If there wasn’t substantial precedent for armed fundy parents already this would be a light-hearted jape. The only thing that makes this unlikely is our fundy murderers are all of the other gender from Carol.
I’m an idiot so it literally took the “Imagine you earned $10,000 a minute since 10,000 BCE…” posts to get me to realize just how unjust billionaires are, but ever since then, probably around 2019 or 2020, just the thought of them makes my skin crawl. For all the good that Carla’s parents assuredly do, they’re still hurting people in amassing the wealth they have.
Thag Simmons
Carla’s parents are cool, not necessarily good
Sajuuk-Khar
I’m picturing a more inclusive, trans-positive version of the Bluths from Arrested Development. Like, straight up Lucille Rutten.
“Oh, Carla, darling, it’s one banana. What could it cost, ten dollars?”
Katherine
Wouldn’t they have been selling Carla’s banana, not buying her one?
What would be the backstory of everyone’s favorite character, the staircar?
Sajuuk-Khar
It was the prototype vehicle for a startup called Handsy, which was supposed to work like a combination of Angie’s List and Uber, but in practice was just litigation fodder.
JRivest
I haven’t heard that one. I’ve heard the one about Christopher Columbus arriving in America, getting a job that pays 5,000$/day everyday without weekends or vacation and still not having a billion dollars today.
I imagine your story is similar, but I feel obligated to say that if you were paid 10,000$/minute, you’d be a billionaire after 70 days. It doesn’t really work. It’s a shame because I really like the image it conjures. A more realistic, and still impressive way to use that time frame would be to say that getting a job in 10,000 BCE that paid 80,000$/year you would still have less than a billion dollars in 2023.
Mark
Sheesh, if I got $5000/day I could live nicely for a month on the first day’s pay and invest the rest. Even so-so stocks’ dividends are 100x what the banks are paying on savings. And that ignores appreciation.
For perspective, imagine that Chris invested his entire pile in Coca Cola on the day they went public, held it until now, and reinvested the dividends. THAT is how billionaires are made.
It sounds like the one about Columbus assumes that he neither spends nor invests a dime. Kinda like the physicist who said he figured out why the chicken crossed the road, but it only works for spherical chickens in a vacuum.
Tan
I believe it’s supposed to be $10,000 per month (after expenses) since 10,000 BC which makes you a (low-end) billionaire.
Of course to hit actual Bezos levels that needs to be more like $30,000 per day, every day including weekends.
ktbear
The one I heard was if you give your wife a million dollars and shes allowed to spend it at $1000 a day she’ll be back in less that three years. Give her a billion dollars and she wont be back for 3000 years. Im available to test this theory.
a/snow/mous/e
How generous! I’d gladly accept your loan so you can conduct this experiment 🙂
Clif
Your math is wonky.$10,000 a month for 10,000 years is a billion with an extra couple of hundred million in spare change. There’s no need for the extra 2 thousand or so years you get by specifying BC. And going from once a month to once a minute is real overkill.
For perspective, there are about 8 trillion people on the planet. Invent something that improves lives enough that it’s worth a penny in profit to one out of every 7 and there’s you over 10 billion right there. But no, let’s all hate on the rich and ignore the fact that countries without the very wealthy tend not to do very well.
My fixed retirement income is the same whether Steve Jobs and Bill Gates exist or not. But the Gates foundation has funded the biological hack on photosynthesis that will take us from doing a bad job of feeding almost 8 trillion people to being able to do a bad job of feeding almost 64 trillion people. You can hate on the very rich if it makes you feel better about yourself, but I say that if there are people who can afford to do massively frivolous things with their money, good for them. And I’m rather fond of my computer and cell phone.
Regret
Mayor citation needed. As far as I can tell countries without very wealthy do consistently better if you correct for a few other factors. The USA golden age (at least economically speaking) was when taxes for the richest were 91%.
Agemegos
There are only eight billion people, not eight trillion.
I don’t think you should be telling other people their math is wonky. And yes, billionaires are economic evil. It isn’t “hating rich people” to recognize there’s a difference between a wealthy person and an economic hoarder.
