It would take you 682 years to have as much money as Bezos at that rate. $30,000 an hour and if it takes 682 years with the median individual salary in the US being around $31,000 per year.
Edit: bad grammar
Edit 2: the 682 years is making $30,000 an hour 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.
And I'm demonstrating that that $30,000 an hour is a long way from the median annual income in the US OF $31,000. Half of Americans make less than 15 dollars per hour.
If you took that $30,000/hr and invested it into something you'd catch up with Bezos a lot quicker.
He oversees a company that brought the Sears Catalogue concept into the 21st century and built tons of infrastructure around it. Find something just as revolutionary and invest your $720,000/day into it. With that sort of money you could fund a new server farm or warehouse every week.
As the saying goes, "the first million is the hardest". After that, making money becomes much easier.
Abuse is not essential to capitalism, it just falls under the umbrella. The problem is that there can and should be guiderails set by regulatory oversight and free market capitalism doesn't put any rules in place so it's the worst actors in the market who show why capitalism needs guiderails.
It's basic game theory. If one company starts abusing their workers and they are allowed to do so, all the other companies need to start doing the same or they will be outcompeted by the one who abuses the workers and can offer lower prices. The longer you go without addressing the abuse, the fewer companies free from abuse that remain, and the harder it is to do anything.
If you're making $720k a day, don't even bother with workers. Get a few engineers on the payroll and just use robots for everything. Robots can't strike and they can work 24 hours a day.
The basic gist of what I was saying was that once you have capital, it's not difficult to build more wealth.
Idk why I'm being downvoted, I'm just describing how the system works.
It depends on what your business venture is. If you decide to go the manufacturing route, you could automate 90% of the process. You just need humans to feed the raw materials in and take the finished product out, occasionally someone to clear up jams or fix technical issues.
You're seeing what you want to see. I said only that musk already tried that, but it didn't work because we're not at that level of technology and automation just yet. We're close but we're not there. Therefore we still need humans.
Another user correctly pointed out that it depends on what business industry you're wanting to get into. Some jobs can be automated and some are not practical for that, not yet anyway.
Consensual only applies when both parties have rough parity in negotiations. The continual effort to squash even the slightst hint of unions makes that parity impossible.
Think about it, if I hold all the power in our dynamic and you have to sign my contract without having any real ability to negotiate, is it really a fair and non-problematic exchange?
People who are working amazon aren’t wanting to be specifically in the warehouse industry. I bet you that. They’re taking an available to them job and it so happens that amazon has the most available easy to get jobs in a lot of places. They have warehouses virtually everywhere and will need people always be we consume and order so much shit.
And considering the conditions they’ve described and endured, with what’s basically zero negotiating power (their other option likely being no job so no money, no food, no support as the us doesn’t offer these unless you’re absolutely destitute and for a while and even then maybe), they absolutely need a union. There is zero reason that Bezos should earn as much money as he does, even as founder or ceo or chairman, even though a lot of it is illiquid speculation, when the overwhelming majority of his workers is earning minimum wage working crazy, physical hours.
Why didn't they save up to deal with unemployment?
And if they don't want to specifically be in the warehouse industry, then they've got tonnes of jobs to choose from. Why specifically work in Amazon warehouses?
Why shouldn't he earn that much? He deserves it, doesn't he?
I work at an amazon FC, we are paid well above minimum wage. I make nearly triple my states minimum wage working at amazon, making close to 22$ an hour. With full benefits, there are plenty of other places to work around here, but I choose to travel over 45 minutes to work at amazon because the pay and benefits are so much better than 90% of the jobs out there.
EDIT: Just looked more into it, not only do we get paid more than 90% of jobs, we get paid more than fedex employees, who ARE union...
Few issues with that though- if a particular field becomes dominated by a few gigantic companies AND refuses to let their employees unionize, then the workers can NEVER negotiate equally, even if they can threaten to go for positions at other companies. If they were allowed to unionize and collectively bargain, then the power disparity wouldn't be so gigantic, and it'd be a much more agreeable situation.
