[HN Gopher] Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jone...
___________________________________________________________________
Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose
Andres
Author : flowerlad
Score : 148 points
Date : 2021-07-21 15:28 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com)
| shawnk wrote:
| It's the billionaire race not only did he reach outer space as he
| said he would, I know he wanted to be the first BILLY to do it.
| Branson bear him to it.. so he says ok.. I wasn't the first to do
| it but I'll be the first to dig into my bag and give away some
| life changing money. Which will spread the news of Blue origin
| even further.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| All the critics lobbing cynicism against Bezos, Branson, and Musk
| saying, in essence, that their money is better spent here at home
| reminds me of a wonderful scene from The West Wing when one
| character asks why we have to go to Mars:
|
| "'Cause it's next. For we came out of the cave, and we looked
| over the hill, and we saw fire. And we crossed the ocean, and we
| pioneered the West, and we took to the sky. The history of man is
| hung on the timeline of exploration, and this is what's next."
|
| I personally don't care that these billionaires are spending
| their money on vacations to orbit. It's how we get to the moon
| and Mars and how we survive as a species. It's what's next.
| sweetheart wrote:
| This is total fallacy, I'm sorry. "We do this thing because we
| have always done this thing" isn't actual any justification
| whatsoever. It's whats leftover when realizing you're having a
| hard time actually justifying why it needs to be done.
|
| "It's the way things are" are perhaps in all seriousness the 5
| most dangerous words in the English language.
| IfOnlyYouKnew wrote:
| It's maybe a bit silly to argue about inspirational slogans
| from TV presidents, but constructing "we have always been
| exploring and we will continue to explore" as a defense of
| the status quo is... quite impressive, actually?
|
| To rephrase it: "we need to shake things up! I propose we do
| so by stopping to change".
| aeternum wrote:
| We need to go to space because if we don't, all of humanity
| will go extinct. The earth won't last forever and also tends
| not to fare well when it goes 1:1 with asteroids or nukes.
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| That's okay. Nothing lasts forever.
| ModernMech wrote:
| We're talking a timescale of millions of years before that
| happens, right? Have you you thought this all the way
| through? All the possible scenarios?
|
| If we send humans out to the stars, our civilizations will
| diverge. First there's a hop to Mars, then Titan, then then
| next solar system over, then a galaxy or two. Soon enough
| you've seeded the universe with human civilizations that
| have no concept of what Earth was like. Maybe they've heard
| stories, seen videos or pictures, but what will they really
| _know_ about Earth in 100k years?
|
| It's not like we're going to be one happy galactic human
| family. We can't even do that here on Earth, how are we
| going to maintain peaceful relationships across the
| universe? So now all you've done is seed the entire
| universe with a race of petty, greedy, selfish, war-prone
| primates; living on barren planets, underground or in
| habitats; who have stories about a mythical homeland filled
| with a breathable atmosphere, rivers of drinkable water,
| abundant lifeforms that roam the surface freely, where no
| one has to live like hamsters (what even are hamsters?) in
| a habitat. What if they start talking about a better future
| for themselves on another planet, and they come right back
| here to conquer it?
|
| I guess what I'm saying is, if all we're doing here is
| using science fiction to project out millions of years into
| the future, why are we only projecting positive scenarios
| where humanity heads to the stars and saves the human race
| from obliteration? What if instead of inventing the United
| Federation of Planets, all we do is invent the Reavers from
| Firefly, and we end up the authors of our own demise?
| coliveira wrote:
| The earth can last for billions of years. That is, if we
| don't destroy it... The problem is not to get out of earth,
| it is not to destroy whatever planet we happen to inhabit.
| louloulou wrote:
| Those two things are not mutually exclusive.
| lend000 wrote:
| This is blatantly wrong. The Earth's climate will
| naturally enter a significantly higher temperature
| climate attractor within 50 million years and will be
| completely inhospitable to known life in less than a
| billion years. The oceans will have completely boiled
| away, even from the poles, within 1.1 billion years, as
| the sun continues to increase in luminosity [1].
|
| And this is the most optimistic scenario, assuming no
| gamma ray bursts, bolides, or super-volcanoes strike
| first.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth
| Traster wrote:
| This is still orders of magnitude longer than our
| distance to the Roman Empire. We've gone from no flight
| to space travel in 150 years and you're worried about 50
| _million_ years.
| mustafa_pasi wrote:
| Humanity won't go extinct any time soon, and at this point
| in time focusing resources on fighting problems like
| climate change is infinitely more rewarding than any stupid
| dicking around on the moon or mars.
|
| Mars won't ever be even as habitable as a thoroughly fucked
| up earth. It is a huge waste of time and resources that
| could be better employed on more immediate problems.
| theodric wrote:
| It's possible to care about more than one thing at once.
| Some people simply cannot be motivated to work on climate
| change, but there are 7.5 billion people on the planet,
| and they don't all need to work on the same thing. We
| just need a critical mass, the same as for any other
| problem.
| ThomPete wrote:
| Climate change isn't en existential risk, the way we deal
| with it is developing new knowledge which as a by product
| allow us to go to the moon or mars. Furthermore there is
| a whole other perspective on space which is military and
| includes china who is not going to hold back.
| aeternum wrote:
| Even if we manage to get human carbon output under
| control, we know that historically the earth has gone
| through very extreme natural climate changes.
|
| If we want to keep the earth habitable by humans over
| long time-scale then we absolutely need to learn how to
| do minor terraforming. Much better to experiment on the
| moon or mars than the earth.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| They're not saying "let's do things the way we've always done
| them," they are observing that people seem to have a huge
| intrinsic drive to explore.
|
| It's cousin to the famous phrase, "why do we climb the
| mountain? Because it is there." It's not a rational thing but
| it is a very real part of being human nonetheless.
| [deleted]
| kmnc wrote:
| I mean, when you take your inspiration from television and sci-
| fi movies it does seem like rich people doing vanity ego
| projects is the best way for us to survive as a species.
| Assuming you mean mean the "rich" when you say species, because
| unless you are watching different movies then me the non rich
| don't survive or are turned into a slave class. The
| Earth...well its prospects are even grimmer.
|
| It is stupid to be cynical of rich people spending money on
| productive ventures, yet I don't buy the idea that spending on
| getting the hell off of Earth is the best way to save the
| species. It might be...which is pretty damned depressing in my
| opinion.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| I just finished _The Calculating Stars_ by Mary Robinette
| Kowal. It is a fantastic piece of alternate history science
| fiction that I highly recommend.
|
| I mention it because the premise is that a meteorite hits the
| earth off the east coast of the United States and what the
| after-effects of such an event would be. It's horrific. A
| slow death at first that rapidly increases over a period of
| 50 years. It would be paradoxical because the immediate
| effects would be cold but the long-term effects would be a
| planet so hot that it couldn't sustain life.
|
| Our global response to COVID has proven that we wouldn't be
| able to handle such a thing. How would you convince people
| that, sure, it's cold now but it's going to get hotter in 3-4
| years? A LOT hotter. We can't even get these people to not
| freak out over having to wear a tiny piece of fabric in
| Costco!
|
| We know something like this is going to happen. It's just a
| matter of when. Spending money to get off the earth could
| very well be the best way to save the species.
| tdfx wrote:
| > I don't buy the idea that spending on getting the hell off
| of Earth is the best way to save the species
|
| What are the alternatives? On a long enough timeline, it
| won't be possible for life to survive here. And even on
| shorter timelines, trusting in untested asteroid deflection
| plans seems pretty risky, as well. Seems that diversifying
| ourselves in multiple locations as soon as possible is the
| best way to guarantee survival of the species (or whatever
| derivative species we become).
| ModernMech wrote:
| On a long enough timescale the heat death of the universe
| will occur and there won't be any free energy left for life
| to exist. Therefore we must invest massive resources today
| to finding another universe. All life in the universe
| depends on this, so you can see how important it is.
| courtf wrote:
| There's no reason to believe we can sustain human life on
| Mars. Immense technical and biological hurdles stand in the
| way of that being possible, much less worth focusing on
| while the planet that does sustain life can still be saved.
| Believing the human race needs to go to another planet in
| our solar system to survive is philosophical suicide for
| sci-fi fans, akin to believing that saving Earth is futile
| because the rapture is imminent. To the degree that it
| distracts from the very real problems on Earth that must be
| solved and are in fact less daunting than living in Mars,
| it may even contribute to our literal suicide as a species.
| tdfx wrote:
| > it may even contribute to our literal suicide as a
| species
|
| Much as choosing to stay on earth is guaranteed suicide
| for humanity, on a long enough timescale. I would hate to
| see all of our eggs in one basket.
| courtf wrote:
| On a long enough timescale aliens will come and rescue
| us! See how silly that sounds? Pretending to save
| humanity with absurdities is a cowardly way of facing the
| real, imminent problems we actually have here and now.
| tdfx wrote:
| I don't understand why you think sustaining human life
| anywhere beyond earth is an absurdity. The large
| technological hurdles you mentioned aren't going to solve
| themselves, we have to start somewhere, and the sooner
| the better.
| tspike wrote:
| That quote is referring to the history of Europeans, not
| humanity.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Many non-europeans have been pro-expansionist.
| tmp_anon_22 wrote:
| I love the West Wing but "pioneered the West" is a really
| interesting way to frame Columbus and Spain and France and
| Britain and ultimately the US doing what they did in the
| 17th-20th centuries.
| [deleted]
| misiti3780 wrote:
| I agree, I think another way to put it is would you rather have
| your tax dollars spent on advancing rocket technologies (via
| NASA or equivalent) or would you rather have Bezos spend his
| after-tax dollars on it. Put like that, it's not a tough
| decision
| verdverm wrote:
| Except that both companies are competing for govt money.
| SpaceX is already serving NASA
| misiti3780 wrote:
| blue origin was funded with 0 tax payer dollars as far i
| can tell.
| hellomyguys wrote:
| Hasn't there been many years where Bezos paid no taxes?
| [deleted]
| weare138 wrote:
| >It's how we get to the moon
|
| We already did that. Why not just support NASA?
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| NASA is the one making those Moon/Mars missions actually
| happen. Companies like SpaceX or Blue Origin are just vendors
| that help NASA to have greater flexibility and do more with
| less. It's the same reason your company is able to move
| faster by leveraging pre-built solutions like
| Stripe/Twilio/Okta/etc. instead of re-building every one of
| those services in-house.
| aeternum wrote:
| NASA is beholden to congressional funding, and congress is
| supposed to act in the interest of their constituents.
|
| Even if we assume everyone is rational and the system works
| as-designed, NASA must work to keep each state and even
| district within that state happy. That means hundreds of
| small contracts and explosions of complexity in order to do
| some of the work in each state.
|
| NASA's mission designs for the last 50 years have been a mess
| of complexity and ridiculously expensive, and rarely happened
| as a result. Only now with the commercial contractors are
| things starting to change.
| jhgb wrote:
| Sadly NASA didn't do what people in the Age of Exploration
| did, namely settling there.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| Because something like VTOL rockets can only be innovated by
| a private company focused on unit economics and scale
| economies.
|
| Government is good when the public externalities are large,
| the private benefit is small and there's an extremely large
| capital requirements.
|
| This is _not_ the case any longer for rocket tech, and so it
| makes zero sense to have the government do it. It 'd be like
| asking the government to make smartphones, which is an
| obviously ridiculous proposition.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| Because NASA can't get funding unless the right
| Congresspeople can spread the pork around their districts.
| openforce wrote:
| Privatization spurred tremendous increase in efficiencies.
| SpaceX rocket material is much more fuel efficient,
| significantly more re-usable. Even the blue origin rocket
| landed on it's feet yesterday.
| KerrickStaley wrote:
| Getting to Mars won't help us survive as a species.
|
| Mars is a barren rock that is less desirable for human
| inhabitation than even the most remote land regions on Earth
| (such as the middle of the Sahara desert and the middle of
| Antarctica). Mars has no atmosphere, its mean surface
| temperature [1] is about the same as the average daily low
| temperature in winter at the south pole [2], its surface
| gravity is about 38% of Earth's [3] which can lead to muscle
| and bone atrophy, and it receives about 44% as much sunlight as
| Earth [4] which makes it harder to grow crops and can cause
| seasonal affective disorder.
|
| In other words, if it were desirable to live on Mars, people
| would already be living in the middle of Antarctica.
|
| What about mining resources from Mars? The problem with that is
| that it's prohibitively expensive due to the fundamental laws
| of physics. Getting stuff (e.g. equipment) to Mars requires
| escaping the gravity well of the Earth ([5] is a nice visual),
| which requires 225 kilograms of fuel per kilogram launched [6].
| Sending things back is cheaper, and things like fusion engines
| would help, but it still takes a lot of energy and it's always
| going to be cheaper to mine on Earth.
|
| Computers have gotten exponentially better over the past few
| decades because we've learned to make them smaller and more
| energy-efficient. Space travel hasn't because there are
| immutable requirements in terms of how much energy you need to
| do it.
|
| Planet Earth is by far the best place in the universe for the
| human species, and I don't see that changing in the next
| millennium. It's really tailor-made for us (or rather, we are
| tailor-made for it). The best use of resources right now is
| towards making life on Earth more sustainable.
|
| [1] https://www.space.com/16907-what-is-the-temperature-of-
| mars.... [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pole#Climate_and_day_and...
| [3] https://phys.org/news/2016-12-strong-gravity-mars.html [4]
| http://tomatosphere.letstalkscience.ca/Resources/library/Art...
| [5] https://xkcd.com/681_large/ [6]
| https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/279947-nasa-wants-to-mak...
| soperj wrote:
| >and we pioneered the West
|
| The west was already fully populated.
| nohr wrote:
| It's not though, it was only for us if the technology is
| returned to public space. That's why NASA is cool.
| hemloc_io wrote:
| I don't think it's really fair to lump Bezos, Branson, and Musk
| into the same bucket.
|
| Musk, for all his flaws, started an actual rocket company with
| new and frankly insane tech.
|
| Bezos and especially Branson's ventures feel much more like
| personal vanity projects than something that will actually push
| space exploration.
|
| I mean Blue Origin has been running for 20 years and the best
| we have from them is flights that were accomplished in the Cold
| War?
|
| SpaceX has been around for two years less and has accomplished
| orbital missions. Lumping them all together feels like we're
| giving out participation trophies.
| Causality1 wrote:
| Seconding this. Musk is a workaholic who happens to be a
| total jackass on Twitter but his employees are well paid and
| to the best of my knowledge aren't forced to piss in bottles
| at work.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| I thought Tesla and SpaceX famously underpay and overwork
| compared to most of the big Tech firms?
| Causality1 wrote:
| Quick Googling gave me values of 92K for the average
| SpaceX employee and $18.37/hr for Tesla's lowest
| unskilled labor rate.
| superfrank wrote:
| > Bezos and especially Branson's ventures feel much more like
| personal vanity projects than something that will actually
| push space exploration.
|
| I'm not sure why people feel this need to draw this weird
| line in the sand and say that SpaceX is okay because Musk
| built a business, but Blue Origin and Virgin are bad
| because... reasons?
|
| Technology advances for all sorts of reasons. Lamborghinis
| exist because a farmer was pissed at Ferrari. Motorolla made
| the first cellphone to steal the thunder from AT&T. Hell, the
| first space race back in the 60s was basically done to flex
| on the USSR.
|
| If this is all a massive dick measuring contest, I honestly
| couldn't care less. It's advancing space exploration and
| providing competition in the space. Even Bezos and Branson
| stopped right now, they've still proven that it's possible
| for a company other than SpaceX to put a man in orbit and
| dumped billions of dollars back into the economy.
|
| When I hear people complain about this being a vanity project
| like that somehow taints the accomplishment, all I can think
| about is a particularly on the nose quote from the TV show
| Community. "Who cares if Troy thinks he's all that? Maybe he
| is. You think astronauts go to the moon because they hate
| oxygen? No, they're trying to impress their high school's
| prom king."
| dahfizz wrote:
| > If this is all a massive dick measuring contest, I
| honestly couldn't care less. It's advancing space
| exploration and providing competition in the space.
|
| This is the crux of your argument, and it's the core
| disagreement. Blue origin does nothing to advance space
| exploration just by virtue of existing. They are not
| competitive.
| eloff wrote:
| I'm not sure that's true. Even if they are never
| competitive with SpaceX you can't employ that many people
| and spend that much money without advancing the industry.
| The benefits are just second order effects.
| foobarian wrote:
| This. Every engineer employed at BO is one engineer not
| wasting their talents doing adtech at FAANG to pay the
| bills.
| eloff wrote:
| Different kind of engineers usually, but yeah.
| sidr wrote:
| I have worked with multiple folks with
| Aerospace/Mechanical Engineering backgrounds who have
| switched to being data scientists or software engineers.
| Often because of the dismal job prospects in their
| fields. So yes, quite often the same kind of engineer.
| [deleted]
| teawrecks wrote:
| Give me a 10000 people and 100 billion dollars. I
| guarantee you I can squander it like a pro.
| eloff wrote:
| That's not what's happening here though.
| geocrasher wrote:
| Even Bezos and Branson stopped right now, they've still
| proven that it's possible for a company other than SpaceX
| to put a man in orbit and dumped billions of dollars back
| into the economy.
|
| False. I hate to be "that guy" but neither Bezos or Branson
| made it to orbit. Those were sub-orbital flights with
| parabolic trajectories. To use your analogies: If Tesla
| were the Ferrari, then Virgin Galactic and friends would be
| the kit cars that look like a Ferrari but have a typical
| muscle car under the skin.
|
| That's not to say that neither is impressive. They are
| _definitely_ impressive. But they 're also just carnival
| rides for Billionaires, and that's what gets on peoples
| nerves.
| superfrank wrote:
| You're correct, but that doesn't really change the point
| I was trying to make
|
| Since you've edited your post, I'll respond to the rest.
|
| > But they're also just carnival rides for Billionaires,
| and that's what gets on peoples nerves.
|
| If Bezos or Branson had sent someone else up in their
| place, does that really change anything?
|
| Sure, it's expensive and only the super wealthy can
| afford to go into space right now, but there are plenty
| of technologies in our past that only the wealthy could
| afford at first, but as time went on, they became more
| affordable.
| maccam94 wrote:
| I think it's viewed as wasteful because it doesn't
| actually get people into orbit, AND it is expensive.
| Thus, it's only really appealing to rich people with cash
| to burn. These vehicles aren't even stepping stones to
| orbital rockets, and orbital launch prices are dropping.
| It's much more likely that SpaceX will offer tickets to
| orbit for $25k in the next 5-10 years than it will be for
| Virgin Galactic to do so. Blue Origin at least has an
| orbital rocket in development, but who knows if/when
| it'll even start being fabricated.
| xorfish wrote:
| Safety won't be high enough for orbital flights for
| tourists.
|
| Sending rockets to space is still very prone to failures.
| Failure rates for unmanned rockets where lower 40 years
| ago than they are now if you look at the trailing 10 year
| failure rates. Around 1 in 20 unmanned mission fails.
|
| Failures for manned missions are less frequent, however
| noone can guarantee you, that the rate is lower than 1%.
|
| https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/8566/what-is-
| the-s...
| geocrasher wrote:
| Sorry about that, I realized I had more to say after I
| had posted the reply. Your point about expensive
| technology becoming more affordable in the long run- that
| makes a lot of sense, and I totally get it. At first,
| basic air travel was such a thing, as was travel by rail.
| Or fancy carriage. So yes. That much is true.
|
| And I think if they'd sent up _other_ billionaires
| instead, it would have made no difference. The truth is
| that a lot of people are hurting badly, and to watch
| others do extravagant things that don 't make a
| difference for the bettering of humanity _now_ just pours
| salt on the 'wound' of poverty. For many people, it's
| visible proof of the gaps getting wider and wider.
| superfrank wrote:
| > The truth is that a lot of people are hurting badly,
| and to watch others do extravagant things that don't make
| a difference for the bettering of humanity now just pours
| salt on the 'wound' of poverty. For many people, it's
| visible proof of the gaps getting wider and wider.
|
| I hear you there, but I don't understand why Musk gets a
| free pass then? He's just as rich as Bezos and just as
| out of touch with what the needs of average American.
| [deleted]
| geocrasher wrote:
| Because in a lot of people's eyes all Branson and Bezos
| have done is show up late to the game with inferior
| technology and thrown themselves a party for it.
| marconey wrote:
| Their 'normal' lifestyle is as comparatively extravagant
| anyway, regardless of space travel, just less reported
| on. It being on cable news doesn't change that.
| teawrecks wrote:
| No one has a problem with dick measuring contests, the
| criticism is that Bezos and Branson aren't "whipping it
| out", so to speak. They're just continuing to do what's
| already been done before and drumming up press about it.
|
| I don't have a position one way or the other, it just
| sounded like you were missing the argument of the post you
| responded to.