Ed Callahan
Why not? The figure of 8 trillion simply is incorrect. Pointing out the correct figure doesn’t even undercut his point.
Mark
Being off by three orders of magnitude makes the audience doubt the calculations, even if they do turn out to be useful.
milu
much as you enjoy your phone and laptop Clif (and so do i for that matter) the way these and much of the industrial goods of rich nations depend for their manufacture on a system of unaccountable neocolonial exploitation. and one way or the other, much of the wealth of the very wealthy in rich nations depends on that same internationale of misery and exploitation. Not to mention the dogma of economic growth that has greatly helped locked in2+°C global warming, at the very, very best.
regarding the agro research stuff, what the hell, seriously. publicly-funded research is just as competent, except they don’t reap profits from downstream IP. if commercial benefits weren’t so efficiently captured by the billionaire class, scientists would still be doing that same research.
like, no. there is no rational excuse for billionaires existing. And hating billionaires is fine, if it fuels the political project of expropriating them as soon as feasible.
milu
also,
“Invent something that improves lives enough that it’s worth a penny in profit to one out of every 7 and there’s you over 10 billion right there.”
glossing over the math glitch, this is such a silly sentiment. sorry Clif i like you but your politics are sooo terrible.
sure sounds great in the abstract, but in the real world, you know, where the planet is burning, and people die of hunger and so on? that’s not how anyone has ever made 10 billion bucks.
you can’t just invent, produce and sell a thing. you also need the support of a world power with a big army. Cos otherwise, say you did invent that clever thing. why would people just keep paying you for it forever? at some point they’d start producing it for themselves. you’d probably make a tidy sum regardless, but you need a powerful structure to ensure your “intellectual property” (a problematic concept to begin with) is respected for decades throughout the world. that’s not incidental. that’s an integral part of the business plan.
now, granted, most of the billionaires never did invent anything quite so fascinating, or anything at all. many of them just happened to have a lot of capital handed down to them, and didn’t let such boring quandaries as “not funding a dictator” and “not fucking up the atmosphere” stop them from making the smart investments.
Also, too…
Every invention may be attributed to someone, but if they weren’t around someone else would have invented that thing. The inventor is like an instrument of technological history. (Ref. the history of lawsuits surrounding most inventions – often multiple people were working on a thing)
After that, the invention, whatever it is, is still built and implemented by workers who produce the value in question.
TL:DR – ideas are a dime a dozen.
Tan
Just out of curiosity, can anyone actually name an actual billionaire who invented something which Changed All Our Lives For The Better(tm)? Not who owns said invention or funded said invention or was the CEO of the company that made it, but personally with their own brain and hands invented such a thing?
Wizard
I’m perversely impressed by the sheer gall of someone openly advocating theft calling someone else’s politics “terrible”. The idea that people can only get rich by stealing from the poor is some stupid-ass medieval zero-sum bullshit. The idea that centrally directed research and production could ever hope to be as productive as a free market is a proven delusion. Just look at the history of the 20th century. Socialism killed 100M and impoverished far more. Free markets lifted billions out of poverty. The global slide backwards toward authoritarianism is the biggest current threat to prosperity.
I’m not going to claim that our current system is perfect, but the biggest problems are usually the result of state interference. The idea that state power can somehow be harnessed to make things “fairer” is laughable once you realize that such efforts are routinely hijacked by those already in power to reinforce their power.
milu
yeah, i’m impressed by the sheer bullshit of acting like “theft” is some sort of transcendant reality. property law, commercial law, IP law all of these are social constructs, they are absolutely not transcultural and ahistorical. they have been constructed and are enforced by people, and they can be changed by people. be serious.
and what? states bad? sure, i don’t like states either. but corporations are: bad too! they are: also “harnessed” by those “already in power to reinforce their power”! and they are even less accountable than states. ok bye
thejeff
The global slide backwards into authoritarianism is mostly driven by those supporting the billionaire oligarchs. We’re not having a grand resurgence of socialist dictatorships anywhere outside the imaginations of some right wing conspiracy theorists.
Bruh
lol
lmao
Fnord
8 billion people, not trillion.
