Comment by closewith
2 days ago
The age of plausibly buying a legacy is gone, so these vanity projects inspire more cynicism than anything else.
2 days ago
The age of plausibly buying a legacy is gone, so these vanity projects inspire more cynicism than anything else.
I am not understanding how this is bad. Other than a guy made a bunch of money and is spending it how he wants. Or is that the whole reason?
> a guy made a bunch of money
Through the systemic abuse and exploitation of countless individuals' privacy and autonomy. The context is everything.
The 'how' matters.
> Other than a guy made a bunch of money and is spending it how he wants.
A guy has woken up to the fact that he'll be remembered as a villian and is trying to whitewash his reputation.
I don’t know that the vast majority of Americans know who Eric Schmidt is. And unless they find little green men, no one will care about this project, so it won’t affect his (essentially nonexistent) reputation.
It’s not unlike if you had a blog post about a gardening project in your backyard. Perhaps interesting to gardeners, but approximately no one cares.
Low effort cynicism.
I forget why he’s a villain. Did he do something at Google?
He’s sort of a lesser known figure to me.
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It worked for Alfred Nobel.
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Right now he's mostly spending it on weapons and AI to control people
Well, this is better than what Bezos is using his surplus money for.
You don't support trying to save the planet?
The Bezos Earth Fund: https://www.bezosearthfund.org/
The planet will be just fine. It measures consequential time in many millions of years. You mean: support saving humanity.
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Bezos is one of the best, though? Blue Origin, the Long Now foundation, and I could go on all day. I don't know of too many other billionaires so willing so spend vast sums on the Heinleinian dreams of their youth.
I don't believe it's a net benefit to the world when a single person fundamentally changes entire economies, captures a significant portion of the resource stream and then maybe a some point redirects a portion of of it to their pet projects. Although I strongly support shooting tech bros and politicians into space (one way; even better)!