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| I think one of the main reasons that a line gets drawn
| between Musk and the others is the focus of the business
| models. While Musk focuses of space station resupply and
| satellite launch, in addition to "Mars Missions", Branson
| and Bezos have fully stated that they are in the business
| of space tourism. Those are very real reasons to draw a
| line in the sand between SpaceX and Blue Origin and Virgin.
|
| As for the founders. Meh. They're circus show men, but at
| least Musk comes from an engineering back ground, I guess?
| But the difference in mission is important.
| superfrank wrote:
| > While Musk focuses of space station resupply and
| satellite launch, in addition to "Mars Missions", Branson
| and Bezos have fully stated that they are in the business
| of space tourism.
|
| That's kind of a silly argument in my mind. Tesla started
| out making electric sports cars that cost $100,000+ each.
| Just because a company focuses on high margin products
| for the super rich when they are starting off, doesn't
| mean they aren't making significant technological
| progress that can benefit the world.
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| Sure, but in the automotive world Musk is taken to task
| plenty when it comes to "more serious" EV's with more
| moderate performance that appeal to a broader market. He
| is given credit for popularizing the market, again,
| thanks to his carnival barker style, but he isn't
| bringing EV's to the masses. That's a large void that
| companies like Ford, Volkswagen and Toyota are filling =/
| least wrote:
| Musk's contribution to EVs isn't just that he brought
| them to market, but that he made them a highly desirable
| technology. That it's "cool" and "hip" to own an electric
| vehicle, something that everyone else up to this point
| had failed to do. Like you said, "carnival barker style."
|
| Yeah, the reality is that the big car manufacturers are
| going to be the ones to commoditize it because they are
| experts in commoditization and manufacturing processes
| that Tesla still struggles with today. That may have even
| happened without Tesla. But I am confident that Tesla has
| accelerated the adoption of EV and I think it's fair to
| say that in this sense, yes, Musk absolutely is "bringing
| EVs to the masses."
| viraptor wrote:
| Tesla's plan from the start was: luxury cars now to fund
| cheaper mass production later.
| jeffbee wrote:
| That doesn't stand scrutiny of the facts. Tesla lost
| money on every Model S.
| [deleted]
| MikeHolman wrote:
| They definitely aren't all at the same level right now, but
| I'm happy for the competition. Hopefully it will drive
| innovation.
| Layke1123 wrote:
| Since when has competition ever spurred innovation?
| varispeed wrote:
| Especially the Bezos one also feels unethical, when you take
| into account tax avoidance, poor wages and working
| conditions. It feels like he skimmed money from the workers
| and tax payer to give himself a trip to space.
|
| He deserves ostracism rather than recognition.
| boringg wrote:
| Just a minor correction here- SpaceX has been around for 20
| years as well.
| LukeShu wrote:
| Unless it's been edited, the comment says that SpaceX has
| been around "for two years less"; as in 2 fewer years than
| Blue Origin, which is essentially true (Sept 2000 vs May
| 2002; so really more like "a year and a half less").
| staunch wrote:
| There's no reason to get into comparisons, except to the
| extent that it helps push them to compete harder, and make
| more progress.
|
| A public space race of billionaires is exactly the kind of
| thing we should all be hoping for. They can leverage their
| _relatively_ small funding to push much larger government
| funding in productive directions. They 're better than most
| government administrators and don't have as many constraints,
| so they can take more risks and pay experts what they're
| worth on the open market.
|
| The public should be calling for more of this kind of thing
| across all major areas of civilization. Let's get a public
| race among billionaires for curing cancer, HIV, and poverty.
|
| If it feeds their egos, all the better. Almost all progress
| is connected to selfish goals, even among the greatest and
| most "pure" scientists. They want to win a Nobel, for the
| money and the recognition. Or they're doing science because
| it's just extremely pleasurable for them, which is not a
| selfless reason at all. The sooner people realize that base
| motivations aren't a sin the better we'll all be. And in
| reality, motivations are always a mix of (mostly) selfish and
| selfless reasons.
|
| Motivations aren't what matters. What matters is making
| progress that can (eventually!) benefit everyone.
| kylestlb wrote:
| "Almost all progress is connected to selfish goals"
|
| [citation needed]
| WalterBright wrote:
| More like find one that isn't. I bet you can't :-)
| varispeed wrote:
| > A public space race of billionaires is exactly the kind
| of thing we should all be hoping for.
|
| I'd rather see them paying fair wages and taxes. It's
| hugely inappropriate that they make billions while their
| workers struggle to pay rent.
|
| It's only possible, because those poor people are too
| worked out to protest and do something about effectively
| being slaves.
|
| These rockets seem more like modern day pyramids, only
| difference is that they will not last 3000 years.
| andrepd wrote:
| > Let's get a public race among billionaires for curing
| cancer, HIV, and poverty.
|
| Imagine thinking that having to _beg_ fief lords for what
| should be yours by right is a _good thing_...
| 8note wrote:
| This "eventually" sounds like it's really "we get progress
| once we put them through guillotines and claw back all the
| tech we paid for"
|
| The end state of these things is still government provided
| utilities: space equivalents to roads and busses
|
| The main benefit of billionaires doing this is that
| republicans love giving as tax money to rich people, so it
| can actually be funded, and the funding is what really
| decides whether a thing will be done
| nyokodo wrote:
| > Lumping them all together feels like we're giving out
| participation trophies.
|
| In defense of Branson his other space company Virgin Orbit
| now does orbital launches also, and has cool capabilities
| that genuinely differentiate it from other providers. We'll
| see if Bezos catches up, he's personally focusing on it more
| now and may make faster progress on New Glenn etc.
| fbelzile wrote:
| I agree, Blue Origin at least was thoughtful enough to use
| fuel that doesn't emit CO2.
|
| Branson is more likable but does seem like he's just trying
| to defend his title of being the eccentric billionaire,
| rather than thinking too hard about the future.
| xxpor wrote:
| >I agree, Blue Origin at least was thoughtful enough to use
| fuel that doesn't emit CO2.
|
| I thought that too, but apparently the BE-4 engine uses LNG
| :/
| soperj wrote:
| Where do you think the H2 comes from?
| Channel11 wrote:
| You're a disrespectful troll.
|
| The board admins here suck to tolerate these kinds of sh!t
| posts.
| kube-system wrote:
| > Lumping them all together feels like we're giving out
| participation trophies.
|
| Like this?:
| https://kstp.com/kstpImages/repository/2021-07/richard-
| brans...
|
| I honestly don't think it's something bad to praise when only
| a handful of organizations have ever done it. [0] Thousands
| of people have climbed Everest, but it is still a commendable
| achievement.
|
| > Blue Origin has been running for 20 years and the best we
| have from them is flights that were accomplished in the Cold
| War?
|
| Plenty of other _nation-states_ have been working on
| spaceflight longer than that and accomplished less.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_spaceflights
| #Sum...
| aeternum wrote:
| Did we have fully reusable rockets during the Cold War? Even
| though it's suborbital, Blue Origin's re-use is still a
| pretty impressive achievement.
|
| Spaceplanes are also interesting tech. Maybe not the best
| choice for earth but could prove useful on other planets with
| different atmospheres.
| Retric wrote:
| Yes, going back to WWII many aircraft have been reusable
| rockets.
|
| In 1963 the reusable X-15 broke the same 330,000f (100km)
| barrier at 353,200 ft using a nearly identical approach, 3
| aircraft 199 flights, zero crashes. Blue Origin only
| nominally beat that at 367,490 ft, but was optimized for
| altitude rather than extreme speeds of the X-15 @ Mach 6.7.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_X-15
|
| Blue Origin is an awesome amusement park ride, but not
| particularly interesting in terms of space exploration. Air
| launched anti satellite weapons for example are actually
| the most common approach. The main issue with air launching
| is scaling problems as you need to support the weight in
| multiple directions.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| No, but nobody had any interest in creating a reusable
| suborbital rocket. Hobbyists can do that, it just isn't
| very hard. The reason why what Falcon9 does is hard is the
| margins are so slim, to be able to get big payloads to high
| orbits, and still have fuel left to land from that speed
| and altitude, usually on a boat!
|
| What blue origin is doing is vastly simpler.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| > I mean Blue Origin has been running for 20 years and the
| best we have from them is flights that were accomplished in
| the Cold War?
|
| Blue Origin's is reusable. That's a _huge_ difference.
| alttab wrote:
| SpaceX has already done that, in less time, and took humans
| to the ISS.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| So we should stop? SpaceX did it first, everyone else can
| just fold up shop?
|
| C'mon. Blue Origin has a proper rocket, it seems very
| capable. They even land the booster like SpaceX does. To
| be unimpressed with their achievements seems like sour
| grapes.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Yes, blue origin was founded in 2000 and spacex founded
| in 2002.
|
| Blue origin landed it's first rocket in 2005. It was a
| tiny rocket and a tiny flight and purely for testing.
|
| SpaceX landed it's first rocket in 2015. It was an
| orbital flight delivering real value.
|
| Would it have made sense for SpaceX to stop because blue
| origin already flew a reusable rocket?
| what_ever wrote:
| I don't see the point of this comment. The parent comment
| didn't talk anything about SpaceX.
|
| Also, since SpaceX did it already, in less time, should
| others just close the shop and not try to do the same?
| fnord77 wrote:
| > Musk, for all his flaws, started an actual rocket company
| with new and frankly insane tech.
|
| there's nothing that spacex has done that's "new tech". VTVL
| rockets were worked out in the 60s and the 90s
|
| spacex does a good job of making it seem like what they're
| doing is new, though.
| dpcx wrote:
| Do you have some examples of VTOL rockets from the early
| days? I can't find much online other than the Lunar module,
| and that was designed for VTOL on the moon...
| fnord77 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X
|
| I also believe that Blue Origin had VTVL working before
| space-X
|
| in the early 2000s there were one or two other scale VTVL
| projects that were working, I can't find info on them
| now.
|
| also Masten: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5b9LnzjGgU
| sli wrote:
| Musk's MO _in general_ is to make tech look new when it 's
| not. Most of his ideas (that seemed have petered out,
| strange) are just worse versions of what we currently have.
| The Hyperloop in particular was a laughing stock of an
| idea. Nothing but an amusement park ride. We already have
| something that works better for transit, and so much better
| than it's ridiculous: trains.
| sofixa wrote:
| > It's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a
| species. It's what's next.
|
| I find it extremely weird that people are banking on a (almost
| literal) moonshot for the survival of our species. Isn't trying
| to stop/lessen the damage we're doing to the place we currently
| live and which can sustain us better and more optimistic
| proposition than hoping a metric shitton of things go perfectly
| after probably millions of man-hours and trillions of dollars
| in order for a privileged few to go live on Mars in underground
| settlements with artificial everything to sustain life there?
| Ffs, all the rocket tests create enormous amounts of CO2
| emissions, among other things, actively helping to make the
| Earth less habitable.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| I don't think people that think about this as their day job
| consider climate change to be the existential threat we are
| fixing by going to mars.
|
| It's generally: nuclear war, asteroid strike, super volcano
| bioweapon/plauge and possibly malicious AI.
| 8note wrote:
| Super volcanoes, nuclear wars, asteroid strikes and
| bioweapons makes earth about equal to living on Mars or the
| moon. You could build all the same things on earth instead,
| for a fair bit cheaper.
|
| Malicious AI would almost certainly affect the moon or mars
| more heavily than earth, since on earth you can survive
| without high tech solutions
| ixacto wrote:
| We need to make humanity a multi-planetary species, Mars is
| just the beginning. The moonshot is just a tech validation,
| then we can send humans to the rest of the planets and the
| belt too.
|
| Figuring out how to solve pollution on Earth is also doable
| with modern technology. We can terraform Earth to be more
| habitable as well, we could melt the antarctic icecap and
| colonize it. Maybe even make a new civilization there without
| as many problems [government/bureaucracy as we have in the
| rest of the world?
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| Am I the only one who calls bullshit on this? Let's say
| Elon pulls off going to Mars and establishing a permanent
| colony within the next 50 years. What plausible doomsday
| scenarios are there where everyone on Earth dies, but the
| people on Mars survive and are completely self-sustainable
| and able to grow their population exponentially?
|
| I mean, even if 99.99% of all humans on Earth are killed,
| there will be several orders of magnitude more people left
| on Earth than in the colony on Mars, and they will have a
| lot more resources to play with.
| ghostbrainalpha wrote:
| It's seems pretty unlikely now. But what about once the
| Mar's colony has been established and growing for 300
| years+ ?
| ModernMech wrote:
| What makes you so sure that within 300 years, the Mars
| colony won't become an existential threat with
| interplanetary nuclear weapons pointed our way? They may
| even take to calling themselves "Martians" as generations
| live and die on Mars with little connection to Earth.
| Like any civilization they'll have their own language,
| culture, and values.
|
| The British colonized America in 1607 and 170 years later
| those colonists were calling themselves "Americans" and
| waged war for independence. What's it going to be like
| when that happens on an interplanetary scale?
| [deleted]
| dheera wrote:
| > Isn't trying to stop/lessen the damage we're doing to the
| place we currently live
|
| There are lots of people working on that problem in parallel.
|
| It's worth exploring multiple solutions.
|
| Also, even if we stop damaging the Earth, the sun will damage
| it in a few hundred million years. We will at some point need
| a new home.
| [deleted]
| imgabe wrote:
| Living on only one planet is a recipe for extinction no
| matter how perfect that planet's environment is. Sooner or
| later it will get hit by an asteroid, or the sun will go
| supernova or any one of a million other completely
| unpreventable natural disasters will happen. Being multi
| planetary is the only way to ensure the survival of humanity.
| ThomPete wrote:
| You are assuming we know all the problems we might encounter.
| We don't, in fact there are many ways the human species can
| go extinct that are not fault of our own.
|
| The best we can do is to create general knowledge which allow
| us to better combat future challenges. Climate change is a
| potential problem but not existential and not something we
| can't handle with our current technological understanding.
|
| The idea that humans can somehow survive or progress without
| an impact is IMO missing the entire premise for human
| survival if that is in fact what you want.
| fallingknife wrote:
| What is this rockets and co2 argument that's being parroted
| everywhere lately? Yes it does emit co2, but it's a drop in
| the bucket compared to cars.
| robotastronaut wrote:
| I personally don't think many people are banking on
| colonizing another planet, but rather the technologies
| created as byproducts of that effort. Between energy
| creation, energy storage, thermal regulation, extraction and
| refinement of products necessary for life (oxygen, water,
| etc), and transformation of atmospheric gases, there's plenty
| that can help keep our current planet healthy and suitable
| for human life.
| ModernMech wrote:
| But why do we have to go to Mars to invent all those
| things? Aren't there enough incentives to invent them in
| the context of helping our own planet?
| dahfizz wrote:
| Clearly not.
| Karsteski wrote:
| Would the internet have been invented if not for military
| interests? Innovation, especially massive leaps, is born
| from necessity and drive, not "let's improve our
| technology".
| bavila wrote:
| This reads like a truism that one is simply expected to
| accept. Yet we could just as well cite the Wright
| Brothers as an example of people innovating for no other
| reason than a desire to improve technology:
|
| > In 1896, the newspapers were filled with accounts of
| flying machines. Wilbur and Orville noticed that all
| these primitive aircraft lacked suitable controls. They
| began to wonder how a pilot might balance an aircraft in
| the air, just as a cyclist balances his bicycle on the
| road. [1]
|
| > The Wrights' serious work in aviation began in 1899
| when Wilbur wrote the Smithsonian for literature.
| Dismayed that so many great minds had made so little
| progress, the brothers were also exhilarated by the
| realization that they had as much chance as anyone of
| succeeding. Wilbur took the lead in the early stages of
| their work to solve the problems of flight, but Orville
| was soon drawn in as an equal collaborator. They quickly
| developed their own theories and, for the next four
| years, devoted themselves to the goal of human flight.
| [2]
|
| Human flight was one massive innovation born not out of
| "necessity", but out of the curiosity of two restlessly
| brilliant men seeking to make a technological
| breakthrough for its own sake.
|
| [1] https://www.wright-
| brothers.org/History_Wing/Wright_Story/Wr...
|
| [2] https://www.nps.gov/wrbr/learn/historyculture/theroad
| tothefi...
| 8note wrote:
| But as above mars and the moon are not necessities -
| climate change is
| passivate wrote:
| Well, we still can't get two people of opposite political
| parties to agree to any long term policy on sustainability.
