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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

> Jeff spraying champagne and squealing with his marketroids

Criminy. Let the the man have his moment. He earned it.

He certainly paid for it, but the work was done by others.

I don't understand this inclination to take away credit from anyone that people don't like or find objectionable. What level does it end at? There is no rocket launch without Bezos, he started Amazon, and built it then used those funds to create blue origin. He employed millions of people along the way. You can argue that there are things he should have done better but there is no way that the credit does not belong to him. Its possible to be both super accomplished, responsible for many great things and a flawed human. People are complex.

> He employed millions of people along the way.

Some of the reports of said working conditions at Amazon, from fulfillment centers to AWS, are very appalling. I recall reports on how at Amazon it was normal to see staff crying at their desks, and how the average tenure barely reaches two years. Even life as a coveted software engineer at Amazon sounds far from great, with burnout and threat of firing constantly on the horizon.

I guess getting a paycheck is great, and Maslow's pyramid does keep us looking up, but I'm not convinced that Bezos' job creation process, and the impact that it has on employees suffering, is something that justifies high praises.

Even if Bezos was Practically Perfect In Every Way, people would just invent flaws in him.

By this logic one should not get excited after buying a house, a car, or even a birthday cake since someone else did the work. Obviously, that's crazy thinking.

But besides that, Bezos did a lot more than just buy a rocket from a supplier. He invested billions of dollars and years of work into Blue Origin. By any reasonable definition, he deserves to celebrate its successes.

Humanity as a whole succeeds when things like this are accomplished. The world has many problems, but advancing our ability to travel into space is not one of them.

Only a sad kind of cynic sees these events as an opportunity to spew hate. They reveal much more about themselves than anyone else.

You get excited after buying a cake because you then get to enjoy it. Its not _who_ made the cake that determines your enjoyment of it. That is separate from buying a cake and then taking credit for the cake itself, not just the fact you have cake now.

Honestly I would be much more excited about building a house than buying one!

If the rocket had blown up, all the fingers that denied him credit would be pointing at Bezos.

> If the rocket had blown up, all the fingers that denied him credit would be pointing at Bezos.

Do you believe Bezos should be free from scrutiny, or even criticism, if Shatner was killed due to a launch failure that was organized as a publicity stunt?

There are two perspectives here: the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for someone to go to space, and a corporation's PR stunt. Even if you ignore one of these aspects, they don't just go away.

But some low level guy would go to jail, teams would lose jobs and Bezos would be poked fun at next time he hangs out with Branson

> some low level guy would go to jail, teams would lose jobs

Is that what's happened with past rocketship catastrophes that killed the passengers? (Or airplane catastrophes, for that matter?) I don't think so...

Unless you buy into some of the Soyuz conspiracy theories, no. However in cases of extreme negligence, people have gone to jail for causing airplane catastrophes

So nothing ever can be celebrated, since it leaves out the 5 million layers of others that precipitated any event

This is true, and how we should all live our lives. I cancelled all my kids birthday parties because they did not accomplish getting a year older by themselves and if the father of the 3rd grade teacher that tutored the nurse that delivered my kids could not be there then no one gets to celebrate. After all they did not deliver themselves. /S

> So nothing ever can be celebrated, since it leaves out the 5 million layers of others that precipitated any event

Is it reasonable to ignore 5 million problems and pretend they don't matter if the people responsible for all those problems manage to put together a PR stunt that's praise-worthy?

I guess the concept of bread and circus isn't new, but it tends to be more subtle than this.

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