i'm kinda jaded because it seems the type of people that get into politics do it to gain money and power.. so voting always feels like picking the lesser of two evils
Start by just attending a some meetings of your local school board, city council, etc. Sit, watch, and maybe take notes. Compare the reality with local press coverage (if any) of it. Try analyzing the social dynamics. Talk to other ordinary citizens about it.
If the only people paying real attention to gov't leaders are the greedy and power-hungry, then few decent people will run for office. And very few of those win.
And then what? Another bald head will replace them, but this time with an army of peons on their side to protect them president style, because for them it is much easier to buy loyalty of even 1000 men than it is for you to rally people to your cause.
That’s because Trump needs to show his face. If you’re making billions as a CEO you can protect your identity, there are billionaires in Germany that hadn’t shown their faces online in decades.
Let's assume he does and is very successful, he makes $1T. Then what? Giving it all away won't resolve growing inequalities. Using it to influence medias and politics?
Why should someone need to start a business just to have as good a life as their parents did? Why is today's wealth inequality optimal for society? Rich people in the past got by just fine. They started businesses, succeeded, lived incredibly comfortable lives, all while earning a smaller multiple more than the people working for them. The centralization of wealth is a sign of a sick society, especially when people who provide labor suffer and get less of the pie.
Not saying that you shouldn’t vote or try to change things, but nothing short of starting massive revolution with military insurrection and enforcement is going to change anything.
I'd much rather live in a society where Jeff Bezos has more wealth than me and I can buy things on Amazon, than in a society where Amazon no longer functions as a company because it was destroyed by a military insurrection and also the leaders of said insurrection have unequal access to resources compared to most other people (because they're the leaders of a military insurrection; there's not a whole lot of equality in a military)
Also, who said anything about Amazon? Why are you myopic? The whole system is rotten to the core when a single person can make it in a minute more than 99% of world’s population and not use the money to advance the world. And before you mark (ha, get it?) me as a communist – I’m not against wealth and personal ownership. It’s one thing to own a Ferrari and an expensive home, and is another to live in a cookie clicker world watching number go up and doing nothing with it but multiply the money.
I'd much rather neither, but apparently that's utopian.
Dictatorship is an almost inevitable outcome of huge wealth inequality.
At the very least political checks and balances erode rapidly, because most politicians, judges, and media people love easy money. If a billionaire throws money at them they'll do whatever they're told to do.
There aren't many systems that protect non-compliers from negative consequences when they're surrounded by corruption.
so it is either or, eh? this is the fault of our society (the most in america due to two-party system) where we have been programmed (especially in recent years with party-controlled “social” media) to think this way. there is of course much more sane middle ground but we are past the point, evidenced by comments like yours, where this is even debatable. any approach to a more sane scenarios will be labeled as “socialism” etc…
Are there not wealthy business owners who donate their money to poltical causes they believe in in other countries with differently designed electoral systems?
A classic example of how the vaunted "First Amendment" doesn't actually help. Sure after a couple of decades it might be repealed, and your conviction would be quashed. Doesn't mean it doesn't stop the damage in the first place.
Serious (but not easy) answer:
You can move to a different country that more aligns with your moral standings or interests. You're (presumably) a valuable asset that will provide a net-positive contribution wherever you move, and a loss will be incurred when you emigrate.
It's a huge undertaking, but you _can_ vote where your tax money gets sent. You can ensure it bootstraps a more equal system instead of propping-up an unequal one.
I did this myself, and I feel good about having done it.
Come on now. They’re not rich. They can’t just buy a visa and move where they want. And unfortunately there don’t seem to be many companies desperate to displace their domestic workforce with cheap compliant Americans or anything.
You don't need to be rich to get a working visa (assuming you are a competent software engineer -- plenty of places in Europe will hire you, and there is a path to citizenship).
You'll have to reassess what a "software engineer" salary looks like, but this is unironically part of the pathway towards living in a more-equal society where perhaps we shouldn't be earning 3x as much as everyone else just because we can invert a binary tree.
I wonder if instead of shaking their fist at the sky in anger with billionaires, we could run influence campaigns to:
Collect enough money to run marketing campaigns for billionaires to give more money to charity. (I don’t super trust politicians to tax them more and I am not sure that taxing them would even be effective given that there are always tax havens and loopholes, but persuasion should be possible, not extraordinarily expensive and have a high cost-benefit IMHO)
What I always find peculiar about this is the wealth disparities even at the highest levels. Andy Jassy for instance, or David Solomon (CEO of Goldman), have less than 1% of the bulge bracket class and certainly have similar work demands and impacts.
It was never about hard work its about who owns the means of production. And it turns out the best way to amass huge amounts of wealth is creating something so you have ownership and working on growing it for decades.
Jeff had similar compensation as jassy when he was ceo. It’s just that he is also the owner.
The "means of production" has been one of the clarion calls of Marxism. It is more about who controls those means than who owns them. They can be officially owned by a government (so called public ownership), a co-operative (or "people's committee"), shareholders or a board, but in reality controlled by an individual it or a handful of individuals. That pattern continues after revolutionaries "seize the means of production" as well.
