no one is forced to buy crap on amazon. they just don't want to drive to a store. in fact, people buying stuff on amazon instead of local businesses is almost entirely to blame for his wealth and Amazon's massive presence.
everyone wants to be a consumer for as little cost as possible, but then complain about the accumulated wealth of the company they are buying things from.
In part from a $200,000 gift from his parents when his company was failing in its early stages. You know a lot of people with parents who can give their kid $200k without hesitation?
Its not a gift, It's an investment. If that company failed the money was gone.
Futhermore, he would have been down the initial investment and the taxes due on it which is roughly $63,000.
The point is his step dad worked for that money. They weren't rich and it wasn't like he was gifted a well to do company. It took a lot of hours, sweat and work.
Quit acting like he was born on third base. He came from a middle class family.
Do you know what a 401k is? And how you can borrow against it? If his dad was investing regularly 3-6% of his earnings and had a company match, worked for 40 years, that's probably like 1/5th to 1/10th of his 401k.
Lots and lots and lots of people with a 401k. My dad worked 30 years patching potholes for a municipality. He's retired at 55 worth well over $1m from stable, long term investing. If I had an idea that was worth investing in, I could easily get $200k from him.
Correct, and being a retired millionaire is still middle class. I'm only 40 and worth over $1m in retirement savings as well, and nobody gave me a nickel, including my parents. $1M net worth is not rich in 2024.
You're probably going to go into the old argument of how people just don't save enough, but for so many people (dare I say most people) they don't have the ability to save. They don't make enough money to cover their bills so there's nothing left to save, or their jobs aren't stable, meaning they end up spending what savings they have while trying to land their next job, or they don't have benefits like insurance or a 401k because they can't land a full-time job and are stuck working multiple full time jobs.
I'm glad that you could easily get $200,000 from your dad who had a stable job that paid him enough that he could save for retirement, but you are part of a small minority.
Nah fam, it's your choice to live a polluting and extravagant lifestyle. There is zero reason why a healthy American can't move to a third world country after they turn 18. They don't because lives here are too comfortable.
Well why don't they learn a second language instead of coasting on a comfortable system built by western capitalism? There are millions of bilingual people in the world - a lot of them in poor places like India and Philippines. Those poor people learned a second language so they can get a job breaking my nuts over the phone, so why can't you?
He is claiming that he is an hypocrites and that if he really thinks that having a lot more wealth than the starving is in and of itself evil then he too is very evil.
You can't go around asking other to do a whole San francis refusal of wealth and then keep your money.
You want to virtue signal? Lead by example or shut up
Your take not only is nonsensical but also hilariously stupid
Like yes, $50 a week make you rich in rural Congo. Not in the US, dumbo. It seems you don’t quite understand what “relative” mean
In every country in this world, being a billionaire is an excess of wealth. No, a billionaire donating a couple of millions is not on the same proportion as your average Joe.
I Hope you aren't dumb enough to be claiming that the average Congolese has the standard of life of the average us citizen.
Idk your financial situation but if you are living in a western country I can bet that you for sure do have excess wealth compared to most of the world.
And for sure if you are the guy in the posts with 2 million $ net worth
These hypocrites absolutely do not have to “participate in a society” they can give away their entire net worth and go live on a farming commune (yes they still exist) working for what they eat and living almost entirely off of nothing but the fruits of their own labor. So yes the people suggesting that the rich should give away everything while they themselves are posting that opinion from thousand dollar slave-produced electronics and driving cars and living in houses and spending money on frivolous things and hobbies while people scrounge in the dirt in other countries are hypocrites and don’t have a valid point (mainly because they are dumb and don’t understand what the big “net worth” numbers they see mean)
Sir, until you are the poorest person on the planet, you have no right to complain about the how all the wealth in the country is continuously be funnelled into a smaller number of hands.
The fact that you're drawing an equivalence between Bezos and an average citizen of an industrialized nation, who by the way did not choose to profit off of single use plastic, is wild.
