Billionaires Blast off

[Shadowy Man]

The political philosophy of the US: as long as you don't break the law, you are welcome to accumulate unlimited power. It's the paradox of liberalism.

Convenient then that the rich write the laws, neh?

 

[Harry Bosch]

No. Why would you?



What's wrong with thrill rides? If you go on a tourist trip to the Galapagos or something, you are not advancing science either. It's not like you're going to catalogue previously unknown flora and fauna while there.
But just because Charles Darwin did it almost 200 years ago, does not mean your trip there would be pointless.

These people have a lot of money. I see nothing wrong in spending it on stuff not affordable to us mere mortals. Bezos' jaunt to the edge of space is no more pointless than his longer-than-football-field yacht.

I don't agree.

First of all, the impact on the environment must be very significant and I don't think it's justifiable just to massage the egos of a bunch of rich people.

But the other more important thing is that it would be a very, very grave mistake to allow wealthy people to somehow stake a claim to any part of space or space exploration or the intellectual property rights to any discoveries made as part of these missions.

Of course you are way too young to remember the early days of NASA and the beginnings of space exploration but I'm not. Today, the world is filled with products and devices that directly arose from the space program. I don't want Jeff Bezos near any of the next waves of technology and innovation to arise. That belongs, by rights, to the world, not to any individual who has the ego and the pocketbook to grab even more for himself. It's obscene. And dangerous.

The problem Toni is that we'll never colonize another planet or continue to explore without a profit incentive. And until we have a base on another planet or moon, our civilization is at risk. I personally can't wait until we have a base on the moon, a base on mars, are mining the asteroids, and exploring the rest of the solar system. And if someone can figure out how to do all this at a profit, we'll all benefit.

 

[funinspace]

Now this is stuck in my head...

[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qD9qWsEcHH4[/YOUTUBE]

 

[ideologyhunter]

So someday the moon and Mars and all will have ciggie butts blowing about, and discarded Red Bull cans, and Twinkie wrappers, WalMart bags, and an unpaired jelly flip-flop or two. Somehow I think we should rededicate ourselves to healing this world and hedging in the lethal damage we do. Not only that, but to picture the first Trump resort that's extraterrestrial (Astro-Lago) -- with the Secret Service forced to pay literally astronomic rates to guard Fat Bastard -- is to imagine the ultimate insult to the universe. Expect an asteroid to hit us hard, at that point.

 

[lpetrich]

Branson Beats Jeff Bezos to Space, Aiming to Open Space Tourism - The New York Times

Doing what the  North American X-15 did some 60 years ago. Carrying a rocketplane up on a carrier plane and then releasing it. The rocketplane then fires its rocket engine and gets high up in the atmosphere, close to the  Kármán line boundary of outer space (100 km, 62 mi, 328,000 ft).

 Virgin Galactic
Virgin Galactic
WATCH LIVE: Virgin Galactic Unity 22 Spaceflight Livestream - YouTube - the actual trip is nearly an hour into this video

The "Virgin" part refers to Richard Branson liking to enter new businesses, something that e has done for decades.

RB himself flew in this flight, in rocketplane "Unity" carried up by carrier plane "Eve".

That livestream video does not show the takeoff of the Eve-Unity combination, and it skips to where Eve released Unity. It did so at
Altitude: 46,300 ft, 8.8 mi, 14.1 km
Velocity: 390 mph, 628 km/h, 174 m/s, Mach 0.5

Unity's rocket engine soon started, and it burned for a minute, pushing Unity to
Altitude: 138,000 ft, 26.1 mi, 42.0 km
Velocity: 3268 mph, 5259 km/h, 1460 m/s, Mach 3.0

Unity then flew on a ballistic trajectory, going up to apogee at 2:35 after release
Altitude: 283,000 ft, 53.6 mi, 86.3 km
Velocity: 674 mph, 1085 km/h, 301 m/s, Mach 1.1

It then dropped a little bit before its re-entry phase started at 3:40.
Altitude: 220,000 ft, 42 mi, 67 km
Velocity: 1500 mph, 2400 km/h, 670 m/s, Mach 2.3

Unity then became a glider, much like the X-15's and the Space Shuttles, and it successfully landed at 14:20.

