I just don’t know what to say about folks like Bezo’s and that one British dude who have everything in the world, but it is just not enough for them. To a large part, I do in feel sad for them, because it is in fact sad that all the riches and all of the best in life simply is not enough for them. And I feel sad about that. To have everything, yet still be wanting, has to be a miserable way to go through life. In the case of Bezos, his behavior led to his divorce in part because he was tooling around with that pedophile Epstein (MY BAD THIS WAS GATES I GOT MY BILLIONAIRES CONFUSED), in pursuit of more and better and who knows what. That’s sad.
The other side of the coin from my sadness is my inchoate rage at the waste of it all. Just the brass balls on this motherfucker to say something like this:
“I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this,” Mr. Bezos said during a news conference after his spaceflight.
It’s maddening. Just a few more dollars an hour would make life so much easier on his employees, who suffered tremendously the last two years during the pandemic while he galavanted around the world raking in truckloads of cash. He could easily do it, but he won’t because if he did, the Wall Street Boys would lower his stock value and that would cut into his billions. It’s a robber baron shell game.
My sleep apnea machine broke the other day. I used duct tape and scissors to patch hoses together to make an old machine functional in the interim, and today I went to the doctor, got a new script, and bought a used machine for a sizable chunk of money- 400 buck. I won’t be able to get a new one because there is a global recall on phillips machines, but because I have the insurance to see a doctor and enough cash to spend a good bit of money on a used one, my health needs will be met. How many of his workers can say the same thing? How many service workers have never even been to the doctor for a checkup.
And this greedy fuck isn’t even content vacationing on fucking earth.
Chetan Murthy
John, just in case, just in case, if your “sleep apnea machine” is a CPAP or BiPAP machine, and is a Phillips machine, I read that there’s a recall, b/c some of them produce volatile carcinogenic vapor.
I’m guessing you already know about this, and/or that it doesn’t apply. But just in case.
HumboldtBlue
I ain’t got nobody, that I can depend on!
I’m cooking pork chops and Santana fits well.
For the rest of youse here’s a reprise of Monsieur Periné.
Jerzy Russian
My CPAP machine broke a few months back. Kaiser does not have a copay for that, so I got another one that looked just like the old one.
Bezos certainly needs Shutting The Fuck Up lessons. I offer a course on Shutting The Fuck Up, should Mr. Bezos (or anyone else for that matter) gain enough self awareness to realize he needs the lessons.
I have also been thinking of branching out with an advice column, which might go something like this:
Dear Mr. Russian,
I make $70 million a year. Should I complain about taxes, or should I just Shut The Fuck Up?
Sincerely,
Phil
Dear Phil,
You should just Shut The Fuck Up.
Jerzy
Ruckus
John, Nice and righteous rant. Because of the way he’s done business and because he’s often the lowest cost by a bunch on core items that I need I sometimes have to purchase from amazon. It pisses me off but some things he’s up to 25% less than the local store, or the local store doesn’t carry the item. And I’d prefer to support the local store. But I’m on a fixed income and it’s just enough to get by. And I mean just. So when my choice is amazon or bust…. And this douchebag is spending enough to likely pay his employees significantly more but he’d rather take a very expensive ride in a craft build to look like him, a dick. Like he thinks this is going to get him laid.
Chetan Murthy
@Ruckus:
Some wag noted that AMZN’s foray into premier movie production (e.g. MGM) is fully-explained by Jeffy boy’s divorce. He wants to hob-nob with young actresses. Case closed.
Ruckus
@Chetan Murthy:
He was friends with Jeffery E so there should be little doubt about his ideals.
frosty
@Jerzy Russian: I think you’re on to something here! I would def read your advice column.
Roger Moore
@Ruckus:
I wouldn’t assume that being friends with Epstein is proof someone is a pedophile. Epstein made a point of cultivating the rich and famous in general, I assume both because it’s a perk of being rich and famous oneself and because it provided cover for his less savory relationships. And while Bezos did get in trouble for having an extramarital affair, it was with someone about his age, not a nymphet.
