3159

He changed the world, dude! Why didn’t you?

3160

Tom Hanks doesn’t deserve his salary because they could have hired someone else instead.

3162

Caledari is literally arguing:

It’s an insane position, because it means that no action that anyone takes can have value to society… Or at least, they themselves are not valuable or special as a result of their actions. If they hadn’t done whatever they did, it wouldn’t have mattered, because “someone else would have done it.”

3163

Amazingly, the arguments for both are the same, so it’s not really a strawman.

I agree with Strollen’s earlier argument:

3164

Well, even extraordinary inventions this can be true.

Look at the rivalry between Newton and Leibnitz over the invention of Calculus, for example. If Newton hadn’t invented it, someone else would have. And we know this, because they both did independently within a relatively narrow time frame.

And that was a far more important and innovative development than Amazon’s online retail platform. But enough smart people were working that problem that, eventually, even absent those two, something very close to what we know as calculus would have come into being. Almost certainly within a decade, two max.

As for Amazon: It may have been a few more years, and it might have been different, but the fundamental concept would have taken place. I mean it wasn’t like there wasn’t already a bunch of people already taking bites at that apple at the same time. See: the dot com boom. Amazon just happened to be the big winner, but it was hardly the only competitor.

3166

But they won because they were better than all the others.

Again, you are reducing out the value of any individual’s actions. No matter what you do, it is ultimately pointless, because eventually, someone else is going to do it anyways.

Even if you were to believe in that view, then that suggests the ONLY value that anyone can offer to society, is to be the first one to do something. So even in the case where you nihilistically reduce the innovative aircraft of anyone’s choices, the mere fact that someone like Bezos did something first, at the time he did… Is the only metric by which you could measure anyone’s utility anyway, in that worldview. Because that act of doing something first is the only thing pushing society forward.

If we accept the unsubstantiated claim that some alternate Bezos would have eventually done what Bezos did… Then that would just mean that person was Bezos. THEY would the one to have changed the world.

Even in that worldview, being the one who actually does a thing so has value, because SOMEONE has to actually do it. It cannot continually exist in this ethereal state where it is merely an unrealized idea that no one has actually executed, and all of society shares it’s non existence equally.

At some point, actions are taken and the person who actually takes them is the person deserving of credit. Not the multitudes who could have done so, but didn’t.

It’s mindless to play this game of saying, always in hindsight, “oh, well that’s obvious, anyone curls have done that.” Every great idea seems obvious on HINDSIGHT. That’s what separates visionaries from everyone else. Seeing something in hindsight isn’t worthy of the same praise that is due to seeing something before anyone else

Anyone can watch a chess game and see how the masters moved their pieces. Not everyone can decide the moves to make in real time. Watching the game doesn’t take the same degree of skill as playing the game.

3167

So, we’ve gotten around to the argument that anyone who isn’t successful at becoming a trillionaire and make GDP go up is a worthless whiny cog that doesn’t accept their lot in life to live below their effort. It’s true, we’re all worthless against Fuckerberg, the Kochs, Skilling, Warren Anderson, Murdoch and all such luminary job creators that did things no one could ever possibly ever thought about, not even those who lost the race, the miserable failures.
I’d propose we strike until we see how much exactly their work is worth, but I expect we’d get the Pinkerton’s to set us straight in our place in society. We just have to wait for the house of cards to crumble so that we can magnanimously pay to rise it again, as is our place, I guess.
It’s just a shame the environment just doesn’t seem to give a shit about the brilliancy of the supermen, though; the end of history was going so well. Oh, and that whole China thing eating everyone’s lunch by avoiding the stupid mistakes that happen when you feed egos with, well, everything.
I’m sure that’ll go away quickly now that a real serious man is in charge of the world and we can ignore the contradictions about how any of it works. Any day now…

3168

No. They are not.

Yes, you are strawmanning. Constantly. That’s a large part of how discussion of a tiny tax on wealth above 50 million dollars got steered here.

3169

Yes, yes, you keep parroting the justifications that the GOP use to lower taxes on corporations and the wealthy, while ignoring forty years of evidence showing that whatever money does get reinvested into a company pales in comparison to the money that lines the pockets of the already wealthy. You don’t need to explain it again.

Yes, assuming you don’t have any expenses at all and just make your salary in pure profit, I guess you’re right! But in the real world, many people live on thin margins, and many don’t have enough savings to cover any amount of time of unemployment. For most Americans, losing their job is a catastrophe, full stop.

Again, you prove unwilling or unable to tell the difference between illustration and literal statement of fact. If a company loses a bunch of money, shareholders or executives or whoever will make cuts to protect the company’s profits and therefore its shares price. That is the norm, because you want to keep your operating costs lower than your profits. Right? Or do I not understand business enough?

Man, only you could say this and then follow it up with the GOP’s definition of trickle-down economics. Amazing.

