#Investors in Most States

[markmaupin-realestate]

Hard Money for Investors by Hard Money Guy Lee Anthony / For Investors i...

[genderqueerdykes]

poverty is so isolating. it means being alone and away from people, events, society. you can't afford trips to and from places. you can't afford to spare gas. you can't afford the entrance fee. you can't afford tickets. you can't afford making eating a social event. you can't buy drinks. you can't engage in hobbies.

all you're encouraged to do are "free" things, but they're not free. Internet isn't free. cell phone service isn't free. sitting on the computer and your phone all day is frowned upon for good reason because it destroys your health. we shouldn't have to only be able to talk to people digitally to be able to socialize. we shouldn't have to watch streams all day. we need to see other people, i DON'T care if it costs a few dollars: poor people shouldn't be relegated to what few free activities there are because most of them involve being alone.

the library is one of the most annoying suggestions because it makes you feel pinned. yes i want to support my local library. i cannot sit still and read in public. it is not socially acceptable to start taking to strangers in the library in fact you can't have conversations there at all because you need to be quiet for the other readers. libraries are places of education, accessibility to information and resources, and social services. it is not a place to socialize. maybe entertain but Only if you can, well, read. i have dissociative disorders and unmedicated ADHD, i don't make it very far into books. i feel like most poor people get really tired of the library suggestion. it's an amazing resource. but it's not for this purpose

social events are almost always off limits. sure you can go to the bar and not drink, if you don't have alcohol trauma, aren't a recovering alcoholic, aren't overstimulated by noise, aren't photosensitive, don't have anxiety with crowds and strangers, aren't a minor, have an ID, and can walk there or get a ride there. sure you can walk to the cafe and use their Wi-Fi but this isn't a social activity and in many places you can't sit there for long periods unless you buy anything.

i get SO tired of the "go to a cafe" suggestion. think about how boring that actually is. you're alone. in America, it is NOT socially acceptable to sit at a strangers table like it is in other countries, let alone just start talking to them. it is NOT a common experience to strike up a conversation with strangers in cafes in America, like we really have cafes other than fucking starbucks to begin with.

going for walks and going to parks is not accessible to people with physical disabilities, agoraphobia, some schizophrenics, people with dog trauma, and other issues. parks usually have really poorly maintained or no sidewalks or foot paths. they can be uneven and hard to traverse for people who use mobility aids. unless you live near a monument or state park, your local parks are really meant for dogs to piss and shit in, for joggers to run through, and to look impressive to investors. they're usually pathetic swaths of grass with you guessed it, nothing to do. again it's rare to strike up conversation at the park. people need conversation starters. there's Nothing going on at the park. it's a great place to go if you need to cool down when angry or stressed, but it's fucking boring.

window shopping is pointless and dehumanizing. i really can't stand it when people suggest poor people window shop so we can think about things to buy when we have money ... why the fuck would i ever do that. when i don't have money i don't think about frivolous things i don't need. what the fuck kind of activity is window shopping, that's for people who have money.

poor people get tired of doing the "free" shit. if you suggest that a poor person should do these things when you do none of them yourself, you have 0 clue how boring and dehumanizing it is to never be able to decide what you do with your time. to have limited options to live. to experience.

money is not the reason you get to experience; you get to experience because you are alive. no poor people don't deserve to sit there and do nothing all day because they didn't "earn" anything. no poor people don't deserve to live their lives because they don't make as much as you. poor people deserve to enjoy being alive. poor people get to decide to have fun with their money, too.

I'm so tired of people being so harsh on people who struggle with financial issues and spending money "right" or "smart". reckless spending and difficulty managing finances are symptoms of mental illness and neurodivergence. bipolar, personality disorders, schizophrenia, anxiety, autism, ADHD, OCD and other mental health conditions can make managing funds very hard. don't be extra cruel to someone who spends money poorly in response to a mental health crisis. this won't make their situation any easier.

i sat in apartment after apartment for a decade doing nothing. i was a total shut in because i had no money. i never did anything but browse the Internet. all day long. without end. i was dissociating constantly. my anxiety was at its highest. i was constantly psychotic. instead of going out to fix it, i would stay inside longer, making it worse and worse and worse. i never bought anything. i didn't have hobbies. all of my decorations and possessions were from my childhood, my clothes were literally falling apart, a decade old. my walls were barren. my world was grey.

don't do this to yourself. don't tell yourself that you deserve nothing because it's harder for you to make money than other people. I'm very lucky now that i have made friends who pulled me out of my shell and have helped me get outside of my house. i spent so long alone and trapped indoors thinking it's the only thing i could do with myself for years. I'm finally recovering. if you're poor you deserve to live. you're alive. and you're not alone. i love you.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Watch out for a wave of Zionist disinformation and propaganda:

A billionaire real estate tycoon in the United States is rallying support for a high-dollar media crusade to boost Israel’s image and demonise the Hamas armed group amid global pro-Palestinian solidarity protests. The media campaign — called Facts for Peace — is seeking million-dollar donations from dozens of the world’s biggest names in media, finance and technology, according to an email seen by news website Semafor. More than 50 individuals are being courted, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Dell CEO Michael Dell and financier Michael Milken. They have a combined net worth of around $500bn, Semafor said. Some of the individuals, such as investor Bill Ackman, have publicly threatened to blacklist pro-Palestine students who are critical of Israel. On October 10, Ackman wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that he and other business executives wanted Ivy League universities to disclose the names of students who are part of organisations that signed open letters criticising Israeli policies in Gaza.

[...]

Facts For Peace, the media campaign launched by Sternlicht, aims to win back public favour for Israel, posting videos on its social media pages blaming Hamas for the plight of Palestinians and denying claims of Israeli rights violations. The most recent video posted on its Facebook page argues that “Israel is not an apartheid state”. This contradicts findings from Palestinian, Israeli and international rights experts, including from the United Nations, that Israel is practising apartheid through its “deeply discriminatory dual legal and political system” in the occupied territories.

[verinarin]

How Ratio handles his reckless partner during a mission

I wrote this as a character study to better understand and illustrate how he treats people he respects and trusts (*´꒳`*)

So fluffiest fluff ever; in Ratio’s standards ofc

Please tell me if you guys want a part 2 of this ٩( ᐛ )و

Part Two ψ(｀∇´)ψ - Part Three (о´∀`о)

Support me on Ko-fi ╰(*´︶`*)╯♡

“I often wonder how does the IPC’s HR department handles the recruitment process,” he sighs as he walks towards your body slumped to the floor as a result of your trademarked clumsiness

He stood there beside you waiting for you to sprung back to life like you usually do “How rude, for your information I aced my test,” you huff as you dust off your hands

“Is that so ?,” he replies candidly, he continues to leave you behind without much thought, he knows you possess some qualities that’s befitting for a investor but still you’re too clumsy and reckless at times

Hence why the higher ups assign him as your supervisor or so to speak, he acknowledges your lack of experience as well as your potential that’s why he agreed to be your supervisor

But he didn’t sign up to be your babysitter….

“Wait up would ya?,” you whine as you quickly jog to be by his side

He tilted his head to the side, studying you from afar to assess any damages on your body from the fall earlier “Time awaits for no one,”

“Please do think before anything else, stop making a fool out yourself while representing the IPC,” he continues his statement as he paced himself to be slightly slower for you to catch up

You huff feeling a little bit dejected by his statement but it’s the truth and from this past year of working beside him, you knew he always have your best interest at heart, well even though most of the times he verbally bullies you

“Yes yes of course Mr. Ratio,” you smile as you walk beside him, you notice that he slowed down his pace earlier, it made you smile to know that behind that rude demeanour he does care a lot

He steal a glance at your expression before resuming to look at the road ahead, he can’t help but to feel comfort in knowing that you didn’t seem to take his words to heart

He always finds it hard to express his truth towards others because to be frank the truth hurts, yet the pain itself is a important element to achieve improvement, pain used as a motivation of sorts

Most people deemed his truthful nature to be harmful yet you’re astoundingly adept in his true nature, you easily read between the lines and see his objective clearly

“Can I ask you something ?,” his sudden inquiry surprises you, it is usually you who do the asking, you deem this as a pleasant surprise

“Sure go ahead,” you reply casually while masking your excitement, he rarely does this so you’re ecstatic

“I know you’re both emotionally and intellectually intelligent, but I can’t seem to grasp why you’re so reckless at times,” he smiles as he ask this question, he’s mostly likely to remember a gamble you took a few weeks ago

Well granted you almost lose your life by gambling your life away in a literal sense to gain a dictator’s trust towards the IPC, but at least you won

Ever since that stunt, Ratio seems to respect you more although afterwards he berated your gamble for two hours straight

“Audaces fortuna iuvat,” you reply as you stare at his face, his merely scoffs as he took notice of the philosophy behind your statement

In a sudden trance he leans down towards your face, ardently reading through your flustered expression caused by the sudden close proximity “Fortune favours the bold, that’s very true to yourself,” his voice deepens as it is drenched in sultriness

Well this is an uncharted territory between you both-

He then leans back towards his previous position, smirking as he relish in your dumbstruck expression, he gently strokes your hair as a sign of acknowledgement something you didn’t knew you enjoyed before

“Now then we should get going, our next meeting is due in approximately 13 minutes,” he stated as he retracts his hand away and leaves you behind yet again but this time speechless and flustered

“H-hey !, what was that about ?,” you huff as you try to catch up with him, not knowing that he’s currently blushing himself underneath that cold exterior of his

“What have I done..” he mutters as he covers his face with his alabaster head

[psychotrenny]

It’s fucking insane to me how normal Yankee Liberals are about Hawaii. As in like the way they just treat it as an unremarkable fact that their nation controls the island. Like the annexation of Hawaii wasn’t just any old example of Settler-Colonialism, the subjugation of a decentralised non-urbanised people that could be just dismissed as mere “tribes” or what have you. Not to say that such forms of “typical” Settler Colonialism are any less abhorrent or disgusting, just easier to justify from a Liberal point of view. Easier to claim that they weren’t *really* using the land properly or that they were an hopelessly and eternally backwards who only really benefitted from their conquest or that they were doomed and dying anyway and their fate was a mere tragic inevitability not worth dwelling on or… Point is all these arguments are all wrong and stupid and cruel but they can serve well enough to downplay or justify such atrocities in the eyes of Imperial Core Liberals.

