“We are very proud of this! We are nobodies, we have no money, nothing!” Tommaso Cacciari, from a group calling itself No Space for Bezos, told the BBC.
“We’re just citizens who started organising and we managed to move one of the most powerful people in the world - all the billionaires - out of the city.”
The wedding kicks off later this week, and has a star-studded guest list of the rich and famous that is rumoured to include Kim Kardashian, Mick Jagger and Leonardo diCaprio, as well as several of the Trumps.
Nothing was ever built by a person on a computer.
Don’t diminish his work. If you want billionaires to have less influence you have to replace what they do. If you think they do nothing then you have nothing to understand.
Of all places, Venice is in the top 5 of places that cannot complain about being commercialized and rented out. Simping for Venice just shows how big the hate for Bezos is which isn’t justified when looking at the criticism:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos
Where does the hate come from? He shows the limits of worker organized structures in comparison. All the unemployed could have built Amazon by themselves. The focus should be placed on finding new forms of cooperation, not on hating Bezos.
Ok, Jeff
He hordes more wealth than almost anyone else in the entire world. The man could fucking cure cancer and I would still hate him and consider him a horrible person. Nobody needs or deserves that much money when so much of the word is struggling to get by. And nobody makes that much money without exploiting others.
He owns shares of Amazon, not money. If he sells those he loses his influence.
People are struggling because markets are distorted, including preventing free global movement of people. Figure out who does that before hating Bezos.
And that shows you don’t understand the power of “just owning shares”. It’s a whole fucking shit load better than having income or money. He can take whatever loan he wants with his stocks as collateral. He skips out completely on doing anything helpful to society whatsoever. People are struggling because of this system, yes, and people like Bezos are happily living grand off of it
Of course. But Bezos taking loans is only slightly connected to keeping people poor. As far as I know Bezos also hasn’t financed a regime change for some mining operations.
Other corporations depend much more on keeping people poor. They don’t get the attention because they are not household names. It’s not good that richness has become the measure for evil, and not evil itself.
Look up “criticism of Amazon” or anything like that and you’ll see he isn’t just a good guy who happened to make a big benevolent corporation. From antitrust practices, to design theft, especially from POC, counterfeit products, special tax deals designed to contribute as little as possible, a significantly negative effect on the environment and more. Add to that Bezos’ personal relationships with business and government leaders that are actively trying to keep people poor, including Trump. It’s not the good-guy corporation you think it is.
And yes, when you’re worth 220 billion dollars and you do nothing positive with it whatsoever, you’re problematic, bordering on evil. It’s greed. If Bezos gave a flying shit about humanity, imagine what kind of change he could actually do.
Of course. As the saying goes, there are no innocent billionaires.
Yes, that would be nice. But it totally shifts the blame away from regular people. We live in a democracy. This entire debate could have been spent on how to improve the world. If we don’t have the money, why don’t we come up with a plan and ask Bezos for the money if needed? Actually there are so much taxes that society can easily outspend Bezos.
So you do recognise that. Then why are you spending so much energy defending Bezos and people like him?
Sure, regular people should rise up and retake power. Take back resources from the billionaires. Idk who “we” are - but I don’t live in USA, and if I did I wouldn’t be living in a democracy. There are plenty of plans for how to save the planet and they all include stopping billionaires and fundamentally changing the system. Think Bezos will bankroll it if we ask him nicely?
Because this is backwards. Billionaires fill the void that people don’t fill. The system could be changed right now if people stopped focussing on billionaires and would create their own structures.
Yes, people are kept stupid. But believing that all it takes is getting rid of billionaires is part of the disinformation.
You simping this hard for Bezos for free is the really sad part.
To me, the sad part is that I am not simping, but nobody recognizes that. Like a bull in a bullfight, people attack billionaires without seeing the dagger.
Especially Amazon, people could have recognized the idea and created a cooperative competitor. Bezos is a billionaire because they haven’t.
There are four options for the billionaire situation. Do nothing, organize a new party, civil war or starting competing businesses.
Hating Bezos without understanding his skills looks like the first option to me. In a world of flooding zones, that makes me wary.
People like Bezos actively prevents competitors from emerging. You equating someone who received $245,000 from his parents with any random guy who could have done the same is culpably dense. His skills are being the business equivalent of a cancer that kills its host in order to grow.
And yet, what other options exist right now?
But starting another regular company would end up with yet another billionaire, if successful. To avoid billionaires, businesses have to be structured and financed differently anyway.
His work, his sole accomplishment, is maximizing value extraction. That’s not nothing, it’s less than nothing because it’s a monumental net negative for the rest of society.
Maximizing value extraction is not bad as long as there is a free market. That’s what drives competition and brings prices down. Of course, employees and customers need other options for this to be fair.
Unless you organize a cooperating economy, maximizing value extraction is inevitable.
Besides, you shouldn’t ignore the work he does.
Yes it is. It is inherently exploitative.
How is it exploitative? If you get market rates for your work or pay market rates for the stuff you buy, you don’t lose in transactions.
Those who maximize value extraction optimize resource allocation and bring prices down for everybody.
Lemmy, the software you’re using right now, was built by a person on a computer. As was the operating system your computer uses to function.
As was the management structure, leadership culture and selection of markets by Bezos.
People on computers work, but so do CEOs.
Don’t diminish his work? The world could easily do with Amazon, or with an alternative/competitors/etc.
So Bezos himself is irrelevant in the discussion about important leaders. He wishes he was in that group.