Jeff Bezos Doesn’t Have Time to Be CEO of Amazon

Unlike normal scale issues where you may be convinced (or even see yourself) you were doing wrong even with the best of intentions, with successful founders and CEOs that's nigh impossible. They genuinely cannot acknowledge this because even hard numbers will look like "it needs a small tweak but my vision and implementation are still great".

DuPont CEOs surely see it as a net benefit that everyone can cook in teflon pans even if the price was heavy pollution. Same for big oil companies. Because they will always sell the narrative that "the bad had to come with the good". In reality the bad can almost exclusively be traced back to the desire for more profit, not to the ability to survive to deliver the good.

A warehouse worker or truck driver don't need to be squeezed for every drop of productivity or underpayed just so you can get your Amazon package on time. They're squeezed so Amazon can make an even bigger profit while you still get the package on time.

Turns out that while you can't necessarily come up with a perfectly accurate estimate of benefit/harm, you can come up with obvious candidates for improvement that are consistently disregarded by those successful founders and CEOs who saw the money rolling in and everything else stopped mattering. The bad stopped mattering or even existing in their view.

It's not a matter of calculating benefit/harm, it's a matter of them not acknowledging the harm even exists.

On one hand we have people who are starving because they don't have access to a reliable food source.

On the other, we have people who have severe health complications due to poor nutrition/obesity/whatnot.

I believe it is also a mistake to compare relative suffering--e.g. perhaps (hypothetically) more people are obese than starving, but starving sounds more painful than being obese: these comparisons also run afoul of subjective experience and understanding.

Both problems are significant, and require attention which we are capable of doing, as a civilization: we can multi-task. I believe it is naive to frame them in opposition to each other as well.

Apologies if my reading of your post is not what you intended.

He can start by not avoiding his taxes. That would be a good help.

> He doesn't owe us anything.

Naive. He owes at least the taxes he avoided. Any business that avoids taxes ends up costing the society more simply because they make use of infrastructure which needs maintenance, it likely pollutes the environment either directly or by proxy, and it ends up exploiting people for their bottom line, people who then need to be financed by the society. He also owes back for the brains he amassed that end up not giving back to the society, brains that were likely educated on the tax payer's pocket.

> He's free to spend his time on what he thinks is important

He is free, but he can also not be pretentious, or put his money where his mouth is.

The argument for helping other people instead of creating new ventures to pat your back is quite simple, but goes over most people's heads; the more scientists we have that actually tackle problems, the easier it becomes to deal with issues like cancer that plague everyone, the rich included. By accepting that the probability that many people smarter than us are impoverished, or born in awful circumstances is large, we see that the expectation that comes from dealing with poverty/lack of education has greater impact on our life expectancy and overall QOL over starting new projects and trying to sample people from a limited pool of candidates.

Obviously, being able to get just about anything delivered in a day is nice. But at what cost to the environment?

Is it a net good?

What am I going to do with kindle unlimited if I need to pay for price fixed scientific books [1]?

> Hunger? Amazon's subscribe and save isn't as insanely cheap, but it's still quite a deal.

He can't guarantee a good meal and roof for his workers. What are you on about?

[1] https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/p...

Those workers are definitely a temporary problem until those warehouses are 100% automated. Once all the people are gone, all the labor concerns are gone as well. No more safety. AC costs are minimized to what is needed for product safety. No more restrooms with no more plumbing. Just machines which ingest goods and distribute goods.

It’s pretty much impossible to get our human minds around $185 billion, but any which way you spin it, it’s an insane amount of money. His $2bn altruistic fund is sort of like the equivalent of me giving away £1000. It’s a bit generous, but really not very much. Plus, that sort of altruism is utterly skewed to your benefit when you’re that wealthy.

If he gave away 99.99% of his net worth, he’d still have $18.5 million, a figure that’d make anyone on the planet - and their family - blissfully comfortable for the rest of their lives.

Details aside (yeh, I know it’s not actual money, it’s in stocks, yada yada), the point is it is an absolutely obscene amount of money for any individual to possess. I have no understanding how he sleeps at night knowing the world around him is full of appalling poverty that he could help solve.

World hunger is a distribution problem related to the shape of the global politico-economic system, and the politico-economic systems in the places experiencing the most serious hunger; the problems in the latter are the main short-term problem, but they are anchored by the problems in the former which tend to make solutions both difficult and temporary.

Jeff Bezos is rich, but not “overthrow the international politico-econonic regime and institute a just world which would solve the problems creating hunger durably through simple amplication of wealth” rich.

The government is really subsidising the money into Jeff Bezos's accounts.

The skills aren't considered worth $25/h because they are not paid according to the value they are providing, which is evident by the grotesque profits that Amazon is making.

Amazon arguably has monopoly power over this type of job, which means there isn't competition for the workers, and they aren't paid correctly.

That should be corrected, rather than subsidised.

Letting all the otherwise important economic intricacies and potential efficiency regarding the implementation of UBI, isn't the aim of such a measure exactly what Bezos is describing here? To free oneself (laypeople in UBI's case) from personally irrelevant tasks in order to enjoy a more fulfilling life? Perhaps this could be an indicator that what is currently a huge privilege should in the future be a commonality.