randomsummer

Are we so far gone that we can't come back from this? If Biden wins, will this stuff continue to escalate, or will these people shuffle back into their homes and settle back into their shitty lives? Were they just quietly wishing they could wreck this country but not doing anything about it before? If Trump wins, will they continue this path of destruction, eventually refusing to leave the white house after two terms? Will they cause so much damage and division that cannot be repaired in a generation?

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/08/kanye-west-2020-campaign-invalid-signatures-fraud/amp

Fuck no, but that's the American attitude. I went to a brewery yesterday in Hershey, PA to pick up some limited edition beer, but I had to park at the outlet stores next door because they had free chargers for my car. The outlets were fucking packed, people waiting in lines (not 6 feet apart) to get into Bath & Body works. I would say about 20 - 25% of the people were not wearing masks. Fuck this country.

At this point it seems hard to point to a single or even a few responsible parties, as it seems that the people in charge of the port knew about the danger but were prevented from doing anything because of inaction by the courts. I guess you could hold the judges responsible but I read that the entire court system just ignored their letters pleading allowance to get rid of the ammonium nitrate.

I'm not an artist and I'm really not trying to be a dick, but isn't the whole point of "working" for compensation creating something that others in the community need / want? If any worker, even an artist, is creating something that people in general don't want or need in significant quantity, should they be compensated for it? Of course this is beside the discussion of artists who make art that people want being ripped off by middle men who are distributing the art.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/trent-reznor-tobacco-babysitter-1039325/

Finally finished the Lambo:

The warehouse nextdoor probably held all of the raw materials to make fireworks, including a giant cache of the stuff that goes boom.

edit: stupid youtube won't embed

Agree. It's the same when you take a step back and look at corporations in general. Financial corporations can make tons of money with very little overhead, and contribute very little to the betterment of society as a whole, whereas manufacturing takes real investment (capital and human), time, and volume to make a modest profit. In today's world where every business is so focused on the short-term and on shareholder returns, nobody wants to take the time to invest in long-term anymore even if it betters society as a whole.

I agree in principle, but is a universal basic income sustainable in our current society? I am an altruist by nature but I'm also a realist, and I'm not sure if it's sustainable not from a monetary point of view, but I feel like if we had a UBI we'd have a hard time filling a lot of the low-tier jobs that still need to be done. I admit that I'm severely uneducated on these things, and I'd love to be proven wrong.

Kind of off topic because I think this thread is about the shitty systems that we have for compensation for art going to the wrong people... I'm not an artist in any sense of the word and I don't have any artistic talent at all (wish I did), so maybe I have a different view on the larger aspect here of artists getting paid for art. I'm an engineer, so my views are very pragmatic. People should be paid for what they contribute to a society, and it seems like art always comes near the end of the list after more "essential" needs are met. Art to some is essential, but it seems that is not the majority and as such it has always been relegated to a place where most people see it as a "nice to have" and "I'll pay what I want for it." For people who love and need to make art, that sucks, but it's the reality. However, it seems that some artists feel that they are entitled to be paid for their work regardless of whether or not a lot of people want to consume that art. Obviously, I don't know what the best system is to distribute art and compensate artists fairly, it seems like we've never had a good system for that (maybe that's the biggest problem here), but it seems that a pragmatic approach would be for artists to find jobs tangentially related to what interests them and do art in their free time. Then they could contribute to the well being of our society and if their art takes off and they start making enough money to live off of that, they can count themselves among the lucky few to get paid for what they love doing. I love to build Lego, I'd do it in my sleep, but if nobody wants to pay to watch me build Lego I'm not going to demand that they do. I'll get a job where I build "other stuff", not as satisfying but somewhat satisfying, and build Lego in my free time.