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

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/20/media/van-jones-bezos-100-million/index.html

by flowerlad • 5 years ago

241 801 5 years ago

catillac• 5 years ago

There will be a lot of cynicism on this post from the HN crowd, but these are unbelievably good recipients. I have interacted with Jose Andres many times, and go to his DC restaurants when I visit, and he is truly a wonderful soul who spends all his effort helping others. I don’t know much about Van Jones beyond what I see on TV, but if he’s of the same character as Jose Andres, that is stellar and they will both do wonderful things for our world with that money.

consumer451• 5 years ago

Another reason to temporarily suspend cynicism is that this is a very interesting method of philanthropy. Allowing the recipients to chose their own destinations for the money could lead to a more diverse and disruptive set of expenditures. I am interested to see this award program's effects in 10-20 years.

Is this an annual event? I never saw a definitive answer on that.

skeeter2020• 5 years ago

> I am interested to see this award program's effects in 10-20 years

One of the challenges of this "pay it forward on steroids" approach is that it will likely be hard to attribute measurable changes to the original investments.

It does seem notable that Bezos has captured a huge set of resources, then paid it out to others for redistribution under their policies and procedures; he's essentially acting like a government which raises some concerns.

sgpl• 5 years ago

I mean I'd say Mackenzie Scott (fka: Mackenzie Bezos) is someone who should be lauded more here. Not that it's a competition or that one takes away from the other but she's doing more to chip away at the status quo of philanthropic giving vs others.

In 2020, she gave away nearly $6 billion to 500 organizations. And has distributed $2.74 billion so far this year to about 286 orgs. From what I've read, these grants/donations don't come with any strings attached unlike grants from a lot of big foundations.

masterphilo• 5 years ago

Personally, I'm too confused to be even cynical about it. I don't know anything about Van Jones other than what I see on TV, but that by itself cannot explain why Bezos felt he deserved the "award".

chroem-11• 5 years ago

Previously he's been known for being openly communist (i.e. not just a regular socialist). As an aside, I still find it odd how we've rightfully shunned other totalitarian and mass murdering political ideologies, but we've completely whitewashed communism. I couldn't imagine another newscaster openly identifying as a nazi.

ianai• 5 years ago

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.

chasd00• 5 years ago

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

courtf6• 5 years ago

They are great choices, it's a generous and interesting form of charity. The focus on civility is a strange demand from the guy who has his workers peeing in bottles, but ok, I guess you need to stand for something at some point in the face of criticism.

Will this counterbalance the negative responses of the last few days? Probably not, the criticisms about the power wealthy individuals wield in society aren't affected, but it's a well timed gesture of good faith and the recipients are well chosen.

cs702• 5 years ago

I've interacted with José Andrés in the past too, and can attest that he's an amazing human being. He is the kind of person who will try his hardest to use every single one of those dollars to help other people who are desperately in need of that help. It's really great to see Bezos doing this.

cassac• 5 years ago

It deserves cynicism. If he wasn’t a jerk he’d just pay his employees more and maybe pay some taxes. When everyone is fair upfront they don’t need to give us free turkeys on thanksgiving we can buy our own.

havetocharge• 5 years ago

His employees are free to seek a better paid employment if a jerk they work for underpays them. What's up with this nonstop handout mindset lately?

pb727• 5 years ago

He pays all the taxes he owes.

missedthecue8• 5 years ago

He pays all of his employees no less than what Bernie Sanders considers a living wage. At what point would people be satisfied that Bezos pays enough?

xibalba• 5 years ago

Wage growth is starting to take off in the US due to extremely fierce competition over job applicants. If, as you say, Amazon doesn't pay employees enough, they will leave in droves for better paying jobs.

Of course, if your facts aren't correct, they won't. To wit, 71% of Amazon workers in the recent unionization drive in Alabama voted against a union, citing, of all things, the good pay and strong benefits of the job.

ironrabbit4• 5 years ago

Genuine question because I'm out of the loop: it looks to me like the "Bezos doesn't pay taxes" argument is just pointing out that most of his wealth sits in unrealized gains in amazon stock. When he sells stock, he pays taxes. Is there more to it that I'm missing? Is the prevailing argument that we should be paying taxes on unrealized capital gains?

prepend5• 5 years ago

pay his employees more

Doesn’t Amazon pay highest in its industry? I suppose people always want more, but it seems like they are already among the best.

Of course pay varies by location and what’s good in one state is good in another. But it seems the average warehouse worker pay is $12.61 [0] with states ranging from $9.66 for North Carolina (holy cow) to $14.84 in Washington [1].

Amazon pays $16/hour [2] so that’s quite a big higher than the average and even the highest state.

So it seems like an odd complaint, “the company with the highest pay should pay even more.” And would be more appropriate if they paid crap wages.

Warehouse worker isn’t the easiest job, but I’m not sure how a warehouse worker job for Amazon is harder than other employers.

[0] https://www.indeed.com/career/warehouse-worker/salaries [1] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-Average-Wa... [2] https://www.glassdoor.com/Hourly-Pay/Amazon-Warehouse-Worker...

cactus20933• 5 years ago

This line of argument is so completely unhinged. Bezos paid roughly $1B in taxes in 2018, and Amazon warehouses pay well above the minimum wage.

I understand progressives wanting to raise taxes and raise minimum wage, but why in the world would you blame someone personally for just paying the going rate? That's what we all do for the taxes and service providers we pay.

jimbokun7• 5 years ago

I don't understand the point about trying to make this a character referendum on one specific billionaire.

Just make federal minimum wage $15 / hour and be done with it. Why is there so much rhetorical energy wasted on singling out one billionaire or another, as if they are going to feel bad and unilaterally raise everyone's wages in some kind of real world Ebeneezer Scrooge moment?

Democrats technically control Presidency and both US Houses of Congress, but it's looking like they won't accomplish anything because of Manchin's love for the sanctity of the filibuster is greater than his love for delivering concrete economic benefits for his constituents.

andrepd13• 5 years ago

Absolutely. I don't want my fief Lord to throw me a morsel of food every now and then. I want to throw him down from his castle and share our wealth fairly, so I can buy my own food myself.

colordrops• 5 years ago

These guys are stooges of the elite for maintaining narrative control. They are part of the same media bloc as the Washington Post, which Bezos owns - that bloc being neoliberal establishment. To call them "unbelievably good recipients" is orwell speak.

timmytokyo• 5 years ago

I can maybe see this argument being made against Van Jones. But Jose Andres?

balozi• 5 years ago

Bezos isn't known for being dumb with his money. So, I am curious about his motivation in this case. What is the deep reptilian part of his tycoon brain telling him? Is he buying positive press after yesterday's show? Does he care about the cause? Or is he buying a 1990 Cutlass Supreme from Jones on the down-low?

tills132• 5 years ago

It's a tax write-off.

avalys• 5 years ago

What do you imagine that means exactly?

kstrauser• 5 years ago

I'll explain why that comment almost never makes sense.

Let's say your tax rate is 50% and your taxable income is $1,000,000, so you'll owe $500,000 in taxes. If you donate $100,000 to charity as a "tax write-off", now your taxable income is only $900,000 and you'll only owe $450,000 in taxes, but you lost $100,000 to save that $50,000. At the end of the day, you'll have $50,000 less than if you didn't donate anything.

Before anyone starts with "but what if it drops you into a lower tax bracket!": a) that's not how marginal taxes work, and b) the top tax bracket starts at $518,400 in the US in 2021, and I'm pretty sure Bezos made many times that amount.

"It's a tax write-off" doesn't make sense mathematically. It's not a thing. There's not a plausible way where giving away money can improve your bottom line over not giving it away without having tax rates above 100%, which we don't have.

whymauri4• 5 years ago

Bezos has been obsessed with space since middle school, he's a huge Star Trek fan and originally wanted to study astrophysics.

shawnk• 5 years ago

It’s the billionaire race not only did he reach outer space as he said he would, I know he wanted to be the first BILLY to do it. Branson bear him to it.. so he says ok.. I wasn’t the first to do it but I’ll be the first to dig into my bag and give away some life changing money. Which will spread the news of Blue origin even further.

Zelphyr4• 5 years ago

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 man is hung on the timeline of exploration, and this is what's next."

