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It’s been said that in order to become a space faring species access to space, rocket launches, must become routine, common. Hats off to Bezos. He has certainly

It’s been said that in order to become a space faring species access to space, rocket launches, must become routine, common. Hats off to Bezos. He has certainly made it boring. You can put stuff on top of it! There is a club! The presentation opened with the most uninspired call to inspiration. And then pivoted to a call to fear. We’re gonna have to ration due to energy shortages! In a couple hundred years. Fusion? 1) It’s gonna be raw resources and real estate, not energy, that we run out of first. 2) Amazon, the company, is doing all it can to reap profits at the expense of the environment with seemingly no regards for the health of the real Amazon and other natural treasures. 3) Amazon, the company, is a primary driver of some of the “immediate” social problems Bezos opened with such as poverty, so that argument falls flat. Not to mention the whole presentation managed to avoid mentioning SpaceX explicitly and ended with a self-referencing “Big things have small beginnings” photo of Bezos, kinda sadly insecure. I for one don’t want to live in a “manufactured” world that is “manufactured” by Amazon. My head just kept going to “Amazon Prime Planet”!! My god it will be efficient, cheap, on time, and chock full of externalities that we can all ignore because instead of being off-shored and hidden in warehouses, now they’ll be off-planet. This is how we get the dystopian future none of us deserve or want. (edit: Also, did Bezos just rip off the tag line from Prometheus, a movie whose central thesis is the inherent dangers in attempting to engineer life and worlds!? Bezos: “Big things start small.” Prometheus: “Big things have small beginnings.”

golergka 7y ago
> Amazon, the company, is a primary driver of some of the “immediate” social problems Bezos opened with such as poverty What. Amazon as a company have created enormous value for all of its clients, created thousands of jobs and value for it's trading partners. It's one of the forces that work to eradicate poverty in modern world, not the other way around.
- patagonia 7y ago
  Yes, it has created value for its customers and investors. It has also generated enormous externalities. Those two things are not mutually exclusive, and the point is one of the main points of my argument. The other being, this is just uninspired and unoriginal. It’s a presentation by an ex-hedge fund guy on a profit play, that feels more like my know-it-all uncle lecturing the family during Thanksgiving about how we all finally see that his warnings about climate change are being proven true and that means we all have to buy Soylent Green from him. And everyone around the table just stays quiet because we are afraid he is serious and just want him to stop talking. Amazon’s unconstrained growth relies on a model that allows for limitless externalities and this requires limitless resources both as direct inputs to production and cheap or free pricing of waste handling and social costs, in order to capture the value creation and offload the costs for its customers and investors.
  - negamax 7y ago
    Would world had been a better place without Amazon? You may think that it's hurting mom and pop shops. But that's not really true. Without AWS, we would still have 100 people sysadmin teams everywhere and many startups won't see light of the day. Without Amazon fulfillment centers, who get most flak for automation and worker issues, there are many things we won't have in life. Kindle gave me access to books that I would not be able to read otherwise. Alexa save time and energy. Continue questioning them about employment practices and keep them ethical (they are raising minimum wage to $15/hr) but Amazon hate is often misplaced.
    - Amygaz 7y ago
      But cutting the benefits so that workers end up poorer. Also kindle workshops are considered sweat shops, and that’s by Chinese standards so imagine...
  - nickik 7y ago
    You are making a lot of claims without any actual explanation what those things are supposed to be. > It’s a presentation by an ex-hedge fund guy on a profit play Yeah, the last 20 years almost of him investing in his dream that he has been talking about since he went to school is clearly a massive for profit play.
  - lorenzorhoades 7y ago
    Thats capitalism... And due to capitalism Amazon has launched on of the most efficient infrastructures in the world. Their warehouses and logistics systems are state of the art. Launching a Space Company is a GREAT THING. It puts pressure on SpaceX, as competition has proven over the years to be the father of invention and innovation. Of course with growth comes externalities such as a increase global footprint. However, these things are judged in a silo. Without Amazon, there would not only most likely be another "Amazon", but in the unlikely scenario that it is not aggregated long term with one centralized company, a vast meriad of mom and pop shops would have a much larger footprint and be much less efficient. I hate all the anti-corporate tendencies that have been prevailing on hacker news lately.
8draco8 7y ago
Amazon is not saint but market hates vacuum. If Amazon wouldn't exist then other, smaller companies would fill it's space. That would probably mean more people employed but environmental footprint would be much greater. It may look bad if you study Amazon carbon footprint etc. but if not them then someone else would be doing all that pollution and most likely in far less efficient way.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  What's your point? That doesn't make it okay. Amazon could and should pollute less.
  - 8draco8 7y ago
    My point is that Amazon is polluting less than multiple small companies doing Amazon job. Should they pollute less? Yes. Are they polluting less than others? Also yes. You see grand total numbers of pollution created by Amazon and compare them to other companies and those numbers are terrible, the issue is that Amazon, one company, is pretty much whole industry and should be considered as such. It's like comparing USA pollution to Cameroon. In raw numbers USA will be far worst, on the other hand, per capita numbers are not so nice on Cameroon side of things. TL;DR Amazon is not ideal but still much better than it could be.

