Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has $131 billion. What can/should be done with all that money? One thing is certain: no one man has what it takes to make that call. And Bezos is certainly not that man.
What Should Be Done with Jeff Bezos’ $131 Billion?
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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Bezos dhould use the money for this planet
He should use it to buy up open space and keep land from being “developed”.
He should also donate to Planned Parendhood International. The earth cannot sustain seven billion and growing human beings.
“earth cannot sustain seven billion and growing human beings”
a UN study had the world population peak at around 9 billion then decline. Look up the demographics for aging and replacement populations.
I think the last one to balance is India, then they start to decline (more old than young) around 2150.
Population is the last thing to worry about.
I should also add we actually have surplus food/land/water. The issue is the people who CONTROL food/land/water.
“You want to help world hunger? Stop sending them food. Don’t send them another bite, send them U-Hauls. Send them a guy that says, “You know, we’ve been coming here giving you food for about 35 years now and we were driving through the desert, and we realized there wouldn’t BE world hunger if you people would live where the FOOD IS! YOU LIVE IN A DESERT!! UNDERSTAND THAT? YOU LIVE IN A FUCKING DESERT!! NOTHING GROWS HERE! NOTHING’S GONNA GROW HERE! Come here, you see this? This is sand. You know what it’s gonna be 100 years from now? IT’S GONNA BE SAND!! YOU LIVE IN A FUCKING DESERT! We have deserts in America, we just don’t LIVE in them, assholes!”
On the starvation in Ethiopia.”
Actually we do live in deserts but all the same Sam had the right idea.
My point is that human beings should not come before every other form of life on this planet. In fact, we should come last, so much do we detract from Earth.
British scientists such as David Atenburough maintain that humans should pull back to half the planet. That seems more than fair. No more development. No more mansions with three people living in them. No more lawns. Everyone should grow some of their own food.
And everyone should go vegan. All you hypocritical posters, you Falco, you Crazy H, and the departed Derlehrer would rather die than give up the flesh of other species whose suffering you cause. You carnivores cause more suffering than anyone on the planet. When you go vegan, then you can calumny me.
American Teacher
Dude you do understand that Humans do come last and other species like insects, bacteria, and viruses are dominant?
CARLIN: Let me tell you about endangered species, all right? Saving
endangered species is just one more arrogant attempt by humans to control
nature. It’s arrogant meddling. It’s what got us in trouble in the first
place. Doesn’t anybody understand that? Interfering with nature. Over
90%, way over 90% of all the species that have ever lived on this planet,
ever lived, are gone. They’re extinct. We didn’t kill them all. They
just disappeared. That’s what nature does. We’re so self-important, so
self-important. Everybody is going to save something now. Save the
trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails. And the
greatest arrogance of all, save the planet. What?
I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white
bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is
there aren’t enough bicycle paths, people trying to make the world safe
for their Volvos. There is nothing wrong with the planet. Nothing wrong
with the planet. The planet is fine. The people are (bleep) —
difference, difference. The planet is fine. Compared to the people, the
planet is doing great. It’s been here four and a half billion years. Did
you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a
half billion years. We’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a
little more than 200 years.
Two hundred years versus four and a half billion, and we have the
conceit to think that somehow we’re a threat, that somehow we’re going to
put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that’s just
a-floatin’ around the sun? The planet has been through a lot worse than
us, been through all kinds of things worse than us, been through
earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares,
sunspots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of
thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors,
worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays,
recurring ice ages, and we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans
are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. We are!
We’re going away.
…
“We’re so self-important. Everybody’s going to save something now. “Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails.” And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. Save the planet, we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet. I’m tired of this shit. I’m tired of f-ing Earth Day. I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren’t enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don’t give a shit about the planet. Not in the abstract they don’t. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn’t impress me.
The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE ARE!
We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.
The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?”
Plastic…asshole.”
? George Carlin
…
“We’re so self-important. Everybody’s going to save something now. “Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails.” And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. Save the planet, we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet. I’m tired of this shit. I’m tired of f-ing Earth Day. I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren’t enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don’t give a shit about the planet. Not in the abstract they don’t. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn’t impress me.
