Why all the hate for Branson and Bezos, and their forays into space travel?

[k9bfriender]

@thorny_locust

Improving your own pie doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with how good your neighbor’s pie is.

Right, as I just said, for little personal things, sure, a desire for personal improvement can sometimes be a motivating factor.

@thorny_locust

Semmelweis invented modern asepsis because he wanted to compete with other doctors?

No, he did so so that he could show those other doctors that they were wrong, and he was right about the best way of preventing complications and death in childbirth. He wanted to have less women die under his care than under the care of other doctors who did not follow his practices. Or, as you would say, he wanted to put them down.

And I don’t know that you follow when I say, “Big things”. Sure, this was a big impact, but it wasn’t a big thing like organizing the labor of thousands of people of different abilities and backgrounds to do something like build a rocket and launch it into space.

[Miller]

@DrDeth

The When people are starving? is bullshit. You, I and most of the SDMB waste money every day… when people are starving . We eat large, see movies, have internet, watch TV… when people are starving. NASA was sending men to the moon… when people are starving.

It’s a bit different when a lot of the income inequality in this country is directly because of the corporate practices and political lobbying done by these astronaut cosplaying assholes.

[octopus]

By that logic, no nation should have a space program until there are no hungry people.

To answer the OP: I think it’s irrational to dislike folks for using their resources for space exploration. Someone needs to move the species forward.

[DrDeth]

Which are not those Democratic billionaires. Jeff Bezos contributes heavily to Democratic politicians. The tax cuts for the rich come from Republican Congressmen. Bezos also donates heavily.

In January 2018, Bezos made a $33 million donation to TheDream.US, a college scholarship fund for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as minors.[276][ better source needed ] In June 2018, Bezos donated to Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a private philanthropic fund founded by Bill Gates aimed at promoting emissions-free energy.[277] In September 2018, Bezos donated $10 million to With Honor, a nonpartisan organization that works to increase the number of veterans in political office.[278]

In February 2020, Bezos pledged $10 billion to combat climate change through the Bezos Earth Fund.[279][280][281] Later that year, in November, Bezos announced $791M of donations to established, well-known groups, with $100M each going to Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, The Nature Conservancy, World Resources Institute and World Wildlife Fund, and the remainder going to 11 other groups.[282][283][284] In April 2020, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Bezos donated $100 million to food banks through Feeding America.[11][285][286]

So I want to highlight that: Bezos donated $100 million to food banks through Feeding America.

Branson is British and politically liberal- neutral.

So, the income inequality in this country is directly because of the Republican party .

[k9bfriender]

@Stranger_On_A_Train

First of all, it is simply not true that “competition has always driven innovation.” The vast majority of actual technical innovation hasn’t been the result of competition; it has been someone working in a laboratory (in the post-WWII era, often supported by funding from the Department of Defense or Department of Energy) on some obscure technical problem that had zero promise of commercial profitability at the time it was conceived. Nearly every modern technological innovation relating to modern computing and digital electronics has come out of public funding–again, mostly DoD–with the one major exception being the transistor, and even that development was indirectly subsidized through general government support for Bell Labs.

And that was funded by the government, especially the Department of Defense, in order to compete with the research output of other countries, esp. the Soviet Union.

I would actually say that what you said there actually backs what I said, rather than detracts from it. Isn’t the Department of Defense specifically about competition?

@Stranger_On_A_Train

You would be led to believe that companies like Apple, Microsoft, AT&T, Tesla, et cetera squeeze out “innovations” on a daily basis based upon their slick PR flackdom, but the reality is that these (and most large companies) do very little actual technical innovation on their own, instead taking advances in materials science, computing, energy storage, et cetera that have already been developed and matured and then inserting them into products.

I’m not sure your point, but it is in fact new products that each delivers in an attempt to increase their market share at the expense of their competitors. Sure, it is a small iterative improvement over the last model, but that’s how you get from here to there.

@Stranger_On_A_Train

There is this mistaken belief that “cost plus”, presumably meaning Cost Plus Incentive Fee (CPIF) or Cost Plus Award Fee (CPAF) is an endless pot of money for contractors while Firm Fixed Price contracts guarantee performance within budget.

I’m not sure why anyone would have that belief. It’s certainly not an endless pot of money, or we would have far more space missions of all sorts, at any cost. However, it does not use that fairly limited pot of money as efficiently as it could, as it has no incentive to do so. There was no one else for NASA to turn to to launch their rockets, not many options for commercial satellite operators either. They would get all the money that was allocated for space launches, no matter how many or how few launches that actually was.

Now that there is actual competition, the price for space launch is coming down rapidly, and the abilities of those launch systems is increasing even as that cost is coming down.

@Stranger_On_A_Train

However, unless you are just making cheese sandwiches, the lowest bid often comes with a lot of subtle corner cutting and machinations in the proposal process, in which contractors seek to underbid one another while defining scope so narrowly that critical parts of the project are “out of scope” (not defined as requirements in the Performance Work Statement or contract deliverables), requiring contract amendments or supplementary contracts to be issued to complete the project at great expense.