Aslan
While we’re on the subject of ignoring facts, shall we discuss how you’re ignoring the fact that imperialism led to the immense disparity in global wealth? Or that the reason widespread global poverty exists is because wealth was stolen from the global south and hoarded by the ruling class in the global north?
Wizard
And the dumb just keeps coming. Imperialism was mostly a net loss for the conquerors. Those who gained the most from looting ended up coasting their way into irrelevance. The countries that were forced to actually produce something became far richer in the long run. Poverty is the natural state of humanity, so it’s hardly surprising. The amazing part is just how many people human ingenuity, enabled by greater freedom, has managed to lift out of poverty.
milu
????
what strange alternate world you live in.
the US is an empire? it gained a whole lot from looting? so did france and britain and they are still among the leading world economies? what are you even talking about. switch off pragerU and read books by actual historians or something this is ridiculous
jflb96
I put it to you that capitalism is not an integral part of scientific endeavour
jflb96
Oh, also, we’re only ‘doing a bad job’ of feeding 8 billion people because the dipshits who own the food for 12 billion people don’t see the profit in distributing it fairly
Taffy
They also don’t see a profit in not making half again as much food as they need, thereby completely wasting about a third of the food for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
Wizard
The triumph of “fairness” over freedom is the single biggest reason for poverty. Fetishizing some nebulous idea of fairness is an evolutionary hangover that has long since outlived its usefulness.
milu
omg you are actually kind of fascinating.
spriteless aunty
The rich are mobile, so can pick and choose where to live. You’re kinda putting the cart before the horse here.
Let’s take a look at the nine kinds of passive income. How much of a jerk do you “necessarily” have to be to run a billion dollar tech company? There’s a possibility they only needed #1 – luck. Though usually these companies go at least all the way to #7, inventing something new and then holding a monopoly and deliberately squashing competitors by the time everyone wants it. It would certainly be almost impossible to get that kind of fortune if they were paying their employees the same kind of hourly wages as they get paid themselves.
But we don’t know. For all we know the Ruttens could pay ten times more than their competitors and throw money to charity as fast as they can. (Look at what MacKenzie Scott is doing.) I don’t think it’s fair to “assume” they’re not doing their best to redistribute this wealth as it grows beyond control after some unexpected successes.
Schpoonman
I don’t know if MacKenzie Scott is a great example given her wealth is from Amazon, even if she is turning around and trying to do good with it. Part of Amazon’s “success” has been due to its exploitation of its workers, and while it’s great that someone is making the best of a bad situation they themselves cannot change, the Ruttens don’t have that excuse. It’s their company, they set policy (or are beholden to shareholders), and as the kind people above illustrated, billionaires cannot morally exist. Unless the economy of DoA’s world is very different, the Ruttens stepped on a lot of bodies to get where they are now.
Well then, what should they “do” to exist morally? If you make a billion dollars, is it too late for you to start doing better and you should just kill yourself?
To be clear, I’m not making excuses for rich people. I’m not saying our world wouldn’t be better off if any one of our 2640 billionaires took a dirt nap. I am saying it’s silly to judge someone’s character and intentions based entirely on one label society put on them. Even if it is a label that’s only applicable to about one out of 300 million people who ever lived. You don’t lose anything by giving them a chance.
Yotomoe
One of my big frustrations is when people make wide sweeping statements about groups of people and how they’re bad. And in the money sense it’s like…usually to get that much money they did it by screwing the little guy or doing some sorta human rights violation. But like. I still feel REALLY uncomfortable when I see people say “this group of people is inherently bad”.
It’s just always in my nature to give people the benefit of the doubt.
TheCatCameBack
See that’s a really kind perspective, but billionaire isn’t a label Society put on billionaires, it’s a label/state of wealth that billionaires actively sought and abused millions to get to. There’s no moral way to be a billionaire except to stop being a billionaire by giving your money away. Rich people are okay, millionaires are fine, multimillionaires are fine, it’s just billionaires that are flat-out immoral no questions asked. Because a billion is a truly absurd number of dollars to hoard, and there’s no way you could spend it within your lifetime.
