If China wants to pay 25% of the price of my car to make it affordable for me, I’m down with that. It’s more than my government is doing for me.

Now he’s going to want to invade Australia.

All those shithole Red states are going to get raped by data centers, while the Blue states will force them to pay their way.

This treasonous MAGA pedophile is more proof that only the good die young.

We should pass a law that it is illegal to name anything after him, or build any monument to him. How many statues of Hitler are there in Germany?

I wasn’t offering a comprehensive list of “famous” or “great” living artists, just a few examples. I’m not naive, I know about Damien Hurst, and his consortiums, but he’s the exception. I chuckled typing his name as an example, he’s a K-Pop band, on a stage with Springsteen and Dylan, but technically he IS an artist, just like technically the K-Pop band are musicians. He’s just figured out a way to monetize his art, but he’s an exception. Koons is another one. So was Thomas Kinkade. These guys are bomb throwers, not serious artists.

Most artists don’t have that kind of notoriety, nor do they want it. Most artists I know, would be happy just making their living from their art, so they can only do art. Some don’t even want to make money from their art. Generally, success is based on how well they personally feel they rendered the emotion they were trying to explore.

And the wealthy have ALWAYS been the best benefactors for the arts, especially music and painting, that’s nothing new, and should be strongly encouraged. Most of Haydn’s greatest compositions were written while he spent decades employed by Prince Esterhazy. Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and just about every composer took commissions from wealthy patrons.

And why shouldn’t an artist take it? The wealthy generally have more money than brains (most inherited), so if they are going to throw away their excess excess excess money on obviously metaphoric rockets, throw some dough to the artists instead. It’s one way to get that promised trickle down money, although you got to squeeze that tree really hard to get the juice out of it.

There are getting to be quite a few these days. Musicians like McCartney, Springsteen, Dylan, Sting, Beyonce, Jay-Z, and more, are reaching Billionaire status these days. Most of them have sold their publishing for $500 million, putting them halfway there, with a lifetime of royalties.

Visual artists are another story. I feel sorry for them. They create a beautiful painting, and then sell it for a bunch of money. Then that buyer holds it for a few years, and sells it for double, but the artist doesn’t see any of that. All he gets are the proceeds from that initial sale. Being the artist that holds the record for the largest sale by a living artist has got to be rough. Some guy just got $50 mill for a painting that you sold 20 years ago for rent money.

I can name a LOT of them: Damien Hurst, Banksy, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, and many, many more. Plenty more that have died recently, but were hugely famous during their lifetimes, like Chuck Close or Roy Lichtenstein, who are displayed in nearly every museum in the world, including the Met and MOMA. Many artists like Picasso, Rembrandt, Michaelangelo, Monet, and many more, were extraordinarily famous in their lifetimes.

The idea that famous artists and composers didn’t get famous until long after they were dead, is an exaggeration to the point of being mostly false.

I have a degree in music history, and I can name 10 famous composers who were relatively famous in their own lifetimes, for every one that became famous posthumously. Many famous artists and composers were very famous in their lifetimes, which is why they became even more famous in death. There are the notable exceptions like JS Bach and Van Gogh, but there are a lot more like Beethoven or DaVinci, who were enormously famous during their lifetimes. Even those that are known for becoming famous after death, like JS Bach or Schubert, were still well known among local and regional musicians, which is why their music was preserved after death.

And that’s where I concede that there may have been great composers who NEVER became famous because nobody ever heard their music, and nobody ever preserved it. But that’s not the same as becoming FAMOUS after death. That’s a bit of a cliche, with few actual examples.

There are a lot of different kinds of artists, not just actors and singers, and while Nepo-Babies are common in Hollywood, they are less common in most other art forms.

Art tends to be very merit-based. Bad artists don’t tend to be very successful. Good artists don’t always find success, but bad artist almost never do, and never on a huge basis. Wealthy artists are generally very good at what they do.

Wow, you really don’t have a clue about art.

They started with paint rollers, and realized that wasn’t going to work, so they switched to sprayers. Seriously.

From what I understand, his Arc de Trump (seriously, that’s what it’s called), is going to be located between the pool and the Washington Monument, and will be TALLER than the the Washington Monument. He’s making sure it gets a nice reflection.

Lovely.

About the only billionaires that I might excuse are artists, who take a blank page, or a black canvas, and write song, or a book, or create some work of art out of their thin air, using only the ideas in their head. If they can create something out of their head, and get enough people pay them for it, then they deserve the money.

