You seem to be overlooking that Microbet was disputing this claim so he likely went intentionally high to show that even the upper end estimate is ~half as much as ecriture d'adulte said it was.

Amazon was founded in the infancy of the internet. At the end of 1998 internet penetration was only 2%. Amazon was founded in 1994. This means that if you had access to the internet in 1998 you hit a 1 outer. Should we confiscate your money since you were lucky to have access to things like the internet earlier than most people (only about 1 in 12 had internet when you joined 2p2 so if that was your first ever online action you were still luckier than 90% of people!)?

Separately, people have been saying Amazon was doomed to fail since it began and this refrain was still actually very common in the past 5 years though you don't hear it very frequently anymore.

Basically everyone in the world who has a halfway decent life has had a ~2% likely positive event attributable to luck happen to them at some point. Luck is a part of life and there is nothing wrong with it playing a role in how good and successful your life is.

Oh whoops, that should have been 15 billion, 5* 10^5 employees making like 3*10^4, conservatively Should have realized that 150 billion didn’t make sense even with amazons multiple.

i’ll include spoilers because it’ll be a few years before the tv show and they’ll probably change things up and you’ll probably forget it by then. stop reading whenever

basically a bunch of scientists start killing themselves mysteriously and a hard-boiled detective investigates with the help of this nanomaterials scientist and they discover this VR mmorpg video game where a society tries to figure out the light/dark cycle that appears to be random and sometimes destroys the whole planet. anyway they figure out in the game that the cause of the randomness is that they’re on a planet orbiting between 3 suns but guess what? that planet is real and years ago an earth scientist working at a SETI-type organization sent out a message reflected off the sun and she got a response from this planet 4 light years away saying, “DO NOT ANSWER! DO NOT ANSWER! we can tell what direction you’re in relative to us but as long as you don’t send any more signals we won’t know where you are and you don’t want us to know where you are because we can’t wait to take over a planet without the hassles of 3 suns” and the earth scientist because of her history is sore with earth and humanity and as soon as she gets that message she sends a message back like, c’monnn downnnn” and the aliens send their fleet but it’ll take like 400 years to get to earth but they figure out a way using their advanced alien technology to unfold protons into like 11 dimensions and program the protons to be super computers that are quantumly entangled with protons on their planet and send the protons (now known as sulfons) at light speed to earth to spy on earth and make contact with humans who want to overthrow human society and bring about the rule of the emperor of trisolaris, whom many of them regard as a deity. anyway the sulfons can display text on people’s retinas to communicate in real time and the sulfons also mess with basic research by fooling with particle accelerators, trying to stunt earth’s technological advancement so they can take over earth easier

then in book 2 basically the cat is out of the bag and earth knows about the trisolaran fleet and the sulfons which can watch every person everything they say or write down everywhere on earth, so the UN sets up a planetary defense council and the pdc figures their best way to fight the trisolarans is by taking advantage of the fact that they can’t underatand trickery or lies very well because they communicate with direct brain waves so they empower a small group of people to come up with secret plans that only they know and since the sulfons cant read human brains it’ll be a secret plan, and these are called Wallfacers. but the trisolarans appoint humans sympathetic to their cause to be Wallbreakers to figure out the secret schemes of the Wallfacers so the trisolarans can effectively take over earth without human trickery. and yadayadayada that’s a fun part of book 2 but eventually one of the wallfacers figures out the grand truth about the universe, that the galaxy is a dark forest and every civilization is a hunter in the dark forest and if someone makes their position in the forest known he’ll be killed by another hunter quickly because everyone is a threat and allowing any one civilization to live will inevitably lead to that civilization using up all the matter and energy in the galaxy. anyway this one wallfacer eventually figures this out and let’s the sulfons know that if they make an incursion on earth he’ll send out a signal revealing the location of trisolaris and earth to the galaxy, and the trisolarans agree to a cease fire on the grounds of mutually assured destruction

then in book 3 that wallfacer has spent like 50 years in a room deep underground holding this button staring at a big screen just waiting to press if it trisolaris makes a move, but during this time things are more optimistic and they elect someone to replace this guy, who is known as the swordholder, and end up replacing him with a young optimistic woman and within like 10 minutes of the handover trisolaris full speed attacks earth’s antennas for sending out the doomsday signal and the swordholder is like “oh **** this sucks. i can’t do it” and doesn’t press the button and the trisolaran fleet sets itself up to invade earth and they’re like, “ok everybody move to australia” and after some terrorizing humanity reluctantly relocates to australia and when they finally get there m, they’re like “we need food” and sulfon says “you’re surrounded by food. human food. when your population gets down to like 50,000 we’ll be better able to deal with you”. but simultaneously a bunch of space ship stuff happens that i won’t get into but is really cool and it wraps it up. essentially, earth and trisolaris are destroyed by 4-dimensional superaliens from the Twin Peaks universe after a doomsday signal is sent out, and everyone dies except for a handful of minor characters on space ships

