#not saying he should be evading taxes but in an industry where EVERYONE evades taxes... it feels targeted when someone goes down for that | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

avengerofiron · 4 years ago

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the people who built me || danny & tony

summary: tony has a choice to make when he encounters iron fist during an enforcer patrol. he chooses family. (solo incoming when lola gets time about The Consequences TM - sorry tony)

when: a few days before the siege

word count: 10,094 (we thought we were brief. we were not.)

trigger warnings: torture mention, abuse mention, death mentions

featuring: danny rand

TONY: Everyone made mistakes. It was a fundamental part of life — a fundamental part of science — to do something once, find out where you went wrong, and improve on it for the next situation that came your way. That innovation was what Tony lived for, what he breathed every single day in Stark Industries or as he acted as Iron Man. It was innovation that other people boasted about, too, until the point where mistakes became too much for them to simply brush off, when mistakes were too large to sweep under the rug, that’s when things got dicey.

Tony Stark had a habit of making things dicey.

The Sentinels weren’t his doing, though. For once, he wasn’t the guy in the room to create the targeting system, or the artificial intelligence, or even the giant, maniacal robots designed for one purpose and one purpose alone. These robots were created by men before Tony was even born, years before most kids would remember their first appearance on the scene just after the events went down in Cuba.

Their design needed a little work. Tony could say that with certainty. Their morality needed a complete overhaul, and if Tony could see that, if he could spot it a mile off with no hesitation, he didn’t see how they were going to spin it to make the public agree — but they did. They did, even if Ross stepped into every meeting with a face that looked like he’d been chewing on a wasp because his ass had been well and truly handed to him by the World Security Council. . Security. Sometimes it came at the cost of what really mattered in life. Sometimes, in the process of making a better world, you destroyed the old one that was perfect in its own unique way. Sometimes, people needed a little bad to make the good worth it.

Tony was still learning that. Of course, it was a little hard to learn with Ross breathing down his neck, the warning lingering on the horizon of every decision he made or didn’t make in the field.

He couldn’t afford to mess up. He couldn’t afford to make a dicey mistake, couldn’t afford to pull a Tony Stark.

Inevitably, that was exactly what would happen.

The Sentinels tracking system picked up an anomaly that wasn’t significant enough to investigate, but enough to suggest that something not entirely above board was going down in Hell’s Kitchen. Someone had latent powers they were aware not to use was one of the suggestions thrown around the meeting room. Others said it could be a fault with the system. Either way it needed checking out, and enforcement agents had been put on clean up duty while the robots handled the real, perceptible threats that they didn’t need to negotiate with. . Not just enforcement agents — Tony, specifically. Iron Man, glorified janitor, delegated to the bottom of the pile for the past month because he dared not to disclose some minorly crucial facts to his employers.

Bastards.

“You’ve reached the point of the fluctuation, boss,” FRIDAY informed him through the helmet’s sound system. “So far I’m picking up a single heat signature other than your own.”

“Tell me it isn’t burning up,” Tony replied. “I’ve had enough of fire people for one lifetime.”

“I wasn’t with you during that one, boss. Must’ve been the other computer.”

“Must’ve been.”

“The temperature signal appears human. They’re moving slowly — no adrenaline spike as of yet. I would suggest landing before things get nasty.”

“When have you ever known my missions to get nasty?” Tony asked. FRIDAY remained conspicuously silent, but her presence was noted. Tony could almost imagine her rolling her eyes. “Alright, darling. Let’s get this show on the road.” . He landed on the pavement in the alleyway, hand up and palm glowing. “Hi there,” he announced, voice robotic but not nearly as warped as he would like it to be. (Doing things you fundamentally disagreed with was easier when you were wearing a mask, he had found — Iron Man had always been more of his true self than Tony Stark, billionaire playboy.) “I’m Iron Man, you’re in breach of the Sokovia Accords, and we’re going to need to have a little chat. If you don’t mind, come easily and this’ll all be—”

The figure turned. The way he moved was as familiar as someone stepping around Tony’s kitchen counter, or pulling Tali over on the couch onto his knee, or messing around with Colleen in the gym, clearly holding back while Tony was watching because Tony didn’t know, couldn’t know, the truth.

The truth that was staring him in the face now.

He was wearing a mask, of course. Even Danny wasn’t trusting enough to know that running around with his own face in New York City in the current climate would result in anything but trouble. Tony still knew him, though. He knew him when he was a kid, chasing after him at galas. He knew him as a man, talking about a plane falling from the sky and snow surrounding him. He knew him as a cousin, broaching a subject, a word, Tony had always dodged, backing off the second Tony didn’t bite.

(Sometimes he wondered what would’ve happened if he did. If he gave Danny the truth in that moment, if he opened himself up, if he admitted something to both of them that he’d been carrying since he was fifteen years old. Sometimes he wondered, but not tonight. He was a little preoccupied.)

The man in the mask, the man on the Sentinels’ system, the man on FRIDAY’s tracker, the man he was sent to arrest …

It was Danny Rand.

DANNY: Over the last few years, Danny had had a few very close calls in his life of vigilantism. He’d been stabbed (multiple times now), shot (though only by Harold), kidnapped (also multiple times, which was worrying), maimed… The list went on and on. He had plenty of personal experiences to tell him just how dangerous this life was, plenty of scars and near-death moments to inform him just what he was risking every time he pulled that bandanna over his face.

He’d only recently come to consider the law to be one of those potential consequences.

Danny had never been arrested before. He’d certainly come close a few times in his early days back in the city, when his heart beat too quickly in his chest and he swung his fists at anyone who looked at him too closely, but he’d never seen the backseat of a patrol car. Thanks to Harold’s meddling, he’d even found himself on a federal watchlist for a moment or so, but Jeri took care of it before it could lead anywhere substantial. The closest Danny had come to prison was his forced stay in Birch, an experience he desperately wanted to avoid repeating.

If he were smart, he supposed, he might have scaled back the vigilantism to prevent an arrest. It was what Ward had advised him to do, on more than one occasion. Money can do a lot of things, Danny, he’d warned, but this isn’t one of them. If they catch you, they will send you to the Raft. Not some nice prison for tax evaders, the fucking Raft. And he was right. Danny knew he was right, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to hang up his worn hoodie and yellow bandana. Every time he tried, Ward’s voice was drowned out by a thousand others.

Protect my city. Matt, who hadn’t died for him but almost did, who’d trusted him to save a city he hadn’t even managed to stay in.

Danny Rand failed an entire city. The place he was sworn to protect. Sowande, who had been cruel and ruthless and right. . You should never have borne the Fist. Davos, angry and bitter and hitting the nail on the head every time. Danny had power, and he didn’t deserve it. He hadn’t earned it. Not really, not in the ways that counted. If he did nothing with it, if he failed New York the way he’d failed K’un Lun, what was the point of him? What did any of the sacrifices made to get him where he was mean?

So he didn’t stop. He kept fighting, kept roaming the streets with his Fist glowing as if there weren’t robots out to drag him in and enforcers less understanding than Colleen looking for a high profile collar. Because he needed to make amends. (Because he didn’t know how to stop.)

Tonight had been quiet. He hadn’t seen any sentinels, hadn’t run into any enforcers. He’d barely even seen any crime, only taking out one mugger by well into the morning hours. He probably should have been glad for it, but his skin itched and his chest was tight and he wanted to hit something. When he heard a quiet tang of something unmistakably metallic landing behind him, he was almost relieved. Finally, finally, a chance to let out some of that pent up rage on something he didn’t have to feel guilty for breaking.

But then he turned around, and the world tilted on its axis.

Everyone knew who wore the Iron Man suit, but even if he hadn’t there was no mistaking Tony’s voice beneath the modulated tones. Danny had been following Tony Stark around since he was a little kid, been clinging to his pant legs since he could walk. The fifteen-year gap in their relationship amounted to surprisingly little when he crashed on Tony’s couch as often as he did as an adult. Tony was there in good moments and bad, there on Christmas and in hospital rooms, at family dinners and in the moments when he couldn’t scrape himself off the floor. Tony had been there for all of that, and now, he was here for this.

And Danny froze. . Tony was frozen too, and though Danny couldn’t see his face, he had a feeling the wide-eyed expression beneath Iron Man’s mask was a pretty close match to the one he wore on his own face right now. Uncertainly, Danny shifted. Half of him wanted to walk towards Tony while the other half screamed at him to move away. He didn’t know which half was right. Maybe neither of them was.

“Hi,” he said experimentally, as if checking to see if his voice still worked. “I don’t… Uh, I can’t go to jail.” He bit his lip, barely stopped himself from adding, ’Please, Tony,’ because if Tony didn’t know who he was now, there would be no hiding it after something like that.

TONY: At least Batman roamed the rooftops of Gotham with a voice modulator. At least Daredevil pulled off that dark, mysterious, brooding, silent vigilante type. At least for the few weeks Tony himself managed to keep an alter ego on the down low, he wore a mask that covered the entirety of his face, his whole squishy human body, and his multitude of self worth issues all in one handy package. Danny was out here in a hoodie that wouldn’t have been out of place in Rhodey’s grungy backpack in MIT and a bandana that was riding up on his entirely too familiar nose, his voice breaking through in a weak attempt at a different pitch that Tony could see through in an instant, because he wasn’t a moron.

He was a genius, a fact that he often lamented over, and a genius who loved Danny Rand, at that.

Christ, it was looking at his own heart staring back at him, wide eyed and about to bolt, feet two seconds away from running down the alleyway and never looking back. Tony could catch him, of course. The suit could catch a rocket, if it wanted — but the question was whether he wanted to. The question was whether he wanted to see for himself, up close and personal, what Danny learned in the years he was gone, what knowledge he shared with Colleen that made the woman utterly terrifying. The question was whether Tony was willing to put someone else he loved in cuffs while the man he’d asked to marry him remained on the run, being fed intelligence from Stark systems, being told that if it came down to it, Tony would make the hard choice because it was the right one. . Making the right choice always seemed so difficult. Tony told himself that he needed compasses, like Steve or Sharon or Jarvis, Yinsen or Rhodes or Rumiko (not all of them were good compasses, but that was beside the fact), in order to make them. He told himself that he didn’t know the difference between wrong and right, because when he looked back at his extensive list of personal defects and lifelong tendency towards making mistakes, he figured that was proof of some void in his chest that other people had filled, something his parents failed to cultivate or he burned away with liquor.

But he knew, now. He knew it as much as he knew when Steve looked at him he’d burn down the world to put things right. He knew when he looked at Danny, he could never put cuffs around his wrist. he could never let anyone touch a hair on the kid’s goddamn head, and he wasn’t a kid anymore, Tony knew that, but he was. He always would be.

Tony lost him once before. He wasn’t losing him again, not by choice, not like this.

Of course, of all the words Tony could have chosen to put that sentiment into the universe, he went with something completely …

Well, completely Tony.

“Yeah,” he said, helmet retracting quickly. “No shit you can’t go to jail.”

“Boss,” FRIDAY interjected, “perhaps we should shut off the Panel communication servers-”

Tony clicked one of the panels on the suit’s arm, and FRIDAY faded into nothingness — along with Ross’ feed to this conversation. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Tony demanded, taking a step forward. “Do you just think you can go around the city in … in not even spandex. You’re in less than spandex. You look like you raided a Goodwill and then they kicked you out because you were making the babies cry. I … I do everything I can to try and stop you from getting into shit, Da— Iron Fist, and you and all the, uh … the other ones, you all keep doing this!”

DANNY: Surprisingly, this wasn’t actually a situation Danny had been in before. When he first returned from K’un Lun, he had seen no reason to lie to people about where he had been and what had been done to him. He told the Meachums everything, didn’t understand why they didn’t believe him immediately because it was real. He knew it was real, had the scars and the nightmares to prove it. He told Colleen who, while more receptive, still spent the first few hours of their acquaintanceship looking at him like a bomb about to go off. He told the doctors at Birch, positive that they would understand what he was saying and let him go, so sure that it would reinforce his sanity. He told anyone who would listen about the Fist, and everyone looked at him like something inside of him was broken. Like it was some wild story invented by a child’s mind in order to avoid accepting the truth.

Danny had never wanted Tony to look at him like that. He’d looked up to Ward as a kid, sure, but back then, Tony had been his hero. He’d wanted, so badly, to do everything Tony Stark did. He remembered saying as much to his mother one night as she was putting him to bed, remembered barely stopping for air as he launched into an elaborate retelling of what he’d done at the Starks’ that day, adding animated hand gestures to the conversation as he went on and on about Tony’s games that only he really knew all the rules to and the way he was never angry when Danny and Sharon made up their own rules on top of them, the way the three of them laughed and played and no one flipped the gameboard over when they were losing the way Ward always did and no one cried like Joy used to. The Meachums were family, but that had always been more because of Harold than the children. The Carters and the Starks were family because of Tony and Sharon. Because of Danny.

And now, he couldn’t help but wonder if he’d be the reason they stopped being family, too. . He didn’t think Tony would arrest him. Not if he knew it was him, not if he recognized the eyes staring back at him. On a logical level, Danny knew that Tony never put him in cuffs, never take him to the Raft. But old paranoia told him he was assuming too much, old anxiety clawed at his gut and demanded to be free. Ward had put him in a mental institution, had paid people to hurt him while he was there. Harold had traded him to the Hand, had pointed a gun at him and pulled the trigger. Joy had hired someone to kidnap him, knowing he might not survive the experience. Davos had cut into him, bled him out over a clay pot, shattered every fucking bone in his leg twice for good measure. Danny loved his family, he really did. But he had a lot of bad experiences with trust, a lot of scars he could have avoided if, for a moment, he had loved less.

