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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago

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When the app tries to make you robo-scab

When we talk about the abusive nature of gig work, there’s some obvious targets, like algorithmic wage discrimination, where two workers are paid different rates for the same job, in order to trick occasional gig-workers to give up their other sources of income and become entirely dependent on the app:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Then there’s the opacity — imagine if your boss refused to tell you how much you’ll get paid for a job until after you’ve completed it, claimed that this was done in order to “protect privacy” — and then threatened anyone who helped you figure out the true wage on offer:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#boss-app

Opacity is wage theft’s handmaiden: every gig worker producing content for a social media algorithm is subject to having their reach — and hence their pay — cut based on the unaccountable, inscrutable decisions of a content moderation system:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

Making content for an algorithm is like having a boss that docks every paycheck because you broke rules that you are not allowed to know, because if you knew the rules, you’d figure out how to cheat without your boss catching you. Content moderation is the last place where security through obscurity is considered good practice:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

When workers seize the means of computation, amazing things happen. In Indonesia, gig workers create and trade tuyul apps that let them unilaterally modify the way that their bosses’ systems see them — everything from GPS spoofing to accessibility mods:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

So the tech and labor story isn’t wholly grim: there are lots of ways that tech can enhance labor struggles, letting workers collaborate and coordinate. Without digital systems, we wouldn’t have the Hot Strike Summer:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/02/not-what-it-does/#who-it-does-it-to

As the historic writer/actor strike shows us, the resurgent labor movement and the senescent forces of crapulent capitalism are locked in a death-struggle over not just what digital tools do, but who they do it for and who they do it to:

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

When it comes to the epic fight over who technology acts for and against, we need a diversity of tactics, backstopped by tech operated by and for its users — and by laws that protect workers and the public. That dynamic is in sharp focus in UNITE Here Local 11’s strike against Orange County’s Laguna Cliffs Marriott Resort & Spa.

The UNITE Here strike turns on the usual issues like a living wage (hotel staff are paid so little they have to rent rooming-house beds by the shift, paying for the right to sleep in a room for a few hours at a time, without any permanent accommodation). They’re also seeking health-care and pensions, so they can be healthy at work and retire after long service. Finally, they’re seeking their employer’s support for LA’s Responsible Hotels Ordinance, which would levy a tax on hotel rooms to help pay for hotel workers’ housing costs (a hotel worker who can’t afford a bed is the equivalent of a fast food worker who has to apply for food stamps):

https://www.unitehere11.org/responsible-hotels-ordinance/

But the Marriott — which is owned by the University of California and managed by Aimbridge Hospitality — has refused to bargain, walking out negotiations.

But the employer didn’t walk out over wages, benefits or support for a housing subsidy. They walked out when workers demanded that the scabs that the company was trying to hire to break the strike be given full time, union jobs.

These aren’t just any scabs, either. They’re predominantly Black workers who rely on the $700m Instawork app for gigs. These workers are being dispatched to cross the picket line without any warning that they’re being contracted as strikebreakers. When workers refuse the cross the picket and join the strike, Instawork cancels all their shifts and permanently blocks them from new jobs.

This is a new, technologically supercharged form of illegal strikebreaking. It’s one thing for a single boss to punish a worker who refuses to scab, but Instawork acts as a plausible-deniability filter for all the major employers in the region. Like the landlord apps that allow landlords to illegally fix rents by coordinating hikes, Instawork lets bosses illegally collude to rig wages by coordinating a blocklist of workers who refuse to scab:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/company-that-makes-rent-setting-software-for-landlords-sued-for-collusion/?comments=1

The racial dimension is really important here: the Marriott has a longstanding de facto policy of refusing to hire Black workers, and whenever they are confronted with this, they insist that there are no qualified Black workers in the labor pool. But as soon as the predominantly Latino workforce struck, Marriott discovered a vast Black workforce that it could coerce into scabbing, in collusion with Instawork.

Now, all of this isn’t just sleazy, it’s illegal, a violation of Section 7 of the NLRB Act. Historically, that wouldn’t have mattered, because a string of presidents, R and D, have appointed useless do-nothing ghouls to run the NLRB. But the Biden admin, pushed by the party’s left wing, made a string of historic, excellent appointments, including NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who has set her sights on punishing gig work companies for flouting labor law:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/10/see-you-in-the-funny-papers/#bidens-legacy

UNITE HERE 11 has brought a case to the NLRB, charging the Instawork, the UC system, Marriott, and Aimbridge with violating labor law by blackmailing gig workers into crossing the picket line. The union is also asking the NLRB to punish the companies for failing to protect workers from violent retaliation from the wealthy hotel guests who have punched them and screamed epithets at them. The hotel has refused to identify these thug guests so that the workers they assaulted can swear out complaints against them.

Writing about the strike for Jacobin, Alex N Press tells the story of Thomas Bradley, a Black worker who was struck off all Instawork shifts for refusing to cross the picket line and joining it instead:

https://jacobin.com/2023/07/southern-california-hotel-workers-strike-automated-management-unite-here

Bradley’s case is exhibit A in the UNITE HERE 11 case before the NLRB. He has a degree in culinary arts, but racial discrimination in the industry has kept him stuck in gig and temp jobs ever since he graduated, nearly a quarter century ago. Bradley lived out of his car, but that was repossessed while he slept in a hotel room that UNITE HERE 11 fundraised for him, leaving him homeless and bereft of all his worldly possessions.

With UNITE HERE 11’s help, Bradley’s secured a job at the downtown LA Westin Bonaventure Hotel & Suites, a hotel that has bargained with the workers. Bradley is using his newfound secure position to campaign among other Instawork workers to convince them not to cross picket lines. In these group chats, Jacobin saw workers worrying “that joining the strike would jeopardize their standing on the app.”

Today (July 30) at 1530h, I’m appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning “Ghost Post” Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/30/computer-says-scab/#instawork

[Image ID: An old photo of strikers before a struck factory, with tear-gas plumes rising above them. The image has been modified to add a Marriott sign to the factory, and the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' to the sky over the factory. The workers have been colorized to a yellow-green shade and the factory has been colorized to a sepia tone.]

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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galaxiasgreen · 6 months ago

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🍺🖤This Hell We Create

Sebastian x F!Muggle!Reader with eventual smut [E-Rated, 3.6k words]

"It's hot." "No, and here I thought it was the Arctic." When he makes no move to do anything, you raise your chin, glaring up at him. "No shirt, no service." "I am wearing a shirt." A glint of mischief pierces briefly through his mood. "You know, most women usually ask me to take off my clothes—"

The freckled stranger has been visiting your pub for three months now, drinking to forget the worst times.

You might be the person he needs to remember the best.

[MASTERLIST][NEXT] [read on AO3, read on Wattpad]

TW: swearing, alcoholism, grief, discussions of death.

1: stupid questions

The freckled stranger has been in your pub every day for the last three months.

It never matters whether it's windy, raining, or overbearingly sunny. It never matters whether it's busy, tables crammed, the counter sticky with spills, or if the tax on drink has gone up. It never matters if he's in a good or bad mood. Every day, right as expected, he shoulders inside Ye Olde Hen House, ignores the chorus of greetings from the tipsy regulars, lumbers to the bar and orders a drink. His choice is always the same: cold stout, brought over in as many glasses he can take before he's one whit away from passing out.

You're used to hauling out drunkards. In this part of the old city they trundle in after labour shifts, seeking to forget the day's worries, and wind up on the floor by hour's end. You pity them their weak constitutions and poor decision-making, and the wives who will have to suffer their company upon their brazen return in the middle of the night.

To his credit, the freckled stranger has never been that drunk.

Yet you pity him most of all.

The first time he steps foot inside the pub he immediately draws your eye. Most of the regulars are in their forties, pot-bellied and cheerful like Christmas adverts of St Nick – but the freckled stranger is around your age, five-and-twenty, with youthful skin, a smooth gait and broad, firm shoulders. His hair is a bed of chestnut curls, and the ends shadow his eyes, also a dark brown, like coffee. Stubble grows in patches over his sharp jaw. In the heat of summer he wears only a linen shirt rolled up at the sleeves, and you can see muscle there, and tattoos, though you force yourself to look away before you can determine what they are, burying your curiosity behind professionalism.

When he makes it to the counter, he slaps down a handful of change and sinks onto the barstool, looking at you, gaze burning expectantly but not with disdain.

"Pint of beer, please."

"Two pence."

He pushes all his coins over. You extract two pennies, then fill a glass to the brim. He drinks quietly but greedily, siphoning the beer like it's his first liquid in days, and when he finishes, every drop consumed, the glass clatters to the countertop in a white-knuckled grip, pronouncing the veins in his hands like cobalt forks of lightning.

"Another, please."

You raise an eyebrow. "Knock that back any faster you might see Heaven before you mean to."

"What makes you think I'm going to heaven?" He throws out a few coins – pennies and halfpennies this time. "Pint of beer, please."

He drinks slower and slower each time as the alcohol alleviates his worries. You feel pity, strong and true. Same age or abouts, and people would look down on you for having a peasant's job, but at least you're not wasting your life away like the freckled stranger.

At least of yourself you make a name, whilst the freckled stranger makes a fool.

By his fourth, sometimes fifth drink, he's spread-eagle on the countertop, playing with the pocket change between his fingertips, wide-eyed with fascination.

"Don't fall asleep," you tell him, squeezing a cloth over a soiled plate. "Or I'll kick you out."

"Not sleepy," he slurs, flicking a half-penny into a tailspin. "Am pensive."

"Pensive... right."

"Pensive about pennies." He chuckles to himself. "Your coins are so funny. What's the point of half-pennies and farthings?"

The use of your is unusual, but he's drunk, so what's new. "Why don't you ask King Edward?" you say humorously.

"You say it like he's only next door. Know him, do you?"

"'Course. We're best mates."

"Put me in contact. I'll change— more make sense."

You purse your lips. He's too drunk to respond coherently, though there's still about three fingers left in the glass, which he eventually works up the means to finish, leaving his lips sticky with cream. By this point it's almost closing time and he struggles to get to his feet. You don't help him. Why should you?

"Ta," he hiccoughs roughly in your direction, and staggers out the door, out of view. You wonder where he goes, what he does in the daytime, whether he has family, or friends, or a pretty girl who pities him too.

He's in a mood on a particularly hot June evening, when he walks into the pub with his shirt unbuttoned.

Do not look. Despite being a complete wastrel, the freckled stranger, you hate to admit, is extremely well-built, with a finely-toned chest and brawny arms that could easily win many wrestling matches, and many hearts too. Maybe he already has. The long stripe of flesh between the two front panels tease a wide chest tattoo, inked over his pectorals like fine canvas – what appears to be two runic symbols and the number 706.

You quickly glance away. That's already too much. Just because a man is attractive doesn't mean you should be staring. You compose yourself and make your way over before he reaches the bar.

"Shirt," you say. "Button it up."

He halts, drinking in the sight of you. Up close, all you can smell is his musk, salty like the sea, and just as powerful. His hair is soaked with it too – there are dirt marks there, like he's been in a scrap, but he appears uninjured.

"It's hot."

"No, and here I thought it was the Arctic." When he makes no move to do anything, you raise your chin, glaring up at him. "No shirt, no service."

"I am wearing a shirt." A glint of mischief pierces briefly through his mood. "You know, most women usually ask me to take off my clothes—"

"Do up your shirt," you grind out, "or get out."

The mischief dissipates as his eyes narrow, but he reluctantly buttons up the front. The shirt is ratty and torn at the elbows, but still smells enticingly like him, and he doesn't bother going up all the way, leaving an annoying glimpse of that unusual scrawl of symbols.

"Happy now?"

You go around the counter, ignoring him. "What do you want?"

"What do you think?"

Your eyes narrow. "You know the cost."

A hand slips into his pocket and produces a handful of coins, which he dumps out flippantly. They clatter to a stop in a wide arc.

Impertinent. Your lips flatten. Two can play that game.

"You've been here enough times to know the correct change by now."

He snorts. "Every bloody coin looks the same."

"It has Britannia wielding the trident on one side."

"Who the hell is Britannia?"

You roll your eyes. "Edward is on the other. Know who he is or have you really been living in the Arctic?"

"I remember your best mate." Finally he takes two pennies from the pile. "You could've just said it was the biggest bronze coin and saved yourself the hassle."

You could've also told him it literally says penny on the rim, but who knows if he's able to read – or whether he can right now. "You don't learn if you don't figure it out for yourself." You take them from his proffered hand. "Pint or half-pint?"

"Another stupid question."

"In that case, I won't serve you—"

"Wait." He grunts in annoyance and holds out the pennies again. "One pint of beer, please."

"That's better."

He takes the drink, and your gaze dips to the hand clenching the glass – you've never seen a drunk with such... muscle definition before. His frame is broad, his chest like full barrels of whiskey. He looks like he knows how to handle his body – how to use it to full advantage.

Shame. If only he didn't have the personality of a wet rag.

You serve another few people before he motions for you again, and this time you pour him the drink without saying a word. He exchanges the right money for the glass.

"I'm sorry," he mumbles, before you go away again. "I've been rude."

You hesitate, suspicious. "Yes, you have."

"You're just doing your job."

"Yes, I am."

"Can you forgive me?"

That same glint of mischief there, except this one is charming – this one prods a little more insistently at your mental walls. You snort.

"This time."

He takes a sip, leaving a trail of foam on his mouth – he thumbs it away and licks the tip.

