3118

… with a nice settlement and a new rotating job the following week. Unfortunately, I don’t know what the url for that coverage was, but the CNN piece almost touches on it.

3119

All the meme means is that you’ve got to show your work beyond just saying that “a lot of people use it, therefore it must be good.” I’m putting forth an argument that the private nature of the Prime logistical network, Amazon’s allowance of third-party sellers with inconsistent or nonexistent QA, and the easy circumvention of “quality guardrails” (like paid reviews and direct returns) all add up to make something that is not a net positive for society. I haven’t seen opposing arguments from anyone else in the thread to try and refute those arguments.

And again, this isn’t peer-reviewed discussion or a research paper. I’m not demanding that anyone hit me back point-by-point. We’re all just buds shooting the shit in our tiny corner of the internet.

I don’t think this refutes my statement. See, when you say this:

There seems to be an underlying assumption that because a CEO takes on responsibility for other people’s livelihoods, they are also taking on an equivalent amount of risk for those livelihoods. If that were true, I could squint and almost see where you’re coming from – if a billionaire is willing to take on greater and greater amounts of personal risk, then it would be somewhat fair to say that they should be allowed to realize greater and greater gains as a result.

But what I’m saying with CEOs specifically and the uber-wealthy in general is that they are able to realize obscene gains, but they are doing so with essentially no personal risk at all. If a CEO makes a good decision, yeah, good things happen. New jobs are created, and the CEO gets a fat bonus. If the CEO makes a bad decision, a bunch of employees lose their jobs. The CEO may or may not lose their job, but they are almost certainly going to be left in a fine position afterward.

That’s what I mean when I say they’re playing with borrowed money. They get to realize massive gains, but they aren’t actually taking on any individual, personal risk. The risk of the CEO’s decisions is primarily on the workers, not the CEO. And since the CEO isn’t taking on a proportional amount of personal risk in their decisionmaking, I don’t think they should be entitled to the massive amounts of compensation and wealth that come as a result of their decisionmaking either.

As an aside, I think we’re getting way down in the weeds, hyperfocused on Bezos and Amazon and maybe a few steps removed from the overall notion of income (and wealth) inequality. If we need to pull ourselves out of the rabbit hole, I’m happy to drop a lot of this.

3120

If amazon was a sole propriotorship, that’d make sense. Unlimited risk for the owner, so they better not screw it up or they get hit hard with the failure bat. But corporations do not carry the same risks for their executives, which is a big part of why corporations exist. Tank the company, get a golden parachute, and on to the next one. Or maybe tanking the company was the purpose in the first place cough Mitt Romney and toys r us in order to fleece its bones. Not exactly the job creators and men of industry that some people seem to imagine.

3121

I am certainly not making the assumption that the CEO takes on the risk for those people’s livelihoods. Offhand I’m not aware of any job where an employee assumes the risk for his or her mistakes, from line cook to CEO.

Aside from maybe a coal miner or a race-car driver, I’m not aware of any jobs that require personal risk from the employees. When I said that the CEO is responsible for the livelihood of thousands of people and millions of dollars, that’s exactly what I mean: Their decisions impact thousands and thousands of people. Bob Iger decides to buy Marvel for $4 billion, which ends up paying off and creating tens of thousands of jobs and millions of fans.

CEOs (like most employees) aren’t paid because of the personal risk of what they do; they are paid based on (among other things) the scope of their decisions and the impact that can result from those decisions.

Here’s another example: Amazon decides they want to make an iPhone competitor. So they design a product, spend years developing it, get it manufactured, and ultimately bring it to market. Let’s say they had 100 people on that team, each paid $100,000 per year, and they spent five years working on the device. That’s a $50 million expense from the company, which ultimately did not pay off. The product fails, production stops, and the employees who worked on it go back to working on other projects instead.

So that mistake cost the company $50 million dollars…but the employees weren’t put at risk either. They each got paid a half-million dollars over the five years they worked on the product! It cost the company money, but there was no risk to the CEO or the employees. The product failed, and no one lost anything (except the company lost money). But if it had succeeded, they would have hired more workers and created more jobs.

That’s why the CEO is paid so much money: If he succeeds, it means that they can hire more employees. But that doesn’t mean that if he fails, they have to fire a bunch of employees.

3122

And yet people start companies all the time, invest a bunch of their own money, and then the company fails and they’re left with nothing but debt and broken dreams. A golden parachute for a high-profile job doesn’t mean that every CEO gets one.

3123

This is going to sound harsh, but the reality is that most people never do anything. They are born, they procreate, and they die. If they never existed, the world wouldn’t be any different. Their lives meant essentially nothing.

If everyone were like most people, we would be living in caves.

Because he actually did something. He changed the entire world, and for the better.

You can pretend like you are just as good because you are nice, but at the end of the day, you and everyone you know are going to die, and history probably isn’t going to notice.

Meanwhile, separate from his wealth, Bezos noticeably improved the lives of billions. He enabled commerce that resulted in the improving standard of living for tons of people. He made buying and selling stuff far more convenient for everyone.

