As soon as you’re worth eight figures, you deserve nothing but death and suffering and are responsible, PERSONALLY AND DURECTLY, for ALL of the evils in the world. Thus spake the internet.
I dont know which internet you move around in.
The critics of wealth inequality I follow? Usually have much more differentiated views on the complex, global systemic development.
The specific construction of the fiat currencys we use. A privatized and secretive banking system that earns profits from managing the money system risks – instead of treating it like the public infrastructure it is. The mathematical provable tendency of wealth to accumulate in our economic system. The psycholgical deformation virtually unlimited resorces can cause in individual people and in-groups. Political corruption systematically being tolerated, even encouraged.
But hey, if you can keep your dogma protected by strawmanning all people seeing and naming a problematic development, more power to you.
Well that’s an extreme and equally absurd extrapolation. No, obviously not. At the same time, there is something grossly wrong with a system where a person can have thousands of lifetimes of wealth accrued to them alone, while people are dying, homeless, in the streets of the same nation. And Ms Swift, for all of her public look, still partakes of the degree of wealth she’s hoarded.
Always kind of weird to say of people that they’re “worth” what they own. Elon Musk’s personal worth is less than zero IMO; his mere existence makes the world worse.
Anyways, his wealth is mostly smoke and mirrors. He doesn’t own billions upon billions in cash, he owns it mostly in Tesla stock. And Tesla is the most overvalued company in history.
Supposedly, Tesla is worth more than Toyota, Honda, Suzuki, Nissan, General Motors, Ford, BMW, Ferrari, Porsche, Stellantis, Volkswagen, and Mercedes-Benz combined. If you think that’s reasonable and rational, name any bridge you want me to sell you; I’ve got it in stock.
It’s not valuated like a car company, it’s valuated like a meme coin.
Billionaires get to take out loans at 0% interest with no down or payment since there’s no risk of default as long as their net worth keeps going up. So they have to keep net worth line pointed up so they get to live with literally zero concern about money. They live like land rich nobles and southern plantations, where instead of money they trade in favors. They don’t have the actual cash money to give up, and if they did it would pull them out of their infinite money hack. They will never choose to give up their absolute security because the least amount of insecurity feels like a crisis.
More money does not mean more evil. Elon is evil regardless of his net worth.
Taylor Swift has her problems and to deny that is to bury your head in the sand, but I agree she’s kinda the least of our concerns when it comes to billionaires
Continuing to be a billionaire in a world where people are starving and dying in poverty is a banal, boring, and real brand of cruelty.
Taylor Swift (since we’re talking about her) COULD choose to give away so much money to good causes that she’s not a billionaire anymore. She could do it by the BAREST margin (leaving herself 900mil if she didn’t bother to claim her donations back as tax relief, which is still a nauseating amount of money) and have given away 700mil. Imagine for a minute what that kind of cash could do for the world if given to the right programs.
Amnesty International, the Acacia Center for Justice, homeless shelters or food kitchens in every city she flies to.
Instead, she hoards that wealth. Keeps it to herself so she can buy houses and cars and fly around with models. I think there are definitely worse people in the world than Taylor Swift, by miles, but I do think she’s part of the problem.
Taylor Swift is a landlord. She owns enormous capital.
Talent for appealing to the lowest common denominator aside, she has exploited thousands and thousands.
The fact this labor exploitation is indirect and systemic is no redemption.
Entertainment and other forms of intellectual property provide a way to make tons of money ethically. For all the transphobia of JKR, her making billions by writing children’s books that sold hundreds of millions of copies is hard to indict.
Software, well, Microsoft certainly had a lot of anti-competitive practices. But “create very widely used software” is at least a candidate for getting rich.
Also, I don’t think “wage theft”, strictly defined (failing to pay contracted wages), is at all necessary to get rich. Whether employer-employee wage relations are intrinsically a form of exploitation is another matter.
I don’t think this fully acknowledges the things any one billionaire must be complacent in to achieve their wealth. It’s not as simple as “I wrote a popular book or song, guess I’m billionaire now.” Admittedly I’m not knowledgeable on all the ethical implications of being a billionaire myself, but just the infrastructure alone that you inevitably use to distribute enough of your product to earn a billion in profit, whether that’s planes, the internet, literally the roads trucks drive on to deliver physical merchandise. A billionaire profits from all that without contributing even a fraction of their BILLIONS that could improve that not just regionally but globally. And that’s just the basic taxes argument.
Seems bold to say that bookstores, planes, and roads are unethical. And while there are lots of tax dodges and shelters that get abused, one could logically become a billionaire while fully paying taxes. If you make $3 billion in book royalties, you’ll end up with more than $1 billion of wealth, and I think that’s true in any modern rich country.
(I believe Warren Buffet noted that his biggest “tax dodge” is simply the long-term capital gains tax: without any effort beyond holding onto stock for at least a year, he pays only 15% on income, vs. the higher brackets of his much poorer secretary.)
Which is why they didn’t say that; they said that using things for free is exploiting everyone else who has to pay for them. It’s like how oil and gas and coal get a lot more expensive once you start costing in things like having to clean up the atmosphere.
Now I’m interested in kind of exploring that further.
Are we arguing that infrastructure (planes, roads, internet, etc.,) is inherently evil? I personally, I’d need some persuading on that. There are certainly costs in their creation, and I know that there’s plenty of history that makes the WAY our interstates in the U.S. were built (through the neighborhoods of minority groups who didn’t want them there), but the existence of infrastructure as a concept seems to pretty clearly improve the quality of life for the public. If we are looking at use of infrastructure as being a net evil, I don’t think our issue is just whether or not there can be an ethical billionaire. It’s whether there can be ethical large-scale production of goods at all. And eve Karl Marx loved himself some production.
The o5er point is the one about contributing “a fraction of their BILLIONS that could improve that not just regionally but globally”. I mean, there are Billionaires who do large amounts of charitable a philanthropic acts and donation. Bill Gates donates huge amounts to his foundation which works extensively with impoverished communities. Is the issue about donating a fraction, or is there an actual amount of wealth accumulation that is itself unethical? If so, how do we estimate what that amount is?
John D. Rockefeller became the world’s first billionaire by creating a company that made huge efficiency and economy improvements in the extraction, refining, and distribution of petroleum. In 1870, Standard Oil had a 10 percent market share, three quarters of the refining industry was losing money, and kerosene was 26 cents a gallon. By 1880, Standard Oil’s market share had grown to 90 percent, refining was absurdly profitable, and kerosene had dropped to 9 cents a gallon. I wouldn’t hold up Rockefeller as an example of an ethical businessman, but what made Standard Oil into a titan wasn’t that he was better at stealing wages, it’s that he was was better at making a useful product which improved the life of the average person. I’ll take that over Zuckerberg becoming rich by making Facebook and then selling everyone’s personal information to advertisers.
Rockefeller is the prime example of illegal monopolization and employing unethical, predatory business practices to eliminate competition, like actively colluding with manufacturers and rail lines to prevent other oil companies from transporting their product. His prices depended less on profit and more on undercutting competition and overcharging where he had no competition.
Plus he and his family sold his employees and customers information to the mafia and had dozens of striking miners and their families violently killed while they were asleep.
Yes, I said that I would not hold him up as an example of an ethical businessman, because he wasn’t. Yet for all that, Rockefeller’s supposedly predatory business prices were still largely good for society. Production went up, prices went down, and most of the competition that was driven out of business got to go home with money in their pocket because he bought them out. The reason we ban collusion, trusts, and monopolies is because they can lead to inefficient allocation of resources, meaning bad product, bad service, and bad prices. Yet somehow Rockefeller cornered the market in oil refining, drove most of his competition out of business, and still delivered a superior product at a better price. Not saying the man deserved to be a billionaire, nobody deserves to be a billionaire, but he did overall make society better on the way there.
