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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

#421

Post by CossieRay »

visarga wrote: post #287
mjfl wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the general consensus is that if you can identify a specific property that has been stolen from you in an estate, you can reclaim it (from the estate). But claims against someone who purchased the stolen goods unknowingly, or general claims from one group to another, like a common English person against the Queen, a colored person against a random white man, or a Palestinian against an Israelite, those are no…

> claims against someone who purchased the stolen goods unknowingly ... are not valid I am not sure about that. A stolen good cannot be legally buyed from the thiefs.

No, you won't kill it so casually. It is: "legally bought from the thieves".

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

#422

Post by krapp »

titraprutr wrote: post #418
andrepd wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, Bezos didn't create more value than 100,000,000s of people. How could he? He started it, sure, he owns it and he directs it, but Amazon employs 341,000 people. Those are the people who generate the bulk of the value produced by the Amazon company, yet they share in very little of the value they produced. Would you say a CEO is responsible for all the value the company makes? Would you say it's fair for a feudal…

Yes, he did. This value doesn't come from all the "monkey" jobs that most of his employees do. It comes from the ability to produce ideas and making them happen by managing that 341,000 people. You completely underestimate the value of directing a company like Amazon.

Except Jeff Bezos doesn't produce those ideas, or make them happen, or directly manage 341,000 people.

All of that is done by his employees. The ideas, the innovation and the execution are done by people other than him, while the credit and most of the value they create is taken by him.

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

#423

Post by saiya-jin »

JCharante wrote: post #350
fanzhang wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thought experiment: if you could destroy half of Bezo's wealth with the push of a button, would you do it? (Not dollars, but actual wealth -- imagine he has thousands of houses and you are allowed to legally demolish them with the push of a button). It would reduce inequality, and increase everyone else's relative economic standing, and probably make many people feel better in comparison.

But why? He earned it.

it's a good comment when you look at half posts here - pure envy how unfair the world is, how he doesn't deserve it and so on. it doesn't matter how hard he worked (from 0), how talented he is. no, he has too much and should burn in hell and have his money taken from him.

it's one of the more sad days on HN - I held general audience here in higher esteem. well back to work

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

#424

Post by monort »

emt02 wrote: post #376
rdtsc wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Farm here or I'll decapitate you." I think you got confused, that's communism. :P And it's not decapitation (too messy) it is a bullet to the back of the head or death in a labor camp. Feudalism is "you can farm here but you owe me and your promise to fight in my wars". > The fact that you harbor a resentment as if the former is anything like the latter is slightly terrifying. Really? Is it terrifying to compare a…

> that's communism. I think you're confused about communism. What you're talking about seems more about soviet russia and other countries that run/ran an authoritarian state-capitalism system (often calling it communism). However, communism has nothing to do with enforcing people to work under a threat of death, rather the contrary.

From Communist Manifesto:

8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

Unsurprisingly this leads to labor camps in every communist government.

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

#425

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

iamnotlarry wrote: post #313
visarga wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when the violence was selling them an Amazon echo at a cheap price How about when the violence was selling under the normal market value undermining competition, then remaining the only vendor. Also replacing employees with robots. So in the end, people who would have had a job lost it, no matter if they work directly for Amazon or for the competition. It's not violence to take people's jobs, but in a society with…

Selling under normal market value is not an act of violence. Using robots instead of human employees is not an act of violence. You have a very strange world view. Are your clothes hand-stitched? Was the electronic device you used for your post painstakingly constructed by hand? Do you think it is fair for some things to be automated but not others? Perhaps you think that it was bad to selectively cultivate a variety…

There's a very strange phenomena going on where are starting to equate non-violent things with violence. Even words are violence.

I have witnessed a friend being physically attacked and have seen the aftermath of an physical attack.

From this perspective, I can only conclude that these people equating things to violence are simply attempting to gain political power, or virtue signal or whatever.

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

#426

Post by baursak »

WalterBright wrote: post #333
8note wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

each system is as violent as the people running it. An ideal king is just the land owner collecting rents from the people on their land, and lending rights to people they think can make more wealth from it. Capitalism is perfectly happy with slavery; it didn't end because it wasn't profitable. There's still some rather violent things in today's capitalism like "give me all your money or die from cancer" which when th…

> it didn't end because it wasn't profitable. Actually, it ended because it could not compete with free labor. It was dying around 1800 because of that, and then the cotton gin revived it. It was dying again in the 1850s, and a big driver of the Civil War was the slave states trying to protect their economy from free labor competition. I don't think it's a coincidence that social justice has tended to follow what wor…

Slavery still very much exists in places like Middle East, South Asia, and US prisons, so your argument is moot.

