Amazon Is Thriving Thanks to Taxpayer Dollars
newrepublic.com
newrepublic.com
There are side effects of him creating such wealth. Maybe you can’t see them directly but they are there. Advances made in tech allow for people everywhere in the world to benefit. Look at smart phone penetration which allows people knowledge, greater communication, etc.
None of this comes about by what you’re commenting on. Take a look at the Gates foundation and how many tens of billions which are pledged by the world richest.
It’s very easy to judge and comment from the stands. I’d love to see what your daily activities are to help the world’s poorest. I’d dare say what they want is a job that comes from foreign investment rather than a sack of UN grains for the month’s rations.
Bezos has enough money to feed the world BUT doesn't even pay his own employees enough to feed themselves. "Evil corporations" like AT&T and Comcast have taken their Trump tax windfall to pay bonuses to all hands. Amazon takes the money and pockets it... while their employees are food insecure.
Also a more pertinent decision is how much of the federal budget goes to foreign aid, and its effectiveness. Those dollars include taxes from the likes of Bezos
No, no one is forced to buy from these companies, but that's not how the coercion works. How it works is that there is a coercion in making an offer too good to refuse, where the costs to others of that offer are hidden in some way or another. Then because those other people are getting hurt, they have less, which forces others to take a cut to stay viable, which hurts them, and so forth and so on.
It's a kind of runaway process, and how monopolies often come to be. They don't come and threaten you if you don't use their services, they make an offer that is too good to be true, because it is, except that the costs of that fraud are borne in production, not the product, or in the long-term.
The fraud comes in the form of avoiding financial obligations by hiding them. It's how a lot of these financial inequities develop: Corporation X hides the costs, especially where those costs are long-term, fuzzy, or loosely monitored (ecologically, in public health, in welfare), and then profits by passing those costs on to society more broadly. It's like someone saying they can build a house for you cheaply, then hiding all the short-cuts they use to do so, and then disappearing when you're left to foot the bill 10 years later for their irresponsibility and lies.
With the financial crisis underpinning the Great Recession, it happened by firms passing on the risk costs to the public through bailouts. Various manufacturing and energy-sector companies get out of the real ecological costs of their activities by plausible deniability in lawsuits, etc.
Here, Amazon is hiding the costs of that free shipping, etc. by not providing their workers fair conditions and by passing those costs on to the public. So their employees get injured every day, and they shouldn't pay that?
The reason people become irate when a certain level of financial success is reached is because so often, the greater the inequity, the higher the likelihood that inequity was obtained through unfair means. It's not guaranteed, but the probability increases rapidly, and society is full of these extreme forms of inequity. Corruption isn't driven toward impoverishment, and human attributes are usually bell-shaped, not grotesquely skewed.
These companies become so bloated and their monopolies so extreme that often it is understandable that government give into their demands. So we end up with companies "too big to fail"--really, isn't that a euphemism for "too big to stand up to"?--and rationalizing the bullying and unfairness by telling ourselves these companies are really making a better place, as if it's only these companies, no one else, that no one else would have done these things if they could compete fairly, that we're buying from this company in particular because we preferred that company, and not because the choice was really to buy or go without, and that it's justified that the profits should be unevenly distributed throughout the company.
Isn't, after all, Amazon's success due to Bezos? Isn't he the one doing all the work?
And could you elaborate on hidden cost to others? All I see right now is thousands if not millions workplaces created thanks to Amazon, hundreds businesses having a relatively cheap marketplace to sell their goods, which in turn creates workplaces, millions of kids in their third world countries having their chance to leave the farm and go and try to build a skill, billion of people went out of poverty in last 30 years, all of it just because Bezos and others like him managed to make that offer “too good to refuse”.
This line with Bezos didn’t do all of the job himself is really a slippery slope, blink of an eye and you’re sending kulaks to Siberia with their families. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/
I also fail to see why it’s Bezos’s problem that nobody wants to hire those people for bigger salaries. At least he’s giving them something. Would they be better off without Amazon existence? Or are they better off because it’s existence?
the reality is that the few people in the first world (let's face it, if you're reading hackernews, you're probably in the first world) aren't benefiting directly from amazon in someway, whether it be directly or indirectly.
it's frustrating to see this generalized hatred towards anyone who surpasses a certain level of success, as if what he's doing to make the world a better place isn't quite enough and he should be off in africa spoonfeeding starving children. it's such a cartoonish and unrealistic notion that anyone with that amount of money would be able to solve the most complex issues that we face as a species simply because he has a high net worth.
i'd take facebook, google and amazon as my technocratic overlords over just facebook and google any year of the millenium.
Amazon is going to uproot huge amounts of engineers? Doubt it. I wouldn't move just to help jeff make a bit more.