Now, his strikebreaking on the other hand is quite indefensible, and I have no reservations about calling it out as ugly and evil behavior with no social benefit. It was just utterly unnecessary, Rockefeller could have treated his workers fairly and still become the richest man in the world from delivering a revolution in industrial petroleum refining. Though, with respect to having strikebreakers murdered in their sleep, if you mean the Ludlow Massacre that was his son John D. Rockefeller Jr. He was very much a lesser man than his father, which is another problem with billionaires, because as true as it is that nobody deserves to make a billion dollars, it’s even more true that nobody deserves to be born into a billion dollars. That much wealth and power is corrosive to men’s souls.
To try and clarify a bit, my position on John D. Rockefeller is that he was an insane megalomaniac who hugely benefited society by channeling it in a useful direction, which also made him wealthy beyond reason. Literally beyond reason, because there’s no good reason for anyone to be that rich, but that doesn’t change the fact that his wealth wasn’t stolen in the strict sense of the word. He also did a bunch of unquestionably evil stuff, because even at his most pro-social he was still an insane megalomaniac. The good billionaires aren’t billionaires, but the idea that billionaires are only billionaires because they are thieves is a reductive and misleading view of wealth creation. Though yes, many of them are also thieves.
Standard did a ton of unethical and illegal shit to get as big as it became, and when it was broken up under the Sherman act, John D. Rockefeller became even more absurdly wealthy because he was a huge shareholder of all the new companies.
Standard Oil cornered the petroleum refining market largely by having a flatly superior supply and production line. Their practices during their market consolidation phase in the 1870s were not illegal at the time, and while Rockefeller was by no means an ethical businessman, the net result of his business was that the consumer got a better product at a lower price. During the 20+ years that Standard Oil held a 90 percent market share in oil refining, the quality of their product remained high and prices only continued to drop. Kerosene was 9 cents a gallon in 1880, and was down to 6 cents a gallon before 1900. After that, Standard Oil started losing its efficiency advantage as competition finally caught up, so by the time it was broken up in 1911 its market share had dropped to 64 percent.
Even beyond the evil practices of Rockefeller and Standard Oil, fossil fuels are the exemplar of an industry where most of the real price of a commodity never comes up. If Standard Oil had also had to pay for reforestation or inventing artificial trees to clean up after themselves, they probably wouldn’t have been such a runaway success.
Rowling is a bad example, even outside her trefyness. She did not just make money with selling books. She also sold a ton of merch, and that often was produced under less than stellar conditions. Until fan’s and human right workers called her out and documented those conditions. I am talking sweat shops and the like.
The bar is basically in the underworld at this point; the concept of being a billionaire is amoral on its face. Hell, Elon himself was considered “good” by the electric car buyers before he went full MAGA, even though he was still the same grifter he always had been, just more openly a nazi. And to a lesser extend, Phil Spencer was seen as this guy who worked at MS and was “just a guy”; only for gamers to learn to he’s actually just a rich asshole who cosplays an average Joe to sell XBox stuff.
Carla’s folks can be caring parents, and also be terrible people. The nature of being a billionaire means you have had to do some pretty nasty stuff to obtain and continue to retain that level of wealth. Avoiding taxes, unfair wadges, union busting, arming a genocide. . . y’know, the usual things that tech billionaires and their companies get up to.
I submit Dolly Parton. Look up what she did during the worst of COVID. Look up all her good deeds. You don’t have to like her music. (I’m not all that fond, myself.)
Dolly Parton is worth $650 Million. She’s not a billionaire and while I admit she’s not terrible she doesn’t want to get off the fence when she absolutely should.
Haraldur Thorleifsson would also be worth a lot more if he didn’t asked to be paid the way he did when his company was bought out. He wanted to be paid in salary to maximize the amount of tax he would pay in Iceland (his home country). He has had a muscular disease and had to be in a wheelchair since the age of 25, and has a lot of gratitude for the disability benefits he received from his country.
Caroline Bamberger Frank Fuld and her brother Louis Bamberger, who both helped fund the Institute for Advanced Study, are both worth looking into as well. They sold their store for 25-50 million dollars in 1929 (461 to 922.82 million dollars in today’s money) and then used the money to help fund the institute and hire people to research there.
I do think that you don’t tend to hear about the good ones because they tend to want to give most of their money away and not brag about it or be in the media.
There is no way to become that wealthy ethically. Every billionaire got their wealth from a combination of being lucky enough to be born to parents who were already decently well-off, and exploiting workers.
Just given the borderline-unethical and decidedly exploitative-of-the-fans way the last couple of albums have been marketed (TLOS and TPS both had what three dozen different variants, with some different bonus tracks and other assorted FOMO associated), I cannot imagine she’s not also doing shady things on the business side of things.
I always relate Miley Cyrus as the ‘good’ version of Taylor Swift. She also got places because of being related to influential people but she’s pulled away from the bad seeds (like her dad). I think Dolly Parton had a lot of good influence on her.
Okay, gonna bring this back to Dolly Parton, who is only a half-billionaire because she gives away so very much of her income. She became a billionaire by being a damn good writer and songstress, then became not a billionaire by giving away huge sums of money to various causes (most notably a program that purchases books for children in less-advantaged areas of the US). Going looking for controversies regarding her or her career, I keep coming up with things like her support for LGBTQIA+ causing issues with “conservative” fans, and he drawing criticism from the Trump administration for supporting masking and vaccination during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sorry, she’s just not coming across as evil and exploitative here.
“is it possible to MAKE absurd amounts of money without necessarily exploiting workers” (yes, in the entertainment industry, though vanishingly few people get even close, lots of movie stars and famous musicians wind up destitute)
“is it possible to HOARD absurd amounts of money and still be a good person” (no)
“is this specific famous person unproblematic?” (probably not)
Taylor Swift wasn’t a great example for being unproblematic, but I think she’s a decent enough example of “being able to MAKE millions of dollars without necessarily exploiting workers”.
again, the part where she keeps it, and various other issues with her, are not awesome or anything
That thing about their still being billionaires is definitely what the story is about, right? she’s called them to follow up about Ruttech being the locus of the “divest” protests. The girlfriend thing is *just* her chickening out. That juxtaposition is baaaarely subtext, like, for maybe one or two more strips.
My guess is Carla chickens out of bringing it up on the call, talks to Charlie some more about the situation, and brings it up face-to-face tomorrow (DoA time, not Monday’s strip).
Seems kinda relevant that her girlfriend researching the topic up and directly talking to Carla about it is what brought the whole issue of Bulmeria using Ruttech miltech to the forefront of Carla’s attention
Even the billionaires that seem nice are still not good, because they’re still hoarding wealth while millions of other people are struggling and dying because they can’t afford food, shelter, necessary medical care, etc.
A fun exercise is to write down everything you’d actually want to own in your wildest fantasy of being Scrooge McDuck rich and having no further need for a job to take up your time, and see how much you’d actually need to have in the bank at ~3% interest to be able to afford all of it without running out of money before you die.
I haven’t yet been able to come up with a number above $100mil, although that’s largely because I have no desire for a yacht or a private airliner. Each of which are about a $200mil purchase if you go whole ham.
IMHO, therefore, any money in any individual’s possession/control that’s more than a couple hundred million maximum is by definition pointless resource hoarding — I don’t think it’s strictly evil to be “so rich you don’t need to deny yourself anything”, but it is pretty strictly evil to be so rich that you’d have money left over after not denying yourself anything for a lifetime.
Add in the whole money is a construct and not real and billionaires “wealth” is tied up in “investments”. I can’t wait for the down fall of capitalism.
the point of the rules of capitalism, of private ownership of vast concentrations of money and thus “value”, combined with the power of bestowing that value to that which others can produce via “investment”,
Is that what you spend your time doing, that your work, is only as valuable as the degree by which it satisfies the desires of the supremely monied classes (-_-)
Submersibles are expensive too; James Cameron put a big chunk into his underwater games.
