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Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

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Re: Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

#191

Post by badosu »

tucaz wrote: post #117
nier wrote: post #103

Would it be possible for a guy like Jeff to sell all his stock and convert his wealth to, let’s say, gold? The motivation for my question is my doubt that the different sources of wealth are comparable. So this ranking is hypothetical. Wouldn’t the stock price drop if someone was to sell so many shares?

I believe you are correct. In theory he would be able to turn all his assets into money, but probably he would loose huges amount of it in the process due to the effect you mentioned. I guess these rankings are just rankings. It's an abstract way to value what someone have (or could potentially have) with no relationship to absolute truth.

I am sorry for sidetracking on this, but I need to understand why I am reading so much 'loose' here on HN.

Is this error being used with intent? I have no interest in shaming grammar errors, it's just that I am seeing this too often here, in the same place where I read great arguments.

English is not my native language, so maybe this is a colloquial use of the word?

Re: Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

#192

Post by ploxiln »

psyc wrote: post #166
pfisch wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He provided more economic/productive value to the world than 100,000,000s of people. Idk about "working hard" or "merit" because who cares if someone has to work super hard for 2 days to produce the same results another person can produce in 10 minutes.

That's a fantasy. An analogy taken too literally. People lionize John Galts and imagine that they are their organizations. They aren't. Just because he started it and called the shots doesn't mean he literally is Amazon. That's a fanciful way of thinking and it's disastrous for us mortals to take it literally. Amazon is all the people working there, who, while well-paid compared to all the other serfs, actually get a…

Very complicated systems, like computer hardware and software systems, particularly services and distributed systems, do have this un-intuitive property of amplifying competence differences.

healthcare.gov is one visible and notable example where thousands of "trained and certified professionals" made a huge mess, and like 10 volunteers from silicon valley cleaned it up.

You could hire 100000 or 200000 such contracted professionals and the value produced would be even lower. Sure, most of the blame is with the management structure, which the ~10 volunteers bypassed and overrode. But the results stand. A few people in the right place can produce more value than orders of magnitude more people doing the wrong thing for whatever reason.

EDIT to better address your point: very few people could have done as well as Bezos in his position. Take any of the CEOs HP has had in the last decade, put them at the head of Amazon, and it would have done a lot worse. Put them all there, it would have done worse. Bezos gets a huge value multiplier for practical reasons.

Re: Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

#193

Post by obstinate »

_m8fo wrote: post #84

Everytime I see these types of articles I wonder if we're still in feudalism. Should we really be celebrating that a single individual is worth more than hundreds of millions of people[1]? I dunno, it seems dystopian , like we're enslaved to the system. [1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16/...

A person with a single dollar to their name will have a higher net worth than a significant fraction of the world. I have never found "more wealth than" to be a useful relation to think about.

Re: Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

#194

Post by zaroth »

kyleblarson wrote: post #174
_m8fo wrote: post #84

Everytime I see these types of articles I wonder if we're still in feudalism. Should we really be celebrating that a single individual is worth more than hundreds of millions of people[1]? I dunno, it seems dystopian , like we're enslaved to the system. [1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16/...

You should start a company, grow it to a multi billion dollar market cap, and give away your generated wealth.

That's pretty much exactly what Jeff will end up doing. He can either give it away or the government will take more than half of it. Unless he manages to crack that whole mortality thing.

Re: Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

#195

Post by mhermher »

mjfl wrote: post #100
_m8fo wrote: post #84

Everytime I see these types of articles I wonder if we're still in feudalism. Should we really be celebrating that a single individual is worth more than hundreds of millions of people[1]? I dunno, it seems dystopian , like we're enslaved to the system. [1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16/...

I think that's a little hyperbolic. In feudalism the balance of power is enforced by violence, whereas Jeff Bezos got rich because you gave him money in exchange for products. Like, "Hey, here's this cool electronic device called the Amazon Echo for $50." is a markedly different from "Farm here or I'll decapitate you." The fact that you harbor a resentment as if the former is anything like the latter is slightly terr…

Property is violence.

If I try to take something that "isn't my property", the state will intervene with violence (e.g. forced imprisonment, etc.) on behalf of the person deemed to be the "lawful owner".

