Patreon, Drones, and too much coffee?

I was in one of those manic moods this Sunday morning. Typically resulting in an essay, but I needed to be somewhere else. At some point, I will need to explore the topic of obligation, but at the moment all I can say is I would have preferred to be writing this morning. 

So here I am at 11 PM Sunday night, trying to reconstruct what it was I manic about. There was something that provoked the episode. The first item was a CBS report on Patreon. Yep, that got me all excited. The web continues to tease us with the possibility of artists and musicians, writers, photographers being able to live and thrive on their work. 

A few years back there was Pledge Music, a crowd funding site that had been dedicated to musical projects. It was starting to catch on and many musicians were beginning to use the site. Then the owners or management of the site proceeded to spend or piss away the funds that various artists had trusted them with, leaving the artists holding the bag. Again. We had reported on the Pledge Music betrayal back in 2019. 

I recall Steve Jobs offering up iTunes as the solution to the music business’ problems. I admire the man, but I am afraid he got this one wrong. Anyway, when the owner / creator of Patreon talks of his intent of eliminating the term “starving artist, my ears do perk up. I am intrigued. It was in fact the web and its allure to musicians that the Wild West is on the web. If it were not for the fact that Bernie Torme decided to build his website, which he had hoped would do the job of market and promote his music

What I did do before running out the door is reach out to a writer and poet in NYC who just created a Substack account, another internet thing, again allowing for creatives to embrace DIY. I was curious about her thoughts on such trends. She has been a curiosity for years. Regardless of where that goes, this topic needs to be part of the Wild West’s focus going forward. How do artists thrive today? It used to be that signing with a record label was a thing. Not the case today. So, what do folks do?

So that was item number one regarding my manic moment. What was item number two? What was it? Ukrainian Drones. Fareed Zakaria’s report on Ukraine’s recent drone attacks on targets that were in some cases thousands of miles from Ukraine into Russia. Likewise, Ukraine had damaged planes worth millions with hardware they had largely gotten from the local Radio Shack. They achieved such results using commercially available materials and products, spending less than $1 million and damaging or destroying 41 Russian planes. Some of these planes that were part of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, or the delivery systems for that arsenal. 

It is just another take, another angle, involving the power of asymmetric warfare. Once again, I am intrigued with the economics of it. The Ukrainians did all of this for pennies on the dollar. It was quite a good return, an awesome return. It will not sadly end the war, but they got a good bang for their buck.

Is it possible that considering such that we, the US, are now truly really wasting taxpayer’s dollars when we build the next batch of tanks or aircraft carriers? They become just more easy targets for the next batch of drones. There has never been a better time to hear such news. Now let us hope that Congress and the Pentagon listen and ponder that. Let us hope. 

For the time I will stop there. . . there was more this morning, but now it is late.