#the amount of people who act like this does not tally with the rate of those
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postsforposting · 8 months ago
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>how can you provide value to justify remaining in their life.
.....that's not how that works.
why doesn't anyone want to admit they like someone? make the first move? why is that scary? it shouldn't be, because all you're doing is saying you value someone else. that's a great thing to do.
the scary bit comes in with other people's nastiness. they can make fun of you or reject you, say they hate you, etc.
....why is that something you (general you) take personally, as a charge against you? that's their piss poor behavior, it's got nothing to do with you. you didn't do anything wrong. someone shits on the floor of the store, that's their problem, it has nothing to do with you. even if they claim they did it because of you. what people say and what is fact are not the same thing. you realize you are pissing on the poor here?
if they say they only like you as a friend, assuming we're talking about dating, same deal. yea, it's rejection, but why is that something crushing to you? it sucks, sure. but crushing? you did nothing wrong. it's not a judgement of you. people have reasons to say no that have nothing to do with negative judgement. just like you say no for reasons that don't mean "i fucking HATE YOU, DIE". you're different genres of movie, you're just not the kind they're looking for. it sucks, but it's not soul crushing to find out you like horror and they don't. it happens.
even if they do get nasty in their rejection of you. you dodged a bullet, so why are you pissing on the poor?
i feel like part of this comes from some idea that you could MAKE people change their answer, make them accept you, and then that would have avoided it and that would be SO MUCH BETTER. because acceptance is moral approval and rejection is moral inferiority....????? i know that's what we're taught, but that is not reality. pissing on the poor.
you see what i'm getting at here? wild fear of other people that everyone is taking personally as if it's due to personal flaws, and IF ONLY they were obsessive enough to avoid errors then their lives would be perfect. you know. like how advertisements work. not real.
you don't "provide value" to other people. you don't need to justify your existence. your value is that your presence is wanted--you're liked. that's the totality of it. friendship and romance aren't transactional, you're not providing a service like a plumber who has to leave upon completion. that's a red flag, not a healthy relationship.
i'm not trying to say that changing the way you think about this stuff is going to make other people stop being nasty. it won't. it'll just change the way you view their behavior: it's not about you, it doesn't reflect upon you. it shouldn't make you reconsider your life.
and that means it hurts less. it sucks, but it's not shattering. because their behavior is their choice, it's not about you.
that sort of gets into the suffering thing, because suffering generally means something is wrong. (i did not read the link and it sounds like something i would not agree with based on the summary) suffering doesn't go away until you fixed the wrong thing.
the wrong thing here is taking responsibility for the way other people act. thinking you "have no value". being alone sucks, but it doesn't mean you suck. you just haven't found someone in the same movie genre. you still get to enjoy your genre fully. you're still you.
if you keep setting off suffering, it gets worse. if you turn that off before you fix it, then you still get damage. silencing the alarm does not fix the cause of the alarm.
(that doesn't mean suffering is good or useful, philosophically speaking. emotions and biology don't translate to the abstract like that. we gotta have stuff that says "something is wrong", and biology hasn't got many ways to do that. i am actually saying here that feeling bad isn't necessary. we are choosing to inflict this stuff on each other by how we treat each other and how we believe reality works.)
i'm not saying you should suffer. i'm saying the suffering is unreasonable and unnecessary. it's something you can fix if you change how you think about this stuff.
so fix the problem, stop the suffering. don't bolster it by saying it's correct.
There's a post from a couple of years ago which I was reminded of and wanted to add to today, about nobody wanting to take the supplicant role in courtship, but it's unrebloggable due to some constraint the OP put on it, so I'll just quote my bit:
Being attracted to someone is distressing. I think the largest part of it is hunger to know someone (?); but when you can’t get to know them well, it ends up a stunted obsession: all that drive-to-know - enough to build a deep, detailed model of another personality - chewing over scraps of phrases and trivial actions, until you’re snappishly bored with your own mind. Your skin feels hungry and there’s nothing you can do about it: “touch starvation” is a phrase that comes to mind. The person’s absence and their presence both hurt: absence obviously, presence because once you’re there you find that there’s still distance, you still miss them. It’s rather like homesickness. Courting someone is wretched. It’s frightening and humiliating and full of agonising waiting periods and jarring mood switchbacks. It feels something like being dragged along on a fishhook, with the line attached to another person’s little finger. Liking someone more than they like you is a position of low power. The incentives are to be servile. You have nothing to bargain with: whatever they decide, you agree to with a smile. You always try to sound happy, because that’s what’s most appealing. You give up on areas of confusion instead of trying to understand, because asking questions annoys people and any annoying act pushes you closer to the cliff-edge of losing them. Any small disagreement feels like a large risk, so you distort your own opinions a bit. You can’t be spontaneous; your inner voice is always tallying accounts: how many days since the last message, too few, you mustn’t bother them yet / how many days since you came up with something interesting, too many, they may forget; don’t intrude so much, but simultaneously what have you done for them lately, how can you provide value to justify remaining in their life. It seems bad that we’re like this. I don’t imagine humans are especially badly formed or anything, it’s probably just as subjectively rotten for every animal that does courtship displays. But if anyone eventually makes robots with emotion-like motivational systems, they shouldn’t include anything like attraction. It’s so silly.
I feel like resurrecting this today to celebrate being out of it. In the last two weeks, somebody has given me the double gifts of liking me and of having the generosity to say so, and show so. All I want to do is be glad and be grateful, and try never to cause this person to experience anything described above.
But I stand by the description, it is a correct description, and we are so badly made it is infuriating. @nohoperadio's good post on the tragic stupidity of pain incidentally also works as a discourse on eros: if there'd been any intelligence involved in the design process, distress signals would come with an off-switch! (Hence my blog tagline.) But instead, evolution is a pitiless idiot, love is humiliation, nonviable attachments take years to starve to death, and there is no moral of the story. Absurd. A baboon could design a better emotional constitution.
Delightfully, this week ACX introduced David Pearce ("For centuries, philosophers have praised suffering as a necessary part of the human condition. For decades, David Pearce has told those other philosophers that they are bad and wrong"), who is doing his best to make a better emotional constitution available, and I approve of such a project so highly that it's been necessary to stack new levels of approval above my previous maximum to encompass how right he is. It's really exciting that any intelligent and active person considers progress of this sort possible and is working on it.
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redwineconversation · 2 years ago
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Australia - Ireland Postgame Thoughts
Blah blah not doing this for every game, I feel like I am going to DIE I am so tired so idk how those who are chronically online manage to do this on a daily basis, etc etc. Pls send Red Bull or Starbucks, I need it so badly.
I still don't think that Australia is going to win and I have reservations that they will go deep, but they won the first game at home in front of a pretty big crowd. It's not that I thought nerves would get to them, but I wasn't exactly sure how they would handle the nerves either, if that makes sense.
What I wasn't concerned about was them handling Ireland's physicality. It's interesting to me because I don't think that Australia is "physical" in the traditional footballing sense of the term, more that they are athletic. But because of the athleticism they were able to cope with McCabe's traditional definition of defending.
For me, McCabe is the ultimate "what if" player. She's good, she's talented, I like her left foot. I am more than happy to acknowledge all of that. But holy crap does she lack structure / self-control, and I wish she would find herself in a team where reckless fouls had consequences rather than be encouraged. One of these days McCabe is going to cause an extremely severe injury to another player. When it happens, Arsenal fans will hand wave it away, saying that McCabe is "not that kind of player" and that she "didn't mean it." (second part I will probably concede)
I don't think McCabe actually wants to severely injure another player. At least, I hope she doesn't want to. But I also think it's only a matter of time before she will, because these reckless tackles are done intentionally. It's done with the intent to foul, to show that neither she or her team will be bullied. I'm fine with a team wanting to prove they are top dog. I'm less fine with it if the only way to do it is dirty fouls.
Steph Catley is under-rated. Her penalty was really well taken, excluding the last 10 minutes or so she managed to keep her team's composure under control pretty well, and she didn't let the occasion overwhelm her. I'm rapidly developing a soft spot for her but only as long as she plays for Australia.
Vine and Cooney-Cross are two of the younger players I really, really like. I do think they will be snatched up by bigger European teams if not this summer then by the end of next season for sure. They're fun to watch in that they're, well, quiet, just keep their head down and do their job.
One day Carpenter will cross accurately and I will finally know peace. Her finishing is something that definitely needs work. The plus side is she is young and it will happen - especially because she is working on it at both club and national team level. It's nice knowing she has room to grow, it's frustrating that there are growing pains. Overall I don't think her game was much to write home about in that she too just did her job without having to do anything flashy. I'd rather not notice my defenders because if you do then it means something is going wrong. The heat mat shows her exactly where she should be - defending on the lower right side of the field. So I guess it's a give and take: yes I would rather her crosses weren't on a "lob it into the box and hope for the best" level, but she also was defending a fair amount this game, which is kind of her job.
There's a dig to be made about the McCabe - Littlejohn - Foord drama but realistically I don't think it impacted the outcome of the game that much so it is what it is I guess.
Obvious penalty, dumb act to concede it. Not sure why people were up in arms about it when Raso was already getting fouled probably more than anyone (is there an actual tally? I got that impression during the game but it was also 3am and I was regretting my life choices). Shoving someone in the back in the box will always result in a penalty, particularly when they end up going to ground because of it, so yeah. Not sure why there were complaints about it. Raso didn't even dive.
Finally, just want to say thank you for New Zealand for delivering on #UpsetsWelcome from the very first game. I'd say I don't think there should be any surprises in tomorrow's games but I'd also have put real money that we would never see Hegerberg questioning her life choices while ending up as Norway's LB, so I guess never say never.
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spraxinoscope · 4 years ago
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Oct. 14: Why I still think Trump has a ~75% chance of winning
Epistemic status: Who even am I? You shouldn’t listen to me. But see the final section for details.
By ‘winning,’ I mean still being president on 1/22/21, and there being no serious actionable plan to get him out.
2500 words of paranoia and bad math after the cut.
Polling factors:
Today, 538 gives Trump a 13% chance of an EC victory, so let’s use that as a starting point. As Nate Silver will tell you every chance he gets, 2016 presidential polls were only off by a few percentage points, and that’s probably still true. But a similar (or even smaller) systematic polling error would be enough to flip some battlegrounds, bumping Trump up to something like 25-30%. Have pollsters managed to correct for the systemic errors of 2016? There’s true meaningful debate around this, but the balance of evidence seems to be that the pollsters never figured out what caused the errors, and so were not able to fix them.
Note that Trump’s decline in the polls is driven by voters who approved of the president until very recently. Consider the sort of person who still had a favorable of opinion of Trump right up until fall 2020. Generally, dips in Trump’s favorability ratings seem to have been due to conservative infighting. Often, when a person stops supporting Trump, it’s because he is being insufficiently racist. These constituents’ loyalty may be wavering, but they are not likely to switch sides.
As a complete asspull hypothesis, I’d guess that some people who tell pollsters they no longer support Trump are trying to pressure him into adopting more hardline policy and will never vote for a Democrat.
I would posit that the 13% number is the absolute hard minimum chance of Trump winning an EC victory, fair and square. Error bars push that number higher. Taking average polling data over time also pushes that number higher, since it’s almost never been this low.
Dysfunction factors:
So, those are the odds for a free and fair election. What are the odds of the election being free and fair? I’m glad you asked! Zero. 
Election integrity has taken major hits recently. Citizens United turned elections into ad campaigns. Shelby County v. Holder made laws against discriminatory election practices unenforceable. The Hatch Act is also not being enforced. The numerous alleged campaign finance law violations brought against the 2016 Trump campaign all amounted to nothing (except jail time, and subsequent pardons, for some functionaries).
Fine, let’s say elections can never be perfectly fair, but even if we grade on a curve and request that elections be as fair as possible, we’re still not doing great, and it’s been getting worse since 2010.
Hey, remember all those jokes from like 2004 onwards about how unreliable and insecure electronic voting machines are? That shit never got fixed. Remember the story from this week about some 90,000 New Yorkers getting the wrong mail-in ballots?
Remember when the Russians got into the Illinois voter database in 2016? The institutions that were supposed to defend against that kind of thing have since been gutted or captured by republicans.
Hey, remember when the Iowa primary was so dysfunctional that they ended the vote count without ever producing a final tally or figuring out what the problems were?
Election integrity groups have been sounding the alarm continuously on this one. Electoral commissions and underfunded, understaffed, and undertrained in use of modern systems. This is a huge problem all by itself, and it gets worse when applied to the next issue.
Malfeasance factors:
In my American public school civics education, I learned that Richard Nixon was a crook who paid some burglars to spy on the democrats, because of how crooked he was. I did not learn that ratfucking is bog-standard procedure, in every election, all over the world. I had to learn that on my own, later. Generally speaking, the election integrity talking heads take the opinion that most countries routinely interfere in the elections of most countries, and the Ds and the Rs have never not been spying on each other. The extraordinary thing about Watergate was that Republican congressmen were weirdly amenable to allowing an investigation into one of their own, a mistake they have never since repeated.
Some amount of ratfucking is to be expected. The nation has weathered this factor before. But, like electoral competence, this may be getting worse over time. State governments have very wide purview when it comes to voting procedure, and Republican states are wasting no time in finding creative new ways to toss out ballots. The most common reason for a mail-in ballot to be rejected is that the signature on the envelope doesn’t match the voter’s signature on file. There is no official criteria or standard practice for how close a signature has to be to count as a match. Signatures are not useful security for anything, anyway.
Georgia’s 2018 election was arguably illegitimate. Irregularities included voting sites closed at the last minute for unclear reasons and fraudulent ballot collectors stealing ballots. Calls for recounts all failed. Other southern states are on thin ice. All the big Texan cities are getting one ballot drop box each, in case you thought Texas would be allowed to turn blue.
Red states already have various laws permitting them to throw out ballots that arrive after the election. Sabotaging the post office or throwing out all uncounted ballots soon after the election, as most sitting Republicans in congress and governors have already gone on record to suggest may be necessary, is a violation of the letter but not the spirit of existing restrictive voting laws.
The big thing, of course, is that the right wing media landscape has been fully saturated with the idea that Democrats will engage in conspiracies to steal the election, and action will need to be taken to thwart these plots. To that end, Republicans at all levels of government, including at the DOJ, have repeatedly signaled willingness to take unprecedented measures to stamp out fraud. These include numerous voter purge plans, new criteria for dismissing ballots, and sending the DHS or other law enforcement agencies to take custody of ballots.
In addition, the MAGAs are organizing ‘poll watcher’ groups to secure urban voting sites. Even if these groups fully obey the law and do not engage in anything that could legally be termed intimidation or harassment, that’s still a lot of leeway. Of course, over the last couple years, we’ve all learned that right wing protesters can sometimes bend or break the law and get away with it, and sometimes receive cooperation from the police. This goes triple for blue cities in red states, which is exactly what we’re worried about.
Malfeasance in general is made easier by the unprecedented levels of geographically-sorted voting blocs. It is trivially easy to tell whether a district will go hard for Trump or hard for Biden. So, whether interference is coming from law enforcement officers, protesters, or semi-sanctioned militias, they will know which lines to intimidate and which boxes to steal.
Russiagate set a clear precedent: It doesn’t matter if it’s blatant, outrageous, or corrupt. Republicans do not want to defect, and right wing media will keep the base in line. Democrats will be outraged, and then fold. There are no remaining nonpartisan referees to appeal to.
Pundits like to imagine that sitting Republicans in congress will not blatantly steal an election for fear that it will lead to them getting voted out of office, to which I would suggest that the obvious answer is the correct one: Voted out how?
Democrats shooting themselves in the goddamn foot factors:
Trump likes to say that the election will be illegitimate if he loses. Mainstream news outlets like to push back against this. The NYT, for instance, has been loudly insistent that the election is totally secure all year.
It’s not, and they’re morons. No experts agree with them on this. Trump fabricating a bunch of fictional threats does not invalidate the numerous actual threats.
Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer would not be anyone’s first pick for the task of contesting an election, but that’s who we got.
Possible October surprises:
Hey, what do you guys think this year’s James Comey is going to be? The only real prediction I have is that something very destabilizing happens in the week before the election, but the particulars could be anything. Some fun possibilities:
DNC hacked again
Federally sanctioned repeat of the 1985 MOVE bombing
Hunter Biden cocaine sex tape
Anything that startles people, destabilizes institutions, and distracts from other issues is a viable possibility.
Scenarios after a contested election:
There are plenty of bluechecks and think tanks who have already gamed this out in detail. You don’t have to take my word for any of this part. The choices are:
There are rival sets of state electors, and Congress decides which ones count. Result: McConnell and Barr play Calvinball until they get the outcome they like, Trump remains in office.
The supreme court decides. Result: Trump remains in office.
The militias decide. Result: Trump remains in office, plus the Handmaid’s Tale happens.
There’s an orange revolution. After months of protracted struggle, Trump is ousted from office. However, in the meantime, ~8 states have seceded and Russia has annexed Alaska. In the ensuing chaos, John McAfee claims the presidency.
Probability estimates:
Trump’s odds of a ‘legitimate’ EC victory are only at 13% as of this moment, but the running average is higher, with occasional spikes above 30%. Polling errors add a little extra. Let’s say 25%.
Trump’s odds of losing the EC vote, but clawing it back through malfeasance until enough Republicans agree that he’s won, are very low in the case of a Biden landslide. But a landslide is unlikely, and as the results are closer, the probability of Republicans declaring themselves winners approach one. Note that, at least from mainstream news coverage, this won’t look like the power grab that many democrats fear. It will look like a lot of confusion and disarray, with an unclear EC count, followed by a cascade of authorities and sources declaring Trump the winner and securing the acceptance from government bodies one at a time. For the most likely election outcomes in which Trump doesn’t win straight up, I’d say a 30% chance Trump remains in office.
The election being a total dysfunctional disaster, with multiple states unable to certify results, is at least 5%. At least! In such a case, I’d give Trump an 80% chance of remaining in office.
In general, I believe that the only way that Biden gets to be president is if everything basically holds together and works like it’s supposed to, and also Trump legitimately loses the EC. There is one way for everything to go right. There are many ways it can go wrong.
The NYT has fixated on the possibility that Trump clearly loses, but refuses to leave office anyway. I’d give this no more than a 1% chance of happening. But I think there’s a major blind spot around the possibility that we have no idea who won, because the whole thing is obfuscated by multiple layers of confusion and malfeasance. What tools to democrats have for investigating malfeasance? What tools do they have for persuading people that they won when the results are in question? What tools to they have for enforcing election laws that they didn’t have in 2017?
I think they have approximately one asset, and it’s a populace that’s willing to rise up in defense of their rights. But the DNC spent the last five-ish years antagonizing and alienating anyone left of Dianne Feinstein, so, the efficacy of a potential national mobilization has been severely compromised.
Any protracted contested election scenario either favors Trump remaining in power, or the eventual balkanization of the US. One reason there are no good scenarios for a contested election is that mainstream media has been so adamant that the election is secure. When the Democrats are trying to contest results, they will be struggling against their own narrative.
Then, I add a 10% chance that a last minute October surprise tips the race to Trump. It happened last time, and Comey wasn’t even trying; now that every government office is staffed with Trump appointees who are trying, they have a decent shot at this.
Summing up these odds, I arrive at Trump having around a 70% chance.
Then, I add another 5%, because I bet there’s things I haven’t thought of, and every year there’s some small chance that the far right will go all in on a race war, and this would be a good opportunity for them.
I will take actual bets on these odds.
My biases:
Numerous.
I grew up in a red community in a red state and was bullied a lot by kids who grew up to be far-right; I have a chip on my shoulder about this that precludes dispassionate analysis.
I believe the RNC has looked at US demographic trends and likely consequences of climate change, and has accepted a certain amount of fascistic will to power as a necessary evil. This is mere supposition on my part.
Despite the fact that I am more or less an asshole stoner burnout weeb, I remain convinced that the editorial staff at the NYT and several other major American journalistic institutions are somehow even dumber than I am. Although this may sound unlikely, this assumption has been invaluable for making predictions about the world.
I am a paranoid person.
My motivations for writing this:
Believe it or not, I’m only doing this to assuage anxiety. I’ve been convinced that Trump’s odds for remaining in office have been significantly higher than polls would suggest since 2018, and it’s maddening to see so few other people agree even though my core assumptions keep not going away.
If anyone read this far: I’m sorry, and I hope this motivates you to vote, if you weren’t going to already. If Trump remains in office, protests against him will benefit from having the mandate of a clear popular vote win, even if not an EC win, so I do believe that even people outside battleground states should vote.
I don’t know about Tumblr, but on Twitter, ‘no-hopers’ are characterized (fairly or not) as being defeatist Bernie bros who think that Trump should win the election to teach the DNC a lesson. I disavow this idea in the strongest possible terms. I think Biden can win and urgently should win. But every time I see someone talking about the Biden presidency as if it were a sure thing, it takes another year off my lifespan.
No matter what happens, we will be fighting racism and corruption for the rest of our lives, because that’s what ethical behavior entails in this world. But a Biden term vs. a second Trump term are in no way equivalent, and things can still get worse.
In conclusion, [that picture of the guy at the folding table with the ‘prove me wrong’ sign]
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greyias · 5 years ago
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FIC: Smoke and Mirrors - Chapter 11
Title: Smoke and Mirrors Fandom: SWTOR Pairing: Theron Shan/f!Jedi Knight Rating: T Genre: Pre-Relationship, Slow Burn Synopsis: Something’s rotten on Carrick Station, and Theron won’t rest until he finds out what. But picking at the frayed threads of suspicion quickly unravels a conspiracy much larger than even the Republic’s top spy can handle on his own. (A mostly canon-compliant retelling of the Forged Alliances storyline, as seen through the eyes of Theron Shan.) Author’s Notes and Spoilers: See Chapter 1.
