The 2024 U.S. Presidential race

Ellie

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Nice easy explanation for my coffee-deprived brain.

 
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Noodles

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Dakota Tebaldi

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It's so hard though. Amazon I don't feel guilty about canceling Prime. But - well I didn't have a sub to the Washington Post, but I feel like hitting that cancel button would actually hurt a little bit. You can tell how much the staff at the Post hated the decision, because they themselves reported that the decision was made by Lex Bezos and they had intended to endorse Harris, rather than trying to pretend it was some neutral policy decision. But...how else can you express your displeasure other than cancelling?
 

Noodles

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Prime is hard. I have tried a few times (over price hikes) and think I even did it for a few months a few times.
 
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Isabeau

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I can understand the difficulty, especially for those living in areas where there aren’t many shopping choices.

Although, more and more companies are now offering free shipping, so that can help. For those living in cities, I find that I can often find an item on sale for the same price somewhere. Obviously, I have to go and get it, but I have the time. I don’t have a car, so I have to plan ahead for bigger items, or have it shipped (free). Its also very difficult to find what you want on Amazon with their terrible search engine, and the way the results are filled with junk you need to wade through.

Honestly, unless you live outside urban areas, or need a specific item you can’t find anywhere else, having a subscription to Amazon is mostly just a convenience. Bonus, you also get Prime Video. Including a streaming service was a genius idea. Every time you think about cutting the cord, you’re like, well, I DO get some shows with it. It helps justify the cost, and like we know, it IS so convenient.

At first, when I subscribed, after so many years of refusing to because of my dislike of Bezos, I thought, I’ll only use it for hardware stuff for work, that I would continue to encourage local stores and products, but then I started buying cat food, makeup, birthday gifts…. Books FFS! Just SO convenient. You get sucked in.

Anyway, I know that not everyone lives in close proximity to stores, so no judgment. For some it’s a necessity, but I also think for a lot of people, you just get used to it.
 
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Innula Zenovka

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Ya'll do know that Bezos sold Amazon, right? He doesn't own it anymore.
He apparently still owns the largest proportion of the company (variously stated as 9 or 10%) of all its shareholders, both individual and corporate.

.
 

Isabeau

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Honestly, I knew he had sold off a large part, but I thought he still owned more shares.

I still feel Amazon is just too tempting for me, and prefer helping the local economy. I just don’t want to have anything to do with him, even if he owns ”only” 10 percent.

Man, these billionaires (Musk, Bezos, etc.) types, are so untouchable. Makes me feel powerless.
 

Cindy Claveau

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Rumors of Trump Having a Stroke Reach Fever Pitch After He’s Seen Walking Yet Again With a Pronounced Limp

Just while he was in the White House alone, he lied every single year about things that were contradicted by simple observation. If you say you’re 6-foot-3 and 230 pounds, and you end up standing next to a guy with the same build, you’d better hope you look the same. Donald never has. The comparisons he’s drawn, in fact, have never been kind.

One physical tic, however, does more to support the rumor that Trump has had a stroke sometime recently than even the drooling he did at a rally a while back: He drags his right leg behind him when he walks.

Of COURSE we’re not talking about some Quasimodo version of the Electric Slide. But it is very apparent that he’s now having some trouble walking, and he hasn’t said a word about it publicly.

It’s no surprise that he’s keeping it a secret. Again, his ego prevents him from even talking about the mysterious regrowth of his ear after his “assassination attempt,” since it doesn’t appear to have been touched by a bullet in any way. So if he’s had a stroke, he’s absolutely going to keep that to himself.
 
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Also, the idea that we are raised to praise billionaires, I find so offensive. Tell me a story of a billionaire who started with nothing, and was handed nothing, and I might be impressed. All these billionaires were handed silver spoons. What is there to admire about that? Tax the rich!
Mostly. Mark Cuban had a pretty humble upbringing.
 

GoblinCampFollower

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Also, the idea that we are raised to praise billionaires, I find so offensive. Tell me a story of a billionaire who started with nothing, and was handed nothing, and I might be impressed. All these billionaires were handed silver spoons. What is there to admire about that? Tax the rich!
I've read before that Silicon Valley created most (or at least a lot of) billionaires in the USA, but it does seem like most of the TRULY self made ultra rich got their start in entertainment of some kind. Rihanna and Oprah are on a very short list of super rich who grew up with absolutely nothing. Even many "self made" billionaires were able to secure financing for their companies in a way that most just can't.

I think Essence is correct that Cuban was also remarkably self made. But even with the truly self made, luck is a major factor. Many who were very successful with one business fail to repeat their success because nobody just psychically knows what the market will do.
 

Innula Zenovka

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Evernote Link

Brian Klaas (whom I know I keep quoting, but he really is good) on what we know about billionaires:

So let’s put this all together. The club of 2,640 billionaires is, like any group of humans, a non-random subset of the population that is skewed by self-selection effects.

In particular, the people who try to become billionaires are more likely than the rest of us to be greedy and overconfident (the latter, a trait that evolved for rational reasons, but that has produced some unfortunate outcomes).

But they’re also likely to have other advantages such as family wealth, connections, and so on — along with a fabulous amount of luck and fortunate timing. When they strike it rich, they mistake that good fortune as a validation of their inflated sense of their own talents, reinforcing their overconfidence, and developing a dangerous sense of illusory control.

However, because of their obsession with horizontal inequality, a billion dollars is never enough for a billionaire. They just keep angling for that next billion, in a Quixotic quest to entrench their status and outcompete their peers.
 

Innula Zenovka

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A recent research study, involving a collaboration between physicists who model complex systems and an economist, however, has revealed why billionaires are so often mediocre people masquerading as geniuses. Using computer modelling, they developed a fake society in which there is a realistic distribution of talent among competing agents in the simulation. They then applied some pretty simple rules for their model: talent helps, but luck also plays a role.

Then, they tried to see what would happen if they ran and re-ran the simulation over and over.
What did they find? The most talented people in society almost never became extremely rich. As they put it, “the most successful individuals are not the most talented ones and, on the other hand, the most talented individuals are not the most successful ones.”

Why? The answer is simple. If you’ve got a society of, say, 8 billion people, there are literally billions of humans who are in the middle distribution of talent, the largest area of the Bell curve. That means that in a world that is partly defined by random chance, or luck, the odds that someone from the middle levels of talent will end up as the richest person in the society are extremely high.
 

Dakota Tebaldi

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I mean it's true; you hear stories about things like that Microsoft was kinda-sorta started by Bill Gates in his parents' garage when he was a teen and it's intended to sound like a self-made kind of thing, but the story leaves off the fact that Gates's parents were rich.