(Contra popular belief, the OceanGate guy seems to have been worth “only” $12 million, when a good titanium sub costs at least $35 million; I think this basically explains the fiasco: he was trying to fund a lifestyle he couldn’t afford.)
We’re talking tens of billions for me, but that’s because the thing I’d most want to own is a stable, well-funded research laboratory that could survive for a long after my own death continuing to do its research, and that shit is expensive.
See, this is exactly the kind of problem that incorporation is LITERALLY designed to solve, on some level — that’s the kind of thing that SHOULD have more than one person’s resources and a good charter and all that kind of thing attached.
This is more or less where I’m at. I’m not like, *morally* opposed to someone having 5, 10, or even 50 million dollars (although if they wanted to share with me I wouldn’t mind). That’s pretty close to “whatever I want *and* I get to leave some behind for my kids, and maybe their kid assuming they don’t blow it.”
Once you get to that 50 or 100 million mark, I think it’s pretty morally indefensible to just be sitting on it. I suppose if they were like “look it’s generating 5% per year and I’m funneling the entirety of that 5% to charities, etc., and that’s more money over the course of my lifetime than they’d get if I just divested outright,” that would at least be an *interesting* position. Still not sure I’d necessarily agree with it.
A second one is a couple I met worth almost $100 million. They sold their business a several years ago and are using $90 million to fund various charities. At my request they hired a friend of mine at a very decent salary. Though the job is working at a non-profit that supports minorities, my friend said she is not worried about her future because the charity does not take government funding. The couple said they have enough money to keep all their charities funded for at least six more years, and, by getting fellow millionaires to donate, they can keep going ad infinitum. (At least two local millionaires have donated about $10 million each.)
While they are a significant minority, there are good multi-millionaires out there. You just don’t hear about them because they don’t usually make a big deal out of it.
I said I identify as an attack helicopter as a joke and they got me a dozen hellfires for my birthday. . .I mean I’m not not going to have a use for them but jeez parents do not get memes.
Emil: Carla, we will always love you, but Bulmeria must be destroyed so we can build our super eco city there. The President already promised us the East side.
Janneke: Superman and the Justice Gang stopped us last time but Ruttechia Land will be live!
Carla: Have you considered being opposite to Superman is bad…
Emil: Oh no, Carla, what has college done to you?
(prefers Bulmeria to be closer to fiction than reality)
They aren’t like all other billionaires – I don’t think Musk loves any of his kids this much. Besides, history, current and former, is full of powerful people who do terrible things with said power, but they are still people with loves and hopes and dreams. Friends and family. They can be avaricious monsters and Machiavellian powerbrokers and also be generous friends and honest loving parents. Neither detracts from the other.
Alexander the Great seems to have truly deeply loved his horse. He also murdered a friend, who had saved his life on the battlefield, in a drunken rage. People are complicated and nearly always self-contradictory.
‘Loving to 10 people, needlessly, monstrously cruel to the other 300 million in their country of origin’. One does indeed take away from the other. Billionaires are rich based on non-competitive, non-supportive laws that keep poor people poorer every year while allowing more money to be funneled to the .01%.
“They can be avaricious monsters and Machiavellian powerbrokers and also be generous friends and honest loving parents. Neither detracts from the other.”
Yeah, you lost me here. Being evil, heartless, and cruel detracts from every other aspect of your personality. I don’t care if Hitler liked puppies or if Elon Musk cries at that incestuous Foldger’s Christmas commercial. There’s no amount of “humanizing” someone like that which excuses the amount of damage they’ve done.
Look I am not saying one action excuses the other, nor that you shouldn’t work to protect the world from exploitive corporations and the abusive wealthy. I am just saying that being a good person to a few people is still being a good person to a few people, and being a bad person to a ton of people is being a bad person to a ton of people. I am not going to tell a little kid that his dad being a loving father doesn’t matter at all because he is also going around poisoning the local water supply for profit. Of course having a father who looks after and loves him matters to that little kid; just as the all the contaminated water matters to those who drink it. Being a good father doesn’t make you a good person if you spend all day profiting from evil, but its not like it stops your positive effect on that kid from mattering in their life. Human behavior is not defined by a linear morality slider. Not every villain in the world makes it obvious by running around punching babies in the face in their free time. You can have a loving family man who should never have an inch of political power, and a man of principle who totally ignores his family to focus on his work. A failure to see the difference between the two is partially why we keep electing some very dangerous people into high office.
You said a LOT of things to a LOT of stuff I didn’t say.
Being vicious and cruel does detract from how kind you are to others. I just flat disagree with your core point, and I’m not responding to a debate about things I didn’t say.
Yeah, while Carla’s parents seem nice now, I’m waiting to see Carla ask them about the computer systems their company makes for weapons used for genocide. Then we’ll see how nice they actually are by their response.
Possibly, they simply have no idea. They might very well employ an entire division of accountants and investors, and know nothing about what’s invested in their name.
It’s also really nice to see Carla with all her defenses down, which we’ve really never seen before. No boasting, no hijinks. It’s a glimpse at what she might have been like in world without transphobia.
As much as this storyline might suck in the end, I much prefer this storyline for Carla. She’s never been a character I vibed with that much (performative assholes don’t do much for me), but this plot is something I can actually get behind.
Now here’s hoping she gets a better resolution facing a billionaire parent than Hannelore.
I am pretty sure she had explicitly said at least some part of her self aggrandizing attitude come as a coping mechanism for all the bigotry she faced. She is not only tge daughter of very public figures she they had to go court for her to be able to live in the girls dorm. No way she hasn’t had shit throw at her simce she transition.
I spent quite some time delighting in the fact that, regards Booster, I had no sex/gender for them at all, which was great. Then suddenly I thought, hang on, the authorities put them in the Walky dorm.
For whatever it helps: That really just means the authorities have an opinion on their gender. It doesn’t mean that opinion is in any way correct or worth taking into account for them.
Seems like it’s the opposite and her parents really went to bat for her
Every indication we’ve gotten is that her transition was a bit of a flashpoint for trans rights in the state and a media circus, and it seems like they were always in her corner for that
God, why can’t all trans people have parents more like this? I’m lucky that I have supportive parents, but I’m like the only person out of all of my trans friends who does.
If you’re talking about red hair, I think it’s Carla who dyes her hair. I vaguely remember finding that out, but I might just be remembering a joke made about someone trying to talk to Joyce about Carla being trans.
I mean my defense mechanism against getting hurt was learning to stealth it up so that the gaze of anyone looking to start trouble would just slide off me like so much water off a duck’s back. I can’t turn invisible but I can look like I’m more trouble than I’m worth, which is handy for a nerd who can’t throw a punch
but then I’m not a spoiled brat billionaire, the experiences don’t mesh
People who develop a different defense mechanism to you aren’t in the wrong for doing so. Insulting Carla for who she has to be to protect herself is super gross <3
My mom once came to visit me in college to meet my best friend, who I said looked just like her when she was young. My friend and I made time out of our schedules to go to dinner with her.
I know Carla’s parents are trying to be respectful, but from my own experience, if a parent wants to come see you and travels a great distance to do it, you go by THEIR availability… though you should also clear it with your friend/significant other that THEY want to meet your parents too. They always have the right to say “no.”
I think the Ruttens have a different framework on that point. Not every parent has the schedule (or money) to be able to just fly in whenever, but Emil and Janneke here are ultra rich. Generally, the time should definitely be chosen for the parents’ leisure, but rich people have different rules.
