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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

But also don't let that one attribute of the person taint and overshadow a lifetime of accomplishments. I've seen a lot of this in the last few years on these sites. You start a thread about someone with a lifetime of achievements, and someone will inevitably come out of the woodwork to remind everyone: "Buuuuuut he was sexist" or "Buuuuuut he sometimes beat his kids" or (going farther back) "Buuuuut he was a slave-owner", implying that one attribute nullifies everything else the person did. Yes, everyone has flaws. Nobody is perfect. Particularly when you use today's more sensitive moral yardstick to measure yesterday's actions! You're never going to find Mother Teresa (who, by the way, is also a target of these kinds of "but she also" nit-picks).

History books should also talk about the bad, but it usually doesn't deserve even a single chapter, let alone be a major theme of the book.

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I think the best current example of this is the ‘cancel billionaires’ writ large in the billionaire race to space.

Yes wealth inequality is probably one of the biggest issues of our generation. Yes it is probably unethical that people are able to amass such huge fortunes particularly in some examples less reflective of the current crop of tech billionaires through tax loopholes and the fact that if you have money its easier to get more money. Yes musk is a billionaire but almost all of his assets are tied up in company stock, so like how do you go about redistributing that? Also, why is the meme that if we still have world hunger we shouldn’t have a space program back again? As though the world isn’t large enough for us collectively to pursue more than one avenue of progress at once.

The issue is not about a space program, the issue is that it's a space program that is largely redistributing wealth from the commons to rich billionaires, i.e. a significant portion of funding is coming from government, through contracts and/or subsidies.

On top of that is that the billionaires are using their money to fly to space, instead of really changing the world for better, which they clearly good do. At the same time there is a significant portion of our community that idiolises these people and acts as if they are in fact changing the world for better.

> redistributing wealth from the commons to rich billionaires

are these space programs really profitable for the billionaires in question? i was under the impression that they were sinking their time and money into them too, as more of a hobby than a money-maker

> are these space programs really profitable for the billionaires in question?

They aren't. We have currently two billionaire hobby space programs. One is a pure hobby and doesn't do actual space yet (suborbital hops != orbit). The other one exists solely to open Mars for regular access and eventual colonization, in the process also opening up near-Earth space for general exploration and exploitation. If it succeeds, it'll create an unprecedented amount of lasting value for humanity in general.

Really, complaining about billionaire space is one of the dumbest part of the current zeitgeist.

If you read the wikipedia page for SpaceX (which is as neutral as you are likely to get) you see that in the first 10 years of operation, SpaceX spend $1 billion, of which $200M were private investments (Musk $100M) and $400M came from NASA via progress payments on launch contracts, so yes SpaceX was primarily funded through government contracts. It doesn't really matter if they made a profit or not, the growth of SpaceX is largely build on government spending.

And the product of this investment will benefit all, it's not just some billionaire rollercoaster unlike others * cough * blue origin * cough *.

How?

In ways we are already seeing tangible benefits: supply missions and passenger missions to the ISS, Commercial and military satellite launches, Starlink. Future benefits this tech would potentially support: asteroid mining, colonising other planets.

The other company I reference have not made a commercially viable rocket that will get you into orbit.

To quote you:

> largely redistributing wealth from the commons to rich billionaires

Which means that you are saying that Musk is getting taxpayer money from SpaceX. This clearly isn't the case, he's sinking his own money into it too

I'm not sure how you think investment works. He is not donating his money to SpaceX and it disappears. If the government contracts increase the value of SpaceX it is increasing his investment.

> It doesn't really matter if they made a profit or not, the growth of SpaceX is largely build on government spending.

Well, yes, they're a real company providing real services and getting paid in exchange.

Anyway, whether the contracts are private or government is off-topic (if it was, I'd point out that the government is getting a really good deal here, which is a very rare case in large-scale government spending). The point is, all that money isn't being funneled to line Musk's pockets, it's being reinvested straight into "let's go to Mars" R&D program.

Also, if we want to end world hunger we will need to figure out how to build a highly efficient means of distributing perishable goods. Selling off all of Jeff Bezos' assets and then trying to use the proceeds to do that seems highly wasteful.