The problem is, in order to transfer than money from the fan to the artist, especially in massive amounts, it usually takes some gargantuan corporation that does all the exploiting on the part of the artist.

So while the artist wasn’t exploitive in the creation of his art, his distribution company that collected the money for him, certainly was.

If you have to hide significant evidence from the jury, that’s a pretty good indication you’re doing something wrong.

I think she’ll make a great president someday, but let her get some deep experience first.

Now, this is the point where I disagree: if it is possible with today’s tech, why is it not happening? Why is automation limited to repeatetive tasks and stuff like self checkout?

They have the tech right now. My local news even ran a little disguised Chipotle PR video showing their new robotic burrito bowl machine, as the news anchors oohed and aahed over what was essentially a propaganda ad.

So Chipotle already has it, and every other fast food outlet is either working on it, or has it - and has for a long time. They’ve been salivating for this moment for decades. There are only two things holding it up:

1. The tech isn’t quite ready: It is, but it it isn’t. It’s ready to be fully tested on the public, and that’s when it will finally get fully perfected. They’ve gone as far as they can without actually installing it. Now they need real world scenarios.

2. It will be a PR nightmare. The first fast food chain to announce a fully robotic store is going to get savaged, including a massive national boycott, one that I will happily join. But once one company does it, and the dust settles a bit, the others will do it, too.

The next stage will be when someone announces that their entire company will be mostly automated, probably a fast food operation again. That will result in an even stronger boycott that may even bankrupt the company. It will certainly take a serious hit, but someone will make the calculation that the short-term PR risk is worth the long-term profits.

We are in the calm before the storm. We can see it on the horizon, and we can see how big and ferocious it will be. The job environment after the full implementation of AI, is going to get really bad. Saying that it won’t be so bad, that the approaching maelstrom won’t kill EVERYBODY, isn’t comforting.

I forgot that the US is a dystopian hellscape where many people work what would have been a college summer job a couple of decades ago just to get by, my bad.

Sarcasm aside

That was supposed to be sarcastic? Because that’s the reality for MANY people in America. If you don’t see it happening around you in your life, good for you, things are going well for you. But we are in a K-shaped economy, and a lot of people are on that lower rung, and those are the people that are going to get hit worst by AI.

Great, so in your scenario, things will still be great because people can always clean up busted milk jigs, and watch for shoplifters (both of which could be easily automated, by the way)? And that sounds like a reasonable job environment to you? Don’t worry about AI taking your job, you can always get a minimum wage job guarding the rich guy’s stuff, at least until they perfect the Slaughterbots to replace you. Nice career, you should get those $120k student loans for your software development degree paid off in no time.

And they’ll use the pizza vending machine, if they want a pizza, or any other fast food, because they’ll ALL be fully automated. The building itself will be the vending machine. Autonomous trucks will be loaded by robots at a robotic warehouse, driven to the locations and unloaded by robots, then cooked and served by robots. The entire process from end to end can be done without a single human touching it, with the technology they have RIGHT NOW.

It’s only a matter of time before it’s perfected and launched. Dismissing an obvious societal trend because it is inconvenient is a very American trait, and it has gotten us to where we are now. How about we start seeing the actual future that is looming in front of us, and stop pretending it’s not there? AI is coming, and the manner in which businesses are already deploying it is already losing jobs, just in anticipation of losing even more jobs.

Replacing as many human-powered the is the express purpose of AI by nearly every corporate entity. Stop pretending that it isn’t.

I actually agree. I think she should openly challenge Schmuck for his seat, and make him fight for it, or quit. Then go to work in the Senate, destroying any attempted MAGA SCOTUS or Cabinet appointments.

Tear up the Senate for a term or two, and then start looking at a presidential run, or a Cabinet post, depending on the timing, then a presidential run.

Or just stay in the Senate, and run your own joint. It’s a whole separate branch, after all, equal to the president. It would be good to have someone running it who isn’t afraid to remind them of that.

She’s smart enough to navigate a track like that.

Like I said, their choice.

Biden will always be in the bottom 15 of presidents for not crushing MAGA as a National Security Threat after the Insurrection and hundreds of stolen documents, and allowing them to rise and take power again. Trump should have been executed for his treason, or at least put in prison for the rest of his life.

And they had the Epstein Files, too.

Unforgivable political malpractice.