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Jeff Bezos Becomes the Richest Man in Modern History, Topping $150B

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Re: Jeff Bezos Becomes the Richest Man in Modern History, Topping $150B

#271

Post by dragonwriter »

e12e wrote: post #257
paulie_a wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A house hold often includes more than one person. Those other individuals are not gun owners. Gun owners are a fairly small group with a very powerful lobby that needs to be ignored.

This (and the sibling) strikes me as an odd interpretation - there are more guns than people in the US - most households with any guns, have more than one gun. And as I see it living in a household with guns, generally means access to guns? So I readily read one in three households, as strictly more than one in three persons - have access to guns?

> So I readily read one in three households, as strictly more than one in three persons

That's a bad reading. Even if everyone in a household with a gun owner have access to guns, that would mean 33% of households implies exactly 33% of people if gun ownership is distributed among households with no bias by household size. It doesn't imply more than 33% of people unless gun owning households are larger than non-gun-owning households.

Re: Jeff Bezos Becomes the Richest Man in Modern History, Topping $150B

#272

Post by koube »

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #256
koube wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't advocate any position besides that violent revolution is improbable. Is the improbability of violent revolution a neoliberal concept? Do I ignore workers when I state that discussions around police obesity are not grounded economic discourse? Is there any universe in which this conversation leads to a reasonable place?

>Do I ignore workers when I state that discussions around police obesity are not grounded economic discourse? Well it's not economic discourse at all, it's political discourse. >Is there any universe in which this conversation leads to a reasonable place? You're against the conversation in general? It seems that you think discussion of inequality leads inevitably to the idea that we should engage in violent revolutio…

What exactly do you have a problem with? You want discussions of inequality to center around police obesity more? Or did you perhaps not know that the order of comments can change?

I am literally pointing out that the top few comments were centered around violent revolution and police obesity. I'm not saying "inevitable slippery slope", I am literally describing the content of the first few comments at the time. If your conclusion from this is that violent revolution is the most reasonable then you just wanted violent revolution in the first place.

And no, this conversation didn't lead to a reasonable place, seeing as you're now here saying that I, because of a hacker news comment, am justification for violent revolution.

Re: Jeff Bezos Becomes the Richest Man in Modern History, Topping $150B

#273

Post by stickfigure »

save_ferris wrote: post #39
nostromo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Bezos is a bad argument for us being in a new guilded age. When you look at Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, and perhaps even Gates, they had near total control over some aspect of the American Economy. And they used that control to make incredible profits. Amazon is trying to do the same, but they haven't done so yet. Their retail business is not wildly profitable (if at all). They haven't monopolized online ret…

> When you look at Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, and perhaps even Gates, they had near total control over some aspect of the American Economy According to TechCrunch[1], Amazon controls 49% of the entire e-commerce market, and 5% of the entire retail market overall. They're also in a position to jockey for even more market share as retail continues to move online. Amazon is in the perfect position to completely own e-…

49% could be the high-water mark; we don't know yet. If Amazon doesn't get a grip on the counterfeit product problem, sales could plummet. The switching cost to a new retailer is low.

Re: Jeff Bezos Becomes the Richest Man in Modern History, Topping $150B

#274

Post by amelius »

frockington wrote: post #242
amelius wrote: post #215

Capitalism needs an upgrade. Our current version breaks down in the global internet economy with digital platforms and digital retailers, where simple brands combined with external capital have the ability to turn companies into supermassive black holes for consumer attention. As we know from math, singularities need special care, so we better start thinking about how we could fix the situation.

We are now at a point in history where the average human is better off than ever before. Capitalism has pulled more people out of poverty than any other system. If someone who radically changed the world has a ton of wealth, good for them. Jeff Bezos having money has no impact on my ability to succeed, if anything it has positively affected it as he has created so many new jobs

True, but it's like saying that MS-DOS doesn't need an upgrade because it allows the average human to work more efficiently than ever before.

Re: Jeff Bezos Becomes the Richest Man in Modern History, Topping $150B

#275

Post by yayadarsh »

kart23 wrote: post #164
twodave wrote: post #128

In my opinion, the biggest risk to Bezos' wealth is the same thing that drew me into the service to begin with. In the mid-to-late 2000s it was easy to go to Amazon, search for "thing I want" and blindly purchase the 4.5-5 star item with enough reviews to appear legitimate. I could do this and expect to get a great product _every_ time. Now, I find myself spending an hour screwing with the filters and reading reviews…

Honestly, I fucking hate Amazon. I love going to a store, feeling the product and then deciding if I like the look and feel of a product. And Amazon doesn't even carry good stuff anymore. It's all just junk nowadays, and the useful stuff is often overpriced or out of stock. I want somewhere where I can find unique, good quality brands, and brick&mortar will always be best for that.

