#property accountant uk

[uk-property-accountant]

Self Assessment Tax Returns – A Complete Guide

The UK Self-Assessment tax system requires individuals and businesses to report their income and pay taxes if not deducted automatically. Taxpayers must file a Self-Assessment Tax Return annually if they fall into various categories, including self-employment, high earners, or those with specific types of income like savings or foreign earnings. Registration involves obtaining a Unique Taxpayer Reference (UTR) and setting up an online account. Deadlines are critical: informing HMRC by October 5th for new filers, submitting paper returns by October 31st, and online returns by January 31st. Accuracy in reporting income, expenses, and other financial details is crucial to avoid penalties, with options to amend returns if necessary. Maintaining records is essential, with different retention periods based on circumstances. Late filing or payment incurs penalties, but appeals are possible with valid reasons. Overall, compliance ensures taxpayers meet their obligations under UK tax law while managing their financial affairs responsibly.

Read More: Self Assessment Tax Return: Guide

[parxarchive]

awstenknight instagram story [november 24, 2023]

[smanthaolson]

Let Property Campaign (LPC)

[mmbaaccountants]

Small wonder then that so many people turn to us for the help of a crypto tax accountant UK regulations are a veritable minefield. But we think that our ability in this area demonstrates our capacity. If we can navigate your finances through the crypto minefield you can be sure that when they come to us for a Property Tax Specialist London clients have confidence that we can navigate through those matters too.

[twopoppies]

I just saw a Daily Mail article...Lottie and Lewis better buckle up. Caroline's mum is all ready to drag them through the mud and that documentary isn't even due out until the end of the year. She swipes at Lou Teasdale as well.

Why Caroline Flack's mum finds her ex's new romance 'devastating' https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-14272227/Why-Caroline-Flacks-mum-finds-ex-boyfriends-new-romance-influencer-devastating-showbiz-bombshell-KATIE-HIND.html?ito=native_share_article-nativemenubutton

Yikes. Yeah, I saw that was happening. I mean, everything surrounding Lewis when he first got together with Lottie seemed very shady. And he didn’t seem like a great boyfriend to Caroline. And I can totally understand Caroline’s mother not being able to let go of the fact that Lewis moved on to this seemingly glamorous and happy life after her daughter died.

But this second documentary comes across more like a way to attack him and other people she feels let Caroline down, rather than providing closure. It’s all terribly sad.

[…] One person who didn't join in the congratulatory messages was Christine Flack, the mother of television presenter Caroline who took her own life five years ago next month.

The much-loved 40-year-old had been in a turbulent relationship with Lewis – a model and former professional tennis player – who was 13 years her junior.

It was this relationship, Caroline's mother openly declared on social media, that 'ended her life'.

Indeed, it was a late-night explosive row between the two in 2019, after Caroline was said to have found text messages from another woman on his phone, that led to her hitting him with a lamp, being charged with assault - and ultimately resulted in her downward mental spiral and suicide on February 15, 2020.

It's understandable, therefore, that Christine found Lewis's new romance so difficult to take: the pair went public six months after Caroline died when they were spotted on holiday in Ibiza.

It's also understandable that Christine has long questioned whether the messages Caroline found on Lewis's phone that night may have been from Lottie.

Now Lottie, the younger sister of One Direction band member Louis Tomlinson and one of the UK's most sought after influencers, with more than four million followers on Instagram, has spoken about the scurrilous suggestion for the first time to the Mail.

Referring to the text messages Caroline is said to have found on Lewis's phone that night, her agent said: 'It is not true at all, they hadn't even met before at the time of the incident. Hope this clears that rumour up.'

Today, Lottie, 27, and Lewis, 33, live together in a £800,000 five-bedroom, three-bathroom luxury home in Kent which they are renovating in the style of a Los Angeles mansion.

The property, which both Lottie and Lewis regularly post about on social media, even has its own Instagram account.

As one of Caroline's friends tells me: 'It must be devastating for Christine, she has lost her daughter and now Lewis has become some kind of influencer with his girlfriend, living in apparent bliss and about to become a father for the second time.

[…]

In a statement yesterday, she said: 'I still have so many questions about what happened to Caroline in her final months, and it's something I feel deeply compelled to explore, even though I know it will be challenging. I'm pleased to be working with the team at Curious Films once again, in the hope of bringing clarity and understanding to Carrie's story – not just for her, but for everyone who cared about her.'

There are many targets, including the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and ITV – whom Christine is said to take 'a very dim view of' for sacking her daughter from her beloved job hosting the dating show Love Island.

Caroline killed herself after learning that her criminal trial for assaulting Lewis was going ahead, after initially being told she would only be given a caution.

Caroline had feared that the body cam footage taken by police on the night the incident took place would be played out in court. In a confession to a pal, she said she would 'rather die' than have the recordings played in a public arena.

Lewis was first spotted with influencer Lottie Tomlinson six months after Caroline's death

[…]

[Lou Teasdale] was one of Caroline's best friends, and the pair would regularly party together. And it was through Louise that Lewis got to know Lottie: Louise became friends with Louis Tomlinson through her work as the stylist for One Direction in their heyday.

It's a close friendship that endures today - another thing Christine finds very uncomfortable.

'Christine could be forgiven for thinking that Caroline's friends might have cast Lewis adrift,' one former friend of the television host tells me. 'But that isn't the case and it is hard for her.

'While nobody would try to argue that Caroline [wasn't] an easy person to be around at times, it has been another part of Caroline's death which has been difficult for Christine.