I personally don't care that these billionaires are spending their money on vacations to orbit. It's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a species. It's what's next.

nohr• 5 years ago

It's not though, it was only for us if the technology is returned to public space. That's why NASA is cool.

minikites4• 5 years ago

I personally don't care that these billionaires are spending their money on vacations to orbit. It's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a species.

Really? Which billionaires personally funded the Apollo program? The progress of our species shouldn't have to rely on the fickle preferences of one person, their enormous wealth should be taxed and the money should be used for programs like NASA and its benefits which help all of us.

alfalfasprout2• 5 years ago

But the reality is that competition really does drive innovation.

In the past few years we've seen SpaceX get reusable boosters working, a mission to the ISS, etc. Though people like to diminish blue origin's accomplishments due to not hitting orbit they were able to land their reusable booster on the first try too.

In a short amount of time we've seen tremendous progress in bringing down the costs of launching. It's frankly inconceivable NASA would do the same.

I have a few friends that have spent years at JPL and the amount of bureaucracy, waste, and red tape they had to deal with all went away when they started working at SpaceX and then Blue Origin.

andreilys• 5 years ago

You would be surprised to learn that history is littered with examples of the fickle preferences of one person impacting the trajectory of the human species.

Also I'm curious why you think that a government is better suited at spending money. From what I've seen this leads to lobbyists doing all they can to curry favor and secure contracts despite the fact that they deliver a sub-par product.

awillen• 5 years ago

Guess what? The government has decided that NASA isn't important. If they're taxed more, that doesn't magically send money to NASA.

The government has had first dibs on space for a very long time, and they've done nothing with it. Talk about taxing billionaires until you're blue in the face - whether you do or not has no effect on NASA. There's plenty of money to put towards it now, and it's not a priority.

I'm glad that billionaires are taking up an important cause for the future of our species when our government is failing to do so.

BHSPitMonkey5• 5 years ago

NASA is still doing the hard/interesting stuff, but now that there is a market that can more cheaply/rapidly work on creating the rockets/vehicles to get payloads where they need to go they can focus more on the actual missions.

Likewise, NASA has always chosen "buy" over "build" where applicable (like contracting out spacesuit construction to major textile manufacturers). If they'd done everything in-house, that means fewer resources where it matters. Public-private partnerships make NASA more effective, not less.

courtf6• 5 years ago

Getting to the moon and Mars won't save the human race, Earth is where life can be sustained. Humans cannot reproduce in space, on the moon or on Mars because gravity has a strong and vital role in gestation in mammals. Beyond that, these other locations are quite inhospitable (radiation, temperature, pressure, etc), more inhospitable than pretty much anywhere on Earth.

If we can't make it work here and end up destroying the ecology of Earth, upon which we depend, there's no reason to think we'll survive on the moon or Mars.

krallja• 5 years ago

FYI, there’s actually gravity on the Moon and Mars. We haven’t done studies to determine if it’s enough G for successful propagation of the species.

criddell• 5 years ago

I don't believe the moon and Mars are end goals, just steps along the way.

kmnc• 5 years ago

I mean, when you take your inspiration from television and sci-fi movies it does seem like rich people doing vanity ego projects is the best way for us to survive as a species. Assuming you mean mean the "rich" when you say species, because unless you are watching different movies then me the non rich don't survive or are turned into a slave class. The Earth...well its prospects are even grimmer.

It is stupid to be cynical of rich people spending money on productive ventures, yet I don't buy the idea that spending on getting the hell off of Earth is the best way to save the species. It might be...which is pretty damned depressing in my opinion.

tdfx3• 5 years ago

I don't buy the idea that spending on getting the hell off of Earth is the best way to save the species

What are the alternatives? On a long enough timeline, it won't be possible for life to survive here. And even on shorter timelines, trusting in untested asteroid deflection plans seems pretty risky, as well. Seems that diversifying ourselves in multiple locations as soon as possible is the best way to guarantee survival of the species (or whatever derivative species we become).

Zelphyr4• 5 years ago

I just finished The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal. It is a fantastic piece of alternate history science fiction that I highly recommend.

I mention it because the premise is that a meteorite hits the earth off the east coast of the United States and what the after-effects of such an event would be. It's horrific. A slow death at first that rapidly increases over a period of 50 years. It would be paradoxical because the immediate effects would be cold but the long-term effects would be a planet so hot that it couldn't sustain life.

Our global response to COVID has proven that we wouldn't be able to handle such a thing. How would you convince people that, sure, it's cold now but it's going to get hotter in 3-4 years? A LOT hotter. We can't even get these people to not freak out over having to wear a tiny piece of fabric in Costco!

We know something like this is going to happen. It's just a matter of when. Spending money to get off the earth could very well be the best way to save the species.

weare1382• 5 years ago

It's how we get to the moon

We already did that. Why not just support NASA?

jhgb• 5 years ago

Sadly NASA didn't do what people in the Age of Exploration did, namely settling there.

fighterpilot4• 5 years ago

Because something like VTOL rockets can only be innovated by a private company focused on unit economics and scale economies.

Government is good when the public externalities are large, the private benefit is small and there's an extremely large capital requirements.

This is not the case any longer for rocket tech, and so it makes zero sense to have the government do it. It'd be like asking the government to make smartphones, which is an obviously ridiculous proposition.

cbm-vic-20• 5 years ago

Because NASA can't get funding unless the right Congresspeople can spread the pork around their districts.

openforce• 5 years ago

Privatization spurred tremendous increase in efficiencies. SpaceX rocket material is much more fuel efficient, significantly more re-usable. Even the blue origin rocket landed on it's feet yesterday.

BHSPitMonkey5• 5 years ago

NASA is the one making those Moon/Mars missions actually happen. Companies like SpaceX or Blue Origin are just vendors that help NASA to have greater flexibility and do more with less. It's the same reason your company is able to move faster by leveraging pre-built solutions like Stripe/Twilio/Okta/etc. instead of re-building every one of those services in-house.

aeternum5• 5 years ago

NASA is beholden to congressional funding, and congress is supposed to act in the interest of their constituents.

Even if we assume everyone is rational and the system works as-designed, NASA must work to keep each state and even district within that state happy. That means hundreds of small contracts and explosions of complexity in order to do some of the work in each state.

NASA's mission designs for the last 50 years have been a mess of complexity and ridiculously expensive, and rarely happened as a result. Only now with the commercial contractors are things starting to change.

lefrenchy• 5 years ago

We literally got to the moon before any billionaires bought joy rides to lower orbit, so what you’re saying is proven false already by history?

It’s so insane to me that people honestly believe that we need billionaires to fund all their hedonic desires in order to achieve anything good and useful as a society. It’s provably false and frankly an absolutely pessimistic view of society and humanity.

throwaway0a5e2• 5 years ago

We literally got to the moon before any billionaires bought joy rides to lower orbit,

Once upon a time you needed nation state sponsorship in order to sail across the ocean.

It's absolutely insane to me that people don't see that a billionaire can do as a vanity project something that was ~50yr ago only the purview of superpowers as an obvious sign of societal progress.

ErneX• 5 years ago

What’s hedonistic? this is a business. There’s money to be made on space, be it via a fancy rollercoaster now or mining or who knows what else in the future. It is inevitable.

Hokusai3• 5 years ago

You are 100% right. A million people can own $1000 in a corporation, or 1 person can own $1,000,000,000. The company has the same capital but wealth is distributed differently.

Even if we needed big corporations, we still do not need billionaires.

WalterBright20• 5 years ago

Government did indeed put man on the moon. But they did it at an insane and unsustainable cost, which is why the moon was then abandoned.

Musk/Bezos/Branson are making space travel a paying proposition, which makes all the difference.

peakaboo• 5 years ago

I don't know how to put this in a polite way... Let's just say your brain seems to have gotten too much TV entertainment.

These billionaires made many billions on covid, while you got a 1400 dollar check so you could survive. These billionaires pay their workers minimum wage every day. People can't get toilet breaks at amazon warehouse without being harassed.