It’s nice to see parents who are supportive of their trans daughter and her new girlfriend. But nice as they seem to be right now, I still don’t trust Emil and Janneke because they’re billionaires and their company makes computer systems for weapons.
Oh yes! Dad totally has the engineer problem solving mania. Father and daughter are very much alike. If mom has the ‘solution implementation’ genes, it’s no wonder they’re a successful company.
It’s so nice Carla can drop her defenses with them.
I’ll recommend the first 3000-ish strips, personally. There’s a lotta good stuff in there, especially if you like music talk and slow-paced conversations about weird indie townies.
The whole internet loves Trans Ally Parents, lovely parents who love and enthusiastically support their trans daughter! *5 seconds later* We regret to inform you the parents are billionaires [and also . . . well . . . I’m sure that they have no other problematic flaws whatsoever]
LOL at how Carla’s parents are kind of like Walkyverse Joyce’s parents, without Carol’s “Would you please let them know with subtlety to stop doing it in the ass or pulling out or whatever the hell they’re doing to deprive me of my babies” ignorance of boundaries.
oh man… I love them so much already…. this is gonna be an interesting conversation when Charlie gets there and asks them point blank about their weapons.
These enablers of imperial murder are pretty nice on a personal level, which kinda checks out. For that matter I’ve heard that Trump is personally pretty polite. And, though I hate comparing even an asshole like Trump to ol’ Mister Hitler, I read that unlike Stalin, who had people executed for waking him up too early Hitler was perfectly nice to his secretary. In other words, personally decent people can do publically disgusting/evil things. Here’s hoping Carla brings up the evil.
The one personal anecdote I’ve heard about Trump is from his college roommate, who said one day Donald’s father showed up and punched him in the face. And then there’s the famous lines he’s said in candid interviews re. how to treat women and what you can get away with when you run beauty pageants for little girls.
I don’t believe someone whose whole life has been a racist-flavored struggle to dominate, manipulate, use and defraud as many people as possible is going to be pleasant to be around, unless you’re more powerful than him or have something to give him.
Though I agree with your point.
Also, and this probably isn’t the best place to post this, but…
Your Asma title bar? It needs more Asmas. It only has six, most of your character title bars have more. I know, she hasn’t been a main character for that long, but still.
They seem nice but unfortunately are irredeemable monsters, worth only the same decisive response that all billionaires should face. Tragic for bestgirl.
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as much as I’m happy they respect and support their daughter,
mind you they are probably still just like any other IRL billionaires 👀
I mean they’re the opposite of how Elon Musk treated his children, especially his trans child.
1. That bar to hurdle is in the earth’s mantle layer.
2. Nobody in a real world economy makes that much money except through wage theft and other exploitative practices
Taylor Swift!
🙂
Counter Argument: Music Industry!
Taylor Swift is responsible for the crimes of the music industry?
As soon as you’re worth eight figures, you deserve nothing but death and suffering and are responsible, PERSONALLY AND DURECTLY, for ALL of the evils in the world. Thus spake the internet.
so true bestie
I very much agree. All millionaires are evil.
So true
I dont know which internet you move around in.
The critics of wealth inequality I follow? Usually have much more differentiated views on the complex, global systemic development.
The specific construction of the fiat currencys we use. A privatized and secretive banking system that earns profits from managing the money system risks – instead of treating it like the public infrastructure it is. The mathematical provable tendency of wealth to accumulate in our economic system. The psycholgical deformation virtually unlimited resorces can cause in individual people and in-groups. Political corruption systematically being tolerated, even encouraged.
But hey, if you can keep your dogma protected by strawmanning all people seeing and naming a problematic development, more power to you.
AMAB? AMAB.
she was born enmeshed in it lmao her father is james taylor im certain
shes complicit in all sorts of awful stuff
They’re not related.
No no no, her father is Elizabeth Taylor. How do people get this so wrong
And her other dad? Zachary Taylor, twelfth President of the United States! This goes ALL THE WAY UP.
lmfao im stupid her parents are Scott Kingsley Swift and Andrea Gardner Swift
her dad is a stock broker, she was successful because of rich parent/s
Well that’s an extreme and equally absurd extrapolation. No, obviously not. At the same time, there is something grossly wrong with a system where a person can have thousands of lifetimes of wealth accrued to them alone, while people are dying, homeless, in the streets of the same nation. And Ms Swift, for all of her public look, still partakes of the degree of wealth she’s hoarded.
You mean the woman responsible for more CO2 emissions than any other celebrity on the planet?
That can’t be true. Isn’t P Diddys plane used a lot more than Taylor swift? Even in jail? He apperently rents it out
That’s not how she makes her money; it’s how she spends it.
If Taylor increased her Net Worth by $10 million dollars, every single day, it would take her 132 years to be worth as much as Elon.
Always kind of weird to say of people that they’re “worth” what they own. Elon Musk’s personal worth is less than zero IMO; his mere existence makes the world worse.
Anyways, his wealth is mostly smoke and mirrors. He doesn’t own billions upon billions in cash, he owns it mostly in Tesla stock. And Tesla is the most overvalued company in history.
Supposedly, Tesla is worth more than Toyota, Honda, Suzuki, Nissan, General Motors, Ford, BMW, Ferrari, Porsche, Stellantis, Volkswagen, and Mercedes-Benz combined. If you think that’s reasonable and rational, name any bridge you want me to sell you; I’ve got it in stock.
It’s not valuated like a car company, it’s valuated like a meme coin.
Billionaires get to take out loans at 0% interest with no down or payment since there’s no risk of default as long as their net worth keeps going up. So they have to keep net worth line pointed up so they get to live with literally zero concern about money. They live like land rich nobles and southern plantations, where instead of money they trade in favors. They don’t have the actual cash money to give up, and if they did it would pull them out of their infinite money hack. They will never choose to give up their absolute security because the least amount of insecurity feels like a crisis.
Dear god this comment section sucks.
More money does not mean more evil. Elon is evil regardless of his net worth.
Taylor Swift has her problems and to deny that is to bury your head in the sand, but I agree she’s kinda the least of our concerns when it comes to billionaires
Continuing to be a billionaire in a world where people are starving and dying in poverty is a banal, boring, and real brand of cruelty.
Taylor Swift (since we’re talking about her) COULD choose to give away so much money to good causes that she’s not a billionaire anymore. She could do it by the BAREST margin (leaving herself 900mil if she didn’t bother to claim her donations back as tax relief, which is still a nauseating amount of money) and have given away 700mil. Imagine for a minute what that kind of cash could do for the world if given to the right programs.
Amnesty International, the Acacia Center for Justice, homeless shelters or food kitchens in every city she flies to.
Instead, she hoards that wealth. Keeps it to herself so she can buy houses and cars and fly around with models. I think there are definitely worse people in the world than Taylor Swift, by miles, but I do think she’s part of the problem.
Depending on what it is they’re writing, Authors?
Taylor Swift is a landlord. She owns enormous capital.
Talent for appealing to the lowest common denominator aside, she has exploited thousands and thousands.
The fact this labor exploitation is indirect and systemic is no redemption.
Entertainment and other forms of intellectual property provide a way to make tons of money ethically. For all the transphobia of JKR, her making billions by writing children’s books that sold hundreds of millions of copies is hard to indict.
Software, well, Microsoft certainly had a lot of anti-competitive practices. But “create very widely used software” is at least a candidate for getting rich.
Also, I don’t think “wage theft”, strictly defined (failing to pay contracted wages), is at all necessary to get rich. Whether employer-employee wage relations are intrinsically a form of exploitation is another matter.
I don’t think this fully acknowledges the things any one billionaire must be complacent in to achieve their wealth. It’s not as simple as “I wrote a popular book or song, guess I’m billionaire now.” Admittedly I’m not knowledgeable on all the ethical implications of being a billionaire myself, but just the infrastructure alone that you inevitably use to distribute enough of your product to earn a billion in profit, whether that’s planes, the internet, literally the roads trucks drive on to deliver physical merchandise. A billionaire profits from all that without contributing even a fraction of their BILLIONS that could improve that not just regionally but globally. And that’s just the basic taxes argument.
