Bezos Says He’ll Spend ‘Amazon Lottery Winnings’ on Space Travel
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Bezos had ordered a dish called Tom’s Big Breakfast, a preparation of Mediterranean octopus that includes potatoes, bacon, green garlic yogurt, and a poached egg. “You’re the octopus that I’m having for breakfast,” Rutledge remembers Bezos saying. “When I look at the menu, you’re the thing I don’t understand, the thing I’ve never had. I must have the breakfast octopus.” [0]
[0] https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2014/july/...
But yeah if you have a pet iguana your perception will be vastly different. If you come from an island full of them where it's normal to eat them then you wouldn't think twice about it. If you're somewhere in the middle of that spectrum you'll either be the curious type, the snakes/lizards are gross/not for food type, or be the non-adventurous type.
I wouldn't make a habit of eating iguana or horse or other things many would consider oddities but if I'm visiting a place where it's part of their culture I'll see what it's about.
Do you really see us sitting around here and just being? Just stagnating? Waiting for the real-estate and resources to finally run out?
If you don't, or hope that it's not what all of this amounts to, the only question remaining should be "if not now, then when?".
This is an odd opinion to have here. I thought Bezos was clear that Blue Origin is all about protecting the Earth in the first place! The stated goal of Blue Origin is to stop all mining and manufacturing on Earth, to move it off-world, and leave Earth a peaceful place to live and generally hang out.
The entire purpose of Blue Origin is to stop humanity from resource-extracting-and-polluting Earth's oceans, land and water. I cannot envision a way Bezos would be better suited to personally spend his money on solving Earth problems than the way he has just posited.
Wow, I hadn't heard Blue Origin's vision stated like that. I think it's a great idea. Elon Musk gets a lot of press for his "Mars backup plan" vision; why doesn't Blue Origin promote their vision more heavily?
Here's Bezos talking about it: https://www.geekwire.com/2016/interview-jeff-bezos/
And interestingly, it's a vision he has had in some form since at least high school: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/for-bezos-th...
It's crucial that we help third world countries rise from poverty so women can get an education and be something else than baby making machines.
Bill Gates is doing wonderful things in this regard.
I'm not sure I see the connection. I'd argue most of the damage we're doing to the earth is not industrial: overfishing the oceans, raising cattle, slash and burn agriculture, extracting and burning hydrocarbons, transportation, waste disposal. Moving industry off planet is fine but we still need to address these things.
Now, if you want to move a bunch of humans off planet, that would be super.
In Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, one of the points made is that even with multiple space elevators, you could never move more people off the planet than are being born on it at the same time. Consequently, space exploration is not a cure for overpopulation. KSR researched this 25 years ago, has the math on that changed?
Who knew they do own some solar and wind assets: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/sustainability/
When we talk about him, personally, that's his wealth. He can give it to charity, use it to improve the world or burn it on pleasures. It's his money that society agreed to give him - it's society that owes him. I know the system has many flaws, FED etc. but this in general is how money works. You give something, and in exchange you get right to receive something.
When we talk about Amazon he decided to optimize for customer, not employee satisfaction. I'm not a fan of what Amazon is doing currently (as an e-commerce) but when you sum amount of welfare it provided over the whole humanity, it seems quite possible that it is a very positive number - I'm assuming unhappiness of employees counts negatively towards it. Apart from the whole economical aspect, creating work places and opportunities for other companies to create them, just looking at cheaper prices, let's say employee A earns $500 less than he could. And that per one employee we have 10,000 customers in similar living situation that saved $20. The net result for people in this life situation is $200,000 - $500.
And then there's difficult problem of general optimization function if you want to do whatever best you can for the humanity. Given GCRs associated with all of us living on the same rock, if you think about humanity as a whole and its future, it may turn out that space exploration has extremely high priority and it would be EV+ even if we would have to scarify lives of most of those currently alive.
Thats what anti trust laws are for.
I perceive any such talk that he should spend his money a certain way as propaganda.
An argument posits that there is a factual inconsistency that needs to be clarified through dialogue.
What you are proposing is a debate.
I AM NOT DEBATING - I am stating the fact that in American society the people have political vehicles to enforce cultural morality as codified through law.
And i continue this dialogue because it is important for people to recognize that using morality as a metric is arbitrary when discussion such matters necause at the end of the day morality varies from pers9n to person and culture to culture
All i am trying to communicate is that he can do what ever he wants.
And yet you keep doing it.
Don’t blame employers for the iron law of wages.
Paying the market wage, meaning the best (lowest) price you can find that meets all of your requirements for quality of service, is still contributing to the global economy.
And by making your firm more productive, you are increasing the pool of goods/services that the world's consumers can divide amongst themselves. That's how for profit enterprises contribute to a rising standard of living.
They are not mutex. You can actually care about your employees, see them as human, and pay them an amount that you both mutually consent to, which is what Amazon is doing.
Amazon doesn't. That's the point.
You are wildly oversimplifying the iron law of wages. It does not say "it is morally acceptable for employers to treat employees as badly as they can possibly get away with."
More generally, this idea that paying more is better for the world is misguided and over-simplistic. You can often reduce suffering in the world more by paying 100 very poor people sweat shop wages than 10 middle class people developed world wages, and that is the kind of choice you have to make when deciding how to spend your capital.
We cannot simply increase the wealth at our disposal and pay all 100 people high wages. Scarcity of resources is a reality we have to be mature enough to contend with, and that means looking at more than just the direct and immediate effects, and factoring in opportunity costs, to weigh the trade-offs.
There is no coherent argument that Amazon isn't treating its employees poorly, even relative to other companies in the same fields. Read some articles about working conditions at Amazon. This one's a decent starting point: https://gizmodo.com/reminder-amazon-treats-its-employees-lik...
The working conditions are voluntarily assumed by the employees, so it can't be mistreatment, and the terms offered are the best the employees could find on the market, so they are better off for these jobs existing. I don't see the rationale behind calling it mistreatment and implying Amazon is having w negative impact.