241–250 of 548 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Crimes aren't inherited.
So if I kill you and take your house, and somehow escape justice before dying myself and passing said house to my son, your son forfeits any claim to the house? Correct?
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…
Although, my relationships with AT&T, Exxon, and my landlord do not seem to match this Wilt Chamberlain scenario.
The social world is entirely constructed, just as much as societies infrastructure. In capitalism the goal is to make as much as possible doing as little as possible, and the only way you do that is to become the supplier you despise. Personally, I believe a world with reproduction caps and universal income would do a lot to ensure that, at the very least, capitalism is "opt in".
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Although, my relationships with AT&T, Exxon, and my landlord do not seem to match this Wilt Chamberlain scenario.
The standard claim is that you need to be a better buyer, and to have backups for all of your suppliers. It can be painful to switch suppliers (and successful suppliers quite intentionally make it more painful to switch away). The social world is entirely constructed, just as much as societies infrastructure. In capitalism the goal is to make as much as possible doing as little as possible, and the only way you do th…
1. Most of the time there is no alternative 2. Even when there's alternative, it's probably crap 3. If the alternative isn't crap, then the existing market players will engage in anti-competitive tactics until there are only crap market players remaining.
Amazon is, by any definition, a company engaging in illegal anti-competitive business practices. Losing money in order to stifle competition is nothing new, and it's still as illegal as it has ever been: very.
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…
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
But that's not the important part. The violence is the important part. Feudalism wasn't unjust because the kings had a lot of money, it was unjust because they got a lot of money through force and not through productive economic activity. Also, I think it is extremely problematic to compare any system with large disparities of outcome with an essentially violent system like feudalism (or just defining "inequality = v…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Merit" could refer to many things, but yes, I think he directly/indirectly added more utility to people's lives than 100,000s of other people.
I don't think money is a good proxy for "adding utility to people's lives". It's a good proxy for "good at playing the money game". A nurse won't be paid $1B if she saves a CEO's life, and he is able to go and make his company billions as a result. A clever business person might, if she saves the CEO in some other aspect, as she can setup a provision first. That being said, I don't think money has much to do with mer…
A nurse will be paid a substantial sum if she is one of very few that can save the CEO's life.
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/...
A person with a single dollar to their name will have a higher net worth than a significant fraction of the world. I have never found "more wealth than" to be a useful relation to think about.
You're talking about millions of people who have so much less than nothing that they will have to work for years just to get to $0.
With all our technology, our wealth, our sophistication; all the work of our ancestors and the sacrifices they made, all the works and understandings they developed, and the ability to transmit this knowledge at the speed of light and for damn near free; with the incredible bounties of the earth, the ocean, the sun, plants, animals, fungi - with all that, why should so many people be in such a hole, working their arses off as they make wealthy people wealthier?
While you may feel privileged to have a single dollar to your name, 8 people have more dollars than 3.5 billion people. That points to real, catastrophic injustice endemic in our systems and societies, even our belief systems.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a lot of ways you can look at it. Feudalism was a hierarchical system. Not all nobles went around hacking off heads - they could farm that out to higher ups who kept order. What's the difference between Amazon's reliance on national governments? The business model only works because the US enforces peace on parts of the world and because the Chinese government allows its workers to be used for pennies on the…
> 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.
We're quickly reaching the point where without venture capital, there's no way to enter any market anymore. You can't start a company and just produce good products worth paying for. You have to have enough VC to be able to withstand sustained market pressure from those who do have it and can spend you out of the market by lowering their prices.
There's a reason that these practices are illegal.
Plus they pay fuck all tax.
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.
No, that's not true. That's not at all true.