But like with Hawaii you don’t have that. The Kingdom of Hawai’i was a sovereign state that was internationally recognised as such by the Great Powers of Europe even at the very height of Western Imperialism. Literacy rates were high and compulsory education was introduced in 1841 (pre-dating the US by 77 years), healthcare was given to all Hawai’ian subjects free of charge, Christianity was dominant (so even the most ardent Imperialist couldn’t claim that the people were in the thrall of some “barbaric superstition” that necessitated the “civilising influence” of empire) and it had a well-developed Capitalist economy dominated by Sugar production.  Like even if we take the Western model of statehood as the be all end all of what separates the civilised from the savage (to be clear hear you really fucking shouldn’t, but many people do so for a second that’s the frame of reference we’ll employ) then Hawai’i was very much unambiguously the former.  But that didn’t stop the US from shamelessly interfering it’s politics Indeed those aformentioned markers of Western-Style “civilisation” and “development” came with the price of allow US missionaries and investors to settler in the islands and become very wealthy and influential. For decades the US used the threat of force to influence the policy decisions of the kingdom, going as far as to regularly send warships in a classic display of “gunboat diplomacy”. In 1887 a US settler militia called the First Honolulu Rifles staged a coup where they forced Kalākaua to accept a new Constitution that heavily favoured the interests of USamerican settlers who had grown very wealthy through their investment in sugar production on the island.  It stripped the Monarchy of much of its power and introducing requirements for voting that heavily favoured US settlers; re-introducing wealth/property requirements that were now higher than even, allowing resident aliens to vote and just outright banning any Asian immigrants from voting (which at that point had as much to do with plain racial hatred as it did to any acting threat they might have posed). This wasn’t enough for the Yanks and 6 years later a group of 13 US settlers known as the “Committee of Safety” outright overthrew the newly crowned Queen Liliʻuokalani when she refused to co-operate. It existed briefly as an “Independent” USamerican dominated republic before the US government decided to official annex it in 1898 (similar to what you saw with Texas or California).

While incredibly controversial at the time due to both strategic concerns with the annexation of ultramarine territories and some level of outrage at the shameless take-over of a sovereign nation (hence the time gap between the coup and the actual annexation), nowadays Yanks enjoy their control over the island without the slightest care in the world. They even turned it into a tourist destination, a heavily romanticised one that not only receives many millions of visitors every year but is constantly mentioned in the popular culture the US then proceeds to export all over the world, literally revelling in their land that is by literally any definition (even the most nakedly pro-imperialist) stolen. The land itself is severely exploited to the point of significant ecological damage, the indigenous peoples too are exploited as many of them live in poverty while US investors grow wealthy from their land and labour. Even their very culture is stolen and monetised, the most marketable parts bastardised into cheap kitsch and the rest of it left to rot, only kept alive through over a century of continued resistance from the indigenous peoples. It’s a very common story of course, but I think it stands out with how utterly ghoulish it is even under the most Liberal of consistently applied worldviews. It would be like if in say 2007 someone set up Disneyland in Bagdad. And yet by the vast majority of the US (and by extension the vassals states whose view of the situation is filtered through the lens of US media and propaganda) it isn’t seen that way. Hawaii is just the 50th state, the only state outside North America and in the tropics (hahaha ain’t that a neat little fact. Geography is so fun J), an island paradise perfect to visit with the whole family and yet still as American as Apple Pie. Even many self-described “progressives” talk about it in this way, at most mentioning the plight of the indigenous Hawaiians with minimal though as to how this situation came about. Like while the story of Hawaii is far from unique; even in terms of the US doing colonialism to Westernised peoples you examples such as the ethnic cleansing of the Five Civilised Tribes from the Eastern USA, it still stands out to me with the sheer level of international recognition and Western-style development that the Kingdom of Hawai’i possessed. Like it’s just such an obvious example of the naked greed at the heart of the USamerican empire, and how utterly bullshit talk of a “civilising mission” and “spreading democracy” is. No matter what they may claim, no matter what excuses they may trot out, Imperialist rapacity has no limits.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Antitrust is a labor issue

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SATURDAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, then Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

This is huge: yesterday, the FTC finalized a rule banning noncompete agreements for every American worker. That means that the person working the register at a Wendy's can switch to the fry-trap at McD's for an extra $0.25/hour, without their boss suing them:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/ftc-announces-rule-banning-noncompetes

The median worker laboring under a noncompete is a fast-food worker making close to minimum wage. You know who doesn't have to worry about noncompetes? High tech workers in Silicon Valley, because California already banned noncompetes, as did Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Virginia and Washington.

The fact that the country's largest economies, encompassing the most "knowledge-intensive" industries, could operate without shitty bosses being able to shackle their best workers to their stupid workplaces for years after those workers told them to shove it shows you what a goddamned lie noncompetes are based on. The idea that companies can't raise capital or thrive if their know-how can walk out the door, secreted away in the skulls of their ungrateful workers, is bullshit:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#neofeudal

Remember when OpenAI's board briefly fired founder Sam Altman and Microsoft offered to hire him and 700 of his techies? If "noncompetes block investments" was true, you'd think they'd have a hard time raising money, but no, they're still pulling in billions in investor capital (primarily from Microsoft itself!). This is likewise true of Anthropic, the company's major rival, which was founded by (wait for it), two former OpenAI employees.

Indeed, Silicon Valley couldn't have come into existence without California's ban on noncompetes – the first silicon company, Shockley Semiconductors, was founded by a malignant, delusional eugenicist who also couldn't manage a lemonade stand. His eight most senior employees (the "Traitorous Eight") quit his shitty company to found Fairchild Semiconductor, a rather successful chip shop – but not nearly so successful as the company that two of Fairchild's top employees founded after they quit: Intel:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/the-traitorous-eight-and-the-battle-of-germanium-valley/

Likewise a lie: the tale that noncompetes raise wages. This theory – beloved of people whose skulls are so filled with Efficient Market Hypothesis Brain-Worms that they've got worms dangling out of their nostrils and eye-sockets – holds that the right to sign a noncompete is an asset that workers can trade to their employers in exchange for better pay. This is absolutely true, provided you ignore reality.

Remember: the median noncompete-bound worker is a fast food employee making near minimum wage. The major application of noncompetes is preventing that worker from getting a raise from a rival fast-food franchisee. Those workers are losing wages due to noncompetes. Meanwhile, the highest paid workers in the country are all clustered in a a couple of cities in northern California, pulling down sky-high salaries in a state where noncompetes have been illegal since the gold rush.

If a capitalist wants to retain their workers, they can compete. Offer your workers get better treatment and better wages. That's how capitalism's alchemy is supposed to work: competition transmogrifies the base metal of a capitalist's greed into the noble gold of public benefit by making success contingent on offering better products to your customers than your rivals – and better jobs to your workers than those rivals are willing to pay. However, capitalists hate capitalism:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/18/in-extremis-veritas/#the-winnah

Capitalists hate capitalism so much that they're suing the FTC, in MAGA's beloved Fifth Circuit, before a Trump-appointed judge. The case was brought by Trump's financial advisors, Ryan LLC, who are using it to drum up business from corporations that hate Biden's new taxes on the wealthy and stepped up IRS enforcement on rich tax-cheats.

Will they win? It's hard to say. Despite what you may have heard, the case against the FTC order is very weak, as Matt Stoller explains here:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/ftc-enrages-corporate-america-by

The FTC's statutory authority to block noncompetes comes from Section 5 of the FTC Act, which bans "unfair methods of competition" (hard to imagine a less fair method than indenturing your workers). Section 6(g) of the Act lets the FTC make rules to enforce Section 5's ban on unfairness. Both are good law – 6(g) has been used many times (26 times in the five years from 1968-73 alone!).

The DC Circuit court upheld the FTC's right to "promulgate rules defining the meaning of the statutory standards of the illegality the Commission is empowered to prevent" in 1973, and in 1974, Congress changed the FTC Act, but left this rulemaking power intact.

The lawyer suing the FTC – Anton Scalia's larvum, a pismire named Eugene Scalia – has some wild theories as to why none of this matters. He says that because the law hasn't been enforced since the ancient days of the (checks notes) 1970s, it no longer applies. He says that the mountain of precedent supporting the FTC's authority "hasn't aged well." He says that other antitrust statutes don't work the same as the FTC Act. Finally, he says that this rule is a big economic move and that it should be up to Congress to make it.

Stoller makes short work of these arguments. The thing that tells you whether a law is good is its text and precedent, "not whether a lawyer thinks a precedent is old and bad." Likewise, the fact that other antitrust laws is irrelevant "because, well, they are other antitrust laws, not this antitrust law." And as to whether this is Congress's job because it's economically significant, "so what?" Congress gave the FTC this power.

Now, none of this matters if the Supreme Court strikes down the rule, and what's more, if they do, they might also neuter the FTC's rulemaking power in the bargain. But again: so what? How is it better for the FTC to do nothing, and preserve a power that it never uses, than it is for the Commission to free the 35-40 million American workers whose bosses get to use the US court system to force them to do a job they hate?

The FTC's rule doesn't just ban noncompetes – it also bans TRAPs ("training repayment agreement provisions"), which require employees to pay their bosses thousands of dollars if they quit, get laid off, or are fired:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose

The FTC's job is to protect Americans from businesses that cheat. This is them, doing their job. If the Supreme Court strikes this down, it further delegitimizes the court, and spells out exactly who the GOP works for.

This is part of the long history of antitrust and labor. From its earliest days, antitrust law was "aimed at dollars, not men" – in other words, antitrust law was always designed to smash corporate power in order to protect workers. But over and over again, the courts refused to believe that Congress truly wanted American workers to get legal protection from the wealthy predators who had fastened their mouth-parts on those workers' throats. So over and over – and over and over – Congress passed new antitrust laws that clarified the purpose of antitrust, using words so small that even federal judges could understand them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men

After decades of comatose inaction, Biden's FTC has restored its role as a protector of labor, explicitly tackling competition through a worker protection lens. This week, the Commission blocked the merger of Capri Holdings and Tapestry Inc, a pair of giant conglomerates that have, between them, bought up nearly every "affordable luxury" brand (Versace, Jimmy Choo, Michael Kors, Kate Spade, Coach, Stuart Weitzman, etc).

You may not care about "affordable luxury" handbags, but you should care about the basis on which the FTC blocked this merger. As David Dayen explains for The American Prospect: 33,000 workers employed by these two companies would lose the wage-competition that drives them to pay skilled sales-clerks more to cross the mall floor and switch stores:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-04-24-challenge-fashion-merger-new-antitrust-philosophy/

In other words, the FTC is blocking a $8.5b merger that would turn an oligopoly into a monopoly explicitly to protect workers from the power of bosses to suppress their wages. What's more, the vote was unanimous, include the Commission's freshly appointed (and frankly, pretty terrible) Republican commissioners:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/ftc-moves-block-tapestrys-acquisition-capri

A lot of people are (understandably) worried that if Biden doesn't survive the coming election that the raft of excellent rules enacted by his agencies will die along with his presidency. Here we have evidence that the Biden administration's anti-corporate agenda has become institutionalized, acquiring a bipartisan durability.