This guy is a world class parasite. There is nothing "we" about what he is doing. We are not with him. He doesn't care about any of us.

whymauri4• 5 years ago

I felt like I entered a wormhole in the GP comment where the ocean wasn't on fire, the Amazon wasn't burning down, a heat wave didn't sweep through the Northwest, and the polar caps aren't melting at an irreversible rate. The largest redistribution of wealth in history is happening right now while the global environment collapses and somehow there are cheerleaders egging it on so rich guys can play around in sub-orbit.

TechBro86152• 5 years ago

They also caused me exactly zero suffering. In fact, they actually helped me since I was able to order from Amazon throughout the lockdown.

pb727• 5 years ago

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 breaks at amazon warehouse without being harassed.

Citation needed. Individuals out of a population of 1,000,000 diverse people choosing to do things is not a trend.

He doesn't care about any of us.

I don't care about him either. It's a business transaction that benefits both parties, nothing more, nothing less.

rejectedandsad2• 5 years ago

while you got a 1400 dollar check so you could survive

American people had the most generous COVID response of any country in the world, including the Superdole.

rootusrootus3• 5 years ago

These billionaires pay their workers minimum wage every day.

My nephew works at an Amazon warehouse. Makes like 15 bucks an hour for the first 40, and then 20 more at double the rate (his choice to take the extra hours). He's very happy, and nothing suggests he feels taken advantage of.

misiti37804• 5 years ago

He's a parasite because the company (which hired 100K new workers during COVID) that he started and owns a shit-ton of equity in went up in the past year because of lockdowns?

UncleMeat• 5 years ago

An alternative viewpoint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4

I'm not convinced that exploration is such a self-justifying good that we should look past the very real and very urgent problems that are aggravated precisely by the people "leading the way" here.

acituan2• 5 years ago

It's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a species. It's what's next.

The core fallacy is to assume whatever made Earth less than ideal will not follow us to the new destination. To assume our survivability as species only depends on the locale, not what we will eventually turn that locale into.

This happened with every new frontier. The romanticism of "it will be better in the new place" is baked into our genes probably because of the explore/exploit mechanism; it is natural for any animal to want to wander off when resource/danger ratio in a place isn't ideal. What we omit is that the most important layer of our habitat is the anthroposphere; us and our artifacts. We will drag the best resources and worst dangers with us anywhere we go.

that their money is better spent here at home reminds me...

What that money represents is an agreement on commanding other humans' goods and services. As such, how much can that be "theirs" if we are taking a plant scale perspective? Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to inject a purely collectivist perspective here; money works great at certain scales, but for entire-humanity-scale issues it is a rather useless construct to think with.

To me a more accurate perspective is "smart but ultimately single person, thus bounded in their rationality, somewhat exploits the imperfections of our value representation/abstraction layer to redirect tons of goods and services of humanity into what is ultimately a useless vanity gesture that will generate no insight into humanity's perennial problems".

sigstoat• 5 years ago

The core fallacy is to assume whatever made Earth less than ideal will not follow us to the new destination.

there are plenty of existential risks which can't "follow" anything, or happen to more than one planet simultaneously.

does living on two planets eliminate all existential risks? no, and nobody has claimed that.

WalterBright20• 5 years ago

What are you afraid that humanity will do to Mars? There's no life there to disrupt, no ecosystem, no environment to destroy, nothing to displace.

tspike• 5 years ago

That quote is referring to the history of Europeans, not humanity.

theandrewbailey• 5 years ago

Many non-europeans have been pro-expansionist.

hemloc_io• 5 years ago

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 were accomplished in the Cold War?

SpaceX has been around for two years less and has accomplished orbital missions. Lumping them all together feels like we're giving out participation trophies.

boringg• 5 years ago

Just a minor correction here- SpaceX has been around for 20 years as well.

nyokodo• 5 years ago

Lumping them all together feels like we're giving out participation trophies.

In defense of Branson his other space company Virgin Orbit now does orbital launches also, and has cool capabilities that genuinely differentiate it from other providers. We'll see if Bezos catches up, he's personally focusing on it more now and may make faster progress on New Glenn etc.

aeternum5• 5 years ago

Did we have fully reusable rockets during the Cold War? Even though it's suborbital, Blue Origin's re-use is still a pretty impressive achievement.

Spaceplanes are also interesting tech. Maybe not the best choice for earth but could prove useful on other planets with different atmospheres.

MikeHolman• 5 years ago

They definitely aren't all at the same level right now, but I'm happy for the competition. Hopefully it will drive innovation.

staunch5• 5 years ago

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 constraints, so they can take more risks and pay experts what they're worth on the open market.

The public should be calling for more of this kind of thing across all major areas of civilization. Let's get a public race among billionaires for curing cancer, HIV, and poverty.

If it feeds their egos, all the better. Almost all progress is connected to selfish goals, even among the greatest and most "pure" scientists. They want to win a Nobel, for the money and the recognition. Or they're doing science because it's just extremely pleasurable for them, which is not a selfless reason at all. The sooner people realize that base motivations aren't a sin the better we'll all be. And in reality, motivations are always a mix of (mostly) selfish and selfless reasons.

Motivations aren't what matters. What matters is making progress that can (eventually!) benefit everyone.

superfrank5• 5 years ago

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 pissed at Ferrari. Motorolla made the first cellphone to steal the thunder from AT&T. Hell, the first space race back in the 60s was basically done to flex on the USSR.

If this is all a massive dick measuring contest, I honestly couldn't care less. It's advancing space exploration and providing competition in the space. 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.

When I hear people complain about this being a vanity project like that somehow taints the accomplishment, all I can think about is a particularly on the nose quote from the TV show Community. "Who cares if Troy thinks he's all that? Maybe he is. You think astronauts go to the moon because they hate oxygen? No, they're trying to impress their high school's prom king."

fbelzile• 5 years ago

I agree, Blue Origin at least was thoughtful enough to use fuel that doesn't emit CO2.

Branson is more likable but does seem like he's just trying to defend his title of being the eccentric billionaire, rather than thinking too hard about the future.

varispeed3• 5 years ago

Especially the Bezos one also feels unethical, when you take into account tax avoidance, poor wages and working conditions. It feels like he skimmed money from the workers and tax payer to give himself a trip to space.

He deserves ostracism rather than recognition.

X6S1x6Okd1st8• 5 years ago

I mean Blue Origin has been running for 20 years and the best we have from them is flights that were accomplished in the Cold War?

Blue Origin's is reusable. That's a huge difference.

Causality12• 5 years ago

Seconding this. Musk is a workaholic who happens to be a total jackass on Twitter but his employees are well paid and to the best of my knowledge aren't forced to piss in bottles at work.

fnord772• 5 years ago

Musk, for all his flaws, started an actual rocket company with new and frankly insane tech.

there's nothing that spacex has done that's "new tech". VTVL rockets were worked out in the 60s and the 90s

spacex does a good job of making it seem like what they're doing is new, though.

kube-system2• 5 years ago

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 from them is flights that were accomplished in the Cold War?

Plenty of other nation-states have been working on spaceflight longer than that and accomplished less.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_spaceflights#Sum...

malwrar2• 5 years ago

I don't think distinguishing them is really useful. For Bezos at least, it's worth noting he's an ex-ceo of one of the most successful companies in the world and now seems to be spending a lot of his time on this project. I think it's more fun to be optimistic that this will contribute towards a more interesting future where humans in space is just kinda normal.

pbreit• 5 years ago

I don't think that's true at all about Branson. Almost all the Virgin companies are non-vanity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Group#Subsidiaries_and_...

jpgvm• 5 years ago

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.

Aerroon• 5 years ago

SpaceX has been around for two years less and has accomplished orbital missions.

And if they didn't get government contracts, then where would they be right now? If those contracts had landed in the lap of other companies, maybe they'd be the more successful ones?

machinelearning3• 5 years ago

The truth is that there 100% isn't anything morally wrong with:

1. Building a rocket company

2. Being a billionaire

3. Going on a flight on a rocket your company built

The issue stems from how the optics of these 3 lumped together appears to the masses.

To the people who are struggling everyday to make a living, it says: "Hey look at how much of a baller I am, I just went to space and you didn't"

Obviously, investing many personnel hours, pain and billions of dollars into a venture just for a "personal vanity project" is absurd and key driver behind these ventures is probably a desire to build the future.

However, most people don't have the luxury to worry about building the future when they're living paycheck to paycheck.

