8 ms·

You Are Jeff Bezos

56 points by codewiz 5y ago

iliekcomputers 5y ago
I decided to "pay off personal taxes" >Here's where we get into the dicey business of what "personal worth" is, and how that translates to taxable income. >Answer: It usually doesn't, because rich people are master frauds and charlatans who exploit loopholes in tax code to avoid paying their fair share. >Jeff Bezos is worth $156 billion? You're using the top tax bracket of 37% and paying out $57.72 billion of that. You'd pay 99%, but then this would be a very short simulator. That's not how it really works, right? He's supposed to pay tax on income not on wealth.
- throwoutway 5y ago
  You’re right. That’s not how it works because these are paper gains of capital (stock, which capital gains tax applies to) rather than income (W2).
- Swizec 5y ago
  > He's supposed to pay tax on income not on wealth. Yes. That’s the trap most of these arguments for taxing the rich fall into under the current system. Having money and making money are taxed differently. If you own a house and all of your neighbors sell theirs at a 30% markup, should you pay taxes on making $300,000 (for a 1mil house) this year? Maybe … seems kinda unfair though. You didn’t participate in those transactions and made no money to pay the new taxes with. Should wealth be capped? Dunno, maybe. It would solve a lot of problems and yet feels a bit draconian. Should wealth be repatriated by the state? Eh no let’s not go there. Large swathes of Europe tried that in the past and it’s still causing problems. Should “rich people” be taxed? Yeah definitely. The hard part is defining what exactly gets taxed and how. Making people sell their assets to pay taxes on those assets seems kinda weird to me.
  - triceratops 5y ago
    > If you own a house and all of your neighbors sell theirs at a 30% markup, should you pay taxes on making $300,000 (for a 1mil house) this year? In most places (not California) your property will likely be assessed higher and your taxes will be commensurately higher next year. Your house's increased value isn't treated like realized income, but its effect on your taxes isn't 0 either.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > In most places (not California) your property will likely be assessed higher In California it will be assessed higher, there is just a cap in the rate of increase (lots of places have copied this though none in the US have as low a cap as California’s “lower of 2% or rate of general inflation”, and few combine their cap on increases with as low a cap on nominal property tax rates [1%] as California.)
    - Swizec 5y ago
      > Your house's increased value isn't treated like realized income, but its effect on your taxes isn't 0 either. Yes true. My point is articles about “tax the rich” prey on people not understanding this. The narrative is that “X rich person made billions and didn’t pay the same 30% tax as you!” … no they didn’t make anything. The value of their assets went up. They might even have negative cashflow to sustain that.
      - triceratops 5y ago
        "Tax the rich" people get the details wrong, but I understand where they're coming from. For most people with a consequential net worth, that net worth is tied up in their primary residence. If its value goes up, they pay higher taxes. Even if a rental property's assessed value goes up, rent goes up. This doesn't really apply to the ultra-rich. Unless they're real-estate billionaires, and even then I'm sure they have better tax strategies than regular people.
  - ItsMonkk 5y ago
    The wealth tax is a bad tax, but it's trying to fix a bad monetary system. When the Fed only cares about inflation and doesn't care at all about wealth inequality effect of lowered velocity, you get exactly what you incentivize. The Fed lowers interest rates. The wealthy take out loans. The wealthy buy assets with the money from those loans. The values of assets goes up. As the wealthy assets are now up, they are free to take out another loan... as all new money was just piled into markets and isn't consumed the velocity goes down, and therefore the inflation rate goes down. As the inflation rate went down... the Fed lowers interest rates. The true way to solve this issue is by having a constant velocity of the money supply. If you don't give Congress the tools to fix the monetary system, their only option is a hack.
- belval 5y ago
  This is just another piece written by someone who does not understand how income tax works and is unable to appreciate that this problem is actually complicated. If Jeff Bezos net worth increases by 1 billion over a year, he hasn't realized any of the actual gains and that profit it purely on paper. If he chose to live on 1M$/year then he only has to pay 370k$ in taxes that's how it works for you and me and that's how it works for him. Does it make sense that he paid 0$ in taxes and bought a 300M$ yacht? Absolutely not and we should find ways to close that loophole. Does it mean that we should tax wealth? Absolutely not.
