> And to the people criticizing, this is cheating. To them, a billion dollars enterprise is not possible without the exploitation of employees, customers, or at least the environment.
Well that’s wrong. Exploitive businesses do exist. Rent seeking and arbitrage does exist. But the ire today isn’t directed to Wall Street or private equity. It’s being directed to people who built real companies. It’s not inherently exploitive to sell a customer a valuable product or employ someone to build that product.
In the 1990s, it took weeks to order something by mail. Amazon can now deliver me stuff the same day of the next morning. That’s amazing, considering that it’s all done with trucks, warehouses, and other things that already existed in the 1990s. Whoever made that happen when USPS couldn’t do it deserves to be a billionaire.
Okay, now try applying your thinking to abusive healthcare insurance companies and see how well this fares...
Okay, but people aren’t complaining about health insurance companies. None of those are owned by billionaires.
Yes we are, yes they are. You can google dozens of examples of billionaire owners or CEOs of health insurance companies, for example Warren Buffet is deeply invested/has ownership stake.
Why state something so obviously disprovable and false?
Amazon itself used the extremely advantageous rates of USPS for book delivery in the 90s/early 2000s to be able to grow. Combined with the lack of sales tax it could undercut basically any bookstore in sale-tax free states. Part of the reason why USPS couldn't improve itself was because of a law in 2006 which forced them to prefund retiree health benefits for decades into the future making them unable to spend those billions a year into modernisation right when it needed it the most (and private companies didn't face this pressure). Both the sale tax benefit and the USPS disadvantages are reversed now but the momentum amazon got and the slowdown USPS had can't be reversed.
The company also pushed for all sort of regulatory changes to punish competitors (e.g. minimum wage to harm Walmart) while it had labour violations which barely got fined. This isn't to say that I think Amazon didn't provide value at any point in time, with its recommendation algorithm and review system it actually abuses the added value the platform delivered in the past to benefit its own basic products, but I believe there would've always been an Amazon who would've used similar regulatory plays to get ahead. That's why it's kind of difficult for me to say how many of Bezos his billions were 'fairly' earned.
Furthermore I don't believe it's impossible for someone to truly earn a billion, the financial sector is one that has some of the best examples (e.g. Jim Simons) it's just difficult to find a 'close to purely fair' billionaire.
But there are many online stores, and Amazon is one of the worst? On line shopping was an innovation but Amazon, in particular, was just a cash grab from all the others.
If you pay attention to how people spend their money, and not what they say (i.e. actions speak louder than words)
People really love billionaire owned businesses.
We can look at Walmart, which eviscerated mom&pop stores all over rural America, and you'd be hard pressed to find much love of Walmart in those places, but alas, people gave their money to Walmart instead of Jone's Town General.
I saw a Harvard-Harris poll a couple of years ago where Amazon had the highest favorability ratings of institutions/organizations polled, basically tied with the U.S. military and ahead of the police and CDC: https://harvardharrispoll.com/key-results-may-2 (page 15).
People don't have to like things they use though.
> Whoever made that happen when USPS couldn’t do it deserves to be a billionaire.
This bit might be a bit unfair. USPS and Amazon Delivery are different services, fulfilling different needs. Neither will deliver a pizza in 30 min or less, for example.
> Neither will deliver a pizza in 30 min or less, for example.
Looks like Amazon will deliver me a (frozen) pizza in 23 minutes, actually!
> Amazon can now deliver me stuff the same day of the next morning. That’s amazing, considering that it’s all done with trucks, warehouses, and other things that already existed in the 1990s. Whoever made that happen when USPS couldn’t do it deserves to be a billionaire.
It's also impossible without Amazon exploiting all the workers in the chain - from warehouse workers forced to undergo dehumanizing _unpaid_ searches that take hours when leaving the warehouse, to being forced to pee in bottles.
It is impossible to become a billionaire without exploting people.
Someone working a job they freely chose is not being exploited. This word is losing all meaning. Amazon pays more with better benefits than most other warehouse jobs.
> Someone working a job they freely chose is not being exploited.
This article from 2022 has something to say about that:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/22/amazon-wo... Amazon is right to be worried – its staff turnover rate is astronomical. Before the pandemic, Amazon was losing about 3% of its workforce weekly, or 150% annually. By contrast the annual average turnover in transportation, warehousing and utilities was 49% in 2021 and in retail it was 64.6%, less than half of Amazon’s turnover.
So you mean workers who find it disagreeable freely leave to do something else? Hmm, doesn't sound like exploitation to me.
"People are exploited by this organization so they leave"
"Can't you tell how unexploited all these people are, just look at them leave!"
"A job had requirements I didn't want to do, so I left and didn't do them"
"help, help, I'm being exploited!"
If someone could pick and choose jobs they wouldn't be a warehouse worker, come on now.
