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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

#501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

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

#502
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…

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.

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

#503
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…

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.

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

#504

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…

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.

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

#505

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…

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 constra…

> 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...

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

#506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 =/

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."

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

#507
post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Who said that he was? Wealth has little to do with productivity.

Yes, and perhaps that might be a problem, don't you think?

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

#508
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…

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?

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

#509
post #102

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…

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

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

#510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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".

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/theroadtothefi...

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