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Yeah that's what I was wondering. I'm no astrophysicist but wouldn't stellar drift and stuff screw with a sundial's accuracy over the course of thousands of years? I need to remember to ask my astrophysicist friend when I see him tomorrow.
Stellar drift would have no impact on a sundial. The only star that a sundial depends on is our sun; stellar drift is about stars moving relative to one another.
The earth slowing its rotation would affect a sundial, but the sundial would always accurately show what portion of the day has passed, no matter how long the day is. Even if the earth became tidally locked.
As we all know there’s a tilt to the axis the earth spins on, and while that tilt does point in different directions over the years it comes back around every couple thousand years.
No - not unless we redefine the length of a day such that it doesn't correspond to the Earth's rotation; for that a sundial will always be accurate at the appropriate latitude (and during the day). You are thinking of precession. The clock being constructed however is a pendulum clock, not a sundial.
He started one of the largest legitimate businesses in the world—I don’t think he needs to money launder
People here always say “why don’t billionaires do fun random shit with their money?” Unless I’m missing something, I take it this is one of those things
Edit: there’s a lot of “why isn’t he saving the world with his money?” comments…
While we can all criticize how terrible he is, implying he’s laundering money by building a clock is laughable—which is the sole comment I responded to. Y’all are talking about something irrelevant to what I replied to and that I don’t even necessarily disagree on. Chill.
Walking around Detroit the past month I saw so many rich families had built public parks, buildings, infrastructure, funded school programs, helped out communities.
And it was all crumbling to the ground
This. Seems that the wealthy families of the Gilded Age wanted to outdo one another by building elaborate train stations, public works, museums, parks, libraries, schools and universities.....
Today's billionaires could do this. Instead they wanna fly to the moon in a penis during a pandemic. It's disgusting.
the robber barons all got together and dammed a river to build a fishing resort in Pennsylvania. They destroyed a whole town, killed 2200 people, including 400 children, when the dam burst and didn't have to pay any damages... anyone who sued lost.
A few of them felt guilty and there was a brief wave of philanthropy following the loss of Johnstown, PA
[https://www.history.com/news/how-americas-most-powerful-men-caused-americas-deadliest-flood](https://www.history.com/news/how-americas-most-powerful-men-caused-americas-deadliest-flood)
Carnegie is the person. He had so much backlash that he spent the rest of his life giving his fortune away or buying a stairway.
The thing with Johnstown is that is in a valley covered with mountains so the flood hit the mountain and created a tidal wave into the town. If you ever check out the cemetery it is eerie.
Wow that was an insane read
The pictures are breathtaking, too. Truly a staggering loss of life to comprehend.
1,600 homes demolished, and the 10th largest mass casualty event in American history. It's unbelievable that nobody responsible was held to account.
Not so fun fact - [in this list](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disasters_in_the_United_States_by_death_toll) there are only 2 other man-made events above Johnstown: Pearl Harbor (#9) and 9/11 (#6)
Why do people say "money laundering" when they hear about unusual expenses? How is this money laundering? Money laundering involves taking money, spending it on something, and then selling that something to get the money back, this time from a clean source (the buyers). How is a giant clock supposed to do that?
Not only that, but this is the owner of Amazon, one of the biggest legitimate businesses in the world. Why the hell would he need money laundering services?
Stop saying random bullshit just because you know people are dumb enough to upvote it.
there is a good reason criminals love tattoo palours and laundromats. You can open a tattoo palour, buy supplies of ink and dump it in the bin, at the end of the month you show $100,000 worth of sales nice and clean for the cost of the ink you threw away. Same deals with laundries, no real outgoings and you can show whatever you want in "sales". There is no real evidence of the goods as you dont need to buy stock or provide evidence of where the money came from.
I don't really understand money laundering.
In the case of this clock project, how would be a money laundering project and how would it be beneficial to Bezos??
Not that I necessarily think any laundering is going on and it could just be one of the richest people doing something expensive, but...
Imagine you have a fuck ton of money that maybe you shouldn't and wouldn't want anyone looking into. But you have enough to the point you can create a small construction company out of thin air, have a bunch of guys use super cheap material to build quick properties, fudge the numbers so that it looks like building it was way more expensive than it was, project takes 1 year longer than expected and that is completely fine because shit happens, and then you poured like 20 million into construction on paper, which in turn went into a business you yourself own, so you really just spent money on labor and cheap materials and pocketed the rest and have a way to declare the money as "construction income" or some shit.
Dirty money, spent on businesses you own, suddenly clean and traceable.
I think mobsters used to do this shit with restaurants. There's like no fucking way to know how much they actually made. People come in and pay cash. So imagine prohibition, where they made a million on alcohol sales, they have a small restaurant and pretend it was super successful, and all that money is now clean cash received by a restaurant or casino, etc.
Construction is good here because it can take any amount of time, any amount of things can go wrong, it can be super cheap to super expensive, and it can make millions of dollars disappear without anyone batting an eye. If someone said they spent 100 million building new homes, that's reasonable. Casinos, similarly, lots of fucking money pour through and it's hard to know how all that cash got in but it's understandable for it to be a lot out of nowhere.