'Lewis wasn't always so nice to Caroline and there has been much talk about her giving him money for reasons that people don't known for certain.

'Christine and Louise are no longer close and her not ditching Lewis is thought to be a contributing factor for it. Christine thinks that if it hadn't been for Caroline going out with Lewis, she might be here today.'

Others point out that Louise 'did so much' for Caroline and was utterly devastated by her death – something she believes she will never get over.

'Caroline's death was a tragedy,' said one source close to Louise, who is now dating former Newcastle United and England footballer Andy Carroll.

'She wanted nothing more than for Caroline to get better and get through what was such an awful time. She is still today utterly devastated by her death but she has known Lottie since she was a teenager.

'Caroline's friends are simply trying to get on with their lives after the most terrible thing happened. It is awful and heartbreaking for them, too.'

Full article here

[is-the-owl-video-cute]

Pits aren't evil, but it's disingenuous to ignore how prevalent they are in dog bite and fatal attack statistics (both on humans and animals). These dogs were bred for bloodsport, and more specifically they were bred to not send out warnings before attacking, that's not going to magically go away just because you're good with dogs or because an individual pit is friendly. If that were the case, the majority of dog attacks wouldn't consist of pitbulls, pit mixes, or other trouble breeds like rottweilers.

Even if the dogs were 100% safe the weird culture surrounding them would continue to be a problem. Why does one individual dog breed need such a zealous defensive squad? Why do attack survivors have to tread on eggshells to avoid offending owners of the dog breed that attacked them? Why do so many people pin the blame on the human or animal victim of an attack when these dog breeds are designed to snap without warning? Why is "bully bashing" so reprehensible, but shit like "chihuahuas are hellspawns" and "cats are so mean" acceptable?

Alright, I suppose we can dissect this.

Claim: Pit bulls are more prevalent than any other breed in dog bites and dog bite fatalities

Fact: this claim is only relaying bite incidents regarding pit bulls and “pit bull type dogs” in the US. Why does that matter? Well these surveys self-admittedly were inaccurate, and no conclusion could be drawn from them, simply because they were relying on the public to accurately identify the breed of dog that bit them and it didn’t account for cases that were not reported or the dog could not be identified as one breed or another. These surveys also did not account for prevalence of one breed over another in the country. Why does that part matter?

Well you could factually say that most smokers in the UK are white. If you then say white people in the UK are significantly more prone to nicotine addiction, that’s a very false conclusion to draw if you don’t account for the fact over 85% of people in the UK are white. This is the same level of false conclusion being drawn from those dog bite surveys because, as I have said before, there are a lot of pit bulls in America. But besides that, they are a very common breed in low income areas. Dog bites are more likely to be reported in a low income area because if a rich person’s dog bites someone, they tend to pay off the victim to avoid the dog being labeled as an aggressive dog and taken away or put down for being too dangerous. Low income families obviously can’t do that. Low income areas will also commonly have lower/less sturdy fencing and other limitations that can lead to a dog escaping the owner’s property. A lot of the bites reported also involved dogs where an owner could not be located, which means strays. A large stray dog of any breed is absolutely dangerous. If I see a stray malinois or something I’m not going to be thinking “ah well thank goodness it isn’t a pit bull” because I don’t particularly want to be bitten by a malinois either.

Bottom line though, the CDC stopped collecting data on what specific breeds were “more dangerous” because there was too much statistical error in the nature of collecting the data for any meaningful conclusion to be drawn.

Claim: pit bulls were bred to attack opponents with no warning which means they can and will attack at any time

Fact: this is another example of a false conclusion.

For one thing, I couldn’t find any non-biased sources claiming that pit bulls specifically were bred to attack without warning, but even if we say that’s true for sake of argument, attacking an opponent dog in a fight without telegraphing their attack doesn’t mean “this dog does not engage in any body language” thus making them unreadable or whatever. They wag their tails when happy, whine when they want something, and yes! They do in fact curl their lip and growl when they want you to stop doing something. They bark at noises or scents they don’t trust, and they bow and roll when they want to play.

They’re dogs. Therefore, they share a lot of the same body language cues as any other breed will give you.

Claim: pit bulls were bred as fighting dogs so they’re bred for aggression.

Fact: dogs classify other dogs and humans in very different categories of their mind in much the same way they classify a rabbit and a cat and a cow in different categories of their mind. A dog that’s extremely reactive to other dogs may not be reactive towards humans at all.

No modern breed was bred for blanket aggressive behavior because that would make them impossible to keep in captivity at all because the second someone went to feed them they’d lose a hand and the second you tried to get two extremely aggressive animals to breed they’d kill each other on sight. Pits were bred primarily to be reactive to unfamiliar dogs and for physical strength. They were not bred to be reactive to humans, and attack dogs are typically abused in some way to make them reactive to humans in the same way they’re reactive to dogs, or at minimum rewarded for reacting excessively to an unknown human to encourage more extreme reactivity.

So why does one breed need so much defense?

Because pits and other “”trouble breeds”” cause your insurance rates to go up significantly if your insurance provider finds out you own one. Because you can live in an apartment for years and get an ultimatum to be evicted or get rid of your dog despite it never showing any signs of being dangerous. Because there are people who will see a bully dog in the street and hit the gas.

