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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

#251

Post by bluedevil2k »

Salgat wrote: post #77
TechBro8615 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also caused me exactly zero suffering. In fact, they actually helped me since I was able to order from Amazon throughout the lockdown.

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…

> 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.

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

#252

Post by courtf »

tdfx wrote: post #222
courtf wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#254

Post by lumberingjack »

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 money doesn't go to space.lol

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

#255

Post by mustafa_pasi »

aeternum wrote: post #216
sweetheart wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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

#256

Post by dantheman »

ljm wrote: post #221
edmundsauto wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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.

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

#257

Post by Retric »

aeternum wrote: post #205
hemloc_io wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

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

#258

Post by louloulou »

coliveira wrote: post #245
aeternum wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Those two things are not mutually exclusive.

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

#259

Post by jamesgreenleaf »

sofixa wrote: post #219
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…

> 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 mil…

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.

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

#260

Post by asciimov »

cowgoesmoo wrote: post #143
beerandt wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You or me would sell stock and pay taxes. He borrows against the shares, which keeps his votes while cashing out non-taxable income.

But wouldn't he need to sell stock eventually to service the loan payments?

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.

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