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Comment by vzidex | Hacker News Reader

> I sure wish a tech billionaire would do something about this.

I've noticed in tech that a common hope that people in tech hold is that "the billionaires", in their infinite wisdom and generosity, will pull magical solutions out of their hats and save us all. Like you mention later, yeah, right.

> one of the thousand reasons I got out of tech

Not an option I've considered much, but it's almost tempting.

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>> that "the billionaires", in their infinite wisdom and generosity, will pull magical solutions out of their hats and save us all. Like you mention later, yeah, right.

I think its more that they have the means. Cant get anything done on a large scale without lots of moolah

> Cant get anything done on a large scale without lots of moolah

You can, but it requires collective action. But in order to have collective action, you need to win the propaganda war. I'm not sure that lots of moolah at this point can win the propaganda war against climate denialism.

It might not hurt to try some new approaches instead of just increasing the magnitude of the same message. I don't disagree though, propaganda is the key part of the puzzle that needs solving.

Meh people over-estimate the wealth of billionaires. A $1 billionaire can only buy 1000 houses in the bay area for example, and then make something like $6m/yr in rent from it.

If we take all the wealth of the top 100 billionaries and put it towards the US annual budget, it wouldn't fund it for more than a year or two also and then you'd soon be out of billionaires as you go down the list.

Governments are the real 'wealthy' organizations out there.

More like $60m in rent, just FYI.

It's because we can no longer rely on our governments to act responsibly or arrive at a solution. We now have to rely on the world's billionaires and their generosity for help.

We no longer rely on our governments not because governments are inherently distrustful but due to a toxic hyper-libertarian philosophy that's been systematically trying to disable our governments and moving power toward the billionaires. The solution isn't to pray "Save us of wise and powerful billionaires" - the solution is to fix the governments.

Then hold our governments responsible. I don’t know why anyone would expect a private citizen, regardless of whether or not he happens to have more than $1 billion, to help with environmental catastrophes. In fact I’d expect them to help the least out of anyone, since they have the resources to simply escape if they face danger or scarcity.

There's no realistic escaping planet Earth. Indeed this is a reason so many wealthy people become philanthropists. When someone truly has enough wealth to be free of any monetary anxiety, their concerns tend towards survival/preservation. Both of self and sometimes of humanity. It's ultinately self serving, in that they recognize that humanity's problems can negatively impact their own situations. Broad economic, societal, and environmental failures are probably the biggest risks to their powerful positions. And some do indeed look to ways to escape planet Earth.

I'm not saying that governments don't need to act, just pointing out that the motivations of the wealthy may not be what you expect.

I have a theory that the highest priority most people with wealth (very reasonably) have is "never be financially insecure again" (propagated to their descendants), and that the more wealth somebody has beyond "sustain a comfortable lifestyle indefinitely off of dividends", the more of their money and mindspace they invest into protecting themselves against the long tail of circumstances that could affect that. Applied on a broad scale, with different value systems and mindsets, this explains both preppers ("Society might collapse, so I should do everything I can to ensure that my needs are met in that circumstance" with a little bit of "here's hoping it happens so I have an excuse to shoot someone" mixed in) and philanthropists ("Society might collapse, or even just fall apart to an extent that degrades my control over the means of production, so I should do as much as possible to keep that from happening").

At the extreme of wealth, an appropriately diversified portfolio takes both options into account. If you have $1 Billion and think there's a .1% chance that society will collapse soon and make your money worthless, you're perfectly justified in spending up to $1million to protect against that contingency.

> Then hold our governments responsible.

With today's rampant lobbying and propaganda driven news, that's a bit of a moot point. When critical questions are asked of those in power, they're dismissed as asking nasty questions and saying it's fake news. The propaganda is also created to keep citizens fighting against themselves rather than those in power. It's a losing position from a citizens point of view. Either the politicians have to willfully change things themselves, or you need to play the waiting game until the country deteriorates enough until it sparks revolts like in Belarus.

Bezos can't just "buy" the world a new coral reef - it will require government authority, coordination between specialists, and a lot of collective buy-in by private individuals.

Unfortunately, the US has endured a multi-decade war against the bureaucracies that sparked the Interstate Highway system, the Internet, and countless other achievements.

I think the only reason tech billionaires stay tech billionaires is because they don't act out of compassion.

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