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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

#551

Post by cwkoss »

superfrank wrote: post #397
geocrasher wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 trut…

> 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…

SpaceX actually brings things up to orbital speeds, which is the minimum bar for useful space activity.

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

#552

Post by YuriNiyazov »

peteretep wrote: post #516
kube-system wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fr…

> nation-states You mean "countries", right, or are you trying to make some point about nationalism?

No, he means “governments.”

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

#553

Post by micropresident »

zapnuk wrote: post #185

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.

> At least I had a role in electing the government and can change my vote based on their performance.

The real crux. You want control over what other people do.

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

#554

Post by xyzzyz »

cwkoss wrote: post #547
superfrank wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Neither Bezos or Branson achieved orbital velocities, which is the minimum bar for doing useful things related to space. It really is just a carnival ride - it's not about who's in it, its that they didn't actually achieve anything: what they built has no utility except as a dick-measuring contest. Orbit is a little bit of upwards velocity and a whole lot of sideways velocity. They only did the much simpler former. T…

> Neither Bezos or Branson achieved orbital velocities, which is the minimum bar for doing useful things related to space.

Well, ICBMs are very useful, and only require sub-orbital velocities, though I don't necessarily want Bezos or Branson to get those.

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

#555

Post by aylmao »

WalterBright wrote: post #392
monocasa wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> Also, the economy was considerably smaller in those days, and so the Apollo program took up a much larger share of it.

Isn't that what adjusting to today's dollars essentially does? Those $28 billion were back then what $257 billion are in today's economy.

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

#556

Post by thundergolfer »

dmz73 wrote: post #550
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…

The problem is not that billionaires are spending their money on space exploration. The problem is that we have many billionaires and millions (billions world wide) are barely surviving. Do you want our species to expand to other planets with this kind of society? We will all end up being slaves if this keeps going on, not in 19th century sense but modern kind - forced to work endless hours just to scrape enough mone…

Kim Stanley Robison's Red Mars explores exactly this problem of colonising a new world whilst the old world is brokenly unequal and has ecological disasters tearing it apart.

Really good book. I won't spoil it too much, but think it offers a powerful challenge to the techno-utopianism of Mars Colony obsessives. The Martians cannot escape their terrestrial ideologies, because those ideologies are still rooted in the old world that they rely on for survival, and because they carried over those ideologies in their own minds.

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

#558

Post by shkkmo »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #339
ixacto wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

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 ord…

Self-sustainability is definitely more than 50 years away (barring a major technological revolution.)

Once sustainability is achieved, exponential growth seems implicit (even if the base of that exponential growth is close to 1.)

Full, long term Sustainability is probably centuries away (at a bare minimum and assuming some very significant technological advancement.)

Ironically, the very technology (manufacturing, sealed stable ecological design, etc) that would allow a fully self-sufficient mars colony would also significantly reduce that set of possible civilization ending catastrophes on earth.

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

#559

Post by denkmoon »

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…

They can do whatever the hell they want after they've paid their taxes. That is the consternation, not that going to space is somehow bad.

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

#560

Post by thundergolfer »

mym1990 wrote: post #423
jonny_eh wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100x the poverty line. Excess earnings goes to taxes.

RIP innovation if the bar is that low

The world's greatest 20th century innovators, such as Einstein and Shannon, did not do their work to get rich. It's more than a little crazy that "innovation" has become so closely associated with ECommerce entrepreneurship, and is assumed to be driven by greed.
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