And while there hasn't been a lot of press about that anti-corporate agenda, it's pretty goddamned huge. Back in 2021, Tim Wu (then working in the White wrote an executive order on competition that identified 72 actions the agencies could take to blunt the power of corporations to harm everyday Americans:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

Biden's agency heads took that plan and ran with it, demonstrating the revolutionary power of technical administrative competence and proving that being good at your job is praxis:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

In just the past week, there's been a storm of astoundingly good new rules finalized by the agencies:

A minimum staffing ratio for nursing homes;

The founding of the American Climate Corps;

A guarantee of overtime benefits;

A ban on financial advisors cheating retirement savers;

Medical privacy rules that protect out-of-state abortions;

A ban on junk fees in mortgage servicing;

Conservation for 13m Arctic acres in Alaska;

Classifying "forever chemicals" as hazardous substances;

A requirement for federal agencies to buy sustainable products;

Closing the gun-show loophole.

That's just a partial list, and it's only Thursday.

Why the rush? As Gerard Edic writes for The American Prospect, finalizing these rules now protects them from the Congressional Review Act, a gimmick created by Newt Gingrich in 1996 that lets the next Senate wipe out administrative rules created in the months before a federal election:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-04-23-biden-administration-regulations-congressional-review-act/

In other words, this is more dazzling administrative competence from the technically brilliant agencies that have labored quietly and effectively since 2020. Even laggards like Pete Buttigieg have gotten in on the act, despite a very poor showing in the early years of the Biden administration:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/11/dinah-wont-you-blow/#ecp

Despite those unpromising beginnings, the DOT has gotten onboard the trains it regulates, and passed a great rule that forces airlines to refund your money if they charge you for services they don't deliver:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/04/24/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-announces-rules-to-deliver-automatic-refunds-and-protect-consumers-from-surprise-junk-fees-in-air-travel/

The rule also bans junk fees and forces airlines to compensate you for late flights, finally giving American travelers the same rights their European cousins have enjoyed for two decades.

It's the latest in a string of muscular actions taken by the DOT, a period that coincides with the transfer of Jen Howard from her role as chief of staff to FTC chair Lina Khan to a new gig as the DOT's chief of competition enforcement:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-04-25-transportation-departments-new-path/

Under Howard's stewardship, the DOT blocked the merger of Spirit and Jetblue, and presided over the lowest flight cancellation rate in more than decade:

https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/2023-numbers-more-flights-fewer-cancellations-more-consumer-protections

All that, along with a suite of protections for fliers, mark a huge turning point in the US aviation industry's long and worsening abusive relationship with the American public. There's more in the offing, too including a ban on charging families extra for adjacent seats, rules to make flying with wheelchairs easier, and a ban on airlines selling passenger's private information to data brokers.

There's plenty going on in the world – and in the Biden administration – that you have every right to be furious and/or depressed about. But these expert agencies, staffed by experts, have brought on a tsunami of rules that will make every working American better off in a myriad of ways. Those material improvements in our lives will, in turn, free us up to fight the bigger, existential fights for a livable planet, free from genocide.

It may not be a good time to be alive, but it's a much better time than it was just last week.

And it's only Thursday.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/25/capri-v-tapestry/#aiming-at-dollars-not-men

[togglesbloggle]

Why do you think tumblr will die in only a few years?

Answer with jargon: a strong correlation between recent economic shifts and chaotic choices by major tech companies is most easily explained if the 'traditional' social media platforms of 2005-2020 are mostly a zero-interest rate phenomenon.

Longer answer, with less jargon: Even though Musk's takeover is making all the headlines recently, the last year has in fact seen major shakeups at many social media platforms, so Twitter is actually part of a trend. Almost inevitably, these are cases of social media companies trying to find a way to squeeze more money out of their userbase (Reddit), cut costs dramatically (Twitter), or both. This marks a sudden departure from a much more relaxed attitude towards revenue in the Pictures Of Cats industry, where the focus was historically more on expanding the userbase to a global scale and then counting on world domination to sort of <????> and then the company would become profitable eventually.

We joke, correctly, that Tumblr has never been profitable. But the entire structure of ad-supported content curation between human users is deeply suspect as a business model; IIRC Twitter was never profitable either, and Facebook has been juicing its numbers in very shenanigany ways. Discord was actually making money on net last I checked, at least a bit, so they're not all completely in the hole. But even if you take the accounting figures at face value, none of these companies has anything like the amount of money that their cultural prominence would suggest. Instead, they're heavily fueled by investment dollars, money given by super-rich people and institutions in the expectation that fueling the growth of the company now will pay off with interest later.

So what changed?

I'm not an expert here, but I'll do my best to muddle through. The American Federal Reserve has one mandate that dominates all others (sometimes called the 'dual mandate'), and one primary tool that it uses to enforce that mandate. The goal is to maintain low (but nonzero) rates of inflation and unemployment, which in their models are deeply interlinked phenomena. The tool is 'rate hikes', or more specifically, tweaking the mandatory rate of interest that banks charge one another when making loans.

As a particular consequence of this, hiking the rate also means that bonds start paying out much better. When the rate hike goes through, that affects people who let the government borrow their personal cash- that is, people who buy bonds- as well as institutions like banks that lend to one another. A rate hike means that you, personally, can make a little extra money by letting the government borrow it for a while. The federal government of the US is a rock-solid low-risk choice for this kind of moneymaking scheme, so the federal interest rate sort of defines the 'number to beat'; to attract investors, a company has to give those investors money at a better percentage than whatever the feds are offering. Particularly since a company is a lot more likely to go out of business than the state!

To wrap this back around to the Pictures Of Cats industry: the higher the rate hike, the better your company needs to be doing (or the less risky it needs to be as an option) to attract big investment dollars. Very high rates make it very hard to convince people to invest in business activity rather than the government itself, and very low rates put moonshots and big dreams on the table, investment-wise, in a way that wouldn't otherwise be possible. Social media companies were one of these big dreams.

In the great financial crisis of 2008, the Fed took the dramatic step of reducing their rate to zero, trying to juice the economy back to life. And ever since then, they've kept it there. This has produced an unprecedented amount of funding for very crazy stuff; it's part of what has allowed so many weird new tech companies (Uber, streaming services, etc.) to get so much money, so quickly, and use that to grow to massive size without a clear model of how they're ever going to make money. This state of affairs kept going for quite a while, with no clear stopping point; that zero-interest environment has been one of the shadowy forces in the background that shaped fundamental contours and limits in how our Very Online World has grown and developed. Until COVID.

Or rather, the bounce back from COVID: we suddenly saw a massive spike in inflation and an incredibly strong labor market, as employees quit in record numbers, negotiated higher salaries, and found better work, and at the same time supply chain issues and other economy stuff caused prices to climb dramatically. Recall the Fed's 'dual mandate', to control the employment rate and inflation. This was, basically, kicking them right in the jooblies. They responded in kind, finally finally raising their rates for the first time in 15 years. For some of the people reading this, it'll be the first significant shift in their entire adult lives.

The goal, as I understand it, is to fight inflation by reducing the amount of outside investment into private companies, forcing them to hire fewer people and pay smaller salaries, ultimately drawing money out of the working economy and driving prices back down by lowering demand for everything. You get paid less, so you eat out less, and buy at cheaper restaurants when you do, so restaurants have to compete harder by lowering their prices; seems pretty dodgy to me as a theory, but it's the theory. And the first part will almost certainly work- companies are going to see less investment.

For social media companies that are still paying most of their salaries with investor dollars instead of revenues, this is especially catastrophic. Without outside investment, they're just a massive pile of expenses waiting to happen, huge yearly costs in developer salaries and server fees. This is why, all of a sudden, every social media company is suddenly making bonkers decisions. They're noticing that nobody wants to give them any more money! So they're trying to figure out how to live a lot more cheaply, to actually somehow for reals turn their giant userbases in to some kind of actual revenue stream, or both.

Tumblr is kind of the ur-example of this kind of thing, supporting a very large userbase with no coherent plan whatsoever to start paying its staff with our dollars instead of investors' dollars. When interest rates were low and Scrooge McDuck had nowhere else to hide his pile of gold coins, a crazy kid with a dream was the best alternative available to him. But now, unless something changes, he's going to notice he can just buy bonds instead, and that crazy kid can go take a hike.

That's why I think Tumblr is living on borrowed time, though I don't know how much. Like all cartoons, the economy doesn't really fall off a cliff until somebody looks down and notices they've been standing on thin air this whole time. But they always fall eventually; that's the gag.

[zvaigzdelasas]

Israeli tanks, jets and bulldozers bombarding Gaza and razing homes in the occupied West Bank are being fueled by a growing number of countries signed up to the genocide and Geneva conventions, new research suggests, which legal experts warn could make them complicit in serious crimes against the Palestinian people.

Four tankers of American jet fuel primarily used for military aircraft have been shipped to Israel since the start of its aerial bombardment of Gaza in October.

Three shipments departed from Texas after the landmark international court of justice (ICJ) ruling on 26 January ordered Israel to prevent genocidal acts in Gaza. The ruling reminded states that under the genocide convention they have a “common interest to ensure the prevention, suppression and punishment of genocide”.

Overall, almost 80% of the jet fuel, diesel and other refined petroleum products supplied to Israel by the US over the past nine months was shipped after the January ruling, according to the new research commissioned by the non-profit Oil Change International and shared exclusively with the Guardian.

Researchers analyzed shipping logs, satellite images and other open-source industry data to track 65 oil and fuel shipments to Israel between 21 October last year and 12 July.

It suggests a handful of countries – Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Gabon, Nigeria, Brazil and most recently the Republic of the Congo and Italy – have supplied 4.1m tons of crude oil to Israel, with almost half shipped since the ICJ ruling. An estimated two-thirds of crude came from investor-owned and private oil companies, according to the research, which is refined by Israel for domestic, industrial and military use.

Israel relies heavily on crude oil and refined petroleum imports to run its large fleet of fighter jets, tanks and other military vehicles and operations, as well as the bulldozers implicated in clearing Palestinian homes and olive groves to make way for unlawful Israeli settlements.

In response to the new findings, UN and other international law experts called for an energy embargo to prevent further human rights violations against the Palestinian people – and an investigation into any oil and fuels shipped to Israel that have been used to aid acts of alleged genocide and other serious international crimes.

“After the 26 January ICJ ruling, states cannot claim they did not know what they were risking to partake in,” said Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, adding that under international law, states have obligations to prevent genocide and respect and ensure respect for the Geneva conventions.[...]

“In the case of the US jet-fuel shipments, there are serious grounds to believe that there is a breach of the genocide convention for failure to prevent and disavowal of the ICJ January ruling and provisional measures,” said Albanese. “Other countries supplying oil and other fuels absolutely also warrant further investigation.”