Tony Stark was not Ward Meachum. Danny knew that. Tony never would have hired guards to chase him down the street with guns in hand because he was afraid of losing money, wouldn’t have hurt him over and over and over again to save his own reputation. Tony wasn’t Joy or Davos, either, and he certainly wasn’t Harold. Tony was a good man who loved Danny, who had always treated him like a person instead of a billionaire, who had let him be a kid when no one else seemed interested in doing so. The Carters and the Starks and the Rands, they were a different kind of family than he’d had with Harold and Joy and Ward. They were less cutthroat, less money-hungry. Sharon and Tony had never wanted anything from him except for him to be himself. Danny knew that. . But that old paranoia still hovered for a moment as he and Tony stared at each other, both still as they assessed the situation. Danny stood lightly on the balls of his feet, ready to bolt if he needed to, as if it would make a difference. He couldn’t outrun Tony when he was wearing the suit, and even the intimate knowledge he’d gained over the last few years of vigilantism wouldn’t help him much against Iron Man. He was pretty sure Tony had some kind of x-ray vision in that thing, so hiding in a dumpster would only end up embarrassing him.

Danny didn’t realize he’d been holding a breath until Tony spoke and he let it out, a quiet exhale as a wave of relief hit him so hard it threatened to knock him off his feet. Tony didn’t sound like Iron Man, enforcer of the Accords right now. He sounded like Tony Stark, exasperated older cousin getting ready to gear up for a pretty intense lecture. . Tony did something with his arm that Danny thought might mean the higher-ups couldn’t eavesdrop anymore, and Danny’s shoulders relaxed just a little. He still carried some tension in his shoulders as Tony launched into his lecture, but he was pretty sure he wasn’t getting arrested for the moment. It allowed him to relax enough to look mildly offended, if nothing else. “Hey,” he said, “Je --- uh, my friend said spandex is lame. And this is comfortable! I need to be comfortable.” Not that the outfit was the point, but it was the principle of the thing, wasn’t it? He had to defend his style choices. “Look, you’re mad. I know you’re mad. Can I just --- I can explain. Okay? It’s just, uh, it’s a really long story, and I ---” He broke off for a moment, searching for words momentarily before continuing, “I punched a dragon! And now I’ve got --- I’ve got control over my chi, and I --- A building fell on Daredevil! And he told me, he said, ’Protect my city,’” his voice got momentarily deeper in a poor imitation of Matt, “and I couldn’t say no, because he was gone! And then --- And then my brother did a sacred ritual on me and I broke my leg and went to China, which you knew that part because of course you would have noticed that I was in China, right? And now I’m back! And, um, yeah. That’s it.”

It was an utterly nonsensical explanation, a series of stories strung together that, from the outside, seemed completely unrelated. Danny had never been the best at setting the record straight, especially not under pressure. Tony knew that, of course.

TONY: He wasn’t his father. Tony had never been his father, and recently, he’d stopped feeling inferior about that fact and started feeling grateful. He rarely gave over to anger. His rage, when it was prompted, came relatively smoothly. It built in him, gathered in his chest, curled around in his mind until he found the way most appropriate to put it to good use. There were rare occasions when Tony lost his cool, at least in that regard.

This was one of those rare occasions.

He was pissed. He was pissed off, and he was angry, and he was every word that he could think of to describe the rising heat on the back of his neck, the way his hands balled into fists. Any other man in a metal suit would use the mask to its fullest potential at this moment and hide his weakness. Tony had never been good at covering the emotions on his sleeve, not when it came to enemies, not when it came to strangers, or the press. Definitely not when it came to family.

He was angry, but he was terrified, too. His throat felt tight as he spoke, his voice raising but not nearly strong enough to have any kind of weight behind it.

“You know I’m mad?” Tony repeated, raising an eyebrow. “You know I’m mad? Are you fucking joking me?” Danny stopped talking, and Tony held up a hand. “Listen, this is the moment where you zip it, alright? This is the point where you stop talking, because I have a lot of things to say to you, and you just—”

Danny kept. On. Talking.

(Jesus, that ran in the family.) . The words that were coming out of Danny’s mouth were quick and panicked, and suddenly Tony was having flashbacks to when Danny was nine years old. Sharon assisted in the breaking of one of Tony’s vases, entirely accidentally, and Danny had a hundred and one excuses for Tony, not one of which included any form of a lie. At that stage, the kid had been utterly incapable of keeping a single detail from Tony. Secrets weren’t something that existed between the three of them.

Except they had. Except every time Sharon and Danny walked into his house in Malibu, Tony had to clean up weeks of evidence of his real life, the life he led on a daily basis. He had to hide the people he spent time with, the things he wasted time on, the things that kids didn’t want to see and he would die before he admitted to, because they, for God knows what reason, looked up to him. Cared for him. Loved him.

Danny was talking fast, and he’d never lied to Tony before except for when he had, but when he said dragon Tony couldn’t find even a piece of his heart that doubted the validity of what he was saying. “A building fell on Daredevil because he chases that,” Tony interjected, before Danny could go any further. “I don’t know the guy as anything other than a dot on my threat analysis, but come on. He goes out in a mask and he tries to make a difference, and that’s honourable and heroic and all of those things, but it’s also fucking stupid.” . What Iron Fist was doing was stupid. FRIDAY was in his ear reminding Tony that he was stupid, that there was a timer on this conversation and Ross would realise before long that Tony had tapped out, and that only spelled trouble when Tony was already on the shitlist …

“This life,” Tony said, taking another step forward, gesturing at Danny’s gear, “this life only ends one way. It ends with you in the ground. It ends with someone taking joy in putting you there. And that’s … I do this because I killed people. I killed innocent people for decades. I killed people, and I need to make up for that but Christ, you …”

Tony sucked in a breath, and all pretence went out the window.

“You had ten years.” He was yelling. No, yelling would be easier — he was trying to scream, but the words were barely coming out. “You were ten years old and you were dead. You were dead and that damn near killed all of us, you know that? You ever wonder why Sharon’s mom worries more than is even close to normal about her coming home in a box? You ever wonder why I … I was in a cave and I was seeing so much shit, and they were going to kill me and I saw you. I saw you and you weren’t even dead. You weren’t. You were alive the whole damn time.”

Tony stepped back, then, heart beat pounding loud in his ears. “You can’t do that to us again.” He said it the same way Pepper had, pushing herself out of bed, shooting him a glare on the way down to the couch. He said it like there was no other solution, like Danny would stop or he wouldn’t, and Tony would be able to walk away — but he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t even be able to stop himself if Danny asked him to. “If it wasn’t me,” he continued, “if it wasn’t me here, tonight, things would be different. You know that, right?”

DANNY: There were days when Tony reminded him so much of Ward that Danny ached with it, moments when his cousin got a look on his face and it felt like Danny was looking at his brother instead. This moment, with Tony clearly and understandably angry and Danny standing in front of him with some dangerous stunt only faintly in the rearview mirror, was one of them. Danny couldn’t help but think back to the thousand and one times he’d had this conversation before. In Ward’s office, when he and Danny were slowly making their way back towards being brothers. On his couch, bloodied and beaten, with Ward quietly trying to pretend not to be terrified. On the runway of a private airport, Ward threatening to lay down in front of a plane to keep Danny from going off on his own.

He’d had the conversation with other people too, of course. Colleen, who waited up until he stumbled home at five in the morning with bruised knuckles and blood on his hands, who asked him quietly how many times he’d lit up the Fist, how many hours of sleep he was running on. Claire, who told him how terrified she was that his obsession with being something he wasn’t would take away everything good about what he was. Jessica, Matt, Luke, Misty… Danny had people who loved him, people who knew what he did and tried desperately to convince him to do it in a way that wouldn’t kill him in the end. And Danny wished he knew how to do it for them. He wished he knew how to be the sort of man who might get a happy ending, the sort of man who could die peacefully of old age someday instead of the sort destined to bleed out in a back alley gasping and wheezing and waiting for help that would never come. He wanted to be that person for them, but he couldn’t. Most days, he still wasn’t confident he knew how to be a person at all. . Tony was talking to him as if he was one. Tony was talking to him like he was a child, perhaps, but he was talking to him as if he was a person all the same, like he was more than a weapon, and Danny had to remind himself that that meant something. He opened his mouth to say more, to dig his grave a little deeper, but Tony told him to be quiet and Danny had always wanted to do pretty much anything Tony told him to do.

It was Tony’s turn to talk now, Tony’s turn to talk about how buildings didn’t typically fall on men who didn’t run into them when they were already shaking, and Danny winced just a little. “A building fell on Daredevil because I ---” He cut himself off, taking a deep, shuddering breath. How much should he reveal here? How much did he tell Tony about the things Iron Fist had been a part of, the things that happened because of him. As far as the police knew, Iron Fist had been nowhere near Midland Circle. Danny Rand’s involvement in the collapse had been swiftly covered up by Ward, who made a hefty donation and requested that his brother’s trauma not be capitalized on to a very receptive commissioner with a very big check. Danny could tell Tony, right in this moment, that it wasn’t Daredevil’s stupidity that dropped a building on his head --- it was Danny’s. He wondered if that would change Tony’s perspective or make him angrier. . “I know how this ends,” he said instead, quiet and apologetic and utterly unafraid. Danny had always known how this would end, had thought he’d seen the end of it more than once, with Bakuto’s blade slipping silently between his ribs or Harold’s gun aimed firmly at his head or Elektra’s face inches from his own or Davos carving him up or Rhyno’s gang watching him shiver and shake and vomit blood onto the warehouse floor and laughing. Danny knew how this story ended, and he’d made his peace with it. If he died tomorrow, he still would have lived far longer than he had expected. He’d accepted death at ten years old with a plane shaking around him, accepted it again a few months later with sweat beading on his brow and boys his age hitting him over and over and over again because there was no mercy in K’un Lun, not even a little. He’d accepted his death at the mouth of a cave, welcomed it when he stepped inside with nothing but his clenched fists and his aching muscles to face a beast he’d only heard of in storybooks. Death was nothing new, nothing scary. Danny had known it for years.

Tony went on then, talked about why he put on a metal suit, and Danny took a shuddering breath, closed his eyes for a moment as the words rushed out before he could stop them. “So have I,” he blurted, sudden and thick and full of grief. “I’m --- I had a job. I had people to protect, and I failed them, and they’re --- I have things to make up for, too. I have scales to balance.” You are nothing. Danny Rand failed an entire city. The place he was sworn to protect. Sowande’s words echoed in his ear, and they were true. They were true, no matter how many people claimed they weren’t. . When Danny’s plane went down, he’d never considered how it affected other people. He’d been ten years old, had his father’s body and his mother’s screams burned into the forefront of his mind, and thoughts back to New York had never been to think of how the people he’d left behind were coping with his presumed death. He remembered Joy talking about it shortly after he came back, quiet and mournful. He remembered the way Jeri looked at him with more emotion in her expression than he’d ever seen her wear before or since. He remembered Sharon showing up to his office and threatening to kill him for disrespecting the memory of a person she’d loved. He’d heard all those stories, but he’d never really stopped to ponder them.

Not until now.

Tony’s words rung in his ears, and Danny flinched. “I wasn’t…” He started, trailing off because what could he say? I’m sorry my plane went down? I’m sorry you thought I was dead and it broke you? I’m sorry you had to lose me? Danny had been a ghost for a very long time, a child haunting the people who had loved him, sainted by his death. And he was alive now, he was back, but they were still haunted. The ghost of the boy they’d known still hung in the corners of their minds, still rattled chains in the basements and made the floorboards groan. You couldn’t undo fifteen years of grief. . “I’m not trying to,” he said quietly, and it didn’t feel true even if it was. Danny didn’t want to die. He’d realized it all at once in Rhyno’s hideout, when BB crouched beside him and they’d both understood with abject certainty that the gang would be disposing of a corpse by nightfall. Danny didn’t want to die, but he’d still gone after Davos mere hours after he was rescued from that warehouse. He’d still gone out, alone and unarmed, to fight a man who’d already beaten him once, still landed himself in the hospital with doctors who whispered in voices they thought he couldn’t hear about the probability that amputation would be required to save his life. Danny didn’t want to die, but he didn’t know how to stop chasing death, either. He didn’t know how to walk away. “I know.” He said quietly. If any enforcer but Tony had found him, things would be different. Things would be worse.

Danny ran a hand through his hair, eyes burning. “I can’t stop, Tony. I can’t --- The way I was raised, after that plane went down, they taught me… I wasn’t a person to them. I was --- I’m a weapon, Tony, a, a thing, and I don’t --- It was expected there. That I’d… They expected it.” They expected him to die. Some of the kids took bets on it, in the beginning. ’If he lives more than a month, I’ll do your chores for a week.’ ’You can have half my rations for three days if he makes it a year.’ They hadn’t even tried to hide it, had spoken about it clear and outright well within earshot. Danny had grown used to that, over the years. It was how things were. He wasn’t supposed to live. He wasn’t meant to.

TONY: He’d been pretending his entire life. He’d been wearing masks since he was a child, going to galas with his father’s hand digging into his shoulder, leaving bruises in the shapes of his fingertips that expensive material always managed to hide. He’d been pretending from the first second he put on the metal mask in that cave, pretending that he was capable of becoming something bigger than former warmonger, Tony Stark, the boy turned man who was so naive as to believe that the person who helped raise him was incapable of hurting him, incapable of ordering his death.

Obadiah loved him, Tony had reasoned. Obadiah loved him, and he couldn’t possibly have known about any of the deals under the table, couldn’t possibly be the mastermind Pepper said he was. Obadiah loved him, and that was exactly why he wanted Tony dead, because loving Tony Stark had never been easy, not for anyone.

Rhodey’s career almost ended just by associating with him. Pepper was dropped into a blazing fire. Rumiko’s family all but disowned her, Tiberius’ stocks dropped, Sharon was forced to pick him up off the floor and discharge him from hospital, driving home silent and pretending that there wasn’t this large, unspoken thing sitting in the space between the driver and passenger’s seat. Loving Tony meant Maria cried every damn night. Loving Tony was so damn difficult that it made Howard want to hurt him, and he had. . ‘You’ll understand when you’re a parent.’ He’d uttered that more than once. ‘When you’re looking at someone you watched grow up, someone who has disappointed you, lied to you, failed to become what they should be — when that happens, Anthony, you’ll understand that it isn’t as black and white as you seem to think it is.’

