> Makes my point that if things go well, Bezos doesn't deserve any credit. If things go badly, Bezos gets all the blame.
Bezos just paid for the entire thing. If it failed, he didn't pay enough. Therefore, I don't see how he deserves any credit, but I do see how he could be blamed.
And aren't we all? People praise us for our taste in furniture, clothes, music, cars, books, houses - all stuff we didn't actually create, just consumed.
I believe Bezos was a little more involved though.
Yes; very good point. Although Blue Origin has done an excellent job so far, it's important to remember that space travel is very dangerous and eventually there will be an accident and people will likely die. It's not an 'if' but a 'when'.
Space travel is magnitudes of magnitudes deadlier than cars. A large chunk of astronaut training is basically "you're dead in 5 seconds, your actions".
The current statistical fatality rate for astronauts and cosmonauts is 3.2 percent. Lets give Blue Origin the benefit of newer tech and learning from previous mistakes and say they're twice as safe as any other spacecraft. That's still a 1.6% chance you'll die taking a flight in it.
Does that rate also hold for flights using the same model or even the same vehicle as tested in previous flights? Shouldn't testing bring the rate down?
Sure, but the average car trip doesn't span millions of miles and last for months. If you compare deaths per passenger-mile, space travel is safer than cars (but more dangerous than airplanes).
Because Shatt's space trip was relatively short and quick, he's fairly safe if you extrapolate from the statistics. Of course that extrapolation might not be reasonable for various reasons:
* There's only been one deadly space incident in the last 30 years, so we don't have a very good sample size
* Not all passenger-miles are equally dangerous. Leaving and returning Earth are the most dangerous parts of space travel. However by not going to orbit, Shatt didn't have to leave Earth as quickly, nor did he have worry as much about a speedy reentry.
* Most of those passenger-miles were done on vehicles that have a launch heritage than New Shepard
I heard this a lot. The "whistle blower" did a great job convincing the public it seems.
Interestingly enough, though, in 19 flights that space dildo didn't kill anyone unlike Branson's death bird that was grounded by the FAA due to numerous security issues.
Yes it was a publicity stunt, yes Bezos is a horrible person, but still the track record of the rocket powered phallus symbol doesn't look too bad as of now and at least appears to be somewhat safe and reliable.
For the crime of making tens of thousands of people millionaires, providing people with what they want the world over, living the American dream, and hurling Shatner's body into the void?
For the crime of breaking numerous state and city laws to favor what he wants, moving money in such a way his company pays little to no federal taxes, creating horrible working conditions in warehouses, and the list goes on.
Frankly, this isn't a Bezos failing but a government failing.
We shouldn't be beholden to our employers to have good working conditions and we shouldn't be mad at uber wealthy companies for using the taxcode to avoid paying taxes.
There are 100s of individuals and companies doing exactly what Bezos has done. We solve nothing by blaming companies for working withing the confines of law and being shitty.
Blame legislators that have allowed for such a system to exist. Vote in primaries and public for politicians that are looking at making things better for the individual.
I think it's pretty safe so say it's a double failure. A human abusing other humans is a failure of that first human. If there were other humans, a third party, that were supposed to protect the now-abused humans, then that is also a failure.
Just because there was no law that said "do not be an asshole" doesn't mean that an asshole is any less of an asshole.
Doing it at Bezos-scale makes it a Bezos-scale asshole problem.
I do understand why people are mad at bezos. However, the way I see it is that the government gave bezos and others the ability to act like this.
When slavery was legal, were the individual plantation owners terrible? Yes. However, it was the lack of government protections that allowed them to continue operating. Trying to draw the distinction between bezos and other billionaires feels like trying to compare one slave owner to the next and hoping that somehow that condemnation would make them grow a conscience.
Slavery didn't end in the US because abolitionists condemned slave owners. It ended because it was made illegal through the force of law (and in the end, a civil war).
Companies abusing their employees and the tax code won't go away because you dislike them. Those practices will only stop if the law changes.
If only the world was so black-and-white that you could look at all the negative impacts of an individual, consider none of the positive impacts, and conclude they are a bad person.
He's a horrible person for finally accomplishing something that nobody else has been able to: sparking a surge in compensation among unskilled labor in the US. /s
Amazon instigated the surge in all the major retailers moving toward $15 / hr as the new minimum wage for unskilled, entry labor. Amazon is setting the bar and forcing everyone else to keep up. They're likely to keep moving it higher faster than everyone else as well.
It also (very obviously) doesn't excuse all the mistakes that Amazon has made that everyone here is well acquainted with. I don't think anybody would pretend otherwise. The good goes with the bad. Amazon deserves credit for the things they get right as well as what they get wrong.
I was talking about this with my wife just today. The minimum wage is ticking up, not as a result of legislation, but because there's real competition for workers now. Very positive thing.