It’s not about them being “more important” than cats or micro dogs, no one is saying that. No one has ever been saying that, but a pit bull gets all the hate and aggression and vitriol people throw at black cats but with legal backing on top of that. People defend the breed because there is a culture of “the only good pit bull is a dead one” and actually act on it. Yes, people insult and mock chihuahuas and that’s very rude and all, but how many places have breed bans against them?

Why do people blame the human over the animal?

Well because any dog will bite “without warning” if it’s raised to think failure to do so will cause it pain and any dog that’s never seen a human other than the ones in its house has the potential to be reactive to outside stimuli. And if you run up to a random dog and try to pet it, it’s not the dog’s fault you got bit it was your fault for just assuming you can touch any random animal and not get bitten/scratched/etc.

Do I blame children for not knowing better or victims that were charged by a loose dog? No. Is that what most bite cases are? Also no.

But hey it’s also weird to frame it as “either the dog is at fault or the victim is at fault and you’re blaming one” as like a blanket statement. Because no. That’s not what’s being said or claimed. Some bites are the fault of how the dog was raised, some are the fault of the person who was bitten, and some are a mix of both or just poor circumstances and the worst of happenstances.

Treating it as a breed specific thing rather than a “people need better education on raising and behaving around animals” thing isn’t going to make less bites happen fwiw.

[betweendoctorsanddetectives]

I can't attend a protest tonight (Wednesday) or on Saturday so I'm trying to take some measures from home to support antiracist and antifascist efforts across the country.

Where to find protests:

Keep an eye on the organisations Stand up to Racism and Hope not Hate. Their instagram accounts are probably being updated better than their websites as this is such a rapidly unfolding situation.

Stand up to Racism are accepting donations to help with antiracist efforts and I believe support bail funds during this week's protests.

Go to protests in a group for your safety. Protect each other.

Know your rights:

Green and Black Cross specialise in legal support for protesters. They have lots of useful resources on their website. Their protest support line is 07946 541 511. Write this on your arm in permanent marker and keep hold of a bustcard which contains information and advice regarding arrests and cautions. They have localised bustcards for contacting local support. Print it or write it out by hand and have it on your person. Print out many and give them to your fellow protesters if you're able.

Mutual aid:

POC are needing extra funds for things like: taxis to get safely to and from places of work, food (both takeaway and groceries) ordered directly to their houses. Reach out to friends and members of your community who could use money, company, escorting, food dropping off, dog walking, or anything else.

UK POC please feel free to ask for any funds needed in the notes of this post and I will try to either personally help or amplify your request.

Keep an eye on the news for POC and their businesses who have been targeted in attacks and then research to see if they have funds to fix or replace their damaged/burned property. I don't have specific examples to share because thankfully any funds I have personally seen have far surpassed their goals.

Forward pertinent information:

Email photos, videos, or any information you have about plans for or people involved in rioting and violence to rightresponse@hopenothate.org.uk

Help with the aftermath:

See if you can offer assistance to businesses, mosques, and public buildings that have been attacked. Help to pick up the rubble and litter in the streets of towns and cities that have been targeted.

Get informed:

Read the report by The Runnymede Trust on the mainstreaming of far right values following the 2024 election. They are a research organisation challenging structural racism in Britain.

The Runnymede Trust accept donations to support their work.

[serinemolecule]

Does your knowledge of East Asia extend to horticulture? Do people there have terrible problems trying to keep bamboo out of places they don't want it, or do they have some way to deal with it, or are the dynamics different where it's a native rather than an invasive plant?

Sorry, no clue.

I found this mention at the bottom of the Chinese Wikipedia page for bamboo:

雖然竹可以作為盆栽、觀賞用途，但是對於建築物卻有極大的破壞風險。竹的生長速度極快，根莖蔓延得很快，應該避免在花園種植竹類。快速長生的竹會破壞地基、混凝土。而由於竹根深藏於地底，橫向生長，要根除的成本極高，所以一般來說，花園發現竹類會���房價有負面影響。

While bamboo can be used for bonsai, it poses a very large danger to buildings. Bamboo grows extremely quickly, its stem extends very quicky, so you should avoid planting it in gardens. Quicky growing bamboo can harm foundations and concrete. And because bamboo can grow underground and sideways, making it very difficult to exterminate, the discovery of bamboo in a garden will negatively influence property values.

Which seems to confirm your suspicions. BUT the two sources cited are both British:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220601061310/https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7772477/British-gardeners-urged-NOT-grow-bamboo.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20220605100918/https://www.rhs.org.uk/plants/types/grasses/bamboo-control

(So my guess is that this was written by some Hong Konger living in the UK.)

That's the only mention I can find of negatives on Wikipedia, though. The English, Japanese, and Chinese articles are otherwise all relentlessly positive and talk about how many uses it has and all its cultural significance in religion and considered one of the Four Gentlemen and considered pure etc etc.

I googled "bamboo weed" in Japanese (protip: if you know both languages, Japanese is better to google in because of the lack of Great Firewall) and got some results about bamboo control but about as many about using bamboo to control other weeds, so that and the Chinese sources being English-language does suggest to me that it sometimes causes trouble but not particularly? One reason might be that, because it's native, building techniques already account for it. But I'm just speculating, I woke up today with zero knowledge of what kinds of trouble people have with bamboo.

[mariacallous]

I’ve been thinking about a famously orange-skinned former presenter of trashy TV programmes, who lives on a luxurious coastal estate. He has a history of racist and Islamophobic remarks, of blaming asylum seekers for bringing disease into the country and ranting about the “supercilious metropolitan elite”. He swept into a rightwing political party and refashioned it in his image, presenting himself as the antidote to politics-as-usual, whipping up culture wars and using the platform to boost his planet-sized ego.