Chapter Index: 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | Crossposted to AO3
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All-in-all, Darok was not gone at all that long. Just a few minutes if that.
Maybe he went to the refresher, Theron thought to himself sarcastically. Just couldn’t hold it another minute.
By the time the colonel returned, Theron had busied himself back at the terminal. He caught the movement in the reflection of the monitor and made a mental note of the time. It hadn’t been enough to make more than a quick call, although the question of to who remained. Most of the comm traffic going in and out of Carrick Station was either monitored or secured. If it had been on official channels, there would be a log of it somewhere. Another item for Theron’s ever expanding to-do list once he had the freedom to begin his investigation.
That would be soon.
Not long after Darok had made his reappearance, they’d gotten word from the team on the ground that the battle had been won. Tython was theirs again, but it had come at a high cost. There was cleanup work to be done — major cleanup work. It would take months to repair or rebuild what the bombings had destroyed. To say nothing of the fatalities they were currently tallying. 
That uncomfortable feeling in Theron’s chest was trying to settle back in, and he still didn’t have the time nor energy to spend on it. Part of Theron wished he had an unobstructed view of the temple from the armorcams of Darok’s men, but he still wanted to keep a low profile. From his position, he could only catch glimpses of what was mostly wreckage. Unless he went and joined Darok at the holotable, there was no chance he could look at any of the faces of the dead. Perhaps that was for the best. Outside of Hashimuut, Theron hadn’t spent much time among large groups of Jedi. It had mostly just Master Zho and him. Easier to focus on the larger picture if he didn’t try to individual faces. Or maybe just one face in particular. But he wasn’t thinking about that right now.
Instead he busied himself with sorting through the data that Teeseven fed him. The rest of Highwind’s team had been put to work with the rescue crews, and the little faithful astromech had begun the long arduous process of sifting through the wreckage to try and salvage what was left of the temple’s security footage and data.
If there was anything to salvage at all. Theron pursed his lips, seeing the fragments of code he would have to sort through later. Piecing together exactly what had happened was going to be a massive undertaking. 
That left one last wildcard in this situation: Highwind herself.
Apparently she had ordered Bickell and his men to keep all of the prisoners secured until a team of SIS agents could begin questioning them. Theron found it interesting that she was attempting to direct the investigation work over to his branch rather than leave any interrogation to SpecOps. Perhaps that meant she trusted Theron more than Darok with this. The colonel himself had only grunted with just the barest amount of disgruntlement at the announcement, as if the fate of the prisoners on the ground didn’t matter to him at all. Like he’d already gotten what he wanted.
Theron was still musing on that, and the other little mysteries surrounding his asset when she strode in with all of the force (and Force) of a Jedi to be reckoned with. Her strides were measured and deliberate, setting a quick pace that made her cape billow behind her as she once again commanded the attention of the entire room. Perhaps it was in the stern set of her jaw, or the way her attention zeroed in on Darok. Maybe it was just something in her eyes, a dangerous glint that a less observant person might pick up on. Whatever it was, Theron was almost glad he wasn’t on the receiving end of her attention at the moment. Maybe that was the look that Doc had kept mentioning.
“Master Jedi, good to see you,” Darok said smoothly, standing up to his full height. “Our forces are sweeping the rest of the muck off of Tython as we speak.”
That was the wrong thing to say, apparently, as her brows drew down into an unhappy expression. Yeah, no. Theron wasn’t saving Darok from whatever storm was brewing in the Jedi’s intense gaze. In fact, he would’ve broken out the bangcorn if he’d had any on hand.
“Tell me, Colonel, this muck you speak of. Are you referring to the devastation wrought upon my temple? Or perhaps the people we’ve taken prisoner?”
Darok’s lips pressed into a thin line as his wide shoulders raised up in indignation. He apparently did not like being called out on his behavior. Not that it was the first time that Theron had heard that sort of comment from the military. He was pretty sure that not even the Jedi were so perfect as to keep that sort of sentiment tamped down completely.
For all his bluster, the colonel seemed smart enough to not fall into the trap of clarifying his comment, and instead just snorted out a breath before forcing a grim smile onto his face. “You will be glad to hear that reconstruction crews are already being prepped.”
“That is good news,” she said evenly. “It sounds like you have been busy over here.”
“The Jedi homeworld coming under attack tends to garner a lot of attention from Republic command,” he agreed. “The Imps caught us by surprise, but it could have been a lot worse. Thanks in no small part to your leadership.”
The flattery seemed to fall on deaf ears as Highwind just crossed her arms, fixing the larger man with that same intense stare. “I have been meditating as you suggested, Colonel.”
Confusion stole across Darok’s face, as he tried to recall whenever he’d made that sort of suggestion. “I don’t—”
“You said that after we recovered Tython that I should meditate on the coincidences of today. I spent my time on the journey here doing just that.”
“Have you now?” 
“Yes, on the timing of our attack and the Empire’s. They must have happened almost simultaneously. That is a remarkable coincidence, don’t you think?”
“Maybe you’re right,” Darok rumbled. “For them to launch an assault of this magnitude speaks of a robust intelligence network. Perhaps Imperial Intelligence isn’t quite as devastated as we have been led to believe. I am sure the SIS will determine how we managed to miss so many red flags.”
It was a comment designed to rile Theron. Another mark of a con. Keep the targets off balance. Keep them emotional. Nice try, but he wasn’t falling for it. That said, it didn’t take much to lace a good amount of anger and indignation into his tone. “Yes. We’ll get right on that.”
Highwind’s gaze briefly flicked away from Darok to study Theron, but the action was too quick for him to decipher it.
“All the same,” Darok continued on, “your work has been exemplary — gaining us two back-to-back victories. You are a hero and that deserves recognition.”
“A Jedi does not need to seek recognition. The act of doing what is right is enough.” Stars, she sounded like a recruitment pamphlet. Well. If the Jedi had recruitment pamphlets.
The colonel didn’t seem to hear her, as he pulled out a box that had been delivered during her return flight and held it out as if for inspection. She eyed the box with the same amount of skepticism that Theron had on its arrival, but her lack of enthusiasm didn’t make an impact on the show that Darok was putting on. Without another word, he opened it up to reveal a glinting, ornate medal.
The medal was just shiny and distracting enough that neither of them were paying close enough attention to see Theron’s startled reaction at its appearance. Had that been what Darok had disappeared off to take care of? No. It couldn’t have been. That had happened before Tython had been successfully recovered. That would have meant Darok would have had to arrange for the medal before there was a victory to award it for. Or… or perhaps that was Darok’s cover story. Come to think of it, there hadn’t been any mention of the teams that had remained behind on Korriban. Had they made it out safely? And if they hadn’t, why hadn’t Darok brought it up? Why was he so focused on branding today as a day of victory?
If Theron voiced his thoughts aloud they would sound utterly paranoid. This whole thing would sound paranoid. But no… there was something here. Theron would need to comb through whatever communication logs he could get his hands on to verify.
“This is the medal of valor. One of the Republic’s most prestigious commendations.” Perfect. She could hang it up next her Cross of Glory and whatever other trinkets she’d collected over the course of her overly heroic career. “The Chancellor herself wanted me to present this to you. She was truly impressed with your heroic actions today, just as I am. Congratulations.”
One dark blonde brow arched high as she glanced between Darok and his offering. The colonel continued to hold out the medal and its rather ornate box, and as the moment began to stretch out, the more awkwardness and tension built. Finally, she blew out a breath and accepted the box, shutting the lid without giving its contents a second look.
“My crew, Bickell, and the rest of your men deserve just as much recognition for their work on Tython,” she said, managing to sound almost diplomatic. “Perhaps more.”
“They do,” Darok agreed, “but your name is the one that lights up the HoloNet. Especially considering this particular commendation has never been awarded as quick before.”
A flicker of that shadow appeared in her eyes again, before she successfully smoothed her expression back into that Jedi placidity. “I am more interested in speaking of what happened today than the headline that will lead on RNN tonight.”
“It’s hard to leave an operation,” he rumbled, “we’ve all been there. But your part in this is done now. You should focus on your victory and all the rewards that come with it.”
“I do not need a medal,” she said firmly, “what I need are answers. We need to find the person responsible for what happened today and bring them to justice.”
“We have all of the information you gathered,” Darok’s smooth, complimentary tone began to harden. “I’m sure we’ll be able to identify them soon enough.”
“There’s also the matter of a Sith lord that I spoke to on the holo in the Council’s chambers. I told Bickell about it,” she continued on, as if she hadn’t heard the shift in tone. “Before the Sith realized I was not his compatriot he was talking about a package that had been secured.”
“Maybe they just took the opportunity to grab a few things,” the colonel, his words coming out in a tight clip.
“We need to identify who this Sith is and what he wants. He said something about—”
Now that she was on a roll, Highwind kept going as if she needed to be heard. As she did so, Darok’s frown settled in deeper and deeper. The large man’s shoulders bunched up, big meaty fists settling on his hips while his lips pressed together in a line.
For all of her keen observations and quick thinking in the field, right now Highwind was like a Sibian hound that had caught a scent. So fixated on her goal, the Jedi wasn’t paying attention to her surroundings and appeared to be almost oblivious to the danger practically tingling in the air. Nor did she seem to notice that with each protest she uttered the more predatory the colonel’s expression became. He didn’t seem to like questions. 
Theron took several steps back so that he was out of Darok’s line of sight, before he keyed his subvocal mic. “Stop.”
That seemed to take her off guard, and for a moment she looked like she was about to bring attention to the subterfuge. Her protest ended in a lurch as he gaze strayed over Darok’s shoulder to Theron. He didn’t say anything else, just caught her eye and shook his head ever so slowly. They couldn’t talk here. 
She pursed her lips together, that Jedi calm driven away as her temper flared in a way that Theron had not expected at all. Then again, she kept finding new ways to surprise him. This was just one more to the tally. Thankfully, though, she relented in pressing on in her line of questioning. Frustration evident, she let out an annoyed sigh before turning her attention back to Darok. He was still eyeing her with a sharp intensity that made Theron’s skin crawl.
“I apologize, Colonel, perhaps you are right,” she said tersely, as if it cost her something to say it. “I suppose that there might be some good to be found in today. I should meditate on that further.”
“That is most wise, Master Highwind,” Darok rumbled, continuing to eye her for several long moments. “I have my own work to do. I’ve been tasked with organizing the Tython cleanup.”
She tipped her head to him in acknowledgement. “I see, that is quite the task. I should not keep you from it.”
“I need to let the Jedi Council know the Republic is behind them. Let them know this is not like Coruscant. If you’ll excuse me.” He turned back to the holotable, completely dismissing the remaining two people in the room as if they weren’t even there.
The tension that had filled the room seemed to dissipate with the action, and Theron quietly let out a breath. He would definitely be adding “stubborn and bullheaded” as a note to Highwind’s file, just as a warning to any future handler. Maybe put in a warning or two about her propensity to take dangerous risks. She was still glaring at the colonel’s back with undisguised suspicion at this point.
“I don’t know about you,” he said, managing to pulling her attention away, “but I need that drink.”
He was eager to leave this damn room and put some distance between them and Darok, so Theron didn’t even wait to see if she followed. He just made a beeline for the bar. If she was as quick on the uptake as she seemed, she’d get the hint. 
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momentofmemory · 5 years ago
Text
fictober - day seven
Prompt #7: “No, and that’s final.”
Fandom: Spider-Man (All Media Types/Tom Holland Films)
Warnings: Canonical Character Death
Rating: PG
Characters: Peter Parker & May Parker, Ben Parker (mention)
Words: 2461
Author’s Note: part v of a may & peter series, but can be read as a stand alone. we all knew this was coming but that doesn’t really make it any easier, im so sorry. i wound up cutting out a lot for time’s sake, so i’ll probs buff it up a bit when i clean it up later. but for now, enjoy :)
>>No Strings Attached
Peter is four. No, Peter is fourteen—but Peter is four.
Peter is four, because it’s just not possible that May would have to drive through the dead of night to a police station, fear lancing through her heart, twice in one lifetime.
May fights back tears and races into the one hundred and seventh precinct, and it’s just as frantic and overwhelming as it was ten years ago—except Peter is fourteen, and Ben isn’t here to fight off the officers that intercept her this time.
They tell her she doesn’t need to ID the body, and her stomach churns when she realizes that it’s because Peter already has.
Still, they ask her if she wants to see him anyway, and she does, she does, because she saw Ben just barely under an hour ago and it already feels like an eternity.
(Mary is thirty-six and thirty-six and thirty-six, and Richard is thirty-eight and thirty-eight and thirty-eight, but Ben is fifty-one and god, how can there not be a fifty-two?)
What she says is: “Where’s Peter?”
They tell her he’s been taken to one of the back rooms to get cleaned up and get a change of clothes, and that it could be a little while before he’s ready for her.
One of the officers asks her if they’d like her to dispose of his old clothes, and May’s brain refuses to compute why that would be necessary. The officer glances at his partner, and then explains that the stains will probably never come out.
May clutches at the desk to keep from dropping to the floor, and manages to stammer out permission to do whatever they want to with them.
Peter is fourteen.
(But Ben is fifty-one.)
She wavers, torn between her grief for Ben and her desperation to see Peter.
“Take me to him, please,” May says, because it doesn’t feel real yet. “I want to see my husband.”
She does, and it feels real.
She locks herself in one of the bathroom stalls and cries and cries and cries, because Ben is gone and she doesn’t know how to live in a world without him in it, and she doesn’t know how to take care of a teenager by herself, and this wasn’t supposed to happen.
But it has, so at the fifteen minute mark May scrubs away her ruined mascara, splashes the coldest water she can stand across her face, and asks the officer outside the door if Peter is ready yet.
When she walks into the room Peter’s been told to wait in, it feels so much like that night she can almost hear Ben arguing on their behalf in the background, because Peter’s sitting on the floor, back squashed against the wall, orange shock blanket draped haphazardly across his shoulders.
It steals May’s breath away, because for a moment, all she can see is a Peter who is four.
A piece of paper is clenched in his fist, and his hands are raw and red-looking, like he’d been scrubbing at them for hours. Peter looks up, and when his red-rimmed eyes meet hers, her soul cracks in half because he is, inarguably, a Peter who is fourteen.
May stumbles across the room and frantically checks him over. The officers told her he was unharmed so she’s not really looking for anything, but she needs this to feel real, too. Finally satisfied, she takes his hand into hers and asks him if he’s okay.
He stares at the desk in front of him and shakes his head. No.
May wraps a hand around the back of his head and pulls him to her. She plants a kiss in his hair and strokes his back, because he may be fourteen, but she’s only fifty-three.
(And Richard is thirty-eight—and Mary is thirty-six—and Ben is fifty-one.)
______________________
When the day of the funeral comes, Peter is almost late, and May would have been furious at him if she’d had any energy to spare. He’d been acting weird ever since the science trip to Oscorp three weeks ago, and apparently even a funeral is not enough to change that. They stand in the receiving line next to each other, and pretend to smile and tell the well-wishers that no really, they’re okay.
Halfway through, one of Peter’s classmates—Michelle, May’s brain supplies—pushes to the front of the line and says, “Some new vigilante dropped off the mugger at the precinct forty-minutes ago.”
May stares at the girl, uncomprehending.
“He still had the gun on him, so as long as the prints match there shouldn’t be any trouble getting a conviction.” She shrugs. “Thought you’d want to know.”
Several of the people in hearing distance nod approvingly, but their next-door neighbor, Mrs. Dara, just scoffs. “Typical vigilantes. Only show up in time to clean up the mess, not stop it.”
Michelle glares at the woman, and then gives May a salute that’s awkward, but not mocking. She slips off to wherever she came from, and May realizes that she does feel a bit lighter knowing that Ben’s killer can’t hurt anyone else.
May keeps smiling and shaking hands, and it takes four people passing by before she realizes Peter is no longer by her side.
______________________
May guilts her supervisor into letting her off early her first day back to work, because the pitying stares and I’m so sorrys are enough to make her want to drive her headset through a wall. Money is already too tight for her to have to pay for damages, so instead, she signs out of work at 1:30, and takes the train the long way home because the normal route reminds her too much of Ben. She gets off two stops early, buys a coffee she can’t afford, and avoids the eyes of every couple she passes.
Peter had texted that he’d be spending the night at Ned’s, so May fully intends to go through an entire case of beer the second she gets home. She also intends to pull up every single home video they have, which is a decent amount thanks to Peter, and bawl her eyes out while curled up in one of Ben’s old sweaters.
This plan is completely derailed when May goes to unlock the apartment door and it nearly slams open in her face.
Peter is standing on the other side, hoodie pulled up around his face and bags under his eyes. He clearly wasn’t expecting her arrival, just like he clearly isn’t happy about it.
“May!” he says, scrambling back as May pushes her way into the apartment. “How’re you—what’re you—what’re you doing here?”
“What am I—what are you doing here?” May notes the way Peter is edging  towards the door, and so she clicks it shut with her foot.
“I just needed to get some stuff for tonight and now I have it, so, bye?”
“Whoa, buddy,” she says, placing a hand on his shoulder to lead him away from the door. “Try again.”
Peter shimmies out of her grasp, and the movement dislodges a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket. It falls to the floor and his eyes widen, coloured with an emotion May can’t place, and he scrambles after it. He’s faster than May’s ever seen him, but not fast enough to reach it before she’s placed her foot firmly on top, pinning it to the ground.
He looks up and she jerks her head in its direction. “What’s this?”
“Nothing,” he says, definitely too quickly for it to be true.
May slides her foot across the floor, and the paper with it, until it’s directly under her.
“May, please—”
She ignores him and bends over to pick it up, unfolding it and smoothing out the wrinkles.
It’s a piece of printer paper, and the watermark on the top is from the NYPD—May suddenly remembers seeing him with it in the back room. There’s one line drawn in black ink down the middle, dividing it in half, and red, blue, and purple tally marks fill it nearly two-thirds of the way down on the left side. The right, however, is completely empty.
May lingers on the different colours, knowing Peter’s too disorganized to have more than one colour of pen on him at one time. She frowns. Peter must have been keeping track of something over multiple days, or at least multiple sittings.
Her eyes flick up and meet his. He looks at the floor.
She takes a sip of her coffee and wishes it were something stronger, and then places the cup on the counter. “What’s going on, Peter?”
“I—” Peter’s eyes dart back and forth between her and the door. “It’s nothing.”
“I majored in bullshit, Peter. Try again.” The dividing line stands out starkly on the page and suddenly, it clicks. She lowers the paper and stares over the top of her frames. “You wanna tell me what was so important you had to make a pros and cons list in a police department?”
Peter loops his thumbs under the straps of his backpack and mumbles something May can’t pick out.
She places a finger behind her ear. “Excuse me?”
“It was—nevermind.” Peter pauses, and kicks his foot at nothing. “It’s nothing, and I’m going out now.”
“You got somewhere you need to be, Parker?”
Peter groans, the hood of his sweater falling off as he cards anxiously through his hair. “This is exactly why you weren’t supposed to be here.”
“I can’t be in my own apartment now?” May can’t believe what she’s hearing. “Who do you think pays—”
“That’s the problem!” Peter shouts, and he whirls around, and May’s startled by the unshed tears in his eyes. Then he deflates. “Or at least... one of them.”
"Then what’s the problem?”
Peter starts to just shake his head, and then his back straightens. He sets his jaw. “...I’m leaving.”
“Yes, you’ve said that.”
“No, like.” Peter bites his lip. “Leaving.”
May stares at him.
“Forever.”
The world drops out from underneath May, because out of all the things she’s expected to come out of Peter’s mouth during her long, sleepless nights, this has never been one of them. May’s eyes jerk back and forth between Peter, who’s inching towards the door, and Ben’s empty chair.
“Peter Benjamin Parker, if you so much as step one foot out that door you are grounded for life.”
Peter shakes his head, a hysterical determination in his countenance. “No. No, I thought this through.”
“Clearly not enough,” May snaps, grabbing his wrist.
Peter breaks her hold easily, and May’s taken aback because when has Peter gotten strong?
“I’m not—I can’t—” Peter chokes, his throat tightening. “I can’t be around you. Or anyone.”
“The hell is that supposed to mean?”
“I—he—” Tears start running down Peter’s face. “Look at the tally marks.”
May does, and for the first time, notices that the very first lines are not red at all, but only reddish: rust-like in colour, unusually thick and too inconsistent to be from a pen.
Almost like blood.
Oh god.
“Peter,” May says, wanting to hold him but scared he’ll bolt if she does, “Peter, it isn’t your fault.”
Peter shakes his head. “I could have stopped him. I could have, May, and I just—I let it happen all over again. I killed my parents and I killed Ben and I can’t stop thinking about how I’m going to get you killed, too, and I could have stopped it this time—”
“Peter, look at me.” May throws caution to the wind and grabs him by the shoulders. “He had a gun. Okay? I don’t care if you’re four or fourteen, there was nothing you could have done to—”
“You don’t know that!”
The apartment echoes with the sound of his shout, but the empty space between them echoes louder. May drops her hands from his shoulders and Peter’s fists quake at his sides.
“Okay. You know what? You’re right.” May says, taking a step back. “I don’t.”
Peter sucks in a strangled breath, but May ignores him. Instead, she rifles through the apartment, tossing pillows off couches and overturning magazines, until she finds what’s she’s looking for: a green ink pen. She snatches it up and walks over to the dining room table, and slams the paper down.
“All right, let’s try this shall we?” She uncaps the pen and starts to draw. “First off, we’ve got the lying. Constantly. And for god knows why. You’re late for everything, no matter how important and how many times I remind you. You space out in the middle of conversations. You’re unnecessarily snappish, you’re irresponsible with your things, you have an annoying tendency to vanish on the rare occasion you actually do show up. You’re a teenage boy so you break shit all the time, which I then have to pay to replace. Your uncle—”
May cuts off, her throat having closed up. Hot, salty tears land on the page, blurring the ink. May doesn’t know if they’re hers or Peter’s.
