"Gene Cash" wrote in message
...
"Jim Oberg" writes:

BLOG | Posted 04/07/2007 @ 6:09pm

Pigs in Space
Richard Kim

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?bid=15&pid=183428

Is there a more perfect symbol of the excesses of global capitalism
than Charles Simonyi's 13-day joyride into outer space? Simonyi, a
Hungarian-American software programmer who made his fortune at Xerox and
Microsoft before launching his own start-up, paid $20 million to be
escorted
to the Kazakh steppes, packed into a Russian Soyuz rocket and blasted
towards the international space station. En route, he'll enjoy a meal of
roasted quail, duck breast confit with capers, shredded chicken
parmentier
and rice pudding with candied fruit -- all carefully selected by his
girlfriend, Martha Stewart. (Martha, whatever happened to astronaut ice
cream and Tang?) No word yet on the threadcount of his sheets or if
there's
24-hour concierge service in orbit.

Yeah, and Kim can suck it too.

I think I detect a faint odor of hypocrisy and "*I* don't have any
money, so I'm reduced to telling you how to spend yours". I think if
Mr. Kim had a billion dollars he sure wouldn't be skipping out on his
Rolls-Royce and his big house.

Gotta, agree, definitely sounds like a case of sour grapes.

And I love how he trots out what is as far as I can tell a purely arbitrary
number of "33% of earnings") as morally responsible. Umm.. why? Why not
50%? Or 5%?

Yeah, it would be nice if perhaps Simonyi contributed more (but hey the
article already lists a number of ways he is) but I'm not too bothered by
it.



These are the sorts of whiners that always appear when you talk about
any big project and *always* propose to spend that money on the poor.

Can you get ANY more cliche than that?

As a matter of fact, Simonyi *is* helping the poor. That money goes
straight to the Russian space industry, which right now is about as
poor as it gets without being a wino in the gutter.

That's far better than feeding the idiots and druggies wandering the
streets here in Orlando.

-gc

--
Our main goal for a long time was to make it more dangerous to be in the
target area than to be part of the test crew. -- Wernher von Braun

--
Greg Moore
SQL Server DBA Consulting Remote and Onsite available!
Email: sql (at) greenms.com http://www.greenms.com/sqlserver.html