Seems bold to say that bookstores, planes, and roads are unethical. And while there are lots of tax dodges and shelters that get abused, one could logically become a billionaire while fully paying taxes. If you make $3 billion in book royalties, you’ll end up with more than $1 billion of wealth, and I think that’s true in any modern rich country.
(I believe Warren Buffet noted that his biggest “tax dodge” is simply the long-term capital gains tax: without any effort beyond holding onto stock for at least a year, he pays only 15% on income, vs. the higher brackets of his much poorer secretary.)
Which is why they didn’t say that; they said that using things for free is exploiting everyone else who has to pay for them. It’s like how oil and gas and coal get a lot more expensive once you start costing in things like having to clean up the atmosphere.
Now I’m interested in kind of exploring that further.
Are we arguing that infrastructure (planes, roads, internet, etc.,) is inherently evil? I personally, I’d need some persuading on that. There are certainly costs in their creation, and I know that there’s plenty of history that makes the WAY our interstates in the U.S. were built (through the neighborhoods of minority groups who didn’t want them there), but the existence of infrastructure as a concept seems to pretty clearly improve the quality of life for the public. If we are looking at use of infrastructure as being a net evil, I don’t think our issue is just whether or not there can be an ethical billionaire. It’s whether there can be ethical large-scale production of goods at all. And eve Karl Marx loved himself some production.
The o5er point is the one about contributing “a fraction of their BILLIONS that could improve that not just regionally but globally”. I mean, there are Billionaires who do large amounts of charitable a philanthropic acts and donation. Bill Gates donates huge amounts to his foundation which works extensively with impoverished communities. Is the issue about donating a fraction, or is there an actual amount of wealth accumulation that is itself unethical? If so, how do we estimate what that amount is?
John D. Rockefeller became the world’s first billionaire by creating a company that made huge efficiency and economy improvements in the extraction, refining, and distribution of petroleum. In 1870, Standard Oil had a 10 percent market share, three quarters of the refining industry was losing money, and kerosene was 26 cents a gallon. By 1880, Standard Oil’s market share had grown to 90 percent, refining was absurdly profitable, and kerosene had dropped to 9 cents a gallon. I wouldn’t hold up Rockefeller as an example of an ethical businessman, but what made Standard Oil into a titan wasn’t that he was better at stealing wages, it’s that he was was better at making a useful product which improved the life of the average person. I’ll take that over Zuckerberg becoming rich by making Facebook and then selling everyone’s personal information to advertisers.
Rockefeller is the prime example of illegal monopolization and employing unethical, predatory business practices to eliminate competition, like actively colluding with manufacturers and rail lines to prevent other oil companies from transporting their product. His prices depended less on profit and more on undercutting competition and overcharging where he had no competition.
Plus he and his family sold his employees and customers information to the mafia and had dozens of striking miners and their families violently killed while they were asleep.
The world would be a much better place today if Rockefeller had never existed.
Yes, I said that I would not hold him up as an example of an ethical businessman, because he wasn’t. Yet for all that, Rockefeller’s supposedly predatory business prices were still largely good for society. Production went up, prices went down, and most of the competition that was driven out of business got to go home with money in their pocket because he bought them out. The reason we ban collusion, trusts, and monopolies is because they can lead to inefficient allocation of resources, meaning bad product, bad service, and bad prices. Yet somehow Rockefeller cornered the market in oil refining, drove most of his competition out of business, and still delivered a superior product at a better price. Not saying the man deserved to be a billionaire, nobody deserves to be a billionaire, but he did overall make society better on the way there.
Now, his strikebreaking on the other hand is quite indefensible, and I have no reservations about calling it out as ugly and evil behavior with no social benefit. It was just utterly unnecessary, Rockefeller could have treated his workers fairly and still become the richest man in the world from delivering a revolution in industrial petroleum refining. Though, with respect to having strikebreakers murdered in their sleep, if you mean the Ludlow Massacre that was his son John D. Rockefeller Jr. He was very much a lesser man than his father, which is another problem with billionaires, because as true as it is that nobody deserves to make a billion dollars, it’s even more true that nobody deserves to be born into a billion dollars. That much wealth and power is corrosive to men’s souls.
To try and clarify a bit, my position on John D. Rockefeller is that he was an insane megalomaniac who hugely benefited society by channeling it in a useful direction, which also made him wealthy beyond reason. Literally beyond reason, because there’s no good reason for anyone to be that rich, but that doesn’t change the fact that his wealth wasn’t stolen in the strict sense of the word. He also did a bunch of unquestionably evil stuff, because even at his most pro-social he was still an insane megalomaniac. The good billionaires aren’t billionaires, but the idea that billionaires are only billionaires because they are thieves is a reductive and misleading view of wealth creation. Though yes, many of them are also thieves.
Standard did a ton of unethical and illegal shit to get as big as it became, and when it was broken up under the Sherman act, John D. Rockefeller became even more absurdly wealthy because he was a huge shareholder of all the new companies.
Standard Oil cornered the petroleum refining market largely by having a flatly superior supply and production line. Their practices during their market consolidation phase in the 1870s were not illegal at the time, and while Rockefeller was by no means an ethical businessman, the net result of his business was that the consumer got a better product at a lower price. During the 20+ years that Standard Oil held a 90 percent market share in oil refining, the quality of their product remained high and prices only continued to drop. Kerosene was 9 cents a gallon in 1880, and was down to 6 cents a gallon before 1900. After that, Standard Oil started losing its efficiency advantage as competition finally caught up, so by the time it was broken up in 1911 its market share had dropped to 64 percent.
Even beyond the evil practices of Rockefeller and Standard Oil, fossil fuels are the exemplar of an industry where most of the real price of a commodity never comes up. If Standard Oil had also had to pay for reforestation or inventing artificial trees to clean up after themselves, they probably wouldn’t have been such a runaway success.
Rowling is a bad example, even outside her trefyness. She did not just make money with selling books. She also sold a ton of merch, and that often was produced under less than stellar conditions. Until fan’s and human right workers called her out and documented those conditions. I am talking sweat shops and the like.
Rowling didn’t make money writing, she made it owning capital and exploiting labor.
The bar is basically in the underworld at this point; the concept of being a billionaire is amoral on its face. Hell, Elon himself was considered “good” by the electric car buyers before he went full MAGA, even though he was still the same grifter he always had been, just more openly a nazi. And to a lesser extend, Phil Spencer was seen as this guy who worked at MS and was “just a guy”; only for gamers to learn to he’s actually just a rich asshole who cosplays an average Joe to sell XBox stuff.
Carla’s folks can be caring parents, and also be terrible people. The nature of being a billionaire means you have had to do some pretty nasty stuff to obtain and continue to retain that level of wealth. Avoiding taxes, unfair wadges, union busting, arming a genocide. . . y’know, the usual things that tech billionaires and their companies get up to.
I submit Dolly Parton. Look up what she did during the worst of COVID. Look up all her good deeds. You don’t have to like her music. (I’m not all that fond, myself.)
Dolly Parton is worth $650 Million. She’s not a billionaire and while I admit she’s not terrible she doesn’t want to get off the fence when she absolutely should.
The only reason Dolly isn’t a billionaire is because of how generous she is.
Haraldur Thorleifsson would also be worth a lot more if he didn’t asked to be paid the way he did when his company was bought out. He wanted to be paid in salary to maximize the amount of tax he would pay in Iceland (his home country). He has had a muscular disease and had to be in a wheelchair since the age of 25, and has a lot of gratitude for the disability benefits he received from his country.
