don't worry, it's about money and social mobility. So here's the question. $5000 daily for 528 years, or a billion dollars in your storage unit? (because there's another infographic out there showing a billion in $100 bills on 3' high skids, and damned if it didn't take 8 of'em. (40"x48" pallets). seriously... $5000 x 365days x 528years still isn't $1 000 000 000 ($963 600 000).
Earning isn't about doing physical labor, it's about creating value. Jeff Bezos created Amazon and its worth a great deal of money.
substitute "physical" for "actual"... maybe "labour" for "work" while we're at it. I'm not limiting this to some sort of John Henry proletariat thing... Hell, I'm not even saying that amazon (cancer that it is) isn't worth a great deal... I'm asking how he is when we know the conditions that the workers in that (and hundreds of other companies) are a few bus stops away from feudalism-not too mention often a fair hike from the nearest bus stop.
I think @Paladin thinks CEOs of large companies use their super human psionic powers to accomplish all the work and all the people who enable them to make something like amazon work are just sucking off their awesomeness like parasites.
Person A can do a year's worth of exhausting, back-breaking physical labor, and get $7/hour for it. Person B can do an afternoon of daydreaming in a comfortable office and come up with an idea worth a million dollars. Why? Person B created more value. "Work" doesn't have some objective value to it. It's worth what other people will pay for it. I'd argue that since Jeff Bezos made Amazon happen--he had the dream, he took the risks, he drove it to success--that the wealth created is rightly his. This notion that the value of work should be based on the amount of toil involved is very nineteenth century, completely out of step with the modern world.
"Create more value" seems to be shorthand for "found a way to manipulate people into giving them money."
How does Bezos "manipulate" his customers into buying from Amazon? With lower prices, wide selection, and speedy delivery?
I agree with you 100% of course, but there are days (quite a few) where i would happily swap my work for stress free, limited thought, manual labour..... if only they paid the same. Digging holes in a road in the rain or cutting grass does seem appealing.... sometimes. Disclaimer - i am not a CEO of Amazon sadly, or a CEO at all.
so then how come, despite building houses, I don't make enough to own one? If the value of the effort is irrelevant, then why should anybody starve?
nobody said effort is irrelevant. And while you may be great at building houses there are plenty of other people who are also, and will willingly work cheaper if not actually better than you. It's about supply and demand - if nobody in Canada knew how to swing a hammer, your skills would be in great demand and you could indeed earn enough to buy a house. I used to work construction and thought it was a gyp that I built them but couldn't afford them. Then I joined the army and after a few years I did indeed earn enough to buy one.
Your labor isn't valuable enough to afford it, no different than if you built jetliners or yachts. I work on things I couldn't afford to buy. I'm sure a lot of the guys who build Cadillacs or Mercedes can't afford them. How can you fix this? Command the price of houses down? Then little interest in building more, even though more people could potentially afford them, so, still lots of people without. Command the value of your labor up? Houses get much more expensive, and again, fewer are built. The value's in what the effort produces, not the effort itself. You could work really hard building a house, but unless the effort yields a saleable house, your efforts are for naught.
If you were even semi intelligent and invested your money you would be a billionaire many times over.
The labour obviously is of value... what's not proportionate in renumeration are the investors, brokers, and agents. How is the guy who brokered a house flip worth the same as the two dozen guys who did the work? (Granted, that's Toronto where a two year luxury project nets a million bucks... but isn't that part of the problem of "value"?) I think you're off on a red herring with the manipulating the consumer bullshit. SOmewhere between profiteering and embezzlement was what I was thinking... like if you're playing Monopoly and the banker takes $5000 to everyone else's $200 and claims it's for the "value" of his stewardship. https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/#35866001251c top 10 us billionaires= about 500B 75% is 375B enough to give everyone in the country who isn't a millionaire a $10 000 per year raise and they'd still have more money than everyone except the next ten people (who make up another half Trillion) on the list. While we're on it... why is it that the "freer" the "market" gets in theory, the more exclusionary it becomes in practice?
I am not a billionaire, true, but we were talking about half a millennia of time-value of money, weren’t we? Start thinking about how compound interest works.
Governments, shareholders, banks, economies. Customers don’t mean shit after a certain point. If you disagree, feel free to ask Comcast how much customer side service matters.
so... not only worth the money, but gets paid first? GM Manages To Find $22 Million To Pay CEO As It Closes 5 Plants And Lays Off 15,000 Workers Sahid Fawaz December 13, 2018 Funny how there is always exorbitant amounts of money for executives, even when a company is laying off workers. Money and Markets reports: “General Motors CEO Mary Barra might be the most unpopular CEO in the United States right now after GM announced it is slashing up to 15,000 jobs and closing up to five plants in North America. Barra has been shredded from all sides for the decision, including from President Donald Trump. ‘Very disappointed with General Motors and their CEO, Mary Barra, for closing plants in Ohio, Michigan and Maryland. Nothing being closed in Mexico & China. The U.S. saved General Motors, and this is the THANKS we get! We are now looking at cutting all @GMsubsidies, including… for electric cars. General Motors made a big China bet years ago when they built plants there (and in Mexico) – don’t think that bet is going to pay off. I am here to protect America’s Workers!’ [Related: GM, Which Made $8.1 Billion In Profit And Paid Its CEO $22 Million, Just Cancelled Health Benefits For 50,000 Workers] West Virginia Democrat Richard Ojeda, who is considering a presidential run in 2020, blasted Barra on Twitter for her $22 million salary, a number that was confirmed by Politifact. Barra’s salary is in fact 295 times higher than the average GM salaried worker’s $74,000. At General Motors, CEO Mary Barra ‘took home almost 22 MILLION DOLLARS last year alone (295x your company’s average employee).’ he tweeted.” ****** Seriously? I mean, she basically got paid to kill 15 000 north american jobs. I fuck up a bathroom tile and I've gotta fix it.
Amazon got $72.4 billion from its its customers in 2018. I assure you, they matter. A bad example, as Comcast has a state-sanctioned monopoly in many places.
This is why schools and financial advisors preach investment and interest. While that math is accurate, its only one of the many ways to build wealth.
My definition of worth is the market price, the amount to which buyer and seller--at all levels--mutually agree. The guys who build the house don't provide the land, or the plans, or the permits, or the capital to finance the construction. They don't take any risk in the endeavor. They provide labor. They get the market price for it. The guys building the house cannot command more. They'd be dismissed and replaced with other guys willing to do the work. If the law mandated they get more, there probably wouldn't be many new house built. Exclusionary? The typical person in the west enjoys benefits and capabilities a king could not have had 100 years ago. A typical person in 1800 was hardly better off than a typical person in 800, but most of us are much better off than our grandparents at the same age.
Nope. https://www.thestreet.com/opinion/amazon-is-losing-money-from-retail-operations-14571703 https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/04/14/is-amazon-com-retail-business-actually-profitable.aspx https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/12/how-amazon-makes-money.html Amazon also hosts most of the US government’s servers. If you think the retail side of their business is where they make the bulk of their money, I have a bridge to sell you. They leverage their customer base for shareholders and third party sellers, but retail is a side job these days.
If it's fair for billionaires to hoard money and not pay employees a decent wage because "the free market dictates value," I don't see why it's not also fair if I create a massive legion of poor people and take their shit by force. Don't like it, then hire an army to protect your shit. My legion is bigger than your army and can overpower your mercenaries? Oh well, free market, baby!
In all honesty, major corporations do have an army: the U.S. army. It's interesting how often the military has been used to secure corporate interests against protesting workers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_the_United_States