Tony was looking at Danny. He was looking at Danny, and he felt like his heart had jumped out of his chest and was spluttering on the pavement between them, sustained only by the muddy water in the puddles of the alleyway, but he didn’t want to hurt him. He didn’t want anything to hurt him.

All Tony wanted, in that desperate, aching moment, was to bring Danny to a place where they never needed to have a conversation like this again, a place where they didn’t need to dance around the truth for months and years, because the Starks might have lied, the Carters might have made their name out of mistruths, the Rands may have misdirected, but their kids were honest. The three of them, they’d always loved each other different.

They’d always loved each other right.

(Tony was capable of that, after all — of loving someone in the correct way, of not turning into his father. In other circumstances, he may have been relieved. He had other things on his mind at this point in time.) . “Is that how you want it to end?” Tony would understand that, too. He would understand it more than almost anything else, that desperate need to go out in a blaze of glory to prove himself, to tip the cosmic scales, to cleanse his hands, to make himself worthy of being called hero by kids and parents alike. He’d tasted a human death. He didn’t much care for it. He would understand.

Just like Danny understood him.

I have scales to balance. Tony shifted, feeling like the conversation was on a Dutch tilt, like he’d had a few too many and the world wasn’t that blissful blur anymore but something far more disconcerting.

“Okay,” Tony breathed. It took him three attempts to make the word audible. “Okay, you can’t stop. That’s … we can work with that. We can make that happen, but you— if you want to do this, you have a chance now to do it right. Legitimise yourself. Get the protection of the Panel. Think of the good you could do if you didn’t need to look over your shoulder every five minutes for the cops.” Tony sucked in a breath, taking another step forward. “Register that weapon. I know you. I know what you stand for. Other people might not. They wouldn’t get it. If you …”

(It was Maria at the bottom of the marble staircase, head in her hands, shaking it gently when Tony asked if they were leaving after all. It was Steve, looking up, meeting his eye, putting the pen back in its case and walking away, taking the air in the room with him. It was Natasha on that balcony, or Rhodes in a plane saying hanging out with you is bad for our friendship, or Pepper asking what the hell was wrong with him that he could think, even for a moment, she would be okay with…)

“Please,” Tony said, reaching out a hand. “Come with me. Let me fix this, for you. Let me fix all of it.” We don’t have much time.

DANNY: In the months after he was brought into K’un Lun, after the wounds from the plane crash had healed and he had learned to breathe around the biting cold of air far crisper than even the coldest winters in New York, Danny had developed a habit of running away. It happened often in the beginning, so much so that sometimes he’d find Chodok waiting for him at the edge of the city with a knowing expression on his face, sad and disappointed and utterly unsurprised. He never got far, of course --- there was nowhere to go. There was no way out of K’un Lun, wouldn’t be until the gate opened fifteen years later, but Danny hadn’t wanted to believe that back then. He’d struggled to understand the complexities, had a hard time wrapping his mind around the new rules that seemed so strange compared to what he’d grown up with. How could something be there and then not be there? How could there be a way out one day and nothing the next? How could he exist for the rest of his life in a place that had made it so abundantly clear to him just how little he belonged?

He remembered Chodok, on one of the occasions he found him waiting at the gate for the next grand escape, looking especially exhausted. ’Why do you do this?’ He’d asked, frustrated and at his wits end and sounding more like a father than anyone else in the city had ever bothered and Danny had felt a rush of anger and grief so unexpected it had nearly knocked him off his feet. He’d wanted to scream, wanted to pound his tiny fists against the ground as if he had the strength to bend it to his will, to make it into something familiar and safe and home. His throat had felt tight and Chodok’s hand’s gripping his shoulders had been the only thing keeping him upright. ’I was trying to go home,’ he’d said, quiet and mournful. ’I’ve been trying to go home, I just want to go home and no one will let me. Why won’t you let me?’ . The outburst was embarrassing in hindsight, so childish that Danny felt humiliated at the memory, but the sentiment remained. There were days, even now, when he looked out into the city’s skyline and the thought would cross his mind, strong and certain and utterly nonsensical. I want to go home. Why can’t I go home? It reminded him of sitting in a helicopter with Colleen, of coming back to New York after months away, of looking down at the lights and feeling nothing where he should have felt safety. ’That’s the beauty of it,’ she’d said, ’it can be whatever you need it to be.’ ’What do you need it to be?’ He’d asked, because maybe if he knew her answer he could puzzle out his own. And she’d said home, like that was all there was to it, like one word was a complete sentence, and Danny felt nothing. He’d fought like hell to get back to New York, had nearly died for the city a hundred times over, and he felt nothing.

It took him a long time to understand why. It took him years to realize that it wasn’t buildings or sidewalks that got him out of bed in the middle of the night to run barefoot through the snow, desperate for a way back. It wasn’t his family’s old brownstone or his father’s office that tightened his chest with grief and rage and confusion when Chodok asked him why he insisted on running away time and time again. It was never New York that Danny was trying to get back to. It was Ward. It was Joy, it was Sharon. It was Tony.

Tony, who was looking at him like he’d ripped his heart out of his chest. Tony, who had accepted him back into his life as if he’d never left it, who had never once questioned where he had been or why he was different or why sometimes it seemed to hurt him just to breathe. Tony, who must have known all along that Danny had a nighttime hobby but who had never quite let it come to the surface because knowing meant he’d have to act on it.

Tony, who looked just as frustrated and tired now as Chodok had back then. . It occurred to Danny, quite suddenly, that there had been more than one driving factor in his grief that day with Chodok’s hands on his shoulders. It occurred to him that he’d spoken of home, but that hadn’t been all he’d wanted to say. The words hit him now all at once, quiet thoughts soaked in a child’s anger. Why didn’t you let me stay with you? Why did you give me away to Lei Kung? He doesn’t even like me, but you do. You’re the only person here who’s ever been nice to me, and you gave me away. Chodok must have known, when he’d found a boy in the snow, what would happen to him in K’un Lun. He must have known what he’d go through. He must have known they’d warp Danny into a weapon, must have known they’d beat him and berate him and hurt him, and he’d still done it. Danny thought, back then, that Chodok was the only person who’d never hurt him, but he had. Maybe not directly, but he had.

And now here was Tony, with that same expression on his face, and one key difference Danny recognized with ease --- Tony would never hurt him. Tony loved him the way Chodok couldn’t, the way Lei Kung and Harold couldn’t, the way maybe even Wendell couldn’t. Without consequence. Without condition. Danny had gone against him in a way that would have been punishable by death in K’un Lun, in a way that would have made Tony well within his rights to put him in cuffs and take him to the Raft, and Tony didn’t. He wouldn’t. There weren’t many people who loved Danny like that, and he thought Tony might have been first. He thought Tony might have been the first person to look at him, before K’un Lun and the plane crash and everything else, and decide he was worth loving.

He hoped letting him down wouldn’t change that. . “No,” Danny said, too quickly for it to be true. He paused for a moment, closing his eyes and swallowing before amending. “I don’t know.” He knew how it was supposed to end for him. He knew he’d been meant to die on that mountainside, when the Hand’s soldiers invaded the path he was supposed to guard. The Iron Fist was always supposed to die an honorable death in battle, and there was no K’un Lun left to die for but there were still battles to be fought. If he lost his life in one, maybe it would make up for the battle he’d missed. Maybe the only way you could find redemption was through death.

Tony went on then, offered options, and Danny felt like he was suffocating just a little. Register that weapon. Could he do that? It left a sour taste in his mouth, twisted a knot in his stomach that he didn’t understand. “Tony…” The name fell from his lips in a whisper, and it sounded like an apology, even to him. How could he explain it? How could he talk about K’un Lun, about the lasting damage done to him there? He’d belonged to someone once. He’d been a thing, and they had owned him. He existed for them, bled for them, would die for them, and they’d treated him with as much respect as they treated their swords. You kept a weapon sharp, you kept it clean. You gave it a sheath to rest in, you recognized its power when it was in your hands. You showed a weapon respect, you understood the danger it represented.

You didn’t love it. . You didn’t call a weapon by its preferred nickname. You didn’t ask it how it felt about the solution you used to clean it with. You didn’t value its opinion, you didn’t tuck it into bed at night, you didn’t hold it close when it woke up screaming, didn’t wipe away its tears when it cried. When a weapon had an owner, it couldn’t be loved. And Danny wanted, with the same childlike desperation that inspired his outburst in Chodok’s arms more than a decade ago, to be loved.

If he signed the Accords, it wouldn’t make people love him less. He knew that. On a logical level, he knew that. But the heart was not a logical organ, and his was beating so quickly in his chest that some paranoid part of him feared his ribs might break. “I can’t,” he said quietly. “Tony, I just can’t.”

TONY: He wasn’t talking half as much as he was ten minutes ago. Danny wasn’t arguing, wasn’t trying to plead his case. He wasn’t putting the pen back in the case like Steve, or reaching a hand out to him like Sam had on the grass that day. He wasn’t looking at Tony how Obadiah used to, like he was exhausted and frustrated and disappointed all in one, like he couldn’t understand how Tony could be so intelligent and still unable to grasp what he conceived to be simple facts of the universe, and he sure as hell wasn’t looking at Tony like Howard used to.

He was looking at Tony a little how Maria used to, though — a little like Tony was breaking his heart. Tony decided not to think too much into that.

Maybe this would be easier if Danny was arguing. Maybe it would be easier for Tony to say he was convinced to let Danny go, or that he was persuaded to break the code that he’d signed up to enforce, if his cousin was standing in front of him in a goddamn bandana making a case for his vigilante activities that Tony had been resolutely ignoring for the past six months (years, really. Not just months. Years, since he came back).

Tony could’ve been dead in Afghanistan. He could’ve been dead and he wouldn’t even have the chance to stand in front of Danny and make a decision that should be difficult.

It wasn’t difficult.

“Stop,” Tony said, raking his fingers through his hair. What he’d give to be a few shots down right now — and with that thought, memories came flooding back of Sharon, barely out of high school, coming to sign him out of the hospital because he didn’t want Obie to see him, because of the shame that came with it. Memories came flooding back of Pepper, and of Rhodes falling, and of Steve in Siberia, and … . He turned from Danny. A tactical misstep, undoubtedly, but Tony wasn’t thinking tactically. He knew Danny wasn’t going anywhere. He knew that, because he knew Danny.

He also knew something else. He ran his hands down over his face, eyes burning, and turned back to meet his cousin’s eye.

“Just because you love someone,” he started, swallowing thickly around the lump in his throat. “Just because you love someone doesn’t mean you’re good for them, right? Just because … I mean, I’m not good.” The suit whirred as his hand went to his chest. “This thing, it’s never— I’ve never worked right. I’ve always been hard, you know, difficult to …”

Tony sucked in a breath. FRIDAY was in his ear, despite the mute order. (He really needed to work on obedient artificial intelligence — but like his friends, Tony always preferred having bots around him that were willing to call him out. A moral compass of his own creation.) They didn’t have much longer.

They didn’t have any longer. A holograph appeared from the arm of Tony’s suit, detailing several targets (colleagues) a few metres from the alleyway.

He looked up once more. “I want to be good for someone. I need that.”

A long sigh, and the helmet formed over his head. “No wonder I’m in permanent heart failure,” he muttered. “Come on, idiot. My co-workers are coming, and if they get a shot in on us, I’ll die of embarrassment before I get to kill you.”

DANNY: When Danny was ten years old, his childhood ended in a heartbeat. He was a boy one moment, sitting on a plane and listening to music that was probably a little too old for him, staring out the window at mountaintops that looked so small. Then the world started to shake and the plane started to groan and all at once, life as he knew it was over. His mother was sucked into open air, his stomach bottomed out, his father’s voice grew more and more desperate until he couldn’t hear it at all. Danny hadn’t died in that crash, but the boy he’d been when he stepped on that plane? He was gone the moment the debris hit the snow.

There were no children in K’un Lun. It was Davos who told him that, Davos who sat beside him when he was terrified and desperate and trying to understand what was going on, why he was being beaten and pushed and hurt even when he hadn’t done anything wrong. We’re kids, he’d said, almost pleading as he gripped bruised ribs and tried not to cry. Why are they hurting us? We’re just kids. And Davos, if anything, had been confused. He hadn’t understood that, in other parts of the world, things were different. He hadn’t been familiar with cultures that saw children as precious things to protect. There are no children in K’un Lun, Danny, he’d said, in what Danny figured now was a tone as close to gentle as he’d known how to make it. We’re weapons. And so he had been. For fifteen years, he had been a weapon instead of a child, a thing instead of a person. . But he didn’t feel like that now. Standing in this alley, with Tony across from him, Danny felt like he was nine years old again. He felt like a child, being scolded by a parent. He felt like he had when he’d knocked his mother’s wine glass off the table and shattered it against the floor, when his father sat him down and lectured him on caution. It’s so easy to break things, Danny, he’d said, it’s so easy to do damage. It’s hard not to. It’s hard to be good. We have to try anyways.

Danny’d broken something much worse than a wine glass now. He’d broken a law, broken more than one law, actually. He’d broken Tony’s trust, too. (And he’d broken more than that. A quick flash of a memory popped into his mind --- the Reaper, blood on his lips, grinning up at Danny. This is my favorite part. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Danny’s throat felt tight.)

He’d opened his mouth again, to explain or to argue or to beg forgiveness, but he snapped it shut quickly when Tony told him to stop. Obedience was an easy habit to fall back on after K’un Lun, especially when he was on edge. Tony wasn’t Lei Kung or Priya, wasn’t Yu-Ti or Master Khan. He wouldn’t beat Danny into submission if he didn’t comply without question. But Danny’s mind was split between two places, and there was some comfort in doing what you were told when you were at a loss. There was some comfort in silence, too. . Tony turned away from him, and Danny squeezed his eyes shut and took a breath. He was disappointed, he knew. He’d disappointed Tony, and that was the last thing he’d ever wanted to do. “You’re one of the best people I know,” he offered quietly, because it was true. “I’m not…” he trailed off, chest aching. “I’m not what anyone wanted me to be. I don’t know how to be what anyone wants me to be. Not you, or Ward, or Sharon, or Colleen, or…” He trailed off, smiling tightly and giving his head a self-deprecating shake. If he listed all the people he’d let down, he knew, they’d spend all night in this alley.

