The bridge dismantling isn’t why a huge personal yacht is disgusting, indeed.
It is just a poor choice of resource allocation, any way you look at it. Personally for Bezos, or as a society
It is just a poor choice of resource allocation, any way you look at it. Personally for Bezos, or as a society
500m dollar yacht seems like a good place to start, we can work our way back from there.
I'm not a fan of Elon Musk, but I feel much less negative about his ventures than about Bezos, simply because they are adding to the world of what is possible. Bezos' rockets seem like a "me too" thing. People often say expensive things are "status symbols". It appears that Musk really wants to make science fiction real, independently of what anyone else does, and I suspect Bezos of actually being obsessed with relative status. Who knows if that's fair, but that's how it looks.
Depends:
> If we suppose that the goal of society is to produce the greatest utility, and that the utility wealth provides an individual is sub-linear (i.e. twice as much money makes you less than twice as happy), then inequality is inefficient resource allocation.
> However, we also suppose that some level of inequality can lead to greater productivity, and thus greater utility overall. The question is then what level produces the best outcome?
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14505342
At want point is the cut-off in the diminishing returns of utility/happiness?
The fact that the end product happens to be a yacht is largely irrelevant to the economic impact and value of this investment.
There very well will be hundreds of key innovations and significant investments in R&D, materials science, construction techniques, etc. that stem from the investment made into building this product.
The more money Bezos spends the better, and I’m personally glad he’s spending some of it on projects like this. Just because it’s privately owned doesn’t make it any less a of an incredible feat of engineering and accomplishment of human ingenuity.
It will also employ hundreds if not thousands of people for years into the future (maintenance is much more expensive than the initial build).
No? Is there something special about this yacht outside of its size? Why would there be any innovation around it?
I'm sure it required at least 1 bit of special tooling, capacity, or engineering. Ignoring downstream innovation challenges, like the bridge. You don't think there is an opportunity for innovation there? Maybe they make improvements when they replace it
A biggest in the world sailing yacht will have hundreds of innovations just in construction of the masts. All the rigging is likely custom materials and hardware, they are probably using exotic techniques in all sorts of ways.
Also you don't necessarily want to innovate too much when you want to build something reliable.
Boats at this calibre take months if not years to iron out all the build kinks - it's custom made after all.
I'd love someone like Bezos or Musk to build a robotic dry stack of e-boats for public to use by subscription basis - something that can actually take innovating, can be scaled everywhere in the world, has positive impact (grid balancing) and is useful.
Not if it cranks up the global carbon footprint, and wastes resources better left in the ground. At some people we simply don't need to grant these people the "right" to build whatever ego-inflating toys they want, wherever they want.
Useless $500m boats like that simply shouldn't be built.
What it sounds like you're describing is communism, and it's an incredibly destructive and brutal philosophy to try to control people like this.
I have no issue with Bezos paying the full share of the net externalities of the project. I suspect a proper accounting would show significant net positive externalities to society, but if the scales were net negative then by all means tax it. I suspect that amount of taxes Bezos will pay all said and done as a result of this project are fairly astronomical.
To say that a person has no business or no right or no reason to build something incredible like this is beyond sad, it's a line of thinking that free democracies have gone to war against to protect themselves from.
To say this creation should not allowed to be built in any case, is IMO a violation of basic human rights and decency and crushing to the human spirit.
Edwardsville city officials identified the names of the six deceased on Sunday, who ranged in age from 26 to 62.
Among the victims identified by authorities was Larry Virden, 46, whose daughter Justice Virden told ABC News' Rob Marciano for "Good Morning America", "I walked out of that building after they told me my dad was gone, and I dropped to my knees and screamed at the sky at the top of my lungs."
"I said 'No, my dad's coming home," Justice Virden said. "'I need my daddy. He can't leave.'"
The same people who decide, for example, that you can't just chop down a forest of old-growth trees so that you can make a killing selling them as chopsticks.
Whom you are welcome to call "communists" if you want.
I'd be all in for superyachts like this were they used for public education, tourism, expeditions. Now it's going to just sit with 20 people on crew and be used twice a year.
Boats like these spend more on fuel while idling or relocating than when they are actually used by owner.
IMHO if you can't handle it by yourself then it's just too big.
