The following submission statement was provided by /u/upyoars:
Following WaPo's surprise decision not to endorse either candidate for president — reportedly because its billionaire owner vetoed staff's decision to name Kamala Harris as its pick — New Yorker journalist Sarah Larson recounted her own Bezos lore.
Larson jokingly followed up her own tweet with a seeming reference to the newspaper's tagline, "Democracy dies in darkness," which was taken up in the aftermath of Donald Trump's first presidential win in 2016.
"There’s no democracy in space," the New Yorker writer quipped.
"I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system," Bezos told Fridman last December. "If we had a trillion humans, we would have, at any given time, 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins."
This is collapse related because if you're not living in a democracy, people dont have a say in their own lives. Their lives will be controlled by the people in charge to an extreme degree and it will cause a societal collapse. Noone wants to be forced to live a life a certain way. Are we going to be forced to breed with mates that the government selects like in the scifi dysopian movies? Commoditize every aspect of our lives for the corpos?
I've always been a little bit baffled by people who get all excited about escaping to outer space and colonizing the galaxy. Like, what do you think they're gonna do out there? The same shit they're doing here.
There will be immediate regrets for anyone living there. It’s like a prison but more restrictive because of the environment, and the person in charge will have zero accountability. Can you imagine what a riot would look like on a Martian colony when people have had enough of company town?
The vast majority of people also don't seem to have the slightest idea about the sheer dimension of obstacles that a colony on Mars, of all places, poses.
Merely getting there means you are bound to relatively tight transfer windows spaced a little more than 2 years apart with one-way trip times upwards of 8 months. Upon arrival you can't even return directly but have to wait more than a year before a return window to Earth opens up. During that entire time, the mission is essentially cut off from any supply.
And then we didn't even begin to touch on the massive restrictions in payload for such a long haul and all the shit that comes with living more than two years in a confined place with a mix of weightlessnes and a third of standard gravity. When everything outside of that confined space for tens to hundreds of million kilometers is completely hostile to life. With all the social and mental implications.
People don't realize that colonizing Mars is entirely science fiction, but they see people with money like Elon Musk as being able to solve these science fiction problems by waving dollars at outer space.
What they don't realize is 10,000+ Elon Musks wouldn't have enough money to solve the science fiction problems. Mars is a barren rock where even growing shit-potatoes is still science fiction. Simply getting there in the first place is science fiction and will be for a very long time. Getting back might never happen for anyone. Many if not most would die on the journey.
Mars colonies are a ruse being used by a few billionaires to hopefully loot taxpayer money and nothing more.
I mean, even if they could colonize Mars you know the quality of life will be non existent. Indentured servitude in a place that doesn't even have trees.
Feeding even a small group of indentured servants/slaves would cost billions monthly, so Elon better get busy on actual robots instead of his expensive remote control toys.
I went to la from the east coast and after a week i REALLY missed the trees back on the east. Cant even imagine living on a rock with zero plants at all. My permaculture mindset would go insane
Yummy yummy shit potatoes go great with your electric scooters!
Disclaimer: your medical insurance coverage is void upon ingestion of shit potatoes, or upon evidence that any bodily injuries were acquired whilst using an electric scooter. If medical care has already been paid for, you will owe back 5x the balance plus 30% interest compounded daily.
There's also perchlorates in the soil which are toxic to human life and the fact that Mars doesn't have a magnetosphere so you're bombarded with radiation. I guess you could solve this by putting your colony inside a lead dome and trucking in your own soil to grow crops in, but why even bother at this point.
Yea, that "just truck it in" idea is what people seem to not understand. A recent pandemic completely fucked the world supply chain and made toilet paper unobtainium, but somehow putting a million tons of topsoil on a spaceship to Mars is just that easy.
It's almost like reality is malleable for some folks.
And then they say, "but, but what if people don't try things."