It is difficult to explain how the pie grows and everyone is better off (even if the inventors are the best off) as we invest in technology. The only solution to prevent public backlash to innovation is to make everyone well off enough to want to invest in building the future (and better PR, Jeff Bezos shame on you).

sidcool• 5 years ago

I think Bezos and Branson are just lagging Musk in execution. But that does not mean theirs are vanity projects. In the long run, Bezos plans to create a platform like AWS for space launch. And it's OK if it happens by 2025 or 2030. SpaceX, for all the wonderful things it has achieved, won't be able to cater to all space launch requirements. There needs to be a competition.

lwhi2• 5 years ago

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.

dumpsterdiver4• 5 years ago

A spaceship is only a vanity item until you actually need it. Who knows when you might need to spend a few years in orbit waiting out a nuclear winter?

I’d be interested to see more progress made toward long term space habitats. You don’t need reusable rockets when you don’t plan on coming back anytime soon.

rhizome• 5 years ago

Musk, for all his flaws, started an actual rocket company with new and frankly insane tech.

Isn't is an amazing coincidence that Elon was able to find so many rocket engineers with ideas just as NASA was being starved of funding? Just lucky I guess! anotherwinformilos.gif

SpaceX is a privatization that enjoys plenty of easy funding from the government, it's just that spaceflight staff aren't paid via the federal HR department anymore.

Frankly, I don't see the benefit of Elon getting any of my tax dollars.

sweetheart2• 5 years ago

This is total fallacy, I'm sorry. "We do this thing because we have always done this thing" isn't actual any justification whatsoever. It's whats leftover when realizing you're having a hard time actually justifying why it needs to be done.

"It's the way things are" are perhaps in all seriousness the 5 most dangerous words in the English language.

IfOnlyYouKnew3• 5 years ago

It’s maybe a bit silly to argue about inspirational slogans from TV presidents, but constructing “we have always been exploring and we will continue to explore” as a defense of the status quo is… quite impressive, actually?

To rephrase it: “we need to shake things up! I propose we do so by stopping to change”.

aeternum5• 5 years ago

We need to go to space because if we don't, all of humanity will go extinct. The earth won't last forever and also tends not to fare well when it goes 1:1 with asteroids or nukes.

snowwrestler2• 5 years ago

They’re not saying “let’s do things the way we’ve always done them,” they are observing that people seem to have a huge intrinsic drive to explore.

It’s cousin to the famous phrase, “why do we climb the mountain? Because it is there.” It’s not a rational thing but it is a very real part of being human nonetheless.

sofixa• 5 years ago

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 millions of man-hours and trillions of dollars in order for a privileged few to go live on Mars in underground settlements with artificial everything to sustain life there? Ffs, all the rocket tests create enormous amounts of CO2 emissions, among other things, actively helping to make the Earth less habitable.

robotastronaut• 5 years ago

I personally don’t think many people are banking on colonizing another planet, but rather the technologies created as byproducts of that effort. Between energy creation, energy storage, thermal regulation, extraction and refinement of products necessary for life (oxygen, water, etc), and transformation of atmospheric gases, there’s plenty that can help keep our current planet healthy and suitable for human life.

courtf6• 5 years ago

It's a religion at this point. The problems facing humanity on Earth appear daunting, so it's easier psychologically to put faith in sci-fi ideas that might be impossible, but are simple by comparison to thinking through concrete solutions to our woes.

Humanity sits atop a food chain that is going extinct, right before our eyes, and it's long past time to stop hiding from it. Human life on Mars is neither feasible nor imminent. We aren't getting level 5 autonomous vehicles or AGI or androids or flying cars or time travel any time soon either. These are ideas we run to when facing the absurdity of our existence becomes too much to bear.

louloulou2• 5 years ago

Living underground on Mars with limited resources doesn't seem like a privilege to me, it seems like hard work.

Also, an extinction level event for a single planet species is a binary thing.. and there's not much you can do after it happens.

jamesgreenleaf• 5 years ago

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, who don't have our knowledge) then adapting, exploring, and surviving in space is what we must do. It absolutely surprises me that relatively few people seem to understand (or voice) this fact. We may have a long time to accomplish it, but that it should be our primary goal is extremely clear.

ixacto• 5 years ago

We need to make humanity a multi-planetary species, Mars is just the beginning. The moonshot is just a tech validation, then we can send humans to the rest of the planets and the belt too.

Figuring out how to solve pollution on Earth is also doable with modern technology. We can terraform Earth to be more habitable as well, we could melt the antarctic icecap and colonize it. Maybe even make a new civilization there without as many problems [government/bureaucracy as we have in the rest of the world?

ThomPete4• 5 years ago

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 humans can somehow survive or progress without an impact is IMO missing the entire premise for human survival if that is in fact what you want.

passivate• 5 years ago

Well, we still can't get two people of opposite political parties to agree to any long term policy on sustainability. Expecting millions of businesses and/or billions of individuals to follow along as part of a long-term coordinated effort is, IMHO, a super hard problem too. I can't say going to/living on Mars is any easier, but they're both hard problems.

fallingknife2• 5 years ago

What is this rockets and co2 argument that's being parroted everywhere lately? Yes it does emit co2, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to cars.

X6S1x6Okd1st8• 5 years ago

I don't think people that think about this as their day job consider climate change to be the existential threat we are fixing by going to mars.

It's generally: nuclear war, asteroid strike, super volcano bioweapon/plauge and possibly malicious AI.

dheera2• 5 years ago

Isn't trying to stop/lessen the damage we're doing to the place we currently live

There are lots of people working on that problem in parallel.

It's worth exploring multiple solutions.

Also, even if we stop damaging the Earth, the sun will damage it in a few hundred million years. We will at some point need a new home.

imgabe• 5 years ago

Living on only one planet is a recipe for extinction no matter how perfect that planet’s environment is. Sooner or later it will get hit by an asteroid, or the sun will go supernova or any one of a million other completely unpreventable natural disasters will happen. Being multi planetary is the only way to ensure the survival of humanity.

bonestamp2• 5 years ago

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...

Why not both?

fighterpilot4• 5 years ago

This anti-space exploration position is basically a meme now and is so unoriginal and tiresome.

Where's your anger when it comes to movie development, international tourism, stadium construction, the cosmetics industry, and the rest of the endless list of nonsense that is more wasteful and less beneficial than allocating a tiny proportion of Earth's resources towards rocket tech?

I hope to hear this cynical take when the next Spiderman is announced! (I'll be holding my breath, though)

void_mint• 5 years ago

As an aside, The West Wing was an incredible show that just became too hard to rewatch. The things the fought and cared about on the show all turned out for the worst. In S1 or S2, they're shouting about cyber warfare and privacy, and here we are 20(?) years later constantly observing cyber warfare and having lost the war on privacy.

coliveira8• 5 years ago

It's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a species.

No, it's not we. It's them: billionaires and their friends. Other people will never go to the moon and mars because billionaires are using their money to lobby politicians in order avoid taxes and get more subsidies at our expense.

xvilka3• 5 years ago

Other people will never go to the moon and mars

Oh, they will. Someone should build the colony. Someone should do the work to maintain and grow the colony, etc.

mustafa_pasi2• 5 years ago

The quote is wrong. Antarctica is next. Then the moon. Then the bottom of the ocean.

But all these places are desolate of life and not even resource rich, so there is little point to go there. Mars is like this as well. It's not like you are colonizing a rich continent like America.

m4rtink10• 5 years ago

For in space infrastructure (that has the potential to bring immeasurable energy and resources long term) anyways available outside the Earth gravity well is a valuable resource, even just for stuff like radiation shielding.

TaylorAlexander3• 5 years ago

Sounds like “manifest destiny” where we destroyed thousands of indigenous civilizations in the country because “it was next”.

I’m starting to come around to the idea that this kind of thinking is exactly why we have poverty and hunger in the USA. We allow individuals to accumulate endless wealth even when that money could be used to help those who need a helping hand.

I’m not saying we necessarily have the government tax them, as I’m more in favor of workers collectives and union power where more of the profit accrues widely across all workers instead of narrowly to the top.