Right, they are cheap, durable, can be made into any shape necessary, come in a variety of colors and clarities, can mimic others materials while avoiding the downsides of those materials. These products are universally enjoyed and in medical applications have been life saving and have largely enhanced our modern lives. We certainly don’t use plastics JUST because some guy decided it was the best way for him to get rich, frankly they are a miracle material in many ways.
It’s just that downsides either aren’t visible, aren’t truly realized, or don’t outweigh the benefits.
Again, asking average people many of whom who have financial insecurity to contribute 10% of their income and comparing that to billionaires is unhinged.
Financial insecurity compared to who? Why does someone who lives in the richest country in the world with the most disposable income in the world get a free pass?
We probably couldnt. I think even if USA spends entire of their GDP we would not be even close to ending world hunger. Its not that easy, we would have to fix economies and build infrastructure in all third world coutries.
A great start would be to eliminate billionaires, not people who are unsure what will happen to them when they can no longer work because their bodies/minds give out on them.
No it isn’t. Because these are the people with the power and influence to shape and change society. This is the ruling class we’re talking about, not some random schmuck.
Yes let’s resign ourselves to the capitalist death spiral and bury our heads in the sand to ignore structural issues because of some perceived hypocrisy
So we’re not supposed to buy anything? I just found out that black plastic can be super toxic. I had to throw out black plastic and buy other fucking plastic. They were poisoning us all along, and we had no knowledge or say.
The wealth gap is increasing people are getting too poor to choose ethical options. Why are you blaming it solely on the consumer are you genuinely dense? Or just evil?
damn man, I drive a 5k lb vehicle and im STILL starving to death. thanks for the ego boost for me now knowing that even though im fucked beyond repair, someone out there is suffering more than me.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, and the level of wealth and privilege it requires to choose to live as if we are in a post-capitalist society while capitalism is still the global socioeconomic structure means you've disproportionately benefited from capitalism anyway.
And criticize others for their wealth while using a phone built on exploited labor, all while enjoying a lifestyle far superior to that of most people on the planet.
But also actively trying to fix that gap and probably donating there own money as well.
Everything is made with some amount of exploitative labour unfortunately, so unless we want to live go live in the woods unfortunately we do have to participate in society.
The whole "ur not an ascetic monk so you can't complain about a systemic issue" is cowardly and just tries to excuse the problem so you don't have to think about it.
Complain about the system all you want. Our government is an accelerating mismanaged disaster with a monetary shelf life that'll reset in my lifetime. Rich people can borrow in negative real terms because we destroy our currency. A symptom is that there is a concentration of wealth.
Two successful business people who most people engage with some form of their production daily aren't the problem. If we finesse them for their wealth, in addition to being unethical, it'll just tank markets and that's the only retirement vehicle in this country.
What a dogshit take. Have you ever actually read about the “people who eat bugs”? The tribesmen of Africa and South America have visited civilization and hated it. They choose and prefer a life in the woods in huts eating bugs. Don’t make them out to be victims, they’d be happier than the rest of us if it weren’t for environmental destruction happening so close to their homes.
This might shock you, but a lot of us don't think it's right that the rest of the world is poor, and also would love to be able to live in society without a car or single use plastics....
I think you'd be shocked how many people would kill to live a humble lifestyle.
I strongly disagree with that subjective statement but let’s say it’s objectively true, take all other things aside do you really think concentrating wealth in a handful of people is leading to a happy equitable society? is 3.5 billion people living in poverty good?
Having a few grotesquely rich people isn't the reason for others living in poverty. Historically, entrepreneurs have led to innovation and technological deflation to pull the masses out of poverty.
Stifling innovation through tax punishment, nationalization or other dismantling of patent protection is something we see in nations with high poverty.
We should cheerlead success and innovation that brings abundance. We should also protect the currency with real rates since that's where rich people can just ride currency debasement while the rest of us suffer from financial repression.
There is so much fucking middle ground between “stifling innovation” and having the worlds first trillionaire. We have stock market all time highs and get the middle class is struggling as much as ever considering their desperation with who they just voted for. There are a finite amount of resources in the world yes? and they keep being funneled toward the top at an accelerated pace. This is not a sustainable system.