Chetan Murthy
@Roger Moore: “being friends with Epstein” == “being OK with pedophilia”. From everything we’ve read, he was quite open about all these “nymphets” surrounding him, and any adult male could have put two and two together.
NotMax
@Ruckus
Well, it doesn’t measure up to the Flesh Gordon runabout. in flight — hangared
;)
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
@Chetan Murthy:
He can already do that as Prime Video produces and distributes a ton of product. They’ve even won Oscars (Manchester by the Sea)
Chetan Murthy
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: Yyep. The wag who noted this, did so *before* AMZN+MGM happened.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
are you sure you mean Bezos and not Bill Gates? I know Melinda Gates cited Epstein in her divorce, but I haven’t heard about Bezos (that divorce seemed amicable).
craigie
Today’s best headline:
Why are we going gaga over Jeff Bezos doing something a monkey did 72 years ago?
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
It doesn’t bode well for his citizenship review.
Jeffery E was not exactly an ethical person so hanging around with him does not lend him much creed. And from the reports floating around, it seems Jeffery E was rather open about what he was selling.
Richard
He would be bored. He would be bored with our ways. He would look at our world and think it is too slow and stupid.
He would have no problem spending all those resources for a 10 minute ride into the stratosphere. He would be astonished that we even have that word stratosphere, or that we think about it sometimes.
He is the ultimate example of wealthy privilege. He is like that king that we used to talk about. Was it Croesus, or was it Midas?
Anyway, this king, whatever he touched turned to gold. At first it was good. But then he touched his cat, and it turned to gold.
That was a little weird but the kingdom has many cats.
And so it went. Everything he touched turned to gold.
This happened a long time ago, they say.
NotMax
@Roger Moore
Indeed. Guilt by association is a sticky wicket.
Bill and Hillary attended the wedding of Dolt 45 and Melania, and received favored treatment at the Westchester golf club. Doesn’t make them deranged megalomaniacs.
Chetan Murthy
@Roger Moore:
@Ruckus: was talking about “ideals”, and not solely action. I’m reminded of “ACAB”. The idea there isn’t that all cops are ready&willing to commit acts of brutality against innocent civilians, but rather that all cops are manifestly willing to cover for the cops who *do* commit such acts. And this is obviously true: we saw as much last summer, when many major cities suffered “police riots” and yet basically no cops have been prosecuted for acts that were caught on video and broadcast on network television. For that to happen, many, many cops had to be complicit, even when they didn’t act.
It’s the same with Epstein’s friends: they could see what was going on, and they neither blew the whistle, nor ran the hell away. And I include Clinton in this. Sure sure, he didn’t rape any little girls. But the *idea* that he didn’t know what was going on …. that’s an insult to my intelligence.
Gbear
I-ve got one of the recalled Philips units. Apparently a part is degenerating and could end up in your lungs. No word yet on how they’ll deal with it, just standard cya language and a warning against using it. The woman I talked to went out on a limb and suggested that some people are adding a filter in the path so I cut up a face mask and tucked it across the air hole between the mahine and the reservoir. Between this and breathtaking forest fire smoke, I hope I don’t die in my sleep.
Gbear
I wonder how I’d feel if something screwed up and jeff got stuck in forever orbit or on a slow trip to the sun. I think I’d be sayng “So sad, too bad, haha” kind of like the forward ship in Hitchhiker’s Guide.
James E Powell
This guy uses rice to show how much money Bezos has. Might be a little silly, but most people cannot wrap their minds around large numbers.
There is no reason why anyone should have that much wealth or the power that goes with it.
Chetan Murthy
@James E Powell: He’s not a *human*: he’s a force of nature, he’s so rich. If he wants to be human, he can give up all but some decent portion of money. Nobody begrudges him wealth, comfort, luxury, etc. So sure, keep $1B, Jeffy. But after that? Fugeddaboudit.
