#annual payout

[fazcinatingblog]

Waking in the middle of the night thinking about those two ASIC things that were lodged a day late and how shitty my boss will be and how the superfunds need to be uploaded to BGL and that those two new guys keep asking dumb questions and one's quite nice, the other is really sour, almost grumpy, he's not really a bully, just really "wait I have to do that?" Like yes, you have to data entry into our software and I think I'm adopting his mannerisms especially talking to Sophia but maybe I always had that in me, maybe I've always been grumpy "no I don't know how long I worked on it, I kept getting interrupted" but also those stupid ASIC things I should've taken more notice of the date and I'm so dumb and there were two of them and

[aquitainequeen]

The WGA has two main stipulations. First, the guild wants to make sure that “literary material” — the MBA term for screenplays, teleplays, outlines, treatments, and other things that people write — can’t be generated by an AI. In other words, ChatGPT and its cousins can’t be credited with writing a screenplay. If a movie made by a studio that has an agreement with the WGA has a writing credit — and that’s over 350 of America’s major studios and production companies — then the writer needs to be a person.

“Based on what we’re aiming for in this contract, there couldn’t be a movie that was released by a company that we work with that had no writer,” says August.

Second, the WGA says it’s imperative that “source material” can’t be something generated by an AI, either. This is especially important because studios frequently hire writers to adapt source material (like a novel, an article, or other IP) into new work to be produced as TV or films. However, the payment terms, particularly residual payouts, are different for an adaptation than for “literary material.” It’s very easy to imagine a situation in which a studio uses AI to generate ideas or drafts, claims those ideas are “source material,” and hires a writer to polish it up for a lower rate. “We believe that is not source material, any more than a Wikipedia article is source material,” says August. “That’s the crux of what we’re negotiating.”

In negotiations prior to the strike, the AMPTP refused the WGA’s demands around AI, instead countering with “annual meetings to discuss advancements in technology.”

The looming threat of AI to Hollywood, and why it should matter to you by Alissa Wilkinson

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

Academic economists get big payouts when they help monopolists beat antitrust

After 40 years of rampant corporate crime, there's a new sheriff in town: Jonathan Kanter was appointed by Biden to run the DOJ Antitrust Divisoon, and he's overseen 170 "significant antitrust actions" in the past 2.5 years, culminating in a court case where Google was ruled to be an illegal monopolist:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve

Kanter's work is both extraordinary and par for the course. As Kanter said in a recent keynote for the Fordham Law Competition Law Institute’s 51st Annual Conference on International Antitrust Law and Policy, we're witnessing an epochal, global resurgence of antitrust:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/assistant-attorney-general-jonathan-kanter-delivers-remarks-fordham-competition-law-0

Kanter's incredible enforcement track record isn't just part of a national trend – his colleagues in the FTC, CFPB and other agencies have also been pursuing an antitrust agenda not seen in generations – but also a worldwide trend. Antitrust enforcers in Canada, the UK, the EU, South Korea, Australia, Japan and even China are all taking aim at smashing corporate monopolies. Not only are they racking up impressive victories against these giant corporations, they're stealing the companies' swagger. After all, the point of enforcement isn't just to punish wrongdoing, but also to deter wrongdoing by others.

Until recently, companies hurled themselves into illegal schemes (mergers, predatory pricing, tying, refusals to deal, etc) without fear or hesitation. Now, many of these habitual offenders are breaking the habit, giving up before they've even tried. Take Wiz, a startup that turned down Google's record-shattering $23b buyout offer, understanding that the attempt would draw more antitrust scrutiny than it was worth:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wiz-turns-down-23-billion-022926296.html

As welcome as this antitrust renaissance is, it prompts an important question: why didn't we enforce antitrust law for the 40 years between Reagan and Biden?

That's what Kanter addresses the majority of his remarks to. The short answer is: crooked academic economists took bribes from monopolists and would-be monopolists to falsify their research on the impacts of monopolists, and made millions (literally – one guy made over $100m at this) testifying that monopolies were good and efficient.

After all, governments aren't just there to enforce rules – they have to make the rules first, and do to that, they need to understand how the world works, so they can understand how to fix the places where it's broken. That's where experts come in, filling regulators' dockets and juries' ears with truthful, factual testimony about their research. Experts can still be wrong, of course, but when the system works well, they're only wrong by accident.

The system doesn't work well. Back in the 1950s, the tobacco industry was threatened by the growing scientific consensus that smoking caused cancer. Industry scientists confirmed this finding. In response, the industry paid statisticians, doctors and scientists to produce deceptive research reports and testimony about the tobacco/cancer link.