I am, of course, describing the British former politician Robert Kilroy-Silk.

After he was sacked from his presenting job by the BBC for a crudely racist rant in the Sunday Express in 2004, he joined Ukip (the forerunner of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK), energising it and captivating the media with his culture war polemics against the EU, immigrants and “the political establishment”. His unnatural hue inspired the viral video Mr Tangerine Man. But when Ukip could no longer contain his ego, he broke away and started his own political party in 2005, Veritas (widely dubbed Vanitas), which quickly crashed and burned. Thank goodness there are no such characters on the world stage today!

I could just as well have been thinking of Silvio Berlusconi, the satsuma-tinged TV presenter and culture warrior, who, like a certain other politician, went to extreme lengths to hide his baldness. He became the demagogic, rightwing Italian prime minister, seeking (successfully) to return to power after being ejected from office, despite a long series of sexual and financial scandals and criminal charges. Like Donald Trump’s, his loyal supporters somehow managed to overlook his moral repulsiveness, childish attention-seeking and love-in with Vladimir Putin, and saw him as the saviour who would make Italy great again.

Of course, there are differences between these people, but every time one of these characters emerges, we are nonplussed by them. We react as if we’re dealing with something new, and appear to have little idea how to respond. But there are patterns to the emergence of extreme-right demagogues: patterns that repeat themselves with remarkable fidelity. By learning and understanding them, we can better defend ourselves.

I’ve spent part of my summer reading Arno Mayer, the great historian who died in 2023. His book Dynamics of Counterrevolution in Europe, 1870-1956, published in 1971, could have been written about any of the rightwing populists we face today: Trump, Farage, Viktor Orbán, Benjamin Netanyahu, Narendra Modi, the leaders of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, the National Rally in France, the Brothers of Italy and – lately – Jair Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson.

Mayer’s descriptions of the demagogues of his period are uncannily familiar. These leaders created the impression “that they seek fundamental changes in government, society, and community”. But in reality, because they relied on the patronage of “incumbent elites” to gain power (think, today, of media moguls like Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk and Paul Marshall, and various billionaire funders), they sought no major changes “in class structure and property relations”. In fact, they ensured these were shored up. “They need to revile incumbent elites and institutions without foreclosing cooperation with them.” So their project “is far more militant in rhetoric, style and conduct than in political, social and economic substance”.

For this reason, Mayer explains how rightwing populists expose and overstate the cracks in a crisis-torn society, but fail to “account for them in any coherent and systematic way”. They direct popular anger away from genuine elites and towards fictional conspiracies and minorities. They variously blame these minorities (whether it be Jews, Muslims, asylum seekers, immigrants, Black and Brown people) for the sense of inadequacy and powerlessness felt by their supporters; helping “humiliated individuals to salvage their self-esteem by attributing their predicament to a plot” and giving them immediate targets on which to vent their frustrations and hatreds.

The fake firebrands often, Mayer remarks,also issued “rampant broadsides against science” (think of the climate science denial to which almost all today’s rightwing demagogues subscribe), and against innovation, modernism and cosmopolitanism. They combined “the glorification of traditional attitudes and behaviour patterns with the charge that these are being corrupted, subverted, and defiled by conspiratorial agents and influences”. Hello JD Vance and Ron DeSantis.

The demagogues of Mayer’s period adopted a purposely “ambiguous position”, when people who might have been inspired by their claims committed acts of violence – both inflaming the attacks and distancing themselves from them. This might trigger memories of Donald Trump during the January 6 assault on the Capitol, Modi during anti-Muslim pogroms and the video Farage made after the Southport murders, which is seen by many people as bearing some responsibility for last month’s racist riots.

But there is one major difference. In Mayer’s era, the development of what he called “crisis strata” of disillusioned, angry men to whom the demagogues appealed was a result of devastating war or state collapse.The rabble-rousers were able to appeal both to angry working-class men and to anxious elites by invoking the spectre of leftwing revolution. None of these conditions pertain today in countries like our own. So how does the current batch of populists succeed? I think they are responding to a crisis caused by a different force: 45 years of neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism simultaneously promises the world and snatches it away. It tells us that if you work hard enough, you too can be an alpha. But it also creates the conditions which ensure that, no matter how hard you work, you are likely to remain subordinate and exploited. It has enabled the formation of a new rentier class, that owns the essential assets and ruthlessly exploits younger and poorer people. Young men step into a world of promises – to find all the golden doors are locked, and someone else has the key.

It is in the vast gap between the promises of neoliberalism and their fulfilment that frustration, humiliation and a desire for vengeance grow: the same emotions that followed military defeat or state collapse in Mayer’s time. These impulses are then exploited by conflict entrepreneurs. Today, some of these entrepreneurs stand for office; others, using opportunities that weren’t available in previous eras, monetise the anger, making a fortune through their social media outlets.

Understanding the tradition these demagogues follow, which long predates the rise of fascism in the 20th century, should help us to develop a more effective response to them. We begin to see this in Kamala Harris’s intelligent campaign, which, in contrast to Joe Biden’s, is starting to land heavy blows on Trump and Vance,drawing attention to their creepy intrusions on people’s private lives and their attacks on fundamental freedoms. If we want to anticipate and stop rightwing authoritarian rule, we should seek to comprehend its eerie consistencies.