| Expecting millions of businesses and/or billions of
| individuals to follow along as part of a long-term
| coordinated effort is, IMHO, a super hard problem too. I
| can't say going to/living on Mars is any easier, but they're
| both hard problems.
| courtf wrote:
| It's a religion at this point. The problems facing humanity
| on Earth appear daunting, so it's easier psychologically to
| put faith in sci-fi ideas that might be impossible, but are
| simple by comparison to thinking through concrete solutions
| to our woes.
|
| Humanity sits atop a food chain that is going extinct, right
| before our eyes, and it's long past time to stop hiding from
| it. Human life on Mars is neither feasible nor imminent. We
| aren't getting level 5 autonomous vehicles or AGI or androids
| or flying cars or time travel any time soon either. These are
| ideas we run to when facing the absurdity of our existence
| becomes too much to bear.
| louloulou wrote:
| Living underground on Mars with limited resources doesn't
| seem like a privilege to me, it seems like hard work.
|
| Also, an extinction level event for a single planet species
| is a binary thing.. and there's not much you can do after it
| happens.
| jamesgreenleaf wrote:
| The Earth is going to die one day. The Sun will die too.
| There is no guarantee that intelligent life will survive on
| this single planet, even if we do a perfect job of taking
| care of it. Catastrophic, species-killing events can happen
| at any time. If we wish to ensure the long-term survival of
| the only intelligent life in the universe that we know about
| (as well as the survival of all the other creatures on Earth,
| who don't have our knowledge) then adapting, exploring, and
| surviving in space is what we must do. It absolutely
| surprises me that relatively few people seem to understand
| (or voice) this fact. We may have a long time to accomplish
| it, but that it should be our primary goal is extremely
| clear.
| kelnos wrote:
| I think part of the negativity is the expectation that
| we'll eventually screw up any other plant we inhabit as
| well. Which I think is true, unless we make some
| fundamental changes to our society.
|
| But I agree that it's important to make planetary
| colonization a priority now rather than waiting. We can --
| and should -- develop the technology and expertise needed
| to build a settlement on Mars while simultaneously trying
| to arrest and reverse some of the damage we've done to
| Earth. The latter is unfortunately largely a political
| process, not as much a technological and scientific one, so
| it will take a lot more time and effort than it should.
| qvrjuec wrote:
| The main argument for colonizing planets is some kind of
| cataclysm destroying earth that we had nothing to do
| with, e.g. meteor or gamma ray burst. It doesn't make
| sense to set up shop somewhere else otherwise, as we
| could spend resources to make earth more habitable way
| more easily than other planets
| kelnos wrote:
| Yes, I understand that, but I think the belief among some
| people is that, as long as we are being irresponsible
| stewards of Earth, we will be equally irresponsible with
| any other planet we colonize. And if life on Earth is
| destroyed by a meteor, that will still be the case. Some
| seem to believe that this is a reason to get a handle on
| our own destructive tendencies toward our environment
| _before_ we try to colonize other planets. But I agree
| that it 'd be better to have a somewhat-environmentally-
| destructive bunch of humans on Mars, rather than waiting
| and risking extinction because a meteor hit Earth before
| we got our shit together.
|
| I do believe, however, that it will be at least a couple
| hundred years before a colony on Mars will not only be
| self-sufficient, but capable of flourishing, if some
| extinction event were to befall Earth. That doesn't mean
| that we should give up or stop working on it right now,
| but I think the reality check is important.
| ghostbrainalpha wrote:
| Because Mars doesn't have life to mess up....
|
| Isn't the Terra-forming technology that we will have to
| develop to make Mars habitable, basically aligned with
| what we will have to learn to repair/manage our
| relationship with the Earth's environment?
| void_mint wrote:
| As an aside, The West Wing was an incredible show that just
| became too hard to rewatch. The things the fought and cared
| about on the show all turned out for the worst. In S1 or S2,
| they're shouting about cyber warfare and privacy, and here we
| are 20(?) years later constantly observing cyber warfare and
| having lost the war on privacy.
| gorwell wrote:
| And it's worth noting that they have overtaken a wildly
| expensive, ineffective government program and built a
| competitive industry, driving down the cost of getting a
| kilogram into Low Earth Orbit by 44-fold already.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| An alternative viewpoint:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4
|
| I'm not convinced that exploration is such a self-justifying
| good that we should look past the very real and very urgent
| problems that are aggravated precisely by the people "leading
| the way" here.
| 8note wrote:
| Being on the moon or mars isn't helpful if you still need all
| your supplies to come from the earth.
|
| The survival of our species depends on us being able to keep
| ecosystems running, and we can do that on earth.
| blondie9x wrote:
| Everyone knows that if Earth climate destabilizes then life on
| Mars or the Moon is science fiction. We need the Earth's
| climate to stabilize and that requires lowering consumption and
| population.
| andrepd wrote:
| So much about your comments strikes me the wrong way. The
| meaningingless faux-inspirational second paragraph first of
| all. The empty platitudes about "exploration". You say "It's
| how we survive as a species. It's what's next.". No!! We are
| facing massive problems due to overindustrialisation,
| overproduction, misalignment of incentives basically. We should
| focus on the (comparatively easy, but still very hard) task of
| keeping our planet habitable, and to find ways to conduct our
| affairs in a sustainable manner, rather than dream of idiotic
| outlandish ideas of Mars colonization...
|
| And you say:
|
| >I personally don't care that these billionaires are spending
| their money on vacations to orbit.
|
| See, that's where the whole problem lies. The problem is
| precisely that our current economic system allocates _massive_
| amounts of power to these people, and therefore allocates
| _massive_ amounts of labour and resources to their vanity
| projects. The problem is that it concentrates power in a
| disastrous way. Like it allocates talented engineers to ad-tech
| and yacht-buliding rather than water purification projects or
| renewables. Like it allocates thousands of people to staff
| 5-star hotels to serve the whims of 10 or 20 billionaires and
| saudi princes, which could be serving 10000 children at
| daycares or 10000 seniors at nursing homes. Etc etc.
|
| I guess what I mean to say is this, and I apologise for the
| off-topic tone that my comment took: the insane thing to me is
| how you simply take this very arbitrary, very non-natural way
| of organizing economic activity and production, and accept it
| _as completely inevitable, in fact you don 't even stop to be
| critical or skeptical of it_, hiding it beneath the simple
| phrase "I don't care how they spend _their money_ ". The true
| triumph of neoliberal capitalism seems to be making itself look
| as natural and inevitable as the air we breathe.
| brobdingnagians wrote:
| Government protected monopolies and intervention to
| centralise corporations has created these megacorporations
| ruled by some of the most ruthless in our society. What we
| really need is de-centralisation, artisan ingenuity, and more
| free-spirited independent-thinkers who make decisions based
| on their ethics. Large corporations can make decisions where
| no one really feels responsible for the negative results.
| Small corporations would make people feel more invested in he
| end results, community, ecological results, etc.
| coliveira wrote:
| > It's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a
| species.
|
| No, it's not we. It's them: billionaires and their friends.
| Other people will never go to the moon and mars because
| billionaires are using their money to lobby politicians in
| order avoid taxes and get more subsidies at our expense.
| [deleted]
| acituan wrote:
| > It's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a
| species. It's what's next.
|
| The core fallacy is to assume whatever made Earth less than
| ideal will not follow us to the new destination. To assume our
| survivability as species only depends on the locale, not what
| we will eventually turn that locale into.
|
| This happened with every new frontier. The romanticism of "it
| will be better in the new place" is baked into our genes
| probably because of the explore/exploit mechanism; it is
| natural for any animal to want to wander off when
| resource/danger ratio in a place isn't ideal. What we omit is
| that the most important layer of our habitat is the
| anthroposphere; us and our artifacts. We will drag the best
| resources and worst dangers with us anywhere we go.
|
| > that their money is better spent here at home reminds me...
|
| What that money represents is an agreement on commanding other
| humans' goods and services. As such, how much can that be
| "theirs" if we are taking a plant scale perspective? Don't get
| me wrong, I am not trying to inject a purely collectivist
| perspective here; money works great at certain scales, but for
| entire-humanity-scale issues it is a rather useless construct
| to think with.
|
| To me a more accurate perspective is "smart but ultimately
| single person, thus bounded in their rationality, somewhat
| exploits the imperfections of our value
| representation/abstraction layer to redirect tons of goods and
| services of humanity into what is ultimately a useless vanity
| gesture that will generate no insight into humanity's perennial
| problems".
| WalterBright wrote:
| What are you afraid that humanity will do to Mars? There's no
| life there to disrupt, no ecosystem, no environment to
| destroy, nothing to displace.
| sigstoat wrote:
| > The core fallacy is to assume whatever made Earth less than
| ideal will not follow us to the new destination.
|
| there are plenty of existential risks which can't "follow"
| anything, or happen to more than one planet simultaneously.
|
| does living on two planets eliminate all existential risks?
| no, and nobody has claimed that.
| maverick-iceman wrote:
| You see earthly stuff as a risk because all the positives
| are grandfathered in and you only see the negatives.
|
| Bats and pagolins, now are public enemy #1. In general
| animal reservoirs for viruses and species jumps can't
| possibly happen on Mars because there are no animals and no
| other specie. So we have eliminated that risk right?
|
| But....that also means no food, no ecosystem, no biosphere,
| basically absence of everything. So the benefits provided
| by bats , poultry, bovines etc. outweigh the negatives of a
| pandemic every 100 years or so
|
| Even an Earth ruined by supervolcanoes, mega asteroid,
| nuclear war and climate change all at the same time..is
| better than Mars.
|
| The only cases in which Mars comes out on top are a huge
| comet impact and a Gamma Ray burst which strikes the Earth
| but somehow misses Mars.
|
| Bezos is right saying that we have to go to space to save
| the Earth, then we can talk sci-fi type things such as mind
| uploading ourselves in silica, and once that process is
| complete than Mars and the Earth will be equally valid to
| host us. But that ship won't set sail for a long while.
| acituan wrote:
| > there are plenty of existential risks which can't
| "follow" anything, or happen to more than one planet
| simultaneously.
|
| If the most salient risk was a large meteor striking Earth,
| you would be right, changing locale would have solved that.
| But almost all of our _current_ existential risks are
| anthropogenic, and specifically risks based on our current
| lack of ability in being do multi-agent coordination at
| scale. Without solving the game theory of the entire class
| of those problems, they will follow us to any planet we go
| just fine.
|
| > does living on two planets eliminate all existential
| risks? no, and nobody has claimed that.
|
| Your implication of a strawman is a strawman itself. I am
| not arguing on the basis of a two-planet-solution's non-
| exhaustivity.
|
| I am arguing that assuming a change of locale as the
| principal solution to our inherent perennial problems is
| not a risk-free position. In fact I find it actively
| harmful as it distracts us from proper root cause analysis
| and makes us chase after old men's peter pan dreams instead
| of our need for growing up.
| bagacrap wrote:
| "we pioneered the west" --- ouch. I guess "pioneer" is one way
| to say "rape and pillage".
| [deleted]
| mustafa_pasi wrote:
| The quote is wrong. Antarctica is next. Then the moon. Then the
| bottom of the ocean.
|
| But all these places are desolate of life and not even resource
| rich, so there is little point to go there. Mars is like this
| as well. It's not like you are colonizing a rich continent like
| America.
| minikites wrote:
| >I personally don't care that these billionaires are spending
| their money on vacations to orbit. It's how we get to the moon
| and Mars and how we survive as a species.
|
| Really? Which billionaires personally funded the Apollo
| program? The progress of our species shouldn't have to rely on
| the fickle preferences of one person, their enormous wealth
| should be taxed and the money should be used for programs like
| NASA and its benefits which help all of us.
| awillen wrote:
| Guess what? The government has decided that NASA isn't
| important. If they're taxed more, that doesn't magically send
| money to NASA.
|
| The government has had first dibs on space for a very long
| time, and they've done nothing with it. Talk about taxing
| billionaires until you're blue in the face - whether you do
| or not has no effect on NASA. There's plenty of money to put
| towards it now, and it's not a priority.
|
| I'm glad that billionaires are taking up an important cause
| for the future of our species when our government is failing
| to do so.
| andreilys wrote:
| You would be surprised to learn that history is littered with
| examples of the fickle preferences of one person impacting
| the trajectory of the human species.
|
| Also I'm curious why you think that a government is better
| suited at spending money. From what I've seen this leads to
| lobbyists doing all they can to curry favor and secure
| contracts despite the fact that they deliver a sub-par
| product.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| Lobbyists are paid for by private businesses, to win
| contracts which will be poorly performed by privately owned
| contractors.
|
| OTOH the US Government, with programs run by publicly paid
| employees: went to the moon, built a ton of dams, including
| the Hoover and Grand Coulee, electrified the Tennessee
| Valley, built the interstate highway system, etc.
| bluedevil2k wrote:
| Can you come up with any projects the US government has
| done successfully in the last 50 years though?
| arrosenberg wrote:
| The Affordable Care Act website, despite the initial
| difficulties, is a pretty impressive feat. That said, the
| issue for me is that people parrot Reaganisms blaming the
| government, without stopping to consider cause and effect
| or history. The US Government was intentionally stripped
| of it's capabilities so private sector oligarchs could
| gorge off the public dole, and that's where we are at
| today. The solution is to rebuild those capabilities, not
| to surrender completely.
| minikites wrote:
| "Great Man history" is a troublesome way to interpret the
| past and neglects many other forces that shape our society
| and planet:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Ignoring the influence one person can have is equally
| troublesome.
|
| Suppose Constantine never converted to Christianity.
| Suppose Genghis Khan had been injured before conquering
| Asia. Suppose Louis the XVI had reformed the French
| government. Sure some other ruler would probably have
| embraced Christianity or some other ruler would have
| conquered Asia but history is fundamentally a sequence of
| events and minor changes, like a strong ruler in one
| place or another, can have massive downstream impacts.
| minikites wrote:
| >Suppose Constantine never converted to Christianity
|
| What about the changes in wider Roman society that
| allowed for Constantine's conversion to have a large
| impact?
|
| >Suppose Louis the XVI had reformed the French
| government.
|
| Would those reforms have been carried out by the
| nobility? Would it have been enough to satisfy the
| peasants?
|
| Focusing on "great men" is a far too simplistic view of
| history and it ignores the impact that each of us have on
| history as individuals.
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| NASA is still doing the hard/interesting stuff, but now that
| there is a market that can more cheaply/rapidly work on
| creating the rockets/vehicles to get payloads where they need
| to go they can focus more on the actual missions.
|
| Likewise, NASA has always chosen "buy" over "build" where
| applicable (like contracting out spacesuit construction to
| major textile manufacturers). If they'd done everything in-
| house, that means fewer resources where it matters. Public-
| private partnerships make NASA more effective, not less.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| But the reality is that competition really does drive
| innovation.
|
| In the past few years we've seen SpaceX get reusable boosters
| working, a mission to the ISS, etc. Though people like to
| diminish blue origin's accomplishments due to not hitting
| orbit they were able to land their reusable booster on the
| first try too.
|
| In a short amount of time we've seen tremendous progress in
| bringing down the costs of launching. It's frankly
| inconceivable NASA would do the same.
|
| I have a few friends that have spent years at JPL and the
| amount of bureaucracy, waste, and red tape they had to deal
| with all went away when they started working at SpaceX and
| then Blue Origin.
| minikites wrote:
| >It's frankly inconceivable NASA would do the same.
|
| It's only inconceivable because we refuse to fully fund
| NASA.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| NASA has so many entrenched issues from being a primarily
| political organization. even if you fully funded them, I
| wouldn't expect the level of innovation as elsewhere.
| mostdataisnice wrote:
| The fundamental problem is that NASA's funding is tied to
| politics and not a business model. Both Democrats _and_
| Republicans gutted NASA over the last 15 years and
| essentially killed any chance we had at even launching
| basic rockets. The SLS was the last serious project NASA
| tackled and it was shuttered.
|
| Private space exploration has brought us innovation at a
| pace NASA could have never delivered because it always had
| to be pessimistic and scared of funding cuts if anything
| ever failed.
| dantheman wrote:
| SpaceX raised about 6 billion in total, NASAs budget is
| 23 Billion/Year -- why did NASA lose the ability to get
| people to space?
|
| You can blame whatever you want, but at the end of the
| day - they're failing.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Didn't they just land a robot on mars? Maybe they aren't
| failing but have different priorities. People marvel that
| SpaceX docks with the ISS but the existence of the ISS
| and the people on it is taken for granted at this point.
| How did they get there before SpaceX?
| dcolkitt wrote:
| Wouldn't it make sense that Antarctica and the open seas are
| "next in line" before Mars?
|
| The point is we have a huge, open continent. At the present
| moment there's absolutely zero demand to colonize it. Why?
| Because it's inhospitable and hard to get to. But it's a hell
| of a lot more hospitable and accessible than Mars. So, honest
| question why would we expect anyone to move to Mars if they
| can't even be bothered to move to Trinity Peninsula?
