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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

#761

Post by WA »

fighterpilot wrote: post #628
Decker87 wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respect your position but I completely disagree. We are so far off from needing to worry about the sun dying out. We should be focused on stopping and reversing climate change.

It's not just about the sun dying out. A large asteroid could strike at any time and wipe us out. If that is going to happen on Earth with probability p and we make it to Mars then our chances of going extinct due to that cause shrinks to less than p -squared (it's less than p -squared because Mars is smaller than Earth), which is many orders of magnitude smaller than p . Diversification is extremely important to our…

Still, it makes sense to take the chances for another 500 years, work on making our lives on planet Earth more habitable and sustainable and then invest in space faring tech.

The chances of being wiped out by a super volcano or asteroid impact over the next 500 years until we solved the sustainable energy problem and a stable ecosystem are rather small.

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

#762

Post by aporetics »

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…

They’re not exploring, they’re creating private, for profit, ventures. Your comparison doesn’t hold.

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

#763

Post by kennywinker »

gameman144 wrote: post #690
kennywinker wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I sortof disagree. Like, yes it’s down to individual corrupt politicians - but systemically basically nobody who isn’t corrupt can get elected anymore because of the massive amounts of dark money involved. So, getting mad at them seems pointless to me.

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

#764

Post by ThomPete »

spideymans wrote: post #749
ThomPete wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are assuming we know all the problems we might encounter. We don't, in fact there are many ways the human species can go extinct that are not fault of our own. The best we can do is to create general knowledge which allow us to better combat future challenges. Climate change is a potential problem but not existential and not something we can't handle with our current technological understanding. The idea that hum…

> Climate change is a potential problem but not existential and not something we can't handle with our current technological understanding. Climate change is not existential to humanity, but it is existential to human civilization as we know it.

The climate has wiped out 99.999% of all other species. We are the first who have a chance to avoid being part of that statistic. Not by minimizing our impact on the planet but by maximizing it through climate mastery.

Human civilization has never been as robust as it is now and we have never been as safe from the climate as we are now.

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

#765

Post by kennywinker »

Lionga wrote: post #760
samsin wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If every US person would donate this "pocket change" it would around 50 Billion in donations

A quick google shows that actually individuals give something more like $450 billion per year. Some of that is going to be the jeffs and marks, but i think gp is underestimating how much average people give to charity.

But more importantly, if we made the jeffs of the world pay their employees and their taxes we’d have a lot less need for charity

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

#766

Post by TaylorAlexander »

dane-pgp wrote: post #673
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sou…

It does seem a rather roundabout way to find a silver lining.

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

#767

Post by lwhi »

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…

Bezos: "How can I improve the chances of positive press?"

"I'll encourage journalists to say nice things by letting them believe there's a chance they'll become insanely rich if they do."

... Such a cynical move.

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

#768

Post by jollygoodshow »

pb7 wrote: post #372
ModernMech wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been trying to get a meeting with my Senators to express my opinion, but they won't have me. They regularly take meetings with corporate lobbyists though. I wonder what it is they're telling my Senators? Sure wish I had $10 million to spend on lobbyists like Amazon.

You elected Senators that don't care about your opinion. Maybe you should be more mad at them and less mad at Amazon who provides millions of people with exactly the goods and services they promise.

Brazen assumption that the senator they voted for is the one in power. It is a democracy after all, they could have been on the wrong side of it

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

#769

Post by duchenne »

geocrasher wrote: post #281
superfrank wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> neither Bezos or Branson made it to orbit.

It is true that reaching orbit is much more difficult than reach space but Branson has another company called Virgin Orbit that did reach orbit.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Orbit :

> The first successful flight was on 17 January 2021, which delivered a payload of 10 CubeSats to low Earth orbit (LEO)

It uses an unusual strategy. A boeing 747 carries the rocket under its left wing. So, it does not need a spaceport and can can be pre-aligned on any orbit.

Bezos is also trying hard to reach orbit with the New Glenn space rocket. But this one had a lot of delays.

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

#770

Post by kennywinker »

dumbfoundded wrote: post #661
kennywinker wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“At scale”. Name an example of a failed alternative, and i’ll show you a country where the CIA plotted coupes and waged economic warfare against them. We’re like an abused spouse - we keep hearing “i’m the only one who’ll love you” from our abuser while they cut us off from our friends and family.

I sometimes think we deserve capitalism. Capitalism is the best solution when you assume people are selfish, immoral, and all-around kind of evil. It's a system to incentive people to work together despite our awful nature. I certainly don't think it's the best system imaginable given different assumptions or conditions. I hope as the basic needs of more and more people are met, we will be able to come together. I th…

The collective generational trauma of about two centuries of industrialized capitalism means we don’t actually know what people are like in a system that doesn’t beat the kindness out of us every chance it gets. I suspect, a lot nicer - but not right away, it’d probably take a few generations to shake off the damage being done right now. I don’t think it makes sense to ask if “we” deserve it. If it can be better, then it should be better.
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