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forever--rain · 3 years

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*hops up and down excitedly* EVER I'M NOT SUPPOSED TO BE ON HERE RN BUT FHDJKSFHA I CAME OUT OF MY CAVE TO SAY SUKKA PLAYLIST!!! DO IT DO IT DO IT I THINK WE ONLY HAVE ONE? ON SPOTIFY WHICH IS A TRAVESTY MAKE ONE PLEASE

BLUE, YOU ARE LITERALLY MY FAVORITE PERSON IN THIS FANDOM. YOU AND YOUR BEAUTIFUL BRAIN. I'M NEVER GOING TO GET OVER THIS ASK.

Footage of me creating this playlist:

Look. You guys know that I love Zutara. But I don't think you all realize that I love Sukka just as much. Their love is so pure and their vibe as a couple is just... *sigh* 💙💚💙💚💙💚 So putting together this playlist was so much fun. I'll put all explanations of songs below the cut because this reply is already long without what comes next (but you should read them because you'll get the full effect of this playlist).

All The Small Things by blink-182

Cross Me (feat. Chance the Rapper & PnB Rock) by Ed Sheeran

I Think He Knows by Taylor Swift

I Like Me Better (Spotify Studios Version) by Lauv

Ho Hey by The Lumineers

Jackie and Wilson by Hozier

Passenger Seat by Death Cab For Cutie

Stand By Me by Florence + The Machine

The Bones - with Hozier by Maren Morris

Yours - Wedding Edition by Russell Dickerson

Send me a playlist title and I’ll give you 5-10 songs I think would go on it!

All The Small Things

She left me roses by the stairs/Surprises let me know she cares

First of all, Suki would. Second of all, I firmly believe that Sokka and Suki would constantly be doing little things to show each other that they care. Sokka would send Suki his drawings and things he's carved for her. Suki would send Sokka little gadgets and pick up fun little accessories for him at the market. They'd leave out snacks for one another. And they would always, always be there to support one another 100% of the time.

Cross Me

Just know, if you cross her, then you cross me

"WHERE. IS. SUKI?"

I rest my case.

I Think He Knows

He's so obsessed with me, and boy I understand/Boy I understand

I love this song for Sokka and Suki because we all know that Sokka throws off major "THAT'S MY WIFE" vibes in regard to Suki. As he should. But if you think that badass, super cool Suki isn't also low-key super into Sokka in the same way you are wrong. She's the type of girl to totally get why he's into her. (Why wouldn't he be? DUH.) But she would also 100% be like, "Check out this hot, goofy genius! HE'S MINE. I LANDED HIM! THAT'S MY HUSBAND!!"

I Like Me Better

To not know who I am but still know that I'm good long as you're here with me//Damn, I like me better when I'm with you

I picked this song because of the influence Suki had on Sokka's character. Their interactions on Kyoshi Island really did change him for the better. Sokka spent so much of the series lost and feeling as though he didn't belong, but Suki brought out the best in him and helped his character evolve. He saw her, this incredible warrior with a heart of gold who wouldn't take his misogynist crap, and started working to be a better person. And I think we can all agree it was awesome to see him come into his own as a strategist and warrior. A large part of that is thanks to Suki. And Sokka would acknowledge that.

Ho Hey

I belong with you, you belong with me/You're my sweetheart

I don't think this choice needs much of an explanation. Just... They belong together, you guys.

Jackie and Wilson

She blows outta nowhere, roman candle of the wild/Laughing away through my feeble disguise/No other version of me I would rather be tonight/And, Lord, she found me just in time//She's gonna save me/Call me "baby"/Run her hands through my hair

Again, I'd like to point back to Sokka and Suki's first meeting. She comes out of nowhere, sees right through him, and it's thanks to her that Sokka changes his views on women (it takes time, of course, and loss, but he gets there). Also, the loss that Sokka experiences with Yue clearly affects his relationship with Suki in Book 2. He has to learn to be comfortable with the fact that Suki can save herself as well as him. And by the time Book 3 rolls around, we see them working together as a seamless team. He knows she has his back and she knows he has hers.

Passenger Seat

When you feel embarrassed/Then I'll be your pride/When you need directions/Then I'll be the guide/For all time

Oh, this song is so subtly Sukka. I hear these specific lines and think of Toph and Aang laughing at Sokka's Suki sand sculpture and Suki being proud of the fact that he even tried. I think of them being each other's compass, guiding light, and level head in stressful situations. They are so steady for and so true to one another. And I'm not crying, you're crying.

Stand By Me

If the sky that we look upon/Should tumble and fall/Or the mountains should crumble to the sea/I won't cry, I won't cry/No, I won't shed a tear/Just as long as you stand, stand by me

I chose this song because of how Sokka and Suki make one another stronger. They bolster each other. They face down certain death in the knowledge that their partner has their back and that's a beautiful thing. (Also, Florence Welch's voice on this track is incredibly emotive and intensifies the Sukka feels.)

