bUt He cReAtEs tHe JeRbS!
They aren't greedy! They're exercising rational self-interest!
They aren't cruel! They're acting in the best interests of shareholders!
They don't sociopathically betray the workers who helped them succeed, they curtailed redundancies to maximize workplace efficiency!
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
It's the people at the company working that make the money. So technically the people create their own jobs or smth. A company should be owned by the workers at that company and they should get to elect leading personnel. I think this sounds rad.
I couldn't have phrased that any better!
"The mine owners did not find the gold, they did not mine the gold, they did not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy all the gold belonged to them!" - Big Bill Haywood, 1929
They convinced investors to buy into the mining company, they bought the land, they paid the prospector, they bought the mining equipment, they paid the miners
The gold paid them back.
How else could it work?
Edit. Interesting that no one has an answer on how else it could work.... For example, in Bolivia there are mining cooperatives, but they still use all the tools of capitalism to extract the gold, and the co-op members are no different to investors really. The hours worked and conditions are no different. Mining is hard and dangerous.
Permanently Deleted
Not when one party is dead set against it and the other will only do so with loopholes the size of Ireland.
That's what happens when the politicians who promise to rein in billionaires rely on legal bribes from billionaires to fund their election and re-election campaigns.
That's not a dog.........it's a raccoon! Oh my god, look at that raccoon wearing a hat!
You’re right! I’m going to buy that same hat off of Amazon for my raccoon
This is the problem with capitalism. The workers do all the work, but the "owning" class keeps all the rewards of all that work.
I don't agree with the size of the wealth gap between owner and regular employee, but I don't understand why people think the heads of these companies - and I'm talking the ones that started them from nothing - did no work or continue to do no work. It's pretty ludicrous to think that the low level employees at Amazon are doing "all the work." Are they doing all the grunt work? Yes. Is their job the most physically demanding? Yes. Are they underpaid? Yes. But to pretend like the owner does nothing is just so idiotic and shows a lack of understanding of what goes into running a massive organization like amazon.
There definitely needs to be reform. I don't even think taxation is the way to go, I think putting laws in place for higher wages is key.
Yes, bootlicker. Totally right... But in actual reality: What are you talking about!?
I've met and worked with C Suite, Executive, and Officer-level employees... They do as little as you think they do. Unless they're a results-focused executive trying to turn around a failing business, their impact is... very little, in fact. Yet they make 100+ times what you or I make, every single year. It's not fair, it's not logical, yet it is one thing: corruption.
I highly doubt that owners of large companies actually do a lot of work, even for massive organizations. The corporate web is highly complex, and it's kind of impossible for outsiders to know how everything works internally, but judging from how many management positions there are, and seeing how much free time they have judging from their media presence and them having enough time to go to space (which requires training might I add), it's hard for, at least me, to see how they do much of anything besides speaking in events, owning the means of production and occasionally using their money to expand the company.
Again, it's hard to tell with these companies being secretive and this large, and maybe the owners do a lot more work than I'm giving them credit for. But from the various stories and their media appearances, I have my doubts.
quiet shill
Come on now, that's not fair!
I, for one, think we should show our appreciation for Bezos being a titan of capitalist virtue by crowdfunding an experience he'll never forget, a deep sea excursion into the depths to view the wreckage of the storied Titanic!
Who's with me?!
Titan 2: Bezos Boogaloo
You forgot one additional picture, "we, together, allow this madness to exist".
Money has too much power
More like: "we are too gready to prevent this disaster from re-occuring..".
The amount of corporate bootlicking in this thread/meme is simply astounding.
You can look at civilization throughout history and see that the ones that lasted the longest cared about the individual rights of every citizen. When you allow a certain class to violate individual rights you end in revolution.
If they can even get there. At this point there's so much money poured into vitriol and smear campaigns, divisive propaganda to keep everyone off the same page, hell, even people getting murdered or imprisoned just for trying to do what they can to get their voice out on a public platform and improve their countries... I hope the revolution actually happens, but it seems like it'll take some grand feat of coordination..
