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Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

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Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#281

Post by sjg007 »

mssundaram wrote: post #24
mc32 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe he’ll take a cue from Bill Gates and get involved in philanthropy. Alternatively he might get more involved in Blue Origin?

Perhaps Bill Gates truly has developed compassion for the less fortunate, however moving his money into the foundation is a very convenient tax strategy, and I suspect he enjoys the challenges and influence he has, and less so the warm fuzzies from helping people. (I anticipate this comment will not go over well, as it seems I must just not see the truth that Bill Gates is a perfectly benevolent being who has ascende…

The US and the world really need an organized approach to pandemics and it needs to be free of political influence. Said work is going to require a lot of academic and government support. If Gates can bootstrap that, that would be a good legacy.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#282

Post by mr_toad »

rrdharan wrote: post #176
ses1984 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of all those things the only two uniquely amazon are cloud computing and fast shipping.

Cloud Computing is uniquely an Amazon invention the way smartphones are uniquely an Apple invention. Which is to say there’s a sense in which you’re right and a sense in which this is an absurd statement..

There were data centres before Amazon, but there was nothing like EC2. Infrastructure as code made all the difference.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#283

Post by wing-_-nuts »

petre wrote: post #196
gonehome wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you pass the point of not having to work somewhere prior to 130B net worth. I'm worried about what happens to Amazon with Bezos gone. A good outcome would be something like Apple and Tim Cook. A bad one would be Microsoft and Ballmer, it will take a while to see which type this ends up being. Either way losing Bezos as CEO is a bummer.

Don't know, but I like Gates better since he stepped down as MS CEO and brought positive change to more unfortunate people's lives. Maybe Bezos would do similar things? I don't like the press release, it keeps repeating Amazon every sentence. It's a tiring read, much Like Andy Warhol's repeating patterns. That alone pretty much says a lot about the current Jeff Bezos.

You raise a great point. I did not like Gates the CEO but I deeply respect gates the Philanthropist. We can only hope Bezos turns out the same. I wonder how one could change the world with 130B dollars.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#284

Post by splistud »

yourself92 wrote: post #164
cafed00d wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's $280.5 billion in revenue in 2019 put it above the GDP of Romania, Peru, Ukraine, etc. > Corporations should never be allowed to get this large. Or maybe we should convince a larger swath of humanity to unite behind an idea larger than "nationhood" or "my country".

Maybe I'm just pessimistic but I doubt that will happen until there is a clear existential crisis for humanity. It will always be a matter of "us vs them" it's just a matter of who is "us" or "them"

An existential crisis for humanity is absolutely NOT the kind of climate that would cause humans to stop valuing a nation, a people, a culture, or their ancestry. I would argue that it is only the benign environment that most humans have enjoyed for the last 60 years or so that has caused these values to mean less than they always have.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#285

Post by IntelMiner »

dantheman wrote: post #195
WitCanStain wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A for-profit corporation seems like a terrible candidate for such a position.

Why it actually provides things people want and is based on voluntary interaction.

How do you volunteer not to interact with a monopoly?

Not saying Amazon IS a monopoly. But a "nation corporation" would effectively be company scrip on a much larger scale I suspect

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#286

Post by bigiain »

keanebean86 wrote: post #81
wiremine wrote: post #63

Crazy, he's one of those guys that you think will just be at the top forever. Hopefully the transition for Amazon is as (seemingly) seamless as the Steve Jobs/Tim Cook transition was for Apple.

Retiring at 57 is pretty risky. Hopefully his savings hold out. He's looking at 30 more years of life. Personally I would be too cautious to leave this early. Edit: risking -> risky; fixed life sentence

Super risky.

Assuming he lives past 100, and gets zero interest/return on his ~200 billion net worth, he’ll need to somehow keep his spending below about a thousand dollars a minute to survive.

Sounds like real poverty to me...

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#287

Post by jvreagan »

Incredibly grateful for what Bezos has built. I learned more in my 6 years at Amazon that I have in my 20 other years in the industry. And Amazon gave my autistic spectrum son a chance when literally nobody else would.

Thank you, Jeff.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#288

Post by arcticbull »

Quinner wrote: post #261
arcticbull wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "get this big"? Governments aren't defined by a market cap, but rather by the services they provide to their citizens. Consider that a private company's only goal is to enrich its shareholders, and they have no responsibility to the people or places around them. They are only accountable to their shareholders and the government. A governments responsibility is solely to its citizens who also contr…

A corporation that didn't take its customers demands into account would be quite likely to fail. There are many governments that continue to exist by enriching and providing for a small segment of society, and uses force to suppress the demands of the rest of society. A corporation generally doesn't shoot dissatisfied customers. Even in relatively liberal democracies, governments are clearly more beholden to forces o…

> A corporation that didn't take its customers demands into account would be quite likely to fail.

Without a government to enforce monopoly rules, it'll just aggregate all its competition into one big blob, and you won't have any choice. Efficiencies of scale mean there's a natural pressure towards consolidation. The terminal state is always one blob that owns everything.

Once they do, they can smash any new upstarts, by undercutting prices, or by just buying them too.

> A corporation generally doesn't shoot dissatisfied customers.

Sure does shoot dissatisfied union leaders though [1] and enslave children to farm cocoa [2], and take down a democratically elected government kickstarting a 36 year long civil war [3]. Also substantially all of the trans-atlantic slave trade [4, 5].

These things were all allowed to happen because the governments in those respective jurisdictions weren't (and in the case of child slave labor, aren't) strong enough to stop them.

The idea that "a corporation generally doesn't shoot dissatisfied [people]" is a privileged western position to take based on the current system working pretty well. In places that have weak government, your statement simply does not hold.

[1] https://prospect.org/features/coca-cola-killings

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/business/hershe...

[3] https://www.umbc.edu/che/tahlessons/pdf/historylabs/Guatemal...

[4] https://www.britannica.com/topic/East-India-Company

[5] https://dutchreview.com/culture/history/voc-dutch-east-india...

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#289

Post by adventured »

rrdharan wrote: post #176
ses1984 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of all those things the only two uniquely amazon are cloud computing and fast shipping.

Cloud Computing is uniquely an Amazon invention the way smartphones are uniquely an Apple invention. Which is to say there’s a sense in which you’re right and a sense in which this is an absurd statement..

It's definitely not absurd, even if they only deserve a share of the credit.

There's nothing absurd about the way Amazon and Apple defined cloud computing and smartphones. They deserve as much credit as anyone for the services / products we know today as cloud computing and smartphones. The version of the smartphone that took off in sales, took over the culture and has become a human staple globally, was entirely defined by Apple's iPhone. No other company did that, it was Apple, period. To not recognize them as the prime mover of smartphones would be absurd.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#290

Post by grey-area »

WitCanStain wrote: post #165
cafed00d wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's $280.5 billion in revenue in 2019 put it above the GDP of Romania, Peru, Ukraine, etc. > Corporations should never be allowed to get this large. Or maybe we should convince a larger swath of humanity to unite behind an idea larger than "nationhood" or "my country".

A for-profit corporation seems like a terrible candidate for such a position.

Until you consider that everyone is born into a quasi-feudal arrangement where they owe fealty and taxes to a country culture and government they didn't choose, and the only choices of leader are limited to those willing to climb the greasy pole of politics - typically self-selecting sociopaths.
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