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Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

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Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#221

Post by ljm »

edmundsauto wrote: post #53
whymauri wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-orbi…

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 distr…

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.

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#222

Post by tdfx »

courtf wrote: post #188
tdfx wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

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…

> 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.

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#223

Post by void_mint »

Zelphyr wrote: post #9

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…

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.

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#224

Post by theandrewbailey »

tspike wrote: post #73
Zelphyr wrote: post #9

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…

That quote is referring to the history of Europeans, not humanity.

Many non-europeans have been pro-expansionist.

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#225

Post by ModernMech »

BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #182
eli wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a proportional share

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)?

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.

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#226

Post by staunch »

hemloc_io wrote: post #138
Zelphyr wrote: post #9

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…

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 wer…

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.

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#227

Post by pb7 »

jonny_eh wrote: post #217
pb7 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> 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.

So where do you draw the line? What's the number? And when that number is reached, what happens exactly?

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#228

Post by MildlySerious »

pb7 wrote: post #102
peakaboo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

>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…

> 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...

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#229

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew »

ErneX wrote: post #95
lefrenchy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#230

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #52
lefrenchy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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]
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