…
David Attenborough has a degree but as far as I can tell his doctorate is honorary.
His bio states “after completing a degree in natural sciences” but any doctorate mentioned is honorary.
He is kind of like a British documentary Oprah.
EWG
Does the credential matter?
Why is the comparison with Oprah fair?
American Teacher
Sir David was mainly a BBC presenter until he stumbled into the Earth stuff.
Which is roughly the same time Global Warming came into fashion.
I’m with Bezos. Humanity needs to move into space.
Why offer degrees for even more unemployable Woman’s study majors?
That $422 would go back to Amazon for various sundries.
I’m confused how Bezos gains are “ill gotten” ? Yet Musk has exploding cars and lives off various government subsidies which come directly from taxpayers pockets.
Why no Musk toon?
I am thankful the Trump bashing took a break. That there was not another my legal problems whine.
Nothing on that dirtbag Schniederman though. Racist woman beating kinky fuck. Comet pizza member if there ever was one.
Women’s Studies is not a viable academic field. They are political activist departments that have no place at a university. These departments hould be shut down.
Or possibly place more emphasis on cooking and cleaning skills than staring at your own vagina.
American Teacher
Try this test.
Ask intelligent educated professional women to name three female scientists.
Most can name Marie Curie. Cut them a break if they can name Anna Freud, even though she is not a hard scientist.
It ends there.
I’m always amazed that women can’t name role models for intelligent successful Scientists.
Yet they can pull fashion models, actresses, politicians, out tof their assess al day long.
The same is true with Andrea Dworkin or Camille Paglia. Literally no clue as to who they are.
And heaven forbid you get into people like Angela Davis. Whitey don’t know know minority types.
@EWG
Of course, they don’t know anyone beyond Marie Curie. Mention Jane Goodall and Dion Fossey and they will simply stare at you.
Feminists are terrorists. In aiming to take down “patriarchy”, they want to destroy Western civilization, the only civilization that has afforded women so much.
Feminists are terrorists
Well Emma Goldman wasn’t.
Feminists are racist though.
They tend to disregard the needs of minority women.
EWG
Goldman espoused violent revolution and was imprisoned for attempted assassination. That fits my definition of terrorist.
She was also hideously ugly
“Goldman espoused violent revolution and was imprisoned for attempted assassination”
And?
You do not support violent revolution within oppressive regimes? Nor assassination of despots and tyrants?
Are you a complete pacifist? A Jain?
Your rights end at the tip of my nose.
She and anarchist writer Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong friend, planned to assassinate industrialist and financier Henry Clay Frick as an act of propaganda of the deed. Frick survived the attempt on his life in 1892 and Berkman was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Goldman was imprisoned several times in the years that followed, for “inciting to riot” and illegally distributing information about birth control. In 1906, Goldman founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth.
In 1917, Goldman and Berkman were sentenced to two years in jail for conspiring to “induce persons not to register” for the newly-instated draft. After their release from prison, they were arrested—along with hundreds of others—and deported to Russia. Initially supportive of that country’s October Revolution which brought the Bolsheviks to power, Goldman reversed her opinion in the wake of the Kronstadt rebellion and denounced the Soviet Union for its violent repression of independent voices. In 1923, she published a book about her experiences, My Disillusionment in Russia. While living in England, Canada, and France, she wrote an autobiography called Living My Life. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, she traveled to Spain to support the anarchist revolution there. She died in Toronto on May 14, 1940, aged 70.
During her life, Goldman was lionized as a freethinking “rebel woman” by admirers, and denounced by detractors as an advocate of politically motivated murder and violent revolution.[3] Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality. Although she distanced herself from first-wave feminism and its efforts toward women’s suffrage, she developed new ways of incorporating gender politics into anarchism. After decades of obscurity, Goldman gained iconic status by a revival of interest in her life in the 1970s, when feminist and anarchist scholars rekindled popular interest.
We get Bezos and Sputnick gets NO RESISTANCE TO BLOODY GINA .
