5 ms·

Jeff Bezos: Request for ideas

28 points by cosmoharrigan 9y ago

deathhand 9y ago
How does one parse thousands of ideas? How does one keep it in a character limit? Post an image like he does? Would it be a novel idea to copy the already posted images and then repost with dummy(but appear real) accounts using automation making this exercise worthless(or does he plan on doing this himself with no attribution?)
- krapp 9y ago
  You can't possibly think Jeff Bezos had any direct personal involvement with any of this. He likely didn't compose the tweet and likely won't have a hand in reading the results. I doubt anyone associated with him is actually going to read the results.
petepete 9y ago
He (well, Amazon) could be more forthcoming with taxes.
- anonymoushn 9y ago
  Are you saying that US federal spending is the most effective charity in the world?
radiorental 9y ago
Paint me cynical... He's a smart kid, a lack of insight and focus do not come to mind when I think of his ability to tackle challenges. In other news today... a lot of middle to upper middles class people, who view Amazon as a cold corporate digital version of Walmart, just had their favourite grocery store taken over.
- CamperBob2 9y ago
  In other news today... a lot of middle to upper middle class people who already get 2 or 3 boxes a week from Amazon will start getting 3 or 4 boxes a week instead. I don't think the widespread resentment of Amazon as a "cold corporate digital version of WalMart" exists outside of your own point of view, and perhaps a few publishers' offices in New York. Amazon is one of those factors in its customers' lives that pretty much always Just Works. Gotta give credit (and cash, and gift cards) where it's due.
  - radiorental 9y ago
    Forgive me, I conflated a complex issue. And I also regcogise I'm generalizing. I know more than a few people who dislike what Amazon did to their favourite local bookstore but also shop at Amazon. I'm very long AMZN and I shop at Wholefood & Trader Joes. I'm just suggesting that (a) Bezos has smart people around him who could give him suggestions and (b) this isn't bad PR.
  - maxsilver 9y ago
    > I don't think the widespread resentment of Amazon as a "cold corporate digital version of WalMart" exists outside of your own point of view, and perhaps a few publishers' offices in New York. Just one opinion, but I already thought of Amazon as "the internet's WalMart". And that was before they took over Whole Foods. It's not a widespread opinion yet, but I'm guessing as they exert ever more influence, more people will come to a similar association. If Amazon decides to takeover Meijer's next (just as an example) a lot of upper-midwest folks would suddenly make a similar association.
Apreche 9y ago
Bribe all of congress. It's not that expensive for someone with Bezos money. Why let energy companies, telcos, insurance providers, and military contractors get all the action? Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple are bigger than they are! For less than the cost of SpaceX they could have just bribed congress to give NASA sufficient funding. For less than the cost of whatever Bill Gates tries to do with education, he could have just bribed congress to fund schools properly. If they really believed in equal rights regardless of gender, sex, nationality, sexual orientation, race or religion, they could bribe congress to fix those things. If they cared about the environment, you could bribe congress to fund the EPA more. Single payer health care, they can just make it happen. If I had that money, that's sure as hell what I would be doing with it. The fact that they haven't already suggest to me that maybe they don't actually believe in these things as much as they sometimes pretend to. Rich assholes never put their money where their mouth is. And when I say bribe I mean the legal kind. Where you fund their campaigns through SuperPACs. You can outspend those Koch bros. easily. Why not go for it?
- throwaway-1209 9y ago
  You seem to think money grows on trees. Your suggestions can't be implemented without taxing people like Bezos to death. In fact, I'm pretty sure they can't be implemented at all, no matter who you "bribe".
  - yequalsx 9y ago
    Every wealthy nation but the U.S. provides universal healthcare. They all provide much more subsidized higher education. They do theses things without taxing people to death. Do you have any evidence to support your belief?
    - throwaway-1209 9y ago
      They have different cost structures and much higher taxes, and their healthcare couldn't exist without multi billion research efforts US healthcare consumer pays for. How much pharmaceutical innovation is there outside the US?
devanti 9y ago
The problem I find with most philanthropic efforts, most namely charities, is that it's a black box with little measure of accountability. You don't know how exactly the money is spent, and how effective it was. If someone can start a 100% transparent charitable organization, where each line item of expense is open to the public, it would give people more confidence in giving, and it would give the organizations more incentive to make effective and efficient decisions. Kind of like a manager overseeing your moves, except it's the public since they provide the funding. In terms of where to focus the efforts -- I find providing education is the only short term effort that can lead to long term and everlasting gains.
- jarjoura 9y ago
  Just as many people would only donate to organizations where they can be anonymous. For example, if you were a gay man and wanted to send money to Russia to help fight the anti-gay sentiment over there, you might not want to do it with your name easily traceable.
  - omonra 9y ago
    Or, a more real-life example, one might want to donate anonymously to a no side in the referendum about gay marriage in the US lest they want to lose their job.
- sov 9y ago
  You might be interested to hear about GiveWell and Effective Altruism. http://www.givewell.org/ http://www.givewell.org/ https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ GiveWell, in particular, publishes a bunch of information (cost/benefit analyses, intervention reports, etc.) about their charitable success/initiatives.
throwaway-1209 9y ago
Just pool the money with Buffett and Gates, and do something jointly. Eradicate some deadly disease, cure cancer, something like that. Really bring those billions and project management skills to bear on it.
andrewstuart 9y ago
I tweeted to suggest that he buy a Raspberry Pi computer for every primary school kid in the world.
andrewstuart 9y ago
It'll be interesting to see a summary of all the ideas, after all the snark, looney and funny replies are filtered out.
camus2 9y ago
Pay your warehouse employees a little bit more? because it's easy to feel charitable when you made money by over-exploiting your workforce.
neptunespear 9y ago
On the microscopic chance that Jeff Bezos sees this: mellow out, man! There was an anecdote, I can't remember from where, maybe from the "Faces of Amazon" page, related to Jeff's response to the NYT criticism back in 2015. Jeff's response was, "should that happen to you, escalate to HR or email me directly". Someone did exactly that and got fired for it.
sunstone 9y ago
The Elephant Soup Solution: 1) First, buy an under utilized country (or a piece of country eg Newfoundland, Sakhalin Island, Princes Royal Island or similar) 2) install the British Institutions OS (run by retired Commonwealth employees). just like Hong Kong or Singapore. 3) allow visa free travel and residence for any non-criminal person on earth 4) To prime the pump, buy stuff from this new country and sell it through any handy distribution channel you might have N.B. Don't forget to recirculate income from the top of the economy to the bottom or the heart will stop.