Hastily you look away.

"How long have you been working here?" the freckled stranger asks one Tuesday night, when the pub is dead.

You slap your cloth to the countertop, soaked with wood polish. You've talked to him a few times now, but this is the first that's been more than polite greetings, menial chatter, and get out, you're completely sozzled.

"Why?"

"What d'you mean, why?"

"Why d'you want to know?"

He leans back, lips tugging upwards. "I know you but I don't know you, if that makes sense."

"And it should stay that way."

"I just think it would be nice to properly appreciate the woman who serves me drinks every day."

You roll your lips. He's a good talker when he wants to be – when he's sober. "Been working here longer than you've been drinking here, that's for sure."

"A year? Five years? How old are you?"

"Careful."

"I'm twenty-six."

"Didn't ask."

His gaze on you is lowered but penetrating when he braces his chin in a hand. You can't help but feel a little flushed.

"Do you own this fine establishment?"

"I do."

"Not your husband?"

"Not married."

"But you're so old."

"Do you want to get kicked out?"

His smile curls. "Put-off marrying because it will mean handing all your assets to your undeserving husband?"

You pause to glare at him. "So you know the lack of women's rights but you can't figure out which coin is a penny?"

"Women's rights makes sense. The coins don't. Why do all the bronze ones look the same? I'm still waiting on a meeting with Ed about that, by the way."

"Oh, the lack of women's rights makes sense, does it?"

"I said women's rights makes sense. I'm on your side."He shrugs. "Personally, though, I'm more of a supporter of women's wrongs."

A laugh gutters out of you, and with a self-satisfied, feline grin, he drinks.

Something is very wrong when he comes in on his four-month anniversary.

If rain could embody a person, the freckled stranger would be a barely-contained hurricane. He looks the worst you've ever seen – dark crescents beneath red eyes, skin frighteningly wan, burst blood vessels webbing across his cheeks like crinkles on a flattened wad of newspaper. He glowers at anyone who looks at him askance, a clear signal to stay the fuck away.

He slumps bodily onto his normal barstool – and there comes the pity, an avalanche crashing through your body.

"Beer."

You don't move.

He lets out an annoyed sigh. "Pint of beer, please."

You pour it. "What's the matter with you?"

"Nothing."

"Fine. All the same to me." It's not all the same – he looks like the truth might kill him from the inside. "Stout's out. I've got porter."

His eyes flash. "Porter's weak shit."

"That or ale. Take your pick."

"Porter then."

You pour it. It's infamously dark in colour, like his eyes right now, black and molten and unforgiving of a world that has cut him up and left him to die. When he takes the glass he doesn't thank you, just jams the rim between his teeth and gulps ravenously. The slam on the countertop reverberates.

"Another."

"Seem to be missing a thank you and please—"

"Can you just—" He catches himself. "Not today. Just not today."

"Today is a regular ol' Thursday for me," you point out coldly. "If you want some leeway for your absent manners you're going to have to give me a reason."

He mumbles something inaudible.

You lean forwards. "Didn't catch that."

Finally his gaze settles on you, and it's guarded, striking, like steel.

"My twin sister died four months ago today."

When people turn to drink, it's mostly because of one of two things: grief, or loneliness. Now you know the freckled stranger is both. You can see it in the shadows that cling to him, in the trembling of his cracked knuckles, grasping the glass like it's the only thread between him and sweet oblivion.

It doesn't surprise you to hear it, nor see it with your own eyes – but a death of a twin... now that's something you've never heard before. Especially not from someone so young.

"Sorry to hear that." The condolence softens your disdain, just a little. "I can't imagine—"

"No, you can't imagine what it must be like, yes, it's awful, is there anything you can do? Sorrows and prayers, sorrows and prayers!" The laugh is hysterical. "I don't want that. I didn't come here to listen to your pity."

Strange... until this conversation, pity was all you felt.

Now you're just angry.

"Why'd you tell me then?" you shoot back, as your temper builds in your belly. "You blurt your sob story and, what, expect me not to say anything?"

"I came to drink, so that's what I'll damn well do."

"Then shut your cakehole, drink your damn porter and stop fishing for sympathy."

Something cracks along his expression. He splutters. "Like hell I'm fishing—"

"Four months, you said? Yet here you are, sulking. You look like she passed only yesterday. Is this what she would've wanted, for you to drink yourself into stupor every bloody day?"

Genuine anger clouds his face. "You don't know what she would've wanted."

"I know you care for her deeply, so I can guess she cared deeply for you too, and I don't know a single loved one of mine who'd want me to live in this hell you've created for yourself."

He stands to his feet – nearly stumbles. "You can't talk to me— like— you don't—"

"Look at you, too drunk to even stand. You drank before you came here, didn't you? You've been drinking all day, feeling sorry for yourself. If you won't accept my condolences, fine, but you better heed this warning instead: if you ever talk to me like that again, I will have you chucked out and barred not just here, but every damn pub this side of the city, and I won't give a rat's arse about your grief or your shitty coping strategies. Do you understand?"

Something lifts and vanishes from his eyes, like a dark shape that flees arrest in the cover of night. The crack in his façade widens, and maybe it's the reek of him, of old stale drink that wisps out of him in short breaths, but something makes you lean back, give him space to process your words, to process his mistake in crossing you.

You were yelling all that, and the rest of the pub has quietened in response. One of the regulars stands up and makes eye contact with you, but you wave him away. You're all right. The freckled stranger understands now.

The look on his face is not just defeat... but clarity.

"Understood," he rasps out eventually.

"Good." Your heart races – you fight to control it. "Now, I've got other customers waiting, so if you don't mind keeping your voice down?"

But he knocks back the rest in one go and leaves without saying a word.

Maybe you were a little harsh.

You stew on it the next morning as you prepare for a busy day. Wiping the surfaces, preparing the stock, checking the tills, rallying the other staff and replenishing the taps – so much to do and occupy your mind, yet there you are, face creased as you think of the freckled stranger and his grief.

He needed the push, you don't regret that, but you do regret, just slightly, how you delivered it. It could've gone so many ways – he could've complained to the police and tarnished the pub's reputation, could've destroyed furniture, glass, could've hurt you. You might own Ye Olde Hen House but at the end of the day you're a glorified barmaid – a wench, some of the older patrons sometimes use against you derogatorily. Who are you to offer the freckled stranger life advice?

You thought he might not appear that evening, but at eight o'clock, he shoulders through the door and takes the same bar stool, right in front of you, as always.

"Pint of beer," he murmurs, "please."

You pour it for him, making it extra frothy, but say nothing when you slide it over. This time he pays the correct coinage, no fuss. So he's capable of using his brain just as much as you're capable of feeling guilt. His knuckles blanch over the glass, clenching it hard – you find yourself distracted by his hands, solid and engulfing, like he would never yield anything in his grip.

You let out a scathing sigh. "Look, I'm sorry."

He raises a finger and tips the glass back until all the porter has slid down his throat.

"Can't have this talk sober," he says, using his muscled forearm to wipe his mouth messily. "Another. Please."

He sets out the coin, you pour him the drink. He doesn't say a word until the next one goes down, and the next. Eventually he massages the bridge of his nose.

"I'm sorry myself," he forces out, even though the drink softens the consonants. "You shouldn't have to apologise."

"I was harsh."

"You were an arsehole."

"Funnily enough that's why I'm saying sorry."

"No, but... it was nice, your bluntness." He sags on the counter, but his gaze is still locked on you. "Every bloody person I know has been coddling me for months. Sorry about Anne this, I'm sad for you that. The condolences and sadness and hugs and well-wishes has never stopped. Even my best friends Ominis and Garreth keep tiptoeing around me like I'm as fragile as a Remembrall."

"A what?"

"Glass," he amends swiftly. His thumb presses into the curve of his jaw, protruding the strong cords of his neck. "I'm so fed up with it. So fucking fed up."

"You know you're not helping yourself, right?" you say, hoping this doesn't cross a line again. "Coming in here to drink—"

"Every day, I know. I just need it. I need to drink. I need to— to forget what I did—" He shakes his head and grasps his temple fiercely. "Tell me something. Quick."

"What?"

"Anything. Your favourite book, how your parents met, the drama of whoever you're shagging at the moment, I don't care. I don't want to think. Just – give me anything. And another beer. Please."

So you tell him your favourite book – you don't get to read very often, you're lucky you can read at all – and you tell him the less-than-exciting story of how your parents met. You're not 'shagging' anyone at the moment, which you say with a roll of your eyes, so you're relatively drama-free. Your life is utterly mundane, as you like it.

You don't leave him with nothing, however.

"I've been at this pub since I was eighteen, seven years ago. Inherited it off my parents now that they're too old to work."

He must do the maths as he squirrels away another beer.

"You must enjoy it."

"It was either here or the match factory. You must know how that went."

He smiles indulgently. "Expert in women's rights, remember?"

You huff a snort.

"You get how this place works, then."

"I've been helping out here since I was a tot, so yes, I know everything there is to know. Plus it pays well and keeps me mostly protected, and I get to be part of the community and meet new people."

He lets out a breathy chuckle.

"Like me?"

You tip your head.

"Yeah, like you, I suppose." You gently pry the empty glass from his hand. "Another?"

"Stupid question."

But he smiles fondly this time, so you make a face and pour his fourth beer without complaint.

You don't talk much from then. You're busy with other customers and he's probably tired of chatting, though you meet his eye several times during the last hour, like a hook on a thread that catches by accident – or fate. It's those coffee eyes that you're drawn to. They dance like fingers on skin, to a rhythm as constant as ocean waves, cascading down your spine even when you turn away.

By the time the other patrons have left and the gramophone has run out of records to play, all that's between you and closing is the freckled stranger.

"What's your name?"

You glance his way. "Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why'd you want to know?"

"It's not an interrogation. It's just so you're not the bar girl in my head."

"In that case," you smile sweetly, "it's none of your business."

"You drive a hard deal, bar girl," he says, taking it in his stride. "My name is Sebastian Sallow."

"Didn't ask."

"Trade you? I'll even throw in a middle name as a bonus."

"No thanks." You flick towards the door. "Now, it's nearly one o'clock and my pub is about to close, so you better skedaddle before I toss you out by ear, Sebastian Sallow."

"That's a lot more effective now that you can use it against me." The barstool scrapes – Sebastian Sallow manages to make it to the door without stumbling once. "Will I regret telling you?"

You hold the door and smile indulgently as he steps out.

"Stupid question."

You shut it in his face.

[MASTERLIST][NEXT] [Gorgeous art by FlamboyantJelly][Divider credit]

#hogwarts legacy #sebastian sallow #sebastian sallow x reader #sebastian sallow x mc #hogwarts legacy fanfic #azkaban seb #muggle reader #thwc #the bar girl #my writing #my stuff #being a good author and promoting my work lol

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thoughtportal · 1 month ago

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A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears)

PublicAffairs, 288 pp., $28.00

But don’t worry—it almost never comes to this. As one park service PSA noted this summer, bears “usually just want to be left alone. Don’t we all?” In other words, if you encounter a black bear, try to look big, back slowly away, and trust in the creature’s inner libertarian. Unless, that is, the bear in question hails from certain wilds of western New Hampshire. Because, as Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling’s new book suggests, that unfortunate animal may have a far more aggressive disposition, and relate to libertarianism first and foremost as a flavor of human cuisine.

Hongoltz-Hetling is an accomplished journalist based in Vermont, a Pulitzer nominee and George Polk Award winner. A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears) sees him traversing rural New England as he reconstructs a remarkable, and remarkably strange, episode in recent history. This is the so-called Free Town Project, a venture wherein a group of libertarian activists attempted to take over a tiny New Hampshire town, Grafton, and transform it into a haven for libertarian ideals—part social experiment, part beacon to the faithful, Galt’s Gulch meets the New Jerusalem. These people had found one another largely over the internet, posting manifestos and engaging in utopian daydreaming on online message boards. While their various platforms and bugbears were inevitably idiosyncratic, certain beliefs united them: that the radical freedom of markets and the marketplace of ideas was an unalloyed good; that “statism” in the form of government interference (above all, taxes) was irredeemably bad. Left alone, they believed, free individuals would thrive and self-regulate, thanks to the sheer force of “logic,” “reason,” and efficiency. For inspirations, they drew upon precedents from fiction (Ayn Rand loomed large) as well as from real life, most notably a series of micro-nation projects ventured in the Pacific and Caribbean during the 1970s and 1980s.

None of those micro-nations, it should be observed, panned out, and things in New Hampshire don’t bode well either—especially when the humans collide with a newly brazen population of bears, themselves just “working to create their own utopia,” property lines and market logic be damned. The resulting narrative is simultaneously hilarious, poignant, and deeply unsettling. Sigmund Freud once described the value of civilization, with all its “discontents,” as a compromise product, the best that can be expected from mitigating human vulnerability to “indifferent nature” on one hand and our vulnerability to one another on the other. Hongoltz-Hetling presents, in microcosm, a case study in how a politics that fetishizes the pursuit of “freedom,” both individual and economic, is in fact a recipe for impoverishment and supercharged vulnerability on both fronts at once. In a United States wracked by virus, mounting climate change, and ruthless corporate pillaging and governmental deregulation, the lessons from one tiny New Hampshire town are stark indeed.

