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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

#181

Post by Pooshlmer »

dougmany wrote: post #149
zvpxdlk wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> any less intelligent or hard working Not necessarily true. Luck plays a big role in things like this but Bezos is clearly in the elite when it comes to effective professionals.

How many times more effective? As the difference between what humans can do and what computers can do increases, we become relatively closer.

Really? I would say we become a lot farther apart. The productivity an elite can have with computer support is far greater than an uneducated worker.

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

#182

Post by therpe1 »

mjfl wrote: post #100
_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/...

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…

Uh, that's now how feudalism worked. Feudalism worked because an elite class (lords, the Church) owned the land. They had exclusive access to the means of production. Peasants didn't work the land out of a fear of violence. (Like a few dozen guys on horses could threaten a few thousand peasants.) Peasants worked the land because they didn't want to starve.

The modern system is not any different. Jeff Bezos is part of an elite class that has exclusive access to the means of production. But now it's capital, not land. And this is what allows him to create something like the Echo and sell it. This is a feat that most people could never hope to do. At the end of the day because the average citizen doesn't have access to production he has no choice but to exchange his labor for food. He is a peasant.

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

#183

Post by greghatch »

ruleabidinguser wrote: post #129
greghatch wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The negatives need not be so similar for the two to occupy the same space of vast property ownership concerns - namely that a single person has what many consider to be a troubling amount of wealth and power. EDIT: sentence structure change

Sorry, why is it concerning? It seems concerning to me but only if you choose not to really engage with what it means.

My intention was to show why comparing the two things you mentioned and claiming the comparison is outrageous was not a reasonable dismissal of OP's concern - because they were talking about the similarities of society predicated on wealth accumulation generally and not the violence inflicted to protect that wealth and how that has changed over time.

Many disagree with the tenants of capitalism regardless of how violent those in power are or how corrupted their authority is, the system itself can occur as strange, especially when it puts a lot of power into the hands of a few people - that causes uneasiness in many cultures and it is certainly something to think about as wealth inequality gaps widen, for better or worse.

I don't really have any stake in the result of this conversation and my views aren't as critical of capitalism generally, I'm commenting because your out of hand dismissal of OP's comment made me think that you might either be erroneously framing the comment or reading his concern as something far more serious than the casual comment would otherwise indicate (at least, that's how I read it).

Another way to read the OP would be something this - "Doesn't this remind anyone of how wealth was distributed in more clearly feudalistic times? Weird, right? - it makes me feel weird. I worry sometimes that this might be the beginnings of what we will consider to be a slip into a dystopian society. It worries me, and I wonder about it from time to time."

EDIT: copy/pasted a little too much and repeated myself

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

#184

Post by samstave »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #152
samstave wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in the /r/conspiracy realm - it is widely believed that the reason for Gaddafi's execution was to go after the billions he had - and to take him down. The idea is that the Benghazi fiasco was let loose by the state dept so that HRC could loot Libya... its not provable - but the fact is that Gaddafi was one of the worlds richest ppl - and the rumor is that HRC and cabal stole all his loot. He was worth a reportable 70…

As long as you recognize that this is just nutjob conspiracy nonsense, then yeah... I guess it's entertaining?

Cool - thanks - so rather than provide any refuting evidence to something I stated was a RUMOR, you post this drivel. So - if you are so informed, please update me.

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

#185

Post by [deleted] »

greghatch wrote: post #183
ruleabidinguser wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, why is it concerning? It seems concerning to me but only if you choose not to really engage with what it means.

My intention was to show why comparing the two things you mentioned and claiming the comparison is outrageous was not a reasonable dismissal of OP's concern - because they were talking about the similarities of society predicated on wealth accumulation generally and not the violence inflicted to protect that wealth and how that has changed over time. Many disagree with the tenants of capitalism regardless of how viol…

[deleted]

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

#186

Post by cousin_it »

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.

Imagine I find a way to create bread from thin air and don't tell anyone else how to do it. Assume the value of a loaf of bread to a consumer is 1 dollar. I sell 100 loaves for 99 cents each, because that's what the market will bear. How much money have I made? 99 dollars. How much value have I created for everyone else? 1 dollar.

Now imagine instead I give away 100 loaves for free. How much value have I created for everyone else? 100 dollars. How much money have I made? Zero.

Do you now see the problem with estimating a person's usefulness to society by looking at their net worth?

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

#187

Post by mhermher »

indeed_thetruth wrote: post #169
habosa wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's the point.

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

#188

Post by SwellJoe »

ohyes wrote: post #151
SwellJoe wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is important to the point, that one man is worth the annual GDP of countries that have millions of people. A country is not a person...it's millions of people, and it's nonsensical to say, "Oh, it's not such a big deal, because a nation of millions makes as much in a year as this guy's whole net worth." That's a terrible argument for why the amount of money Bill Gates has is not absurd.

I'm not saying it isn't absurd I'm saying it isn't comparable to feudalism. (It is indeed a terrible argument for the point I'm not making). In feudalism a single person is the entire state. His wealth isn't comparable, disregarding the extra rights that are conferred from literally being the law of the land as a monarch.

Eh, I guess...but a feudal lord oversaw hundreds, maybe thousands of people. I'm not suggesting feudalism was better than what we have now, or necessarily agreeing with the argument made above about this being feudalism. Let's just all agree that Bill Gates isn't a feudal lord and this isn't feudalism, but rather something else that is probably bad, but it may take us a few generations to figure out exactly why it's so bad and how to avoid it.

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

#189

Post by mjfl »

bluedino wrote: post #178

I am failing to see how someone who founded a company that hasn't made > $1B in profit over each of the last twenty years can have a fortune of $75B

I think when computing profit you subtract capital investments into the company. These capital investments become assets/equity on the balance sheet, contributing to the wealth of the shareholders without being counted as "profit". Amazon did this a lot.

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

#190

Post by austenallred »

loeg wrote: post #42
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #28

With a little math, we are not-too-many years from the world's first US$ trillionaire. Using Mr. Bezos as the example: US$ 72,000,000,000 Annualized gain of, say, 10% on AMZN stock Over a period of 27.6 years 1.1^27.6 * US$72,000,000,000 = ~US$ 1,000,000,000,000 Just in time for his 80th birthday.

Assuming 27 years of 10% compounding is quite the leap.

It is in the S&P; I'd argue that 10% compounding may not be an absurd stretch for a company like Amazon
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