The point of this work wasn't necessarily to convince people that tobacco was safe – rather, it was to create the sense that the safety of tobacco was a fundamentally unanswerable question. "Experts disagree," and you're not qualified to figure out who's right and who's wrong, so just stop trying to figure it out and light up.

In other words, Big Tobacco's cancer denial playbook wasn't so much an attack on "the truth" as it was an attack on epistemology – the system by which we figure out what is true and what isn't. The tactic was devastatingly effective. Not only did it allow the tobacco giants to kill millions of people with impunity, it allowed them to reap billions of dollars by doing so.

Since then, epistemology has been under sustained assault. By the 1970s, Big Oil knew that its products would render the Earth unfit for human habitation, and they hired the same companies that had abetted Big Tobacco's mass murder to provide cover for their own slow-motion, planetary scale killing spree.

Time and again, big business has used assaults on epistemology to provide cover for unthinkable crimes. This has given rise to today's epistemological crisis, in which we don't merely disagree about what is true, but (far more importantly) disagree about how the truth can be known:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/25/black-boxes/#when-you-know-you-know

Ask a conspiratorialist why they believe in Qanon or Hatians in Springfield eating pets, and you'll get an extremely vibes-based answer – fundamentally, they believe it because it feels true. As the old saying goes, you can't reason someone out of a belief they didn't reason their way into.

This assault on reason itself is at the core of Kanter's critique. He starts off by listing three cases in which academic economists allowed themselves to be corrupted by the monopolies they studied:

George Mason University tricked an international antitrust enforcer into attending a training seminar that they believed to be affiliated with the US government. It was actually sponsored by the very companies that enforcer was scrutnizing, and featured a parade of "experts" who asserted that these companies were great, actually.

An academic from GMU – which receives substantial tech industry funding – signed an amicus brief opposing an enforcement action against their funders. The academic also presented a defense of these funders to the OECD, all while posing as a neutral academic and not disclosing their funding sources.

An ex-GMU economist, Joshua Wright, submitted a study defending Qualcomm against the FTC, without disclosing that he'd been paid to do so. Wright has elevated undisclosed conflicts of interest to an art form:

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/google-lawyer-secret-weapon-joshua-wright-c98d5a31

Kanter is at pains to point out that these three examples aren't exceptional. The economics profession – whose core tenet is "incentive matter" – has made it standard practice for individual researchers and their academic institutions to take massive sums from giant corporations. Incredibly, they insist that this has nothing to do with their support of monopolies as "efficient."

Academic centers often serve as money-laundries for monopolist funders; researchers can evade disclosure requirements when they publish in journals or testify in court, saying only that they work for some esteemed university, without noting that the university is utterly dependent on money from the companies they're defending.

Now, Kanter is a lawyer, not an academic, and that means that his job is to advocate for positions, and he's at pains to say that he's got nothing but respect for ideological advocacy. What he's objecting to is partisan advocacy dressed up as impartial expertise.

For Kanter, mixing advocacy with expertise doesn't create expert advocacy – it obliterates expertise, as least when it comes to making good policy. This mixing has created a "crisis of expertise…a pervasive breakdown in the distinction between expertise and advocacy in competition policy."

The point of an independent academia, enshrined in the American Association of University Professors' charter, is to "advance knowledge by the unrestricted research and unfettered discussion of impartial investigators." We need an independent academy, because "to be of use to the legislator or the administrator, [an academic] must enjoy their complete confidence in the disinterestedness of [his or her] conclusions."

It's hard to overstate just how much money economists can make by defending monopolies. Writing for The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner gives the rate at $1,000/hour. Monopoly's top defenders make unimaginable sums, like U Chicago's Dennis Carlton, who's brought in over $100m in consulting fees:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-09-24-economists-as-apologists/

The hidden cost of all of this is epistemological consensus. As Tim Harford writes in his 2021 book The Data Detective, the truth can be known through research and peer-review:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#harford

But when experts deliberately seek to undermine the idea of expertise, they cast laypeople into an epistemological void. We know these questions are important, but we can't trust our corrupted expert institutions. That leaves us with urgent questions – and no answers. That's a terrifying state to be in, and it makes you easy pickings for authoritarian grifters and conspiratorial swindlers.

Seen in this light, Kanter's antitrust work is even more important. In attacking corporate power itself, he is going after the machine that funds this nihilism-inducing corruption machine.

This week, Tor Books published SPILL, a new, free LITTLE BROTHER novella about oil pipelines and indigenous landback!