Something was happening inside the suit, and Danny wasn’t a smart man but he could guess what. Tony had been here too long, and enforcers didn’t work alone. Someone else was going to come soon. Someone who wouldn’t want to talk things over, someone who didn’t love him enough to forgive his transgressions.

For a moment, the whole world seemed to hold its breath. Danny was pretty sure Tony wouldn’t arrest him, but he didn’t quite relax until Tony told him to come on. His shoulders slumped and he nodded his head slightly. He moved to follow Tony before hesitating, pausing with one foot still lifted in a half-step. “You’re going to get in trouble for this, aren’t you?” For helping him. For loving him.

TONY: Being a good man always came with too many terms and conditions for it to be something Tony genuinely strived for. Being a good man meant making choices that cost people their livelihoods. It meant dropping bombs in foreign countries and focusing purely on the statistics of such a move instead of the human impact. It meant saying no when you wanted to say yes, saying yes when you wanted to say no. It meant hurting the people you cared about and spending your entire life following those you didn’t, because they’d offer you a leg up the career ladder, or get you that coveted contract.

“No,” Tony said, holding his hand up. “We’re not doing that, okay? We’re not. I … I’m not the guy people put weight on, alright?” Tony was the fixer. He always had been for those he cared about, for those he didn’t, for his family and friends and strangers all in one. He was the guy people went to when they needed out of a bad situation, but the second people started loving him, the second they shifted into thinking of him as more than just a means to an end, the second they started looking at him like he knew Danny was behind that bandana, things changed. That was when people could really hurt you, when they could get inside you and twist you inside out, when they could let you down.

He’d already dragged Steve down with him, a truly good man, a man who deserved so much better than anything Tony could give. He wasn’t going to do the same thing to Danny, not without a warning. Not without a comprehensive list outlining all the reasons why Tony Stark wasn’t someone to consider a hero. . “You don’t need to know who you are,” Tony replied. “You don’t. You … I know you’re going to hate me for saying this, but you’re young, Danny. You’re so fucking young. You’re … I was still selling weapons when I was your age. I still believed Obie wasn’t trying to put a hit out on my head. I was still calling Ru every time I got drunk, and you, you didn’t even get your childhood. You didn’t get to be a teenager. You’re young. Your mistakes, they still count, but they’re not … you’re not irredeemable. You’re not.”

No one was. Not even Tony, not even when he found that hard to accept.

You’re going to get in trouble for this, aren’t you? Tony hesitated, just for a moment, then shrugged a shoulder. “I’m already in a shit load of trouble, Danny,” he said. “Helping you isn’t going to be the thing that drags me down.” As it had always been, Iron Man’s greatest foe was himself.

And then the Enforcers arrived, providing a rather convenient outlet for the anger that particular thought prompted. “Keep tight,” Tony called over, “but the second you see a gap, you get out.” With that, and trusting that for once Danny would listen to a word he said, Tony sent a blast towards one of the Enforcers, knocking them back before their weapon could fire.

This was going to be so much paperwork.

#char: danny rand #discord

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berniesrevolution · 6 years ago

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I’ve written before about Abdul El-Sayed, the exciting progressive candidate in Michigan’s Democratic gubernatorial primary. When I first heard about El-Sayed, I wasn’t sure what to make of him: He has impeccable credentials as a physician and educator, but limited experience in politics. But I admired his combination of unapologetically left political positions with pragmatic policy proposals, which seems like an effective and promising model. Now, El-Sayed has released his plan for a full single-payer healthcare program in Michigan. And it’s incredible.

Just have a look at the 25-page proposal El-Sayed has released for “MichCare,” a plan to implement a “Medicare for All” program for the state of Michigan. It’s bold and brilliant: First, El-Sayed draws on his personal experience as a doctor and healthcare researcher to show that Michigan’s health outcomes lag behind both the rest of the United States and the other industrial countries, with 600,000 people in the state lacking adequate medical coverage and insurance costs rising significantly every year. Then, El-Sayed lays out a clear and comprehensible solution: MichCare.

The MichCare policy document is something of a masterpiece. Not only does it make state-level single-payer seem like it isn’t a “left-wing pipe dream,” it convincingly argues that it’s both feasible and essential. And it combines scholarly rigor (every contestable assertion has an endnote with an academic source) with clear, accessible language that helps voters understand exactly what’s being proposed, how it would be implemented, and what it would do for them. El-Sayed carefully compares MichCare to the existing system of healthcare delivery, showing precisely how people’s costs would be reduced.

He goes through various types of income levels and family structures, showing how much each category would stand to save on insurance costs. And he explains exactly how it’s going to be paid for. He’s even worked out how to use his position in the governor’s office to get the program passed and implemented:

A Governor’s Office for Healthcare Transformation will be established on the first day of the ElSayed administration to start working immediately to make MichCare a reality. The initial priorities for the office will include working with legislators to introduce a MichCare bill, engaging stakeholders across the state, applying for federal waivers, and developing financing plans that are fully compliant with state and federal laws. Like other government health plans and private insurance plans, MichCare must determine and update the specifics of reimbursement rates to providers, create pharmaceutical formularies, and determine specific benefits covered by the plan. These tasks will be implemented by an appointed MichCare Board consisting of Michigan state officials, healthcare professionals, academics, and health system experts. The MichCare agency and its leadership team will be housed in the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services and will be responsible for administering the MichCare insurance plan and processing claims for MichCare enrollees.

I didn’t select the most inspiring quote from the proposal. Far from it. But I think this shows clearly what I love about El-Sayed’s plan: He’s done his homework. He’s thought it through. He has answers to every question people might have. As you read it, you begin not only to believe single-payer in Michigan is a good idea, but to wonder why it wasn’t implemented long ago, and conclude the state needs it right away. And because he’s sorted out everything from the budget to the coverage to the logo, it almost seems as if MichCare does exist. That’s why I call this proposal incredible: Not only has El-Sayed worked out the full details of a pragmatic single-payer program, but he’s presented it in a way that challenges anyone to make the argument that it’s a “fantasy” that will “never, ever happen.” If you think that the left doesn’t know how to make its proposals actually work, meet Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, public health scholar and former director of the Detroit Health Department. He can tell you exactly how it will work, and answer every question from “Where will you get the money?” to “How will this interact with the provisions of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA)?”

There are a few other noteworthy features of the plan. First, El-Sayed shows how it connects to the opioid crisis and rising suicide rates, explaining how everything fits together as part of a comprehensive plan to tackle the state’s most serious social problems. Second, he makes everything about Michigan. He shows that he knows the state frontwards and backward, and adapts his plan to serve the unique needs of his particular constituency. I think that’s crucial for progressive politics: We can’t talk in general terms about abstract people, we have to show that we know about the particular lives that individuals live, and have answers for their lives rather than just “humankind as a whole.” Running through the document is a deep understanding of (and clear love for) the people of Michigan. Third, El-Sayed doesn’t evade the hard questions. He knows that single-payer requires raising revenue through taxes, and he says it, but he finds every way he can to show clearly that the benefits people would receive through reduced premiums and deductibles would far outweigh the increased taxes. The MichCare plan feels honest, like it’s never hiding the ball or ducking a tough criticism.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #current affairs #michigan #Abdul El-Sayed #medicare for all #universal healthcare #single payer #Justice Democrats #progressive #progressive movement

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belaborthepoint · 4 years ago

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Vice Presidential Debate 2020

SUSAN PAGE: Welcome to the first, and thankfully only, vice presidential debate of 2020. It is my honor to moderate this debate, a messy and chaotic charade that's such an important part of our democracy. We have a small audience here tonight, in part because of covid, and also because no one wanted to come. No one here tonight wants to be here, but with a lot of encouragement they have agreed to express enthusiasm two times. Senator Harris, let's start with you. Please talk about some concrete things that the Biden administration will do to handle covid. You have two minutes.

KAMALA HARRIS: Thank you, Susan. I think instead I'd like to use these two minutes as an opportunity to summarize all the ways that Trump has mishandled the virus. Biden probably does have some ideas, but I will not tell you any of them. Just know that he will do things, and I believe he will do them well.

SUSAN PAGE: Um. Okay. Vice President Pence, I'll give you an opportunity to answer a question. Why is the U.S. death toll higher than that of like every other wealthy country?

MIKE PENCE: Thank you, Susan. I will not answer that, but what I will do is tell you that under President Trump's leadership, Operation Warp Speed, we have something called Operation Warp Speed, which is totally badass. I think ultimately Americans will be proud to have died for their country. Thoughts and prayers to all the families of people who died solely due to our negligence.

SUSAN PAGE: Vice President Pence, your administration has made a mockery of the national response to covid. You don't wear masks and you don't social distance and now Trump has covid himself and is actively exposing other people. How do you expect the American people to take this seriously if you don't?

MIKE PENCE: Well, thankfully most of the country is composed of people who are more intelligent, thoughtful, and compassionate than us, and we trust that they will do the right thing. I have to believe this. President Trump and I are pieces of living human garbage, and if I didn't trust that most people out there are actually decent human beings, I wouldn't sleep at night. I just have to believe that we are the very worst that humanity has to offer if I want to have hope for the future.

SUSAN PAGE: Cool. So, for both of you, have you talked to the guys about if they die because they’re old/one of them has covid?

MIKE PENCE: I appreciate that question, but I would like to go back--

SUSAN PAGE: I would prefer if you answered the question actually.

MIKE PENCE: I respect that you feel that way, and instead I will not do that. Senator Harris, I'd just like to say that a lot of people got sick with a cold under Obama's leadership, and if the common cold were as bad as covid, literally millions upon millions of people would die. Lots of people get the cold, and they would all die.

KAMALA HARRIS: Okay?

MIKE PENCE: Also, I think I would be remiss if I didn't remind all of us about the Plague of Justinian that killed 25 million people from the year 541 to 542. The bubonic plague RAVAGED Europe, and where was Barack Obama then? Nowhere to be seen.

SUSAN PAGE: ....alright. Senator Harris, would you be willing to answer the question that Vice President Pence so ineptly evaded?

KAMALA HARRIS: I would not. But speaking of aging and death, I'd like to talk about life, my life, and some highlights from it. Life is so precious. Here one day and gone the next. Which is why it's so important to take stock of the times in our lives that we felt truly happy, because happiness is ephemeral. It's something we can't grasp with our hands, like a butterfly. It's a chimera of a memory of a moment, and we have to hold onto it. When Joe Biden asked me to be his vice president, it was on a zoom call. Haha, anyone here use zoom? Haha just kidding. But it was a zoom call, and it reminded me of my mother, and the day I came out of her sack of flesh that is a human body. It's beautiful, but also gross and weird. But everyone was crying, because I was a baby who became born, and that's amazing.

SUSAN PAGE: I don't even know why I'm here. Okay, well, we're supposed to be talking about the economy now, if that matters to anyone.

MIKE PENCE: Thank you so much, Susan. What Joe Biden wants to do is to tax people. He will tax you. He will take a portion of your money and use it to invest in PUBLIC SERVICES.

KAMALA HARRIS: Yes, correct.

MIKE PENCE: What? No, we don't like that. He will use YOUR MONEY to build ROADS and LIBRARIES and invest in EDUCATION.

KAMALA HARRIS: Yeah.

MIKE PENCE: Uh, uh, okay, hold on, okay, he's also going to BAN. FRACKING.

KAMALA HARRIS: He will do no such thing.

MIKE PENCE: He wants to ABOLISH. FOSSIL. FUELS.

KAMALA HARRIS: No he doesn't!!! We like the fossil fuel industry!!!!!

SUSAN PAGE: Vice President Pence, do you believe that climate change is related to the fact that the climate is changing?

MIKE PENCE: Nope. I believe that the air and stuff are all actually very clean, not in spite of, but because of capitalism. The free market economy is actually the reason why the earth is in such good shape.

SUSAN PAGE: Huh. Okay, let's talk about China. President Trump is a racist. Can you speak to that?

MIKE PENCE: I am also racist and xenophobic, and those are values that are important to me. Joe Biden, however, doesn't hate China that much, which is bad. He actually likes China. He's obsessed with it. He's also a gay cheerleader. He's a cheerleader for gay communists. Biden has been a cheerleader for communist China for years, ever since he joined the intramural adult cheerleading squad for people who love communism. He literally goes to China and wears one of those little skirts even though he's a dude, and he waves pom poms around and does splits and has people throw him up in the air while he shouts good things about Mao Zedong. In his fifth year on the squad, the whole group got matching tattoos of Chairman Mao on their lower backs, and it was all Joe Biden's idea.

SUSAN PAGE: We've seen strains in our relationship with China. Senator Harris, what's your definition of the role of American leadership in 2020?

KAMALA HARRIS: Thank you, Susan. I like that you use the word 'relationship,' cause I think it really is all about relationships. I talk about this with Joe a lot, and how how important friendship is, and how you have to trust your friends. You have to be honest and loyal to them, Susan, because they are your friends. And that's what it's all about.

SUSAN PAGE: Uh, okay. Moving on, Vice President Pence, if Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed as a supreme court judge and Roe v. Wade is overturned, would you want your home state to ban all abortions?

MIKE PENCE: That's a really interesting question, Susan, but I think I'll just take this time to say that everyone who practices Islam is a terrorist and Joe Biden loves terrorists. Joe Biden created an entirely different intramural adult cheerleading squad so he could be a cheerleader for Osama bin Laden, because he's obsessed with terrorism. Also, I hope you don't treat Amy Coney Barrett like you did Justice Kavanaugh, whom you criticized and bullied relentlessly just because he's a rapist. If Amy Coney Barrett turns out to be a rapist, I hope you'll give her the respect she deserves. Also, if you critique the pro-life movement it means that you're intolerant of Christianity and you hate religion.