Yotomoe
For me, I’m just uncomfortable with anyone being “too” comfortable saying “all of ___ is bad”. I feel like that mindset is the very death of humanity. Even in times it’s justified I honestly feel like it’s a mindset I’m not a fan of. I feel like people tend to fall back on “us vs them” out of pattern recognition and it’s rare that anyone who does it with one thing doesn’t do it with a lot of other things.
But then again I don’t know shit about fuck. I’m just going off vibes.
BBCC
That’s fair Yotomoe, so consider it this way. It’s not so much that billionaires are inherently bad as people – I’m sure many of them are lovely in one on one conversations and that some may have good intentions. However, they still do bad things or profit from bad things because that is how one becomes a billionaire – at some point down the line, either people or the environment have been exploited to get the money. That is not just and so, while people may not be inherently bad as a group, being part of certain groups still requires doing or gaining from bad things. Billionaires are one such case.
I dunno if that helps or not, but I hope it does.
not someone else
I mean most of them could make a really good start by instituting non-actively-malevolent working conditions and living wages within the various businesses they own, not throwing money at fascist and borderline-fascist politicians, and throwing their money around in ways that lessen structural inequality. A couple of them even sort of do that, hell some people have actually spent enough money to stop being billionaires.
Why is it that people treat “being a billionaire” as some sort of inherent quality? “What can they do, kill themselves”? Good lord. No, it’s like being a cop, you’re allowed to stop doing it at any time- though much like being a cop, you might have to worry about the other billionaires getting scared of you if you go against the system and trying to get you killed or at least discredited and jailed over it.
Schpoonman
Oh boy, Clif showed up again. I wasn’t being rigorous with the math, no, but I assumed everyone would pick up on it being an approximation/substitution for the actual math done in the posts I mentioned. Some of you got that, and I’m proud of you.
AlexaSpuds
ma’am, this is a comic strip about dumb late teen-agers, you do not need to start an ethical conversation about the existence of capitalism in the comment section
GeekyWarrior
Me: “Hm, haven’t read the comments in a while, maybe I will today”
Sure, it seems like an inconvenience now, but can you imagine how the ability to summon parents at will is going to up NightGuy’s superhero game?
Imagine the terror in a mugger’s eyes when he suddenly realizes his mom is standing behind him, already wailing about how she raised him better than this.
I’m trying to remember exactly how Blaine got banned. Like, Ross discharged a fucking shotgun on campus, so that’s an easy ban right there, but was Blaine banned from campus just on Ruth’s word alone?
Segnosaur
Well first of all Blaine was in the residence on family weekend, despite not being on the list of approved visitors.
Then he got into a physical altercation with Ruth.
Fighting a school employee (or a sort-of employee) while being in an area you do not have permission to be in might be reason enough to be banned.
505 thoughts on “Snap”
newlland(Henryvolt)
EVERYONE GET DOWN SHE MIGHT BE ARMED!
Taellosse
*bared-teeth grimacing emoji*
Opus the Poet
If there wasn’t substantial precedent for armed fundy parents already this would be a light-hearted jape. The only thing that makes this unlikely is our fundy murderers are all of the other gender from Carol.
Ana Chronistic
Someone pulled the Parents Tag?
Thag Simmons
Maybe we could at least get a cool set of parents next? still haven’t really met Carla’s
Blackdrazon
If Joe’s dad looks like Joe,
And Ultra Car’s dad was Joe,
I want to believe Carla’s dad also looks like Joe.
No explanation.
Furie
Both of them Spider-Man pointing at each other in… how long is the buffer now? Six months? Around Christmas if they get a set-up.
Elle L
I’m kinda waiting for a plotline where we reveal Joe and Carla are half siblings due to his dad’s sleeping around.
Smallmoon
Extension of your idea: Joe Sr. was cheating on his wife, but the Ruttens weren’t; Carla was born from a threesome.
Schpoonman
I’m an idiot so it literally took the “Imagine you earned $10,000 a minute since 10,000 BCE…” posts to get me to realize just how unjust billionaires are, but ever since then, probably around 2019 or 2020, just the thought of them makes my skin crawl. For all the good that Carla’s parents assuredly do, they’re still hurting people in amassing the wealth they have.