  - hncurious 5y ago
    People also seem to have forgotten that stock can, and often does, go down.
  - coldpie 5y ago
    > Does it mean that we should tax wealth? Absolutely not. I'm not so sure. Maybe we should. Wealth hording is a real issue. I'm at least open to the idea. I agree with the rest of your comment.
    - lapetitejort 5y ago
      Taxing wealth acts as an incentive to spread the shares around the company instead of hoarding them. Don't want your wealth taxed? Let the workers enjoy the fruits of their labor. The same goes for ~90% brackets. Don't want your salary to be taxed at such a high rate? Put that money into R&D or worker's paychecks.
      - joshribakoff 5y ago
        The (capitalist) counter argument is that forcing people to spread wealth acts as an incentive not to innovate
      - deelowe 5y ago
        This only applies in the very limited scenario where you personally own the shares. What's to stop someone from setting up a trust, shell company or similar and then giving them all of the "wealth" while maintaining a controlling interest? From there, the individual simply extracts what they need when they need to. We're basically back to the original scenario only with more steps added in between. I assume there isn't going to be an argument against companies "hording wealth."
- SllX 5y ago
  You are correct. Much of his personal wealth is equity in his companies, primarily Amazon. That’s tied up in Amazon’s business, not a piggy bank, and leaving that money in Amazon does leave it subject to rises and falls in the market valuation of Amazon. Realizing those gains from his initial investment and any subsequent personal investments in Amazon, or cashing out means selling on the market; and the act of selling on the market has an effect on the selling price on the market, particularly the bigger the sale. Jeff Bezos has never earned $156B in income in his life, but on paper he could by selling everything he owns. On paper at least.
  - edge17 5y ago
    Not really without moving the price of the stock. You can try it yourself by trading some illiquid securities. It goes with anything you trade - if you trade enough you move the price. It's also not working capital, it's just a personal asset - albeit unrealized gains. Taxing unrealized gains is like you paying taxes for an increase in value in the house you purchased. Until you sell the house, you may not have the money to even pay it.
    - SllX 5y ago
      We are mostly not disagreeing. On paper does not necessarily reflect what would happen in reality if he tried to sell that much Amazon stock quickly. You did raise a good point on equity vs working capital though, and I’m still inside the edit window so I’m going to adjust that now. Thanks!
- eps 5y ago
  > He's supposed to pay tax on income not on wealth. Depends on the country. In the US, it's just on income. In Switzerland, for example, it's also on wealth. Well under a single percent, but still.
lprd 5y ago
I'm getting an error when I visit the page: > Apologies! A fatal error has occurred. Aborting. > Error: no valid storage adapters found. > Stack Trace: > e@https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/1654035/index.html?v=1574335019:1067:13164 https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/1654035/index.html?v=157... @https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/1654035/index.html?v=1574335019:1072:9527 https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/1654035/index.html?v=157... j@https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/1654035/index.html?v=1574335019:59:29948 https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/1654035/index.html?v=157... g/</k<@https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/1654035/index.html?v=1574335019:59:30262 https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/1654035/index.html?v=157... I'm using Firefox 93.0.
- Lukas_Skywalker 5y ago
  The creator mentions that this could be caused by an ad blocker: "This is usually the result of your browser's adblocker. Please disable your adblocking plugins and see if that helps things!"
kardianos 5y ago
This appears to either be a sincere product of a socialist Utopian who doesn't understand basic physical processes and tax concepts, or a cleaver work of satire. I'm unsure which at this time.
- iliekcomputers 5y ago
  Great observation. I'd really like to hope it's satire. >You eliminate homelessness in the United States. Every person living in the US now has the guarantee of a roof over their head. >This costs you $20 billion, or a trivial 12.8% of your starting net worth. You still have $136,000,540,000. I really really wish it was that easy.
  - marcellus23 5y ago
    It isn't that much more complicated than that — politics-wise, sure, but all you really need is housing and money to solve homelessness.
    - leesec 5y ago
      I wonder what kind of incentive it would create if we just started giving homeless people houses