“In a country known for fussy states with streaks of independence,” Hongoltz-Hetling observes, “New Hampshire is among the fussiest and the streakiest.” New Hampshire is, after all, the Live Free or Die state, imposing neither an income nor a sales tax, and boasting, among other things, the highest per capita rate of machine gun ownership. In the case of Grafton, the history of Living Free—so to speak—has deep roots. The town’s Colonial-era settlers started out by ignoring “centuries of traditional Abenaki law by purchasing land from founding father John Hancock and other speculators.” Next, they ran off Royalist law enforcement, come to collect lumber for the king, and soon discovered their most enduring pursuit: the avoidance of taxes. As early as 1777, Grafton’s citizens were asking their government to be spared taxes and, when they were not, just stopped paying them.

Nearly two and a half centuries later, Grafton has become something of a magnet for seekers and quirky types, from adherents of the Unification Church of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon to hippie burnouts and more. Particularly important for the story is one John Babiarz, a software designer with a Krusty the Klown laugh, who decamped from Big-Government-Friendly Connecticut in the 1990s to homestead in New Hampshire with his equally freedom-loving wife, Rosalie. Entering a sylvan world that was, Hongoltz-Hetling writes, “almost as if they had driven through a time warp and into New England’s revolutionary days, when freedom outweighed fealty and trees outnumbered taxes,” the two built a new life for themselves, with John eventually coming to head Grafton’s volunteer fire department (which he describes as a “mutual aid” venture) and running for governor on the libertarian ticket.

Although John’s bids for high office failed, his ambitions remained undimmed, and in 2004 he and Rosalie connected with a small group of libertarian activists. Might not Grafton, with its lack of zoning laws and low levels of civic participation, be the perfect place to create an intentional community based on Logic and Free Market Principles? After all, in a town with fewer than 800 registered voters, and plenty of property for sale, it would not take much for a committed group of transplants to establish a foothold, and then win dominance of municipal governance. And so the Free Town Project began. The libertarians expected to be greeted as liberators, but from the first town meeting, they faced the inconvenient reality that many of Grafton’s presumably freedom-loving citizens saw them as outsiders first, and compatriots second—if at all. Tensions flared further when a little Googling revealed what “freedom” entailed for some of the new colonists. One of the original masterminds of the plan, a certain Larry Pendarvis, had written of his intention to create a space honoring the freedom to “traffic organs, the right to hold duels, and the God-given, underappreciated right to organize so-called bum fights.” He had also bemoaned the persecution of the “victimless crime” that is “consensual cannibalism.” (“Logic is a strange thing,” observes Hongoltz-Hetling.)

While Pendarvis eventually had to take his mail-order Filipina bride business and dreams of municipal takeovers elsewhere (read: Texas), his comrades in the Free Town Project remained undeterred. Soon, they convinced themselves that, evidence and reactions to Pendarvis notwithstanding, the Project must actually enjoy the support of a silent majority of freedom-loving Graftonites. How could it not? This was Freedom, after all. And so the libertarians keep coming, even as Babiarz himself soon came to rue the fact that “the libertarians were operating under vampire rules—the invitation to enter, once offered, could not be rescinded.” The precise numbers are hard to pin down, but ultimately the town’s population of a little more than 1,100 swelled with 200 new residents, overwhelmingly men, with very strong opinions and plenty of guns.

Hongoltz-Hetling profiles many newcomers, all of them larger-than-life, yet quite real. The people who joined the Free Town Project in its first five years were, as he describes, “free radicals”—men with “either too much money or not enough,” with either capital to burn or nothing to lose. There’s John Connell of Massachusetts, who arrived on a mission from God, liquidated his savings, and bought the historic Grafton Center Meetinghouse, transforming it into the “Peaceful Assembly Church,” an endeavor that mixed garish folk art, strange rants from its new pastor (Connell himself), and a quixotic quest to secure tax exemption while refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of the IRS to grant it. There’s Adam Franz, a self-described anti-capitalist who set up a tent city to serve as “a planned community of survivalists,” even though no one who joined it had any real bushcraft skills. There’s Richard Angell, an anti-circumcision activist known as “Dick Angel.” And so on. As Hongoltz-Hetling makes clear, libertarianism can indeed have a certain big-tent character, especially when the scene is a new landscape of freedom-lovers making “homes out of yurts and RVs, trailers and tents, geodesic domes and shipping containers.”

If the Libertarian vision of Freedom can take many shapes and sizes, one thing is bedrock: “Busybodies” and “statists” need to stay out of the way. And so the Free Towners spent years pursuing an aggressive program of governmental takeover and delegitimation, their appetite for litigation matched only by their enthusiasm for cutting public services. They slashed the town’s already tiny yearly budget of $1 million by 30 percent, obliged the town to fight legal test case after test case, and staged absurd, standoffish encounters with the sheriff to rack up YouTube hits. Grafton was a poor town to begin with, but with tax revenue dropping even as its population expanded, things got steadily worse. Potholes multiplied, domestic disputes proliferated, violent crime spiked, and town workers started going without heat. “Despite several promising efforts,” Hongoltz-Hetling dryly notes, “a robust Randian private sector failed to emerge to replace public services.” Instead, Grafton, “a haven for miserable people,” became a town gone “feral.” Enter the bears, stage right.

Black bears, it should be stressed, are generally a pretty chill bunch. The woods of North America are home to some three-quarters of a million of them; on average, there is at most one human fatality from a black bear attack per year, even as bears and humans increasingly come into contact in expanding suburbs and on hiking trails. But tracking headlines on human-bear encounters in New England in his capacity as a regional journalist in the 2000s, Hongoltz-Hetling noticed something distressing: The black bears in Grafton were not like other black bears. Singularly “bold,” they started hanging out in yards and on patios in broad daylight. Most bears avoid loud noises; these casually ignored the efforts of Graftonites to run them off. Chickens and sheep began to disappear at alarming rates. Household pets went missing, too. One Graftonite was playing with her kittens on her lawn when a bear bounded out of the woods, grabbed two of them, and scarfed them down. Soon enough, the bears were hanging out on porches and trying to enter homes.

Combining wry description with evocative bits of scientific fact, Hongoltz-Hetling’s portrayal of the bears moves from comical if foreboding to downright terrifying. These are animals that can scent food seven times farther than a trained bloodhound, that can flip 300-pound stones with ease, and that can, when necessary, run in bursts of speed rivaling a deer’s. When the bears finally start mauling humans—attacking two women in their homes—Hongoltz-Hetling’s relation of the scenes is nightmarish. “If you look at their eyes, you understand,” one survivor tells him, “that they are completely alien to us.”

What was the deal with Grafton’s bears? Hongoltz-Hetling investigates the question at length, probing numerous hypotheses for why the creatures have become so uncharacteristically aggressive, indifferent, intelligent, and unafraid. Is it the lack of zoning, the resulting incursion into bear habitats, and the reluctance of Graftonites to pay for, let alone mandate, bear-proof garbage bins? Might the bears be deranged somehow, perhaps even disinhibited and emboldened by toxoplasmosis infections, picked up from eating trash and pet waste from said unsecured bins? There can be no definitive answer to these questions, but one thing is clear: The libertarian social experiment underway in Grafton was uniquely incapable of dealing with the problem. “Free Towners were finding that the situations that had been so easy to problem-solve in the abstract medium of message boards were difficult to resolve in person.”

Grappling with what to do about the bears, the Graftonites also wrestled with the arguments of certain libertarians who questioned whether they should do anything at all—especially since several of the town residents had taken to feeding the bears, more or less just because they could. One woman, who prudently chose to remain anonymous save for the sobriquet “Doughnut Lady,” revealed to Hongoltz-Hetling that she had taken to welcoming bears on her property for regular feasts of grain topped with sugared doughnuts. If those same bears showed up on someone else’s lawn expecting similar treatment, that wasn’t her problem. The bears, for their part, were left to navigate the mixed messages sent by humans who alternately threw firecrackers and pastries at them. Such are the paradoxes of Freedom. Some people just “don’t get the responsibility side of being libertarians,” Rosalie Babiarz tells Hongoltz-Hetling, which is certainly one way of framing the problem.

Pressed by bears from without and internecine conflicts from within, the Free Town Project began to come apart. Caught up in “pitched battles over who was living free, but free in the right way,” the libertarians descended into accusing one another of statism, leaving individuals and groups to do the best (or worst) they could. Some kept feeding the bears, some built traps, others holed up in their homes, and still others went everywhere toting increasingly larger-caliber handguns. After one particularly vicious attack, a shadowy posse formed and shot more than a dozen bears in their dens. This effort, which was thoroughly illegal, merely put a dent in the population; soon enough, the bears were back in force.

Meanwhile, the dreams of numerous libertarians came to ends variously dramatic and quiet. A real estate development venture known as Grafton Gulch, in homage to the dissident enclave in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, went belly-up. After losing a last-ditch effort to secure tax exemption, a financially ruined Connell found himself unable to keep the heat on at the Meetinghouse; in the midst of a brutal winter, he waxed apocalyptic and then died in a fire. Franz quit his survivalist commune, which soon walled itself off into a prisonlike compound, the better to enjoy freedom. And John Babiarz, the erstwhile inaugurator of the Project, became the target of relentless vilification by his former ideological cohorts, who did not appreciate his refusal to let them enjoy unsecured blazes on high-wildfire–risk afternoons. When another, higher-profile libertarian social engineering enterprise, the Free State Project, received national attention by promoting a mass influx to New Hampshire in general (as opposed to just Grafton), the Free Town Project’s fate was sealed. Grafton became “just another town in a state with many options,” options that did not have the same problem with bears.

Or at least—not yet. Statewide, a perverse synergy between conservationist and austerity impulses in New Hampshire governance has translated into an approach to “bear management” policy that could accurately be described as laissez-faire. When Graftonites sought help from New Hampshire Fish and Game officials, they received little more than reminders that killing bears without a license is illegal, and plenty of highly dubious victim-blaming to boot. Had not the woman savaged by a bear been cooking a pot roast at the time? No? Well, nevertheless. Even when the state has tried to rein in the population with culls, it has been too late. Between 1998 and 2013, the number of bears doubled in the wildlife management region that includes Grafton. “Something’s Bruin in New Hampshire—Learn to Live with Bears,” the state’s literature advises.

The bear problem, in other words, is much bigger than individual libertarian cranks refusing to secure their garbage. It is a problem born of years of neglect and mismanagement by legislators, and, arguably, indifference from New Hampshire taxpayers in general, who have proved reluctant to step up and allocate resources to Fish and Game, even as the agency’s traditional source of funding—income from hunting licenses—has dwindled. Exceptions like Doughnut Lady aside, no one wants bears in their backyard, but apparently no one wants to invest sustainably in institutions doing the unglamorous work to keep them out either. Whether such indifference and complacency gets laundered into rhetoric of fiscal prudence, half-baked environmentalism, or individual responsibility, the end result is the same: The bears abide—and multiply.

Their prosperity also appears to be linked to man-made disasters that have played out on a national and global scale—patterns of unsustainable construction and land use, and the climate crisis. More than once, Hongoltz-Hetling flags the fact that upticks in bear activity unfold alongside apparently ever more frequent droughts. Drier summers may well be robbing bears of traditional plant and animal sources of food, even as hotter winters are disrupting or even ending their capacity to hibernate. Meanwhile, human garbage, replete with high-calorie artificial ingredients, piles up, offering especially enticing treats, even in the dead of winter—particularly in places with zoning and waste management practices as chaotic as those in Grafton, but also in areas where suburban sprawl is reaching farther into the habitats of wild animals. The result may be a new kind of bear, one “torn between the unique dangers and caloric payloads that humans provide—they are more sleep-deprived, more anxious, more desperate, and more twitchy than the bear that nature produced.” Ever-hungry for new frontiers in personal autonomy and market emancipation, human beings have altered the environment with the unintended result of empowering newly ravenous bears to boot.

Ignoring institutional failure and mounting crises does not make them go away. But some may take refuge in confidence that, when the metaphorical chickens (or, rather, bears) finally come home to roost, the effects are never felt equally. When bears show up in higher-income communities like Hanover (home to Dartmouth College), Hongoltz-Hetling notes, they get parody Twitter accounts and are promptly evacuated to wildernesses in the north; poorer rural locales are left to fend for themselves, and the residents blamed for doing what they can. In other words, the “unintended natural selection of the bears that are trying to survive alongside modern humans” is unfolding along with competition among human beings amid failing infrastructure and scarce resources, a struggle with Social Darwinist dynamics of its own.

The distinction between a municipality of eccentric libertarians and a state whose response to crisis is, in so many words, “Learn to Live With It” may well be a matter of degree rather than kind. Whether it be assaults by bears, imperceptible toxoplasmosis parasites, or a way of life where the freedom of markets ultimately trumps individual freedom, even the most cocksure of Grafton’s inhabitants must inevitably face something beyond and bigger than them. In that, they are hardly alone. Clearly, when it comes to certain kinds of problems, the response must be collective, supported by public effort, and dominated by something other than too-tidy-by-half invocations of market rationality and the maximization of individual personal freedom. If not, well, then we had all best get some practice in learning when and how to play dead, and hope for the best.

#article #new hampshire wildcats #the new republic #bears #ecology #economics #urban planning

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genericpuff · 7 months ago

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Here's your regular service reminder that $48k/year sounds like a dream come true to people who have never made a living off their art or comics before, until you factor in the following:

Cost of assistants which is out-of-pocket (some creators literally don't hire assistants because of this which makes the process of meeting their deadlines even harder)

Cost of additional tools necessary to making webtoons and meeting deadlines, such as paying for drawing software, 3D models, etc.