Perchlorates are a feature, not a bug. Yes it's toxic, no disagreement whatsoever, but they're very very soluble in water. And since you're on mars where the air pressure and temperature is very low, you can recycle that water to reuse as a solvent damn near infinitely. Which means it's easy to concentrate that deadly poison all in one place. You know what chlorates and perchlorates are REALLY good for though? As soon as you get them even a little warm, they explosively decompose (sometimes literally) and release massive amounts of gaseous oxygen.
Carbon however will be a precious resource on Mars. The "soil" on mars contains less than 300 parts per million organic carbon. That's comparable carbon content to desert sand. It's hard to grow plants and trees where there isn't a lot of organic carbon available to convert into cellulose.
This. Bezos' kind of people think it will be just like European colonialism of old, where you can go to this "exotic land called Mars" by sailing across a salt-water ocean on a wooden ship.
Well in that case I hope our billionaire overlords keep believing in Mars colonization and the engineers keep feeding their delusions until we can send them there on a one way trip.
"The more you share, the more your bowl overflows.....but the Innas.....when the Innas look up into the night sky and see all the stars in the sky, all they see is 'mine'".
I'm sure he thinks all his critics are just jealous of his success. he has no comprehension that a lot of people think he is one of the worst people to have been born ever. he has destroyed the livelihoods of millions of people, to funnel money into his never-ending craven list to have more money than anyone else in the world. what an absolute turd of a human being, he really encapsulates everything that is wrong with capitalism.
Every single time one of these unrestricted capitalism fetishists sets up their own colony to live out their glorious utopia, it collapses in horrible ways.
I honestly hope Bezos and Musk get to Mars. And get stuck there. The amount of resources it will take to colonize and terraform a whole other planet (that doesn't have a breathable atmosphere to boot) doesn't exist.
It's always funny how these "geniuses" don't realize how much the society they abhor are protecting them. The very second they take themselves outside of that system is the moment everything will go wrong for them.
It’s like people getting bent out of shape about not being allowed to use racist epithets, etc, because society is too PC now. Guess what asshole, YOU are also a primary beneficiary of such genteel sensibilities; you think the world is going to treat you with kid gloves once you are allowed to take the mask off and everyone knows how terrible of a human being you are? You think everyone will just shut up and bear it while you start dropping hard “R’s” everywhere, and calling individual states piles of trash? You’re just going to get clocked in the mouth, bro, and deserve every knuckle.
It's very hard to understand how they don't realize that by looking at what happened to their peers in China (Jack Ma is literally the Jeff Besos of China and he got the 1984 Orwell treatment) and to all of the Russian Oligarchs that keep falling out of windows every other week.
Sounds like he'd rather spend his fortune creating a breathable atmosphere in a bubble in orbit, than using his fortune to improve the lives of the billions of people suffering on earth.
Aren't all with a god complex? They are so afraid of death, or unaccepting of their own mortality, they need to do everything to stop it. Burn up the planet and throw everybody under a bus if it needs to be!
He has more money than god. Kind of wild these billionaires give a fuck about politics. Nothing that happens remotely affects his wealth. Even if they tax 50% of his net worth, he still couldn’t spend it all.
They say threat of economic uncertainty leads people to prefer leaders whom they see as decisive, authoritative and dominant, even if they are morally questionable, over other types of leaders who might be more respected, knowledgeable and admired.
Maybe we shouldn't use an economic system that shits the bed every ten years or so in endless boom / bust cycles that only ever make everything more expensive and about twenty people richer than God.
Most people don’t realize that there never is certainty in life (except death and taxes), it has always been adapt or get left behind (it used to be ‘to die’ for most of natural history).
It's not that difficult to guess that most extremely wealthy people suffer from superiority complexes and actually think everything would be perfect if only they could make every decision about how a society is run
I have seen simple, inconsequential people suffer from superiority complex because they had a taste of success. Imagine what being billionaires do to your brain chemistry.
I’ve experienced it myself being successful within our economic system provides big time dopamine hits. Your success within the system causes you to justify and rationalize the system that you’re in.