But the problem with billionaires thinking they can solve the worlds problems is they want to create more and more tech to solve our problems, even though we already have great solutions. We could design our cities around trains and bicycles but instead every person drives a car. That takes vastly more resources to produce and operate than a bunch of bicycles. I spent 15 years in Silicon Valley and the whole place is pretty hostile to bicycles even though it’s all flat!

I think when you have $100B your mind comes up with big industrialized solutions to problems when the real solution in my mind is to reduce our resource utilization (which we can do without reducing quality of life).

Bezos built Amazon along with the help from thousands of workers. It is only a trick of our legal system that he was able to hold on to all the wealth that the company created. And it should be noted that 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. Or think of the millions of overseas workers caught up in abusive labor arrangements [1], paid pennies per day, who helped create the goods that are sold on Amazon.

I really don’t see Bezos as a hero, but as a complex figure who got more than he deserves. America is chock full of poverty and Bezos is directly opposed to the growth of worker unions which I think could help ease a lot of that poverty.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxFwA-jw3X4

fesago90• 5 years ago

Exactly.

"we pioneered the west" lmao.

"how we survive as a species" wtf lmao

op is heavily romanticizing technology and throwing humanity under the bus without even realizing it.

dane-pgp7• 5 years ago

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.

riantogo• 5 years ago

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 billionaires spending money on such activities as it puts money back in the economy. The more the better.

WalterBright20• 5 years ago

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.

vernie• 5 years ago

https://twitter.com/meganamram/status/1087143660389466112?la...

onion2k2• 5 years ago

It's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a species.

This is unbelievably pessimistic. You're literally saying that Earth is beyond repair and the only way for humans to survive is to move to a rock in orbit that we've spent a total of 3 days on in the past 70 years, or to a planet no one has visited that has radiation that makes life essentially impossible for us.

Assuming that's true, let's run some numbers. Assuming we can get to 3 launches per day (weather, launch sites, Mars being in the wrong place, etc are limiting factors), and we get 100 years of launches before everyone dies, and we can fire 100 people in to space at a time, that means the future of the human race rests on slightly more than 10 million people. The other 6,990,000,000 of us will perish with the rest of life on Earth.

Damn. If you're right then humans are going extinct.

dheera2• 5 years ago

I don't think it's pessimistic at all.

The Earth is fucked. Not by humans, just by itself. It will be fucked within a few hundred million years simply because the sun is going to get bright enough to boil away the oceans.

If we want any hope of our legacy to carry on in the universe, we need to begin exploring the possibilities now, because we have the scientific knowledge and technological capabilities to begin that exploration process.

teawrecks4• 5 years ago

That's not what they're saying at all. Imagine if at some point in the history of the human species we just stopped exploring, stopped adapting, and just focused on preserving what we had and nothing more. We wouldn't be who we are today. Not just in the technological sense but in the human sense. The drive to explore the unknown is fundamentally human. The challenge of space and mars is the "final frontier".

The real criticism I have is that it's a false dichotomy. We need BOTH exploration and exploitation. Both greed and fear. Both mutation and rote replication. A species can't survive without a balance of both.

ncallaway2• 5 years ago

This is unbelievably pessimistic.

It's not pessimistic, it's realistic. It's just that what the parent poster means by "how we survive as a species" and what you mean are...different things.

Going to the moon, going to mars, are necessary for the survival of our species...on a 100,000 year time horizon.

At some point, something catastrophic may happen to earth. An asteroid impact, or a Gamma Ray Burst, or some other unexpected cataclysm. If a GRB happened to hit earth in 10,000 years, we only survive as a species if we're self-sufficient on other rocks by then.

If your time-frame of "how we survive as a species" is the next 100 years, then colonizing the moon or mars isn't on the list of potential solutions. I know of very few people who advocate that the moon and mars are the solutions to our climate change issues. Climate change is a crisis that we have to confront within the next 100 years. It's extremely unlikely that any moon or mars base would be self-sufficient within that time frame.

To survive as a species, the human race has to eventually be able to survive a fatal blow to earth and keep going. Hell, eventually we have to be able to deal with a fatal blow to this entire solar system.

m4rtink10• 5 years ago

You are never gonna evacuate the Earth with even reusable rockets. With launch loops and space elevators? Yeah, no problem, totally possible. :)

For fictional yet science based scenario see this Orions Arm article:

https://orionsarm.com/eg-article/49b46fd2198ed

The biggest problem is actually not to lift all the people out of Earth's gravity well, but where to put them afterwards...

misiti37804• 5 years ago

I agree, I think another way to put it is would you rather have your tax dollars spent on advancing rocket technologies (via NASA or equivalent) or would you rather have Bezos spend his after-tax dollars on it. Put like that, it's not a tough decision

verdverm2• 5 years ago

Except that both companies are competing for govt money. SpaceX is already serving NASA

hellomyguys• 5 years ago

Hasn't there been many years where Bezos paid no taxes?

8note4• 5 years ago

Being on the moon or mars isn't helpful if you still need all your supplies to come from the earth.

The survival of our species depends on us being able to keep ecosystems running, and we can do that on earth.

tmp_anon_22• 5 years ago

I love the West Wing but "pioneered the West" is a really interesting way to frame Columbus and Spain and France and Britain and ultimately the US doing what they did in the 17th-20th centuries.

soperj3• 5 years ago

and we pioneered the West

The west was already fully populated.

KerrickStaley• 5 years ago

Getting to Mars won't help us survive as a species.

Mars is a barren rock that is less desirable for human inhabitation than even the most remote land regions on Earth (such as the middle of the Sahara desert and the middle of Antarctica). Mars has no atmosphere, its mean surface temperature [1] is about the same as the average daily low temperature in winter at the south pole [2], its surface gravity is about 38% of Earth's [3] which can lead to muscle and bone atrophy, and it receives about 44% as much sunlight as Earth [4] which makes it harder to grow crops and can cause seasonal affective disorder.

In other words, if it were desirable to live on Mars, people would already be living in the middle of Antarctica.

What about mining resources from Mars? The problem with that is that it's prohibitively expensive due to the fundamental laws of physics. Getting stuff (e.g. equipment) to Mars requires escaping the gravity well of the Earth ([5] is a nice visual), which requires 225 kilograms of fuel per kilogram launched [6]. Sending things back is cheaper, and things like fusion engines would help, but it still takes a lot of energy and it's always going to be cheaper to mine on Earth.

Computers have gotten exponentially better over the past few decades because we've learned to make them smaller and more energy-efficient. Space travel hasn't because there are immutable requirements in terms of how much energy you need to do it.

Planet Earth is by far the best place in the universe for the human species, and I don't see that changing in the next millennium. It's really tailor-made for us (or rather, we are tailor-made for it). The best use of resources right now is towards making life on Earth more sustainable.

[1] https://www.space.com/16907-what-is-the-temperature-of-mars.... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pole#Climate_and_day_and... [3] https://phys.org/news/2016-12-strong-gravity-mars.html [4] http://tomatosphere.letstalkscience.ca/Resources/library/Art... [5] https://xkcd.com/681_large/ [6] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/279947-nasa-wants-to-mak...

gorwell• 5 years ago

And it's worth noting that they have overtaken a wildly expensive, ineffective government program and built a competitive industry, driving down the cost of getting a kilogram into Low Earth Orbit by 44-fold already.

blondie9x• 5 years ago

Everyone knows that if Earth climate destabilizes then life on Mars or the Moon is science fiction. We need the Earth's climate to stabilize and that requires lowering consumption and population.

andrepd13• 5 years ago

So much about your comments strikes me the wrong way. The meaningingless faux-inspirational second paragraph first of all. The empty platitudes about "exploration". You say "It's how we survive as a species. It's what's next.". No!! We are facing massive problems due to overindustrialisation, overproduction, misalignment of incentives basically. We should focus on the (comparatively easy, but still very hard) task of keeping our planet habitable, and to find ways to conduct our affairs in a sustainable manner, rather than dream of idiotic outlandish ideas of Mars colonization...

And you say:

I personally don't care that these billionaires are spending their money on vacations to orbit.