In early August, a tanker delivered an estimated 300,000 barrels of US jet fuel to Israel after being unable to dock in Spain or Gibraltar amid mounting protests and warnings from international legal experts. Days later, more than 50 groups wrote to the Greek government calling for a war-crimes investigation after satellite images showed the vessel in Greek waters.

Last week, the US released $3.5bn to Israel to spend on US-made weapons and military equipment, despite reports from UN human rights experts and other independent investigations that Israeli forces are violating international law in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. A day later, the US approved a further $20bn in weapons sales, including 50 fighter jets, tank ammunition and tactical vehicles.

The sale and transfer of jet fuel – and arms – “increase the ability of Israel, the occupying power, to commit serious violations”, according to the UN human rights council resolution in March.

The US is the biggest supplier of fuel and weapons to Israel. Its policy was unchanged by the ICJ ruling, according to the White House.

“The case for the US’s complicity in genocide is very strong,” aid Dr Shahd Hammouri, lecturer in international law at the University of Kent and the author of Shipments of Death. “It’s providing material support, without which the genocide and other illegalities are not possible. The question of complicity for the other countries will rely on assessment of how substantial their material support has been.”[...]

A spokesperson for the Brazilian president’s office said oil and fuel trades were carried out directly by the private sector according to market rules: “Although the government’s stance on Israel’s current military action in Gaza is well known, Brazil’s traditional position on sanctions is to not apply or support them unilaterally.

Azerbaijan, the largest supplier of crude to Israel since October, will host the 29th UN climate summit in November, followed by Brazil in 2025.[...]

The Biden administration did not respond to requests for comment, nor did Vice-President Kamala Harris’s presidential election campaign team.

Israel is a small country with a relatively large army and air force. It has no operational cross-border fossil fuel pipelines, and relies heavily on maritime imports.[...]

The new data suggests:

•Half the crude oil in this period came from Azerbaijan (28%) and Kazakhstan (22%). Azeri crude is delivered via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, majority-owned and operated by BP. The crude oil is loaded on to tankers at the Turkish port of Ceyhan for delivery to Israel. Turkey recently submitted a formal bid to join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ.

•African countries supplied 37% of the total crude, with 22% coming from Gabon, 9% from Nigeria and 6% from the Republic of the Congo.

•In Europe, companies in Italy, Greece and Albania appear to have supplied refined petroleum products to Israel since the ICJ ruling. Last month, Israel also received crude from Italy – a major oil importer. A spokesperson said the Italian government had “no information” about the recent shipments.

•Cyprus provided transshipment services to tankers supplying crude oil from Gabon, Nigeria, and Kazakhstan.[...]

Just six major international fossil-fuel companies – BP, Chevron, Eni, ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies – could be linked to 35% of the crude oil supplied to Israel since October, the OCI analysis suggests. This is based on direct stakes in oilfields supplying Israeli and/or the companies’ shares in production nationally.[...]

Last week, Colombia suspended coal exports to Israel “to prevent and stop acts of genocide against the Palestinian people”, according to the decree signed by President Gustavo Petro. Petro wrote on X: “With Colombian coal they make bombs to kill the children of Palestine.”

20 Aug 24

[opinioncore]

* ੈ✩‧₊˚— VICTIMs HOLD GRUDGES

— getting to know your friends! And enemies! And faculties! And students!

⸝⸝୭ ˚. ᵎᵎ — possessive and obsessive tendencies (yandere things), bullying, incest (not to you), OOC, manipulation, power imbalance (they're all rich and you're poor, or teacher and stuff) assault, you/your and they/them but AFAB reader, animal death (on Kabukimono's part only), OC mentions, mentions of death, choking (on Scaramouche's part only).

ᝰ.ᐟ — part 1 - reader x genshin cast

-–———————————————–-

Tartaglia/Ajax — The older brother of Patrina and Xiao. Zhongli always brought him to business meetings and these meetings are with foreigners, specifically Russian foreigners, since he was a child. He is a child of a different mother, a mother with ginger hair and blue eyes. He's a sporty kid in school, one of the most known representatives in sports whenever the school participates in competitions.

"Did you come to see me?" He asks, you shake your head, "I came here for Patrina, where is she?" You asked and looked around, he laughed, but it didn't sound happy at all, he placed an arm on your shoulder and pulled you close, not caring that he's sweaty, "I'm hurt, you came here looking for someone like her and not me? We gotta fix that, we're 'friends' remember?"

he doesn't really like how the word friend rolls on his tongue.

Xiao — The youngest brother of both Patrina and Tartaglia. He's the one closest to his father — Zhongli — the most. Xiao feels like he's indebted to Zhongli the most because unlike his siblings, he never knew he had a mother, and Zhongli raised him by himself, no nanny or whatsoever, Patrina helped a little to that. He's in that little infamous group — 5WIRL —known for making the teachers live a living hell, he doesn't really do much and just follows what Venti does.

"You're a clumsy person, you know that?" He says, trying really hard to bandage your sprained ankle, that he caused. "This was your fault you know?" You snort, he doesn't really answer, but you're getting irritated at how he can't bandage your ankle properly at all. "I'll just go get Dr. Baizhu to do it in the infirmary—" and you let out a pained gasp, he just tightened the bandage on your sprained ankle, "No. I'll do it."

he doesn't really like how Baizhu looks at you.

Zhongli — The father of Tartaglia, Patrina, and Xiao. Owns the biggest, wealthiest, powerful and most successful company out there. Would do anything he could to spend time with his children despite his very tight schedule, like taking Tartaglia to meetings, studying with Patrina, and raising Xiao. He used to be a student in Teyvat Academy and is now the biggest investor that funds the company.

"It feels like you aren't glad to see me at all. Why's that, I wonder?" He asks as he drinks his tea that's probably more expensive than your entire house and furniture and food all together. He isn't dumb, he knows why you're so unfriendly, but he's the one paying your therapy to help your mental state after seeing your friend die, you really should be more grateful. He doesn't hear you speak, not even glancing at him. "You're quite the troublemaker, no?" He stated.

he doesn't really like how hostile your eyes look.

─── ᯓᡣ𐭩 ───

Kabukimono — The oldest out of the triplets by 5 minutes, but he really acts more of the youngest out of all of them. Was at first supposed to be the heir of the company his mother owns but she soon deems him unworthy (his words), and now he seeks attention from Amaya instead. He doesn't really do the same bad things his other brothers do, his just more clingy and obsessive than an average sibling. He's one of the most innocent and least sane people in the Academy (at least that's what they think).

"Please, have this.." he hands you something, it has a little flower with it.. and the main thing was a dead sparrow. He looks away with a flushed face while you look at it in horror. He fiddles his fingers, "I really love you. It brings me comfort that you don't make me feel less or worthless." It would've been very romantic if it weren't for the dead sparrow in your hands.

he really loves how he never feels left out when he's with you.

Scaramouche — He's next to Kabukimono, he was named Kunikuzushi but he doesn't want to be called that and prefers to be called Scaramouche. He also was supposed to be the heir, but his mother deemed him unworthy too (his words), so he grows to hate, feel insecure and finds comfort when he sees others as unworthy, just like him back then, he refuses to believe that. And thinks he's above everybody when somewhere in his heart, he feels unworthy. He uses Amaya as a way to release his frustrations, whether physically or emotionally or sexually, it doesn't matter. He's also in that little infamous group — 5WIRL —known for making the teachers live a living hell, and he is the worst out of the group, he doesn't wanna follow Venti at all but finds his ideas amusing enough to follow, students fear him, like a lot.

"Tell me. Where did you get this necklace from?" He asks you, holding out the necklace your friend - Nanako - gave you, "And why should I tell you that?" You spoke, defiant, not wanting to tell him anything, what if he was the one who actually killed your friend? It won't be long until he goes after you next if he finds out then. He scoffs, "Stupid... You're just really stupid aren't you?" He pushes you on the ground and gets on top of you. "Let's make something similar then, hmm? Something matching, and on our necks." And you feel something wrap around your neck, and as if on instinct, you wrap your hand around his.

he really loves the look in your eyes whenever you face him.

Wanderer — the youngest out of the triplets, yet more mature than the both of them, he was never meant to be an heir and never cared about it, was just heavily influenced by Scaramouche as a kid but soon grew to be more mature than him. He isn't as bad as Scaramouche when it comes to Amaya but isn't as good as Kabukimono though. He's also in that little infamous group — 5WIRL — known for making the teachers live a living hell, and he is like Xiao, just doing what Venti does, he isn't really with them all the time, just by himself.

"You're putting yourself in danger by talking to me, y'know that, don't you?" He scoffs, you don't even want to talk to him at all, you just want to ask where Amaya is, "I.. where is Amaya?" You asked, and he clicked his tongue in annoyance, should've expected that, "Amaya this, Amaya that," he pulls your face closer to him by your face, "Why not ask me things about me, or yourself instead? I'm tired of getting asked about Amaya."

he really loves how you would call out to him by his name.

-–———————————————–-

⋆⭒˚｡⋆ part 1!! Yippie!! I wanna add more but like, nahh let's keep it to them instead, maybe I should do doodles too?

[evilscientist3]

I gotta say, the Dow rising 2000 points after the Trump win really highlights how useless the stock market is at value estimation. Some theorise that the best way to accurately predict things is using a prediction market - an exchange where people can stake something on some prospective outcome occurring, with a reward if they're correct. The idea is that the predictions of many will, when they're serious enough to put money on, be correct on average - sort of like how you can get an accurate answer for those "guess the number of beans in the jar" competitions by finding the average of everyone else's guesses (though the village fair officials have learned to throw me out if they find me with my notebook out in earshot of the stand). Roughly speaking, the stock market works a bit like this - there's heavy convolution stemming from the fact that you're really guessing that a company's *perceived* worth will go up, but in the grand scheme of things the goal is to choose companies whose economic output will grow.

Trump's proposed heavy tariffs that would gut US trade. Businesses are freaking out and running damage control already, it seems - I've seen people talking about companies cutting Christmas bonuses to rush-import equipment. Everyone but investors are bracing themselves to go over an economic cliff. So how come Wall Street isn't picking up on the message? It could be that the current short-lived surge in trade is pushing numbers up - but for the most part, it's probably that your average investor is stupid and racist enough that Trump in power means more to them about the state of the economy than any actual knowledge ever could. Meaning, of course, that like in 2008, the whole market will collapse like a mistreated soufflé when people start trying to cash cheques.

I hope the tariffs happen. I want to see America dissolve

[markmaupin-realestate]

Hard Money for Investors by Hard Money Guy Lee Anthony / For Investors i...

[randomshyperson]

Mess is Mine - Milf!Wanda Maximoff x Reader

Summary: Being divorced from Wanda Maximoff implies never getting over her.

Warnings: (+18), language, brief smut, divorced ladies who are very still much in love with each other, unspecified age gap, marriage going wrong, hopeful ending, mild angst, fluff.| Words: 3.949k.