      - avianlyric 5y ago
        What are you trying to suggest? That people only work to avoid homelessness? That homeless people deserve to be homeless? That providing homes to the homeless would cause people to stop being productive members of society?
        leesec 5y ago
        Merely that you must consider the incentives of policy as well as the immediate result of a policy.
        padastra 5y ago
BitwiseFool 5y ago
>"End homelessness in the United States (-$20 billion)" Wow! Someone tell congress. $20 billion is nothing to those folks. The solution was here all along! Were it so easy...
- unethical_ban 5y ago
  If we could just concentrate them in some kind of camp, it would make their administration so much more efficient. But seriously, it creates serious ethical questions for our country. If someone is a public nuisance, has no place to go and no caretakers, no money, and the only alternative is jail, should we or should we not involuntarily commit certain people to mental hospitals or facilities to help them get clean, get counseling, and keep them off the streets? Is it impossible to set up such a system with transparency reports, an adversarial watchdog for rights and patient advocacy, etc.?
- missedthecue 5y ago
  the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has a budget of almost $70 billion per year. Someone should fill them in that the internet figured out how to solve homelessness for a one-time payment only fraction of what they spend year-in year-out.
  - throwoutway 5y ago
    What are we paying them $70B for?!
    - lostmsu 5y ago
      For trying to convince people to enter one of the homeless support programs, and not drop out of it in the middle?
    - MrPatan 5y ago
      A self-perpetuating bureaucracy. Paper pushers who are unfit for any actual productive work. It does combat homelessness in a way, I suppose.
major505 5y ago
Not recommend. Theres no option to raise a private army, build nukes, invade a small country in the East Europe and make it your personal resort.
betwixthewires 5y ago
The person who made this doesn't have a single clue what they're talking about.
leesec 5y ago
Such an unrealistic game, doesn't have the option anywhere to create jobs for 1.3 million employees while also providing an immense service to the world. I hope people really don't believe anything like the contents of this game, but I know some do.
- pentae 5y ago
  It's as if these people haven't heard of the government and how much money they have to throw around to fix their wish list of problems. Why is it a private individuals responsibility?
  - leesec 5y ago
    Completely ignoring that we spend 2+ trillion on welfare in USA yearly ( if you include Medicaid ), albeit only hundreds of billions on housing.
logshipper 5y ago
Seeing the comments here debating the semantics of taxes, now seems like a good time to mention Poe's Law. [0] I personally took home the message that the "game" was satire and meant to contextualize Bezos' wealth. Saying that the cost of hiring 100k teachers for 4 years is a fraction of his wealth is a lot more (for the lack of a better term) impactful than saying Bezos is worth $xyz Billion. Of course, that does not mean that Jeff can write a check for $22.4B and we can address the issues with the public school system in the United States. It does, however, help drive home the point that some individuals in our society have such immense wealth that they could theoretically transform society. I do not intend to comment on the nature of said wealth, but the game still makes good food for thought. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
booleandilemma 5y ago
I stopped reading at: “What would you do if you had more money than any single human being should ever have?” Who’s to say who should have what? What kind of dystopia are you imagining? The only reason Bezos has money is because people give it to him, and for good reason.
- FredPret 5y ago
  I personally don’t like most of what I’ve learnt about the guy, or Amazon, but I have voluntarily handed them thousands upon thousands of dollars and intend to continue. There’s good and bad in everything.
jkingsbery 5y ago
> End homelessness in the United States (-$20 billion) The problem with this way of thinking is: we've already spent this amount of money on ending homelessness. California plans on spending $4.8 billion next year [1]. HUD has a budget of around $2.7 billion [2]. In 2019, the City of New York spent $3.2 billion [3]. I haven't bothered to do a full accounting of how much we've spent on homelessness over the past 5 years, but from those three data points it seems safe to extrapolate we've spent over $20 billion. This is also in the context of the larger War on Poverty, which has spent an estimated $15 trillion since the program started in the 1960's [4]. It seems that simply throwing money at problems is insufficient. > "The options are stark reminders of public good we forsake in refusing to redistribute wealth." - Newsweek One could