Re: Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

#196

Post by obstinate »

cousin_it wrote: post #186
pfisch wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He provided more economic/productive value to the world than 100,000,000s of people. Idk about "working hard" or "merit" because who cares if someone has to work super hard for 2 days to produce the same results another person can produce in 10 minutes.

Imagine I find a way to create bread from thin air and don't tell anyone else how to do it. Assume the value of a loaf of bread to a consumer is 1 dollar. I sell 100 loaves for 99 cents each, because that's what the market will bear. How much money have I made? 99 dollars. How much value have I created for everyone else? 1 dollar. Now imagine instead I give away 100 loaves for free. How much value have I created for…

That's not really how consumer surplus works. Just because "the market will bear" a certain price, does not mean the value to a given buyer is that price. In reality, there are probably some who really do only value the loaf at $1, but others would be willing to pay $1.10, $1.20, or even more before the transaction was no longer break-even. You might make an attempt to capture this surplus as well (this is called price discrimination), but it's notoriously difficult to do with commodities.

Also, there is no actor in the world economy who is having an effect like your metaphorical bread-give-away-er. So while it might hypothetically have been better if someone had built Amazon out of the goodness of their heart and operated at cost to all users, that is not one of the alternatives we have to decide between. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that such altruists are out there waiting in the wings. If anything, they'd have a competitive advantage, if they did exist, because they'd be able to offer lower prices.

Re: Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

#197

Post by samstave »

openasocket wrote: post #145
samstave wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in the /r/conspiracy realm - it is widely believed that the reason for Gaddafi's execution was to go after the billions he had - and to take him down. The idea is that the Benghazi fiasco was let loose by the state dept so that HRC could loot Libya... its not provable - but the fact is that Gaddafi was one of the worlds richest ppl - and the rumor is that HRC and cabal stole all his loot. He was worth a reportable 70…

OK, I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but this is just crazy. So, in your scenario, HRC wants Gaddafi's money. So she orchestrates an attack on a US embassy nearly a year after he died, as a false flag operation. And then we sent people in get the money. Of course, officially we didn't send anyone in Libya in response to the attacks except some more marines to guard the embassy, so this group that went in to get th…

Sorry - but you're accusing me of a timeline I had not stated.

I said that fuckery was afoot -- I didn't give any timeline or sequence to events...

I simply stated that Gaddafi was murdered for his money (and the fact that he refused to bow to the Rothschild central banks, and wanted to run his system on a gold standard) -- I did NOT stand up for anything regarding his character, dictatorship or anything. And yes - I personally do believe that HRC is a criminal (as is trump) I only put faith in Sanders, but almost exclusively I am apolitical.

So keep fucking on topic - Gaddafi got killed for a reason we will never know, and his ~$70 billion dollars evaporated to who-knows-where.

Re: Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

#198

Post by houst0n_ »

badosu wrote: post #191
tucaz wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe you are correct. In theory he would be able to turn all his assets into money, but probably he would loose huges amount of it in the process due to the effect you mentioned. I guess these rankings are just rankings. It's an abstract way to value what someone have (or could potentially have) with no relationship to absolute truth.

I am sorry for sidetracking on this, but I need to understand why I am reading so much 'loose' here on HN. Is this error being used with intent? I have no interest in shaming grammar errors, it's just that I am seeing this too often here, in the same place where I read great arguments. English is not my native language, so maybe this is a colloquial use of the word?

Me too!!

Nah its an error.. I don't know why it's made so often..

Maybe it was happening all the time and we only started noticing it?

It irritates me far less than your/you're tho ;)

Re: Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

#200

Post by dwaltrip »

dougmany wrote: post #149
zvpxdlk wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> any less intelligent or hard working Not necessarily true. Luck plays a big role in things like this but Bezos is clearly in the elite when it comes to effective professionals.

How many times more effective? As the difference between what humans can do and what computers can do increases, we become relatively closer.

Technology is a lever that can hugely amplify differences in capability.

A 10% skill difference between two people with shovels will result in a much smaller output difference than a 10% skill difference between two operators of heavy duty earth moving equipment.

With software, this dynamic occurs in the extreme, as the cost to run a software program is so low. A hour of unskilled human labor cost hundreds or thousands of times more than an hour of computation. And the quantity and complexity of output from a single hour of computation is rapidly increasing.

Edit: reworked the comment to make my point much more clearly

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