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Sounds like "manifest destiny" where we destroyed thousands of
| indigenous civilizations in the country because "it was next".
|
| I'm starting to come around to the idea that this kind of
| thinking is exactly why we have poverty and hunger in the USA.
| We allow individuals to accumulate endless wealth even when
| that money could be used to help those who need a helping hand.
|
| I'm not saying we necessarily have the government tax them, as
| I'm more in favor of workers collectives and union power where
| more of the profit accrues widely across all workers instead of
| narrowly to the top.
|
| But the problem with billionaires thinking they can solve the
| worlds problems is they want to create more and more tech to
| solve our problems, even though we already have great
| solutions. We could design our cities around trains and
| bicycles but instead every person drives a car. That takes
| vastly more resources to produce and operate than a bunch of
| bicycles. I spent 15 years in Silicon Valley and the whole
| place is pretty hostile to bicycles even though it's all flat!
|
| I think when you have $100B your mind comes up with big
| industrialized solutions to problems when the real solution in
| my mind is to reduce our resource utilization (which we can do
| without reducing quality of life).
|
| Bezos built Amazon along with the help from thousands of
| workers. It is only a trick of our legal system that he was
| able to hold on to all the wealth that the company created. And
| it should be noted that Amazon draws a lot of profit
| (presumably) from millions of cheap plastic objects from
| overseas which will break and end up in landfills in some poor
| country. Or think of the millions of overseas workers caught up
| in abusive labor arrangements [1], paid pennies per day, who
| helped create the goods that are sold on Amazon.
|
| I really don't see Bezos as a hero, but as a complex figure who
| got more than he deserves. America is chock full of poverty and
| Bezos is directly opposed to the growth of worker unions which
| I think could help ease a lot of that poverty.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxFwA-jw3X4
| fesago90 wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| "we pioneered the west" lmao.
|
| "how we survive as a species" wtf lmao
|
| op is heavily romanticizing technology and throwing humanity
| under the bus without even realizing it.
| lumberingjack wrote:
| That money doesn't go to space.lol
| courtf wrote:
| Getting to the moon and Mars won't save the human race, Earth
| is where life can be sustained. Humans cannot reproduce in
| space, on the moon or on Mars because gravity has a strong and
| vital role in gestation in mammals. Beyond that, these other
| locations are quite inhospitable (radiation, temperature,
| pressure, etc), more inhospitable than pretty much anywhere on
| Earth.
|
| If we can't make it work here and end up destroying the ecology
| of Earth, upon which we depend, there's no reason to think
| we'll survive on the moon or Mars.
| criddell wrote:
| I don't believe the moon and Mars are end goals, just steps
| along the way.
| krallja wrote:
| FYI, there's actually gravity on the Moon and Mars. We
| haven't done studies to determine if it's enough G for
| successful propagation of the species.
| courtf wrote:
| Yeah of course there's gravity, there's gravity in space
| too. I'm saying it won't be enough.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Have we done studies to show this conclusively? If not, I
| would think that getting to the moon would be important
| in order to perform those studies.
| lefrenchy wrote:
| We literally got to the moon before any billionaires bought joy
| rides to lower orbit, so what you're saying is proven false
| already by history?
|
| It's so insane to me that people honestly believe that we need
| billionaires to fund all their hedonic desires in order to
| achieve anything good and useful as a society. It's provably
| false and frankly an absolutely pessimistic view of society and
| humanity.
| Hokusai wrote:
| You are 100% right. A million people can own $1000 in a
| corporation, or 1 person can own $1,000,000,000. The company
| has the same capital but wealth is distributed differently.
|
| Even if we needed big corporations, we still do not need
| billionaires.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Countries without billionaires are mired in poverty.
| Billionaires can make high risk investments. A million
| people won't.
| Hokusai wrote:
| A million people can invest $20 in high risk/high reward
| investments similarly to a venture capitalist, meanwhile
| investing $800 in some less risky investment.
|
| Kickstarter exists.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Good luck doing a Kickstarter for an enterprise that will
| need billions in investment.
| dumbfoundded wrote:
| Governments actually make the risky investments. From
| infrastructure to nukes to the internet to space travel
| to particle colliders to fusion. The governments that
| have made these investments are the ones that do the best
| job of representing the interests of millions of people.
|
| If you take the limit of concentrating wealth, you get a
| dictatorship. They don't seem to do much. It's hard to
| believe in democracy and insane wealth concentration at
| the same time.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Governments actually make the risky investments.
|
| Large investments are not the same as risky investments.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > If you take the limit of concentrating wealth, you get
| a dictatorship.
|
| Except that's never happened, not even close. Ironically,
| the modern activists are busy trying to force businesses
| into getting involved in politics unrelated to their
| business. This smacks of foolishness to me, as in be
| careful what one wishes for.
|
| > It's hard to believe in democracy and insane wealth
| concentration at the same time.
|
| Wealth in a capitalist country is created, not
| concentrated.
| robryan wrote:
| I think it makes sense in a limited way. Government can
| do a lot but struggles to make big bets and see them
| through in the way a single minded billionaire could.
| Maybe government could solve this is providing some
| bigger chunks of no strings attached funding under the
| direction of a single person.
|
| NASA has been beholden to the latest administration's
| whims and inconsistent budget allocation for decades.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >We literally got to the moon before any billionaires bought
| joy rides to lower orbit,
|
| Once upon a time you needed nation state sponsorship in order
| to sail across the ocean.
|
| It's absolutely insane to me that people don't see that a
| billionaire can do as a vanity project something that was
| ~50yr ago only the purview of superpowers as an obvious sign
| of societal progress.
| [deleted]
| rgbrgb wrote:
| I think you're articulating exactly what the other
| commenters find appalling: a single man with the power of a
| state.
| avarun wrote:
| You, a single human being, can send messages from your
| home to the other end of the planet within a second
| today. This is greater power than any state had even 100
| years ago.
|
| Why compare this "single man's power" to a state from 50
| years ago? It's disingenuous.
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| There's some truth to this but for the most part you're
| drawing the wrong conclusion here; Things like aviation
| and rocketry have become well-understood and "cheap"
| enough that they're now within reach of the private
| sector (same goes for the development/construction of
| satellites which facilitates commercial demand for access
| to orbit). Just because I can use my smartphone to
| perform tasks which could only be rivaled by global
| superpowers 300 years ago doesn't mean I wield the power
| of a state.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| WalterBright wrote:
| Government did indeed put man on the moon. But they did it at
| an insane and unsustainable cost, which is why the moon was
| then abandoned.
|
| Musk/Bezos/Branson are making space travel a paying
| proposition, which makes all the difference.
| dumbfoundded wrote:
| Musk is creating a constellation of satellites that can
| provide global internet. His technology seems like the only
| viable way to and back from Mars. Bezos/Branson made a
| rollercoaster for the super wealthy.
| monocasa wrote:
| The Apollo program was about $120B in today's money all
| said and done. And that's with 1960's manufacturing
| processes. The complete Gemini program was about $10B.
|
| Blue Origin is up to ~$10B already and hasn't even gone
| orbital yet.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I googled "cost of Apollo program" and it comes to $257
| billion in today's dollars.
|
| Also, the economy was considerably smaller in those days,
| and so the Apollo program took up a much larger share of
| it.
| monocasa wrote:
| I've seen a lot of numbers, how about we go with Wiki's
| $156 and cut the difference?
|
| And it doesn't matter what the rest of the economy was
| doing if we've converted it to today's numbers. The
| argument you were making was that government was
| intrinsically bloated, but from my view these private
| orgs are barely keeping up with 1960s .gov.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Since you're leaving off half the cost, it does make the
| government bloat look slimmer :-)
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| Why did the Apollo program stop?
| ErneX wrote:
| What's hedonistic? this is a business. There's money to be
| made on space, be it via a fancy rollercoaster now or mining
| or who knows what else in the future. It is inevitable.
| IfOnlyYouKnew wrote:
| They, minus Musk but plus Carmack, aren't in it for the
| money. It's no coincidence that they all chose the same
| field to work in, which happens to be one 9-year old boys
| tend to be fascinated by.
|
| And it isn't because it's such a good opportunity only they
| have a chance to succeed on, or we'd see plenty of large
| companies or a few unicorn startups trying as well.
|
| That doesn't mean they will never get some revenue, maybe
| recoup their investments, or even see real profits. Space X
| is on a trajectory in that general direction. But it isn't
| what motivated them.
| riantogo wrote:
| That is the romanticized version. The history of man is
| exploration, expansion and exploitation. Destroying everything
| nice in its path. We destroyed other species, our own species
| if they looked different, and finally we have all but destroyed
| the planet. Rather than staying on that path maybe a better
| approach for humanity is compassion, kindness and helping each
| other out.
|
| Having said that, I'm totally okay with billionaires spending
| money on such activities as it puts money back in the economy.
| The more the better.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > as it puts money back in the economy
|
| That's the rich people hoarding cash theory.
|
| They don't hoard any cash. All of it is invested in the
| economy. Even "cash" deposits in the bank are, as the bank
| loans out a multiple of those deposits.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| Rich people hoard bitcoins, now.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The money they paid for the bitcoin went into the
| economy.
| onion2k wrote:
| _It 's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a
| species._
|
| This is unbelievably pessimistic. You're literally saying that
| Earth is beyond repair and the only way for humans to survive
| is to move to a rock in orbit that we've spent a total of 3
| days on in the past 70 years, or to a planet no one has visited
| that has radiation that makes life essentially impossible for
| us.
|
| Assuming that's true, let's run some numbers. Assuming we can
| get to 3 launches per day (weather, launch sites, Mars being in
| the wrong place, etc are limiting factors), and we get 100
| _years_ of launches before everyone dies, and we can fire 100
| people in to space at a time, that means the future of the
| human race rests on slightly more than 10 million people. The
| other 6,990,000,000 of us will perish with the rest of life on
| Earth.
|
| Damn. If you're right then humans are going extinct.
| dheera wrote:
| I don't think it's pessimistic at all.
|
| The Earth is fucked. Not by humans, just by itself. It will
| be fucked within a few hundred million years simply because
| the sun is going to get bright enough to boil away the
| oceans.
|
| If we want any hope of our legacy to carry on in the
| universe, we need to begin exploring the possibilities now,
| because we have the scientific knowledge and technological
| capabilities to begin that exploration process.
| onion2k wrote:
| Mars and the Moon will be unusable long before Earth in
| that scenario. Our atmosphere is a really good shield.
| teawrecks wrote:
| That's not what they're saying at all. Imagine if at some
| point in the history of the human species we just stopped
| exploring, stopped adapting, and just focused on preserving
| what we had and nothing more. We wouldn't be who we are
| today. Not just in the technological sense but in the human
| sense. The drive to explore the unknown is fundamentally
| human. The challenge of space and mars is the "final
| frontier".
|
| The real criticism I have is that it's a false dichotomy. We
| need BOTH exploration and exploitation. Both greed and fear.
| Both mutation and rote replication. A species can't survive
| without a balance of both.
| ncallaway wrote:
| > This is unbelievably pessimistic.
|
| It's not pessimistic, it's realistic. It's just that what the
| parent poster means by "how we survive as a species" and what
| you mean are...different things.
|
| Going to the moon, going to mars, _are_ necessary for the
| survival of our species...on a 100,000 year time horizon.
|
| At some point, something catastrophic may happen to earth. An
| asteroid impact, or a Gamma Ray Burst, or some other
| unexpected cataclysm. If a GRB happened to hit earth in
| 10,000 years, we only survive as a species if we're self-
| sufficient on other rocks by then.
|
| If your time-frame of "how we survive as a species" is the
| next 100 years, then colonizing the moon or mars isn't on the
| list of potential solutions. I know of very few people who
| advocate that the moon and mars are the solutions to our
| climate change issues. Climate change is a crisis that we
| have to confront within the next 100 years. It's extremely
| unlikely that any moon or mars base would be self-sufficient
| within that time frame.
|
| To survive as a species, the human race has to _eventually_
| be able to survive a fatal blow to earth and keep going.
| Hell, _eventually_ we have to be able to deal with a fatal
| blow to this entire solar system.
| aeturnum wrote:
| First, I favor space exploration and think we, as a
| society, should spend more money on it than we do now.
| Second, calling this 'realistic' is nonsense:
|
| > _It 's not pessimistic, it's realistic. [...] on a
| 100,000 year time horizon._
|
| It has been 65 years since Sputnik was launched, so you are
| projecting out 1,565x that duration into the future. I'm
| sure you picked a nice, big, round number, but I think it's
| really important to grapple with how immediate all of space
| travel has been against how long our horizon is as a
| species is.
|
| The first record we have of homo sapiens is from 300,000
| years ago[1] - so 3x your time horizon. The founding of
| civilization could be pegged around 4,000 years ago with
| the founding of Babylon[2]. 100,000 years is about 25x the
| duration of the existence of civilization.
|
| So I agree that space exploration must come at some point,
| but I actually think the most "realistic" approach would be
| to *ban* space exploration until climate change is under
| control. Fixing our impact on our own climate has fewer
| technical barriers and is a larger limiting factor to human
| survival than space. If the time horizon is really 100,000
| or 10,000 years, then addressing climate change would be a
| blip on that timeline.
|
| [1] https://theconversation.com/when-did-we-become-fully-
| human-w...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon
|
| Edit: accidentally a word
| peakaboo wrote:
| I don't know how to put this in a polite way... Let's just say
| your brain seems to have gotten too much TV entertainment.
|
| These billionaires made many billions on covid, while you got a
| 1400 dollar check so you could survive. These billionaires pay
| their workers minimum wage every day. People can't get toilet
| breaks at amazon warehouse without being harassed.
|
| This guy is a world class parasite. There is nothing "we" about
| what he is doing. We are not with him. He doesn't care about
| any of us.
| pb7 wrote:
| >These billionaires made many billions on covid, while you
| got a 1400 dollar check so you could survive.
|
| They made billions from excellent businesses on which the
| world relied during a time of crisis. What would people have
| done without the likes of Amazon and fast delivery of nearly
| everything?
|
| >These billionaires pay their workers minimum wage every day.
|
| No one makes minimum wage at Amazon.
|
| >People can't get toilet breaks at amazon warehouse without
| being harassed.
|
| Citation needed. Individuals out of a population of 1,000,000
| diverse people choosing to do things is not a trend.
|
| >He doesn't care about any of us.
|
| I don't care about him either. It's a business transaction
| that benefits both parties, nothing more, nothing less.
| [deleted]
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > They made billions from excellent businesses on which the
| world relied during a time of crisis. What would people
| have done without the likes of Amazon and fast delivery of
| nearly everything?
|
| They've been rewarded enough already. Sometimes enough is
| enough, it's obscene.
| pb7 wrote:
| So where do you draw the line? What's the number? And
| when that number is reached, what happens exactly?
| dpcx wrote:
| This seems like a pretty good place, really. https://twit
| ter.com/Mikel_Jollett/status/1241843944238923777...
| jonny_eh wrote:
| 100x the poverty line. Excess earnings goes to taxes.
| mym1990 wrote:
| RIP innovation if the bar is that low
| coliveira wrote:
| > They made billions from excellent businesses
|
| Bezos is not 1 million times more productive than other
| human beings. He just managed to create a system that
| exploits people in a massive scale. That's not what I call
| excellent business.
| pb7 wrote:
| Who said that he was? Wealth has little to do with
| productivity.
| andrepd wrote:
| Yes, and perhaps that might be a problem, don't you
| think?
| amazoningrace wrote:
| > They made billions from excellent businesses on which the
| world relied during a time of crisis. What would people
| have done without the likes of Amazon and fast delivery of
| nearly everything?
|
| You're building an argument atop the assumption that if
| Amazon didn't exist, nothing else would be available.
| Amazon's strategy is to spend money that no other company
| can spend (by forgoing profits) to be the fastest /
| cheapest option available. Bezos' innovation is not the
| "fast shipping" or "broad range of products" Amazon offers,
| his innovation was the foresight to understand how to
| dominate the market and the gumption to do it.
|
| A single business that owns the sales and distribution of
| goods is one possible solution to the problem you describe,
| absolutely, and it's pretty clear that Amazon is doing the
| best job at that solution... but it's not the only
| solution, it's one of many.
| pb7 wrote:
| Well written reply so I'll try to address thoroughly.
|
| >You're building an argument atop the assumption that if
| Amazon didn't exist, nothing else would be available.
|
| I cannot be making this argument because Amazon exists
| _and_ we have many other options. We also had many other
| options before Amazon. Despite this, Amazon became an
| e-commerce powerhouse. Why? I suspect it 's because
| Amazon is by the far the best option for consumers and
| others are only close because they adopted many of the
| same guiding principles like fast free shipping and easy
| returns.
|
| >Amazon's strategy is to spend money that no other
| company can spend (by forgoing profits) to be the fastest
| / cheapest option available. Bezos' innovation is not the
| "fast shipping" or "broad range of products" Amazon
| offers, his innovation was the foresight to understand
| how to dominate the market and the gumption to do it.
|
| He dominated the market _because_ he offered those
| things. How else would Amazon be able to overtake its
| much larger competitors? Amazon is not operating at a
| loss with external funding like many startups, it simply
| reinvests in itself because it makes incredibly
| impressive use of its resources. Other companies could do
| the same but as it turns out, it 's quite difficult to
| repeatedly leverage your profits into bigger and better
| outcomes. Apple and Google sit on a pile of cash because
| they don't know how to best make use of it despite a
| history of successes.
|
| >A single business that owns the sales and distribution
| of goods is one possible solution to the problem you
| describe, absolutely, and it's pretty clear that Amazon
| is doing the best job at that solution... but it's not
| the only solution, it's one of many.
|
| Nothing stops me from shopping elsewhere and I frequently
| do. Best Buy gets much of my business for certain
| products because they've been quite good ever since their
| early 2010s turn around. eBay gets all of my business for
| used products. Walmart, Target, and regional grocery
| stores (not Whole Foods) get the rest. And I shop online
| mercilessly and don't have a particularly strong taste
| for Amazon (despite my countless comments in this thread
| would suggest -- I'm simply arguing for principles) so
| I'm as decent of a gauge for the state of things as
| anyone.
| MildlySerious wrote:
| > They made billions from excellent businesses on which the
| world relied during a time of crisis. What would people
| have done without the likes of Amazon and fast delivery of
| nearly everything?
|
| "Excellent businesses" that are modern day slave labor, in
| the case of Amazon.
|
| Their employment is predatory to the maximum, optimized
| around the ridiculous churn rates. Blocking unions from
| forming the same way Musk and others do is really just the
| smallest part of that at this point.
|
| This article below touches some of the insane practices one
| should keep in mind while watching Bezos thank his
| employees and customers for paying for his cowboy space
| ride.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/06/15/us/amazon-
| wor...
| andrepd wrote:
| You're blind to the injustices and violence in the system,
| masked under the veneer of "free transactions". There's
| nothing "free" about the current organization of the global
| economy.
|
| Free market [?] Capitalism [?] Post-80s Neoliberal
| Capitalism
| Ostrogodsky wrote:
| > They made billions from excellent businesses on which the
| world relied during a time of crisis. What would people
| have done without the likes of Amazon and fast delivery of
| nearly everything?
|
| And the people earning the low wages were all doing crappy
| jobs? Did Bezos personally deliver all the packages? I mean
| you can be as capitalistic as mr Moustache (or whatever he
| is called) from Monopoly,but you have to agree this is
| equivalent to defending the feudal lords who "gave" us
| their lands so we could all eat.
|
| > No one makes minimum wage at Amazon.
|
| They make 17 USD/h. Double in actual dollars from 1975
| minimum wage. College, medicine, housing have increased
| 5-10 times. In 1975 the richest man in America (Howard
| Hughes) had around 11 billion of CURRENT dollars, 5% of
| Bezos. It is Bezos 20X as productive?
|
| Meanwhile in the real world :
| https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2020/12/18/amazons-
| wareho...
|
| Amazon is colony of locusts,devoring everything in front of
| them.
| tester756 wrote:
| > College, medicine have increased 5-10 times
|
| I think you should be mad on your govt, not Bezos.
| Ostrogodsky wrote:
| The government is only to blame insofar as they let the
| capitalistic system run unfettered which has created this
| obscene level of inequality and this rare breed of what
| it is effectively working class people defending 10-20
| oligarchs.
| co_pilates wrote:
| He's called the Monopoly Man as far as I know. Also, I
| second your remarks; these guys made great businesses...