just as easily make a game that did something similar with the US government's budget. The overall budget is something like $4 Trillion. Just the annual interest payments are on the order of $250 Billion. If we had a more fiscally responsible approach to budgeting and therefore didn't have to make interest payments, according to that game we could "repair Puerto Rico," "hire 100,000 new teachers," and "end homeless in the United States." We already redistribute wealth on a grand scale. It's also not like the wealth of billionaires is just in a Scrooge McDuck-style money vault that they swim in all day, nor are they like Smaug, holed up in a cave sitting on vast amounts of gold and precious stones. The wealth is invested in various things, which in turn serve the public good. 1. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-07-16/california-budget-homelessness-spending https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-07-16/californ... 2. https://endhomelessness.org/ending-homelessness/policy/federal-funding-homelessness-programs/ https://endhomelessness.org/ending-homelessness/policy/feder... 3. https://datalab.usaspending.gov/homelessness-analysis/ https://datalab.usaspending.gov/homelessness-analysis/ 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_poverty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_poverty
plainnoodles 5y ago
I think the most salient part of this is the remarking that being a billionaire is immoral. I don't think being a billionaire is necessarily immoral, but I definitely think it's incredibly difficult to do so without being immoral. I think the closest examples I can think of are people who weren't even trying to become wealthy - I doubt anyone whose goal was to make fat stacks of cash would, for instance, start writing young adult fiction on napkins in a pub in Britain, or start writing a voxel-based crafting game in Java. And unfortunately even these two individuals aren't remotely close to paragons of virtue. That said, I think the biggest sin of Jeff Bezos' is just being complicit in the whole system that keeps our tax code a disaster. I would feel a lot better about the wealthy, and mega corporations, if I felt like they were appropriately paying for the community resources they use, for example: * public universities and education that educate (and train, to some degree) their workforce * public services that cultivate the kind of safe and secure society that allows people to focus on things that aren't subsistence or physical security * infrastructure that makes their existence possible - roads their employees drive on, DMVs that their employees register their vehicles at, water systems their employees drink at both work and home, power systems that provide stable electricity, etc etc etc * And it's not just your employees, it's your customers too. If we didn't have all of the above, people would have a lot less psychological, financial, and physical safety to need anything Amazon sells. * And something that I think really goes under-noticed: the world's best-regulated, safest, most reliable, most well-understood, and most liquid securities market. Both private and public. So much goes into making all of that crap (I say this semi-affectionately as someone who used to work in the sector) work, and it's where an enormous percentage of both these companies weath both lives and came from. I think you see where I'm going with this. All of the wealth that's generated here is entirely predicated on, and a product of, this incredible foundation we've built collectively as a society. And the bigger you are, the more wealth you generate, the more of this system you've taken advantage of in one way or another (with some of the secret sauce of these companies being that their employees and company take a relatively small amount of it, while their reach scales to so many more customers, that they disproportionately (compared to other companies) take advantage of huge swathes of the customer side of "benefiting from the social foundation". This is the main thing that irks me. They would be nothing without all of this, and yet they can use their wealth to skirt out of paying their fair share, even though it really seems to me that paying their fair share - paying back into the system they benefitted from - is probably better for them in the long run (50+ years) as they'll have more educated employees, more stable customers, and so on. It's a giant feedback loop that they're short-sightedly intentionally not paying back into.
thih9 5y ago
I like the interactive novel as a medium to show how a really big amount of money translates to actions, decisions, power, etc. I don't like that the actual content seems to present a very narrow and extremely simplified view. It reminds me of a political meme or a political cartoon.
drivingmenuts 5y ago
I was kind of disappointed. There weren’t the options to do more evil and make more money. If I’m going to be Jeff Bezos, I’m going to try to out-Jeff Bezos Jeff Bezos.