SUSAN PAGE: Senator Harris, same question: if Roe v. Wade is overturned, what would you want California to do?

KAMALA HARRIS: Okay, I just need to make it very clear that Joe Biden and I both believe in God and we're really into going to church. Joe Biden is a Catholic, and I am extremely proud to be friends with him. Catholic men have been persecuted in this country for too long and I'm so happy to say that soon we will have a Catholic man serving as president of these United States of America. But yeah, obviously women should have control over their bodies.

MIKE PENCE: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris murder babies.

SUSAN PAGE: Maybe we should talk about actual murder. Senator Harris, on the subject of racial justice, do you think it's okay that the cops who killed Breonna Taylor aren't being indicted?

KAMALA HARRIS: No, obviously not. We need to reform our criminal justice system.

SUSAN PAGE: Vice President Pence?

MIKE PENCE: Well, you know, it's an interesting question. I think that...death...is....not good. I do not love it when any person dies. It is not my favorite thing by a long shot. That being said, I think the most important thing is that we have blind faith in our incredibly broken justice system, and they said that everything was fine here. So was it wrong that she died? No. And frankly I think it's rude that you would disrespect cops by condemning the act of murder that they committed.

KAMALA HARRIS: Dude, I love cops. I AM a cop. I just think they shouldn't murder people. And I think that if we make it so that they're not allowed to, they will stop.

MIKE PENCE: Why are we talking about human life right now when we should be addressing the real issue at hand which is destruction of property? Killing human beings is one thing, but destroying property? Reprehensible. The only time I've ever been ashamed to be an American is when I spoke personally to the CEO of Target and saw the grief that he and his family were experiencing at the hands of rioters and looters. Those looters have the blood of private property on their hands. I mean, you know, not literal blood, but like, the stuff that buildings are made of.

KAMALA HARRIS: Why can't you just condemn white supremacy? It's really not hard.

MIKE PENCE: Because we ARE white supremacists.

KAMALA HARRIS: Oh, true. Also you have a fly on your head.

FLY: Greetings.

MIKE PENCE: Okay but should we talk about your history with criminal justice reform? Cause it's also not great.

KAMALA HARRIS: It's fine. You still have a fly on your head.

FLY: Howdy.

SUSAN PAGE: Yeah, there is totally a fly on your head, dude. Now I want to address the fact that Donald Trump will refuse to leave office even if he loses the election. Senator Harris, do you have a plan for if that happens?

KAMALA HARRIS: I think everyone should vote.

SUSAN PAGE: Yeah, but--

KAMALA HARRIS: Everyone needs to vote. Voting is extremely important, and you should do it.

SUSAN PAGE: But do you have a plan for--

KAMALA HARRIS: Voting.

SUSAN PAGE: Okay, whatever. Vice President Pence, what will you personally do if Trump loses the election and refuses to accept it?

MIKE PENCE: He's not going to lose so I actually don't need to think about that.

SUSAN PAGE: Yeah but if he does--

MIKE PENCE: He's not gonna.

SUSAN PAGE: But IF--

MIKE PENCE: Nope. Not gonna happen. I would also like to say that when Joe Biden was vice president, he made the FBI spy on us and our campaign. They had a little man that they shrunk down to fit inside of my pocket and listen to what I said with a little tiny ear trumpet, and he wrote it all down on a small notepad. They spied on us, and if Joe Biden is president he will make lots of small men to climb in people's pockets and spy on the American people. It is unethical and I will not stand for it. But it's fine because Joe Biden will not win.

SUSAN PAGE: Well tonight was a massive waste of time. To conclude this spectacle, we're going to ask a question from an 8th grader. It's not a real question so don't worry about coming up with anything substantial, just say some nice stuff to end the night on a good note. This question is from Brecklyn.

BRECKLYN: It makes me sad when people don't get along. Why can't people just get along?

MIKE PENCE: Brecklyn, that question was dumb as shit. But it was also beautiful, and the only question I will actually bother to answer. Brecklyn, sometimes your friend is a white supremacist. Sometimes, your cousin has blue hair and is a lesbian. But at the end of the day, we all want to smile and hold hands in a circle, because underneath our skin, we all have bones and muscles, and they can look different, but we're all made of the same stuff. We're all made of stars. And that's America. Thank you, Brecklyn.

KAMALA HARRIS: Yes, that's an excellent question. And Brecklyn, I want to tell you that Joe Biden also feels sad sometimes. If I know anything about Joe Biden, it's that he is a human man. He's literally a living human person, which means that he has experienced emotions. He has felt a lot of emotions such as sadness, joy, anger, that specific kind of secondhand embarrassment that you feel for fictional characters on tv, and lots of other human feelings, because he's a person. He's not a lizard, he's not a small pile of rocks, and he's not a piece of wallpaper. He is a human person. THAT'S America.

SUSAN PAGE: Cool, thanks. Well that's that. We hope you'll join us for another presidential debate next week if Trump is alive and has somehow recovered from covid. Which we want. We wish him a, uh, recovery. Goodnight everyone.

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frankmwilliams25 · 4 years ago

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4 common legal issues businesses face and how to avoid them

Anyone in the world can start a business. If you have enough money, all you have to do is to spend it, and you can create a business overnight. However, starting a business and running it are two different things. According to the statistics, more than 50% of small businesses fail in the very first year of startup. Moreover, more than 95% of these startups fail to go past the first five years. So, when you look at the facts, you might be more inclined to do your 9-5 job than to risk your future by investing in a business.

However, the reason that most of these businesses end up being in the pile of failures rather than soar up as an emblem of success is that they have not done the needed research. Before you dive deep into a certain industry, you have to figure out how the market works and work towards developing a product or a service that is unique. After you have come up with a perfect product to sell, you need to pay some attention to the legal side of your business. The high cost of legal services is one of the main reasons why small businesses evade hiring legal representation. Overlooking this one small detail ends up being the cause of their doom. So, in this article, I am going to highlight the most common legal issues that businesses face and how you can avoid these issues.

Undefined Business Structure

One of the most solid ways to ensure that your business turns out to be profitable is to define a solid structure before you start pouring in money. Your company’s business structure is the foundation on which your future relies. If the foundation is weak, your business is not going to pass the test of time. A business structure can be categorized into:

Sole Proprietorship

In this type of business model, a single person is responsible for setting up the entire company without a legal entity. If you opt for this model, you will be in full control of all the profits you earn. But, on the other side, you will also be responsible for all the liabilities and taxes your business faces.

Partnership

It is a type of business model in which a company is established by two or more people. You begin a partnership by signing a partnership agreement with the other people involved. By doing so, everyone involved in the agreement is equally responsible for the liabilities, taxes, capital, obligations, and restrictions related to the business.

C Corporation

In a C Corporation, the business and the owners are considered to be two different entities. It means that both of them are taxed separately. The company has to pay corporate income tax, and the shareholders have to pay tax on their income.

S Corporation

On the other hand, in an S corporation business structure in which you can avoid double taxation. It provides the owners with limited liability, which means that the owners’ personal assets are shielded from any claims from contracts or litigation.

Limited Liability Company

Just like in the S Corporation, in this form of business structure, the company is not taxed separately. You can acquire an LLC agreement, which outlines the rights you have as a business.

The type of business structure you choose has a huge effect on your taxes and how much you will be held responsible as an individual in case a lawsuit is filed against a business you own.

Protection of Intellectual Policy

The intellectual policy of a company refers to its patents, trademarks, and copyrights that must be protected at all costs. If you copy the intellectual policy of another business, you may be at the risk of losing your business license. To make sure that you don’t have to go through any trouble when it comes to your business license, consider acquiring the services of a professionals like the San Diego License Defense Lawyer, experienced in navigating the process. If your business license is on the line, a license defense lawyer will help you get out of trouble.

When you are starting out, you need to conduct a detailed market analysis before filing for your intellectual property. If another business believes that you have copied its trademark or patent or created a business name or logo similar to theirs, they will take you to court and skim you off your hard-earned money.

Employee Related Issues

A business depends on its employee to function smoothly. However, if you don’t develop a clear set of rules, you might get yourself in quite a bit of trouble. When you hire an employee, you have to offer him a legally binding contract. If there is a single loophole in your contract, you can potentially lose a lot of money if your employee finds it out. The first thing that you have to do is to determine the status of the employee you are hiring. An employee can be classified into full-time, part-time, or as an independent contractor. The benefits that you are going to offer him depend on the aspects of employment.

Independent Contractor

If you are hiring an independent contractor, it means that you are acquiring services from other businesses to do a certain task for your own company. Typically, when you hire an independent contractor, you don’t have to offer him many benefits as he doesn’t come under your direct employment and is only going to work for you for a period of time. You should negotiate what kind of work is he supposed to do, how much time should he spend doing the work, and how much you are going to pay him for the work he does.

Full time and Part-Time Employee

The main difference between full time and part-time employees is the number of working hours and how they are paid. Full-time employees have to stick to company rules as defined in their employment contract and may have to complete at least eight working hours every day. They have a basic salary and enjoy all the perks a company offers. On the other hand, part-time employees work by the hour and are paid for the amount of time they work.

Termination of Contract

One of the biggest problems employers have to face is when they are terminating an employee. It can raise a lot of legal issues if you don’t do it the right way or mishandle the issues. So, you need to be very careful when you are terminating the contract of an employee, as doing it for the wrong reasons might result in legal issues. Generally, you can fire an employee due to underperformance, misconduct, or retrenchment. All of these things should be mentioned in the contract.

Discrimination

Another thing that you have to be careful about when running a business is to make sure that none of your employees are being discriminated against by any of your executives or by other employees. Your former or current employees can sue you on the grounds of discrimination, which not only leads to defamation, but you can also lose a lot of money. These allegations can be based on age, gender, ethnicity, religion, etc.

As an employer, it is your job to protect your employees and provide them with a safe working environment where they don’t feel attacked. You must treat all your employees equally, and there shouldn’t be any favoritism for a certain group of people.

Health and Safety

Last but not least, you need to make sure that you provide all the safety equipment that your employees need to do their work safely. If any employee gets injured on duty, and the accident occurred due to your negligence, you may be sued for damages. So, you should draft a clear Health and Safety Policy where you mention all your responsibilities and the procedures that employees need to follow to prevent any injuries and illnesses.

Dissatisfied Customers

You might have seen it in movies and TV series that a certain group of people go out against a whole corporation by filing a class-action lawsuit against them. Trust me when I say that you don’t want to be on the receiving end of a class-action lawsuit as it is going to hit you where it hurts the most. Before you launch a product or a service, you need to rigorously test it to make sure that it isn’t faulty in any way. If the product isn’t as you claim it to be or if the product is the cause of any long or short term health complications for the user, a class action lawsuit is going to tarnish your brand image and cost you millions. In order to make sure that you are safe, you need to be proactive and pay attention to the queries of your customers. You need to provide swift customer support and deal with every client professional so that they are happy with your services.

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dzgn-co · 5 years ago

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The Future Of Crypto: Security Tokens As A 'Boring' Reality

Sophia Matveeva

Contributor Careers

Startup founder in fashion tech. As Bitcoin continues to wildly fluctuate, going through boom-bust cycles far faster than traditional markets, the speculation around crypto continues. President Donald Trump came out against cryptocurrency and — love him or hate him — I believe he made several valid points. Primarily, crypto is largely unregulated, and efforts to regulate pseudonymous cryptocurrencies almost inevitably fail. This message may have caused the crash in the price of Bitcoin from roughly $10,500 to $9,500 in just a few minutes. A 10% drop in the value of the U.S. dollar in this time frame would have dramatic implications, but 10% fluctuations are business as usual in crypto. (Full disclosure: I am a Bitcoin holder.)

Essentially, what we have is a volatile and difficult-to-regulate digital asset. That's hardly the basis for a global currency, or for the future of the financial industry. However, an important technology was created as a response to the ICO scams of 2017 and the crypto crash of 2018, called "security tokens," which are securities on the blockchain. The blockchain is the underlying technology of crypto, one used to distribute trust and remove intermediaries, while securities are tradeable financial assets — everything from equity, debt, real assets and more.

One of my organizations, the Security Token Alliance, is working to unify the industry. By onboarding and working with around 80 companies in the space, we've seen firsthand the great potential of tokenizing securities. Even more importantly, we've also seen the struggles and barriers to successfully tokenizing assets.

The point of many cryptocurrencies is to evade regulating and taxing intermediaries, like governments, while the point of security tokens is to make it easier and more efficient to comply with government regulations. This is important in a world that rests on the stability and protection provided by authorities like governments.

While crypto continues to be denounced by government officials and enterprise executives, I've seen a clear shift toward security tokens. Players like NASDAQ, JPMorgan and Overstock have entered the space — NASDAQ funded a security token platform, JP Morgan launched a digital currency and Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne shared his opinion that 100% of Wall Street stocks and bonds will be tokenized in five years. Infrastructure is also being built for new projects with regulated players like Bakkt and Swiss Digital Exchange.

Major industry leaders are starting to see the benefits of security tokens, which center around greater operational efficiency. Because security tokens act as a digital wrapper for securities, they can speed up the typically slow and expensive KYC/AML and accredited investor procedures. You can now create legal digital assets and raise capital on the blockchain. However, being compliant with the law is by no means a given with cryptocurrencies, for several technical reasons. Most importantly, typical cryptocurrencies have no functionality built-in for "transfer restrictions," which means that cryptocurrencies can be sent to anyone, anywhere.

The reason that's a problem is that governments naturally regulate who trades securities, and the people behind securities pick certain jurisdictions for the trading of their securities, or they pick where trading will occur. However, since cryptocurrencies don't have restrictions built in, there's a huge mismatch with government regulation. You could send a cryptocurrency to an unaccredited investor, to a minor, to an ex-convict or any number of entities where it wouldn't be compliant.

