mbta-unofficial

[mbta-unofficial]

Nothing quite like the impression Ed Gorey makes on 7 year old new england freaks

I remember hearing in a video years ago that the most popular ride to work at in Disney World was the Tower of Terror, because it was the only place you didn't have to pretend to be happy all the time - gloominess was part of your character.

I am SO pleased to see that the staff at the Edward Gorey museum have embraced this. I would gladly go back to a minimum wage front desk position if I got to tell guests "I suppose I must let you in. Feel free to wander the first floor. The director might come downstairs and give a talk. He might not. Life is full of disappointments." A++, only made better by the many children running around underfoot trying to find various murder weapons in the gashlycrumb tinies scavenger hunt

[mbta-unofficial]

They got scalabrinito on the rats I’m sure he’ll take care of it

Picolo scalabrini

[mbta-unofficial]

Picolo scalabrini

[mbta-unofficial]

Going to strongly disagree with this because a lot of people treat subjective and objective claims as the same thing.

A youtuber speaking from the heart is a great source about a huge range of human activities. Their subjective perspective is valuable and insightful about their experiences which usually include experiences about objective phenomena. Someone can certainly speak objectively about their experiences. But what they have to say is only an objective source about what they have to say.

A youtuber who establishes that they read 300 books of records from the paris archives can objectively report on the contents of those archives. Presumably they wouldn’t lie about the contents of those archives, and if not, it establishes that the sources in the archives say that. But the sources in the archives could be lying too. That’s not the same thing as speaking from the heart though.

When you’re talking about a subjective experience of the present, or a subjective experience of the past, speaking from the heart is usually the only way to know anything. Primary sources are excellent at reporting what people say happened and how they felt about it.

However, just because someone said something happened, especially if they are sure it happened a certain way, you have to be careful. Because objective claims about the past are not something we have direct access to. Even if we remember it, we are still reconstructing what happened after the fact in ways that we should be careful about. As soon as you start making objective claims about history or science, you start to need sources. They aren’t optional because people translate information inaccurately, and you want the best information you can from sources you can evaluate for bias.

I am fucking BEGGING people to include proper sources when talking about news and current events. A screenshot of a headline or a social media post is not a proper source.

[mbta-unofficial]

i love the mbta!!!

I dont

[mbta-unofficial]

I am fucking BEGGING people to include proper sources when talking about news and current events. A screenshot of a headline or a social media post is not a proper source.

[mbta-unofficial]

Leave it to a guy being a grump about the ren faire to almost make me log in to my defunct reddit account.

For someone concerned about "historical accuracy" you would think they would know that rennaisance faires were started by the Rennaisance Pleasure Faire of Southern California in 1962 by blacklisted Hollywood fags and commies. If you didn't want to dance around with fairies in the woods you should have joined your local civil war reenactors

[mbta-unofficial]

i really do fucking love the train. i sit it goes we arrive etc

[mbta-unofficial]

How much would we have to tax the top 1% of Massholes to make the MBTA free to ride?

So these numbers are for income, not wealth. They’re also from 2024. This means that they are significantly less precise than the national figure. However, state by state, assets are significantly harder to track because many of the largest property owners own property across dozens of states. I’m going to try to point out where this skews the numbers.

So the top 1% of MA taxpayers were earning 1.13m/year in 2024. they are already paying between 5% and 9% on that. However, interestingly, these rates are not as strongly progressive as the federal rates. (by progressive I refer to individuals being taxed more the more they make.) There is progressivity to MA state taxes in the form of the millionaire tax, where wages and capital gains over 1m are taxed 4% higher than numbers below that, but this is overall less progressive than federal income taxes. MA does have a progressive estate tax of up to 16%, but there is no wealth tax.

Wealth tax was the tax I proposed to directly tax the assets of the 1% for the medicare post. After all, it is much easier to manipulate income within reporting requirements than it is to manipulate wealth. Taxing wealth instead of income therefore is in general a more effective means of progressive taxation designed to reduce inequality. However, the commerce clause of the constitution would in fact make it illegal for states to go after other states for behaving as international tax shelters, so income is for our purposes the only practical way to get the desired “free MBTA” numbers. There is nothing to practically stop people from moving everything except real estate out of MA to protect it from wealth taxes, although you could maybe do something with residency requirements. Try checking out the lengths certain billionaires have to go to to not “reside” in New York for an example of what I have in mind. In short, while a wealth tax is better for federal revenue and general tax progressivity, Income will be a better tool in this instance, which is convenient because we also can get better data that way.

