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Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

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Re: Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

#161

Post by [deleted] »

wozniacki wrote: post #133
sushisource wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, this is the Seattleite party line. Don't kid yourself into thinking people in Seattle are more humble than the people in SV. They're just not as overt about it. I agree with you that the flashy culture of SV doesn't exist as much here, and that's a good thing, but I'd say Seattleites are some of the most arrogant, standoffish, and surface-polite people I've met anywhere in the world.

I'd say Seattleites are some of the most arrogant, standoffish, and surface-polite people I've met anywhere in the world. Could you perhaps expand on this observation? I genuinely find it interesting. This is the sort of thing you don't see measured in those "most-livable cities" indices you see from time to time [1]. Tricky to capture I agree, but doable. It would greatly simplify one's choice when deciding where to…

[deleted]

Re: Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

#162

Post by pfisch »

andrepd wrote: post #87
_m8fo wrote: post #84

Everytime I see these types of articles I wonder if we're still in feudalism. Should we really be celebrating that a single individual is worth more than hundreds of millions of people[1]? I dunno, it seems dystopian , like we're enslaved to the system. [1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16/...

Absolutely. Did this person work more or does he have more merit than 100.000.000s of people? It's absurd.

He provided more economic/productive value to the world than 100,000,000s of people.

Idk about "working hard" or "merit" because who cares if someone has to work super hard for 2 days to produce the same results another person can produce in 10 minutes.

Re: Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

#163

Post by ohyes »

guelo wrote: post #156
ohyes wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but think of it this way. Bill Gates is worth 90 Billion, sure fine. What is the entire United States worth? GDP is 18 Trillion, expenditures are 4 trillion. So if you do something (admittedly kind of dumb), like take the GDP, subtract expenditures, let's pretend the earnings are 14 trillion? Valuing the US at 10x earnings, that would put it at a valuation of 140 trillion dollars. This is horribly incorrect, bu…

> expenditures are 4 trillion Your calculation is making my head hurt. I assume by 'expenditures' you mean the US governments budget is about 4 trillion? If so, your $14trillion represents expenditures by the private sector. So if we build a bridge or something it doesn't count into your 10x, for some reason. Sorry this whole argument makes no sense to me.

I was trying to figure out what the "earnings" would be. I probably should have just used 18 trillion and been done with it.

Argument is humans aren't on the same scale as governments (even comparing exceptionally rich humans and middle of the road governments). It is easy to verify with a few minutes of thought.

Re: Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

#164

Post by psyc »

_m8fo wrote: post #84

Everytime I see these types of articles I wonder if we're still in feudalism. Should we really be celebrating that a single individual is worth more than hundreds of millions of people[1]? I dunno, it seems dystopian , like we're enslaved to the system. [1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16/...

Funny to find this top comment, since I just had this exact train of thought an hour ago. It went something like this. It's a common unexamined platitude that it takes a huge amount of work, and especially sacrifice to be able to live well. That might well be true under certain conditions of, say, undeveloped agrarian civilizations. It shouldn't still be true of ours, and yet it is. Our infrastructure and supply chain create so much abundance of every imaginable thing, from necessities, to frivolities, to luxuries. There's no way that it actually requires a huge amount of toil and pious sacrifice for each person to earn their share of this abundance. And yet it does. Every time I try to discern why, it always comes back to the same thing. Everything is owned. On the very large scale, everything is owned by a relatively tiny handful of people. And those people absolutely depend, for their absurdly outsized fortunes, on everybody else working for them. The owners of everything want you to work for them.

It's exactly as you say. It's feudalism. Wealth inequality is feudalism.

Re: Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

#165

Post by wozniacki »

enraged_camel wrote: post #146
wozniacki wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say Seattleites are some of the most arrogant, standoffish, and surface-polite people I've met anywhere in the world. Could you perhaps expand on this observation? I genuinely find it interesting. This is the sort of thing you don't see measured in those "most-livable cities" indices you see from time to time [1]. Tricky to capture I agree, but doable. It would greatly simplify one's choice when deciding where to…

>>Could you perhaps expand on this observation? I genuinely find it interesting. Look up "Seattle freeze". It's a real phenomenon sociologists have studied. Essentially, it's easy to make acquiantences in Seattle, but extremely difficult to make friends . Everyone is polite and friendly on the surface, but any attempt to get to know someone is met with (polite) stonewalling.

