I noticed that too. Who puts on a hat of any kind before exiting a space capsule, like it's a Miss Manners rule? But they did land in Texas. Maybe he's running for senate.
I do not begrudge the billionaires their space toys. You can afford your own private NASA? That's fantastic! A real testament to this modern world we live in. BUT . . .
. . . Each and every one of those billionaires owes a major debt to the societies that enabled their acquisition of wealth. PAY YOUR FUCKING TAXES!
We really do need tax reform that makes the wealthy pay more. I know some would like confiscatory tax rates, but just getting Jeff Bezos to actually pay the same tax rate as one of his housekeepers would really make a difference.
Nah. I begrudge them. Can we just hand them a tape measure and lock them in a room together? Less environmental damage, same point.
Also, honestly, dudes keep your fucking feet and your fucking garbage off my moon goddess.
At a minimum we need laws requiring them to pick up all their fucking garbage afterwards rather than letting it rain down on us or float around the atmosphere. The space race has always been a kind of littering on an interstellar scale that borders on vandalism.
Endorsed, sib. I begrudge them. I c-grudge them. I d, e, f, & fucking g-grudge them.
Fuck those fucking fucks. Any one who can wake up & say, "I could end world hunger today & doesn't at leat try is a fucking shambling mass from outer stars & needs to be exorcised. With fire.
I second the tape measure suggestion. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. On twitter, Brandy Jensen said Bezos’ face looks like he got his filler done at a strip mall in Scarsdale, which is one of the sickest burns I’ve heard in a long while, LMAO.
Zuckerberg, too. I don't know if he resembled an obvious replicant when he was rating the hotness of women while going to school, but you would think he could afford SOMEBODY to at least give him a decent facial regimen.
I don't necessarily begrudge them, but I also think they have way too much money. Amazon makes like $50-$100 per American in profit every year. Most of Bezos' money is his 500 million shares of Amazon, which trades at like $3500 per share. Probably Bezos might pay more if taxed consistently on his Amazon and other shares, and also the government would have more money to alleviate the ills caused by Wall Street's passion to reduce and empoverish the employed
Libertarians are the worst because they’re really just Republicans, but they’re pretentious about it.
The single most annoying thing about how fanboys/girls defend billionaires is the idea that any check on them somehow prevents them from rising up to their god-given potential, the attainment of which somehow “helps” the rest of us (underpants gnomes, anyone?). It’s ridiculous. As Roy points out, guys like Bezos, Zuck, and Musk could sell everything, move to Montana, and do nothing for the rest of their lives and they’d still get richer. That kind of money continues to self-propagate without any real effort.
They are all so weird. They aren't attractive or well spoken or particularly charismatic. Or even particularly hard working. They just seem .. lucky. Right place/ right time. I guess we let them run the world hoping the luck will rub off on the rest of us.
Once you reach about $50 million, money creates its own gravitational field. It draws in more money and, just like a planet forming, becomes even more gravitationally attractive as it grows. Personally, I would like to see any income in excess of $1M a month taxed at 95%. If you can't live on a million dollars a month, to fucking bad.
Sure, they could move to Montana, but then they'd just raise themselves up a crop of dental floss and build another fortune on that. (Zappa references two days in a row for me. Should I be concerned?)
That sentence -"History is littered homina homina blah blah etc. <belch>" is the worst sentence ever written. That's quite an accomplishment!
Those wacky Podhoretzes! Norm, Midge, John and Ruthie have made serious money over the years writing, exclusively, pissy bilge. That's quite an accomplishment too if you think about it! Especially when you consider about 14 people actually read them. Three of whom, like Roy, are hate reading them.
Just excellent. It's embarrassing what these tongue-bathers are willing to do to billionaires in public (has Larry Kudlow checked in yet?). They usually bring up Steve Jobs for their "innovation" routine, and never the little-known Wall St. and private equity parasites like John Paulson, David Tepper, Mets owner Steven Cohen, etc. etc. whose only innovation is in rigging the great capitalist casino and getting bailed out by the rest of us.