See, that's where the whole problem lies. The problem is precisely that our current economic system allocates massive amounts of power to these people, and therefore allocates massive amounts of labour and resources to their vanity projects. The problem is that it concentrates power in a disastrous way. Like it allocates talented engineers to ad-tech and yacht-buliding rather than water purification projects or renewables. Like it allocates thousands of people to staff 5-star hotels to serve the whims of 10 or 20 billionaires and saudi princes, which could be serving 10000 children at daycares or 10000 seniors at nursing homes. Etc etc.

I guess what I mean to say is this, and I apologise for the off-topic tone that my comment took: the insane thing to me is how you simply take this very arbitrary, very non-natural way of organizing economic activity and production, and accept it as completely inevitable, in fact you don't even stop to be critical or skeptical of it, hiding it beneath the simple phrase "I don't care how they spend their money". The true triumph of neoliberal capitalism seems to be making itself look as natural and inevitable as the air we breathe.

brobdingnagians• 5 years ago

Government protected monopolies and intervention to centralise corporations has created these megacorporations ruled by some of the most ruthless in our society. What we really need is de-centralisation, artisan ingenuity, and more free-spirited independent-thinkers who make decisions based on their ethics. Large corporations can make decisions where no one really feels responsible for the negative results. Small corporations would make people feel more invested in he end results, community, ecological results, etc.

dcolkitt• 5 years ago

Wouldn’t it make sense that Antarctica and the open seas are “next in line” before Mars?

The point is we have a huge, open continent. At the present moment there’s absolutely zero demand to colonize it. Why? Because it’s inhospitable and hard to get to. But it’s a hell of a lot more hospitable and accessible than Mars. So, honest question why would we expect anyone to move to Mars if they can’t even be bothered to move to Trinity Peninsula?

m4rtink10• 5 years ago

At least for Antarctica this is largely prevented by international agreements. I'm sure there are companies who would go there for the resources alone otherwise.

sidlls• 5 years ago

No offense, but this is a tad outlandish and completely ignores the people who are actually working to get us there. It's not Bezos or Musk, though the latter exploits his PR acumen incredibly to make it seem like he invented modern space travel himself.

We won't get to Mars with a bunch of private-money capitalists competing. Much like in the 50s and 60s, it's going to take a concerted effort of government sponsored and driven research.

dmz73• 5 years ago

The problem is not that billionaires are spending their money on space exploration. The problem is that we have many billionaires and millions (billions world wide) are barely surviving. Do you want our species to expand to other planets with this kind of society? We will all end up being slaves if this keeps going on, not in 19th century sense but modern kind - forced to work endless hours just to scrape enough money for food. Elysium style society but without happy ending.

thundergolfer2• 5 years ago

Kim Stanley Robison's Red Mars explores exactly this problem of colonising a new world whilst the old world is brokenly unequal and has ecological disasters tearing it apart.

Really good book. I won't spoil it too much, but think it offers a powerful challenge to the techno-utopianism of Mars Colony obsessives. The Martians cannot escape their terrestrial ideologies, because those ideologies are still rooted in the old world that they rely on for survival, and because they carried over those ideologies in their own minds.

ehsankia• 5 years ago

How is this situation any different from past cases where people decided to spend money and time discovering new worlds instead of trying to improve the living conditions of their own people?

Endless money and effort has gone into trying to solve world hunger and misery, yet they still exist. Yet inventions like GPS and other technology that came out of the space race has probably had more impact worldwide.

mdorazio• 5 years ago

The issue with this line of reasoning is that money is generally not going to solve the problem of people barely surviving. In the vast majority of cases, sociopolitical issues are the root cause and throwing money at things doesn't really help. If you don't believe me, look at the history of aid to sub-saharan Africa. So there's no reason we can't both spend billionaires' money on space development and fix terrestrial problems with social and political reform.

And if you want to argue that billionaires only became so wealthy by exploiting people... well, yes, and? Their wealth already exists so the options are 1) they spend it on stupid stuff like more yachts and mansions, 2) they spend it on humanity-advancing things like space exploration (Musk/Bezos) and philanthropy (Gates), or 3) we have bloody revolutions to claw it back and hope for the best.

darawk• 5 years ago

You could say this about basically all progress anywhere in human history, though. Leonardo Da Vinci's patrons were spending their money on art and research when they could have been feeding their peasants better. The same with Isaac Newton's patrons and countless others.

We fund science and technology research because it improves expected outcomes in the future, for everyone. The idea that we can't fund research until everyone is fed is an oxymoron, we would never be able to get there without funding research.

fork12• 5 years ago

The overall population is still way better now than it has been historically. I don't understand why both cannot be done in parallel anyway. It's not like we are investing everything in the space race, plenty goes on more earthly concerns.

denkmoon• 5 years ago

They can do whatever the hell they want after they've paid their taxes. That is the consternation, not that going to space is somehow bad.

robertoandred• 5 years ago

They have paid their taxes. Increasing stock prices is not income.

michaelpb2• 5 years ago

I think you answered yourself with your choice of West Wing quotes:

And we crossed the ocean, and we pioneered the West

You really, REALLY aren't selling this the way you think you are by calling it the natural continuation to Europeans "pioneering" the Native Americans, especially given current events [1]. Let me put it this way, selling Mars exploration as a repeat of one of the world's most famous genocides (a blueprint for the holocaust no less [2][3]), really doesn't resonate with me lmao

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57592243

[2] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/03/nazi-germanys-am...

[3] https://time.com/4703586/nazis-america-race-law/

snarf21• 5 years ago

I'm sorry but no one has yet to explain to me how humans are going to treat Mars so much better than we have the Earth. Earth has near unlimited resources and Mars doesn't. The human species will only ever live on Earth on a permanent basis and we will absolutely survive as a species. The Earth will just be a much worse and very inhospitable place for a very very very long time.

baby• 5 years ago

Good old HN. Every crazy advance (the other day it was github copilot) is met with negativity and cynicism.

cyanydeez• 5 years ago

they arnt government entities, their ventures arnt built by multitudes of government workers sharing technokogy.

this is like saying a book store on every corner should replace libraries.

shitty equivelence,

johnrgrace• 5 years ago

The thing is "we" won't get to mars with billionaires trying to go to there it will be their kids and the people they pick.

wanda• 5 years ago

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.

DubiousPusher• 5 years ago

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.

brokenmachine• 5 years ago

It's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a species. It's what's next.

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?

aporetics• 5 years ago

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

raffraffraff• 5 years ago

I keep seeing people make this wild assumption that we're going to somehow terraform Mars and make it habitable. If Earth becomes so uninhabitable that we literally need to find another planet to live in, the question I'd ask is, "why couldn't we save an already perfect planet where we and everything we rely upon evolved?". At what point does earth become so fucked up that we look at Mars and think "Hmm, that looks like an option"

birdyrooster• 5 years ago

What if ending poverty was next, that would be cool, and then Mars?

ladyattis• 5 years ago

Aiming high is all well and good when you got problems at home settled. For too long we've been avoiding fixing those problems which aren't intractable such as homelessness and poverty. If we can supposedly do both like the article mentions then why aren't we?

jjj123• 5 years ago

There are two main disagreements I have with this point. They’re values based, so I don’t expect to change your mind, but to give you some perspective on why people roll their eyes at these stunts:

1. I don’t think we should be looking towards “what’s next” when we have plenty of more pressing issues to solve here and now. I’d rather we more equitably distribute resources so everyone has food, healthcare, and housing before we start trying to colonize mars.

2. I would rather the money be spent in a more democratic way. I don’t want to let a few people decide “what’s next” for me, let’s redistribute that wealth and let the public decide what’s most pressing.

birksherty2• 5 years ago

This is different than humans polluting and crushing the whole ecosystem for it's greed. It will be better for other species if it try to reverse at least what it can instead as we are the cause. Humans are the literally the worst thing in universe. It will also be better for all species if humans die out asap.

50• 5 years ago

"What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it all the rest are not only useless but disastrous."

lwhi2• 5 years ago

We ruin what we have and move on.

The problem with the West Wing, was that it added a pompulus romantic sheen to subjects that arguably didn't deserve it.

hn_throwaway_992• 5 years ago

The really interesting thing to me about this announcement is that it's the first time I think I've ever heard about such a large gift being given to individuals, instead of a foundation or non-profit. Curious if Bezos is just testing to see if this type of philanthropy has better results.