This is why the United States Securities and Exchange Commission is fining the Canadian company Kik $100 million for their ICO. Because the Kik crypto-token, called KIN, does not have any transfer restrictions, it was available to U.S. investors, where Kik was not allowed to trade securities.

Security tokens set out to solve these problems and enable real, legitimate and credible blockchain use cases. Given the Kik scandal, the crypto bust and the SEC's moves against other illegal ICOs, it's hard to imagine enterprises seriously considering ICOs as a capital raise option. However, security token offerings (STOs) compete against IPOs, or initial public offerings, and security tokens compete against securities.

This is not to say that security tokens are a magic bullet for the crypto industry. Security tokens face many barriers to mass adoption, not the least of which is that the financial industry is typically wary of new technologies that promise disruption. Further, industry professionals who were burned by the ICO industry may be hesitant to give a "second chance" to blockchain.

In fact, a security token offering is not the only way to do a compliant blockchain-based capital raise. Utility tokens, which give streamlined access to a company's products or services, have been around for longer and can be sold in the same regulated fashion. For example, Mandala Exchange sought to file for a Reg A+ offering in the United States, though it deems its token to be a utility token.

It's also important to remember that most traditional asset managers in charge of real estate, derivatives, debt and so on haven't even heard of security tokens yet. Given the benefits security tokens provide, I believe that's set to change, but it won't happen overnight. We need greater collaboration between stakeholders to clear up this uncertainty, as well as greater education across the board.

For starters, leaders in the space need to spread awareness that security tokens intend to be similar to securities, and not to crypto. This means that security tokens need to have functionality like transfer restrictions and trade halts built in. Further, since security token offerings seek accredited investors, the process of marketing an STO should look a lot more like marketing an IPO than an ICO, which is open to non-accredited investors. It's also important to remember that STOs aren't for everyone — if a company has the money for an IPO, that may be a better option for now.

It's not as exciting as the crypto world had hoped. Security tokens are a far cry from the original decentralization ethos laid out in the Bitcoin white paper, but from my perspective, they're a lot more feasible. Maybe this "boring" reality is exactly what crypto needs.

YEC

Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invitation-only, fee-based organization comprised of the world's most successful entrepreneurs 45 and younger. YEC members represent nearly every industry, generate billions of dollars in revenue each year and have created tens of thousands of jobs. Learn more at yec.co. Questions about an article? [email protected].

#yec #forbes #crypto #deezgnselect

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creationsitewebnice · 7 years ago

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CO: Denver International Airport is Working to Become a Destination — with Ice Skating and Goat Yoga — In and of Itself

Jan. 21–On any given day at this Denver landmark, there could be goat yoga, ice skating, beer tasting, live music and fine art.

You might even meet former Broncos quarterback and Super Bowl champion Peyton Manning.

This isn’t some all-inclusive Rocky Mountain vacation or a VIP state tour. It’s Denver International Airport — and in some ways, airports the world over — in the year 2018.

Air travel is surging globally, and DIA and other airports that are spending billions of dollars to lure more flights and revenue are also embracing far-flung ideas designed to make passengers feel less like cattle and ease the stress of flying.

"Airports have changed," said Stacey Stegman, DIA’s vice president of communications, marketing and customer service. "It’s a competitive field for airports. It’s not like … we’re competing for local people to fly out of Denver. We know that we are their hometown airport. But what we are seeing is we compete for people who are connecting, we compete trying to get more flights here. If we’re offering things that are exceptional and more fun, that makes us more appealing."

In the past three or four years, airports around the world have been boosting their amenity offerings — from miniature horse therapy at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, to the movie theater at Portland International Airport in Oregon and nature trails and a planned indoor forest at Singapore’s Changi Airport.

DIA and other airports are busy — and getting busier

More than 60 million travelers started, continued or ended trips at DIA last year, the airport’s busiest ever. And worldwide, air passenger traffic in 2029 is expected to be double what it was three years ago, the Airports Council International says.

Add to that shrinking seat sizes aboard airplanes and more fees, and that’s where stress-reducing amenities can make a difference.

"Having things like a pet pig or a llama, those things give a humanity to the airport and to the travel experience," said Michael Taylor, who analyzes passenger satisfaction for J.D. Power. "Today there is just so many people going through airports — every airport sets a new record each month. There’s just more of a crush of people and the more you can introduce a human element and treat people like humans, that helps with the experience."

DIA and the "art of airporting"

DIA officials say these extras are also a way to lure new airlines and flight routes, create incentives for passengers to connect through Denver and even attract local residents who aren’t getting on a plane.

"Our primary focus is on passengers first," said Stegman. "We want to make sure we are meeting their needs. But if we can be great for the community as well and be a place where they want to come and spend time, that’s a good thing for Denver, and for the whole region."

DIA even has a catchphrase for this all-things-to-everyone approach: "The art of airporting."

These initiatives helped North American airports reach an all-time high in overall passenger satisfaction, according to a 2017 J.D. Power survey of more than 34,000 passengers. Denver ranked fifth among U.S. airports that have 32 million or more passenger visits a year, according to the survey, behind Orlando, Detroit, Las Vegas and Phoenix. (Newark’s Liberty International Airport was at the bottom of that list.)

Grooming another customer: The one who isn’t flying

But in Denver, air travelers aren’t the only people who’ve taken notice of the changes. According to DIA, about 20 percent or more of people who attend special events — such as beer tastings and the temporary ice skating rink — aren’t even there to fly.

Two days after New Year’s Day, DIA’s skating rink outside the Westin Hotel was booming, even at midday.

Lisa Hillman, of Denver, was there with her two sons for their second recent visit. They had no flight to catch but decided it was worth the 20-minute drive from home.

"We thought it was kind of odd at first to come ice skating at the airport," she said as her boys laced up their skates. "But I think the way they have set it up is really nice."

All of these things, of course, come at some cost: The ice rink came in at about $150,000, a limited run for goat yoga cost some $7,100 and uniforms for the Canine Airport Therapy Squad run roughly $130 a piece.

Those tabs are minuscule compared with DIA’s planned $1.5 billion gate expansion and $162 million operations and maintenance contract for the airport’s underground trains. Those are on top of a $650 million terminal building renovation that will significantly change the campus’ layout.

But airport officials say the amenities can more than pay for themselves and note that they are covered by revenues, not tax dollars. For instance, the ice rink had paid sponsorship and goat yoga, DIA officials say, had a $1 million-plus media value.

And the therapy dogs? DIA officials say you can’t put a price on relieving passenger stress.

"You’re definitely seeing a trend across the broader airport community," said Scott Elmore, vice president of communications and marketing for Airports Council International — North America.

DIA’s amenities convey a "sense of place"

Elmore’s trade industry group, of which DIA is a member, recently did a survey of airport amenities and found a sharp rise in recent years. At the top of the list were nursing rooms for new mothers and pet potty areas (Denver’s airport has both.)

"Each airport is going to be doing things that show off their unique sense of place," he said. "The one thing I can say about Denver is they do a great job of showing off what it feels like to be in the Denver area without having to leave the airport."

That includes the booming Root Down restaurant in Concourse C, plans for a Denver Central Market and even a popup business called Yoga on the Fly, where travelers can get a quick zen fix.

"We’ve been really well received," said the yoga shop’s owner, Avery Westlund.

The all-volunteer therapy dog squad might best capture Denver’s character, though, with nearly 100 canines (and one cat) it’s become the largest such airport program in the nation.

Gretchen Dirks’ young poodle Halston was a big attraction as passengers made their way through Concourse A on Jan. 3. As a wave of people stopped to say hello — "Can I touch him?" asked a Mexico City-bound man — Dirks remembered a time when the dog calmed a toddler on the brink of a meltdown.

"It’s a great way to kind of give back," Dirks said.

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Why Electoral College trumps national popular vote plan (2 letters)

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Stronger together: More than 50,000 show solidarity against a shifting culture during Women’s March 2018

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I’m sorry, did something happen today?

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Read full post at: http://www.creation-site-web-nice.com/co-denver-international-airport-is-working-to-become-a-destination-with-ice-skating-and-goat-yoga-in-and-of-itself/

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bitcoin24on · 7 years ago

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The United Kingdom has seen an investment slowdown over the drawn-out Brexit process, but one crypto expert says UK firms could use ICOs to overcome this circumstance.

Way back in June 2016, the people of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in a move called Brexit. A newly formed government invoked Article 50 to leave the EU eight months later. While the island nation hasn’t sunk into the sea over Brexit, there has been a slowdown in investments made into UK companies over the lingering confusion and doubt of how, or even if, the actual process will carry out. This has had significant impact, but a crypto expert has come forward and suggested that UK firms could start their own ICOs to overcome this investment slowdown.

Uncertainty Clouds the Issue

If there’s one thing that businesspeople hate, it’s uncertainty. Companies want to make decisions based on hard data, and plans are laid out in advance that take in every possible criteria that could have an impact. (At least the smart companies operate in this fashion.)

The lingering malaise over Brexit is having a chilling effect on investments made into UK companies. After all, who wants to pour their money into a company when the rules could suddenly change a few months down the road?

Przemek Skwirczynski, an associate at ICO Rocket, has a solution to this dilemma. He believes UK companies should tap into the wealth created by the Bitcoin boom by having ICOs of their own. He says:

Cryptocurrencies offer companies a chance to overcome the uncertainty surrounding the Brexit deal and continue to receive investment. Currently this is small scale but as you see the interest in ICOs picking up I am hoping this will become a very mainstream way of financing.

Are ICOs the Answer?

It should be pointed out that Skwirczynski has a vested interest in promoting ICOs. The company he’s attached to, ICO Rocket, specializes in helping businesses that are not well-versed in the crypto world to prepare and run an ICO.

He goes on to say:

Effectively a company will be issuing their own coin and then people will be investing in that and typically this kind of coin will have a higher rate of growth in terms of its value than the more established ones, like Bitcoin or Ethereum … It is effectively spreading the wealth that has been created by the appreciation of Bitcoin or Ethereum … This is a very positive outcome of this kind of this whole boom.

Skwirczynski says ICOs could allow consumers to back individual projects that they support. An example of such support is helping a movie get financed, where he then goes to add:

I don’t see why this could not be applied to the film industry where you can create a coin for a movie production and then have a film being financed in that way and that will be very useful for the industry and the viewers … At the moment film production is really dominated by an oligopoly on a worldwide scale … Doing this kind of disruptive activity where you are breaking up the oligopoly that have got to have a positive effect for pretty much everyone.

There are some pros and cons to UK companies launching ICOs to drum up investment funds. On the pro side, ICOs can be quite successful. SingularityNET raised $36 million during their ICO, which lasted all of a single minute before the capped amount was reached. Allowing ICOs within a country is an investment lure, which is something that the country of Belarus fully understands. Belarus recently signed into law that revenue and profits gained from crypto-based activities will be tax-free until 2023.

The cons to UK firms launching ICOs include ongoing regulatory attempts and shareholders. Most companies that have an ICO are firmly entrenched into the crypto world. Their platforms are designed from the ground up to take advantage of the blockchain and the ability to use tokens. However, most standard companies are not. Will current shareholders be enthused about a bunch of crypto enthusiasts coming on board? What structure would be put into place to offer rewards to token holders and to shareholders? Would token holders get a vote? A dual system would emerge, shares and cryptocurrency, that may or may not work well together.

Plus, the UK is still working on how best to regulate Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The government is concerned people are using crypto to launder money or evade paying taxes. Again, this is more uncertainty.

Overall, the idea of using ICOs to counteract Brexit investment slowdown is an intriguing one, and it could work. The trick is figuring out all the details in implementing them for existing businesses and making sure shareholders are appeased.

Do you think having UK companies launching ICOs are an effective means to counteract the investment slowdown caused by Brexit? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Images courtesy of Pixabay and Bitcoinist archives.

The post UK Companies Could Use ICOs to Overcome Brexit Investment Slowdown appeared first on Bitcoinist.com.

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takebackthedream · 7 years ago

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Why We Need to Confront the Billionaires' Paradise by Richard Eskow

The concentrated wealth of the global plutocracy is the dark matter of the world economy: it is rarely glimpsed, difficult to measure, and it reshapes everything around it.

Two recent reports – the UBS/PwC report on the “new Gilded Age” of the international billionaire class, and the “Paradise Papers” released by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) reveal ways corporations and the ultra-wealthy avoid taxes – that offer a glimpse into this darkness.

Together, these releases tell us a lot about the wealthy few who run the world. We now know that the British royal family has been less than open with the people they rule, who preserve their dubious privilege to monarchy.

And we have learned that, by investing in a Lithuanian shopping center as an end run around taxes, U2’s Bono may have finally found what he’s looking for.

But these reports also help us see how much we still don’t know. In an era when, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, only three Americans – Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett – own more than half of our entire population, we need to do more to understand – and confront – the super-concentration of wealth.

Billionaire Boom

The Swiss bank UBS and the American accounting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers weren’t looking to write an exposé when they prepared their annual “Billionaires Insights” report for 2017. On the contrary. So-called “very high net worth individuals” are the financial industry’s most sought-after clients. The report is entitled, without any apparent irony, “New value creators gain momentum.”

And gain momentum these billionaires did. As the report notes, “Globally, the total wealth of billionaires rose by +17% in 2016, up from USD $5.1 trillion to USD6.0 trillion.”

Did your net worth grow by 17 percent last year? Unless you’re one of the world’s 1,542 billionaires, chances are it didn’t.

The U.S. Wealth Gap

In the United States, wealth for most households grew at a much slower rate, while racial disparities in wealth persist in middle-class households.

Analyses from economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman show a dramatic gain in income for the very wealthy – and no one else – in recent decades. In a useful explainer, David Leonhardt of the New York Times concluded:

Yes, the upper-middle class has done better than the middle class or the poor, but the huge gaps are between the super-rich and everyone else. The basic problem is that most families used to receive something approaching their fair share of economic growth, and they don’t anymore.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve reports that millions of Americans continue to struggle. 30 percent of adults, roughly 73 million people, are finding it difficult to make ends meet or are barely getting by. Just under one fourth of all adults said they could not pay all their bills for the current month. 44 percent said they could not cover an emergency expense of $400, and one fourth of all adults reported that they had to forgo medical treatment during the past year because of the cost.