 

[Jarhyn]

Branson Beats Jeff Bezos to Space, Aiming to Open Space Tourism - The New York Times

Doing what the  North American X-15 did some 60 years ago. Carrying a rocketplane up on a carrier plane and then releasing it. The rocketplane then fires its rocket engine and gets high up in the atmosphere, close to the  Kármán line boundary of outer space (100 km, 62 mi, 328,000 ft).

 Virgin Galactic
Virgin Galactic
WATCH LIVE: Virgin Galactic Unity 22 Spaceflight Livestream - YouTube - the actual trip is nearly an hour into this video

The "Virgin" part refers to Richard Branson liking to enter new businesses, something that e has done for decades.

RB himself flew in this flight, in rocketplane "Unity" carried up by carrier plane "Eve".

That livestream video does not show the takeoff of the Eve-Unity combination, and it skips to where Eve released Unity. It did so at
Altitude: 46,300 ft, 8.8 mi, 14.1 km
Velocity: 390 mph, 628 km/h, 174 m/s, Mach 0.5

Unity's rocket engine soon started, and it burned for a minute, pushing Unity to
Altitude: 138,000 ft, 26.1 mi, 42.0 km
Velocity: 3268 mph, 5259 km/h, 1460 m/s, Mach 3.0

Unity then flew on a ballistic trajectory, going up to apogee at 2:35 after release
Altitude: 283,000 ft, 53.6 mi, 86.3 km
Velocity: 674 mph, 1085 km/h, 301 m/s, Mach 1.1

It then dropped a little bit before its re-entry phase started at 3:40.
Altitude: 220,000 ft, 42 mi, 67 km
Velocity: 1500 mph, 2400 km/h, 670 m/s, Mach 2.3

Unity then became a glider, much like the X-15's and the Space Shuttles, and it successfully landed at 14:20.

So, I do not play "keeping up with the Robinsons" or whatever it's called but it strikes me the motive may in fact be "before the other billionaire" moreso than "before anyone".

 

[lpetrich]

This was all below the von Karman line, and it was far from getting into orbit.

One needs 8 km/s to get into low Earth orbit - nearly 30,000 km/h or 18,000 mph or Mach 25 (25 * speed of sound at high altitudes for airplanes)

After some more test flights, Virgin Galactic is to be open for business in early 2022, with $200,000 / $250,000 per passenger.


There's a much cheaper way to get to high altitudes, even if one does not get very far. Put a video camera on a weather balloon with a parachute, fill the balloon with helium, and release it. Like a GoPro camera or a smartphone with a camera. One can get to 100,000 ft / 20 mi / 30 km with this combination.


Blue Origin on Twitter: "From the beginning, New Shepard was designed to fly above the Kármán line so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name. For 96% of the world’s population, space begins 100 km up at the internationally recognized Kármán line. (link)" / Twitter

The US Air Force and Federal Aviation Administration use 50 mi / 80 km / 264,000 ft instead.

Blue Origin on Twitter: "#NewShepard is go for launch on July 20 for #NSFirstHumanFlight. This is the 16th flight and first with astronauts on board. Watch live at (link). Coverage starts at 6:30 am CDT / 11:30 UTC. (link)" / Twitter

Blue Origin | Home
 Blue Origin

The travelers will be in a space capsule on top of a New Shepard rocket. The rocket will carry them up, detach, and land with its engine in the fashion of SpaceX's rockets. The capsule will also come down, using parachutes.

 

[Angra Mainyu]

Unless you're an autocratic king or dictator, nobody has their own money.

Money is a measure of what your society owes you. It's not property, or a commodity, and it doesn't belong to you. It's a measure of what society owes you at any given point in time, and your society gets to decide how it fluctuates in value. You might have some of it taken away as tax, or some of the value of it taken away by inflation. Or you might be given some for whatever reasons society has to give it away - as payment of salary for bureaucrats or soldiers; as a benefit to people otherwise unable to support themselves, or their families; as a grant for education, or public art, or scientific research.

Of course your money belongs to you, in the moral sense anyway, and legal technicalities aside.