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/2024/09/25/epistemological-chaos/#incentives-matter

Image: Ron Cogswell (modified) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:George.Mason.University.Arlington.Campus.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[robertreich]

Biden vs. Trump: Whose Economic Plan Is Better for You? 

Trump failed to deliver on his number one campaign promise:

President Trump presided over a historic net loss of nearly 3 million American jobs, the worst jobs numbers ever recorded under an American president.

This is no fluke. America’s economy has almost always done worse under Republican presidents. A New York Times analysis found that since 1933, the U.S. economy has grown nearly twice as fast on average under Democrats.

Now Trump’s defenders claim it’s not his fault that the economy collapsed under his watch. It was the pandemic. But there are two big things wrong with this.

First, the pandemic recession was as bad as it was because of Trump. His failure to lead with any national strategy left America in chaos throughout 2020, long after other nations had developed coordinated testing, tracing, and social distancing plans that allowed them to reopen their economies.

But secondly, even before the pandemic, Trump failed to deliver on his economic promises. Job growth slowed under Trump.

America added more jobs in President Obama’s last three years than in Trump’s first three.

Even before the pandemic most middle-class American households saw their incomes go down under Trump.

Trump’s major economic policy was cutting taxes on the rich and big corporations. He promised it would result in $4,000 annual raises for workers. How did that work out? Did you get a $4,000 raise?

Republicans keep claiming that if we just cut enough taxes on the rich, the wealth will “trickle down.” But it never works. Wage growth slowed after Reagan’s tax cuts for the rich and big corporations. And the Bush and Trump tax cuts didn’t trickle down either.

These giveaways to the wealthy came at the expense of investments in infrastructure, education, and health care, making life more expensive and difficult for everyone who isn’t rich.

They also exploded the debt and deficit. Reagan oversaw a 186% increase in the national debt — the biggest percentage increase in over 70 years. The Bush and Trump tax cuts, that mostly benefited corporations and the rich, are the main reasons why America’s debt is growing faster than the economy.

Republican presidents have led us into the three worst economic crises of the last century, and Democrats led us out of them.

Republicans talk about running the country like a business, but they want to run it the way Trump ran his businesses: with massive debts, a string of failures, and payouts for the folks at the top, while workers get shafted again and again. Given Republicans’ track record, why would any hard-working American put their financial security in the hands of a Republican president ever again?

[wumblr]

okay

For decades, nuclear power has been the largest source of clean energy in the United States, accounting for 19% of total energy produced last year

false. first sentence. off to a great start. you may notice this is a 2022 chart but i can tell you the only new reactors started since then are vogtle 3 and 4 (you may notice that's not a new power plant but new reactors at an existing plant), years late and $17b over budget, vogtle as a whole produces 1.1gwh, we use about 29 million annually. point being: it has not risen to 19%, the last reactor since vogtle was watts bar in 2016 and since then we've decommissioned 14 of them

The industry directly employs nearly 60,000 workers in good paying jobs

weirdly low estimate, almost by half

maintains these jobs for decades

"maintains" is doing a lot of work here, does that include toxic exposure payouts? because they are still fighting pretty hard to get those in the world's first nuclear contamination site, hanford

and supports hundreds of thousands of other workers

✅ true! 475,000 according to the NEI link above

In the midst of transformational changes taking place throughout the U.S. energy system

sure

the Biden-Harris Administration is continuing to build on President Biden’s unprecedented goal of a carbon free electricity sector by 2035

have they developed carbon free cement yet? (yes.) at scale? (no.) are we just not counting construction emissions because they're one-time emissions investments or how does this work exactly, i would love to know because i think we're also not counting emissions from waste transport to longterm storage because we haven't started doing that. anyway they've built a train for it even though we don't have a storage site so that's umm. that's uhh. fine i'm sure

while also ensuring that consumers across the country have access to affordable, reliable electric power

i guess you can still say "across the country" if you exclude texas as an outlier

and creating good-paying clean energy jobs.

i guess you can still call them good paying clean energy jobs if everybody who mines and refines the uranium dies of cancer because you just pulled out of the largest disarmament program in history due to it being geopolitically inadmissible (for russia... to continue... selling us the uranium from decommissioning...? i'm still trying to figure out the optics of that one but anyway as i have previously stated we didn't actually stop buying it in cases where it's "liable to cause supply chain issues")

Alongside renewable power sources like wind and solar, a new generation of nuclear reactors is now capturing the attention of a wide range of stakeholders

weird way to say that

for nuclear energy’s ability to produce clean, reliable energy and meet the needs of a fast-growing economy, driven by President Biden’s Investing in America agenda and manufacturing boom.