Accelerationism to justify fucking poor people over because "now they're paid slightly more though definitely not a living wage" is peak HN culture war.
Amazon didn't set that bar, everyone everywhere else did. Amazon finally caught up after years and years of messing around with monopolistic tactics and is only just now doing PR damage control.
> For the crime of making tens of thousands of people millionaires, providing people with what they want the world over, living the American dream, and hurling Shatner's body into the void?
Among other things, you forgot the part about scheduling people like machines to the point where they feel like their only option is to pee in bottles.
It's pretty easy to make any powerful person look good if you're willing to be shamelessly selective.
The only job left after Amazon put the other local stores out of business makes it an involuntarily choice unless you consider that crime is an acceptable career choice.
> Are you by any chance talking about the job they voluntarily applied to and they can freely leave at any time?!
Do you realize that doesn't excuse anything? A rather extreme example to make the point: slave-holding is still wrong even if you can find someone desperate enough to voluntarily sell themselves into it to you.
> You left out the "and they can freely leave at any time" part.
So? That doesn't excuse anything either. If my plane crashes next Jeff Bezos's Antarctic base, and he lets me in on the condition that I submit to daily sadistic beatings for his own pleasure. Does the idea that I could leave at any time (and freeze to death) make his beatings OK? Of course it doesn't.
I don't know that an Antarctic plane crash survivor and a warehouse worker are good comparisons. I'm beginning to think that you're kind of not great at analogies. But let's run with it.
Assuming Base Bezos is the only one around, without it you would have had one choice, death. Now you have an additional choice, survival with daily beatings. He has made you unequivocally better off, despite being a sadistic evil billionaire. Capitalism can be weird that way.
Now - in a scenario closer to the reality of an Amazon warehouse worker - let's assume there are hundreds of other bases around, each with their own terms, with little barriers to entry keeping other bases from being built, and Base Bezos is the one with the best terms. Then again, it's existence makes you better off. If it didn't exist, your choices would be worse.
All the workers at those warehouse jobs (a job far better in every way than the factory jobs I had) are better off because those jobs exist. And people at comparable jobs are better off too, because their employers now have to compete with someone providing what is in reality good pay, benefits, and working conditions for entry level manual labor jobs.
If you had to compare modern-day at will employment - the social construct through we are all earning our living - with slavery - something quite illegal in the entire world - your argument doesn’t hold much water.
> If you had to compare modern-day at will employment - the social construct through we are all earning our living - with slavery - something quite illegal in the entire world - your argument doesn’t hold much water.
You should note that's a straw man, since I did not make a comparison, rather I used a different example to illustrate a concept. To spell it out in the simplest way I can think of: voluntarily agreement to a contract does not make the terms of that contract right. That's true for all wrongs, including slavery and bad working conditions.
> voluntarily agreement to a contract does not make the terms of that contract right
Then why should I bother paying the mortgage to my house or car because that APR sure ain't right in them terms. Dam' bank found me desperate for a new BMW and is slaving my balls off!
> Then why should I bother paying the mortgage to my house or car because that APR sure ain't right in them terms. Dam' bank found me desperate for a new BMW and is slaving my balls off!
For the crime of the multitude of anticompetitive and shady behaviors that Amazon has engaged in, including using their position as a marketplace to leverage their suppliers out of business[1], supply chain fraud by commingling[2], workers rights abuses[3].
But quite frankly, even though several of those are actual crimes, I don't think you need to have committed a crime to be an awful person. Jeff Bezos qualifies for his smug demeanor while being an asshole, regardless of what crimes his company has committed.
>> For the crime of the multitude of anticompetitive and shady behaviors that Amazon has engaged in, including using their position as a marketplace to leverage their suppliers out of business[1], supply chain fraud by commingling[2], workers rights abuses[3].
> Amazon != Bezos, and Amazon's got obligations to its shareholders.
That's a distinction without a difference. Bezos was the CEO and largest shareholder. The shareholders weren't going to fire him if he'd chosen not to have Amazon pursue "anticompetitive and shady behaviors."
By pushing down the people who will never amount to anything Jeff Bezos
is not using luck to get ahead he is using power he obtained through prior luck.
Amazon is still Bezos. Ownership and leadership wise just not day to day.
I do. I think that we, as individual consumers and as free persons in a functional society, need to start drawing lines and pushing back on all retailers, Amazon included but not exclusively. That means picking our buying habits better and that means pushing back with laws and regulations that prevent or penalize abuse.
There are two things that have hindered those efforts: )1the race to the bottom is very fast, so by the time one retailer has had abuses exposed every retailer is doing it. 2) Enforcement efforts have been neutered, to the point where the fines are just cost of doing business - and that has it's own complicated history of abuse.