I want to have a serious conversation on this if possible. As devil’s advocate, if I want to start a business that helps people, what would I have to do to not run afoul and garner this type of criticism? Are you indicating that I must relinquish my business once it gets too big and that I am only entitled to a certain amount of success? Are you indicating that I must pay my workers far beyond what the free market dictates they are worth? Trying to understand how those are my issues. It would seem to me that these would need to change with far reaching government policies. Those policies in many ways go against capitalist principles when you start to consider having to pay a janitor for a company hundreds of thousands of dollars if the company is successful and employees are paid in revenue share. That makes far less sense than the owner of the company reaping the benefit of their innovation. I would also argue that an entrepreneur will potentially use these earnings more interestingly than a janitor, potentially to start additional businesses that help the public by increasing offerings and jobs.
I don’t really have a direct reply to these ideas but I would like to point out an interesting example of a business model that addresses some of these concerns, that is the worker cooperative, where the workers have some portion of ownership of the company, either in revenue sharing or decision making.
Worker coops are wildly underappreciated. I'm a big fan of "workers' right to first refusal". If a business owner is selling, the workers have a given amount of time to match that offer and buy it themselves.
What the free market dictates they are worth
That's one of the main fallacies of capitalism apologia: assuming that the market is free and inherently fair.
In reality, the "market wage" is the lowest amount that the company can possibly get away with while retaining its workforce. Conversely, the market price for a product that workers buy is the HIGHEST profit margin possible without hurting sales and the number one priority is always profit for owners/shareholders.
As for the market being free, that's literally impossible: without the presence of government regulations and unions to constrict them, the most powerful forces constrict the less powerful.
You either have tyranny of the already rich and powerful corporations or limits to their freedom being imposed. The American system leans heavily towards the tyranny end, which severely stifles the freedom of workers.
What you said is not wrong. Each economic lever is a negotiation with sentiments. The government could impose more stringent regulations. I believe it has to with regard to monopoly-busting and possibly doing some salary-policing, but I don’t feel that the system should be thrown out. It has spawned countless innovations by providing the incentive that people can be rewarded handsomely for their creativity and entrepreneurship. If you don’t like corruption, vote it out.
If you're paying your employees what they're worth (not the minimum the market will bear, but actually in line with the value they contribute), and you're still making Bezos money, then you're fleecing your customers.
There's no way to get to a billion dollars without 1) exploiting your labor and supply chain by taking advantage of capitalist forces to pay less than the value of their contribution or 2) exploiting your customers by taking advantage of capitalist forces to charge more than the value of your product. Usually both, to extreme degrees, enabled by monopolies, regulatory capture, collusion, and other capitalist tricks. That's not "a business that helps people".
No matter how "innovative" an entrepreneur is, the actual value of their product or service is generated by the people who actually do the work. Of course, you're entitled to the value that you personally create, but the best business idea in the world is worth exactly zilch without implementation. Bezos doesn't build those fulfillment centers, he doesn't manufacture the products, he doesn't pack the boxes, he doesn't drive the trucks, he doesn't program the website. He only has the wealth he does because he pays the people that generate the value of his company the absolute minimum that he can get away with, skimming a big slice of everyone's labor value for himself. That doesn't help the public.
You don’t give him enough credit. He worked extremely hard to make Amazon what it is today. Additionally, he took major risks to his credit where he convinced investors to fund a new form of supply chain. He is reaping the reward of taking entrepreneurial risks and creating something innovative. I don’t know how you can say that Amazon doesn’t help people. Their prices are in-line with the market and no one can touch their shipping costs. Their warehouse jobs are demanding, but they explain that to anyone getting into it. In time, the people will mostly be replaced by robots anyways. The employees want more money, but robots work for free. If anything, we should be very interested in potentially implementing UBI and a VAT on automation per Andrew Yang.