Now, I can’t find the gross income of the top 1% of MA residents, but we can still math some things out. We have our threshold number of 896k, and we have some other numbers that will help us get an estimate, such as the gdp per capita (110k) and the top 5% threshold (349k).

Our target number is easy, in some sense. MBTA’s 2024 operating expenses and debt service was 2.5 billion dollars. MA’s population is 7.1 Million, so 2.5B divided by the 1% we’re expecting to pay is 35k apiece. On individuals with incomes that are a minimum of 1.13m, this is a maximum additional tax rate of 3.5%, below the 4% existing millionaires tax. (obviously the millionaires tax funds more than the mbta) However, just like in the federal medicare example, this is not a good progressive tax scheme in the sense that it applies far more heavily to people at the bottom of its bracket cutoff than to people at the top. A better formula could be devised. However, without more numbers I can’t set that out here.

That said, I also don’t necessarily think that continuing to fund the mbta with rider dollars is a bad idea. Revenue from the lines is a significant source of income and also means that people feel that the system is more fair which is important. I do think the buses should be free but the rapid transit services remaining paid would be my general recommendation at least for now.

[mbta-unofficial]

Medicare in 2024 was 4% of GDP or about 1.2T dollars. It's projected to rise as high as 6% of GDP as the baby boomers get old and die.

The top 1% controls 30% of US GDP in aggregate assets.

With no progressivity on a wealth tax, just a sharp "once you enter the top 1% of americans by wealth (about 11.6 million in 2024) you begin paying a flat 10%" the united states would immediately generate 3% of GDP in revenue. This is a ludicrously unfair way of doing it, because there is no reason to tax people with 11.6 million as sharply as people with 100 billion, without taxing people with 11.5 million at all. A more gentle curve could easily be devised mathematically to gradually increase tax on wealth over 1 million.

10% is less than what you pay in payroll taxes. It's less than what you tip your server. It would solve the medicare budget problem.

A 10% tax on the total wealth of the top 1% of americans would almost singlehandly pay for medicare

[mbta-unofficial]

A 10% tax on the total wealth of the top 1% of americans would almost singlehandly pay for medicare

[mbta-unofficial]

I love when I spend an hour on another 2k words about brutalism and tumblr eats it for no reason

I should only edit in word docs

[mbta-unofficial]

For an example, I’ve already written unpublished essays about Hamilton, RRR, Harry Potter, Twilight, The Matrix, Kendrick’s DAMN, Beeple’s 17m NFT sale, The Charlie Hebdo comics. There are others I’m working on for works that had similar impacts but the list is very America-centric and I’d like to talk about Chinese contemporary art without entirely reproducing Weiwei’s criticisms without context. I’d love people to point me to works or critics that have a similar position as historical moments of change

Hey, quick question for my followers: Does anyone know a lot about Chinese Contemporary Art History? Without being able to actually read any chinese language my access to sources other than western ones is fairly limited.

I’ve been collecting works that interest me from a political historical perspective but I don’t think I can do the subject justice without talking about Chinese contemporary work and while I’ve done some writing about Ai Weiwei his perspective is extremely international and critical so I’d like another perspective if possible

[mbta-unofficial]

Hey, quick question for my followers: Does anyone know a lot about Chinese Contemporary Art History? Without being able to actually read any chinese language my access to sources other than western ones is fairly limited.

I’ve been collecting works that interest me from a political historical perspective but I don’t think I can do the subject justice without talking about Chinese contemporary work and while I’ve done some writing about Ai Weiwei his perspective is extremely international and critical so I’d like another perspective if possible

[mbta-unofficial]

Leave it to a guy being a grump about the ren faire to almost make me log in to my defunct reddit account.

For someone concerned about "historical accuracy" you would think they would know that rennaisance faires were started by the Rennaisance Pleasure Faire of Southern California in 1962 by blacklisted Hollywood fags and commies. If you didn't want to dance around with fairies in the woods you should have joined your local civil war reenactors

[mbta-unofficial]

100 years from now people are going to look back and say, you know, if I had to pick a communist dictator to live under, Turbo-Elizabeth Warren was honestly better than most of her contemporaries and it was a real shame how as soon as she got infected with texan malware we started ethnically cleansing the connecticut yankees

Genuinely judging by everything I have heard about the us states sounds to me like Massachusetts is the us state version of balkans

[mbta-unofficial]

And buddy, the year is 1914, I’m dying of syphilis, and we’re about to plunge a centuries old empire into a war that will dispossess it of ALL of its former colonies

Genuinely judging by everything I have heard about the us states sounds to me like Massachusetts is the us state version of balkans