The Bezos backlash is bigger than Blue Origin’s success
qz.com
qz.com
I get to watch the guy who killed book stores ride a giant dick into space."
Just letting that system persist and then hamfistedly grabbing the gains at the end and redistributing them is difficult for a huge number of reasons including both fairness and regulatory capture.
It's seems governments have a budgeting problem, not a funding problem.
You can point out objective things like that contemporary billionaires are nothing like super-rich monarchy or noblemen in the past, who literally didn't have to work one day of their lives and could dispose of people around them as they pleased, quite literally. There was no me too, no rape allegations, they just did whatever they pleased with minimal consequences.
You can point out all that, but it's irrelevant. Many humans just don't tolerate "rich entitled jerks who show off". Other humans don't tolerate other kind behaviours; humanity is clearly not a uniform bunch.
Even if we stole 10B from Bezos and gave it out equally to every US citizen... Its ~$30. Is this life changing for anybody in the US? If so what percent. Most beggars on the street clear more than $30 a day, some make $30 a hour!
So yeah, common core has failed us, and the inability to understand numbers is a problem.
I do this nearly every time somebody is upset somebody else has money. One time it was some Walmart executive. They got some multi million dollar bonus. I did the math, it would have been something like 2.27 a week more for all the employees.
Edit:
But yet we have folks still going around on twitter saying he could give everybody a million (some even a billion) and still have money left over.
I mean, obviously it's gonna look small if we fixate on Bezos specifically. If we "stole" a flat $1B from every American billionaire and paid it out equally to every US citizen, that stimulus jumps up to $1,996.70. If we "stole" all the money from every billionaire, that'd jump up further to $12,569.61.
We can go further. The top 1% of Americans have a combined net worth of $34.2 trillion. If we "stole" all of that, the resulting stimulus would be a comfy $102,842.28.
> I did the math, it would have been something like 2.27 a week more for all the employees.
$122.58/year could very well make a considerable difference to someone barely scraping by. And again, you're fixating on one Walmart executive; what about the other executives who likely received similar bonuses? VPs? Middle managers?
If you made the top %1 liquidate all their assets to give to others everything would stop working. You would create more problems than ever.
Somebody would have to buy the assets, and because we are doing away with anybody who would have the sort of money to buy the assets, you would likely deadlock long before you would get 34 trillion out of the system. Like its mind boggling what you said. Where would this money come from? Other 1%ers who would then have to sale their assets?
Folks, Net Worth is not tangible, and even less tangible if you required a mass amount of folks to liquidate. It would simply drive prices down to a point where they were no longer in the 1% and then our economy would simply pop.
Every major system that moves money (this is what we want) would grind to a halt, and the folks you want to steal money for would simply have no job and have no cash flow.
But beyond that, stealing money assets, or even in this case "net worth" is immoral.
Bezos was a nobody driving a Honda Civic, folks just mad he drives a rocket now.
100% agree, so lets tax the fucker, and all the other fuckers.
I'm not a fan of Bezos or the other "fuckers", but how are American billionaires going to pay that tax? They'll have to sell assets to someone not subject to the tax, probably a billionaire from another country.
Do you really imagine anything will get better when most big American businesses are owned by foreign billionaires? Will working conditions in Amazon warehouses improve if Amazon becomes a subsidiary of Alibaba?
Or you could tax the assets themselves, in which case it no longer matters who owns them. And seeing as how certain assets - like land - have inelastic supply (i.e. taxation doesn't affect the price point set by supply v. demand) and can't exactly be moved to offshore accounts, taxing the value of those assets would be far more economically sound than the current emphasis on income and payroll taxes.
Most of those assets fall into two categories:
1. Real estate, which doesn't need to be liquidated to be put under public ownership
2. Corporate shares, which don't need to be liquidated to be put under public ownership
The thought experiment around liquidating that wealth and cutting everyone a check was purely a response to your own hypothetical of liquidating a fraction of one billionaire's wealth and cutting everyone a check. Specifically, it was to point out that your "argument" misses the bigger picture around how much wealth is locked up in the accounts of even just billionaires, let alone millionaires.
> But beyond that, stealing money assets, or even in this case "net worth" is immoral.
Unless the wealthy do it through rent, lobbying, labor exploitation (including union busting), and monopolization, then it's all hunky-dory, right?
That's why I put "steal" in scare quotes. Retaking wealth already stolen from the working class is the precise opposite of theft, yet here you and others are, white-knighting for the poor millionaires.
Something's gotta give, or else the outcome will inevitably be far worse for that 1% than merely having to liquidate their assets.
A year passes. Now what? No more billionaires to fleece, but the population demands some more, because spending windfall money is such a fun. So the next move is to fleece the millionaires...
Already the Ancient Greeks knew quite a lot about populist rule and its consequences. And the 20th century definitely tried it out in much larger dimensions, to much worse outcomes.
Humanity is not normal, but it is normally distributed!
I know that's a tall order, but I think governments should be accountable to how they've invested their citizen's money and how those investments are doing.
Also should be pointed out many countries greatly expanded their deficit as part of Covid measures.