56 points by codewiz 5y ago

I decided to "pay off personal taxes" >Here's where we get into the dicey business of what "personal worth" is, and how that translates to taxable income. >Answer: It usually doesn't, because rich people are master frauds and charlatans who exploit loopholes in tax code to avoid paying their fair share. >Jeff Bezos is worth $156 billion? You're using the top tax bracket of 37% and paying out $57.72 billion of that. You'd pay 99%, but then this would be a very short simulator. That's not how it really works, right? He's supposed to pay tax on income not on wealth.

throwoutway 5y ago
You’re right. That’s not how it works because these are paper gains of capital (stock, which capital gains tax applies to) rather than income (W2).
Swizec 5y ago
> He's supposed to pay tax on income not on wealth. Yes. That’s the trap most of these arguments for taxing the rich fall into under the current system. Having money and making money are taxed differently. If you own a house and all of your neighbors sell theirs at a 30% markup, should you pay taxes on making $300,000 (for a 1mil house) this year? Maybe … seems kinda unfair though. You didn’t participate in those transactions and made no money to pay the new taxes with. Should wealth be capped? Dunno, maybe. It would solve a lot of problems and yet feels a bit draconian. Should wealth be repatriated by the state? Eh no let’s not go there. Large swathes of Europe tried that in the past and it’s still causing problems. Should “rich people” be taxed? Yeah definitely. The hard part is defining what exactly gets taxed and how. Making people sell their assets to pay taxes on those assets seems kinda weird to me.
- triceratops 5y ago
  > If you own a house and all of your neighbors sell theirs at a 30% markup, should you pay taxes on making $300,000 (for a 1mil house) this year? In most places (not California) your property will likely be assessed higher and your taxes will be commensurately higher next year. Your house's increased value isn't treated like realized income, but its effect on your taxes isn't 0 either.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > In most places (not California) your property will likely be assessed higher In California it will be assessed higher, there is just a cap in the rate of increase (lots of places have copied this though none in the US have as low a cap as California’s “lower of 2% or rate of general inflation”, and few combine their cap on increases with as low a cap on nominal property tax rates [1%] as California.)
  - Swizec 5y ago
    > Your house's increased value isn't treated like realized income, but its effect on your taxes isn't 0 either. Yes true. My point is articles about “tax the rich” prey on people not understanding this. The narrative is that “X rich person made billions and didn’t pay the same 30% tax as you!” … no they didn’t make anything. The value of their assets went up. They might even have negative cashflow to sustain that.
    - triceratops 5y ago
      "Tax the rich" people get the details wrong, but I understand where they're coming from. For most people with a consequential net worth, that net worth is tied up in their primary residence. If its value goes up, they pay higher taxes. Even if a rental property's assessed value goes up, rent goes up. This doesn't really apply to the ultra-rich. Unless they're real-estate billionaires, and even then I'm sure they have better tax strategies than regular people.
- ItsMonkk 5y ago
  The wealth tax is a bad tax, but it's trying to fix a bad monetary system. When the Fed only cares about inflation and doesn't care at all about wealth inequality effect of lowered velocity, you get exactly what you incentivize. The Fed lowers interest rates. The wealthy take out loans. The wealthy buy assets with the money from those loans. The values of assets goes up. As the wealthy assets are now up, they are free to take out another loan... as all new money was just piled into markets and isn't consumed the velocity goes down, and therefore the inflation rate goes down. As the inflation rate went down... the Fed lowers interest rates. The true way to solve this issue is by having a constant velocity of the money supply. If you don't give Congress the tools to fix the monetary system, their only option is a hack.
