#rich company owners amirite

[mckitterick]

the final generation was a brilliant send-off - finally a reliable Jaguar! all-aluminum monocoque and body, and gorgeous inside and out. this is our wedding car, a bargain we picked up at only 10 years young (rich people only want new cars, so we got it for less than the original buyer's tax bill)

on our cross-country honeymoon trip last fall, despite the car's supercharged-V6 power, we averaged better than 30mpg thanks to its light weight, 8-speed overdrive transmission, direct fuel injection (99mpg coming down hills and mountains!), and judicious use of cruise control (gradually dropping speed on uphills when real-time mileage dropped below 19mpg)

plus it's a joy to be inside - every drive is a little vacation. I mean, surrounded by soft leather and gleaming wood under a panoramic sunroof while listening to an audiophile sound system and embraced by heated and cooled massaging seats, amirite?

the only reason Jaguar ceased production on the XJ sports sedan is that the next-gen was supposed to be all-electric, and the company's research revealed that their traditional buyers don't want electric cars. but examples like ours will be around for decades to come, if they end up well-loved by their final owners like us

so far after putting on 6000 miles, so good. only needed a new headlight bulb (knocks shiny wood trim)

Jaguar XJ, 1968-2019. Jaguar have cancelled plans to produce a new generation electric XJ model as part of a new Reimagine plan which will see Jaguar’s entire range being electrified by 2025

[kiaronna]

fic title: silvertongue

Ooooh hmm. 

OKAY SO ENVISION a kind of My Fair Lady situation! But with a lot of twists. Viktor specializes in public speaking-- in training politicians, company CEOs, etc-- and language skills. He has a PhD in like 3 languages. His English, Russian, French, and like two other languages are fan-effing-tastic. 

At a corporate party, he meets a nervous and stuttering Katsuki Yuuri. Viktor’s facial memory, despite his talent for socializing, is that of a face-blind goldfish. “So how long have you worked here?” He asks, because oh this man is cute, and maybe Viktor can persuade the CEO to give him his number. Who is Viktor kidding-- of course he can persuade the CEO to give him his number. He knows exactly the persona and the enunciation to use.

“I don’t.... work here,” says Yuuri, and Viktor watches his hypotheticals go up in smoke. “My company has, umm, a c-contract?” 

“With a fortune top 500 company? You clearly made the right choice with your employment.” He nudges up a little closer, and thus gets to observe as the man frantically eyes his empty champagne glass. 

“Lucky me, having this job still.” The words are strangely dark-- but Viktor forgets them, far too easily, as Yuuri snags three flutes of champagne from a passing maitre-d’.

Three hours later, Viktor is the closest to plastered he’s been in a while in public, silver tongue melting. “You’re so-- inspiring,” he hiccups. “You talk as smooth as a devil, Yuuri!”

“That’s because his company shows no mercy,” says Christophe, who is not as drunk as Viktor wishes he was.

“His company?” 

Viktor has to learn quickly. My company=Yuuri’s company=the company that Yuuri owns.

“MY company,” Yuuri says, “donates 10% of our income to charity. You should see it, Viktor! Come visit! Teach me English! Teach me... powerpoints!”

Viktor hates Powerpoint. He still shows up at YT America’s headquarters in Detroit, where Yuuri flings a whole sheaf of papers into the air at the sight of him.

...They might have a lot to work on, Viktor admits. But that raw charisma, that English which is so close to refined... Viktor is going to shape it. 

Also, he’s in love with him, but if Yuuri is going to pretend that hasn’t already happened, Viktor will tone it down.

(Viktor does not tone it down)

“Honestly,” says Yuuri, when they’re curled up together after a particularly terrible meeting, “if I don’t get at least three more contracts before the end of the year, I’ll have to return to Japan in disgrace.”

“Do you even speak Japanese?” Viktor asks, because he’s started to wonder. All of Yuuri’s business partners are American, but there’s the occasional private phone call...

Yuuri laughs. “I’m from Japan, Viktor, did you think I was a second gen?”

“But-- your accent?”

Yuuri smirks. “What accent?”

Exactly.

“I moved over when Yu-Topia--” only the most exalted hotel series in the Eastern hemisphere ”--needed to branch out to the States.” The explanation is not helping. “But I’ve been struggling. Building up a company from the ground is different here than in Japan. I refuse to go back to my family’s company with this kind of progress.”

He makes a face. Viktor has a heart attack.

“You have a whole chain of top hotels in the States! With... with world famous spas! You have doggy spas for Makkachin, for Christ’s sake, I refuse to stay anywhere else when I’m on business trips...”