I’m trying to understand Rall’s marketing strategy.
Know your audience and all.
Is there an assumption that this site is anti rich anti trump and Sputnick is simply anti US?
American Teacher
Wanna be scared
https://retractionwatch.com/?s=yoshitaka+fujii
“Major fraud probe of Japanese anesthesiologist Yoshitaka Fujii may challenge retraction record
We have learned that a widely published Japanese anesthesiologist is under investigation by his university over concerns that he engaged in repeated fraud for decades that has tainted roughly 180 articles—many of which may be retracted as a result.”
When you have surgery it’s the anesthesiologist who should scare the piss out of you. This is the person who can leave you brain dead. This is the person who can leave you brain damaged.
Sometimes they, and I haven’t looked into this in a while, manage three or four surgeries. at once. That means out of the room the majority of the time.
Read through the article and links.
Jeffy & Elon sittin’ in a tree, K I S S I N G…
Bezos and Muskrat want to harvest space and have you pay for it trough “YOUR” government.
Muskrat got a head start with his “SpaceX” but Bezos wants to catch up.
Is that what capitalist oligarchs mean when they use the word “competition”?
Musk merely copies what the Russians have successfully done for decades.
Which is to reuse launch vehicles.
Once in space it becomes a gold rush with trillions going to anyone discovering a mineral rich asteroid.
Let them open the door.
Fortunes will be made by the bold and insane.
In a century people will recognize them as footnotes in History.
I’ve lived in scifi land for fifty years. I’m personally fond of the Neal Asher/Charles Stross/Ian McDonald versions. Along with a hefty dose of Heinlein.
Larry Niven thought space miners would use their spare time to study for multiple doctorates.
That was before video games.
Tax away half of his wealth.
Use the money to turn dead and dying malls into real communities that provide housing and local jobs.
The mall buildings may refurbished or clearered away: In it’s place
low cost housing for seniors, the disabled, veterans, some apartments for students, low income and average income, no upscale units. Small independent retail stores, a used book store, (a green rental reduction for and reuse stores) restaurants with 1-4 locations, a few chain stores…yes I would let Starbucks in.
Artist workspaces, small offices for startups, limited parking, a good light rail stop, bus stops, bike paths and a park. A school if needed, daycare, medical offices, a library, a community center for plays, and meetings.
At the edge of the property, clean light manufacuturing through worker owned bussiness.
Oldvet
Nice idea.
Won’t work.
People tend to fuck up free shit.
Hell renters tend to fuck up other peoples property.
First I would reach out to the many Anarchist/Communist (communes) communities in the US and around the world to see how they avoid those issues.
Do you allow everyone no matter how filthy? Who polices? Who makes the rules? Who cleans the public toilets? How does the community garden allocate work, and what happens to lazy workers?
One of the flaws with the preppers I see is they say find a like minded community. What happens when you disagree with how the people of like mind choose to use resources.
I’m of the Hank Stamper ilk. Read Sometimes a great notion.
Much better that Atlas Shrugged with a similar message.
Rand kind of peaked with The Fountainhead. Have no clue why AS fifty page repetitive rants gain so much support.
Oldvet
Then this guy has the right idea and should be supported?
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/12/23/mormon-mogul-eyes-small-town-vermont-for-vast-futuristic-development/VevYULqFPKGSnd8zHj2twL/story.html
The project is called NewVistas, and its goal is to create a fully sustainable megalopolis of 1 million people — nearly twice the state’s current population — clustered together in the hills and valleys near here, about 30 miles south of Montpelier.
A former Mormon bishop, Hall said he was inspired by the Plat of Zion, Smith’s 1833 blueprint for a self-sufficient community in which residents would lead deeply interconnected lives. The Mormon church opposes his project, and many residents view it as a threat to their way of life. But Hall, whose family fortune grew out of his father’s invention of synthetic diamonds, promotes it as a social and economic savior for the state’s economy.
“Vermont is dying, and anybody who looks at it realistically knows that,” Hall said in a lengthy phone interview. “The only thing saving Vermont is that it’s surrounded by wealth.”