28 points by cosmoharrigan 9y ago

How does one parse thousands of ideas? How does one keep it in a character limit? Post an image like he does? Would it be a novel idea to copy the already posted images and then repost with dummy(but appear real) accounts using automation making this exercise worthless(or does he plan on doing this himself with no attribution?)

krapp 9y ago
You can't possibly think Jeff Bezos had any direct personal involvement with any of this. He likely didn't compose the tweet and likely won't have a hand in reading the results. I doubt anyone associated with him is actually going to read the results.

petepete 9y ago

He (well, Amazon) could be more forthcoming with taxes.

anonymoushn 9y ago
Are you saying that US federal spending is the most effective charity in the world?

radiorental 9y ago

Paint me cynical... He's a smart kid, a lack of insight and focus do not come to mind when I think of his ability to tackle challenges. In other news today... a lot of middle to upper middles class people, who view Amazon as a cold corporate digital version of Walmart, just had their favourite grocery store taken over.

CamperBob2 9y ago
In other news today... a lot of middle to upper middle class people who already get 2 or 3 boxes a week from Amazon will start getting 3 or 4 boxes a week instead. I don't think the widespread resentment of Amazon as a "cold corporate digital version of WalMart" exists outside of your own point of view, and perhaps a few publishers' offices in New York. Amazon is one of those factors in its customers' lives that pretty much always Just Works. Gotta give credit (and cash, and gift cards) where it's due.
- radiorental 9y ago
  Forgive me, I conflated a complex issue. And I also regcogise I'm generalizing. I know more than a few people who dislike what Amazon did to their favourite local bookstore but also shop at Amazon. I'm very long AMZN and I shop at Wholefood & Trader Joes. I'm just suggesting that (a) Bezos has smart people around him who could give him suggestions and (b) this isn't bad PR.
- maxsilver 9y ago
  > I don't think the widespread resentment of Amazon as a "cold corporate digital version of WalMart" exists outside of your own point of view, and perhaps a few publishers' offices in New York. Just one opinion, but I already thought of Amazon as "the internet's WalMart". And that was before they took over Whole Foods. It's not a widespread opinion yet, but I'm guessing as they exert ever more influence, more people will come to a similar association. If Amazon decides to takeover Meijer's next (just as an example) a lot of upper-midwest folks would suddenly make a similar association.