But they do know their audience. Forgive me if I've mentioned this before, but a 2000 Time magazine poll showed that 19% of Americans think they are in the richest 1% and a further 20% expect to be someday. That's almost 40% of Americans who don't even know what the facts are, and who are generally clueless as to even how much a billion dollars really is. Anyone in "middle class circumstances" would be delighted to make a million bucks a year. Someone who makes a billion in one year makes a million every two hours. Jeff Bezos "made" $75 billion in 2020, or about $38 million per "working" hour. Musta done a whole lot of innovatin'.
It always reminds me of Steinbeck's: Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
"Meritocracy" is not reality. It's a phony justification for stealing. The suggestion that our space tourist billionaires are going to accomplish anything that will help humanity more than it hurts humanity is based on faith, and I'll think about developing that faith when they start demonstrating they're capable of it. Even just some small steps would help.
And yet, every time I make this point, the weirdo inequality stans explain that the space race gave us Tang, so stop saying it's pointless. A) we already have Tang, so thanks. B) it may or may not be pointless, but it's a very low priority. Apparently a firm grasp on reality doesn't include understanding why oxygen is important. If they want to leave their mark, there's so many ways they could do it without acting out NewsRadio scripts to the tune of billions of dollars and more environmental degradation.
And just guessing here, but McArdle is almost certainly one of those people who makes fun of government grants to fund pure research.
So these three weirdos could actually do us a bigger solid by getting themselves into the kitchen. Can we give them a cooking show? Maybe they want instant attention more than a legacy. We get them involved, maybe they don't do any real damage for a while.
The future, think about it: sex tourism in space. "Sure you've gotten an handy-j from a sex-trafficked teenager from a third world country, but have you ever done it... in space."
McArdle ("Jane Galt"!) and Poddy are such romantics at heart, it makes me want to cry. The purpose of these projects is to enable multibillionaires to make STILL MORE money than they are already making, because that is the only motivation they are capable of experiencing. They have reservations booked already up through at least the next year for other billionaires who want to be photographed being weightless for four minutes, at hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop. The thing we've been witnessing is what is called a product launch, same as a new perfume or watch or "cruise to nowhere". It will not contribute in any way to the colonization of space (I doubt humanity will survive enough centuries to get to the point where they can send crews to the next solar system) or the advancement of science. It will just make them a little richer or give them a new tax loss to report if it flops.
Innovation! They seem to think that Bezos et al are the first, people in space. Or did they piggy back on the billions (trillions?) of government money spent on NASA?
that 2% was for every year, well, 1969 I think, but I can't find the reference in which I saw that. I found it in 2009 when I was preparing for an interview on SD public radio after spending the summer working at NASA in Huntsville
Weird that she'd cite the 737 as the pinnacle of aviation achievement, aside from all the recent problems with Plane Go Boom, it's a fifty year old plane. She could have just as well said "From the Wright Brothers to the Cessna 172."
When I was a kid, I thought living in a Robert Heinlein novel would be cool (kid buys a used spacesuit from Nasa, gets abducted by aliens and saves Earth by giving a speech). This is not what I imagined The Man Who Sold The Moon would be like.
I noticed that too. Who puts on a hat of any kind before exiting a space capsule, like it's a Miss Manners rule? But they did land in Texas. Maybe he's running for senate.
Obvious Steve Miller reference, maybe? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELcTJZLxhFU
He's a joker
He's a tax-dodging toker
I do not begrudge the billionaires their space toys. You can afford your own private NASA? That's fantastic! A real testament to this modern world we live in. BUT . . .
. . . Each and every one of those billionaires owes a major debt to the societies that enabled their acquisition of wealth. PAY YOUR FUCKING TAXES!
We really do need tax reform that makes the wealthy pay more. I know some would like confiscatory tax rates, but just getting Jeff Bezos to actually pay the same tax rate as one of his housekeepers would really make a difference.
Nah. I begrudge them. Can we just hand them a tape measure and lock them in a room together? Less environmental damage, same point.
