Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

You cannot love your country only when you win.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

Giving in to doom is how we fail to fight for ourselves & one another.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

In my day, never was longer.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

I’m more christian than these people and i’m an atheist.

You cannot shame the shameless.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

The fight for our country is always worth it. ~Kamala Harris

Nothing worth doing is easy.

The press swings at every pitch, we don’t have to.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

If you voted for Trump, you don’t get to speak about ethics, morals, or rule of law.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / In Honor of Jeff Bezos’ Trip to Space

Reader Interactions

37Comments

  1. 1.

    germy

    Billionaires love charitable donations because they retain the power of who to give them to, and when. They hate taxes because they lose control of that. Taxes are theft!

  2. 2.

    germy

    Makes perfect sense that Jeff Bezos, who I sat next to at the Edge dinners hosted by John Brockman and paid for by Jeffrey Epstein & Kremlin money man Yuri Milner, would blast off to space in (looks, zooms in, squints) a giant dick

    — Xeni (@xeni) July 20, 2021

  3. 3.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    Sorry, can’t read. I’m too busy fondling myself over the Tom Barrack story.

    I despised that motherfucker back in 2016, with that kindly smile humanizing the bloated mediocrity….

  5. 5.

    Ninedragonspot

    OT, but woke up to the horrible news of the floods in Zhengzhou and other parts of Henan province, There are terrible pictures and clips on Chinese social media. I imagine I’ll up late tonight getting updates and checking in on folks there I know. Zhengzhou isn’t one of China’s most glamorous cities, but I always enjoy visiting there because Henan’s operatic culture is so vibrant.

  7. 7.

    Searcher

    IIRC the increase in Bezos’s net worth last year was approximately equal to the total Amazon payroll for the year.

  10. 10.

    germy

    With his money, couldn’t Bezos find a cowboy hat that fit his head properly? He looks like someone switched hats on him as a joke.

    Yes, Amazon workers did pay for this – with lower wages, union busting, a frenzied and inhumane workplace, and delivery drivers not having health insurance during a pandemic.

    And Amazon customers are paying for it with Amazon abusing their market power to hurt small business. https://t.co/7qMgpe8u0M

    — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) July 20, 2021

  11. 11.

    NotMax

    @Searcher

    Increase in net worth is not the same as increase in income and ought not be conflated as such when talking about what is currently legally taxable.

  12. 12.

    MattF

    Ars Technica has an entertaining review of the ‘Freedom Phone’, intended for RW buyers who want to escape the clutches of Big Tech:

    The phone has so many red flags, it’s difficult to know where to start. The website lists almost no information about the device itself. There’s the name, a picture, and a price, but there’s no spec sheet of any kind. This is a $500 phone, and its website gives you no indication of what you’re actually buying. The front page of the website looks normal, but every button that should say something like “learn more” and link to more information instead says, “Buy it now.” There are 10 “buy it now” links placed all over the front of the website—and almost no important information about the phone. Plenty of manufacturers publish incomplete teaser pages for upcoming phones, but they don’t collect the full retail price from customers without providing detailed spec information first.

  13. 13.

    waspuppet

    I honestly don’t know why I’m supposed to care about Jeff Bezos sort of going into space. We went into space 60 years ago.

    Am I supposed to think this is a self-evidently great thing because it was privately done? I don’t. Why should I? Because someday passengers might go into space? I don’t care.

    Put it this way: John Glenn was the son of a plumber and a teacher. Did he have a better chance of becoming a proper astronaut, or of coming up with the $28 million some twerp’s twerp dad paid for him to go?

    And if passengers can someday go into space, where will they go? Some other planet? Maybe, if there’s a facility to receive them. And who’s gonna build that? We are.

    So seriously, F all of this.

  14. 14.

    citizen dave

    It might just be me, but the amazon logo always reminds me of a male member.  Like his rocketship penis compensator.

  15. 15.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    @NotMax:

    All I know is that Jeff Bezos created a one stop shop that keeps me out of stores, has amazing customer service on delivery and returns and provides me with everything from streaming content to books to musical instruments to beloved food items to clothing to sex toys.

    What’s not to love?

  16. 16.

    Another Scott

    Amazon has roughly 1.3M employees now.

    Miscarriage early in pregnancy is not uncommon.

    As many as 50 to 75 percent of pregnancies end before getting a positive result on a pregnancy test. Most women will never know they were pregnant, though some may suspect they were because of pregnancy loss symptoms.

    Week 5

    The rate of miscarriage at this point varies significantly. A 2013 study found that the overall risk of losing a pregnancy after week 5 was 21.3 percent.

    Weeks 6–7

    The same study suggested that after week 6, the rate of loss was just 5 percent. In most cases, it is possible to detect a heartbeat on an ultrasound around week 6.