Dan B
@Gbear: I’ve avoided Amazon for years but gave in when some very superior LED’s were available through them. It was the same feeling that 99%+ of them and Solar PV panels are made in China. The issues, like the Randian ideals of High Tech, are systemic and seem like they doom humanity to the knee jerk response that regulating them will result in fascist horrors being unleashed.
The telling tidbit that Amanpour dropped was that Anderson Cooper asked what surprised Bezos. His response was that he’d heard about the inexplicably mind boggling reaction to being in space and was amazed that how incredibly thin the atmosphere appears was what struck the biggest emotional chord.
He doesn’t seem to make the connection that building the biggest distribution system for more products that use more resources and head us towards unstoppable, worldwide, climate nightmares should register in his thoughts. He gave $200 million to two people who do what they can to save the poorest and the brownest skinned from going into climate Hell first.
Bezos awareness cannot break through his nightmarish Randian ideology, but it keeps trying. Ask the many victims of the last few weeks of weather nightmares, floods, fire, smoke, heat, what they think of the brilliant efficiency of Amazon’s delivery network.
Brachiator
@James E Powell:
But there are people who have that much wealth, so now what?
Former Clinton era cabinet guy Robert Reich has been strenuously arguing that we should abolish billionaires, but he never provides any rational argument for this. So, millionaires are okay, but billionaires are suspect?
I had a odd lefty coworker who firmly believed that no household should earn more than $300,000 a year and that every dollar over that amount should be confiscated. This amount was close to what she and her husband were making, so I guess this was acceptable because it was aspirational. However, she did not include the value of three homes that they owned, which would push them into the multi-million dollar wealth zone.
She also seriously believed that it would be a kindness if homeless people were painlessly put to death. She wanted life to be pleasant and comfortable for most people, but especially for her.
mrmoshpotato
@Brachiator:
And how much flowery language was this couched in, so she could tell herself she isn’t Nazi trash?
mrmoshpotato
Yup. When it comes to people who could easily live the rest of their lives very comfortably, but they always need more, I wonder “How much money would make your greedy ass happy?”
(I know it’s not about money, but power over others, but dammit.)
Brachiator
@mrmoshpotato:
We were walking to lunch in downtown Los Angeles, and having to step around some unfortunate souls. I was surprised when she advocated euthanasia for the homeless. She said something about how it would be the kind thing to do. And that she would not have to look at such suffering, which made her feel bad. This was years ago and I don’t remember exactly what she said. But I was a little stunned at how blandly she said this.
Dan B
@Brachiator: And the very wealthy, to a great extent, believe that the poor would not stop at either billionaires or your co-worker’s $300 000. It’s the escalation of the wealthy view that the poor would make bad decisions and lose all the money, universal basic income experiments have given the lie to this belief, and ideologies that support confiscation of massive wealth have little interest, for the most part or for the noisiest factions, in being strategic.
Why is it we don’t have more revolts and more wars?
NotMax
@Brachiator
Adjusted for inflation, the individual fortunes of Rockefeller, Carnegie and Vanderbilt each outstrip Bezos’ worth.
Brachiator
@Dan B:
Isn’t this just the flip side of the view that the super wealthy will inevitably make bad decisions and so should have all their money taken from them?
Procopius
@Gbear:
That’s funny, but that is one of my hopes. If I don’t die in my sleep, then I hope I die from a huge, massive, comprehensive myocardial infarction or an aneurysm that hits me suddenly. I don’t want to end up like my great-uncle on my fathers side who spent 25 years confined to a wheelchair, unable to speak, after he retired. I don’t want to spend five years with some degenerative, painful disease. Of course whatever I die from will almost certainly be drawn out and painful, because almost all deaths are, but dying in my sleep seems like a good way to go. I’ve known since I was 18, in the Air Force stationed in Korea (1956) that I am going to die and it could be tomorrow, or even today, so I’ve thought about this for a long time. I’m old now, well past the biblical three score and ten, but enormously lucky to have pretty good health. I don’t fear death; I fear pain.
prostratedragon
But I was a little stunned at how blandly she said this.