Apreche 9y ago

Bribe all of congress. It's not that expensive for someone with Bezos money. Why let energy companies, telcos, insurance providers, and military contractors get all the action? Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple are bigger than they are! For less than the cost of SpaceX they could have just bribed congress to give NASA sufficient funding. For less than the cost of whatever Bill Gates tries to do with education, he could have just bribed congress to fund schools properly. If they really believed in equal rights regardless of gender, sex, nationality, sexual orientation, race or religion, they could bribe congress to fix those things. If they cared about the environment, you could bribe congress to fund the EPA more. Single payer health care, they can just make it happen. If I had that money, that's sure as hell what I would be doing with it. The fact that they haven't already suggest to me that maybe they don't actually believe in these things as much as they sometimes pretend to. Rich assholes never put their money where their mouth is. And when I say bribe I mean the legal kind. Where you fund their campaigns through SuperPACs. You can outspend those Koch bros. easily. Why not go for it?

throwaway-1209 9y ago
You seem to think money grows on trees. Your suggestions can't be implemented without taxing people like Bezos to death. In fact, I'm pretty sure they can't be implemented at all, no matter who you "bribe".
- yequalsx 9y ago
  Every wealthy nation but the U.S. provides universal healthcare. They all provide much more subsidized higher education. They do theses things without taxing people to death. Do you have any evidence to support your belief?
  - throwaway-1209 9y ago
    They have different cost structures and much higher taxes, and their healthcare couldn't exist without multi billion research efforts US healthcare consumer pays for. How much pharmaceutical innovation is there outside the US?

devanti 9y ago

The problem I find with most philanthropic efforts, most namely charities, is that it's a black box with little measure of accountability. You don't know how exactly the money is spent, and how effective it was. If someone can start a 100% transparent charitable organization, where each line item of expense is open to the public, it would give people more confidence in giving, and it would give the organizations more incentive to make effective and efficient decisions. Kind of like a manager overseeing your moves, except it's the public since they provide the funding. In terms of where to focus the efforts -- I find providing education is the only short term effort that can lead to long term and everlasting gains.

jarjoura 9y ago
Just as many people would only donate to organizations where they can be anonymous. For example, if you were a gay man and wanted to send money to Russia to help fight the anti-gay sentiment over there, you might not want to do it with your name easily traceable.
- omonra 9y ago
  Or, a more real-life example, one might want to donate anonymously to a no side in the referendum about gay marriage in the US lest they want to lose their job.
sov 9y ago
You might be interested to hear about GiveWell and Effective Altruism. http://www.givewell.org/ http://www.givewell.org/ https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ GiveWell, in particular, publishes a bunch of information (cost/benefit analyses, intervention reports, etc.) about their charitable success/initiatives.

throwaway-1209 9y ago

Just pool the money with Buffett and Gates, and do something jointly. Eradicate some deadly disease, cure cancer, something like that. Really bring those billions and project management skills to bear on it.

andrewstuart 9y ago

I tweeted to suggest that he buy a Raspberry Pi computer for every primary school kid in the world.

andrewstuart 9y ago

It'll be interesting to see a summary of all the ideas, after all the snark, looney and funny replies are filtered out.

camus2 9y ago

Pay your warehouse employees a little bit more? because it's easy to feel charitable when you made money by over-exploiting your workforce.

neptunespear 9y ago

On the microscopic chance that Jeff Bezos sees this: mellow out, man! There was an anecdote, I can't remember from where, maybe from the "Faces of Amazon" page, related to Jeff's response to the NYT criticism back in 2015. Jeff's response was, "should that happen to you, escalate to HR or email me directly". Someone did exactly that and got fired for it.

sunstone 9y ago

The Elephant Soup Solution: 1) First, buy an under utilized country (or a piece of country eg Newfoundland, Sakhalin Island, Princes Royal Island or similar) 2) install the British Institutions OS (run by retired Commonwealth employees). just like Hong Kong or Singapore. 3) allow visa free travel and residence for any non-criminal person on earth 4) To prime the pump, buy stuff from this new country and sell it through any handy distribution channel you might have N.B. Don't forget to recirculate income from the top of the economy to the bottom or the heart will stop.