Is Elon Musk making cheese sandwiches?

@Stranger_On_A_Train

In other words, this has nothing to do with “innovation” and not much with competition as much as the government acquisition apparatus being not able to get out of its own way.

Yes, opening things up for competition doesn’t just cause innovation, it also allows for things to become less expensive. It is exactly what you described in that preceding paragraph that comes from not having competition that prevents such entrenchment.

Anyway, I don’t disagree with what you say, I’m just not sure exactly what it is that you feel was misleading or outright untrue in what I said. Your post was informative, but didn’t really counter my point that competition is a far more encouraging environment to innovation than stagnation is. The “competition” as it were, between different aerospace industries was between giant behemoths, who each were going to be awarded a number of govt contracts. Now new players are entering the field, unencumbered as you said by the various political entrenchments are changing things, bringing down costs and expanding capabilities.

[Miller]

The income inequality in this country is directly because billionaires can effectively buy politicians, regardless of party. The Democratic party isn’t going to go to bat for American workers when that’s against the best interests of their largest donors.

[k9bfriender]

@GreenWyvern

I really suggest you look up the evolutionary value of cooperation and community benefit.

I’m not sure what you are getting at. An algae mat has great cooperation and community benefit.

It’s only if some elements of the mat, as some would put it, “put someone else down” and have an advantage over someone else, that some of those cells work to evolve into slightly higher beings.

[Velocity]

@octopus

To answer the OP: I think it’s irrational to dislike folks for using their resources for space exploration. Someone needs to move the species forward.

IMHO, it doesn’t even necessarily need to be that. Even if it were nothing but a fun vacation, I wouldn’t begrudge Bezos and Branson their fun.

It’s the attitude of those guys that rubs me the wrong way, but still, the space-tripping is fine. Although I would dispute that Bezos actually made it to space since he didn’t pass the Karman Line.

[octopus]

Income inequality comes from the fact that different people have different economic values because they have different intrinsic and/or extrinsic properties. Even in communist nations there are hierarchies of power and wealth.

[Saint_Cad]

@velomont

Between my military pension and my current income I could be buying tons of meals for homeless Montrealers. Instead I have a house, a car, and some bicycles. Does that make me a bad person because I’m not helping to solve the problems here on Earth?

I feel the difference is that Bezos and Branson et al. are helped by society to make their money. Offhand, they get at the very least favorable tax laws at the federal, state and local levels and (relatively) cheap labor for their factories, warehouses, offices, etc. so isn’t it fair for society to expect a return on their investment?

[Jasmine]

The “Jet Set” has become the “Rocket Set”. Space is the new playground of the exorbitantly rich and privileged. The screaming worldwide headlines flaunt that, and many find it extremely annoying.

[k9bfriender]

It explains why one may make twice, or several, or even a few dozen times another.

It doesn’t explain how one makes hundreds of times as much as another, especially when that lower paid person is doing the actual work that makes money for the higher paid one.

It also makes a difference in where that lower paid employee is. If they are living a fairly comfortable life, they may fantasize of being rich and wealthy, but they won’t be resentful towards them. If they are not managing to maintain even a basic lifestyle, then they can rightfully be resentful to those who put their wants before the needs of others.

It’s the difference between sitting on a beach and seeing a yacht go by, versus drowning in the middle of the ocean and being swamped by that same yacht’s wake.

[RickJay]

@velomont

Between my military pension and my current income I could be buying tons of meals for homeless Montrealers. Instead I have a house, a car, and some bicycles. Does that make me a bad person because I’m not helping to solve the problems here on Earth?

OK, well let’s honestly examine this; do you think people are JUST angry about this because Bezos isn’t helping the poor?

No, of course not.

In owning a car, you are not preposterously richer than everyone else. Literally hundreds of millions of people own cars. Almost everyone has a place to live. You’re not conspicuously wealthy.

What you have in Jeff Bezos is the ultimate example of someone who isn’t just wealthy, but wealthy in all the worst possible ways:

1. Bezos is ludicrously wealthy at a time that the gap between rich and poor is getting worse.

2. Bezos is, specifically, a wealthy person whose company famously avoids paying either its employees or the government what people think of as being a fair share.

3. Bezos seems genuinely uninterested in real charity.

I mean, I’m a proponent of free market capitalism, but his hoarding of wealth bothers even me. He makes my skin crawl. I do not personally understand for an instant how a person can be that rich and not let his employees take bathroom breaks, or how he doesn’t spend most of his free time giving money to charity.

[octopus]

Why give it to charity when he can employ that capital more efficiently? Now, some of the ruthless metrics he runs his business by aren’t what I’d do but I’d be content with a mere 10 mil.

[Miller]

@octopus

Income inequality comes from the fact that different people have different economic values because they have different intrinsic and/or extrinsic properties. Even in communist nations there are hierarchies of power and wealth.