Cost of emergency services such as healthcare are not covered by WT, so if your health deteriorates while you're working on your comic (which it often does for many creators whose bodies are destroyed from working long hours at a desk 7 days a week), WT will not help you.

No paid vacation time, no paid sick leave, no accommodations for people with kids, disabilities, etc. meaning if you have to take time off, WT will not be covering it.

Speaking of vacation time, Webtoons ONLY pays creators for completed and submitted episodes, meaning they will not pay you for pre-production time leading up to a series release OR have your back when you have to go on hiatus. Some creators manage multiple series to make ends meet and avoid stretches of unpaid hiatuses (IIRC I believe KitTrace does this with Nevermore and Shiloh rotating on and off hiatus one at a time) and others simply have to go without pay relying solely on their Patreons and other forms of income when they go on hiatus. And, as we've seen in the past, when they return from hiatus is often up to Webtoons, not them.

That $48k is basically just an average ballpark of what Webtoons pays creators for a season of content, and for those who recall, FastPass earnings are not given to creators until they make back that payment.

It's really hard to get people to FastPass when Webtoons is deliberately not advertising your series and, in some cases, outright SABOTAGING your attempts to advertise.

I don't even know if that $48k is before or AFTER taxes, I'm assuming before considering this is a self-employment contract, meaning you likely have to put away a good few thousand for taxes depending on your state tax rate and what you're able to write off. This also includes having to track assistant expenditures for filing.

The 60-80+ hour weeks many creators are having to pull to meet their deadlines turns that $48k/year into an ASTOUNDING drum roll ... $11 - $15/hour! Which is just barely over minimum wage in many states, and absolutely 100% not a living wage in most! And that's BEST CASE scenario in which you don't pay an assistant, don't suffer any health expenses, don't pay for 3D models / software, and POSSIBLY don't pay your taxes. Yaaaaay! 😒🖕

TL : DR $48k/year hasn't been a salary worth bragging about since 2005 ESPECIALLY not for such high-demand specialized work like this, fuck you Webtoons <3

#webtoon critical #fuck webtoons

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lieutenant-rasczak · 2 years ago

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On the incredible danger of the quaint, English village....

Although I live in Texas, thanks to various streaming services I get to watch a great deal of British T.V. I have noticed that these shows (Midsomer Murders, Dalziel and Pascoe, Waking the Dead, Shakespeare and Hathaway, Vera, Rosemary & Thyme, Wycliffe, etc.) share a common theme.

And, after a certain amount of research I discovered that, believe it or not, the third leading cause of death in the UK seems to be "Moving to a quaint, country village".

While “Getting murdered in a quaint, English, village” killed slightly fewer UK Residents in 2021 than "Cancer" and "Heart Disease" it was distressingly close. Even worse it came in only slightly ahead of "Attending a weekend party at a stately country home", which is in itself a fairly lethal pastime. In fact “Attending a weekend party at a stately country home” WAS the second leading cause of death in Britain between 1919 and 1939, but began to decline after the war as the Labour Govt. raised taxes and the number of country homes dropped drastically; thus causing a steep decline in the number of weekend parties one could be murdered at.

In any case my research indicates that IF you are British, AND you are feeling down, depressed, and suicidal, there is no reason for you to run your car off a cliff, or take a trip to Switzerland. In fact, you need only do the following

1) move to a lovely, quiet, English village where nothing ever happens, but the murder rate is (adjusted for population) is far higher than that of South Chicago or East L.A.

You might think that such a village would be hard to find, but apparently England is simply teeming with them. Places with highly competitive flower shows or bleak, cliff filled coastlines seem to be particularly deadly.

2) Change your will, and make sure to mention this to the former beneficiary. (This is vitally important!) Also make sure to let them know where the new will is kept. The top drawer of your desk is probably the best place, no need for locking file cabinets or bank safety deposit boxes!

3) Develop a keen interest in local land titles and/or genealogy. In fact you should probably announce that you are writing a book on the subject. (It is suggested that you do so in a crowded pub.) In any case make sure to spend plenty of time at the local public records office researching this while receiving vaguely threatening remarks from various upset neighbours. If you receive any threatening notes make sure to save them in an easily discovered drawer somewhere, but do NOT mention them to anybody, and certainly do not heed any warnings you are given about a need to “back off”. That last one is ESSENTIAL.

4) Stand against the most popular member in the election for Parish Council. Threatening to win the local flower show is also a good move.

5) Always leave the door or doors unlocked at night. (This includes your car.) Even if you have lived in London for decades, discard any habits you may have about locking up as soon as you move to the quaint, country, murder hole.

6) Never close any curtains or blinds, that way your future assailant always knows exactly where you are and what you are doing.

7) Either don't have a phone or keep it in an inaccessible or hard to find place.

8) Never, ever have any useful weapons nearby or if you do ensure you lose of drop them immediately on seeing your assailant.

Do this, and you’re guaranteed to be pushing up daisies by Christmas.

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simply-ivanka · 5 months ago

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Who’s Afraid of Project 2025?

Democrats run against a think-tank paper that Trump disavows. Why?

Wall Street Journal

July 29, 2024

By The Editorial Board

Americans are learning more about Kamala Harris, as Democrats rush to anoint the Vice President’s candidacy after throwing President Biden overboard. Ms. Harris wasted no time saying she’s going to run hard against a policy paper that Donald Trump has disavowed—the supposedly nefarious agenda known as Project 2025. But who’s afraid of a think-tank white paper?

“I will do everything in my power to unite the Democratic Party—and unite our nation—to defeat Donald Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda,” Ms. Harris tweeted shortly after President Biden dropped out. She’s picking up this ball from Mr. Biden, and her campaign website claims that Project 2025 would “strip away our freedoms” and “abolish checks and balances.”

***

Sounds terrible, but is it? The 922-page document doesn’t lack for modesty, as a wish list of policy reforms that would touch every part of government from the Justice Department to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The project is led by the Heritage Foundation and melds the work of some 400 scholars and analysts from an eclectic mix of center-right groups. The project is also assembling a Rolodex of those who might work in a Trump Administration.

Most of the Democratic panic-mongering has focused on the project’s aim to rein in the administrative state. That includes civil service reform that would make it easier to remove some government workers, and potentially revisiting the independent status of agencies like the Federal Trade Commission.

The latter isn’t going to happen, but getting firmer presidential control over the bureaucracy would improve accountability. The federal government has become so vast that Presidents have difficulty even knowing what is going on in the executive branch. Americans don’t want to be ruled by a permanent governing class that doesn’t answer to voters.

Some items on this menu are also standard conservative fare. The document calls for an 18% corporate tax rate (now 21%), describing that levy as “the most damaging tax” in the U.S. system that falls heavily on workers. A mountain of economic literature backs that up. The blueprint suggests tying more welfare programs with work; de-regulating health insurance markets; expanding Medicare Advantage plans that seniors like; ending sugar subsidies; revving up U.S. energy production. That all sounds good to us.

Democrats are suggesting the project would gut Social Security, though in fact it bows to Mr. Trump’s preference not to touch the retirement program, which is headed for bankruptcy without reform. No project can profess to care about the rising national debt, as Heritage does, without fixing a program that was 22% of the federal budget in 2023.

At times the paper takes no position. For example: The blueprint features competing essays on trade policy. This is a tacit admission that for all the GOP’s ideological confusion on economics, many conservatives still understand that Mr. Trump’s 10% tariff is a terrible idea.

As for the politics, Mr. Trump recently said online that he knew “nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it.” That may be true. The chance that Mr. Trump has read any of it is remote to nil, and he doesn’t want to be tied to anyone’s ideas since he prizes maximum ideological flexibility.

The document mentions abortion nearly 200 times, but Mr. Trump wants to neutralize that issue. The project’s chief sponsor, Heritage president Kevin Roberts, also gave opponents a sword when he boasted of “a second American revolution” that would be peaceful “if the left allows it to be.” This won’t help Mr. Trump with the swing voters he needs to win re-election.

By our lights the project’s cultural overtones are also too dark and the agenda gives too little spotlight to the economic freedom and strong national defense that defined the think tank’s influence on Ronald Reagan in 1980.

***

But the left’s campaign against Project 2025 is reaching absurd decibels. You’d think Mr. Trump is a political mastermind hiding the secret plans he’ll implement with an army of shock troops marching in lockstep. If his first term is any guide, and it is the best we have, Mr. Trump will govern as a make-it-up-as-he-goes tactician rather than a strategist with a coherent policy guide. He’ll dodge and weave based on the news cycle and often based on whoever talks to him last.

Not much of the Project 2025 agenda is likely to happen, even if Republicans take the House and Senate. Democrats will block legislation with a filibuster. The bureaucracy will leak with abandon and oppose even the most minor reforms to the civil service. The press will revert to full resistance mode, and Mr. Trump’s staff will trip over their own ambitions.

Democrats know this, which is why they fear Trump II less than they claim. They’re targeting Project 2025 to distract from their own failed and unpopular policies.

#Wall Street Journal #Project 2025 #trump #trump 2024 #president trump #repost #ivanka #donald trump #americans first #america first #america #democrats

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kremlin · 11 months ago

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i figure most human behaviour that, not only doesn’t occur in other animals but has zero connection to animal behavior is basically distantly rooted in the known fear of inevitable death. let me be clear. cats and shit don’t know they’re gonna die. we do. we have thoughts. we know it’s coming. we think we’re gonna be rich, bullshit like that, most humans believe in magic and most humans doubt that math is a universal or consistent thing. total nonsense right. but everyone knows their ass is gonna die. before you write me off as some dumbass reciting basic 101 level university lectures just Trust Me I’m An Engineer. anyways. being human and dying are somewhat one in the same.

“if i do nonhuman things i can cheat the reaper.” short and sweet. if i can beat zelda faster than anyone i can outrun the reaper. and you know what, fuck it, i’m scared shitless of dying. it’s gonna hurt really bad no doubt. what if the brain destroyal process makes time slow down in my perception and it’s not just like five seconds of bleeding out or fire ant bites or however you go. Scary. so i’ll play along:

i am an average american man and i enjoy bad game runescape. it’s a computer game. MMO. kill monster get loot. sell what i don’t want to other players for gold. spamming chat with “SELLING BOWSTRINGS 200gp” for an hour “sucks” so the devs add a grand exchange where you can post buy/sell orders for a given item+price to maximize gameplay efficiency and minimize social interaction.

like any other MMO you can pay some sketchy website real money for ingame gold farmer by chinese gold farmers. totally against the rules. remember this

so the first thing that comes to any male aged 23-27 mind is “buy low sell high” basic bitch shit. no good. there’s a 5% tax that’ll wipe out your profit margin intended to eliminate this behavior (you’re supposed to friggen kill monsters). but everyone thinks they’re a genius and can beat the system and that there is a secret george soros style illuminati group that is holding the secrets, blah blah blah, whatever, and this comes as a coping mechanism after losing your shirt after trying to beat the market (success rate of 0%).

here is where people mostly quit thinking: if you do the math, which takes about ten minutes and can be done on one side of a sheet of paper with the most basic calculator, it’s easy to figure out that the amount of gold you’d need to play dirty (buy out all the available Feathers or Fire Runes or whatever) in order to corner the market would be so high that there is no possible way for a character to hold that much without having spent IRL money for gold. you’d get autobanned.

SO..finally, go on the ol’ www.reddit.com, and make a really really professional-to-professional sounding post advertising a “service”. Saturate the fuck out of it with dense but very real financial jargon. the “service” (which needs to be obscured enough with plausible and relevant language) is a hedging service aimed at make-believe market players who are buying and selling such huge amounts of items and gold (usually in anticipation of a game update that will speculatively introduce a sudden, dramatic, and capitalizable price change for some item). you need it to be as alien-sounding and foreign as possible but with enough believability and clarity that a handful of reddit jackasses will figure out what the fuck your post is about. whenever pressed further, act totally puzzled and make it very clear that this is not a service relevant to “individual entertainment-motivated” players or some shit. no matter what amount of gold anyone quotes at you, just act puzzled and if that amount is 1/1000th the amount one of your “normal” clients deal with. you need to do all of this extremely artfully. and by “you”, i’ve been meaning to write “me”. really lay it on thick that whatever you’re “doing” is totally unavailable to them and that you want zero to do with them.

so now theyre still mostly totally confused but enough is made clear that their interest is piqued. got my hook in em. some guy will copy/paste wikipedia shit in an obnoxiously long and pseudointellectual, contemptible but characteristically reddit guy style what you’re “selling” actually is in the most exhausting, hand-holdingest way to his fellow reddit gamers. with complete tone of authority.

inevitably one of them will put on their sherlock holmes hat and go deep undercover, emailing me posing as an interested party. bingo. now i get to really lay on the WTF and go off the rails asking about vouchers from One Of The Big Seven, but oh no, you can’t get one of them to vouch for you, that’s fine, it makes sense, we’re the only firm that deals with unvouched, that’s our market, well, one of them at least. Just give me a rough rundown of your entry criteria, dwell time, risk tolerance, fuckin “Gamma Ratio”, you know, all the basic stuff, and i’ll have the team generate a .xlsx for you to plug your data into to get a rough feel for what the final contract might be like.