While I’m not a huge fan of the budge bracket class existing, I would say that:
1. Bezos once said something along the lines of don’t judge me by how much money I have, rather look at how may other wealthy people I’ve made. That view may be over simplifying some things, but it’s not completely wrong either.
2. Jassy or Solomon are just employees at the end of the day. Well paid, but they didn’t create the company. The system rewards those that create the thing a lot more than those that run the thing.
3. I’m vastly more critical of trust fund folks than someone like Bezos. He created true value in the economy and has been rewarded for that. Trust fund folks that simply live off that income are generally not productive members of society. They live the lifestyle then live purely because of a rich relative and, with rare exception, would be unable to have earned that wealth themself as their performance in society is poor relative to those who created the wealth.
And how many have become more poor? I do not give a flying fuck about how many 5 percenter have made even more money. You either lift society as a whole or you let small part prosper at the expense of the rest.
Some time ago conditions in the US / Canada were that many small people got the opportunity (The American Dream or whatever the fuck it is called).
Basically no one has been made poorer by the existence of Amazon, a company that mainly sells cheap consumer goods (or cloud compute) to the masses. The small number of people who have been made poorer by the existence of Amazon are people in the upper 5% or so of American wealth who owned a consumer-facing business that got out-competed by Amazon, and by definition that means that a much larger number of generally-poorer people benefitted because Amazon fulfilled their wants and needs better than the other business did.
Jeff Bezos started Amazon with family money. Sure, there were richer folks, but few have parents capable of giving them hundreds of thousands of dollars for a business venture.
How about we judge him not by dollars made but by positive actions taken in the world? The number of people he has helped. It would be interesting to see the ratio of people he's helped to people he's hurt. I wonder if it's 1:1 or more like 1:10000?
Under no circumstances should we allow him to define the criteria by which he should be judged. Greed is not a good. Hoarding wealth is just like any hoarding -- a psychological disorder. The reason the wealthy can never be satisfied is because hoarding is a psychological disorder. It will never be rational. It will never be normal.
> ...we always look up at the oligarchs or sideways at the Jones, but we never look at those who are not doing as well as us.
Which uses universal language to incorrectly declare the behavior of all humans. I assumed you were writing in good faith and reporting you find true and in my writing rejecting your claim.
Maybe there's no one doing worse than you but I doubt it because here you are, with clear, well written english. Do you not offer them a helping hand?
The real problem with your statement is that there are many of us who do look at and after those who are not doing as well as us (and some of those are quite wealthy). A group of us spend every Tuesday to collect food from stores with which to prepare a meal that we send to homeless encampments around town and then serve to anyone who shows up (usually around 100) for dinner. We provide a positive environment, build relationships, and help them to get clothes, toiletries, services, and emergency shelter. I and many others give substantial portions of our incomes to reduce poverty and disease across the world. I have been lucky to write software that has helped resolve the violence of genocide and open source software that has lifted businesses and made starting them more accessible. I have spent the core of my mind's considerations on trying to understand why the world functions as it does and how that can be improved, how we can move the standards higher, and how we can include everyone. In all of this there are many ways I have made decisions that make my wealth less, my comforts lower, and my time and mind more strained but I will not cease and I am not alone.
So... When you claim that everyone only looks to those who are doing better I assert that you can speak for yourself. The belief that it's all every person for themselves and dog eat dog is false. It's bad for hope and bad for seeing reality.
Honestly, I don't care how rich the rich are. The thing is, that for most part the poor become richer alongside the rich. Yeah, the gap widens, but what does it matter, if you also become more rich?
Many reasons, but one reason is because having obscene wealth also means having obscene power. Power to influence politics and power to exploit workers.
At this scale, it's not about material wealth. It's about power.
The issue is not that Jeff Bezos can buy an yacht and you can only buy an used RV for your weekend trips. The issue is that Jeff Bezos can buy a whole newspaper to shape public opinion and decide what laws get passed, and you can do nothing more than write a blog post about it.
What you are saying is you're happy with a trillionaire class, if it means you can be a millionaire. But then what does being a millionaire mean, if you can't buy a house for a million dollars?
> It’s worth noting that these vastly unequal growth rates are on top of the already vast inequality that existed in 1979. Back then, the top 1% earned average wages ($281,932) more than nine times as much as the bottom 90% ($29,953). In 2023, the top 1% earned average wages ($794,129) more than 18 times as much as the bottom 90% ($43,035).
Correct. It is not about the gap, it is about the lower end. It needs to be raised. It can only be done with the optimal social programs, not by "eating the rich".
People shaking their fist at this on hacker news is weird.
Yes there is growing wealth inequality in the world. Because we invented a way to turn capital in to more capital without humans.
Bezos is just the first of many. He also has on average made other people richer than he has pocketed, he doesn't own more than 50% of Amazon, his investors (shareholders, pension funds, the US government) have all done incredibly well out of his vision and enterprise.
I love Prime, I love AWS, I love that I can get rare books over night at a great price. Should he be wealth capped? Should he innovate less as he get's more? Not as long as the primary way he makes money is through computers, that would just be self defeating. As someone who lives in Europe, the tech sector is America's growth engine and has defined the gap between the two economies, we'd love a Jeff Bezos.