“—your uncle died in front of you. So did your parents.”
She finishes writing with an aggressive swipe, green tally marks littering the paper for every damning thing she’s said. Peter’s jaw is clenched so tightly May can hear his teeth grinding together, but it can’t stop his tears from spilling out.
“And you know what?”
Peter jerks his head, no, not trusting his voice. May abruptly rips the paper clean in two.
“I don’t care.”  She crumples up the side holding the tally marks, leaving only the blank piece intact.
“You could have pulled the trigger yourself and I still wouldn’t let you go.”
A sob rips out of Peter’s chest, and he shakes his head. “I can’t, I can’t. I–I messed up so bad, May.”
“No. You listen to me, remember? Me.” She holds up the blank sheet of paper. “You see this? There are zero reasons written here, Peter. Zero. You could have a million reasons on the other side, and it still wouldn’t matter because I don’t need a reason to know you’re mine.”
Peter’s lip trembles. “But I—”
“No. And that’s final.” May reaches out and wipes the tears off Peter’s cheek with her thumb. “I’ve already lost Ben. I’m not losing you too.”
Something snaps. Peter’s backpack drops to the floor and he crashes into her, hugging her like he hasn’t in years and sobbing I’m sorry, I’m sorry into her shoulder.
May hugs him back and they rock back and forth in the kitchen, and when Ben doesn’t come up to join them, she sobs, too. But she doesn’t let go.
“I promised you forever Peter. No strings attached,” May whispers, tears running down and merging with his. “Just me.”
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typhonserpent · 6 years ago
Text
You Showed Me, Chapter 7
Fandom: Dragon Age 2 Rating: Explicit Genre: Romance/Omegaverse Pairing: Fenris/Anders Summary: Omegaverse AU. Fenris has a secret that nobody else knows. When he has to travel to Orlais to help Hawke and her new friend Tallis steal a priceless jewel, his secret becomes harder to hide. When Anders discovers what Fenris is hiding, what he does with the knowledge is not what Fenris expected.
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They opened the door to a guard in red armor.
"What in the name?" He shouted in a thick Orlesian accent, stopped only by the sight of Tallis calmly approaching him with her hands out.
"There's no need for you to die today, friend. Just move on. You never saw us."
He cupped his hand to his mouth and just barely managed to begin the word, "Thieves!" Before his shout turned into a gurgle, blood shooting up around Tallis' dagger in his neck. His body spasmed briefly before he collapsed, dead in seconds.
"You could have walked away." She sighed as she knelt next to him and yanked the dagger out of his neck.
Hawke cocked an eyebrow, "Something wrong?"
"I didn't want to kill him."
"I've seen you kill several men."
"There are other paths. They do not all need to lead to the same destination."
Fenris grumbled, "Cheap words from a criminal."
Which had Tallis shooting to her feet, glaring while she pointed her dagger at him, "You've never sought a different path, Fenris? Really? In between resigning yourself to a life of slavery and escaping to Kirkwall you didn't stop to reconsider the path you were walking in your life?"
"Wait, how-"
"Enough!" Hawke stepped between the two of them, "We're here for the Heart." And with those words, shouldered past Tallis and into the manor vault. Tallis had her lips pursed shut, eyes glued to the ground and avoiding Fenris' accusing glare while she turned and followed Hawke.
Fenris was shaking, livid, and followed only because Anders had decided to obey as well. He kept his eyes on the back of her head the whole time.
x - X - x
The iron gate came down and separated Anders and Fenris from Hawke and Tallis with a deafening clang.
Any number of traps were to be expected in an Orlesian vault, but when Fenris tried to lift the gate only to find it thoroughly locked in place, he set his glare on Tallis.
"I swear I didn't know!" She hissed, holding up her hands, "There's gotta be some sort of switch."
"It's never easy, is it?" Hawke sighed, "Alright, we'll look around on this side and you two circle back and see if there was a switch we missed."
Fenris glanced at Tallis, then back at Hawke, "Will you be alright here?"
"After the blight, a dragon, and a crazed magister?" Hawke winked, "I think I can handle a few Orlesian guards."
His eyes passed over Tallis again, then returned to Hawke. He nodded, then swiveled and left with Anders close behind.
They had left the hallway well behind them before Anders said, "Something the matter?"
"I never told Tallis about by time as a slave. Unless Hawke mentioned it to her, she knows too much."
"You think she set up the trap?"
"I don't know. Maybe." He paused, studying a painting of the younger Duke Prosper, flanked by two vases. He picked up each vase in turn, and replaced them when no mechanism was found.
"No." He concluded, "I don't think she could have set that up in advance. But I think Hawke trusts her too much."
There was a deafening CRASH to his left, where they'd entered the vaults. Armored footsteps rattled their way down the hall. Grabbing Fenris' arm, Anders ducked around the corner and took refuge in the shadows of a rounded door frame. While Anders flattened himself against the wall, Fenris peered around the corner to catch sight of the platoon of guards that were running past, directly towards Hawke and Tallis.
He didn't stop staring until Anders tapped him on the shoulder and jerked his head backwards. Anders opened the door they'd been hiding next to and revealed a storage closet. A broom and mop leaned against one corner with a bucket nearby. A pile of rags accompanied some scrub brushes and a bar of soap on the wall shelf. Anders shut the door behind them, leaving them in total darkness until a mage light flared to light in his palm.
"What now?" Fenris asked.
"Well, while you were snooping around the corner, I managed to find something."
There was one stone in the wall that stood out, perfectly round and smooth, and when Anders pressed it the wall swung away to reveal a second hallway behind.
"The way we came in is out of the question," Anders continued, "I think this is our only option."
There was no small amount of dust and cobwebs in the passage. Thankfully only the smaller breeds of spider managed to cross their paths. The first door they came across opened to the back of a tapestry which bore the Prosper family crest. Pushing it aside spit them into a familiar hallway. The loud clank of dishware and the murmur of conversation greeted them. Servants in the kitchen down the hall were scrubbing away evidence of the Duke's party.
Following their previous route led them back to the vault entrance, the guard’s body still growing cold at the entrance.
The iron gates that had separated their party before were returned to their previous position. Fenris noted the thicker-than-usual crack in the ceiling as they passed under them, this time with far lighter steps. Even slowly creeping along, Fenris managed to brush a stone which sank slightly before he realized his error and retreated.
It was only by following the path that didn't lead further into the vaults that they managed to find the dungeon. They entered a small room with a steel door on the other side, marked only by a tiny window with bars on it. Next to it was a chest that with Hawke's staff resting beside it. A guard was asleep on a cot in the corner.
Fenris phased his hand through the guard’s back and made quick work of him before he even woke up. With a squeeze of Fenris' hand, the guard only gurgled quietly before going limp. Opening the chest revealed Tallis' throwing daggers. After gathering the weapons and relieving the guard of his keys, they went inside.
Rows and rows of cells were empty, and just as Anders inhaled and cupped his mouth, a familiar voice echoed through the otherwise empty prison.
"I have a question." Tallis said, and Fenris put his hand over Anders' mouth.
"When the duke told you what I was, you said you didn't care. Was that true?"
"You could have told me the truth." Hawke replied, "I might have listened."
"And what if you didn't?"
"I suppose we'll never know."
A short pause, and Fenris' hand slowly lowered. Tallis continued, "I am sorry. This didn't work out like I'd planned ... obviously."
"What was your plan exactly?"
"The one I expected to find is named Salit, a member of the Ben-Hassrath ... the Heart of the Many. I was told he's here to sell secrets to the Orlesians, and I came to stop him. I ... suppose I was misinformed."
"So you came here to stop this Salit from betraying your people?"
"You probably won't believe me, but this isn't a political mission. It's ... personal."
"What do you mean?"
"Salit was my bessrathari - the one who recruited me into the Ben-Hassrath. My tutor. I was a slave, being transported in chains to a new master who had bought a whole ship of us. The Qunari love raiding any Tevinter ship that comes close to their waters. They freed us all, giving us the choice to go where we wished or join the Qun. Salit saw my potential, convinced me that I could make a difference."
Eyes wide, Fenris ran towards the cell that held Hawke and Tallis. Tallis' voice cracked, "It doesn't matter now."
Tallis came into view first, seated on the floor with her back against the wall. Laying eyes on her was like finding a lost piece of a puzzle.
"Dithari?" He asked.
She met his gaze, eyes glazed over. She looked ready to cry even though a smile tugged at her lips.
"You remembered." She breathed.
"You ... dyed your hair."
"No, but it was dark in Danarius' basement. I don’t blame you for not noticing."
Fenris was breathless as she rose, a far cry from the timid girl who'd washed his wounds and coaxed him to drink water and healing potions. When she moved to press her hand against the bars of the cell, he stared at her eyes. Wide, stormy gray, and as gentle as he remembered them.
"You two know each other now?" Hawke quipped from her corner of the cell, "Any other secrets people want to share? Anders, you're not the Divine or anything, are you?"
"Knickerweasels, no." Anders laughed.
“Why didn’t you say something sooner?” Fenris breathed.
“Would you have listened to me?” She asked, cocking an eyebrow, “Be honest.”
His eyes met the floor.
Tallis coughed to clear her throat, finally moving her hand away from Fenris'. "Well, mushy reunions aside, I say we get out of here before the Duke decides we would taste good in the soup ... or whatever he has planned."
Bending down, Tallis removed a single pin from her hair and set to work picking the cell's lock. Seconds later, the gate was sliding up.
"So, back through the castle, then?" Hawke said as she took the lead.
Tallis took one step forward before Fenris' hand on her shoulder stopped her. "Wait," He said, "You said this Salit was selling secrets?"
"He is." She nodded, "Or at least he intends to. One last act of defiance. I couldn't let him do that. Not when he'll hurt so many others in the process."
Hawke was already out the cell door, taking her staff from Andes. She glanced back at Tallis, "He'll hurt other Qunari?"
"Not every Qunari is a soldier." Fenris replied.
"There are tens of thousands of farmers, aristans, craftsmen ..." Tallis continued, "People who have never hurt anyone. People who's only crime is living! People who helped me when I didn't even have the words to ask for help!" Her voice was echoing in the empty prison. Having realized this, she took a breath and pressed her hands together. Fenris recognized the meditation technique he'd seen repeated by both Qunari and Tal Vashoth.
"I never knew what it was like to have someone help you without any concern for themselves." She continued, voice steady, "I want to pay them back. They don't deserve what Salit is going to do to them."
Slowly, Fenris' eyes were drawn to Anders, who was staring back with complete helplessness. Light may have been shed on the situation, but the path still wasn’t clear yet. Someone had to make a decision. Tallis shuffled her feet, eyes on the floor.
"One last question." Fenris said, causing her head to snap up, "Did you involve Hawke to get to me?"
She shook her head, "I chose Hawke because she was the only one on the invitation list who wasn't a personal friend of the Montfort family. And she's also the Champion of Kirkwall. And a Ferelden with no reason to love Orlais."
This time, Hawke chimed in with a question, "So what was supposed to happen when all this was over?"
"Truth? This wasn't exactly what I was expecting." Tallis was wearing a smile that was some mix of awkward politeness and genuine amusement, "Asit tal-eb."
Fenris translated aloud, "'It is to be'."
They spent another few seconds in awkward silence. Anders offered Tallis her throwing daggers, which she accepted with a forced smile.
Finally, Fenris took the lead. “Come. We will stop Salit.”
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marcjampole · 7 years ago
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If FCC drops net neutrality, get used to higher prices, slower service & more political censorship on Internet
Talk about the other shoe dropping. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wasted no time after changing one regulation that will decrease access to news and freedom of the press to change another that does the same thing. Less than a week after announcing it would allow companies to own both broadcast stations and newspapers in the same town, the FCC is proposing to end net neutrality.
Yes, you read right.
The Trump FCC is on the verge of overthrowing net neutrality, the policy that Internet service providers (ISP) and governments must treat all data the same way. Net neutrality prevents ISPs from discriminating or charging different rates because of the user, content, website, platform, application or type of attached equipment.
Current net neutrality rules prohibit ISPs from slowing down, blocking or charging more for the delivery of Internet content. Without net neutrality, ISPs like Spectrum, Verizon and Comcast could create different levels of service, sending the content of big corporations that can afford the higher rates at faster speeds and slowing down other content. You could experience slowdowns in receiving and in sending content. As the New York Times points out in the first story it did on the new FCC plan, Verizon could slow down delivery of movies from Netflix because Netflix competes with Verizon’s FiOs.
The most profoundly disruptive part of the FCC plan—constructed by telecom henchman and FCC chair Ajit Pai—is the reversal of an Obama administration decision to consider Internet broadband service to be a utility. Because utilities such as electricity, landline phone service, home natural gas service and water, are considered essential to the participation in modern life and the economy, they are allowed to be heavily regulated—not just by the federal government, but by states as well. Governments regulate many aspects of a utility’s business—for example, what it can charge, how it can charge, the level of service it must provide, when it must provide free or subsidized rates, how it can advertise, where and how it can extend service, and standards and procedures for beginning and shutting off service.
There is currently little regulation of broadband service, but the Internet is still relatively new. Considering broadband to be a utility will make it easier in the future to institute those regulations that will make high-quality broadband service available to everyone at reasonable rates, like water and electricity. The FCC decision to take the “utility” label off broadband service is short-sighted and will eventually lead to more expensive or lower quality Internet connections for many, if not most people. It will be the equivalent of suddenly turning off the water tap or limiting electricity service to certain hours of the day.
Just as with the FCC decision to allow companies to own both broadcast and print media properties in one locale, Pai’s rationale for ending net neutrality is to enable telecoms to compete with Google and Amazon. And once again, the reasoning makes no sense. Google, Amazon and other Internet portals are not ISPs. They neither provide nor enable electrons to pass over wires or radio wave impulses to travel through air according to strict and highly detailed engineering specifications. All Amazon and Google do is provide content—a whole heck of a lot of it, to be sure.
If the FCC or the federal government have a problem with Facebook or Google, they should go after these companies, not create new regulations that threaten access to the Internet and freedom of speech. It’s increasingly clear that both Facebook and Amazon control vast amounts of information and business. For Amazon, the answer is simple—break the company up, like the government broke up Standard Oil and AT&T. The case of Facebook is less simple, because as a social media site it has become something of a utility. We could declare Facebook a utility and then break the profit-making part of the business—selling ads on Facebook—into several businesses, perhaps based on territory, which was the basis for the AT&T breakup. But when the FCC blames Facebook and Amazon as the excuse for ending net neutrality or allowing companies to own more local media outlets, it’s creating more large and problematic business behemoths instead of addressing the concerns about the existing behemoths.
Note, too, that this primary rational involves the impact on businesses, not the greater good of consumers or society. As usual, a right-winger is making the argument that if we help the already powerful, they will have the tools to help all of us. As with lowering taxes on the wealthy, it’s faulty logic that fails in real world conditions.
According to the Times short article, the FCC will vote on ending net neutrality in its December meeting, with the tally likely to be along party lines, 3-2 in favor of the proposal.
That means we don’t have much time to protest. Write to the FCC, to Donald Trump, and to your Senators and Congressional representatives. Attend any rallies or marches organized to uphold net neutrality. Spread the word via social media.
I imagine those who want to preserve net neutrality will be getting a lot of help from the large content-providing corporations that funded the protests in 2015 when the Obama FCC was considering the net neutrality issue. Those who naturally feel squeamish supporting anything that big corporations are behind, keep in mind that it was the support of big corporations that helped win the fight for gay marriage and transgender equality. Big corporations also helped to preserve the Affordable Care Act. Many are lining up against the GOP’s awful proposal to cut taxes on the wealthy and pay for it by raising taxes on the middle class, increasing deficits and cutting programs. Sometime you don’t get to choose who your trench mates are. You join hands and fight the common enemy, knowing you may be fighting your fellow soldier in another battle once this one is over.
Like so many of the battles being fought against the current administration, a lot is at stake. If we want to continue to have an open society with an easy flow and equal access to information and commerce, we must preserve net neutrality and the concept that broadband Internet is a utility.
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bienready2122 · 5 years ago
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Casino Players - Say Goodbye to Lady Luck
Club players, dispose of the possibility of karma. There are the individuals who consider karma a power outside of themselves, maybe even an embodiment, Lady Luck, and they accept that on the off chance that they charm her via conveying enough lucky trinkets she will come stumbling into their lives sprinkling star dust on the Blackjack and Craps tables so they can leave with a fortune. That is dream. It might work that route in the motion pictures however not, in actuality  cach tinh lo de hieu qua nhat What will be talked about in this article can be either acknowledged or dismissed. It's limited's perspective on. On the off chance that it's dismissed, there will be no mischief done and life will go on. Be that as it may, for the occasion, it will in any event be something worth mulling over.
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There is nothing of the sort as karma. We bring all things - wellbeing, ailment, riches, need, glad occasions, hopelessness - into our carries on with through our considerations. There is a Power inside you that won't just let you become a victor in gambling club play yet can acquire achievement any undertaking you pick. You should simply figure out how to bring your deduction into a strong association with that Power and it will realize the ideal outcomes.
This Power made you, brought you into being- - you, however every individual that is or will ever be, just as everything that exists, the whole universe with its vast number of stars and planets, including the little one that we happen to be on. Without this Power nothing would be. This Power is All-Knowing, All-Wise, and its substance is Love. You are associated with this Power. It is in you. It communicates through you. This Power transfuses itself to you and needs you to utilize It to accomplish all that you want throughout everyday life.
People have utilized this Power down through the ages to imagine each innovation that was ever created, to assemble each extension that crosses a gorge or waterway, to raise each high rise that remains in all the urban communities of the world, to paint each work of art of workmanship, to compose each book at any point composed. Furthermore, this Power is yours to utilize today to bring whatever you want into reality.
How? By what procedure would we say we are ready to bring things into being?
We realize that in spite of the fact that we have yet one psyche, it has two sections: the cognizant and the inner mind. The cognizant brain gives us mindfulness. We are aware of our environmental factors and understand that things are going on. We utilize the cognizant psyche to get things done. We choose to head to a gambling club, step into our car and turn the key in the start. At the point when we originally figured out how to drive we deliberately thought of each activity before we did it. We took a gander at the switch that controls the rigging shift and moved it into drive. We concentrated how much strain to apply to the gas pedal, how far to turn the controlling wheel to cycle a corner, and the separation our foot needed to head out to apply the brake. Presently, in the wake of driving for such huge numbers of years, quite a bit of what we do has been consigned to our inner mind, leaving the cognizant brain allowed to tune in to the radio, and before we know it we are at the club, scarcely mindful of how we went there.
Our cognizant brain is grinding away as we tally our chips to perceive the amount we've won as we sit at a blackjack table. It thinks about which video poker machine to play, the Deuces Wild or Double Bonus, and it settles on a decision. The cognizant psyche embeds the coins into a gaming machine and presses the turn button. It decides, regardless of whether to stop play and grab a bite, or to proceed. This piece of our brain can be supposed to be the supervisor since it coordinates the decisions we make. It thoroughly considers things and chooses. It is the executive, the creation director.
Interestingly, the psyche mind does no picking at all. It serves the cognizant psyche. Its responsibility is to create things. It will create beneficial things as well as awful things too - whatever the cognizant psyche through its reasoning guides it to do. The cognizant psyche picks and the inner mind must react to that decision. The inner mind has supernatural forces and capacities. It realizes how to bring beneficial things into being, can appear achievement, and it stands prepared to deliver for the individual who figures out how to utilize it.
The inventive procedure comprises of accepting we can have what we need, requesting what we need, understanding that our psyche, which works in the Infinite Mind, can bring what we need into being, and afterward discharging it to that Power inside us so what we need can appear.
Some who read this article will be hindered at the absolute starting point of the imaginative procedure. They won't have the option to force themselves to accept that their brain can connect through its musings to impact gaming machines, dice, or cards. As a matter of fact, it's implausible, and if an individual's psyche can't acknowledge that chance, it will always be unable to do it. The cynic needs to move in his speculation from a place of unbelief to at any rate an acknowledgment of the thought as a chance, since this works just at the degree of one's comprehension of how it functions and his supreme faith in it. Uncertainty is an executioner. Stay distrustful and you stay where you are, a non-adherent, a non-achiever. The decision is yours. State, "Indeed, I trust it is conceivable. I need this capacity to turn into a victor at whatever point I step into a club to bet," and you start a mixing in your subliminal that will prompt extreme achievement.
We are submerged in Universal Mind. Our inner mind is interlaced with His Mind, and there is a law in life that gives us whatever we accept. All that transpires is an impact of our reasoning. The contemplations we set forth have inside them a drawing in pull, similar to the power of a magnet. What makes a washout a failure is that the individual methodologies his betting round of decision with an indifferent want to win. Expectation has inside it as much power as some modest magnet one would discover in a game at Toys-R-Us. The draw isn't there. As the idiom goes, expectation and two dollars will get you some espresso. As you remain before a video poker machine or spot your chips on the wagering circle of a blackjack table, you need to realize you're going to win. The preeminent certainty that is in your cognizant psyche will drop down into your inner mind, will collaborate with the Power inside you and get it going. The inclination you will feel as this is going on is called confidence. Confidence. With confidence acting inside you while you're playing, you won't need to ask, or crush to cause your great to occur. You will have the option to unwind, on the grounds that you will manage the Absolute. All Power will dominate and winning will turn into a conviction.
It's straightforward why some would laugh at this. You can nearly hear their wariness: "You mean All Power is there with me in a betting gambling club? Helping me to win? Ludicrous."
