So in Bezos case with his estimated net worth of 205B USD and assuming a average net worth of an american family of 750k (not sure how accurate this number is it was the first thing on google) this comes down to Bezos owning 266666 Apples for every apple a "normal" famliy owns. Noone would complain if it was a 1000 to 3 ratio.
Almost noone argues that we should take all his apples away but I think there is a lot of room before he has to feel like his risk is not worth it anymore.
The only issue Amazon would have in a more socialized society is that it would be way harder to exploit poor people that have to take up with their working conditions and wages because they rely on those jobs. And if your business cannot survive without exploitation it should not exist in the first place.
I'm still thinking that any bigger taxation could decrease potential risk taking and/or investments into new potentially innovative avenues. Maybe there could be a golden taxation point that's higher than it is now, but I also think it's definitely possible that it would work out worse overall for everyone.
If there's 1000 to 3 ratio, the things small group of people could organize to build would be far off what individuals could start with today.
If a single individual who has a good idea, they would have to convince many more people that the idea is good in order to be able to proceed with it.
Also, why does it even matter that much what Jeff's net worth specifically is? Unless he's wasting that money or using that to purposely destroy the world, it just exists as a number and if it was divided between people, it would only increase prices of everything and we probably would be back where we started. And it would only benefit the world if the people the money was divided with would use the money more wisely as opposed to Jeff.
If they can't get over 1000 to 3 ratio or certain ratio, because of the taxes, why would those folks just not rest on their laurels?
I agree that at some point there will be a decrease in risk taking and investments but I don't think that risk and investments are inherently more important than all other factors.
I am also not arguing for 1000:3 or any other specific ratio. The only reason I brought his net worth up is to show the ratio that we have right now (not even including the ratio compared to amazon workes which would be even higher). And even if he doesn't do anything evil with his money its money that other people dont't have. People that could use that money to provide for their families or put their kids through school. People that could have the potential to create something new or come up with new ideas who never get to do it because they barely make enough to get through the month. For Bezos it is indeed just a number but for others it could mean a lot more.
For all of those people it suddenly doesn't matter how hard they work or how skilled and talented they are. We do not live in a meritocracy and its probably impossible to achieve that so the only answer can be a more socialized system.
You are right in that it would not help to just split the money up my point is that we should not allow this to happen in the first place. As for prices increasing - If our system only works if a few have a lot and a lot have very little I think we should think about the sustainability of this system. If we do nothing things will get out of hand sooner or later (if they are not already).
People wont stop investing or taking risks just because they cannot reach bezos levels of wealth. Bezos has absolutely no reason to aquire another dollar but he still keeps going. Again I am not arguing for 1000:3 the number can be a lot higher but there needs to be an upper limit.
It would be definitely interesting to see what would happen and amazing to test out if we could have two parallel universes where in one you will increase taxes.
I wonder if there are any economic simulations done that would represent the actual world most closely to have something to toy with.
What if instead of paying Bezos paying more taxes, he has to pay his workers more? I think it's wrong to just force Bezos to give away his wealth. However, I also think that some Amazon workers should be payed more.
I don't think Bezos would have had the same amount of success with Amazon, if he had to do everything himself without hiring any other people. I believe most successful achievements were achieved through the work of many people. In the villagers and apples example, if the one man was able to produce 1000 apples by himself, I agree that the one man should be able to keep all 1000 apples to himself. However, if the one man was only able to produce 1000 apples with the work of others, I think that the workers should be receive a "fair" share of the produce. I don't have an idea or definition of what "fair" would be but 266,666 to 1 apple doesn't seem very "fair".
I don't see Bezos as being bad or evil but I see the fact that his workers don't get payed more as unfair. It's kind of like the "thank you essential workers for keeping the society functioning during the pandemic" phase that America had last year. We call these workers "essential" but their pay doesn't reflect that title. Some of the work that these "essential workers" do might be simple unskilled labor, but it is necessary work. Even if the work itself might not be of something that demands better pay, I believe the fact that the work is necessary is something that demands better pay. And if one person has 266,666 apples, I think there are enough apples to go around to pay the "essential workers" more. I just don't think it's "fair" that some "essential workers" who are earning close to minimum wage will never have the same opportunities that others in more lucrative fields (e.g. software engineering) will because of financial limitations.