>>People shaking their fist at this on hacker news is weird
I mean I know(at the back of my head) that HN is owned by Y Combinator which is all about creating startups that explode and make you a billionaire. But personally I come here for the actual hacking - gameboy games running on a pregnancy test, that kind of thing. Bezos making more money than GDP of a small country in a day is a thing that kinda deserves us shaking our fists at it - it means the global system is broken, if one man can have this kind of power. But in a way, it's nothing new - emperors and khans had more riches than any current billionaire, comparatively. On the other hand, they were actual rulers, not just "regular" citizens.
Bezos is making a lot of money. But it doesn't mean it makes the world better. Prime or AWS can still work fine without having Bezos making tons of money
Few big dicks take over everything and as the result they buy media, they buy government / laws, and having less and less competition they also have way too much power over the employees. All for convenience of overnight delivery? Are you sure this can not be achieved without Amazon? And what are you going to do if Google, Amazon, whatever else that controls good chunk of your life cuts you off?
I don't get the outrage. Our system needs incentives to get people to do great work. If you do one-of-a-kind work, shouldn't you get rewarded proportionally?
There is 1 Amazon. It's not easy to create Amazon from scratch.
Who should decide what's proportional, though? Should there be a committee that says, Bezos is capped at X billions, and any money he makes after that gets confiscated?
Taxes are not a punishment, a person earning exponentially more than the average person can also afford to pay more taxes, and it will not even begin to affect their quality of life. How is that so hard to understand?
If you don't want to pay taxes i take it you don't want to live in a civilized society, then you are welcome to leave.
I don't know, but societies seem to determine these kinds of things just fine through democratic processes, usually - why is the tax system where I live structured such that everything below 100k is taxed at 40% but everything above is at 60%? How is that any different? These are just numbers we came up with.
And yeah, I don't have the answer to what the number is for people like Bezos. Maybe there isn't one - maybe he can own whatever amount of money he likes, but every person with wealth above 1BN is banned forever for making politican donations, either personally or through proxies. Enjoy your life with your hard earned money, do whatever you like - but don't use it to influence politics.
Again, I'm not seriously suggesting this - just saying that as societies we determine many things which are right for the greater whole already, why not this? And I really want the answer to be "because we haven't sat down to think about it yet" and not "because Mr Bezos gave us 100M last year for our campaign we so won't be looking into it".
Sure, so influencing politics with money should be outlawed (or perhaps it is already..?). Why not.
That's not the type of conversations I hear, though (including from you). People always seem to focus on punishing people that are more successful. And that can only happen by force, where somebody has to decide what you can and cannot do and then steal whatever you lawfully earned.
What is proportional? Shall we crown him god? Allow him to keep slaves? Put him on a pedestal? Do you even know how much is it: a billion? If you strip him off 95% of his wealth, he’ll still have more than you can achieve in your 10 lives. He is disproportionately well compensated.
I'll repeat here what I am saying since 2022 [0]. Focusing on wealth inequality does not work. Concentration of wealth is a symptom of the large problem of concentration of power. Get rid of the mega-corporations, and it will be virtually impossible to have this much wealth in the hands of a single individual.
Just put a cap on the size of a company. Break any corporation that has more than 150 employed people. Count independent contractors as employees if more than 1/3 of their income is dependent on any single customer.
How much he worked has nothing to do with what he is earning - there are people working three jobs out there who barely make ends meet. The page illustrates the absurd level of inequality our society has reached, a level that pure numbers are useless at illutrating.
Sure, but let me ask you this - do you think there should be any limit to how much wealth can one person own? Like, to take it to the extreme - say Bezos owned every single media corporation, evey factory and every farm in the US, buying it with his "hard earned" money - would that be fine? Like, he started one of the world's largest companies, why shouldn't be allowed to own everything, right? What if he(completely legally) starts giving hundreds of millions of dollars to politicans so they just start doing what he wants instead of what their constituents want? Is that ok too?
I think we can both agree that hard work and one of a kind achievement like this should be rewarded. But I suspect we will disagree on whether the reward should have a limit or not. I don't want Bezos to give up his wealth and live on 50k/year. But I don't want him to be so wealthy he can influence politics both home and abroad.
No, there shouldn't be a limit. If there's a limit it means that somebody needs to decide what limit that is, and steal whatever is over the limit by force. I'm for freedom.
Should he be able to won every single media corporation? He shouldn't and he can't, because there are laws to protect against monopolies. Same thing for factories and farms.
Should he control politicians? No, but in theory people still control politicians since they can vote them out. If there's a problem where politicians are willing to get bribed, perhaps the solution would be to impose more transparency and harsher penalties for that.
>> If there's a problem where politicians are willing to get bribed
The problem is that bribery is completely legal in the United States, donating money to a PAC is completely legal and without a limit. I'm not talking about money under the table in a suitcase kind of thing - I'm talking about the situations like recent OpenAI donation of $25M to Trump's PAC - do you think after such donation he is more likely to do what OpenAI wants, or what his voters want? It's not even about Trump specifically - the entire American system is structured in such a way that this is allowed, billionaries from both sides donate to politicians to help them win and achieve their goals, this is the real power of the money they make and this is the problem I have with it.