Also, honestly, dudes keep your fucking feet and your fucking garbage off my moon goddess.
At a minimum we need laws requiring them to pick up all their fucking garbage afterwards rather than letting it rain down on us or float around the atmosphere. The space race has always been a kind of littering on an interstellar scale that borders on vandalism.
Endorsed, sib. I begrudge them. I c-grudge them. I d, e, f, & fucking g-grudge them.
Fuck those fucking fucks. Any one who can wake up & say, "I could end world hunger today & doesn't at leat try is a fucking shambling mass from outer stars & needs to be exorcised. With fire.
I second the tape measure suggestion. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. On twitter, Brandy Jensen said Bezos’ face looks like he got his filler done at a strip mall in Scarsdale, which is one of the sickest burns I’ve heard in a long while, LMAO.
Zuckerberg, too. I don't know if he resembled an obvious replicant when he was rating the hotness of women while going to school, but you would think he could afford SOMEBODY to at least give him a decent facial regimen.
What if that's what he looks like after as decent a facial regimen eighty braziliian dollars can buy?
I don't necessarily begrudge them, but I also think they have way too much money. Amazon makes like $50-$100 per American in profit every year. Most of Bezos' money is his 500 million shares of Amazon, which trades at like $3500 per share. Probably Bezos might pay more if taxed consistently on his Amazon and other shares, and also the government would have more money to alleviate the ills caused by Wall Street's passion to reduce and empoverish the employed
No way I'm going to read it, but does she even once mention the fact that Amazon doesn't pay taxes? Past experience tells me no.
Libertarians are the worst because they’re really just Republicans, but they’re pretentious about it.
The single most annoying thing about how fanboys/girls defend billionaires is the idea that any check on them somehow prevents them from rising up to their god-given potential, the attainment of which somehow “helps” the rest of us (underpants gnomes, anyone?). It’s ridiculous. As Roy points out, guys like Bezos, Zuck, and Musk could sell everything, move to Montana, and do nothing for the rest of their lives and they’d still get richer. That kind of money continues to self-propagate without any real effort.
They are all so weird. They aren't attractive or well spoken or particularly charismatic. Or even particularly hard working. They just seem .. lucky. Right place/ right time. I guess we let them run the world hoping the luck will rub off on the rest of us.
Once you reach about $50 million, money creates its own gravitational field. It draws in more money and, just like a planet forming, becomes even more gravitationally attractive as it grows. Personally, I would like to see any income in excess of $1M a month taxed at 95%. If you can't live on a million dollars a month, to fucking bad.
Sure, they could move to Montana, but then they'd just raise themselves up a crop of dental floss and build another fortune on that. (Zappa references two days in a row for me. Should I be concerned?)
The poodle bites, the poodle chews it
"I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half." Jay Gould, 1891
Sometimes a rocket is just a rocket.
Yes but a Hindrocket is just plain painful...
Touché!
I wish the rockets had kept going, and going, etc.
Yeah, that's my thought. I don't mind that they went into space, just that they came back.
I too was sad that they didn’t escape orbit. Entirely.
That sentence -"History is littered homina homina blah blah etc. <belch>" is the worst sentence ever written. That's quite an accomplishment!
Those wacky Podhoretzes! Norm, Midge, John and Ruthie have made serious money over the years writing, exclusively, pissy bilge. That's quite an accomplishment too if you think about it! Especially when you consider about 14 people actually read them. Three of whom, like Roy, are hate reading them.
McArdle is proof America is not a meritocracy.
To be fair, so is Peggy Noonan, so they're perfect for each other.
Just excellent. It's embarrassing what these tongue-bathers are willing to do to billionaires in public (has Larry Kudlow checked in yet?). They usually bring up Steve Jobs for their "innovation" routine, and never the little-known Wall St. and private equity parasites like John Paulson, David Tepper, Mets owner Steven Cohen, etc. etc. whose only innovation is in rigging the great capitalist casino and getting bailed out by the rest of us.