"The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . "
What needs be recognized is that "allowing" Bezos to do this is not an ideological or engineering question between what is optimal or suboptimal. It's a question of how much confidence do we have in our interventions. Humans naturally engage in trade and acquisitive behaviors. There have been rich and powerful men for many millenia before Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations and capitalism became a philosophy. Commerce is a default, not an imposition.
The question is whether armchair hot takes, politicians, bureaucrats, economists, and ideologues are qualified to make confiscatory decisions against "the wealthy" that will not do more harm than good to society as a result. Our world is a system that is too complex to understand easily, or sometimes at all. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. There isn't mass human misery resulting from this yacht, but preventing the order could lose people their jobs and have who-knows-what consequences. So maybe we should chill.
We don't live in a world that's big enough for millions of Bezos's to average out, so I think it's a fallacy to appeal to a laissez faire, free market approach. To the extent it works and seems logical, that's in the context of a huge economy with millions of people.
Bezos being the product of a (sort of) free market doesn't make his actions free-markety once he's attained his current level of power. Treating him as different from "politicians, bureaucrats, economists, and ideologues" is wrong because he's not fundamentally different.
In both of those cases, wouldn't the creation of those assets require burning $500M in real stuff? Gold as well as Bitcoin costs what it costs because of the expense of mining, which is real peoples' lives, materials, and fuel burned.
If Bezos kept his $500M in Amazon stock or cash or something, then it would be just numbers and not waste.
1) there is not a consensus as to what an optimal economy looks like for reasons so numerous its unimaginable someone would make such a claim, but include things like: globalism vs nationalism, hedonism vs utilitarianism, militarism vs pacifism, importance of a problem vs tractability of a problem, etc ad infinitum.
2) even if there was somehow a consensus on what an optimal economy is, its a floating target. economics is based on intangibles like demand and peoples feelings. if such a thing were to exist, it couldnt exist for long and would require constant change.
3) what an optimal economy could even theoretically be requires knowledge of the future. if earth becomes uninhabitable in 1 year due to meteor impact, the optimal economy certainly doesnt involve anything but meteor detection and defense. or from volcanic eruption. or solor flare/ejection. or nuclear war.
do you bemoan a suboptimal economy when people buy 50 sneakers? or candy and soda? or have 5 TVs? or 3 computers? what does wealth inequality have to do with anything? what are you even talking about?
Sure, maybe this type of activity counts towards the GDP in the short term, but long term a giant yacht isn't capital that is going to give a return on the investment. For other metrics it is useless as well. It makes 1 person (and maybe his friends) a bit happier for an extreme cost. I think by most metrics this is a poor allocation of resources in the medium or long term. It's just an ultra rich guy spending a ton of capital to make himself happy.
Maybe this can help you to see how comments like yours in discussions about examples of extreme displays of wealth inequality might be the ones that actually drive people mad.
Well, not always. And sometimes many stone-cold, rational people flash money. Just to improve business.
A friend of mine was perfectly happy with his shit of a car even though he could afford something much better.
Then he started a business. A business that involved communicating and meeting with people very outside of our tech or liberal/vegan/minimalist/generic-dominant-fad bubbles.
These people cared about the car he drove. They did not want to be seen or meeeting or seen with someone with a shitty car or using a cab. Perception mattered, and business was hurt.
Then, that friend bought a BMW just to drive it to meetings. He also keeps his old car and drives for personal use.
There might be some people, important to Bezos's business that care about where they meet with him. Bezos wants it to be a yatch.
Can't blame him without more information.
He might be a money-flashing, wealth-displaying rich asshole. But I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
> He might be a money-flashing, wealth-displaying rich asshole. But I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
So you're willing to to give him the benefit of the doubt that there's a chance he needs to impress other wealth-displaying rich assholes like your friend's colleagues? This is almost a worse reason than him just wanting the absurd boat in the first place.
Perhaps I'm being too picky here, but he remained way below the Kármán line...
Nothing to do with "blame", or being an asshole. At some point we just can't let these people keep gobbling up resources like there's no tomorrow. Doesn't matter how much money they have. That doesn't buy them any special rights.
Do you really think there is any person or entity that Amazon does business with, that will do significantly more because he has rockets and yachts?
Bezos appears to want to do things that are not original, simply because other billionaires do them. The very essence of status symbolism.
Lots of people hate Elon Musk, and I'm hardly a fan, but wanting to make science fiction real seems to me easier to respect and accept. He wants to go to Mars because he genuinely wants to do it.