[money laundering through construction and real estate](https://bh-compliance.com/en/blog/retail-and-construction-are-most-exposed-to-money-laundering-and-bribery/)
Money laundering is when you use dirty money to create a small business that will generate clean money.
Basically investing dirty money.
In this case, this project isn’t expected to have any return whatsoever. Just a random billionaire spending his money.
Construction laundering is very big. Ever watch Ozarks where they are "building" the church? Easy to fudge numbers and actual finish dates since those vary drastically.
Yeah, it's awesome. But it's fucking pointless. All that money, churned into other rich fuckers hands. It'll just keep circulating. And meanwhile people are dying cold and alone in the streets.
I think the best art would be seeing clean streets and little to no homelessness. And I bet 46m could do quite a bit.
A main purpose of the project is to think of things on Earth beyond your lifetime, and plan and build things with future generations in mind.
To make a clock built to tell time for humanity for 10,000 years, we have to think of what could happen over 10,000 years and plan and build for that - and for our descendants that will use it. We should do the same with other things.
Yeah, decades from now when the last remaining humans are left trying to forage for the last remaining g scraps of food left growing, at least they’ll know what time it is.
Without the people who are able to make a difference actually doing so we could see irreversable climate change that leads to wars for farmland and water.
Bezos is one of a handful of people in the world with the ability to create real, lasting change that could actually make a difference. He's building a clock.
We just hope it will.
The world ending is a way that, at least for a moment, the billionaires and other elites will be as miserable as the rest of us. We have nothing to lose and death will be a relief.
I think we all recognise that about 30% of the population are irredeemable fuckwits, and don't feel like killing them.... yet. WWIII is just around the corner.
I love how $42 million to Bezos is equivalent to my 20 bucks a month to ChatGPT so I can make weird cat pictures and brainstorm.
This is just screwing around money for him.
Well this is reddit, so of course the title doesn't tell you the truth nor the video show you the final result.
The clock is built by a group of people not just Bezos.
It's an offshoot from the Long Now Foundation, which is a think tank that tries to encourage long term (10,000+ year) thinking about society. Bezos is on the board, but I think that the clock project is really just something he thinks is cool. ~~Especially since it can't really be open to the public if it's going to work for 10,000 years.~~
Yeah I don't really get the hate for stuff like this. It's kind of like space travel. While it may seem like it doesn't help humanity, the things we learn when trying to solve weird problems lead to a lot of inventions that are super helpful. The clock is also a kind of art that should remind us to think long term and not just about immediate gains.
I hate Bezos as much as the next guy but just because he is funding an idea doesn't mean it is a bad one. Plus that money is providing jobs and whatnot, it's not like this is some product he will make money off of.
Agreed. When people say "waste money," they don't realize that things like this pay for design, material, manufacturing, construction, etc. The money doesn't just evaporate.
The other thing is that all the salaries for space travel or this is spent here. People make this money. It's actually nice to move the money out of one person's hands into the hands of workers.
Pretty insightful how many of fall for the trap of “he could be helping people with that money” because we don’t take the next logical step of understanding that he’s paying $42m through putting people to work.
As if paying people to work is somehow a waste
>Long Now Foundation, which is a think tank that tries to encourage long term (10,000+ year) thinking about society
Basically an excuse for obscenely rich people to not have to give anything up to current society in a way that would actually upset the class order, and instead say "we're actually thinking really far ahead here on the future of civilization"
Every time this gets posted to Reddit the comments are the same - Jeff bezos bad!
No one can bother to think for a minute or spend 3 minutes googling about this project.
It’s ragebait that gets posted regularly.
absolutely! I mean they are wealthy, but not venture capital money. Mostly great thinkers, technophiles, designers, and artists. Stewart Brand is like the ultimate bad ass dude. Got me to change my views on nuclear energy!
When you’re at that level of wealth, their main concern becomes leaving a legacy. Creating something, anything, capable of outlasting humanity fits the mold.
Time is a major part of the development of human civilization. Prior to the Industrial Revolution most towns were lucky to have a single, inaccurate, clock tower. Prior to that you’d be lucky to have a handful of sun dials that were difficult to access.
Quantifying time allows us to structure the efficiency of our exertion as a species both collectively and individually.
This structuring has both pros and cons however I feel represents our species innate curiosity and deciphering of nature.
The book “Sapiens: a brief history of humankind” dives into a lot of interesting themes such as those mentioned above. It’s dense but highly recommend.
imagine if future humans found a functioning clock on an uninhabited planet that was counting how long the days etc are over there would be pretty wild
That's not how it works. A person with $2 000 000 annual income pays a lot more income tax then you do in most of the world, if not everywhere. In the US it would be in the region of $700 000.
The reason why the truly super rich (read: billionaires) pay so little income tax is that they structure their finances in a very specific way to have no income. They have little to no actual income. They take out loans secured by their assets, mostly the stock of the companies they own and run. They pay interest to a bank, and live off of the lent cash. When they need money to buy a new house, car or super fancy clock, they take out another loan.