Hannah Arendt wouldn’t have been.
Bezos just threw $200m at the appearance of giving a dam. That’s on the order of .2% of his wealth. Now, it’s possible that Van Jones and Chef Andres can find productive uses for the windfalls, but part of the point is that Bezos doesn’t need to care about that, any more than Bloomberg needed to care about blowing $100m on a presidential campaign that he had little chance of winning, or the more right-wing billionaires need to care about the hundreds of billions that have gone into dry hole candidates or legislative efforts for each howling success they manage to fix. A person of that kind of wealth can command the resources of society in any old bullshit way, either for their private interests or their whims.
A metric to bring it down to earth: Consider how many of our politicians have shown that they can be bought for pitifully small amounts of money, $5000 here, maybe a big $20,000 there, and consider how many such portions can be doled out from $100 or $200 million, an amount that even a determined person with only a billion or 3 (not enough to get on Forbes’s recent billionaires index) can manage. That to me is an argument as to the need for some kind of restraint like a huge high-income marginal tax rate, and an indication of how to decide where it should bite.
Relatedly, I happened to think of this little tune today. My working title for it has long been, “Faithful Dogs.”
Chetan Murthy
@Brachiator:
Jesus, that’s sick. I’m reminded of some techbro who wrote to the Mayor of SF, complaining about having to step over homeless people on his walk to his cushy Twitter job. And the comments I saw on Nextdoor, bitching about the homeless people camping near the Safeway, that they would spread disease, and why couldn’t they be moved elsewhere? These are sick people. Sickening, too.
Everybody wants to believe that their own level of income and wealth is perfectly OK. Everybody. I remember when Warren Buffett was writing about how he paid a lower effective rate of tax than his secretary. A (now-former, b/c he turned out to be a Trumpist) friend of mine, who’d retired with a few millions from selling his company, had gotten married. His new wife was telling me about how Buffett was *so* wrong, b/c …. and this is almost a direct quote
In retrospect, it seems they were well-suited for each other: peas in a pod.
We need taxation sufficiently confiscatory, as to bring all these fortunes down to the single-digit millions. Nobody needs more than that. That leaves enough for a nice life, and then a little to bequeath to one’s children (which is already a *massive*, *massive* giveaway). We need end these “generational trusts” and other shit, that locks up money that ought to be taxed at death. Just ending billionaires isn’t enough by a long shot. Warren says her wealth tax proposals start with fortunes $50m and up. That too, is a massive giveaway, and these rich motherfuckers need to understand that.
Ugh. The idea that somebody can think that my fellow SF residents, my fellow Californians, are like aging pets, that can be put down. It’s infuriating.
lol chikinburd
I just now found out that they came back and my morning is ruined.
Chetan Murthy
@Chetan Murthy:
This is the part that made me see red. I mean …. the complete uncaring about anybody less fortunate (who, in their case, are the vast majority of their fellow Americans).
mrmoshpotato
@Brachiator:
Wow.
bjacques
@prostratedragon:
I’ve been trying to hammer this point home to some people for ages. They think of millionaires and billionaires as just living in the same situation as the rest of us but fortunate to have it better than most. That’s simply not true. They helped to create the situation and exacerbate it by spending a shockingly small fraction their untaxed wealth on politicians to make sure it remains untaxed (and free to flood markets in food, water, fuel, and housing), and that the tiny amount that is taxed isn’t collected. It’s a runaway feedback loop that Biden is trying to address with his proposal for a global minimum tax. EU has belatedly pushed for something similar. Both may be too late.
NotMax
@mrmoshpotato
Remember Barbara Bush’s comment about “Why should I have to waste my beautiful mind on something like that?” about war casualties and body bags?
Or, speaking of Katrina evacuees bused to makeshift shelters in Texas, “What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.”
Brachiator
@Chetan Murthy:
Why do you think that you can decide what someone else needs?