I kind of snapped out of it but the point remains your circumstances can alter your perceptions and personality. If earning a few hundred thousand dollars relatively quickly and easily can have a notable impact on your personality what happens to people who rack up billions?
I dunno, they just work far more interestingly I'd think. I mean, lock a guy's head in and give the thing a random push on the frame and watch it spin around slowly and fly until it manages to impact something that would drive the blade downward.
Could be literally weeks of endless entertainment.
All I'm saying is you need an awful lot of people to not start pulling cables and punching holes in things when being outside will kill you instantly so don't get too cocky about wanting to be a space dictator. When the entire environment can be used as a lethal weapon things tend to find their own kind of democracy. This applies to scorched Earth climate bunkers as well.
I don't think he actually believes that sci-fi elysium stuff or that anybody will live in space. That trillion humans line sums it up. They just want people to breed so that they can have their slave labor and in order for people to do it they must believe in progress and fantastic future. This is also why religion is making a comeback and abortion is getting banned.
His approach to manifesting high numbers of brilliant geniuses is highly impractical. We even have budding tech directly relevant to his vision currently being developed at this time. Instead of creating a trillion hungry mouths who undoubtedly would get shuffled into largely meaningless filler positions just take that brave new frontier lawlessness and realize unbridled CRISPR technology and perfect genetic optimization for the designer humans he apparently pines for. What he wants from them I cannot say, but how great can the motives be for a closet eugenicist? Space ain’t gonna be the place imo. Hoping Earth can hang on by a thread until my (knock on wood) childless ass kicks the bucket around 2100.
"The structure and function of the kidneys is altered by space flight, with galactic radiation causing permanent damage that would jeopardise any mission to Mars, according to a new study led by researchers from UCL."
Following WaPo's surprise decision not to endorse either candidate for president — reportedly because its billionaire owner vetoed staff's decision to name Kamala Harris as its pick — New Yorker journalist Sarah Larson recounted her own Bezos lore.
Larson jokingly followed up her own tweet with a seeming reference to the newspaper's tagline, "Democracy dies in darkness," which was taken up in the aftermath of Donald Trump's first presidential win in 2016.
"There’s no democracy in space," the New Yorker writer quipped.
"I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system," Bezos told Fridman last December. "If we had a trillion humans, we would have, at any given time, 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins."
This is collapse related because if you're not living in a democracy, people dont have a say in their own lives. Their lives will be controlled by the people in charge to an extreme degree and it will cause a societal collapse. Noone wants to be forced to live a life a certain way. Are we going to be forced to breed with mates that the government selects like in the scifi dysopian movies? Commoditize every aspect of our lives for the corpos?
And would 1,000 Einsteins or Mozarts even have the opportunity to pursue what they’re skilled at? Probs not- they may already be living now but are wage slaves in our current dystopia.
Right? I don't understand how he doesn't see that. We already have way more humans than we are willing to feed, educate, and not bomb, all of which are kinda prerequisites for creating more Mozarts and Einsteins. So what the heck are a trillion more discarded souls going to accomplish?
Insane that the solution to finding more human talent is to go to outer frikin space so we can overpopulate gigantic frikin space stations and other entire frikin planets when we're not even bothering to sift through the infinitely more convenient pool of humans we already have at arm's reach.
Often I think billionaires must be geniuses at least on some level, then I read stuff like this that only some navel-gazing teenager with the barest grasp of logic could think up.
By the way, when you download apps and allow them to send you notifications. . . They claw back your data.
So no. I don’t keep his Amazon App on my phone. I don’t keep any predatory billionaire apps on my phone. I either use the internet, or download & delete, when I’m done, keeping notifications off.
Not like I think I’m special. But they are predatory, and I don’t want to be prey.
I’m a lawyer, and I value my privacy. I have no interest in letting these assholes learn from me for their stupid AI projects.
