For some unfathomable reason, yes, we're in some sort of weird anti-business mood.

To quote The Dude - "that is like, your opinion... man".

People are better off than any time in history. Some people are more better off than others... and some people perceive other people's success as the cause/reason for their own personal failures.

Jeff Bezos has made every single person's life in America better by making products accessible to everyone regardless of economic bracket. Bezos' Amazon has compelled all other ecommerce companies to do better and offer better service to compete with Amazon. Literally everyone has won - except now that Bezos has been rewarded for creating one of the most important companies in the US, people want to tear him down. How dare he have more money than me!

Let's pick any wealthy successful person, the story is the same.

Those who believe the people who've built these mega companies don't actually provide value and/or earn their rewards are the very same people who have never and will never attempt to start a business and employ other people. The work only gets harder and there's more of it... Someone like Bezos is responsible for hundreds of thousands of jobs, perhaps millions when you consider all of the 3rd party sellers operating on Amazon these days.

But, it's much easier to just scream "LaTe StAgE cApItAlIsM!" than do anything about our own situations.

Read some books, work in industry to develop skills, then start your own business. Let's talk again in five years about this anti-business mood.

Quite a history revision.

1. Businesses do not pay sales tax - customers do. No online webstore collected taxes until recently. That was not something special for Amazon...

2. The business employs hundreds of thousands of people. All of which pay taxes. Even if the business itself literally paid zero dollars in taxes (lol), it is responsible for millions of dollars of taxes every month via payroll and employees buying things.

3. More taxes is not inherently better. What is up with people demanding more taxes be paid to the black hole that is the government?

This idea that businesses don't pay taxes and therefore are bad is totally naïve.

The more jobs a business can create and pay for, the more tax money gets funneled into the black pit we call the government.

I am disputing your assertion that Amazon was successful because of this. By that logic, all online webstores would be Amazon today... yet, there's only one Amazon.

In fact, the recent changes to online sales tax collection have places a significant burden on smaller online webstores. You now need a 3rd party service to calculate taxes for the gazzilion tax jurisdictions all across the US. In some cases you have to guess if you meet the minimum thresholds for collecting taxes in certain states. The entire thing is a mess.

Regardless, nobody is not purchasing online because they have to pay sales tax. Amazon's early appeal was being able to buy darn near any book and it was delivered to your house a few days later. No longer were you limited to the inventory of your local Barnes & Noble, etc.

Your logic is severely flawed, as previously pointed out. Every single webstore that existed back then would be the size of eBay, PayPal, Amazon, etc. Yet, very few are.

The lack of tax collection by a webstore has absolutely nothing to do with a couple examples of extreme success.

Perhaps you should consider the companies you are using as examples. What sets them apart from the countless smaller, less successful companies out there? They were the first to do something new that literally changed the world. Online auctions from anywhere in the world, online payments from anyone to anyone, virtually unlimited product inventory and choices, etc. That is why those companies are huge - not because they didn't collect taxes for some state a customer lived in.

> Their business model is one of exploitation.

Again, fundamentally flawed logic. As an employee, you literally sell your labor/time in exchange for money. You literally have the power to choose how much you are willing to sell your labor/time for. This fictitious narrative of exploitation requires quite a mental leap and assumption people have zero other options but to work for $COMPANY.

If you worked for Amazon and felt you were underpaid - quit and get a different job. It's literally that simple.

The reason customers used Amazon was because it was easy and fast, not because you didn't have to pay sales tax. I used it extensively even back then, and sales tax was literally never a factor.

By violating employees rights and encouraging other companies to achieve success the same way... No, he has not made life better.

However, one cannot use Reddit currently without seeing 42 smiling pictures of a murderer, with thousands of fawning comments.

Many are bots, manipulating people on social media. Unfortunately, too many people are pulled into that bubble and become convinced it represents reality. It doesn't anymore than the flood of Harris posts that suddenly stopped on a dime election night, leaving millions of young people wondering where all the support went (not realizing the support was never there to begin with).

I don't think you're describing any particular political phenomenon though. We saw the same thing happen in 2016 and 2020 overnight - people go from Facebook pundits to sheepish and sore losers in just 12 hours. Bots certainly play a role in all this, but I think you're wrong to blame them as the deus-ex-machina when human behavior explains it all just fine.

Support bases are real for Luigi Mangione and Harris in the same way it's real for MAGA and Elon. People are truly sucked into the cult of personality because it's big, and they don't understand how to contextualize politics outside of celebrity. In a world where people virtue-signal on their favorite politically-aligned platform, it's not hard at all to imagine the majority of this support being entirely genuine.

A lot of people thought the "Stop the Steal" folks were bots, until they showed up and rioted and subsequently hid their identities out of fear that they'd be lambasted for supporting an anti-populist movement. In a post-Jan 6th world I don't quite understand how you can still blame bots for stupid opinions that real people clearly hold.

Most of America (somehow) didn't know what they were voting for and just believed the empty promises.

See the recent regrets of steelworkers and trends of people searching "can I change my vote".

Oh yeah, and all of the people mad that President Musk is gonna increase H1Bs.