Those philosophies are not the only way to do things. Workers don't have to be paid the minimum possible. At some point, wealth accumulation becomes so extreme that it's immoral, like when people have so much money that they could never possibly spend it and are spending $300 million on a new boat or whatever. Tax rates used to be much, much higher on wealthy people and they still were "reaping the benefit of their innovation". Even better than paying taxes would be giving the money to employees. Paying a janitor (not sure why that is your example of someone who is lesser) enough money to buy a house and pay for their children to go to college is not a waste. It's also how the economy works. Capitalists and the wealthy class in the US seem to think they can keep all the money and economically starve their employees without realizing that the public has to have enough money to buy their products.
workers don’t have to be paid the minimum possible
Ideally, the market dictates salary in capitalism. This means that a worker can shop themselves around if you are not paying them enough. Where this has broken down a bit is in corporations intentionally and unintentionally colluding on appropriate pay for positions across an industry. The get consulting groups to indicate whether they are in line with industry practices. This can also result in employees getting pay bumps if a company has is having trouble retaining talent. If the government tries to break the organic model by imposing minimum pay rules, then it will hurt small businesses. If it creates a percentage system based upon company profits then you end up having your talent retire early. It is not really a tenable model to keep a business afloat. You would end up with these companies that exist and then go away because the employees have extracted all the wealth they need, so you wouldn’t have prolonged enterprises like Amazon that offer an extremely useful service because their wild success means that it becomes impossible to figure out how to hire people to new positions because the revenue share for one employee would far exceed what other companies could offer, so you have to somehow either find the best person ever for that position or some kind of hereditary system forms. The use-case doesn’t make much sense. If you simply cap the CEO’s salary and say that they are not allowed to make many multiples of standard employees and standard employees cannot make many multiples above the standards for their roles in the industry then maybe that would work, but it seems like an overreach of government.
If I need to pay my employees more because my company is more profitable, then the government is basically telling me that my cost of labor is far more expensive than my smaller competitors. It will result in only small new companies being able to invest in innovation at a large risk and big companies not having the capital to invest in the kind of research and development that only a large venture can do. Amazon spends ~$43B on R&D. If they had to pay tons more to employees, we wouldn’t have things like their streaming devices, content offerings, or warehouse and logistics improvements that allow for packages to arrive same or next day.
My take? The issue I have with the mega rich is that they (generalization here) aren't playing by the same rules as you or I. I don't have an issue, with not paying all of your employees 6 figures. Different jobs, skills, training, and capabilities are (and should be) worth different amounts of money. It's important that people with good ideas, or business capabilities have avenues of expanding, bettering themselves, and enjoying the fruits of their labor.
When you pay money to write rules that are favorable to you, you become the problem. Money in politics is the problem. Imo, that has enabled all of this. Don't have good healthcare? Likely it was lobbied for because someone wanted more money. Stuck in prison? Oh yeah, money in politics got you there. Minimum wage hasn't kept up with inflation? Something, something trickledown-bullshit, money in politics. Kids killed in school constantly? Oh you know....FUCKING MONEY IN POLITICS.
Favorable can be lobbying against health & safety or environmental regulations because it impacts your bottom line. It is donating to political campaigns for tax cuts (you know, fucking bribery). It's blocking minimum wage hikes to secure your bottom line.
All of that said, how people sleep at night with absurd amounts of money and minimal charity is disgusting. I don't fault someone for enjoying an oppulant lifestyle.....I do fault someone for Scrooge McDucking and hoarding cash....for what? Bragging rights? Power?
TLDR: be gaddamn ethical about it.
This is a fair take.
I am only entitled to a certain amount of success
This. No one working for a business is 399 times worth as much as any other employee. Not even the owner of that business. No one deserves to be filthy rich.
The idea that rich people are supposedly so many times more valuable than any other person is nothing more than the same old self-aggrandizement kings and pharaohs have shown in the past. It isn't that much different from believing you were somehow chosen by God to be above everyone else.