You like to imagine such things just magically occur, but they don’t. They happen because specific men make them happen.

3124

I mean, I know I’m a better person than Jeff Bezos, whether history notices or not. So kindly fuck off by saying I’m pretending I’m just as “good” as him. What the actual fuck, dude.

Oh wait, to fit the spirit of your Atlas Shrugged belief system, I guess I should say, “Would you kindly fuck off?”

3125

We really don’t. We get that Amazon was the winner in the market. You seem to be the one that thinks its a unique snowflake that would have never occurred in some (possibly even better!) form without the Ayn Randian magnificence of Jeff Bezos.

The guy whose parents were able to float him $250,000 to start a business in their garage? Dude.

He didn’t start out Croesus rich, I’ll grant you that.

3126

I mean, you may think you are. But that’s just something you tell yourself. Your opinion isn’t universal.

If you ignore the achievements of Bezos, then sure, it’s easy to pass judgement… But you are just living in a fantasy world.

That guy didn’t start out rich, and he changed the world. You didn’t do that.

3127

Here’s a hint. This guy:

Blake: Fuck you-- that’s my name! You know why, mister? Because you drove a Hyundai to get here tonight, I drove an $80,000 BMW. That’s my name.

…is not intended as a role model. He’s not the hero of the movie.

3128

Your assertions are pretty weak there, bud. The environmental impact of Amazon alone is a tangled knot of cost/benefit for the entire planet. Stack that on top of local businesses going down because of it and I think the full story is a bit more complicated. Plus it’s also about the perfect example of wealth concentration, all that local commerce went poof, and into his pocket. I think we can all agree that while Amazon may or may not have created more jobs than it cost (which is doubtful, considering it’s a consolidation and optimization of effort) it certainly moved a shit-ton of local economy outwards into Amazon’s coffers, condensed elsewhere.

3129

What? If a line cook screws up dinner and gets people sick, that line cook is likely going to be fired. That is a risk for a mistake, and the line cook is definitely assuming that risk.

Maybe we’re working from different definitions of risk? Maybe consequence is a better word to use. What I’m saying is that, broadly, the average worker is not going to be able to enjoy the positive consequences (increased salary, higher wealth) of a CEO’s decisionmaking, while the average billionaire CEO is not going to be forced to take on the negative consequences (job loss, lowered salary, lower wealth) that would be visited on the worker.

Everyone in your example is so noble! It’s cool to create hypotheticals that prove your point. What happens if instead the shareholders decide that no return on 50 million invested is too bad of a deal, and they demand savings? You also assume that any profit made would have been reinvested in the company, but we’ve seen for decades now that money just doesn’t trickle down in that way.

I think in reality, what would happen is this:

Good thing those people aren’t obscenely wealthy and wouldn’t be affected by a wealth tax and therefore aren’t really pertinent to the discussion! Hell, the additional social welfare paid for via a wealth tax would probably be of great benefit to them!

3130

I’ve never stolen over $60 million of my employees’ tips, therefore I am not nearly as good a person as Jeff Bezos. Got it!

3131

I’ve donated a greater percentage of my net worth to charitable causes than Jeff Bezos. I am empirically a better person than Jeff Bezos 🤣

3132

Oh man, you live in a fantasy land. Wealth = goodness, come on.

3133

I mean, here’s a chart of consumer spending in the US. I’m hoping someone can point to the point at which Amazon changed the world.

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I see a relatively smooth trajectory, which suggests that nobody bought anything they weren’t going to buy anyway, or spent any money they weren’t going to spend anyway.

3134

This is another example… you imagine that Amazon would have just magically happened, like it was preordained.

Who would have created that alternate universe Amazon? You? Probably not, right? Not me.

Even if you pointlessly imagine some alternate universe that didn’t happen, the reality is that it’s absurd to imagine that alternate universe Amazon would have started without some alternate universe Bezos, who alternate universe Caledari would be complaining about.

And to simply say that Amazon “won in the market” is ignoring the crux of the issue, which is WHY did Amazon win in the market?

Amazon won in the market because it provided imense value to billions of other humans.

Maybe that value isn’t the kind of fantasy behavior we imagine in movies and stories. It’s more mundane, in that it simply allowed us to buy and sell stuff with huge convenience. It “only” saved us time and money, while dramatically expanding the selection of goods we could purchase as consumers.

People use Amazon because it makes their lives better. Not on some ethereal, magical way… Just in a normal, every day way. But that kind of improvement, applied to billions of other, is far more impressive than some storybook tale we tell our children.

3135

Amazon won the market because they were willing to spend and lose an endless amount of money to win the market. That is all.

3136

Now weigh that against their network’s impact on the climate, the number of people who have needed to buy the same product multiple times because Amazon promoted cheap knockoffs, the shuttering of local businesses because of the added convenience of shopping online, and the harm done to communities by wealth that has flowed out of those communities into Amazon’s pockets over the last two decades. Do you think they still come out ahead as a net positive? Why?

3137

They took out a second mortgage on their house and cashed out all their credit cards. It wasn’t like they just shook $250,000 out of their pockets like so much loose change.