Earlier quoted context omitted.
100x the poverty line. Excess earnings goes to taxes.
RIP innovation if the bar is that low
Innovators gonna innovate, they don't need ginormous returns to get out of bed.
Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres
531–540 of 879 posts
Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres
#532Earlier quoted context omitted.
> pay his employees more Doesn’t Amazon pay highest in its industry? I suppose people always want more, but it seems like they are already among the best. Of course pay varies by location and what’s good in one state is good in another. But it seems the average warehouse worker pay is $12.61 [0] with states ranging from $9.66 for North Carolina (holy cow) to $14.84 in Washington [1]. Amazon pays $16/hour [2] so that’…
> Doesn’t Amazon pay highest in its industry? Absolutely not. On the tail of the recession, I moved back near my family and got a warehouse job doing the same thing that Amazon workers do. It was shit work under even shittier superiors, but by no means was it worse than what Amazon pays. And that's even being generous to Amazon, comparing it under conditions that totally stacked in Amazon's favor: it's almost like co…
So if other unskilled jobs pay better or have better conditions, why are hundreds of thousands of Americans taking these “horrible” Amazon warehouse jobs then?
Are they all being irrational? Are they being forced at gunpoint to take these jobs?
The real issue is that removing Amazon from the equation doesn’t suddenly make these people’s lives a utopia. They still won’t have healthcare or get higher wages, our laws (the real issue here) will remain the same.
In fact, smaller businesses tend to pay people less and closer to the minimum wage (or even below it, in the case of many Texas and California businesses who employee illegal immigrants).
But nobody writes news stories about tiny warehouses nobody has ever heard of overworking and underpaying their employees.
Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres
#533There will be a lot of cynicism on this post from the HN crowd, but these are unbelievably good recipients. I have interacted with Jose Andres many times, and go to his DC restaurants when I visit, and he is truly a wonderful soul who spends all his effort helping others. I don’t know much about Van Jones beyond what I see on TV, but if he’s of the same character as Jose Andres, that is stellar and they will both do…
It deserves cynicism. If he wasn’t a jerk he’d just pay his employees more and maybe pay some taxes. When everyone is fair upfront they don’t need to give us free turkeys on thanksgiving we can buy our own.
Absolutely. I don't want my fief Lord to throw me a morsel of food every now and then. I want to throw him down from his castle and share our wealth fairly, so I can buy my own food myself.
Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres
#534Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's a parasite because the company (which hired 100K new workers during COVID) that he started and owns a shit-ton of equity in went up in the past year because of lockdowns?
Yes. By reasons I expounded in another comment I believe a percentage of any enterprises's shares (in the order of at least 20%) should be owned by the public and pay out an equal dividend to every citizen.
Luckily, any member of the public is free to buy AMZN :)
Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres
#535Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is blatantly wrong. The Earth's climate will naturally enter a significantly higher temperature climate attractor within 50 million years and will be completely inhospitable to known life in less than a billion years. The oceans will have completely boiled away, even from the poles, within 1.1 billion years, as the sun continues to increase in luminosity [1]. And this is the most optimistic scenario, assuming no…
This is still orders of magnitude longer than our distance to the Roman Empire. We've gone from no flight to space travel in 150 years and you're worried about 50 million years.
I'm not worried at all, because the jealous, anti-progressive, pessimistic commenters littering this thread are not the dominant force in society (even if they did have a numbers advantage, which I don't believe they do, they would lose by the inherent virtue of the weakness in their personalities), and people like Musk, Bezos, and the thousands of engineers executing their visions will ensure humanity has self-sustaining off world colonies in just a few centuries.
Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres
#536Earlier quoted context omitted.
Genuine question because I'm out of the loop: it looks to me like the "Bezos doesn't pay taxes" argument is just pointing out that most of his wealth sits in unrealized gains in amazon stock. When he sells stock, he pays taxes. Is there more to it that I'm missing? Is the prevailing argument that we should be paying taxes on unrealized capital gains?
Well, does it seem like he has realized any gains? The prevailing argument is that as a society we do not have to let one individual amass this much power. It's ok to hold that view without having a deep enough understanding of tax law to know what needs to be changed.
I think it's very reasonable to hold that view (I do as well). But to propose a solution, it's necessary to understand the facts of the current situation, which is what I'm trying to learn.
Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres
#537Earlier quoted context omitted.
> pay his employees more Doesn’t Amazon pay highest in its industry? I suppose people always want more, but it seems like they are already among the best. Of course pay varies by location and what’s good in one state is good in another. But it seems the average warehouse worker pay is $12.61 [0] with states ranging from $9.66 for North Carolina (holy cow) to $14.84 in Washington [1]. Amazon pays $16/hour [2] so that’…
Not an odd complaint considering he's worth 207 billion. He could more fairly divide that stock wealth among Amazonians. Question is: that 207 billion, did he accumulate that fairly himself or did his workforce accumulate that for him? Hard to answer from the outside but could a single man accumulate 207 billion without help as a corporation of one.
