Is this the same Warren Buffett whose railway refused to provide his train workers with sick leave despite the company reporting a net income of nearly 6 billion?
The same Buffett that pays almost no tax? (& can you guess who has to pay the tax in his stead - the poors who are subsidising his private jet flights)
^This. Please stop publishing the frugal, benevolent billionaire propaganda, we've heard this nonsense so many times. Look up "precision scheduled railroading" for just one real life example of how these KPI-focused idiots ruin the livelihoods of many working people. Those are the stories that should be told, not these hagiographical snippets.
And what percentage of the population are major shareholders - to the point that their share holding makes a substantial impact or gives them a significant say in the running of the company? It is the 1% who own 53% of stocks who are the ones who he and the board listens to.
Are you really happier having a higher burden of taxation because of Buffett and others using these (albeit technically legal) means to avoid paying theirs - whether you like what the government does with those taxes or not?
..and of course you do not see a relation between the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few oligarchs and public spending oddly ever more looking like a neoliberal's wet dream...
My wording could have been better, but the point stands - according to Forbes (a conservative capitalist source) he is charging interests rates substantially above the usual for housing to low income residents, something they call "exploitative".
BRK salary is 100k; the corp pays for the private jet ("the Indefensible"). Aside from Berkshire, he also has a personal stock portfolio worth 9 digits or so [in essence due to investment work prior to Berkshire]. He is able to compound that at high rates and is tax savvy so almost all returns are long-term cap gains (or at dividend rates); this is what he's pointed out when stating how low his overall tax rate is vs say typical administrative staff.
Evidently neither you nor the person you're arguing with actually knows much about this topic. It seems like you already have an extremely strong opinion on the man and are trying to back-fill it with "facts". Oh well.
The point of my reply was to point out that having a modest home was not necessarily an indication of character (hence the Scrooge comparison), and that even Warren Buffett - who is seen by some as the best of the wealthy - has come under criticism by the press for his motives and methods having been less than ethical (although they may have been perfectly legal).
One of the sources was anti-capitalist, but the journalists who wrote a a couple of those articles for business news sources undoubtedly were supporters of capitalism, and are likely to be know much more about the financial issues than most us do.
Although there are larger questions of whether anyone should be in a position to hoard so much wealth, what 'cost' that wealth comes at for the rest of us, and whether the accompanying power he exercises (even if indirectly) is good for society.
Those are larger philosophical and ethical queries, that do often come with strong opinions for good reason. Those on the right worry that regulating wealth may come with an affect on some other freedoms, those on the left worry that such wealth comes with a risk to the integrity of the democratic process and comes at a high societal cost.
Most of the defences of Buffett against this criticism have seemed to have been: "he is just a money geek who doesn't get into those details", "at least he is planning to give a lot of it away", and "you are in no position to judge him." I, like many others, do not feel he is beyond criticism or that those are sufficient answers.
It seems there are multiple train companies which have had derailments including his. It is almost as if his train company is just as lax with its safety as the others. But luckily this one did not derail in a town.
In some way, Warren Buffet is a nerd. He enjoys accumulating money in the same way other people enjoy programming. They don’t do it to get something done or reach a goal. Rather the work itself is enjoyable.
This way, other things in life become less relevant, which might explain his behavior. Basically, he’s living with a hacked reward function.
If a monkey at a zoo hoarded all the bananas such that all the other monkeys there were starving, scientists would be examining that money down to a brain dissection to see just what was wrong with it.
Meanwhile, in human societies we have people who hoard so much wealth that they impoverish entire nations, and we put them on the covers of Forbes and Times magazines, and laud them as “pillars of the community” and “shrewd people to look up to”.
These people are parasites. We need to eliminate them to return wealth to the true creators of value - the workers and labourers.
Profit is the delta (difference) between the wages workers receive, and the price that the products of their labour garners on the open market.
Ergo, all profits are stolen wages. Or stolen labour, it’s all the same shite, different pile. The sale price of those products defines how much that labour is worth, but it’s the Parasite Class which divert a massive chunk of that value from ever getting back to the worker. In some industries like fast-food, workers receive less than 3¢ for every dollar of value they produce. That other 97¢/$ trickles upwards through greedy and obscenely overpaid people until it gets to those which have done practically no work at all - the C-suite and shareholders.
Then start a fast food co-op and win with your superior labour force.
How is the C-suite executive not a valid worker, but when a blue-collar guy fills out the same paperwork and makes the same decisions, he's doing a productive and worthy work task?
Yes comrade, grab the sickle and hammer, we shall seize the means of paying ourselves everything that goes on necessary overheads normally.
We shall overpay for unskilled labour whom works on heavily automated fast food equipment, and let administration of an thousand-store international franchise be run by the worker who also fixes the ice-cream machine.
No, not really. A bad comparison. A programmer building software, commercially or not, will have a positive impact on something (product, customer, technology, ideas). Any negative impact coming from an enthusiastic programmer, in form of bugs causing outages or general errors in programme output will be unintentional. We rightfully call those programmers who intentionally cause damage in order to generate economic gains for themselves or their clients, a small group of people, cyber-criminals. We prosecute them, put them into jails, as is right. After serving enough time and provided they genuinely repent, we might let them integrate back into the society, like we did let Kevin Mitnick. Now people like WB who similarly use their competencies to intentionally cause economic damage to the society, in order to gain "value" for themselves and their clients, a small group of people, what should we call them and how should we treat them? What do you think?