Hall has not filed formal plans with state or local authorities, and he might not do so for decades — if at all. But his vision has taken form on the drawing board, and Hall said he will spare no expense to realize it.
NewVistas, in his imagining, would gradually grow into a cluster of 50 “villages,” each with as many as 20,000 residents. They would live in tiny units — about 200 square feet per person — which would allow most of the acreage to be preserved as wilderness.
Hall said the first village would likely be located among the towns of Tunbridge, Strafford, Royalton, and Sharon, which now have a combined population of 6,700. He has a host of other futuristic notions that engineers already have been hired to work on, Hall said. They include robots that rearrange furniture at the push of a button, 4-by-4-foot kitchens, and high-tech toilets that can help detect medical problems.
The communities would be self-sustaining, he said. No cars and trucks would roam inside a village. Rooftops would become small farms, and businesses within NewVistas would meet basic consumer needs.
But Hall’s vision comes with a big catch.
Residents would be required to relinquish all assets to NewVistas’ for-profit trust. And forget government by town meeting. Each village would answer to a hierarchy akin to the Mormon model.
EWG
Fair enough, but that doesn’t make what he says any less valid.
American Teacher
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones
A message consisting of a set of ten guidelines or principles is engraved on the Georgia Guidestones[8] in eight different languages, one language on each face of the four large upright stones. Moving clockwise around the structure from due north, these languages are: English, Spanish, Swahili, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian.
Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
Guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity.
Unite humanity with a living new language.
Rule passion — faith — tradition — and all things with tempered reason.
Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
Balance personal rights with social duties.
Prize truth — beauty — love — seeking harmony with the infinite.
Be not a cancer on the earth — Leave room for nature — Leave room for nature.
There’s always a point that gets lost in debates about space exploration. That is that the money is not put into rockets and launched into space; rather it is spent right here on earth. You know, making jobs.
The space race gave us the biggest technological leaps that have ever happened outside of war.
Tang? Oh yeah those wrappers that everything from granola bars to yogurt come in now.
@Wiz
If you’re solely interested in commercial applications and consumer goods, here’s a list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
Then there are satellites: communications satellites and weather satellites and GPS satellites. I’d say that roughly 99.2% of humanity benefits from those puppies.
Prior to The Space Race, government sponsorship of aero engineering was restricted to military applications. All at once they had an incentive for R&D into technology which *wasn’t* used to kill people. (intentionally)
The technology that put a man on the moon was a giant leap as well, but there’s not such a big market for moon landings.
No Henri?
Is today French national surrender monkey day?
Lot’s of cheese eating and kneeling toward Germany and various former colonies.
All those losses no wonder he hasn’t had time to post.
Today must be US fatuous fool day, as our beloved «[Stupid]EvilWizard» – the man with the IQ of 50 – is posting so much drivel to this thread, none of which seems to have much to do with its topic, Mr Bezo’s wealth and how it should be used. But then again, given her/his low position on the intelligence spectrum, it would be unkind to expect more from this silly troll…. 😉
Henri
bug eater
Does the day start with kneeling to Germany. Then to all the former colonies. Finally ending with the mass kneel at the Chunnel?
The cheese tears and wine mingle to mark this significant French holiday.
Is it mandatory to kiss an immigrants ass, or only those which kicked French weepers from their homelands?
I know there is a large migrant camp somewhere near the chunnel. Thus the ass kissing would be fairly simple after kneeling to the Brits.
I imagine some of your kinsmen combine the two for a single ecstatic moment of ultimate failure.
«bug eater
Does the day start with kneeling to Germany. Then to all the former colonies. Finally ending with the mass kneel at the Chunnel?» Why describe yourself and your day in those terms, my dear «[Stupid]WizardGlick» ? Even given your IQ of 50, surely you needn’t demonstrate all the fears and desires you project on others – in this case your humble interlocutor – on a public forum. But as noted above, it would unkind – and unreasonable – to expect a silly troll like yourself to be able to respond to the thread topic, rather than making a further arse of her/himself here…. 😉
Henri