“Nothing the Hiltons haven’t done before,” says Yuuri, and Viktor is an expert on body language but it is still impossible for him to believe that, with those unwavering eyes and guileless face, Yuuri isn’t lying.

“You need a vacation,” Viktor declares. Apparently, his vacation to be Yuuri’s adviser is not enough of one for both of them.

“Vay...cay...shun,” Yuuri sounds out slowly, curiously.

“Oh my god,” Viktor fusses, taking his face in his hands. “Yuuri! You’re worse than me!”

“No I’m not,” laughs Yuuri, with a kiss to the tip of his nose. Viktor is still frowning. “...I know what a vacation is. I also know that it’s great to own hotels in paradise. So when I get my three contracts, where do you want to go?”

They end up going to a tiny onsen in Japan, which is still occupied by its multi-millionaire owners. 

Viktor couldn’t have asked for a better vacation.

[argumate]

There were some errors in my last post! I was unaware of some facts. However, reality is actually even more in my favour than I realised.

I said you could purchase a headphone adapter for $9, but I have since been informed that the iPhone 7 comes with one for free. So if you buy the phone you get a new pair of headphones with a lightning connector, and you get an adapter so that you can use your old headphones too. Win-win!

Yes, if you lose the headphones or the adapter you must purchase new ones. This is how physical objects work in the universe in which we live. I too resent Apple for not having cloning facilities that can replicate matter at zero cost and usher in fully automatic luxury communism, that would indeed be swell.

But you worry that $9 to replace it is “not particularly cheap”! The phone itself costs over $1000 you fucking walnut, so if you have a habit of losing small electronic items you might want to reconsider purchasing one in the first place.

When I said that anyone can make Bluetooth headphones I didn’t mean that you are capable of doing this. But Bluetooth is an open standard and you can buy compatible headphones from wherever you like. Personally not a fan of the wireless, but standards are good.

(The lightning connector being proprietary is bad, and is a genuine knock against Apple, one that I have pointed out in numerous posts, and something actually worth complaining about if you are someone who dislikes capitalism).

But let’s zoom out a little. By myopically focusing on a few trivial inconveniences you are missing the opportunity cost of not making the change, and the future potential for innovation that it unlocks. This attitude will not age well, and the fuss over the headphone jack will seem laughable in the future.

More generally, why so much outrage? No one is obliged to purchase an iPhone and suffer the terrible consequences of having to use wireless headphones or need an adapter for the aux cord. This is an entirely voluntary choice, and as has been pointed out Apple has around 15% market share.

If anything this could be seen as an indirect tax on the wealthy, charging them more for overpriced phones and giving them reduced functionality, while the poor enjoy the benefits of cheap convenient Android devices. How could a leftist possibly oppose soaking the rich?

From a design point of view it is entirely consistent with Apple’s ethos going back to the very founding of the company, so it should not be surprising at all, just Apple being Apple as they have every right to be. One button mice, amirite.

There are ways of reacting to this product announcement that make sense:

“I personally require a 3.5mm headphone jack on my phone, so I will not be purchasing an iPhone 7 for this reason.”

“I would prefer to have a headphone jack but the benefits of owning an iPhone outweigh the disadvantage, so I will simply register my disappointment.”

“Haha by removing the headphone jack Apple has made a foolish decision and will lose ground to their competitors.”

Any of these is a perfectly reasonable reaction! But the sense of aggrieved outrage on behalf of imagined iPhone owners compelled by the Man to upgrade to an expensive new model and then suffering the travails of needing to use an adapter to plug in old audio equipment is just baffling.

Has anyone told you what they’ve done to the home button, btw? You’re going to hate it.

[silver-and-ivory]

Would you like to provide some links or examples as to how police favor white supremacists over black rights activists? No pressure to respond, of course, but if you do choose to, I'm not asking for anything exhaustive. Maybe a keyword or event or two so I can research it myself. Thanks.

Ha, this is not the ask I was expecting to get about that post!

Hm.

It’s possible that this article from the Atlantic about gun control has some relevant information, but it’s not comprehensive.

So here’s a summary of what I was referencing instead. When slavery was common in the South, there were gangs of white men who would search for runaway slaves and in general police black behavior. According to some sources, modern police forces are a direct descendant of these gangs.

After the Civil War, former plantation owners and so on tried to reestablish their power. Part of the way they did this was through arresting lots of innocent black people; slavery was - and is - still legal as long as the slaves were criminals. The police didn’t function as protectors or as enforcers of the law, but instead as the implements of white supremacy.

