751–760 of 879 posts
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I think you're articulating exactly what the other commenters find appalling: a single man with the power of a state.
You, a single human being, can send messages from your home to the other end of the planet within a second today. This is greater power than any state had even 100 years ago. Why compare this "single man's power" to a state from 50 years ago? It's disingenuous.
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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…
At least cheaper than going to actual space and longer than using parabolic flights in planes.
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> 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.…
Stalin didn't buy his way into power. He took power by force, then used that power to make himself rich.
This is not capitalism. As I pointed out, people who take money through force are in a quite different category.
> I hope you feel like you've learned something.
I'm dumbfounded that you believe that Stalin, Caesar, etc., were free market capitalists gaining their wealth through running a successful business.
> It is only our recently invented democratic institutions that enable billionaires who profit from non-violent sources.
None have yet turned that into running the country. Note how billionaire Bloomberg's presidential campaign failed miserably. As did Ross Perot's. Rich people in America have not had much of a track record of buying themselves into office, though elected representatives have a tendency to get very rich while in office. Hmmm...
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> Bezos and especially Branson's ventures feel much more like personal vanity projects than something that will actually push space exploration. I'm not sure why people feel this need to draw this weird line in the sand and say that SpaceX is okay because Musk built a business, but Blue Origin and Virgin are bad because... reasons? Technology advances for all sorts of reasons. Lamborghinis exist because a farmer was…
Even Bezos and Branson stopped right now, they've still proven that it's possible for a company other than SpaceX to put a man in orbit and dumped billions of dollars back into the economy. False. I hate to be "that guy" but neither Bezos or Branson made it to orbit. Those were sub-orbital flights with parabolic trajectories. To use your analogies: If Tesla were the Ferrari, then Virgin Galactic and friends would be…
What exactly would they need to do to prove its not a carnival ride? Help me understand what your bar is.
Before you can run, first you learn to walk. And before that, you learn to crawl.
So in your view, Blue Origin is nothing more than a vanity/fun project. I’d really like to understand what objective take you have.
For the record, I do know engineers at Blue Origins, and knowing how much they believe in the mission (their words), I’m struggling to understand what objective take you might have other than “I don’t like Bezos or billionaires and so I’m going to dismiss all the hard work that went into this as a carnival ride”
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> 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.
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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…
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…
“A lot of people are hurting badly” is a subjective statement. If you listen to economists or look at the data, the world overall is doing better today than in the past.
Help me understand why space exploration has to stop because some people are suffering, just as people suffered in the past when governments or other companies invested billions in X. Was the Apollo program a mistake? Was the ISS, the most expensive project in history, also a mistake? Is India wrong to send a satellite to Mars? What about China? Do you have a problem with America’s extreme, bloated military budget? Where’s the emotional rage about all these other things? What makes Bezos or Branson so special?
There’s a more inaccurate but emotionally appealing argument that I think you’re trying to make - that we can simply use money to make every problem go away.
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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…
The only thing it may make cheaper is suborbital flights, which are essentially useless. You can't even launch satellites that low. So there's essentially no practical purpose for their tech, and their companies, besides bragging rights for rich guys.
A lousy metaphor we could use here is that in a world of automobiles, Bezos and especially Branson decided to research horses. It's not a very good metaphor - maybe a better one is someone trying a new entrant in the floppy disk category in 2021. Much like "Zip Drives" were able to make contemporarily larger floppy drives in their day (100mb instead of 1.3mb), you likely could make very good "modern" floppies in 2021, measuring in hundreds of gb, but they would still possess the fundamental flaws of the medium (being so easy to damage), and you simply couldn't get away from that. We abandoned it as a technological dead end for a reason.
They achieved something we already have the tech to do; the only thing that's special is that they paid for it all by themselves.
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Musk, on the other hand, has two feathers in his cap - the first is that they're working on tech that's already fundamentally useful and "has room to grow" in incremental improvement. Getting to orbit is fundamentally useful (it's the tipping point where you can start to do satellites, and even extra-terrestrial trips); and pouring R&D into making that cheaper is very helpful for humanity.
The other feather he's got in his cap is that the company he founded didn't just do some piddly "incremental improvements" that shaved a little bit off the cost of launch. We'd all be cheering if they'd shaved, oh, 10% of the cost away. That would be really good for humanity.
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But no.
They went so far above and beyond that it's absolutely daffy duck. They won the lottery. They didn't roll a natural 20; they rolled a d20 and the dice face on top said "50 million".
They invented reusable rockets - which everyone, including all the government space agencies, had written off as permanently impractical. The cost comparisons are just nuts — The cost of a space shuttle launch is something like 0.5-1.5 billion dollars. A similar launch from space x is something like, pessimistically, a few hundred thousand. It's like FIVE ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE. This is my first "allcaps" on HN, but it needs the emphasis. The thing that Musk's company (really; folks like Gwynne Shotwell deserve core credit here) did was a quantum leap that honestly - nobody else might have had the political capital to do. We might have gotten this a century earlier than an alternate timeline without him precisely because of the stupidity of "allocation of funding" - there's no practical reason why a government agency couldn't have done this; it's all social dynamics and groupthink.
It singlehandedly makes a lot of crazy, impractical things (like solar panels in space to solve terrestrial power problems) tip from pure fantasy into "gosh, maybe we could actually do this?" He's already rolling out Starlink, but there are an awful lot of really helpful things for real, contemporary problems on earth that "cheap space launches" could solve.
"One of these is not like the others."
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 moon and mars are both ridiculously unsuitable for human life.
Why on earth would that possibly be an option rather than making even a cursory attempt to slow or stop the destruction of our perfect planet?
It's a ridiculous idea. How could anyone think this was a worthwhile endeavor?
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> 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 in a lot of people's eyes all Branson and Bezos have done is show up late to the game with inferior technology and thrown themselves a party for it.
If you despise Bezos and Branson because of their wealth, you can just leave it at that. But trivializing the hard work and accomplishment that went into what happened two now this month is near sighted, short term thinking. IMO it actually explains why America’s Congress is basically at a stand still. People are better feeling outraged about something rather than celebrating something right in front of them.
Without scale, reporting on donations like this is nothing but PR for the ultra rich. Bezos donated $200M, his net worth: $211 billion Scale that to a normal human’s net worth - let’s take the national average: $121,411 And you see that he just gave away the equivalent of $120 dollars. Barely pocket change.
I see your point, but I don't agree that it's "barely pocket change". If the average person donated $120 to a cause they believe in (which doesn't necessarily benefit themselves) then that's commendable.