A/N-> There's this divorced couple in a Brazilian soap opera with so much chemistry in their scenes together because of the intimacy gained during marriage (even though that didn't work out) and they won't leave my tik tok ; at some point, my brain thought about this fic. I would love to write more of this trope in the future.

General Masterlist | AO3 | Wattpad

--//--

Wanda had a persistent migraine, and the pile of work in front of her was not helping.

Still, all her stubborn brain could focus on instead of her real job was the stupid headline of the gossip magazine on her desk.

A cheap and badly angled photo of her ex-wife with colorful captions that read 'The newest business killer couple?" and dozens more insinuations about a secret high-society romance made her stomach churn.

Wanda tried not to be affected by the gossip, but you looked so happy in the photo that she couldn't help it.

The sudden opening of her door made Wanda jump in her seat, in one quick pull close the magazine and sigh with relief when she saw it was only Natasha.

"Why are you here?" Her long-time friend and co-worker asked. Wanda frowned in confusion.

"It's still my company..."

Nat rolled her eyes, walking into the office and taking long strides to her desk. "I meant in here, smarty-pants. The event is starting in an hour, the staff wanted some words of encouragement or something."

Wanda sighed wearily, massaging her forehead with one hand. "Can't you do that for me, Nat? I gotta make some calls."

Nat hummed in agreement, but her gaze caught the closed magazine on the table and she raised a brow at her friend. "One of those calls includes your ex-wife, I suppose."

Wanda chuckled dryly, taking the magazine out to one of the drawers and adjusting herself to reach the desk phone. "There's nothing else for me to say to her."

Her friend hid a smile that said that she didn't believe this one bit. "Okay, whatever you say. See you later, boss."

Wanda waved goodbye, with the phone to her ear. Her immediate instinct was to dial known numbers but she shook her head to push that ridiculous idea away and went back to work.

Several hours after the peak of the event when the company was filled with guests, from potential clients to journalists looking for any news like vultures at the carrion, Wanda was at her second glass of champagne, trying to keep the rest of her patience intact after having answered so many questions for gossip magazines regarding the headline from earlier in the day.

She absolutely did not want to discuss a possible romance between her ex-wife and the heiress of Bishop Industries. 

Years before, any of them would have been afraid to question her about something so ridiculous, but that was before you came along. And melted your way into the Business Ice Queen, the untouchable Wanda Maximoff, or whatever insensitive nickname they invented about her back then. Before breaking down all of Wanda's walls, making her a better person, and of course, before you left her.

It was definitely the alcohol's fault that she was thinking about this, and with these stupid tears welling up in her eyes. Wanda swallowed all the emotion, burying it deep and making sure that no one had noticed her broken expression. With an excuse to a group of investors who were boring her into a corner, she retreated to an area far away from the company's outdoor gardens, taking a deep breath to calm herself. The beautiful view of the state lake was most welcome.

So of course the reason for her almost minor breakdown had to show up wearing her favorite suit.

"Are you running away from your guests, Maximoff?" Your tone was casual, the smile provocative. She snorted to herself, crossing her arms and keeping her eyes on the lake. You didn't mind, walking over to her at a slow pace until you were beside her on the edge. 

"I just needed some air." She merely replies. With one hand in your pockets, you adjust your own hair, and Wanda hates that she can smell the shampoo, her body betraying her and shuddering as if your scent were addictive. 

"You're avoiding me today." You comment lightheartedly, studying her face. "I arrived an hour ago and it took me almost all this time to find you."

Wanda forced a smile, finally facing you back, but her angry look made you hesitate. "I thought your chaperone was keeping you busy."

You glanced back at the party, stealing a quick check on Kate at the food stand, chatting with a blonde girl, before turning your attention back to Wanda.

"I forgot how hot you get when you're jealous."

Wanda huffs away, her cheeks burning which she tries to hide by staring at the lake. "Don't even start." She warns between teeth. 

You chuckle, rolling your eyes, but don't insist. You turn your attention to the lake as well. "I wanted to let you know that the boys have already arrived in King Cross. I spoke to them and Charles on the phone."

"I know, Pietro texted me." She retorts more harshly than she meant to and bites the inside of her cheek as she sees you lower your head in upset. With a sigh, she mumbles, "I meant, thanks for letting me know."

You smile, nodding before turning your gaze back to the party. "What do you think of Miss Bishop?" 

Wanda locks her jaw; How dare you honestly. A list of curses lays ready on the tip of her tongue, but she remembers where you two are, and takes a deep breath. You were clearly trying for some kind of reaction from her, and she's not going to let you have this victory today.

"She's beautiful." Wanda replies. "As young as you were when I met you."

You chuckle shortly, raising an eyebrow at her. "What are you implying, Maximoff?"

Wanda shrugs her shoulders softly, turning to leave. "You're quite clever, Y/N, I'm sure you follow." She hits back, but you step forward into her path. You are suddenly too close, and Wanda finds herself holding her breath. She needs to take a step back to avoid stopping breathing for good.

Your eyes stare into theirs. "Not that this is any of your business, darling, but my relationship with Kate is strictly professional."

You assure her in a low tone, and Wanda swallows hard as your gaze moves down to her lips for a long moment before focusing on her eyes again. A smile forms on your mouth next. "Besides this, I've always had a thing for older women."

Wanda sighs heavily, using all her mental control to pull away at once. "Go pay attention to your chaperone, Y/N. Especially if she's a potential client."

You roll your eyes at the business tip; you already know them by heart, the vast majority learned from Wanda. And your ex-wife makes mention of leaving, so you slide your hand down her forearm gently, taking some amusement in seeing the way she shivers.

"I wanted to talk to you about something, Wanda." You let her know, with a serious tone but a tender look. The redhead swallows dryly at the closeness of your faces now that you're standing side by side, your hands connected. "Later, after the party, okay?"

"I-I..."

"It's important." You assure her, knowing her hesitation is so as not to break your agreement about relapses. With a gentle expression, you insist, "Please, it won't take more than five minutes."

She licks her lips, and you almost kiss her. Lucky for her she agrees and walks away because God knows you would have done it, right there in that garden for all the New York reporters to have a week's news about.

Without Wanda's perfume around you, you take a deep breath and try to clear your mind, having to wait a few more minutes in the garden for your heart to stop beating so fast.

As the event nears its end and Wanda needs to give a closing speech, you say goodbye to Kate before the parking area. You ignore all the journalists who try to insinuate something about you having taken the girl to the car and exchange a glance with Wanda in the small crowd before moving toward the elevator.

Wanda has always known you so well, and with a nod, she knows exactly where she has to go.

Her work floor is completely deserted as she makes her way to her own office. But she still closes the door as she enters, letting out a tired laugh at your figure sitting on her armchair.

Her smile fades when she sees what you are reading.

"Headlines nowadays are getting creative..." You wryly chuckle, laughing at your ex-wife's caught expression. "It says here that I might have an eye to the Bishop's fortune. How silly, you gave me almost half of yours in the divorce, why would I need more money?"

"Very funny." Wanda dryly retorts, reaching up to snatch the magazine from your hands with a tug, and raking the item into the trash afterward. She crosses her arms as she looks at you. "What did you want to tell me?"

You flashed a small, sideways smile. "You used to be more polite when you wanted to sleep with me. At least offer me a drink."

Wanda chuckled dryly, rolling her eyes and begrudgingly moving to the personal bar in the corner of the room. If she leaned over more than necessary to grab one of the whiskey bottles, aware that the position in the chair gave you a full view of her ass, neither of you said anything about it. She hid her satisfied smile as she heard your breath hitch at the image, and you hid your own reaction as you cleared your throat and looked away.

Shortly thereafter, two shots of whiskey were served on the glass table in front of you. But before the toast, you declared:

"I'm leaving."

Wanda frowned, and when you made mention of taking the glass, she placed her hand on your forearm. "Speak."

You chuckled, staring her in the eyes. "I closed a contract with the Ten Rings folks. They want me in Korea for the next four months."

Wanda lets go of your arm as if she had been burned and steps away from the table with an indecipherable, but very disturbed expression.

"B-but the boys.." She tries to formulate, but you rise from the armchair with a sigh.

"They'll be at school." You retort, even though firm, your gaze is almost pleading. For what, Wanda doesn't have the heart to wonder. "It's not as if they stay with us all the time, Wands. The boarding school takes up this time quite well. It will only be four months, and they've already invented the telephone and internet, you know?" You try to joke, but Wanda hugs her own body and faces you.

"Why are you here, then? You've traveled before."

"Not for that long." You say, taking steps toward her, and mentally thanking heavens that she doesn't pull away. "And not... not since we made the divorce official."

"Y/N..."

"I know, I know." You murmur with a sad smile, raising your hands to her arms uncovered by her dress. "Maybe it's stupid, but I wanted to make sure we're okay. That it won't be something...I don't know, that hurts us."

"More than a divorce? I find that difficult." She replies with restrained emotion in her husky voice. You sigh.

"Wanda..."

"No, you're right. It was stupid." She cuts off, pulling away so you don't see the tears welling up in her eyes. "Of course it's okay. But I appreciate that you respect the concept of shared custody. I imagine the kids already know?"

"Yes, I told them before I took them to the airport." You mutter upset, watching Wanda walk away to the window. "But Wands, I wanted to tell you in person..."

"And why is that, huh?" she retorts with an impatience that makes you flinch. And for this, Wanda loses it for good. "You know, I don't understand you! You left me! You filed for divorce, you wanted to break us up. But you keep showing up here, and at home, and everywhere, and now you want to come here and say you care-"

"I care, Wa-"

"Then why did you leave me?" she shouts back, almost regretting it when she sees the tears in your eyes. You laugh tearfully, shaking your head.

"We've had this conversation dozens of times, Wan." You say, much calmer than she is. "But you just can't accept that you're wrong, can you?"

"Right, I forgot that I'm the villain in your story." She sneers, wiping her face with the back of her hand. You give another sad laugh.

"I wish it were that simple, darling." You tell her, taking slow steps toward her. "If you were just the villain, the bad wife, the evil boss, everything would be easier. I could hate you, curse your names to all my friends, and spend all the divorce money on expensive, empty things out there, but it's not like that. You forget the part that I love you and tried to fight for us until the last second."

Wanda sobs quietly, looking down at the floor, "Don't do that, Y/N."

"But it's true, baby, you know. I'm not the one who broke any promises, Wands. I just got tired of begging for crumbs of attention from the person who swore to spend the rest of her days with me."

Wanda lifts her chin, and the determination in her gaze doesn't do justice to the tears. "You knew how much my career meant when you said yes."

You smile sadly, taking one last step to get close enough to hold her face. Wanda shudders as you wipe away her tears, as you have done so many times before, as if no time has passed and everything was fine.