All of this was accompanied by racist policies whereby insurance companies would devalue districts where black or other nonwhite people lived, resulting in white flight and creating ghettoes. Also, job discrimination created poverty; government welfare programs after wars and in the New Deal weren’t applied equally to whites and blacks, so that the form of welfare that blacks got ended up being more stigmatized. (For example, WWII veteran benefits included a Nice Picket Fence in Suburbia. Black people did not get that benefit.)

Skip ahead a few years the criminalization of blackness (and other minorities) continues to be a Major Problem. The police consistently act as enforcers of e.g. segregation laws. The criminal “justice” system consistently fucks over black people and forgives white supremacists, like the murderers of Emmett Till. (A little known fact is that Emmett Till had had polio, which left him with a consistent stutter. He was taught to whistle so that it was easier for him to speak. The incident that lead to his death was him whistling at a white woman. This is kind of far out there but it seems as though there’s a natural connection between these two facts.)

(Police also served as enforcers of gender normativity- there were laws that women had to be wearing three articles of men’s clothing at a time, and vice versa; also, gay sex was sometimes criminalized. The police would arrest and rape queer people routinely. This is depicted in Stone Butch Blues very disturbingly and it is also probably relevant to this Amnesty International article, “Brutality in Blue”. It’s part of what caused the Stonewall Riots.

In addition to this, the police would ignore crimes committed against queer people, turning a blind eye to queers being assaulted or raped. This is called selective enforcement and it is Very Bad.

This all means that black trans women are (likely) at a higher risk of having bad stuff happen to them; for an example, see the CeCe McDonald case.)

At some point the school-to-prison pipeline became a thing as well. The policing of black people was also extended to Latinos.

 It only gets worse with the War on Drugs, wherein President Nixon deliberately and explicitly decided to criminalize crack in order to hurt black people (and marijuana in order to hurt the anti-Vietnam counterculture). A particularly notorious example of the criminalization of [stuff black people do] is the massive disparity in crack versus powder cocaine sentencing. Crack is something poor black people tended (tend?) to use more; powder is something rich white people tend(ed) to use. So of course…

…people faced longer sentences for offenses involving crack cocaine than for offenses involving the same amount of powder cocaine – two forms of the same drug. Most disturbingly, because the majority of people arrested for crack offenses are African American, the 100:1 ratio resulted in vast racial disparities in the average length of sentences for comparable offenses. On average, under the 100:1 regime, African Americans served virtually as much time in prison for non-violent drug offenses as whites did for violent offenses. 

The disparity has since been reduced to a mere 18:1 ratio. Racial equality, eh?

This is a good time to mention that a good deal of Republican presidents, including Nixon and Our Good Friend Ronald Reagan, tried to pander to the South by being utter racists. They would deliberately say things like “welfare queens” or “thugs” or “law and order” or “states’ rights”, and the South would know that they really meant to say “fuck those uppity n-words, amirite?”. This was called the Southern Strategy. Internal records show that Nixon knew exactly what he was doing and that he was deliberately doing it; he summarizes his strategy in basically the same way I am.

At some point a narrative of black criminality started being common. Black people and black men especially were seen as threatening, thugs, brutes, less than human. They were threats to the beauty of the white women (as in Emmett Till’s case). This has also been applied to various other minorities (see: Donald Trump on Mexicans).

Unfortunately - somewhat similarly to their treatment of queers - , police are very bad at actually doing stuff about real crimes committed against black people- ie, the much vaunted black-on-black crime problem, which some people use to derail conversations about police brutality and abuses. The underpolicing of minority neighborhoods is actually an outgrowth of racism as well.

Partially due to a fear of blacks, and partially due to a neurotic fear of Communism, during the 70s or around that time, the FBI started keeping information on a lot of black activists, including the (radical! socialist!) Martin Luther King Jr. They assassinated or otherwise eliminated a lot of the black leadership. Here is a very emotional letter from James Baldwin to Angela Davis about her arrest, which is probably somewhat relevant. (Content warning for comparisons to the Holocaust.)

The media did not care about dead black people. The media did care when white college students, down in the South for Freedom Summer, started getting killed, by police forces. The involvement of white students, of course, was orchestrated by nonviolent black activists like King.

Another remarkable thing that King did was that he made going to prison a mark of prestige, rather than shame. This is really cool just on its own, but it’s even more clever when one considers the context.

Everyone knows about Martin Luther King Jr. Not everyone knows why he was so admirable, or so successful. Through nonviolence, he made clear what had been true for centuries- that the white supremacists were the initiators of violence and the breakers of peace. He actively worked against notions of black people as brutes or criminals.