Thag Simmons
Carla’s parents are cool, not necessarily good
Sajuuk-Khar
I’m picturing a more inclusive, trans-positive version of the Bluths from Arrested Development. Like, straight up Lucille Rutten.
“Oh, Carla, darling, it’s one banana. What could it cost, ten dollars?”
Katherine
Wouldn’t they have been selling Carla’s banana, not buying her one?
ValdVin
What would be the backstory of everyone’s favorite character, the staircar?
Sajuuk-Khar
It was the prototype vehicle for a startup called Handsy, which was supposed to work like a combination of Angie’s List and Uber, but in practice was just litigation fodder.
JRivest
I haven’t heard that one. I’ve heard the one about Christopher Columbus arriving in America, getting a job that pays 5,000$/day everyday without weekends or vacation and still not having a billion dollars today.
I imagine your story is similar, but I feel obligated to say that if you were paid 10,000$/minute, you’d be a billionaire after 70 days. It doesn’t really work. It’s a shame because I really like the image it conjures. A more realistic, and still impressive way to use that time frame would be to say that getting a job in 10,000 BCE that paid 80,000$/year you would still have less than a billion dollars in 2023.
Mark
Sheesh, if I got $5000/day I could live nicely for a month on the first day’s pay and invest the rest. Even so-so stocks’ dividends are 100x what the banks are paying on savings. And that ignores appreciation.
For perspective, imagine that Chris invested his entire pile in Coca Cola on the day they went public, held it until now, and reinvested the dividends. THAT is how billionaires are made.
It sounds like the one about Columbus assumes that he neither spends nor invests a dime. Kinda like the physicist who said he figured out why the chicken crossed the road, but it only works for spherical chickens in a vacuum.
Tan
I believe it’s supposed to be $10,000 per month (after expenses) since 10,000 BC which makes you a (low-end) billionaire.
Of course to hit actual Bezos levels that needs to be more like $30,000 per day, every day including weekends.
ktbear
The one I heard was if you give your wife a million dollars and shes allowed to spend it at $1000 a day she’ll be back in less that three years. Give her a billion dollars and she wont be back for 3000 years. Im available to test this theory.
a/snow/mous/e
How generous! I’d gladly accept your loan so you can conduct this experiment 🙂
Clif
Your math is wonky.$10,000 a month for 10,000 years is a billion with an extra couple of hundred million in spare change. There’s no need for the extra 2 thousand or so years you get by specifying BC. And going from once a month to once a minute is real overkill.
For perspective, there are about 8 trillion people on the planet. Invent something that improves lives enough that it’s worth a penny in profit to one out of every 7 and there’s you over 10 billion right there. But no, let’s all hate on the rich and ignore the fact that countries without the very wealthy tend not to do very well.
My fixed retirement income is the same whether Steve Jobs and Bill Gates exist or not. But the Gates foundation has funded the biological hack on photosynthesis that will take us from doing a bad job of feeding almost 8 trillion people to being able to do a bad job of feeding almost 64 trillion people. You can hate on the very rich if it makes you feel better about yourself, but I say that if there are people who can afford to do massively frivolous things with their money, good for them. And I’m rather fond of my computer and cell phone.
Regret
Mayor citation needed. As far as I can tell countries without very wealthy do consistently better if you correct for a few other factors. The USA golden age (at least economically speaking) was when taxes for the richest were 91%.
Agemegos
There are only eight billion people, not eight trillion.
vulcanodon
I don’t think you should be telling other people their math is wonky. And yes, billionaires are economic evil. It isn’t “hating rich people” to recognize there’s a difference between a wealthy person and an economic hoarder.
Ed Callahan
Why not? The figure of 8 trillion simply is incorrect. Pointing out the correct figure doesn’t even undercut his point.
