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Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

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 dollar. Within Amazon's kingdom, good luck getting the authorities to help you if you aren't a big player.

Meanwhile the average worker who isn't any less intelligent or hard working is seen as worth a fraction of a percentage of Bezos. Sounds like feudalism, serfdom, slavery, or whatever you'd like to call it. That we can celebrate such disparities of human value and even worse in some places this kind of rampant greed is seen as something good is what is truly terrifying.

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> 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.

Bezos is effective because his company engages in illegal anti-competitive practices. Amazon either breaks even or loses money, and the reason is because they have incredibly low prices. Why do they have incredibly low prices? Because they can, because they have the venture capital, and because others can't compete with those prices without that venture capital.

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.

You can open a hair salon without venture capital.

You can start a tech consulting company without venture capital.

You can start a construction company, a law practice, an auto repair shop, or a dental practice without venture capital.

Oh, you mean that you can't build a multi-billion dollar company overnight without venture capital?

Thank you for your insight.

>Oh, you mean that you can't build a multi-billion dollar company overnight without venture capital?

No, you can't build a large company ever without venture capital. Money begets money. The only way that any company will ever be large in the future is if some other existing billionaire decides they think they deserve funding.

I beg to differ. Here are a few examples that you might have heard of: ESRI Oracle

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

Technology is a lever that can hugely amplify differences in capability.

A 10% skill difference between two people with shovels will result in a much smaller output difference than a 10% skill difference between two operators of heavy duty earth moving equipment.

With software, this dynamic occurs in the extreme, as the cost to run a software program is so low. A hour of unskilled human labor cost hundreds or thousands of times more than an hour of computation. And the quantity and complexity of output from a single hour of computation is rapidly increasing.

Edit: reworked the comment to make my point much more clearly

Part of being effective is leveraging your abilities via managing other people. An effective manager can make 10 people each perform 10x more effectively when working towards a goal. You could argue then that one person's effectiveness increases the whole organisation's effectiveness 100x

Of course with bad managers it can easily go the same amount in the other direction, but it seems that Bezos has extremely effectively leveraged his abilities in management and built a very successful company because of that.

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.

Two people move their finger forward one centimeter.

One of them made a hole in the ground; he's going to put a seed in it, which will hopefully grow into something useful.

The other one pushed a button which started an automatic lathe which created an engine piston worth a hundred thousand dollars.

The difference in the productivity of two people is practically limitless.

But the second person isn't being productive. The lathe is being productive. In Amazon's case, the person actually pushing the button on the lathe can barely make rent.

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