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

#427

Post by dkrich »

thinkling wrote: post #325
dkrich wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference to me is the valuation- during previous downturns they weren't trading at a $400 billion market cap. I think a lot of people assume that because they're amazon that they'll crack the last mile delivery problem, a problem that FedEx and ups, two exceedingly smart and successful and well run companies have not, not to mention the usps. FedEx and UPS want no part of last mile delivery because there's no m…

Not having net profits does not mean that parts of your business are not profitable. You may want to take a closer look at Amazon's financials and see what kind of free cash flow they're generating before they reinvest that cash in expansion and new businesses. Net operating cash flow for 2016 was $16B and the trend is strongly upwards. https://secure.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/AMZN/financia...

Right, but free cash flow is one of the most common areas of a balance sheet to use deceptive accounting to show huge numbers. Amazon is notorious for this, actually, particularly with their widespread use of capital leases. A big reason that that number has jumped so much is because of their increased investment in AWS hardware which they lease instead of purchasing.

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

#428

Post by averagewall »

dragonwriter wrote: post #347
iamnotlarry wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck with that. The daughter of a wealthy estate might receive the very best in private education, music lessons, etc. She might take her allowance and start a successful business. She might just have a successful business because of all her parents' social connections. Then dad dies. How do you propose to nullify all the advantages she still enjoys because of her father's wealth? Can you take away the child's b…

> If you reject all inheritance, you reject much of the incentives of capitalism. I reject the idea that inheritance is a matter of right, and particularly that there is any moral right in extending the will of the dead past their death. I don't, OTOH, disagree that some inheritance may even socially useful and worth permitting, with appropriate conditions and limitations, on that basis. In fact, I said so explicitly…

People care about what's going to happen after they die. You can see this from any global warming activist. They're not concerned about their own live but about future generations. Are you saying they should mind their own business and ignore the grandkids who might have more storms and famines?

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

#429

Post by dkrich »

nuane wrote: post #327
dkrich wrote: post #255

I know that I'll get skewered for this, but here goes: recently I've convinced myself we are on the verge of a very serious Amazon stock correction. Just today I saw three separate articles (without seeking them out) giving umpteen reasons Amazon is going to a trillion, or that Amazon is only getting started. Then I turned on CNBC during lunch and what are they talking about? Amazon. There's simply too much positive…

My understanding is that Amazon makes their money from aws, then builds their brand through their eCommerce site and other gadgets/projects. Those projects (like aws) have the potential to make bucko bucks, but as long as Americans income continues to diminish, the profitability of Amazon's core business will stall. But I agree that Amazon will become the first $1 trillion dollar enterprise, but after weathering anot…

I don't necessarily think that's the case. Amazon did make more from AWS than their ecommerce business last quarter, but it wasn't a lot more (less than a billion in profit). They will face as much or more competition in this area than in the ecommerce space.

In any case, since a lot (I would say most) of Amazon's market cap is based on perceived value and growth of its distribution and ecommerce business, if the fundamentals aren't there to make larger profits long term, there's no way the stock can maintain its current valuation.

I do shop on Amazon a lot, because I live in a city where the convenience factor is too great to drive to a store, and believe all this in spite of that. I agree that their working conditions are awful, but unfortunately I don't think most people care when shopping. Wal-Mart has taken a lot of flack for that over the years and it hasn't slowed them. In fact it was only about five years ago that there was a best selling book about how Wal-Mart was taking over the world and had to be stopped at all costs. I don't hear that as much these days and in fact it seems that they are viewed as an underdog. Things can change very quickly.

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

#430

Post by averagewall »

efaref wrote: post #387
sudhirj wrote: post #375

I just don't get this complaining about wealth concentration - for every person capable of complaining on an online forum that some people have 100 to 1000x the wealth they do, there are also likely to be more people that exist who have 1000x less than you. How exactly am I any more entitled to the wealth of those richer than me, than are those poorer than me entitled to my (relative) wealth? It seems to me that the…

The problem isn't that Bezos has 1,000x my net worth. He has 1,000,000x my (approximate) net worth. One millionth of my net worth is seven cents, so Bezos:me is me:$0.07. The graph isn't logarithmic. It's shaped like this: | | | ____________|

Norway has a $900 billion sovereign wealth fund. Is that a problem too? If you never heard about Bezos's wealth, would you suffer any troubles because of it? I think it's fine.
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