>> I'm for freedom.
Someone already decides that you pay taxes on the money you make, and presumably will come and take it from you by force if you don't pay - the only difference is the percentage value. Or are you commenting from somewhere that doesn't have a functional tax system?
The answer is simple: By definition only about 100-300 people.
There's only 100 of the "worlds biggest companies" (assuming this refers to the top 100). And companies are usually started by 1-3 people.
Similarly: There's usually only 4 participants in the top 4 of a tournament bracket.
(The question is a bit: what does "can" even mean in this context and the answer im hinting at here: It's not individual skill that creates companies ex-nihilo. It's our economic system that produces companies.)
Sure, all entrepreneurs risk it all. They quit their job to pursue something that can fail and make them bankrupt.
Was he lucky? He had an intuition that books could be sold on the internet because you don't need to test them out before buying. Luck might have been part of it, but I hadn't thought of that in 1990-something, I was playing AOE II all day instead.
What exactly did he risk that justifies this reward?
> and worked hard
How hard exactly? How much harder than a doctor, firefighter, waiter, or just your average joe could he possibly have worked to justify earning a million times more.
> to start one of the world's biggest companies, he shouldn't be rewarded for that?
No, he really, really shouldn't. Not that much, not even remotely that much.
> I really don't get it.
It is absolute poison for society, for the whole of humanity, that a single person can own that much, hold that much power, with zero accountability.
He didn't "risk it all." He was never going to end up on the street in a tent if Amazon failed.
And a lot of what he did risk was other people's money.
Which is how Amazon works anyway. Everyone who relies on Amazon - the authors, the drop shippers, the small traders, the warehouse staff, the drivers, the white collar employees - can be rug-pulled at any moment for any random reason.
And Amazon lives off indirect government welfare. Pay at the low end is so miserly nearly a quarter of employees rely on SNAP.
Let us ignore the specific case of Jeff Bezos and Amazon, let us look at a generic founder starting a company that turns into a billion or trillion dollar company making the founder a billionaire.
The founder founded the company but the billions were earned by the thousands of employees working for the company. The founder alone would not have earned a single dollar without the employees and there would not be a company the be employed by without the founder.
If you start a business, you create a company to isolate the business risk from your personal risk, if the business does not work out, the company goes down, the founder should be fine. You will probably risk some of your personal money as a founder in many cases, but how much of a reward do you want for that? If you risk a million and make a billion, is that not more than enough? Did you really start a business where you expected to fail with more than ninety-nine point nine percent?
On the other hand, even if the founder would not get an oversized portion of the profit, because that money would get distributed to many employees or many sold products, the effect is relatively small, it would neither make all employees earn millions nor the product significantly cheaper. Bushiness owners making billions is just being in a position where you can take a little money from very many others and that adds up.
Also founders getting rich is capitalism not working as intended. The point of an economy is to provide goods and services that people want as efficiently as possible. Business making a lot of profit means that things are not as cheap as they could be and competition is supposed to correct that. Making a profit is a mean to an end, an incentive for the creation of businesses to satisfy demands, it is not the end itself.
Masses of doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals who individually have much less wealth than Bezos are a lot more responsible for the cost you pay for health care than Jeff Bezos is.
People argue that UBI means people won't bother to work
Yet any billionaire can quite happily retire to a private island with every possible need catered for. Want to travel to Japan for a photo, just ask your PA and there's a helicopter waiting taking you to a plane by the time you put your shoes on.
Anyone with a wealth of $10m can live the life of a very well paid worker ($500k a year)
Anyone with a wealth of $2m can live like the average American.
Anyone with a wealth of $500k can live "like a king" in cheaper locations.
The word 'made' is a peculiar one. If we are talking about creating value, then the definition of value is also kind of tricky. Does it add anything to the world or does it just move stuff around in a zero sum game.
In any case, in my opinion, blaming Bezos for being Bezos, is looking in the wrong direction. The real issue is; who enabled this? And a good place to start, is to look at yourselves in a mirror.
The logic is sound. That you are doing nothing, is exactly the problem. Not even recognising that there is anything you can do, is more telling about you than of people like Besoz.
No it's not. It's based on how much he "made" in the first half of 2020, mostly originating from gains in Amazon's stock, in a period specifically selected to inflate the number. If you actually want to display how much Bezos made since the user opened the page, there are many public APIs to get live stock data and you could show the actual live gain/loss. But that wouldn't really support the point you're trying to make, since there would be days where he actually loses more money than most people ever see.
Also anyone who owns Amazon stock in their investment accounts - or who owns the S&P 500 - is also making and losing money when Jeff Bezos makes or loses money, for exactly the same reason.
Billionaires in countries with large inequality, like the developing and the US, are like Gods, not so much in low inequality, like Denmark.
There are two ways to diminish their role and position without robing them: reduce the inequality or stop worshiping the consumerism and focus in non-material ideas. Both are difficult but effective.
$116k — Senior software developer yearly salary. Interns makes more than that in US. Not that anybody's hiring interns anymore, but that's not the point.