this is a carrier sentence to inject the president's name, but i would like to question which sectors of the growing economy are driving the most energy demand because i'm sure there are no nasty truths being elided there (it's computing)

The Administration recognizes that decarbonizing our power system, which accounts for a quarter of all the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, represents a pivotal challenge requiring all the expertise and ingenuity our nation can deliver.

it's time once again for... the energy flow sankey chart! the reason the power system accounts for a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions is in no small part because 67% of it is lost to waste heat. has the nation's expertise and ingenuity started working on that yet

The Biden-Harris Administration is today hosting a White House Summit on Domestic Nuclear Deployment, highlighting the collective progress being made from across the public and private sectors

oh boy! a summit! talking about it is the same as doing it

Under President Biden’s leadership, the Administration has taken a number of actions to strengthen our nation’s energy and economic security by reducing – and putting us on the path to eliminating – our reliance on Russian uranium for civil nuclear power and building a new supply chain for nuclear fuel

gosh, i got ahead of myself and already criticized both of those things

including: signing on to last year’s multi-country declaration at COP28 to triple nuclear energy capacity globally by 2050

everybody criticized that

developing new reactor designs

which ones, the bill gates project that just got cancelled because utilities pulled out (edit: that's nuscale, the bill gates project is terrapower), the rolls royce submarine, or the one that just got regulatory approval (edit: this is also nuscale)

extending the service lives of existing nuclear reactors

yep! you sure showed the embrittlement at diablo canyon by doing nothing about it

and growing the momentum behind new deployments

nonsense clause, but it has this really ominous undercurrent due to its vagueness

Recognizing the importance of both the existing U.S. nuclear fleet and continued build out of large nuclear power plants, the U.S. is also taking steps to mitigate project risks associated with large nuclear builds and position U.S. industry to support an aggressive deployment target.

this one is not nonsense but they can't just out and out say "we are deregulating the industry because opening the process for public comment is most often the thing that slows it down" because then somebody might realize they're bulldozing ahead no matter what any constituent says, does, or actually wants

To help drive reactor deployment while ensuring ratepayers and project stakeholders are better protected, theAdministration is announcing today the creation of a Nuclear Power Project Management and Delivery working group that will draw on leading experts from across the nuclear and megaproject construction industry to help identify opportunities to proactively mitigate sources of cost and schedule overrun risk

i'm sure a revolving door working group packed with industry insiders can solve this without compromising their commitment to the profit motive, not that it particularly matters since the cost is passed on to the consumer in the form of fees on the electric bill

The United States Army is also announcing that it will soon release a Request for Information to inform a deployment program for advanced reactors to power multiple Army sites in the United States

good god... that is a fresh nightmare i did not see coming

Additionally, the Department of Energy released today a new primer highlighting the expected enhanced safety of advanced nuclear reactors

"expected" really serves to demonstrate several points i've made

i'm going to stop going line by line here because i know this is already too boring and long for anyone to read this far, unless anybody wants to know what i think about parts 50, 52, and 53 of the NRC licensing guidance -- which many of you have very clearly stated over the years that you don't -- and while i do want to acknowledge that it does go into more detail and even answer some of the questions i raised (vogtle comes up, diablo canyon comes up, a list of which SMR designs is given, or at least a list of the companies responsible for them),

what i would like to focus on is one conspicuous absence:

the reason we need a new fleet of reactors is because they are an essential part of the bomb production chain. they are the beginning of the refinement process, and we cannot carry out the plan (already underway) to replace the minutemen missiles currently in silos with sentinel missiles without significant new construction. we cannot start the president's desired wars with russia and china without the new sentinels. he's not going to be the one to carry this out, he's ensuring whoever is his successor in about 2030 or more likely 2040 will be armed to do so. limited amount of time left to prevent that

[highways-are-liminal-spaces]

Hello! I've been looking at setting up an Inprnt shop myself, but I'm unfamiliar with the platform from an artist's perspective. I was wondering if you'd be willing to let me know what you think about it? Any pros or cons you've found while using it?

Totally, here's a quick pros-cons rundown from my experience:

Pros:

Unbelievably easy to use for uploads

All the printing and shipping work is done very smoothly on their end

Firmly anti-AI and anti-plagiarism, with fast responses to reporting and also backstops against false-positive AI detection

Higher default percentage payout (30%) than many competitors

Very reasonably priced for higher quality prints. I've used the site for a canvas print of one of my own photos as well as for some posters of other artists' work, and everything has been really professional

Artist's prices for your own work (again, I got a really nice canvas print of one of my bears that's hanging in the living room of my dad's house)

Easily allows you to place orders for other shops on the site using your balance from your sales

Cons:

Custom crops are not supported

Payout percentage is still very low relatively speaking (obviously worth it to me for the amount of time/work, but it wouldn't be where I'd sell digital art, for example)

Setting up withdrawals is very annoying and you can only do it at over $100 without filling out a special request, which is limited annually. Given the relatively low price of most sales, this may take a long time for a small shop and sucks when $80 is sitting there and would make a huge difference in your life.

