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Comment by sega_sai | Hacker News Reader

Obviously everybody (Branson/Bezos) is entitled to spend their cash in whatever way they want. But, if they are making a spectacle of it, publicise it and promote it like some big achievement, then those people should be prepared to take some criticism. And in my opinion, I see the last two launches as indeed amusement rides for billionaires and a strong argument for better taxation policies. In contrary, what Musk does with SpaceX ( and I'm not a fan of Musk as a person), can be classified as technological development as he actually sends satellites, deliveries to ISS.

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> I see the last two launches as indeed amusement rides for billionaires

I see this take a lot, and I strongly disagree.

These launches are marketing events for their space tourism businesses! The billionaire CEOs go up to prove they personally trust the tech is safe. If they won't go, who else would?

Now they can start selling trips to paying customers, and hopefully build genuinely sustainable space tourism businesses. The fairly minimal experience of these short jumps will be improved gradually, and that future is impossible to predict, as it is completely novel territory.

> These launches are marketing events for their space tourism businesses!

Okay, so these launches aren't amusement rides for billionaires, they are marketing stunts to advertise amusement rides for other billionaires? Hard to see the difference tbh

No need to be snide. Prices will drop hundreds of thousands of dollars in just a few years, well within the means of many millionaires.

Democratization of space FTW!

Poe's law is strong in this one

These rides are being sold for a few hundred thousand dollars. Before New Shepard and SpaceShipTwo, the only private tourists to space paid tens of millions. That is a huge decrease in price! Now any millionaire can afford it, and it is just within reach of an upper middle class person willing to save for a significant part of their life. Some people couldn't care less about this, but others have dreamed of flying into space ever since Yuri Gagarin, and it is finally a reality.

And like all things, the price will go down. Not as fast as I'd like for these specific crafts, but they seemed like a good target at the time their development began.

s/billionaires/millionaires isn't a very compelling argument in my opinion. It's still a huge waste all so some rich people can float in zero-g for a few minutes so making it accessable to a few million people instead of a few thousand doesn't seem like a win to me.

Is there anything billionaires can spend money on that doesn't seem like waste from your perspective?

Easy, paying their workers more

Most billionaires build mansions and buy islands and offshore their money. Bezos and Branson are doing R&D. Bill Gates does philanthropy. There's a spectrum of wastefulness, and I wholeheartedly applaud billionaires doing R&D that our governments seem to have lost interest in.

> Obviously everybody (Branson/Bezos) is entitled to spend their cash in whatever way they want.

straight up, no. they're using your tax dollars because they aren't taxed

> And in my opinion, I see the last two launches as indeed amusement rides for billionaires and a strong argument for better taxation policies.

How would different taxation policies prevent Bezos from spending a very modest share of his wealth on what he wants to do? He has $204 billion. What he has done with Blue Origin can be replicated for 1-3% of that.

Is the plan to take 99% of the Bezos fortune through government confiscation and forced sales of Amazon stock? I ask because only a small number of nations have ever behaved with that level of brutality toward private wealth, all were - without exception - totalitarian genocide machines with zero human rights. How about we not keep repeating the mistakes of the past.

Even Scandinavia - the region that arguably created the highest standard of living in world history - would never dare to behave that way toward private wealth (Scandinavia is overflowing with billionaires and adores private wealth). Nor would Germany or France.

What's the premise then, no fun if you're rich? Which board of comrades is going to be responsible for dictating who gets to do what? Are we abolishing the bourgeois, 20th century style? I think I've read this story before. There's only one way to prevent someone like Bezos from doing Blue Origin, only one approach politically that can be utilized to accomplish that (skeptics will argue there are utopian approaches to mass property confiscation that are humane; there aren't, once you uncork that genie, extreme violence and genocide always follow).

So if you've got $N wealth, you're not allowed to own a boat. If you've got over $1 million you're not allowed to fly in a plane for fun or convenience, nor may you experiment with creating new types of planes.

Perhaps if you've got over $250,000 you may not experiment with new types of technology period. That includes software and hardware. No fun for you. I say so. I have decided to draw the line there and my Socialist board of comrades will enforce it. I have no interest in only restricting the fun Bezos is allowed to have, it should be taken to its logical conclusion, so everybody gets to enjoy how the system will really work in the end.

It's really funny how you translated "better taxation" into literally "totalitarian genocide machine" and then typed up a thoroughly straw-manned paragraph about hypothetical questions that no one is promoting or suggesting. It's completely disingenuous that you bring up all these arbitrary lines in the sand about wealth when no one is suggesting that obviously ridiculous approach.

We can tax billionaires so that they pay their fair share for the public resources they use without it going full gulag.

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