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I don't know how to put this in a polite way... Let's just say your brain seems to have gotten too much TV entertainment. These billionaires made many billions

I don't know how to put this in a polite way... Let's just say your brain seems to have gotten too much TV entertainment. These billionaires made many billions on covid, while you got a 1400 dollar check so you could survive. These billionaires pay their workers minimum wage every day. People can't get toilet breaks at amazon warehouse without being harassed. This guy is a world class parasite. There is nothing "we" about what he is doing. We are not with him. He doesn't care about any of us.

whymauri 5y ago
I felt like I entered a wormhole in the GP comment where the ocean wasn't on fire, the Amazon wasn't burning down, a heat wave didn't sweep through the Northwest, and the polar caps aren't melting at an irreversible rate. The largest redistribution of wealth in history is happening right now while the global environment collapses and somehow there are cheerleaders egging it on so rich guys can play around in sub-orbit.
- edmundsauto 5y ago
  Is wealth being redistributed, or are the Bezos’ simply slurping up the new money that have been so abundant? It matters, I think. Because if people are only getting relatively poorer when compared to the top 1%, it’s not as bad as if they are losing their standard of living. There are other issues about how excessively rich people can distort our society, but that’s not so much about the redistribution but the distribution, which is an ancient story.
  - ljm 5y ago
    It's fair to say there is redistribution at play when wages have stayed stagnant for over 10 years (at least since the 2008 crash) while executive salaries and payouts have skyrocketed at an unbelievably disproportionate level. It's effectively a global aristocracy as a handful of people amass an amount of wealth that would be impossible to conceive of not even 50 years ago. They can't soak it all up from new money, they depend on keeping their wage bills and other costs low to keep their profits up. And the standard of living is being lost when the people with stagnating wages are being priced out of the housing market, with renting or sharing being the only reasonable alternatives. Renting itself is a redistribution of wealth from poor to rich in many a case. Not to mention that tax policies (like Trump's tax cuts for example) tend to disproportionately benefit the wealthy far more than the middle class, and the poor. I can't think of a more clear cut example of redistribution there. The typical HN user is likely to be on the higher end of the scale and less exposed to issues like this (after all, many of us software engineers get a yearly payrise by switching job), but I find it hard to dismiss things like this when looking at my own country's politics.
    - dantheman 5y ago
      The redistribution is from the young to the old, to those who stopped housing construction to that drive up the cost of living for those without houses. Those who create wealth aren't redistributing it, they are capturing a small portion of what they create for others.
    - edmundsauto 5y ago
      For many workers, wages have stagnated but total compensation hasn’t, when you account for increased costs of benefits. I support universal healthcare, but it’s important to realize how much it costs employers has gone up.
  - arrosenberg 5y ago
    > Is wealth being redistributed, or are the Bezos’ simply slurping up the new money that have been so abundant? How do you differentiate these? If you have 100 dollars, distributed evenly among 10 people, and then you print 100 more and give them all to Jeffery, then you have redistributed the wealth even though you only printed new money. He went from 10% of the power to 55%.
    - edmundsauto 5y ago
      I differentiate distributed from re-distributed. He may have a higher percentage of available wealth, but it’s not like other people have lost their money.
      - arrosenberg 5y ago
        That doesn't make sense though, each dollar doesn't exist in a value vacuum, so you can't ignore the impact of uneven distribution. If Jeffery wants to own the entire town, he can (and then he can get loans against his property to continue funding operations). At that point it seems pretty inane to argue that re-distribution hasn't happened - money is a proxy for economic power, and when you give one person a larger percentage, that's redistributive. Maybe the other people in the town can still buy groceries, but now they're competing with the baron for things like land, and baron Jeff will always win, if he wants to, with all that extra money.
