Wow, you sound exactly like me - except I have a bit less years of experience. Let me know if you want to connect to help keep stay motivated (email in profile)
Bezos' parents lent him $250k to start Amazon. The point is that by the time Bezos started Amazon they were wealthy and could provide him this safety net. Not many middle class families would be able to loan their kid that much money.
okay but $250k is still $250k right? Most people in the world, for most parts of the world, don't see that kind of money in an entire lifetime of work. Most people think privilege means a trust fund, but a $250k loan of US dollars (life-savings or not) is also a privilege that most people don't have.
i think in this thread the goalposts were slowly moved. people were initially talking about success being predicted by having the excess necessary to comfortably take many shots on goal. it seems like we've granted that this $250k shot was a one-time thing.
it is true but irrelevant to the original topic that this is more money than the global poor ever see, and that this is more money that most people get to have. i don't think anyone was arguing that this represents zero privilege
Do you have a source for that being their life savings?
Most of your points have nothing to do with their wealth. Why would it suggest they’re poor if his mom had him at 17 and was taking night classes while raising him? She wasn’t employed, that just sounds like she herself was still able to take risks beyond her means probably because her father was wealthy.
Do you have a source for that not being their life savings? It sounds like you're just making assumptions and guesses as well; if you're going to assert Bezos came from wealth in the first place, you have to back that up. Perusing the "early life" section of Bezos' Wikipedia page doesn't suggest to me that he came from money, at least. But I don't see anyone on either side of the argument presenting anything beyond that.
> Do you have a source for that not being their life savings?
I mean there are many sources that talk about the $300k he received from his family to start Amazon, it's a famous story. None of those sources mention that it was his family's life savings. I don't really know how to provide a source that says it wasn't his family's life savings, but I also can't provide a source that says he wasn't an alien from Zeta Reticula. This is generally the problem with proving a negative and why the onus is usually on the person making a positive assertion.
> if you're going to assert Bezos came from wealth in the first place, you have to back that up.
I did, I'm saying that a family that can give their son $300k to start a business in 1993 is wealthy. That would be about $674k today.
Yep, my father, with no business training or college was funded by my grandfather and was in business for years, decades. He ultimately failed without any savings and died in poverty. Being a small business owner was the only job he ever had.
My grandfather was similar--he was the first one to leave the farm life and tried several different careers and businesses. He worked for a railroad, was a realtor, owned a lumber yard, and lastly owned a delicatessen. The lumber yard nearly destroyed the entire family because he would sell on credit and then contractors failed to pay up on time. It was a huge disaster and the the thing is, this was way before the Home Depot national type chains or the "84 Lumber" regional type chains and if he had had any business acumen at all, he could have been the franchise. People don't know what they don't know. Anyways, my dad worked for my grandfather for free for several years and screwed up his life quite a bit doing so in order to "save the family" and I think my dad has told me this damn story every single time I have called him on the telephone for at least the past 30 years. His complex over the whole situation must be enormous!
This is why I never started a business myself. I figured it was a family curse to fail at business.
Reminds me of a blog post I once read from a manager writing about all the qualities of being a good manager. I read it nodding along that they all seemed like good traits. Then in the comment section there was a post from someone saying something like "You were my manager at one point and honestly you were one of the worst managers I've had in my career. I didn't see many of these behaviours from you". The author responded with something like "I don't disagree. There's sometimes a gap between knowing and doing"
The same principle holds for quality management. You don't need to inspect every single product. However, if you inspect a small number of products at random, you'll detect a large percentage of the quality issues.
While leaders can't know everyone they should make it a priority to have those random connections outside their inner circle. If they don't, they become in danger of hearing only the info that their inner circle wants them to hear.
> However, if you inspect a small number of products at random, you'll detect a large percentage of the quality issues.
As quality issues become fewer, the odds increase that inspecting a small number of products at random will lead to you thinking that there are zero quality issues. Have your inspections procedure scale and adapt to the relative proportion of quality issues you have reason to believe exist. And if you believe you truly have zero quality issues, then you need to switch to an immediate feedback procedure (such as an anonymous tip line, or a non-anonymous one for customer feedback).
> Sycophancy, in which chatbots agree with and excessively praise users, is a trait they’ve manifested partly because their training involves human beings rating their responses. “Users tend to like the models telling them that they’re great and so it’s quite easy to go too far in that direction”
We've already seen the effects of social media algorithms that route people into isolated bubbles. This is going to exaggerate it.
reply