I think that’s part of the point being made.
Always remember: The good billionaires aren’t billionaires.
Caroline Bamberger Frank Fuld and her brother Louis Bamberger, who both helped fund the Institute for Advanced Study, are both worth looking into as well. They sold their store for 25-50 million dollars in 1929 (461 to 922.82 million dollars in today’s money) and then used the money to help fund the institute and hire people to research there.
I do think that you don’t tend to hear about the good ones because they tend to want to give most of their money away and not brag about it or be in the media.
What about Gabe Newell? Is he doing that too? Legit question here, afaik dude seems legit.
Praise be to GabeN, but there’s still no HL3.
Sadly, AFAIK, GabeN is a “yacht guy”, he’s just super quiet about it for whatever reason.
all the people who made Steam left Valve
they have it all backwards these days where they favor AAA garbage and hate indies
Steamworks documentation hasn’t been updated in YEARS @-@
Gabe Newell only cares about money, wants to eventually make cyber eyes for all of humanity, and owns a bunker in New Zealand an entire yacht company.
There is no way to become that wealthy ethically. Every billionaire got their wealth from a combination of being lucky enough to be born to parents who were already decently well-off, and exploiting workers.
Again, Taylor Swift?
Every billionaire includes Taylor Swift.
Just given the borderline-unethical and decidedly exploitative-of-the-fans way the last couple of albums have been marketed (TLOS and TPS both had what three dozen different variants, with some different bonus tracks and other assorted FOMO associated), I cannot imagine she’s not also doing shady things on the business side of things.
Taylor Swift was also born to a wealthy and connected family and essentially gifted a modeling and singing career in her teens.
I always relate Miley Cyrus as the ‘good’ version of Taylor Swift. She also got places because of being related to influential people but she’s pulled away from the bad seeds (like her dad). I think Dolly Parton had a lot of good influence on her.
Her store had to remove a necklace recently with strong SS symbolism.
THAT was overblown — those lightning bolts were incredibly generic and not particularly close to the SS Doppelte Sig-Rune symbol.
Okay, gonna bring this back to Dolly Parton, who is only a half-billionaire because she gives away so very much of her income. She became a billionaire by being a damn good writer and songstress, then became not a billionaire by giving away huge sums of money to various causes (most notably a program that purchases books for children in less-advantaged areas of the US). Going looking for controversies regarding her or her career, I keep coming up with things like her support for LGBTQIA+ causing issues with “conservative” fans, and he drawing criticism from the Trump administration for supporting masking and vaccination during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sorry, she’s just not coming across as evil and exploitative here.
Other entertainment near-billionaires:
James Cameron 800 million
Peter Jackson 1.5 billion
Spielberg 8 billion
Lucas 10 billion
I will never find it non-suspicious that Spielberg owns the copyrights to all of MLK’s speeches (-_-)
I think there’s also just, an issue of:
“is it possible to MAKE absurd amounts of money without necessarily exploiting workers” (yes, in the entertainment industry, though vanishingly few people get even close, lots of movie stars and famous musicians wind up destitute)
“is it possible to HOARD absurd amounts of money and still be a good person” (no)
“is this specific famous person unproblematic?” (probably not)
Taylor Swift wasn’t a great example for being unproblematic, but I think she’s a decent enough example of “being able to MAKE millions of dollars without necessarily exploiting workers”.
again, the part where she keeps it, and various other issues with her, are not awesome or anything
What if they won the lottery and then used the winnings to buy a second ticket and won a second time tho?
That thing about their still being billionaires is definitely what the story is about, right? she’s called them to follow up about Ruttech being the locus of the “divest” protests. The girlfriend thing is *just* her chickening out. That juxtaposition is baaaarely subtext, like, for maybe one or two more strips.
Yeah but, nah, but Willis still got us good, eh? However it pans out in the end.
My guess is Carla chickens out of bringing it up on the call, talks to Charlie some more about the situation, and brings it up face-to-face tomorrow (DoA time, not Monday’s strip).
So we gotta wait until January to see it? :O
Seems kinda relevant that her girlfriend researching the topic up and directly talking to Carla about it is what brought the whole issue of Bulmeria using Ruttech miltech to the forefront of Carla’s attention
Even the billionaires that seem nice are still not good, because they’re still hoarding wealth while millions of other people are struggling and dying because they can’t afford food, shelter, necessary medical care, etc.
This.
A fun exercise is to write down everything you’d actually want to own in your wildest fantasy of being Scrooge McDuck rich and having no further need for a job to take up your time, and see how much you’d actually need to have in the bank at ~3% interest to be able to afford all of it without running out of money before you die.
I haven’t yet been able to come up with a number above $100mil, although that’s largely because I have no desire for a yacht or a private airliner. Each of which are about a $200mil purchase if you go whole ham.
IMHO, therefore, any money in any individual’s possession/control that’s more than a couple hundred million maximum is by definition pointless resource hoarding — I don’t think it’s strictly evil to be “so rich you don’t need to deny yourself anything”, but it is pretty strictly evil to be so rich that you’d have money left over after not denying yourself anything for a lifetime.
Add in the whole money is a construct and not real and billionaires “wealth” is tied up in “investments”. I can’t wait for the down fall of capitalism.
the point of the rules of capitalism, of private ownership of vast concentrations of money and thus “value”, combined with the power of bestowing that value to that which others can produce via “investment”,
Is that what you spend your time doing, that your work, is only as valuable as the degree by which it satisfies the desires of the supremely monied classes (-_-)
Submersibles are expensive too; James Cameron put a big chunk into his underwater games.
(Contra popular belief, the OceanGate guy seems to have been worth “only” $12 million, when a good titanium sub costs at least $35 million; I think this basically explains the fiasco: he was trying to fund a lifestyle he couldn’t afford.)
We’re talking tens of billions for me, but that’s because the thing I’d most want to own is a stable, well-funded research laboratory that could survive for a long after my own death continuing to do its research, and that shit is expensive.
See, this is exactly the kind of problem that incorporation is LITERALLY designed to solve, on some level — that’s the kind of thing that SHOULD have more than one person’s resources and a good charter and all that kind of thing attached.
This is more or less where I’m at. I’m not like, *morally* opposed to someone having 5, 10, or even 50 million dollars (although if they wanted to share with me I wouldn’t mind). That’s pretty close to “whatever I want *and* I get to leave some behind for my kids, and maybe their kid assuming they don’t blow it.”
Once you get to that 50 or 100 million mark, I think it’s pretty morally indefensible to just be sitting on it. I suppose if they were like “look it’s generating 5% per year and I’m funneling the entirety of that 5% to charities, etc., and that’s more money over the course of my lifetime than they’d get if I just divested outright,” that would at least be an *interesting* position. Still not sure I’d necessarily agree with it.
Eastman and Laird (of TMNT fame). Ethical multi-millionaires, though I don’t know what they are doing right now.
A second one is a couple I met worth almost $100 million. They sold their business a several years ago and are using $90 million to fund various charities. At my request they hired a friend of mine at a very decent salary. Though the job is working at a non-profit that supports minorities, my friend said she is not worried about her future because the charity does not take government funding. The couple said they have enough money to keep all their charities funded for at least six more years, and, by getting fellow millionaires to donate, they can keep going ad infinitum. (At least two local millionaires have donated about $10 million each.)
While they are a significant minority, there are good multi-millionaires out there. You just don’t hear about them because they don’t usually make a big deal out of it.
“Helicopter parents? HECK YEAH, WE GOT HELICOPTERS!”
The alt text beat ya to thag punchline
Or maybe just dedicate this thread to all the “helicopter parent” jokes.
Sweetheart, watch you blades. And hoover with your back straight. Did you finish all your fuel?
“Can I get some specialty helicopter fuel at the airport?”