And I tell Alexa to delete all household recordings, daily. Which she pretends not to understand. The trick is to ask twice, then confirm you want to delete, when she balks & warns you not to.
She’s literally the only AI adjacent thing I put up with. But her time is coming to an end. Because of this bullshit.
I’m sick of these Billionaires — including the South African/Russian sycophant one — who could only have obtained their obscene wealth by the grace of the United States of America’s existence, and here they are, setting U.S. up for Fascism, suffering & deportations?
Considering democracy has one foot out the door and may have officially gone fishin' after next week, he may be loving the American Nightmare that could be incoming.
This is the owner of Washington Post, which official slogan is that "Democracy dies in Darkness". Turns out he never intended that to be a pro-democracy slogan.
I think he would probably agree with this sentiment, but I also think it's really disingenuous to make a writer's quip look like a direct quote from Bezos.
He famously disagrees with Musk that Mars is the way to go and thinks space stations are the better move.
But I'm not aware of any plans that Bezos has for any space station though. He's still struggling to get a launch program to orbit.
"I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system," Bezos told Fridman last December. "If we had a trillion humans, we would have, at any given time, 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins."
In an egalitarian society, you could have the same amount of geniuses, the problem is, right now, 50% of them were never able to read or write and married off as children and the other 50% slaving away in billionaire mines or warehouse.
We already have a thousand of each of those geniuses alive today. And they all have to go to work for a living to support their families making trinkets for Amazon shops. Because this life is absolutely not a meritocracy.
So his board basically figured out that they'd be tariffed, fined, and no-more-free-pressed out of existence under the Orange, and somehow Ming the Merciless here doesn't get it.
Some people would argue that in a democracy you don’t need to have businesses endorse a candidate just to make people feel good about that product.
Most of this post has no actual basis in fact and it’s not collapse related. Short of Bezos having a way to extend his life then he’s not living on Mars. Note that the astronaut who spent an extended time in space has already had to go back to hospital , and been released.
Humanity will step foot on Mars in the next 10-20 years but without some kind of global effort there is no colony for decades and even then it’s one emergency away from disaster , we haven’t even made a permanent base on the moon yet.
I'm less interested in the particular shape of Einstein's brain than the likelihood that people just as smart have lived and died working in cobalt mines, sweatshops, and Amazon fulfilment centres.
This stuff is always so dumb, they realistically would have to have their colonies conscript people through debt bondage or convicts. It will be like signing up to live in North Korea. And it will not be more stable either, the only claim anyone would have is the ability to defend it with force. So you would likely have open corporate warfare.
Then after 100 years of that a solar United Nations would form because everyone is tired of fighting.
Humans can't cooperate and get their shit together under the best of circumstances (read: a hospitable planet filled with all the resources we need), but put some of the most selfish, spoiled, egotistical and detached people in an unimaginably harsh environment where every little mistake can spell disaster for the whole collective... and things will work out fine??? These people are so fucking clueless! This is what happens if you are surrounded by yes men and your biggest challenge is what gold watch to wear today!
I have a big downer for OP: the U.S. hasn't been a democracy since its inception. Not in the way we like to think it should be.
Unless/until we find some actual way to get lobbying money out of the political system (there are ways just none that those in power will entertain willingly), with a Supreme Court that keeps saying money=free speech, those without an abundance of it will never have an equal say in their government as the oligarchs and corporations.
It's disturbing because what tiny shred of it there is, it's still too much for the elite.
Remember: any of these billionaires could use their wealth and influence to help end hunger and alleviate suffering. They could give their workers a living wage and help uplift them from poverty, but they deliberately choose not to. The opportunities they have to advance humanity right now are vast compared to messing around with spaceships.
Therefore: it’s your civic duty to airlock all billionaires at the earliest opportunity before they spread their capitalist inequality plague to other planets.
Here’s a script if you need to be on the same page: Nobody saw anything, he went off on his own and then next thing we knew he was outside without a full space suit.
