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Re:Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and... by andrepd on Wednesday July 21, 2021 @06:41PM (#27913080)
So much about your comments strikes me the wrong way. The meaningingless faux-inspirational second paragraph first of all. The empty platitudes about "exploration". You say "It's how we survive as a species. It's what's next.". No!! We are facing massive problems due to overindustrialisation, overproduction, misalignment of incentives basically. We should focus on the (comparatively easy, but still very hard) task of keeping our planet habitable, and to find ways to conduct our affairs in a sustainable manner, rather than dream of idiotic outlandish ideas of Mars colonization...

And you say:

>I personally don't care that these billionaires are spending their money on vacations to orbit.

See, that's where the whole problem lies. The problem is precisely that our current economic system allocates massive amounts of power to these people, and therefore allocates massive amounts of labour and resources to their vanity projects. The problem is that it concentrates power in a disastrous way. Like it allocates talented engineers to ad-tech and yacht-buliding rather than water purification projects or renewables. Like it allocates thousands of people to staff 5-star hotels to serve the whims of 10 or 20 billionaires and saudi princes, which could be serving 10000 children at daycares or 10000 seniors at nursing homes. Etc etc.

I guess what I mean to say is this, and I apologise for the off-topic tone that my comment took: the insane thing to me is how you simply take this very arbitrary, very non-natural way of organizing economic activity and production, and accept it as completely inevitable, in fact you don't even stop to be critical or skeptical of it, hiding it beneath the simple phrase "I don't care how they spend their money". The true triumph of neoliberal capitalism seems to be making itself look as natural and inevitable as the air we breathe.

Re:Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and... by brobdingnagians on Wednesday July 21, 2021 @07:00PM (#27913244)
Government protected monopolies and intervention to centralise corporations has created these megacorporations ruled by some of the most ruthless in our society. What we really need is de-centralisation, artisan ingenuity, and more free-spirited independent-thinkers who make decisions based on their ethics. Large corporations can make decisions where no one really feels responsible for the negative results. Small corporations would make people feel more invested in he end results, community, ecological results, etc.