Nor am I. Doesn't change the fact that he should treat and pay his employees better, or the fact that he's a colossal wanker like every billionaire. You lose perspective on things with that much money and tend to start developing narcissistic and sociopathic viewpoints.
Dude just wanted to sell books to people. He built it and they came. He has a machine that's working, and probably doesn't actually oversee the majority of the decisions made. If you think Jeff sits at his desk, opens up a little UI, clicks on the wages slider and slides them all the way to the bottom, you're being a bit silly. It's a publicly traded company with a board of directors, those directors have other managers below them, and those managers have even lower managers under them. Jeff Bezos has a very considerably sized head that reflects a lot of the sun's rays, but it is not big enough to directly micromanage all that.
That's a very simple explanation of why communism is incompatible with human nature, but I always found it inadequate in explaining the superiority of the capitalist model. It neglects the benefits of the profit motive or the benefits of competition, both of which incentivise innovation and progress.
That's almost certainly an idea that was spawned at the top, and it is appropriate that Futurama's suicide booths would get their start at Amazon. Both hilarious and grim at the same time.
That also wouldn't be surprising, since they want to pretend to give employees a certain level of input while simultaneously not allowing them to make any major changes. It's not like more frequent/longer breaks were ever on the table, after all. I wouldn't be surprised if it was initially proposed as a joke and Amazon ran with it anyway.
Neither communism nor capitalism is immune to downfall by oligarchy and authoritarianism. We might be living through that downfall in the US right now, as nearly half of all voters endorse dictatorship.
Whoever told you that lied to you. We have no communist or leftist party in the US. The Democratic party is a capitalist, center-right party. The Republican party has always been further right than that, but only in recent years have they been tilting toward outright fascism.
I'll answer with another saying - "given enough money and time anyone can do anything, the question is whether that's worth it". The trick isn't just in achieving something, but rather in getting there down the most efficient, cost-effective path that yields the best results. Few things can incentivise that more than fierce competition, and while we're all competing, it's generally nice to have a prize and the end of the rat race. Of course there are people who will do such things regardless, even pro bono, simply due to their personal passion, or the satisfaction discovery brings. With that being said, one must ask if we'd have as many doctors if a doctor's wage wasn't what it is right now, given the degree of dedication it requires to become one, just to name one example. If you give to each according to their needs, as the "ideal" suggests, I don't see a whole lot of incentives to go down such an arduous career path besides deeply rooted interest. That's not to say that capitalism is the de facto ideal system for organising a social structure - it's all relative. You wouldn't run your family like that, you don't expect your mother or father to pay you for each and every task, and in turn, you don't expect young children to pay rent. It's specifically suited for organising larger groups that are subdivided into smaller units with (often competing) interests of their own, particularly if said groups far surpass Dunbar's Number in size. As you say, we are wired to only care about so many relationships in life - anything beyond +/- 150 becomes a blur.
Except capitalism doesn't really do that. You can't have competition when you just buy everyone out or put them out of business by undercutting the other businesses by just leaning back on your immense wealth and profits. There's a reason very few places can contest with the likes of walmart, target, and so on. It's because the moment their is competition, Walmart will undercut them by giving insanely lower prices the competition cannot contest. Eventually run the competition out of business, and then re raise the price the moment said competition is gone, or even increase it further than the original price.
Ah, you're one of those "too big to fail" guys. Blockbuster called, they want their late VHS return fees. While you're at it, please return all the Betamax tapes and Laserdiscs you've borrowed, the keys for the Oldsmobile are on the Magnavox TV in the living room. The nearest Blockbuster is right next to Sears, America's biggest retailer (in the 80's, now down to some 223 stores in total after going through Chapter 11). The market is a wild place, you can be at the top and tumble right back down in the span of a couple years. Any roadblocks in the free market are set up by well-meaning government pencil pushers, no corporation is immune to being beaten in their own game, particularly if their business model isn't flexible enough to adjust to a rapidly changing business landscape. If they *are* flexible enough and they do compete in the realm of price and quality then the beneficiary of that conflict is the customer - there will always be new challengers.
Let's all point and laugh at the guy who thinks this is the reality of modern-day capitalism, and not just the idealized version of it found only in libertarian wet dreams. Cronyism runs rampant, the market is fixed (rigged) in several ways, and no corporation has been tried on anti-trust violations since Microsoft, the one and only time it has happened in my lifetime. Certain people love to brag about all the "innovation" and "variation" that capitalism brings with it, but the truth is that one or two megacorps own all fifteen brands of any given product you can buy at the grocery store. We only get the illusion of choice, just as we often only get the illusion of freedom.
Now that's just a bad argument. What killed blockbuster was failure to catch up with the times. They didn't really follow up when things started changing to streaming only ,and rentals were not much of a thing. And you want to know what killed them? Amazon, Netflix, etc. And they were extremely wrong.
I hope you realise that brands under the same umbrella *also* compete with each other. Heck, individual departments compete with each other.
Netflix, the wee baby startup, which began as a rental service, killed Blockbuster, an industry giant that chose not to innovate. Thank you for reinforcing my point.
I think he was saying it's an outdated argument, as if 2008 was so long ago. Don't worry, all the corporations and big banks are totally playing by the rules now *wink* *wink*.