> all of his assets are tied up in company stock, so like how do you go about redistributing that?

Something that was tried in Sweden in the eighties was Employee Funds [0]. In short, tax the companies and use the money to buy stock in the same. Put the stock in funds controlled by the employees, which, in practice meant the unions. I think the original proposal was meant as a way to softly introduce a true socialist society, where the means of production (the capital) eventually would be completely owned by the workers.

The funds were never particularly popular outside the big labour union. Even the ruling Social Democrats that implemented the solution did it reluctantly after pressure from the unions. The funds was scrapped in the early nineties.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_funds

That works when a company is profitable, which it seems spacex isn’t; and as a musk style startup I (presume, with no evidence) that employees would have some stock. Perhaps.

And then wait for an Enron style fraud to emerge and wipe out the employee’s assets? Why not invest in broad market index fund instead if cash is being spent?

I would be pretty pissed if my compensation was being tied up in the risk of 1 company like that.

Not one fund per company. Just a few funds that owns a lot of companies. Also, it’s not clear how the proceeds of those funds would be distributed.

This is all been tried before. It is the same as defined benefit pension funds with a board of trustees made up of union members. Anyway you cut it, if there is a board tasked with allocating a big pot of money, there will be corruption.

So far the least corrupt method is a low cost broad market index fund. There are fewer people in the chain of decision making, hence less agency risk. Passive index funds do the job better than human investors with lower probabilities of corruption.

We have surprisingly little corruption in Sweden. Not that it doesn’t exist, but it’s far from the norm.

Anyway, I’m not arguing for the solution. I just brought it up as I think it’s an interesting historical footnote. Even the finance minister of the ruling party that introduced them famously wrote a poem that goes something like (in fine translation by google)

  The wage earners' funds are fucking crap,  
  now we've dumped them all the way here.
  Then they should be filled with every union bigwig
  who supported us so strongly in our struggle.
  Now we do not have to go more rounds,
  until the whole of Sweden is full of funds.

I think this whole affair is hilarious, but I’m afraid it is somewhat lost in translation.

Sorry, I should not have written my post in a way that insinuates you were advocating for that. It is interesting history. It does seem something is lost in translation for the poem.

Well said.

There are probably tens of millions of people and ten thousand MIT graduates who love and study physics more because of Walter Lewin. Does that justify the ways that he was abusive or morally ambiguous? Hell no!

Despite the controversy and very public cancellation of Prof. Lewin, his lectures are my top recommendation for studying introductory physics.

> Particularly when you use today's more sensitive moral yardstick to measure yesterday's actions! [...] History books should also talk about the bad, but it usually doesn't deserve even a single chapter, let alone be a major theme of the book.

Then again, pretty often the bad stuff is what influenced history a lot. And it is simply not true that all the bad stuff was just because back then the poor thing of person did not knew better. Pretty often, the same person being celebrated was the driver of the "bad stuff" , not merely follower acting like everyone else.

And yet again, bad stuff often is what made achievement and victories possible. So then, people who made more ethical decisions did not earned as much. That deserves recognition too.

> Buuuuut he was a slave-owner

You say this mockingly, as if being a slave owner should not overshadow everything else you do in life.

Yes, it should. It absolutely should. Being a slave-owner is massively, grotesquely evil. It should be what you are remembered and rightly denounced for.

> Particularly when you use today's more sensitive moral yardstick to measure yesterday's actions!

Considering slave-owning to be morally wrong is not a modern invention. It was considered wrong at the time too, just not by those who were profiting off it.

For instance, I don't think you'd find many slave who did not think it was evil.

So by your logic we should remember people like George Washington as essentially evil. How is that fair? One’s achievements and flaws must be considered inside their historical context, not our modern viewpoint.

> inside their historical context

Even among just the founders, slavery wasn't an institution universally accepted even in Washington's day.

Yes. Yes, we should.

Yes.

Then man kept other humans as slaves. That is evil. There is no question about this. People in his own time thought this was evil. He did it anyway. He was evil.

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