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Comment by Kon-Peki | Hacker News Reader

Keep in mind that boats in general aren't built in sufficient quantities to enable mass-production on the scale of automobiles. And this is a custom yacht on top of that.

So, a stupendously high percentage of the purchase price went directly into the paychecks of the middle-class laborers that built it.

Let's be honest - this is going to spend 98% of its time sitting in a harbor, with a full-time middle-class maintenance team making sure it is ready for the other 2% of the time. Enjoy it Jeff.

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Yes, at the end of the day the lucky laborers now hold a fresh piece of paper on their hands. While Mr. Bezos enjoys his real world tangible object, the laborers will discover that their work isn't done yet. Because their money is only worth if they themselves work for each other once again, otherwise it is just worthless paper.

But all of that labour could have gone into building actually productive assets or infrastructure that meet some of the many real needs that exist in the world. This is a terrible allocation of resources, barely better than him paying them to go into the desert and dig a giant hole and then fill it in again.

I don't the Jeff Bezos personally is the problem, but he and his peers are symptoms of an economic system with very messed up incentives.

Though somehow I still find it unsatisfying that these laborors rely on a single person's decision to buy a luxury item for these wages.

I'm not anti-capitalism by any means, but despite the average person becoming better off, I find it deeply unsatisfying that we have very few mechanisms to control the insane broadening of the wealth gap.

I don't want to rely on Jeff trickling down his wealth through purchases of yachts and random donations to Van Jones. I want us to collectively agree that there must be some ceiling to wealth for individuals. Not putting a ceiling on wealth is effectively not putting a ceiling on power - and we've already realized that power needs to have checks and balances.

Yeah sure, I agree in principal. And I agree that power needs checks and balances. But all I see are proposals that move the power into the hands of a fickle mob which in the long run is way worse (see the French Revolution as an example).

And I don't have a Time Machine to go back and change the rules to prevent him from getting so rich in the first place. So here we are. He's got the cash. And it's great that he is spending at least a tiny amount of it on something that requires a continuous stream of spending or the asset becomes useless. Whether he uses it or not.

Yeah, I also want us to agree on a cap of life expectancy in Europe and North America. We have millions of poor kids dying of disease and malnutrition in Asia and Africa. Whereas millions of rich people in West are reaching up to 80-100 years of age, supported by high quality medicine and nutrition. If we agree to put ceiling on age at 75% of current it could save tremendous resources for young and poor people in this world.

I can only assume this is sarcasm.

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