Makes my point that if things go well, Bezos doesn't deserve any credit. If things go badly, Bezos gets all the blame.
Personally, I'm pleased Shatner got to make this flight. It's a great capstone for his career. Thanks, Bezos & Blue Origin, for making this happen!
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.
Then you should credit him for providing enough pay.
I believe Bezos was a little more involved though.
Quite frankly, I don't know if NASA would still exist if they managed to off one of the most popular children's show characters around.
Read "An Astronaut's Guide to Living on Earth"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...
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.
How many people have died in suborbital rockets with low apogees and barely any down range movements?
Numbers just aren’t there to reasonably draw any conclusions
The three astronauts of Apollo 1.
As any tech matures, it becomes safer. Early flying was a death circus. Now it's the safest way to travel of all.
It's hard to say where on the "getting safer curve" space travel is with so few data points. But it just might be pretty good. Time will tell!
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
It would be interesting to do a comparison of deaths / travel time. Challenger exploded 73 seconds into flight.
The Shuttle program lost 2 out of 135 flights over its 30 year life.
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?
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.
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 would only blame the government if they forced him to do this. He had free choice.
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.
«Except, none of those are crimes.»
Breaking the law is the textbook definition of a crime, isn't it?
Is that perhaps a non sequitur?
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.
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.
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.
Are you saying customers should've been denied this choice in order to subsidize those local store jobs?
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. Your analogy doesn't make sense once you add it back in.
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.
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.
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.
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!
You're being obtuse.
And no, I'm not comparing you to an angle.
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.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-i... - Literally on the front page today [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27177539 [3]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/05/amazon-wo...
Bezos did put in the hard work and got results, so he can be smug.
People who will never amount to anything will of course claim it was just luck.
> 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."
Amazon is still Bezos. Ownership and leadership wise just not day to day.
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.
Envy is a bitch.
Makes me worry when those in charge appear to have impulse control problems. Why not listen? Or use discretion? It does feel like discretion was more of a 90s-00s thing that's gone. Does that resonate with others or is it just me?
I swear people here just don’t like Bezos and see the worst in him.
The flight itself may be a stunt, but Shatner's words aren't. He's clearly overwhelmed, and his voice breaks as he thanks Bezos for giving him "this most profound experience". He then says he doesn't want to lose how he is feeling.
>The contrast between him and Jeff spraying champagne and squealing with his marketroids was very apparent.
Bezos isn't paying attention at first, but realizes what Shatner is saying and the feeling behind his words, and stops what he is doing to let Shatner unburden his soul.
Criminy. Let the the man have his moment. He earned it.
Some of the reports of said working conditions at Amazon, from fulfillment centers to AWS, are very appalling. I recall reports on how at Amazon it was normal to see staff crying at their desks, and how the average tenure barely reaches two years. Even life as a coveted software engineer at Amazon sounds far from great, with burnout and threat of firing constantly on the horizon.
I guess getting a paycheck is great, and Maslow's pyramid does keep us looking up, but I'm not convinced that Bezos' job creation process, and the impact that it has on employees suffering, is something that justifies high praises.
But besides that, Bezos did a lot more than just buy a rocket from a supplier. He invested billions of dollars and years of work into Blue Origin. By any reasonable definition, he deserves to celebrate its successes.
Humanity as a whole succeeds when things like this are accomplished. The world has many problems, but advancing our ability to travel into space is not one of them.
Only a sad kind of cynic sees these events as an opportunity to spew hate. They reveal much more about themselves than anyone else.
Honestly I would be much more excited about building a house than buying one!
Do you believe Bezos should be free from scrutiny, or even criticism, if Shatner was killed due to a launch failure that was organized as a publicity stunt?
There are two perspectives here: the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for someone to go to space, and a corporation's PR stunt. Even if you ignore one of these aspects, they don't just go away.
Is that what's happened with past rocketship catastrophes that killed the passengers? (Or airplane catastrophes, for that matter?) I don't think so...
Is it reasonable to ignore 5 million problems and pretend they don't matter if the people responsible for all those problems manage to put together a PR stunt that's praise-worthy?
I guess the concept of bread and circus isn't new, but it tends to be more subtle than this.
At first he didn't get trekkies (not exactly the "Get a Life!" skit, but something) and then he sort of realized that these were quiet nice warm-hearted people and embraced it all.
So what.
That makes as much sense as a NFL team owner suiting up with helmet and shoulder pads just because his team is playing.
I guess Bezos is free to dress up as an astronaut whenever he feels like it and gets out of bed, but is that something that happens whenever Blue Origin doesn't summon the media to do a press release?
Also a cool cop, a demented but brilliant republican lawyer, and other things besides. I think he always considered the Star Trek thing a little silly, kind of like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rqb4V9GxaBo
I love to watch bike racing, and have seen plenty of overjoyed people hugging their spouses and friends and everyone after a big win. The joy and other emotions all come pouring out. This didn't feel like that, at least from what I saw. Maybe Bezos and his crew are just that way, but reading through the comments, I'm not the only one who was not really impressed. And for the record, I'm not someone who loathes Bezos or Amazon.
I once wangled a ride on a P-51, a lifelong wish of mine. It was only 30 minutes, but I had a smile for the next week.
The contrast between him and Jeff spraying champagne and squealing with his marketroids was very apparent.