Where would we be able to go that He isn't? The writer Tennyson had it right: "Closer is He than breathing, and closer than hands and feet." We have been informed that the very hairs of our head are numbered. Would you be able to reveal to us what number of hairs there are your responsibility? All Knowledge knows. The scoffer has however a questionable association with the Power. He doesn't comprehend what his identity is, so he needs to depend on karma and a bunny's foot. It would do well for the scoffer to recall that the hare had four of them when he was alive and clearly didn't admission such well.
There are a few people who pronounce themselves failures even before they show up at the club. How frequently have you heard a discussion like this:
"Going to Las Vegas, right?'
"That's right. Got the opportunity to go make my commitment to pay for their electric light bill."
What you state is the thing that you get. The psyche mind isn't responsive to satire. Is anything but a Saturday Night Live crowd; it doesn't have the foggiest idea when an individual is joking. It generally accepts what is spoken on the grounds that what comes out of an individual's mouth demonstrates what's happening inside his head, so it just gets on that individual's negative remark, submissively slips into a failure mode and produces what is called for. You ought to never at any point, say whatever you would prefer not to bring into the real world. It's essential to dispose of each part of pessimism in discussions. This isn't anything but difficult to do on the grounds that at whatever point at least two individuals meet in a social climate, the discussion much of the time goes to the issues they by and by have. So watch who you run with. Life is intense enough without encircle yourself with a hover of bellyachers.
You can have what you need on the off chance that you accept that you can. Request it, acknowledge that your psyche mind, which is a declaration of Infinite Mind, can bring it into being, and afterward unwind and permit it to occur. Hope to win when you visit a gambling club, realize that you will, and you will. Those cards in Blackjack and Mini-Baccarat, the dice at the Craps table, and those video poker machines are under your psychological control through the Power inside you. That is ensured not by the writer of this article yet by All-That-Is.
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woundvest7-blog · 5 years ago
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2:00PM Water Cooler 7/25/2019
By Lambert Strether of Corrente
Politics
“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” –James Madison, Federalist 51
“They had one weapon left and both knew it: treachery.” –Frank Herbert, Dune
“2020 Democratic Presidential Nomination” [RealClearPolitics] (average of five polls). As of July 24: Biden flat at 28.6% (28.6), Sanders up at 15.0% (14.8%), Warren up at 15.0% (14.6%), Buttigieg up at 4.8% (5.0%), Harris down 12.2% (12.6%), others Brownian motion.
* * *
2020
Sanders (D)(1): “Tensions Between Bernie Sanders and MSNBC Boil Over” [Daily Beast]. “The backlash from Sanders-world reached a new high on Sunday, when MSNBC analyst Mimi Rocah, a former assistant U.S attorney for the Southern District of New York and occasional contributor to The Daily Beast, launched a personal critique of Sanders during a segment with host David Gura, saying that he makes her “skin crawl” and that he’s not a ‘pro-woman candidate.’… A senior campaign aide said the campaign believes there are possible biases in the network, but instead of shunning MSNBC they’ve been aggressive in getting their people booked. Sanders has been on the network at least nine times this cycle.”
Warren (D)(1): “Elizabeth Warren Wants to Stop Banks From Dominating Trillions in Payments” [Bloomberg]. “At issue is the development of real-time payment systems that would allow consumers and businesses to instantly access money that’s sent to their bank accounts. Everyone agrees that creating such networks is necessary. But they’re at odds over whether it’s a good idea to let big banks, which already have one up and running, reign supreme….. [Warren] wants the Federal Reserve to join the fray. The Massachusetts lawmaker, along with Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and two House Democrats, plans to introduce a bill Wednesday that would require the Fed to build a competing system. They say they want to make the U.S. payments infrastructure a public utility and prevent big banks from gaining a monopoly.” • Good!
Warren (D)(2): “Warren Is No Hillary. She’s Also No Bernie” [Jacobin]. “Characterizing Warren as a ‘neoliberal‘ or, even more stupidly, a ‘Clintonite,’ some misguided online Bernie Sanders supporters seem to be trying to cast her as the archvillain in the sequel to 2016’s horror flop, Hillary. With Warren’s advocacy for aggressive government regulation, her support for redistributive programs, her sharp critique of antisocial corporate behavior, and her rejection of individualistic folklore (remember ‘You didn’t build that‘?), she’s emerged as a relatively mild but nevertheless quite serious opponent of neoliberal ideology…. However, while Warren isn’t a neoliberal, Sanders supporters aren’t the only ones making shit up. Her own supporters have been spinning a series of fictitious narratives rooted in classic neoliberal identity politics, using feminism and anti-racism to discredit Sanders’s socialist agenda… One of these curious neoliberal narratives is that only sexism could explain why people support Sanders over Warren, since the candidates are exactly the same politically. Earlier this year, Moira Donegan, writing in the Guardian, asked, ‘Why vote for Sanders when you can have Elizabeth Warren instead?’ While Warren calls herself a “capitalist to my bones,” Sanders is a lifelong socialist.”
* * *
“Biden tries to set the stage in Detroit” [Politico]. “CNN’s broadcast, which begins at 8 p.m., will also feature an introduction of the candidates and playing of the national anthem.” • The debates are already enough like a sporting event, so what next? A military flyover?
“Can’t Buy Mohammed bin Salman Love” [Foreign Policy]. Last month, credible reports emerged that the U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg was courting campaign investors linked to Saudi Arabia. In June, Buttigieg held a fundraiser in the home of Hamilton James, a major Democratic donor and the mastermind behind a $20 billion deal to generate Saudi investment in U.S. infrastructure. Buttigieg is not alone. The Intercept revealed that former Vice President Joe Biden’s American Possibilities PAC includes investment from former Democratic Sen. John Breaux, a lobbyist for the firm Squire Patton Boggs, which is registered as a representative for Saudi Arabia.” • Classy!
Impeachment
“Mueller testimony fails to move needle on impeachment” [The Hill]. “[S]ome of the most vocal impeachment proponents said they don’t expect Mueller’s halting testimony — in which he asked legislators to repeat their questions on multiple occasions and often declined to answer questions at all — to lend any significant new power to the effort… More than 90 House Democrats have come out in favor of an impeachment inquiry, according to a tally kept by The Hill. But impeachment backers are still mostly progressives and amount to less than half of the 235-member caucus. Only a half-dozen Democrats representing swing districts have joined the push — and even they all hail from districts carried by Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.”
Ouch:
Watching the dry prose of the Mueller report leap to life in the form of hours of committee hearings reminds me of when I was a fundamentalist kid and they tried to make the Bible fun using claymation. Now kids could SEE that Amminadab was the father of Nahshom, who begat Uzziah
— Pinboard (@Pinboard) July 24, 2019
“You Can’t Beat Trump without Throwing a Punch” [National Review]. “[Democrats’] desire is that the president should be removed from office, perhaps that the result of the 2016 election itself could be abrogated. And that all this could all be effected while they remain passive observers and commentators. Perhaps they would only be the formal executors of a judgment made elsewhere…. In other words, pro-impeachment Democrats wanted Mueller to make the decision for them, to take responsibility for moving public opinion in their favored direction. This is not how impeachment works under the Constitution, and it is not how political conflict works anyway. Just as spectators of the political game, it should be obvious by now that this is the signature mistake that all of Trump’s opponents have made. A fear of direct confrontation with Trump and his base leads his opponents to hope that Trump can be defeated without hard fighting….This is a vain hope. Like Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Hillary Clinton before them, House Democrats will lose any contest with Trump so long as they are unwilling to sustain political damage in the act of inflicting more damage to him.” • Hard to argue with any of this.
RussiaGate
“These Questions for Mueller Show Why Russiagate Was Never the Answer” [The Nation]. The best question: “3. Why didn’t you interview Julian Assange? “The uncertainty in Mueller’s account of how WikiLeaks received the stolen e-mails could possibly have been cleared up had Mueller attempted to interview Julian Assange. The WikiLeaks founder insists that the Russian government was not his source, and has repeatedly offered to speak to US investigators. Given that Assange received and published the stolen emails at the heart of Mueller’s investigation, his absence from Mueller’s voluminous witness sheet is a glaring omission.” • Lawyers believe that you should never ask a question if you don’t already know the answer. So what does Mueller’s refusal to interview Assange say about his trust in the DNC?
Realignment and Legitimacy
“There Are Reasons for Optimism” [Noam Chomsky, Catalyst]. A long, long interview, well worth a read. Chomsky concludes: “A lot of things have improved and they’ve improved by active, organized, committed people who went to work on it and changed the world. That’s a reason to be optimistic.”
Stats Watch
Jobless Claims, week of July 20, 2019: “One of the Federal Reserve’s two central pillars policy — employment — is showing increasing and unusual strength” [Econoday]. “Labor conditions in July [may] have been at least if not more favorable than conditions in June.”
Durable Goods Orders, June 2019: “If manufacturing is the Federal Reserve’s central focus, they have less to be worried about. [Econoday]. “It’s a rare 1.9 percent jump in core capital goods orders that points to new confidence in the business outlook and the release of prior pent-up demand for new production equipment.” • What you want to see in a capitalist economy, even if most of turns out to be going to robots. More: “Revisions and the Boeing 737 aside, this report is an echo of the strength of last week’s industrial production report where manufacturing posted its strongest performance of the year, and it diminishes the need for Fed rate cuts and will have to be put into broad context or explained away by Jerome Powell at his press conference next week should the Fed indeed lower rates.”
Kansas City Fed Manufacturing Index, July 2019: “Weighed down by increased uncertainty due to trade concerns and weaker domestic demand, Tenth District manufacturing activity unexpectedly slid into mild contraction” [Econoday]. “Today’s survey from Kansas joins yesterday’s Richmond Fed survey in showing manufacturing in contraction in their respective region, scaling back expectations of a general rebound in the nation’s flagging manufacturing sector that were aroused by last week’s positive Philly Fed and Empire State surveys,”
International Trade in Goods, June 2019: Exports fell very sharp[ly] with imports down. These are among the weakest results in 2-1/2 years and outside of isolated gains in May” [Econoday]. “Capital goods are the US’s strongest exports and these fell… Import contraction was deepest in industrial supplies…. Facing a sudden rush of improving economic data — whether employment or retail sales or core capital goods — the Federal Reserve will be able to point to declines in global trade as a justification for what appears to be an approaching rate cut at next week’s meeting.”
Retail Inventories [Advance], June 2019: Retail inventories contracted unexpectedly [Econoday]. “However unfavorable for the GDP calculation, low inventories at a time of strong consumer demand and what may be, based on this morning’s durable goods report, improving business demand point to the need for inventory building which would be a plus for third quarter employment and production.”
Wholesale Inventories [Advance], June 2019: Wholesale inventories rose lower-than-expected [Econoday]. As above on inventory building.
Retail: “Amazon Has ‘Destroyed’ U.S. Retail Industry, Mnuchin Says” [Bloomberg]. “U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin alleged that Amazon.com Inc. has “limited competition” and harmed the retail industry as the Trump administration announced a broad antitrust review into whether technology companies are using their power to thwart rivals. ‘If you look at Amazon, although there are certain benefits to it, it destroyed the retail industry across the United States, so there’s no question they’ve limited competition,” Mnuchin said in an interview with CNBC Wednesday.'” • And just think! If Kamala Harris had prosecuted Mnuchin, he wouldn’t be saying this today!
Housing: “Nearly 250,000 NYC rental apartments sit vacant” [6sqft]. Early numbers from the Census Bureau’s Housing and Vacancy Survey show that the number of unoccupied apartments throughout New York City has grown significantly over the past three years–a whopping 35 percent to 65,406 apartments since 2014, when the last survey was taken. As the Daily News puts it, “Today, 247,977 units — more than 11% of all rental apartments in New York City — sit either empty or scarcely occupied, even as many New Yorkers struggle to find an apartment they can afford.” One reason for the growing vacancy rates, as the article states, is the city’s high rent, which has risen twice as fast as inflation….. Many of the 75,000 temporary apartments are pied-à-terres–think weekend or vacation homes for the rich–a number that’s expanded from 9,282 in 1987.”
Tech: “Twitter, Unable to Control Its Worst Elements, Rolls out a Site Redesign” [Fortune]. “The social media site began testing the new version of its site back in September 2018. The new look better resembles the site’s experience on modern smartphones. At the start, the new look was optional, and only available to some. Now, the redesign will be mandatory for Twitter users, disabling their ability to switch to the social network’s legacy layout.” • Amazingly, press coverage of this debacle has been universally positive; neither the designers nor the press seem to understand that phones (tiny screens, touch) and laptops (bigger screens or even monitors, mouse/keyboard) are different media. Hence the grotesquely oversized menu, the big type, the wasted screen real estate, the extra steps, and so on. The good news is that there are workarounds to the so-called “mandatory” redesign, if design is the word I want.
Tech: “How to switch back to the old Twitter layout” [ShackNews]. • The new Twitter laptop redesign really is ghastly. This technique works, though it’s not clear for how long.
Manufacturing: “Boeing says 737 MAX crisis could temporarily shut down Renton production” [Seattle Times]. “Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg said Wednesday that though the company’s “best estimate” is that the 737 MAX will return to service in October, a slip in that optimistic timeline could mean the Renton 737 production line would be temporarily shut down. ‘That’s not something we want to do, but something we have to prepare for,’ he said on Boeing’s second-quarter earnings call with analysts and the press. Such a drastic step would mean temporary layoffs at the plant, which employs more than 10,000 people. ‘A temporary shutdown could be more efficient than a sustained lower production rate,’ Muilenburg said. ‘That’s what we are thinking our way through.’ Wednesday’s call also included worrying news for Boeing’s Everett factory: The new 777X that rolled out of the factory in March will not fly until next year because of delays in fixing a problem with the plane’s GE-9X engine.”• A firm with enormous quality assurance problems considers screwing over its workers…
Manufacturing: “Southwest ceasing operations at Newark airport because of 737 Max delays” [CNN]. “Southwest Airlines is ceasing operations at Newark Liberty International Airport because of the continued grounding of the Boeing 737 Max. The airline announced Thursday that Boeing’s (BA) “extensive delays” in getting its 737 Max plane back in service, Southwest has to stop flying in and out of the New Jersey airport starting November 3. Southwest called it a financial decision, saying its financial results at the airport have fallen below expectations, and it had to “mitigate damages and optimize our aircraft…. The airline operates 20 flights per day from Newark to 10 cities, including Phoenix, Austin and Chicago. Southwest (LUV) will still continue to fly from two New York area airports including LaGuardia and Islip on Long Island.” • Newark or LaGuardia…. I’d have to give it some thought.
Manufacturing: “Airbus A350 software bug forces airlines to turn planes off and on every 149 hours” [The Register]. “Some models of Airbus A350 airliners still need to be hard rebooted after exactly 149 hours, despite warnings from the EU Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) first issued two years ago.” • Funny to have the famous Help Desk reponse — “Please reboot your machine and try again” — appear at such a high level. To be fair to Airbus, the problem was fixable. The article has interesting information on how Airbus aircraft are wired up.
The Biosphere
“Moody’s Buys Climate Data Firm, Signaling New Scrutiny of Climate Risks” [New York Times]. “The rating agency bought a majority share in Four Twenty Seven, a California-based company that measures a range of hazards, including extreme rainfall, hurricanes, heat stress and sea level rise, and tracks their impact on 2,000 companies and 196 countries. In the United States, the data covers 761 cities and more than 3,000 counties.” • I’m reminded of the scene from The Big Short where Mark Baum visits Standard & Poors:
“I work in the environmental movement. I don’t care if you recycle.” [Vox]. “All too often, our culture broadly equates “environmentalism” with personal consumerism. To be “good,” we must convert to 100 percent solar energy, ride an upcycled bike everywhere, stop flying, eat vegan. We have to live a zero-waste lifestyle, never use Amazon Prime, etc., etc. I hear this message everywhere…. While we’re busy testing each other’s purity, we let the government and industries — the authors of said devastation — off the hook completely. This overemphasis on individual action shames people for their everyday activities, things they can barely avoid doing because of the fossil fuel-dependent system they were born into…. If we want to function in society, we have no choice but to participate in that system. To blame us for that is to shame us for our very existence.” • Amen.
“Special Report: A Cloudspotter’s Guide to Climate Change” [Reuters]. “When Gavin Pretor-Pinney decided on a whim to inaugurate the Cloud Appreciation Society at a literary festival, he never expected it to draw much attention. Fifteen years later, more than 47,000 members have signed up for a group that could have been dismissed as another example of quintessentially British eccentricity…. Global climate models are a computational mesh that use grids of the Earth that are tens to hundreds of kilometers wide. Clouds and the complicated processes they are made under are smaller in size and present a ‘blind spot’ in climate modeling, says [Tapo] Schneider, the Caltech climate scientist…. [T]he Cloud Appreciation Society decided not to get involved in the climate change debate. Asked what he made of his fellow members’ reluctance to include climate advocacy in the Cloud Appreciation Society’s work, [Walt Lyons, an atmospheric scientist and former broadcast meteorologist who belongs to the society] pauses for a moment. ‘Just appreciating clouds is a big job, because people are reconnecting with nature,’ he says finally. ‘If more people could begin to understand what they’re about to lose…’ He walks away and settles his bill with the cashier.” • Great metaphor, there. A sad ending! A very good article on clouds; the Cloud Appreciation Society is the story hook (or, I suppose, barb). Well worth a read.
“Sacramento UC Master Gardeners to host annual Harvest Day gardening event in Fair Oaks” [Sacramento Bee]. “Gardening is incredibly rewarding, but it can also frustrate, especially when a plant is struggling or bugs are plaguing your garden. But there’s help available: The Sacramento UC Master Gardeners are here to help and give advice at their annual Harvest Day event.” • Master Gardeners are a great resource.
For rail fans, a thread:
Trains are running at reduced speeds tomorrow, because of all this heat causing the rails to buckle.
Inevitably this brings out people asking “why doesn’t this happen in Spain/Mexico/other hot countries”, so it’s time for a thread about railway track. https://t.co/YlwCUiaVAl
— Alex Chan (@alexwlchan) July 24, 2019
“Real Estate Agents Trying To Gentrify Run-Down Earth By Renaming It West Saturn” [The Onion (RH)]. “With Mars almost sold through, demand for the good spots on Earth is only going to heat up, much like Earth itself.”
Guillotine Watch
Get used to it:
Tonight I tweeted a pic of a Georgetown party hosted by @maureendowd, attended by @SpeakerPelosi, @SenSchumer and DC journos. In the old days it would’ve been a benign big-shot brag. No more. It was viciously ratio’d by left and right. I deleted it. All establishments are hated.
— Howard Fineman (@howardfineman) July 25, 2019
Here’s Fineman’s deleted tweet:
pic.twitter.com/0I7M89N5Th
— Walter (@Waltersghost1) July 25, 2019
Class Warfare
“If You Hate Capitalism You Will Love This Map” [Vice]. “The Black Socialists of America (BSA), a coalition of ‘anticapitalist, internationalist Black Americans,’ just launched its Dual Power Map. The map promises to plot every single worker cooperative, small business development center, community land trust, and dual power project in America so ‘you can support them right now.’ But what are any of these things? What is dual power? Why should you care? At its heart, dual power is a socialist strategy concerned with helping people who are unable to have their needs met by capitalism. The strategy calls for ‘counter-institutions’ that not only meet the needs of those left behind but are run by those very people. It also calls for people to protect and develop these institutions into forms of social, economic, and political ‘counter-power’ through social movements or organizing efforts.” • Good press for BSA. I’ve been following BSA for awhile and they seem quite disciplined.
From an actual organizer on the shop floor, a thread:
I want to share some thoughts on rank and file work. I am going to avoid the touchy debates and focus on the experience of embedding yourself in a workplace to carry out work.
— Comrade Scalawag ✊🌹 (@ComradeScalawag) July 21, 2019
The labor aspect of the Gulf tanker seizures:
The tanker's owners are registered in Britain in order to be defended by her military and diplomatic power but the vessel is 'flagged' to Liberia in order to avoid British employment and health and safety legislation. And of course to avoid having RMT organised ratings on board. https://t.co/05cvtrfy3c
— Eddie Dempsey (@EddieDempsey) July 22, 2019
“Baby Boomers are staying in the labor force at rates not seen in generations for people their age” [Pew Research Center]. “The relatively high labor force participation of Boomers may be beneficial both to them and the wider economy. Some retirement experts emphasize working longer as the key to a secure retirement, in part because the generosity of monthly Social Security benefits increases with each year claiming is postponed. For the economy as a whole, economic growth in part depends on labor force growth, and the Boomers staying in the work force bolsters the latter.”
News of the Wired
The stuff of nightmares:
Two franchises can play at that… pic.twitter.com/WCuJyycxRi
— ρhαετhøṉ (@PhaethonTweets) July 24, 2019
(You may have to click “View” to see the “sensitive content,” for some nutty reason.
I like these stories:
Do good recklessly is my new motto https://t.co/u6sXHC0jlN
— dr. phoenix calida is bearly black (@uppittynegress) July 25, 2019
At the university cafeteria, the person behind me in line paid for my food — just randomly! So I have done the same for others. Not every day, but often enough. Its a small tradition and maybe not reckless, but I like it.
* * *
Readers, feel free to contact me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, with (a) links, and even better (b) sources I should curate regularly, (c) how to send me a check if you are allergic to PayPal, and (d) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi are deemed to be honorary plants! If you want your handle to appear as a credit, please place it at the start of your mail in parentheses: (thus). Otherwise, I will anonymize by using your initials. See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. Today’s plant (JN):
What a pleasing prospect!