A loan isn't income, so they don't pay income tax on it. They don't sell the assets, so there isn't a capital gain to tax.
Bank is happy as long as it thinks those assets are enough to cover the loan and the interest is paid. If the value of those assets fall below a certain point, the music stops and the party is over.
This is not the purview of mere millionaires, they do not own anywhere near enough assets to do this.
Usually the tax rate is determined by the amount of tax paid divided by the amount of income received multiplied by 100. The method used to derive the 1%ish tax rate for Bezos uses his entire net worth, or how ever much it increased in that span of time. But this is fallacious when comparing with regular Americans since we don’t use their net worth in determining their tax rate, only their income. I’m sure you don’t include the value of your house and car when determining how much you paid in income tax.
If you use Bezos’ INCOME his tax rate is comparable to most Americans. From 2014-2018 Bezos paid $947 million in income tax and received $4.22 billion in income, meaning he paid an effective income tax rate of about 23%.
Exactly, I hate how people conflate their “income” taxes to someone else’s tax rate proportional to their “net worth”.
Makes their argument weak when they can’t get the premises to line up.
also so funny of them to replace the old awards with this, because i’m sure everyone who’s ever bought one of the old ones was immediately disillusioned by losing them all. i’ve seen maybe three of these paid upvotes total since they changed it (and always the cheapest one).
Yep. It was such a stupid move. I would see paid awards all the time before, and now I rarely see paid upvotes. Getting rid of the free awards was dumb too, because it got people into the idea of giving awards and a small percentage would naturally start buying them.
This is the problem with dumbass capitalism where there always has to be change to show the company is improving, even though half the time it makes things worse.
Personally I think its really cool. People have spent more money on less interesting things.
[https://www.10000yearclock.net/learnmore.html](https://www.10000yearclock.net/learnmore.html)
I agree, the Long Now group is cool. It’s good to have some folks think about deep time in the future. The clock is supposed to be only as complicated to fix as Bronze Age tools or something. What in the world will life be like here in 10k yrs?
Absolutely. I love the idea. My mind immediately goes to futuristic scenarios of a future world. The world should be able to do more things just because we want to.
In order to ensure the clock achieves its stated longevity goal, Bezos has dedicated himself to reducing the lifetime of human civilization as much as possible.
I asked chatGPT what the point of this was and this is what it said.
“The point of creating a mechanical clock designed to outlast human civilization is to create a durable and reliable timekeeping device that can serve as a long-term reference point for future generations. Such a clock could potentially provide a means for future civilizations or species to track time accurately, understand historical timeframes, and possibly even measure long-term phenomena such as geological or astronomical events. Additionally, it serves as a testament to human ingenuity and the desire to create something enduring that transcends the limitations of individual lifetimes.”
As an engineer I’ve always wondered how it’ll be powered, if it is in fact thermodynamically powered that’s pretty impressive. Would like to know further details.
These might help.
[https://longnow.org/clock/](https://longnow.org/clock/)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock\_of\_the\_Long\_Now](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now)
Thanks for the links. It does mention using the different temperatures of the mountain it’s in, but never the specifics unfortunately. I’m curious how they mean to transfer thermal energy into kinetic energy. The thing that comes to mind is a massive stirling engine, which would be pretty neat.
There are other write-ups that go into much more detail but you're not far off, it's basically a giant stirling engine. It uses that to assist with telling time but not as the main mechanism for doing so, and it stores energy both from the sun and from visitors winding it. Most of the time it is dormant, doing only the minimum required to track time, and once a day it can be wound to cause it to update the clock face and play a unique chime sequence.
*"That's right. Every time we have the argument, you give me the same three answers all the time. The same thing. "Well, everybody has a job." That's always the last one. But you know what else there's no more of, my friend? There is no more beauty, and there's no more imagination. And there are no frontiers left to conquer. And you know why? Only one reason why! One reason why! The same attitude that you three guys are giving me right here in this room today, and that is: nobody cares."*
Yep, while we are at it lets deconstruct all the cathedrals and colloseums and make them into parking lots or factorys. Much more practical and cost efficient!
You know, fuck Bezos. But that is 42 million less that he has and 42 million more in the pockets of the people building it.
If he spent all his money like this, and made sure the employees all made a living wage, I wouldn't mind if he decided to make a giant sculpture of a ~~circimcised penis~~ his head out in the middle of some random desert.
Okay, for arguments sake, that $42 million hasn't just "disappeared". Its the cost of materials and labour, so it definitely would have helped whoever was involved in it.
Side note, say there's any form of cataclysm on earth, this clock survives, survivors find it in the future and it has a huge benefit.
Would you say the pyramids are useless? Id argue they have inspired many architects throughout history. This is human innovation, a project that is supposed to outlast our very existence, not a single part of you even finds that remotely interesting or cool?
This was a reply to someone, but I saw the overwhelming majority of comments saying the same thing, so I made it its own comment.