What if I said “Send me your financial statements and let me decide if you have too much.”
I believe in progressive taxation and substantial estate taxes. But just as I don’t believe that we can say when a poor person’s life no longer has value, I don’t think there is some magical gauge that determines a limit on how much wealth a person should have.
r€nato
@James E Powell: every time I see an article posted on FB fawning over billionaires in space, I post something like this in the comments.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/07/billionaires-space-richard-branson-jeff-bezos-elon-musk
Or any of the multiple results found by doing a web search with the terms “jacobin” and “billionaires”.
I am certain that most Americans, deep inside, think there is something wrong with one person having so much wealth. But they have to be made to feel OK about allowing that thought to rise into their consciousness, that it doesn’t make them a communist to say “yeah, this is wrong”.
r€nato
@Brachiator:
How on Earth do you square this:
with this?
Clearly you believe that people who inherit wealth have too much of it by default.
NotMax
@Brachiator
I’ll add, if I may, that once the word confiscatory enters the conversation I recoil. Taxation rates tied to means, sure. Asserting ownership of every penny above X, no. That’s defining those assets as criminal spoils.
Chetan Murthy
@Brachiator:
Sure: set a limit for me. But then, I’ll expect that you will go forth and ensure that all the people richer than me, will also be expropriated commensurately. I donate politically to that end, just to be clear. So yeah, I’m happy to show the relevant authorities (== you) when they have the power to act.
Chetan Murthy
@NotMax:
And yet, we see all around us, that that is *precisely* what they are. Look at Mike Milken: he went to prison for a few years for his crimes in the 80s in the financial markets; he emerged, somehow had a ton of money left over, and has become a lion of wealthy society. Look at the Sacklers. Look at the guy who ran the NYSE when it was a regulated utility, and got paid $600m-some for what was basically a no-brainer job. All around us, we see people making great fortunes by committing great crimes. And other people doing it by rent-farming (like Manchin’s daughter with the Epipen).
So yeah, as some great writer wrote: “Behind every great fortune, lies a great crime”.
Chetan Murthy
@NotMax:
“confiscatory” enters the conversation because when you’re reaching Eisenhower-era rates (91%), what else are you going to call it? Also: economists have studied what firms do under high-taxation regimes: it turns out that they invest *more* in the firm, and less in executive compensation. And so companies as a whole actually do better, even as their executives are compensated less.
it’s clear that CEOs don’t earn their pay. Abundantly and brutally clear. There’s lots of work on this, showing that there is simply no correlation between performance and pay, none whatsoever.
Turning now to entrepreneurs, it’s clear that in many sectors, these people ride on the backs of massive public goods (like the mRNA research that was completed on the public dime, and then monetized by Moderna — which was *paid* for all the research it did, btw, and then for the actual doses). Or tech companies, that ride on massive government funding of research, and massive investment by both companies and individuals into open-source software for which these companies pay nothing.
eclare
@NotMax: That is kind of what the estate tax is designed to do, to prevent huge fortunes passed down between generations, like the Waltons. But there are way too many devices to get around that.
Paul
Ayn Rand did a lot more damage to this country than I think a lot of people realize.
For tech bros, her words about selfishness were the Gold Standard. The same mindset is apparent in police forces across the nation.
Rand melds fiercely-independent male braggadocio with ignorance of history and really bad sentence structure. Her adherents have flowered and pollinated for decades (the Prog rock band Rush, really pushed it). Unsurprisingly, there sure seem to be a lot of people out there who don’t understand how civil society works.
Chetan Murthy
Imagine if when the Feds funded research, *any kind of research*, the government took a stock interest in the commercial result of that research, just like an angel investor would: does anybody think that that wouldn’t end up being massive, for these tech and biotech companies, these pharma companies? The entire reason this doesn’t happen, is that we all pretend that *instead*, the government *taxes* economic activity, and recovers that money. And that this is more *efficient* than all the bloody bookkeeping involved in tracking the stock interest in every little research project and idea. And that’s *correct*.
