“The tax law that congressional Republicans and US President Donald Trump enacted last summer has proved to be a massive boon for Amazon, slashing the corporate behemoth’s 2025 tax bill even as its profits surged and it moved ahead with mass layoffs that have cost 30,000 workers their jobs since October.
“Citing a new securities filing, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Amazon’s “current US taxes, an accounting measure of taxes incurred last year, declined to $1.2 billion from $9 billion” while the company’s “pretax US profit increased by 44.5%, to $89.5 billion. On a cash basis, the company paid $2.8 billion in federal income taxes last year after paying more than $7 billion in each of the prior two years.””
Their bunkers plans are mostly insane. Zuck has a bunker designed for him and like 100 staff. I don’t think he understands how the power dynamics are going to change once civilization ends and his money isn’t worth anything.
They do, they actually worry about it:
More people really need to know that this was a legitimate thing. That they balked as well at the guy saying “treat people better and pay them more.”
Easy, he just has to make an inner and an outer chamber, where most of the staff are kept in the outer chamber and only a handful of his most trusted individuals have access to him. He might even be able to make it so only robots can serve him in his inner cloister.
People really think these dudes haven’t thought it through? They’ve floated explosive collars for Pete’s sake…
Lol dude even the prison from Andor needs maintenance staff who aren’t prisoners to operate and fix shit. This model doesn’t work when prisoners and the prison are all there is.
An inner chamber in a bunker that’s only large enough for himself and his family is more of a residential scale rather than a commercial scale. He can let in one handyman at a time with relative safety. It’s not like he has to bring a whole maintenance crew into his sanctum to change the washers on his bathroom sink.
Why will the handyman keep coming?
He’ll probably get paid just enough to keep him and his family slightly above the level of poverty that everyone outside the bunker will be reduced to?
Paid with what? Who stops him from demanding more, and how are they paid and with what? Billionaire power comes from currency that is spendable on a large open market. The market doesn’t exist anymore.
I explained this in a different comment. They would have servers in their bunkers which allow them to continue to control the systems which extract resources and exploit labor in order to generate more wealth for themselves.
It doesn’t matter if the market ceases to exist. Whoever controls supply lines, controls the resources. And the billionaires can pay just enough people to keep the automated systems working in their favor.
What??? That makes no sense.