"I am so proud of you, Wands, for all you have accomplished with your work. I only wish I had been as important as this building." 

You place a long kiss on her forehead, pulling away afterward. You offer her one last sad smile before closing the door on your way out. Wanda starts to cry as soon as you have done so, even though she tries very hard to keep her tears away.

–//–

You burned a pancake to answer the door, but all the irritation over the ruined dish vanished when you saw Wanda standing in front of you.

It had only been a few days since you had last seen her, and now all the furniture in your apartment was already packed away and covered with rags, prepared for the time you would be away. Wanda's party dress gave way to a casual suit that made you swallow dryly and become self-conscious of the sweatpants and sports top you were wearing. Wanda wouldn't have picked anything better.

"Are you going to let me in, detka?" Wanda asked with some teasing for your moment of shock. You immediately recovered, making room for her to enter and closing the door once she was in the hall. "Sorry for disturbing your breakfast. I wanted to see you before your flight."

"Oh, don't worry about it. And I'm not going until the afternoon." You clarified somewhat clumsily by her presence, one hand still holding a spatula and the other adjusting your hair. "I made pancakes if you'd like..."

"I would love it." Wanda assured with a smile that made your stomach twist. It wasn't fair that your ex-wife got more beautiful every time you looked at her, honestly.

Wanda followed you back into the kitchen, and to both your surprise, you fell into a light conversation about work and the boys while preparing and serving food, completely different from the tone of the conversation the last time you had seen each other. 

But it was a time bomb, of course, so you weren't surprised when Wanda suddenly bit her lip, assuming a more tense posture. 

Finishing chewing your pancakes, you asked:

"Why are you here, sweetheart?" 

Wanda raised her eyes to you, and you stared back at her, patiently for her to clarify. 

"I wanted to say goodbye to you properly." She said, spinning her own stool around first before tipping her hands around yours to spin you toward her. You raise a brow in curiosity, but the question of what she was doing dies in your throat as she leans in and brings your lips together. 

It has been exactly three months, eighteen days, and sixteen hours since you last kissed Wanda, and you only realize how much you missed the feeling when she does it again. It's as intoxicating as it is overwhelming, and you gasp into her lips, breaking the kiss at once as you stand up, taking good steps away from the countertop.

"Wanda, we talked about this." You remind her in a husky voice, pressing a hand over your face. It's ridiculous how much your skin is burning and your heart is racing for something that lasted less than three seconds. "No relapses. You promised-"

"It's not a relapse." She assured, reaching up and grabbing your hands to place them around her waist. You grunted at the sensation, closing your eyes as Wanda slipped hers over your shoulders, too close for you to think about anything other than her. "It's a parting gift. So you'll have a reason to come back."

"W-what...?"

Wanda presses closer and brings her mouth to your ear. "Just stop overthinking it and accept the gift, detka."

With encouragement, she bites the lobe of your ear, and you give up resisting.

With a tug on her waist, you bring your mouths together in a kiss much hungrier and more passionate than the first, which elicits loud, almost primal moans of need from both of you. Wanda pushes and pulls, and by the time you stumble to the back of the living room couch, your pants are already open and there's nothing covering your torso; much like the woman in front of you, who as soon as she throws you sitting up against the cushions, your breathing out of rhythm and your lips swollen from kissing hard, makes a show of removing the rest of her clothes.

She has time to smile mischievously at your look of pure adoration at her completely naked body in front of you before you pull her onto your lap by her thighs. Wanda climbs on you with a needy grunt, burning from the inside out in anticipation for you to touch her again.

Your touches are almost desperate, your kisses mark her skin. It is your gift, but you also seem determined to make sure that Wanda has the memory of this morning for quite some time. 

When your mouth closes around her nipples, she whimpers to the ceiling, arching her back and steadying her hands in your hair, a soft plea that you not stop.

"Yes, baby, just like that." She encourages over the stimulation on her nipples, breaking into an excited whimper when you simply use your free hand to masturbate her. At any other time, you would have taken your time to work her up until she was begging for your touch, but now, in the urgency you two were sharing, it wasn't necessary. She was ready for you. 

Your fingers penetrate her without delay, and Wanda digs her nails into your shoulder, breaking into a breathless moan. You give one last hickey on her hardened nipple before you move your face back up to hers, kissing her with intensity as your fingers dance inside her walls with the mastery of one who has done this a dozen times, one who knows her like the palm of the hand she so deliberately grinds against in the intention of relieving herself.

"G-god, detka! Right here!" She breaks the kiss into an affected moan, practically meowing as you repeatedly hit that sensitive spot inside her. The wetness grows in your palm, Wanda oozes into you, and to help her, you bring your free hand to her hip, coordinating her movements as she begins to fail. "I-I'm going to..."

"Don't talk, show." You interrupt her with a proud little smile, moving your mouth down to bite the sensitive spots on her neck. "Come to me, baby, I've got you."

That's all she needs to reach the first climax of the morning, and she is not surprised that you don't stop at the first. Or the second, or the third.

You are on your knees on the living room floor when your first alarm goes off. Breathing as out of breath as Wanda, on the couch with her torso exposed and her legs spread from which you against your will need to remove your face to turn off the alarm when you pull away.

She covers herself when you disappear to the kitchen because she knows it's because of the flight, and when you return, the cell phone goes on the coffee table and you sit on the floor next to her on the couch. 

There is a long silent pause, where only your breaths can be heard. Wanda skirts a hickey on her own thigh and you sigh.

"We shouldn't have..." But you can't complete, it because your voice fails you as if you are going to start crying. You look away, and Wanda lets herself fall to your side on the floor, where she reaches for your hand.

"Detka, look at me." She asks, and you have to wait a moment until you sniffle and do so with difficulty.

"I told you it hurts me, Wands. I can't-" You take a deep breath. "I can't heal if this keeps happening. There’s no getting over you if we keep doing this”

She shakes her head. "I don't want you to get over me." She says and you huff, trying to pull her hand away, but Wanda squeezes. "I love you, you know I do."

"Love is not enough." You retort bitterly, your eyes filled with tears. "Loving me doesn't mean you won't hurt me. Nor that you won't ignore me. Those are just words, Wanda. I haven't felt loved by you in a long time."

She releases your hand from the shock of your words, and watches you create a physical distance between you as you walk away. You slip away to the bedroom, muttering that you need to get ready for the flight, and she tries to make a decision the whole time you are in the shower.

When you return to the room, wearing a set of travel clothes, Wanda is wearing your sweatpants and her own dress shirt. Your chest aches to see her wearing your clothes again.

"Wanda, you'd better go, my flight-"

"I love you, detka." She cuts you off with eyes bright with determination as she stares at you. You swallow dry, but can't resist when Wanda reaches up to touch your face. "I will make sure you know it. You'll know it so deeply that you'll be able to feel it in your bones. And you'll never doubt it again."

You sniffle lightly. "Wanda..."

"Don't worry about it now, detka." She interrupts you more gently, caressing your face. "Have a great trip. I'll be here when you come back home."

You sigh, and Wanda doesn't let you say anything more, kissing you in a calmer, but somehow much more intense way than before. 

She leaves the apartment before you, with a wink and a request that you call the boys before and after the flight. 

And even before she gets to the first floor, Wanda has already texted Natasha about her early retirement procedure after her well-deserved family vacation.

[fatehbaz]

"The most fashionable bathing station in all Europe". British industrialists and American mining investors plotting the colonization of the Congo, while mingling at Ostend's seaside vacation resorts. Extracting African life to build European railways, hotels, palaces, suburbs, and other modern(ist) infrastructure. "Towards infinity!"

---

In 1885, King Leopold II achieved an astonishing and improbable goal: he claimed a vast new realm of his own devising, a conjury on a map called [...] the Congo Free State. [...] [A] fictional state owned by the king, ruled by decree, and run from Brussels from 1885 to 1908. [...] This was [...] a private entrepreneurial venture [for the king]. The abundance of ivory, timber, and wild rubber found in this enormous territory brought sudden and spectacular profits to Belgium, the king, and a web of interlocking concession companies. The frenzy to amass these precious resources unleashed a regime of forced labor, violence [millions of deaths], and unchecked atrocities for Congolese people. These same two and a half decades of contact with the Congo Free State remade Belgium [...] into a global powerhouse, vitalized by an economic boom, architectural burst, and imperial surge.

Congo profits supplied King Leopold II with funds for a series of monumental building projects [...]. Indeed, Belgian Art Nouveau exploded after 1895, created from Congolese raw materials and inspired by Congolese motifs. Contemporaries called it “Style Congo,” [...]. The inventory of this royal architecture is astonishing [...]. [H]istorical research [...] recovers Leopold’s formative ideas of architecture as power, his unrelenting efforts to implement them [...]. King Leopold II harbored lifelong ambitions to “embellish” and beautify the nation [...]. [W]ith his personal treasury flush with Congo revenue, [...] Leopold - now the Roi Batisseur ("Builder King") he long aimed to be - planned renovations explicitly designed to outdo Louis XIV's Versailles. Enormous greenhouses contained flora from every corner of the globe, with a dedicated soaring structure completed specifically to house the oversize palms of the Congolese jungles. [...]

---

The Tervuren Congo palace [...]. Electric tramways were built and a wide swath of avenue emerged. [...] [In and around Brussels] real estate developers began to break up lots [...] for suburban mansions and gardens. Between 1902 and 1910, new neighborhoods with luxury homes appeared along the Avenue [...]. By 1892, Antwerp was not only the port of call for trade but also the headquarters of the most profitable of an interlinking set of banks and Congo investment companies [...]. As Antwerp in the 1890s became once again the “Queen of the Scheldt,” the city was also the home of what was referred to as the “Queen of Congo companies.” This was the ABIR, or Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company, founded in 1892 with funds from British businessman “Colonel” John Thomas North [...].

Set on the seaside coast, Belgium’s Ostend was the third imperial cityscape to be remade by King Leopold [...] [in a] transformation [that] was concentrated between 1899 and 1905 [...]. Ostend encompassed a boomtown not of harbor and trade, like Antwerp, but of beachfront and leisure [...] [developed] as a "British-style" seaside resort. [...] Leopold [...] [w]as said to spend "as much time in Ostend as he did in Brussels," [...]. Ostend underwent a dramatic population expansion in a short period, tripling its inhabitants from 1870–1900. [...] Networks of steamers, trams, and railway lines coordinated to bring seasonal visitors in, and hotels and paved walkways were completed. [...] [A]nd Leopold’s favorite spot, the 1883 state-of-the-art racetracks, the Wellington Hippodrome. Referred to with an eye-wink as “the king incognito” (generating an entire genre of photography), visitors to the seaside could often see Leopold in his top hat and summer suit [...], riding his customized three-wheeled bicycle [...]. By 1900, Ostend’s expansion and enhancement made it known as “the Queen of the Belgian seaside resorts” and “the most fashionable bathing station in all Europe.” Opulence, convenience, and spectacle brought the Shah of Persia, American tycoons, European aristocrats, and Belgian elites, among others, to Ostend.

