TL;DR
Billionaires treat other people as replaceable bots, which is why they cannot grasp how cruel it is to deny workers the right to urinate.
Bezos is 62. The author is 55. That, he says, is enough to know for certain that Bezos has to pee constantly — get older and the bladder stops taking orders.
The robot does not care whether you can hold it
Amazon's warehouse and delivery workers are watched by software and cameras. Algorithms set the pace; fall behind and you are punished. The system makes no allowance for a toilet break, and lateness is docked just the same.
So drivers pee into bottles in the cab. Arriving back at the depot with a bottle in the van is penalised as heavily as stopping to find a toilet. If you are going to be punished either way, you might as well pull over. The roads leading to the warehouses are lined with bottles flung out of windows — so many that a British media activist collected them, bottled the contents as a 'bitter lemon energy drink' and listed it on Amazon.
It became a bestseller, and Amazon asked whether he wanted help scaling up deliveries.
Other people are not real
The author pushes further: the super-rich do not believe other people are real. Bezos cannot hold it himself, yet keeps hundreds of thousands of workers holding it. If he truly believed a driver's need to pee felt like his own, he would let them go.
The reason is simple. Manage hundreds of thousands of people as a stream of statistics and they stop being people. Then earn billions by extracting from those statistics, and eventually you cannot face the fact that other people's pain is as real as your own. The guests on Epstein's island could go there only because those young women's suffering was less real to them than their own daughters'.
Once you see that, Mark Zuckerberg's enthusiasm for replacing your friends with chatbots makes sense: to him you and your friends were already just balky, defective bots. The same premise underlies the belief that bots can teach your kids, treat your illnesses or handle your mental health.
One plain truth
Everybody pees. Bezos will, the author will, you will. Banning other people from peeing is a declaration of war on humanity itself.
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