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

theregister.com

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

#81

Post by jokethrowaway »

RONROC wrote: post #12

[flagged]

There are people, namely Amazon shareholders who are happy to pay that money.

It's a voluntary transaction, there's nothing unfair about it.

People who are not in tech are also shocked to hear about developers salaries. And yet, there's nothing wrong with it, it just means shareholders can (on average and with a certain degree of risk) extract more than that value out of CEOs or engineers. If this wasn't true those companies won't be profitable (if we exclude market distorting forces like government bailouts or regulations that help top companies to maintain their edge).

There's an argument to be made that companies could afford to pay less for these roles and have the same performance - that may very well be true. But this doesn't make it unfair; simply put, the customers (the shareholders) are pooling their money and deciding to shoot for the best of the best by offering the best compensation.

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

#82

Post by uoaei »

sleepymoose wrote: post #78
joecot wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just double-checked with my peers and it turns out it's possible to protest two different things at once, and that petitioning at multiple sources of the problem is often more effective at getting things done.

>petitioning at multiple sources of the problem is often more effective at getting things done Could you provide any sources for this? As it stands, I've seen zero tangible results regarding Amazon's ongoing unchecked growth, the prevailing lack of workplace standards in their warehouses or for delivery drivers, monopolistic practices, or any general "ethical" standing of the company. Same goes for the US Government.…

Sources? For what amounts to "approaching this problem two ways is better than approaching it in one way"?

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

#83

Post by paulryanrogers »

dvt wrote: post #56
paulryanrogers wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing wild outliers seems seems like expectation grooming. How about lowest pay at company compared to highest? It can cope with variations in industries and even among companies.

The often-cited notion that a warehouse worker has even remotely the same responsibility as a company CEO is just straight-up fiction. Ergo, their jobs are incomparable.

I'm not so sure. Stakes may be higher but feels like CEO performance doesn't correlate strongly to education, past experience, class, or anything really. So perhaps a random lottery--with some IQ floor--and lower pay would be a win-win for companies and workers.

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

#84

Post by CryptoPunk »

sofixa wrote: post #52
jaywalk wrote: 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? There are plenty of organisations trying to do just that. UN Human Rights Council, Amnesty International, etc. There's a Universal Declaration of Human Rights that could quite easily be applied as a baseline.

Do they consider putting someone in prison, for their refusal to surrender their privacy and private property in complying with the Income Tax Act, a violation of Human Rights?

How about confiscating someone's fruit cart because they do not possess a licence for it? This led to Mohamed Bouazizi immolating himself, which triggered the Arab Spring.

How about fining someone for refusing to use someone else's gender pronouns? Or for refusing to perform a Brazilian wax on the male genitalia of a male who asserts they are a woman?

If not, then I question the existence of any underlying principle, beyond ideology, guiding their assessments.

>>There's a Universal Declaration of Human Rights that could quite easily be applied as a baseline.

The UDHR, as interpreted by the UNHR High Commission, explicitly defines "collective bargaining rights" as a human right:

https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/...

Laws that grant collective bargaining rights mandate an employer to engage in collective bargaining with any set of his workers that form a union and demand collective bargaining, to the exclusion of negotiating with any other worker or job applicant. Such a government mandate is a blatant violation of the right to free association, and thus property understood as a violation of human rights. In fact, it violates article 20 of the UDHR, which states:

https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...

>>Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.

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

#85

Post by joecot »

uoaei wrote: post #82
sleepymoose wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>petitioning at multiple sources of the problem is often more effective at getting things done Could you provide any sources for this? As it stands, I've seen zero tangible results regarding Amazon's ongoing unchecked growth, the prevailing lack of workplace standards in their warehouses or for delivery drivers, monopolistic practices, or any general "ethical" standing of the company. Same goes for the US Government.…

Sources? For what amounts to "approaching this problem two ways is better than approaching it in one way"?

Asking for sources and explanations of completely obvious things is a great way to exhaust people on the internet. Which I assume was the point given the "both sides"iness of the response.

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

#86

Post by jokethrowaway »

JaimeThompson wrote: post #75
wincy wrote: 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.

>It doesn’t make your life objectively worse If my taxes go up to fund plants / warehouses for profitable companies I am objectively worse, am I not?

Absolutely, we need to abolish taxes and the government.

I don't see why your solution to your taxes should be "let's make the government control even more of the private sector via more regulations".

Get rid of the public sector and everything will move according to value for the customers, instead of who can bribe politicians better.

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

#87

Post by CaptainNegative »

sofixa wrote: post #52
jaywalk wrote: 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? There are plenty of organisations trying to do just that. UN Human Rights Council, Amnesty International, etc. There's a Universal Declaration of Human Rights that could quite easily be applied as a baseline.

The UNHRC is a wonderful source in that you can more or less use the complement of those they decide to condemn to identify the truly heinous human rights violators and violations.

Has Ki-Moon ever explicitly told any other UN branch to cut it with its rhetoric and unabashed partisan bloc voting?

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

#88

Post by OminousWeapons »

wincy wrote: post #19
RONROC wrote: 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.

> Why are people so concerned with the salary of the ultra rich?

Two reasons. First it's because the left lets Twitter determine their messaging and so the economic problems facing the country have been framed incorrectly with an unnecessary moral slant. The economic problems facing the poor are not a function of "wealth inequality" (the delta between rich and poor), but instead are a function of the poor having insufficient resources and services regardless of how much money the rich have. When you frame the issue as wealth inequality, then bringing Bezos's wealth down without any concomitant increase in funding for the poor is a victory as the delta is being reduced. Certainly the rich will need to be taxed more to pay for additional services necessary to improve the lives of the poor and middle class, but explicitly lowering the wealth of the rich doesn't need to be in scope to solve the problems we are facing.

Second, no one wants to admit it and by saying it this comment will get flagged, but people care because they are jealous and misinformed. They have zero understanding of what an executive's job actually entails / they don't know anyone in such a role, and as such they (incorrectly) think anyone could do it. Therefore they don't understand why executives are receiving very high levels of comp or amassing massive net worths when they don't appear to be "doing" anything complex.

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

#90

Post by evandale »

anonporridge wrote: post #32
jaywalk wrote: 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?

I agree. It's really starting down a bad path when we start asking megacorps to do the government's job. Corporations are fundamentally not subject to the will of the people, and it is almost impossible for the people to countervail the control authority of the extremely small set of owners who own the majority of voting shares. Let the justice system crack down on people or organizations "violating human rights" and…

>It's really starting down a bad path when we start asking megacorps to do the government's job.

IMO it's even worse than that. Not only do we expect corporations to do the government's job, we're also giving corporations more power than we give governments.

Just look at the "it's a private company they can censor whoever they want!" crowd. They actually believe companies who control over half the content we're exposed to online should be able to censor and deplatform whoever they want for whatever reason they want.

I visit Canadian subreddits and they cheer when our telecom oligopoly censors RT news and unironically ask to "do fox news now!"

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