A Second Gilded Age

As of last report, America’s ten wealthiest men – they are all men – are collectively worth more than $633 billion. The combined wealth of these 10 men has risen by nearly $116 billion since the start of this year alone.

The explosive growth of billionaire wealth, at a time when the middle class is dying and millions of Americans are struggling, has implications for democracy as well as the economy.

The work of political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page has shown that the preferences of the majority have very little effect on government policy, while the political wishes of the wealthy few are far more likely to become reality.

As history teaches us, centralized wealth often leads to political oligarchy. Our country is no exception. Expand this oligarchical effect across the globe, and you get a sense of the global reach of the billionaire class. As Oxfam international reported earlier this year, just eight men possesses as much of the world’s wealth as half the global population.

The author of the UBS/PwC report commented that “We are now two years into the peak of the second Gilded Age,” with levels of inequality not seen since 1905. He also says that “this is something billionaires are concerned about,” leading to fears that the world’s population could “strike back.”

It’s a rational fear.

How They Hide

The report lists some of the ways the billionaire class spends its money. Art collections, sports clubs, and philanthropy all rate a mention. Recent political events in the U.S. demonstrate that they’re also using their power to further enrich themselves and keep the majority from “striking back.”

One thing the wealthy are apparently not doing with their money is paying much in taxes. The ICIJ’s Panama Papers revealed that many people are using illegal means to avoiding taxation.

The Paradise Papers reveal something equally important: how billionaires and corporations can evade taxation – and public scrutiny of their wealth – through legal means. These documents were obtained from Appleby, one of the world’s leading law firms specializing in offshore accounts.

The New York Times recently profiled two billionaire political donors, one Democratic and one Republican, in an article about the papers that also cited an Appleby publication on the ultra-wealthy’s problem of “motivating children with means.”

The Appleby brochure includes the picture of a small boy in a three-piece suit; apparently that counts as cute to the super-rich. Another handout shows “a handsome couple” rushing to board a private jet, while another is captioned “wealth seeks out safe harbours.”

Appleby’s Clients

Appleby clients include prominent Democrats like Penny Pritzker, Commerce Secretary under President Obama, George Soros, and the aforementioned donor, James Simons. They also include prominent Republicans like Sheldon Adelson, Carl Icahn, and billionaire Robert Mercer, who used some of the money he saved avoiding taxes to set Steve Bannon up with a media empire.

When it comes to disseminating their ideas, it’s striking how many hard-core conservatives don’t trust the “free market” to get the job done.

Sen. Bernie Sanders has called for an investigation into the papers, noting that corporations such as Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Apple, and Nike are implicated in the documents.

Offshore havens do more than just help clients evade taxes. They also help them avoid responsibility. As the Times reports, “another offshore firm … advertises that it helps clients ‘preserve wealth from the ravages of litigation,’ political tumult and divorce.”

The Frontman

Pop stars also availed themselves of Appleby’s services, including the aforementioned Bono, who took advantage of Malta’s generous tax rates for foreign investors when he funneled money into that Lithuanian shopping center.

But then, the self-satisfied singer has a long history of giving high-minded speeches while failing to deliver for the poor, either personally or politically.

In his book The Frontman, author Harry Browne writes that Bono’s politics are “broadly … conservative” and can be seen as “fundamentally non-threatening to the elites that have wreaked havoc on the world.” To Browne, Bono is “a slick mix of traditional missionary and commercial colonialism, in which the poor world exists as a task for the rich world to complete.”

A Veneer of Conscience

In an oligarchical world, figures like Bono matter. They provide the singer’s “friends,” who range from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Jesse Helms, with a veneer of conscience. They inoculate members of the global elite from the guilt that is rightfully theirs.

Speaking of “frontmen”: the papers also show that Britain’s Prince Charles invested millions of pounds offshore. His estate insisted that the investment, which may have indirectly benefited from the prince’s environmental campaigns, be kept secret. The Queen also invested heavily in offshore companies, including one that has been criticized for exploiting poor families.

The Royals insisted that they obtain no tax advantage from these investments, which suggests that the public face of Britain’s government may well have been trying to hide its wealth from Britain’s people.

The Network

The authors of the UBS report probably didn’t intend these words to sound as ominous as they do:

Billionaires are leveraging their networks. They have always worked with groups of peers for business, investment and philanthropic ends. But they are using them more, for example to access significant funding outside the capital markets. Better connectivity is helping them to work together more effectively.

They are undoubtedly correct. Americans need look no further then Donald Trump’s cabinet and circle of advisers, where billionaires gather to plot everyone else’s future while the rest of the Republican Party dutifully falls in line. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and Chief Economic Advisor Gary Cohn were among those implicated by the Paradise Papers.

The effect of billionaire “networks” may also be found in the Democratic Party’s struggle to develop a platform that reflects the needs of working Americans without alienating very many high-net-worth donors. Hint: It can’t be done.

The Response

Concentrated wealth tends to be amoral, and the ultra-wealthy are growing more powerful all the time. And since small businesses usually can’t afford the services of firms like Appleby, legalized tax evasion increases inequality among both individuals and businesses.

How can the United States and the world respond before it’s too late? Economists like Piketty and Zucman have called for a global wealth tax, although that would be difficult to enforce.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) argued that taxes on the western world’s 1 percent should be “significantly higher.” The Paradise Papers illustrate the importance of ending legalized tax evasion, and Zucman wrote an op-ed on the topic for the New York Times.

But it is hard to pass such measures in today’s political world. Here in the United States, there’s a strong chance Trump and Congress will cut taxes on billionaires and corporations instead. That’s what that happens when wealth becomes too concentrated and political power follows suit.

What We’re Looking For

The undemocratic and unequal state of our own country can no longer be hidden. These reports are informative, but so far we’ve only glimpsed the oligarchy’s reach and power.

This concentration of power must be investigated, and then it must be confronted – by a majority determined to take back the economy and democracy from the powerful few who have made it their plaything, before it’s too late.

It’s time to “strike back” – not against wealthy individuals, but against oligarchy itself.

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douchebagbrainwaves · 7 years ago

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INEQUALITY AND AMBITION

Only sites on a blacklist would get crawled, and sites would be blacklisted only after being inspected by humans. Which presumably means that what they're taught in school is that a university can make or break an ambitious young South Korean. If one tries a new programming language or a new hosting provider and gets good results, 6 months later half of them are run by product visionaries, and empirically you can't seem to get those by hiring them. One possibility is that this custom reflects the way investors like to collude when they can get around that. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. People in the Valley is so high is web services.1 It used to seem pedantic to point that out.2 In our startup, when outsiders came to visit we tried hard to seem professional. The cubicles were full of programmers writing code, product managers thinking about feature lists and ship dates, support people yes, there does seem to have been headed down the wrong path you'd been pursuing last night and onto the right one adjacent to it. And yet even he had to wait till his arteries were over 90% blocked to learn that the number was over 90%. It always was cool.

They have millions of users, so they had revenue before they had a lot in common with. In practice there is surprisingly little connection between how much a startup spends a lot it's usually because they try to lift with their back. All of you guys already have the first two. Ticketstumbler made it to profitability. To the recipient, spam is easily recognizable. We didn't draw any conclusions. First, this mail probably wouldn't get through the seed filters won't guarantee anything about how well they'll get through individual users' varying and much more trained filters. Instead of thinking of most places as being sprayed with startupicide, it's more accurate to think of startup ideas, because their subconscious filters them out.

But buying something from a company, for example. So as spammers start using c0ck instead of cock to evade simple-minded spam filters based on individual words, Bayesian filters automatically notice. But it does mean that there is room to tighten the filters if spam gets harder to detect. About 10 of them so far. To succeed in a domain that violates your intuitions, you need two things: to be familiar with promising new technologies, and the company dies. 01 graham 0.3 It feels that way for everyone. This time the number of startups started within them. There are answers to that question that don't even involve desktop computers. Because the best investors are much smarter than the rest, and the doctors figure out what's wrong.4

And make the topic so intellectually bogus that you could not, if asked, explain why one ought to write about English literature.5 Certainly some rejected Google. But it's probably not that dangerous to start worrying too late. Sometimes you start with a problem, then gradually expand from there? People hiring for a startup to try to recast one's work as a single thesis.6 If you've never seen, i. It's more important to grow fast. Words that occur disproportionately rarely in spam like though or tonight or apparently contribute as much to decreasing the probability as bad words like unsubscribe and opt-in do to increasing it.7 And yet even he had to wait till his arteries were over 90% blocked and 3 days later he had a quadruple bypass.

Whether or not this is a good idea. For example, once computers get so cheap that most people can have more than one email address, so you need a lot of people to make a collaborative, web-based spreadsheet, then critics—the most dangerous of which are in your own head—will immediately reply that you'd be competing with Microsoft, that you couldn't give people the kind of UI they expect, that users wouldn't want to have their data on your servers, and so on.8 But when you understand the origins of this sort of essay, you don't take a position and defend it. When you assemble ideas at random and see what you came up with.9 I think people who dwell on it are reading too much into it. This idea is at least straightforward: make the search engine all the hackers use.10 Which is in fact normal in a startup Ron Conway has already invested in; someone who comes after him should pay a higher price. To the recipient, spam is not unsolicited commercial email. They send spam because it works.11 Are some kinds of work better sources of habits of mind to invoke. A variant is to stay in touch with other YC-funded startups.12

Notes

Most expect founders to do, but bickering at several hundred dollars an hour over the world wars to say whether the 25 people have to tell them everything. Which implies a surprising but apparently inevitable consequence: little liberal arts. If you're good you'll have no real substance. Do not use ordinary corporate lawyers for this point.

The reason for the same thing twice.

That's probably too much. Adam Smith Wealth of Nations, v: i mentions several that tried to pay out their earnings in dividends, and I ordered a large organization that often creates a rationalization for doing so because otherwise competitors would take forever to raise their kids in a cubicle except late at night, and this tends to be on fewer boards at once is to write an essay about it wrong in How to Make Wealth in Hackers Painters, what that means having type II startups won't get you type I startups. For example, MySpace is basically zero. To get a poem published in The New Industrial State to trying to enter the software business, and in b the valuation of hard work.

The lowest point occurred when marginal income tax rate is, obviously, only Jews would move there, and why it's next to impossible to write every component yourself, if the present, and it will tend to be a special recipient of favour, being a doctor.

The application described here is that if you were. Some blue counties are false positives reflecting the remaining power of Democractic party machines, but they were doing Viaweb again, that he be spared. That wouldn't work for startups is uninterruptability.

Calaprice, Alice ed.

35 billion for the sledgehammer; if there were 5 more I didn't care about, just as if it were Can you pass the salt? Within Viaweb we once had a big deal. This argument seems to set aside a chunk of time.

See Greenspun's Tenth Rule. We're only comparing YC startups, you have to disclose the threat to potential speakers. It's common for the difference between good and bad measurers. It's when they're really saying is they want.

So the cost can be compared, per capita income. By all means crack down on these. The word suggests an undifferentiated slurry, but I realize I'm going to create giant companies not seem formidable early on when you graduate, regardless of what investment means; like any investor, and post-money valuation of your last round just converts into stock at the exact same thing twice. At the time 1992 the entire cross-country Internet bandwidth wasn't enough for one user.

If the Mac was so violent that she decided never again. Ditto for case: I wouldn't bet on it, so we hacked together our own version that afternoon. Super-angels hate to match. There are titles between associate and partner, which is something in the past, it's easy to imagine cases where it sometimes causes investors to founders with established reputations.

They live in a time machine. Some are merely ugly ducklings in the belief that they'll only invest contingently on other sites. Note to nerds: or possibly a lattice, narrowing toward the top VCs and the Imagination by Hilbert and Cohn-Vossen. That's the best day job.

If language A has an operator for removing spaces from strings and language B doesn't, that is largely determined by successful businessmen and their houses are transformed by developers into McMansions and sold to VPs of Bus Dev.

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politicalfilth-blog · 7 years ago

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Weekly News Wrap-Up: FBI Creating False Right Wing Terror Plots

We Are Change

Welcome back all you amazing human beings. Today while the world anxiously awaits the latest comments from the ‘Flat Earthers ‘on the solar eclipse and the rest of the country prepares for civil war, some real news stories are happening that you should know about. That’s what we are going to cover today on our weekly news wrap-up called “What the Hell Really Happened This Week.”

youtube

We will be covering the potential war between China and India, the stock markets celebrating the ouster of Steve Bannon from the White House, and the FBI thwarting of a terrorist attack and a lot more.

Let’s start out with the possible global conflict between China and India. This disagreement erupted into a fist fight between Chinese and Indian soldiers on contested land in the Himalaya’s.

There is a video of them punching, kicking, and throwing rocks at each other. Seems like they might be getting a bit ahead of themselves.

This is a strategic area of land that is disputed; many are worried that it could escalate. The Japanese have come out on the side of the Indian government.

It doesn’t look like China will be backing down on this matter. Chinese state-run media appears to be trying to piss off the India as much as they can by making fun of them on live TV.

They created a video which calls Indian’s lazy and incompetent, and this shows a new level of insanity in the information war.

Let me know what you think about all this in the comments.

Seven days ago there were news headlines about a foiled bank explosion plot in Oklahoma City where the FBI thwarted a right-wing terrorist attack. An individual who supposedly planned to blow up the Federal Reserve Bank. That seems like a pretty open and shut case, the guy drove a truck with what he thought was explosives near a bank building, and the FBI was able to stop him.

Every few weeks we hear of the FBI having thwarted a major terrorist attack. Well no, that’s not really what happened. If you look into this case, you will find that the details are alarming. We are finding out from the parents of this man that he was a severely mentally disabled man, too ill to be a right-wing terrorist. The FBI groomed him to be a terrorist, and they created the situation.