* * *
Readers: Water Cooler is a standalone entity not covered by the annual NC fundraiser. So do feel free to make a contribution today or any day. Here is why: Regular positive feedback both makes me feel good and lets me know I’m on the right track with coverage. When I get no donations for five or ten days I get worried. More tangibly, a constant trickle of small donations helps me with expenses, and I factor in that trickle when setting fundraising goals. So if you see something you especially appreciate, do feel free to click this donate button:
Here is the screen that will appear, which I have helpfully annotated.
If you hate PayPal, you can email me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, and I will give you directions on how to send a check. Thank you!
This entry was posted in Guest Post, Water Cooler on July 25, 2019 by Lambert Strether.
About Lambert Strether
Readers, I have had a correspondent characterize my views as realistic cynical. Let me briefly explain them. I believe in universal programs that provide concrete material benefits, especially to the working class. Medicare for All is the prime example, but tuition-free college and a Post Office Bank also fall under this heading. So do a Jobs Guarantee and a Debt Jubilee. Clearly, neither liberal Democrats nor conservative Republicans can deliver on such programs, because the two are different flavors of neoliberalism (“Because markets”). I don’t much care about the “ism” that delivers the benefits, although whichever one does have to put common humanity first, as opposed to markets. Could be a second FDR saving capitalism, democratic socialism leashing and collaring it, or communism razing it. I don’t much care, as long as the benefits are delivered. To me, the key issue — and this is why Medicare for All is always first with me — is the tens of thousands of excess “deaths from despair,” as described by the Case-Deaton study, and other recent studies. That enormous body count makes Medicare for All, at the very least, a moral and strategic imperative. And that level of suffering and organic damage makes the concerns of identity politics — even the worthy fight to help the refugees Bush, Obama, and Clinton’s wars created — bright shiny objects by comparison. Hence my frustration with the news flow — currently in my view the swirling intersection of two, separate Shock Doctrine campaigns, one by the Administration, and the other by out-of-power liberals and their allies in the State and in the press — a news flow that constantly forces me to focus on matters that I regard as of secondary importance to the excess deaths. What kind of political economy is it that halts or even reverses the increases in life expectancy that civilized societies have achieved? I am also very hopeful that the continuing destruction of both party establishments will open the space for voices supporting programs similar to those I have listed; let’s call such voices “the left.” Volatility creates opportunity, especially if the Democrat establishment, which puts markets first and opposes all such programs, isn’t allowed to get back into the saddle. Eyes on the prize! I love the tactical level, and secretly love even the horse race, since I’ve been blogging about it daily for fourteen years, but everything I write has this perspective at the back of it.
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2:00PM Water Cooler 7/25/2019
Digital Elixir 2:00PM Water Cooler 7/25/2019
By Lambert Strether of Corrente
Politics
“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” –James Madison, Federalist 51
“They had one weapon left and both knew it: treachery.” –Frank Herbert, Dune
“2020 Democratic Presidential Nomination” [RealClearPolitics] (average of five polls). As of July 24: Biden flat at 28.6% (28.6), Sanders up at 15.0% (14.8%), Warren up at 15.0% (14.6%), Buttigieg up at 4.8% (5.0%), Harris down 12.2% (12.6%), others Brownian motion.
* * *
2020
Sanders (D)(1): “Tensions Between Bernie Sanders and MSNBC Boil Over” [Daily Beast]. “The backlash from Sanders-world reached a new high on Sunday, when MSNBC analyst Mimi Rocah, a former assistant U.S attorney for the Southern District of New York and occasional contributor to The Daily Beast, launched a personal critique of Sanders during a segment with host David Gura, saying that he makes her “skin crawl” and that he’s not a ‘pro-woman candidate.’… A senior campaign aide said the campaign believes there are possible biases in the network, but instead of shunning MSNBC they’ve been aggressive in getting their people booked. Sanders has been on the network at least nine times this cycle.”
Warren (D)(1): “Elizabeth Warren Wants to Stop Banks From Dominating Trillions in Payments” [Bloomberg]. “At issue is the development of real-time payment systems that would allow consumers and businesses to instantly access money that’s sent to their bank accounts. Everyone agrees that creating such networks is necessary. But they’re at odds over whether it’s a good idea to let big banks, which already have one up and running, reign supreme….. [Warren] wants the Federal Reserve to join the fray. The Massachusetts lawmaker, along with Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and two House Democrats, plans to introduce a bill Wednesday that would require the Fed to build a competing system. They say they want to make the U.S. payments infrastructure a public utility and prevent big banks from gaining a monopoly.” • Good!
Warren (D)(2): “Warren Is No Hillary. She’s Also No Bernie” [Jacobin]. “Characterizing Warren as a ‘neoliberal‘ or, even more stupidly, a ‘Clintonite,’ some misguided online Bernie Sanders supporters seem to be trying to cast her as the archvillain in the sequel to 2016’s horror flop, Hillary. With Warren’s advocacy for aggressive government regulation, her support for redistributive programs, her sharp critique of antisocial corporate behavior, and her rejection of individualistic folklore (remember ‘You didn’t build that‘?), she’s emerged as a relatively mild but nevertheless quite serious opponent of neoliberal ideology…. However, while Warren isn’t a neoliberal, Sanders supporters aren’t the only ones making shit up. Her own supporters have been spinning a series of fictitious narratives rooted in classic neoliberal identity politics, using feminism and anti-racism to discredit Sanders’s socialist agenda… One of these curious neoliberal narratives is that only sexism could explain why people support Sanders over Warren, since the candidates are exactly the same politically. Earlier this year, Moira Donegan, writing in the Guardian, asked, ‘Why vote for Sanders when you can have Elizabeth Warren instead?’ While Warren calls herself a “capitalist to my bones,” Sanders is a lifelong socialist.”
* * *
“Biden tries to set the stage in Detroit” [Politico]. “CNN’s broadcast, which begins at 8 p.m., will also feature an introduction of the candidates and playing of the national anthem.” • The debates are already enough like a sporting event, so what next? A military flyover?
“Can’t Buy Mohammed bin Salman Love” [Foreign Policy]. Last month, credible reports emerged that the U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg was courting campaign investors linked to Saudi Arabia. In June, Buttigieg held a fundraiser in the home of Hamilton James, a major Democratic donor and the mastermind behind a $20 billion deal to generate Saudi investment in U.S. infrastructure. Buttigieg is not alone. The Intercept revealed that former Vice President Joe Biden’s American Possibilities PAC includes investment from former Democratic Sen. John Breaux, a lobbyist for the firm Squire Patton Boggs, which is registered as a representative for Saudi Arabia.” • Classy!
Impeachment
“Mueller testimony fails to move needle on impeachment” [The Hill]. “[S]ome of the most vocal impeachment proponents said they don’t expect Mueller’s halting testimony — in which he asked legislators to repeat their questions on multiple occasions and often declined to answer questions at all — to lend any significant new power to the effort… More than 90 House Democrats have come out in favor of an impeachment inquiry, according to a tally kept by The Hill. But impeachment backers are still mostly progressives and amount to less than half of the 235-member caucus. Only a half-dozen Democrats representing swing districts have joined the push — and even they all hail from districts carried by Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.”
Ouch:
Watching the dry prose of the Mueller report leap to life in the form of hours of committee hearings reminds me of when I was a fundamentalist kid and they tried to make the Bible fun using claymation. Now kids could SEE that Amminadab was the father of Nahshom, who begat Uzziah
— Pinboard (@Pinboard) July 24, 2019
“You Can’t Beat Trump without Throwing a Punch” [National Review]. “[Democrats’] desire is that the president should be removed from office, perhaps that the result of the 2016 election itself could be abrogated. And that all this could all be effected while they remain passive observers and commentators. Perhaps they would only be the formal executors of a judgment made elsewhere…. In other words, pro-impeachment Democrats wanted Mueller to make the decision for them, to take responsibility for moving public opinion in their favored direction. This is not how impeachment works under the Constitution, and it is not how political conflict works anyway. Just as spectators of the political game, it should be obvious by now that this is the signature mistake that all of Trump’s opponents have made. A fear of direct confrontation with Trump and his base leads his opponents to hope that Trump can be defeated without hard fighting….This is a vain hope. Like Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Hillary Clinton before them, House Democrats will lose any contest with Trump so long as they are unwilling to sustain political damage in the act of inflicting more damage to him.” • Hard to argue with any of this.
RussiaGate
“These Questions for Mueller Show Why Russiagate Was Never the Answer” [The Nation]. The best question: “3. Why didn’t you interview Julian Assange? “The uncertainty in Mueller’s account of how WikiLeaks received the stolen e-mails could possibly have been cleared up had Mueller attempted to interview Julian Assange. The WikiLeaks founder insists that the Russian government was not his source, and has repeatedly offered to speak to US investigators. Given that Assange received and published the stolen emails at the heart of Mueller’s investigation, his absence from Mueller’s voluminous witness sheet is a glaring omission.” • Lawyers believe that you should never ask a question if you don’t already know the answer. So what does Mueller’s refusal to interview Assange say about his trust in the DNC?
Realignment and Legitimacy
“There Are Reasons for Optimism” [Noam Chomsky, Catalyst]. A long, long interview, well worth a read. Chomsky concludes: “A lot of things have improved and they’ve improved by active, organized, committed people who went to work on it and changed the world. That’s a reason to be optimistic.”
Stats Watch
Jobless Claims, week of July 20, 2019: “One of the Federal Reserve’s two central pillars policy — employment — is showing increasing and unusual strength” [Econoday]. “Labor conditions in July [may] have been at least if not more favorable than conditions in June.”
Durable Goods Orders, June 2019: “If manufacturing is the Federal Reserve’s central focus, they have less to be worried about. [Econoday]. “It’s a rare 1.9 percent jump in core capital goods orders that points to new confidence in the business outlook and the release of prior pent-up demand for new production equipment.” • What you want to see in a capitalist economy, even if most of turns out to be going to robots. More: “Revisions and the Boeing 737 aside, this report is an echo of the strength of last week’s industrial production report where manufacturing posted its strongest performance of the year, and it diminishes the need for Fed rate cuts and will have to be put into broad context or explained away by Jerome Powell at his press conference next week should the Fed indeed lower rates.”
Kansas City Fed Manufacturing Index, July 2019: “Weighed down by increased uncertainty due to trade concerns and weaker domestic demand, Tenth District manufacturing activity unexpectedly slid into mild contraction” [Econoday]. “Today’s survey from Kansas joins yesterday’s Richmond Fed survey in showing manufacturing in contraction in their respective region, scaling back expectations of a general rebound in the nation’s flagging manufacturing sector that were aroused by last week’s positive Philly Fed and Empire State surveys,”
International Trade in Goods, June 2019: Exports fell very sharp[ly] with imports down. These are among the weakest results in 2-1/2 years and outside of isolated gains in May” [Econoday]. “Capital goods are the US’s strongest exports and these fell… Import contraction was deepest in industrial supplies…. Facing a sudden rush of improving economic data — whether employment or retail sales or core capital goods — the Federal Reserve will be able to point to declines in global trade as a justification for what appears to be an approaching rate cut at next week’s meeting.”
Retail Inventories [Advance], June 2019: Retail inventories contracted unexpectedly [Econoday]. “However unfavorable for the GDP calculation, low inventories at a time of strong consumer demand and what may be, based on this morning’s durable goods report, improving business demand point to the need for inventory building which would be a plus for third quarter employment and production.”
Wholesale Inventories [Advance], June 2019: Wholesale inventories rose lower-than-expected [Econoday]. As above on inventory building.
Retail: “Amazon Has ‘Destroyed’ U.S. Retail Industry, Mnuchin Says” [Bloomberg]. “U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin alleged that Amazon.com Inc. has “limited competition” and harmed the retail industry as the Trump administration announced a broad antitrust review into whether technology companies are using their power to thwart rivals. ‘If you look at Amazon, although there are certain benefits to it, it destroyed the retail industry across the United States, so there’s no question they’ve limited competition,” Mnuchin said in an interview with CNBC Wednesday.’” • And just think! If Kamala Harris had prosecuted Mnuchin, he wouldn’t be saying this today!
Housing: “Nearly 250,000 NYC rental apartments sit vacant” [6sqft]. Early numbers from the Census Bureau’s Housing and Vacancy Survey show that the number of unoccupied apartments throughout New York City has grown significantly over the past three years–a whopping 35 percent to 65,406 apartments since 2014, when the last survey was taken. As the Daily News puts it, “Today, 247,977 units — more than 11% of all rental apartments in New York City — sit either empty or scarcely occupied, even as many New Yorkers struggle to find an apartment they can afford.” One reason for the growing vacancy rates, as the article states, is the city’s high rent, which has risen twice as fast as inflation….. Many of the 75,000 temporary apartments are pied-à-terres–think weekend or vacation homes for the rich–a number that’s expanded from 9,282 in 1987.”
Tech: “Twitter, Unable to Control Its Worst Elements, Rolls out a Site Redesign” [Fortune]. “The social media site began testing the new version of its site back in September 2018. The new look better resembles the site’s experience on modern smartphones. At the start, the new look was optional, and only available to some. Now, the redesign will be mandatory for Twitter users, disabling their ability to switch to the social network’s legacy layout.” • Amazingly, press coverage of this debacle has been universally positive; neither the designers nor the press seem to understand that phones (tiny screens, touch) and laptops (bigger screens or even monitors, mouse/keyboard) are different media. Hence the grotesquely oversized menu, the big type, the wasted screen real estate, the extra steps, and so on. The good news is that there are workarounds to the so-called “mandatory” redesign, if design is the word I want.
Tech: “How to switch back to the old Twitter layout” [ShackNews]. • The new Twitter laptop redesign really is ghastly. This technique works, though it’s not clear for how long.
Manufacturing: “Boeing says 737 MAX crisis could temporarily shut down Renton production” [Seattle Times]. “Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg said Wednesday that though the company’s “best estimate” is that the 737 MAX will return to service in October, a slip in that optimistic timeline could mean the Renton 737 production line would be temporarily shut down. ‘That’s not something we want to do, but something we have to prepare for,’ he said on Boeing’s second-quarter earnings call with analysts and the press. Such a drastic step would mean temporary layoffs at the plant, which employs more than 10,000 people. ‘A temporary shutdown could be more efficient than a sustained lower production rate,’ Muilenburg said. ‘That’s what we are thinking our way through.’ Wednesday’s call also included worrying news for Boeing’s Everett factory: The new 777X that rolled out of the factory in March will not fly until next year because of delays in fixing a problem with the plane’s GE-9X engine.”• A firm with enormous quality assurance problems considers screwing over its workers…
Manufacturing: “Southwest ceasing operations at Newark airport because of 737 Max delays” [CNN]. “Southwest Airlines is ceasing operations at Newark Liberty International Airport because of the continued grounding of the Boeing 737 Max. The airline announced Thursday that Boeing’s (BA) “extensive delays” in getting its 737 Max plane back in service, Southwest has to stop flying in and out of the New Jersey airport starting November 3. Southwest called it a financial decision, saying its financial results at the airport have fallen below expectations, and it had to “mitigate damages and optimize our aircraft…. The airline operates 20 flights per day from Newark to 10 cities, including Phoenix, Austin and Chicago. Southwest (LUV) will still continue to fly from two New York area airports including LaGuardia and Islip on Long Island.” • Newark or LaGuardia…. I’d have to give it some thought.
Manufacturing: “Airbus A350 software bug forces airlines to turn planes off and on every 149 hours” [The Register]. “Some models of Airbus A350 airliners still need to be hard rebooted after exactly 149 hours, despite warnings from the EU Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) first issued two years ago.” • Funny to have the famous Help Desk reponse — “Please reboot your machine and try again” — appear at such a high level. To be fair to Airbus, the problem was fixable. The article has interesting information on how Airbus aircraft are wired up.
The Biosphere
“Moody’s Buys Climate Data Firm, Signaling New Scrutiny of Climate Risks” [New York Times]. “The rating agency bought a majority share in Four Twenty Seven, a California-based company that measures a range of hazards, including extreme rainfall, hurricanes, heat stress and sea level rise, and tracks their impact on 2,000 companies and 196 countries. In the United States, the data covers 761 cities and more than 3,000 counties.” • I’m reminded of the scene from The Big Short where Mark Baum visits Standard & Poors:
youtube
“I work in the environmental movement. I don’t care if you recycle.” [Vox]. “All too often, our culture broadly equates “environmentalism” with personal consumerism. To be “good,” we must convert to 100 percent solar energy, ride an upcycled bike everywhere, stop flying, eat vegan. We have to live a zero-waste lifestyle, never use Amazon Prime, etc., etc. I hear this message everywhere…. While we’re busy testing each other’s purity, we let the government and industries — the authors of said devastation — off the hook completely. This overemphasis on individual action shames people for their everyday activities, things they can barely avoid doing because of the fossil fuel-dependent system they were born into…. If we want to function in society, we have no choice but to participate in that system. To blame us for that is to shame us for our very existence.” • Amen.
“Special Report: A Cloudspotter’s Guide to Climate Change” [Reuters]. “When Gavin Pretor-Pinney decided on a whim to inaugurate the Cloud Appreciation Society at a literary festival, he never expected it to draw much attention. Fifteen years later, more than 47,000 members have signed up for a group that could have been dismissed as another example of quintessentially British eccentricity…. Global climate models are a computational mesh that use grids of the Earth that are tens to hundreds of kilometers wide. Clouds and the complicated processes they are made under are smaller in size and present a ‘blind spot’ in climate modeling, says [Tapo] Schneider, the Caltech climate scientist…. [T]he Cloud Appreciation Society decided not to get involved in the climate change debate. Asked what he made of his fellow members’ reluctance to include climate advocacy in the Cloud Appreciation Society’s work, [Walt Lyons, an atmospheric scientist and former broadcast meteorologist who belongs to the society] pauses for a moment. ‘Just appreciating clouds is a big job, because people are reconnecting with nature,’ he says finally. ‘If more people could begin to understand what they’re about to lose…’ He walks away and settles his bill with the cashier.” • Great metaphor, there. A sad ending! A very good article on clouds; the Cloud Appreciation Society is the story hook (or, I suppose, barb). Well worth a read.
“Sacramento UC Master Gardeners to host annual Harvest Day gardening event in Fair Oaks” [Sacramento Bee]. “Gardening is incredibly rewarding, but it can also frustrate, especially when a plant is struggling or bugs are plaguing your garden. But there’s help available: The Sacramento UC Master Gardeners are here to help and give advice at their annual Harvest Day event.” • Master Gardeners are a great resource.
For rail fans, a thread:
Trains are running at reduced speeds tomorrow, because of all this heat causing the rails to buckle.
Inevitably this brings out people asking “why doesn’t this happen in Spain/Mexico/other hot countries”, so it’s time for a thread about railway track. https://t.co/YlwCUiaVAl
— Alex Chan (@alexwlchan) July 24, 2019
“Real Estate Agents Trying To Gentrify Run-Down Earth By Renaming It West Saturn” [The Onion (RH)]. “With Mars almost sold through, demand for the good spots on Earth is only going to heat up, much like Earth itself.”
Guillotine Watch
Get used to it:
Tonight I tweeted a pic of a Georgetown party hosted by @maureendowd, attended by @SpeakerPelosi, @SenSchumer and DC journos. In the old days it would’ve been a benign big-shot brag. No more. It was viciously ratio’d by left and right. I deleted it. All establishments are hated.
— Howard Fineman (@howardfineman) July 25, 2019
Here’s Fineman’s deleted tweet:
pic.twitter.com/0I7M89N5Th
— Walter (@Waltersghost1) July 25, 2019
Class Warfare
“If You Hate Capitalism You Will Love This Map” [Vice]. “The Black Socialists of America (BSA), a coalition of ‘anticapitalist, internationalist Black Americans,’ just launched its Dual Power Map. The map promises to plot every single worker cooperative, small business development center, community land trust, and dual power project in America so ‘you can support them right now.’ But what are any of these things? What is dual power? Why should you care? At its heart, dual power is a socialist strategy concerned with helping people who are unable to have their needs met by capitalism. The strategy calls for ‘counter-institutions’ that not only meet the needs of those left behind but are run by those very people. It also calls for people to protect and develop these institutions into forms of social, economic, and political ‘counter-power’ through social movements or organizing efforts.” • Good press for BSA. I’ve been following BSA for awhile and they seem quite disciplined.
From an actual organizer on the shop floor, a thread:
I want to share some thoughts on rank and file work. I am going to avoid the touchy debates and focus on the experience of embedding yourself in a workplace to carry out work.
— Comrade Scalawag
Tumblr media Tumblr media
(@ComradeScalawag) July 21, 2019
The labor aspect of the Gulf tanker seizures:
The tanker’s owners are registered in Britain in order to be defended by her military and diplomatic power but the vessel is ‘flagged’ to Liberia in order to avoid British employment and health and safety legislation. And of course to avoid having RMT organised ratings on board. https://t.co/05cvtrfy3c
— Eddie Dempsey (@EddieDempsey) July 22, 2019
“Baby Boomers are staying in the labor force at rates not seen in generations for people their age” [Pew Research Center]. “The relatively high labor force participation of Boomers may be beneficial both to them and the wider economy. Some retirement experts emphasize working longer as the key to a secure retirement, in part because the generosity of monthly Social Security benefits increases with each year claiming is postponed. For the economy as a whole, economic growth in part depends on labor force growth, and the Boomers staying in the work force bolsters the latter.”
News of the Wired
The stuff of nightmares:
Two franchises can play at that… pic.twitter.com/WCuJyycxRi
— ρhαετhøṉ (@PhaethonTweets) July 24, 2019
(You may have to click “View” to see the “sensitive content,” for some nutty reason.
I like these stories:
Do good recklessly is my new motto https://t.co/u6sXHC0jlN
— dr. phoenix calida is bearly black (@uppittynegress) July 25, 2019
At the university cafeteria, the person behind me in line paid for my food — just randomly! So I have done the same for others. Not every day, but often enough. Its a small tradition and maybe not reckless, but I like it.