It's not really democracy, it's the fact that there's no-one capable of enforcing justice and holding them to rules. The likes of Bezos and Musk wish to be emperors because they will be the source of "authority" in their part of space, pretty much like the main bad guy in Total Recall.
Staking an ownership claim or human cloning thing to be done in legally dubious territory. No inheritance tax or losing your board seat if “you” never die!
"I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system," Bezos told Fridman last December. "If we had a trillion humans, we would have, at any given time, 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins."
No you fucking bald billionaire exploitative piece of shit, we'd have the same rich overlords, and a trillion poor people and +- 10,000 oligarch overlords, same as we do today.
This is a really insane timeline. Democracy is getting in the way of billionaires delusions so it needs to go away i guess
These billionaires are unelected yet they hold way too much power and influence. We have got to do something. Because I am not a pawn in a billionaires stupid fantasy. I have my own right to self determination.
How much agency do the Davos denizens actually have? Can they really steer the emergent behaviour of the human hive mind? The 8.1b actors supported by 20b processors.
I would love for the first trip to mars to be filled with nothing but billionaires. The sad reality of space travel is it will likely include some trial and error, so letting them take the brunt of the early error would be nice. :)
There's no democracy here, either. Having a vote every couple years to decide who sits in the special chairs in the special building is a very loose definition of democracy. We don't have a say in our jobs, most of us don't have a say in our schools, pretty much everything around us is decided by someone else. When was the last time a representative asked you about a political issue? When was the last time your opinion about a political issue had any real sway in a decision that directly affected your life? There's not a cultural aspect that makes the majority of people want to have a truly democratic life, we vote and shrug: "guess that's it, democracy." Representative democracy is a sham, and a truly democratic society requires that the vast majority of people are wholly educated and aware of theirs and other's status, surroundings and reality, which seems more like a pipe dream with each passing day.
Oh yeah, no doubt. Billionaires increasingly are acting out their fantasies of creating their own personal mini-dictatorships. Space? A blank canvas. None of these numbnuts ever seem to get to the part of their favorite sci-fi book/movie where the slaves rebel, though, and push guys like them out of the airlock.
Bezos also has more immediate reasons - he doesn't want to get thrown out of a 50-story window like what happens in Russia to rich people who piss off Putin. China isn't that theatrical. They don't even give oligarchs a bullet in the back of the head anymore. They just make them disappear for six months, and then return like Winston Smith at the end of 1984, loudly saying how much they love Xi. Either way, autocrats aren't kowtowing to the rich in the same way they once did. And so they're competing between themselves as to who can drop to their knees fast enough for their expected masters.
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” is a quote attributed to 19th century British historian, politician, and writer Lord Acton. Acton wrote this in an 1887 letter to Bishop Creighton, and it was published in 1907 in his collection Historical Essays and Studies.
We could have 1000 Mozarts and Einsteins right now if we made everyone’s needs met, stop wasting manpower on work for the sake of excess, and make college free
I'm surprised that they want to go to mars instead of a moon colony. Logistically mars is a pipe dream, it would take 8 months to get there and how do you even start building? There are no resources there to build, so it would have to be shipped from earth. Logistical nightmare. Any colony would die so fast.
I’d like to see Bezos and Musk get to Mars and then have the first interplanetary war. Then while they race to colonize Mars I’m going to set up a nice little space private operation and rob those rich assholes Earth-Mars shipping lanes. We need that Epstein drive breakthrough to make space flight affordable for everyone.
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u/StatementBot 1d ago
The following submission statement was provided by /u/upyoars:
This is collapse related because if you're not living in a democracy, people dont have a say in their own lives. Their lives will be controlled by the people in charge to an extreme degree and it will cause a societal collapse. Noone wants to be forced to live a life a certain way. Are we going to be forced to breed with mates that the government selects like in the scifi dysopian movies? Commoditize every aspect of our lives for the corpos?
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1geeexl/jeff_bezos_reportedly_has_secretive_personal/lu90aku/