belval 5y ago
This is just another piece written by someone who does not understand how income tax works and is unable to appreciate that this problem is actually complicated. If Jeff Bezos net worth increases by 1 billion over a year, he hasn't realized any of the actual gains and that profit it purely on paper. If he chose to live on 1M$/year then he only has to pay 370k$ in taxes that's how it works for you and me and that's how it works for him. Does it make sense that he paid 0$ in taxes and bought a 300M$ yacht? Absolutely not and we should find ways to close that loophole. Does it mean that we should tax wealth? Absolutely not.
- hncurious 5y ago
  People also seem to have forgotten that stock can, and often does, go down.
- coldpie 5y ago
  > Does it mean that we should tax wealth? Absolutely not. I'm not so sure. Maybe we should. Wealth hording is a real issue. I'm at least open to the idea. I agree with the rest of your comment.
  - lapetitejort 5y ago
    Taxing wealth acts as an incentive to spread the shares around the company instead of hoarding them. Don't want your wealth taxed? Let the workers enjoy the fruits of their labor. The same goes for ~90% brackets. Don't want your salary to be taxed at such a high rate? Put that money into R&D or worker's paychecks.
    - joshribakoff 5y ago
      The (capitalist) counter argument is that forcing people to spread wealth acts as an incentive not to innovate
    - deelowe 5y ago
      This only applies in the very limited scenario where you personally own the shares. What's to stop someone from setting up a trust, shell company or similar and then giving them all of the "wealth" while maintaining a controlling interest? From there, the individual simply extracts what they need when they need to. We're basically back to the original scenario only with more steps added in between. I assume there isn't going to be an argument against companies "hording wealth."
SllX 5y ago
You are correct. Much of his personal wealth is equity in his companies, primarily Amazon. That’s tied up in Amazon’s business, not a piggy bank, and leaving that money in Amazon does leave it subject to rises and falls in the market valuation of Amazon. Realizing those gains from his initial investment and any subsequent personal investments in Amazon, or cashing out means selling on the market; and the act of selling on the market has an effect on the selling price on the market, particularly the bigger the sale. Jeff Bezos has never earned $156B in income in his life, but on paper he could by selling everything he owns. On paper at least.
- edge17 5y ago
  Not really without moving the price of the stock. You can try it yourself by trading some illiquid securities. It goes with anything you trade - if you trade enough you move the price. It's also not working capital, it's just a personal asset - albeit unrealized gains. Taxing unrealized gains is like you paying taxes for an increase in value in the house you purchased. Until you sell the house, you may not have the money to even pay it.
  - SllX 5y ago
    We are mostly not disagreeing. On paper does not necessarily reflect what would happen in reality if he tried to sell that much Amazon stock quickly. You did raise a good point on equity vs working capital though, and I’m still inside the edit window so I’m going to adjust that now. Thanks!
eps 5y ago
> He's supposed to pay tax on income not on wealth. Depends on the country. In the US, it's just on income. In Switzerland, for example, it's also on wealth. Well under a single percent, but still.