Sure if people could just pick whatever they want we'd all be sitting on the beach having drinks with supermodels, but then who's going to make the drinks?
People can pick among various jobs. If they picked warehouse worker that was the best option available to them. Taking it away means they have to choose something worse.
And a job is not a lifetime commitment. Warehouse worker may be a stop on the way to something else. I worked in a warehouse for a while, now I don't. People are not static blobs.
Maybe it's Amazon's predatory pricing and regulatory capture that drove most other nicer job opportunities out of business.
I used to work retail selling software and games as a teen. It was a nice starter job talking about the things I liked most. There were 7 places I could do that back in the day. Now the kids have only 3 such options in my area. Many areas now have none.
Now the kids can learn to code online or post videos on YouTube or do a hundred other things we couldn’t do. The world moves on.
YouTube pays far below minimum wage for all but a tiny fraction of creators.
All 7 places I could have worked (doing what I enjoyed) as a teen paid above minimum wage.
> Now the kids can learn to code online
Starter coding jobs are increasingly rare in light of AI.
> or do a hundred other things we couldn’t do
Can you name a few that pay at least minimum wage?
Under capitalism, man exploits man.
Under communism, it's the other way around!
> It is impossible to become a billionaire without exploting people.
Explain this to me using math not feelings.
At 5% APR compounded daily and zero inflation, a person would need to invest $300,000 weekly to attain 1 billion dollars after 80 years. Fiddle with the numbers as you like.
Do enlighten us as to what actual labor creates $300,000 in real value every week, week after week.
Tim Cook’s labor optimizing Apple’s supply chain easily crates billions in value.
Excellent way to put this, by moving and accelerating Apple's outsourcing of manufacturing and production to countries with more exploitable labor and cheaper corruption to advantage himself with, Tim Cook not only exploited people in multiple countries around the world but helped hollow out American manufacturing and suppress wages!
Through this exploitation he created billions in value for himself and other capital holders.
Here's a useful, easy-to-understand number: "Exactly zero"
That is the answer to the question: "How many of the top 50 billionaires in the world have NOT been in legal trouble for anti-worker, anti-consumer or anti-competitive practices."
Try it yourself! If you ask it to, Google AI Overview will even detail the infractions of each billionaire on the list.
The fact that lawsuits exists doesn’t prove that unfair practices account for any particular share of the wealth. You can’t just wave your hands like Glenn Beck and say “connect the dots.”
Saying "lawsuits exist" obscures the fact that they have almost all resulted in convictions and penalties per billionaire. The fact remains that every single of the top billionaires has been convicted for patterns of exploitation. Are we to reasonably expect that all of these were random, uncorrelated one-off occurrences rather than a pattern of behavior?
And that still underplays their overall scope of culpability. As a lawyer, you are probably best positioned to appreciate how asymmetrically difficult it is for anyone but the most well-funded to realistically take these giant companies to court.
> Saying "lawsuits exist" obscures the fact that they have almost all resulted in convictions and penalties per billionaire.
You need to quantify it for these lawsuits to support your point. The fact that these companies sometimes color outside the lines doesn’t negate the enormous value they create otherwise.
You know who else has lost tons of lawsuits and paid a huge amount in penalties? The federal government. 40,000 lawsuits are filed agains the federal government annually. The government pays out billions of dollars a year for various wrongdoing: https://settlementinsight.com/research/federal-government-pa.... By your logic, we can assume that the existence of these lawsuits and payments means that the entire value of the government can be attributed to exploitation.
Here's a site you could play with: https://violationtrackerglobal.goodjobsfirst.org/ -- enter any of the large companies you want and see the laundry list of convictions, sometimes multiple per year with penalties and settlements ranging from 6-figures to 10-figures. That is a pattern of behavior.
Yes, they create enormous value, but they get convicted of rule-breaking with such regularity and such large penalties that "coloring outside lines" is not a "sometimes" thing but rather a standard mode of operation. At that point it becomes impossible to separate the genuine value created versus the revenues generated from exploitation.
As an example, look into Project Bernanke, which is part of Google's convictions in the latest Ad Tech antitrust it lost, wherein they rigged all their ad auctions to benefit themselves: https://www.adtechexplained.com/p/google-project-bernanke-ex... -- now try to explain how we could separate that from the profits they made during all those years, which would also require one to consider how they profited from the lock-in they reinforced through that time.
> By your logic, we can assume that the existence of these lawsuits and payments means that the entire value of the government can be attributed to exploitation.
I never said "the entire value" (see point above about attribution) but yes, it applies to governments too. From the site you linked the top reason for lawsuits seem to be Breach of Contract, which does sound somewhat "exploit-y" to me.
>By your logic, we can assume that the existence of these lawsuits and payments means that the entire value of the government can be attributed to exploitation.
In the US? most def. I don't even know where to start with all the exploitative practices of the government - Regan's strike busting is a good place to. And don't forget the institutional practices:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline
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