The only resources being used up here are one boat’s worth of metal/plastic/energy/whatever. Probably about as much as a couple of hundred cars.
I would add to your list, some of the finite resources I can think of that's wasted here is labor per human per year. The labor of those boat builders. It's an opportunity cost type of waste.
The money spent on the yacht has improved society.
The evidence of such is that the public officials in Rotterdam are willing to temporarily move a bridge so that construction of the yacht can continue within their municipality. They see it as a greater benefit to their society to encourage the construction of such yachts. Oceanco employs 320 people whose salaries are likely taxed at a fairly high rate. They have two shipyards in Rotterdam on which they probably pay significant property tax among other fees. They are a manufacturing business and yachts consist of a huge variety of different materials and finished goods so they will be deeply integrated with the supply chain which means there is a large outflow of cash from them to other businesses. The production of luxury goods has a significant impact on an economy, by their nature they demand the highest quality parts and workmanship. Attracting those materials and skills to a city has many knock-on effects that are beneficial. If you removed the demand for or the option to buy super yachts, Rotterdam and other cities would suffer a loss of jobs, skills, tax income, and probably several other businesses.
* if we assume ballpark $300-400 million cost of construction.
Even the left-leaning NY Times wrote a piece on how "luxury taxes" on yachts killed the industry.
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/03/opinion/l-boat-luxury-tax...
But of course that money could have been spent on other things, it even seems suboptimal for Bezos, which implies to me he must have so much money he doesn't actually know what to do with it.
But even worse, the 500M to dismantle part of bridge evidently isn't considered in cost of superyacht so there is a loss of 500M from city's budget because of the money because building superyacht is worth more than this loss to city - but you can see how that is a worse deal for Rotterdam then if Bezos had superyacht built without needing to dismantle bridge.
Bezos is paying for the bridge, not the city.
This was not evident from the article?
>This place would've been looking for another super yacht contract if Bezos didn't come around
They build ships, they would have been looking for another building a ship contract.
And the folks hired to built that yacht (versus a home or a new company) are probably pretty happy to get the business.
The cool thing about democracies is that we could democratically decide to tax the ultra-wealthy at a much higher rate.
> And the folks hired to built that yacht (versus a home or a new company) are probably pretty happy to get the business.
And glass-makers are happy when it hails, but that doesn't mean we should be going around breaking windows.
And yet it doesn't happen
> And glass-makers are happy when it hails, but that doesn't mean we should be going around breaking windows.
No one is going around breaking windows to give window makers jobs
Sure it does. Quite a few European countries have a top tax bracket in the 50% range. Denmark's capital gains rate is 42%, more than double what Bezos pays here.
Sure... and yet, Bezos hasn't moved his assets somewhere with zero capital gains tax, like Switzerland. There are clearly benefits to being in the US that are worth the 20% tax rate to him. I think a lot of them would still be present if it were 30-40%.
Short-term capital gains in the US are also taxed according to income tax rates, so 37% for the top bracket, which isn't far off 42%.
Guess who typically does this? The very wealthy. Guess who doesn't do it? Less wealthy people.
Many of these tax laws that are enacted end up affecting people who are upper middle class and don't affect the mega rich at all.
> No one is going around breaking windows to give window makers jobs.
Not literally no. But metaphorically it does happen all the time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window#O...
The point I was generally making is that more complicated tax laws normally don't tax the people that they purport to target and normally end up affecting those that are a couple of rungs down in the class hierarchy that everyone pretends that doesn't exist in most Western Societies.
For example. This was a few years ago. I saw a headline where I think I paid (relatively) a greater proportion of tax from my small Limited Company than one of American coffee franchises paid in the UK. Due to them doing some tax wangling with Ireland. If I were to do the same, I would have HMRC investigating me and I wouldn't be able to afford such an investigation. They probably have a dedicated tax compliance team. I don't.
Or contribute to their (re-)election campaign...
And no, glass makers and hail aren’t comparable. You need to bone up on your economics and the broken window fallacy.
It would depend on the rates?
I mean Musk paid $500M in taxes last year on a $1.5B exercise of options.
How high you want to go?
The customers and shareholders (and voters and regulators and business partners, etc. etc.) of Amazon did not vote for his yacht.
Bezos is one person with an outsized influence on society and if you don't trust other powerful individuals, it's illogical to give him a pass.
A capitalist and a king and a commissar with comparable powers aren't fundamentally different just because they are labeled differently.