Today we have a military industrial complex supported by both parties and our most vital student loans (championed by our "left" party) come with no bankruptcy protection.
We do have a very strong Federal government, but it's designed to funnel money to various interest groups.
By making compute infrastructure affordable and by making consumer review data available for all products, Bezos is a champion of the little guy. He hasn't gotten rich through government crony capitalism or fraud, he's done the simplest stuff better than anyone else could. He let's people buy products that are reviewed thoroughly by other customers, he has a reasonable return policy, etc. This benefits consumers AND honest merchants selling through the platform.
AWS has made it way cheaper to start and scale many kinds of tech startups, and paved the way for firms like Heroku and DigitalOcean, and the entire vps ecosystem.
Bezos is a master of infrastructure execution. This is extremely rare, as we can see from the fate of Jet and Azure. Year after year the genius of his business tradeoff decisions and strategies become more clear. This is why he's wealthy. What we need are more people with that kind of vision and ability to see the big picture and solve real, unsexy problems.
Before AWS I had dealt with Dell as a part of several startups. The sales people were shady and they tried to milk every penny out of the customer for semi-proprietary hardware that was expensive to support. People flocked to AWS to escape the kind of predation and mediocrity championed by Dell.
Most readers of HN have the technical ability to have started AWS but (if they were of age at the time) did not see the opportunity and the path to execution. Bezos did. Let's give him some credit. I think he's one of the most remarkable visionaries of our age.
>By making compute infrastructure affordable and by making consumer review data available for all products, Bezos is a champion of the little guy. He hasn't gotten rich through government crony capitalism or fraud, he's done the simplest stuff better than anyone else could. He let's people buy products that are reviewed thoroughly by other customers, he has a reasonable return policy, etc. This benefits consumers AND honest merchants selling through the platform.
He didn't do this, his workers did. How many of his workers are making minimum wage, with no health insurance or health insurance they can't afford deductibles for? How many of his warehouses don't have air conditioning? How many people working for Amazon are forced to pee in bottles, pushed beyond their limits?
He's not sitting there shipping all packages, not sitting there soldering amazon echo's, his workers are.
$150 billion shouldn't exist for Bezos and Bezos alone, as the wealth should be spread around the company to the workers who actually do the work. We likely wouldn't be this situation of extreme inequality if this was the case. It's disgusting selfishness that is allowed by our current system.
Not saying that I disagree with the sentiment of your comment but Bezos does not have $150B. I would be surprised if he had any more than a few million in cash/liquid assets. His worth is tightly coupled to the value of Amazon stock that he owns. A lot of workers do benefit from their stock increase through granted stock options.
All that said. Amazon needs to take a long hard look at how they manage their warehouses and fulfillment centers when it comes to workers rights and common decency.
How many of the workers chose to work there instead of some other, inferior option? How many are proud of what they accomplished? How many went on to found other successful startups like Instacart?
selfishness is allowed? Is it possible to disallow a core human trait?
Yes. Envy is a core human trait as well. Some people envy their neighbor's car. Stealing it is still forbidden by law.
Likewise, disallowing envy (or selfishness) by itself is not possible, but making illegal the actions that result from those feelings can (and sometimes should) be outlawed.
Completely agree. Bezos is great. This is not so much an attack on Bezos as it is an attack on a system that let's 30 single individuals amass more wealth than the bottom 3 billion.
except the mass majority of the bottom three billion live where governments do respect property rights. private wealth only exists where that is true, otherwise all wealth would be concentrated in the hands of politicians as it is in many places; well that and their very select friends most of which they installed over state resources.
"In 2013 we estimate that 3.2 billion individuals – more than two thirds of adults in the world – have wealth below 10 000 dollars."[1] In total they also estimate that those 3.2 billion individuals have a combined wealth of 7.3 trillion dollars.
So, unless you're implying that everyone who has "a checking account" has more than 7.3 trillion dollars, sorry, it's just not the same.
I'm not denying that there is extreme inequality between poor in America and poor in Africa or India.
But let's not make false comparisons between having a banking account and being in the top 30 wealthiest individuals. Having a banking account is not the same as having 7 trillion dollars in wealth.
He's going to be many times over the richest person in history before long. This has been clear for a long time if you look at the rate of growth of his wealth. But it's not bad news. Bezos has an unmatched ability to create infrastructure that works well and is low cost.
E-commerce is a very competitive market and yet Amazon grows every day. Why? Because consumers trust Amazon's reviews and return policy. It's way better than what most retailers offer. The reviews are unparalleled and offer consumers tremendous power against firms that try to rip them off.
I've moved many of my tech investments into Amazon b/c of the steady track record and stable trajectory of good decision making and execution.
If the economy tanks, it makes Amazon's review data and free shipping even more valuable. If I'm strapped for cash I'm less likely to walk into a retailer and pay top dollar for something with no reviews.
That's misleading though, because he's had great risk of ruin and lots of smart people have tried (Jet, Azure, etc.) to compete with him but have fallen short.
Compare Amazon to something done by government like the highways. When I order something on Amazon it nearly always arrives exactly on time as expected. Highways are always in a state of disrepair and congestion, and get worse every day.
This is not an example of why Bezos wealth should be used to build highways. Every penny of his wealth was earned by offering services in a competitive market better than the alternatives. With government infrastructure there typically are no alternatives and so nobody cares or expects much.