The Bones

When there ain't a crack in the foundation/Baby, I know any storm we're facing/Will blow right over while we stay put/The house don't fall when the bones are good

This is my quintessential Sukka song. I always think of them older, maybe ten years after the war, when I hear this song. The two of them are as unshakeable as they've ever been. Was their first meeting great? No. But they grew together and formed something solid and real. I'm not one to advocate for childhood sweethearts or high school sweethearts (which is what they would've been in a "normal" storyline), but my god. These two would've been the teenage sweethearts who made it. They'd still be super into one another at 85 and just as in love as they'd ever been. If they had trials, they would've only pulled through stronger. These are two people who are capable of seeing past first impressions and loving one another for their true selves and... UGH. I LOVE them, okay?

Yours

I was one in a hundred billion/A burned out star in a galaxy/Just lost in the sky, wonderin' why/Everyone else shines out but me//But I came to life when I first kissed you/The best me has his arms around you/You make me better than I was before/Thank God I'm yours

Sokka said it himself: Compared to the others in the group, he didn't feel special because they could all bend and he couldn't. He lost his boomerang and had an identity crisis. That's the boy Suki met on Kyoshi Island--the boy who felt inferior to his little sister and to the Avatar; the boy who had to put on a false facade of bravado because he was scared... The boy who thought that it was a man's job to be the protector. The boy who thought a girl couldn't kick his ass purely because she was a girl.

Our girl ignited that change in him. Sokka knows full well what Suki's influence has done for him and he adores her for it. He's grateful for her impact on his life and he's obviously blown away by the fact that she loves him. You can tell it's the kind of relationship where he realized that if he was going to be worthy of her, he needed to prove it to her because she knew her worth. She wouldn't settle for a guy who thought she was inferior to him--she wanted someone who would see her as an equal. By the end of the series, she's his partner in every respect. He proves to her that he trusts her to have his back, that he trusts her judgement, that he trusts her in general.

Sokka knows that he's the best version of himself with Suki. He would 100% spend the rest of his life in awe of the fact that she loves him and that he's landed this miracle of a woman who has always seen him as an equal--even when he didn't feel equal to anyone else because he couldn't bend.

#ask evergreen #evergreen answers #playlist asks #thebluesunflower44 #sukka #really #read the explanations for each song you guys #get the full Sukka Feels effect #their love makes me so happy #THANK YOU BLUE FOR REQUESTING THIS PLAYLIST #blue and her big beautiful brain #when I got this ask I lost my mind #and I'm still not over it #*cries in sukka*#sukka my beloved

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realcleverissues · 5 years

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Wealth Tax

Bernie is my candidate, but I really like Warren’s wealth tax (calculator here). I feel like the results are pretty damn fair, especially when taking into account passive income from wealth.

If you have $10B in investable wealth, and you got a meager 5% return on investment (as opposed to 7.5%, which is typical for the stock market, or other ventures that are even more lucrative), you’re looking at $500M/year in basically no-work, passive income. That’s about how much Warren’s wealth tax would cost you at that point. So, basically, unless you’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year, Warren’s wealth tax would basically allow you to not work and just live off investments at a total wealth of $10B indefinitely. You’d never really get below that.

Frankly, I can’t shed a tear for anyone not having more than $10 BILLION. And I’m rather amused by those billionaires who are crying about it.

Also, as for the economics argument of incentive to work... yeah, I think $10 BILLION is incentive enough. You’ve won Capitalism at that point. Enjoy a margarita on a beach or go help society. You don’t need to accumulate more wealth than that ever.

But what about super rich people with way over $10B? How much will they lose?

Again, the bottom is around $10B. But how long would it take to get there?

Let’s say you got $50B. You’d pay around $3B that year. But.. if we keep in mind a modest 5% interest rate... that’s really only a net loss of 500M. So, it’d take at least 80 years [$50B - (80*500M=40B) = $10B]. You can live a full life as a multi, multi billionaire and retire with $10BILLION! But really it’d be way longer than 80 years bc the tax goes down with less wealth. At $25B, it’s only 250M net loss/yr. That’d take 60 years to get to $10B. So if we take a rough calculation of 40 years for $50B to $25B, and 60 years for $25B to $10B. Then we’re looking at 100 years. And again, these are rough calculations. The end result is going to be even higher than that.

So the bottom line is that if you’re a billionaire, you’re still going to live a luxurious life of fantastic wealth and will likely stay a billionaire till you’re dead.

p.s. If your wealth is $500M, you’d be taxed around $10M/yr. Passive income would be $25M. Minus the tax = net gain of $15M/year. IOW, if you have 500 MILLION BUCKS, Warren’s “super unfair” tax would still allow you to sit on your ass and doing nothing, and still come out $15 MILLION richer the next year - while still helping society with tax money.

#economy #warren #wealth tax #politics

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dailynewswebsite · 4 years

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Most US farmers remain loyal to Trump despite pain from trade wars and COVID-19

Trump prepares to offer a speech to farmers in Mills River, N.C., in August.

AP Picture/Evan Vucci

U.S. farmers have suffered quite a bit up to now few years: The commerce struggle with China, pure disasters and the COVID-19 pandemic have all resulted in substantial losses for a lot of producers.

