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Jeff Bezos is on a quest for eternal life – back on Earth, we’re searching for Amazon’s taxes
杰夫·贝佐斯正在寻求长生不老——回到地球，我们正在寻找亚马逊的税收
On the one hand, it makes huge sense for Jeff Bezos to pour millions into a company seeking the secret to eternal life. Further developments in fauxlanthropy for the Amazon overlord, then, who has decided that death is as inevitable as taxes. Which is to say: not at all inevitable for the likes of him. Bezos was this month reported to be a significant investor in Altos Labs, an age-reversal firm which is on the scientific quest for immortality.
一方面，杰夫·贝佐斯向一家寻求永生秘诀的公司投入数百万美元是非常有意义的。那么，对于这位决定死亡就像税收一样不可避免的亚马逊霸主来说，虚假慈善或进一步发展。这就是说：对于他这样的人来说，并不是完全不可避免的。据本月报道，贝佐斯是Altos Labs的重要投资者，Altos Labs是一家逆龄公司，致力于对永生的科学探索。
Among other expansions, it is thought the firm will now open a lab within the UK, which I think you’ll agree means so much more to our nation than a fair tax contribution from Amazon. You know we’d only spend that shit on social care or the NHS or something, when Jeff can see it’s far better for us to get people on ordinary incomes to pay extra for all that, so that guys like him are freed up to spaff their money on Earth’s most preposterous midlife crises. How else to interpret the fact that this eternal-life news emerged in the very week it was revealed that despite Amazon UK sales increasing by £1.89bn last year, the firm paid just £3.8m more corporation tax?
在其他扩张计划中，该公司预计将在英国开设一个实验室，我想你会同意，这对我们的国家来说比亚马逊的公平税收贡献更有意义。你知道，我们只会把这些钱花在社会福利或国民健康保险制度或其他方面，当杰夫看到让普通收入的人为所有这些支付额外费用要好得多的时候，这样像他这样的人就可以自由地把钱花在地球上最荒谬的中年危机上。这则消息传出的那一周，尽管亚马逊在英国的销售额增长了18.9亿英镑，但该公司仅多缴纳了380万英镑的公司税，这一事实如何解释呢？
Indeed, as he ascended to the astral plane of gazillionaire retirement this year, Bezos quoted Richard Dawkins in his farewell email to Amazon shareholders. “Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at,” they learned. “If living things don’t actively work to prevent it, they would eventually merge with their surroundings and cease to exist as autonomous beings. That is what happens when they die.”
事实上，当贝佐斯今年登上亿万富翁退休的星际飞机时，他在给亚马逊股东的告别电子邮件中引用了理查德·道金斯的话。“延缓死亡是一件必须努力的事情，”他们了解到。“如果生物不积极地阻止它，它们最终会与周围环境融为一体，不再作为自主生物存在。这就是他们死后的归途。”