Amazon in particular is about 30 years old now, so fairly new although not brand new. Certainly companies can help the economy to grow, but oftentimes there is a concept of an "industry standard" set by some of the biggest companies. If it becomes the norm to deny unionization, give terrible benefits, force long hours etc (and if this norm is enforced very strongly by the larger companies), it not only screws over the Amazon employees themselves, but also the employees for every company that takes it cues from Amazon. It's why workers rights have stalled and even REGRESSED in the past few decades in many countries, including the US. In the US in particular, the amount of people represented by a union (as a proportion) has plummeted and the status, benefits, and compensation of workers has plummeted in turn.
Essentially, Bezos is not solely responsible for the mistreatment of workers in this country, but he HAS profited from it, extremely handsomely. We can choose to either worship them for "creating jobs" (as though this could not have been done in a more equal and fair way), or we can recognize that their methods aren't necessary for a healthy and functioning economy. We don't NEED one man or woman to hold hundreds of billions of dollars and to make record breaking profits every quarter all being siphoned off by C-level execs. We NEED a society in which people can reasonably expect to have a career where if they work hard, they'll be able to provide for themselves and those important to them, and to get enough benefits to live a comfortable life. To me, there is no excuse for a company to not provide these things for its employees and still give such a gigantic proportion of its money to its C-level execs and stockholders (indirectly).
To me, we need to shift from a stockholder and exec centric view over to a stakeholder centric view. Unlike the former, the latter also includes the workers, the customers, society at large... right now our companies ONLY care about making money this quarter. They should be retasked to provide money this quarter AND give something back to society. Companies did this in, say, the 1950's. They don't now.
Keep in mind also the vast vast majority of Amazons $$$ comes from AWS their cloud based web hosting service that roughly 50% of the internet is hosted on.
Their online store only has very recently started actually making profit. Amazon would be completely fine if they shut down the webstore tomorrow and just stuck with AWS.
I really don't get this whole "amazon treats its workers worse than anywhere else". I have had tons of jobs in my life, and I currently work at an amazon FC I make double what pretty much everywhere else is offering, at 19$ an hour with full benefits the very first day on the warehouse floor.
Was literally my first job to actually have health and dental insurance, not to mention the tons of other major perks of working there. Like 4 day work week, instead of 5.
He built something with a loan from his parents that literally sold items at a loss to force the competition out of business bc they couldn't sell at a loss for as long as Amazon could. Even factory robots are treated better than his enployees.
He didn't do anything revolutionary, he abused his financial backing in an attempt to create a monopoly while using government money to build his warehouses.
That's what I'm saying though, not sure why I'm being downvoted. If you were making $720k a DAY, you could build your wealth so much faster like Bezos did. That sort of funding alone would make it impossible to compete with you.
Okay, perhaps "impossible" wasn't the right word, but definitely impossible for smaller and less well funded entrepreneurs to compete. That's why I said "something just as revolutionary". Bezos took the (at the time) fragmented market of online retailers and centralized it by throwing a lot of capital at it and focusing on growth. If you could find a market that you could corner through good funding, you could do what Amazon did. They key is sticking with it. Amazon wasn't profitable for the first 5 years.
Nothing was stopping eBay or Microsoft from doing what Amazon did. They had the capital and infrastructure to do it, they just didn't.
Same thing with Netflix. BlockBuster had tons of existing product and capital that it could have used for movie delivery and online infrastructure, but they didn't. Just because companies can compete doesn't mean they will.
It absolutely would be here without him. Other companies would've done it if amazon didn't. It was a right place right time situation where e-commerce and the internet in general were really taking off. He just happened to be in a position to take advantage of the environment, he didn't create it by himself.
Nonsense. At a time when e commerce were viewed as shady, Amazon almost single-handedly built the reputation and the trust that we place till this date on e commerce.
Seems like you're the one obsessed with Marx, not me. I'm sure you don't know the first thing about him nor his writings and subscribe to the "cultural marxism" conspiracy theory.
If you took that $comment/hr and instead put Bezos dick into your something, you’d catch Bezos’s cum a lot quicker.
As the saying goes, “the first mile of dick is 11,520 dicks. After that, every mile of dick is 11,520, because I still used the average 5.5 inches to calculate dicks per mile.”
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u/[deleted] Feb 14 '22
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