If your net worth breaks a billion dollars, you will garner this sort of criticism nearly no matter what you do with it. Bill Gates, at least recently, has been just about as close as you can be to a model philanthropist, and people still spit on his name regularly.
A few things that help though, would be A) paying workers higher than the federally mandated minimum amount that you can legally pay them without running afoul of labor laws, B) Reinvesting profit back into the company instead of paying yourself a gorillion dollar yearly bonus while the rest of the employees get a 2.5% cost of living raise, and C) donating to charitable causes or human rights groups.
But some CEO's (I won't say many, but definitely some) do all of these things and still come under public fire. Realistically, if you actually manage to hoard enough money to become a billionaire, you've already abandoned your morals. No human being needs that much money. By all means profit from your innovations and rake in enough to live a comfortable life off them, but when your take home pay for a month is 12x what your next best paid employee makes in a year, you're a motherfucker. Doubly so, when said employee is the one with boots on the ground and all the CEO is doing is signing papers and looking pretty for the shareholders.
In my opinion, there should never, ever ever, be a discrepancy of more than 5x the amount your lowest paid employee makes. If you're paying people 25k a year to do the work that runs your business, the guy at the top of the chain of command shouldn't make more than 125k. If you pay your guys 100k a year, sure, take home 500k a year if you've got the profits. Live comfortably. But when a company makes record breaking profits, turns around and cans half their staff, then pays the bigwigs a million dollar bonus while everyone else gets next to nothing, yeah, fuck you, fuck your product, and fuck your shareholders. If you look around there's been quite a lot of that going on recently.
I guess my point is, the act of dishonestly hoarding the money in the first place is what makes us hate the rich. If you made that money fair and square and you deserve it, man, more power to you. I don't think anyone is upset with Dolly Parton even though she's worth an estimated 650 million US dollars, because she sweat and bled for that money and hasn't taken to lording it over everyone else just because she can. Bezos invented a website and then rode it's coattails into the realm of the obscenely rich without hardly ever lifting another finger for it. So did Musk. And the better-than-thou attitude they get about it makes it so much worse.
Not all the rich are bad people, but for the most part, good people don't become rich. Not like that. It takes a certain amount of gleefully taking advantage of your fellow humans to get there. That remorseless exploitation is what we hate.
Bezos invented a website
He modernized e-commerce logistics through taking a huge risk of setting up last-mile regional warehouses at significant cost then moved from books to everything. He created sophisticated business processes that accounted for demand and seasonality, then had the foresight to take his logistics software platform and even package its components as a service.
This is an easy question to answer. Look at Henry Ford and look at Bezos and his type (oh for example Walmart, etc). Ford wanted his workers to be able to afford the product he was making, and he even lost a landmark case because he was looking out for the best interest of his employees and his customers, from wikipedia:
Dodge v. Ford Motor Company, 204 Mich. 459, 170 N.W. 668 (Mich. 1919)[1] is a case in which the Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford had to operate the Ford Motor Company in the interests of its shareholders, rather than in a manner for the benefit of his employees or customers. It is often taught as affirming the principle of "shareholder primacy" in corporate America, although that teaching has received some criticism
although that teaching has received some criticism
Rightly so! Such codified and celebrated greed and exploitation is the number one root cause of death and despair in the world right now, probably ever.
The devil doesn't need more volunteer advocates, he's got plenty of paid ones.
I don't think there is a simple answer to this question. Not bribing politicians for favours, not exploiting workers and not selling substandard goods might be considered a basic minimum. Beyond this, there have been businessmen who tried to help their employees (or society as a whole), such as Ernst Abbe of Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung and John Spedan Lewis of JLP / Waitrose.
WTF did I just read?
And it's never enough
Look at all the pathetic and deluded temporarily embarrassed millionaire you've coaxed out of their holes to publicly humiliate themselves and lick some boot like it's going out of fashion..
Not the nausea inducing content I was properad to consume before breakfast 🤮
UPS pays good though.
Their pay is less bad. Not exactly good
Doesn't pay $142,667/ Minute
Depends on the position! Last contract adjustment really helps the part-timers rise above poverty wages. Has yet to be ratified but it looks promising.