I'm also interested in the logistics of a gift this large. I mean, Bezos would have to pay a large gift tax for gifts sent directly to individuals. Obviously he can afford it, but curious if there was some attempt to save on taxes if the end desire is for all of this money to go to charity.

LukeBMM• 5 years ago

I'd suggest that Jeff Bezos is unlikely to pay a meaningful amount in taxes (in this case, meaning "relative to the action" rather than "relative to his overall wealth"), regardless of what he does.

throwawayboise2• 5 years ago

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).

akira2501• 5 years ago

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.

hn_throwaway_992• 5 years ago

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.

jimbokun7• 5 years ago

Seems like exactly how Bill Gates has spent his time since retiring from Microsoft.

this2shallPass• 5 years ago

Agreed. They generally hire teams of people to do it for them.

spoonjim3• 5 years ago

This is not a personal gift to Van Jones and Jose Andres... they are being given this money to donate to charities. I think the way it will work is that they will designate the charities and Bezos will donate it, or Bezos will transfer the money and they will donate it within the calendar year.

dataminer• 5 years ago

Great donations, we need more bridges among different groups of people, and we should all work to make hunger a problem of the past, around 800 million people sleep hungry every day.

https://www.who.int/news/item/15-07-2019-world-hunger-is-sti...

tills132• 5 years ago

The issue imo is that it shouldn't require philanthropy from a billionaire to fund these programs, it should be built into the support system provided by a functioning and compassionate society.

alfalfasprout2• 5 years ago

Problem is a lot of people aren't compassionate. And many of those that are-- when they finally make a fair bit of money-- instantly cease to be so. So this is nothing more than a delusional pipe dream.

inetsee• 5 years ago

If I had $200 million lying around, I'd be more inclined to give $1 million each to 200 people.

seaman1921• 5 years ago

I would give 200$ each to 1M people.

systemvoltage3• 5 years ago

Giving people money is absolutely the last thing anyone should do.

I'd much prefer if Bezos spent $200M in building an education institute or an apprentice shop for tradesmen or to humanitarian aid or doctors without borders or open source courseware or human genome project...

bigthymer• 5 years ago

Giving people money is absolutely the last thing anyone should do.

Why?

Cash transfers to poor people is starting to look like an effective way to alleviate poverty. Despite the old stereotype of poor people blowing it all on booze and drugs, in reality, most people put it to good use. This is also another reason why UBI has started gaining more support.

jimbokun7• 5 years ago

Well since Bezos net worth is around 200 billion, throwing 100 million at someone is in the same ballpark.

joshuahaglund• 5 years ago

I just think this money shoulda been paid in taxes so we could collectively solve problems instead of some guy hand picking a couple lottery winners.

jimbokun7• 5 years ago

Given current level of disfunction in the US government, I'll take Bezos just picking who he thinks can do the most good with the money.

danem• 5 years ago

Well this is what has left me most confused by this decision. Are Van Jones and an incredibly successful celebrity chef really the best he could come up with? If I were Bezos I'd at least give the money to a person or organization that would help improve my PR.

edit:

And by this I meant things like paying for poor kids college tuition etc. I guarantee no one in the media will be talking about this story, and where Van Jones puts the money, beyond this press conference.

dumbfoundded13• 5 years ago

It's a classic conservative strategy. Take over a government program, run it into the ground, use it as evidence that governments don't work, and then run for office on a platform of dismantling the broken government.

The essential problem with the idea of government is that it requires people to cooperate in good faith. People who say government doesn't work are essentially arguing that people cannot cooperate with each other.

Given our level of social and technological progress, you'd think people would give up on this idea but it persists. In a hunter gather society, yes, like one of the ten guys in the tribe could provide way more meat than the other nine combined. In a global society of billions, it requires cooperation, coordination and institutions. A single person is an angstrom of humanity.

Our personal vanity tempts us to ignore the hundreds if not tens of thousands of people that make great companies possible not even counting the public institutions and services. We like to believe a single person can be so important because that makes us feel like we can be important.

In reality, no person is important. Bezos isn't important, Musk isn't important neither you or I are important. How the billions of people work together is important. We should be focusing our efforts on improving how we work together. Our systems of cooperation (aka governments, companies, communities) are the only important thing.

jl27185• 5 years ago

Well the guy he’s giving it to is always clamoring for higher taxes on everybody else, so obviously he thinks that’s the best place for the money. We’ll see what he does with it.

oh_sigh2• 5 years ago

Is anyone ever allowed to have money they give away? Or should all money which would be given away instead have been taken by the government as taxes? Even if Bezos paid $200M more in taxes, it isn't clear that he wouldn't have given this $200M away.

strikelaserclaw• 5 years ago

Like no one is going to willing give money to the us gov't in the name of taxes. Our tax code should be updated so that corps pay the taxes.

flowerlad• 5 years ago

So this money is for the recipients for to use as they please, including for personal use? Or are they required to donate to causes they care about?

Zelphyr4• 5 years ago

My understanding is that they can spend it however they wish, no strings attached.

kypro2• 5 years ago

Kind of genius… My understanding as a Brit is that CNN are known to be supportive of progressive economic policies. I suspect they’re also critical of the existence of billionaires like Bezos in a society where many struggle to feed their families.

Bribing influential CNN contributors who hold progressive or far-left economic policies is probably one of the better ways to help shift the media narrative towards one that benefits Bezos.

gameswithgo2• 5 years ago

orrr, maybe bezos is also very progressive?

ishjoh2• 5 years ago

Then he doesn't walk the walk. He has ample opportunity to write a check to the government and rally for tax schemes that directly and only effect billionaires.

themolecularman2• 5 years ago

It's not a bribe. Van Jones will likely quit his job as a CNN commentator. Why would he stay?

It's a strange donation tbh. Also CNN is a very partisan news source and Van Jones isn't a "middle of the aisle" type. I personally find the Jose donation fine but am kind of put off by this donation to a CNN "journalist".

kypro2• 5 years ago

Van Jones will likely quit his job as a CNN commentator.

Sounds like a win then.

pcrh• 5 years ago

It's seriously distracting that the headline describes these recipients as "CNN contributors"....

jgmmo• 5 years ago

why? that was first thing I thought when Bezos said he was giving Van Jones the prize... 'what... a CNN commentator? that's like giving Sean Hannity free money...'

zapnuk• 5 years ago

If billionaires entrust their money to more or less random people for philanthropic objectives I rather have them be taxed higher and let a (somewhat inefficient) government decide how to invest the money.

At least I had a role in electing the government and can change my vote based on their performance.

kolbe• 5 years ago

There's a lot of things I would rather other people do for my benefit and their detriment as well. Thank you for your contribution.

bilbo0s• 5 years ago

Give it to the government instead?

That's insane.

Live a few years here in Wisconsin, and then talk to me about how we should give the thieves in the government more money. Foxconn much? Better to choose a few good people and give it to them. Best part about the Bezos method is that all of us can also make a boatload of money and give it to people we trust to distribute it.

Under your proposition, all of us have to give it to people in government who we already know we should have zero trust for.

misiti37804• 5 years ago

Im Not sure why you are being downvoted.

micropresident• 5 years ago

At least I had a role in electing the government and can change my vote based on their performance.

The real crux. You want control over what other people do.

ModernMech11• 5 years ago

If it's at the scale of society-level impact, yes, I'd like to have a vote. That's why I prefer to live in a democracy rather than a dictatorship. Don't you?

oh_sigh2• 5 years ago

Why should you have any say in how Bezos spends his money? Do you accept when other people tell you how to spend your money?

cranesnake• 5 years ago

Why should someone other than an elected official be allowed the power to manipulate legislation as corporate lobbies do?

It is not about money, it about money as a proxy for power over the country.

The guy you're talking to does not have enough money to affect disproportional change. It does not matter to anyone else what he does with it as it can't possibly infringe on their rights, unlike when corporations manipulate media and government.

amirhirsch• 5 years ago

As a percentage of net worth, this is like me donating $200. He can afford to give away $100M every week forever on compounding interest alone. When I'm a billionaire the space suits will be purple.

dumbfoundded13• 5 years ago

Assuming a 5% yearly interest rate, compounded weekly, that's a net worth of ~$213K.