No ability to batch upload work

Relatively difficult to internally promote your work on (again, I don't put that much time into the site, but if I were a full-time artist, I would want more from it)

[slutforpringles]

do we have any idea what his payout was? mclaren gave 18m for 2023. his salary was like 7m at vcarb. so the remaining is his payout?? or does that incl enchante, wines, just annual increase etc?

I don't think we've ever got a clear idea what Daniel's salary was at Red Bull - I know It increased from his third driver contract salary when he was promoted. I don't think his payout for this year would be particularly high though, as he wasn't re-signed for 2025 and the option was on Red Bull's side, so his payout would most likely have just been the remainder of his salary for 2024, unless there were penalties for breaking his contract/taking him out of the seat (personally I doubt it given when Daniel's negotiating power when he signed for RBR in 2022).

It would include his income from personal sponsors (gopro, optus, beats, thorne), I guess it would probably include enchante and dr3wines but I'm honestly not sure.

[crashlapine]

"people just don't seek out music anymore and that's why spotify is such a vital service in helping artists get discovered and paid"

hey. buddy. listen 2 me. my fixation on the band sElf is because twenty seconds of a song of theirs was backing a monster hunter world gameplay clip someome posted to a now-dead twitter account. A hand-curated music playlist for a VRChat world I accidentally typo'd my way into introduced me to Superorganism's "It's All Good" a few years ago. Crumb's two albums Jinx and Ice Melt are among the highest number of full-album playthroughs in my library because i caught a shitty recording of Locket playing in-car over a snippet of someone's dash cam footage audio that was lifted for a youtube clip compilation channel someone else runs. back in 2011 my high school forced my entire grade to watch an anti-bullying PSA that ran on for 40 minutes but the credits had Dabrye's "Making It Pay" playing over it and that set me on the path to exploring all of Ghostly International's available music releases i could get my paws on at the time.

like. i've discovered music in the most obtuse places, often via the most unlicensed conduits those tunes could've possibly accompanied, and i can say with one hundred percent sincerity that the $9 i've spent just once on a digital album or two so i could listen to it again and again has probably put more food on the table of these musicians than spotify's "minimum one thousand streams annually per-song before payouts" discovery playback ever could achieve across a decade for many of these folks. i promise this isn't a brag, I just don't know how else to explain that spotify really isn't the only viable path forward when music permeates every facet of this world and all you have to do is take note when something catches your ear. the only thing truly making it harder to discover new music is licensing restrictions, automated Content-ID matching, and the universal/sony/warner music trio regularly leveraging both of the former to ensure your favorite song has an expiration date by tamping down on all of this, and unless you can hunt down a copy to save locally, a time will come when you'll never be able to hear that favorite song again. this isn't a threat; you and me both are going to outlive this service, as we've outlived many other online-only services before it.

(and i say this with complete sincerity to those not in a financially viable place to buy albums on the reg: just slurp the .wav off youtube homie. compared to spotify, the net gain to the individual artist is exactly the same. who knows, maybe you'll be able to inadvertently pass it along to someone else who's able to go and make that purchase, as others have unknowingly done to me. word of mouth alone is a /very/ powerful discovery tool)

[fazcinatingblog]

me starting therapy: oh thank god, she's not younger than me, she'll definitely understand all my totally normal adult problems

me actually in therapy: talks about getting really into olivia rodrigo and my aversion of tumblr and the random love triangle that i created in my head and

[hasufin]

Probably not a hot take

I currently have on my desk three notices of data breaches which may affect me, and expect two more in the next week.

Now, clearly there are "hackers". However, I also know that if these companies followed established data protection standards these breaches would be meaningless.

These are issues because of corporate negligence and greed. The causes are twofold:

First, companies collect way too much data. They track our browsing habits. Our spending habits. Our sleeping habits. Why? in the hope that maybe later they can sell that data. There's an entire economy built around buying and selling information which shouldn't even exist. There's no reason, as a consumer, for my Roomba to upload a map of the inside of my house to the iRobot servers. It provides zero value to me, it's not necessary for the robot to operate. The company can't even articulate a business need for it. They just want to collect the data in order to sell it later.