And sure, it can be taken away as taxes. But so can - say - gold, or wheat, or oil, or anything. And you might be given some not by "society" but by some other individual, in exchange for something you do or give. Just like gold. Or salt. Or maze. Or pretty much anything. And the value might fall due to inflation. And again, that is the relative value against other things. Which might fall for anything, e.g., gold's value might fall because people do not value it anymore to the same extent, etc. So, your argument would apply to pretty much anything if it were proper.

But be that as it may, when I say 'their money' I do not mean necessarily cash or currency in a bank account. In fact, most of their money is in terms of property, in turns in the form of shares of companies. And to get cash, they either get paid by some of those companies - not by society - with money some other individuals, companies (and so in the end other individuals), etc., pay them, or they sell shares, things like that.

Money hasn't been a commodity people can own for almost a century.

It's a measure of what the world owes you. And nobody's done enough for the world to be owed a super yacht, or a private spacecraft.

Even if people did not own money, they do own super yachts. And private spacecrafts. And companies. And so on. And they get them because they get money. Which other people generally give them, willingly, by means of transactions they do of their own free will. It's not about what a nebulous 'society' owes you. It's about what other people choose to give you, usually but not always in exchange from what you give them. Well, that and what you inherit, but usually parents too choose to leave those resources - which they own - to their children, and would do so even if there were no inheritance law to make that transition smoother.

 

[lpetrich]

Thus being like the  V-2 rocket


Some people want to go beyond short suborbital flights. From the NYT,

The era of nonprofessional astronauts regularly heading to orbit may also begin in the coming year. Jared Isaacman, a 38-year-old billionaire, is essentially chartering a rocket and spacecraft from SpaceX for a three-day trip to orbit that is scheduled for September.

In December, Space Adventures has arranged for a Japanese fashion entrepreneur, Yusaku Maezawa, and Yozo Hirano, a production assistant, to launch on a Russian Soyuz rocket on a 12-day mission that will go to the International Space Station.

Another company, Axiom Space in Houston, is arranging a separate trip to the space station that will launch as soon as January.

The orbital trips are too expensive for anyone except the superwealthy — Axiom’s three customers are paying $55 million each — while suborbital flights might be affordable to those who are merely well off.

 

[lpetrich]

Elon Musk is also involved in spacefaring, with his rocket company SpaceX.

There is some value in these spaceflight indulgences, I think. Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are aiming at space tourism, and more tourists involved will likely bring down costs, from economies of scale. Such economies have happened with many technologies, and those economies may happen here also.

However, Elon Musk does not seem interested in running a space-tourism business.


But there is another indulgence that does not have nearly as much value. Yachts. Especially superyachts.  Superyacht - typically at least 40 m / 130 ft long to as much as 180 m / 590 ft.

The current size champion is  Azzam (2013 yacht). It is *huge*. One might almost say ... titanic.

• Gross tonnage (volume measurement): 13,136 (45,000 m^3).
• Length: 180 m / 590 ft, its beam 20.8 m
• Beam (width): 20.8 m / 68 ft
• Draft (depth below water): 4.3 m / 14 ft 1 in
• My estimate of displacement (mass): 10,000 metric tons
• Speed: 32 knots (59 km/h; 37 mph)

It was commissioned by Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the United Arab Emirates. it cost more than $500 - $600 M.

Azzam: 10 facts about Lürssen's 180m superyacht

The Azzam can have a crew of 70 to 80 people and it can have as many as 36 guests.

It has four engines, two diesel engines for long-distance travel and two turbine engines for great speed. The ship uses water-jet propulsion, with two fixed jets and two steerable jets. It's top-speed fuel consumption is 13 tons/hour. That's about 0.01 miles per gallon.

Azzam Superyacht - Ship Technology

 

[lpetrich]

The largest sailing yacht is  A (sailing yacht) about 120 m / 390 ft long at the waterline.

It has three masts with one big fore-and-aft sail on each one.

Next in line is the Sea Cloud, at 77 m / 250 ft long. It looks much like a late 19th cy. clipper ship, with lots of square-rigged sails and some fore-and-aft sals.

Of the other big sailing yachts, Eos, Athena, Aquijo, and Mirabella V have all fore-and-aft sails, much like the A, and much like a typical sailboat.