It's good until you pay off the union that doesn't provide until you've been a member for a number of years
Things may have changed, but I noped out of the package handlers Union back in the 00's when I was offered a shitty job at UPS because it looked like the pay was going to be shit until I'd suffered for years, then it's be slightly less shit.
/please correct me if I'm wrong, I don't want to spread misinformation, just want to share how shit the union system can be unchecked.
Buy local when you can, if you have to order a chinese made products (most are these days) buy from Aliexpress, you save a ton of money not paying amazon markup or a 3rd party Chinese seller running business on Amazon.
Permanently Deleted
If you have some electronics knowledge I find that garbage much easier to repair. They're usually assembled with just screws and made of mostly plastic. Plus, Ali express is one of the last places you can buy a TV that's just a god damn TV.
I totally agree with that, the issue these days is even the good products are chinese made. And things like computer parts; you don't have an western part manufacturer. An example Dell adapter cable on Amazon $24, exact product direct from China $3 free shipping
There's quite a few well made Chinese products nowadays, especially in certain niche tech hobbies.
I bed the creator of the meme is using Amazon frequently and doesn't give a dime about the people there.
You could assume the creator of any meme is a hypocrite to dismiss it.
Maybe meme creators are just hypocrites and grave for likes?
Let's Talk About Go High Level
-
What’s the Buzz About? Hey there! So, have you heard of Go High Level? If not, let's break it down. Imagine juggling multiple apps for marketing. Sounds chaotic, right? That's where Go High Level comes in. It’s like that friend who has a solution for everything. Whether you're trying to create a cool sales funnel or shoot out an email campaign, this platform has got your back. The best part? They let you test drive everything with a 14-day free trial. It's like trying out a new car but for your business. And if you ever get stuck, their support team is just a click away. Pretty sweet, huh?
-
So, How Much Does It Cost? Alright, let's talk money. Go High Level has 3 main plans. There's the Agency Starter Plan, which is perfect if you’re just starting or have a small business. It's packed with all the essential tools, and it’s pretty affordable. But if you're looking to go big, the Agency Unlimited Plan is your best bet. It’s like the VIP pass at a concert, giving you access to everything without any limits. Not sure about committing? Remember that 14-day free trial I mentioned? It’s a great way to take it for a spin without any strings attached. Lastly they offer a Pro plan that includes "SaaS mode". Where you can white label the product under your brand. Amazing!
-
Why Everyone's Talking About It: In a world full of fancy digital tools, Go High Level is like that all-in-one Swiss Army knife. No need to jump between apps, because it's got everything under one roof. Whether you’re a newbie or a pro marketer, it's super user-friendly. It's not just about launching cool campaigns; they make sure you understand how well they’re doing with top-notch analytics. For marketing agencies, there's even a white-label feature, so you can slap on your brand and impress your clients.
Here is a link to their 14 day free trial.
https://www.gohighlevel.com/?fp_ref=get-started-now-
Listen, I can order a plethora of items, from the comfort of my recliner, and get them within two days for a yearly subscription fee of $140. A subscription that also includes Prime video streaming, a service that typically costs about that annually from an alternative provider.
I know it's fun and easy to shit on multi billion dollar companies but Amazon is Amazon because people voted with their wallets to make them that way.
Bezos deserves to reap what he sowed. If you think you can do it better, more equitably, you're welcome to try.
Someone who lets his employees piss in bottles because they don't get breaks, someone who uses his excess wealth for unnecessary luxuries, using up an unimaginable amount of resources, preventing other people from using them, someone who lives in his billionaire bubble not giving a fuck about people or the environment - someone like this deserves just one thing.
Totally unrelated:
You have to blame how he made the money not how much he pays himself. Almost all of his wealth comes from the stock market and how inflated his amazon shares have become. He isnt taking money away from his laborers this is just not true
He underpays his employees to make higher profits to increase his company's value...
