Yeah I just multiplied median salary times number of employees. Thought it would be pretty accurate and way easier than going over capital expenditures.

Nah, nah, nah......It's been decreed earlier itt that the correct range is 32 - 83 billion in salary.

That range is more correct than deducing from known information. It's the best information available at the time.

Get out of here with your facts and math and stuff.

So this one time I met Ron Graham and we got to talking about his famous hypercube vertices problem and I said, "RONALD YOU IDIOT THAT NUMBER IS WAY TOO BIG THE ANSWER IS CLOSER TO 13 GOD YOURE SO STUPID!"

Then he told me an elephant is smaller than the moon and I punched him in the face.

Dont really care much what he does with his money but I do care about the fact of how he made it. It's not only bad towards his own employees, it forces other companies - possibly such as yours - to compete with someone with unfairly lower costs. Many other companies have had no choice other than to compete by treating their own staff worse or going bust. The not paying tax has compounded this problem.

If Amazon (and others) paid its taxes and treated its staff well then it wouldn't have been so successful and bezos wouldn't be so rich. Other companies wouldn't have done so badly. The money wold be far more fairly distributed among better paid staff and a larger group of relatively wealthy business owners. It's not impossible that this would slow progress in some ways but even if that is the case, it would be far better than few people having nearly all the money.

I just want a piece of his pie, for me.

Not sure by who or how the 32-83 billion range was “decreed” , but yeah, that’s a terrible guess. Median salary times number of employees is obviously better.

Lol, nice attempt at judo. It would have never come up except for your claim of $150B which you should have been sceptical enough of to check your math except the wrong result supported a point you were trying to make.

Actually, under the Nazi's 25 point plan they would have wanted to nationalize Amazon and redistribute the wealth to the "rightful owners."

The ultra-rich industrialists were some of the biggest supporters of Hitler and largest donors to the Nazi Party because they massively benefited from their policies.

Trump should stop fighting with Bezos and hire him to build his wall.

If trump spends more than $15bn on the wall he gets free shipping.

Well there was that massive explosion circa 2000 years before that in Greece/Classical antiquity.

And its almost like the explosion that happened circa 1600 was increasing popularity of Greek/Classical ideas and not religious ones.

Basically your reductionist on this is shallow.

The easiest way to prove that very few people will try to get really good at what they do when financial rewards are taken away is to point to the fact that few people do that even when they are not.

Not sure if this has been touched on ITT but should Amazon have run up against anti-trust laws over the last 10 years?

I think much of the retail sector that has moved online and they've captured the market share of was going to go online anyway, but could it have gone to 5-10 companies instead of 1?

What would be the benefits of this?

Comparing the scientific achievements of modern times to a civilization that didn’t fugure out positional based numerical representation (which was first used 2000 years before them) and who’s greatest scientific achievements are now taught to kids in short pants is pretty shallow analysis.

I don't know that most people strive to get really good one way or the other, but the ratio I think is higher for unpaid work, like open source software. Sometimes putting a money value on something limits the motivation to do ones best because the money is limited. This is a fine, rather than payment, but there was a case brought up in Freakonomics where a child care center in Israel was trying to get parents to stop picking their kids up late, so they started fining people for it. It made the problem worse. After that it was transactional, mercenary. Sure, a big enough fine might work, just like tremendous financial rewards for job improvement might work. But in the real world, you aren't even guaranteed recognition for excellent work and the compensation is hardly unlimited or even close outside of very rare jobs. The bigger issue though is probably that most people aren't really that interested in what they do for a living. They do enough to get by and then do something they are interested in for free or even pay to do it.

This was a significant portion of my point. People don't love their jobs in general, they just work because it pays. Thus, if you remove the financial incentive to work then you end up with a demotivated workforce or even a significant shortage of talented workers, especially at the top end but also in any specialized field where the pay doesn't reach an equilibrium with what the labor force demands.

By many accounts and statistics we already have a skilled worker shortfall as there are more open jobs requiring specific skills than there are people with those skills. If you decrease the financial incentive to develop any specific skill or reach a level of success beyond some financial plateau we create through regulation then that shortfall would increase even more.

Peter Gibbons: The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.

Bob Porter: Don't... don't care?

Peter Gibbons: It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime; so where's the motivation?

Which is how we ended up with a polio vaccine.

Are we seriously arguing that if we capped someone's income at say whatever the highest paid athlete or movie star makes in a year and cap net worth at 1 or 2 billion dollars that all of a sudden no one will be motivated to do stuff anymore? That sounds pretty stupid and like a pretty small problem.

Yeah. People will work just as hard, it’s just that private equity will own the market and people won’t take companies public anymore. A pretty big loss for Joe Blow 401k.

Non public companies still have to pay taxes no? So they declare their earnings? We'll just give them a 20:1 PE ratio and grab wealth based on that. Should be fair enough. Joe Blow gonna be so much richer he ain't gonna be worried about his retirement.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...801-story.html

Another heartwarming rags to riches story of a founder whose parents could lose $250k and *hopefully* not be mad about it.

You don’t have to convert me. Anything that prevents or delays companies from not going public while (supposedly) not decreasing GDP would be free money for us.