>What if instead of paying Bezos paying more taxes, he has to pay his workers more? I think it's wrong to just force Bezos to give away his wealth. However, I also think that some Amazon workers should be payed more.
Amazon already pays the most for this type of work. So how much should they pay?
>We call these workers "essential" but their pay doesn't reflect that title.
The work is essential but the workers are easily replaceable, with the exception of medical staff whose pay is appropriate.
As mentioned before, I don't know what a "fair" pay would be. Maybe it could be based on a percentage of the total revenue? But one man being paid 266,666 apples while others get paid 1 apple doesn't seem "fair". Especially, if the 266,666 produced apples were only possible with the combined work of others.
And yes, the work is essential and workers are easily replaceable because the work is something practically anybody could do. My point is that because the work is essential, the easily replaceable workers should be payed more. Regardless of who does the work, whether it is some random civilian off the street or Bezos, somebody has to do the work. That's why it's essential. The work itself is valuable so I believe whoever does the work should be payed based on the value of the work.
Bezos isn't "paid" his net worth. His compensation was actually very low compared to his net worth, only $1.6 million in stock compensation in 2019 (and $82k cash). His net worth comes from his 10% stake in Amazon that he's pretty much had since he founded the company. So, he isn't paid 266,666 apples, he owns 10% of a giant apple farm that he founded.
Yes I understand but even if he isn't necessarily being paid 266,666 apples, he has access to that much wealth. I mean, Bezos is able to start his own space expedition which I don't think many people can do. While that's happening, we have people who are doing essential work getting paid close to minimum wage. Their net worth is probably some insignificant amount. These essential workers probably won't be able even own a home until well later into their life, if ever.
Maybe I'm just too immature and ignorant but the fact that Bezos can start his own space expedition while Amazon workers have to pee into bottles and get paid $15 per hour just doesn't seem fair. And paying people the minimum amount simply because they are replaceable makes it seem like people are treated as if they were resources. Maybe in terms of logistics people can be seen as resources, but my opinion is that people and their lives are not resources. I don't think people go to work and spend a good chunk of their life working just to be a resource for someone else to take advantage of.
Radioactive waste is doing real damage to the planet. After decades of evaluation storage facilities germany has no option that is considered safe.
We have a responsibility towards the following generations. This includes not warming the planet beyond no return and not polluting it with deadly waste.
Both can be achieved with a shift towards renewable energy sources.
Renewable energy sources needs to be supported by power plants that can produce constantly. The only clean option is nuclear and hydro. Sweden has developed a safe storage which is used to stored used fuel.
> Renewable energy sources needs to be supported by power plants that can produce constantly.
Varying power sources need to be combined with adjustable power sources. So do constant sources, unless you want to force consumption to correspond to availability. Shutting off nuclear plants and going fully renewable would require bringing more adjustable sources online, though. Hence the quest for better storage technologies.
EDIT: I misread your comment. I thought you were arguing that "unclean" power plants are nessecary. However my point about not needing nuclear still stands.
I don't think thats how most people mount a bicycle. You can easily get on it without touching the brakes. After all while you are still touching the ground you are breaking it.
Given that you feel like the Pareto distribution can never be wrong I propose that we model all taxes accordingly.
After all it should be natural that very few people pay most taxes while most pay almost nothing.
Nothing about wealth distribution is natural. With the help of the Pareto distributed political power that installed the system in the first place wealth is controlling itself.
I'm 100% for progressive taxes (i.e. higher taxes on richer people). People should have decent lives even if they can't participate in the workforce/markets with great success.
It's just that the top 50% or top 10% or top 1% or top 0.1% will always hold disproportionate amount of wealth, and no system will change that. Under USSR the select few in the communist party had that wealth, although it wasn't expressed in dollars (or any other currency), but in the power and unquestionability of their decisions.
The point of distinction is that EU internal immigration and the refugee situation are entirely different things. Refugees leave there home countries because of war and terror. Members of the UN are obligated [1] to give shelter to those people.
Inside the EU there is indeed some welfare migration. This is however not only driven by social systems but also by available jobs.