Bezos is not an enemy of the little guy, he's someone who has made it so much cheaper to build a startup. Remeber the days when the first $200K of fundraising would go straight to Dell for a bunch of bare metal hardware? Contrast that to AWS. He's done the same in many areas of the economy.
Not really. It's not an actionable metric but it doesn't change the fact he's filthy rich and I wish I could trade net worth with him.
>Bezos is not an enemy of the little guy
Indeed, he's the opposite. I clear international freight through customs for a living... it amazes me how many people/companies import direct to Amazon for FBA selling.
Yeah, Amazon certainly hits you hard with fees if you go FBA and even just using Amazon as a payment method is more expensive than a traditional credit card merchant account (I know it's Chris Bair's most expensive way to be paid by customers for Keto Chow) but Amazon offers all sorts of exposure for enterprising individuals and companies.
As lousy as compensation to employees may or may not be, there is no shortage of people willing to take the rather well-paying jobs (Amazon starts at like 13$ an hour in Indy with minimum wage being 7.25).
Amazon wouldn't even EXIST without those highways which are "in a constant state of disrepair and congestion." It's fair to say that their delivery vehicles are making it worse. Maybe some of his wealth should be used to improve or expand them?
As far as amazon being that great, a lot of the time their stuff is in fact late, and people on their marketplace sell counterfeit items. They also treat a lot of their workers like garbage.
I agree with you on your other points, he's effectively beaten the competition and Amazon is great in many ways, partly because they are so, so convenient, but I wouldn't paint him as some saint of good capitalism
Bezos will surpass that several times over in the next few years. He's added tremendous economic value which is why so many of us pay him for his many products and services.
That just changes the risk profile of deciding to execute a trade vs the predictable outcome. It may be more costly or less costly than existing approaches.
Well, FWIW js is not the most friendly language for functional programming. I'd argue that the trend toward immutable.js and redux occurred partly because rest/spread syntax was/is relatively confusing, and so immutable patterns without a library feel less elegant until one really groks the somewhat visually opaque semantics of the rest/spread syntax.
Redux also offered a simple approach to the "action bus" idea from Flux, but omitted first class async support, etc. React itself also somewhat overlooked async patterns, which created the idea that their absence was by design and so an additional (opinionated) library was appropriate.
In sum I'd argue that React actually fights against js quite a bit and that it will truly come into its own once reason gets more mindshare.
For those of us who invested heavily in react as all this was becoming clear (and being ironed out) I hope we learned enough to allow better decision making in the future.
Also, React has a few "on by default" performance enhancements that are a bit conceptually confusing and create something of a mismatch with the functional approach.
But still it's difficult (and unpleasant) to imagine the world without React.
His point was that openness is highly valued. The way I'd put it is that in SF, it is completely OK to be a nonconformist and to do things your own way.
It's actually hard to be fully aware of the high levels of conformity one finds elsewhere until you have spent 6+ months in SF.
That's not to say that there aren't widespread prejudices held in SF.. the biggest one I have encountered is the belief that people living in "flyover" states are idiots and are less enlightened than those living in SF.
Saying SF is open to nonconformity is not another way of saying SF is "enlightened". It's just an aspect of enlightenment that SF culture does particularly well compared to other parts of the world.
This isn't even necessarily all kinds of nonconformity... it's just some that are rare elsewhere.
If you pick a person at random from anywhere in the US you'll find roughly equivalent levels of enlightenment and judgmental views. What's unique about SF is that being different is way more acceptable than it is elsewhere.
When you live in SF for a while and then go to other major cities and see how people dress it looks like they are all wearing a conformist costume, trying to look acceptable. But acceptable to whom? It's this instinct toward conformity that is so repellent about many areas of the country. The example I used about fashion is just an example, the same exists when it comes to life choices, values, etc.
Yes. This is obvious but also counterintuitive. People forget that it's a long game and that malware (such as Stuxnet) is patient and penetrates gradually.
We do have a very strong Federal government, but it's designed to funnel money to various interest groups.
By making compute infrastructure affordable and by making consumer review data available for all products, Bezos is a champion of the little guy. He hasn't gotten rich through government crony capitalism or fraud, he's done the simplest stuff better than anyone else could. He let's people buy products that are reviewed thoroughly by other customers, he has a reasonable return policy, etc. This benefits consumers AND honest merchants selling through the platform.
AWS has made it way cheaper to start and scale many kinds of tech startups, and paved the way for firms like Heroku and DigitalOcean, and the entire vps ecosystem.
Bezos is a master of infrastructure execution. This is extremely rare, as we can see from the fate of Jet and Azure. Year after year the genius of his business tradeoff decisions and strategies become more clear. This is why he's wealthy. What we need are more people with that kind of vision and ability to see the big picture and solve real, unsexy problems.
Before AWS I had dealt with Dell as a part of several startups. The sales people were shady and they tried to milk every penny out of the customer for semi-proprietary hardware that was expensive to support. People flocked to AWS to escape the kind of predation and mediocrity championed by Dell.
Most readers of HN have the technical ability to have started AWS but (if they were of age at the time) did not see the opportunity and the path to execution. Bezos did. Let's give him some credit. I think he's one of the most remarkable visionaries of our age.