Honest question: what stores have this quality? I find that other than local or high-end/"boutique" stores (with much higher prices), I do not have the same experience.

Re: Jeff Bezos Becomes the Richest Man in Modern History, Topping $150B

#276

Post by Symmetry »

pitaj wrote: post #134
aphextron wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except we actually had a functioning federal government during the last gilded age, so we ended up with things like the Sherman Antitrust Act, and eventually the New Deal. I doubt we'll be so lucky this time around. Things are about to get absolutely brutal for the 90%.

You mean the same New Deal that likely extended the length of the Great Depression by a significant multiple?

You can't just sum up the huge variety of programs that was the New Deal like that. Yes, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) probably did halt the existing recovery but it was a recovery that FDR had started by reversing the hard money policies of his predecessors. And you can certainly argue all day about whether stuff like FDIC was a net improvement if you want to but that didn't really affect the length of the Great Depression.

We actually have a pretty good idea of what worked and what didn't during the Great Depression and mainstream economic historians[1] seem to have reached a rough consensus.

In school, though, we teach the Great Depression through the lens of political history. So for that purpose it doesn't matter what was really causing it, just what people at the time thought was causing it.

[1] I'm excluding Marxists, Austrians, MMTers, etc here.

Re: Jeff Bezos Becomes the Richest Man in Modern History, Topping $150B

#277

Post by nostrademons »

Rescis wrote: post #225
code_duck wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How old is the average American gun owner? Are they physically fit? Merely owning guns is different than possessing the physical ability and training in weapons and tactics to use them effectively, especially versus military or paramilitary forces (National Guard and Border Patrol is a much more likely initial pro-government force than police). Not only are they equipped and trained with the same weapons civilians ma…

Keep in mind that the very modern, very well funded, and very well equipped US military has been fighting a bunch of dudes with rifles and IED's for the past several dozen years without conclusive victories or signs of the resistance slowing. That US military is also neither attacking its own citizens it has filial and friendly ties with, nor attacking people who look and talk like it. Modern armor and missiles don't…

To be fair, the U.S. military is very effective against the individual people they are fighting at any given moment. Kill ratios in recent conflicts are of the order of 100:1. It's just that for every insurgent you kill, you create 10 more. Unless your goal is to just depopulate the rest of the globe (something I wonder about, given recent U.S. foreign policy), you can't actually win this war without addressing the conditions that lead people to hate the U.S. in the first place.

Re: Jeff Bezos Becomes the Richest Man in Modern History, Topping $150B

#278

Post by WilliamEdward »

csomar wrote: post #253

These numbers are not fair and square. Let's say someone has $100. Cold Cash. Let's say someone has $100. In xyz Asset. Comparing both in terms of wealth is not fair and square. First. They might have different purchasing power. Bezos can't liquidate $150bn of AMZ stock without slippage. If he could, then there must be another party willing to put $150bn of cash. Not many such parties in this world have that kinda ca…

Asset management is not the same as owning the assets so I don't really understand that point. If you were to write up a balance sheet to measure the net worth of an Asset management company, you wouldn't really count other companies assets as their own.

Re: Jeff Bezos Becomes the Richest Man in Modern History, Topping $150B

#279

Post by mi100hael »

csomar wrote: post #253

These numbers are not fair and square. Let's say someone has $100. Cold Cash. Let's say someone has $100. In xyz Asset. Comparing both in terms of wealth is not fair and square. First. They might have different purchasing power. Bezos can't liquidate $150bn of AMZ stock without slippage. If he could, then there must be another party willing to put $150bn of cash. Not many such parties in this world have that kinda ca…

Nice strawman. You're the only one I see conflating net worth & liquidity.

Re: Jeff Bezos Becomes the Richest Man in Modern History, Topping $150B

#280

Post by Infernal »

pazimzadeh wrote: post #221
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Americans have guns. The police has better weapons, but it would be a war of attrition, and I doubt most police would want to go on killing sprees against their fellow countrymen. Although I doubt it'd reach the point of massive insurrection. That would require a total loss of trust in the government, and I think we're still far from that.

30% of Americans have guns http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/06/22/the-demographics-o...

I wonder how much of the privately owned land area of the US is owned by Americans who own guns?
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