My attempt at math: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=200+%2F+%281.05%5E%281...

motohagiography• 5 years ago

The recipients seem like earnest people who have done a lot of good, and the money will supercharge what they do.

Personally, I think that if I had a really good plan for $100m I could probably raise it because there is a highly competitive sellers market for things that you can put that much money into and create value from it. I just don't have that plan. :)

There are a zillion holes to throw money down, but something that can sustain its value and grow? Bezos' decision was probably the same as a regular investment "team, market, product" call: there's a real problem that a lot of people have, and here is a long list of people who want to solve it but nobody has a complete solution yet, and if I had to choose the top ones to get exposure to - to make a difference on this problem, these two guys are the best ones I can find to figure out what the solution is, so I'm in for $100m apiece. Same game as any angel or startup investor, he's just playing at the three-comma table.

I genuinely believe the path to that table starts by challenging ourselves to think bigger, which means doubling down when it's the hardest, and testing assumptions when it's easy. It's not sufficient, but it is the necessary condition.

Think of a problem that people with effectively infinite resources would invest in solving and start working on it. To them $100m is a rounding error, what they don't see are credible plans or track records for making the change they would invest in. Jones and Andres had it. The money isn't a prize, it's an investment and a bet. I wish them luck.

pphysch• 5 years ago

It's interesting that Bezos is coming out with these big PR initiatives after stepping down as Amazon CEO. As the world's richest individual and face of Amazon, he endured a lot of (perhaps justified) smear campaigns, but didn't really fight back in a major way, like target the (more wealthy) Waltons or something. The MBS phone hacking scandal got a terse, professional Medium article.

It's also interesting to note that the horrendous stories of Frito Lay factory worker conditions are coming out now, despite being a widespread and longstanding issue. Previously, the media narrative around poor work conditions was all "Amazon, Amazon, Amazon", with little indication that it's a systemic issue with--let's be honest--far worse cases in America.

Now Bezos is going full throttle. To what end? Why not operate from the shadows on a megayacht? If it is all ego, why not do this populism drive earlier to mitigate some of the damage?

roody15• 5 years ago

What an overtly political move by Bezos. He could have donated to libraries, schools, medical research … nope donates to defacto narrative control.

X6S1x6Okd1st8• 5 years ago

Those damn chefs.

ModernMech11• 5 years ago

The guy already bought the Washington Post? What do you expect?

WalterBright20• 5 years ago

It'll be very interesting to see what Jones and Andres do with the money.

mucholove2• 5 years ago

Dudes and dudettes. Before you ask for higher taxes—hear me out.

First, recognize the trajectory.

Bezos is the definition of someone living out the American dream.

The corporate interest may be trending towards a monopoly—but this is a guy who was abandoned by his biological father, adopted by an immigrant, and was able to use his skills, smarts and efforts to achieve the easiest way for me to buy something.

Second—for all the taxes paid directly and indirectly in the US, the CDC and the FDA could not respond to this pandemic with any sort of competence.

Do I trust these people with money? No.

They could have spent 800 million dollars and avoided a pandemic—but once it started up again they just find it so easy to spend money like gangbusters.

This is a complicated issues. But before asking for higher taxes, ask for better constitutions.

PS-for my money, your tax rate should be based on lifetime earnings. I would love to know how to switch from yearly, to lifetime.

ramesh312• 5 years ago

and was able to use his skills, smarts and efforts to achieve the easiest way for me to buy something.

And a small loan of $200,000 from his parents. Also that.

mucholove2• 5 years ago

You’re supposed to build on the shoulders of giants. His parents went all in on him. That $200,000 was a meaningful amount of money to them. They bet the farm. I personally, want to live in a society which celebrates living on the shoulders of parents. Good for his immigrant father on being able to make this amount of money after having his fortunes erased in Cuba.

At some point, we cant be expecting more rags to riches stories. We need more acrobats, leaping from our shoulders.

daseiner1• 5 years ago

that is a small loan

robertlf• 5 years ago

I suspect Bezos's PR person came up with this after that stupid you all paid for this comment he made.

okareaman2• 5 years ago

0.001 (200M/200B) of his wealth for some great PR to clean up his greedy image? Not bad for pocket change.

buryat• 5 years ago

he would've hired a top-notch PR campaign/firm if he wanted to clean up his image

okareaman2• 5 years ago

Oh, he's already done that but it's not helping. This was the cherry on top.

kennywinker6• 5 years ago

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.

samsin• 5 years ago

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.

Lionga• 5 years ago

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

agomez314• 5 years ago

Proof that people with a lot of money don't always know what to do with it

dukeofdoom• 5 years ago

This is the same guy that has his employees pee in bottles to make quotas. I guess he's rewarding people that helped him over the last year. I can see how CNN deserves it for being so kind to him and not criticize too much the lockdowns. Though I feel like part of that money should have gone to BLM for helping his business grow too.

corban1• 5 years ago

I remember Van Jones saying American people's vote for Trump was a "whitelash". And Bezos is saying he tried to be a unifier in a divisive world. We live in a strange society.

readonthegoapp• 5 years ago

Van Jones left activist-town a long time ago -- and he's been called out for it.

But as an already-rich person, to agree to be fully, comprehensively bought....this world is crazy.

...adding, I'm available for $10M. negotiable.

themolecularman2• 5 years ago

Right. I'm wondering what the hell this donation means. Van Jones isn't an activist and is a partisan commentator. This country has been divided by people like him in the news media constantly turning out better ratings by instigating and propagandizing.

JBiserkov• 5 years ago

Blue Origin has received $181M in public funding since 2019, and is slated to get over $300M more by 2024.
One might think of this, then, as Bezos giving our money to people he likes in return for good PR and personal tax benefits.

ironfootnz• 5 years ago

In other countries this would be considered bribes

dd444fgdfg2• 5 years ago

I'm glad billionaires like Bezos exist. They can choose to fund grand visions when people who need votes either don't, or they do and the funding gets cut after the next election.

This is one of the ways China is able to execute long term strategy better than the west, they can maintain focus.

We're not able to do that without a significant necessity (winning a cold war).

Get over your jealousy of the billionaires. Some people are luckier than you, smarter, work harder. That's just life.

trainsplanes2• 5 years ago

Imagine a world where instead of saying "hey, people in your town are dying on the streets, your water is full of lead, you can't afford medical treatment, and your children can't possibly afford college, but quit being jealous of lucky rich people! It's not fair to them", we instead said "we could take just a little bit of unfairly acquired cash from mega billionaires and make the lives of 300 million people measurably better."

That lucky, smart, hard working, genetically gifted, handsome, strong, virile, well-endowed, wrinkle-free, and blessed by all the gods billionaire would still be able to go to space and give mindblowing amounts of cash to anyone they want even with 1/10th the wealth they have now.

Otherwise, society is going to reach a breaking point as it always has and will again. But that's just life.

dd444fgdfg2• 5 years ago

the problems people have is not the fault of the billionaires.

sometimes it's their fault. sometimes it's their families. mostly it's their communities.

the existence or lack-of of billionaire going into space is going to have zero impact on homelessness, water quality, medical treatment, and your kids going to college.

cratermoon4• 5 years ago

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...

ThisIsMineToo• 5 years ago

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 ?

cratermoon4• 5 years ago

Bezos is probably hoping to convince Wally Funk to go on a motivational speaking tour of Amazon warehouses.

sunstone• 5 years ago

Perhaps he's just being tired of being embarrassed by his Ex who's been donating billions while he has senior citizens peeing in bottles in his warehouses.

sakopov• 5 years ago

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.

rajacombinator• 5 years ago

That’s some expensive wokewashing.

georgeplusplus• 5 years ago

Is there some reason to believe the work of Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic will stop at tourism? Couldnt their designs progress to offering sub orbital flights across the world in record times?

imwillofficial2• 5 years ago

Anyone curious why those two got 100mil each?

ramesh312• 5 years ago

So billionaires are upvoting people IRL now

1vuio0pswjnm7• 5 years ago

s/donates/awards/

jl27185• 5 years ago

I’m not upset that he isn’t paying taxes. I’m upset that he’s paying for leverage on other people’s taxes.

But Bezos did not create this system, he’s just using it to his advantage, exactly the way it was designed. At least he’s transparent about it.

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

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