Here we see Bezos hurriedly trying to patch up his horrendous legacy with an empty letter. Too little too late. Hopefully peoples' memories aren't so short to forget that he's been nothing but the encyclopedic example of greed.
I have no sympathy for him. If he really wanted to make up for his decisions (or at least for not addressing issues), he would have stayed as CEO and fix it all. It really looks like a childlish attempt to... I dunno what exactly are Bezos' intentions.
Is it a get out of jail free card? 'I wanted to change and improve workers situation, but my successor totally ignored it'.
He already gave his answer by surrendering the power he could have used to change things. If it comes out that he was pushed out for trying to actually change things then more power to him, but I find that extremely unlikely.
>Hopefully peoples' memories aren't so short
Who has time for thinking when Marvel Megahero Show #34 has 3000 new episodes to binge? Besides, he's donating to or even directing all the Right Causes now! He's like a real life superhero.
Can you tell us more about the extraordinarily and unforgivably damaging lives of evil of those two?
Do you really think that’s a reasonable way to describe Gates’s tenure at Microsoft? Some anticompetitive behaviour hardly seems unforgivably evil.
Do you subscribe to some weird right wing conspiracy theory about Soros?
He seems like a pretty reasonable and interesting guy. The Vox episode sounded like a balanced take on his legacy: mixed but generally positive impact. The biggest argument against him that resonates with me is the same that applies to all the mega-wealthy: a handful of rich individuals should not have ultimate power to craft policy decisions, rather the world would benefit from a more balanced democratic process.
He was really nasty on a personal level too. Allen only saved his stake in the company because he happened to walk through the office late one night and heard Bill gloating with someone else about how they were going to screw him out of his shares.
I'm glad Bill has turned into the philanthropic leader he is now, but there was more ugly to his career than just some anticompetitive behavior.
Sounds like a fun story, do you know if it's online somewhere?
The stuff you mention is so far from “evil” that it’s hardly worth mentioning in this context. Gates isn’t a saint, but calling him unforgivably evil is just ridiculous.
I can remember 4 controversies surrounding Soros off the top of my head. There is (or there should be) room to discuss the statements below without redirecting off-topic by raising a curtain around the subject through claims of anti-semitism:
* In the late eighties Soros was convicted of insider trading by some French regulatory authority. If memory serves, his appeals of these convictions failed. Some people claim the conviction and fine was politically motivated, some claim the conviction was true as written.
* In 2009 a Hungarian agency fined Soros Fund Management LLC for manipulating values of Hungarian OTP bank stocks. The same arguments were made for/against the justice of the conviction.
* There are claims that Soros took advantage of the British screwing up when they pegged the Pound against the Deutschmark under the Exchange Rate Mechanism, and that he gamed a lot of value from the British economy as a result. I probably don't have the details right, I've heard people say that he sucker-punched the British, and others say that it actually helped the Brits in the long run.
* There are claims that in the 90's Soros manipulated the Maylaysion economy, society and currency for his profit, and that many suffered as a result. Some believe Soros had nothing to do with the Malaysion troubles and call this a conspiracy theory- it's still worth discussing.
My point is that the use of labels that identify real problems to distract from or avoid altogether a potentially controversial discussion has the potential to make [real] racism, [real] anti-semitism, etc. much worse, and should be avoided.
EDIT: spelling / grammar
You're conflating two posts- each is taking a different position.
The OP mentions "...the league of superwealthy philanthropists like Bill Gates and George Soros who leave their lengthy, extraordinarily and unforgivably damaging lives of evil...". He was referring to his belief that there is an evil group of wealthy people- and that this group includes Soros as well as Gates. My post gave examples of controversy surrounding Soros, with the admonition that these should be discussed instead of being labeled then memory-holed because of the man's ancestry.