| by investing a sliver of their money in smart managers
| and execs. They certainly couldn't have done it all
| themselves, not even half of it, so why do they get like
| 90 percent or more of the profits and upside? Why
| shouldn't Joe Dirt from bumfuck get double or even triple
| what they make as a packer? He's the one doing all the
| work that makes packages move, when it comes down to it.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| > while you got a 1400 dollar check so you could survive
|
| American people had the most generous COVID response of any
| country in the world, including the Superdole.
| throwaway2048 wrote:
| this isn't even remotely true, in Canada for instance, if
| you got laid off during covid, you could get $2000 a month
| payments unconditionally.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| $2k CAD ($1,591.79 USD)a month vs 600 * 4.33 = $2599 USD
| (which is in _addition to unemployment insurance_ ).
| pb7 wrote:
| In the US, you would get $600/week on top of the usual
| unemployment (which is 60% of your regular wage) which
| amounts to significantly more than Canada. For a minimum
| wage worker, that would be over $40K/year.
| whymauri wrote:
| I'm sorry to inform you that in many states, like
| Florida, the unemployment infrastructure is purposefully
| built to avoid paying unemployment. You're talking about
| something that for millions of Americans is a pie-in-the-
| sky hypothetical thanks to their state legislature.
|
| By purposefully built, I literally mean that the
| unemployment web services infrastructure was designed to
| fail at scale. Not to mention dark pattern roadblocks,
| insane eligibility requirements, and authorized self-
| sabotage.
|
| [0] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-
| updates/2020/0...
| pb7 wrote:
| That's a product of the leadership elected by the people
| of Florida.
| whymauri wrote:
| Which is a product of the design of government in the
| country, so no: it doesn't get to be ignored when
| comparing the reality of COVID relief in the US compared
| to other countries.
| pb7 wrote:
| The design works just fine for states that look out for
| the wellbeing of their populace. No point in discussing
| COVID relief in states that don't believe in the dangers
| of COVID.
| GravitasFailure wrote:
| Don't forget that money is exempt from federal taxes for
| the 2020 tax year and isn't taxed at all by many states.
| whymauri wrote:
| I felt like I entered a wormhole in the GP comment where the
| ocean wasn't on fire, the Amazon wasn't burning down, a heat
| wave didn't sweep through the Northwest, and the polar caps
| aren't melting at an irreversible rate. The largest
| redistribution of wealth in history is happening right now
| while the global environment collapses and somehow there are
| cheerleaders egging it on so rich guys can play around in
| sub-orbit.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Is wealth being redistributed, or are the Bezos' simply
| slurping up the new money that have been so abundant?
|
| It matters, I think. Because if people are only getting
| relatively poorer when compared to the top 1%, it's not as
| bad as if they are losing their standard of living.
|
| There are other issues about how excessively rich people
| can distort our society, but that's not so much about the
| redistribution but the distribution, which is an ancient
| story.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| > Is wealth being redistributed, or are the Bezos' simply
| slurping up the new money that have been so abundant?
|
| How do you differentiate these? If you have 100 dollars,
| distributed evenly among 10 people, and then you print
| 100 more and give them all to Jeffery, then you have
| redistributed the wealth even though you only printed new
| money. He went from 10% of the power to 55%.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| I differentiate distributed from re-distributed.
|
| He may have a higher percentage of available wealth, but
| it's not like other people have lost their money.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| That doesn't make sense though, each dollar doesn't exist
| in a value vacuum, so you can't ignore the impact of
| uneven distribution. If Jeffery wants to own the entire
| town, he can (and then he can get loans against his
| property to continue funding operations). At that point
| it seems pretty inane to argue that re-distribution
| hasn't happened - money is a proxy for economic power,
| and when you give one person a larger percentage, that's
| redistributive. Maybe the other people in the town can
| still buy groceries, but now they're competing with the
| baron for things like land, and baron Jeff will always
| win, if he wants to, with all that extra money.
| causalmodels wrote:
| I think wealth actually is being redistributed, but not
| in the sort of nefarious way that some people are
| claiming.
|
| Last year incomes went up for the lowest earners. When
| less wealthy people get more money they tend to buy
| material, mass market goods. Large corporations tend to
| be the main suppliers of those goods. Thus, increasing
| buying power at the lower end of the income distribution
| results in companies earning more money.
| ljm wrote:
| It's fair to say there is redistribution at play when
| wages have stayed stagnant for over 10 years (at least
| since the 2008 crash) while executive salaries and
| payouts have skyrocketed at an unbelievably
| disproportionate level. It's effectively a global
| aristocracy as a handful of people amass an amount of
| wealth that would be impossible to conceive of not even
| 50 years ago. They can't soak it all up from new money,
| they depend on keeping their wage bills and other costs
| low to keep their profits up.
|
| And the standard of living is being lost when the people
| with stagnating wages are being priced out of the housing
| market, with renting or sharing being the only reasonable
| alternatives. Renting itself is a redistribution of
| wealth from poor to rich in many a case.
|
| Not to mention that tax policies (like Trump's tax cuts
| for example) tend to disproportionately benefit the
| wealthy far more than the middle class, and the poor. I
| can't think of a more clear cut example of redistribution
| there.
|
| The typical HN user is likely to be on the higher end of
| the scale and less exposed to issues like this (after
| all, many of us software engineers get a yearly payrise
| by switching job), but I find it hard to dismiss things
| like this when looking at my own country's politics.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| For many workers, wages have stagnated but total
| compensation hasn't, when you account for increased costs
| of benefits. I support universal healthcare, but it's
| important to realize how much it costs employers has gone
| up.
| dantheman wrote:
| The redistribution is from the young to the old, to those
| who stopped housing construction to that drive up the
| cost of living for those without houses.
|
| Those who create wealth aren't redistributing it, they
| are capturing a small portion of what they create for
| others.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| He's a parasite because the company (which hired 100K new
| workers during COVID) that he started and owns a shit-ton of
| equity in went up in the past year because of lockdowns?
| [deleted]
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| They also caused me exactly zero suffering. In fact, they
| actually helped me since I was able to order from Amazon
| throughout the lockdown.
| Salgat wrote:
| Who pays for the roads that Amazon depends on for
| deliveries and employee commutes? Who pays for the k-12
| educations and public universities that these employees
| used to become educated? Who pays for the entire social
| infrastructure that allows Amazon to even exist? That's
| what people mean when they say Amazon isn't paying their
| fair share. They depend on us and taxpayer benefits more
| than almost any other company in the country, why aren't
| they also paying a proportional share of their taxes?
| pb7 wrote:
| They are paying exactly what they owe otherwise the IRS
| would come after them. You have equal access to the same
| infrastructure. Feel free to start a trillion dollar
| company.
| Salgat wrote:
| No ones saying otherwise, what we're saying is raise the
| taxes to something reasonable.
|
| >You have equal access to the same infrastructure. Feel
| free to start a trillion dollar company.
|
| And this is such a lazy cop-out that ignores that Bezos
| had parents who funded his company (to the tune of half a
| million in today's money) during a time where he was in
| the right place at the right time. It insane how ignorant
| people are to how much luck in one's situation plays into
| their success. I'm not saying he isn't a talented
| businessman, but that alone is never enough to reach his
| level of success.
| pb7 wrote:
| VCs hand out millions to all sorts of companies that
| fail, every single day. This is another common talking
| point that holds no water. I'll give you $250K (or $500K
| equivalent) myself if you bet your life on turning it
| into a billion, let alone a trillion.
| dantheman wrote:
| Taxes barely go to roads and infrastructure they go to
| welfare and warfare.
| bluedevil2k wrote:
| Who cares if he had parents invest in his company?!? Why
| do people jump to that immediately trying to prove what
| an "evil" guy he is. Guess what...Bezos's parents paid
| their taxes on their incomes and saved the money and
| chose to invest in their son. Why is that a negative?
| Right place at the right time - there were millions of
| people in their 20's in the late 90's, thousands had
| $250,000 in cash to start a business, but only 1 turned
| into the biggest most efficient company in history. It
| wasn't luck man, it was talent. The ignorance seems to be
| on your end believing it was luck.
| Salgat wrote:
| I'm not saying he is evil or that he doesn't deserve his
| success, I'm addressing his point that Bezos isn't just a
| product of his own talents, but that of his situation and
| the opportunities he was provided by our society.
| tylersmith wrote:
| Thats an opportunity provided by his parents, not
| "society". If he owes anyone then it's them.
| pb7 wrote:
| That's the case for literally everyone in our society.
| Can I take your money then, since you're a product of a
| society I contributed to?
| kelnos wrote:
| If you make less money than the parent does, and live in
| the same country, than you essentially are taking their
| money, through their higher tax burden that pays for
| services (like roads and public schools and firefighters)
| that you almost certainly use or benefit from.
|
| And that's a good thing! But I think higher earners
| should have more money taken than is currently the case.
| Wealth and income inequality are largely a result of luck
| and opportunity, not raw talent. An equitable society
| should find ways to mitigate those effects, which have
| only gotten worse in recent decades, not better.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Would you say that it's reasonable that if you start a
| business, you get to keep 10% of the value created?
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| Do they not pay payroll taxes for the nearly 100k people
| they employ?
| pb7 wrote:
| 1.3 million*
| eli wrote:
| That's not a proportional share
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| Complain to your senators, then? Congress is who sets the
| algorithm defining how taxes are owed, not the taxpayers
| themselves. Have you ever written the IRS a check for
| more than what you owe them (or declined to accept a tax
| refund)?
| ModernMech wrote:
| I've been trying to get a meeting with my Senators to
| express my opinion, but they won't have me. They
| regularly take meetings with corporate lobbyists though.
| I wonder what it is they're telling my Senators? Sure
| wish I had $10 million to spend on lobbyists like Amazon.
| pb7 wrote:
| You elected Senators that don't care about your opinion.
| Maybe you should be more mad at them and less mad at
| Amazon who provides millions of people with exactly the
| goods and services they promise.
| eli wrote:
| I live in DC so I don't have any Senators and barely any
| say in how my tax dollars get spent.
| qeternity wrote:
| Without getting into a debate about progressive taxes,
| Bezos pays far more than his fair share in taxes. The
| social burden that he creates is microscopic compared to
| the tax revenue he pays. If he disappeared tomorrow, the
| national budget would be in worse shape than it is today.
| techrat wrote:
| No. The people they employ pay the payroll taxes out of
| their salary. No company pays payroll taxes for their
| employees.
| pb7 wrote:
| Businesses pay the same amount in payroll taxes as
| employees do. Self employed people pay double the payroll
| taxes.
| prepend wrote:
| Technically, self employed people pay less than double
| because they can deduct the employer contribution. So I
| think it's like 12.4% for self-employed vs, 7.5% for just
| an employee.
| lordnacho wrote:
| This is more complicated than you make it out to be.
|
| The person who literally sends the money according to the
| law is not the same as the one who pays in the economic
| sense.
|
| For instance, you could transfer the legal obligation to
| the other party, but that would change the negotiating
| position between the employer and the employee.
|
| Similarly, you can add a sales tax to some product, and
| make the company that sells the product collect it and
| forward it to the government, but that doesn't mean that
| the company is worse off the that amount. The pie is
| split according to some negotiating position.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Not really. Firms hire based on the cost of an employee.
| If suddenly the employer portion of the payroll tax
| disappeared, there would immediately be an incentive to
| funnel those funds into the salary to make job offerings
| stand out against what the employee's other options would
| be. Sure, some firms would pocket it, but it beggars
| belief that most of them would, when they've already made
| a decision to open a hiring line based on the funds
| available and projected revenue.
| lordnacho wrote:
| > If suddenly the employer portion of the payroll tax
| disappeared...
|
| That's what I'm saying. The piece that's added or removed
| is negotiated over, it doesn't just belong to whoever has
| their name on it.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| "There are a variety of payroll taxes, some paid by
| employers, some by employees, and some by both."
|
| https://www.paychex.com/articles/payroll-taxes/employers-
| gui...
| bluedevil2k wrote:
| > Who pays for the k-12 educations and public
| universities that these employees used to become
| educated?
|
| Ummm...the people living in that community pay for the
| schools in that community. I'm not sure why you think
| Amazon is responsible for paying school taxes in some
| location where they have no offices.
| bluedevil2k wrote:
| > Who pays for the roads that Amazon depends on for
| deliveries and employee commutes?
|
| If they're the interstate highways, then the gas tax pays
| for most of that. And Amazon buys a LOT of gas.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > If they're the interstate highways, then the gas tax
| pays for most of that.
|
| That's mostly a subsidy from passenger cars to larger
| vehicles, because road wear goes up _much_ more rapidly
| with vehicle weight than fuel consumption does (IIRC, the
| former with roughly the fourth power of weight, the
| latter sublinearly.) Since Amazon mostly isn 't using
| passenger cars as part of its delivery fleet, its
| actually being subsidized by gas tax, not paying its way.
| pb7 wrote:
| What you say is true but they're just passing those
| subsidies on to their customers (the majority of the US).
| And they're still paying a significant amount contrary to
| the very popular belief, even if it's not proportional to
| the consumption which I agree with you on.
|
| Amazon e-commerce is not all that profitable. Most of
| Amazon's value comes from AWS.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > These billionaires pay their workers minimum wage every
| day.
|
| My nephew works at an Amazon warehouse. Makes like 15 bucks
| an hour for the first 40, and then 20 more at double the rate
| (his choice to take the extra hours). He's very happy, and
| nothing suggests he feels taken advantage of.
| vernie wrote:
| https://twitter.com/meganamram/status/1087143660389466112?la...
| WalterBright wrote:
| It'll be very interesting to see what Jones and Andres do with
| the money.
| grouphugs wrote:
| these people don't deserve to come to the future with us, and
| neither does anyone praising them
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| The really interesting thing to me about this announcement is
| that it's the first time I think I've ever heard about such a
| large gift being given to _individuals_ , instead of a foundation
| or non-profit. Curious if Bezos is just testing to see if this
| type of philanthropy has better results.
|
| I'm also interested in the logistics of a gift this large. I
| mean, Bezos would have to pay a large gift tax for gifts sent
| directly to individuals. Obviously he can afford it, but curious
| if there was some attempt to save on taxes if the end desire is
| for all of this money to go to charity.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > is just testing to see if this type of philanthropy has
| better results.
|
| The idea of a billionaire spending time minmax-ing their
| donations seems highly unlikely.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Seems like exactly how Bill Gates has spent his time since
| retiring from Microsoft.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| You don't know many billionaires then. Many prominent
| philanthropists have written extensively about how to track,
| measure and optimize the impact of their donations.
| this2shallPass wrote:
| Agreed. They generally hire teams of people to do it for
| them.
| spoonjim wrote:
| This is not a personal gift to Van Jones and Jose Andres...
| they are being given this money to donate to charities. I think
| the way it will work is that they will designate the charities
| and Bezos will donate it, or Bezos will transfer the money and
| they will donate it within the calendar year.
| LukeBMM wrote:
| I'd suggest that Jeff Bezos is unlikely to pay a meaningful
| amount in taxes (in this case, meaning "relative to the action"
| rather than "relative to his overall wealth"), regardless of
| what he does.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I mean, there's either a legal tax shelter he will take
| advantage of, or he'll pay the gift tax. People complain
| about the wealthy and giant corporations "paying no tax" but
| they are paying the minimal taxes that the law reqires, as we
| all do (any readers who voluntarily send extra money to the
| IRS are excepted).
| inetsee wrote:
| If I had $200 million lying around, I'd be more inclined to give
| $1 million each to 200 people.
| [deleted]
| jimbokun wrote:
| Well since Bezos net worth is around 200 billion, throwing 100
| million at someone is in the same ballpark.
| [deleted]
| seaman1921 wrote:
| I would give 200$ each to 1M people.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Giving people money is absolutely the last thing anyone should
| do.
|
| I'd much prefer if Bezos spent $200M in building an education
| institute or an apprentice shop for tradesmen or to
| humanitarian aid or doctors without borders or open source
| courseware or human genome project...
| bigthymer wrote:
| > Giving people money is absolutely the last thing anyone
| should do.
|
| Why?
|
| Cash transfers to poor people is starting to look like an
| effective way to alleviate poverty. Despite the old
| stereotype of poor people blowing it all on booze and drugs,
| in reality, most people put it to good use. This is also
| another reason why UBI has started gaining more support.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > Cash transfers to poor people is starting to look like an
| effective way to alleviate poverty.
|
| Much like alleviating homelessness by giving people homes,
| it's so simple and obvious that no one can tolerate it.
| [deleted]
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I vehemently disagree. Handing out cash to the poor isn't
| fixing the problem. It will make matters worse (inflation).
|
| It's almost unbelievable that investing in education and
| apprenticeship is considered a negative thing but giving
| straight up cash from Billionaires is popular.
|
| Homelessness and poverty needs to be tackled by getting
| these people jobs.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| > I vehemently disagree. Handing out cash to the poor
| isn't fixing the problem. It will make matters worse
| (inflation).
|
| Huh? Bezos giving away money likely isn't going to lead
| to inflation. The money supply is held constant here.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I was referring about the concept of giving people cash
| (UBI) in general and replying to the comment above mine.
| zapnuk wrote:
| If billionaires entrust their money to more or less random people
| for philanthropic objectives I rather have them be taxed higher
| and let a (somewhat inefficient) government decide how to invest
| the money.
|
| At least I had a role in electing the government and can change
| my vote based on their performance.
| [deleted]
| kolbe wrote:
| There's a lot of things I would rather other people do for my
| benefit and their detriment as well. Thank you for your
| contribution.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Give it to the government instead?
|
| That's insane.
|
| Live a few years here in Wisconsin, and then talk to me about
| how we should give the thieves in the government more money.
| Foxconn much? Better to choose a few good people and give it to
| them. Best part about the Bezos method is that all of us can
| also make a boatload of money and give it to people we trust to
| distribute it.
|
| Under your proposition, all of us have to give it to people in
| government who we already know we should have zero trust for.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| Im Not sure why you are being downvoted.
| okareaman wrote:
| 0.001 (200M/200B) of his wealth for some great PR to clean up his
| greedy image? Not bad for pocket change.
| buryat wrote:
| he would've hired a top-notch PR campaign/firm if he wanted to
| clean up his image
| okareaman wrote:
| Oh, he's already done that but it's not helping. This was the
| cherry on top.
| mucholove wrote:
| Dudes and dudettes. Before you ask for higher taxes--hear me out.
|
| First, recognize the trajectory.
|
| Bezos is the definition of someone living out the American dream.
|
| The corporate interest may be trending towards a monopoly--but
| this is a guy who was abandoned by his biological father, adopted
| by an immigrant, and was able to use his skills, smarts and
| efforts to achieve the easiest way for me to buy something.