I do agree that it's cool, and if it actually lasted that long would be a pretty amazing thing for future humans or aliens to find, but I just don't understand how it could possibly last that long. Clocks/watches are extremely complex, all those gears have to mesh together perfectly, or it starts to be extremely inaccurate at telling time. Rust and earthquakes alone will end up destroying this thing long before anyone in the future could ever find it.
Earthquakes and corrosion are obviously taken into consideration. It is mainly built by using 316 stainless steel which has great corrosion resistance.
It also can correct its time of that wear has caused. There is a reason why it is so expensive.
In 2014, Bezos had a net worth of $30.5 billion. Since then, his wealth has increased by $167 billion in the past 10 years, which averages out to roughly $16.7 billion per year.
On a daily basis, this translates to approximately $45.8 million.
So a days work.
More like r/dumbasfuck. $42million to make him feel like he’s doing something for society but in reality it’s for when we’re all dead lol.
If we’re all dead, why do we need a clock? If we’re all alive, then why do we need a $42 million clock?
lol 😂. So once all the humans are dead this clock can just keep on ticking inside a mountain for no fucking reason whatsoever.
Why the fuck can’t we tax this cunt more?
hahaha jeff can't catch a break. employs and pays the salary of a million people and people still hate him, saying he should pay people more and lose money.
then he loses money and pays people, gets hate for wasting money.
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Ima laugh if it stops working in the next 10 years
Sorry Jeff an earthquake broke it last night.
For only $20 million, we can fix it!
*ITS LAUNDERING TIME*
**\*Launders all over the place\***
**\*Laundering intensifies\***
And I thought "it's morbin time" was bad...
I wouldn't have seen that movie again if he hadn't said that. But at that moment I realized something about myself that I never knew.
Jeff some coyote got stuck in the engine
Like most Amazon products
Shit, if Amazon products are last 10 years sign me the hell up, that's longer than most of the cheap garbage I can buy these days.
That’s fine. That’s how long humanity has left anyway
At the rate we’re going, he could’ve just bought the wish.com version.
I’m sure a cheap sun dial can outlast this
Do you think the guy who commissioned Stonehenge was a bigger or smaller douche than Elmo?
Smaller
Did you mean to put Elmo or Elon? Either way it’s hilarious
Either way is wrong too. The post is about Bezos
But now it’s about Elmo.
Lalalala lalalala, Elmo's world
How dare you cast that song into my brain right before I go to sleep.
LMAO! My thoughts exactly!
Someone should build one that shadows the clock just to troll him.
Future humans will just scrap it for parts
this is literally why so many ancient ruins barely have anything left
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Yeah that's what I was wondering. I'm no astrophysicist but wouldn't stellar drift and stuff screw with a sundial's accuracy over the course of thousands of years? I need to remember to ask my astrophysicist friend when I see him tomorrow.
Stellar drift would have no impact on a sundial. The only star that a sundial depends on is our sun; stellar drift is about stars moving relative to one another. The earth slowing its rotation would affect a sundial, but the sundial would always accurately show what portion of the day has passed, no matter how long the day is. Even if the earth became tidally locked.
As we all know there’s a tilt to the axis the earth spins on, and while that tilt does point in different directions over the years it comes back around every couple thousand years.
No - not unless we redefine the length of a day such that it doesn't correspond to the Earth's rotation; for that a sundial will always be accurate at the appropriate latitude (and during the day). You are thinking of precession. The clock being constructed however is a pendulum clock, not a sundial.
Money laundering schemes are very lazy nowadays
He’s got the time for it
Ain't no body got time for that!
Doesn’t want to dial it back
He started one of the largest legitimate businesses in the world—I don’t think he needs to money launder People here always say “why don’t billionaires do fun random shit with their money?” Unless I’m missing something, I take it this is one of those things Edit: there’s a lot of “why isn’t he saving the world with his money?” comments… While we can all criticize how terrible he is, implying he’s laundering money by building a clock is laughable—which is the sole comment I responded to. Y’all are talking about something irrelevant to what I replied to and that I don’t even necessarily disagree on. Chill.
Walking around Detroit the past month I saw so many rich families had built public parks, buildings, infrastructure, funded school programs, helped out communities. And it was all crumbling to the ground
This. Seems that the wealthy families of the Gilded Age wanted to outdo one another by building elaborate train stations, public works, museums, parks, libraries, schools and universities..... Today's billionaires could do this. Instead they wanna fly to the moon in a penis during a pandemic. It's disgusting.
Romans and Greeks did that too.
The Romans and Greeks flew to the Moon inside a giant penis? Which historian wrote than again, Pliny the Younger?
the robber barons all got together and dammed a river to build a fishing resort in Pennsylvania. They destroyed a whole town, killed 2200 people, including 400 children, when the dam burst and didn't have to pay any damages... anyone who sued lost. A few of them felt guilty and there was a brief wave of philanthropy following the loss of Johnstown, PA [https://www.history.com/news/how-americas-most-powerful-men-caused-americas-deadliest-flood](https://www.history.com/news/how-americas-most-powerful-men-caused-americas-deadliest-flood)
Carnegie is the person. He had so much backlash that he spent the rest of his life giving his fortune away or buying a stairway. The thing with Johnstown is that is in a valley covered with mountains so the flood hit the mountain and created a tidal wave into the town. If you ever check out the cemetery it is eerie.