There are two big sailing yachts with a very innovative kind of sail setup. The Maltese Falcon and the Black Pearl both use DynaRig, a system with three masts that can rotate, each one with five remote-controlled square-rigged sails.

 

[bilby]

Unless you're an autocratic king or dictator, nobody has their own money.

Money is a measure of what your society owes you. It's not property, or a commodity, and it doesn't belong to you. It's a measure of what society owes you at any given point in time, and your society gets to decide how it fluctuates in value. You might have some of it taken away as tax, or some of the value of it taken away by inflation. Or you might be given some for whatever reasons society has to give it away - as payment of salary for bureaucrats or soldiers; as a benefit to people otherwise unable to support themselves, or their families; as a grant for education, or public art, or scientific research.

Of course your money belongs to you, in the moral sense anyway, and legal technicalities aside.

And sure, it can be taken away as taxes. But so can - say - gold, or wheat, or oil, or anything. And you might be given some not by "society" but by some other individual, in exchange for something you do or give. Just like gold. Or salt. Or maze. Or pretty much anything. And the value might fall due to inflation. And again, that is the relative value against other things. Which might fall for anything, e.g., gold's value might fall because people do not value it anymore to the same extent, etc. So, your argument would apply to pretty much anything if it were proper.

Governments and central banks cannot manipulate the value of commodities. They don't control supply or demand.

But they can control money supply. Money isn't like a commodity. There are similarities, but there are very significant differences.

But be that as it may, when I say 'their money' I do not mean necessarily cash or currency in a bank account. In fact, most of their money is in terms of property, in turns in the form of shares of companies. And to get cash, they either get paid by some of those companies - not by society - with money some other individuals, companies (and so in the end other individuals), etc., pay them, or they sell shares, things like that.

Any of which transactions are subjected to tax, so that the amount of money they get is controllable by the government.

Money hasn't been a commodity people can own for almost a century.

It's a measure of what the world owes you. And nobody's done enough for the world to be owed a super yacht, or a private spacecraft.

Even if people did not own money, they do own super yachts. And private spacecrafts. And companies. And so on. And they get them because they get money. Which other people generally give them, willingly, by means of transactions they do of their own free will.

and which can be taxed at various rates.

It's not about what a nebulous 'society' owes you. It's about what other people choose to give you, usually but not always in exchange from what you give them.

It's a combination of both. But ultimately the value of money is determined by what it can buy, which is entirely dependent on what society can and does produce. The whole point of money is that it doesn't specify what it can be spent on. It's redeemable against any good or service available in society.

Well, that and what you inherit, but usually parents too choose to leave those resources - which they own - to their children, and would do so even if there were no inheritance law to make that transition smoother.

And again, such transactions can be (and often are) subject to taxes.

The dismantling of aristocracies worldwide has been achieved by taxation OR revolution. Taxes aren't theft, they're a civilised alternative to theft, that allows people to keep both their heads, and some of the wealth that they do not deserve all of.

When (as we see today) an aristocracy becomes hugely wealthy while disregarding high levels of poverty, something has to be done to reduce that inequality. It's better for all concerned that that something should be an orderly redistribution of wealth, because disorder tends to destroy both the wealth and the wealthy.

 

[SLD]

It's a measure of what the world owes you. And nobody's done enough for the world to be owed a super yacht, or a private spacecraft.

And then what, comrade? Expropriate the rich like they did in the glorious Soviet Union? How did that work out?

Well, actually better than the tsarist system that preceded it, but not as good as good as the system instituted by the west, which included high marginal tax rates for the uber wealthy, and significant antitrust enforcement, as well as other significant regulatory environment.

 

[lpetrich]

• Jeff Bezos’s New Superyacht Heralds Roaring Market for Big Boats - Bloomberg
• Jeff Bezos is spending millions on a superyacht with its own 'support yacht'
• Jeff Bezos and the secretive world of superyachts - BBC News
• Jeff Bezos' superyacht is so big it needs its own yacht - CNN
• Which billionaire has the biggest superyacht? Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Virgin’s Richard Branson and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin all enjoy setting sail in show-off boats | South China Morning Post

JB's new yacht is to have a support yacht with a helipad on it. That is because his main yacht will have three large masts on it. Will it be a sailing yacht?