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

‘You are killing us’: Mariana survivors face ill health, lost culture and a long wait for justice

When a dam burst eight years ago in a Brazilian mining town, the toxic mud swept downriver, crushing all before it. Affected communities are still fighting in the courts – and mourning a way of life that has disappeared for ever

Marino D’Ângelo Júnior regularly takes antidepressants and medication to help him sleep. A former resident of Paracatu, a district of the city of Mariana in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, the 54-year-old says he has lost his sense of self since 60m cubic metres of mining waste flattened his town, forcing him to live in a rented property near the centre of an environmental disaster that shocked the world eight years ago.

D’Ângelo is one of the survivors of the collapse of the Fundão tailings dam near Mariana. Almost a decade on, the people affected by Brazil’s worst environmental tragedy still await justice as they live under the shadow of the toxic mud that swept away life as they knew it.

“The collapse of a dam isn’t what you see on TV – the river of mud destroying things,” says D’Ângelo. “A dam failure entails an infinity of invisible ruptures. The rupture of connections, family links, communities, histories, dreams.”

D’Ângelo used to own a herd of 60 dairy cows before the incident but he began to sell them off as he found himself unable to work properly, which led to him being “forced into poverty”. A member of the Commission for People Affected by the Fundão Dam, D’Ângelo holds the mining companies responsible for the disaster and the subsequent neglect of the affected populations who still struggle with losing their livelihoods and way of life.

The dam – which was managed by Samarco, a joint venture between the Brazilian mining company Vale and the Anglo-Australian company BHP – collapsed on 5 November 2015, and caused mining waste to flow nearly 700km (430 miles) down the Rio Doce into the Atlantic Ocean, devastating everything in its path.

The torrent of toxic sludge buried villages, killed 19 people and left thousands more homeless. Nearly a decade later, hundreds of thousands of people continue to suffer the effects daily, in the contaminated soil unfit for agriculture, the diseased fish they catch in the polluted river, and the breakdown of their communities and cultural traditions.

No one has yet been held accountable for the socio-environmental disaster. BHP, Vale, Samarco and eight other defendants stand accused of environmental crimes in a Brazilian court case that has been dragging on for seven years. They are due to face a judge for questioning this month.

Separately, about 700,000 people are suing BHP in a UK court, seeking £36bn in reparations in English legal history’s most significant group claim. BHP denies liability.

Continue reading.

[purplethingpoetry]

found these somehow-

So, I was looking on the 7D Wiki page and managed to find six out of the seven original 7d promo music videos they made to promote episodes of the show on Facebook of all things-

The only one that's currently missing is the Sneezy one- it was available on tom rugger's Facebook account at one point, but it's gone now unfortunately-

i know Disney channel UK uploaded the full extended versions on YT btw- I'm aware-

I may upload more of these bc I have most of them, well apart from the original Sneezy one lmao-

But this is the sleepy song-

(The 7d isn't owned by me. All characters featured are owned by Disney, and are all property of Disney.)

[rhythmelia]

Support a Translator of Color (1 day left of Crowd Justice fundraising!)

Fresh post for the tags! As I've shared extensively in updates on this post since 2023.06.24, my friend Yilin Wang (yilinwriter on twitter) has had their translation work stolen and used uncredited by the British Museum in a major exhibit on The Hidden Century in Chinese history that featured major feminist revolutionary Qiu Jin, and when called out on that behavior, the museum chose to remove Qiu Jin's poetry and Yilin's translation, silencing both of them. Instead of, yanno, naming the translator and giving appropriate credit and payment. ....yup.

So! Here's the Crowd Justice:

Case updates can be found at that fundraiser (especially as the muskrat has made twitter into an epic trashfire at the moment) but some key points, in Yilin's words:

I need to raise at least £15,000 by July 10th to enable me to instruct expert lawyers in London to initiate a claim of infringement of my copyright and moral rights. I will be working with lawyers in the UK to bring a claim against the British Museum for its infringement of my copyright and moral rights in the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court (IPEC), which is a specialist court and part of the Business and Property Courts of the High Court of Justice in London. ......

Please contribute and share if you can - each and every small contribution is very much appreciated! Let’s hold the British Museum accountable together!  I realise that this is a lot of money at any time, and especially in the current economic circumstances, but the cost and difficulty of taking legal action is a huge barrier when it comes to access to justice. My hope is that if I am able to generate enough support to take this point of principle forward, it will give the British Museum and all similar institutions the maximum possible incentive to avoid similar conduct in the future, because they will see that there is collective power in communities who feel disrespected and insulted. .....

Why This Case Matters This case matters to me not only because I believe both my work and Qiu Jin's work should receive the credit and respect they deserve, but because it affects the copyright and moral rights of all translators, writers, and creatives. 

The British Museum has not issued an appropriate apology or taken proper responsibility for its actions, so if it is not held accountable, then this is a cycle that stands to be repeated.

Yilin was able to make the minimum to retain a lawyer, and is now working towards the stretch goal. Here's part of the statement from the lawyer on the crowd justice page:

Accordingly, it is not giving anything away to say that we sincerely hope that the British Museum come to recognise the shortcomings in their conduct so far, and move to make amends rather than fight Yilin all the way. We will make Yilin’s funds go as far as we can, but there is a real prospect of the case being drawn out beyond the funding she has available, so it continues to be the case that every pound she raises towards her stretch targets puts her in the strongest possible position - a position that the British Museum has extensive visibility of - to hold out for what she deserves with help of expert legal assistance.