I'm not even saying Bezos is appropriately taxed. I don't really care how high his tax bill is, but my main point is that the existence of world hunger and poverty isn't his fault even though many people online blame him for it, and secondly, taxing him at 100% wouldn't seem to solve the problem.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governm...
Raising the deficit and inflating the currency for blind and reckless cash give-aways (imo), only makes it worse and all the more reprehensible and should have everyone questioning why we're not overthrowing the existing parties by rallying around new ones and collectively agreeing to stop voting Dem or Rep altogether. Because if we traced the government (tax) money spent over the past year to where it is now, I bet we'd see it directly widening the wealth gap no matter the party or rhetoric used while misappropriating it.
Anyway, I think the real solutions (to hunger, education, healthcare, &c) would involve breaking down the issues causing the inequality and really working to solve them one by one in good faith with a common vision. Small groups of people can achieve this. It's unfortunate that the idea of that happening on the scale we're discussing is laughably absurd.
Saying "tax the rich" as a fix to a problem shows a lack of critical thought.
At the moment it seems like every government in the world is being held hostage by the obscenely rich, while workers with multiple jobs are struggling to even afford rent.
Please give me some hope and tell me how the change might come about? What signs have you seen out there that things are changing?
Because everything I see is just more and more wealth inequality, expanding year over year. Meanwhile the media, also in the obscenely rich's pocket, reports on these billionaire space assholes as if they've achieved something worthwhile, which is sickening to me.
My answer is always some variant of "I don't like the way you treat the help"
I know I'm in the minority, but I stopped shopping with Amazon long ago, closed my audible account, and have slowly been migrating my current workplace off our/their AWS infrastructure.
A handful of people have mentioned this is too much of a hardline stance, but personally I think it's important to take some actions if you truly want to see change in the world.
You're quite welcome!
It's not even like a physical constraint like having to drive a little further to a different store. Just visit a different website it's the bare minimum of effort needed.
For instance you can't buy a quality headset from Plantronics or get a USB NFC reader from either of those firms. Best Buy will sell you a Sony Alpha 7 camera but forget about any lenses other than the kit lens.
Don't get me started about how Dick's Sporting Goods sells mostly men's athletic shirts that will show your nipples which would be fine if I wore a bra but I don't know many men that do. I asked the people there, "Do you want to sell any clothes or do you want to make excuses for why you aren't selling any?"
They probably just want to be left alone. They get shipped the stuff someone higher in the chain of command ordered. Why are you bothering the sales staff with things outside their control?
Does Amazon really care what answers people give? Would dicks sporting goods? Wegmans at least wants to look as if they care.
Planet fitness once told the NYT that they’d never gotten customer feedback on an issue but they make it so hard to find the form that they obviously don’t want you to use it.
It's quite possible that the stuff you're complaining about sells to other people. If so, I can see keeping their customers that purchase happy.
Agreed. That's what I did.
What I found amusing is that when I cancelled the services, Amazon (unlike pretty much every other company) didn't ask me to tell them why. It seems that they want to know everything about everybody -- except for why someone would want out.
Big successes do not erase equally big failures. And the failure here, not on Amazon alone, is far too many Americans not earning enough from their labor the fund continuing to exist reasonably and show up to work.
Roughly a third of us have few worries. Media, business, a whole lot of news and opinion bolsters that third, the assumption is things are fine.
Like two different worlds.
Yeah, govt is out of touch, but so are many others, all oh whom dominate the national dialog.
SpaceX very much branded its initial launches as "we are what NASA should have been." Countless appearances and interviews with people who were very clearly "engineers' engineers" excited out of their minds to be working on the project. It was clear that there was overflowing passion given a very "shiny" space to dream, and that was the guiding light. You could disagree with Elon Musk and still admire his ability to build, inspire, and fund such a team. You could see the light in their eyes and want to contribute like them some day.
Blue Origin was very much starting from a disadvantage, not being the first private-industry movers. But - and I think this is critical - they also made an unforced error by insulating the public from the passion their engineers undoubtedly have. It makes it very much the Jeff Bezos Show, which makes the whole venture much more susceptible to public opinion about Bezos personally. His tone-deaf remarks on customers "paying" for the venture dug that hole even deeper.
Setting aside emotion, whoever paves the way for space exploration in the coming decade needs to inspire. I'm going to root for the team that understands what it means to inspire. And that makes it impossible for me to root for Blue Origin.
Wasn't BO incorporated in 2000, two years earlier than SpaceX? Whatever delay they incurred is not caused by them entering the field later.
This is really all it is, it's rich guys performing for other rich guys while the rest of us fight for scraps. It's sickening to me that so many people defend the honor of rich CEOs like Bezos, Branson, Musk, Gates, etc because they truly think that more money = better than.
Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are just hobbies for the rich, but SpaceX might bring real benefits to "average joes" (just like the GPS system did).
Starlink isn't profitable yet, and won't be for several more years.
Parts of their business are definitely profitable today, for example the Falcon 9 launch business. Other parts of their business are being pursued in the hope of future profits, but those future profits are some years away.