Remember that drug that Gilead Pharma patented and charged a *mint* for, and when they got called before Congress, Katie Porter [IIRC] adduced all this evidence that basically the government had both funded the research, and a good bit of the commercialization: Gilead basically got handed the thing on a silver platter.
This happens over and over. And we never bother to right these wrongs, claw back these ill-gotten gains.
And they *are* ill-gotten.
Geminid
@Chetan Murthy: Journalist Xeni Jardin has followed the Epstein stories closely, by retweeting otherjournalists’ stories and telling some of her own. She attendef several “Edge Foundation” dinners where Epstein and oyher moguls like Bezos were present. It’s not like Epstein brought underage girls along, but people who met him would likely hear about his 2009(?) criminal conviction. The leniency and opaqueness of his sentencing may have allowed new aquaintences to minimize his crimes.
As has been said, Epstein cultivated the very wealthy and powerful, and some he compromised with illicit sex. His apparent mode of blackmail was not outright payments but instead investments placed under his management. In effect, his targets became partners . Aside from his “business” interests, Epstein also just liked hanging out with the big shots.
Xeni Jardin’s contributions to this story are on lowly Twitter, but she steadily links to others’ good reporting. Jardin is unsparing of those who associated with Epstein and this crowd, including herself.
I’d never heard of Jardin until a couple months ago, but evidently she is known as a tech journalist, and co-editor of the internet journal BoingBoing, which she left this past February.
The Thin Black Duke
Ruckus
@Procopius:
There is a good reason for pain. It tells you there is something wrong.
Except.
I’m on a med. I need this med for a condition. This med causes pretty strong, not massive, random pain in random places all over my body. They come and go, sometimes gone for a few days, to come roaring back for a few days. It makes life suck donkey balls. I just found an enzyme, sold over the counter that our bodies normally make that as we age – have I stated before that I’m an old, we make less of, that often keeps this pain from happening. I’ve been on it a week and it’s like my life is back. Life gives us pain for a reason – normally. But sometimes modern medicine gives us pain as a side effect. As I said, donkey balls.
You are right to not want pain, especially when it’s not real.
Did I mention the donkey balls?
Chetan Murthy
@The Thin Black Duke:
Inconveniently for them, there ain’t no such lifeboat. They’ve failed to understand the rocket equation and Newton’s Law of Gravitation and Motion. They’ll never set up self-sustaining facilities on other worlds: it ain’t feasible.
The Thin Black Duke
@Chetan Murthy: I know. But it’s impossible to explain that to people who never heard the word “No” before. Sure, they’re in for a rude awakening, but it’ll be too late for the rest of us.
Ruckus
@The Thin Black Duke:
They aren’t even life boats. They are toys for people that have far, far, far more money than sense. Yes they may be looking for an escape, but it’s not to leave, it’s for the boredom. Most of us work, not to stay busy but to eat, have a home and clothes. Sure it helps with boredom but we do it for the money. The super wealthy do whatever it is they do, for the money, which they already have so much of that the average things that cost money to keep from being bored, that’s small change for them. These guys and their “space flights” are bored little kids with an almost unlimited bank account. This is the thing they can do that very, very few can do. And they have so much that it’s not all that big a deal, other than it’s not boring and they get undulation from those that can’t see that it’s just idiots with way, way, way too much money and time and nothing better to do. This country would be so vastly much better if these idiots paid even the same tax rates that working people do and didn’t pollute our air with their childish bullshit. As many have pointed out, the country did far more than the level these guys did 50+ yrs ago. They aren’t ground breakers, they are rich children playing space invaders.
germy
Chetan Murthy
@germy: Apropos of, “Common People” by Pulp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuTMWgOduFM
HeartlandLiberal
For all debating whether Bezos was pals with Epstein, some headlines from 2019, last from 2020.