Sure. But you can have policies that try to minimize that gap, or you can have policies that maximize that gap. Bezos favors the latter.

[RickJay]

@octopus

Why give it to charity when he can employ that capital more efficiently?

I don’t believe he employs it all that efficiently, and I do not think it’s good for a free market economy and the society it supports to allow one person to accumulate that much wealth while others go without. I think it threatens the health of the country.

[DrDeth]

@RickJay

Bezos seems genuinely uninterested in real charity.

Are we now in the position of saying just exactly how much the rich need to give?

@DrDeth

In January 2018, Bezos made a $33 million donation to TheDream.US, a college scholarship fund for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as minors.[276][ better source needed ] In June 2018, Bezos donated to Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a private philanthropic fund founded by Bill Gates aimed at promoting emissions-free energy.[277] In September 2018, Bezos donated $10 million to With Honor, a nonpartisan organization that works to increase the number of veterans in political office.[278]

In February 2020, Bezos pledged $10 billion to combat climate change through the Bezos Earth Fund.[279][280][281] Later that year, in November, Bezos announced $791M of donations to established, well-known groups, with $100M each going to Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, The Nature Conservancy, World Resources Institute and World Wildlife Fund, and the remainder going to 11 other groups.[282][283][284] In April 2020, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Bezos donated $100 million to food banks through Feeding America.[11][285][286]

So I want to highlight that: Bezos donated $100 million to food banks through Feeding America.

[RickJay]

@DrDeth

Are we now in the position of saying just exactly how much the rich need to give?

No. You’re totally missing the point.

[thorny_locust]

@k9bfriender

he did so so that he could show those other doctors that they were wrong, and he was right

Cite, that that was his reason, rather than wanting to save lives? And that he wouldn’t have tried to save the lives if he didn’t think he could show up the other doctors?

(Didn’t work, if so. They got so indignant at the very idea that thousands, at least, more died before the techniques actually caught on. Because they weren’t thinking ‘is this a good idea?’ but ‘does this make me look bad?’ Their desire to be seen as better than others didn’t help improve things; it prevented the improvement.)

@k9bfriender

And I don’t know that you follow when I say, “Big things”. Sure, this was a big impact, but it wasn’t a big thing like organizing the labor of thousands of people of different abilities and backgrounds to do something like build a rocket and launch it into space.

Oh. You only mean things involving thousands of people, not in their impact or in how many wind up doing them, but thousands of people in one organization at one time.

Who have to cooperate with each other, and try to help each other’s work, even when it makes the other people look good.

[Sam_Stone]

Jeff Bezos is rich because millions of people use Amazon, and because the infrastructure Amazon built internally was good enough to be sold as Amazon Web Services, which powers an awful lot of the web sites we all use.

Amazon has made lives better for many people. Bezos’ relentless push to drive down costs and increase efficiency is not only why he is rich, but it’s also why you can order a $5 item with free shipping.

During the pandemic in particular, the existence of Amazon not only made a lot of people’s lives easier, but helped curb the pandemic by keeping people at home instead of going out shopping.

Elon Musk initially got rich by helping to solve the payment problem on the internet. He took the money from that and invested every nickel in SpaceX, to the point where he was living in a small apartment and was one rocket failure away from bankruptcy.

His constant push to drive down the cost of spaceflight and enable fully reusable rockets has made him lots of enemies in old space who like to trash him whenever they can, but the U.S. government now saves something like $60 million per seat every time they launch astronauts to the ISS with SpaceX, and the money stays in America instead of going to Russia.

SpaceX’s Starlink constellation will be a huge boon to rural people around the world who cannot compete because they don’t have Internet access. Starlink could bring high speed internet and the attendant commercial and educational benefits to poor people around the world. That alone could do more to improve global income inequality than all the redistribution plans the left might have.

Musk also is partly responsible for the widespread growth of electric vehicles, having figured out that building boring little electric boxes was not the say to capture the public. He decided to build electric cars festooned with ‘delighters’ like giant touch screens and ‘ludicrous mode’ that made them not just good electric cars, but desirable cars for their own sake. That, and Tesla’s massive investment in a nationwide charging network really changed the game.

While many billionaires spend their money on private Islands, gigantic yachts and palatial homes, these three guys are spending their money on things that will trickle down to all of us. Even the suborbital rockets and planes are advancing the technology.

It’s very odd that while there are many billionaires around who inherited their money and do little with it, or who made it through financial manipulation or currency speculation, or who use their money for purely hedonistic pursuits, we choose to attack three self-made people who got rich providing goods snd services that the public desperately wanted or needed, and who are spending their riches advancing the frontiers of space.

You could take all their money, every nickel of it, and it woukdn’t make a tiny dent in income inequality. If you taxed those billionaires 100% of their wealth you would crater the economy, and the money raised wouldn’t even pay down 10% of the debt. It wouldn’t even pay tor Biden’s proposed ‘stimulus’. And if we had done that 20 years ago there would be no SpaceX or Amazon today.