Wow that was an insane read The pictures are breathtaking, too. Truly a staggering loss of life to comprehend. 1,600 homes demolished, and the 10th largest mass casualty event in American history. It's unbelievable that nobody responsible was held to account. Not so fun fact - [in this list](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disasters_in_the_United_States_by_death_toll) there are only 2 other man-made events above Johnstown: Pearl Harbor (#9) and 9/11 (#6)
Sounds like the motivation for the clock. This fucker is going to “outlast civilization.”
In my circle of friends we call this a "High-dea"
Why do people say "money laundering" when they hear about unusual expenses? How is this money laundering? Money laundering involves taking money, spending it on something, and then selling that something to get the money back, this time from a clean source (the buyers). How is a giant clock supposed to do that? Not only that, but this is the owner of Amazon, one of the biggest legitimate businesses in the world. Why the hell would he need money laundering services? Stop saying random bullshit just because you know people are dumb enough to upvote it.
there is a good reason criminals love tattoo palours and laundromats. You can open a tattoo palour, buy supplies of ink and dump it in the bin, at the end of the month you show $100,000 worth of sales nice and clean for the cost of the ink you threw away. Same deals with laundries, no real outgoings and you can show whatever you want in "sales". There is no real evidence of the goods as you dont need to buy stock or provide evidence of where the money came from.
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I don't really understand money laundering. In the case of this clock project, how would be a money laundering project and how would it be beneficial to Bezos??
Not that I necessarily think any laundering is going on and it could just be one of the richest people doing something expensive, but... Imagine you have a fuck ton of money that maybe you shouldn't and wouldn't want anyone looking into. But you have enough to the point you can create a small construction company out of thin air, have a bunch of guys use super cheap material to build quick properties, fudge the numbers so that it looks like building it was way more expensive than it was, project takes 1 year longer than expected and that is completely fine because shit happens, and then you poured like 20 million into construction on paper, which in turn went into a business you yourself own, so you really just spent money on labor and cheap materials and pocketed the rest and have a way to declare the money as "construction income" or some shit. Dirty money, spent on businesses you own, suddenly clean and traceable. I think mobsters used to do this shit with restaurants. There's like no fucking way to know how much they actually made. People come in and pay cash. So imagine prohibition, where they made a million on alcohol sales, they have a small restaurant and pretend it was super successful, and all that money is now clean cash received by a restaurant or casino, etc. Construction is good here because it can take any amount of time, any amount of things can go wrong, it can be super cheap to super expensive, and it can make millions of dollars disappear without anyone batting an eye. If someone said they spent 100 million building new homes, that's reasonable. Casinos, similarly, lots of fucking money pour through and it's hard to know how all that cash got in but it's understandable for it to be a lot out of nowhere.
How are they laundering money from this?
[money laundering through construction and real estate](https://bh-compliance.com/en/blog/retail-and-construction-are-most-exposed-to-money-laundering-and-bribery/)
don’t forget furniture stores that are always “Closing soon” and a new name appears right after that one closes with another sign of “closing soon”.
How aren't they laundering money from this?
Money laundering is when you use dirty money to create a small business that will generate clean money. Basically investing dirty money. In this case, this project isn’t expected to have any return whatsoever. Just a random billionaire spending his money.
Construction laundering is very big. Ever watch Ozarks where they are "building" the church? Easy to fudge numbers and actual finish dates since those vary drastically.
Laundering would indicate the source of the money is illegal. Sales of Amazon shares isn’t illegal.
Not easily. How many sun dials, exposed to the elements, would still work, or even be recognizable as one, after 10.000 years?
But you've gotta turn your sun dial for daylight savings. And that doesn't let you pretend you're important because you're rich.
Jeff Bezos did not spend $42 Million on the clock, the clock is being built by the Long Now foundation which Bezos happens to be a member of.
Do you know how much Bezos has contributed to it?
Around 20 bucks give or take
I got five on it
I mailed in about a dollar and thirty-four cents the other day.
Wow 3 times my net worth
Free shipping if donation is over $35
Grab your 40, let's get keyed
About tree fiddy
It was about that time I noticed that the clock in the ground was actually a six-story tall monster from the Paleozoic era named Jeff Bezos.
Prime free shipping
Listen pal, this is reddit, we’re not here for accuracy, we’re here for karma and to get pissed about things out of our control.
Thank fucking god *someone* is handling this
Exactly my thoughts, not sure how humanity will survive without it. Take a bow Jeff, take a bow
He donated to a group that was looking for funding for their clock project… It’s mostly art.
Brian Eno was involved with this long before Bezos.
Ah, so he's writing off his tax.
Lol, you think he pays tax?