* * *
Readers, feel free to contact me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, with (a) links, and even better (b) sources I should curate regularly, (c) how to send me a check if you are allergic to PayPal, and (d) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi are deemed to be honorary plants! If you want your handle to appear as a credit, please place it at the start of your mail in parentheses: (thus). Otherwise, I will anonymize by using your initials. See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. Today’s plant (JN):
What a pleasing prospect!
* * *
Readers: Water Cooler is a standalone entity not covered by the annual NC fundraiser. So do feel free to make a contribution today or any day. Here is why: Regular positive feedback both makes me feel good and lets me know I’m on the right track with coverage. When I get no donations for five or ten days I get worried. More tangibly, a constant trickle of small donations helps me with expenses, and I factor in that trickle when setting fundraising goals. So if you see something you especially appreciate, do feel free to click this donate button:
Here is the screen that will appear, which I have helpfully annotated.
If you hate PayPal, you can email me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, and I will give you directions on how to send a check. Thank you!
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2:00PM Water Cooler 7/25/2019
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thechasefiles · 6 years ago
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The Chase Files Daily Newscap 6/19/2019
Good MORNING  #realdreamchasers! Here is The Chase Files Daily News Cap for Wednesday 19th June 2019. Remember you can read full articles for FREE via Barbados Today (BT), Barbados Government Information Services (BGIS) or by purchasing a Midweek Nation Newspaper (MWN).
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OK FOR LAND TAX PAYMENTS IN 4 PARTS – The people voiced their concerns about land tax payments, and the Government says it listened. Barbadians, many fuming over the hike in land tax, will now be allowed to pay their bills in four equal instalments by March 31 next year, and still earn a five per cent discount.  In addition, some property owners, especially pensioners, have also been advised they can apply for relief through the Land Tax Relief Board, to show that payment of increases may bring about undue hardship. The changes were announced yesterday by Prime Minister Mia Mottley in the House of Assembly, as she revealed initiatives aimed at easing the burden on taxpayers. (MWN)
LAND 'LAYAWAY' – After hearing the “cries of the people”, Government has implemented a four payment instalment plan, inclusive of a five per cent discount, for taxpayers.  In addition, those who own vacant property valued under $450,000 will get a ten per cent rebate. The announcements were made by Prime Minister Mia Mottley as she delivered a Ministerial Statement on the land tax payment issue in the House Assembly today. The Minister of Finance, Economic Affairs and Investment repeated the call for Barbadians to stay the course. Mottley told the House: “This Government, my Government has taken the time to listen to the cries and to act where we can. In my 2019 Budget Speech I asked that we as a nation stay the course. “We all knew it would not be easy but my Government is determined that we should all share the burden fairly and that no group would be unduly affected by the measures which we implemented.” She said that taxpayers who enter the instalment arrangement can benefit from the five per cent discount once they do so before July 26. “We have created a framework to allow Barbadians to pay their land tax bill over a longer period of time. We will be facilitating payments in instalments. We have entered into an arrangement with the Barbados Revenue Authority which allows a taxpayer to pay the bill in up to four instalments. This would allow people to better plan and be able to pay over a longer period of time.” The Prime Minister said there would be relief, too, for owners of vacant lots. She explained that 1,870 vacant lots will not benefit from the discount with nearly 35,000 benefitting from it. But the discount is not available to owners of commercial lots. “Any person owning vacant property which is valued under $450,000 will now attract a ten per cent discount on the amount of land tax they would have to pay to the Barbados Revenue Authority. In a case where the land tax has already been paid, and a credit exists such a credit will be applied by the Barbados Revenue Authority to your next land tax bill.” The Prime Minister, who interrupted Minister of Tourism Kerrie Symmonds to deliver the Ministerial Statement, explained that the increase in land tax is only on properties valued more than $450 000. “For most property owners the decrease income tax will be significantly larger than any increase in land tax charge to any person owning a property over $450,000. The decrease in the amount of income tax being paid will be more than what Government is asking persons to pay in land tax.” Mottley said the early issuing of the land tax bill was to allow people more time to get their house in order. “There has also been an outcry about the early issue date of these bills and the comparatively shorter discount periods for taxpayers to take advantage of. That has not been the case. I would like to remind the public that the land tax payments are always due before March 31 of the financial year in which they are issued. “Once you pay before March 31, 2020, you will not be subject to any penalty or any interest. The due date has not changed. Previously, land tax bills would have been issued in September which would have actually given you a shorter period of time to pay your bill between September and March 31,” she said. Mottley continued: “We took the deliberate decision to be able to issue the bills by the end of May to give you a full ten months to be able to make way to being able to pay the bills rather than being forced to do so within that six-month period. We acknowledge that there was a five per cent and ten per cent discount if paid 30 days and 60 days after the issuance of the bill. We chose only to offer the five per cent discount this year instead of the ten per cent discount as well.”  (BT)
FORMER AG TO MARSHALL: RESIGN – With Barbados four killings shy of its highest ever murder tally in a given year, and with six months still to go in 2019, Attorney General Dale Marshall has been told to quit the post by his predecessor. Former Attorney General Adriel Brathwaite, in calling for the resignation of his successor, has declared that Marshall is now learning that the job is more difficult than it appeared from the outside looking in. In 2017, Marshall, who was the Opposition spokesperson on legal matters, called for Brathwaite to be relieved of duty following a wave of shootings, including brazen gunplay on Kadooment Day in which a man was killed and 22 others injured. Marshall said then: “I think the time has come when the Prime Minister [Freundel Stuart] needs to relieve the Attorney General of the portfolio that he gave him to maintain the peace and stability of our country. He’s failed woefully. “The Attorney General has failed us. He has failed the country. He’s failed, I’m sure, his constituents. And the time has come for the Prime Minister to relieve him of that responsibility since I’m sure that he would not resign.” But with the tables now turned, the former AG is making the same demand. Brathwaite told Barbados TODAY: “I used to say to the present Attorney General that even though opposition politics is difficult, it doesn’t mean that you say things that are not true. “If you go back to 2017, you would see that [Marshall’s] position was that I was doing such a poor job and my party was doing such a poor job that we should resign. Now, of course, we have an unprecedented level of murders in this country.” Brathwaite, who served in the Freundel Stuart administration which was ousted from power in the May 2018 general election, argued that Marshall, by his own standard, has been a failure as the Government’s top legal advisor and should therefore vacate the position. Said the former attorney general: “I think he should resign. Having taken the position that he did over the last couple of years in particular with respect to my job as Attorney General. “Given his performance, in any serious Westminster system, no one should have to call on him to resign, he should just resign. He should say that I have failed and therefore I resign.”  The former AG expressed the view that Government has failed to comprehend that the murder-rate is merely a manifestation of a systemic problem and unless steps are taken to address the problem from the root, the vicious cycle will continue. Brathwaite was referring to plans for dealing with at-risk youth who he said are often neglected until they end up in the justice system. Brathwaite declared: “They were so opposed to the [Democratic Labour Party administration] that they refused to see the challenges that we were having. I have always said that it is not an Attorney General’s problem to solve the crime in this country. “It is not his alone. The problem actually begins at inception… These youths who are often fleeing abuse, are condemned as criminals before an attempt is made to help them. “Unless we have a holistic approach to crime and criminal behaviour in this country, then pointing to criminal statistics does not help. So, we focus on the ones that commit crime, but we do not focus on the other challenges within society. We need to go back to basics”.   (BT)
BWA BE WARNED! – Top management of the state-run Barbados Water Authority (BWA) and its engineers are caught up in a standoff over the manner in which the latter claim they are being treated by company officials. And a source close to the issue, has told Barbados TODAY that nothing has gotten better since their bargaining agent – the Barbados Workers’ Union (BWU) –  sent a “warning” letter dated May 20, 2019 to general manager Keithroy Halliday regarding “the degree of psychological battering” to which the engineers are being subjected. In the correspondence – a copy of which has been obtained by Barbados TODAY – BWU General Secretary Senator Toni Moore told Halliday the water works company should count itself fortunate not to have been severely dislocated by strike action. “You should note that based on the degree of psychological battering which your engineering staff reported from their meeting with the Minister [of Water Resource Management] on Friday, 3rd May, 2019, there may well have been a fully publicized and gravely embarrassing work stoppage on Monday, 6 May, 2019,” Moore wrote. The union boss said her organisation met with the workers as it has been trying since February to “bring respect and decency” to the work environment at the water authority. She informed the BWA GM that the thrust of her strongly-worded letter was intended to identify national interests rather than personal pique or individual departures from acceptable courses of action. And Moore assured Halliday that the union was not closing the door on their relationship. “This organisation is still willing to meet with you and fully detail its concerns regarding those hostilities which continue to be a source of tremendous unease among your staff, including Mr Nathan Hart [an engineer] whose treatment still remains an untreated industrial relations abscess poisoning our labour management landscape,” the BWU leader wrote. Senator Moore told the water company’s general manager that if he continued to seem oblivious to what was going on, it could only be due to his failure to follow his own communications channels. “The terms of our meeting and our establishment of an acceptable way forward, are clear. Your answer should not be in seeking to coerce or to disarm by using individual approaches. Let this past period be confronted squarely, the issues properly bled and a new way forward embraced. We await your response,” the union boss said. However, inside sources told Barbados TODAY that up to this afternoon, there had been no response to the letter.. And tonight general manager Halliday said the BWA was not in a position to comment on the issue because they are in discussions with the union. “Based on what was presented, we are not in a position to comment at this time. As you know, once we are engaging in discussions with the union, we respect those boundaries. So we would not be able to respond at this time,” he told Barbados TODAY. (BT)
YOUNG PEOPLE NOT WORK READY – Employers across Barbados are generally dissatisfied with the level of readiness for the workforce among young people leaving secondary and tertiary learning institutions here. This is according to Chief Executive Officer of Pinelands Creative Workshop Sophia Greaves-Broome, who pointed out that research carried out in 2007 and again in 2011, showed that there were several barriers that prevented more graduates finding a job. Those research findings identified males and females between the ages of 15 and 24 as being most at risk, with most of the barriers to them finding gainful employment being poor basic education, poor work ethics, lack of marketable skills, and lack of work experience. Greaves-Broome pointed out that between 2017 and 2018 the Ministry of Labour carried out a similar survey funded by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) through the Skills for the Future programme. “The research findings revealed that employers in all sectors were generally still unsatisfied with the skills displayed by school leavers whether secondary or tertiary,” said Greaves-Broome. “Concerns were with the inadequate level of adaptability, the ability to collaborate, poor communication and conflict resolution, poor customer service, decision-making and time management skills and work ethics. Overall the soft skills of secondary school leavers were of high concern. It was also suggested that this type of personal and professional development gap can be of a significant barrier to employment,” she explained. Greaves-Broome was addressing the Pinelands Creative Workshop’s 19th annual Career and Life Management (CALM) programme at the office of the IDB on Monday. The ten-day event, which will see sessions continuing at the University of the West Indies (UWI) Open Campus in The Pine, St Michael in coming days, is being held under the theme Employ-Ability, and will engage students from secondary schools in high-level discussions on varying angles related to the labour market and the preparation for the world of work. Greaves-Broome called for attention to be redirected to developing skills in the areas of problem solving, critical thinking, team work, communication and conflict resolution, adding that it was the collective duty of civil society, and the private and public sectors to ensure quality education was provided to young people. “The world will continue to shift, but in the interest of our children, are we keeping up, are we aligning our education with the demands and creative industries, blue and green economies and other new and emerging areas that could be avenues for economic sustainability at the individual and national levels?” she asked. She welcomed Government’s decision to move away from the 11-plus examination system, adding that she hoped the new system would look to an education from a sustainable development angle and an international perspective”. Minister in the Ministry of Investment Marsha Caddle insisted that for individuals and the country to experience sustainable growth and development, there would be need for more engagement with young people in “the things that matter to them”. As such, she said the Mia Mottley-led administration was focused on seven main pillars to achieve a growth strategy, which included investing in areas that would benefit the youth. These, she said included “reinvesting in education and skills, reinvesting in public health, investing in climate resilient infrastructure, resetting fiscal policy, reinventing Government, reforming our financial system . . . and reengaging with CARICOM (Caribbean Community)”. Caddle said for the next 50 years Barbados should have an education system that “has a certain level of flexibility”, while welcoming the planned move away from the 11-plus examination. “Education is not just about employability. It is education for life. It is about being able to live meaningful lives and create agencies so that you understand why you are making decisions and how those decisions are important to you and the people around you. It is really about being able to live a life that we all value,” she said. Project Manager at the Maria Holder Memorial Trust Ruchelle Roach said there was need for more education and awareness among parents about the new and emerging sectors, as she called on individuals here to move away “from the doctor, lawyer, bank manager mode of thinking”. “We are seeing a trend where more and more young people are moving into the non-traditional areas of employment and we have to prepare the youth for the changing dynamics,” she said. Meanwhile, IDB representative Juan Carlos De La Hoz Vinas urged students to be bold and ask all the questions they could about career options they were interested in as they prepare to enter the world of work. (BT)
MORE SHIP BERTHS COMING – Plans to develop several berthing areas off the south, west and north of the island are in motion. Minister of Tourism and International Transport Kerrie Symmonds said the request for proposals for the repairs on the Speightstown jetty and development of “several other landings for maritime transportation” have recently gone out. He said officials have identified several sites including Speightstown in the north, Holetown and Fitts Village in the west and Accra and Oistins in the south, and “one or two in between” where some vessels could dock. He explained that the vessels to use those berths would be yachts and small luxury vessels with 1,500 and less passengers. He first outlined this plan back in February after meeting with local tourism officials and representatives of the Florida Caribbean Cruise Association (FCCA). At that time, Symmonds said as Government prepared the island to receive larger cruise vessels, the highly-touted Sugar Point Cruise Terminal that was earmarked for the location between the Bridgetown Port and the Bridgetown Fishing Complex was to be reviewed so that larger vessels could be accommodated there. Presenting a resolution for the final report of the National Cruise Development Commission in Parliament on Tuesday, he expressed concern about the island’s capacity to handle larger vessels as cruise lines prepare to introduce bigger ships carrying more passengers adding that the former administration had signed contracts in this regard. “The Bridgetown Port on its best day in homeporting can turn around 10,000 people . . . but on any given day during a weekend period you will find four ships or more berthed at the Bridgetown Port,” he said. “We can do and do or fail to do until they dump us from the itinerary as they have dumped other people . . . So the ships that are coming are going to be carrying 5,000 people or more, but the maximum capacity we have is to carry 10,000 and we have an itinerary that tells you that you will have four ships homeporting. “It is in writing, they signed the contract. Richard Sealy [former minister of tourism] signed on behalf of Government, on November 29, 2013. And nothing was done, and we come to a point therefore where the capacity is the issue,” said Symmonds. However, he gave the assurance that while the $400 million development was now the subject of court proceedings, it was still very much a plan on the table but some changes would have to be made. “Discussions are ongoing. I give the House that assurance, but two things have to be looked at, one, a complete redesign of the concept, and a scaling down of the concept from the US$200 million enterprise that it was first mooted to be,” he said. (BT)
SAVING BELFIELD – Prime Minister Mia Mottley has announced that the former home of National Hero, the Right Excellent Samuel Jackman Prescod, which was demolished on Friday is to be rebuilt. The declaration came amid assurances by Mottley that her administration will do its best to preserve the island’s historic buildings. She told the audience at a reception, which included,Sir Henry Fraser, that Government has indicated that the property should be rebuilt to respect its heritage.     “The truth is that we will not always be able to save everything that we want to save. But we have determined as a Government that we will try, that is why the new planning development legislation has been drafted… and that is why we are working and will continue to work with all of the relevant entities to either restore or repurpose where possible, those aspects of our heritage that we want to be able to keep.”    The abandoned Belfield, Black Rock mansion, which was on the premises of the Nightingale Children’s Home, was bulldozed last Friday, a move which Sir Henry described as “a tragic and dramatic event”. He also charged that it was a “callous disregard for its history, our National Hero the Right Excellent Samuel Jackman Prescod, the generosity of a brilliant black Barbadian benefactor and its overall history of service to the children and people of Barbados”. But Mottley said while the demolition of the 200-year-old structure was “a difficult moment” for her, reports and recommendations from the engineers on the site was that restoration of the property would be difficult. “And that in circumstances where children were on that property, I have a responsibility with respect to the legal liability that would flow from Government … should children be injured.” Mottley made the comments at a reception on Monday night at Friendship Plantation in Hothersal Turning, to mark the 30th anniversary of Carib Rehab.  She also highlighted the need for repurposing plantation houses around the island in a bid to reduce the number of derelict properties. She said: “We believe that whether it is being able to facilitate enterprises such as this that don’t necessarily have to be in the centre of town, or whether it is international business offices as we see at Woodlands, that across Barbados we need to repurpose our plantations and… across the board, so that there [are] less derelict buildings across Barbados. “And I hope and pray that we can work with persons from St Lucy to St Philip to be able to do so.” (BT)
SBRC ON FIRE – Clouds of thick black smoke surround the Sustainable Barbados Recycling Centre at Vaucluse, St Thomas. Work was brought to an immediate halt around 3 p.m. when piles of garbage caught a fire. More details as they come. (MWN)
MINISTER CONFIRMS PRISON SCABIES-FREE – Minister of Home Affairs Edmund Hinkson has confirmed the existence of at least one case of scabies at HMP Dodds Prison in St Philip so far this year. However, Hinkson explained that the most recent reports of an infestation of the disease among prison officers turned out instead to be a fungal skin infection which affected six inmates last month. “In May 2019, which is probably the information that you have now received, six inmates were diagnosed as having a fungal skin infection, which, I am informed by the medical doctor, is not contagious and is not scabies,” the Minister told Barbados TODAY this morning. He was responding to a story published in this paper on Friday which quoted an unnamed prison officer as saying there was an infestation of scabies at the prison and that the officer who transports inmates to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) contracted it from an inmate and had to be treated at the QEH. It was also reported that a close family member of the prison officer also had to be treated. But the Minister said management of the penal institution has not received any reports from any staff of them being infected by scabies. He revealed though that in February this year, one inmate was diagnosed with the disease and had to be quarantined. “In February this year, one inmate revealed signs of having suspected scabies. A doctor was notified [and] the inmate was quarantined. Inmates who shared housing quarters with that inmate were also isolated. As you would appreciate, it would be in conformity with proper protocols. They were not allowed to have visitors or attend classes or have interaction with anyone during that period,” Hinkson said. “When he was further examined by a dermatologist, it was confirmed that he was carrying scabies,” Hinkson told Barbados TODAY. Hinkson however stressed that right now, the prison was free of scabies. He reported though that in October 2017, five inmates were isolated as a result of suspected case of scabies. “Two of those inmates were confirmed by one of the medical practitioners assigned to the prison as carrying the scabies virus They were treated and remained isolated for one week. A week after that, they were reviewed and discharged back into the general population with the medication and personal hygiene instructions,” Hinkson stated. He contended that the prison was just a microcosm of the wider Barbadian population and that there was nothing magical about the prison “at that time” having two cases of scabies. The Minister disclosed that  measures were being put in place to reduce the incidence of any fungal skin disease inside the St Philip jail. “In an effort to reduce this fungal skin infection, which is not contagious, recurring in the prison, the management and staff have increased their sensitization programme to both staff and inmates,” Hinkson said. The programme was being conducted through oral presentations by the staff of the medical unit and by way of distribution of leaflets on the issue. “These bacterial skin infections which would have been revealed last month among six of the inmates are mostly seen during the warm periods…and this is what we have been experiencing. You would concede [these] are mainly due to heat rashes, which is also due to poor hygiene practices…and hence the sensitization being given to the prisoners as well on this particular issue,” the Home Affairs Minister added. (BT)
REMAND INMATES GET DAY – A week after Justice Randall Worrell suspended High Court trials in an attempt to deal with the list of remand prisoners who wanted to plead guilty, the first set, 17 men, were brought down from HMP Dodds yesterday. Interestingly, one man declared he had no intention of pleading guilty and was given a date for trial. The status hearing in the No. 2 Supreme Court was the brainchild of the High Court judge after he had dealt with two men, one on remand for ten years, who told his court they had been waiting to plead guilty for a number of years.  At the time, Justice Worrell said he would be setting aside a week to deal with such men and matters and would not be hearing any more trials. (MWN)
COPS CHECKING GUN TALK VIDEO –The Cyber Crime Unit and detectives from the Criminal Investigation Department are examining a “disturbing” video by a group threatening revenge. The same day after Commissioner of Police Tyrone Griffith addressed a press conference in which he talked about revenge killings, the video surfaced on social media of the men boasting about attacking their opponents anytime or place, even during funeral services or school graduations. In response, Griffith said he had already directed the unit and detectives to investigate the matter thoroughly. Meantime, church leaders insisted they would not be intimidated into not conducting funeral services for any individuals dying through gun violence. (MWN)
MURDER ACCUSED REMANDED – Twenty-seven-year-old Romell Akeem Cummins, of Vauxhall # 2, Christ Church appeared before Magistrate Kristie Cuffy-Sargeant in the District ‘A’ Magistrate Court this afternoon. He is accused of the murder of Dave Archer, 32, West Terrace, St James on June 10 on board the MV Dreamchaser. Cummins, who is being represented by attorney-at-law Angella Mitchell-Gittens was not required to plead to the indictable charge. He was remanded to Dodds until July 16. (BT)
