A Boring Dystopia

Some people who don't know any better would say that poor Jeff innovated the world into a better place by inventing Amazon, that he's being justly rewarded by the free market.

But Amazon became so successful because it killed off all of it's competitors - not through a better service, but using investor capital to artifically lower it's prices, systematically targeting it's rivals and taking them over.

Amazon is so profitable because it has killed the market and replaced it with itself, and the tech giants and uber and so on are doing exactly the same thing.

So turn it into a co-op, let it's workers decide if they can piss on the clock or not. Give it's sellers a say in whether they want to pay 40% markup and hidden fees to get pushed to the top of front page. Amazon abuses workers, businesses and the market - this is a great solution to a problem that everyone ought to have, regardless of politics.

That's impossible. Because a bonus that much would mean there would be a lot of taxes paid, and that goes against Bezos his principles.

The Behind the Bastards episode about him is really mind blowing. Like, he sucks way more than you could ever imagine. When I was in college, Amazon was the company that you could get used textbooks from. Now they're the default web shopping platform.

I did the math recently and if you took the assets of the wealthiest 1% and divided only half of it amongst the remaining 336.3 million Americans it would be a check of approximately 68,000 for every man woman and child and those bloated blood sucking leaches would still have an average remainder of just under 6 million dollars each.

I think you're math lost an order of magnitude somewhere in there. Quite a few billionaires increased their wealth by 10s of billions of dollars in 2024 alone. 336 million is a bit less than 1/3 of a billion. If you just took 1 billion dollars from Bezos for example, and distributed that to all Americans you'd have an economic disaster from the sudden shock of every single American becoming a multi-millionaire overnight and Bezos would still be wealthy as fuck and making more money in a day than anyone could dream of

Tax. the. rich. When billionaires can increase their wealth by hundreds of billions of dollars per year, there is no reason for anyone to be poor. Hell, lets imagine a conservative 30% tax on wealth gains over a billion dollars. That's hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into the government every single year. Universal healthcare, free university tuition, and UBI all paid for with plenty leftover for ambitious megaprojects like reconnecting the entire country to passenger rail services. Anyone who says the government can't pay for shit that will help the 99% is ignoring the amount of wealth that exists.

Anybody saying that co-ops don't work or whatever should check Mondragon which thrives in thoroughly capitalist Spain.

I got into an argument years ago with someone who appeared to start on the conclusion that co-operatives must be bad and tried to work backwards from there.

There was this notion that it was somehow unfair for one delivery driver to earn $1,000,000 and another to earn $10,000 just because they worked for different companies, since it was mostly the efforts of other people in the company that gave it its value. He wasn't able to then take the tiny extra step required to apply the same logic to CEOs and shareholders.

I realized there's a kind of proximity bias; billionaires are so far removed from our lives that we just accept their existence as part of how the world works, whereas if a regular employee like us is getting something we're not then the jealousy becomes palpable. It's the same thing that drives hatred towards minorities and immigrants.

He’d have to give them this as equity in the company, he’s not liquid for that amount. None of the “richest Americans” have near the amount of wealth they appear to have.

This is what people mean when they say workers should own the means of production tho

You could just use the top .1% and not drop that figure much. The differences as you go up are huge.

Going by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis the 1% are valued at ~49 Trillion works out to be ~$145k per person. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLT01026

So that was 5 years ago. Which means he could give them all a $20,000 annual raise and still be making money.

What was that thing about the band in 'Restaurant at the End of the Universe' being so so unbelievably wealthy that the accountants prove that space/time is not just curved, it is warped, please internet tell me i'm not insane?

Will that keep them from parking like assholes?

I like the energy, but you're not going to sell 92 Billion dollars worth of stocks for 92 Billion dollars.