Second, companies are incredibly lax about IT security. They're understaffed, underfunded, and they often don't bother training people on the technology they have, nor do they install and configure it (hint: a firewall doesn't count if it's still sitting in a box on the datacenter floor).

And I think the only way for companies to sit up and take notice is to make them bleed. You can issue guidelines as much as you want, they won't care because making changes and performing due diligence is expensive. They'd much rather just snoop on their customers and sell it all.

So what we need to do, is set a regulatory environment in which:

We recognize that customers, not companies are the victims of data breaches. The companies which are breached are not victims, they are accomplices.

Create a legal definition of private data. This should definitely include medical data, SSNs, &c, but should be broad enough to include information we'd not think about collecting normally (someday in the future, someone will create a toilet which is able to track how often you flush your toilet. They WILL want to sell that data. Fuck 'em.) [I would also want to sneak in there some restrictions clarifying that disclosing this data is covered under the 5th amendment - that no one else can provide your medical data in a court of law, and that you cannot be compelled to do so.]

Create a legal set of guidelines for data security. This needs to be a continuing commitment - a government organization which issues guidance annually. this guidance should establish the minimum standards (e.g., AES128 is required, AES256 certainly qualifies, it's not "the FITSA guidelines only allow AES128, we can't legally use AES512").

Legislate that failure to follow these guidelines to protect private data is negligence, and that responsibility for corporate negligence goes all the way up to the corporate officers. This should be considered a criminal, not civil, matter.

Restrict insurance payouts to companies when the cause is their own negligence.

Set minimum standards for restitution to victims, but clearly state that the restitution should be either the minimum, or 200% the cost to make the victim "whole" - whichever is higher. This must be exempted from arbitration and contractual restrictions - fuck DIsney's bullshit; no one signs their rights away.

Make the punishments for data negligence so severe that most companies - or at least their officers - are terrified of the risks. I'm talking putting CISOs and CEOs in jail and confiscating all their property for restitution.

The goal here is to make it so that the business model of "spy on people, sell their information" is too damned risky and companies don't do it. Yes, it will obsolete entire business models. That's the idea.

[readytoplaygod]

Every day I come refresh your Tumblr and hold my breath for that Onlyfans link to appear 😞

Here are some things I did not know going into this:

OF performs ID verication requiring official documentation and photo submission, which can be rejected multiple times if the submissions don't perfectly match their specifications.

They require W9 tax forms to be submitted in order to appropriately link bank accounts for payouts.

Having a W9 means it would be best practices to have a sole proprietorship or LLC created to provide an EIN instead of a SSN, while also affording content creators some legal protections.

An LLC is better suited for this as it has the most legal protections, particularly in case of a lawsuit where prosecution would go after the business instead of the individual.

Operating an LLC would reasonably mean you should have a bank account opened for your registered business to simplify annual fiscal reporting and taxes.

LLC creation as well as sole proprietorship creation have their own specific fees within the state of operation.

OF Customer Support has to authorize connection to a business account, which is a manual process.

I'm currently working on this, but will let you all know once things are ready. Also need to develop a content upload timeline and marketing plan as I work within the limited confines of separating this from my wider public life.

Have patience my dear 🙌🏼

In the meantime, I am still accepting requests for paid content 🤷🏽‍♂️😄

[mariacallous]

Elon Musk is a man comfortable with risky bets. He pledged to send 1 million people to Mars (SpaceX), to fill factories with humanoid workers (Tesla Bot), and to create a network of highways deep underground (the Boring Company). All of these bets are yet to pay off. But six years ago, Musk took a leap of faith that would also affect him personally. He tied his own pay at Tesla to a series of financial targets over the next decade, including boosting the company’s market value from $59 billion to $650 billion. Such targets were decried by commentators at the time as “jaw-dropping” and “his most unlikely goal yet.” And Musk’s wage from the company if he didn’t pull them off? Nothing at all.

The board agreed to the plan in 2018. However, a heavy-metal drummer named Richard Tornetta, who owned just nine Tesla shares, did not. In June of that year, he decided to sue, claiming the pay package was unfair to investors like him. By the time the case reached court in Delaware in 2022, Musk had just one milestone left before the big payout. But the judge agreed with Tornetta in January, voiding what she called an unfathomably large pay package and describing the directors who negotiated it as beholden to Musk.