From Bloomberg,

“The market’s been roaring,” said Sam Tucker, head of superyacht research at London-based VesselsValue. The number of transactions in recent quarters “was record-breaking -- the second-hand market is absolutely red hot.

If anything, demand for extravagantly high-end yachts has outstripped supply. “It’s impossible to get a slot in a new-build yard,” Tucker said. “They’re totally booked.”

The inland waterways of northern Germany, home to several highly regarded shipbuilders, are crammed with the city block-size steel hulls of future superyachts as well as existing yachts back for a spruce-up. In total, there are about 50 boats longer than 100 meters currently under construction, Tucker said. Bremen-based Luerssen is responsible for 10 of them.

The SCMP mentioned Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Richard Branson of Virgin, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, David Geffen, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Diane von Furstenberg and Barry Diller, Steve Jobs of Apple, Niklas Zennström of Skype, Jim Clark of Netscape, Charles Simonyi of Microsoft.

However, Elon Musk and Bill Gates like private planes, and some of these yacht lovers have bought secondhand yachts.

 

[Derec]

Convenient then that the rich write the laws, neh?

Bezos and Branson do not write the laws.
Hell, Bezos wasn't even able to build his HQ2 in Queens because a certain socialist freshman congresswoman objected.
The government is A LOT more powerful than the billionaires.

 

[Derec]

Thus being like the  V-2 rocket


Some people want to go beyond short suborbital flights. From the NYT,

The era of nonprofessional astronauts regularly heading to orbit may also begin in the coming year. Jared Isaacman, a 38-year-old billionaire, is essentially chartering a rocket and spacecraft from SpaceX for a three-day trip to orbit that is scheduled for September.

In December, Space Adventures has arranged for a Japanese fashion entrepreneur, Yusaku Maezawa, and Yozo Hirano, a production assistant, to launch on a Russian Soyuz rocket on a 12-day mission that will go to the International Space Station.

Another company, Axiom Space in Houston, is arranging a separate trip to the space station that will launch as soon as January.

The orbital trips are too expensive for anyone except the superwealthy — Axiom’s three customers are paying $55 million each — while suborbital flights might be affordable to those who are merely well off.

If we are counting hitching a ride on existing government (i.e. Russian) spacecraft and staying at the ISS as a paying customer, then that era has begun 20 years ago with Dennis Tito.
Profile: Tito the spaceman

 

[Shadowy Man]

Convenient then that the rich write the laws, neh?

Bezos and Branson do not write the laws.
Hell, Bezos wasn't even able to build his HQ2 in Queens because a certain socialist freshman congresswoman objected.
The government is A LOT more powerful than the billionaires.

Bezos and Branson aren’t the only rich people. There are plenty of laws written to benefit rich people and their corporations, often at the ultimate expense of those less fortunate. Who do you think wrote those laws? Poor people?

 

[Angra Mainyu]

Governments and central banks cannot manipulate the value of commodities. They don't control supply or demand.

First, they can significantly manipulate the value of many commodities in the domestic market by means such as increasing or decreasing taxation, banning some imports or exports, etc.
Second, they do not fully control the value of money, either: for example, the local peso falls vs. the dollar despite government efforts to prevent it. And of course, there is inflation.
Third, that is not the point I was making. Rather, the point is that the properties of money you were listed are also properties of other things.
For example, you say

You might have some of it taken away as tax, or some of the value of it taken away by inflation."

Sure. And the same happens with wheat, corn, gold, or land: they can be taken away as tax, or some of the value is taken away by market forces, or by government intervention in the market, etc.

But they can control money supply. Money isn't like a commodity. There are similarities, but there are very significant differences.

First, they can control to a considerable extent the supply of pretty much anything: they cannot increase supply indefinitely, but they can certainly limit it massively - how well depends on how well they can prevent smuggling.
Second, no government can increase money supply of other currencies. And people can use other currencies.
Third, that it's not a commodity is beside the point. It's still, for all intents and purposes, their money.

But this is all beside my central point, which is that they are using their resources, regardless of whether they pay with dollars, euros, bitcoin, Tesla shares, or whatever.