golergka 7y ago

> Amazon, the company, is a primary driver of some of the “immediate” social problems Bezos opened with such as poverty What. Amazon as a company have created enormous value for all of its clients, created thousands of jobs and value for it's trading partners. It's one of the forces that work to eradicate poverty in modern world, not the other way around.

patagonia 7y ago
Yes, it has created value for its customers and investors. It has also generated enormous externalities. Those two things are not mutually exclusive, and the point is one of the main points of my argument. The other being, this is just uninspired and unoriginal. It’s a presentation by an ex-hedge fund guy on a profit play, that feels more like my know-it-all uncle lecturing the family during Thanksgiving about how we all finally see that his warnings about climate change are being proven true and that means we all have to buy Soylent Green from him. And everyone around the table just stays quiet because we are afraid he is serious and just want him to stop talking. Amazon’s unconstrained growth relies on a model that allows for limitless externalities and this requires limitless resources both as direct inputs to production and cheap or free pricing of waste handling and social costs, in order to capture the value creation and offload the costs for its customers and investors.
- negamax 7y ago
  Would world had been a better place without Amazon? You may think that it's hurting mom and pop shops. But that's not really true. Without AWS, we would still have 100 people sysadmin teams everywhere and many startups won't see light of the day. Without Amazon fulfillment centers, who get most flak for automation and worker issues, there are many things we won't have in life. Kindle gave me access to books that I would not be able to read otherwise. Alexa save time and energy. Continue questioning them about employment practices and keep them ethical (they are raising minimum wage to $15/hr) but Amazon hate is often misplaced.
  - Amygaz 7y ago
    But cutting the benefits so that workers end up poorer. Also kindle workshops are considered sweat shops, and that’s by Chinese standards so imagine...
- nickik 7y ago
  You are making a lot of claims without any actual explanation what those things are supposed to be. > It’s a presentation by an ex-hedge fund guy on a profit play Yeah, the last 20 years almost of him investing in his dream that he has been talking about since he went to school is clearly a massive for profit play.
- lorenzorhoades 7y ago
  Thats capitalism... And due to capitalism Amazon has launched on of the most efficient infrastructures in the world. Their warehouses and logistics systems are state of the art. Launching a Space Company is a GREAT THING. It puts pressure on SpaceX, as competition has proven over the years to be the father of invention and innovation. Of course with growth comes externalities such as a increase global footprint. However, these things are judged in a silo. Without Amazon, there would not only most likely be another "Amazon", but in the unlikely scenario that it is not aggregated long term with one centralized company, a vast meriad of mom and pop shops would have a much larger footprint and be much less efficient. I hate all the anti-corporate tendencies that have been prevailing on hacker news lately.

8draco8 7y ago

Amazon is not saint but market hates vacuum. If Amazon wouldn't exist then other, smaller companies would fill it's space. That would probably mean more people employed but environmental footprint would be much greater. It may look bad if you study Amazon carbon footprint etc. but if not them then someone else would be doing all that pollution and most likely in far less efficient way.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
kerkeslager 7y ago
What's your point? That doesn't make it okay. Amazon could and should pollute less.
- 8draco8 7y ago
  My point is that Amazon is polluting less than multiple small companies doing Amazon job. Should they pollute less? Yes. Are they polluting less than others? Also yes. You see grand total numbers of pollution created by Amazon and compare them to other companies and those numbers are terrible, the issue is that Amazon, one company, is pretty much whole industry and should be considered as such. It's like comparing USA pollution to Cameroon. In raw numbers USA will be far worst, on the other hand, per capita numbers are not so nice on Cameroon side of things. TL;DR Amazon is not ideal but still much better than it could be.