(lololol) But REMEMBER, that excel sheet is seeded, output is fuzzed and salted and if you share it or try and sell it to our competitors, it will be fuzzy enough to be worthless to them but obvious to us who leaked what. this is the only way we’re able to integrate unvouched clients without untenable premiums and while managing our risk levels

blah blah blah blah, i go on and on and on and the guy on the other end is developing a scab from constant head-scratching. and that’s about the maximum real-world harm i’m willing to inflict. i know this sounds like an elaborate as fuck confidence scam but it isn’t. that shit makes me sick. i’d literally slam my arms in a car door before taking a cent from all this. hell, i’ll go out of my way to guarantee i don’t even piss anyone off or offend them or anything.

your guess is as good as mine but i do stuff like this constantly for anything i know well enough and the example i gave above is just a pretty low quality one i made up on the spot. this is a public blog after all.

anyways, cheers, hoping this saves me from dying or whatever the hell i was talking about before that could have probably been cut out. Namaste. Mahala.

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rjzimmerman · 8 months ago

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Excerpt from this story from the New York Times:

At first glance, Dave Langston’s predicament seems similar to headaches facing homeowners in coastal states vulnerable to catastrophic hurricanes: As disasters have become more frequent and severe, his insurance company has been losing money. Then, it canceled his coverage and left the state.

But Mr. Langston lives in Iowa.

Relatively consistent weather once made Iowa a good bet for insurance companies. But now, as a warming planet makes events like hail and wind storms worse, insurers are fleeing.

Mr. Langston spent months trying to find another company to insure the townhouses, on a quiet cul-de-sac at the edge of Cedar Rapids, that belong to members of his homeowners association. Without coverage, “if we were to have damage that hit all 17 units, we’re looking at bankruptcy for all of us,” he said.

The insurance turmoil caused by climate change — which had been concentrated in Florida, California and Louisiana — is fast becoming a contagion, spreading to states like Iowa, Arkansas, Ohio, Utah and Washington. Even in the Northeast, where homeowners insurance was still generally profitable last year, the trends are worsening.

In 2023, insurers lost money on homeowners coverage in 18 states, more than a third of the country, according to a New York Times analysis of newly available financial data. That’s up from 12 states five years ago, and eight states in 2013. The result is that insurance companies are raising premiums by as much as 50 percent or more, cutting back on coverage or leaving entire states altogether. Nationally, over the last decade, insurers paid out more in claims than they received in premiums, according to the ratings firm Moody’s, and those losses are increasing.

The growing tumult is affecting people whose homes have never been damaged and who have dutifully paid their premiums, year after year. Cancellation notices have left them scrambling to find coverage to protect what is often their single biggest investment. As a last resort, many are ending up in high-risk insurance pools created by states that are backed by the public and offer less coverage than standard policies. By and large, state regulators lack strategies to restore stability to the market.

Insurers are still turning a profit from other lines of business, like commercial and life insurance policies. But many are dropping homeowners coverage because of losses.

Tracking the shifting insurance market is complicated by the fact it is not regulated by the federal government; attempts by the Treasury Department to simply gather data have been rebuffed by some state regulators.

The turmoil in insurance markets is a flashing red light for an American economy that is built on real property. Without insurance, banks won’t issue a mortgage; without a mortgage, most people can’t buy a home. With fewer buyers, real estate values are likely to decline, along with property tax revenues, leaving communities with less money for schools, police and other basic services.

And without sufficient insurance, people struggle to rebuild after disasters. Last year, storms, wildfires and other disasters pushed 2.5 million American adults out of their homes, according to census data, including at least 830,000 people who were displaced for six months or longer.

#home insurance #climate change

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so-much-for-subtlety · 4 months ago

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The thing that gets me so worked up about universal healthcare is how people say that it will be so expensive for the tax payer.

This is long rant warning so I added a break lol.

The TLDR is that even in a low tax state like Florida, someone making 50k a year will have an effective rate of of 32% (for taxes, healthcare, costs for an undergraduate degree).

Someone making 50k a year in a 'high tax' country like New Zealand has an effective rate of 21% (for taxes, healthcare, costs for an undergraduate degree).

For an American and a Kiwi with the same salary of $50k, if they have the same disposable income, the Kiwi will be able to save an extra $75,000 over 10 years that they can use for a downpayment on a home to further build wealth.

Low tax states just have the costs shuffled to other places, you end up paying a LOT more for the same services.

Here's a comparison of someone who makes $50,000 a year in New Zealand and Florida (I chose Florida as an extreme example because they have 0% state tax rate) and each person makes $15,000 worth of purchases that are taxable.

New Zealand

$7,658 in combined income taxes and levies

$2,250 in taxes on $15k of purchases (15% sales tax)

Total of $9,908 - an effective total rate of 19.8% paid to taxes and purchases and healthcare

Florida

$7,945 in combined taxes (federal taxes, social security, medicaid etc)

$1,050 in taxes on $15k of purchases (7% sales tax)

$1,700 average annual health insurance premium for Florida

$2,060 average annual health insurance deductible for Florida

Total of $12,755 - an effective total rate of 25.5% paid to taxes and purchases and healthcare

Even in a low tax state, you're already have less take-home income than someone with the same salary in New Zealand.

But

... in New Zealand with your taxes you're also getting public education. It's not completely free, but costs are fixed, and you get one year of your undergraduate free, so for example a Bachelor of Arts would cost a total of $13,548 (USD $8,347)

If you can't pay that upfront, you can get a 0% loan from the government, which you don't need to start paying off until you earn at least $23k per year. For someone making $50k that would be an extra 6.5% deducted from your income ($270/month) until the loan is paid off (which would be 2 years and 8 months).

In Florida the average student loan debt is 25k and if you're making the same payments as someone in NZ ($270/month) then you'll be paying that off for 11 years. [Note: I believe that some private loan interest rates go as high as 15%].

Bachelor of Arts in NZ $13,548, paid off over ~2.7 years.

Bachelor of Arts in Florida $35,539, paid off over ~11 years.

So lets look at effective payments over 11 years (for simplicity salary stays at 50k).

New Zealand works out to be 21% effective rate over 11 years (including taxes, healthcare, and undergraduate degree).

Florida works out to be 32% effective rate over 11 years (including taxes, healthcare, and an undergraduate degree) - you're paying 52% more!

That means someone with the same income will effectively be able to save an additional $5,000 per year over 11 years, if they invest that extra amount and get a 5% return, the New Zealander will have savings of about $75k which they can use for downpayment for a home etc.

In conclusion, even though it may seem like you're getting a good deal in a low tax state like Florida, you end up paying soooo much more in healthcare and education costs compared to a country where taxes are a little higher, but you get public healthcare and education.

Why is the U.S. so expensive? Well once place to look is defense, intelligence, and police. In the United States this costs on average $3,700 per person. New Zealand spends $1,600 per person (USD ~1,000).

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freeworldallahmbaclass · 1 year ago

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youtube

This is my rule as the ruler

Getting them all with this champion sound

Hot song see you soon with it presenting my song Champion 🏆 sound

And

Now to present you with some of my accomplishments already

My New York City accomplishments

Trump is the whole package but he had boundaries he set boundaries and was strong against people especially the criminal element me I defend the proletariat the common man and woman with real issues and get them the laws passed that they need boost the economy with more money legalize weed get free college education for the city citibikes more money for people on Human resources administration and permanent employment from temporary seasonal jobs from decades long however much months work program they learn and then get kicked out and you can't support yourself and your family I made it where that after you finish that probation period you get the job the job security meaning your secure because you got a steady paycheck and now could build a future from there I got union contract for Starbucks workers and Amazon workers and more money on the city feps and seps voucher for their housing the city pay more rent for you so you and your family could rent in the neighborhoods you want with better schools and employment opportunities for the parents to provide a good future for their kids

I got hotels for the homeless in New York City 2021 it is now happens where everything that happens in New York City is under my name and my control of the city which is good because I do good for the people my name is Allen Henry notice the Henry Hall building with the Henry lives here sign on it next to 42nd Street Port Authority yes I live in New York City and thanks for the big announcement on your building symbolizing radio city music hall at Rockefeller center in New York City is shouted out about from a building with the Henry lives here sign on it let radio city music hall know I'm coming soon and thank you my super hero Batman and Superman my superhero days are just starting that's on 38th Street on llth Avenue in New York City Manhattan next to port authority on 42nd Street you could actually drive pass it and see it now it is actually a tourist site wow thanks that's amazing I love it thanks I'm honored I appreciate it again like the sign says I live in New York City and thanks for the big announcement on your buildings and don't forget the Henry apartment buildings in Brooklyn New York thank you I'm honored

I got Amazon workers their union contract

I got Starbucks workers their union contract

I got the minimum wage increased from $ 11 dollars an hour to $ 15 dollars to $ 17 dollars an hour put 100 million $ dollar boost in New York State economy proven math governor Kathy Hochul is signing that into law from where I already got it she is going to give it boost we need oh yeah very great and lovely governor we got now she is pretty good at doing her job I like her a lot and wish that the government of America go through with wage increase for all states and have the new federal minimum wage for a better rate of pay for all workers from the dishwasher , to the bike messenger to the Mexican American and union for job security is created for them to help immigrants and Kathy Hochul signs off on a new money adjustment plan to balance out against inflation and new tax cuts that help the common man and woman the employees that provide services in the places me and you have to visit

I got more money put on the housing vouchers the city feps and seps voucher so that homeless individuals and women with their kids and husband and wife can have better housing and a better life for themselves and their family And it's only going to get better more housing more safer housing where the housing crew does it's job and provide safe clean housing cleaning the apartment from Asbestos and using the wrong products that could harm the people in the apartment and their should be more NYCHA the projects job openings to the people in those surrounding neighborhoods the hood and any hood in the world to help clean their neighborhoods 20 men and women crews clean up crews drivers and even regular normal everyday people of those neighborhoods newly hired people that take pride in doing a very good service for the people of their community they have to educate the tenants on lead paint and checking their apartments carbon monoxide levels how to use a stove fire safety plans and evacuations plans in those apartments safety with electrical sockets for their children and toxic free apartments air conditioners and heating free cable so they can watch some good TV shows and movies and enjoy their summer and winter and they get WI Fi now hooked up with their house packages and hopefully more money on the voucher to help rehabilitating families to get their lives together better housing and better schools for their kids equal a better future don't forget to give New people moving into their apartment fire safety 🦺 training courses on unplugging their wires from the outlets and child safety outlets not leaving the oven on or stove on or leaving the stove and ovens on unattended child safety windows no water near electronics and electrical devices carbon dioxide early detectors and smoke detectors no smoking 🚭🚬 around fire hazardous materials and we should reduce the number of accidents and tragedies in NYCHA called the housing projects in our neighborhoods and enjoy your cable wifi air conditioning heat in the winter and your Citibikes .

I got the fair chance to compete for a job act of 2019 in New York City and California hopefully other cities and countries are going to follow suit

I legalized marijuana in New York City on March 31 , 2021 no violence in the hallways of the projects that we are from fellas respect people space and their kids in those hallways don't bring an violent atmosphere and environment around those kids when hanging out with our friends in the lobby that means no violence and violent talk around the kids while walking through projects NYCHA hallways go outside and enjoy the sun or the nice breeze that passes us and chill and enjoy outside that is so no laws will be passed restricting our laws .

I cleaned up fox square in Brooklyn , NY

Free college education in New York City

Free gym membership for people on Medicare

Citi bikes for New Yorkers

I got the second stage theatre in Manhattan , New York City meaning I got my second chance to perform music 🎼🎶 on a stage record and performing music, I rap .