Musk succeeded in hitting those 12 jaw-dropping targets by the close of 2023, following Tesla’s brief spell as a trillion-dollar company. And now, despite what happened in Delaware, he’s demanding to be paid. At Tesla’s annual meeting on Thursday, shareholders are being asked to vote again on whether Musk should receive what has by now swollen to a nearly $50 billion pay package, the biggest in US corporate history. The $50 billion question for shareholders is: Is Musk worth it?

Posing the question of whether he deserves his pay packet at all marks a significant shift for the relationship between Musk and the electric automaker he has led since 2008. “The resistance shows that there is a ceiling to the influence that a single person has on the company,” says Mike Ramsey, an automotive analyst at the consultancy Gartner. “This is the the first time Tesla shareholders might be willing to say, ‘You can’t have unlimited power.’”

The vote comes at a difficult time for Tesla. For the first time in the company’s history, Tesla is facing intense competition in the electric car market—especially from cheaper Chinese competitors. Meanwhile, some observers have puzzled over Musk’s response and his pivot to robotaxis and artificial intelligence.

“The debate here really is about the future, not the past,” says John Colley, professor of practice in strategy and leadership at the UK’s Warwick Business School. “Tesla has become a mature business, and it’s got all the problems that mature carmakers have now.” Whether a visionary like Musk is the best man to lead a mature business is unclear, he adds.

The pay package is just one in a series of measures that shareholders have already been asked to vote on by proxy, ahead of Thursday’s meeting. Others include whether Tesla’s incorporation should move from Delaware to Texas, whether the company should soften its hardline stance on labor negotiations, and whether the company should preemptively impose a moratorium on using minerals mined from the seabed.

Yet none have been as divisive as Musk’s pay. Deep rifts among investors have been exposed in the lead-up to the vote. Tesla board chair Robyn Denholm has backed the pay package, as has billionaire investor Ron Baron. “Tesla is better with Elon,” Baron wrote in an open letter last week. “Tesla is Elon.” Yet the deal’s opponents include two influential proxy advisory groups, which guide institutional investors on votes, as well as shareholders from the Nordic countries, where Tesla has clashed with workers over labor rights.

Norway’s trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund has said it will vote against the pay deal, as will the country’s largest pension fund, KLP. “While we acknowledge that the company has grown significantly and successfully during the performance period, we still note that the total award value remains excessive,” Kiran Aziz, KLP's head of responsible investments, told WIRED, adding the fund will vote in favor of the motion urging Tesla to engage in labor negotiations. “Recent [dispute] between Tesla and the company’s workers in Sweden as well as Tesla’s history of accusations of interference with workers’ rights is of great concern and shows that the company needs to do better work in the area.”

Behind the scenes of the vote, lobbying has been intense. Tesla has paid for ads on Google and X, which is owned by Musk, telling investors to “protect your investment” and support the proposal, according to a company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In April, Tesla also launched a website urging shareholders to vote against the Delaware court decision and support the pay package. “The Court’s decision, if implemented, means that Elon would not receive any compensation for the tremendous accomplishments that have generated significant stockholder returns in less than six years,” the website reads.

“This is the most advertising I can remember from any proxy solicitation,” says Robert Anderson, a professor at the University of Arkansas School of Law. He believes the Musk effect—the CEO’s ability to attract endless publicity—has contributed to this situation. But the pay package and the proposed Texas move are both unprecedented in the business world, he adds. “Either [of] those things by themselves would be pretty significant, even if he were not a public figure.”

The vote will be decided by a mix of institutional investors as well as an unusually large cohort of retail investors, who control around 44 percent of the business. Among shareholders, there are concerns that if Musk does not win his compensation, “his attention might drift to some of his other ventures a little bit more,” says Anderson. Musk managed to juggle multiple ventures for years, but he has been more publicly distracted since acquiring the social media service Twitter and renaming it X. There, his visible turn to right-wing politics has garnered new fans and left some old ones behind.

Whatever happens this week, Tesla and Musk may emerge looking a bit less superhuman. For years, the two have insisted that Tesla is a tech company, with a Silicon Valley–style startup scrappiness. “We should be thought of as an AI or robotics company,” Musk told investors—or voters—in April. “If you value Tesla as just an auto company … fundamentally, it’s just the wrong framework.”

[triviallytrue]

I'm not sure it's true that the lump sum beats the daily payments if you only put it in treasury bonds, unless you're assuming you can't invest the daily payments. Assuming you'll live another 50 years, invest everything you get from this deal at a 4.25% annual return (the current rate for 30-year US Treasury bonds), and there's a 2% annual inflation rate, the net present value of the $1,000 daily payments will be $11M, vs the $10M lump sum. Obviously your expected lifespan affects this, and you can pretty trivially get a higher ROI with even a modicum of risk, but an extremely risk-averse person who expects to live a long time might genuinely do better with the daily payments. (And having this kind of income probably shifts the actuarial tables in your favor.)