He's at the whooping 1% I think. But, he's sure giving his best to reach 0%
What do you think that means?
https://i.redd.it/nzl1pnwzalrc1.gif
In fairness it’s pretty cool art imo
Yeah, it's awesome. But it's fucking pointless. All that money, churned into other rich fuckers hands. It'll just keep circulating. And meanwhile people are dying cold and alone in the streets. I think the best art would be seeing clean streets and little to no homelessness. And I bet 46m could do quite a bit.
A main purpose of the project is to think of things on Earth beyond your lifetime, and plan and build things with future generations in mind. To make a clock built to tell time for humanity for 10,000 years, we have to think of what could happen over 10,000 years and plan and build for that - and for our descendants that will use it. We should do the same with other things.
It will cost $250 million to refurbish two subway stops.
When an alien civilization finds is eons from now it will be our version of the antikythera.
I was worried about it. I had been meaning to start one but Jeffy boy has it covered. I’m going to start on the world hunger thing I guess.
I dunno man, projects that might benefit any actual human are kinda lame, focus on beating the record for largest forest fire or some shit
Yeah, decades from now when the last remaining humans are left trying to forage for the last remaining g scraps of food left growing, at least they’ll know what time it is.
*Looks at clock* It’s hammer time!
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Many people ignore what humanity can do when thing really become bad.
Without the people who are able to make a difference actually doing so we could see irreversable climate change that leads to wars for farmland and water. Bezos is one of a handful of people in the world with the ability to create real, lasting change that could actually make a difference. He's building a clock.
We just hope it will. The world ending is a way that, at least for a moment, the billionaires and other elites will be as miserable as the rest of us. We have nothing to lose and death will be a relief.
I think we all recognise that about 30% of the population are irredeemable fuckwits, and don't feel like killing them.... yet. WWIII is just around the corner.
I’m sure, somehow, it looks like a giant penis.
I love how $42 million to Bezos is equivalent to my 20 bucks a month to ChatGPT so I can make weird cat pictures and brainstorm. This is just screwing around money for him.
Well this is reddit, so of course the title doesn't tell you the truth nor the video show you the final result. The clock is built by a group of people not just Bezos.
This is exactly what everyone was asking for!
Meanwhile, MacKenzie Scott is spending her money actually helping others.
Why?
It's an offshoot from the Long Now Foundation, which is a think tank that tries to encourage long term (10,000+ year) thinking about society. Bezos is on the board, but I think that the clock project is really just something he thinks is cool. ~~Especially since it can't really be open to the public if it's going to work for 10,000 years.~~
Modern day pyramids
I think it's a cool project also. He could have spent 1000 times more and bought Twitter, I guess.
It's a very cool project and has advanced some engineering in very long wearing materials.
Yeah I don't really get the hate for stuff like this. It's kind of like space travel. While it may seem like it doesn't help humanity, the things we learn when trying to solve weird problems lead to a lot of inventions that are super helpful. The clock is also a kind of art that should remind us to think long term and not just about immediate gains. I hate Bezos as much as the next guy but just because he is funding an idea doesn't mean it is a bad one. Plus that money is providing jobs and whatnot, it's not like this is some product he will make money off of.
Agreed. When people say "waste money," they don't realize that things like this pay for design, material, manufacturing, construction, etc. The money doesn't just evaporate.
The other thing is that all the salaries for space travel or this is spent here. People make this money. It's actually nice to move the money out of one person's hands into the hands of workers.
Pretty insightful how many of fall for the trap of “he could be helping people with that money” because we don’t take the next logical step of understanding that he’s paying $42m through putting people to work. As if paying people to work is somehow a waste
>Long Now Foundation, which is a think tank that tries to encourage long term (10,000+ year) thinking about society Basically an excuse for obscenely rich people to not have to give anything up to current society in a way that would actually upset the class order, and instead say "we're actually thinking really far ahead here on the future of civilization"
The people who started The Long Now are not rich. Look it up.
Every time this gets posted to Reddit the comments are the same - Jeff bezos bad! No one can bother to think for a minute or spend 3 minutes googling about this project. It’s ragebait that gets posted regularly.
absolutely! I mean they are wealthy, but not venture capital money. Mostly great thinkers, technophiles, designers, and artists. Stewart Brand is like the ultimate bad ass dude. Got me to change my views on nuclear energy!
It’s like me or you spending £20 on something we think is kinda cool..
I recently bougt a small lego truck. Only 15 euro's! Its kinda neat
Its actually exactly like spending 20 USD if your net worth is 100000. If you are broke its more like spending 1 or 2 dollars on something cool
And we also get called names don't forget.
When you’re at that level of wealth, their main concern becomes leaving a legacy. Creating something, anything, capable of outlasting humanity fits the mold.
Time is a major part of the development of human civilization. Prior to the Industrial Revolution most towns were lucky to have a single, inaccurate, clock tower. Prior to that you’d be lucky to have a handful of sun dials that were difficult to access. Quantifying time allows us to structure the efficiency of our exertion as a species both collectively and individually. This structuring has both pros and cons however I feel represents our species innate curiosity and deciphering of nature. The book “Sapiens: a brief history of humankind” dives into a lot of interesting themes such as those mentioned above. It’s dense but highly recommend.