|
| Second--for all the taxes paid directly and indirectly in the US,
| the CDC and the FDA could not respond to this pandemic with any
| sort of competence.
|
| Do I trust these people with money? No.
|
| They could have spent 800 million dollars and avoided a pandemic
| --but once it started up again they just find it so easy to spend
| money like gangbusters.
|
| This is a complicated issues. But before asking for higher taxes,
| ask for better constitutions.
|
| PS-for my money, your tax rate should be based on lifetime
| earnings. I would love to know how to switch from yearly, to
| lifetime.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >and was able to use his skills, smarts and efforts to achieve
| the easiest way for me to buy something.
|
| And a small loan of $200,000 from his parents. Also that.
| mucholove wrote:
| You're supposed to build on the shoulders of giants. His
| parents went all in on him. That $200,000 was a meaningful
| amount of money to them. They bet the farm. I personally,
| want to live in a society which celebrates living on the
| shoulders of parents. Good for his immigrant father on being
| able to make this amount of money after having his fortunes
| erased in Cuba.
|
| At some point, we cant be expecting more rags to riches
| stories. We need more acrobats, leaping from our shoulders.
| jl2718 wrote:
| Funny to imagine. I did the opposite and spent the first 20
| years of my career paying for my birth family, and only now
| am waking up to the idea of starting my own (family and
| career). This is a difficult shift in mindset. But
| ultimately you are right. His obligations to his parents
| were different but no less serious, maybe more so.
|
| By the way, I claim no hardship or victim status. It gave
| me a lot of courage to do things I would have been able to
| do otherwise. The problem was when things settled and they
| needed me less, and I no longer felt like I had to do
| anything crazy. Then it was like, "this is it?".
| mrtweetyhack wrote:
| More like a bribe/payoff
| catillac wrote:
| There will be a lot of cynicism on this post from the HN crowd,
| but these are unbelievably good recipients. I have interacted
| with Jose Andres many times, and go to his DC restaurants when I
| visit, and he is truly a wonderful soul who spends all his effort
| helping others. I don't know much about Van Jones beyond what I
| see on TV, but if he's of the same character as Jose Andres, that
| is stellar and they will both do wonderful things for our world
| with that money.
| ianai wrote:
| Agree. They seem like good choices. Maybe he's making a pivot
| now that he's retired from Amazon?
|
| I will caution people to not read too little or too much into
| this.
|
| Personally I live by the maxim of "I don't need a reason to do
| something nice, but I do need a reason to do something mean."
| So I suggest we all wait and see what else he does before
| further analysis.
| chasd00 wrote:
| probably attempting to buy his way into heaven now that his
| fortune has been won. The same thing Gates is doing.
| colordrops wrote:
| These guys are stooges of the elite for maintaining narrative
| control. They are part of the same media bloc as the Washington
| Post, which Bezos owns - that bloc being neoliberal
| establishment. To call them "unbelievably good recipients" is
| orwell speak.
| [deleted]
| cs702 wrote:
| I've interacted with Jose Andres in the past too, and can
| attest that he's an amazing human being. He is the kind of
| person who will try his hardest to use every single one of
| those dollars to help other people who are desperately in need
| of that help. It's really great to see Bezos doing this.
| courtf wrote:
| They are great choices, it's a generous and interesting form of
| charity. The focus on civility is a strange demand from the guy
| who has his workers peeing in bottles, but ok, I guess you need
| to stand for something at some point in the face of criticism.
|
| Will this counterbalance the negative responses of the last few
| days? Probably not, the criticisms about the power wealthy
| individuals wield in society aren't affected, but it's a well
| timed gesture of good faith and the recipients are well chosen.
| cassac wrote:
| It deserves cynicism. If he wasn't a jerk he'd just pay his
| employees more and maybe pay some taxes. When everyone is fair
| upfront they don't need to give us free turkeys on thanksgiving
| we can buy our own.
| prepend wrote:
| > pay his employees more
|
| Doesn't Amazon pay highest in its industry? I suppose people
| always want more, but it seems like they are already among
| the best.
|
| Of course pay varies by location and what's good in one state
| is good in another. But it seems the average warehouse worker
| pay is $12.61 [0] with states ranging from $9.66 for North
| Carolina (holy cow) to $14.84 in Washington [1].
|
| Amazon pays $16/hour [2] so that's quite a big higher than
| the average and even the highest state.
|
| So it seems like an odd complaint, "the company with the
| highest pay should pay even more." And would be more
| appropriate if they paid crap wages.
|
| Warehouse worker isn't the easiest job, but I'm not sure how
| a warehouse worker job for Amazon is harder than other
| employers.
|
| [0] https://www.indeed.com/career/warehouse-worker/salaries
| [1] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-
| Average-Wa... [2] https://www.glassdoor.com/Hourly-
| Pay/Amazon-Warehouse-Worker...
| pwdisswordfish0 wrote:
| > Doesn't Amazon pay highest in its industry?
|
| Absolutely not. On the tail of the recession, I moved back
| near my family and got a job at warehouse doing the same
| thing that Amazon workers do. It was shit work under even
| shittier superiors, but by no means was it worse than what
| Amazon pays. And that's even being generous to Amazon,
| comparing it under conditions that are much more favorable
| to it: it's now 10 years hence, not to mention that the
| reference point is _the recession_. What 's that bastion of
| magnanimity that we're comparing it to, by the way? None
| other than Walmart.
|
| When I learned how little Amazon workers made, at the time
| around five years after my experience at Walmart, where
| you're essentially guaranteed a 50 cent raise every year
| (or more when the company does well), I was floored.
| tw04 wrote:
| Your own link [0] shows they aren't even close to the
| highest (Sysco - $30.99). At $16/hr they don't make the top
| 25.
|
| And knowing people who work warehouse for Best Buy and
| Target ($19.33), the working conditions are so much better
| as to be incomparable to what Amazon does to warehouse
| workers. Ignoring the fact they get paid more.
| prepend wrote:
| So not the highest, but above average.
|
| It's cool you know people who make $19.33 but I was
| referencing average pay.
|
| Target seems to pay $13.68/hour [0] and BestBuy $13.69
| [1] so they pay substantially worse than Amazon.
|
| It's hard to systematically understand working conditions
| though so hard to compare.
|
| But again, the claim that Amazon employees aren't paid
| well seems unsubstantiated.
|
| [0] https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Employer=Target_
| Corpora...
|
| [1] https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Employer=Best_Bu
| y/Hourl...
| snug wrote:
| Warehouse workers are average $17 Target and $15 Best Buy
|
| Your link doesn't show Amazon, but found it here
| https://www.glassdoor.com/Hourly-Pay/Amazon-Warehouse-
| Worker...
|
| which puts in in the average of Target, Amazon, and Best
| Buy
| tw04 wrote:
| >Target seems to pay $13.68/hour
|
| You're comparing apples and oranges. The $13.68/hr
| includes high school cashiers. The average wage for a
| Target warehouse worker is $17, again from your own link
| [0] on page 2. The average range for best buy is $15,
| well north of the $12.61 Amazon is paying.
|
| And AGAIN, far better working conditions. So no, not
| unsubstantiated. And no, it isn't hard to understand
| working conditions unless you're intentionally trying to
| gaslight. Amazon has pretty well known requirements for
| packages per hour that they brutally enforce to the
| detriment of employee health. Their competitors do not.
| BingoAhoy wrote:
| Not an odd complaint considering he's worth 207 billion. He
| could more fairly divide that stock wealth among
| Amazonians. Question is: that 207 billion, did he
| accumulate that fairly himself or did his workforce
| accumulate that for him? Hard to answer from the outside
| but could a single man accumulate 207 billion without help
| as a corporation of one.
| mhh__ wrote:
| You don't make a company out of a bunch of workers in a
| field though, do you? People underestimate what good
| leadership it worth - sometimes even people who I later
| see worshipping Lisa Su (She's not a chip architect, she
| lets the chip architects fly - Bada bing Bada boom AMD is
| up however many gazillion percent).
| agorabinary wrote:
| How many of the decisions that determined whether Amazon
| would become worth >$1T or yet another mediocre web store
| were made by warehouse workers? Jeff is primarily
| responsible for Amazon's success. For making Amazon what
| it is, him being worth ~10% of the whole company is a
| totally reasonable compensation
| BingoAhoy wrote:
| He's entitled to more than your average amazon employee,
| warehouse worker, and probably any other employee: YEAH
| sure. But I do not agree on paying such a high premium
| for simply being a decision maker. I'm merely making an
| argument that it's hard to objectively determine how much
| more one employee is entitled to the corporations stock
| pie than another based on merit. Amazon and it's 800,000
| employee base built Amazon into the >$1T behemoth it
| became due simply to the fact one man can't do it alone.
| A lot of those employees may not have been able to make
| the important decisions that Jeff Bezos was able to, but
| they instead contributed blood and sweat. I'm willing to
| bet even if Jeff Bezos is a super employee, one thousand
| times more productive and smarter, than the next best
| employee he still couldn't amass 207 billion himself. By
| that metric he is overcompensated and others are under.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| >simply being a decision maker.
|
| This right here shows you don't understand what it takes
| to make a trillion dollar company.
|
| They were a book seller that eventually expanded into an
| online Walmart, that ended up becoming the largest cloud
| provider in the world.
|
| Just look at Borders/Barne's and Noble if you want to see
| two companies that were actually in a better position in
| the same industry 25 years ago. That's the difference
| between 'simply a decision maker' and an average CEO.
|
| > I'm willing to bet even if Jeff Bezos is a super
| employee, one thousand times more productive and smarter,
| than the next best employee he still couldn't amass 207
| billion himself.
|
| This is actually just false. He essentially just proved
| you could. [0]
|
| [0] Reality
| [deleted]
| prepend wrote:
| It's not like he gets a $207B salary. That's the worth of
| the equity that has increased over time.
|
| He literally has a percentage of the company and it's
| increased in value.
|
| So he's not paid such an astronomical salary. His salary
| was about $1.6M [0] as his fortune comes through his
| stock in founding the company.
|
| I agree that it would be absurd to pay someone $1B, but
| it's odd complaining that his assets shouldn't appreciate
| in value.
|
| [0] https://news.yahoo.com/much-does-jeff-bezos-
| per-143450179.ht...
| missedthecue wrote:
| He pays all of his employees no less than what Bernie Sanders
| considers a living wage. At what point would people be
| satisfied that Bezos pays enough?
| tharne wrote:
| Never. People with a scarcity mindset tend to be resentful
| of anyone who's achieved any level of success greater than
| their own.
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| Bezos hasn't achieved anything of note himself. He's
| exploited those around stealing from all of his employees
| to create an empire of exploitation the world over. He's
| a leech. A parasite. Pass the salt.
| RIMR wrote:
| Why is Bernie Sanders the authority here? Given inflation
| and a year-after-year growth in productivity, the minimum
| wage should be closer to $25/hour. Sanders falls way short
| of reality - but likely because the powers that be are more
| likely to compromise with a half-measure than give up more
| wealth to meaningfully improve America's economy by paying
| people equitably.
| missedthecue wrote:
| I never said he is the authority, but is probably the
| most prominent and well known Amazon critic on the planet
| today, and leads a huge populist movement that has been
| pushing for a 'living wage', which Sanders defines as
| $15/hr.
|
| My question remains - at what dollar amount will people
| be satisfied that Bezos is being fair?
| homarp wrote:
| > at what dollar amount will people be satisfied that
| Bezos is being fair?
|
| 70k a year :) https://www.inc.com/magazine/201511/paul-
| keegan/does-more-pa...
|
| $15 an hour is $120 a day (8h) and $600 a week (5 days)
| and $2400 a month and $28800 a year.
|
| $20 an hour is $160 a day, $800 a week, $3200 a month and
| $38400 a year.
|
| $35 an hour is $280/d, $1400/w, $5600 a month and $67200
| a year
| xibalba wrote:
| Wage growth is starting to take off in the US due to
| extremely fierce competition over job applicants. If, as you
| say, Amazon doesn't pay employees enough, they will leave in
| droves for better paying jobs.
|
| Of course, if your facts aren't correct, they won't. To wit,
| 71% of Amazon workers in the recent unionization drive in
| Alabama voted against a union, citing, of all things, the
| _good pay and strong benefits_ of the job.
| [deleted]
| imgabe wrote:
| If you weren't a jerk you'd pay $100 for a gallon of milk
| when you go to the store so the workers could have some extra
| money. Why are you such a jerk that you don't pay more for
| things than what they cost?
| havetocharge wrote:
| His employees are free to seek a better paid employment if a
| jerk they work for underpays them. What's up with this
| nonstop handout mindset lately?
| wedowhatwedo wrote:
| What's up with this complete lack of empathy mindset
| lately? We hear this all the time "if you don't like it,
| leave". Quite often employees have very few options and
| their only leverage is to leave but not many people have
| large amounts of cash available to be unemployed.
| [deleted]
| mrstone wrote:
| Yeah, why don't they just stop being poor??
| RIMR wrote:
| I remember this from the bible.
| RIMR wrote:
| Expecting a living wage from a full-time job, especially
| when you're working for one of the most profitable
| companies in the country headed by the wealthiest man on
| the planet, isn't a "handout mindset".
|
| You'd have to be an absolute doormat to accept poverty in
| exchange for your full-time labor. "Get a different job"
| isn't the solution here, because there is clearly a massive
| demand for jobs at Amazon, and those jobs should pay people
| fairly for the work that they do.
| bpt3 wrote:
| Define "fairly".
| mtgx wrote:
| Monopolies and corporate consolidations tend to limit one's
| job opportunities.
| 015a wrote:
| So its alright for rich CNN contributors to get handouts
| from Bezos, but unacceptable for average Americans?
| pb7 wrote:
| It's his money, he can do whatever he wants with it. It's
| the same freedom afforded to everyone in this country.
| 015a wrote:
| I would bet similar things were said in 1790s France.
| Hokusai wrote:
| > His employees are free to seek a better paid employment
| if a jerk they work for underpays them.
|
| So, people have options to stop being poor, people have
| options to not have to pee in a bottle at work, but they
| chose to do it, why?
|
| Poverty removes many options, lack of good education
| removes many options, abusive corporations keep options far
| away. The system is the problem, people is just living in a
| system manipulated for the benefit of others.
|
| It's not a handout, it's asking for growth to be shared
| fairly. It's about taking care of our fellow humans. It's
| about creating a society that works for everyone and not
| just the few.
| tailrecursion wrote:
| And the handout-mentality people want to give that
| abusive system more power by demanding handouts on which
| they become dependent, and demanding censorship.
| dantheman wrote:
| It is a handout. It's a handout you agree with, but it's
| a handout.
| pb7 wrote:
| >people have options to not have to pee in a bottle at
| work
|
| Just because a few weird individuals chose to do this
| doesn't mean you have to do it. It's a folk tale used as
| a rallying cry against Amazon. It has as much meaning as
| Googlers earning $300K/year choosing to live in vans
| parked outside the office. Some people make questionable
| decisions. It doesn't speak at all to any sort of
| environmental problems.
| bicknergseng wrote:
| I'm curious if you actually think there's a real
| equivalency between choosing to eccentrically live in a
| van despite having more socially acceptable alternative
| options enabled by a salary far above the median vs
| making desperate moves to keep a poverty-low-but-not-the-
| absolute-lowest job that is designed to force turnover
| for all but the "highest performers." I understand
| there's a lot of hyperbole in a topic that deserves way
| more nuance, but IMO trying to make these seem the same
| causes more damage than anything else, since it drives
| this negatively reinforcing cycle where the effectively
| disenfranchised group of poverty wage workers somehow has
| a real stake at the table.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > It's not a handout, it's asking for growth to be shared
| fairly. It's about taking care of our fellow humans. It's
| about creating a society that works for everyone and not
| just the few.
|
| Stop with the feel good euphemisms!
|
| Which SPECIFIC policies do you want? Full blown
| communism? Single payer health care? Universal Basic
| Income?
|
| Every ACTUAL policy has costs, trade offs and drawbacks.
| Put actual dollar amounts on the table, and a rational
| discussion can take place.
|
| Just handwaving about a society where everyone someway
| somehow gets everything they need to happy, healthy,
| fulfilled, and self-actualized accomplishes nothing.
| jimbokun wrote:
| I don't understand the point about trying to make this a
| character referendum on one specific billionaire.
|
| Just make federal minimum wage $15 / hour and be done with
| it. Why is there so much rhetorical energy wasted on singling
| out one billionaire or another, as if they are going to feel
| bad and unilaterally raise everyone's wages in some kind of
| real world Ebeneezer Scrooge moment?
|
| Democrats technically control Presidency and both US Houses
| of Congress, but it's looking like they won't accomplish
| anything because of Manchin's love for the sanctity of the
| filibuster is greater than his love for delivering concrete
| economic benefits for his constituents.
| ironrabbit wrote:
| Genuine question because I'm out of the loop: it looks to me
| like the "Bezos doesn't pay taxes" argument is just pointing
| out that most of his wealth sits in unrealized gains in
| amazon stock. When he sells stock, he pays taxes. Is there
| more to it that I'm missing? Is the prevailing argument that
| we should be paying taxes on unrealized capital gains?
| burkaman wrote:
| Well, does it seem like he has realized any gains? The
| prevailing argument is that as a society we do not have to
| let one individual amass this much power. It's ok to hold
| that view without having a deep enough understanding of tax
| law to know what needs to be changed.
| beerandt wrote:
| You or me would sell stock and pay taxes.
|
| He borrows against the shares, which keeps his votes while
| cashing out non-taxable income.
| [deleted]
| cowgoesmoo wrote:
| But wouldn't he need to sell stock eventually to service
| the loan payments?
| beerandt wrote:
| Yeah- but you postpone it indefinitely, or pay it back in
| a year where you have negative income or other
| circumstances that afford a better tax situation.
|
| Or get sneaky and attempt other "creative" legally
| questionable solutions, like having an entity you control
| buy that debt from the bank and hold it while giving you
| a 0% rate, or something similar.
| asciimov wrote:
| Not necessarily. The wealthy put up $-worth of shares as
| collateral to borrow $$$$-worth of money from the bank at
| low interest rates.
|
| The bank doesn't just sit on those shares, they use them
| to generate money for themselves. For example, say the
| Bank takes $250M in Amazon shares from Bezos and loans
| him $1B. If the bank projects that the price of Amazon is
| going down, they short that $250M in shares.
|
| If Bezos did need to pay off one bank, he just borrows
| from another.
| kristjansson wrote:
| It's the other way around? You borrow substantially fewer
| dollars than the value of the shares you pledged as
| collateral so that the bank doesn't call the loan if
| (when) the value of the shares changes.