Pictures of me as Christopher Wallace Biggie Smalls the Notorious BIG in Brooklyn New York City that is a big big accomplishment shout out to his moms how are you doing Ms . Violetta Wallace I'm very honored thank you Governor Cuomo legalized weed Marijuana the gaunja off of those pictures and across the street from the picture I got apartment buildings in my name the Henry apartments in Brooklyn on Rockaway Avenue in Brooklyn New York City

I brought Yo MTV raps to the Brooklyn Museum 🎨 an Art museum since I'm of the sophisticated crowd and Talented tenth from W . E . B . Dubois book and I'm a rapper from Harlem and Brooklyn New York City via Saint Croix U.S. Virgin Islands

I got my own subway street named after me called Respect Avenue in New York City New York and Brooklyn New York

Governor Andrew Cuomo gave me and opened an hospital named after me in Brooklyn , New York back in 2015 Brooklyn's 760 Parkside Avenue where my family is originally from when they landed in Brooklyn , New York City my uncle and his family 760 Parkside Avenue downstate biotechnology incubator hospital 🏥 thank you I'm honored and actually do put my sponsorship behind it not being funny it's just that it's an hospital and hospitals heal people and take care of them and I love that caring nurturing loving and nourishing environment of hospitals and the hospitality of the nurses doctors and specialists we never tell them we love them and thank you and I love you enough tell your doctor if he is doing a great job correctly say hey doctor I love you I love you all of my hospital staffs for providing a great service in my name I love you for taking care of God's people all of God's people I mean people from all communities we are all good people and deserve the best in treatment and the care that is given to patients when you visit my hospital and counselors should know the nutritionist and give out good advice even while your A casac counselor therapist and clinician do your job with passion , love and the intention of betterment for your patients and even those that come to work under and learn from you teach them how to doctor truly heal human beings through laughter , love a d being strong for them and doctor the soul through a warm smile and hug for all patients and pediatrics should know you have a great responsibility to love provide and care for all patients you have a very very important job and I love you we never know when you might need somebody to take care of our every needs, I love hospitals they should actually play Joyce Meyer and Joel Osteen in the care units to help heal the people in special care units play their TV shows and audio all through all units of the hospital

I won the Super bowl with Patrick Mahomes I got Clinton Dannemora back and I came home and took over the streets of NYC in politics Errol Louis of Channel 1 news would be proud of me

President Joe Biden presented me with a medal 🏅 of honor in the year 2023 for my heroism

Watch out Donald Trump my movement is doing very good now

I'm on 5th Avenue in the heart of New York City now

My gift 🎁 from Nicki Minaj the female rapper from her Young Money Crew thank you Nicki I got my own library in New York City thanks to her in the heart of New York City it is pleasing to me to be able to have a library that host after school programs for the kids and storytelling fun with their teachers and parents with Barney the dinosaur type characters to make the kids laugh and enjoy their selves that is a blessing for me coming from where I come from I had a rough life I grew up in Harlem New York City running the streets but I kept my nose in a book and part of that reason is because my mom was in college she would have tons of books on her bed and I fell love in books because of her she went to Monroe College in the Bronx and got her degree and even worked for the Board of Education for awhile and I got my love of books from her and to see that they give me a library is beautiful to me I know she is proud of me I made something of myself reading books I learned my way in anyway the library have costume animals Barney the dinosaur type costume animals for the kids to make them laugh and enjoy life is a blessing for me and it is in my building thank you I'm honored New York City and yes it is in the same building that I got my GED from in 2003 so I had already been going their for awhile they gave to me in 2022 thank you New York City and it's on 40th street and 5th Avenue right next to Grand Central and Times Square New York City and the same block wow as the Joel Osteen store so go get some Coffee ☕ and bagels and enjoy your day , their programs to help people returning to work , Cafe on the seventh floor outside rooftop so you could watch New York 5th Avenue like the empire state building and their are regular programs special instructors from any career is their to teach and instruct you on how to get where you would want to be in life it is so so clean the water fountains are the new ones where you place your bottle under some kid of water dispenser and it fills your bottles you could stand there and get as much refills as you want self service sanitized napkins to wipe your area where you are going to be reading I own the building so I eat at my seat the security guards is very professional that is their brand professionalism and high quality service with a smile they greet you warmly and treat you like you are at home it's mines so it is your home of course I'm like yeah yeah whatever but you would love it there make it a tourist attraction when you come to New York City I left school early I wish I didn't but the library is to give me a new start to learn all the on the job skills I need to excel in my career and it is there for you to hang out have fun meet some good people all New Yorkers are really good people and watch movies listen to music and to learn anything you want to make it there and enjoy yourselves

I won the Nobel Peace Prize 🏆 once for my caring Martin Luther King jr would be proud of me and love of humanity and with the helping of this page and Nobel memorial prize for economic sciences twice so that makes three Nobel prizes I won three Nobel prizes

Benefit monetary assistance increase for snap and cash assistance recipients

I'm John Wick in the movies John Wick series and I'm Neo in the Matrix and Matrix series congratulations to me I'm very Honored thank you Keeanu Reeves I'm very Honored thank you so much with tears in my eyes 💞 I love it everything I am now is bigger than what I been through in life and it is all because of people like you thanks and to my very close friend Laurence Fishburne true story real friend I mean we go back while he was studying to do the Matrix and I turned out to be a fine gentleman thank you and I found out I'm the one but the ones are the ones that study hard and work hard and making themselves into great people efficient and effective in constructive productivity their good at school , music or their career whatever they are good at is because they worked hard at it and that how we all can be an anomaly in society the good people .

Rikers Island tablet program podcasts and video games for inmates in jail to help stop crime violent crime in prison and to help rehabilitate the guy or woman and stop the back and forth of them going to jail . The tablet have podcasts and programs for Job Search legal research and books to read to help them become better citizens in the free society .

I was named The 16th Captain of New York City that is New York Yankees history and current captain of New York city New York Yankees hat history and time magazine 2022 man of the year the 16th and current captain of New York City , thank you .

I got meteors in front of the courtroom in New York City right in front of City Hall , 80 and 100 Centre street symbolizing I'm superman and I'm not the people of New York enemy I'm a friend and employers are there to help me if I just meet them halfway with some job skills they will employ me get me a job and for all that I say thank you for letting me work my way back into America's good people list thank you so much I mean I'm working and learning to give myself a job start my own business I'm learning how to do that but it is good to know that I got y'all white people the decent ones on my side not the ones that side with my enemies and haters but the ones that rock with me to be there to give me my life back with the meteors real live meteors thank you so much now in front of City Hall the famous New York City at 80 and 100 Centre where I first caught my first case at 16 years old🥇Joe Montana number thank you goodness for Bill Walsh is now in front of the courtrooms thank you for the chance again in my life to work and not stay idle in dangerous neighborhoods and environments which I'm teaching my way out of but thank you so much and I honor that thank you so much I'm proud to be an American 🏈

Laws I'm proposing

Job Safety and secure act - 2022

Fair banking act - 2022

Retirement investment plan for employees IRA act - 2022

Ready , willing and able Expansive territory act - 2023

Riverside drive Expansion project act - 2023

The new ferry from New Jersey to New York City - 2023

School sports culture expansion Act Copperas Cove , Texas

Rikers Island schooling expansion act Added on Basic education classes on Rikers Island on the tablet , college programs on the program , online school on the Tablet . -2023

NYCHA ( New York City Housing projects ) plans and ideas for improvement

The New Trench town rock - 2021 , 2022 , 2023

And many other pitches and proposals rebuilding the workforce , wages and structure of New York city and cities like New York .

Next order of business : My Plans for infrastructure in a utopian society hotels jobs pay raise on citizens paycheck from 15 $ - 17 $ dollars minimum wage pay to 19$ dollars to 20$ dollars an hour to better provide for all costs emergencies uncovered insurance payments due to partial health care coverage and full union membership granted to employees of any company free education grants and school loans payment plans

Pay raise for school teachers in every city at junior high school , high school and elementary school level since they are stewards of our children's future .

Pay raise for civil service workers and Civil service exams made and updated daily to the public , school crossing guards , correction officers , supervisors , probation officers , construction site supervisors .

Pay raise for day care workers

Free day care services for temporarily unemployed mothers and fathers

Pay raise for city fire fighters and police officers .

Job contractors fulfilling contracts with back to work public assistance programs that train and employ job candidates without their high school diploma or GED and granting them full employment with full medical and medicare coverage union membership and back to school Acces Vocational rehabilitation counseling and restoration of financial aid assistance for non violent crimes like drug sellers and abusers to stop recidivism to prison and to cure an addiction to a habit of committing perpetual crimes thus creating repeat offenders .

Jobs moving back to inner cities through the effort of study and research groups from urban planning courses from their neighboring colleges .

Tax abatement and financial incentives and business incentives and tax breaks .

Joe Biden and vice president Kamala Harris should include this law into all of their plan for cleaning up America I'm glad to see it go beyond New York City and other counties in New York I want to share this honor with author Michelle Alexander who I did my research from her book about mass incarceration of the black and Latino community and the political office and my friends that help put this law in place I reached out to hopefully stop the recidivism to prison and hopefully to help some of my friends and people that go back and forth to jail because they couldn't get a job due to the felonies on their record I recommend a certificate of relief of disabilities to all people returning to society if they haven't given you one go get it from your county's or borough courthouse it works wonders .

Next order of business : Tax cuts to help the everyday person keep more of their check in their pockets cut the tax rates in New York City by 4 percent I see it as New York State taxes % 8.82 to % 4 percent and business tax cuts to create more jobs Proposal For a Wage increase of $ 22 dollars an hour Including : Fire safety directors Security guards Librarians Fed Ex workers UPS workers Ready Willing and able with free vocational grants from access vr programs they should hire vocational rehabilitation counselors and job developers finding permanent housing and permanent job placement after the clients training Stock Clerks and cashier's at major stores like Gristedes , C Town , met foods , Burlington coat factory wage increase for all warehousing and factory workers jack pallet and forklift training for people with no experience and a starting salary at $ 17 - 19 $ dollars an hour and it increase with more time on the job how about the first year at that base salary of $ 17 - 19 $ dollars and on the even of that year the employee gets an raise of $ 2 dollars more on their check and other financial incentives as cash allocation from their check for newly place employee mutual fund packages besides with other benefits that said company is offering this helps to place that company on the stock market and grant their employees preferred stock options from their company that they work for at that current moment and because of the huge huge employee buy in it is like the employers are investing in their employees and their stores and company .

Educational requirements for jobs posted is less than a high school diploma but the job candidate has to be in a vocational program or GED preparation course half or full time hours .

Civil service jobs and exams posted weekly .

Sales professional salary plus commission on sales and stock options for mutual funds packages as bonuses with an wage increase to $ 19 dollars to $ 21 dollars an hour .

Newly added benefits to a job description benefits an employer on jobs posted give to their employees an employer get to hold back cash or take money out of an employees check to put towards a mutual funds stock fund option to help that client make more money as a second job the municipals funds and stock and funds and stock and then you gotta get hedge funds option packaged in to help the employees money make more money for them talk about overtime whew and at the same time that local market and store owner can put his company on the stock market and give out public shares thus in the end making it a good investment a regular place of shopping in a family like environment it is like getting to know your deli clerk , butcher , bakery attendant again only this time you are making money with the people you are spending money with Think about it that in turns build better communities better stores customer relationships safer neighborhoods and the beautifying of economically depressed environments more money for your kids college tuition school supplies newer roads being built leading to and from better neighborhoods and businesses and this is a future that we all as fellow New Yorkers can build together .

#Youtube

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sapphia · 10 months ago

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The Right Are Engineering A Recession In NZ

tumblr isn't very good at local news, which is why i tend to get my nz politics information from elsewhere. so i can confidently tell you that aotearoa under national is totally, utterly fucked. like, not just in terms of all the social progress they plan to undo, though they do very much do plan to do all of that.

national+act+nzfirst have committed to a financial policy that makes zero fucking economic sense. you know how every time the economy is in bad shape, tories sieze the good economic opportunity to slash services or give tax cuts to the rich? imagine if that was happening for just no reason at all. there’s no crisis we’re facing this would even marginally help, but that's what nact+nzfs tax cut policy is anyway.

aotearoa is currently in a cost of living crisis, like much of the world, and our inflation is, to give it it's technical term, "sticky". This means that it's not still shooting up the graph like crazy, but it should have started to go down more by now according to predictions, but it hasn't, and is sitting at an unsustainably high level.

Inflation is bad because it eats away at the value of your money (not something you want generally) but this inflation is especially bad because it's inflation we created to ward off a recession back in 2020. NZ had the hardest and fastest lockdowns in the world, but at a huge cost -- our economy basically stopped overnight. Without goods and services being bought and sold, we would have been plunged into a financial crisis. But instead the government borrowed money to fund the wage subsidy and pay workers through the lockdowns, injecting money into and stimulating the economy.

This was a bill that was always going to come back to bite us, and for the past several years, the Labour government and the Reserve Bank had been playing a balacing game with our economy, steering us between a recession and a wage-price inflation spiral, with a recession definitely being the preferable one of the two. We actually had short soft one that we’ve come out of, exactly what Grant Robertson and Adrien Orr were aiming for.

Recessions can be small or big - inflation spirals are usually just big. We wanted to aim for a "soft" landing recession by hiking interests rates just enough to bring inflation back under control. The Reserve Bank uses it's tool - the Official Cash Rate, or the OCR, which basically sets the price of interest rates across the country, and the government also can use it's powers to create monetary policy to help the economy. A lot of the criticism Labour received before losing the election was about overspending in areas post-pandemic, as putting money into the economy through government spend by using debt to fund it genuinely causes inflation.

What a government should do during a time of inflation is remove money from the economy. For example, a right wing government would often issue an austerity policy, where the cut the amount of government spending through slashing programmes, benefits, staff, etc etc. A government could also increase taxes so people have less money to spend, could pay down government debt, could invest the money into a fund (e.g. NZ has a superannuation fund that's designed to be eventually self-funding set up by Labour that National have paused payments on when getting into government). It doesn't matter too much what, theoretically speaking -- the point is to get the money out of the economy.

What you definitely, definitely don't want to do during a period of high and sticky inflation is put more money into the economy. That would do the opposite of what you want. Labour were rightfully (at some points) criticised for their inflationary policies. So you'd think National would take their criticisms of Labour’s debt blowout and start paying it down to show how responsible they are, right? No, they’re cutting taxes for (mostly) the wealthy while offsetting this with austerity measures to make this “fiscally neutral”. They will make up for the inflationary effects of doling out money to landlords by cutting back essential government services, trying to frame it as a personnel and budget blowout (it’s not) and saying Labour mismanaged the books and we are in terrible financial shape (we are not; we have a triple A credit rating).

And further, it’s becoming increasingly hard to ignore our infrastructure crisis at nearly every level and every location. Our water systems needs billions of dollars of investment that our councils can’t afford to borrow, our rates are shooting up (and so will our rents), our ferries are old and broken down and Nicola Willis Minister of Finance just canned the “too expensive” deal that was needed to replace them — with most of the money going to into wharf upgrades that are desperately needed. There was a huge sunk cost; we’re not going to be able to to buy shit now. The ferries link the North and the South Island and are vital infrastructure; when they break down (which they did multiple times last year) it causes chaos and brings things to a standstill.