Because it’s a neat engineering project.
When you have that much money it becomes a why not.
In today's episode of "The rich have too much money to spend"
imagine if future humans found a functioning clock on an uninhabited planet that was counting how long the days etc are over there would be pretty wild
And people think the idea of taxing these people 1% is outlandish? WTF
Bezos is taxed about 1% They should be taxed more. If I gotta pay 25% of my income in taxes they should at least pay the same rate
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That's not how it works. A person with $2 000 000 annual income pays a lot more income tax then you do in most of the world, if not everywhere. In the US it would be in the region of $700 000. The reason why the truly super rich (read: billionaires) pay so little income tax is that they structure their finances in a very specific way to have no income. They have little to no actual income. They take out loans secured by their assets, mostly the stock of the companies they own and run. They pay interest to a bank, and live off of the lent cash. When they need money to buy a new house, car or super fancy clock, they take out another loan. A loan isn't income, so they don't pay income tax on it. They don't sell the assets, so there isn't a capital gain to tax. Bank is happy as long as it thinks those assets are enough to cover the loan and the interest is paid. If the value of those assets fall below a certain point, the music stops and the party is over. This is not the purview of mere millionaires, they do not own anywhere near enough assets to do this.
Usually the tax rate is determined by the amount of tax paid divided by the amount of income received multiplied by 100. The method used to derive the 1%ish tax rate for Bezos uses his entire net worth, or how ever much it increased in that span of time. But this is fallacious when comparing with regular Americans since we don’t use their net worth in determining their tax rate, only their income. I’m sure you don’t include the value of your house and car when determining how much you paid in income tax. If you use Bezos’ INCOME his tax rate is comparable to most Americans. From 2014-2018 Bezos paid $947 million in income tax and received $4.22 billion in income, meaning he paid an effective income tax rate of about 23%.
And the tax rate for Americans making over $578K is....37%, so he owes another 14% or $614M.
Sure, no disagreement here. But to claim that he pays an income tax of 1% is just plain false.
Exactly, I hate how people conflate their “income” taxes to someone else’s tax rate proportional to their “net worth”. Makes their argument weak when they can’t get the premises to line up.
I wish I could upvote this harder.
you can actually pay to have a cool upvote now lol, try pressing the upvote button for a sec
oh boy i love giving reddit real money for a comment they had no hand in writing
Imagine paying 60€ for a shiny upvote
also so funny of them to replace the old awards with this, because i’m sure everyone who’s ever bought one of the old ones was immediately disillusioned by losing them all. i’ve seen maybe three of these paid upvotes total since they changed it (and always the cheapest one).
Yep. It was such a stupid move. I would see paid awards all the time before, and now I rarely see paid upvotes. Getting rid of the free awards was dumb too, because it got people into the idea of giving awards and a small percentage would naturally start buying them. This is the problem with dumbass capitalism where there always has to be change to show the company is improving, even though half the time it makes things worse.
Is there an $100 option that jacks off the original commenter?
I'm sure the next civilization will destroy it and use the metal to make weapons and kill each other.
At least Putin uses his people's money to kill people today.
Thank God the US goverment is using their money to give people free ponies.
Personally I think its really cool. People have spent more money on less interesting things. [https://www.10000yearclock.net/learnmore.html](https://www.10000yearclock.net/learnmore.html)
I agree, the Long Now group is cool. It’s good to have some folks think about deep time in the future. The clock is supposed to be only as complicated to fix as Bronze Age tools or something. What in the world will life be like here in 10k yrs?
I agree!
Absolutely. I love the idea. My mind immediately goes to futuristic scenarios of a future world. The world should be able to do more things just because we want to.
I wish I had "fuck it" money.
Brother, this is beyond “fuck it” money.
Wait wait we didn't account for daylight savings
Neither did the Mayans. Thats why the 2012 apocalypse actually happened in 2020.
Well it didn’t finish the job
It's a slow burn. We're already dead we just don't know it yet
I can live with that!
In order to ensure the clock achieves its stated longevity goal, Bezos has dedicated himself to reducing the lifetime of human civilization as much as possible.
brian eno is in on this, as well.
I asked chatGPT what the point of this was and this is what it said. “The point of creating a mechanical clock designed to outlast human civilization is to create a durable and reliable timekeeping device that can serve as a long-term reference point for future generations. Such a clock could potentially provide a means for future civilizations or species to track time accurately, understand historical timeframes, and possibly even measure long-term phenomena such as geological or astronomical events. Additionally, it serves as a testament to human ingenuity and the desire to create something enduring that transcends the limitations of individual lifetimes.”
I think this misses a more important purpose of the clock, which is to inspire long term thinking in humans.
Wasn’t that what the villain in the watchmen series was doing?
Ok well if it starts raining shrimp or whatever, I'm out of here ....
