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Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

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Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#381

Post by _2d30 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #252
lotsofpulp wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody should ever have a $1B worth. How does this work? Forced sale of assets? Who determines the market price of the assets, if they’re not highly liquid?

When you get issued stock options at a company, you immediately become liable for taxes on them, since they are treated as income. This is true even if there is no public market for the shares at that time (something that caused headaches for many early dotcom stock option grantees). It's is an obvious precedent for taxing somebody who has "received" wealth via the route that Bezos has done.

> When you get issued stock options at a company, you immediately become liable for taxes on them, since they are treated as income.

This is false, right? It's only taxable on exercise. That or I know 1,000s of people at major companies that owe back taxes.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#382

Post by chrshawkes »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #231

> This journey began some 27 years ago. Amazon was only an idea, and it had no name. It had a name, and that name was "Cadabra". It didn't become Amazon until Jeff watched a documentary about the Amazon River. His lawyer had already turned up his nose at "Cadabra", and Jeff was looking for something else. It's also worth noting that the idea didn't grow over time - Jeff always intended to build something like "Sears…

We're you writing Perl primarily back in those days?

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#383

Post by hintymad »

randallsquared wrote: post #304
temp0826 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Listening to cbell rip someone apart in the weekly ops meeting while watching the #wtf peanut gallery whilst sipping my coffee are probably my fondest memories of working at AWS

I'll try "Places I wouldn't want to work" for 400K, Alex.

It's actually a rare opportunity that someone smart can "rip me apart" for the right reason. Candid truth does not hurt. It stimulates growth. In contrast, the worst place is where everyone is nice, but does not tell you what you have done wrong.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#384

Post by wheybags »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #376
wheybags wrote: post #368

> I don’t know of another company with an invention track record as good as Amazon’s Come on man, that's just bs. From wikipedia: > Researchers working at Bell Labs are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the Unix operating system, and the programming languages B, C, C++, S, SNOBOL, AWK, AMPL, and othe…

Upvoted; and thanks for sharing these details. They might be obvious for you, but I had only a limited knowledge of all that innovation happening at Bell Labs.

You're in today's lucky 10,000 (https://xkcd.com/1053/) :)

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#385

Post by wizzwizz4 »

andrewjl wrote: post #314
arcticbull wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monopoly rules only exist and matter because of the government. It's pretty obvious that even with them, there's a real pressure for consolidation (and that's efficiency of scale). The natural state of a company is a monopoly. Once you are a monopoly, you don't need to worry about getting "re-elected" any more than a despot does. The free society exists only in the space between these two clashing titans.

One of the ideas behind federalism was that government / the state need not have a monopoly on everything. Corporate monopolies usually only persist due to two reasons: regulatory barriers or technological stagnation. Both are solvable.

If not for regulatory barriers, do you really think Bell Systems would ever have lost its monopoly over US telecoms?

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#386

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #363
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no need to set a max. Just set the marginal rate so high that earning (or, if a wealth tax, owning) more than some amount becomes pointless.

The question is how to determine the value of non liquid assets in order to implement a maximum wealth tax. Suppose I own land or a private company or a collection of copyrights that become very valuable. Who and how determines when it crosses the $1B threshold, and how am I brought under said threshold. What if the asset is not easily divisible?

These are legitimate questions. In some ways they have analogs that have already been "solved" (perhaps not satisfactorily). Who and how determines the property tax you owe on a building or land? But I agree that these are not trivial to answer in satisfactory ways. Societies frequently have to come up with imperfect answers.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#387

Post by woofie11 »

burkaman wrote: post #355
gher-shyu3i wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> corporations are not democratic, and putting so much power in the hands of one person or a handful of people is dangerous to society. Citation needed. Democracy is not a sufficient nor even necessary requirement for prosperity or "good" in general.

Not really possible to give you a citation, it's an opinion, or a philosophy. If you have a different idea of an ideal society, we're not going to cite our way to an agreement.

Perhaps.

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. I'm a firm believer in continuing to innovate and improve governance. I don't think it's just an abstract philosophical argument. These things can be modeled with game theory (cite: The Dictator's Handbook).

There are opinions and philosophies about evolution, vaccines, and lots of other things, but at the end of the day, those can be resolved through rational discourse.

I'd like my government to look out for my interests. I'd like it to be competent and not corrupt. There are lots of ideas for how to get there, and I'm really not comfortable with the imperialism of democracy.

China had good ideas with civil service exams, which select for competence. Aristotle and Confucius had good ideas around moral philosophy of rulers. Marx had some nice ideas too. They didn't play out as well in practice as capitalist democracy, but that doesn't mean we should toss up our hands, give up, and quit trying. Especially now that we have tools for corrupting democracy like never before, and conversely, ways to model governance like never before.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#388

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

chrshawkes wrote: post #382
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #231

> This journey began some 27 years ago. Amazon was only an idea, and it had no name. It had a name, and that name was "Cadabra". It didn't become Amazon until Jeff watched a documentary about the Amazon River. His lawyer had already turned up his nose at "Cadabra", and Jeff was looking for something else. It's also worth noting that the idea didn't grow over time - Jeff always intended to build something like "Sears…

We're you writing Perl primarily back in those days?

Perl got used for some backend tasks. Nothing related to the webserver.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#389

Post by 1_2__4 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #238
kaszanka wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon did not invent customer reviews.

Could you point me to another merchant who offered customer-readable customer reviews before Amazon? I'm not saying there isn't one, just that when we were implementing them, I was unaware of any precedents ...

It was the entire (original) business model of "Epinions".

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#390

Post by oblio »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #346
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #231

> This journey began some 27 years ago. Amazon was only an idea, and it had no name. It had a name, and that name was "Cadabra". It didn't become Amazon until Jeff watched a documentary about the Amazon River. His lawyer had already turned up his nose at "Cadabra", and Jeff was looking for something else. It's also worth noting that the idea didn't grow over time - Jeff always intended to build something like "Sears…

Something that always stuck with me is I remember reading in a book about the internet long ago about how innovative the name Amazon.com was and how it was the future of internet business. It said it needs to be more memorable. You aren’t going to buy your books on Books.com you are going to use Amazon. Turned out to be very right. And this was in the pets.com era. Everyone thought you needed the most generic name po…

It depends. facebook.com or messenger.com aren't super memorable.

Microsoft also made it work by adding something else next to the name. Microsoft Excel. Microsoft Outlook. Microsoft Access.

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