Bribe all of congress. It's not that expensive for someone with Bezos money. Why let energy companies, telcos, insurance providers, and military contractors get all the action? Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple are bigger than they are!
For less than the cost of SpaceX they could have just bribed congress to give NASA sufficient funding.
For less than the cost of whatever Bill Gates tries to do with education, he could have just bribed congress to fund schools properly.
If they really believed in equal rights regardless of gender, sex, nationality, sexual orientation, race or religion, they could bribe congress to fix those things.
If they cared about the environment, you could bribe congress to fund the EPA more.
Single payer health care, they can just make it happen.
If I had that money, that's sure as hell what I would be doing with it. The fact that they haven't already suggest to me that maybe they don't actually believe in these things as much as they sometimes pretend to. Rich assholes never put their money where their mouth is.
And when I say bribe I mean the legal kind. Where you fund their campaigns through SuperPACs. You can outspend those Koch bros. easily. Why not go for it?
And you're right. It's a great idea. A sort of white-hat political force (controlling a tangled web of various corporation/non-profit/PAC type entities) that, instead of trying to gain some narrow advantage at the expense of the public, does the opposite.
If Bezos really has the balls to spend it, he has enough money; a presidential campaign, the most expensive kind, only costs 1.2 gigadollars or so[1].
You only need 60 senators and a couple hundred members of the House of Representatives to get whatever shit done you want. So doling out $10,000,000,000.00 a year or so in the right places would go a long way.
Of course, eight years later you're broke, the patient hegemony of other rich people and corporate interests reasserts itself, and America starts sliding down the path to democratic failure again...
Isn't owning the Washington Post (as Bezos does) a step in the direction of influencing social outcomes?
Rupert Murdoch is the primary backer of all things right wing in the world, and does more to influence elections and governments than Russia ever could. He wields that influence through media ownership.
You seem to think money grows on trees. Your suggestions can't be implemented without taxing people like Bezos to death. In fact, I'm pretty sure they can't be implemented at all, no matter who you "bribe".
Every wealthy nation but the U.S. provides universal healthcare. They all provide much more subsidized higher education. They do theses things without taxing people to death. Do you have any evidence to support your belief?
They have different cost structures and much higher taxes, and their healthcare couldn't exist without multi billion research efforts US healthcare consumer pays for. How much pharmaceutical innovation is there outside the US?
There are many multi billion dollar companies that do pharmaceutical research outside the US, their revenue is not exclusively from the US, suggesting there would be no healthcare without the US, is like suggesting there would be no cars without the US
Merck isn't a US company, it is a German company. There is a US company with the same name that originates from a seizure of US assets of the German company with the same name.
Also known as the Merck that actually invents new drugs and rakes in almost three times the revenue of the German counterpart. I wonder if the fact that it's a US company has something to do with that. Hmm.
You are making factual claims without providing evidence. It might be true that advancements in healthcare wouldn't be st the level it is today without the U.S. but to ascertain that their healthcare wouldn't exist without the U.S. is clearly incorrect.
Even supposing all pharmaceutical innovation comes from the U.S. still does not show that without the U.S. there would be none. Clearly there is a market for drugs and the U.S. is not the only country with research capabilities.
Taxes are not that much higher elsewhere. People are not being taxed to death elsewhere.
You're saying the rest of the world is so poor, their health care systems are bouyed as a /side effect/ of the research that companies do, financed by the their average American customer?
Why does it have to change? It's a free market, internationally. Perhaps if they don't want to pay for drugs, drug companies should stop selling to them.
Our education system and business environment produces a hell of a lot more innovation (including pharma) than the rest of the world produces combined. The rest of the world then piggy backs on all that and invests diddly squat into R&D, all while being smug about their social safety net. Don't be so quick to dismiss the US way of doing things. While imperfect, it's not beyond repair either.
No. I'd love to see lower drug pricing in the US. One must understand, hovewer that this will cause the prices to rise everywhere else. Which is quite all right with me. About time those folks started paying their fair share. They might even get their own pharma research going if they have to pay through their nose like we do.
