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Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

theregister.com

41–50 of 259 posts

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of a company isn't to employ people. It's to take raw inputs, including employee labor, and turn that into outputs that people want. Employee relief comes in the form of voting with their feet or if they're critical inputs into what the black box produces

The question is: Is that the way it has to be? Can't we build a society which is better? Can't we build a society where "sane" employment is a valid and wanted output and not only maximising shareholder value?

Theoretically or in practice?

Practically, we haven't yet developed anti-fragile socio-ideological technologies which can out compete shareholder-maximization ideologies(SMIs). Instead SMIs are adept at castrating anti-SMIs and rendering them inert before they can establish a foothold. The world we enter into today is the product of this anti-SMI castration. You can even see echos of the great SMI war play out whenever SMI granades are casually lobbed in the bushwar of this discussion.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#42

Man, I can't even imagine how much better Amazon will perform, than if they'd hired a CEO who was willing to work for just $211m. EDIT: If someone has a more recent, or somehow better, graph than this one [1], then I'm all ears. [1] : https://slate.com/business/2014/07/ceo-pay-for-performance-t...

How much better will you perform when they boost your pay 0.005%?

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#43

[in small text] ignoring that it's almost all stock, vested over 10 years, and pretending we can predict the price of the stock 10 years from now [in large text] Amazon is paying its CEO a salary of $212 MILLION DOLLARS!!!

No post body was provided.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#44
post #19
post #12

[flagged]

So Jeff Bezos creating a company that employs people and grows the economy in a non zero sum way through efficiency gains shouldn’t be rewarded billions for the trouble? Why are people so concerned with the salary of the ultra rich? It doesn’t make your life objectively worse, if anything our lives are substantially better because of it, even if you don’t directly shop at Amazon.

The hn bootlickers really come out hard when someone suggests that wealth inequality can't be fixed by unregulated capitalism. Won't someone think of the oligarchs?

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#45
post #12

[flagged]

The problem is who gets to define what is "fair"? I have similar qualms about an athlete who nets $46 million per year [1] for shooting balls into a basket. But, then, who am I to decide his "fair" pay? His club obviously thinks he's worth that… 1 - https://hoopshype.com/player/stephen-curry/salary/

Probably the crab at the bottom of the bucket?

Limits on compensation are ineffective at achieving their goals under the best of circumstances, and the inevitable "unintended" consequences of further government manipulation in the market place would likely have negative effects.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#46
post #25

Most of the stuff in the "ethics overhaul" is pie in the sky nonsense. Take this bullet point: "Whether AWS does due diligence to know if cloud customers are using its services in a way that contributes to human rights violations" What does that even mean? How could that possibly be accomplished? Who decides what constitutes a "human rights violation" in the first place?

> Who decides what constitutes a "human rights violation" in the first place?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology

How about we start with rape, torture, and murder, and work our way back.

But like really. How do we figure anything out? We work at it, we learn we make mistakes and we grow. It seems like just throwing you're hands up is oppositional to the entire notions of innovation that guide tech companies in the first place.

It's hard but we pay CEO's $21 million dollars a year to do hard things.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#47
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Jeff Bezos creating a company that employs people and grows the economy in a non zero sum way through efficiency gains shouldn’t be rewarded billions for the trouble? Why are people so concerned with the salary of the ultra rich? It doesn’t make your life objectively worse, if anything our lives are substantially better because of it, even if you don’t directly shop at Amazon.

Because they can privately buy the regulators who can then make them even richer. If you place that much influence in the hands of anyone, it will be misused for personal gain.

1. If the regulators can behave so unscrupulously, making Jeff Bezos poorer won't solve that problem.

2. Wealth and influence are always used for personal gain. That's kind of the point, no? People are incentivized to work and earn money exactly so they can use it to make their lives better.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#48
post #25

Most of the stuff in the "ethics overhaul" is pie in the sky nonsense. Take this bullet point: "Whether AWS does due diligence to know if cloud customers are using its services in a way that contributes to human rights violations" What does that even mean? How could that possibly be accomplished? Who decides what constitutes a "human rights violation" in the first place?

They want to censor everyone. And good that they have been shown the door.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#49
post #35
post #25

Most of the stuff in the "ethics overhaul" is pie in the sky nonsense. Take this bullet point: "Whether AWS does due diligence to know if cloud customers are using its services in a way that contributes to human rights violations" What does that even mean? How could that possibly be accomplished? Who decides what constitutes a "human rights violation" in the first place?

This is most certainly targeted towards AWS being used by ICE. And not just in a generic way of them hosting ICE servers, but with ICE using Amazon Rekognition to identify undocumented immigrants (and allegedly AWS had meetings with ICE to convince them to use the service). The human rights violations come up when you talk about kids being separated from their families and then straight up lost, and the various other…

ICE is the problem, all the heinous shit US defense and intelligence does, whom Amazon is also in bed with, a-ok

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#50

Man, I can't even imagine how much better Amazon will perform, than if they'd hired a CEO who was willing to work for just $211m. EDIT: If someone has a more recent, or somehow better, graph than this one [1], then I'm all ears. [1] : https://slate.com/business/2014/07/ceo-pay-for-performance-t...

How much better will you perform when they boost your pay 0.005%?

You mean how much better would I perform for an extra million dollars? How much better could I perform with a team of assistants each making six figures?

Why on earth should one accept a percent-based framing of these ludicrous numbers?

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