Black Lives Matter and the Ferguson… thing… are reactions to hundreds of years of racist police enforcement and brutality. Conservative Republican reactions are, by and large, abysmal: whenever another black child gets murdered by the police people always try to justify it, claiming that the kid is Just A Thug. He stole cigarettes! He had his hand in his pocket. He was wearing a hoodie. He was so big and threatening. We had to tackle her to the ground because we were Just Scared. He was rude so we put him in a chokehold and ignored him saying he couldn’t breathe! They were just thugs.

As if these make someone less of a victim, or less worthy of care. As if this makes police officers less responsible for what they’ve done.

(Note that I’m not making specific claims about specific incidents- just, taken as a whole, it’s Very Very Damning.)

As a whole, the police force functions as an instrument of white supremacy. This is a disgusting perversion of the Lockean social contract and the rule of law.

And I don’t know how to solve it.

[blakelywintersfield]

Here are a few posts that give actual examples of why Biden is better than Trump: 1 2 3

Biden fucking sucks, yes. Biden is Republican Lite, yes. Biden still is very anti-progressive, yes. But he is better than Trump. Biden also doesn't have literal white supremacists that are calling for overt mass genocide backing him. Biden doesn't have literal Nazis and terrorists supporting him. Is he what America needs? Not by a fucking long shot. But he is better than Trump, and the first step to keeping people safe. All our problems aren't solved by the "right" person being elected, but it's a crucial step in fixing shit. I'm talking as a literal anarchist.

And for anyone saying "Jo Jorgensen! She's better than both!" She is not. For those not wanting to follow the link: she's a typical libertarian. "No government involvement" seems great until you realize that means discrimination is allowed, including in marriage (she believes churches should determine who can and can't marry), jobs (believes men and women should not be guaranteed equal pay, and that paid leave shouldn't be required), healthcare (believes insurance companies should be allowed to deny people with pre-existing conditions, deny coverage for birth control, not cover non-American citizens, and not support Medicaid and Medicare), services (believes businesses should be allowed to deny service if the individual "goes against their religious beliefs"), and race (believes law enforcement should be allowed to detain immigrants for minor crimes and handed over to federal immigration authorities). She also doesn't believe we should enforce safety measures against COVID (because that's the government telling people what to do! Fuck the immunocompromised, muh rites!); doesn't support Trump being impeached; against defunding police to fund social and community programs, and believes spending on these programs should be cut; against fighting climate change; against changing gun laws (this is needed -- gun laws mainly disenfranchise those who NEED to be armed for safety, and they NEED to be changed to enforce people who SHOULDN'T have guns getting them legally, i.e. domestic abusers, rapists, people with ties to criminal groups like the KKK, etc.); believes the government should not intervene in drug prices, even for lifesaving drugs like insulin (or that the government shouldn't intervene in any business practices); against raising taxes on the rich, including in an effort to relax student debt ('cause fuck the younger generation, amirite?); against mandatory vaccination (once again, fuck the immunocompromised!); against raising minimum wage (because, once again, government "interference" with business); pro-gun in schools (teachers should not be carrying guns in school, for a myriad of reasons); literally against anti-discrimination laws; against free college; against abolishing the electoral college (something put into practice for the benefit of slave owners); against affordable AND single-payer healthcare; pro-fracking and offshore oil drilling; pro-hate speech (she literally states the first amendment should protect it); against funding clean energy; pro-drug testing welfare recipients (this is horribly classist and ableist); pro-throttling, anti-net neutrality; against government intervention to avoid monopolies; for lowering taxes on businesses; against UBI; against funding WHO; against providing safe spaces for college students (in her words: "prepare" them "for real life", which, given she's fine with hate speech, makes sense!); for letting businesses donate to political parties; God I could go on and on, but the point is she's literally a fucking corpocrat. And what's highlighted in blue is what Biden is in opposed to her (i.e. if she's against, he's for, and vice versa).

Yeah, Biden has lied before. So has Trump, so has Jorgensen, so has literally every politician ever. But pushing out leadership that literally condones homeland terrorists and labels anti-fascist movements as a threat is really fucking important, and getting the House and Senate in the blue will put pressure on Biden to pony up on his promises. It's a first step. No one, except cishet white upper middle class folks, thinks Biden getting in office will solve everything. Everyone is aware him winning the election won't be the end of all our problems, but for fuckssake, I'd rather have some old ass motherfucker that can be pushed into being more progressive over a man who literally supports white nationalists' violence against civilians. Biden being better than Trump doesn't mean he's the solution. It just means he's not a literal fascist.