In the OP's post, Soros was included as a member of a group- without mention or implication of any member's ancestry or race. The accusation of anti-semitism regarding the post, based only on Soros having been included in a list of "bad" superwealthy people, lacks any support other than Soros's inclusion in the list- which itself is not even "thinly veiled" evidence of anti-semitism.
The application of the label "anti-semitic" to either post is an over-reaching use of the term, and this over-reach very likely contributes to an increase in real anti-semitism.
The inclusion of Bill Gates further supports this view, most of the people who’d describe him that way believe in weird right wing conspiracy theories about microchips and 5G.
And in any case, “screwing a whole nation”? Are you serious? Black Wednesday screwed the Tories, not the UK. Poor monetary policy cost the UK a few billion pounds, small money in the grand scheme of things.
Even calling it a change of heart seems to give him to much credit by implying this letter actually represents his real feelings as of right now.
...without whom access to goods during the pandemic would have been vastly more difficult and costly.
I am completely in agreement that Amazon is more destructive than it is good now, particular when it comes to the way it treats workers, but it doesn’t help to deny that it provides value.
uhh... bill gates?
I would ignore all of it just to hear him talk for ten minutes about the overwhelming privilege he was born into and how that brought about his success.
Amazon could exist - perhaps not quite to its current scale - without owning its warehouses. It would pay more, but the workers would not earn more. That profit would just be spread across different fulfillment companies and shipping enterprises. It's not as if with Amazon these workers are getting $10/hr but without Amazon they'd be making $25/hr. They'd still make $10/hr just with a different name on the paycheck.
You are correct, Amazon without warehouses only pushes the problem one step out to their fulfillment / shipping companies. The only way to rehabilitate Amazon (from evil to not evil... still far from good) would be for them to pay their employees (ALL of them - not just the tech workers) a livable wage, and for them to only sell things that have been made with non-exploitative labour practices.
The way I'm seeing it - the more you control the situation, the more guilty you are of the exploitation. Amazon controls who they work with pretty fully - but when I look at gates-era microsoft, I work my way out from their direct employees to the companies they work with, and I can't find the exploitative labour until I hit the PC manufacturers that were buying windows to put on their PCs. Maybe I'm missing something, but that feels pretty far out of their control - I'd place my blame at the feet of Dell or Compaq, not MSFT at that point.
The only workaround I've found for ethical consumption is buying second hand, which dilutes my contribution to these industries a little
Add the fact that the deadlines on product announcement and shipping are very strict, so the pressure on workers assembling iPhones is the biggest. Stress with assembly of other manufacturers' phones is nowhere near than that of Apple's.
Samsung, I think, assembles phones in Vietnam, where labor conditions are better than in continental china.
When you are a company the scale of Amazon you have no excuse to not treat the people who make your services possible well. Of course there will be different levels for different jobs, but Amazon should have treated their employees with respect and been using their weight to lift the wage floor.
This of course is true for all companies but especially for the giants.
The problem with this sort of rant is that no amount of equity would ever be enough to satisfy you, and you don't care about the cost to their customers. America and American psuedocapitalism has still made countless lives across the world better in spite of that.
If this opinion hurts your feelings, you should probably spend less time on what is principally a venture capitalism forum.
I think Bezos will have an excellent legacy.
It is important to know where the created value comes from
https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/17/21443933/amazon-post-offi...
Based on that, I don't discount criticisms of Amazon, but rather take them as criticism of the incentive structures in which all businesses operate. The cult of criticism around Bezos is silly, but ignorable. People need something easy to fixate on, and it's hard to do that for something so abstract and complicated as an economic incentive structures.
I find it amusing that sharing a negative opinion about Bezos has apparently affected you so deeply that you've immediately marked me down as an irrational idiot who needs to be shown the door.
Usually these situations occur when people accidentally project their own wounded feelings. Frankly I'm just here for stimulating discussion and stay here because HN has changed my mind before, and generally makes me less dumb.
Your comment has not made me less dumb. It's just boring gatekeeping. Continue posting like this if you'd like; I have zero interest in it.