Could you list a few other cities which are known for such peculiar mannerisms? I was told Boston has its own stripe of the "Seattle Freeze". I find all of this incredibly interesting. If I could, I'd at least make a quick wiki of these observations. Frankly I think this is one of the elements that would figure prominently when considering places to move to, whether within the U.S. or globally. More so than weather or abundance of restaurants or even neighborhood walk scores!

edit: Earlier, HN didn't let me reply to you perhaps due to some time threshold I'm not aware of. So replied to myself. Deleted that post now.

Re: Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

#166

Post by psyc »

pfisch wrote: post #162
andrepd wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. Did this person work more or does he have more merit than 100.000.000s of people? It's absurd.

He provided more economic/productive value to the world than 100,000,000s of people. Idk about "working hard" or "merit" because who cares if someone has to work super hard for 2 days to produce the same results another person can produce in 10 minutes.

That's a fantasy. An analogy taken too literally. People lionize John Galts and imagine that they are their organizations. They aren't. Just because he started it and called the shots doesn't mean he literally is Amazon. That's a fanciful way of thinking and it's disastrous for us mortals to take it literally. Amazon is all the people working there, who, while well-paid compared to all the other serfs, actually get a paltry share of the fortune they generate collectively.

Re: Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

#167

Post by psyc »

flyinglizard wrote: post #154
andrepd wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. Did this person work more or does he have more merit than 100.000.000s of people? It's absurd.

That's not about what he did do or did not do. In reality there's no concept of "fair pay" or "just earnings". In fact, Bezos doesn't even matter, personally. What matters is that he owns an asset (Amazon) that appreciated in value. Obviously, his "net worth" is tied to this holding. It appreciated because it provided desirable services. Now, preventing it can be done in two ways, and only two ways - either limit Ama…

This isn't thinking far enough outside the tiny box of this specific economic order at this specific point in history. For example, we could have co-ops instead of corps.

Re: Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

#168

Post by dragonwriter »

ohyes wrote: post #124
_m8fo wrote: post #84

Everytime I see these types of articles I wonder if we're still in feudalism. Should we really be celebrating that a single individual is worth more than hundreds of millions of people[1]? I dunno, it seems dystopian , like we're enslaved to the system. [1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16/...

Okay, but think of it this way. Bill Gates is worth 90 Billion, sure fine. What is the entire United States worth? GDP is 18 Trillion, expenditures are 4 trillion. So if you do something (admittedly kind of dumb), like take the GDP, subtract expenditures, let's pretend the earnings are 14 trillion? Valuing the US at 10x earnings, that would put it at a valuation of 140 trillion dollars. This is horribly incorrect, bu…

> The key thing in monarchial feudalism is that a single person is the state

No, that's (approximately) monarchical absolutism. Feudalism is completely different, because the state (insofar as that term is even loosely valid for feudalism) is a bunch of people, arranged in heirarchy, but each with both rights and obligations both up and down the heirarchy, not one person with absolute power. That's why the transition from feudal government to absolute monarchies in much of Europe was a big deal.

Re: Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

#169

Post by indeed_thetruth »

habosa wrote: post #143
mjfl wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's a little hyperbolic. In feudalism the balance of power is enforced by violence, whereas Jeff Bezos got rich because you gave him money in exchange for products. Like, "Hey, here's this cool electronic device called the Amazon Echo for $50." is a markedly different from "Farm here or I'll decapitate you." The fact that you harbor a resentment as if the former is anything like the latter is slightly terr…

This reminds me of Nozick's Wilt Chamberlain example, which I will quote here: > Nozick's famous Wilt Chamberlain argument is an attempt to show that patterned principles of just distribution are incompatible with liberty. He asks us to assume that the original distribution in society, D1, is ordered by our choice of patterned principle, for instance Rawls's Difference Principle. Wilt Chamberlain is an extremely popu…

This argument is trivially inconsistent. The state must protect liberty by interfering with one's liberty?

State interfence is a direct transgression against an individual's liberty. Thus far the majority has decided that such interfence is a greater evil than the "inequality" that it could reconcile.

Re: Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

#170

Post by bdcravens »

jwdunne wrote: post #47
huangc10 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

eh is it? I thought it's end of Q2 tomorrow only. The $10 billion is probably the addition of Q1 and Q2 so far this fiscal year.

Sorry I'm mistaken. The end of the fiscal year is the 5th of April in the UK. In the US, I think this is different. So this is a more dramatic result considering.

The US fiscal year ends on September 30, but companies can set their own fiscal year. (Many C corps do end it at specific quarters)
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