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Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

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Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#531

Post by arcticbull »

stale2002 wrote: post #436
arcticbull wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A corporation that didn't take its customers demands into account would be quite likely to fail. Without a government to enforce monopoly rules, it'll just aggregate all its competition into one big blob, and you won't have any choice. Efficiencies of scale mean there's a natural pressure towards consolidation. The terminal state is always one blob that owns everything. Once they do, they can smash any new upstarts…

> Without a government to enforce monopoly rules, it'll just aggregate all its competition into one big blob, and you won't have any choice. Thats not really true. There are tons of industries out there that are highly competitive, and are not aggravating into a monopoly, and those industries are highly competitive without much action from the government. Sure, there are some industries that have huge network effects…

Do you have some examples out of curiosity?

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#532

Post by Artistry121 »

munificent wrote: post #106
ksec wrote: post #66

From https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/email-from-jef... >Fellow Amazonians: >I’m excited to announce that this Q3 I’ll transition to Executive Chair of the Amazon Board and Andy Jassy will become CEO. In the Exec Chair role, I intend to focus my energies and attention on new products and early initiatives. Andy is well known inside the company and has been at Amazon almost as long as I have. He will be a…

For comparison, using national total wealth, that makes Amazon worth more than Saudia Arabia, Denmark, Portugal, or New Zealand. It's $280.5 billion in revenue in 2019 put it above the GDP of Romania, Peru, Ukraine, etc. Corporations should never be allowed to get this large.

I’m glad Amazon is larger and more powerful than most nation states.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#533

Post by barry-cotter »

paxys wrote: post #515
chrshawkes wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BS dude. He wasn't laughed at. The man went to Princeton. Right next to other billionaires like Andy Florence. His family was rich etc... He was already a millionaire. It's not a rags-to-riches story by any stretch.

He went to Princeton because he was smart, not because his family was rich. It isn't a school of billionaires or something. The majority of Ivy League enrollment is regular kids from working class families. They all have the best need-based scholarship programs in the country. His dad was a Cuban immigrant who worked as an engineer at Exxon.

> The median family income of a student from Princeton is $186,100, and 72% come from the top 20 percent. About 1.3% of students at Princeton came from a poor family but became a rich adult.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#534

Post by lwf »

paxys wrote: post #515
chrshawkes wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BS dude. He wasn't laughed at. The man went to Princeton. Right next to other billionaires like Andy Florence. His family was rich etc... He was already a millionaire. It's not a rags-to-riches story by any stretch.

He went to Princeton because he was smart, not because his family was rich. It isn't a school of billionaires or something. The majority of Ivy League enrollment is regular kids from working class families. They all have the best need-based scholarship programs in the country. His dad was a Cuban immigrant who worked as an engineer at Exxon.

Harvard disagrees with you:

> HARVARD COLLEGE has almost as many students from the nation’s top 0.1 percent highest-income families as from the bottom 20 percent. More than half of Harvard students come from the top 10 percent of the income distribution, and the vast majority—more than two-thirds—come from families in the top 20 percent.

https://harvardmagazine.com/2017/01/low-income-students-harv...

(They do have great financial aid for low-income families)

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#535

Post by SllX »

nicoffeine wrote: post #392
SllX wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Corporations should never be allowed to get this large. Make your case instead of dropping your groupthink everywhere. Why? And: What is the maximum size a corporation should be allowed to grow? Who gives that permission now?

> I do not believe that in the four administrations which have taken place, there has been a single instance of departure from good faith towards other nations. we may sometimes have mistaken our rights, or made an erroneous estimate of the actions of others, but no voluntary wrong can be imputed to us. in this respect England exhibits the most remarkable phaenomenon in the universe in the contrast between the profli…

Jefferson spent his public life defending the sanctity of private life and actively fighting against expanding the size, capacity and capabilities of the Federal government beyond what he saw as virtuous.

The United States is without a King nor aristocrats who hold seats in a House of Lords by their birth; it is without a House of Lords!

What you advocate is anti-Jeffersonian in both its intent and nature, and therefore you are without just cause citing Jefferson.

So if you wish to break with Jefferson and make your own advocation, do so without citing the dead when you clearly have no business doing so, and put your own thoughts and words behind that arrow.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#536

Post by laurent92 »

codeulike wrote: post #401
afavour wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that the customer experience of Amazon has declined dramatically in the last few years. Maybe there should be more internal viewings of that video.

Practically have to do backflips to avoid accidentally signing up to Amazon Prime. Dark patterns deployed front and centre.

I contacted support twice in 2 years for Prime subscription I didn’t want. Each time: “Are you sure you didn— Yes I’m sure, I knew intended to avoid it, so it’s clearly not me.” Both times they correctly cancelled it.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#537

Post by paxys »

barry-cotter wrote: post #533
paxys wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He went to Princeton because he was smart, not because his family was rich. It isn't a school of billionaires or something. The majority of Ivy League enrollment is regular kids from working class families. They all have the best need-based scholarship programs in the country. His dad was a Cuban immigrant who worked as an engineer at Exxon.

> The median family income of a student from Princeton is $186,100, and 72% come from the top 20 percent. About 1.3% of students at Princeton came from a poor family but became a rich adult. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...

$180K is like 1-1.5x the median family income in a high CoL area in the US, so that's actually about what in line with what I would expect. You're not poor, sure, but it's not close to the kind of rich the original comment is implying when clubbing him with billionaires. A kid whose family earns $186K/yr isn't exactly on the fast track to becoming the next Jeff Bezos.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#539

Post by astrange »

gnicholas wrote: post #410

> As Amazon became large, we decided to use our scale and scope to lead on important social issues. Two high-impact examples: our $15 minimum wage and the Climate Pledge. Perhaps I'm overly cynical, but I don't think they made these moves because of altruism. They do pay their warehouse employees more than some warehouses, and people talk about changing jobs to work at Amazon because the pay is better. But they also…

Amazon was paying less than $15 minimum pretty recently; they changed after Bernie started yelling at them, although I'm sure they figured it was a win-win anyway.

Before that I think they had an adaption of the pay scale for higher-earning employees where part of compensation was in stock. But if you're making minimum wage you probably don't want to deal with selling shares, waiting for vesting, reporting taxes etc.

> As for the climate, I think they would have been clobbered by environmentalists had they not done this.

For a tech company moves like this are critical for hiring. Amazon's reputation has always been a place to work out of college until your shares vest, and then you quit because management is abusing you. So they probably would like to be thought of as less evil.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#540

Post by gonehome »

gher-shyu3i wrote: post #361
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no need to set a max. Just set the marginal rate so high that earning (or, if a wealth tax, owning) more than some amount becomes pointless.

And disincentivize people from working? That's not a sustainable economic system. For a properly sustainable system, consider how Islam solved this problem over 1400 years ago. Zakat is the only form of "tax" if you will that is mandated. Interest and other predatory practices are prohibited (e.g. shorting). Once the fundamentals are correct, everything else naturally falls into place. It has been reported that durin…

Worse than disincentivizing people from working, it disincentivizes people from risking money on growth (building companies, doing startups, angel investing).

Interest isn’t predatory, it encourages growth and investment in building businesses. Look at the enormous wealth created by capitalism. Economic growth helps the most people the fastest, this model works.

That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be protections on the lower bound and human rights, there should be. It also doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be environmental protections or regulations to effectively coordinate and prevent tragedy of the commons style failures. We should also prevent wealth being able to leverage political power (which isn’t easy).

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