Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres • Hacker News Board

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

#671

Post by staunch » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 2:30 AM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #505

staunch wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...

Imagine making up strawmen on forums so that you can feel smug knocking them down...

The fact is that governments already spend far more than billionaires are able to spend and are relatively ineffective. No one has ever suggested they stop doing their part. Billionaires lending their expertise and money is not a substitute for government work, it's just a proven accelerant.

See Bill Gates' work in Africa for an example. He has leveraged his fortune to help find effective opportunities for his money and government money. He has has saved millions of lives that no government would have otherwise saved, even if he had donated all of his money to the U.S. treasury.

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

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Post by coliveira » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 2:33 AM UTC

michaelpb wrote: post #577

Traster wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dis…

I believe they do this because the plan for such people is exactly to let earth be destroyed. Don't do anything to revert global warming, because, after all, "we" have money and technology to colonize the space and let the poor die from its catastrophic results.

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

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Post by dane-pgp » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 2:37 AM UTC

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #662

dane-pgp wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon draws a lot of profit (presumably) from millions of cheap plastic objects from overseas which will break and end up in landfills in some poor country. So you're saying he's found a way to make carbon sequestration profitable at scale? Maybe he is a hero.

It sounds like you might be joking, but no the plastic does not come from carbon removed from the air. We remove it from the ground as oil, turn it in to plastic, ship it overseas in carbon polluting container ships, transport each item to an end customer, and then transport them to the landfill where they will persist for generations. So no, I am not saying that.

I was half joking, so let me try to make the serious case here.

By purchasing oil to turn into plastics, manufacturers are in competition with buyers who intend to simply burn their oil-derived products (fuels). This increased competition must cause some (small) increase in the price of oil that has to be paid by the oil burners, making it marginally less economically competitive in comparison to renewable energy sources.

The effect might be negligible, and I obviously haven't modelled whether this leads to a significant reduction in oil burning (especially relative to the carbon pollution of the container ships, as you say), but it is an interesting thought experiment.

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

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Post by cratermoon » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 2:37 AM UTC

Wow between this and the donations Jeffy made a couple of weeks ago [1][2], he's either trying to write off as much of the money he made from the pandemic, or trying to whitewash his reputation to distract from criticism of sending himself into space. Or maybe both?

1 https://www.marssociety.org/news/2021/07/14/mars-society-sel...

2 https://airandspace.si.edu/newsroom/press-releases/smithsoni...

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

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Post by staunch » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 2:38 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #668

agrover wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salk and Polio vaccine.

Salk said: "It's brought me enormous gratification" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Salk

Salk got funding for his lab from the billionaire Mellon family. The Polio vaccine is a prime example of how billionaires can help push civilization forward.

> Sarah Scaife's causes were family planning, the poor and the disabled, hospitals, environmental causes and various good works in and around Pittsburgh. Her most famous gifts, in the late 1940s, were to the University of Pittsburgh – $35,000 to equip a virus research lab. In that lab, Jonas Salk discovered his polio vaccine.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clint...

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

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Post by ThisIsMineToo » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 2:40 AM UTC

cratermoon wrote: post #674

Wow between this and the donations Jeffy made a couple of weeks ago [1][2], he's either trying to write off as much of the money he made from the pandemic, or trying to whitewash his reputation to distract from criticism of sending himself into space. Or maybe both? 1 https://www.marssociety.org/news/2021/07/14/mars-society-sel... 2 https://airandspace.si.edu/newsroom/press-releases/smithsoni...

Ill go for both. Sprinkle some money around to distract from the actual issue.

Or is he thanking the Amazon workers again for making it possible for him to donate 200M ?

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

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Post by cratermoon » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 2:42 AM UTC

chasd00 wrote: post #184

ianai wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. They seem like good choices. Maybe he’s making a pivot now that he’s retired from Amazon? I will caution people to not read too little or too much into this. Personally I live by the maxim of “I don’t need a reason to do something nice, but I do need a reason to do something mean.” So I suggest we all wait and see what else he does before further analysis.

probably attempting to buy his way into heaven now that his fortune has been won. The same thing Gates is doing.

everyone: look at the billionaire who bought himself a dick-shaped rocket ride to space

Jeffy: hey everybody, I gave away the change I found in the cushions of my couch!

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

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Post by spoonjim » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 2:42 AM UTC

superfrank wrote: post #610

spoonjim wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know all the ins-and-outs of everything these three companies are working on, but I'm having a very hard time believing that not a single innovative technological has come out Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic. Especially since many Blue Origin employees are former SpaceX employees.

Sure, just like building a superyacht today has some innovation as they customize it to each customer. But ultimately Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are retrodding old ground.

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

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Post by staunch » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 2:43 AM UTC

8note wrote: post #459

staunch wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This "eventually" sounds like it's really "we get progress once we put them through guillotines and claw back all the tech we paid for" The end state of these things is still government provided utilities: space equivalents to roads and busses The main benefit of billionaires doing this is that republicans love giving as tax money to rich people, so it can actually be funded, and the funding is what really decides wh…

Can you point to some examples in history of things going this way? There are relatively few advances that were done purely by governments. Usually progress starts in the government and is then superseded by private industry, or the reverse.

There's a reason capitalist-America has led technological progress for 100+ years. The USSR had almost purely governmental funding and their administrators were almost universally terrible at genuine innovation.

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

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Post by gameman144 » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 2:43 AM UTC

jonny_eh wrote: post #217

pb7 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> 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? They've been rewarded enough already. Sometimes enough is enough, it's obscene.

The thing is, most of the net worth of these people isn't just sitting around in a big bucket of cash; the wealth of these people is overwhelmingly due to their ownership of their businesses.

If I own a mom-and-pop sandwich shop worth $1 million, and I take a $50k salary, I imagine most people would be fine with that.

If I grow this sandwich shop into a national franchise worth $1 billion and still take a $50k salary, I still am in possession of just as much spendable cash, but suddenly I'm a billionaire on paper. It seems incredibly immoral to strip my own business from me because it's been too successful, and that type of ownership expropriation seems extremely likely to stifle entrepreneurship.

Tax people when they sell stock. Tax people's income. Tax collateralized assets. Tax the hell out of them if they're making boatloads of cash. But to wrest ownership of someone's creation from their hands because they've done too good a job creating it seems like a recipe for disaster.