Currently it's at £16,722 pledged towards the stretch target of £20,000 from 573 pledges in small amount donations. Help Yilin be able to keep going if the British Museum continues to behave badly and try to fight until Yilin's out of funds. Please consider reblogging and/or donating a small amount if you can - about 1 day left to July 10! (I'm in UTC-7 and it's the 8th for me but I'm not sure what timezone the fundraiser site is in, since it says 1 day left there)

tagging @copperbadge, @vaspider and @prismatic-bell on the off chance they might be interested in signal boosting? No pressure though!

[ingek73]

The Observer

Monarchy

King and Prince William’s estates ‘making millions from charities and public services’

Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster likely to make at least £50m from leasing land to services such as NHS and schools, according to investigation

Richard Palmer

Sat 2 Nov 2024 20.50 CET

King Charles and Prince William’s property empires are taking millions of pounds from cash-strapped charities and public services including the NHS, state schools and prisons, according to a new investigation.

The reports claim the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall, which are exempt from business taxes and used to fund the royals’ lifestyles and philanthropic work, are set to make at least £50m from leasing land to public services. The two duchies hold a total of more than 5,400 leases.

One 15-year deal will see Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS hospital trust in London pay £11.4m to store its fleet of electric ambulances in a warehouse owned by the Duchy of Lancaster, the monarch’s 750-year-old estate.

The king will also make at least £28m from windfarms because the Duchy of Lancaster retains a feudal right to charge for cables crossing the foreshore, according to an investigation by Channel 4’s Dispatches and the Sunday Times.

William’s Duchy of Cornwall, the hereditary estate of the heir to the throne, has signed a £37m deal to lease Dartmoor prison for 25 years to the Ministry of Justice, which is liable for all repairs despite paying £1.5m a head for a jail empty of prisoners because of high levels of radon gas.

His estate also owns Camelford House, a 1960s tower block on the banks of the Thames, which has brought in at least £22m since 2005 from rents paid by charities and other tenants. Two cancer charities, Marie Curie and Macmillan – of which the king is a longstanding patron – have both recently moved out to smaller premises.

The Duchy of Cornwall has charged the Royal Navy more than £1m to build and use jetties and moor warships. It also charges the army to train on Dartmoor but the Ministry of Defence refused a Freedom of Information Act request asking how much it costs. The duchy also made more than £600,000 from the construction of a fire station and stands to get nearly £600,000 from rental agreements with six state schools.

In spite of the king and Prince William’s speeches and interventions on environmental issues, many residential properties let out by the royal estates are in breach of basic government energy efficiency standards.

InvestigatorsThe investigation found 14% of homes leased by the Duchy of Cornwall and 13% by the Duchy of Lancaster have an energy performance rating of F or G. Since 2020, it has been against the law for landlords to rent out properties that are rated below an E under the Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards regulations.

The Duchy of Lancaster said: “Over 87% of all duchy-let properties are rated E or above. The remainder are either awaiting scheduled improvement works or are exempted under UK legislation.”

The royal estates also have deals with mining and quarrying companies.

The investigation has prompted calls for a parliamentary investigation and for the two empires to be folded into the crown estate, which sends its profits to the government. The king and Prince William pay income tax on profits from the estates after business expenses have been deducted, but both now refuse to say how much.

Critics say the estates, the income from which have been used by successive governments to keep the headline cost of the monarchy to the taxpayer down, enjoy a commercial advantage over rivals because they are exempt from corporation tax and capital gains tax.

Baroness Margaret Hodge, a former chair of the Commons public accounts committee, said the duchies should at least pay corporation tax. “This would be a brilliant time for the monarch to say, I’m going to be open, and I want to be treated as fairly as anybody,” she said.

Both duchies said they were commercial operations that complied with statutory requirements to disclose information. They also emphasised their efforts to become greener.

The Duchy of Lancaster said: “His majesty the king voluntarily pays tax on all income received from the duchy.”

-

&

Over the last two decades the royals have made £22m from the rental of office space in "Charity Towers" at commercial rates to organisations such as Marie Curie, MacMillan Cancer Support and Comic Relief. The King is the patron of Marie Curie and MacMillan

(from someone who is not a sycophant)

Disgusting

And they are already getting half a billion every year

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

Big Business can't stop its illegal, fantastically lucrative gossiping

Seven years ago, I called Leonard Cohen’s Everybody Knows “the perfect anthem for our times.”

Everybody knows the war is over Everybody knows the good guys lost Everybody knows the fight was fixed The poor stay poor, the rich get rich That’s how it goes Everybody knows

https://memex.craphound.com/2016/11/11/leonard-cohen-wrote-the-perfect-anthem-for-our-times/

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/16/compulsive-cheaters/#rigged

That was just after Cohen died, and while the world seems to want to settle on Hallelujah as his totemic song, Everybody Knows keeps inserting itself into the discourse, in the most toxic, hope-draining way possible. Whenever some awful scandal involving the great and the good breaches, we’re told that “everybody knew” already, so let’s move on.

