Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do ICBMs have any practical uses besides delivering explosives?
Same day Prime delivery
literally lol, thanks
Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres
681–690 of 879 posts
Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres
#682Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Bezos is not 1 million times more productive Bezos has unambiguously produced 1m times more than what most humans have.
I've written 10 million lines of code. Can I get a ride to Mars too?
Nobody cares about your 10 million lines of code, so good luck.
Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres
#683Earlier quoted context omitted.
> is just testing to see if this type of philanthropy has better results. The idea of a billionaire spending time minmax-ing their donations seems highly unlikely.
You don't know many billionaires then. Many prominent philanthropists have written extensively about how to track, measure and optimize the impact of their donations.
A lot of charities secretly loathe big donations from the super-wealthy, because they come with all kinds of strings. The charities can't say no, generally. But people who run charities are rightfully put out when a rich person likes a charity enough to give it a lot of money but not enough to let the people running the charity use their expertise to decide how to spend it.
Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres
#684Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
For reference, orbital flight requires 17,400 mph (28,000 km/h)
Suborbital flight only requires 3,700 mph (6,000 km/h)
Highly recommend playing kerbal space program if you'd like to get a better intuitive understanding of the difference: suborbital flights are your second or third attempt - pretty easy, orbital flight will probably take you a dozen flights or so to figure out.
Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres
#685Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ignoring the influence one person can have is equally troublesome. Suppose Constantine never converted to Christianity. Suppose Genghis Khan had been injured before conquering Asia. Suppose Louis the XVI had reformed the French government. Sure some other ruler would probably have embraced Christianity or some other ruler would have conquered Asia but history is fundamentally a sequence of events and minor changes, l…
>Suppose Constantine never converted to Christianity What about the changes in wider Roman society that allowed for Constantine's conversion to have a large impact? >Suppose Louis the XVI had reformed the French government. Would those reforms have been carried out by the nobility? Would it have been enough to satisfy the peasants? Focusing on "great men" is a far too simplistic view of history and it ignores the imp…
"Great men" create Focal Points[0] (or, if you believe in great men, Schelling Points) around which societies and lines of history converge. It's probably equally true, though, to say that societal dynamics have within them focal points which allow certain men (and women) to become great.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_%28game_theory%29
Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres
#686All 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 anyone here would dispute the importance of always reaching beyond as a species.
Ultimately, however, these billionaires are not contributing to reaching beyond. We've been to space before -- in fact, the first space pioneers went further into space than any of these billionaires. Over half a century ago.
Their money would have been better spent on putting together new space telescopes or probes to look further afield, actually reaching for what's next, rather than reaching for familiar ground and taking themselves to the edge of the Earth's atmosphere -- to say nothing of the fact that it was largely for the sake of PR/spectacle.
Musk less so -- as another poster has said, SpaceX seems well-intended and useful.
Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres
#687Wow 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 ?
Bezos is probably hoping to convince Wally Funk to go on a motivational speaking tour of Amazon warehouses.
Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres
#688Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Democratic government could very well make the largest and riskiest investments, but I find it hard to believe that they make the most efficient investments. Government need to get a job done, but they also need to appease voters and play politics to be able to achieve long-term goals. Businesses self-select for efficiency in the long-term, because those that aren't efficient go bankrupt or get overtaken by a more ef…
When making long-term investments, it's often a bad idea to optimize for efficiency (if we want to measure efficiency as return on investment), because it's difficult to predict ahead of time which projects will work out the best in 10 or 30 years. Sometimes the best bets are the ones no one thinks will work out, and therefore no one wants to make.
I think PG has spilled a lot of ink about this in the context of VC investment, but the same idea doubly applies to government funding because their time horizons are even longer term. If all you do is optimize for next quarter, next year, or even the next 5 years, you're going to miss the things that at first seem innocuous or useless, but then in 30 years blow up into something huge.
Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres
#689Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is the romanticized version. The history of man is exploration, expansion and exploitation. Destroying everything nice in its path. We destroyed other species, our own species if they looked different, and finally we have all but destroyed the planet. Rather than staying on that path maybe a better approach for humanity is compassion, kindness and helping each other out. Having said that, I'm totally okay with b…
> as it puts money back in the economy That's the rich people hoarding cash theory. They don't hoard any cash. All of it is invested in the economy. Even "cash" deposits in the bank are, as the bank loans out a multiple of those deposits.
> They don't hoard any cash.
Instead they spend it on lobbying politicians (or becoming politicians) to pass laws that make it easier for them to make money at the expense of everyone else.
Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres
#690Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, there's either a legal tax shelter he will take advantage of, or he'll pay the gift tax. People complain about the wealthy and giant corporations "paying no tax" but they are paying the minimal taxes that the law reqires, as we all do (any readers who voluntarily send extra money to the IRS are excepted).
Weirdly, a system where large sums of money are required to hold political power seems to result in low tax burdens for the ultra-rich. I can’t quite figure out how the two are linked tho… /s
The responsibility for the totally-warped tax law falls entirely on our elected officials.
I expect people to try to bend rules to their advantage, and I expect rule-makers to not concede. I don't blame soccer players for taking a dive when it helps improve the odds of pulling a card; I blame FIFA for not putting in rules to disincentivize this behavior (though in soccer in particular, this is changing).