But they do know their audience. Forgive me if I've mentioned this before, but a 2000 Time magazine poll showed that 19% of Americans think they are in the richest 1% and a further 20% expect to be someday. That's almost 40% of Americans who don't even know what the facts are, and who are generally clueless as to even how much a billion dollars really is. Anyone in "middle class circumstances" would be delighted to make a million bucks a year. Someone who makes a billion in one year makes a million every two hours. Jeff Bezos "made" $75 billion in 2020, or about $38 million per "working" hour. Musta done a whole lot of innovatin'.
It always reminds me of Steinbeck's: Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
"Meritocracy" is not reality. It's a phony justification for stealing. The suggestion that our space tourist billionaires are going to accomplish anything that will help humanity more than it hurts humanity is based on faith, and I'll think about developing that faith when they start demonstrating they're capable of it. Even just some small steps would help.
And yet, every time I make this point, the weirdo inequality stans explain that the space race gave us Tang, so stop saying it's pointless. A) we already have Tang, so thanks. B) it may or may not be pointless, but it's a very low priority. Apparently a firm grasp on reality doesn't include understanding why oxygen is important. If they want to leave their mark, there's so many ways they could do it without acting out NewsRadio scripts to the tune of billions of dollars and more environmental degradation.
And just guessing here, but McArdle is almost certainly one of those people who makes fun of government grants to fund pure research.
Turns out the space program didn't even give us Tang; it went on sale in 1959. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_(drink_mix)
So these three weirdos could actually do us a bigger solid by getting themselves into the kitchen. Can we give them a cooking show? Maybe they want instant attention more than a legacy. We get them involved, maybe they don't do any real damage for a while.
Did I just invent Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan?
[bitter fucking sarcasm on]
The future, think about it: sex tourism in space. "Sure you've gotten an handy-j from a sex-trafficked teenager from a third world country, but have you ever done it... in space."
[bitter fucking sarcasm off]
USS Pedostar
Like you ever turn your bitter sarcasm off
Ya feel meh. You'd love my umami sarcasm tho
"Fortunately for the gazillionaires, the spectacle will be so vivid they can see it from space!"
A guillotine high enough to reach the clouds! There's a project that might have some corollary advancements in engineering!
The space elevator elevating the cause of humanity
McArdle ("Jane Galt"!) and Poddy are such romantics at heart, it makes me want to cry. The purpose of these projects is to enable multibillionaires to make STILL MORE money than they are already making, because that is the only motivation they are capable of experiencing. They have reservations booked already up through at least the next year for other billionaires who want to be photographed being weightless for four minutes, at hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop. The thing we've been witnessing is what is called a product launch, same as a new perfume or watch or "cruise to nowhere". It will not contribute in any way to the colonization of space (I doubt humanity will survive enough centuries to get to the point where they can send crews to the next solar system) or the advancement of science. It will just make them a little richer or give them a new tax loss to report if it flops.
Plus contribute to the climate change with little value gained.
Too bad we get the heat...
Innovation! They seem to think that Bezos et al are the first, people in space. Or did they piggy back on the billions (trillions?) of government money spent on NASA?
Definitely trillion, NASA spent like 2% of the US GDP during the Apollo program years
that 2% was for every year, well, 1969 I think, but I can't find the reference in which I saw that. I found it in 2009 when I was preparing for an interview on SD public radio after spending the summer working at NASA in Huntsville
Like unemployment (Amity Schlaes and her government jobs don't count), government astronauts don't count
Oh, does she mean the 737 MAX?
Weird that she'd cite the 737 as the pinnacle of aviation achievement, aside from all the recent problems with Plane Go Boom, it's a fifty year old plane. She could have just as well said "From the Wright Brothers to the Cessna 172."
When I was a kid, I thought living in a Robert Heinlein novel would be cool (kid buys a used spacesuit from Nasa, gets abducted by aliens and saves Earth by giving a speech). This is not what I imagined The Man Who Sold The Moon would be like.