Mark
Being off by three orders of magnitude makes the audience doubt the calculations, even if they do turn out to be useful.
milu
much as you enjoy your phone and laptop Clif (and so do i for that matter) the way these and much of the industrial goods of rich nations depend for their manufacture on a system of unaccountable neocolonial exploitation. and one way or the other, much of the wealth of the very wealthy in rich nations depends on that same internationale of misery and exploitation. Not to mention the dogma of economic growth that has greatly helped locked in2+°C global warming, at the very, very best.
regarding the agro research stuff, what the hell, seriously. publicly-funded research is just as competent, except they don’t reap profits from downstream IP. if commercial benefits weren’t so efficiently captured by the billionaire class, scientists would still be doing that same research.
like, no. there is no rational excuse for billionaires existing. And hating billionaires is fine, if it fuels the political project of expropriating them as soon as feasible.
milu
also,
“Invent something that improves lives enough that it’s worth a penny in profit to one out of every 7 and there’s you over 10 billion right there.”
glossing over the math glitch, this is such a silly sentiment. sorry Clif i like you but your politics are sooo terrible.
sure sounds great in the abstract, but in the real world, you know, where the planet is burning, and people die of hunger and so on? that’s not how anyone has ever made 10 billion bucks.
you can’t just invent, produce and sell a thing. you also need the support of a world power with a big army. Cos otherwise, say you did invent that clever thing. why would people just keep paying you for it forever? at some point they’d start producing it for themselves. you’d probably make a tidy sum regardless, but you need a powerful structure to ensure your “intellectual property” (a problematic concept to begin with) is respected for decades throughout the world. that’s not incidental. that’s an integral part of the business plan.
now, granted, most of the billionaires never did invent anything quite so fascinating, or anything at all. many of them just happened to have a lot of capital handed down to them, and didn’t let such boring quandaries as “not funding a dictator” and “not fucking up the atmosphere” stop them from making the smart investments.
vulcanodon
Also, too…
Every invention may be attributed to someone, but if they weren’t around someone else would have invented that thing. The inventor is like an instrument of technological history. (Ref. the history of lawsuits surrounding most inventions – often multiple people were working on a thing)
After that, the invention, whatever it is, is still built and implemented by workers who produce the value in question.
TL:DR – ideas are a dime a dozen.
Tan
Just out of curiosity, can anyone actually name an actual billionaire who invented something which Changed All Our Lives For The Better(tm)? Not who owns said invention or funded said invention or was the CEO of the company that made it, but personally with their own brain and hands invented such a thing?
Wizard
I’m perversely impressed by the sheer gall of someone openly advocating theft calling someone else’s politics “terrible”. The idea that people can only get rich by stealing from the poor is some stupid-ass medieval zero-sum bullshit. The idea that centrally directed research and production could ever hope to be as productive as a free market is a proven delusion. Just look at the history of the 20th century. Socialism killed 100M and impoverished far more. Free markets lifted billions out of poverty. The global slide backwards toward authoritarianism is the biggest current threat to prosperity.
I’m not going to claim that our current system is perfect, but the biggest problems are usually the result of state interference. The idea that state power can somehow be harnessed to make things “fairer” is laughable once you realize that such efforts are routinely hijacked by those already in power to reinforce their power.
milu
yeah, i’m impressed by the sheer bullshit of acting like “theft” is some sort of transcendant reality. property law, commercial law, IP law all of these are social constructs, they are absolutely not transcultural and ahistorical. they have been constructed and are enforced by people, and they can be changed by people. be serious.
and what? states bad? sure, i don’t like states either. but corporations are: bad too! they are: also “harnessed” by those “already in power to reinforce their power”! and they are even less accountable than states. ok bye
thejeff
The global slide backwards into authoritarianism is mostly driven by those supporting the billionaire oligarchs. We’re not having a grand resurgence of socialist dictatorships anywhere outside the imaginations of some right wing conspiracy theorists.
Bruh
lol
lmao
Fnord
8 billion people, not trillion.
Aslan
While we’re on the subject of ignoring facts, shall we discuss how you’re ignoring the fact that imperialism led to the immense disparity in global wealth? Or that the reason widespread global poverty exists is because wealth was stolen from the global south and hoarded by the ruling class in the global north?