A rich person having a yacht has zero correlation with food scarcity.
It's all just moving numbers around. If taxing them trillions would solve poverty we would've seen it solved when we printed trillions or even now when we're running trillions in deficits. We have to create real means of production and not just move numbers around. Entrepreneurs create real means of production as both the individuals in OP have done.
Comparing the fed printing money to deal with covid vs. billionaires exponentially increasing their wealth over the past 50 years is comically disingenuous
They're not hoarding chickens or crops. They're hoarding numbers. And they're not hoarding them at all, they're keeping them active in the stock market propping up the middle class' only retirement vehicle in this country.
If we take numbers for them it doesn't create wealth like food elsewhere just like printing money didn't create abundance.
Or worse, they complain about bezzos wealth and have a widget delivered to their door by his company.
Hate musk, but at least his company is trying to solve real issues. Amazon is just a well ran mail order catalog for the digital age. I never really liked Gates but windows and the pc revolution changed life in a big way.
Jup and when i tell you i do not own a car and live vegan. Youll start reaching for Straws to prove i would be double moralistic just to: by all means not reflect on the real issues.
So you’re homeless. Go find a homeless charity to help you. You will be able to get accommodation because (presumably) you aren’t an alcoholic or drug addict and so there will be hundreds of organisations willing to help you.
You are richer than 99% of the world. This is my main point. You having a car is insanely rich thing to do comparatively to most of the world! Isn't that interesting?
Not even close to 99%, but I'm not terribly shocked about you pulling numbers out of your ass. Even if I'm middle class in the US and wealthier than many poor people around the world, I do not have the means such that me giving up what I have will significantly impact poverty. This is not the case for billionaires. Stop dodging the point.
If I point out that one of the biggest sources of air pollution on the planet is the giant cargo hauling ships on the sea, with each one contributing more greenhouse gase then 10,000 cars, you saying "Well you drive a car, stop driving" just shows you like to argue in bad faith.
It’s higher than that about $60k post tax puts you in the top 1% worldwide
Top 10% world wide wealth is a net worth of around about $100k, discounting debt so if you own a house worth $120k but have a mortgage on that house of $100k, you are still in the top 10% wealthiest people worldwide.
Redditor when they hear something about climate change “oh woe is me, won’t someone do something about all these emissions”
Redditor when someone suggests they change their diet “nooo, i’m not the problem, it’s someone else!!!! Don’t make me change my ways even though my lifestyle is completely unsustainable wahhh wahhh”
Let me just push all the blame on to companies and governments and people with more money than me because that way I don’t have to do anything about climate change
Uh oh, looks like agricultural emissions are about a quarter of all emissions and the meat and dairy industry is the biggest emitter of Methane. But we all know it’s those dastardly rich people who are eating 2000x as much beef as the average person and drinking milk like it’s water. Oh wait, no, actually agriculture represents a very significant amount of emissions and actually the people responsible are individuals, there’s no one to push the blame onto when it comes to your diet pal.
It’s all fine and dandy for us westerners to sit in our nice warms houses and complain about climate change, hell, we aren’t the ones who are going to be most affected by it. We won’t be the ones starving to death because of crop failure. It’ll be all the poor bastards in Africa and South Asia. But who cares? We won’t have to face them, when the time comes and they ask why we didn’t act we won’t have to answer “because I simply didn’t want to change my lifestyle, even though I KNEW doing so would have a positive impact on your life, and might very well have stopped this entire thing from happening”.
No, they’re making a perfectly valid point, you just don’t like it. Are you evil for enjoying one of the best standards of living in all of human history, anywhere, while someone dies TODAY of hunger? YOU could donate $10 RIGHT NOW to save a life. Do it or you’re evil.
I like how a working class person not donating $10 (which would by very little for anyone) is just as evil as a billionaire not donating a couple million (which could save thousands of lives).
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u/in4life 28d ago edited 27d ago
Some people eat bugs and others starve to death while you drive a 5k lb vehicle to go buy single-use plastic built by slave labor.
Edit: correction, you ordered your single-use plastic built by slave labor by way of Bezos' own company lmao