How could you possibly know what his inner motivations may be? Do you live with him or have at least talked to him for an hour? Yes I was talking about them based on the visible outcomes of their actions, that is what experience tought me about life and people in general. It's not the talk - it's the walk. Another real-life lesson: what we feel as being morally wrong or right, usually passes the test in the end, at least on major topics (equality, dignity, human rights, economy). Something being just legal, does not make it right. South Africa had a legalised discrimination against the blacks and in the nazi-era Germany it would have been against the law to hide a jewish kid from the deportations. Probably some weird nerd back then around 1937. discussed how we could not get involved based on just moral feelings. All this aside, how could anyone admire or worship these weird characters: WB eats at McD everyday, Bezos apparently dislikes music (!), Altman apparently had a prepper bunker since 2016, not to mention the boy-genius who blew away 44B on twitter. But yes, billionaires dont really have any liquidity, the money is all 'tied up'. They practically live hand-to-mouth.
You are missing the point and are confusing real-world applications with SEO-optimised websites and e-commerce apps. Besides if anything, dark patterns, tracking etc. are pushed mainly by the product mgmt. sect, a group which I agree has had a lot of toxic impact and is mentality-wise closer to the monkey-banana-hoarders than to their engineering peers.They share the same lack of competence, unfounded arrogance and tunnel vision with the likes of Uncle Warren. It all has nothing to do with the genuine, intrinsic motivation of an engineer.
He's generated hundreds of billions for his investors, which include millions of small investors. In what exact way has he caused economic damage to society?
No, the workers have generated billions, not him. But he and his ilk damage the society by pressuring the company mgmt to perform layoffs and cut costs until shit hits the fan. Have you not heard of the struggles of workrs at one of "his" companies regarding the sick leave, have you not heard of the East Palestine, Ohio disaster (I know - not his company, but may have been as well), precision-scheduled railroading and how it completely messes up the lifes of the workforce affected. Did you sleep over the increasing push for RTO so the billionaire class could keep the value of "their" real-estate? The lives of people and environmental impact be damned! The letter of that investor to Google CEO, asking for even more layoffs, commending him for a well-done round one? Finally, have you been living under the rock and have not heard the steady talk of "incoming recession", well for more than 12 months now, the Fed's Powell openly calling for higher unemployment rates and lower salaries. That CNBC talking-head from a few months ago, saying effectively, people still had too much money in their savings accounts? One gets an impression they seem to really, really want to spark the next recession. Are you perhaps too young to remember the credit crunch of 2008? Hint - do a bit of research on Uncle Warrens wise investment decisions leading up to that crisis. Well yes now, one does wonder, how the hell did the likes of WB exactly cause economic damage to the society?
You’re saying “incorrect” like there’s universal agreement on the subject. One can (and many do) just as easily argue that the rate of return on capital investment always exceeds economic growth in the long run. Over time, the resulting income inequality destabilizes society and leads to outcomes undesirable to everyone, like getting your head cut off by an angry mob.
if you believe this, capital investment does not make society better overall absent controls which insure income inequality cannot grow unchecked.
I’m not saying this is inarguably the truth, but if millions of people read “Capital in the 21st Century” then it’s at very least not a fringe idea, and one cannot simply dismiss criticism of investment as it exists in our economy.
Corporate security often insist that CEOs fly in a company jet. If you recall the auto industry execs testifying before Congress in 2008 (the TARP hearings), they came under a lot of criticism for flying to DC. So on their second visit they drove in small convoys with their security staff.
Yea. Most of the media reporting on Buffett is... sloppy to put it politely. The guy lives with Astrid (and some body guards) in a 5 bed house that he sentimentally likes. He also has a couple nice houses in CA (and possibly other states) and a private jet. If someone reads any biography on him they'd know this. (IIRC it also came up when he was advising Gov Arnold on re-doing real estate taxes and he wrote some OP-eds.)
What's more surprising to me is how well he's doing (physically and cognitively) in his 90's as someone who eats at McDonalds every single day and I think is largely sedentary. The other side of the coin is his dad barely made it to 60 though his mom died in her 90's.
...interestingly enough, they have been publishimg this same "story" every few years for a long time now. He seems to be very carefully maintaining the image of a frugal billionaire. Either that or making sure to initiate every new generation to the personality cult of granpa-genius/uncle/frugal investor/ Warren Buffet.
He was a landlord who exploited the low paid by jacking up prices on run down housing, or was that Buffett?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/korihale/2019/04/18/warren-buff...
Is this the same Warren Buffett whose railway refused to provide his train workers with sick leave despite the company reporting a net income of nearly 6 billion?
https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1570088566411366405
The same train company that didn't meet safety standards and so recently ended up poisoning a whole town after a derailment?
https://www.thestreet.com/video/warren-buffetts-bnsf-railway...
The same Buffett that pays almost no tax? (& can you guess who has to pay the tax in his stead - the poors who are subsidising his private jet flights)