That’s excessively kind of you.
It’s been pretty common for a couple decades to call him the outright fascist he is.
Heck, there’s an entire Pit thread from over 19 years ago about it, with this particular post sarcastically mentioning Miller’s known predilections
There was a certain point after 9/11 where he went from “libertarian with some bones to pick with Reagan and Bush” to “frothing at the mouth western chauvinist”. IIRC 300 was written before he went fully over the edge. The Miller who wrote Batman calling guns “the weapon of the enemy” and fighting a Superman who’d become an unthinking pawn of the government is barely the same Miller who wrote Batman as a cop-killing psychopath who kidnaps and tortures a 12-year-old Dick Grayson.
There have been various literary sorts making comments along these lines I’m about to butcher; too lazy to look up a true cite / quote.
Awful lot of folks have started out trying to sell BS to the far right and found themselves as the far right. Anyone who swims in sewage long enough ends up infused with shit.
Which is not meant to defend Miller specifically or his kind generally. IMO most folks who even start down that road are already mentally wired with some desire to end up at that destination.
There was a saying/trope/thingie going around when I was much younger, allegedly from Socrates (no, I wasn’t actually around then):
Be as you wish to seem.
That was when the general assumption was that people wanted to seem to be good people, even if they weren’t. Now it seems kind of irrelevant – so many people are happy seeming just as evil as they actually are. Some aspire to seem worse than they (think they) are, for the lulz and the clicks. Trying to seem better than you are is so last century.
Agreed.
“Be the change you wish to see” has certainly taken a dark turn from its optimistic form in the 1970s.
Folks now are sure being the change, but it’s sure not one I wish to see.
Nobody:
Gavin Newsom: It’s not fair that I have to pay sales tax at Best Buy
It varies from state to state. In the state that you and I live in, we do need to pay sales tax for prewritten/canned software that we download. In California, they don’t. Newsom is suggesting that California change that.
I don’t know that calling it “unfair” is the right approach; fairness doesn’t seem to factor into it. It could be a method for California to raise more revenue though.
Here is a page showing how sales tax for software purchases are handled, state-by-state:
A few states, of course, have zero sales tax whatsoever. A few states tax every kind of software purchase. For most states, it’s a mix.
I’ll post an image of the map directly:
At the moment, California is one of a handful of states that will only charge sales tax on canned software delivered on tangible media (like a disk). His Best Buy example is talking about the only kind of software purchases they currently tax. They could indeed broaden that, as most states do.
That is an… interesting take on Newsom’s point.
I know it as Vonnegut, from Mother Night:
Fortune magazine is apparently writing for a target demographic of about ten people these days.
And why does the article look so screwed up? The formatting is All Weird for some reason.
It’s not that small. Thousands of us have private jets.
RC jets don’t count.
About 15,000 private jets are registered in the USA. And there are tax advantages, just like with yachts, to registering them in nearby tax-friendly countries. So the actual number of jets belonging to US interests is somewhat larger. Some basic Googling didn’t give great numbers; I’d wag it at another 20%, but that is a WAG.
Now the mayor of NYC can’t reach every jet registered in the USA even if he actually wanted to. But of course Fortune is sowing panic that this guy is the face of the future of the Democratic party and if not him, somebody else equally anti-wealth will soon be in a position to tax your jet.
Fortune’s target demographic has always been top 1% earners who expect (read “sincerely hope”) to be top 0.1% wealthy before they retire, if they aren’t already there now.
Yes, proles can read it at the library. But if you want to know the target demographic of a magazine, don’t read the content; read the ads. And those ads are aimed at the “I know I’m gonna have my jet soon” crowd. Some of whom are actually right about that.
Lot more than 10 people in that category in our plutocracy.
But anyone can read that article online. I would venture to say that far more people who read that article don’t own private jets than do. And for the vast majority of the population, “The government might tax private jets!!1!” gets a response of “Hell yeah, let’s do that, why aren’t we taxing the bajesus out of them already?”.
Paul Schrader thinks an LLM is his girlfriend and that it dumped him.
(Vulture quoting Schrader)
Why should writers sit around for months searching for a good idea when AI can provide one in seconds?
The writers I know can come up with a dozen ideas in ten minutes. The skill is in the execution of the idea.
We have threads and threads on “innovators” and “idea people” and the tendency for fools to idolize them.
Ideas are pennies the ton. It’s implementation that brings home the gold.
100%. I’ve “invented” little gadgets and hacks to take care of minor inconveniences in my life, like a doorstop at work that has Velcro to stick to carpet. The only reason is because these seem like simple ideas but I can’t find any of these items for sale anywhere, so I make them up.
I’ve had people suggest I try to patent and market them, and I said fuck that. The world is full of ideas and turning an idea into something successful takes a lot of time, luck, effort, expertise, and monetary investment. It just isn’t happening. And it’s not like I’ve ever made anything groundbreaking, just convenient.
You’d earn more money by creating a video on how to make and use your little gadget and get a few cents per view from YouTube. (While simultaneously blocking anyone else from patenting the idea because it’d be published prior art.)