the end

Using 28,000 would be stupid. Do you know the difference between median and mean? I understand that I posted quite a large range. That's what Google came up with. But it's better than using 28,000. And even at the high end it is quite a bit lower than what I was responding to which was the point.

Ponied. Thank you potato and Rococo.

I think simply being born in the west is "a 1 outer" that should really be adjusted for in a just and reasonable world. I also think we should start with the most egregious, obvious cases for practical reasons if nothing else.

and there's nothing wrong with forcefully taking the proceeds of that luck and distributing it to the unlucky. If we did that then that would just be part of life too. X being part of life isn't really a particularly strong justification for X.

Do you know who first called it 'voodoo economics'? this was posted from the killing fields

'Privatus Propertus' is a hex to ward off flying guillotines.

the forceful redistribution of this luck, when it comes in the form of wealth, decreases the size of the total pie. While many people will be better off, the overall output of the economy and amount of technological progress will slow as incentives for doing so well decline.

Agreed.

The answer to that is hardly obvious I don't know if anyone's posted any empirical evidence here. The redistribution of wealth increases demand because people who have less stuff have more cause to spend it immediately. I suspect in some cases some amount of redistribution increases overall wealth and in some cases it decreases it.

I think it's pretty obvious really that at some level inequality is economically stifling.

heh

Seriously Wookie, why in the hell is a neo-nazi poster with a heil hitler reference in their screen name not permabanned from this forum? WTH?

grunching, but i think you solve all of this with a very HIGH estate tax. i dont think that bezos should have money taken away from him specifically because he hit the one outer. but then again i dont think his descendants should effectively be landed gentry for the rest of time because their great great grandfather hit a one outer.


and yes i lean more on the he was at the right place at the right time side of history. i think thats larger true for all of history.

hahahah oh wow.

ok ok but I get it now. I mean, obv becky was always a known troll. but I finally get it that shes not serious and is actually parody and is mocking the idiotic right wing. its pretty much a genius account. bravo.

Redistribution of wealth based on Sklansky bucks

This certainly isn't obvious and if you had the data to prove this you'd probably win a Nobel prize in economics.

Which part? The last bit. Reductio ad absurdum - what happens if one person owns everything? Seems pretty obvious. What if a thousand people own everything? A hundred thousand?

Anyway speaking of Nobel Prize winning economists here's one on inequality and growth

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sour...zhjwpy5pJM_JMM

(Link to pdf dload)

LOL, talk about spoilers Asian. Sounds interesting though.

This is too generous to them. In business contexts those who accrue massive wealth, in addition to being incredibly lucky, almost certainly have been incredibly bad human beings along the way, lying, stealing, even killing, when necessary.

This is fundamentally wrong.

How many billions of people on this planet lack even the most basic resources to develop new technology and innovate? How many years of productive labor are lost because essential medicine isn't accessible in areas of need? How many billions are given 0 opportunity to accumulate wealth because of the snowballing effects of colonization, oligarchy and dependence on foreign companies/capital?

Like yea it's good to have incentives for innovation but there's literally billions of people subsisting as a result of a lack of resources, all so a small % of the world's opportunity can chase those incentives.

its pretty common for most areas of the world to experience "brain drain" as foreign companies poach the innovators and not only end up moving talent away from places which need domestic skilled labor, but also own the rights to anything that is developed and take the profits from those innovations and move them out of the region. It's a vicious cycle and suppresses the potential for growth of the world economy to benefit a minority of the economy who had a head start 100+ years ago)

Amazon has improved the quality of my life. I hate shopping especially for things that are not readily apparent where you would get that item or get a good deal on said item.


I do expect them to be broken up at some point like they did in Ma Bell in the 70's. Without out action the whole smartphone era would have been delayed or controlled by Ma Bell. Not a good thing for us consumers.

Amazon is awesome, he can do whatever tf he wants with his own money. I hope he starts another company and becomes a trillionaire twice over.