Any of which transactions are subjected to tax, so that the amount of money they get is controllable by the government.

And the same goes for any transactions in which they use, say, gold. Or wheat. Or shares of a company. Or a private currency. The point is that the government, at least if sufficiently powerful, can certainly use force to restrict the freedom of people to engage in transactions. My point is that it's not wrong in general to use one's own money (which pretty much means the same as 'one's own economic resources') to have some fun.

and which can be taxed at various rates.

Yes, and even banned. Of course, the government, if sufficiently powerful, and take away people's money by force. And people's property, of any sort. I was not and I am not arguing that governments do not have enough power to take away people's stuff.

It's a combination of both. But ultimately the value of money is determined by what it can buy, which is entirely dependent on what society can and does produce. The whole point of money is that it doesn't specify what it can be spent on. It's redeemable against any good or service available in society.

But I wasn't talking about the value of money (whatever that is, but leaving that aside). I was talking about how people give other people money, which is a convenient way of exchanging resources.

And again, such transactions can be (and often are) subject to taxes.

Yes, and that happens to transactions using gold. Or bitcoin. Or shares. Or wheat. Or whatever.

The dismantling of aristocracies worldwide has been achieved by taxation OR revolution. Taxes aren't theft, they're a civilised alternative to theft, that allows people to keep both their heads, and some of the wealth that they do not deserve all of.

Taxes may or may not be theft, depending on the case. But I'm not sure why you bring up 'aristocracies'. Revolutions tend to change one group of powerful people for another, at the cost of many lives and more suffering.

When (as we see today) an aristocracy becomes hugely wealthy while disregarding high levels of poverty, something has to be done to reduce that inequality. It's better for all concerned that that something should be an orderly redistribution of wealth, because disorder tends to destroy both the wealth and the wealthy.

Massive inequality would come back again, as a result of the free choices of people. You could try to take away freedom to reduce inequality. But even in Cuba or North Korea, there is still massive inequality given the resources available to regime higher-ups. It is not destroying anything, except perhaps when some people decide to cause destruction.

 

[Derec]

Wealth, shown to scale
https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

I guess this guy never heard of log scales, or feels about them the same way Cueball does.

We can have a world in which wealthy people exist, without handing nearly all money to the super rich.

US household wealth is at ~130 trillion, so, no, the "super rich" do not own nearly all of it.
Hell, US takes about the same amount from taxpayers every year as richest 400 Americans own and spends about twice that amount.

A trillion dollars is such a large figure, that you might as well say "eleventy gajillion zillion dollars."

No you might not. A trillion (short scale) is just 1000 billion or a million million. 10¹² in the other words, or one terabuck. Now a long-scale trillion would be a truly baffling amount, much more than the estimated total wealth of the world, but it is still a well defined number (10¹⁸ or one exabuck).

Some will argue that using this wealth for public benefit is not possible, because it's "tied up" in stocks, and therefore inaccessible. This is just not true.

I guess it could be stolen. But like Soviet Union and Venezuela learned, eventually you run out of rich people to steal from, and then what?

If you scroll far enough, you get to some spending ideas, given the $3.2 trillion controlled by the 400 richest Americans:

I do not see how they priced some of these things anyway. And with things like eradicating malaria the issue is not so much how to pay for it, but what approach to take. Gene drives (where you don't just modify some mosquitos' DNA but you put CRISPR-Cas9 machinery in there so it will modify the DNA of any offspring) offer a lot of promise, but are controversial.

So let's put the figure another way. The $3.2 terabucks 400 wealthiest Americans own would not even pay for the pared down version of the faux-infrastructure bill Dems want to push through reconciliation and it is about half of the full 6 terabuck Dems-alone bill lefty Dems like Sanders wanted. And this wealth, once confiscated, is gone and can't be used for the next item on the government's wish list.

 

[Derec]

Bezos and Branson aren’t the only rich people.

Of course not.

There are plenty of laws written to benefit rich people and their corporations, often at the ultimate expense of those less fortunate. Who do you think wrote those laws? Poor people?

Politicians, of course. And different politicians are beholden to different groups of people. A law written by Bernie Sanders and AOC will be very different than one written by Lindsey Graham and Dan Crenshaw.