“No, sweetie, we’ve got enough helicopter fuel at home.”
It’s definitely important to maintain proper posture while hoovering. Lower back pain kills the mood
I said I identify as an attack helicopter as a joke and they got me a dozen hellfires for my birthday. . .I mean I’m not not going to have a use for them but jeez parents do not get memes.
I’ll bet I’m not the only one who had a helicopter parent comment ready to go before reading the alt text.
No no. Thag punchline is the one about stegosaurus tails.
Tailing a stegosaurus is a real coprolite job.
or maybe it was a comment worth sharing with non-Patreon peeps since Willis’s on the same strip was a different one
she smile 🙂
why do carla’s parents have the best faces
This is all to make it hurt so much more when they end up just like any other billionaire
Emil: Carla, we will always love you, but Bulmeria must be destroyed so we can build our super eco city there. The President already promised us the East side.
Janneke: Superman and the Justice Gang stopped us last time but Ruttechia Land will be live!
Carla: Have you considered being opposite to Superman is bad…
Emil: Oh no, Carla, what has college done to you?
(prefers Bulmeria to be closer to fiction than reality)
Yyyyyyuuuuup. The other shoe dropping is gonna suuuuuck 🙁
They aren’t like all other billionaires – I don’t think Musk loves any of his kids this much. Besides, history, current and former, is full of powerful people who do terrible things with said power, but they are still people with loves and hopes and dreams. Friends and family. They can be avaricious monsters and Machiavellian powerbrokers and also be generous friends and honest loving parents. Neither detracts from the other.
Alexander the Great seems to have truly deeply loved his horse. He also murdered a friend, who had saved his life on the battlefield, in a drunken rage. People are complicated and nearly always self-contradictory.
‘Loving to 10 people, needlessly, monstrously cruel to the other 300 million in their country of origin’. One does indeed take away from the other. Billionaires are rich based on non-competitive, non-supportive laws that keep poor people poorer every year while allowing more money to be funneled to the .01%.
“They can be avaricious monsters and Machiavellian powerbrokers and also be generous friends and honest loving parents. Neither detracts from the other.”
Yeah, you lost me here. Being evil, heartless, and cruel detracts from every other aspect of your personality. I don’t care if Hitler liked puppies or if Elon Musk cries at that incestuous Foldger’s Christmas commercial. There’s no amount of “humanizing” someone like that which excuses the amount of damage they’ve done.
Look I am not saying one action excuses the other, nor that you shouldn’t work to protect the world from exploitive corporations and the abusive wealthy. I am just saying that being a good person to a few people is still being a good person to a few people, and being a bad person to a ton of people is being a bad person to a ton of people. I am not going to tell a little kid that his dad being a loving father doesn’t matter at all because he is also going around poisoning the local water supply for profit. Of course having a father who looks after and loves him matters to that little kid; just as the all the contaminated water matters to those who drink it. Being a good father doesn’t make you a good person if you spend all day profiting from evil, but its not like it stops your positive effect on that kid from mattering in their life. Human behavior is not defined by a linear morality slider. Not every villain in the world makes it obvious by running around punching babies in the face in their free time. You can have a loving family man who should never have an inch of political power, and a man of principle who totally ignores his family to focus on his work. A failure to see the difference between the two is partially why we keep electing some very dangerous people into high office.
You said a LOT of things to a LOT of stuff I didn’t say.
Being vicious and cruel does detract from how kind you are to others. I just flat disagree with your core point, and I’m not responding to a debate about things I didn’t say.
Yeah, while Carla’s parents seem nice now, I’m waiting to see Carla ask them about the computer systems their company makes for weapons used for genocide. Then we’ll see how nice they actually are by their response.
Possibly, they simply have no idea. They might very well employ an entire division of accountants and investors, and know nothing about what’s invested in their name.
Emil has zero chill.
Came here to say this. I wonder if he’s capable of having a calm, cool discussion of the implications of being a military supplier during a genocide?
You just know in panel 5 a message from janneke is popping up on his screen and he’s reading it word for word in panel 6
(“We’re free all day tomorrow” is all him though)
I like how the bottom lines of Carla’s glasses are wavy in panel 5. That is a clever way of showing watery eyes on a character with glasses.
Gosh I love their relationship.
…Okay yeah Emil is Joyce and Janneke is Dorothy huh.
Seems to be for a first approximation.
Pretty spot on.
Added thought: Emily is Joyce possessing Joe’s body, and Janneke is Dorothy possessing Rachel’s body.
The parents continue to be adorable.
It’s also really nice to see Carla with all her defenses down, which we’ve really never seen before. No boasting, no hijinks. It’s a glimpse at what she might have been like in world without transphobia.
As much as this storyline might suck in the end, I much prefer this storyline for Carla. She’s never been a character I vibed with that much (performative assholes don’t do much for me), but this plot is something I can actually get behind.
Now here’s hoping she gets a better resolution facing a billionaire parent than Hannelore.
I’m worried that her attitude comes not as much from needing to protect herself, and more from her parents being assholes.
Maybe, but they aren’t displaying it on screen right now.
I am pretty sure she had explicitly said at least some part of her self aggrandizing attitude come as a coping mechanism for all the bigotry she faced. She is not only tge daughter of very public figures she they had to go court for her to be able to live in the girls dorm. No way she hasn’t had shit throw at her simce she transition.
I spent quite some time delighting in the fact that, regards Booster, I had no sex/gender for them at all, which was great. Then suddenly I thought, hang on, the authorities put them in the Walky dorm.
For whatever it helps: That really just means the authorities have an opinion on their gender. It doesn’t mean that opinion is in any way correct or worth taking into account for them.
Booster also doesn’t seem to particularly mind being in the boys’ dorm, they only seem to care that they be addressed by preferred pronouns.
Sure, I mean either dorm would be incorrect for them, so I think they’re just glad to have an interesting roomie.
^^^ this
It’s not clear that the court case was about living in the girl’s dorm at college. I think it’s at least implied it was farther in the past.
Seems like it’s the opposite and her parents really went to bat for her
Every indication we’ve gotten is that her transition was a bit of a flashpoint for trans rights in the state and a media circus, and it seems like they were always in her corner for that
I choose to believe Emil and Janekke would get along with Hank from Fallout: The Series.
All of them are incredible parents.
🙂
Not. Helping.
🤣
“You can’t see Charlie. She only talks to me via speakerphone. But she always calls me her Angel.”
Charlie: *appears from a closet with a mask covering half of her face* I am your angel of muuuusiiiic …
That’s going to be a whopper when their relationship becomes 10 years old.
Yup.
Yup, those are Carla’s parents.
I assume the helicopters are made by Ruttech?
i still have to erase the notion that janneke looks like blonde, freckled carol
Man, imagine if this had happened before the protest and they arrived during it. I think people would think Ruttech was coming to take them out
Nah, she’s Player 2 Rachel. And Emil is Player 2… well, Joe’s dad, but that’s because Joe is going to look exactly like his dad when he’s that age.
To me she looks like a blonde Ruth.
A very pink, maroon and purple colour palette…
God, why can’t all trans people have parents more like this? I’m lucky that I have supportive parents, but I’m like the only person out of all of my trans friends who does.
Glad they’re like this for Carla.
They’re still billionaires, but nonetheless.
Emil. You’re at a 10 right now old son. Need you to pull it back to a 6 for a spell. Appreciate the go hard but slow and steady, yeah? Good talk.
Emil has already dialed it back from his internal 12. Respect Emil’s restraint. Emil has never been cool.
“Mr Billingsworth, the Rutten’s have rescheduled the board meeting. Their PA told me they just got on a helicopter to, um, Bloomington.”
“Dammit! What’s in Bloomington?! What do they know that I don’t?”