$142k — "basic" Aston Martin Vantage. The base model starts at $192k currently. I don't remember times where new AM was anywhere near 140k no matter how "basic".
$182k — Fully loaded Tesla Model S. This one is the most egregious. More expensive than Aston Martin? Come on, a fully loaded Plaid is $115k with delivery right now.
Haven't watched further since I was already too flabbergasted by how much those numbers didn't match my expectations.
> $116k — Senior software developer yearly salary. Interns makes more than that in US. Not that anybody's hiring interns anymore, but that's not the point.
Some interns make more than that.
I highly doubt the median intern does, even a SWE intern. Please think beyond SF/NYC.
Yeah this is a crazy comment to me. I know multiple people who had entry level Wall Street and NYC/SF SWE offers back in 2022-2023 and I feel like $120k was really good for even an entry level position, let alone an intern. I guess maybe inflation in the past few years might have changed this.
Where do I submit a bug report? AMZN is down 2% today but that number still go up.
To be clear, wealth inequality is absolutely one of the most critical social problems today, just that simplistic numbers like this stifle useful discourse.
The numbers are based on Bezos' $56.7 billion gains during the first half of 2020 (source: Bloomberg and Buzzfeed), which translates into approximately $311 million per day, or $3,605 every second
> simplistic numbers like this stifle useful discourse
Do they? I would agree that it would be much better to just state the above on the page itself, but not because it makes a practical difference. It probably would make it feel even worse, if that was possible, for people who thinking back on the hardships they and/or others went through in that Covid period.
fenaer | 17 hours ago
_What can I, as an individual, do to counter wealth inequality?_
It feels like breaking my fist against a brick wall.
niek_pas | 17 hours ago
Aeglaecia | 17 hours ago
dudefeliciano | 16 hours ago
thousand_nights | 16 hours ago
carlmr | 16 hours ago
wiseowise | 16 hours ago
bell-cot | 16 hours ago
If the only people paying real attention to gov't leaders are the greedy and power-hungry, then few decent people will run for office. And very few of those win.
navane | 17 hours ago
wiseowise | 16 hours ago
iso1631 | 16 hours ago
But yes, generally this is how druglords work.
wiseowise | 16 hours ago
glerk | 17 hours ago
Sayrus | 16 hours ago
csoups14 | 16 hours ago
wiseowise | 17 hours ago
JuniperMesos | 16 hours ago
wiseowise | 16 hours ago
Also, who said anything about Amazon? Why are you myopic? The whole system is rotten to the core when a single person can make it in a minute more than 99% of world’s population and not use the money to advance the world. And before you mark (ha, get it?) me as a communist – I’m not against wealth and personal ownership. It’s one thing to own a Ferrari and an expensive home, and is another to live in a cookie clicker world watching number go up and doing nothing with it but multiply the money.
JuniperMesos | 3 hours ago
TheOtherHobbes | 16 hours ago
Dictatorship is an almost inevitable outcome of huge wealth inequality.
At the very least political checks and balances erode rapidly, because most politicians, judges, and media people love easy money. If a billionaire throws money at them they'll do whatever they're told to do.
There aren't many systems that protect non-compliers from negative consequences when they're surrounded by corruption.
bdangubic | 15 hours ago
JuniperMesos | 3 hours ago
ricardo81 | 17 hours ago
A lot of the time other web stores can offer the same value.
RobotToaster | 17 hours ago
iso1631 | 16 hours ago
cronin101 | 16 hours ago
It's a huge undertaking, but you _can_ vote where your tax money gets sent. You can ensure it bootstraps a more equal system instead of propping-up an unequal one.
I did this myself, and I feel good about having done it.
butterbomb | 14 hours ago
cronin101 | 12 hours ago
You'll have to reassess what a "software engineer" salary looks like, but this is unironically part of the pathway towards living in a more-equal society where perhaps we shouldn't be earning 3x as much as everyone else just because we can invert a binary tree.
smokel | 16 hours ago
If you feed this into a decent chatbot, or in an Ask HN, you might be surprised.
bilekas | 17 hours ago
HelloUsername | 17 hours ago
Raed667 | 17 hours ago
ukblewis | 17 hours ago
Collect enough money to run marketing campaigns for billionaires to give more money to charity. (I don’t super trust politicians to tax them more and I am not sure that taxing them would even be effective given that there are always tax havens and loopholes, but persuasion should be possible, not extraordinarily expensive and have a high cost-benefit IMHO)
wiseowise | 16 hours ago
They’ll just counter it with an army of cheap tik tokers portraying you as soyjack and campaign of disinformation.
AdamN | 16 hours ago
maxilevi | 16 hours ago
Jeff had similar compensation as jassy when he was ceo. It’s just that he is also the owner.
nephihaha | 16 hours ago
cmiles8 | 16 hours ago
1. Bezos once said something along the lines of don’t judge me by how much money I have, rather look at how may other wealthy people I’ve made. That view may be over simplifying some things, but it’s not completely wrong either.
2. Jassy or Solomon are just employees at the end of the day. Well paid, but they didn’t create the company. The system rewards those that create the thing a lot more than those that run the thing.