| asciimov wrote:
| For you and me, you are right, but those on the top get
| to play by different rules.
|
| Also, while it's called a loan, think of it more like a
| credit line.
| fossuser wrote:
| I don't think you're missing anything - the sense I get is
| that it's primarily a knee-jerk political response. I
| suspect people like to take cynical negative views of
| things because it's both easy and a common method of trying
| to signal wise-ness, rarely is it applied consistently
| though. Bezos is just extremely visible and people take the
| positive space stuff as an excuse to 'well, actually' be
| 'contrarian' and negative. Irony though is this seems to be
| the mostly conventional political position anyway.
|
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-
| demand...
|
| On the specific tax stuff, you can borrow against holdings
| and then pass them on when you die (I think people that
| inherit it get the cost basis 'stepped-up' to whatever
| level they get it at). This means some of that tax value on
| gains isn't collected.
|
| It's all tied up in unrealized gains for the most part and
| since it's typically associated with massive non-zero-sum
| wealth creation - I'm not sure why it matters.
|
| If people want to go after inheritance rather than taking
| wealth from people that actually created it, I suspect
| there would be a lot more support.
| ironrabbit wrote:
| Interesting. Resetting cost basis upon inheritance does
| seem like a massive tax avoidance loophole, I can't
| quickly think of a reason why this should be allowed. I
| agree also that this would probably be a popular (and
| sensible) modification to the tax code.
| fossuser wrote:
| Part of me wonders if the same group of people trying to
| take away the wealth created by others have both not
| created much of their own _and_ stand to inherit a lot
| from their parents.
|
| I don't know - but I have a hunch that a lot of these
| voices are often trust fund kids, or kids of wealthy
| parents. It'd be an interesting paradox if they're
| suddenly against policy that may affect their
| inheritance.
|
| Currently though inheritance is protected up to fairly
| extreme monetary amounts (in the US anyway) so the change
| would have to be fairly dramatic.
| okintheory wrote:
| This is my current understanding:
|
| Basically, once you're this rich, you can take hundreds of
| millions or billions of dollars worth of loans to cover
| anything you'd like to spend. Now, you can make sure that
| you're actually "losing" money in any given year by having
| (almost) no realized income. Then, at the end, you die,
| having never paid taxes.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/09/briefing/tax-jeff-
| bezos-w...
|
| https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-
| shor...
|
| EDIT: Yes, this is a big part of why there's now a common
| argument that unrealized (but very large) capital gains
| should be taxed.
| alberth wrote:
| > "Yes, this is a big part of why there's now a common
| argument that unrealized (but very large) capital gains
| should be taxed."
|
| So how will the person pay for those taxes WITHOUT
| selling the underlining asset.
|
| This is a huge problem in startup land with something
| called AMT. Where you "on paper" are a millionaire but
| have no ability to sell your paper shares since the
| company hasn't IPO yet.
|
| I'd hate to live in a word where you have to pay taxes on
| unrealized gains because it's not like you're going to
| get a tax break for unrealized losses.
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| I would imagine that what would end up being implemented
| would be more nuanced. If most of your on-paper net worth
| is unsellable assets, I don't think it would be much of a
| stretch to say those wouldn't be subject to a
| hypothetical wealth tax.
|
| Tax law has plenty of examples of various assets having
| unaccessed value until it's sold. Publicly tradable
| shares have value because I can sell them to someone for
| a fairly visible price. If I can't sell it, you could
| make the argument it's really not worth anything.
|
| AMT also happens plenty to non-startup world people. Own
| a house and have a combined household income of >200k?
| You're probably dealing with AMT.
| alberth wrote:
| Let's pull on this thread some more.
|
| So if I purchase a home and it's my primary dwelling, and
| the fair market value of my home goes way up (like more
| than what my homestead cap is) - I should pay INCOME
| taxes on this UNREALIZED gain?
|
| See why this is so bonkers.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I'm totally in favor of the super
| rich to pay more in taxes ... but they are not using any
| "loop holes" here or getting preferential treatment. It's
| just that they have radically way more unrealized gains
| than ordinary people do.
|
| It'd be interesting if all those people who had huge
| unrealized Bitcoin gains had to start paying ordinary
| income taxes on it.
| digianarchist wrote:
| In the UK this is how they planned to fund social care.
| Taxes would be collected when you sell your home but
| "levied" earlier.
|
| It was labelled the Dementia Tax and was deeply
| unpopular.
| fogof wrote:
| In the comment you replied to, the commenter says:
|
| > If most of your on-paper net worth is unsellable
| assets, I don't think it would be much of a stretch to
| say those wouldn't be subject to a hypothetical wealth
| tax.
|
| Wouldn't a primary dwelling fall under this umbrella?
| alberth wrote:
| I don't think so.
|
| A home is a tangible asset easy to sell. Paper shares in
| a startup is totally different.
| owisd wrote:
| Do they need to sell to pay their taxes? Government could
| just accept the shares as payment in kind, plenty of uses
| for them without selling: sovereign wealth fund, state
| pension fund, employee owned trust.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _once you 're this rich, you can take hundreds of
| millions or billions of dollars worth of loans to cover
| anything you'd like to spend_
|
| Didn't ProPublica show, in their leaked tax returns, that
| Bezos doesn't do this?
| ALittleLight wrote:
| But you have to repay those loans eventually incurring
| the tax burden when you do, right?
| robotresearcher wrote:
| You die without ever selling your stocks. Your heirs can
| pay off your loans by selling some of the stocks they
| inherit. Their cost basis for those stocks is their value
| at the time of inheritance. This way no capital gains tax
| is ever due on the stock gains made in your lifetime.
| djrogers wrote:
| At the amounts you're talking about (100s of millions of
| $$), virtually all of that stock would be subject to the
| federal estate tax, with the vast majority of it at the
| 40% top rate.
|
| Those unrealized gains you're talking about are one of
| the main reasons the estate tax was enacted ~100yrs
| ago...
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Yes, in practice there are more tax sidesteps via
| foundations, etc. But the step that wipes the capital
| gains liability is as described.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Sure but Bezos' heirs will certainly blast past the
| exemption on the estate tax, which exists specifically as
| a backstop against this type of situation. They will pay
| taxes on most of what they inherit.
| bluedevil2k wrote:
| That's what trusts are for! To avoid the estate tax.
| bpt3 wrote:
| For Bezos (and the wealthy in general), the interest rate
| on the loan is lower than your capital gains, so you can
| just keep rolling the loan forward forever.
| bluedevil2k wrote:
| And the interest is sometimes tax deductible
| bpt3 wrote:
| Yep. It's a great setup if you can get it (for yourself
| at least).
| ironrabbit wrote:
| Interesting, but how do you pay off these loans except by
| later selling stock (and paying capital gains tax)?
| abrodersen wrote:
| When you die, your heirs get the stock with "step up
| basis", meaning the cost basis used to calculate capital
| gains resets to the market price at time of death. So if
| they sell right after you die, they pay no capital gains
| tax.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| I'm no super genius, but it does sound like simply
| changing the tax code to require paying back all loans
| before changing the cost basis would be both easily and
| less possibly catastrophic than all of a sudden taxing
| unrealized gains.
| cantrevealname wrote:
| Heirs in the United States don't pay capital gains tax,
| but doesn't the estate of the super rich guy have to pay
| up to 40% in estate taxes on all his assests (with an
| exemption on the first ~$5M)?
|
| Jeff Bezos is worth $200B. If he died, his estate would
| have to pay 40% estate tax on $195B in assets (first ~$5M
| being exempt), which is $78B in tax. That's still a hell
| of a lot tax. I know there were some loopholes used by
| the Walton family and other super rich, but isn't the
| above how it's _supposed_ to work?
| djrogers wrote:
| The heirs get the stock at etc step-up basis _after_
| estate taxes, which are considerable in the $100m+
| realm...
| robotresearcher wrote:
| You die without selling them. Your heirs inherit the
| stocks at current market value: your capital gain
| liabilities are not inherited. They sell some stocks to
| repay the loans. Your gains are never taxed.
| jimbokun wrote:
| If you ask Elizabeth Warren, yes.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Bezos doesn't sell stock. What little he does goes into
| Blue Origin and is written off again. When Bezos needs
| cash, he just borrows from the bank using his shares as
| collateral. No taxes.
| arn wrote:
| This is not true. He realized $4 billion in gains in that
| ProRepublica article people referenced, and he regular
| sells shares.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelsandler/2021/05/11/jef
| f-b...
| nomel wrote:
| Borrowing mean returning the money at some point. Where
| does this money come from, and how isn't it taxed?
| fossuser wrote:
| Person dies, wealth gets inherited at new cost basis,
| heirs pay off loans with new (higher) cost basis, tax
| revenue isn't collected.
|
| At least that's the model as I understand it.
| nomel wrote:
| I assume this means the banks are giving > 40 years
| loans? Isn't inheritance tax fairly high? A quick search
| says 40% federal, with around 20% state.
| fossuser wrote:
| IIRC estate tax doesn't kick in until after ~$20M? I
| don't really know much about this particular area of tax
| law though so I wouldn't rely on my comments.
| djrogers wrote:
| > tax revenue isn't collected.
|
| If you completely ignore estate taxes, this would be
| true.
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah you're probably right - my tax knowledge of this
| area is not great since I haven't had to care about it.
|
| I think that kicks in after $20M?
| pb7 wrote:
| He pays all the taxes he owes.
| missedthecue wrote:
| And he isn't even involved in any arcane minimization
| schemes. ProPublica showed that he sold ~$4 billion in
| Amazon stock last year and paid a billion of it to the
| government.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| Yep, and he also owns literally the largest mansion in
| Washington DC (
| https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/real-
| estate/news/a..., https://www.geekwire.com/2020/party-
| jeff-bezos-d-c-mansion-a...).
|
| It has a Ballroom, and can host parties with hundreds of
| people.
|
| Why? Because he just enjoys flying across the country and
| entertaining political elites out of the goodness of his
| heart? What could possibly be fishy here?
| monocasa wrote:
| And made $100B that year. Can I get a 1% effective tax
| rate too?
| cactus2093 wrote:
| Yes you can, just don't realize your capital gains.
| monocasa wrote:
| "Don't be poor"
|
| Like to hit 1% effective just living on $20k/yr is $2M/yr
| in capital gains.
| pb7 wrote:
| His equity appreciated and will be taxed appropriately
| when it is sold.
| monocasa wrote:
| Except it doesn't get per se, loans are taken out and
| paid back on a schedule smaller than the appreciation of
| the stocks which were used as collateral.
|
| That's what that $1B was, and is relative scales we're
| talking about.
| missedthecue wrote:
| How do you pay back loans without income?
| monocasa wrote:
| Your capital you used for collateral on the loans accrues
| value quicker than the loan's payments.
|
| Hence that 1% effective rate.
| missedthecue wrote:
| But eventually, you sell that capital to repay the loan,
| triggering a tax event.
| monocasa wrote:
| Except you had access to the capital the whole time via
| the loans, and only pay back according to the loan
| schedule, negating most of the tax burden.
|
| Hence the 1% figure based on the numbers you yourself
| provided.
| bpt3 wrote:
| He only has a 1% effective rate if you change the
| definition of effective rate. I assume you're fine with
| making that change, but the federal government isn't
| currently.
| monocasa wrote:
| The federal government that Amazon spends millions
| lobbying.
|
| I'm well aware that what they're doing is legal; I'm
| saying it shouldn't be.
| pb7 wrote:
| Your representatives don't have to accept Amazon's
| bribes, you know. They choose to do so because they're
| corrupt and convinced you to be mad at a different party
| entirely while they pocket the cash for future campaigns
| where they convince other people like you that they will
| serve your interests.
| monocasa wrote:
| Where did I say I don't blame them too?
|
| I shouldn't have to say this explicitly but yes,
| accepting bribes and giving bribes are both bad.
| bpt3 wrote:
| Taxing unrealized capital gains isn't happening because
| Amazon is lobbying the federal government, it's a
| fundamental premise of the US tax code and starting to
| tax them is arguably unconstitutional (I'm not arguing it
| is or isn't, but I've seen arguments that it is
| unconstitutional from reasonable sources).
| monocasa wrote:
| I would find it hard to believe it's unconstitutional
| given that the 16th amendment defers the definition of
| taxable income to US code.
|
| And Amazon's lobbying isn't the only reason, but it is a
| reason.
| cactus2093 wrote:
| This line of argument is so completely unhinged. Bezos paid
| roughly $1B in taxes in 2018, and Amazon warehouses pay well
| above the minimum wage.
|
| I understand progressives wanting to raise taxes and raise
| minimum wage, but why in the world would you blame someone
| personally for just paying the going rate? That's what we all
| do for the taxes and service providers we pay.
| asciimov wrote:
| Bezos makes an easy identifiable target, much easier to
| call out Bezos than any of the Walton's of Walmart.
|
| The real issue is that major corporations aren't paying
| their fair share of the costs of running this country. From
| underpaying workers (who have to use public assistance) to
| getting sweetheart deals to build in your area.
|
| Thanks to amazon I have more heavy delivery trucks running
| up and down my street. Meaning that street wears out
| faster, meaning my tax money is gonna have to repave it.
| bpt3 wrote:
| > major corporations aren't paying their fair share
|
| Define fair share.
|
| > From underpaying workers (who have to use public
| assistance)
|
| I'll never understand this line of reasoning. Would you
| rather have people who can't earn enough to support
| themselves earn $0 and rely entirely on public
| assistance? That's what will happen if you require
| employers to pay people more than the value they
| generate.
|
| > Thanks to amazon I have more heavy delivery trucks
| running up and down my street. Meaning that street wears
| out faster, meaning my tax money is gonna have to repave
| it.
|
| Presumably Amazon delivery trucks are using gasoline, and
| fuel/sales taxes should cover some of those repairs.
| Also, presumably those trucks are using those roads
| because members of the community are asking Amazon to
| deliver stuff to them, so I don't see why the community
| shouldn't bear some of the burden of repairing the roads
| as well.
| asciimov wrote:
| > Define fair share.
|
| Fair share, the cost to run the country. For most people
| that's 33% of what we make a year. For megacorps that can
| be as much as nothing.
|
| > I'll never understand this line of reasoning.
|
| While I understand how some people don't want to give
| individuals handouts, I don't understand how those same
| people are ok giving large corporations handouts.
|
| Take Walmart. If the poverty line where the local
| government steps up to help people out is $12.25 an hour
| (for 40 hours worked a week), and Walmart only pays out
| $7.25 per hour (for 40 hours), the it's on the local
| government to help those people out by giving them that
| extra $5 an hour. Well that means that walmart didn't pay
| the real rate for local wages, and the local tax payers
| got stuck with the bill.
|
| > Would you rather have people who can't earn enough to
| support themselves earn $0 and rely entirely on public
| assistance?
|
| Maybe, at least I'm subsidizing individuals and not the
| shareholders of Walmart. If we free up that person from
| the burden of working their dead end Walmart job, they
| would have an opportunity to improve themselves. Sure,
| many wont, but some will. I don't see how giving that
| same handout to Walmart helps any individual, those who
| own Walmart already have plenty.
|
| > Presumably Amazon delivery trucks are using gasoline,
| and fuel/sales taxes should cover some of those repairs.
|
| We could debate how fair those gas taxes are, and if they
| pay for themselves.
|
| I don't mind paying for the right to use the road, but
| many roads weren't built to handle the increased delivery
| traffic. That delivery traffic is a new burden that Bezos
| created and got rich off of. Surely the company that
| gained the most from using the public roads deserves to
| be billed for their upkeep.
| consumer451 wrote:
| Another reason to temporarily suspend cynicism is that this is
| a very interesting method of philanthropy. Allowing the
| recipients to chose their own destinations for the money could
| lead to a more diverse and disruptive set of expenditures. I am
| interested to see this award program's effects in 10-20 years.
|
| Is this an annual event? I never saw a definitive answer on
| that.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> I am interested to see this award program's effects in
| 10-20 years
|
| One of the challenges of this "pay it forward on steroids"
| approach is that it will likely be hard to attribute
| measurable changes to the original investments.
|
| It does seem notable that Bezos has captured a huge set of
| resources, then paid it out to others for redistribution
| under their policies and procedures; he's essentially acting
| like a government which raises some concerns.
| RIMR wrote:
| He has more capital than entire nation states. It's absurd
| that we celebrate this kind of undemocratic power in
| America.
| [deleted]
| sgpl wrote:
| I mean I'd say Mackenzie Scott (fka: Mackenzie Bezos) is
| someone who should be lauded more here. Not that it's a
| competition or that one takes away from the other but she's
| doing more to chip away at the status quo of philanthropic
| giving vs others.
|
| In 2020, she gave away nearly $6 billion to 500
| organizations. And has distributed $2.74 billion so far this
| year to about 286 orgs. From what I've read, these
| grants/donations don't come with any strings attached unlike
| grants from a lot of big foundations.
| JulianRaphael wrote:
| Agreed! Unfortunately, quite a bit of the money that she
| donates to some of these organizations goes into the
| pockets of extremely well-paid executives. That what's
| always bothered me about giving to charity orgs more
| widely. Luckily, there are websites that allow you to check
| how much charity organizations are actually spending on
| their programs vs. their expenses...
|
| I do think that giving directly to individuals who will
| make sure that all of the money is spent wisely is an
| interesting alternative approach.
| masterphilo wrote:
| Personally, I'm too confused to be even cynical about it. I
| don't know anything about Van Jones other than what I see on
| TV, but that by itself cannot explain why Bezos felt he
| deserved the "award".
| chroem- wrote:
| Previously he's been known for being openly communist (i.e.
| not just a regular socialist). As an aside, I still find it
| odd how we've rightfully shunned other totalitarian and mass
| murdering political ideologies, but we've completely
| whitewashed communism. I couldn't imagine another newscaster
| openly identifying as a nazi.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| The difference is that communism is an economic idea, which
| was used by regimes that did brutal things. Whereas the
| Nazi ideology drove the violence.
|
| In one case, it was correlated. In another, causative.
| chroem- wrote:
| A core tenet of communist ideology is violent overthrow
| of democratic governments to implement a "dictatorship of
| the proletariat". Both are rooted in violence.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Aren't democracy and communism orthogonal? Admittedly,
| I'm not a scholar, but it seems to me that democracy is
| mostly concerned w/ how leaders are chosen. Whereas
| communism is about how resources are distributed. It
| sounds possible to have a democratically elected
| government that sets a communist economic policy.
| chroem- wrote:
| That's not true, because the goal is to establish a
| dictatorship of the proletariat through violent
| revolution. Democracies are incompatible with
| dictatorship and must be overthrown in order to purge the
| other social classes. This is why every instance of
| communism has led to human rights abuses and/or mass
| murder: totalitarianism is part of the ideology.
| [deleted]
| edmundsauto wrote:
| It's been a long time since I read the Communist
| Manifesto. Do you mean to say that Marx's goal was
| violent overthrow? I thought he described more of an
| evolution of systems until the workers paradise was
| reached.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Aren 't democracy and communism orthogonal?_
|
| Theoretically, yes. Practically, if you concentrate all
| ownership in the state you remove the means by which
| private citizens can check it.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Isn't communism ownership by the people? I thought
| totalitarianism or fascism is where the state owns the
| means of production.
| lazyeye wrote:
| Lol
| edmundsauto wrote:
| This is neither a constructive comment, nor the cleverly
| sarcastic wit that you think it is. Are you unable to add
| anything useful to the conversation?
| lazyeye wrote:
| I was thinking you are a bit like a left-wing version of
| a holocaust denier.
| mmastrac wrote:
| Are you sure you haven't just been taken by a talk radio
| conspiracy theory? The only thing I could find on this was
| that Glenn Beck was harping on it ten years ago. That guy
| is not well known for being a fountain of truth. [0]
|
| [0]
| https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2009/sep/08/glenn-
| beck...
| chroem- wrote:
| It says on his wikipedia page that he's a Leninist. It's
| not a conspiracy theory if he's open about it.
| jjulius wrote:
| I ctrl+f'd "Lenin" on Van Jones' Wiki page, and this is
| _literally_ the only time Lenin is mentioned:
|
| >He became affiliated with many left activists, and co-
| founded a socialist collective called Standing Together
| to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM). It
| protested against police brutality, held study groups on
| the theories of Marx and Lenin, and aspired to a multi-
| racial socialist utopia.[13]
|
| I'm not sure how being in a study group that discusses
| Lenin's theories automatically makes one an actual
| Leninist.
| chroem- wrote:
| Does co-founding a Leninist organization not make one a
| Leninist? Why would you create an organization if you
| don't believe in its ideals?
| jjulius wrote:
| Does one have to adopt every ideal of something when
| founding an organization? Would that not be the point of
| _discussing_ those theories? What do we like? Dislike?
| Want to modify /mold to fit our current system?
|
| But given your tone, and responses to other commenters, I
| am 100% certain that your feet are dug in and you aren't
| actually open to being swayed. So, enjoy your day! :)
| chroem- wrote:
| > Does one have to adopt every ideal of something when
| founding an organization?
|
| Let's change the labels. If someone founds an
| organization to spread nazism, is it a reasonable
| inference to suggest that the founder might be a nazi? I
| think yes, and that it is facile to suggest that the
| founder of an organization whose core principle is
| Leninism, is not actually a Leninist. And that's to say
| nothing of Jones' other activities that were cleaned off
| of wikipedia.