This current has been running through our society for decades now. Remember when the Snowden leaks hit and a yawning chorus of nihilists told us that they knew already and so should anyone else with the smallest iota of sophistication? Back then Jay Rosen coined a rejoinder to this counsel of despair: “Don’t savvy me”:

https://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu/status/344825874362810369

Everybody knows. It’s what we heard after the Panama Papers. Swissleaks. Luxleaks. The Paradise Papers. Everybody knows! It’s what the nothing-to-see-here crowd said about Propublica’s explosive IRSLeaks, back in 2021:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/15/guillotines-and-taxes/#carried-interest

The leaks revealed the tax-dodges of the richest and most powerful people in America, which were jaw-dropping in their audacity and shamelessness. Sure, maybe you suspected that the 400 richest people in America paid less tax than you — but did you really guess that the means by which they did this was through taking massive deductions on their elite hobbies?

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

Maybe “everybody knows” that the game is rigged, but did you know how? Like, did you know that REITs — a tax shelter for mom-and-pop investors who buy an income property for their retirement — have become a primary vehicle for gutting unions at hotels, slashing wages and imposing brutal, dangerous working conditions?

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/01/reit-modernization-act/#reit-makes-might

The leaks are cumulative. By combining data from one leak with another, we can build out a far more detailed picture of the conspiracy — and it is a conspiracy — among the utlrawealthy and their Renfields in the law, real-estate and accounting trades to duck their responsibilities and mound ever-more treasure on their hoards.

Take the Jersey Offshore leaks (2020), comprising the internal memos of La Hougue, a fantastically crooked firm of fixers on the Isle of Jersey, one of the lawless tax-crime jurisdictions that the UK pretends it has no control over. La Hougue has a playbook, 11 tactics for lying about your taxes. The remarkable thing about these 11 tactics is how flimsy they are, how easy it is to penetrate their lies. When Parliament says it can’t possibly do anything about the criminal havens in the Channel, remember the Jersey Offshore leaks and remind yourself that not even Parliament is that credulous. They know. Everybody knows:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/20/la-hougue/#complexity

Why do working people think the Democrats are just another party for the ultra-rich? Maybe it’s Pelosi’s relentless opposition to meaningful curbs on insider trading. Or maybe it’s the kinds of politicians that the Democratic Machine likes to rally behind — like Tali Farhadian Weinstein, who raised millions in 2021, in large-money donations from Democratic finance-sector donors in her bid to become the DA of Manhattan. Farhadian Weinstein and her husband have more than $100m in annual income, and yet, paid no federal tax in 2013, 2015 and 2017. In 2014, they paid $6,584:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/17/quis-custodiet-irs/#trumps-taxes

Propublica isn’t done with the IRS Files. Today, they published a long investigation into ultra-rich corporate executives who buy and sell their competitors’ stock for massive profits with suspiciously precise timing. The data comes from 1099-B filings, which brokerages file with the IRS with each trade, but which the IRS doesn’t share with the SEC:

https://www.propublica.org/article/secret-irs-files-trading-competitors-stock

Here are some examples:

Ohio billionaire August Troendle, CEO of Medpace, repeatedly bought and sold shares of $Syneos — his company’s archrival, timing the transactions with a management shakeup that dropped the stock by 16% in one day, and an SEC investigation that crushed Syneos’s stock by 25%. His precision timing made him at least $2.3m in profit.

Isaac Larian, CEO of Bratz-maker MGA, made $28m trading shares in Mattel, MGA’s nemesis and frequent litigant — during a period when Mattel stock crashed by 57% (!). Larian boasts that “I made a LOT more money shorting Mattel stock than they did running a $4.5 billion toy company.”

Larian’s trades also involved some very precise timing. Sometimes, he took positions just before his own company announced its upcoming products, and others positions immediately preceded major disclosures from Mattel. Larian’s subordinates told Propublica that he is “is a boss with an endless appetite for information about his company and its competitors, constantly grilling subordinates on minutiae about the industry.”

Larian couldn’t explain the timing of these trades. His lawyer told Propublica that it was “false and defamatory” to suggest that he “possessed material, nonpublic information that Larian knew was obtained in breach of a duty.”

Next up is Gerald Boelte, founder and chair of the massive oil company LLOG. LLOG partners with other companies for its oil drilling. Companies like Stone Energy. Boelte bought a huge position in Stone the day before the company’s 2015 earnings report, in which they revealed an increase their reserves’ value, pulling in a 65% one day profit. He’d never bought shares in Stone before.

Boetle told Propublica, “I do not and have never traded on any material, non-public information of competitors, business partners or others… Any implication that I was investing based upon advance knowledge is therefore clearly false.”

Jim Sankey is CEO of Invue. He bought $3.2m worth of shares in his rival Checkpoint, while checkpoint was in secret negotiations to be acquired by CCL Industries. Sankey was already thoroughly connected to Checkpoint, having sold a $150m product line to them in 2007. There’s no record that he’d ever traded Checkpoint before. He made $2.3m. Sankey says “he did not know Checkpoint was going to be acquired.” He says that his company was not approached by Checkpoint as a potential acquirer.

Barry Wish was a board member of Ocwen, a company he co-founded. After the Great Financial Crisis, Ocwen bid unsuccessfully to buy $215b worth of Bank of America mortgages. The winning bidder was Nationstar. Three weeks before Nationstar’s winning bid was announced, Wish bought $600k worth of Nationstar shares. After the bid was announced, he sold them for for a $157k profit.

Wish told Propublica that he never traded competitors’ stock: “No, not at all.” Propublica read him the details of the trade from his leaked 1099-B. He said “You might see it, but I don’t have any recollection” and hung up.