I never understood why people care how many people are part of the creation of music. The overall product should be better if every part of it (writing, producing, perfoming, ...) is executed by an expert in the field and not by a single person.
>How is Google holding consumers hostage and not Apple?
It does not matter what Apple is doing this is about Google.
I would expect that there are ongoing investigations against Apples practices regarding similar issues too.
>Honestly, for the value that Android gives phone manufacturers I am surprised that Google's requirements were so low. Android gave the phone manufacturers a platform and asked for little in return.
Not being allowed to release competing OSes / forks and other software is more than a "little" in return. Google does not give android away "for free" because they want to help others they do it because they want to help themself get into everybodies smartphone.
> It's like watching a goddamn movie with scenes shuffled randomly. It makes no sense.
Have you seen Memento?
Jokes aside I never understood why twitter does not allow the user to choose the sort order of the feed. This is a reoccuring theme for social networks (facebook feed, youtube subscriptions etc) so I guess there is some kind of motivation behind it.
These services want to show you cancer - sorry I mean ads - as much as possible, and for that they want you to stay on the app as long as possible.
With a sane chronological feed, once you scroll down to the last tweet you remember reading, you know you’re done and can leave the app and do productive things.
With a bullshit “algorithmic” feed, you never know when you’ve caught up, and the “fear of missing out” will make you stay there scrolling way longer just in case there’s one tweet somewhere down there you haven’t seen yet - this gives them the opportunity to show you more cancer.
Just curious, but do you think a paid service that served photos and no ads, and allowed the customization of feed order, would be able to compete? I've presumed the reason folks continue to flock to Instagram is that not only is such a service not available, but the problem that they would likely have to pay before seeing if there's anything to see there.
I’m not sure it would be able to compete now - displacing an established player is very hard; App.net tried that a few years ago with Twitter; but ultimately not many people cared (despite the free tier) and the few paying users weren’t enough to make it sustainable. The issue wasn’t really with it being paid, it was simply about network effects - everyone was on Twitter.
If a new free social network becomes mainstream, they could however introduce a paid tier as part of their monetisation strategy alongside ads. This would give users a choice, be exploited by ads and see cancer every day, or pay your way out of it.
If anything, Instagram would’ve been the perfect opportunity to offer such a paid plan, as a lot of professional photographers use it, and they wouldn’t mind paying for an improved experience and thus more productivity.
> but ultimately not many people cared (despite the free tier) and the few paying users weren’t enough to make it
My guess?
Twitter only exist because of network effects.
Everything else somebody else does better.
Oh, and most orinary people are more interested in one-to-one group chat than in many-to-many.
WhatsApp managed to break through even though they were announcing loud and clear that they were going to cost money. Why? I guess because they promised to provide something valuable: a versatile, reliable, trustworthy messaging solution for friends, families and small groups.
Telegram has managed to break through as well. AFAIK Signal is climbing steadily and Matrix is getting more and more mindshare.
Based my experience a lot people here will probably disagree with what I say about twitter. If you are one of those, feel free to tell me what technical detail twitter does better than everyone else.
Yep totally agree, Twitter only exists because of network effects.
> even though they were announcing loud and clear that they were going to cost money
On the other hand, WhatsApp announced this back when scammers aka mobile networks still charged a ton for texts, and WhatsApp was the only cheaper option.
Now the masses are trained to expect everything for free, so it's really hard to get them to pay for something. It's not even about social networks, even getting someone to buy a stand-alone app is hard enough - outside of the tech circle, most people consider it weird that I pay for apps. Even getting them to pay for the likes of Spotify is hard (most non-tech people I know are still on the free tier and get their music fix on Youtube, with ads and everything).
This is why I don't think a paid service is unlikely to succeed and become mainstream. A social network needs to be free, at least until it reaches a critical mass, at which point it can switch to a "freemium" model with a free (possibly ad-supported) base tier and a premium, ad-free tier.
I think I can kind of understand those users: I like paying for apps but a number of them will still try to abuse me by adding all kinds of monthly payments etc, start adding ads, remove the features I bought it for etc.
