A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
Our Goals
Once billionaires can’t hide behind the facade of being job creators what incentive does the government have to continue allowing corporate tax abuse? I understand corruption is the answer but I mean, a state government for example, especially one who’s just had a ton of federal funding cuts… why would they give these corporations these sweet deals if they’re not even employing people and contributing to the local economy?
It’s inevitable that people like Jeff Bezos exist. It’s called capitalism. The System is working as expected.
The nuance is that money isnt real. If its spent then interest rates rise as inflation rises, and the nominal value falls. So it cant ever really be spent.
What we should do is raise/lower taxes instead of raising/lowering interest rates, if we have deflation then taxes on the rich go up rather than interest rates falling, and vice versa.
The worst part of Lemmy is this stupid kind of leftism.
No u
NATIONALIZE AMAZON
Use it to fund UBI and other social causes.
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 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 noses of the durn libburuls standing behind them.
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.
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.
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
Elon is worth more than the next three richest billionaires combined.
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.
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.
It works so much better when you use all the zeroes. Makes it easier to compare.
290,000,000,000 dollar net worth 10,000,000 dollar penthouse 120,000,000 dollar met gala 500,000,000 dollar yacht 600,000 workersWith his net worth, he could give every one of those workers $100,000 and still have ~80% of his net worth.
If Bernie Sanders was a cartoon character I think he just might be Lemongrab....
He reminds me of someone...
Zorg understood people in a way that Bezos doesn't. All these billionaires are half robot weirdos.
The best thing about Jeff Bezos is Mackenzie Scott.