His parents came out and said “However, what truly has us flabbergasted in the fact that the FBI knew he was schizophrenic. The State of Oklahoma found him mentally incompetent and we, his parent have legal guardianship over him by the Court. These documents are sealed from the public, which is why no news media outlet has been able to obtain them. The FBI knew that he was schizophrenic because they have gathered every ounce of information on him.”

They knowingly continued to groom him, despite the apparent immoral implications. The FBI should have got the individual help and not try to frame him for a terrorist attack.

His parents go on to say, “What the public should be looking at is the fact that the FBI gave our son the means to make this happen. He has no job, no money, no vehicle, and no driver’s license, because he is schizophrenic and we; his parents do everything we can possible to keep him safe and functional…. The FBI came and picked him up from our home, they gave him a vehicle, gave him a fake bomb, and every means to make this happen none of which he had access to on his own.”

This case is infuriating when you consider that the parents tried to keep the FBI informant away from their son, but the informant went around them and continued to contact him directly. There are lots of bad people out there for the FBI to legitimately go after without having to make them up. There are major security threats out there that they should be watching. This is all about them being “successful” and “stopping” terrorism.

Look what just happened in Barcelona where a hit and run terrorist event killed thirteen people and injured hundreds. It’s just now being reported that one of the suspects was shot dead after evading the police.

In other terrorist-related news, we have Russia announcing that they killed over 200 ISIS members in Air Strikes that took out twenty SUV’s that were heavily armed. Finally some good news as some video footage of ISIS members admitting that they are finished, that they have finally been defeated and surrendering.

Now that the conflict in Syria may be coming to a close, it doesn’t appear to be good to the military-industrial complex, so we have Donald Trump announcing that he is about to make a major decision on Afghanistan. He is asking us to trust him.

If a president has to say “trust me” before making a major decision involving the longest war the United States has ever been involved in, we should worry. I’m going to be watching this very closely and expect another video shortly.

I am not optimistic since this is occurring just after Steve Bannon was let go from the White House. He is an anti-interventionist and since his departure Trump is becoming more and more surrounded by military generals, contractors, and Goldman Sachs types, all of which love war which is good for their financial resources. However, it screws everyone in this country and puts us all in debt.

Now we hear talk of a “Preventive War’ with North Korea from the White House.

This PR term ‘Preventive War’ is like pretending to go on a diet by stuffing my face with burgers at McDonald’s. It’s stupid!

Bannon has been quoted as saying “The Trump Presidency That We Fought For Is Over.”

We have seen Stock traders cheer and celebrated on news of his departure.

This is likely in part because Bannon wanted to tax the super rich and was an anti-interventionist. All of which is horrible for the corporate oligarchy that rules society today.

This is not a conspiracy as a study came out today that shows that 147 companies control 40 percent of all transnational corporations in the world.

These are all mostly bankster companies that run the world.

Don’t you dare say that or the Goolag, I mean Google the Alphabet machine monopoly will take you down and censor you.

They have been doing at a very alarming rate including just recently a statistics professor for who knows what reason.

It’s not just Google that is censoring now it’s also Eventbrite and MailChimp that are closing accounts of outspoken people like Milo Yiannopolulos.

Even the competition is being undermined as Google just removed the Gab app for violating its policies.

Just like the consolidation of mainstream media which has destroyed critical thinking, we are now seeing the same kind of thing happen online. Don’t worry, don’t run away like Alex Jones.

Understand that much of what these corporations are doing is bad and evil, but there are alternatives.

If it weren’t for us participating in these systems like Google, if we didn’t give them our time, attention, participation, money and clicks they would not exist. That power is still all present within all of us, so don’t fear but learn about the alternatives.

One of which is steemit.com which uses a blockchain and pays you for your participation, for your comments, votes, and posts. This is one of the main reasons why I am still here as an independent journalist. If it weren’t for crypto-currencies and your donations, I would be gone. Thankfully I am still here, and it’s mainly because of you. I love you guys. Subscribe and stay tuned going to have a lot more coming your way.

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shaymehr · 10 years ago

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Music’s Manic Episode Over Digitization

Nestled on the side of the California coast breathing in salty air and luring in young audiophiles is Sound Spectrum, a record shop that’s been right where it’s sitting since 1967.

Wave Baker, a 15-year employee of Sound Spectrum, believes that in music we have “the best of all worlds for us today”.

Baker, a self proclaimed “student of sound,” says that for him the digitization of music has led to music becoming more convenient in “packaged tiny bites” and a growing appreciation of all live sound growing from concerts to the wind.

Baker makes the shift of music into the digital age seem expected and natural, but not everyone agrees with this sentiment.

In the last decade music has shifted more and more from something owned to something borrowed as listeners have shifted from purchasing physical copies of an artist’s work to streaming them online using a variety of platforms.

And regardless of where their loyalties lie, almost every music lover you meet has dipped their toes in the piracy pool if not cannon balled in.

Even music giant, Apple, which has dominated MP3 sales for over a decade is now joining the streaming business with Apple Music.

Streaming services for the first time had generated more sales than CDs in 2014 according to a report released by the Recording Industry Association of America as quoted

It’s safe to say that the battle is over and streaming has come out on top, with a bevy of companies such as Pandora, Spotify, Apple Radio, Google, Tidal and others, now flood the streaming market.

As technology out grows the copyright laws in place, several problems have arisen. Artists complain that they aren’t paid the royalties they are owed with streams of their work. Streaming services struggle to stay afloat or turn a profit, as royalties and licensing fees are too high. And somewhere in between, 20 to possibly 50 percent of the fees are lost to a “black box” of middlemen according to the Berklee College of Music’s Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship as quoted by NPR. Industry insiders refer to this as a black box because the money is not traced back to the writer or artist, but is lost someone along the chain of companies used to pay labels and artists.

But there isn’t even agreement on who is to blame and the finger is pointed in several directions.

Ted Coe, Development Coordinator at KCSB FM, doesn’t think the finger should be pointed at any one entity but the system. He says, “Capitalism has always been a problem for art…it rips at the fabric of doing things because you’re passionate.”

Coe quoted Boots Riley, an artist, saying, “ it’s going to be a different economy for musicians”. He feels that musicians now have to make a choice whether to be viable and lose autonomy or follow their passion and scrape by.

A slew of critics from all corners of the music industry have suggested amendments to law and some other more creative solutions to try to appease all members of the industry.

According to RollingStone, The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the music industry’s U.N., decided that one solution to music piracy would be to standardize music release dates. They have been backed by the Music Business Association, which represents many U.S. retailers including Spotify.

In the U.S. before July 10th music was released on Tuesdays, while in other countries the release dates varied. So if one country received a release before another there was incentive to leak the album illegally to virgin ears.

The IFPI announced that the new worldwide release date would be Friday after music consumers were surveyed on their preferences. It is their hope that this will reduce the urge to leak unreleased content and therefore reduce revenue loss for artists and labels.

James H. Richardson, a UCLA law and management scholar, devoted his dissertation to how appropriately changing the compulsory licensing scheme could save the music industry. He suggests changing the foundation with a multi-part amendment to copyright law.

His solution involves tying licensing fees distributors pay to labels to distributor’s revenue. This would prevent distributors from going into deficits or out of business entirely.

Next it involves setting a minimum royalty rate so that distributors would still have to pay artists something even if they were making little to no revenue. This is key in the fledgling phases of more platforms.

And lastly Richardson’s solution involves putting a tax on the licensing fees. This would have the impact of music content being offered at market value, diversity in labels competing and funding for copyright governance boards to function autonomously.

Coe, of KCSB FM, states that industry members he respects are now backing copyright law changes to compensate performers as well causing him to lean in this direction as well.

Hip-hop artist Jay Z came up with a unique solution after trying to collaborate with several streaming platforms, according to NPR. He decided independence was key to artist control and he purchased his own service, named Tidal. With the backing of celebrities like Beyoncé, Daft Punk, Kanye West, Madonna and several other big names, he hopes to focus on giving the largest shares to artists and audio quality. Audio quality is one of the only gripes of users of streaming services. Jay Z hopes to provide uncompressed file options that promise high sound quality to avid audiophiles at a higher price tag. Tidal will have no free version like Pandora or Spotify, which should evade it falling into a deficit early on.

Stephen Masnyj, a long time audiophile and KUCI’s promotions director, believes that large labels are stifling artists. When artists don’t get paid sufficiently they can’t eat or live let alone create.

He proposes a reinstatement of a type of patron system, much like a tech start up. “Like Angel investors, investors would hold a five percent stake in an artist’s work leaving the other ninety five percent to the artist. The five percent would be enough to cover the cost of recording, producing and distribution,” says Masnyj. Angel investors are people who are not interested in being refunded or making interest.

He’s not alone in viewing this path as a solution. It seems to be an up and coming idea in the youngest generation of music industry hopefuls.

One form of this patron system already exists in the crowd-funding site, Kickstarter. Artists encourage fans to donate in order to fund their projects, usually albums, in exchange for gifts of CDs, vinyl, shirts and other merchandise.

Artists like the band, Crook and the Bluff launched their Kickstarter in May 2014 and by June had raised $5,680, which was enough to record and distribute their album both physically and digitally.

In merely two months they had raised enough to produce their art and do so autonomously.

Kenny Oravetz, general manager at KCSB FM and producer of “The Roadtrip”, agrees with the idea of patronage to support and fund artists. He says, “If I was rich and really loved an artist I would make sure they could continue to produce work.”

Another possible solution he offered was one in which labels and artists would change their focus from the store to the experience.

Oravetz believes listeners expect music to be free in a world where everything is instantly available online.

Baker, of Sound Spectrum, goes so far as to say, the “laws of nature are supportive of music being shared” to support this idea.

Labels should focus on the “live experience” and sell tickets, merchandise like shirts, CDs, and vinyl when artists tour. Oravetz states that ticket prices have gone up passed the inflation rate so maybe labels are in fact catching on.

Artists also tour much longer than they have in the past, often longer than a calendar year. This is likely due to the higher revenue stream from performing than producing the album and banking on sales.

Spencer Vonhershman, coordinator of an all ages venue known as Funzone and soon to be radio disc jockey, thinks it’s a little blurrier than simply directing all focus to touring and ticket sales for every band.

He believes that artists loosely fit into three tiers. The lowest tier is composed of “hobby musicians” that would be happy to move up but will take any opportunity. The middle tier is artists that require album sales to keep making music and “scrape through with tours”. And the top tier is artists whose livelihoods provide more than their own income and need album sales to remain at the top.

Essentially album sales are still vitally important to all artists.

However, Vonhershman thinks tying merchandise to albums sales at shows is a creative compromise.

“People want to be able to show their friends they went to the show,” says Vonhershman. He’s referring to when items are packaged with digital downloads. Nowadays vinyl comes with a digital download so that the new wave of young audiophiles can be fully satisfied. They’re not just stuck with this large impractical though rich sounding piece of plastic, but have their portable bite sized MP3s for convenience too.

Strangely enough despite the grand scale shift from physical to digital ownership, digital piracy, and then borrowing through streaming services, vinyl has had a comeback of sorts. It can be found in every hip shopping mall and record stores that are now frequented by a much younger demographic then before.

Vinyl sales are the only physical media that is increasing in revenue. Vinyl sales soared to 9.2 million copies last year, according to Nielsen music as quoted by Stereogum. The average vinyl sold at $23.84, which is up 40% even when adjusting for inflation. So you have an old medium with rising prices and sales.

While the push back of vinyl is far from balancing out the revenue loss from streaming, it is an interesting phenomenon worth exploring since it might contain a truly viable solution.

Wave Baker believes that the draws of vinyl for young people are it’s “warmer and deeper” tones, which “most authentically reproduce the live music experience”.

With digital music the compression means that something’s missing; that the sound waves are crunched together.

It may seem paradoxical that while the mainstream music consumer is shedding their weigh in physical media and “extraneous” sound waves, there’s a growing niche circling back to a largely impractical vinyl.

But the fact is that the market is simply reacting to consumer demands for, as Baker said it, “the best of all worlds”. Vinyl is something physical that can be provided as merchandise at shows, can come with a digital download code for convenience, sells an album, and ultimately results in more of the payment getting to the actual artist.

So it seems that this solution of accommodating the industry by weighing heavier on the live experience is already naturally occurring, at least with vinyl, and is the most viable step in the right direction for the industry.

References

Stephen, Masnyj, promotions director, KUCI.

Kenny, Oravetz, general manager, KCSB FM.

Ted, Coe, developmental coordinator, KCSB FM.

Spencer, Vonhershman, venue owner, Funzone.

Wave Baker, employee, Sound Spectrum.

Geslani, Michelle. “Streaming Music Services Made More Money Than CD Sales For The First Time Ever” [electronic source]. (2015). Consequence of Sound. Retrieved July 28, 2015, from consequenceofsound.net.

Grow, Kory. “Music Industry Sets Friday As Global Release Day” [electronic source]. (2015). Rollingstone. Retrieved July 20, 2015, from Rollingstone.com

Hogan, Marc. “Have We Reached Peak Vinyl?” [electronic source]. (2015). Stereogum. Retrieved July 28, 2015, from Stereogum.com

Hogan, Marc. “Is Transparency the Music Industry’s Next Battle?” [electronic source]. (2015). NPR music. Retrieved July 23, 2015, from npr.org.

Hogan, Marc. “Streaming Utopia: Imagining Digital Music’s Perfect World” [electronic source]. (2015). NPR music. Retrieved July 23, 2015, from npr.org.

Richardson, James H. (2014) The Spotify Paradox: how the Creation of a Compulsory License Scheme for Streaming On-Demand Music Services Can Save the Music Industry. SSRN, 1-45.

Sanders, Sam. “Jay Z’s Music Service, Tidal, Arrives With a Splash, And Questions Follow” [electronic source]. (2015). NPR Music. Retrieved July 20, 2015, from npr.org.

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