3. I’m vastly more critical of trust fund folks than someone like Bezos. He created true value in the economy and has been rewarded for that. Trust fund folks that simply live off that income are generally not productive members of society. They live the lifestyle then live purely because of a rich relative and, with rare exception, would be unable to have earned that wealth themself as their performance in society is poor relative to those who created the wealth.
FpUser | 16 hours ago
And how many have become more poor? I do not give a flying fuck about how many 5 percenter have made even more money. You either lift society as a whole or you let small part prosper at the expense of the rest.
Some time ago conditions in the US / Canada were that many small people got the opportunity (The American Dream or whatever the fuck it is called).
Now that window of opportunity keep shrinking.
So no, fuck you James
JuniperMesos | 3 hours ago
FpUser | 2 hours ago
lots of other if you care to search
DragonStrength | 16 hours ago
Henchman21 | 4 hours ago
Under no circumstances should we allow him to define the criteria by which he should be judged. Greed is not a good. Hoarding wealth is just like any hoarding -- a psychological disorder. The reason the wealthy can never be satisfied is because hoarding is a psychological disorder. It will never be rational. It will never be normal.
We can do better as a species.
ricardo81 | 16 hours ago
ruairidhwm | 16 hours ago
SanjayMehta | 16 hours ago
erikerikson | 16 hours ago
SanjayMehta | 13 hours ago
I sold shaving cream door-to-door to pay for textbooks.
I am speaking for myself and others like me.
erikerikson | 12 hours ago
> ...we always look up at the oligarchs or sideways at the Jones, but we never look at those who are not doing as well as us.
Which uses universal language to incorrectly declare the behavior of all humans. I assumed you were writing in good faith and reporting you find true and in my writing rejecting your claim.
Maybe there's no one doing worse than you but I doubt it because here you are, with clear, well written english. Do you not offer them a helping hand?
The real problem with your statement is that there are many of us who do look at and after those who are not doing as well as us (and some of those are quite wealthy). A group of us spend every Tuesday to collect food from stores with which to prepare a meal that we send to homeless encampments around town and then serve to anyone who shows up (usually around 100) for dinner. We provide a positive environment, build relationships, and help them to get clothes, toiletries, services, and emergency shelter. I and many others give substantial portions of our incomes to reduce poverty and disease across the world. I have been lucky to write software that has helped resolve the violence of genocide and open source software that has lifted businesses and made starting them more accessible. I have spent the core of my mind's considerations on trying to understand why the world functions as it does and how that can be improved, how we can move the standards higher, and how we can include everyone. In all of this there are many ways I have made decisions that make my wealth less, my comforts lower, and my time and mind more strained but I will not cease and I am not alone.
So... When you claim that everyone only looks to those who are doing better I assert that you can speak for yourself. The belief that it's all every person for themselves and dog eat dog is false. It's bad for hope and bad for seeing reality.
haght | 16 hours ago
shafyy | 16 hours ago
rglullis | 16 hours ago
The issue is not that Jeff Bezos can buy an yacht and you can only buy an used RV for your weekend trips. The issue is that Jeff Bezos can buy a whole newspaper to shape public opinion and decide what laws get passed, and you can do nothing more than write a blog post about it.
altern8 | 16 hours ago
kasey_junk | 16 hours ago
If the last year has shown me anything, it’s moneys not all it’s cracked up to be on the power front.
rglullis | 16 hours ago
But with a lot more power than him.
(At least for the moment)
dudefeliciano | 15 hours ago
dudefeliciano | 16 hours ago
bpt3 | 16 hours ago
wiseowise | 16 hours ago
bpt3 | 14 hours ago
dudefeliciano | 16 hours ago
bpt3 | 14 hours ago
Is Bezos taking money out of my pocket or preventing me from buying food, shelter, healthcare, or other services I need or want?
wiseowise | 16 hours ago
https://www.epi.org/blog/wage-inequality-fell-in-2023-amid-a...
lostmsu | 15 hours ago
From the title of your page
wiseowise | 15 hours ago
lostmsu | 14 hours ago
wiseowise | 11 hours ago
40k is what you call rich?
lostmsu | 11 hours ago
lwroo | 16 hours ago
k_kelly | 16 hours ago
Yes there is growing wealth inequality in the world. Because we invented a way to turn capital in to more capital without humans.
Bezos is just the first of many. He also has on average made other people richer than he has pocketed, he doesn't own more than 50% of Amazon, his investors (shareholders, pension funds, the US government) have all done incredibly well out of his vision and enterprise.