The problem I find with most philanthropic efforts, most namely charities, is that it's a black box with little measure of accountability. You don't know how exactly the money is spent, and how effective it was.
If someone can start a 100% transparent charitable organization, where each line item of expense is open to the public, it would give people more confidence in giving, and it would give the organizations more incentive to make effective and efficient decisions. Kind of like a manager overseeing your moves, except it's the public since they provide the funding.
In terms of where to focus the efforts -- I find providing education is the only short term effort that can lead to long term and everlasting gains.
GiveWell, in particular, publishes a bunch of information (cost/benefit analyses, intervention reports, etc.) about their charitable success/initiatives.
Just as many people would only donate to organizations where they can be anonymous. For example, if you were a gay man and wanted to send money to Russia to help fight the anti-gay sentiment over there, you might not want to do it with your name easily traceable.
Just pool the money with Buffett and Gates, and do something jointly. Eradicate some deadly disease, cure cancer, something like that. Really bring those billions and project management skills to bear on it.
On the microscopic chance that Jeff Bezos sees this: mellow out, man! There was an anecdote, I can't remember from where, maybe from the "Faces of Amazon" page, related to Jeff's response to the NYT criticism back in 2015. Jeff's response was, "should that happen to you, escalate to HR or email me directly". Someone did exactly that and got fired for it.
He's a smart kid, a lack of insight and focus do not come to mind when I think of his ability to tackle challenges.
In other news today... a lot of middle to upper middles class people, who view Amazon as a cold corporate digital version of Walmart, just had their favourite grocery store taken over.
In other news today... a lot of middle to upper middle class people who already get 2 or 3 boxes a week from Amazon will start getting 3 or 4 boxes a week instead.
I don't think the widespread resentment of Amazon as a "cold corporate digital version of WalMart" exists outside of your own point of view, and perhaps a few publishers' offices in New York. Amazon is one of those factors in its customers' lives that pretty much always Just Works. Gotta give credit (and cash, and gift cards) where it's due.
> I don't think the widespread resentment of Amazon as a "cold corporate digital version of WalMart" exists outside of your own point of view, and perhaps a few publishers' offices in New York.
Just one opinion, but I already thought of Amazon as "the internet's WalMart". And that was before they took over Whole Foods.
It's not a widespread opinion yet, but I'm guessing as they exert ever more influence, more people will come to a similar association. If Amazon decides to takeover Meijer's next (just as an example) a lot of upper-midwest folks would suddenly make a similar association.
Forgive me, I conflated a complex issue. And I also regcogise I'm generalizing.
I know more than a few people who dislike what Amazon did to their favourite local bookstore but also shop at Amazon. I'm very long AMZN and I shop at Wholefood & Trader Joes.
I'm just suggesting that (a) Bezos has smart people around him who could give him suggestions and (b) this isn't bad PR.
How does one parse thousands of ideas? How does one keep it in a character limit? Post an image like he does? Would it be a novel idea to copy the already posted images and then repost with dummy(but appear real) accounts using automation making this exercise worthless(or does he plan on doing this himself with no attribution?)
You can't possibly think Jeff Bezos had any direct personal involvement with any of this. He likely didn't compose the tweet and likely won't have a hand in reading the results. I doubt anyone associated with him is actually going to read the results.
For less than the cost of SpaceX they could have just bribed congress to give NASA sufficient funding.
For less than the cost of whatever Bill Gates tries to do with education, he could have just bribed congress to fund schools properly.
If they really believed in equal rights regardless of gender, sex, nationality, sexual orientation, race or religion, they could bribe congress to fix those things.
If they cared about the environment, you could bribe congress to fund the EPA more.
Single payer health care, they can just make it happen.
If I had that money, that's sure as hell what I would be doing with it. The fact that they haven't already suggest to me that maybe they don't actually believe in these things as much as they sometimes pretend to. Rich assholes never put their money where their mouth is.
And when I say bribe I mean the legal kind. Where you fund their campaigns through SuperPACs. You can outspend those Koch bros. easily. Why not go for it?