lprd 5y ago

I'm getting an error when I visit the page: > Apologies! A fatal error has occurred. Aborting. > Error: no valid storage adapters found. > Stack Trace: > e@https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/1654035/index.html?v=1574335019:1067:13164 https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/1654035/index.html?v=157... @https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/1654035/index.html?v=1574335019:1072:9527 https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/1654035/index.html?v=157... j@https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/1654035/index.html?v=1574335019:59:29948 https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/1654035/index.html?v=157... g/</k<@https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/1654035/index.html?v=1574335019:59:30262 https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/1654035/index.html?v=157... I'm using Firefox 93.0.

Lukas_Skywalker 5y ago
The creator mentions that this could be caused by an ad blocker: "This is usually the result of your browser's adblocker. Please disable your adblocking plugins and see if that helps things!"

kardianos 5y ago

This appears to either be a sincere product of a socialist Utopian who doesn't understand basic physical processes and tax concepts, or a cleaver work of satire. I'm unsure which at this time.

iliekcomputers 5y ago
Great observation. I'd really like to hope it's satire. >You eliminate homelessness in the United States. Every person living in the US now has the guarantee of a roof over their head. >This costs you $20 billion, or a trivial 12.8% of your starting net worth. You still have $136,000,540,000. I really really wish it was that easy.
- marcellus23 5y ago
  It isn't that much more complicated than that — politics-wise, sure, but all you really need is housing and money to solve homelessness.
  - leesec 5y ago
    I wonder what kind of incentive it would create if we just started giving homeless people houses
    - avianlyric 5y ago
      What are you trying to suggest? That people only work to avoid homelessness? That homeless people deserve to be homeless? That providing homes to the homeless would cause people to stop being productive members of society?
      - leesec 5y ago
        Merely that you must consider the incentives of policy as well as the immediate result of a policy.
      - padastra 5y ago

BitwiseFool 5y ago

>"End homelessness in the United States (-$20 billion)" Wow! Someone tell congress. $20 billion is nothing to those folks. The solution was here all along! Were it so easy...

unethical_ban 5y ago
If we could just concentrate them in some kind of camp, it would make their administration so much more efficient. But seriously, it creates serious ethical questions for our country. If someone is a public nuisance, has no place to go and no caretakers, no money, and the only alternative is jail, should we or should we not involuntarily commit certain people to mental hospitals or facilities to help them get clean, get counseling, and keep them off the streets? Is it impossible to set up such a system with transparency reports, an adversarial watchdog for rights and patient advocacy, etc.?
missedthecue 5y ago
the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has a budget of almost $70 billion per year. Someone should fill them in that the internet figured out how to solve homelessness for a one-time payment only fraction of what they spend year-in year-out.
- throwoutway 5y ago
  What are we paying them $70B for?!
  - lostmsu 5y ago
    For trying to convince people to enter one of the homeless support programs, and not drop out of it in the middle?
  - MrPatan 5y ago
    A self-perpetuating bureaucracy. Paper pushers who are unfit for any actual productive work. It does combat homelessness in a way, I suppose.

major505 5y ago

Not recommend. Theres no option to raise a private army, build nukes, invade a small country in the East Europe and make it your personal resort.

betwixthewires 5y ago

The person who made this doesn't have a single clue what they're talking about.

leesec 5y ago

Such an unrealistic game, doesn't have the option anywhere to create jobs for 1.3 million employees while also providing an immense service to the world. I hope people really don't believe anything like the contents of this game, but I know some do.

pentae 5y ago
It's as if these people haven't heard of the government and how much money they have to throw around to fix their wish list of problems. Why is it a private individuals responsibility?
- leesec 5y ago
  Completely ignoring that we spend 2+ trillion on welfare in USA yearly ( if you include Medicaid ), albeit only hundreds of billions on housing.

logshipper 5y ago

Seeing the comments here debating the semantics of taxes, now seems like a good time to mention Poe's Law. [0] I personally took home the message that the "game" was satire and meant to contextualize Bezos' wealth. Saying that the cost of hiring 100k teachers for 4 years is a fraction of his wealth is a lot more (for the lack of a better term) impactful than saying Bezos is worth $xyz Billion. Of course, that does not mean that Jeff can write a check for $22.4B and we can address the issues with the public school system in the United States. It does, however, help drive home the point that some individuals in our society have such immense wealth that they could theoretically transform society. I do not intend to comment on the nature of said wealth, but the game still makes good food for thought. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

booleandilemma 5y ago

I stopped reading at: “What would you do if you had more money than any single human being should ever have?” Who’s to say who should have what? What kind of dystopia are you imagining? The only reason Bezos has money is because people give it to him, and for good reason.

FredPret 5y ago
I personally don’t like most of what I’ve learnt about the guy, or Amazon, but I have voluntarily handed them thousands upon thousands of dollars and intend to continue. There’s good and bad in everything.