CONVICT: WEAPONS FOR MY PROTECTION – Navy Gardens, Christ Church resident Ewing Anderson Forde today explained that he was on his property when police found him in possession of two weapons. “I had the weapons, I ain’t telling no lie,” the 27-year-old unemployed man told Magistrate Kristie Cuffy-Sargeant today. He pleaded guilty to possession of a cutlass and a broken bottle while on Navy Garden Road, a public place. When police responded to a dispute at Old Navy Road around 7:40 a.m. today they found Forde armed with a cutlass in his right hand and a broken beer bottle in his left on the roadway. Asked to account for this, he allegedly told police, “I got these to protect myself, nobody ain’t gong to unfair me and get way so.” In an explanation from the dock to the magistrate this afternoon Forde said he was in an altercation with his cousin’s boyfriend who was telling him “all sorts of things”. “He asking me if I want to fight and poking me in my face. That is how I end up with all this types of things,” Forde said as he pointed to a swollen right eye. He added that he was talking to family members while holding the weapons when police arrived. “I was still on my property with the weapons but I had the weapons I not telling no lie,” he said before being placed on a bond for six months. If he breaches the order imposed in the District ‘A’ Magistrates’ Court today he will we have to pay a $750 forthwith fine or spend four weeks in prison. (BT)
FIRST BATCH – More than a dozen prisoners on remand for murder, theft, drugs, gun and ammunition declared their intentions as the status hearings got underway before Justice Randall Worrell in the No. 2 Supreme Court this morning. There are reportedly 57 people on remand to appear before Justice Worrell this week alone. The status hearings are being held to clear a backlog of accused persons on remand at Her Majesty’s Prison Dodds following the appearance of a prisoner who was forgotten and left to languish in jail for a decade. Seventeen men, two of them from St Lucia, appeared before the High Court judge today in the first of a series of status hearings. Today’s sitting comes just a week after Justice Worrell suspended sittings in his court and cleared his calendar for the week to get the status on accused persons on remand and their intentions with regards to their offences. The judge took the decision following recent guilty pleas from 52-year-old Joel Mckenzie McDonald Springer, of Hope Road and Northumberland, St Lucy and 50-year-old Winston Adolphus Agard, of 3rd Avenue, Licorish Village, St Michael. Springer said he had not been before a High Court since 2016 and that there were 17 other inmates in his building who were also desirous of pleading guilty. Agard, who the court heard had “fallen through the cracks”, appeared before a judge two weeks ago for the first time in seven years, after being on remand for close to a decade on a theft charge. Among those who stepped off a prison bus today and into the Whitepark Road, St Michael Supreme Court complex was Jamel Ashby, 28, of 4th Avenue Skeetes Road, Ivy, St Michael. He told the judge he had been on remand for nearly five years and wished to plead guilty to a firearm charge. But his case has not been indicted and prosecutors told the judge they are hoping to rectify that by Thursday. David O’brien Best of Thornbury Hill, Christ Church is currently serving a five-year sentence but told the judge he intends to plead guilty to a burglary charge. He however has to return on July 10 for another status hearing as the filed pertaining to him has to be “sourced”. When it was Jeffery William Chandler’s turn in the dock, the 56-year-old of Block E, The Ivy, St Michael told the judge he had been on the remand block at Dodds for the past 32 months. “All I want to do is to plead guilty,” the accused man, who returns to the No. 2 Supreme Court on July 10, and is charged for possession of a firearm and six rounds of ammunition declared. Vauxhall, Christ Church resident Renaldo Carter who lives at 1st Avenue has an attorney in charge of his case but put his name on the list. But when he appeared before the judge, attorney-at-law Angella Mitchell-Gittens, who is standing in as a friend of the court for those who are unrepresented, said Carter was “not sure what his position is.” His matter was therefore adjourned so his attorney could appear before the court and address his situation. Four-murder accused also put their names on the status hearings list and appeared before Justice Worrell this morning. Among them, 44-year-old Kendrick Davis, of Dodds Land, Church Village, St Philip who is charged with murder but wants to plead guilty to manslaughter and has been on remand since 2017 awaiting his day in court. Akil Grant, 33, of No. 2 Blades Hill, St Philip, who is facing a charge of the unlawful disposal of a body and has been on remand for the past three years, also stated his intentions. “I would like to plead guilty,” he said. But it was quickly realised that while his matter had been committed there was no indictment on his case. He will return on July 10. Some of the men at today’s hearings have not been in the system for years but said they were ready to have their cases dealt with. One such accused was Michael Anthony Brathwaite, 47, of Reed Street, St Michael. He was remanded in March for possession of two rounds of ammunition but insisted: “I ready to plead guilty. I am not wasting anytime.” He was given a July date since his matter has not been committed but he was not satisfied that Worrell had understood his position. “I want you to understand I pleading guilty, Sir,” he again stated to which the judge answered: “You have made that pellucidly clear, Mr Brathwaite”. Taking his leave, two men from the south of St Lucia also said they wished to enter guilty pleas to charges of possession, importation and trafficking of 238. 3 kilogrammes of cannabis. The two – Tyron Belhomme, 30, and Jack George, 39, both from Vieux Fort, have been on remand at Dodds for the past ten months. After getting adjournment dates to either return to enter their pleas or a further hearing to find out the status of their indictments, the men excited the docks to make way for another 20 fellow prisoners who are expected to appear for the status hearings tomorrow. Senior Crown Counsel Olivia Davis and Crown Counsel Oliver Thomas were the prosecutors at today’s sitting. (BT)
‘YOU DON’T OWN HER’ – A woman who was beaten by her boyfriend of ten years wants nothing more than for him to stay away from her. That was the woman’s tearful request when she appeared in the District ‘A’ Magistrates’ Court today. She made the plea after she declined compensation via the court from her former boyfriend. It came after Nicholas Ethan Jordan, of Upper Clevedale Development, Black Rock, St Michael pleaded guilty to assaulting her on June 16 occasioning her actual bodily harm. He was warned to stay away from the woman and placed on a bond for 12 months. If breached he will have to pay a forthwith fine of $1,500 or spend eight weeks in prison. Police constable Kenmore Phillips said the two were involved in an argument in which Jordan accused the woman of being unfaithful and proceeded to beat her about the body with a belt. She escaped and sought refuge at another house. Thinking the coast was clear she ventured outside only to be told that Jordan was in the area. She tried to escape but he pounced on her and started to beat on her, going as far as to kick her while she was on the ground. Jordan told Magistrate Kristie-Cuffy Sargeant that he found out that the woman was cheating with two people. “I am very sorry that my feelings got the best of me,” he said. But the magistrate made it clear to Jordan: “You don’t own her!” He responded: “Yes I understand that but I love her so much. We have been together for ten years.” That revelation did not move the magistrate. “Not to the point that you hit and kick her. That is very degrading,” she said before imposing the bond and warning Jordan to stay away from the woman. (BT)
COURT CHALLENGE – Government could soon be facing a lawsuit from some public service vehicle (PSV) owners. Barbados TODAY investigations have revealed that a group of owners is considering taking Government to court over its decision to grant several concessions to PSV operators who joined the recently rolled out Transport Augmentation Programme (TAP). The disgruntled owners are upset they were not offered similar incentives by Government, despite repeated lobbying for almost two decades. Participants in the TAP programme are reportedly being allowed to pay their permit fee over a 12-month period, instead of the usual one-time payment. Permit fee for minibuses is $12 000, while for route taxis (ZRs) it is $7000. Additionally, a $1000 fee charged to register a vehicle as a PSV has been waived. The main bone of contention however, is the decision to allow them to purchase duty-free vehicles. The main bone of contention however, is the decision to allow them to purchase duty-free vehicles. The group of PSV owners has engaged the services of an attorney-at-law to determine if they have a strong enough case. One source told Barbados TODAY it was unfair Government was willing to offer those PSV owners duty-free vehicles, when that offer was not extended to them during initial conversations about joining the TAP programme. Furthermore, the source said they had been asking Government to grant them duty-free concessions on vehicles for 20 years, to no avail. “So how is it that these new players in the business, because some of them now have to go and purchase vehicles, how is it that Government can allow them to bring in duty-free vehicles? “PSV owners have been asking Government for duty-free vehicles for the longest time and even though this particular Government hasn’t been in office for the whole time, it is not fair that some of these guys will be able to bring in duty-free vehicles and we are still here battling with our old vans,” the source complained. The source contended that all PSV operators were critical to the island’s transport sector and should not be disadvantaged. Furthermore, the source pointed out that taxis and ZM owners were already allowed to purchase duty-free vehicles, which meant they would be the only ones in the transport sector exempted from doing so. The source said PSV owners had also previously asked for the $1000 transfer fee to be waived, but that has also not been granted. The source said they were also required to pay the road tax in one lump sum. And while he admitted PSV owners had never asked to be able to pay it on a monthly basis, he claimed Government was giving the new players an unfair advantage. “Some PSV owners have been in this industry for over 15 years and have gotten little to no benefits from Government. “It can’t be fair for these new players to sign onto a programme and just because it is a Government initiative they are going to get all of the perks. What about the PSV owners who have been providing invaluable service transporting Barbadians for the past 20 years? What is happening to us isn’t fair at all,” he complained. TAP was initially conceptualized to supplement the Transport Board’s diminishing fleet. Back in April, Prime Minister Mia Mottley explained that the programme would see public service vehicles (PSVs) integrating with the Transport Board in an effort to help move commuters. However, some PSV owners have chosen not to sign onto the programme. They claimed that some of the terms and conditions of the programme, such as Government’s requirement of them to pay 12.5 per cent of gross revenue were “particularly onerous”. (BT)
NEWBURY STARS BACK IN DIV.1 - Newbury Stars will be glittering in Division 1 netball in 2020. The St George club earned passage back to the top flight after defeating Brydens Stokes 51-46 at the Netball Stadium on Monday, completing a sweep of the Division 2 play-off battle.  The teams had ended tied at the end of the regular season after Stars had defeated Brydens but dropped a game to St Barnabas. In Game 1 of the play-offs, Stars edged Brydens 56-55, and on Monday night the match seemed to be following a similar script, with close quarters of 15-13, 27-26 and 38-36. (MWN)
RICHILD SPRINGER PASSES – Barbados’ standard-bearer in dance, Richild Springer, has passed away. The 73-year-old died this morning after a brief illness in Paris, France, where she lived for more then 40 years. The daughter of former governor general of Barbados Sir Hugh Springer and his wife Lady Springer, Richild attended Queen’s College and began dance studies in Jamaica under Rex Nettleford, Neville Black and Lavinia Williams. She earned a degree in dance from Bard College of New York and danced her away from the United States to Europe and back. Her chosen career allowed her to appear on television in France and England and she worked with some of the biggest names in choreography at the time, including Donald McKayle, Molly Molloy and Yannis Kokkos. She went on tour with Sammy Davis Jr and played the role of Josephine Baker in the last Josephine Baker’s Review in Monte Carlo. Richild also taught dance and was a choreographer. She was the godmother of Prime Minister Mia Mottley. In offering condolences to her family, Granville Garner, who danced with her at the Barbados Dance Theatre Company, remembered the impact she had on the troupe in the 1980s. “We would have all benefitted from her skills as a teacher and her choreographies which were revolutionary at the time when she came to Dance Theatre,” he said on Starcom Network this morning. “Over those years, Richild was always a phenomenal talent. This was a person if you were in dance and you were fortunate to meet Richild, you would have had an experience beyond anything else you would have experienced in Barbados.” Garner said she was very well-respected, both locally and internationally. (MWN)
For daily or breaking news reports follow us on Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter & Facebook. That’s all for today folks. There are 196 days left in the year. Shalom! #thechasefilesdailynewscap #thechasefiles# dailynewscapsbythechasefiles
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classifiedadsmodule · 6 years ago
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Best Classified Ads Script Software for Website
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Classified Ads Scripts are transforming into the latest example these days. Numerous people are consuming money to buy the substance on the web and make a website from them. Since it is basic and fiscally shrewd to make advancements site from a substance, there are a huge amount of associations who have come in the arranged substance business. It has brought a lot of culmination among the associations and now there are amazingly bleeding edge and powerful masterminded notices substance in the market. These days, as people require minute outcomes and don't sit tight for a longer period, a requested substance is the essential choice in case someone needs to dispatch a classified ads script. As the accentuation has proceeded onward displaying and benefitting on the web, site administrators don't contribute a lot of vitality for making new musings, they essentially scan for the course of action that is open in the market and keep running with it.
There are free and paid substance in the market and they have a broad assortment of decision with respect to picking a substance. A free substance can be found and downloaded from online locales and you can check their instructional exercise for foundation and also working for the chairman board. On the other hand, a paid substance can get you secure application and advancing help for updates and new structures. Paid described substance to get you advance application and you can have a very capable arranged site. An extensive bit of this substance is in PHP and they in like manner use, SQL, AJAX, and JS.
Classified ads script associations offer the agile grouped content in packs. These packs go with different arrangement choices or organizations, add-on features, and compelled or vast help. As a buyer, you ought to fathom what the best package is for you and you should settle on your choice as requirements are. For instance, in case you are looking or an orchestrated substance that offers interest with postal locale tally, you ought to find what number of substance have this part.
Online business advertising offers the medium to business visionary various conventional systems for lifting their business to either a territory, ordinary or in general client base. With everything considered, the demand is, what are my decisions? What are the undeniable sorts of online business propelling techniques that are accessible? Moreover, which ones may I need to base on?
Everything considered, to begin, allowed me to equip you with a quick review of likely the most prominent online business propelling structures and their related expenses. Recorded underneath are the most impeccably magnificent ones:
Online life Marketing:
Using on the web long range casual correspondence stages, for example, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to pull in regard for your business' thing or association. The best good conditions of online frameworks organization hoisting wire its openness to the business visionary because of its, for the most part, reasonable nature, and moreover the likelihood of your business.
Google Ad Words:
Google Ad Words is compensation for each snap program in which an affiliation places headways on explicit catchphrases identified with their thing or association. The business will appear in the Google list things and each time somebody taps on your progression, you will pay Google a set expense. The upside of utilizing Google Ad Words is that produces minute development to your site. To make it monetarily sharp, you essentially track how well the majority of your catchphrases is doing, take out your promotions on the duds, and expansion your headways on the ones acknowledging changes (purchaser exchanges)
Article Marketing:
Article progressing is the methodology by which you make an article identified with your free association and along these lines submit it to article vaults on the web. Exactly when your article has been dispersed to a record, individuals with areas and web journals can take your article from the libraries and post it on their objectives. Each article you frame will join a back association with your site, so in a general sense, it's free publicizing for you!
Site upgrade Positioning:
This is just the way toward developing your site improvement by arranging high in the documented records for a given web searcher. Usually, the objectives that get the most activity are consistently the ones that are recorded on the best page or two of the arranged records. The web records pick your position subject to the estimation of your website page's substance, and besides the extent of relationship for your page over the web. With the correct systems, you can create your arranging and your development!
As should act naturally clear, there are different decisions open concerning on the web business publicizing. Research the different methods and attempt to understand which ones are best for your exclusive business. Take the necessary steps not to wear yourself ragged, yet remain centered, and with the correct system, you also can get your self-ruling undertaking saw on the web!
Here are a few conceivable stages to consider:
• The Yellow Pages - Clearly no one is leaving to the telephone file anymore, and most flows have moved their associations on the web. In several business areas they give basic associations and a staggering compass, at any rate in others, they get no improvement to their online properties. So total your work before focusing on this sort of publicizing.
• Direct mail and postcards can at present be an exceedingly persuading approach to manage advance, in any case, it relies on your objective, your cash related course of action, the kind of focusing on you're attempting to do, and the offer you are making. At last, postcards require to go over impressions, which mean you should mail a practically identical region on different occasions already you can anticipate a reasonable reaction.
• Online publicizing can be fundamentally more monetarily brilliant than standard mail, and, on any stages, similar to Google, Bing, and Facebook, you can base on an extremely certain get-together of people who are beginning at now chasing down or has shown excitement for what you are advancing. Additionally, online display progressing, or lucid publicizing can be to an extraordinary degree viable at achieving a territory party of people inspired by an unequivocal point. For instance, a money-related organizer can lift to individuals inside a 15 mile run around her office who are investigating an article about retirement imagining the Wall Street Journal's site.
Truly there are different approaches to manage advancement a brand, an association, and an offer, and the more places you are seen (over and over) the more prominent achievement you will have at inspiring prospects to make out of here your takes note.
A scripting tongue indisputably known as PHP began in 1995 by Rasmus Lerdorf. PHP remains for Personal Home Page Tools. In basically most ridiculous 10 years this tongue has changed into a most treasured of web marketing experts, even free undertaking website head with the more forward and stable kind of the web.
Before PHP, there was Javascript. It does some to an incredible degree cool things like pivot sees plans, script. In any case, incredibly it isn't difficult to observable by the web records. Who is wearing out a web, they love PHP in light of the manner in which that it does all the Javascripts does and everything that does and the turns up on the pages is inspected and checked by the web crawlers.
You can discover PHP classified ads script at zones that have a posting of a couple of stand-out substance. It unites a broad assortment of CGI and Java. Each and every one of those objectives has a bit of substance framed just in PHP, which you need to discover some enormously enchanting free substance and some inconsequential effort PHP substance to enhance our goals execution and place in the web records. One thing is that you would comprehend how to shape PHP since there are such a basic number of ways a webpage executive and besides web advertiser could utilize the substance to help with robotization and page upgrades.
I can not uncover to you how consistently I have obtained a substance, expected to change something little, and found an expert to uncover the improvement for me. While I routinely try to discover a substance that needn't sit idle with changing, there have been two or multiple times where it was basically unavoidable. This being the condition, PHP script is a tongue that has different makers. A piece of these unmistakable has a to an extraordinary degree restricted extent of programming masters to scrutinize. Since this is the condition, they often charge altogether more for any work they do. I have seen upwards of 5 or on different occasions continuously the rates that they charge. In the event that you go to the correct place, some remote PHP programming planners will charge around $10 to $20 reliably. That is all things considered the going rate for a not all that awful PHP programming architect to do handle your substance.
When you are working on the web business, there is without a doubt that security is an essential concern. You would lean toward not to unintentionally have your site hacked. This looks appalling on you and moreover could cost you a critical extent of cash at long last on the off chance that you are found in danger of not really ensuring customers' data. Regardless, hacking isn't as huge of pressure if the arrangement PC programs are done genuinely concerning PHP. PHP is truth be told only a tongue that urges the server to accomplish something. Thusly, everything that it does is persistently covered up by the normal client. It isn't generally the circumstance that on the off chance that you use PHP that your site cannot be hacked. It is fundamentally saying that dealing with customer data with PHP classified ads script is a critical piece of the time done and not a security.
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zaph1337 · 4 years ago
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Monster Hunter Rating 33: Azure Rathalos, the Azure Fire Wyvern
Now that we’re done talking about the tighty-whiteys, I can finally start using the Quest List to order these monsters properly. And man, is this a strong start. I guess it makes sense in-game, considering the missions you had to complete to get to this point, but from the standpoint of this project, we’re going from 0 to 100 real quick. Let’s see what Azure Rathalos has to offer!
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(How it appears in Monster Hunter G)
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(How it appears in Monster Hunter Tri Ultimate)
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(How it appears in Monster Hunter Online)
Appearance: I...do I even need to say anything? It’s Rathalos but blue. An already great design has been perfected. They even made the wing membranes green, which complements the blue very well. By far, it looks the best in MHO, where both the colors are made more vibrant--kinda disappointing, considering that MHO isn’t considered one of the main MH games by many fans, but the last game Azure Rathalos appeared in was World, where they made it look worse by making its wing membranes the same color as regular Rathalos’ are, so who knows if the traditional MH team will get it right in the next game Azure Rathalos appear in? MHO might be the only game we ever see where the design reaches its peak, so if nothing else, I’m grateful for that.
Look, if you were expecting me to say that this I didn’t like this better than the normal Rathalos design, then you don’t know me at all. It’s sad that the game that did it best wasn’t one of the mainline ones, but at least Azure Rathalos’ appearance was perfected somewhere. This is probably tied with Plesioth for my favorite monster design so far, so I’m giving it a 10/10.
Behavior/Lore: Rare to the point of some people considering them a myth, Azure Rathalos are even more feared than their red counterparts; even monsters that would willingly tangle with a Rathalos will think twice about aggressing these blue behemoths. This is due to Azure Rathalos being stronger and more territorial than regular Rathalos are, to the point of attacking the latter in midair. After they mate, Azure Rathalos will actively patrol their territories to ensure that there are no threats to their young in the vicinity.
Y’know, I’ve been complaining about how little there is to talk about these subspecies’ that I didn’t talk about when I covered the base monster, but now that I think about it, I miiiiight have set my expectations too high; I shouldn’t expect a monster’s subspecies to act completely differently from them and have a lot written about them because they’re meant to be slightly different (and often more threatening) forms of existing monsters. I still have to judge what I’m given, though, and all I’ve been given here is “Rathalos+,” which is clearly what Azure Rathalos are meant to be, but that doesn’t necessarily justify it. I’ll stick with the score I gave original Rathalos, but I’m very close to docking it a point for not doing more. 6/10.
Abilities: The mutation that gives Azure Rathalos their scales also increases their elemental resistance, so even if your weapon’s element is strong against them, it won’t do massive amounts of damage. They, on the other hand, will, as like I said in the behavior section, they’re stronger than normal Rathalos, which can already put most of the monsters in MH on a stretcher. With this increased strength comes increased stamina, allowing them to fly longer; this gives them the chance to use more advanced aerial attacks that would likely tire out the average Rathalos rather quickly. Azure Rathalos have also learned how to painlessly land on the ground with great force, preventing attackers from getting close to them when they tire. Other than that, they have the same powers as Rathalos do, though the Azure Rathalos in MHW can spit out more than 5 fireballs in quick succession.
