Comments

1

What, cash under their mattresses? In bank vaults?

Amazing, where do they find the space to store it?

Is it in 100s or 20s?

I leave so much as a $20 bill out and my lady grabs it. I can imagine what Mrs gates and Bezos use when they go out, wheel barrows?

3

I just want a little bit, please. You would never miss it. It's not that I don't work hard.

5

OCA Said it best.

"I'm not saying that Bill Gates or Warren Buffett are immoral, but a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don't have access to public health is wrong," Ocasio-Cortez said during an event honoring the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. on Monday.

8

Two Individuals in Seattle Have Between Them Assets Which, If Sold Today at Market Prices (Implausibly, Without Tanking Prices), Would Be Worth a Quarter of a Trillion Dollars. Also Their Wives Don’t Factor into My Math, Because... Come On.

9

" ...are still getting ringworm"

ROUND worm. Which is a parasitic infection.

Ring worm is a fungal infection (like athlete foot) that millions of people get all of the time.

10

@7 Wrong question. How would not having any impoverished and homeless people improve the lives of billionaires?

11

@5: Poor AOC, typically it's better to have a three-letter moniker start with a consonant than a vowel so it doesn't get garbled into OCA, or ACO.

LBJ and JFK never had that issue.

12

Gates and Bezos profits are powered by the best performing parts of the economy, not the worst performing parts - you'd expect tech companies to always outperform the entire market as long as they're considered 'tech'. As long as any sector of the economy is growing, Microsoft will be there to serve them.

13

I think "AOC, AOC, AOC" is the sound her hipster fan boys make as they furiously jerk off to her videos.

14

Gross capitalism at its finest. And you all feed into Amazon’s billions, no matter how that man treats his workers or his wife.

15

Since the bulk of their fortunes is tied up in corporate shares, the overall total would be cut to a fraction if they tried to liquidate all of it...

16

Man, all that money and you still can't fix that fuckin' face of yours...

17

@15 and to zero if folks thought these companies would be nationalized and run by the likes of Kshama lama ding dong.

18

@17

Wow, is that really the best play on names you can come up with?

SMH

God speed, Seattle...

19

@13: Mike Huckabee and Tucker Carlson aren't hipsters silly!

20

When two individuals possess as much or more wealth (whether actual or "just on paper" really doesn't matter, since most of EVERYONE'S wealth is just on paper) than roughly three-quarters of the nations on the planet, you bet there's a problem.

21

@20 Your successful friends are not the reason you all are miserable failures. That’s not how economies work.

22

@20: I don't mind.

23

What’s an even worse indicator of risk?

This city’s economy is entirely based in three companies. One makes airplanes that fall out of the sky, and has no plan for how to save its reputation. Another has driven the local rents so high that nobody in the service sector can afford to live in the city where they work, and the other is no longer building new and innovative software, it’s just trading on surveillance metadata gleaned from the suckers who use their products. Oh, but they brought back Clippy briefly, so I guess it’s alright.

And all three legs of this rickety stool are so powerful, they can get the Governor to agree to massive payouts just by threatening to relocate to South Carolina, they can get the city council and the mayor to drop them head tax just by threatening to move to NYC and DC, they have a gun to the head and even the most powerful politicians will kowtow if they even twitch the trigger finger.

We’re all hostages to this. The second these billionaires either close down due to either arrogance, idiocy or greed, we’re headed back to the days when the billboard asked te last person leaving Seattle to please turn out the lights. We have no backup plan, no Plan B, to rescue the economy if this happens.

24

@21:

Oh, please John, DO explain it to the rest of us - you just know you're dying to...

25

Grow up people!! These are self-made billionaires and they give away hundreds of thousands of dollars to many deserving charities. They do so much philanthropy (Do you even know what that means?) Remember we are talking about a group of individuals that are responsible for the bulk of our technology today. Put down your tablet, cell phone, computer, laptop, gaming system. Stop using your televisions, stereo, any intelligent features in your car, stop with all of it. What do you think are in all those and so many more things we rely on in our daily life. Do you also feel the same about Henry Ford and Thomas Edison? So once again, GROW UP AND BE THANKFUL that there are people out there MORE AMBITIOUS THAN YOU. You have nothing better to do than criticize those that get things done.

26

The failure are in your thinking is twofold. First: Ask how or why? Ask how/why it is that some people with terrible life starts become financially successful? Second: Read more. If you distribute 10k each to 1000 impovershed people and 1000 financially successful people, the former will soon again be broke and the latter will get wealthier. Ash why/how.

When you learn the answers, teach it. Get the funding to teach it if needed.

To do or think otherwise is to be self-focused on the positive feelings that come from good intentions that have no regard for good results.

27

@26:

If you give 10K to rich people - they're just 10K richer and they take that 10K and either buy even more stock, commodities futures, or precious metals, or else maybe a third Rolex or another Michael Kors ensemble. Give an impoverished person 10K and they pay rent and bills, buy food and medicine, fix their car - assuming they have one - maybe get the kids some new shoes. They can't afford to save or invest the 10K because they have urgent, immediate needs they must pay for; whereas the rich have already covered that, so the 10K is just extra currency to play with. And let's face it: most people today didn't get rich from the sweat of their brow or toiling day in and day out; they inherited it from a rich relative.

Bill Gates, Jr. would most likely be just another tech-bro working in middle-management at some coding farm, were it not for the fact that his father, Bill Gate's, Sr. was able to get a law degree through the G.I. Bill and earn a not-unsizeable fortune, a portion of which his son later used to purchase the exclusive rights to Seattle Computer Products QDOS operating system. It had nothing to do with superior intellect, or ambition, or even skill - he and Allen just happened to be in the right place when IBM came looking for an OS for their new PC line, just happened to know someone who had already created a workable base-code, and happened to have a rich parent who could float them the $$ to buy the rights to use it. That is called "luck", and to attempt to ascribe it to any Libertarian, nose-to-the-grindstone, self-made Horatio Alger boot-strapiness without taking these other factors into account is all part of the problem with the so-called mythos of "American Exceptionalism".

28

And $15 an hour is just too much. Hypocrites.

29

They are rich because of the very people posting in this thread. We use Amazon because it's cheap. Even though we can go get it at a store, albeit for more money. Yet WE CHOOSE to pay less and have it delivered to us. We choose Windows over Linux and iOS for our home pc.

We The People made them as rich as they are. Yet, We also choose to partake of the services that they offer. People don't like to go out shopping anymore. It's the main reason Instacart is as successful as it is. People choose to pay more for their food to have it delivered to them. Because they don't want to go shopping for it themselves.

30

I feel like at the top of any thread that is likely to debate the merits of capitalism should be posted this video: https://youtu.be/agzNANfNlTs

(the whole series is great, but the one that just came out on Friday seems especially appropriate here)


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