I love Prime, I love AWS, I love that I can get rare books over night at a great price. Should he be wealth capped? Should he innovate less as he get's more? Not as long as the primary way he makes money is through computers, that would just be self defeating. As someone who lives in Europe, the tech sector is America's growth engine and has defined the gap between the two economies, we'd love a Jeff Bezos.
gambiting | 16 hours ago
I mean I know(at the back of my head) that HN is owned by Y Combinator which is all about creating startups that explode and make you a billionaire. But personally I come here for the actual hacking - gameboy games running on a pregnancy test, that kind of thing. Bezos making more money than GDP of a small country in a day is a thing that kinda deserves us shaking our fists at it - it means the global system is broken, if one man can have this kind of power. But in a way, it's nothing new - emperors and khans had more riches than any current billionaire, comparatively. On the other hand, they were actual rulers, not just "regular" citizens.
vmaurin | 16 hours ago
Bezos is making a lot of money. But it doesn't mean it makes the world better. Prime or AWS can still work fine without having Bezos making tons of money
FpUser | 16 hours ago
No fuck it.
altern8 | 16 hours ago
I don't get the outrage. Our system needs incentives to get people to do great work. If you do one-of-a-kind work, shouldn't you get rewarded proportionally?
There is 1 Amazon. It's not easy to create Amazon from scratch.
gambiting | 16 hours ago
Are you allowed to think that the reward that Bezos is reaping isn't proportional to his achievements?
altern8 | 16 hours ago
Who should decide what's proportional, though? Should there be a committee that says, Bezos is capped at X billions, and any money he makes after that gets confiscated?
wiseowise | 16 hours ago
altern8 | 16 hours ago
wiseowise | 16 hours ago
dudefeliciano | 16 hours ago
If you don't want to pay taxes i take it you don't want to live in a civilized society, then you are welcome to leave.
bpt3 | 13 hours ago
gambiting | 16 hours ago
And yeah, I don't have the answer to what the number is for people like Bezos. Maybe there isn't one - maybe he can own whatever amount of money he likes, but every person with wealth above 1BN is banned forever for making politican donations, either personally or through proxies. Enjoy your life with your hard earned money, do whatever you like - but don't use it to influence politics.
Again, I'm not seriously suggesting this - just saying that as societies we determine many things which are right for the greater whole already, why not this? And I really want the answer to be "because we haven't sat down to think about it yet" and not "because Mr Bezos gave us 100M last year for our campaign we so won't be looking into it".
altern8 | 16 hours ago
That's not the type of conversations I hear, though (including from you). People always seem to focus on punishing people that are more successful. And that can only happen by force, where somebody has to decide what you can and cannot do and then steal whatever you lawfully earned.
dudefeliciano | 16 hours ago
How about a government that acts for the good of the people, rather than for the companies?
> gets confiscated?
funny way to refer to taxation
wiseowise | 16 hours ago
What is proportional? Shall we crown him god? Allow him to keep slaves? Put him on a pedestal? Do you even know how much is it: a billion? If you strip him off 95% of his wealth, he’ll still have more than you can achieve in your 10 lives. He is disproportionately well compensated.
dudefeliciano | 16 hours ago
soerxpso | 14 hours ago
dudefeliciano | 13 hours ago
rglullis | 16 hours ago
Just put a cap on the size of a company. Break any corporation that has more than 150 employed people. Count independent contractors as employees if more than 1/3 of their income is dependent on any single customer.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31317641
altern8 | 16 hours ago
He risked it all and worked hard to start one of the world's biggest companies, he shouldn't be rewarded for that?
I really don't get it.
banach | 16 hours ago
altern8 | 16 hours ago
How many people can do that? Not me.
gambiting | 16 hours ago
I think we can both agree that hard work and one of a kind achievement like this should be rewarded. But I suspect we will disagree on whether the reward should have a limit or not. I don't want Bezos to give up his wealth and live on 50k/year. But I don't want him to be so wealthy he can influence politics both home and abroad.
altern8 | 16 hours ago
Should he be able to won every single media corporation? He shouldn't and he can't, because there are laws to protect against monopolies. Same thing for factories and farms.
Should he control politicians? No, but in theory people still control politicians since they can vote them out. If there's a problem where politicians are willing to get bribed, perhaps the solution would be to impose more transparency and harsher penalties for that.
gambiting | 16 hours ago
The problem is that bribery is completely legal in the United States, donating money to a PAC is completely legal and without a limit. I'm not talking about money under the table in a suitcase kind of thing - I'm talking about the situations like recent OpenAI donation of $25M to Trump's PAC - do you think after such donation he is more likely to do what OpenAI wants, or what his voters want? It's not even about Trump specifically - the entire American system is structured in such a way that this is allowed, billionaries from both sides donate to politicians to help them win and achieve their goals, this is the real power of the money they make and this is the problem I have with it.
>> I'm for freedom.
Someone already decides that you pay taxes on the money you make, and presumably will come and take it from you by force if you don't pay - the only difference is the percentage value. Or are you commenting from somewhere that doesn't have a functional tax system?
dudefeliciano | 16 hours ago
Garlef | 15 hours ago
The answer is simple: By definition only about 100-300 people.
There's only 100 of the "worlds biggest companies" (assuming this refers to the top 100). And companies are usually started by 1-3 people.
Similarly: There's usually only 4 participants in the top 4 of a tournament bracket.
(The question is a bit: what does "can" even mean in this context and the answer im hinting at here: It's not individual skill that creates companies ex-nihilo. It's our economic system that produces companies.)
iso1631 | 16 hours ago
No he didn't. He tried a business venture like thousands of other founders on this site, and got insanely lucky.
altern8 | 16 hours ago
Was he lucky? He had an intuition that books could be sold on the internet because you don't need to test them out before buying. Luck might have been part of it, but I hadn't thought of that in 1990-something, I was playing AOE II all day instead.
brazzy | 16 hours ago
What exactly did he risk that justifies this reward?