        edmundsauto 5y ago
        I actually decided to delete my comment here. I've had a challenging day and I don't feel like making it worse by continuing this conversation. Have a nice day.
      - aylmao 5y ago
        Inflation would say otherwise. Everyone had the same purchasing power before, and so could buy roughly the same things. Now, Jeffery has more purchasing power than anyone else, which means they can outbid and can keep the better things for himself.
  - causalmodels 5y ago
    I think wealth actually is being redistributed, but not in the sort of nefarious way that some people are claiming. Last year incomes went up for the lowest earners. When less wealthy people get more money they tend to buy material, mass market goods. Large corporations tend to be the main suppliers of those goods. Thus, increasing buying power at the lower end of the income distribution results in companies earning more money.
    - wyre 5y ago
      Incomes went up for the lowest earners because of the trillions the government pumped into unemployment. You’re right that all this money gets spent and funneled up to large corporations, except now these large corporations are buying property en masse and aren’t significantly raising wages for the lowest earners, especially not enough to keep up with the inflation caused from all the stimulus. I guess the point is these corporations need to be taxed at higher rates so low earners aren’t being shafted by our broken economic system.
TechBro8615 5y ago
They also caused me exactly zero suffering. In fact, they actually helped me since I was able to order from Amazon throughout the lockdown.
- Salgat 5y ago
  Who pays for the roads that Amazon depends on for deliveries and employee commutes? Who pays for the k-12 educations and public universities that these employees used to become educated? Who pays for the entire social infrastructure that allows Amazon to even exist? That's what people mean when they say Amazon isn't paying their fair share. They depend on us and taxpayer benefits more than almost any other company in the country, why aren't they also paying a proportional share of their taxes?
  - TechBro8615 5y ago
    Do they not pay payroll taxes for the nearly 100k people they employ?
    - eli 5y ago
      That's not a proportional share
      - qeternity 5y ago
        Without getting into a debate about progressive taxes, Bezos pays far more than his fair share in taxes. The social burden that he creates is microscopic compared to the tax revenue he pays. If he disappeared tomorrow, the national budget would be in worse shape than it is today.
      - BHSPitMonkey 5y ago
        Complain to your senators, then? Congress is who sets the algorithm defining how taxes are owed, not the taxpayers themselves. Have you ever written the IRS a check for more than what you owe them (or declined to accept a tax refund)?
pb7 5y ago
>These billionaires made many billions on covid, while you got a 1400 dollar check so you could survive. They made billions from excellent businesses on which the world relied during a time of crisis. What would people have done without the likes of Amazon and fast delivery of nearly everything? >These billionaires pay their workers minimum wage every day. No one makes minimum wage at Amazon. >People can't get toilet breaks at amazon warehouse without being harassed. Citation needed. Individuals out of a population of 1,000,000 diverse people choosing to do things is not a trend. >He doesn't care about any of us. I don't care about him either. It's a business transaction that benefits both parties, nothing more, nothing less.
- Ostrogodsky 5y ago
