…and Communism, by this time, had already sent Yuri Gagarin into Earth orbit.
It’s nothing more than symbolic of the wasteful ways the top 1% think and behave. May all of their workplaces get the militant unions they deserve!
I definitely admire Bezos and Branson far more than keyboard warriors and cosplay socialists. Perhaps there will be a market for space tourism in the next ten years, if so, great! Economies evolve and if people want experiences over goods, then that’s a just a change in preferences.
Oy vey. There’s comparing apples and oranges, and then there’s comparing humans and algae.
Yes, nobody’s denying that individual competition for resources among primitive/simple organisms has been a crucial element in the development of more complex organisms. But that’s a VERY far cry from the inference that individual competition for resources among members of a very complex social species is equally important for the advancement of the species today.
There is jack-diddly in the way of scientific evidence to suggest that individual competition for resources in modern human societies is in itself a net benefit to our species as a whole. True competition at the individual level doesn’t even exist among most modern humans: it’s all mediated by social and legal frameworks that regulate what forms of competition are deemed “fair”, and what sorts of privilege and/or duplicity permit individuals to evade constraints of “fairness”.
None of those frameworks were in place when our great-great-great^great-grand-algae ancestors were struggling for physical survival. There’s no rational reason to treat the survival struggles of prehistoric microorganisms as analogous to the highly artificial structures of “competition” in human societies today, except maybe to lend some specious social-Darwinist cachet to the valorization of “winning”.
On a shorter timescale, massive inequality tends to lead to destabilization of financial markets and other forms of decoupling of the interests of the very wealthy from those of the society as a whole.
I personally don’t hate billionaires or their preferred hobbies, and I used to assume that there wasn’t even any particular downside to the existence or proliferation of billionaires. Then the Great Recession happened, and we started to hear from a lot of economists explaining how huge wealth disparities had effectively helped desensitize many investors to “normal” levels of risk. What’s a survivable temporary fluctuation to them is ruination to orders of magnitude more people who don’t have the padding of the vast assets of the super-wealthy.
It’s not so much that billionaire money is intrinsically “unfair” or “greedy” as that it makes its possessors at some level intrinsically incapable of operating within the same system as the rest of us.
Ha! Anyone who thinks that merely ceasing to shop at Amazon means that all Bezos’s choices cease to have any impact whatsoever on their life is way too naive to be trusted with a credit card.
Didn’t everyone else fill out the request on the Amazon website to have the profits from their purchase redirected to MacKenzie Scott’s philanthropic efforts? I know I did. As a result, I can shop Amazon knowing that the pennies from my purchase go to HBCUs.
There’s a strike at Frito-Lay. They are owned by Pepsi-co. If anyone want’s to boycott to support the strikers, just look at some of the things you’ll have to avoid.
Ruffles, Fritos, Cheetos, Sun Chips, Tostitos, Doritos, Quaker, KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Chewy, Pepsi, Aquafina, Lipton, 7UP, Dole, Tropicana, Gatorade…
I’m sure the situation with Amazon is similar. No more Whole Foods for one.
I hear so many people whine about the good old 50’s and how they wish we could go back to that. Well, look at the tax rates back then, and the disparity between CEO pay and the workers. It was a lot more fair and people could survive on one income. Not anymore. But they don’t even want to consider returning to those kind of rates.
Billionaires could fix a lot of problems and still never run out of money. Hell they own everything. They can’t not make money.
I would like to think that if I were a billionaire, I wouldn’t be one for long.
No, a small local charity where I know the BoD.
Oh, no. You’re probably thinking of the Amazon Smile thing. What I did was direct all of the profits from my purchases to MacKenzie Scott. The only thing is I think you can only do this on the first day of the fourth month of the calendar year.
(5 characters, yes, Discourse, yes)
Why aren’t you rolling your eyes at the “Hey, if you hate Bezos so much, what are you doing shopping at Amazon?” As if he’ll be sitting there, reading the Amazon sales numbers and saying, “Oh, no! Some random people on the internet are boycotting Amazon and now I won’t be able to afford that billion-dollar sailing yacht. What will I do? What will I do?”
Or to put it another way, saying that people should boycott Amazon is akin to the tired old “If you hate America so much, you should leave.”
I was rolling my eyes at your joke, but it was meant as a way to acknowledge the joke, not disagree. The smiley failed to convey my sentiments (weird!), so I won’t use it again.
I believe we are in agreement on your larger point.
Well, it was a roll eyes, not a smile so I hope you understand my confusion.
Yes. I’ll have to work on finding the correct smiley to convey “very funny mister/nice one”. 
No. It just makes you a “socialist” because you are receiving income from the government for doing nothing.
Well Bezos wins that one… if only by virtue of the New Shepard design.
But the hat though. There has to be a loss in points for that.
Well that’s the thing. You have people like Bezos who are ridiculously wealthy, possessing more wealth that most Americans combined. Then you have thousands upon thousands of his employees working in conditions described as “grueling”, “unsafe”, “controlling” and otherwise unpleasant. It highlights a systematic problem with our nation’s economy that is non unique to Amazon. Namely that the system exists to help maximize the wealth of the people who already own all the wealth. Amazon employees are disposable, just like any other employee. Any any savings derived from disposing of those employees (and squeezing productivity out of the ones who remain) do not go back to the employees. They go back to the shareholders - in particular majority shareholders like Bezos and institutional investors like Goldman Sachs (or whoever finances Amazon).
Basically, it creates a negative perception that companies like Amazon say they can’t afford to treat their employees better, and yet they don’t pay their fair share in taxes, receive all sorts of government incentives and subsidies, and their owners have enough money to fund ridiculous, meaningless boondoggles. I’ve heard Bezzo’s and Branson’s space trips described as “taking a helicopter to base camp and then demanding to be recognized for climbing Everest”. They haven’t exactly broken new ground by flying to low Earth orbit.
Ok, I’ll assume that you’re not being sarcastic, so what should I be doing to set a shining example for the likes of Bezos?
? Have I missed a post somewhere? Where did msmith537 suggest that it’s your duty to “set a shining example for the likes of Bezos”?