> and worked hard
How hard exactly? How much harder than a doctor, firefighter, waiter, or just your average joe could he possibly have worked to justify earning a million times more.
> to start one of the world's biggest companies, he shouldn't be rewarded for that?
No, he really, really shouldn't. Not that much, not even remotely that much.
> I really don't get it.
It is absolute poison for society, for the whole of humanity, that a single person can own that much, hold that much power, with zero accountability.
TheOtherHobbes | 16 hours ago
And a lot of what he did risk was other people's money.
Which is how Amazon works anyway. Everyone who relies on Amazon - the authors, the drop shippers, the small traders, the warehouse staff, the drivers, the white collar employees - can be rug-pulled at any moment for any random reason.
And Amazon lives off indirect government welfare. Pay at the low end is so miserly nearly a quarter of employees rely on SNAP.
danbruc | 16 hours ago
The founder founded the company but the billions were earned by the thousands of employees working for the company. The founder alone would not have earned a single dollar without the employees and there would not be a company the be employed by without the founder.
If you start a business, you create a company to isolate the business risk from your personal risk, if the business does not work out, the company goes down, the founder should be fine. You will probably risk some of your personal money as a founder in many cases, but how much of a reward do you want for that? If you risk a million and make a billion, is that not more than enough? Did you really start a business where you expected to fail with more than ninety-nine point nine percent?
On the other hand, even if the founder would not get an oversized portion of the profit, because that money would get distributed to many employees or many sold products, the effect is relatively small, it would neither make all employees earn millions nor the product significantly cheaper. Bushiness owners making billions is just being in a position where you can take a little money from very many others and that adds up.
Also founders getting rich is capitalism not working as intended. The point of an economy is to provide goods and services that people want as efficiently as possible. Business making a lot of profit means that things are not as cheap as they could be and competition is supposed to correct that. Making a profit is a mean to an end, an incentive for the creation of businesses to satisfy demands, it is not the end itself.
mcsnaj_znqc | 16 hours ago
That's depressing and also embarrassing as a fellow dev
avidruntime | 12 hours ago
bakies | 10 hours ago
mcsnaj_znqc | 7 hours ago
Who doesn't want to get the best doctor?
So what if you want Healthcare? Should the doctor work for you for free? And so on
bakies | 3 hours ago
JuniperMesos | 3 hours ago
bakies | 2 hours ago
iso1631 | 16 hours ago
Yet any billionaire can quite happily retire to a private island with every possible need catered for. Want to travel to Japan for a photo, just ask your PA and there's a helicopter waiting taking you to a plane by the time you put your shoes on.
Anyone with a wealth of $10m can live the life of a very well paid worker ($500k a year)
Anyone with a wealth of $2m can live like the average American.
Anyone with a wealth of $500k can live "like a king" in cheaper locations.
But people carry on working.
bronlund | 16 hours ago
In any case, in my opinion, blaming Bezos for being Bezos, is looking in the wrong direction. The real issue is; who enabled this? And a good place to start, is to look at yourselves in a mirror.
We did this. All of us.
Gigachad | 16 hours ago
Bezos and related are personally responsible for creating the system that allows this.
bronlund | 16 hours ago
dudefeliciano | 16 hours ago
bronlund | 15 hours ago
soerxpso | 14 hours ago
JuniperMesos | 3 hours ago
tsoukase | 13 hours ago
There are two ways to diminish their role and position without robing them: reduce the inequality or stop worshiping the consumerism and focus in non-material ideas. Both are difficult but effective.
duxup | 11 hours ago
I like to read a bit before bed.
bloody-crow | 11 hours ago
According to this website:
$116k — Senior software developer yearly salary. Interns makes more than that in US. Not that anybody's hiring interns anymore, but that's not the point.
$142k — "basic" Aston Martin Vantage. The base model starts at $192k currently. I don't remember times where new AM was anywhere near 140k no matter how "basic".
$182k — Fully loaded Tesla Model S. This one is the most egregious. More expensive than Aston Martin? Come on, a fully loaded Plaid is $115k with delivery right now.
Haven't watched further since I was already too flabbergasted by how much those numbers didn't match my expectations.
helle253 | 11 hours ago
Some interns make more than that.
I highly doubt the median intern does, even a SWE intern. Please think beyond SF/NYC.
redhed | 7 hours ago
keeda | 10 hours ago
To be clear, wealth inequality is absolutely one of the most critical social problems today, just that simplistic numbers like this stifle useful discourse.
customguy | 6 hours ago
The numbers are based on Bezos' $56.7 billion gains during the first half of 2020 (source: Bloomberg and Buzzfeed), which translates into approximately $311 million per day, or $3,605 every second
> simplistic numbers like this stifle useful discourse
Do they? I would agree that it would be much better to just state the above on the page itself, but not because it makes a practical difference. It probably would make it feel even worse, if that was possible, for people who thinking back on the hardships they and/or others went through in that Covid period.