  > They made billions from excellent businesses on which the world relied during a time of crisis. What would people have done without the likes of Amazon and fast delivery of nearly everything? And the people earning the low wages were all doing crappy jobs? Did Bezos personally deliver all the packages? I mean you can be as capitalistic as mr Moustache (or whatever he is called) from Monopoly,but you have to agree this is equivalent to defending the feudal lords who "gave" us their lands so we could all eat. > No one makes minimum wage at Amazon. They make 17 USD/h. Double in actual dollars from 1975 minimum wage. College, medicine, housing have increased 5-10 times. In 1975 the richest man in America (Howard Hughes) had around 11 billion of CURRENT dollars, 5% of Bezos. It is Bezos 20X as productive? Meanwhile in the real world : https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2020/12/18/amazons-warehouse-workers-struggle-to-make-ends-meet/ https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2020/12/18/amazons-wareho... Amazon is colony of locusts,devoring everything in front of them.
  - co_pilates 5y ago
    He's called the Monopoly Man as far as I know. Also, I second your remarks; these guys made great businesses... by investing a sliver of their money in smart managers and execs. They certainly couldn't have done it all themselves, not even half of it, so why do they get like 90 percent or more of the profits and upside? Why shouldn't Joe Dirt from bumfuck get double or even triple what they make as a packer? He's the one doing all the work that makes packages move, when it comes down to it.
rejectedandsad 5y ago
> while you got a 1400 dollar check so you could survive American people had the most generous COVID response of any country in the world, including the Superdole.
- throwaway2048 5y ago
  this isn't even remotely true, in Canada for instance, if you got laid off during covid, you could get $2000 a month payments unconditionally.
  - pb7 5y ago
    In the US, you would get $600/week on top of the usual unemployment (which is 60% of your regular wage) which amounts to significantly more than Canada. For a minimum wage worker, that would be over $40K/year.
    - whymauri 5y ago
      I'm sorry to inform you that in many states, like Florida, the unemployment infrastructure is purposefully built to avoid paying unemployment. You're talking about something that for millions of Americans is a pie-in-the-sky hypothetical thanks to their state legislature. By purposefully built, I literally mean that the unemployment web services infrastructure was designed to fail at scale. Not to mention dark pattern roadblocks, insane eligibility requirements, and authorized self-sabotage. [0] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/08/06/899893368/gov-says-floridas-unemployment-system-was-designed-to-create-pointless-roadblock https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...
      - pb7 5y ago
        That's a product of the leadership elected by the people of Florida.
        whymauri 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rootusrootus 5y ago
> These billionaires pay their workers minimum wage every day. My nephew works at an Amazon warehouse. Makes like 15 bucks an hour for the first 40, and then 20 more at double the rate (his choice to take the extra hours). He's very happy, and nothing suggests he feels taken advantage of.
- wyre 5y ago
  Is it your nephews choice or would he not be able to afford a reasonable lifestyle without working 60 hours a week?
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    His choice. He's kept his lifestyle frugal (roommates, reliable but older Toyota car, etc). He enjoys the work well enough that adding 20 more hours and getting paid twice the rate for it is worth it, because he doesn't expect he'll always feel this way about it (his biggest concern is that it's repetitive and he'll get bored quickly). He's about to turn 30 and it sounds like he's about ready to think of something more career-oriented than warehouse work. Wants to get into something real estate-related, as I understand it, and a little cushion will make that transition easier.
misiti3780 5y ago
He's a parasite because the company (which hired 100K new workers during COVID) that he started and owns a shit-ton of equity in went up in the past year because of lockdowns?
- andrepd 5y ago
  Yes. By reasons I expounded in another comment I believe a percentage of any enterprises's shares (in the order of at least 20%) should be owned by the public and pay out an equal dividend to every citizen.
  - ChickeNES 5y ago
    Luckily, any member of the public is free to buy AMZN :)
    - AngryData 5y ago
      Of course that also requires excess capital to buy into. Most people can't afford significant amounts of capital investment though.
  - simooooo 5y ago
    I would also like free money
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

