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

#691

Post by jpgvm » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 2:54 AM UTC

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…

Also if anyone should get the credit for Virgin Galactic it should be Burt Rutan and the folks at Scaled Composites whose blood sweat and tears made this happen.

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

#692

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 2:56 AM UTC

jamesgreenleaf wrote: post #259

sofixa wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a species. It's what's next. I find it extremely weird that people are banking on a (almost literal) moonshot for the survival of our species. Isn't trying to stop/lessen the damage we're doing to the place we currently live and which can sustain us better and more optimistic proposition than hoping a metric shitton of things go perfectly after probably mil…

The Earth is going to die one day. The Sun will die too. There is no guarantee that intelligent life will survive on this single planet, even if we do a perfect job of taking care of it. Catastrophic, species-killing events can happen at any time. If we wish to ensure the long-term survival of the only intelligent life in the universe that we know about (as well as the survival of all the other creatures on Earth, wh…

[deleted]

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

#693

Post by dumbfoundded » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 2:57 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #650

dumbfoundded wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consolidation of money and power into the hands of a few people is most of the most prevailing trends in history. What do you think a king is? Or a conquerer? Or a Caesar? It strikes me as quite ignorant to posit that wealth and power has never been concentrated into any sort of autocracy. If anything, we live in a unique time and place where military power and financial power are so separated. It is our democratic i…

> Or a Caesar? Caesar gained power through running a business providing people with wine? > You also seem to completely abandon your previous statement Not at all. It is obvious that people who became wealthy through force of arms or using taxation to line their pockets are in a different category.

I'm not sure you really have a grasp of human history if you think money and force are separate things. That's only a very recent idea.

If you look at historical rankings of wealth, by far the richest people were leaders of great empires. They were so wealthy that it's silly to put it in modern terms (1) & (2). Caesar Augustus controlled the entire output of Egypt which was the breadbasket of the Mediterranean world. His person wealth is estimated to be in the $5 to $10 trillion range.

More recently, how rich was Stalin when he could literally do anything with an economy making up 10% of global GDP? It's even unclear how much Putin is worth with credible accusations that he recently built a $1B palace (3) and has a wealth in the $200B range.

It is only our recently invented democratic institutions that enable billionaires who profit from non-violent sources. I sincerely hope you develop a sense of how important these institutions are.

This is my last comment btw, I hope you feel like you've learned something.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_historical_...

(2) https://www.luxuo.com/the-lux-list/super-rich/richest-people...

(3) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56007943

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

#694

Post by AndrewKemendo » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 2:58 AM UTC

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?

I've yet to see a practical alternative to market based pricing that doesn't require rewiring humans at a massive scale.

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

#695

Post by sakopov » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 3:00 AM UTC

I know that Bezos can do whatever he wants with this money, but this is bizarre. If I read news like this in Russian media I'd think it's a clever bribe. But I guess in the US it's called a "charitable donation" and everyone just shrugs their shoulders and think it's some kind of new charitable tactic. This is literally how you buy narrative from a giant media network and make it look like you're a cool dude just raining free money on people.

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

#696

Post by Uhhrrr » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 3:00 AM UTC

fork1 wrote: post #596

Uhhrrr wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I think he's got something here. Surely Bezos could also spend some of his billions overthrowing African kleptocracies.

The issue is not overthrowing them, but finding a good replacement. Overthrowing one just to get another similar one is kinda pointless.

I was assuming he would turn the countries into fulfillment centers.

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

#697

Post by staunch » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 3:02 AM UTC

varispeed wrote: post #333

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…

> A public space race of billionaires is exactly the kind of thing we should all be hoping for. I'd rather see them paying fair wages and taxes. It's hugely inappropriate that they make billions while their workers struggle to pay rent. It's only possible, because those poor people are too worked out to protest and do something about effectively being slaves. These rockets seem more like modern day pyramids, only dif…

> I'd rather see them paying fair wages and taxes.

Unless you're in the "billionaires must not exist" camp, which we could argue about, they'll still be very rich, given the scale and success of their businesses. A net worth of $50 billion vs $150 billion doesn't change all that much, for the U.S. treasury or Bezos.

> It's hugely inappropriate that they make billions while their workers struggle to pay rent.

There are many thousands of Amazon workers making six figure salaries. Thousands that making millions per year. These people are not struggling to pay rent. Amazon has also saved millions of low income people money through their services, not to mention the billions of taxes generated by their businesses. They're not some purely predatory business, like cigarette and alcohol companies. Billions of people benefit from Amazon.com and AWS-powered services every day of their lives.

The fact that low skilled jobs pay crap is in no way unique to Amazon, they just happen to employ more than any other single organization.

I'm fully onboard for a UBI policy in the US and I doubt Bezos or Musk would object for reasons of greed. The caricature of these guys being extremely greedy is fairly ignorant. Greediness is not what made them so rich.

> These rockets seem more like modern day pyramids, only difference is that they will not last 3000 years.

There's some other major differences, like they can actually make humanity space-faring, multi-planetary, provide world-wide high speed internet to poor villages, move toxic industries off-world, etc.

Even the pyramids were not all bad, although the best you can say about them is that they were jobs programs, and a better use of human resources than fighting useless wars.

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

#698

Post by kube-system » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 3:06 AM UTC

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?

Bad word choice on my part. I just meant government-sponsored space programs, in contrast to private attempts.

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

#699

Post by dantheman » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 3:07 AM UTC

ModernMech wrote: post #511

dantheman wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SpaceX raised about 6 billion in total, NASAs budget is 23 Billion/Year -- why did NASA lose the ability to get people to space? You can blame whatever you want, but at the end of the day - they're failing.

Didn't they just land a robot on mars? Maybe they aren't failing but have different priorities. People marvel that SpaceX docks with the ISS but the existence of the ISS and the people on it is taken for granted at this point. How did they get there before SpaceX?

Space Shuttle and then Soyuz.

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

#700

Post by DubiousPusher » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 3:12 AM UTC

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…

Ok but, "I have a sweeping romantic idea in my head that connects a bunch of human activity into a chain and I have decided that this is the next thing in that chain" isn't that good of an argument IMO.