Why are they doing this? Land. It’s always about fucking land. All of National have divested in shares and have bought into land under the guise of this removing the “conflict of interest” that would exist if they had invested into specific companies. The usual alternative that solves this is a blind trust, but that’s not what most of the caucus has money in. Luxon alone sold about 12 million dollars worth of Air NZ shares and now has a property profile worth 20+ million. Oh, and he’s charging the taxpayer $50,000 a year to live in his own house. Thats 2.5 times what I get on the benefit that he’s cutting and putting sanctions on.

Nact don’t care if businesses go under and share prices crash; they’ll just sell their houses and buy stocks for cheaper. Their only concern is propping up the housing market ponzi scheme that they have all invested at the top of. This is why they’ve allowed councils to opt out of densification requirements and why they cut back the brightline test and are trying to boost the population with migrant workers; all of these things make house prices go up, make housing better for investors who make millions in untaxed capital gains.

NACT will not let the property market crash any further. Despite what they’re saying out loud, they actually want it to increase.

And they’re more than happy to wreck the economy to do it.

#New Zealand #nz #aotearoa #nzpol #New Zealand politics #nz politics #corruption #neoliberalism

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago

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Washington State's capital gains tax proves we can have nice things

Today (June 3) at 1:30PM, I’m in Edinburgh for the Cymera Festival on a panel with Nina Allen and Ian McDonald.

Monday (June 5) at 7:15PM, I’m in London at the British Library with my novel Red Team Blues, hosted by Baroness Martha Lane Fox.

Washington State enacted a 7% capital gains tax levied on annual profits in excess of $250,000, and made a fortune, $600m more than projected in the first year, despite a 25% drop in the stock market and blistering interest rate hikes:

https://www.theurbanist.org/2023/06/01/lessons-from-washington-states-new-capital-gains-tax/

Capital gains taxes are levied on “passive income” — money you get for owning stuff. The capital gains rate is much lower than the income tax rate — the rate you pay for doing stuff. This is naked class warfare: it punishes the people who make things and do things, and rewards the people who own the means of production.

The thing is, a factory or a store can still operate if the owner goes missing — but without workers, it shuts down immediately. Everything you depend on — the clothes on your back, the food in your fridge, the car you drive and the coffee you drink — exists because someone did something to produce it. Those producers are punished by our tax system, while the people who derive a “passive income” from their labor are given preferential treatment.

The Washington State tax is levied exclusively on annual gains in excess of a quarter million dollars — meaning this tax affects an infinitesimal minority of Washingtonians, who are vastly better off than the people whose work they profit from. Most working Americans own little or no stock, and the vast majority of those who do own that stock in a retirement fund that is sheltered from these taxes.

(Sidebar here to say that market-based pensions are a scam, a way to force workers to gamble in a rigged casino for the chance to enjoy a dignified retirement; the defined benefits pension, combined with adequate Social Security, is the only way to ensure secure retirement for all of us)

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses

Washington’s tax was anticipated to bring in $248m. Instead, it’s projected to bring in $849m in the first year. Those funds will go to public school operations and construction and infrastructure spending:

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/was-new-capital-gains-tax-brings-in-849-million-so-far-much-more-than-expected/

That is to say, the money will go to ensuring that Washingtonians are educated and will have the amenities they need to turn that education into productive work.

Washington State is noteworthy for not having any state personal or corporate income tax, making it a haven for low-tax brain-worm victims who would rather have a dead gopher running their states than pay an extra nickel in taxes. But places that don’t have taxes can’t fund services, which leads to grotesque, rapid deterioration.

Washington State plutes moved because they relished living in well-kept, cosmopolitan places with efficient transportation, an educated workforce, good restaurants and culture — none of which they would have to pay for. They forgot Karl Marx’s famous saying: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

The idea that Washington could make up for the shortfalls that come from taxing its wealthiest residents by levying regressive sales taxes and other measures is mathematically illiterate wishful thinking. When the one percent owns nearly everything, you can tax the shit out of the other 99% and still not make up the shortfall.

Meanwhile: homelessness, crumbling roads, and crisis after crisis. Political deterioration. Cute shopping neighborhoods turn into dollar store hellscapes because no one can afford to shop for nice things because all their income is going to plug the gaps in health, education, transport and other services that the low-tax state can’t afford.

Washington State’s soak-the-rich tax is ironic, given the propensity of California’s plutes to threaten to leave for Washington if California finally passes its own extreme wealth tax.

There’s a reason all these wealthy people want to live in California, Washington, New York and other states where there’s broad public support for taxing the American aristocracy: states with rock-bottom taxes are failed states. All but two of America’s “red states” are dependent on transfers from the federal government to stay in operation. The two exceptions are Texas, whose “free market” grid is one nanometer away from total collapse, and Florida, which is about to slip beneath the rising seas it denies.

Rich people claim they’d be happy to live in low-tax states, and even tout the benefits of a desperate workforce that will turn up to serve drinks at their country clubs even as a pandemic kills them at record rates. But when the chips are down, they don’t want to depend on a private generator to keep the lights on. They don’t want to have to repeatedly replace their luxury cars’ suspension after it’s wrecked by gaping potholes. They don’t want to have to charter a jet to fly their kids out of state to get an abortion.

This is true globally, too. As Thomas Piketty pointed out in Capital in the 21st Century, if the EU and OECD created a wealth tax, the rich could withdraw to Dubai, the Caymans and Rwanda, but they’d eventually get sick of shopping for the same luxury goods in the same malls guarded by the same mercenaries and want to go somewhere, you know, fun:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/

We’re told that Americans would never stand for taxing the ultra-rich because they see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” It’s just not true: soak-the-rich policies are wildly popular:

https://balanceourtaxcode.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/WA-State-Wealth-Tax-Poll-Results-3.pdf

The Washington tax windfall is fascinating in part because it reveals just how rich the ultra-rich actually are. Warren Buffett says that “when the tide goes out, you learn who’s been swimming naked.” But Washington’s new tax is a tide that reveals who’s been swimming with a gold bar stuck up their ass.

It’s not surprising, then, that Washingtonians are so happy to tax their one percenters. After all, this is the state that gave us modern robber barons like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. And then there’s clowns like Steve Ballmer, star of Propublica’s IRS Files, the man whose creative accounting let him claim $700m in paper losses on his basketball team, allowing him to pay a mere 12% tax on $656m in income, while the workers who made his fortune on the court paid 30–40% on their earnings.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#economic-substance-doctrine Ballmer’s also a master of “tax loss harvesting,” who has created paper losses of over $100m, letting him evade $138m in federal taxes:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/24/tax-loss-harvesting/#mego

These guys aren’t rich because they work harder than the rest of us. They’re rich because they profit from our work — and then, to add insult to injury, pay little or no taxes on those profits.

Washington’s lowest income earners pay six times the rate of tax as the state’s richest people. When the wealthy squeal that these taxes are class warfare, they’re right — it is class war, and they started it.

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Edinburgh, London, and Berlin!

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/2023/06/03/when-the-tide-goes-out/#passive-income

[Image ID: The Washington State flag; the circular device featuring George Washington has been altered so that it is now the head of a naked man clothed in a barrel with two wide leather shoulder straps.]

#pluralistic #steve ballmer #irs files #washington state #soak the rich #capital gains #taxes class war #euthanasia of the rentier

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mbta-unofficial · 10 months ago

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If your city is a Brand, it’s already too late

Long post time. What is it that drives gentrification? Also, what is gentrification? Is it when a city gets blue hair and pronouns? No, it probably already had those.

Gentrification is the result of concentration of wealth in the hands of business owners, including landlords, over and above the hands of residents.

Let’s start with rent. Rent, like any good, is priced according to the laws of supply and demand. Supply of available rental housing is primarily determined by construction costs and estimated return on investment for new construction, and property management costs and estimated return on investment for existing units.

Breaking that down a bit, the higher construction costs get the higher the rent needs to be to break even on new construction. Construction costs include labor (which can always go down but you want it high for moral and practical reasons), materials (highly variable depending on the project) and bureaucratic costs. A bureaucratic cost is a cost that is based on how projects fit into the legal and practical environment, and are usually non-negotiable. Dig Safe, a program which requires three days of surveying local records before breaking ground, is an example where the function is to prevent crews from flattening a neighborhood by puncturing a gas main. Environmental Impact Statements, Fire Codes, Habitability Guidelines, and other regulations increase costs to projects. These programs are good and need to exist, but do stop smaller projects from happening at all because the capital investment required just to actually break ground on a new house might cost as much as the land and materials put together at which point you might as well build another 120$/sqft luxury midrise.

Property management costs for existing units are largely dependent on age and wear. A unit with no occupant is going to depreciate little, and may also appreciate in value. Depreciation and appreciation here are sort of unintuitive because they can happen at the same time. Imagine an old luxury sports car with a high resale price. Driving depreciates the value because it’s literal condition is poorer, even as the resale value goes up over time. The appreciation needs to beat both inflation and the value of depreciation for it to go up in real value. For companies with large capital holdings however, losses such as through the upkeep of empty apartment buildings are useful to a point because they reduce these organizations’s tax burdens. A company that makes a killing on the stock market only has to pay taxes if they keep it: if they buy houses they then don’t rent, they can claim they “lost” their stock market earnings with “bad investments” and then pay no tax while saving the real estate to rent later. Again, this favors the largest possible projects and the largest possible operators because small companies can be killed by an unprofitable quarter or 4 while large ones explicitly benefit from unprofitability in reducing their tax burden.

Expected ROI is the final piece of this, which affects both new and existing units. Every private developer and landlord wants to make as much money as they can, unless they are explicitly are renting as a service. An example of renting as a service would be families, who will rent to each other at favorable rates or for free, privileging people with large and/or wealthy families that are friendly with each other. Now, ROI is also subject to supply and demand. Everyone wants to build 120$/sqft luxury apartments but once everybody does nobody can sell/rent for those prices without setting a price floor and waiting for buyers to catch up. If you are a small developer, you can’t afford to do this. Your expenses will eat you alive. If you are a big developer, though, those expenses are offsetting the gains you make and serving to reduce you tax bill. Units at prices nobody can pay are effectively furloughed, meaning off the market, and, so long as they remain cheap to maintain, will remain that way, artificially restricting supply. It doesn’t matter if it’s for sale or not when it’s at a price you can’t afford. (Sidebar, anyone who tells you that the minimum wage depresses hiring because it artificially restricts demand is lying to you. It’s not strictly false, but like the above it’s a multi-variable equation and blanket statements about cost of labor are aimed at killing wages.)

What this alludes to also is a need for greater income equality. In order for rental to be a competitive option with furlough, not only does the price of furlough have to be increased, the real value of wages have to be increased in order to create opportunities for people to splurge. This is a twofold strategy, of both increasing the rewards of putting units on the market and increasing the costs of keeping them off. If real wages barely cover cost of living, or don’t cover cost of living, nobody can realistically spend more real wages on rent regardless of the percentage of their income it is. (Real wages here refers to the political power implied by dollar wages. A dollar is really worth whatever it can be exchanged for, whether that is a candy bar or a square inch of a 144$/sqft condo) The real value of everything except time and land are also constantly going down because of constant improvements in manufacturing. The cost in acres of land and hours of labor of a pound of beef, a bolt of cloth, or a pint of beer have dropped dramatically in the last century. Unfortunately, land is one of the few things that remains in marxist terms uncommodifiable, because it cannot be fully abstracted from the physical properties that make it valuable and we can’t make more of it just by making a better machine. This means that as the real value of things goes down because of supply and demand, the value of land only goes up because the supply is hard capped. If the value of everything under capitalism must go down because of increased production, while the value of capitalist assets must go up, or the system collapses, it makes sense that land would become a fixed point in that equation, the marxist speed of light observable from all reference points. The best approximation of land as commodity is, what else, apartments, which make available as living space the empty air above us. Because production never stops, the value of everything but land must go down. Therefore, as time passes, the price of land, and hence the price of housing, must tend upwards. Therefore, in order for housing to remain affordable, real wages must grow. This is the opposite of what is currently happening, as real wages have gone down for decades.

This income inequality which is one facet of capitalism is not new. For as long as people have lived in urban areas there have been issues between the abject class, the working class, the ruling class, and the professional class, a four part distinction I will seriously argue for in opposition to a lot of marxist theorists. The ruling and working classes ought to be familiar, or at least self explanatory. However, the other two classes I identify, the professionals and the abject, are useful to this analysis because they fill both a racial gap in the primarily marxist analysis I put forward and identify the two most likely groups to rent, which is to say the worker who works to produce but owns without governing and the professional who works to govern but does not own. The ruling class both governs and owns, but its court is full of courtiers who are there to push various agendas from within the rule of law without per se producing. Likewise, the working class pensioner exists in opposition to the abject who is denied the opportunity or the resources to be productive explicitly as a means to manufacture a threat against which inter-class solidarity between the workers and the rulers is developed. The textbook nazi conspiracy theory about “elites” doing a great racial replacement picks out perfectly what I mean by both the racial character of the professional and the abject and their utilization to foster solidarity between your plumber uncle and Elon Musk. This is relevant to both the broad theme of gentrification and the narrow theme of rent because gentrification is a wedge issue that divides the working class and the professional class far more than its impact on any other. The working class’ disidentification with doctors, lawyers, PMCs and other yuppie types, as well as the professional class’ disidentification with union politics, illegalism, and radicalism in general is brought to firecrackers in virtually any conversation about gentrification which seems in passing to be more about tapas bars than about real politics. Likewise, these groups shared distrust of and disdain for the abject, who are explicitly labeled by the state as constitutionally guilty, is the basis for the very broken windows policing strategy that empties neighborhoods of minorities regardless of class. The Rent is Too Damn High, and excluding homeless people from the “working” working class is a big part of how we got here specifically because the interests of small time owners and small time government functionaries, carried to their conclusions, are necessarily self defeating. These two groups eliminate the presence of the abject from their spaces at their own financial peril.