whymauri 5y ago

I felt like I entered a wormhole in the GP comment where the ocean wasn't on fire, the Amazon wasn't burning down, a heat wave didn't sweep through the Northwest, and the polar caps aren't melting at an irreversible rate. The largest redistribution of wealth in history is happening right now while the global environment collapses and somehow there are cheerleaders egging it on so rich guys can play around in sub-orbit.

edmundsauto 5y ago
Is wealth being redistributed, or are the Bezos’ simply slurping up the new money that have been so abundant? It matters, I think. Because if people are only getting relatively poorer when compared to the top 1%, it’s not as bad as if they are losing their standard of living. There are other issues about how excessively rich people can distort our society, but that’s not so much about the redistribution but the distribution, which is an ancient story.
- ljm 5y ago
  It's fair to say there is redistribution at play when wages have stayed stagnant for over 10 years (at least since the 2008 crash) while executive salaries and payouts have skyrocketed at an unbelievably disproportionate level. It's effectively a global aristocracy as a handful of people amass an amount of wealth that would be impossible to conceive of not even 50 years ago. They can't soak it all up from new money, they depend on keeping their wage bills and other costs low to keep their profits up. And the standard of living is being lost when the people with stagnating wages are being priced out of the housing market, with renting or sharing being the only reasonable alternatives. Renting itself is a redistribution of wealth from poor to rich in many a case. Not to mention that tax policies (like Trump's tax cuts for example) tend to disproportionately benefit the wealthy far more than the middle class, and the poor. I can't think of a more clear cut example of redistribution there. The typical HN user is likely to be on the higher end of the scale and less exposed to issues like this (after all, many of us software engineers get a yearly payrise by switching job), but I find it hard to dismiss things like this when looking at my own country's politics.
  - dantheman 5y ago
    The redistribution is from the young to the old, to those who stopped housing construction to that drive up the cost of living for those without houses. Those who create wealth aren't redistributing it, they are capturing a small portion of what they create for others.
  - edmundsauto 5y ago
    For many workers, wages have stagnated but total compensation hasn’t, when you account for increased costs of benefits. I support universal healthcare, but it’s important to realize how much it costs employers has gone up.
- arrosenberg 5y ago
  > Is wealth being redistributed, or are the Bezos’ simply slurping up the new money that have been so abundant? How do you differentiate these? If you have 100 dollars, distributed evenly among 10 people, and then you print 100 more and give them all to Jeffery, then you have redistributed the wealth even though you only printed new money. He went from 10% of the power to 55%.
  - edmundsauto 5y ago
    I differentiate distributed from re-distributed. He may have a higher percentage of available wealth, but it’s not like other people have lost their money.
    - arrosenberg 5y ago
      That doesn't make sense though, each dollar doesn't exist in a value vacuum, so you can't ignore the impact of uneven distribution. If Jeffery wants to own the entire town, he can (and then he can get loans against his property to continue funding operations). At that point it seems pretty inane to argue that re-distribution hasn't happened - money is a proxy for economic power, and when you give one person a larger percentage, that's redistributive. Maybe the other people in the town can still buy groceries, but now they're competing with the baron for things like land, and baron Jeff will always win, if he wants to, with all that extra money.
      - edmundsauto 5y ago
        I actually decided to delete my comment here. I've had a challenging day and I don't feel like making it worse by continuing this conversation. Have a nice day.
    - aylmao 5y ago
      Inflation would say otherwise. Everyone had the same purchasing power before, and so could buy roughly the same things. Now, Jeffery has more purchasing power than anyone else, which means they can outbid and can keep the better things for himself.
- causalmodels 5y ago
  I think wealth actually is being redistributed, but not in the sort of nefarious way that some people are claiming. Last year incomes went up for the lowest earners. When less wealthy people get more money they tend to buy material, mass market goods. Large corporations tend to be the main suppliers of those goods. Thus, increasing buying power at the lower end of the income distribution results in companies earning more money.
  - wyre 5y ago
    Incomes went up for the lowest earners because of the trillions the government pumped into unemployment. You’re right that all this money gets spent and funneled up to large corporations, except now these large corporations are buying property en masse and aren’t significantly raising wages for the lowest earners, especially not enough to keep up with the inflation caused from all the stimulus. I guess the point is these corporations need to be taxed at higher rates so low earners aren’t being shafted by our broken economic system.

TechBro8615 5y ago

They also caused me exactly zero suffering. In fact, they actually helped me since I was able to order from Amazon throughout the lockdown.

Salgat 5y ago
Who pays for the roads that Amazon depends on for deliveries and employee commutes? Who pays for the k-12 educations and public universities that these employees used to become educated? Who pays for the entire social infrastructure that allows Amazon to even exist? That's what people mean when they say Amazon isn't paying their fair share. They depend on us and taxpayer benefits more than almost any other company in the country, why aren't they also paying a proportional share of their taxes?
- TechBro8615 5y ago
  Do they not pay payroll taxes for the nearly 100k people they employ?
  - eli 5y ago
    That's not a proportional share
    - qeternity 5y ago
      Without getting into a debate about progressive taxes, Bezos pays far more than his fair share in taxes. The social burden that he creates is microscopic compared to the tax revenue he pays. If he disappeared tomorrow, the national budget would be in worse shape than it is today.
    - BHSPitMonkey 5y ago
      Complain to your senators, then? Congress is who sets the algorithm defining how taxes are owed, not the taxpayers themselves. Have you ever written the IRS a check for more than what you owe them (or declined to accept a tax refund)?

pb7 5y ago

>These billionaires made many billions on covid, while you got a 1400 dollar check so you could survive. They made billions from excellent businesses on which the world relied during a time of crisis. What would people have done without the likes of Amazon and fast delivery of nearly everything? >These billionaires pay their workers minimum wage every day. No one makes minimum wage at Amazon. >People can't get toilet breaks at amazon warehouse without being harassed. Citation needed. Individuals out of a population of 1,000,000 diverse people choosing to do things is not a trend. >He doesn't care about any of us. I don't care about him either. It's a business transaction that benefits both parties, nothing more, nothing less.

