Wednesday, August 26, 2026

Smaugs

Other people will provide better Dolly Parton tributes, but her death reminds me of the fact that it is so easy for rich people to do good things. She put the work in over and above that, obviously, but for anyone sitting on a massive amount of dragon treasure, if it is conservatively earning a real 5% a year in investment income, they can do a lot of good works without having their pile of treasure shrink at all.

You can easily buy some karma points to offset being a shithead otherwise.

It is quite stunning how little interest our current overlords have in even the PR benefits of that.