111–120 of 560 posts
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If you're making $50k/year, that's a one time 6 percent bonus. Color me unimpressed.
A lot of Amazon employees make a lot less than $50K. You think $200/month wouldn't make a difference to someone who can't afford food?
He's obviously trying to diffuse the momentum of a movement that is aligning against him. The most popular politician in America just introduced the Stop BEZOS act: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/09/05/bernie-sa... The 2B are less costly than losing the whole shebang. I would not be surprised in the least if he ends up still controlling the 2B and this ends up as just a headline.
> The most popular politician in America just introduced the Stop BEZOS act from the article: > Bernie Sanders Popular by who's standards?
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This means that the public is subsidizing a company owned by the richest man in the world because he refuses to pay his employees a living wage. Doesn't this sound wrong?
But isn't he paying market wages for them? Similar to what the other companies are paying them.
Finally someone realizes that there is a problem. There is no justification in the biggest economy of the world to have this much poverty and homelessness. I am amazed every time I travel to Europe, how few homeless people there are, despite their economic growth lagging the US. And it is inherently a solvable problem with adequate resources. We have $1 trillion for the military. Surely, we can spare a few billions a…
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What is the problem with the employees using public benefits? Genuinely curious.
This means that the public is subsidizing a company owned by the richest man in the world because he refuses to pay his employees a living wage. Doesn't this sound wrong?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Progressives make all kinds of noise and virtue signal for people outside our care, but where the rubber meets the road, they fall short on helping fellow Americans Can you expand on this?
We have homeless, we have veterans, we have addicts, we have people with mental health issues and we have illegal immigrants. The latter gets much more vocal support from progressives over fellow americans. We can have an influence on how we treat compatriots. So while some progressives want to subsidize services out of our tax dollars for people who have not contributed to our society, they don’t fight for fellow Am…
1) Live with roommates, often exceeding the legal limits on the dwelling on the number of occupants, or live in illegal and often not-up-to-code housing.
2) Live two or more hours from their job(s), each way.
3) Live in a van, tent, or truck.
Sometime, people make a sane (for them) choice to choose the last one. Driving around the bay area, one can see these tents and vans in many places. There are obviously thousands of people (perhaps tens of thousands?, it's hard to get a census of these folks) who are plainly visible once you know the signs (blacked out windows, small exhaust vents, generators, etc.)
On the margin, some folks end up sleeping in doorways because of the pressures involved with choosing one of those choices. You could see the evidence for this in a recent article in the Economist which included a diagram of feces complaints spreading out from the Tenderloin (bad neighborhood in central San Francisco) across the city, and the new mayor has hired a "poop patrol" to start cleaning up after them.
Meanwhile, homes that would rent for under $1000/month in many parts of America are renting for over $5K a month. (Actually, in most parts of America, these homes would come with much larger yards, as well as lower prices.) Proposal after proposal to densify the bay area or improve transit get shot down on thinly veiled racist or nakedly self interested grounds. Those proposals that get through are intensely profitable, often to the tune of 5x return on investment or more (not counting fighting the inevitable lawsuits), because the market is so starved for housing.
Forgive the rant, but price controls never work,* and efforts to mitigate the problems caused by price controls are so expensive as to never really solve the problem. The only solution here is to abolish the price controls and the incentives they cause for subsequent laws and zoning which make development impossible. However, that's politically untenable at this time. (So frustration and rants.)
* Actually, the price controls in CA do EXACTLY what they were intended to do, which is to raise the prices on homes, to the benefit of homeowners. As a side effect which many folks foolishly welcome, they also serve to keep Hispanics and Blacks in deeply segregated neighborhoods.
$2B is ~1% of his net worth. Not that impressive. And much lower than Thomas Picketty's proposed wealth tax rate.
"Philanthropy" is just another way that oligarchs take tax-free control of our society and shape it to their whims. A fine example of this is Bill Gates - with no educational training or experience, he used his fortune to push failing methods on millions on American kids.[1] Bezos is a great creator of poverty. He is the wrong person to try and fix it. We need to just make these oligarchs pay taxes and living wages,…
There's plenty of room to throw rocks at billionaire philanthropists, but Gates is more knowledgeable about the areas in which his foundation operates than the heads of most well-known non-profits and relief organizations.