Wizard
And the dumb just keeps coming. Imperialism was mostly a net loss for the conquerors. Those who gained the most from looting ended up coasting their way into irrelevance. The countries that were forced to actually produce something became far richer in the long run. Poverty is the natural state of humanity, so it’s hardly surprising. The amazing part is just how many people human ingenuity, enabled by greater freedom, has managed to lift out of poverty.
milu
????
what strange alternate world you live in.
the US is an empire? it gained a whole lot from looting? so did france and britain and they are still among the leading world economies? what are you even talking about. switch off pragerU and read books by actual historians or something this is ridiculous
jflb96
I put it to you that capitalism is not an integral part of scientific endeavour
jflb96
Oh, also, we’re only ‘doing a bad job’ of feeding 8 billion people because the dipshits who own the food for 12 billion people don’t see the profit in distributing it fairly
Taffy
They also don’t see a profit in not making half again as much food as they need, thereby completely wasting about a third of the food for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
Wizard
The triumph of “fairness” over freedom is the single biggest reason for poverty. Fetishizing some nebulous idea of fairness is an evolutionary hangover that has long since outlived its usefulness.
milu
omg you are actually kind of fascinating.
spriteless aunty
The rich are mobile, so can pick and choose where to live. You’re kinda putting the cart before the horse here.
Amelie Wikström
Let’s take a look at the nine kinds of passive income. How much of a jerk do you “necessarily” have to be to run a billion dollar tech company? There’s a possibility they only needed #1 – luck. Though usually these companies go at least all the way to #7, inventing something new and then holding a monopoly and deliberately squashing competitors by the time everyone wants it. It would certainly be almost impossible to get that kind of fortune if they were paying their employees the same kind of hourly wages as they get paid themselves.
But we don’t know. For all we know the Ruttens could pay ten times more than their competitors and throw money to charity as fast as they can. (Look at what MacKenzie Scott is doing.) I don’t think it’s fair to “assume” they’re not doing their best to redistribute this wealth as it grows beyond control after some unexpected successes.
Schpoonman
I don’t know if MacKenzie Scott is a great example given her wealth is from Amazon, even if she is turning around and trying to do good with it. Part of Amazon’s “success” has been due to its exploitation of its workers, and while it’s great that someone is making the best of a bad situation they themselves cannot change, the Ruttens don’t have that excuse. It’s their company, they set policy (or are beholden to shareholders), and as the kind people above illustrated, billionaires cannot morally exist. Unless the economy of DoA’s world is very different, the Ruttens stepped on a lot of bodies to get where they are now.
Amelie Wikström
Well then, what should they “do” to exist morally? If you make a billion dollars, is it too late for you to start doing better and you should just kill yourself?
Amelie Wikström
To be clear, I’m not making excuses for rich people. I’m not saying our world wouldn’t be better off if any one of our 2640 billionaires took a dirt nap. I am saying it’s silly to judge someone’s character and intentions based entirely on one label society put on them. Even if it is a label that’s only applicable to about one out of 300 million people who ever lived. You don’t lose anything by giving them a chance.
Yotomoe
One of my big frustrations is when people make wide sweeping statements about groups of people and how they’re bad. And in the money sense it’s like…usually to get that much money they did it by screwing the little guy or doing some sorta human rights violation. But like. I still feel REALLY uncomfortable when I see people say “this group of people is inherently bad”.
It’s just always in my nature to give people the benefit of the doubt.
TheCatCameBack
See that’s a really kind perspective, but billionaire isn’t a label Society put on billionaires, it’s a label/state of wealth that billionaires actively sought and abused millions to get to. There’s no moral way to be a billionaire except to stop being a billionaire by giving your money away. Rich people are okay, millionaires are fine, multimillionaires are fine, it’s just billionaires that are flat-out immoral no questions asked. Because a billion is a truly absurd number of dollars to hoard, and there’s no way you could spend it within your lifetime.
Yotomoe
For me, I’m just uncomfortable with anyone being “too” comfortable saying “all of ___ is bad”. I feel like that mindset is the very death of humanity. Even in times it’s justified I honestly feel like it’s a mindset I’m not a fan of. I feel like people tend to fall back on “us vs them” out of pattern recognition and it’s rare that anyone who does it with one thing doesn’t do it with a lot of other things.