Ostrogodsky 5y ago
> They made billions from excellent businesses on which the world relied during a time of crisis. What would people have done without the likes of Amazon and fast delivery of nearly everything? And the people earning the low wages were all doing crappy jobs? Did Bezos personally deliver all the packages? I mean you can be as capitalistic as mr Moustache (or whatever he is called) from Monopoly,but you have to agree this is equivalent to defending the feudal lords who "gave" us their lands so we could all eat. > No one makes minimum wage at Amazon. They make 17 USD/h. Double in actual dollars from 1975 minimum wage. College, medicine, housing have increased 5-10 times. In 1975 the richest man in America (Howard Hughes) had around 11 billion of CURRENT dollars, 5% of Bezos. It is Bezos 20X as productive? Meanwhile in the real world : https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2020/12/18/amazons-warehouse-workers-struggle-to-make-ends-meet/ https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2020/12/18/amazons-wareho... Amazon is colony of locusts,devoring everything in front of them.
- co_pilates 5y ago
  He's called the Monopoly Man as far as I know. Also, I second your remarks; these guys made great businesses... by investing a sliver of their money in smart managers and execs. They certainly couldn't have done it all themselves, not even half of it, so why do they get like 90 percent or more of the profits and upside? Why shouldn't Joe Dirt from bumfuck get double or even triple what they make as a packer? He's the one doing all the work that makes packages move, when it comes down to it.

rejectedandsad 5y ago

> while you got a 1400 dollar check so you could survive American people had the most generous COVID response of any country in the world, including the Superdole.

throwaway2048 5y ago
this isn't even remotely true, in Canada for instance, if you got laid off during covid, you could get $2000 a month payments unconditionally.
- pb7 5y ago
  In the US, you would get $600/week on top of the usual unemployment (which is 60% of your regular wage) which amounts to significantly more than Canada. For a minimum wage worker, that would be over $40K/year.
  - whymauri 5y ago
    I'm sorry to inform you that in many states, like Florida, the unemployment infrastructure is purposefully built to avoid paying unemployment. You're talking about something that for millions of Americans is a pie-in-the-sky hypothetical thanks to their state legislature. By purposefully built, I literally mean that the unemployment web services infrastructure was designed to fail at scale. Not to mention dark pattern roadblocks, insane eligibility requirements, and authorized self-sabotage. [0] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/08/06/899893368/gov-says-floridas-unemployment-system-was-designed-to-create-pointless-roadblock https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...
    - pb7 5y ago
      That's a product of the leadership elected by the people of Florida.
      - whymauri 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

rootusrootus 5y ago

> These billionaires pay their workers minimum wage every day. My nephew works at an Amazon warehouse. Makes like 15 bucks an hour for the first 40, and then 20 more at double the rate (his choice to take the extra hours). He's very happy, and nothing suggests he feels taken advantage of.

wyre 5y ago
Is it your nephews choice or would he not be able to afford a reasonable lifestyle without working 60 hours a week?
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  His choice. He's kept his lifestyle frugal (roommates, reliable but older Toyota car, etc). He enjoys the work well enough that adding 20 more hours and getting paid twice the rate for it is worth it, because he doesn't expect he'll always feel this way about it (his biggest concern is that it's repetitive and he'll get bored quickly). He's about to turn 30 and it sounds like he's about ready to think of something more career-oriented than warehouse work. Wants to get into something real estate-related, as I understand it, and a little cushion will make that transition easier.

misiti3780 5y ago

He's a parasite because the company (which hired 100K new workers during COVID) that he started and owns a shit-ton of equity in went up in the past year because of lockdowns?

andrepd 5y ago
Yes. By reasons I expounded in another comment I believe a percentage of any enterprises's shares (in the order of at least 20%) should be owned by the public and pay out an equal dividend to every citizen.
- ChickeNES 5y ago
  Luckily, any member of the public is free to buy AMZN :)
  - AngryData 5y ago
    Of course that also requires excess capital to buy into. Most people can't afford significant amounts of capital investment though.
- simooooo 5y ago
  I would also like free money

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]