I also acknowledge there is a problem where authors should be able to secure an income to do security updates etc and I've no "one-size-fits-all solution" to it but I think between
- feature keys for new features
- optional extra services (support, server side ocr etc)
- reasonable fees for special cases (for example I loved to pay USD 1 a year for a user friendly, secure messaging service that promised not to spam me, datamine my data or leak it voluntarily.)
- etc
there should be room for better alternatives than many of the ones we have today.
You nailed it. When a company lives or dies by advertising revenue, they are going to optimize for maximum advertising revenue.
The pattern with TV is a good case study. I wonder if there will eventually be guidelines about how many ads you can show users and now much screen real estate is allowed to be covered by ads.
> I wonder if there will eventually be guidelines about how many ads you can show users and now much screen real estate is allowed to be covered by ads.
Isn't that kind of what "acceptable ads" programs in adblocks are? (Or, at least, should be?) There are a lot of Adblock Plus users there that basically decided (or got tricked into thinking) that ads that are appropriate are okay to view.
The issue with "acceptable" ads is that 1) there is no such thing as "acceptable" shit, and 2) the "acceptable" ads are just as bad (if not worse) than everyone else as far as privacy & stalking are concerned.
Even if they limit to a reasonable 10% ads or whatever, they'll still manipulate ad sacrifice content quality to maximize total engagement time/content.
Not only that, but when they can insert other media from friends/people you follow, it can potentially start a new chain of exploration. Even if you know that you've caught up, now you want to see what those other threads are about.
1. There's an inherent belief that they know what you want better than you do (this is inherit in any recommendation engine that gives limited ability to manipulate it)
2. Most users, given the option, won't bother changing it anyways
3. You'll use the service regardless of whether they offer it, because network effects
> There's an inherent belief that they know what you want better than you do
I think it's actually that they believe they can create an algorithm that will keep you coming back. It clearly works. People want to be entertained, often by their friends, often by things that interest then. This algorithm based on _your input_.
You can absolutely manipulate the feed. Search for 12 yoga based people, click on 12 yoga based hashtags, and then watch your feed become yoga-ified for the next few days as the algo adjusts to keep you coming back.
>This algorithm based on _your input_. You can absolutely manipulate the feed.
You can incidentally manipulate the feed. But its clearly not intentional behavior; the recommender system naturally operates on the belief that you're using the services without considering the recommender system. You can manipulate the system to something specific by breaking that assumption, but all you've done is essentially exploit a bug. Its clearly not a feature. And in a perfect world, the recommendation system would realize you're lying to it, and discard that behavior, and serve you what you really want.
your input is expected to be natural consumption of the service, with limited, abstracted forms of feedback, but otherwise without knowledge of the recommender system judging your every move. You don't edit the results, you don't play with ordering, you ideally don't even search too much out of your defined subject range (lest it skew horribly and fuck up all your recommendations, like your yoga example).
>I think it's actually that they believe they can create an algorithm that will keep you coming back. It clearly works.
But this I agree with; it's a better understanding of what I was trying to get at.
1 and maximizing time spend in the app (see sibling comment) seem like a good explaination for this. I'm not sure about 2 but it might be true aswell.
> 3. You'll use the service regardless of whether they offer it, because network effects
Actually I stopped using Facebook for that reason. The feed just didnt provide any value to me anymore. Also I never really got into Twitter because of it. I don't see the value in following people if I cannot see their posts without hours of scrolling through retweets.
> If anticheating techniques really require root access, then people that care about competitive gaming should have an option to consider this trade-off and turn the anticheating pieces on if they think this has a better reward/risk ratio than not giving root access to a game.
In CounterStrike (Global Offensive) this is already the case. The official Valve anticheat is not as intrusive as the anticheat provided by external services like Esea or Faceit. If you choose to use such service they basicly take your system apart. It turns out that in order to get good results this is needed.
I think you underestimate the impact massive cheating can have on a game. Even casual players will leave games that have cheaters in every other lobby.
Almost noone argues that we should take all his apples away but I think there is a lot of room before he has to feel like his risk is not worth it anymore.
The only issue Amazon would have in a more socialized society is that it would be way harder to exploit poor people that have to take up with their working conditions and wages because they rely on those jobs. And if your business cannot survive without exploitation it should not exist in the first place.