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This is basically the exact problem that this thread is about in my opinion. Bezos don’t like the guy who says he is going to tax him and forced his company to pay a living wage, now he is going to call up one of his buddies to try and spoil the election. The irony is that Bloomberg probably helps Bernie if anyone. I think these guys are really clueless as to what is actually going on but hopefully they don’t force some kind of crisis at the convention and respect whatever people vote for at the primaries.
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Hopefully, they try to force some kind of crisis and fail miserably. This is a fight I want and a fight America needs.
I like that guys who receive that level of compensation act like it is not a negotiation, regardless of him being Chairman.
“I don’t even know how much I am going to make until they pay me!”
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They also act like they don’t pay attention to what other CEO’s make and what previous ones had made and it’s not a competition for them.
Their egos are to big to take a pay cut. They need it to show what they are worth.
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I’m not going to wade back into this thread but I can’t pass up the opportunity to tell you all to seek out this film, if you can. It’s in theatres right now. Not only is it the best film I have seen this year, it’s the cinema version of the discussion itt.
Don’t watch the preview or read about it first!
I watched the Dimon piece.
When Stahl asked him about people feeling a sense of foreboding, that things are getting worse: “Hogwash, the economy is great!”
When pointing out that workers’ compensation has gone up 12% in the last 40 years while CEOs’ has gone up 900%: “That’s because we need to grow the economy more.”
These guys are nothing but self-interested dopes.
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I think it’s weird that people try to dig up confirmation that Gates is inherently a terrible person or something. Gates, like Zuckerberg, is just a nerd who happened to be randomly in the right place at the right time, and he reacted to acquiring wealth and power in the same way that human beings generally have since the beginning of time. There’s nothing unusual about the way he tried to protect and increase his wealth, nor is there anything unusual about how he cribbed technologies from other people, that’s just how computer programming works, honestly. The problems are systemic. Most any other human being subbed into Gates’ or Zuckerberg’s positions would behave the same.
Silicon Valley functions as a microcosm of the emergent problems with capitalism in a globalised world, where fighting to achieve increased market share, or ideally monopoly, take precedence over creating anything actually good. There’s nothing inventive or even efficient about Facebook (in fact it was written in PHP, a language which was such a handicap that Facebook had to create their own PHP transpiler so they could pretend they hadn’t used it). There’s nothing different about WhatsApp compared to the million other messaging programs that justifies the 19 billion Facebook paid for it, it’s just a swarm effect thing. The rush to be first, or to carve off a chunk of market share as fast as possible, is creating incredible levels of malinvestment. I don’t know what you do about it.
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Yeah like fuck Gates, I don’t disagree, but it should be recognised that the problem isn’t inherent in Gates himself, it’s just what acquiring huge amounts of wealth does to people. I would still count Gates as among the least toxic of the mega-wealthy, it’s just that’s a bar so low as to be subterranean.
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It wasn’t all luck though. He was ruthless and dishonest (repeatedly posing as a buyer of companies while extracting tech) and that’s a big part of how he got so rich. And it’s not surprising. And it’s not just human nature to be so driven to beat everyone else. And it’s not surprising when you hear things like big-time CEOs are so much more likely than average to be sociopaths.
My experience in the business world is certainly that regularly fucking people over is pretty common for the most financially successful.
The Great Men of history are probably almost exclusively sociopaths.
Bc the scoreboard is now money: Khan looks like Gates, Alexander looks like Bezos, etc. Then again, (physically) Caesar looked closer to them than some Greek God. Napolean was Napolean too, I have no point.
LOL Monopolies suck bad. Don’t pretend otherwise. For years and years Microsoft pretended that the internet options portion of internet explorer was somehow integrated into their operating systems to allow Euro lawyers to argue that it was required to be shipped with windows. Now they are doing the same thing with Edge, hiding internet explorer from menu choices. Inherently Microsoft’s monopoly position is problematic and bad for the ecosystem. Hopefully soon people will have found a viable alternative in the ecosystem that business customers will adopt and this travesty of an operating system will be dead soon after.
#neverforget
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That seems like a classic that everyone has known for a long time, but I’ve never seen it.
It is very much not when the billionaires hoard all the money and all the power. It isn’t like we are discussing Taylor Swift‘s boyfriends.
And systemically use that money/power to dominate our politics/government…
That’s where you are wrong.
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The police and military have power because they have guns, tanks and prisons. The people they listen to listen to the billionaires.
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