But then again I don’t know shit about fuck. I’m just going off vibes.
BBCC
That’s fair Yotomoe, so consider it this way. It’s not so much that billionaires are inherently bad as people – I’m sure many of them are lovely in one on one conversations and that some may have good intentions. However, they still do bad things or profit from bad things because that is how one becomes a billionaire – at some point down the line, either people or the environment have been exploited to get the money. That is not just and so, while people may not be inherently bad as a group, being part of certain groups still requires doing or gaining from bad things. Billionaires are one such case.
I dunno if that helps or not, but I hope it does.
not someone else
I mean most of them could make a really good start by instituting non-actively-malevolent working conditions and living wages within the various businesses they own, not throwing money at fascist and borderline-fascist politicians, and throwing their money around in ways that lessen structural inequality. A couple of them even sort of do that, hell some people have actually spent enough money to stop being billionaires.
Why is it that people treat “being a billionaire” as some sort of inherent quality? “What can they do, kill themselves”? Good lord. No, it’s like being a cop, you’re allowed to stop doing it at any time- though much like being a cop, you might have to worry about the other billionaires getting scared of you if you go against the system and trying to get you killed or at least discredited and jailed over it.
Schpoonman
Oh boy, Clif showed up again. I wasn’t being rigorous with the math, no, but I assumed everyone would pick up on it being an approximation/substitution for the actual math done in the posts I mentioned. Some of you got that, and I’m proud of you.
AlexaSpuds
ma’am, this is a comic strip about dumb late teen-agers, you do not need to start an ethical conversation about the existence of capitalism in the comment section
GeekyWarrior
Me: “Hm, haven’t read the comments in a while, maybe I will today”
Mistakes were made lol.
Alongcameaspider
We haven’t met Carla’s but we know they’re billionaires which means that they’re assholes by default
Schpoonman
Ayyy.
Wraithy2773
They’re Gig Industrialist Billionaires.
They might be great to Carla, but that’s definitely the exception, not the rule…
someone
Carla’s narcissism has to come from somewhere. The only thing worse than a billionaire is an egomaniacal billionaire.
Sajuuk-Khar
I remain firmly convinced of my headcanon that they are lovable, stupid, well-meaning assholes, as opposed to asshole jerks
They love Carla and want the best for her, even if they have never bought their own groceries and don’t know what a Red Robin or a “Tacos Belle” is
MM
Oh, please let that be canon. The Walky freakout will be epic.
foamy
Wait until Linda and Carol team up.
Doctor_Who
Sure, it seems like an inconvenience now, but can you imagine how the ability to summon parents at will is going to up NightGuy’s superhero game?
Imagine the terror in a mugger’s eyes when he suddenly realizes his mom is standing behind him, already wailing about how she raised him better than this.
Sirksome
Lol! You talk as if Night Guy is still an active vigilante. His career lasted five minutes.
cbwroses
Imagine how terrifying it would be when the mom that’s summoned had passed the year before.
True Survivor
That is truly terrifying super power. Broken bones heal, the look of disappointment in your mother’s eyes burns the soul forever.
Clif
She’s not looking at you, she’s looking at Mike. The disappointment comes from knowing no nickles were summoned.
Plain Marie
Well done! I loled.
I summon…. your Mom! Aiiigh! Not the guilt trip!
Dara
OH HELL TO THE NO
WHO LET HER ON CAMPUS
Amós Batista
she got a new haircut
DarkoNeko
oh my gods. There’s a parents meeting isn’t there
Bryy
I would have thought that Carol was banned from campus.
NGPZ
Well that’s the thing, iirc she called in the favor with you know who from the mafia, and they basically own cops.
RassilonTDavros
I’m trying to remember exactly how Blaine got banned. Like, Ross discharged a fucking shotgun on campus, so that’s an easy ban right there, but was Blaine banned from campus just on Ruth’s word alone?
Segnosaur
Well first of all Blaine was in the residence on family weekend, despite not being on the list of approved visitors.
Then he got into a physical altercation with Ruth.
Fighting a school employee (or a sort-of employee) while being in an area you do not have permission to be in might be reason enough to be banned.