This is more what I wanted to see from the subspecies’ abilities; even though Azure Rathalos just have better Rathalos abilities, they use them in interesting ways. From how the wiki described them, White Monoblos were just “Monoblos but more armored and with a stronger horn,” which doesn’t really present too many possibilities for changing up their battle (though to be fair, Monoblos in general don’t have a lot of abilities to alter). Azure Rathalos, on the other hand, have greater aerial prowess, allowing them to stay airborne for longer and use new techniques, likely making battles against them noticeably different from those you have with Rathalos. It would have been cool if Azure Rathalos had different elemental properties, but at that point I’m just being a choosy beggar. 7/10.
Equipment: The Rathalos equipment is already awesome, so making it blue automatically makes it better in my eyes. Still, I want to show off some weapon classes I didn’t show in my Rathalos review. First off is the Azure Rathalos Lance from MHO:
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Oh, heck yes. The vamplate (handguard) is based off of an Azure Rathalos tail, which works out great since their tails already have a long spike to make into the lance head. The shields not anything amazing, but it doesn’t look bad (not like it could with that shade of blue). Next is a Great Sword called Auberon:
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Not sure what the practical point of the spikes is, especially since they aren’t on the cutting edge, but at least they look cool. In fact, the whole sword looks cool; the blade is clearly made of scales that have been bound together into an alloy, and the handguard could slash open arteries by itself. But I gotta put a weird weapon here, so here’s a Hammer called the Huracan Blueblaze:
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Honestly, the reason why I haven’t shown any Hammers like this off in a while is because they’ve kind of gotten predictable. “We stuck the monster’s head on a stick and called it a Hammer” can only be done so many times before the theme becomes tiring. Here’s a fun fact, though: I looked up “Huracan” after seeing that my browser’s autocorrect didn’t find it erroneous, and it turns out that Huracan is the name of a Mayan god of fire and wind. It’s a really cool touch! On to the armor, starting with the Blademaster set from MHO:
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ALL OF MY YES. Do I need to say anything more? Fine, I will: it takes the awesomeness of the Rathalos armor and makes it blue. There are a few differences between it and the Rathalos set--which isn’t surprising considering the renders are from a different game--but for the most part they look identical. The same can’t be said for the Gunner set from Online:
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Honestly, I prefer the design of the Gunner armor I showed in the Rathalos review more than this. Don’t get me wrong, the blue does a lot for it, but something about it doesn’t really gel with me.
Like I said at the beginning of this section, I think the Azure Rathalos equipment is better than the Rathalos equipment just because it’s blue. The fact that Rathalos equipment is already awesome just makes it even better. This comes really close to having a perfect score, but there’s nothing wrong with a 9/10.
Final Thoughts and Tally: Don’t pretend you didn’t see this coming. If you take a monster that isn’t blue and make it this shade of blue, I’m almost guaranteed to like it more than the original. In Azure Rathalos’ case, it’s everything Rathalos was and more. Move over, red boy; there’s a new king in town! 8/10.
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hellofastestnewsfan · 5 years ago
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Since the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, Americans have looked to their elected officials for guidance and comfort. And with President Trump passing the buck to states, governors have–for the most part–risen to the occasion. Several, including New York’s Andrew Cuomo and Ohio’s Mike DeWine, have emerged as inspiring national leaders, foils for the President’s lies and bluster. Polling shows that 72 percent of Americans approve of their governor’s COVID-19 response, compared to only 45 percent who say the same of the president.
But the governors we have come to rely on in this public health emergency now confront a crisis of a different sort: their states are running out of money. The Cuomo Administration warned last month that New York could face a $15 billion funding gap, while DeWine called on state agencies to slash spending by up to 20 percent in anticipation of Ohio’s shortfall. Even states with relatively few COVID-19 cases, like Hawaii, expect tax collections to shrivel.
Congress must fill the void. The latest and largest of the three COVID-19 relief packages so far included $1,200 rebates for most U.S. adults but only a tangle of targeted assistance programs for states. What states need now, though, is exactly what U.S. households need: cold, hard cash–with no strings attached–to pay their bills and keep the lights on.
Keep up to date with our daily coronavirus newsletter by clicking here.
We suggest a simple approach: Give each state a fixed amount of cash per resident per month—we suggest $150—until normal economic activity can resume. This easy-to-implement approach would limit opportunities for pork-barrel politics, save states from insolvency and bolster the national economy.
Congress cannot simply stand by and let the states sink or swim. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, every state except Vermont is subject to constitutional or statutory balanced-budget requirements that limit or prohibit deficit spending. And although the Federal Reserve is providing some relief by buying up state-issued bonds, many states are barred by their own laws from issuing debt to cover operating expenses. Without an infusion of federal dollars, states will likely have to resort to deep spending cuts or steep tax hikes.
We saw how that worked in the last recession: not well. Starting in the spring of 2008, according to one tally, 29 states and the District of Columbia cut services for the elderly and disabled; 31 states reduced access to health care; and 34 states and the District of Columbia cut funding for K-12 education. And that was during a recession in which real gross domestic product declined by roughly 4 percent from peak to trough—a much smaller drop than most economists expect COVID-19 to cause.
States can mitigate some of this damage by raising taxes. But a number of state constitutions either prohibit personal income taxes altogether or states from taxing their residents at progressive rates. The remaining revenue-raising options–like broad-based sales tax hikes–are likely to impose heavy burdens on those least able to pay. What’s more, tax hikes and budget cuts would take even more steam out of the economy and undermine the stimulus Congress has already passed.
A second approach—and the one that Congress has pursued so far—is to provide states with restricted aid for particular purposes. The stimulus package passed by Congress at the end of March allocates $150 billion to state, local and tribal governments for “necessary expenditures incurred due to the public health emergency with respect to the Coronavirus Disease 2019.” These funds cannot, however, be used for expenses that were already accounted for in the most recent state budget.
The $150 billion appropriation for COVID-19-related expenditures reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the challenge states now face. Although the pandemic has caused states to spend more, the current fiscal crunch is not primarily a product of increased expenditures. New York, for example, spent approximately $1 billion–less than 1 percent of its budget–through the end of last month on its direct response to the virus. The state is entering a fiscal crisis not because of that extra spending, but because it is collecting less in income tax due to layoffs and less in sales tax due to the closure of nonessential businesses. The tax shortfall means that states will have trouble paying non-virus-related expenses, like salaries for state workers and support for local school districts.
Some states may be able—through creative accounting maneuvers—to recharacterize some of their existing expenses as “necessary expenditures incurred due to the [COVID-19] public health emergency.” For example, a police officer’s salary—which would have been paid regardless of the virus—might be recast as an expense of enforcing a shelter-in-place order. So in the best-case scenario, states must jump through the right hoops, and in the worst case scenario, some of the $150 billion may lie unused while cash-strapped state governments slash costs elsewhere. And even if states are able to use the entire $150 billion, it will certainly not be nearly enough to address states’ financial needs.
Rather than trying—and often failing—to anticipate states’ specific spending requirements, Congress should let state elected officials, who know their own states’ needs, decide how to spend the funds. In COVID-19 epicenters, like Louisiana, public health priorities will likely be paramount. In states like Hawaii and Nevada—whose caseloads are lower than Louisiana’s but whose tourism-dependent economies have been ravaged—the number-one priority may be to keep essential state government services up and running when state coffers run dry. All states, moreover, already heavily subsidize their cities and towns, and they will almost certainly choose to use some of the federal funds to prop up struggling municipalities.
One can imagine all sorts of formulas for calculating aid to states—based on unemployment statistics, COVID-19 deaths, budget deficits or other factors. Any attempt to construct such a formula is likely to lead to wrangling among members of Congress and senators seeking to maximize their own state’s share. The advantage of a uniform per-capita amount is that it short-circuits these fights. It does not favor blue states or red states, large states or small states. It does not reward states for fiscal irresponsibility or penalize states that acted swiftly to contain the virus.
How much aid will states need to survive the COVID-19 crisis? In negotiations with their Republican counterparts, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer have reportedly demanded an additional $150 billion for states and cities. Maryland Governor Larry Hogan and New York’s Cuomo—the chair and vice chair, respectively, of the National Governors Association—have called for $500 billion specifically to states. It’s not clear, though, how either the congressional Democratic leaders or the governors arrived at their numbers, or how they would allocate the funds across different states.
Here’s a simple way to think about it: States take in roughly $2 trillion in revenue from taxes and fees each year. In a nation of 330 million people, that works out to approximately $500 per person per month. State revenues are closely correlated with overall economic output, and daily output has—according to a Moody’s Analytics estimate—declined by approximately 30 percent since the beginning of March. Those figures suggest that states will lose approximately $150 per person per month as long as shutdowns last.
We don’t know how long the crisis–and the corresponding need for federal aid–will continue.
If, pessimistically, the country remains in lockdown mode until the end of the year, then the total amount paid to states under our proposal would approach $500 billion, the number in Hogan and Cuomo’s request. But the lack of a certain end date shouldn’t keep Congress from starting payments now. Lawmakers can reauthorize aid in three-month chunks or–better yet–keep the payments going until Congress votes to turn the spigot off.
It’s our governors who have guided us through this crisis, and ultimately it will be our governors who guide us out. We have put our trust–and our lives–in their hands. Now it’s time we give them and their states the resources they need to lead us through.
Please send any tips, leads, and stories to [email protected].
from TIME https://ift.tt/34ArR0w
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itsfinancethings · 5 years ago
Link
Since the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, Americans have looked to their elected officials for guidance and comfort. And with President Trump passing the buck to states, governors have–for the most part–risen to the occasion. Several, including New York’s Andrew Cuomo and Ohio’s Mike DeWine, have emerged as inspiring national leaders, foils for the President’s lies and bluster. Polling shows that 72 percent of Americans approve of their governor’s COVID-19 response, compared to only 45 percent who say the same of the president.
But the governors we have come to rely on in this public health emergency now confront a crisis of a different sort: their states are running out of money. The Cuomo Administration warned last month that New York could face a $15 billion funding gap, while DeWine called on state agencies to slash spending by up to 20 percent in anticipation of Ohio’s shortfall. Even states with relatively few COVID-19 cases, like Hawaii, expect tax collections to shrivel.
Congress must fill the void. The latest and largest of the three COVID-19 relief packages so far included $1,200 rebates for most U.S. adults but only a tangle of targeted assistance programs for states. What states need now, though, is exactly what U.S. households need: cold, hard cash–with no strings attached–to pay their bills and keep the lights on.
Keep up to date with our daily coronavirus newsletter by clicking here.
We suggest a simple approach: Give each state a fixed amount of cash per resident per month—we suggest $150—until normal economic activity can resume. This easy-to-implement approach would limit opportunities for pork-barrel politics, save states from insolvency and bolster the national economy.
Congress cannot simply stand by and let the states sink or swim. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, every state except Vermont is subject to constitutional or statutory balanced-budget requirements that limit or prohibit deficit spending. And although the Federal Reserve is providing some relief by buying up state-issued bonds, many states are barred by their own laws from issuing debt to cover operating expenses. Without an infusion of federal dollars, states will likely have to resort to deep spending cuts or steep tax hikes.
We saw how that worked in the last recession: not well. Starting in the spring of 2008, according to one tally, 29 states and the District of Columbia cut services for the elderly and disabled; 31 states reduced access to health care; and 34 states and the District of Columbia cut funding for K-12 education. And that was during a recession in which real gross domestic product declined by roughly 4 percent from peak to trough—a much smaller drop than most economists expect COVID-19 to cause.
States can mitigate some of this damage by raising taxes. But a number of state constitutions either prohibit personal income taxes altogether or states from taxing their residents at progressive rates. The remaining revenue-raising options–like broad-based sales tax hikes–are likely to impose heavy burdens on those least able to pay. What’s more, tax hikes and budget cuts would take even more steam out of the economy and undermine the stimulus Congress has already passed.
A second approach—and the one that Congress has pursued so far—is to provide states with restricted aid for particular purposes. The stimulus package passed by Congress at the end of March allocates $150 billion to state, local and tribal governments for “necessary expenditures incurred due to the public health emergency with respect to the Coronavirus Disease 2019.” These funds cannot, however, be used for expenses that were already accounted for in the most recent state budget.
The $150 billion appropriation for COVID-19-related expenditures reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the challenge states now face. Although the pandemic has caused states to spend more, the current fiscal crunch is not primarily a product of increased expenditures. New York, for example, spent approximately $1 billion–less than 1 percent of its budget–through the end of last month on its direct response to the virus. The state is entering a fiscal crisis not because of that extra spending, but because it is collecting less in income tax due to layoffs and less in sales tax due to the closure of nonessential businesses. The tax shortfall means that states will have trouble paying non-virus-related expenses, like salaries for state workers and support for local school districts.
Some states may be able—through creative accounting maneuvers—to recharacterize some of their existing expenses as “necessary expenditures incurred due to the [COVID-19] public health emergency.” For example, a police officer’s salary—which would have been paid regardless of the virus—might be recast as an expense of enforcing a shelter-in-place order. So in the best-case scenario, states must jump through the right hoops, and in the worst case scenario, some of the $150 billion may lie unused while cash-strapped state governments slash costs elsewhere. And even if states are able to use the entire $150 billion, it will certainly not be nearly enough to address states’ financial needs.
Rather than trying—and often failing—to anticipate states’ specific spending requirements, Congress should let state elected officials, who know their own states’ needs, decide how to spend the funds. In COVID-19 epicenters, like Louisiana, public health priorities will likely be paramount. In states like Hawaii and Nevada—whose caseloads are lower than Louisiana’s but whose tourism-dependent economies have been ravaged—the number-one priority may be to keep essential state government services up and running when state coffers run dry. All states, moreover, already heavily subsidize their cities and towns, and they will almost certainly choose to use some of the federal funds to prop up struggling municipalities.
One can imagine all sorts of formulas for calculating aid to states—based on unemployment statistics, COVID-19 deaths, budget deficits or other factors. Any attempt to construct such a formula is likely to lead to wrangling among members of Congress and senators seeking to maximize their own state’s share. The advantage of a uniform per-capita amount is that it short-circuits these fights. It does not favor blue states or red states, large states or small states. It does not reward states for fiscal irresponsibility or penalize states that acted swiftly to contain the virus.
How much aid will states need to survive the COVID-19 crisis? In negotiations with their Republican counterparts, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer have reportedly demanded an additional $150 billion for states and cities. Maryland Governor Larry Hogan and New York’s Cuomo—the chair and vice chair, respectively, of the National Governors Association—have called for $500 billion specifically to states. It’s not clear, though, how either the congressional Democratic leaders or the governors arrived at their numbers, or how they would allocate the funds across different states.
Here’s a simple way to think about it: States take in roughly $2 trillion in revenue from taxes and fees each year. In a nation of 330 million people, that works out to approximately $500 per person per month. State revenues are closely correlated with overall economic output, and daily output has—according to a Moody’s Analytics estimate—declined by approximately 30 percent since the beginning of March. Those figures suggest that states will lose approximately $150 per person per month as long as shutdowns last.
We don’t know how long the crisis–and the corresponding need for federal aid–will continue.
If, pessimistically, the country remains in lockdown mode until the end of the year, then the total amount paid to states under our proposal would approach $500 billion, the number in Hogan and Cuomo’s request. But the lack of a certain end date shouldn’t keep Congress from starting payments now. Lawmakers can reauthorize aid in three-month chunks or–better yet–keep the payments going until Congress votes to turn the spigot off.
It’s our governors who have guided us through this crisis, and ultimately it will be our governors who guide us out. We have put our trust–and our lives–in their hands. Now it’s time we give them and their states the resources they need to lead us through.
Please send any tips, leads, and stories to [email protected].
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viralnewstime · 5 years ago
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Since the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, Americans have looked to their elected officials for guidance and comfort. And with President Trump passing the buck to states, governors have–for the most part–risen to the occasion. Several, including New York’s Andrew Cuomo and Ohio’s Mike DeWine, have emerged as inspiring national leaders, foils for the President’s lies and bluster. Polling shows that 72 percent of Americans approve of their governor’s COVID-19 response, compared to only 45 percent who say the same of the president.
But the governors we have come to rely on in this public health emergency now confront a crisis of a different sort: their states are running out of money. The Cuomo Administration warned last month that New York could face a $15 billion funding gap, while DeWine called on state agencies to slash spending by up to 20 percent in anticipation of Ohio’s shortfall. Even states with relatively few COVID-19 cases, like Hawaii, expect tax collections to shrivel.
Congress must fill the void. The latest and largest of the three COVID-19 relief packages so far included $1,200 rebates for most U.S. adults but only a tangle of targeted assistance programs for states. What states need now, though, is exactly what U.S. households need: cold, hard cash–with no strings attached–to pay their bills and keep the lights on.
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We suggest a simple approach: Give each state a fixed amount of cash per resident per month—we suggest $150—until normal economic activity can resume. This easy-to-implement approach would limit opportunities for pork-barrel politics, save states from insolvency and bolster the national economy.
Congress cannot simply stand by and let the states sink or swim. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, every state except Vermont is subject to constitutional or statutory balanced-budget requirements that limit or prohibit deficit spending. And although the Federal Reserve is providing some relief by buying up state-issued bonds, many states are barred by their own laws from issuing debt to cover operating expenses. Without an infusion of federal dollars, states will likely have to resort to deep spending cuts or steep tax hikes.
We saw how that worked in the last recession: not well. Starting in the spring of 2008, according to one tally, 29 states and the District of Columbia cut services for the elderly and disabled; 31 states reduced access to health care; and 34 states and the District of Columbia cut funding for K-12 education. And that was during a recession in which real gross domestic product declined by roughly 4 percent from peak to trough—a much smaller drop than most economists expect COVID-19 to cause.
States can mitigate some of this damage by raising taxes. But a number of state constitutions either prohibit personal income taxes altogether or states from taxing their residents at progressive rates. The remaining revenue-raising options–like broad-based sales tax hikes–are likely to impose heavy burdens on those least able to pay. What’s more, tax hikes and budget cuts would take even more steam out of the economy and undermine the stimulus Congress has already passed.
A second approach—and the one that Congress has pursued so far—is to provide states with restricted aid for particular purposes. The stimulus package passed by Congress at the end of March allocates $150 billion to state, local and tribal governments for “necessary expenditures incurred due to the public health emergency with respect to the Coronavirus Disease 2019.” These funds cannot, however, be used for expenses that were already accounted for in the most recent state budget.
The $150 billion appropriation for COVID-19-related expenditures reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the challenge states now face. Although the pandemic has caused states to spend more, the current fiscal crunch is not primarily a product of increased expenditures. New York, for example, spent approximately $1 billion–less than 1 percent of its budget–through the end of last month on its direct response to the virus. The state is entering a fiscal crisis not because of that extra spending, but because it is collecting less in income tax due to layoffs and less in sales tax due to the closure of nonessential businesses. The tax shortfall means that states will have trouble paying non-virus-related expenses, like salaries for state workers and support for local school districts.
Some states may be able—through creative accounting maneuvers—to recharacterize some of their existing expenses as “necessary expenditures incurred due to the [COVID-19] public health emergency.” For example, a police officer’s salary—which would have been paid regardless of the virus—might be recast as an expense of enforcing a shelter-in-place order. So in the best-case scenario, states must jump through the right hoops, and in the worst case scenario, some of the $150 billion may lie unused while cash-strapped state governments slash costs elsewhere. And even if states are able to use the entire $150 billion, it will certainly not be nearly enough to address states’ financial needs.
Rather than trying—and often failing—to anticipate states’ specific spending requirements, Congress should let state elected officials, who know their own states’ needs, decide how to spend the funds. In COVID-19 epicenters, like Louisiana, public health priorities will likely be paramount. In states like Hawaii and Nevada—whose caseloads are lower than Louisiana’s but whose tourism-dependent economies have been ravaged—the number-one priority may be to keep essential state government services up and running when state coffers run dry. All states, moreover, already heavily subsidize their cities and towns, and they will almost certainly choose to use some of the federal funds to prop up struggling municipalities.
One can imagine all sorts of formulas for calculating aid to states—based on unemployment statistics, COVID-19 deaths, budget deficits or other factors. Any attempt to construct such a formula is likely to lead to wrangling among members of Congress and senators seeking to maximize their own state’s share. The advantage of a uniform per-capita amount is that it short-circuits these fights. It does not favor blue states or red states, large states or small states. It does not reward states for fiscal irresponsibility or penalize states that acted swiftly to contain the virus.
How much aid will states need to survive the COVID-19 crisis? In negotiations with their Republican counterparts, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer have reportedly demanded an additional $150 billion for states and cities. Maryland Governor Larry Hogan and New York’s Cuomo—the chair and vice chair, respectively, of the National Governors Association—have called for $500 billion specifically to states. It’s not clear, though, how either the congressional Democratic leaders or the governors arrived at their numbers, or how they would allocate the funds across different states.
Here’s a simple way to think about it: States take in roughly $2 trillion in revenue from taxes and fees each year. In a nation of 330 million people, that works out to approximately $500 per person per month. State revenues are closely correlated with overall economic output, and daily output has—according to a Moody’s Analytics estimate—declined by approximately 30 percent since the beginning of March. Those figures suggest that states will lose approximately $150 per person per month as long as shutdowns last.
We don’t know how long the crisis–and the corresponding need for federal aid–will continue.
If, pessimistically, the country remains in lockdown mode until the end of the year, then the total amount paid to states under our proposal would approach $500 billion, the number in Hogan and Cuomo’s request. But the lack of a certain end date shouldn’t keep Congress from starting payments now. Lawmakers can reauthorize aid in three-month chunks or–better yet–keep the payments going until Congress votes to turn the spigot off.
It’s our governors who have guided us through this crisis, and ultimately it will be our governors who guide us out. We have put our trust–and our lives–in their hands. Now it’s time we give them and their states the resources they need to lead us through.
Please send any tips, leads, and stories to [email protected].
0 notes