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| Are we supposed to take your word for it that it's a
| "Leninist organization"? Your only supporting evidence
| for that idea is the passage above mentioning that
| members of the group studied ideas from Lenin (and
| others), but that alone is not enough to make an
| organization "Leninist" (if it were, then I guess our
| high schools are all Marxist/Leninist/Nazi organizations
| too since we studied and discussed those beliefs there).
|
| It is possible (necessary, even) to study, discuss, and
| debate all of history's notable policial/socio-economic
| ideologies and movements, regardless of which ideals you
| yourself hold (and which actions of those movements'
| prominent figures you view as justifiable).
| chroem- wrote:
| Don't take my word for it, take theirs. Here is one of
| their documents.
| http://www.noisyroom.net/blog/STORMSummation.pdf
| slg wrote:
| His wikipedia page does not say that. It seems like this
| controversy comes from his stance 30 years ago[1]. Van
| Jones was protesting the Rodney King verdict and was
| rounded up as part of mass arrests. From there he fell
| into a crowd that radicalized him as a communist, but a
| few years later his politics changed. He became more
| focused on unity and results rather than revolution for
| the sake of revolution. He also says "One of my big
| heroes is Malcolm X, not because I agree with Malcolm,
| but because he wasn't afraid to change in public,". I
| don't see any reference to him still considering himself
| either a communist or a Leninist. Why don't we allow him
| to "change in public"?
|
| [1] - https://eastbayexpress.com/the-new-face-of-
| environmentalism-...
| chroem- wrote:
| You are suggesting that we hold him to a different
| standard than everyone else and give him the benefit of
| the doubt. Other people have had their careers ruined for
| far, far less, while Jones gets a television gig and
| $100M for his troubles.
|
| And wikipedia _does_ discuss his Leninist activities. See
| below.
| slg wrote:
| >You are suggesting that we hold him to a different
| standard than everyone else and give him the benefit of
| the doubt.
|
| The opposite. I am suggesting we allow people to evolve
| over time. If someone demonstrates that the person they
| are today is different than the person they were 30 years
| ago, I think we should be more willing to forgive those
| 30 year old beliefs. If the person shows no indication of
| change, I am fine with them being made to account for
| those old beliefs.
|
| >Other people have had their careers ruined for far, far
| less, while Jones gets a television gig and $100M for his
| troubles.
|
| You are insinuating that Jones can just pocket the $100m
| which almost certainly isn't happening and is probably
| illegal depending on how all the paperwork is being done
| on this.
| chroem- wrote:
| Would you say the same things about someone who was
| formerly a nazi, but who still engaged in far right
| politics? I do not believe you would.
| slg wrote:
| A Nazi is not the opposite of a communist. Someone
| doesn't become a Nazi post-WWII because they believe in
| fascism. They do it because they are motivated by the
| hateful beliefs of Nazis. Therefore there is a higher
| barrier to prove that the person has truly changed before
| they can be forgiven. However there is still a path to
| forgiveness.
| chroem- wrote:
| > Someone doesn't become a Nazi post-WWII because they
| believe in fascism. They do it because they are motivated
| by the hateful beliefs of Nazis.
|
| Thank you, this is precisely my point. How can someone
| still support communism after the Soviet purges, the
| holodomor, Chinese cultural revolution, the Cambodian
| genocide, etc., etc.? Communism has oppressed and killed
| an order of magnitude more people than fascism, but in
| your opinion is this somehow more tolerable because those
| victims were killed out of love?
|
| Just as fascists follow their failed ideology because of
| hatred, communists follow their failed ideology out of a
| lust for power.
| slg wrote:
| Would you say republicanism/democracy are immoral due to
| the slavery of pre-Civil War America?
|
| That is the equivalent of what you are doing. You are
| blaming a theory of government for the crimes of a
| specific implementation of that theory. Genocide is not a
| central tenant of either fascism or communism anymore
| than slavery is a central tenant of republicanism,
| democracy, or capitalism. Fascism and communism are more
| authoritarian than other forms of government so they are
| both more attractive for people who seek totalitarian
| power, but that doesn't mean they are synonymous with the
| crimes of those totalitarians.
|
| If Jones identified as a Stalinist, Maoist, or something
| similar I would definitely consider that more worrying as
| that is more similar to someone considering themselves a
| Nazi. Identifying as a general "communist" is not the
| same thing.
| lupire wrote:
| This thread is about Leninist socialism, which is not
| Stalinist or Maoist tyranny.
| chroem- wrote:
| That's no more of a defense than claiming you're "only" a
| fascist instead of a nazi.
|
| (still waiting on the reply cooldown for the other
| comments ITT)
| dataminer wrote:
| Great donations, we need more bridges among different groups of
| people, and we should all work to make hunger a problem of the
| past, around 800 million people sleep hungry every day.
|
| https://www.who.int/news/item/15-07-2019-world-hunger-is-sti...
| tills13 wrote:
| The issue imo is that it shouldn't require philanthropy from a
| billionaire to fund these programs, it should be built into the
| support system provided by a functioning and compassionate
| society.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| Problem is a lot of people _aren 't_ compassionate. And many
| of those that are-- when they finally make a fair bit of
| money-- instantly cease to be so. So this is nothing more
| than a delusional pipe dream.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Every billionaire is a policy failure.
|
| Anyone with over $100M should have it confiscated and
| redistributed to those in greatest need and to provide for the
| common good. That's the moral thing to do. These jerks own the
| government and rig the system in their favor, against the
| interests of average people and climate survivability.
| pphysch wrote:
| It's interesting that Bezos is coming out with these big PR
| initiatives after stepping down as Amazon CEO. As the world's
| richest individual and face of Amazon, he endured a lot of
| (perhaps justified) smear campaigns, but didn't really fight back
| in a major way, like target the (more wealthy) Waltons or
| something. The MBS phone hacking scandal got a terse,
| professional Medium article.
|
| It's also interesting to note that the horrendous stories of
| Frito Lay factory worker conditions are coming out now, despite
| being a widespread and longstanding issue. Previously, the media
| narrative around poor work conditions was all "Amazon, Amazon,
| Amazon", with little indication that it's a systemic issue with--
| let's be honest--far worse cases in America.
|
| Now Bezos is going full throttle. To what end? Why not operate
| from the shadows on a megayacht? If it is all ego, why not do
| this populism drive earlier to mitigate some of the damage?
| kypro wrote:
| Kind of genius... My understanding as a Brit is that CNN are
| known to be supportive of progressive economic policies. I
| suspect they're also critical of the existence of billionaires
| like Bezos in a society where many struggle to feed their
| families.
|
| Bribing influential CNN contributors who hold progressive or far-
| left economic policies is probably one of the better ways to help
| shift the media narrative towards one that benefits Bezos.
| weakfish wrote:
| CNN is hardly "far left" - they were highly unfavorable towards
| Sanders in primaries.
| [deleted]
| gameswithgo wrote:
| orrr, maybe bezos is also very progressive?
| balozi wrote:
| Bezos isn't known for being dumb with his money. So, I am curious
| about his motivation in this case. What is the deep reptilian
| part of his tycoon brain telling him? Is he buying positive press
| after yesterday's show? Does he care about the cause? Or is he
| buying a 1990 Cutlass Supreme from Jones on the down-low?
| whymauri wrote:
| Bezos has been obsessed with space since middle school, he's a
| huge Star Trek fan and originally wanted to study astrophysics.
| tills13 wrote:
| It's a tax write-off.
| avalys wrote:
| What do you imagine that means exactly?
| [deleted]
| woah wrote:
| Kramer: It's a write off for them.
|
| Jerry: How is it a write off?
|
| Kramer: They just write it off.
|
| Jerry: Write it off of what?
|
| Kramer: They just write it off!
|
| Jerry: You don't even know what a write off is, do you?
|
| Kramer: No. Do you?
|
| Jerry: No I don't!!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEL65gywwHQ
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Ah so tempted to post the punch line which is the best
| part of the bit. But I won't be the spoiler.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I'll explain why that comment almost never makes sense.
|
| Let's say your tax rate is 50% and your taxable income is
| $1,000,000, so you'll owe $500,000 in taxes. If you donate
| $100,000 to charity as a "tax write-off", now your taxable
| income is only $900,000 and you'll only owe $450,000 in
| taxes, _but you lost $100,000 to save that $50,000_. At the
| end of the day, you 'll have $50,000 _less_ than if you didn
| 't donate anything.
|
| Before anyone starts with "but what if it drops you into a
| lower tax bracket!": a) that's not how marginal taxes work,
| and b) the top tax bracket starts at $518,400 in the US in
| 2021, and I'm pretty sure Bezos made many times that amount.
|
| "It's a tax write-off" doesn't make sense mathematically.
| It's not a thing. There's not a plausible way where giving
| away money can improve your bottom line over not giving it
| away without having tax rates above 100%, which we don't
| have.
| mlazos wrote:
| It's a write off if they donate that money to a foundation
| which they lead and can use the resources of. I agree
| though, that write-off is often used to mean some magical
| tax loophole though. The former case is very interesting
| for a lot of rich people though. You can even leave your
| children in charge to pass the budget to them to use.
| pb7 wrote:
| Also it's a gift to an individual not a non-profit, which
| you can't write off at all.
| monocasa wrote:
| Is it direct from him or did he setup a foundation that
| he can donate to that disperses the funds?
| bagacrap wrote:
| well it does make sense in the case where Mr X "donates" to
| the X Foundation, chaired by X. Then, X has saved 50k and
| still has the same amount of funds at their disposal to
| distribute to cronies/use as marketing.
| omegaworks wrote:
| Bezos' taxable income isn't $1,000,000. Only an idiot
| billionaire would structure their day to day processes in
| ways that were taxable. He likely operates like other
| extremely wealthy people do[1]: take a small salary to
| cover the interest on extremely low-interest loans made
| possible with his massive stock holdings as collateral.
|
| 1. https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-
| trov...
| missedthecue wrote:
| Your own article literally says Jeff Bezos paid almost a
| billion dollars in federal income tax on $4.2 billion in
| income last year. Nothing about crazy schemes to minimize
| or offshore tax liability.
| omegaworks wrote:
| >In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the
| world's richest man, did not pay a penny in federal
| income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011.
|
| From 2014 to 2018 his wealth grew by 99B, and he paid
| under 1B in taxes. Would love a sub 1% effective tax
| rate.
| chrishynes wrote:
| Increase in value of assets isn't taxable until you sell
| them -- this applies for the value of your house just the
| same as Bezos's Amazon stock.
| missedthecue wrote:
| It's a real curiosity how not having any income will
| result in not paying any income tax. Jeff Bezos did not
| sell any Amazon shares in 2007 or 2011.
|
| https://www.secform4.com/insider-trading/1018724-25.htm
|
| https://www.secform4.com/insider-trading/1018724-18.htm
|
| And a stock you own going up in value is not income. It
| does not trigger tax liability. If he doesn't sell shares
| right now, he is simply deferring tax liability to a
| future date. He is not cheating the tax man. His tax rate
| is not less than 1%.
| omegaworks wrote:
| Such a curiosity that poor people without an income
| starve to death or are made homeless but rich people
| without an income can take vanity rocket trips!
| roody15 wrote:
| What an overtly political move by Bezos. He could have donated to
| libraries, schools, medical research ... nope donates to defacto
| narrative control.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Those damn chefs.
| [deleted]
| Y-Bopinator wrote:
| Assassinate Bezos
| [deleted]
| amirhirsch wrote:
| As a percentage of net worth, this is like me donating $200. He
| can afford to give away $100M every week forever on compounding
| interest alone. When I'm a billionaire the space suits will be
| purple.
| dumbfoundded wrote:
| Assuming a 5% yearly interest rate, compounded weekly, that's a
| net worth of ~$213K.
|
| My attempt at math:
| https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=200+%2F+%281.05%5E%281...
| motohagiography wrote:
| The recipients seem like earnest people who have done a lot of
| good, and the money will supercharge what they do.
|
| Personally, I think that if I had a really good plan for $100m I
| could probably raise it because there is a highly competitive
| sellers market for things that you can put that much money into
| and create value from it. I just don't have that plan. :)
|
| There are a zillion holes to throw money down, but something that
| can sustain its value and grow? Bezos' decision was probably the
| same as a regular investment "team, market, product" call:
| there's a real problem that a lot of people have, and here is a
| long list of people who want to solve it but nobody has a
| complete solution yet, and if I had to choose the top ones to get
| exposure to - to make a difference on this problem, these two
| guys are the best ones I can find to figure out what the solution
| is, so I'm in for $100m apiece. Same game as any angel or startup
| investor, he's just playing at the three-comma table.
|
| I genuinely believe the path to that table starts by challenging
| ourselves to think bigger, which means doubling down when it's
| the hardest, and testing assumptions when it's easy. It's not
| sufficient, but it is the necessary condition.
|
| Think of a problem that people with effectively infinite
| resources would invest in solving and start working on it. To
| them $100m is a rounding error, what they don't see are credible
| plans or track records for making the change they would invest
| in. Jones and Andres had it. The money isn't a prize, it's an
| investment and a bet. I wish them luck.
| joshuahaglund wrote:
| I just think this money shoulda been paid in taxes so we could
| collectively solve problems instead of some guy hand picking a
| couple lottery winners.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Given current level of disfunction in the US government, I'll
| take Bezos just picking who he thinks can do the most good with
| the money.
| danem wrote:
| Well this is what has left me most confused by this decision.
| Are Van Jones and an incredibly successful celebrity chef
| really the best he could come up with? If I were Bezos I'd at
| least give the money to a person or organization that would
| help improve my PR.
|
| edit:
|
| And by this I meant things like paying for poor kids college
| tuition etc. I guarantee no one in the media will be talking
| about this story, and where Van Jones puts the money, beyond
| this press conference.
| jl2718 wrote:
| I think he just hired CNN for that.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| CNN != the anchors
| dumbfoundded wrote:
| It's a classic conservative strategy. Take over a government
| program, run it into the ground, use it as evidence that
| governments don't work, and then run for office on a platform
| of dismantling the broken government.
|
| The essential problem with the idea of government is that it
| requires people to cooperate in good faith. People who say
| government doesn't work are essentially arguing that people
| cannot cooperate with each other.
|
| Given our level of social and technological progress, you'd
| think people would give up on this idea but it persists. In a
| hunter gather society, yes, like one of the ten guys in the
| tribe could provide way more meat than the other nine
| combined. In a global society of billions, it requires
| cooperation, coordination and institutions. A single person
| is an angstrom of humanity.
|
| Our personal vanity tempts us to ignore the hundreds if not
| tens of thousands of people that make great companies
| possible not even counting the public institutions and
| services. We like to believe a single person can be so
| important because that makes us feel like we can be
| important.
|
| In reality, no person is important. Bezos isn't important,
| Musk isn't important neither you or I are important. How the
| billions of people work together is important. We should be
| focusing our efforts on improving how we work together. Our
| systems of cooperation (aka governments, companies,
| communities) are the only important thing.
| jimbokun wrote:
| At scale, capitalist economies with democratic
| representative governments still seem like the most
| effective way to organize people working together.
| jl2718 wrote:
| Well the guy he's giving it to is always clamoring for higher
| taxes on everybody else, so obviously he thinks that's the best
| place for the money. We'll see what he does with it.
| [deleted]
| pcrh wrote:
| It's seriously distracting that the headline describes these
| recipients as "CNN contributors"....
| jgmmo wrote:
| why? that was first thing I thought when Bezos said he was
| giving Van Jones the prize... 'what... a CNN commentator?
| that's like giving Sean Hannity free money...'
| flowerlad wrote:
| So this money is for the recipients for to use as they please,
| including for personal use? Or are they required to donate to
| causes they care about?
| Zelphyr wrote:
| My understanding is that they can spend it however they wish,
| no strings attached.
| robertlf wrote:
| I suspect Bezos's PR person came up with this after that stupid
| you all paid for this comment he made.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-07-21 23:01 UTC)