    […]

    (She was 7 weeks.)

    Bezos may be a megalomaniac and a crank and everything people say about him. I don’t know. But he does not personally direct every single action by Amazon’s management.

    If Amazon is breaking the laws, punish them. If laws need to be strengthened, then strengthen them.

    But stories that personalize bad things as being the result of one bad rich guy are tiresome.

    Condolences to her and her husband.

    My $0.02.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  18. 18.

    TheQuietOne

    The wife and I skipped Amazon last weekend and bought a new computer in a Big Box store 30 miles from our house. The machine doesn’t work right out of the box. I’ll update you all about how the store handles this. Amazon has been really good with issues like this. The store, we found out today, doesn’t answer their phone, corporate office might some hour now!!!

  19. 19.

    Sure Lurkalot

    @germy: We’ve been trying to run this country on philanthropy since St. Ronnie. May be why our infrastructure grades D- and our “health care” system is a sham. Of course that’s just two out of thousands of things that could be better if we would just collect freaking taxes from these otherwise worthless MOUs.

  20. 20.

    sab

    @Sure Lurkalot: I would much rather pay an expected level of state income tax, applied to highways and other things, instead of the sudden expense  of three new tires this year after various encounters with potholes on streets that should have been patched

    ETA : New tires are nothing to the rich, but another group of expenses ( replscement tires) totalling more than $600 seriously dents my budget.

  21. 21.

    quakerinabasement

    I’m with Scott.

    Bezos paid more than a billion dollars in personal income tax over a span of a decade, according to the ProPublica story from last month about the wealthy and their taxes. His company is a different story.

    Does any of this mean Bezos is a good guy? Beats me. I just hate it when people on “our side” throw around fake facts.

  23. 23.

    NotMax

    @Another Scott

    But he does not personally direct every single action by Amazon’s management.

    “Bertha McGonigle ordered a nightgown in blue? Send her a green one. Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

    //

  25. 25.

    dmsilev

    @MattF: My favorite part of that story is that they got so many conservative grifters to hawk the thing with promo codes and their payment processor was set up without any limits on how many codes you can use, that users were able to order the thing for $0 plus shipping.

  26. 26.

    Jeffro

    This kind of crap is 99% of the whole problem: instead of billionaires (and millionaires, and everyone) paying their fair share of taxes to fund the things that we as a whole decide are our priorities, as a society…the uber-rich vacuum up ridiculous amounts of dough, never pay taxes on it, and then spend it on their own ego gratification (or buying politicians, or blocking any substantive progress on climate change, or or or)

  30. 30.

    Starfish

    @germy: His charitable donations were unimaginative and thoughtless. Half the money is going to Van Jones. The other half is going to World Central Kitchen. These are both entities that get a lot of press on their own.

  33. 33.

    Starfish

    @Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:

    – Because they don’t have storefronts in states, they do not pay local property tax like other retailers. You are possibly losing both local property tax and local sales tax to your demand for cheap and convenient stuff.

    – The various cloud services make a lot of Amazon’s money. How much energy do all the invisible computers used to power all the electronic things that you like use? How much of that energy comes from renewables?

    – What happens to the internet when Amazon services go down? As an end user, you might not notice stuff like this. As someone who consumes stuff built on Amazon services, I do.

  34. 34.

    brantl

    @Omnes Omnibus: No, but he fights unions in his plants, doesn’t give his people enough time to pee twice in a shift, changes shifts on people without any form of notice and then fires them for shifts that they didn’t know they were supposed to work. He got rich on most of the command people in his chain of command (where he is the top link), being mega-dicks.

  35. 35.

    Urza

    @Starfish: The Cloud actually funds their other ventures.  Its about the only part of the company that actually makes a profit.  The storefront is still not profitable after more than 20 years, and it can only be as cheap as it still is with subsidies from the Cloud division.  They also check at the least metadata on their competitors that use their cloud trying to figure out how to beat them.

  36. 36.

    JAFD

    Look, I don’t like to patronize Amazon.  But when I needed a size #0 Philips screwdriver with a 5″ shaft, there’s a limit to how many hardware stores I can look in, travelling by NJ Transit in 90 F heat …

    Also, IMAO, the Amazon website is a disorganized, poorly-indexed, mess.  Easier to find stuf in it by Googling, surfing to G’s result.  Competition it needs.

    /(-rant)

  37. 37.

    Another Scott

    @JAFD: Yeah, I’m constantly amazed how absolutely horrid searching for stuff on Amazon’s site is.  I figure part of it must be because they’re always promoting stuff they want me to see first.  But still, Google gives much, much more relevant results.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

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