jkingsbery 5y ago

> End homelessness in the United States (-$20 billion) The problem with this way of thinking is: we've already spent this amount of money on ending homelessness. California plans on spending $4.8 billion next year [1]. HUD has a budget of around $2.7 billion [2]. In 2019, the City of New York spent $3.2 billion [3]. I haven't bothered to do a full accounting of how much we've spent on homelessness over the past 5 years, but from those three data points it seems safe to extrapolate we've spent over $20 billion. This is also in the context of the larger War on Poverty, which has spent an estimated $15 trillion since the program started in the 1960's [4]. It seems that simply throwing money at problems is insufficient. > "The options are stark reminders of public good we forsake in refusing to redistribute wealth." - Newsweek One could just as easily make a game that did something similar with the US government's budget. The overall budget is something like $4 Trillion. Just the annual interest payments are on the order of $250 Billion. If we had a more fiscally responsible approach to budgeting and therefore didn't have to make interest payments, according to that game we could "repair Puerto Rico," "hire 100,000 new teachers," and "end homeless in the United States." We already redistribute wealth on a grand scale. It's also not like the wealth of billionaires is just in a Scrooge McDuck-style money vault that they swim in all day, nor are they like Smaug, holed up in a cave sitting on vast amounts of gold and precious stones. The wealth is invested in various things, which in turn serve the public good. 1. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-07-16/california-budget-homelessness-spending https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-07-16/californ... 2. https://endhomelessness.org/ending-homelessness/policy/federal-funding-homelessness-programs/ https://endhomelessness.org/ending-homelessness/policy/feder... 3. https://datalab.usaspending.gov/homelessness-analysis/ https://datalab.usaspending.gov/homelessness-analysis/ 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_poverty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_poverty

plainnoodles 5y ago

I think the most salient part of this is the remarking that being a billionaire is immoral. I don't think being a billionaire is necessarily immoral, but I definitely think it's incredibly difficult to do so without being immoral. I think the closest examples I can think of are people who weren't even trying to become wealthy - I doubt anyone whose goal was to make fat stacks of cash would, for instance, start writing young adult fiction on napkins in a pub in Britain, or start writing a voxel-based crafting game in Java. And unfortunately even these two individuals aren't remotely close to paragons of virtue. That said, I think the biggest sin of Jeff Bezos' is just being complicit in the whole system that keeps our tax code a disaster. I would feel a lot better about the wealthy, and mega corporations, if I felt like they were appropriately paying for the community resources they use, for example: * public universities and education that educate (and train, to some degree) their workforce * public services that cultivate the kind of safe and secure society that allows people to focus on things that aren't subsistence or physical security * infrastructure that makes their existence possible - roads their employees drive on, DMVs that their employees register their vehicles at, water systems their employees drink at both work and home, power systems that provide stable electricity, etc etc etc * And it's not just your employees, it's your customers too. If we didn't have all of the above, people would have a lot less psychological, financial, and physical safety to need anything Amazon sells. * And something that I think really goes under-noticed: the world's best-regulated, safest, most reliable, most well-understood, and most liquid securities market. Both private and public. So much goes into making all of that crap (I say this semi-affectionately as someone who used to work in the sector) work, and it's where an enormous percentage of both these companies weath both lives and came from. I think you see where I'm going with this. All of the wealth that's generated here is entirely predicated on, and a product of, this incredible foundation we've built collectively as a society. And the bigger you are, the more wealth you generate, the more of this system you've taken advantage of in one way or another (with some of the secret sauce of these companies being that their employees and company take a relatively small amount of it, while their reach scales to so many more customers, that they disproportionately (compared to other companies) take advantage of huge swathes of the customer side of "benefiting from the social foundation". This is the main thing that irks me. They would be nothing without all of this, and yet they can use their wealth to skirt out of paying their fair share, even though it really seems to me that paying their fair share - paying back into the system they benefitted from - is probably better for them in the long run (50+ years) as they'll have more educated employees, more stable customers, and so on. It's a giant feedback loop that they're short-sightedly intentionally not paying back into.

thih9 5y ago

I like the interactive novel as a medium to show how a really big amount of money translates to actions, decisions, power, etc. I don't like that the actual content seems to present a very narrow and extremely simplified view. It reminds me of a political meme or a political cartoon.

drivingmenuts 5y ago

I was kind of disappointed. There weren’t the options to do more evil and make more money. If I’m going to be Jeff Bezos, I’m going to try to out-Jeff Bezos Jeff Bezos.