In 2011, Jeffrey Epstein Was A Known Sex Offender. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, And Sergey Brin Dined With Him Anyway
Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged madam Ghislaine Maxwell was a guest at a Jeff Bezos-hosted retreat in 2018, report says
PRIME ‘PAL’ Ghislaine Maxwell ‘boasted of friendship with world’s richest man Jeff Bezos, using Amazon boss’s name to win influence’
Matt McIrvin
@Brachiator:
I would be OK with most of my current income being confiscated if it really meant everyone could live in reasonable comfort and safety. I’d just get the same benefits as everyone, that’s fine. That’s a utopia even if it means I give up a few luxuries (we live way within our means anyway because we’re saving and hedging against the future in ways that would be unnecessary in this world).
Matt McIrvin
@Ruckus: Yeah, it’s a thrill ride.
I can’t get too upset about this, personally. Jeff Bezos is not a good person, but what they’ve done here is to make a modest form of space travel into an adventure-tourism product for the idle wealthy. There’s a lot of snarking about how they’re doing nothing NASA didn’t do 60 years ago, but NASA wasn’t turning it into a consumer product–that’s the big difference, for better or for worse. They went from a can on a missile that could just barely keep a hotshot pilot alive, to this cushy spacious capsule with big windows that people can ride for a lark. That’s the advancement there.
Elon Musk’s company already has an orbital human spaceflight system that they’re selling to the government, and the Russians have been funding their space program by selling orbital seats to zillionaires for decades without raising this much ire… but Bezos and Branson’s products should be much more affordable–merely too expensive for you, not too expensive for most billionaires. It’s a lot like the early ventures into aviation, whose protagonists, lest we forget, were often also horrible people who did this out of vanity or delusion.
Is this, though, the beginning of some massive democratic human expansion into space, like Bezos thinks? Eh, I doubt it. The need isn’t there in the way it was for aviation. And, as adventure tourism, it’s wasteful and far from environmentally benign. But I think it’s also a footnote in the grand scheme of things.
In a way it’s a nice example of the wonders and pitfalls of capitalism in general. Capitalism is better than any other known system at producing really cool consumer products–and that’s nothing to sneeze at, in my opinion. It’s also wasteful, and both fosters and rewards extreme inequality and exploitation. Heavy wealth redistribution and regulation are ways to keep it in check.
Ksmiami
@Chetan Murthy: so how come we never look at what other countries do? Finland warded off their main homelessness by building housing and hiring mental health aides? It’s shameful that we allow homelessness on our city streets (I’ve been visiting the kid in Denver) and the homeless here are seriously ill – we just can do so much better as a society.
debbie
Bezos wins the award for the most tone-deaf statement EVER.
Chetan Murthy
@Ksmiami: 100% agree. I have a professor friend in France, and we’ve discussed these issues a lot: he makes a shit-ton less than people in the US at his rank, but he told me that basically, he doesn’t need to save, b/c health, education, retirement, they’re all taken care of. Of course, Macron is dismantling that system right now, right fucking now. Ugh. And he knows that. He’s really proud of the fact that his parents were pretty poor: high school teachers in some podunk town and he made it to the top of the French education system, b/c it’s that sort of egalitarian system. Or as they would say there: “republican”. Heh.
Matt McIrvin
@debbie: Bezos is basically repeating old ideas out of 1970s-80s space fandom. The idea of somehow saving civilization with space colonies was all over the place then and some nerds never gave it up. They can sound like the Space Sphere in Portal.
germy
@Matt McIrvin:
1970s-80s fandom made space travel look so easy.
You walk around in a large, comfortable space ship with full gravity, served hot meals. It takes a few hours to travel between planets. You may need a space helmet to walk around another planet, but it’s a mild inconvenience.
No wonder people think it’s a fun idea to visit a hotel on the moon’s surface.
NotMax
@Matt McIrvin
But- but- Space: 1999.
When an explosion on the far side of the Moon powerful enough to blast it out of orbit jets it away from the Earth.
Highest paid job at the lunar station in that show had to be, hands down, glazier. Windows were constantly being shattered – left, right and every which way.
