421–430 of 879 posts
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.
My attempt at math: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=200+%2F+%281.05%5E%281...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 vi…
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 trea…
> 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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This. Every engineer employed at BO is one engineer not wasting their talents doing adtech at FAANG to pay the bills.
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. 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 som…
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.
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…
> 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.
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…
> 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.
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…