The thing that’s unacceptable is not that manual labor gets replaced by robots. That’s a good thing.
The thing that’s unacceptable is that Jeff Bezos can amass such wealth and that you don’t get a basic income and housing without needing to work for it.
The worst part of Lemmy is this stupid kind of leftism.
No u
It’s inevitable that people like Jeff Bezos exist. It’s called capitalism. The System is working as expected.
NATIONALIZE AMAZON
Use it to fund UBI and other social causes.
Just saying, if we burn buildings with no human, there will be no human casualties, only BILLIONAIRE ASSETS getting burned… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, keep burning BILLIONAIRE ASSETS and the BILLIONAIRE became MILLIONAIRE… ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
If Bernie Sanders was a cartoon character I think he just might be Lemongrab…
As bad as these Sociopathic Oligarchs are now, imagine when they start reaching Trillionaire status, and can start competing with entire nations. They will manufacture their own armies of Slaughterbots, and demand anything they want.
It is inevitable. Unless we end them.
It works so much better when you use all the zeroes. Makes it easier to compare.
290,000,000,000dollar net worth10,000,000dollar penthouse120,000,000dollar met gala500,000,000dollar yacht600,000workers
With his net worth, he could give every one of those workers $100,000 and still have ~80% of his net worth.
Just some back of the envelope math. With $290 billion, he could give each of those 600,000 people $10k a year for the next 48 years and still have $2 billion left over. And that is without considering interest or investment in the meantime.
The best thing about Jeff Bezos is Mackenzie Scott.
He reminds me of someone…
Zorg understood people in a way that Bezos doesn’t. All these billionaires are half robot weirdos.
He’s my favorite example to bust the “smarts and hard work” myth of billionaires. He had parents with good, union jobs that allowed him to go to Princeton, where he dropped out of a physics major (into CS) because it was too difficult. The school’s connections, though, got him a job at a hedge fund, where he was assigned to study the investment potential of e-commerce on the nascent Web. He saw the enormous potential, but was so bad at his job that he couldn’t convince the other executives that they wanted some of that money. So he left the job, got a large loan from his parents, and started Cadabra in a garage he rented in a conscious nod to Silicon Valley mythos. Oh, Cadabra? He was going to call it that, but his lawyer convinced him to go with his second choice of name, because that one sounds too much like cadaver. The company was profitable in a month, and then he used all manner of dirty tricks to run the competition out of the market.
Nothing in his story indicates anything but dumb luck of randomly being the one in the right time and place to succeed. If it was smarts and hard work, there were hundreds of other e-commerce contenders who put in at least as much as he did.
It’s hard to overstate how much Amazon has changed the economy. It has quite possibly the longest and most consequential game of enshittification in play. It’s already taken over a giant chunk of the retail market and destroyed local businesses in ways Wal-Mart and their like could only dream of.
It’s brought worker exploitation to Gilded Age levels. And there’s no doubt the ultimate goal is to create a monopoly over retail, so that they will later dictate prices. They’re already redirecting popular products to their own cheap, shittier versions in the searches they control. Their long term goal, like all tech companies that touch real world commerce, is to “disrupt” the system that worked for everyone before them, aka what’s left of competition in late stage capitalism, and replace it with monopoly.
Bezos is a would-be feudalist lord of retail in a technofascist hellscape. Peter Thiel will handle the surveillance. And they’ll all ride out the apocalypse on wherever they relocated Epstein’s island.
When I buy things online these days, much rarer than in previous - I deliberately avoid Amazon. For all the reasons you said, and a handful of others lol!
At least half the time the product comes in an Amazon box anyway. I think you might be understating how successful Amazon has been at reshaping things.
“b-b-but Amazon creates JOBS!! Jeff Bezos DESERVES that money!!!”
- Guy who doesn’t understand that jobs “created” by Amazon are jobs destroyed elsewhere by its monopoly
Look, I get it. Jeff Bezos will keep hoarding. That makes sense in that selfish, nihilist worldview. What I can’t understand, is why all fucking people are voting against their own fucking self interests to allow this bullshit. If people didn’t just vote against their fucking better interests we would be in a much better situation.
because voting is not issue based, in the US. it’s “sports team” based, us vs them, etc. it is nothing but distractions while capitalists keep getting richer.
If leftists didn’t refuse to vote “on principle” we would be in a much better situation.
Same for if neoliberals gave up the delusion that chasing conservative voters is going to get them a higher turnout. But I have no doubt they will continue to try the same thing and punch left when they fail.
what principal do you mean? asking harris to say genocide is bad? asking the dem party to cut the horseshit with primaries? asking biden to leave a year before he did?
anyone who voted third party is not why trump is in office, their numbers plus harris’ would still have lost to trump. sadly.
but cut the thick shit pushing horseshit rhetoric like your reply. grow up. stop supporting genocide too.
If people didn’t just vote against their fucking better interests we would be in a much better situation.
Red-staters seem perfectly fine with punching themselves in the face if it means they can stumble back and bloody the nose of the durn libburuls standing behind them.
Elon is worth more than the next three richest billionaires.
Most of his worth is stocks, that are highly overvalued by 100x. If he tried to liquidate for cash he would be with a fraction of his net
That’s why they use the stocks as collateral for a loan.
Exactly. The second we tried to liquidate him, none of that money would exist.
Then we try liquifying instead?
and yet he still has the reach and power he does, with ephemeral shit like stocks. as if they’re … just like dollars. it doesn’t matter what kind of asset it is, these billionaires need to go.
And yet I’d still trade him for a day-old half-eaten bologna sandwich.
Giving or receiving?
Either way, I’m not going hungry.
yeah he could have spent those 0.3% of his net worth on giving those people *checks notes* one and a half week’s pay each instead.
don’t get me wrong, dollar billionaires shouldn’t exist and bezos is definitely among the worst, but focusing on the money he spends rather than how the people still working for him are treated feels backwards.
90% of his ner worth is in 300 p/e stocks.
The money doesn’t exist. It’s all speculation. The second you tried to cash those stocks the value would plumit 90% overnight, and nothing good would be able to be bought with the cash after that.
It’s wild how the money that doesn’t exist buys yachts but not school supplies
And yet, is he treated by other gigantically rich people and institutions as if this is true?
You’re arguing the pedantic point, something like “he doesn’t really have that many dollars, you said dollars!” while (I guess deliberately ignoring?) the OBVIOUS, clear way him and others like him wield influence and power.
Everyone who makes him actually powerful, by lending to him and facilitating it all (by hoping to profit along the way), understands his net worth better than you do. Kinda de facto, by being in his spheres in the first place.
What is it you think you’re adding here?
I’m going to hazard a guess he makes close to 0.3% in interest per week, meaning he could employ those people on his own passive income without even noticing.
He didn’t, you earn interest in cash, not stocks.
That’s his fuck around money, he can give away even more and still not feel it.
and he should probably be made to