“They have a daughter in Bloomington……sp do YOU, sir.”
“I have a daughter?…Since when?”
10/10 follow through no notes.
THANK YOU, WE NEEDED THIS 😭 THE WHOLESOME IS APPRECIATED
These might be the cutest Carlas ever drawn
God damn it I like Carla’s parents. I didn’t want to like Carla’s parents.
Using “helicopter” as a verb. Doesn’t rank very high on the old trustometer.
I mean being fair, if any of us could flight an helicopter anytime we want we probably verb it too.
There’s no noun Americans won’t verb and no verb they won’t noun
Dinner with charlie would be. Interesting. Cause I don’t see her being able to set the genocide enabling aside (nor should she)
You know, I’m not sure that I’ve seen anyone in comic mention genocide.
I might have missed it.
Take it back. Dorothy called it a genocide protest.
Also, perhaps unsurprisingly, Charlie: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/04-the-only-exception/supplier/
I think the first use of genocide was when Jocelyne first talked about the protest. It’s been about genocide the whole time.
Becky might be happy to learn that Carla’s mum’s name is pretty close to Jennika.
I wonder which one dyes their hair…
Mwe heh eh heeee…
Both?
If you’re talking about red hair, I think it’s Carla who dyes her hair. I vaguely remember finding that out, but I might just be remembering a joke made about someone trying to talk to Joyce about Carla being trans.
Also bonus comics showed Carla as a little kid with light hair.
Aww I didn’t know that! That’s cuuute
The comics ARE adorable, she was a little menace. /said with fondness
Also alt-text in this strip refers to Carla attending “the tall, bespectacled blonde-who-dyes convention.”
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2023/comic/book-14/01-everybodys-looking-for-nothing/butter/
it’s weird seeing carla go two whole panels without loudly talking about herself
It’s also weird to see such caring and attentive parents in the dumbiverse. Although, I’m not complaining 🙂
Yeah, almost like that’s a front she puts up to keep herself from getting hurt.
I mean my defense mechanism against getting hurt was learning to stealth it up so that the gaze of anyone looking to start trouble would just slide off me like so much water off a duck’s back. I can’t turn invisible but I can look like I’m more trouble than I’m worth, which is handy for a nerd who can’t throw a punch
but then I’m not a spoiled brat billionaire, the experiences don’t mesh
People who develop a different defense mechanism to you aren’t in the wrong for doing so. Insulting Carla for who she has to be to protect herself is super gross <3
My mom once came to visit me in college to meet my best friend, who I said looked just like her when she was young. My friend and I made time out of our schedules to go to dinner with her.
I know Carla’s parents are trying to be respectful, but from my own experience, if a parent wants to come see you and travels a great distance to do it, you go by THEIR availability… though you should also clear it with your friend/significant other that THEY want to meet your parents too. They always have the right to say “no.”
I think the Ruttens have a different framework on that point. Not every parent has the schedule (or money) to be able to just fly in whenever, but Emil and Janneke here are ultra rich. Generally, the time should definitely be chosen for the parents’ leisure, but rich people have different rules.
starting to see who Carla takes after, personality-wise
They’ve never seen a girlfriend before. That’s why they’re excited.
“‘Girlfriends’? I don’t think they exist.”
*immediately gets tackled by a girlfriend
At least she’s not a GOUS. Those can be dangerous; fortunately, they’re only found in the Fire Dorms.
That SMILE! Oh my heart, I’m so happy she’s just so loved
It’s nice to see parents who are supportive of their trans daughter and her new girlfriend. But nice as they seem to be right now, I still don’t trust Emil and Janneke because they’re billionaires and their company makes computer systems for weapons.
Ah. I see.
wow Carla’s smile can freeze people XD
ooooooooh.
I’m definitely loving them already!!!
not like this, Willis
Oh yes! Dad totally has the engineer problem solving mania. Father and daughter are very much alike. If mom has the ‘solution implementation’ genes, it’s no wonder they’re a successful company.
It’s so nice Carla can drop her defenses with them.
very happy we are getting more of my favorite character : ) love carla so much
I hope Janneke will speak Dutch in the foreseeable future.
So I can laugh at Willis’ ineptitude at writing it. 😀
Maybe she will drop a Hans Van Klompen-Klacke reference.
QC 5254 iydk
I don’t read QC, sorry.
Smart cookie.
I’ll recommend the first 3000-ish strips, personally. There’s a lotta good stuff in there, especially if you like music talk and slow-paced conversations about weird indie townies.
I’ve seen QC stuff. It never makes me interested in finding out more.
You know what would be an amazing rugpull?
“Mom… Dad… I’m worried about Bulmeria, and I think your investments, there, are making the world worse.”
“Oh. Okay. We’ll stop doing that.”
“And maybe donate a lot of money to funds for war orphans?”
“Sure, honey!”
“And maybe donate most of your billions to good causes so we’re not hoarding wealth and making the whole world worse?”
“For you, Carla, anything!”
… it’s a nice dream.
Would be nice IRL, but boring as hell to read.
“Our daughter has a romantic relationship, which we believed would never happen!”
Well, to be fair to them, they have met their daughter
Thank you for being a bad person, so that I don’t have to.
The whole internet loves Milkshake DuckThe whole internet loves Trans Ally Parents, lovely parents who love and enthusiastically support their trans daughter! *5 seconds later* We regret to inform you the parents are billionaires [and also . . . well . . . I’m sure that they have no other problematic flaws whatsoever]
Not a whole lot to comment on today. Yep, they sure are earnest and supportive parents. Hopefully we get to the meat tomorrow.
You can definitely see the roots of Carla’s, erm, “bountiful self-confidence”, shall we say.
LOL at how Carla’s parents are kind of like Walkyverse Joyce’s parents, without Carol’s “Would you please let them know with subtlety to stop doing it in the ass or pulling out or whatever the hell they’re doing to deprive me of my babies” ignorance of boundaries.
honestly I just really like getting to see Carla smile like this.
Same, it’s a really sweet sense of contentment.
oh man… I love them so much already…. this is gonna be an interesting conversation when Charlie gets there and asks them point blank about their weapons.
Loveable billionaires…
Emil was seconds away from Janneke hitting the “Emil, doe nou even normaal..”
Emil: “Wat loop je nou weer te zeiken, vrouw? Ik doe normaal.”
I want Carla’s parents to adopt me 😭 would love such supportive parents
Oh no! They’re nice!
They seem so good and so incredibly supportive of their daughter.
This is going to make the inevitable genocide question hurt all the more isn’t it
These enablers of imperial murder are pretty nice on a personal level, which kinda checks out. For that matter I’ve heard that Trump is personally pretty polite. And, though I hate comparing even an asshole like Trump to ol’ Mister Hitler, I read that unlike Stalin, who had people executed for waking him up too early Hitler was perfectly nice to his secretary. In other words, personally decent people can do publically disgusting/evil things. Here’s hoping Carla brings up the evil.
The one personal anecdote I’ve heard about Trump is from his college roommate, who said one day Donald’s father showed up and punched him in the face. And then there’s the famous lines he’s said in candid interviews re. how to treat women and what you can get away with when you run beauty pageants for little girls.
I don’t believe someone whose whole life has been a racist-flavored struggle to dominate, manipulate, use and defraud as many people as possible is going to be pleasant to be around, unless you’re more powerful than him or have something to give him.
Though I agree with your point.
ICAREICAREICARE oh wait am I caring too much I can care less how much do you want me to care I can do that
Also, and this probably isn’t the best place to post this, but…
Your Asma title bar? It needs more Asmas. It only has six, most of your character title bars have more. I know, she hasn’t been a main character for that long, but still.
Draw more Asmas!
They seem nice but unfortunately are irredeemable monsters, worth only the same decisive response that all billionaires should face. Tragic for bestgirl.