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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

#571

Post by malwrar »

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…

I don't think distinguishing them is really useful. For Bezos at least, it's worth noting he's an ex-ceo of one of the most successful companies in the world and now seems to be spending a lot of his time on this project. I think it's more fun to be optimistic that this will contribute towards a more interesting future where humans in space is just kinda normal.

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

#572

Post by pb7 »

andrepd wrote: post #507
pb7 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

No. I want people to keep being incentivized to create innovative companies, products, and services that make my life easier and more enjoyable. The people that are successful in doing so will reap rewards many orders of magnitude more than their employees that did not take on any risk and whose output is measured by “productivity”.

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

#573

Post by dumbfoundded »

WalterBright wrote: post #490
dumbfoundded wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments actually make the risky investments. From infrastructure to nukes to the internet to space travel to particle colliders to fusion. The governments that have made these investments are the ones that do the best job of representing the interests of millions of people. If you take the limit of concentrating wealth, you get a dictatorship. They don't seem to do much. It's hard to believe in democracy and insa…

> Governments actually make the risky investments. Large investments are not the same as risky investments.

Democratic governments make the largest and riskiest investments. I've provided quite a few examples in the last century. Do you have any evidence or theory as to the contrary?

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

#574

Post by tomComb »

sgpl wrote: post #340
consumer451 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another reason to temporarily suspend cynicism is that this is a very interesting method of philanthropy. Allowing the recipients to chose their own destinations for the money could lead to a more diverse and disruptive set of expenditures. I am interested to see this award program's effects in 10-20 years. Is this an annual event? I never saw a definitive answer on that.

I mean I'd say Mackenzie Scott (fka: Mackenzie Bezos) is someone who should be lauded more here. Not that it's a competition or that one takes away from the other but she's doing more to chip away at the status quo of philanthropic giving vs others. In 2020, she gave away nearly $6 billion to 500 organizations. And has distributed $2.74 billion so far this year to about 286 orgs. From what I've read, these grants/don…

J. K. Rowling too, though not on quite the same scale: she would be a self-made billionaire, but she's given away enough that I don't think she's a billionaire anymore.

To me, she seems like a really admirable public figure in general.

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

#575

Post by dane-pgp »

andrepd wrote: post #507
pb7 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

So maybe we should be taxing wealth instead of productivity (i.e. income). Or at least let's tax both, with a 0% tax rate on the first $100m of wealth.

The median US household pays an amount of tax each year equivalent to about 8% of their net worth, so that would be an obvious rate for billionaires to pay on their wealth.

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

#576

Post by cwkoss »

xibalba wrote: post #107
cassac wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It deserves cynicism. If he wasn’t a jerk he’d just pay his employees more and maybe pay some taxes. When everyone is fair upfront they don’t need to give us free turkeys on thanksgiving we can buy our own.

Wage growth is starting to take off in the US due to extremely fierce competition over job applicants. If, as you say, Amazon doesn't pay employees enough, they will leave in droves for better paying jobs. Of course, if your facts aren't correct, they won't. To wit, 71% of Amazon workers in the recent unionization drive in Alabama voted against a union, citing, of all things, the good pay and strong benefits of the j…

Didn't Amazon also do a whole bunch of union busting before that vote, including trying to film the ballot box? (Or am I getting my Amazon union busting stories confused?)

I wonder if 71% of workers who voted against the union really believed that, or what percentage just voted it down for fear of losing their jobs.

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

#577

Post by michaelpb »

Traster wrote: post #501
lend000 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right all these comments are just baffling me. This is premature optimization on steroids. For a random analogy, I really hope these people aren't in meetings arguing about how to design a DB schema to last for 50000000 years, when the meeting topic was how to fix slow queries on an unindexed field.

The US life expectancy dropped one of the largest drops ever (1.5 years) and instead of facing the actual real-life disasters happening, "science enthusiasts" are quoting TV shows about science fiction disasters that might happen in 50000000 years... while the scene outside the window literally looks like this: https://abc7news.com/why-is-the-sky-orange-sf-yellow-califor...

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

#578

Post by spoonjim »

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…

Because what Musk is doing is pushing a technological frontier that can create new technologies to serve humankind while Bezos and Branson are not. It’s like inventing a new kind of ship vs. buying a super yacht.

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

#579

Post by missedthecue »

monocasa wrote: post #482
missedthecue wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But eventually, you sell that capital to repay the loan, triggering a tax event.

Except you had access to the capital the whole time via the loans, and only pay back according to the loan schedule, negating most of the tax burden. Hence the 1% figure based on the numbers you yourself provided.

In what way does that negate tax burden. You have to sell (some of) the assets to pay the loan you borrowed. That causes a tax to be paid.

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

#580

Post by dukeofdoom »

This is the same guy that has his employees pee in bottles to make quotas. I guess he's rewarding people that helped him over the last year. I can see how CNN deserves it for being so kind to him and not criticize too much the lockdowns. Though I feel like part of that money should have gone to BLM for helping his business grow too.
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