---

Leopold’s interventions and the Congo Free State personnel and proceeds played three pivotal and understudied roles in this transformation, all of which involved ABIR [British industrialists].

First, it was at Ostend that an early and decisive action was taken to structure the “red rubber” regime and set it in motion. In 1892, jurists such as [E.P.] had ruled, contravening [...] trade laws, that the king was entitled to claim the Congo as his domanial property [...]. Leopold [...] devised one part of that royal domain as a zone for private company concessions [...] to extract and export wild rubber.

Soon after, in 1892, King Leopold happened to meet the British “Colonel” John Thomas North at the Ostend Hippodrome. North, a Leeds-born mechanic [...] had made a fortune speculating on Chilean nitrates in the 1880s. He owned monopoly shares in nitrate mines and quickly expanded to acquire monopolies in Chilean freight railways, water supplies, and iron and coal mines. By 1890 North was a high-society socialite worth millions [...]. Leopold approached North at the Ostend racecourse to provide the initial investments to set up the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company (ABIR). [...]

---

One visible sign of Ostend’s little-known character as Congo boomtown was the Royal Palace Hotel, a lavish property next to the king’s Royal Domain, which opened in 1899. With hundreds of rooms and a broad sweep of acreage along the beachfront, the palace “occupied the largest space of any hotel in Europe.” [...]

King Leopold met American mining magnate Thomas Walsh there, and as with North, the meeting proved beneficial for his Congo enterprise: Leopold enlisted Walsh to provide assessments of some of his own Congo mining prospects. The hotel was part of [...] [a major European association of leisure profiteers] founded in 1894, that began to bundle luxury tourism and dedicated railway travel, and whose major investors were King Leopold, Colonel North [...].

At the height of Congo expansionism, fin-de-siècle Antwerp embodied an exhilarated launch point [...]. Explorers and expeditioners set sail for Matadi after 1887 with the rallying call “Vers l’infini!” (“towards infinity!”) [...].

---

Text above by: Debora Silverman. "Empire as Architecture: Monumental Cities the Congo Built in Belgium". e-flux Architecture (Appropriations series). May 2024. At: e-flux.com/architecture/appropriations/608151/empire-as-architecture-monumental-cities-the-congo-built-in-belgium/ [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Italicized first paragraph/heading in this post was added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism.]

[dailyadventureprompts]

Expanded universes really are the final frontier of franchise based storytelling aren't they? The ultimate sign that the brand managers have finally squeezed out the artists and twisted things into a state of maximum profitability.

Crossovers and callbacks can be fun, continuous crossovers and callbacks make the story into a slurry. Canon and what if's and reboots all ground up and served in a trough for the undiscerning consumer to mire in. It's bland, it's exhausting, it's pointless.

Big companies and studios are risk averse, and the profit seeking wisdom steers them away from niche works of art and towards wide appeal content. Why risk money on a movie/game that only a fraction of people will love when you can spread that engagement out across a dozen different products that are just good enough to keep people invested in your extended universe, whether from genuine fandom or just cultural fomo?

Marvel feels ubiquitous as Kleenex doesn't it? It's always there in the movie theatre/store, slightly cheaper offbrands right beside it. While individual works within the marvel universe might be genuinely good in their own right their quality is secondary to their purpose in perpetuating the brand and keeping it relevant.

People like familiarity, and if it's a safe bet for you as a consumer to have a pretty okay time in exchange for your hardearned dollars then it's a safe bet for the investors to receive their quarterly returns. It's no mistake that Disney, the company that owns Marvel does most of its business in theme parks: entertainment on an industrial scale. Just like their movies the rides are made to give you and everyone else who bought a ticket a scientifically optimized amount of fun and then move you along so that that the next batch of riders can have an identical experience.

It's value production as efficient as an assembly line or slaughter house, completely atomized and divested of any trace of the individual for the sake of maximum profitability. The figured out a way to sell you your own fandoms like they sell you happymeals, endless iterations of a product just this side of bad but convenient enough that you never need to go without.

I don't blame anyone for liking things, just like I don't blame people for wanting a quick burger in the middle of a long day. Our minds need entertainment just like our body needs calories, and profit seeking conglomerates exploit that need as they always have. What irks me is the fact that even outside of the commercials I feel like I am being sold something, like the movies and games I actually enjoy are being supplanted by feature length billboards that only serve to advertise the next instalment. The desire to find out what happens next is a powerful thing in media, and that desire is being exploited by expanded universes the same way it's exploited by DLC that contains the "true ending".

You can tell it isn't sustainable.. McDonald's is so inflated in price it's competing with actual restaurants, the gaming Industry guts itself with layoffs every quarter, and Disney's competitors are producing entire movies and tv shows only to destroy them for tax befits. The cracks have been showing for a while but I have no idea what shape the landscape is going to take after the dam gives.

[spaghettificationandpretzels]

Aussie Update

Hello dear friends,

For those of you who don't know, Australia had a historic referendum today for "The Voice to Parliament." This referendum was needed to change the Australian constitution so that an advisory body could give the federal government their opinion on matters affecting Indigenous Australians.

For the voice to pass, we need 51% of the country and 4 out of six states, and it's important to know that most referendums fail. The counting started at 6:00PM in every state, with one to go due to daylight savings. However, it has already failed.

This is not the outcome I wanted, but it is the outcome I expected. This referendum failure points to what POC have always known, we have a problem with racism in this country. We also have a huge problem with apathy and ignorance, the main slogan of the no side was "If you don't know, vote no," and people didn't take the time to educate themselves. I had many conversations with people who had no idea about The Voice or what it meant and all their fears were unfounded because of the missinfo campaign.

This didn't happen in a vacuum, the cost of living is insane, rent is unaffordable, and investors are buying up all our houses. This horrible outcome is just another log in a pile that disproportionately affects Indigenous Australians.

All we can do now is acknowledge the hard work and efforts of the Yes campaigners and thank them for what they did for the country. Hug your friends, give some a call if you think they're having a hard time.

13yarn 13 92 76 the Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander crisis support line.

13 11 14 lifeline.

These services may be very busy right now but there are people who are there for you. If someone is at immediate risk, please call 000.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Ticketmaster jacks us for billions so it can pocket millions

NEXT WEEKEND (June 7–9), I'm in AMHERST, NEW YORK to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Corruption is a system of concentrated gains and diffused costs: cheaters make a lot of money, and their victims each lose a little. The cheater has a much larger pool of money to spend on keeping the scam going, and the victims need to pay again to fight the cheater.

Actually, it's worse. The victim pays once when they are cheated, then, they pay a second time (in time and/or money) when they fight back against the cheater.

But in order to fight back effectively, the victims need to band together – it doesn't make sense for one victim to pony up to counter the cheater, because the cheater stole from a lot of people and can therefore spend far more than the victim lost and still come out ahead.

This is the third time the victim pays: they pay the "collective action" tax of locating other victims, agreeing to a common strategy for fighting back, and then coordinating with all those co-victims to keep the campaign up.

But actually, it's even worse. Because most corruption isn't just dishonest, it's incredibly wasteful. Corruption involves stealing ten dollars from you to make a dime for the cheater. The polluter who gives you cancer rather than cleaning up their industrial process costs you millions in medical bills – and maybe costs your family the lifelong trauma and expense of living with your death. They pocket an infinitesimal fraction of those costs. The rest is just wasted. They're setting your house on fire to spare themselves the cost of a match to light their cigar.

This is yet another way in which the deck is stacked in favor of corruption. A victim of corruption is placed in a condition of precarity and misery from which is it difficult to marshal a counteroffensive. The cheater, meanwhile, is made stronger and more comfortable by their corrupt activities. Immiserated victims must undertake the hard, ongoing work of acting together to be effective against the cheater. The cheater answers only to themself, avoiding the collective action costs that the victims pay every time they seek to act.

All of this is why we have governments. A government is (said to be) a democratically accountable way to meet the concentrated power of the corrupt with the concentrated power of the victims of corruption. Governments are many things, but they are especially a way of solving the collective action problem of enforcing the rules against cheaters. This is partially in service to justice – no one likes to be cheated, and a society of rampant and routine cheating is unstable and prone to collapse.

But it's also a matter of efficiency. While it makes a certain kind of selfish sense for the cheater to liquidate our dollar to make their penny, from a societal perspective, it's a catastrophe. Letting Wall Street slumlords corner regional markets in single family dwellings makes large amounts of money for their investors, but it costs those cities unimaginable amounts in public services as their housing stock decays, homelessness spikes, and schools and public services crumble for want of local taxes.

The paltry sums that Flint's creditors extracted by insisting on switching to a chlorinated water-supply that leeched lead out of the city's water infrastructure are crumbs compared to the vast, lifelong costs of giving an all the children in a city lead poisoning, to say nothing of the costs to the city as a city nor forever tainted by this unspeakably evil crime.

This is why inequality – and its handmaiden, monopoly – is so dangerous. The more concentrated private wealth becomes, the harder it is for the state to police, and the more likely it is that this private wealth will corrupt our officials. We see this all around us – for example, when Supreme Court justices receive lavish gifts from billionaires whom they later rule in favor of:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/06/clarence-thomas/#harlan-crow

Through the neoliberal era – the past forty years of billionaire-friendly Reaganomics – we've seen increasing concentration in wealth, coupled to increasing collusion between the wealthy and the government to protect the corrupt against the public. Think of the IRS's long decay, in which it turned a blind eye to increasingly blatant tax evasion by the ultra-wealthy, while training its fire on working people who fudge a few bucks on their returns:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/13/taxes-are-for-the-little-people/#leona-helmsley-2022

Likewise, think of the governmental obsession with "welfare cheats," no matter what the cost to families who are kicked off food stamps and Medicaid:

https://armandalegshow.com/episode/medicaid-enrollment/

All this in the midst of a corporate crime-wave that is not only unpunished, it's utterly unremarked-upon:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/07/solar-panel-for-a-sex-machine/#a-single-proposition

This emphasis on benefits cheating and indifference to corporate crime really highlights the drag that corruption places on a society's efficiency. Even if you believe that there's a lot of welfare fraud (there isn't!), the dollar in "undeserved" food stamps spent by a cheater costs society…a dollar. Meanwhile the dollar that a corporate criminal makes by skimping on workplace safety costs society thousands of dollars to care for the worker who is then maimed on the job.