In addition to class, there is also a specific historical movement that is crucial to the understanding of gentrification as it exists, which is the movement of factories in search of cheap labor. The United States is not a good place to find cheap urban labor. You build a factory and suddenly everyone complains about air quality and labor violations and you can’t just kill them because everyone has lawyers. You kill one (us citizen) organizer and the NLRB is trying to get you in court for intimidation. What’s the country come to? But a shipping container costs a quarter cent per mile and the goods aren’t perishable so you go to Guangzhou or Cape Town where you can kill union bosses in peace. But for the American city, that’s a loss of what once made land prime real estate. What jobs can replace the insatiable demand for labor that a 24 hour paper mill once produced? Service labor, which crucially is site specific and therefore not outsourceable, is what the US has predominantly turned to. (and arms manufacturing which is not outsourced for very different reasons) However, service labor is only in demand if there is already a stable population that can be served, which requires a constant influx of capital holders in demand of service. This is why Airbnb exists and is hollowing out rental availability, why Boston as a college town is the way it is, and why there are in fact so many damn tapas bars. Fred Salveucci talked about being able to go north of the expressway in the 70s and being able to get a plate of mac and beans for half a buck. I went looking for a 5$ slice of pizza on my lunch break today around Government Center and found two places that were boarded up and ended up spending 20$ at Chilacates. Cities are being slowly turned into Cancun, complete with the fences to keep out the homeless.

What can be done about this? Obviously the factors we’ve discussed that favor consolidation of housing are mostly either contained within a gordion’s knot of tax policy or intrinsic to capitalism/goods as commodities. But, given that we narrow our objectives to making the rent lower, some obvious weaknesses jump out: increasing the cost of vacancy forces units out of furlough, because companies are no longer able to justify the losses, and increasing real wages increases the availability of capital for workers to spend on rent. These are the prongs I talked about earlier.

Legal means to pursue each prong exist. Both a minimum wage and a maximum wage, depending on their implementation, can potentially increase real wages, and vacancy taxes directly increase the costs of vacancy. The government can also ignore the market and directly mandate maximum rents within certain parameters. This tends to decrease the long term supply of housing for the reasons discussed at the outset, given that if the revenues from house building don’t cover the costs of building, less gets built. However, any political movement that exists exclusively within the white lines of the law fails to genuinely threaten change. Landlords, like bosses, break the law constantly with the impunity that a lawyer provides them against consequence. This is why a healthy dose of illegalism is an important part of any effective political movement. The most direct action one can take is property occupation, or squatting. Squatter’s rights are nearly non-existent in the United States. The most leeway that any state grants to any unknown persons occupying a dwelling is 60 days notice to vacate the property, and there are states that allow no notice evictions or lack statutes governing squatting at all. Every single state regards the occupation of owned property as trespassing, meaning most kinds of squatting are prosecutable offenses. However, squatting, even temporarily in ways that don’t expose the squatter to liability provided they don’t get caught, can seriously impact the value of properties. You have heard of rent lowering gunshots. This is the serious version of that. At the same time, illegal action needs legal defense, both in terms of non-compliance with police to protect those willing to take illegal actions from arrest and in terms of legal, 1st amendment protected disruption to keep focus on the issue. The most effective movements have a radical wing and a institutionalist wing who do not acknowledge each other but share the same tactics and objectives.

If you are housed, you need to be willing to protect and support homeless people because they are your front line. Start or join an Occupy movement, where they are your peers in occupying a public space illegally in a way that is too public to prosecute. Give to people on the street, and smash anti-homeless architecture if nobody is watching. Be willing to distract cops if you see someone doing something dodgy so they can get away. Remember that following the law is a tactic, and so is breaking it.

The case for this being on my transit blog is arguably weak, but I felt compelled after a particularly hateful experience looking at facebook memes about homeless people on the T. You should want those people there. You should want those people breaking down the doors of luxury apartments and setting up shop. You should want them keeping your city safe because the cops you hire to separate you from them will train their guns on you next.

And for gods sake, don’t let your city become a brand. Branding is marketing. Branding is clean, and bloodless, and a gloved hand around your throat that leaves no fingerprints.

#long post

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misfitwashere · 5 months ago

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We thank you, Joe

Tonight is for you

Robert Reich

Aug 19, 2024

Friends,

Tonight’s opening of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago will be an opportunity for the Democratic Party and the nation to take stock of Joe Biden’s term of office and thank him for his service.

He still has five months to go as president, of course, but the baton has been passed.

Biden’s singular achievement has been to change the economic paradigm that reigned since Reagan and return to one that dominated public life between 1933 and 1980 — and is far superior to the one that has prevailed since.

Biden’s democratic capitalism is neither socialism nor “big government.” It is, rather, a return to an era when government organized the market for the greater good.

The Great Crash of 1929 followed by the Great Depression taught the nation a crucial lesson that we forgot after Reagan’s presidency: markets are human creations. The economy that collapsed in 1929 was the consequence of allowing nearly unlimited borrowing, encouraging people to gamble on Wall Street, and permitting the Street to take huge risks with other people’s money.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and his administration reversed this. They stopped the looting of America. They also gave Americans a modicum of economic security. During World War II, they put almost every American to work.

Subsequent Democratic and Republican administrations enlarged and extended democratic capitalism. Wall Street was regulated, as were television networks, airlines, railroads, and other common carriers. CEO pay was modest. Taxes on the highest earners financed public investments in infrastructure (such as the national highway system) and higher education.

America’s postwar industrial policy spurred innovation. The Department of Defense and its Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration developed satellite communications, container ships, and the internet. The National Institutes of Health did trailblazing basic research in biochemistry, DNA, and infectious diseases.

Public spending rose during economic downturns to encourage hiring. Antitrust enforcers broke up AT&T and other monopolies. Small businesses were protected from giant chain stores. Labor unions thrived. By the 1960s, a third of all private-sector workers were unionized. Large corporations sought to be responsive to all their stakeholders.

But then America took a giant U-turn. The OPEC oil embargo of the 1970s brought double-digit inflation followed by Fed Chair Paul Volcker’s effort to “break the back” of it by raising interest rates so high that the economy fell into deep recession.

All of which prepared the ground for Reagan’s war on democratic capitalism. From 1981 onward, a new bipartisan orthodoxy emerged that markets functioned well only if the government got out of the way.

The goal of economic policy thereby shifted from the common good to economic growth, even though Americans already well-off gained most from that growth. And the means shifted from public oversight of the market to deregulation, free trade, privatization, “trickle-down” tax cuts, and deficit reduction — all of which helped the monied interests make even more money.

The economy grew for the next 40 years, but median wages stagnated, and inequalities of income and wealth surged. In sum, after Reagan’s presidency, democratic capitalism — organized to serve public purposes — all but disappeared. It was replaced by corporate capitalism, organized to serve the monied interests.

Joe Biden revived democratic capitalism. He learned from the Obama administration’s mistake of spending too little to pull the economy out of the Great Recession that the pandemic required substantially greater spending, which would also give working families a cushion against adversity. So he pushed for and got the giant $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.

This was followed by a $550 billion initiative to rebuild the nation’s bridges, roads, public transit, broadband, water, and energy systems. He championed the biggest investment in clean energy sources in American history — expanding wind and solar power, electric vehicles, carbon capture and sequestration, and hydrogen and small nuclear reactors. He then led the largest public investment ever made in semiconductors, the building blocks of the next economy. Notably, these initiatives were targeted to companies that employ American workers.

Biden also embarked on altering the balance of power between capital and labor, as had FDR. Biden put trustbusters at the head of the Federal Trade Commission and the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department. And he remade the National Labor Relations Board into a strong advocate for labor unions.

Unlike his Democratic predecessors Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Biden did not reduce all trade barriers. He targeted them to industries that were crucial to America’s future — semiconductors, electric batteries, electric vehicles. Unlike Trump, Biden did not give a huge tax cut to corporations and the wealthy.

It’s also worth noting that, in contrast with every president since Reagan, Biden did not fill his White House with former Wall Street executives. Not one of his economic advisers — not even his treasury secretary — is from the Street.

The one large blot on Biden’s record is Benjamin Netanyahu. Biden should have been tougher on him — refusing to provide him offensive weapons unless Netanyahu stopped his massacre in Gaza. Yes, I know: Hamas began the bloodbath. But that is no excuse for Netanyahu’s disproportionate response, which has made Israel a pariah and endangered its future. Nor an excuse for our complicity.

***

One more thing needs to be said in praise of Joe Biden. He did something Donald Trump could never do: He put his country over ego, ambition, and pride. He bowed out with grace and dignity. He gave us Kamala Harris.

Presidents don’t want to bow out. Both Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson had to be shoved out of office. Biden was not forced out. He did nothing wrong. His problem is that he was old and losing some of the capacities that dwindle with old age.

Even among people who are not president, old age inevitably triggers denial. How many elderly people do you know who accept that they can’t do the things they used to do or think they should be able to do? How many willingly give up the keys to their car? It’s not surprising he resisted.

Yet Biden cares about America and was aware of the damage a second Trump administration could do to this nation, and to the world. Biden’s patriotism won out over any denial or wounded pride or false sense of infallibility or paranoia.

For this and much else, we thank you, Joe.

#robert reich

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hetalianhistorian · 5 months ago

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Menu items have been released for the Hetalia: The Glorious World cafe collabs!!

Source links: 1 2 3 Recently, the official Hetamyu account has announced that Hetalia: The Glorious World will be receiving multiple cafe collaborations in celebration of the new musical! The following brands include Animate Cafe Gratte, Marufuku Coffee Shop, and Karatez Karaoke! I will go over the listed menu items and details from the images in order accordingly to brand. Keep in mind I am using a translator, so there may be mistakes! Karatez Karaoke The event will run from August 9th until September 22nd. The holding store will be within the Shibuya Dogenzaka store. There will be 4 different drinks served:

Drink 1 - An iced drink with the ingredients of muscat gold jelly, nata de coco, tonic water, marshmallow, chocolate sauce, arazan, and pocky mint.

Drink 2 - A hot drink with the ingredients of hot cocoa, whipped cream, diced almonds, arazan, and mint.

Drink 3 - An iced drink with red perry jelly, iced tea, vanilla ice cream, framboise sauce, and arazan.

Drink 4 - An iced drink with frucura soji rock, ramune syrup, hyaluronic acid jelly, and rose petals.

For every collaboration drink ordered, you will receive one free coaster as a bonus! These will be randomized. There will also be a special collaboration set you can order! Takeout will be ¥1,980 yen each. If you are going to takeout for a karaoke room, a separate room fee will be charged. Different tax rates vary depending on the service. The followings goods are offered:

One collaboration drink

An original, random coaster

A clear file

A random straw charm.

Animate's Cafe Gratte Animate's collaboration will run from August 9th to September 12th. The following store locations will be hosting the collab during this period:

Ikebukuro main store

Akihabara

Shibuya

Kichijoji Parco

Yokohama Vivre

Sendai

Nagoya

Osaka Nihonbashi

Okayama

There will also be a cookie store hosting this collab in Kyoto! For Gratte stores, there will be a charge of ¥660 yen for eat in and a charge of ¥648 yen for takeout. Base drinks will include coffee, tea, orange, apple, matcha latte, cocoa, and more in options. For cookies, eat in will cost ¥605 yen and ¥594 yen for takeout. You can choose your frosting image from a selection of the cast's photo covers! For gratte stores, you will need to select your pattern at the terminal in stores. For the cookie store, you will need to bring in the order sheet available at the store to the cash register for your selection. There will also be a randomly selected bonus bromide given for every purchase of ¥1,500 yen from the collaboration menu. This offer will end as soon as supplies are gone. There will also be a lottery hosted! For every collaboration food and drink item purchased, they will provide a form to you to fill out. Two people will be chosen to receive a bromide autographed by the cast! If you also bring your ticket for the show, you will receive an additional gift when making a purchase of ¥1,500 yen each. Marufuku Coffee Shop

The Marufuku collaboration will be hosting this event in two stores with each having their own dates. Here are the following stores that will be hosting:

Osaka - HEP Navio Store - August 5th to August 19th

Tokyo - Yodobashi AKIBA store - August 23rd to September 8th

Here are the following menu items:

English Breakfast - A brunch please using natural yeast bread "Levambourg" (this might be a mistranslation?). The uses milk ingredients, wheat, eggs, soybeans, apples, pork, and chicken.

Pain Perdu - A fluffy french toast dish with vanilla ice cream and berries. This dish uses milk ingredients, eggs, wheat, and soybeans.

Ordering both of these dishes will only cost ¥1,050 yen each. If you order from the drink set, it will cost ¥1,350 yen each. You can choose your drink coffee, tea, or cafe au lait. When you order from the collaboration menu, you will receive a special bromide as a gift! The Osaka store will have a limited quantity of 400 bromides and the Tokyo store will have a limited quantity of 500 bromides.

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