;)
apocalipstick
@Ruckus: And wear the most dumbass cowboy hat imaginable. Seriously, I’m supposed to be in awe of a dipshit who thinks that hat works?
apocalipstick
@Brachiator: I think there’s plenty of data to support that position.
germy
People who envision a luxury hotel on the surface of the moon don’t understand how grueling and physically unpleasant (and dangerous) the trip would be, as well as the surface experience.
Revrick
@Brachiator: The Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania has become the East coast version of California’s Inland Empire with warehouses being built all over the place. Starting pay at the local Amazon warehouses runs $17/hour, more for the night shift. That isn’t rolling in dough, but it does work out to about $35,000/year. The jobs are physically brutal, but that’s as much due to us Amazon Prime customers expecting next-day delivery as the inherent nature of the job.
Last year, Amazon made $21.3 billion profits on $386 billion in sales. Amazon profits jumped from $11.6 billion the previous year. Meanwhile, Amazon stock price yesterday was $3,573.19!
Bezos’ wealth comes from the insane stock valuations, because with 500 million shares outstanding that means dividends come to less than a penny a share. His wealth is pretty much Dutch Tulip Mania territory.
And the thing is much of that wealth is not extracted so much from the backs of those working in Amazon’ warehouses as it is from the suppliers of the goods sold on Amazon. Amazon’s power comes from the volumes of sales it generates, which means that any producer that wants to sell on Amazon has to cough up a discount. Amazon’s brutality, like Walmart’s before it, is exacted from the workers who produce the goods.
Jeff Bezos’ salary is $1,681,840. And that illustrates the ridiculous gap between his income and wealth.
Pittsburgh Mike
@Chetan Murthy: There’s real work involved in commercializing Federally funded inventions. In the case of the mRNA vaccines, there is delivery mechanisms, designing efficient production and transportation, and of course all sorts of time consuming but necessary efficacy and safety trials.
That doesn’t mean that the Federal government shouldn’t get significant equity in the resulting company in return for the use of patents generated via Federal funding. But I wouldn’t call the gains “ill-gotten.”
Matt McIrvin
@NotMax: They had to have somebody making new Eagles by the dozens, too, considering how many they lost every episode. It was as bad as shuttlecraft on Star Trek: Voyager.
Matt McIrvin
@germy: That was the Star Wars picture, but even “realistic” futurism of the time imagined vast cylindrical colonies, made out of rock mined from the Moon and rotating for gravity, with what looked like California suburbs on the inner surface.
Pittsburgh Mike
@Revrick: Amazon has about 1M workers (full time and part time) in their warehouses. If they’re all working full time, they cost about $35B/year (I haven’t been able to find out what % are full-time). Amazon made $21B last year, and at least $13B of that comes from AWS.
But last year wasn’t really normal. In a normal year, about 100% of Amazon profits come from AWS.
In short, Amazon is still buying market share by keeping prices low, by leaning heavily on the warehouse workers and their suppliers. I still think they could raise prices a bit and make their warehouse workers’ lives less painful.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Dan B: Oh yes the poor are poor because they bad decisions argument. Being spouted by a guy who just spent countless millions on a pointless joyride into space. The rich make bad decisions with money all the time. The difference is they can afford nearly unlimited screw ups and and still be rich.
rattlemullet
Bezo, Branson and every other billionaire is a blight upon humanity for stealing the wealth of nations. Bezo gave 100 million to two individuals yesterday. He could give one million to every man woman and child and not even dent a billion his 211 billions. The absurdity of wealth distribution in the world is clearly evident. The world is socialistic with all the gears churning wealth to the few. Pitch forks will come it is just a matter of when.
Origuy
@rattlemullet: His wealth in in Amazon stock. To give money to people or organizations, he has to sell that stock. Aside from the fact that every time he sells a big block of stock, the price is affected, he loses a little bit of control of the company. That may be more important to him than the number attached to his wealth.
beef
@rattlemullet:
That math is wrong. Bezos could give about $1000 to each person in the US.