This is very easy to see in the world of corporate environmental crime. The "social cost of carbon" measures the total cost of pollution: the injuries caused by marinating in fossil fuel extraction, processing and combustion byproducts; as well as the loss of life and property from climate events. These costs are blistering, so high that every MWh of renewable power we bring online saves us $100 in social carbon costs:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/30/posiwid/#social-cost-of-carbon

Governments that sleep on corporate crime are objectively governing badly. That's why the antitrust failures of every US presidential administration from Carter to Trump are so damning: they set the stage for later corruption that would not only be carried out on a larger scale than smaller firms could accomplish, but also for those large firms to corrupt the political process.

This is the Ticketmaster story. The superpredator that is today's Ticketmaster is the end-point of a series of ever-more corrupt mergers, waved through by every-more pliable presidential administrations. It was bad enough when Bush I allowed Ticketmaster to gobble up Ticketron in 1990. After all, the company had already proven itself to be a cesspit of corrupt, bullying activity.

The Ticketron acquisition kicked off a two-decade-long corporate crime-spree that produced a mountain of evidence proving Ticketmaster's nature as an inherently corrupt enterprise that acquired power for the purpose of abusing that power, at the expense of creative workers, the public, and the owners of venues:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pearl-jam-taking-on-ticketmaster-67440/

Despite this, the Obama administration waved through an acquisition that was obviously far more dangerous that the Ticketron caper: the 2010 merger between Ticketmaster and the concert promoter Live Nation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Nation_Entertainment#History

After a decade and a half of vertical monopoly power – Ticketmaster/Live Nation controlling ticketing, promotion and venues – the company has grown from a dangerous octopus with its tentacles twined around the industry into a kraken that is strangling every kind of live event and everyone who earns a living from them. This has produced an ever-more obvious string of scandals, most notably the company's assault on Swifties:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/20/anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-will-eventually-stop/

A combination of mounting public outrage (with Swifties at the vanguard) and the Biden administration's generational enthusiasm for smashing corporate power has led, at last, to a reckoning with the Ticketmaster kraken:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/30/nix-fix-the-tix/#something-must-be-done-there-we-did-something

Ticketmaster is a famously opaque organization. When Rebecca Giblin and I were working on Chokepoint Capitalism, our book on monopoly and creative labor markets, we were able to speak on the record to insiders from every part of the industry, except live performance:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

As soon as we raised Ticketmaster/Live Nation with club owners and other events industry insiders, they'd go pale and quiet and tell us that they didn't feel comfortable staying on the record. TM/LN has a well-deserved mafia-style reputation for savage retaliation against snitches.

With the DOJ Antitrust Division chasing Ticketmaster through the courts, we're starting to get a rare, on-the-record glimpse of TM/LN's operations, as its internal documents find their pay into court records. In response Ticketmaster's spokesliars have embarked on an epic spin campaign, to "contextualize" these damning numbers and paint the company as a weak, low-margin business that has been unfairly set-upon by the bullies at the DOJ.

In his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller offers a spectacular, must-read breakdown of these documents and the ensuing spin:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/is-ticketmaster-telling-the-truth

Stoller starts with Ticketmaster's insistence that it is barely profitable. Though this is true on paper, the numbers just don't add up. For one thing, anyone who's bought a ticket can see, printed on its face, TM's junk fees: "a 'service fee' without any obvious service [and] a 'convenience fee' that is anything but convenient."

Far more damning is a comparison between the price of a Ticketmaster ticket in the US vs the EU. The EU has legally mandated competitive ticketing, and the tickets there are far cheaper. A US ticket to see Taylor Swift will run you $2,600 – the same ticket costs $340 in the EU. As Stoller writes:

An American could fly to Paris, spend a few nights at a nice hotel, see a Taylor Swift concert, and fly back, for less than it costs to see that same show in the U.S.

How to make sense of this contradiction? How can Ticketmaster show such a low profit margin on its books but somehow end up costing event-goers such an absurd premium?

Start with the fact that Ticketmaster has three businesses, not just one. They sell tickets, but they also promote concerts (that is, front the money for personnel, travel and marketing), and they also own a bunch of the largest and most profitable venues in the country.

This allows them to play a shell-game that's very similar to (and possibly not actually different from) money-laundering, where money is shuffled between entities in order to shield it from creditors, suppliers or tax agents:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/explosive-new-documents-unearthed

But this presents a problem for Ticketmaster. They're a publicly traded company and their investors demand high returns. And unlike performers or venue owners, investors have power over Ticketmaster management. Keeping "margin per ticket" number as low as possible lets Ticketmaster minimize the revenue it has to share with the people who actually do the work and invest the capital in live performances. But for investors, they need to show another number, one that's as high as possible, to keep the investors happy.

That number is "Adjusted Operating Income" or AOI. While gross margins are the difference between the face value of a ticket and the sum remitted to the venue and the performer, AOI factors in all the other revenue TM/LN books from that ticket, like kickbacks. TM/LN's AOI is very healthy: it's 37% on tickets and 61% on promotions.

Those sums delight TM/LN's investors, and they express their joy through lavish executive compensation packages. CEO Michael Rapino is America's fifth-highest paid CEO, at $139m/year (that's eight times the Fortune 500 average). His sidekick Joe Berchtold is America's highest paid CFO, at $54m. The total AOI for TM/LN is $732m/year – and 19% of that is being paid to two of its execs.

But LN/TM has a third line of business: operating venues. The AOI for these venues is just 1.7%. If this were a normal, cutthroat business, you'd expect those same return-focused investors to insist on their handsomely compensated execs selling off that low-margin turkey. But nevertheless, TM/LN keeps those venues on its books.

When those execs talk to the public, they use the poor profit margins of ticketing and the poor AOI on venues to plead poverty: "how can we be a monopoly when we're barely scraping by?"

But when they talk to the investors who decide whether to pay them 800% of the S&P500 average, they are more forthcoming.

Keeping the margins low on tickets – and making up the money with kickbacks and other corrupt payments – means that potential rival ticketing firms can't afford to get into the business. Without the venue and promotion business, those rivals wouldn't be able to command kickbacks. They'd have to subsist on the rock-bottom margins that are competitive with Ticketmaster.

Likewise those venues: ownership of key venues lets Ticketmaster/Live Nation force out credible rivals in important markets, and keep new ones from emerging, because again, they'd have to make a living on that paltry 1.7% AOI (or the even lower profit margins!).

As Joe Berchtold, the highest-paid CFO in America, told an analyst:

I don't think Concerts AOI per fan is a logical way to look at it. I think if you look at how we've talked about our business, we've talked about our business across the multiple pieces. So you have to look at it, what's the concerts plus sponsorship plus ticketing AOI per fan.

Berchtold is paid roughly $26,000/hour. Those words take roughly 25 seconds to utter, so that's a $7.20 explanation, but it contains a wealth of information – it's basically the DoJ's case in a nutshell.

But Stoller points out a curious fact that isn't captured here. Remember when I told you that TM/LN's NOI is $732m/year? What I didn't mention is the company's gross revenue: $16.7 billion.

When TM/LN talks about how shitty their business is, and therefore they can't be a monopoly, this is the trump card. How could a company creaming off a mere $732 million off $16.7 billion in gross revenue be a monopolist with "pricing power"?

This is where understanding corruption helps clarify our understanding and cut through the bullshit. Corruption is vastly wasteful. In order to extract $732m from $16.7b, TM/LN has to engage in a lot of wasteful and corrupt activities. They have to bribe other key players in the system, spend vast fortunes on lobbying, and generally do a lot of unproductive things with their money.

This is concentrated gains and diffuse losses. In order to command the highest salary of any American CFO, Berchtold has to cook up and maintain this process. In order to earn his $139m/year, Rapino has to play mafia don and keep everyone is his supply chain sufficiently terrorized or sufficiently greased to maintain omerta.

These two men take home a fifth of Ticketmaster's net income because they possess a rare and valuable skill. They are able to obfuscate a corrupt arrangement, enrobing it in layers of performative complexity, until the average musician, concertgoer, or lawmaker, can't understand it. Any attempt to unravel it will induce a deadly, soporific confusion. The investment industry term for his is MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over), the weaponization of complexity. A skilled MEGO artist can convince you that the pile of shit they're peddling is so large that there must be a pony under it somewhere.

Here's Stoller, de-MEGOfying the TM/LN story:

Live Nation has a giant capital intensive unprofitable division of putting on concerts, from which it skims for its real cash flow. But this leverage among different subsidiaries means that it has an incentive to push up the cost of concerts overall, not just for its own profit. This incentive operates in two different ways. One, since ticket fees are based on the price of a ticket, Live Nation seeks higher prices for tickets so it can move more cash to its Ticketmaster subsidiary. And two, since Live Nation itself gets rebates by overpaying for venues, it has the incentive to push up the cost of shows. No one can undercut Live Nation, as it’s a monopoly.

You might think that this is a lot of mental energy to expend on understanding live performances. If you're not trying to see Taylor Swift, does any of this matter?

It assuredly does. Understanding how Ticketmaster's shell-game works is critical to understanding the similar shell-games played by many other kinds of monopolists, who have wrapped their tentacles around all the other parts of our lives. As David Dayen and Lindsay Owens write for The American Prospect, the companies that avoided monopoly prosecution by ripping off suppliers have bled those suppliers dry, and now they're coming for their customers:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-03-age-of-recoupment/

From groceries to plane tickets, rent to cab rides, Amazon to Ticketmaster, we are living through the "Age of Recoupment," when the long con of lowering prices to secure monopolies flips enters it final stage: greedflating the shit out of customers, and using the monopolist's power over regulators to avoid consequences.

Today, everywhere consumers turn, whether they are shopping for groceries at the local Kroger or for plane tickets online, they are being gouged. Landlords are quietly utilizing new software to band together and raise rents. Uber has been accused of raising the price of rides when a customer’s phone battery is drained. Ticketmaster layers on additional fees as you move through the process of securing seats to your favorite artist’s upcoming show. Amazon’s secret pricing algorithm, code-named “Project Nessie,” was designed to identify products where it could raise prices, on the expectation that competitors would follow suit. Companies are forcing you into monthly subscriptions for a tube of toothpaste. Banks have crept up the price of credit, so customers who cannot afford price-gouging in their everyday transactions get a second round of price-gouging when they put purchases on credit. Expedia is using demographic and purchase history data to set hotel pricing for an audience of one: you.

When these companies end up in front of angry attorneys general, DOJ lawyers, or an FTC investigation, they'll use the Ticketmaster/Live Nation playbook to try and wriggle off the hook. They'll point to some barely-profitable (or money-losing) part of their business and say, "How could a monopolist possibly be running a business this shitty?"

If the DOJ makes its case against Ticketmaster, it will set a precedent, both in court and in policy circles, for understanding how a monopolist's corruption works. Monopolists aren't always businesses with gigantic margins. Like other criminals, their corruption can produce spectacular wealth and spectacular waste at the same time.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/03/aoi-aoi-oh/#concentrated-gains-vast-diffused-losses