> Question is: that 207 billion, did he accumulate that fairly himself or did his workforce accumulate that for him? Hard to answer from the outside
Not hard to answer at all, the answer is of course not. The unbalanced property relations ensure that the workers who build the wealth are not fairly compensated and have to consent to surrendering the lion's share of the value they produce to their boss.
Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres
#538Earlier quoted context omitted.
SpaceX has already done that, in less time, and took humans to the ISS.
So we should stop? SpaceX did it first, everyone else can just fold up shop? C'mon. Blue Origin has a proper rocket, it seems very capable. They even land the booster like SpaceX does. To be unimpressed with their achievements seems like sour grapes.
>To be unimpressed with their achievements seems like sour grapes.
Carlin says something similar to what I was going to say, but he's better at saying it.
" The phrase sour grapes does not refer to jealousy or envy. Nor is it related to being a sore loser. It deals with the rationalization of failure to attain a desired end. In the original fable by Aesop, "The Fox and the Grapes," when the fox realizes he cannot leap high enough to reach the grapes, he rationalizes that even if he had gotten them, they would probably have been sour anyway. Rationalization, that’s all sour grapes means. It doesn’t mean deal with jealousy or sore losing. Yeah, I know you say, "Well many people are using it that way, so the meaning is changing." And I say, "Well many people are really fuckin’ stupid too, shall we just adopt all their standards?" " [0]
- George Carlin
Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres
#539Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's really fair to lump Bezos, Branson, and Musk into the same bucket. Musk, for all his flaws, started an actual rocket company with new and frankly insane tech. Bezos and especially Branson's ventures feel much more like personal vanity projects than something that will actually push space exploration. I mean Blue Origin has been running for 20 years and the best we have from them is flights that wer…
> Bezos and especially Branson's ventures feel much more like personal vanity projects than something that will actually push space exploration. I'm not sure why people feel this need to draw this weird line in the sand and say that SpaceX is okay because Musk built a business, but Blue Origin and Virgin are bad because... reasons? Technology advances for all sorts of reasons. Lamborghinis exist because a farmer was…
> I'm not sure why people feel this need to draw this weird line in the sand and say that SpaceX is okay because
It's because they know exactly what it really means if they cut SpaceX off at the knees and include them. It reveals what they're really saying they want to do. And that's just too far in polite company.
With Blue Origin they think they can chop them down and use them as an example and it's ok, because it doesn't imply a desire to return to the stone age and the crushing of technological progress. Blue Origin is a convenient example in other words, for now. If they use SpaceX, it would go too far in making them look like a luddite, lusting to dial back centuries of progress.
They apparently think it's possible to preordain from the word go which company will be the successful one. It's a product of centrally planned thinking, centrally planned fantasy. Such that it was okay for Musk to be doing what he was with his great wealth back when he had $100 million, and not if he crossed some arbitrary wealth line. It was ok for SpaceX to fail over and over and over again, and to burn through a large sum of money trying to get the Falcon 9 flying. It's just not ok for anybody else to fail trying. It's ok to take N time to succeed at $N money, but not ok if it takes more time and more money. Funny little needle the central planners want threaded.
When Bezos had $20 billion, nobody cared much about him. You'd very rarely see his name eg on Reddit or HN or Imgur or anywhere else outside of the business press. He'd occasionally pop up on HN in an Amazon story, it was rare though. Few people actually knew his name or who he was. That's ~2012, he had been a billionaire for about 14 years by that point and had been working on Blue Origin for around 12 years. So now he's worth $200 billion, everybody knows his name, zillions of people apparently hate him, people post vicious shit about him 24/7. They're all lying. They don't know Bezos anymore today than they did in 2012, what they know is his name is at the top of the rich list now, and the mob loves nothing more than to chop people down. The exact same thing happened to Gates once he took the rich list title.
What you're witnessing is mimic-based mob behavior in action. That's why it's so irrational, so emotional, so very much not thought-out. It's very predictable, most people that join in likely struggle to control their urge to mimic and join the rage mobs, and it goes after anybody that pops their head up too far. It's what social media is largely filled with today, ignorance and rage mobs. It's probably genetically wired in behavior for some people and then amplified depending on the culture and context.
Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres
#540Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If they’re the interstate highways, then the gas tax pays for most of that. That's mostly a subsidy from passenger cars to larger vehicles, because road wear goes up much more rapidly with vehicle weight than fuel consumption does (IIRC, the former with roughly the fourth power of weight, the latter sublinearly.) Since Amazon mostly isn't using passenger cars as part of its delivery fleet, its actually being subsid…
What you say is true but they're just passing those subsidies on to their customers (the majority of the US). And they're still paying a significant amount contrary to the very popular belief, even if it's not proportional to the consumption which I agree with you on. Amazon e-commerce is not all that profitable. Most of Amazon's value comes from AWS.
> Amazon e-commerce is not all that profitable. Most of Amazon's value comes from AWS.
AWS represents 43% of net profit, per the most recently posted quarter. It used to be on the order of 75%, but pandemic-related demand for physical products changed all that.
Retail is back, baby.