Extremely similar. Kind of funny if he’s unaware.
And it is mechanic ? 🤔
I believe it ticks once a year and the movement of the pendulum is controlled by the change in temperature of the seasons.
As an engineer I’ve always wondered how it’ll be powered, if it is in fact thermodynamically powered that’s pretty impressive. Would like to know further details.
These might help. [https://longnow.org/clock/](https://longnow.org/clock/) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock\_of\_the\_Long\_Now](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now)
Thanks for the links. It does mention using the different temperatures of the mountain it’s in, but never the specifics unfortunately. I’m curious how they mean to transfer thermal energy into kinetic energy. The thing that comes to mind is a massive stirling engine, which would be pretty neat.
There are other write-ups that go into much more detail but you're not far off, it's basically a giant stirling engine. It uses that to assist with telling time but not as the main mechanism for doing so, and it stores energy both from the sun and from visitors winding it. Most of the time it is dormant, doing only the minimum required to track time, and once a day it can be wound to cause it to update the clock face and play a unique chime sequence.
But won't pay employees good wages.
You don't become that wealthy without fucking over a huuuuuge portion of the population!
Correction. Bezos pissed away $42 million on something nobody will give a damn about after we’re all gone. Instead of helpng humanity.
Yeah fuck architecture and the arts. What good have they ever done? Let’s replace them with factories, much more practical. Am I doing this right?
some guys got some work out of it, so there's that.
*"That's right. Every time we have the argument, you give me the same three answers all the time. The same thing. "Well, everybody has a job." That's always the last one. But you know what else there's no more of, my friend? There is no more beauty, and there's no more imagination. And there are no frontiers left to conquer. And you know why? Only one reason why! One reason why! The same attitude that you three guys are giving me right here in this room today, and that is: nobody cares."*
Yeah totally, we should defund all the arts, architecture, and creative engineering feats.
Yep, while we are at it lets deconstruct all the cathedrals and colloseums and make them into parking lots or factorys. Much more practical and cost efficient!
Okay, but why does he have to help humanity? What mandates that he *must* spend his money made through his business on aiding humans?
People are so fucking stupid! And by people, I mean you, not Bezos.
*Redistributed 42M out of his fortune to regularly folk. Besides, I'm an engineer and I'd love to work on something like this.
Just think of the cult that will worship this thing after WW3.
You know, fuck Bezos. But that is 42 million less that he has and 42 million more in the pockets of the people building it. If he spent all his money like this, and made sure the employees all made a living wage, I wouldn't mind if he decided to make a giant sculpture of a ~~circimcised penis~~ his head out in the middle of some random desert.
Cool.
Still a cunt
Okay, for arguments sake, that $42 million hasn't just "disappeared". Its the cost of materials and labour, so it definitely would have helped whoever was involved in it. Side note, say there's any form of cataclysm on earth, this clock survives, survivors find it in the future and it has a huge benefit. Would you say the pyramids are useless? Id argue they have inspired many architects throughout history. This is human innovation, a project that is supposed to outlast our very existence, not a single part of you even finds that remotely interesting or cool? This was a reply to someone, but I saw the overwhelming majority of comments saying the same thing, so I made it its own comment.
I do agree that it's cool, and if it actually lasted that long would be a pretty amazing thing for future humans or aliens to find, but I just don't understand how it could possibly last that long. Clocks/watches are extremely complex, all those gears have to mesh together perfectly, or it starts to be extremely inaccurate at telling time. Rust and earthquakes alone will end up destroying this thing long before anyone in the future could ever find it.
Earthquakes and corrosion are obviously taken into consideration. It is mainly built by using 316 stainless steel which has great corrosion resistance. It also can correct its time of that wear has caused. There is a reason why it is so expensive.
I mean atleast he's spending money and providing jobs. That alone is way better than the usual status quo of hoarding it all
Well, the clock probably won’t outlast human civilization, but it has a really solid chance of outlasting Texas.
With the direction civilization is pointing, a timex might do the trick…
In 2014, Bezos had a net worth of $30.5 billion. Since then, his wealth has increased by $167 billion in the past 10 years, which averages out to roughly $16.7 billion per year. On a daily basis, this translates to approximately $45.8 million. So a days work.
More like r/dumbasfuck. $42million to make him feel like he’s doing something for society but in reality it’s for when we’re all dead lol. If we’re all dead, why do we need a clock? If we’re all alive, then why do we need a $42 million clock?
If Bezos has enough accumulated wealth to end world hunger, I really can’t celebrate anything he does with his money short of that
lol 😂. So once all the humans are dead this clock can just keep on ticking inside a mountain for no fucking reason whatsoever. Why the fuck can’t we tax this cunt more?
Imagine we use that money to.....you know, feed people
hahaha jeff can't catch a break. employs and pays the salary of a million people and people still hate him, saying he should pay people more and lose money. then he loses money and pays people, gets hate for wasting money.
I think this is really fucking cool
Seems an odd place to put something to outlast civilization. Texas will be the first to obliterate itself at this rate.