This argument holds no water because it ignores the fact that the wealthy have an inordinate amount of influence in American politics, because of their wealth. Good luck getting an inheritance tax passed while they retain that influence.

3170

We should try an experiment. Let’s see what happens to Amazon’s stock when Bezos takes a week off. Then let’s see what happens when every employee takes the following week off. The results may surprise and astound us all!

3171

I’ll try to take my own advice, but maybe start ignoring these monumentally stupid arguments from Andy and, yes, Timex.

3172

None of this has anything to do with corporate tax rates. At all. It feels like you have canned arguments against corporations, so you’re just using them without any regard to the actual point. You do understand that Bezos didn’t get his money from Amazon profits, right?? Or Jobs?

As for the layoffs after the Fire Phone flop, the article says that they were due to dropping new products. But for the sake of argument, let’s just assume that the layoffs were made to offset the $170 million loss on the Fire Phone. I’ll assume that they laid off 99 people, which is the highest interpretation of “dozens.” To offset the $170 million loss, that would mean that each of those 99 employees was making a salary in excess of $1.7 million. But since that’s obviously not what they were paid, we can conclude that the layoffs were not done to offset the financial loss.

And by the way, I know several people who worked on the Fire Phone at the time, and exactly what I said happened to them: They went off that project and went on to a different project. You know, just like most other canceled projects.

Losing your job after two years of employment is less of a catastrophe than being unemployed for two years straight.

No, that is not correct. A company has employees because the value they contribute to the company is greater than their salary. If you fire 500 people to make up for the cost of a failed project, you haven’t gained anything, because now you’re 500 people short of what’s required to run the company. Losing money and then firing your employees is like losing a shoe and then cutting off your leg to pay for new shoes.

Furthermore, shareholders understand that you might incur losses over multiple years, because taking the profits and reinvesting them is the best way to grow the company. If you want an example of this, just look at Amazon’s revenues over time, and how they repeatedly reinvested their profits into the company instead of just passing those profits on to shareholders.

3173

Great, we’ve established that billionaires achieve their wealth by extracting suplus-labor from their employees, rather than through their own work, skill, deservingness, etc.etc.

3174

That’s literally the concept behind every job. A company hires someone because their labor is more valuable than the expense of paying the employee. And the employee chooses to work there because the pay is more valuable than their own time. That’s how employment works.

3175

Well, I’ve previously come around to understand where Timex is coming from a few times, and, well, it was some level of fair. This discussion, however, just reminds me I really need to file my links, as there’s no neoliberal myth that doesn’t come up. At least it assures me that my portfolio isn’t going anywhere.

3176

Great, we’ve established that billionaires achieve their wealth by extracting suplus-labor from their employees, rather than through their own work, skill, deservingness, etc.etc.

3177

Voluntary employment is voluntary, so no one is “extracting” that labor. And any employer gains surplus labor from their employees, because that’s the definition of work for pay. And that surplus labor does not preclude the work, skill, or talents of the employer, nor does work for hire mean that other people don’t “deserve” those profits.

3178

Are you unironically citing Marx?

3179

Jumping in on the whole ‘mythical hero’ status that CEO’s like Bezos, Jobs and Musk have bestowed upon them…

If you hear the fanbois tell it they made nothing but godlike decisions throughout their reign and thus deserve every cent of wealth they have.

The reality is that they are people who made a bunch of decent decisions while managing to avoid bad ones as well have circumstances align in their favor. Plus there’s the thing that just having a shitton of money can insulate one from even really bad decisions. Point in case: Donald Trump.

So let’s take Amazon for example; why did it survive the dot.com bust? Because they weren’t stupid like their competitors who embraced the ‘get large or get lost’ mindset in the middle of a bubble. Does that qualify as a smart decision? It certainly was a smarter one then their competitors made, but I would call it ‘normal’ vs ‘idiotic’ rather than ‘visionary’ vs ‘normal’.

AWS is another good example. It didn’t start because Bezos had a mystical insight that cloud computing was the future. It started because Amazon’s book business had way too much hardware capacity and they just started to rent out a bunch of it to recoup costs. It was circumstance based of a poor decision (buying too much hardware) that set AWS up to become a success story.

In short, it’s not divine champion vs regular mortals, its one-eyed king vs the blind.

3180

Point in case, Donald Trump started out in life as a billionaire, Bezos didn’t, and now Bezos has like between 20 and 200 times Trump’s wealth.

I think you’re just minimizing the impact of these “normal” decisions.
You are just suggesting that everyone else in the world makes idiotic decisions all the time. You’re just redefining the terms, but using “normal” to describe what “visionary” previously meant. You’re just saying that all the “regular mortals” are blind idiots.

If the decisions were truly “normal”, then someone else would have been Bezos. He didn’t start out ahead of everyone. He started out behind a ton of really rich folks, and he beat them.