I agree the lump sum is the "right" answer, but after doing the math I'm actually way more sympathetic to the daily payments voters than I was based on my intuition. Especially if your risk calculus assumes that any scenario where you have a comfortable, independently wealthy life is a win condition, so the first/only priority is to avoid catastrophic failures, which do seem more plausible with the lump sum.

Assuming you'll live another 50 years, invest everything you get from this deal at a 4.25% annual return (the current rate for 30-year US Treasury bonds), and there's a 2% annual inflation rate, the net present value of the $1,000 daily payments will be $11M, vs the $10M lump sum.

This doesn't make any sense to me. Why does inflation matter here, when you can just compare both numbers? How can the daily payments ever overtake the lump sum when the interest from the lump sum outpaces them substantially?

I decided to sim it with some simplifying assumptions (bond pays out once a year, you reinvest everything always, if you invest something the day before the last day of the year it still pays out in full) but I think these assumptions, especially the last one, are favorable to the daily payouts.

This shows the lump sum diverging from the daily sum instead of the daily sum catching up, which is what you would expect (4.25% is a multiplier, $1000 is a linear addition):

[davidsnavelyfinancialexpert]

How Equity Index Annuities Can Secure Your Retirement – Insights from David Snavely

Planning for a stable retirement can be a complex task, but with the right financial products, you can ensure your hard-earned money is protected and continues to grow. David Snavely, the founder of Sound Investment Services and a respected financial expert with over 40 years of experience, highlights Equity Index Annuities (EIAs) as one of the most effective tools in modern retirement planning. In this blog, we’ll break down the benefits of EIAs and why you should consider them for your retirement strategy.

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An Equity Index Annuity (EIA) is a type of fixed annuity that combines growth potential with income protection. Unlike traditional fixed annuities, which offer a predetermined interest rate, EIAs link your potential returns to the performance of a stock market index, like the S&P 500. This means you can gain from market upswings, while still enjoying principal protection—your initial investment is protected even if the market declines.

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While EIAs don’t offer the potentially high returns of individual stocks, they do provide a middle ground between risk and reward. You can still benefit from positive market trends without being exposed to the full risk of market volatility. Interest credited to your annuity is based on the performance of a specific index, offering steady growth with the added assurance of principal protection.

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Having a stable income stream during retirement is essential, and EIAs offer that through lifetime income riders. David Snavely highlights that these riders ensure a guaranteed flow of income throughout your life, providing financial stability regardless of how the markets perform. This reliable income can help cover your essential living expenses and give you peace of mind.

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Tax-Deferred Growth: Earnings grow faster since they aren’t taxed until withdrawal.

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Every retiree has unique financial goals, and EIAs are flexible enough to meet these diverse needs. David Snavely’s firm, Sound Investment Services, works directly with clients to customize their annuity contracts. This can include selecting different indexes, adjusting cap rates, and choosing riders that enhance your annuity, such as enhanced death benefits for your beneficiaries.

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Inflation can erode the purchasing power of your savings over time. To combat this, many EIAs offer inflation protection riders. These riders adjust your income based on inflation rates, ensuring your money retains its value and helps you maintain your lifestyle throughout retirement. David Snavely recommends including this feature for long-term financial security.

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Maintain Your Lifestyle: Ensure your purchasing power stays strong even as inflation increases.

Why You Should Consider an EIA for Your Retirement

David Snavely strongly advocates for incorporating Equity Index Annuities into your retirement plan. With principal protection, growth potential, guaranteed income, tax advantages, and customization options, EIAs provide a comprehensive solution for retirees looking for both security and growth. If you’re seeking a way to safeguard your retirement savings while ensuring steady income, EIAs could be the perfect fit for you.

Achieve a Worry-Free Retirement with EIAs

In summary, Equity Index Annuities offer a powerful combination of benefits that can enhance any retirement plan. From protecting your initial investment to providing a steady income stream, EIAs give you the security and growth potential you need to enjoy a worry-free retirement. With over 40 years of experience in retirement planning, David Snavely is a trusted expert who can help you navigate the complexities of EIAs and secure your financial future.

Ready to Explore EIAs? Contact David Snavely Today

If you want to learn more about how Equity Index Annuities can fit into your retirement strategy, contact David Snavely at Sound Investment Services today. With decades of experience and a commitment to personalized service, David Snavely can help you create a retirement plan that ensures both safety and growth, giving you the confidence to enjoy your golden years.