you withdraw from a centralized exchange they charge you like $25. There's a very good reason for this. For logistics purposes, a CEX will have you deposit Bitcoin to a temporary wallet that identifies your account. They then take the money in that temporary account and move it to a hot-wallet, where it may or may not be transferred again to a cold-wallet or another user.
Not only are exchanges turning a profit from your withdrawal, they are also charging you for these multiple transfers that happen in the background and put all that burden onto the users who decide to cash out. With this taproot upgrade in play we should see the gap in cost between peer to peer transfers and CEX withdrawals get exponentially lower. One can hope anyway. I guess we'll see.
I'm not sure if this upgrade brings with it any kind of unknown vulnerability, but Bitcoin devs are the most conservative devs on the planet and I'm sure they've done their homework over a thousand times over. Also this is just a softfork (like always with Bitcoin) so it is backwards compatible with all the other versions of the network. No one will be forced to used Schnorr signatures, they are only optional for advanced users like exchanges and for use with basic smart-contracts. Should be a great upgrade.
One thing no one seems to be talking about is the obvious sell-the-news scenario. While everyone is wondering why Bitcoin isn't going up, I'm wondering why it hasn't gone down. Everyone has known since June that Bitcoin was going to implement this upgrade, meaning that it was already priced in long ago. The fact that the price hasn't crashed from over-speculation is a fantastic signal.
Again, we see that the crypto community has the memory of a goldfish. If the price had crashed yesterday everyone would have been reminded of "sell the news", but now that it hasn't crashed everyone is wondering why it's not going to the moon. The legacy of infinite greed continues. Holding strong here near all time highs is a fantastic sign as we head into late November.
As always I find the lack of faith disturbing. Technical analysis has not changed. More importantly, on-chain analysis has not changed. There are massive signals of an impending run to the upside, and the full moon will be here in 2 days, which will hopefully relieve the downward pressure of this sideways action and make the price go parabolic for two weeks.
PlanB's stock to flow model is still predicting a spike to near $100k by the end of the month, and so am I. If it doesn't happen I'll need to rethink my trading strategy going forward.
Everyone is predictably impatient for this mega-bull run to get started. I'm personally starting to realize that perhaps my 18-months between bull cycles is still in play. This would put the next peak around June 2022. Raoul Pal has been mirroring the exact same sentiment. The market will always take the path of most pain, and perhaps too many think a peak is coming at the end of the year, so of course it will not.
It feels nice to be officially out of the shadow of Amazon. Onward and upward, I feel a new duty to Hive the likes of which I have not felt for a while. I'm now a crypto-kid, and I need to work harder to build here and put more effort into creating value for everyone instead of just myself. Cheers!