Steven Grossman is a cardboard heir — a nepobaby who inherited Southern Container Corp from his grandpa. After he sold the company to Rock-Tenn for $1b in 2013, he stayed on as a senior exec. Over the next 5 years, he traded large blocks of shares in Rock-Tenn’s competitors, companies like Temple-Inland, a company that he made a 37% profit on after its acquisition was announced in 2011, one week after Grossman started buying its shares.

Grossman falsely told Propublica, “I haven’t traded stock since then.” IRS records show that Grossman continued to trade. Grossman also told Propublica that he had no role with Rock-Tenn, despite being on their payroll for five years. When asked about his extremely lucky timing buying and selling Temple-Inland, he said “That was 10 years ago” and hung up.

As Propublica’s Robert Faturechi and Ellis Simani write, Securities regulations have their origins in the crash of 1929, and the subsequent collapse in confidence in markets and capitalism, the sense that the system was rigged for the wealthy and political insiders. That is a pretty good summation of sentiment today:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/15/mon-dieu-les-guillotines/#ceci-nes-pas-une-bailout

It’s not just that corporate executives are corrupt, it’s that they’re lavishly, shamelessly, endlessly, incorrigibly corrupt. Take Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern, the sixth- and seventh-largest Class I railroads in the USA, whose merger was just approved by the Surface Transportation Board.

There are plenty of good reasons for the STB to have blocked this merger. The rail industry is already excessively concentrated, and its top execs are so convinced that they’re both too big to fail and too big to jail that they’re rendering entire towns permanently uninhabitable in order to eke out a few more points in profit:

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

But there are specific reasons to have blocked this merger, starting with the whistleblower report about CP and KCS executives illegally coming together for a three-day “retreat” at The Breakers hotel in Palm Beach, a notorious site for Republican operatives to collude with the business lobby:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2023-03-16-canadian-pacific-kansas-city-southern-rail-merger/

As Luke Goldstein writes for The American Prospect, both companies spent millions in 2020 and 2022 on campaign contributions to “grease the skids” for the merger — in particular, ensuring that the combined company could transport Alberta tar sands oil (the filthiest, most energy intensive oil in the world) to US ports.

Though the STB was informed of the illegal meeting — in which the two companies behaved as though the merger had already been finalized — STB chair Martin Oberman told Goldstein that the Board did not write to the companies for an explanation before waving through their merger.

Instead, Oberman dismissed the complaint on the grounds that “Railroads have to be able to talk to one another to function.” Typically this takes place over a free phone call, though — not on a three-day executive junket at a hotel where the rooms run $1,500/night.

Oberman knows what happened at that meeting.

Everybody knows.

It comes as no surprise to learn that before FTX imploded and destroyed the savings of its depositors, it paid out $3b to its top executives, including the criminal Sam Bankman-Fried:

https://gizmodo.com/sbf-ftx-crypto-sam-bankman-fried-1850232043

It comes as no surprise that Silicon Valley Bank paid out bonuses to its execs and employees hours before it collapsed:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/11/silicon-valley-bank-employees-received-bonuses-hours-before-takeover.html

Everybody knows.

It’s comforting to think that the tax code loopholes that the ultrawealthy exploit are an epiphenomenon of complexity, an unavoidable consequence of the technical requirements of a big regulation that spans 300m+ people. But the truth is, the loopholes in the US tax code were inserted by politicians who got massive campaign contributions from donors who directly benefited from those loopholes. Senator Ron Johnson got $20m from the owners of Uline (Dick and Liz Uihlein) and roofing magnate Diane Hendricks, then he blocked the Trump tax bill until his fellow lawmakers inserted a loophole that produced $215m for the Uihleins and Hendricks, in just the first year:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/11/the-canada-variant/#shitty-man-of-history-theory It’s not even surprising that a sitting US Senator amended a bill to give hundreds of millions of dollars to billionaires who gave him tens of millions of dollars.

Everybody knows. It’s weirdly comforting to think that everyday people vote for demagogue wreckers because Facebook hired a legion of evil sorcerers to fashion a mind-control ray out of Big Data and AI, but Facebook lies about everything, and everyone who ever claimed to have a mind-control ray was a liar.

Maybe people vote for demagogue wreckers because they believe the system is rotten, and maybe they believe the system is rotten because the system is rotten. Maybe the self-described evil sorcerers of Big Tech aren’t “hacking our dopamine loops” — maybe they’re just helping opportunists target people who are justifiably angry:

https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

The problem with this explanation is that it requires “progressive” parties to actually do stuff to demonstrate that they are on the side of people, not the side of paperclip-maximizing immortal colony organisms and the corporate executives who pretend to run them:

https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1184004730722217984

I try to have hope — that is, I try to believe that if we can only make changes to our material circumstances, however small they may seem, that we might attain a new vantagepoint that reveals more possible changes within our grasp:

https://gen.medium.com/hope-not-optimism-943e88291b

Some days, it’s hard to have hope. Some days, it’s so obvious that everybody knows, all that I can muster is fury. Fury is not a full substitute for hope, but it’ll do. It’s a far superior alternative to the fatalism that “everybody knows” and thus nothing can be done.

Some fights you win, and other fights, you just fight, because surrender isn’t an option. Everybody knows, right? If everybody knows, then everybody might just decide to do something about it.

Next Monday (Mar 20), I’m doing a remote talk for the Ostrom Workshop’s Beyond the Web Speaker Series.

[Image ID: A smoke-filled room lit by candles. Around a large formal table sit various 19th century gentlemen-type people. One of them stands and reads from a memo. The shadow he casts is in the shape of a dollar-sign.]