Farmers overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump in 2016 and stay essential to his reelection in lots of swing states equivalent to Iowa and Minnesota. However given the affect of all that’s occurred, will they stick to the president within the November elections?

We’ve performed in depth analysis on American farmers in recent times via surveys and one-on-one interviews. We’ve additionally examined the affect of the U.S.-China commerce struggle.

Whereas the financial prices have been steep, Trump has discovered a technique to make it as much as them: document subsidies. And that’s why we imagine most U.S. farmers will keep loyal to Trump.

Falling exports

The commerce struggle with China, which started in 2018, has dealt a significant blow to U.S. agricultural exports.

After over a 12 months of escalation, by the autumn of 2019 retaliatory tariffs by China had coated nearly all U.S. agricultural merchandise. In consequence, exports of key items equivalent to soybeans skilled steep declines, leading to losses to U.S. soybean farmers of over US$10 billion, in keeping with our calculations.

The ache was unfold throughout the U.S., if erratically. California’s state economic system, for instance, has suffered essentially the most, shedding over $6 billion. Nonetheless, most states noticed tons of of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in losses, and 11 skilled losses of greater than $1 billion.

Federal subsidies to the rescue

In 2018, the Trump administration created a subsidy program supposed to mitigate farmers’ losses associated to the commerce struggle. Breaking from custom, the administration let the U.S. Division of Agriculture spend the cash with out first getting approval from Congress.

Below this system, farmers and ranchers obtained $8.5 billion for 2018 losses and $14.three billion for 2019. No trade-related subsidies have been distributed for 2020 apart from the remaining third tranche of the 2019 funds.

However simply as some states had been harm extra by the commerce struggle than others, not all states benefited equally from the funds. The subsidies closely focused the Midwest, reflecting the political affect of rural constituents in these states. Many of the states that got here out forward – equivalent to Iowa and Nebraska – are likely to vote Republican and have comparatively giant agricultural sectors.

As Trump put it throughout a latest rally in Iowa, “A number of the farmers had been making extra money the best way I used to be doing it than working their asses off, all proper? They had been very, very blissful.”

For the reason that prices of this system are financed by all taxpayers, states with giant city populations equivalent to California, Texas and New York are footing the invoice – and spending extra money than they’re getting in assist. California farmers, for instance, obtained simply $106 million in funds – regardless of the $6 billion in losses – even because the state’s taxpayers contributed $2 billion to this system.

Coronavirus provides to losses

Sadly for farmers, simply because the U.S. and China had been reaching a truce of their commerce struggle, the coronavirus recession saddled them with one other supply of deep financial ache.

Whereas the financial toll from the virus stays unknown, the closures of faculties, eating places and different companies minimize into meals gross sales and additional depressed markets for crop and livestock farmers throughout the USA. In 2020, even with federal help, Midwest corn and soybean farmers are anticipated to lose cash.

Working with Congress this time, the Trump administration created one other program to assist farmers harm by the coronavirus pandemic and has to this point disbursed virtually $30 billion. Once more, a big chunk of the funds have gone to crimson Midwestern states equivalent to Iowa, which alone obtained virtually $1 billion of the primary $10.2 billion disbursed.

Funds have been accelerating as Election Day approaches. Mixed with trade-related and pre-Trump subsidies, whole funds this 12 months are anticipated to succeed in a document $46 billion.

Whereas the funds are supposed to present short-term reduction, the commerce struggle could have already got carried out long-term harm to American farmers. The tariffs on U.S. agricultural merchandise led Chinese language corporations to hunt out cheaper sources for meals and feed. Brazilian farmers offered document quantities of soybeans to China in Might and June and are actually having fun with their highest earnings from the crop in historical past.

Farm nation demonstrates its persevering with assist for the president. Paul Weaver/Pacific Press/LightRocket by way of Getty Photographs

Assist holds sturdy

So what does this all imply for the way Trump will fare with farmers in November?

Two latest research present that Republican candidates misplaced assist within the 2018 congressional elections in counties extra uncovered to commerce retaliation, in addition to in counties with extra soybean manufacturing. And definitely, not all farmers are pleased with Trump. One Ohio farmer who voted for Trump in 2016 lamented in a information article that the president “all the time does the identical. He hurts you after which he offers you cash to maintain you quiet.”

[Get our best science, health and technology stories. Sign up for The Conversation’s science newsletter.]

But the beneficiant farmer subsidies are one motive farmers have stated they assist Trump’s commerce struggle. Final fall, our survey of Midwest crop farmers discovered that 56% stated they considerably or strongly assist Trump’s tariffs on Chinese language merchandise, regardless of retaliation on their very own exports. Farmers additionally stated they share issues held by many Individuals of the broader perceived menace of China over points just like the commerce deficit and cyber espionage.

And a number of other latest polls present that farmers’ general assist for the president stays sturdy. Eighty-two % of farmers polled by the Farm Journal in August stated they deliberate to vote for Trump. A survey of large-scale farmers in July discovered that 75% would again the president, about the identical as in 2016.

Whereas the commerce struggle’s affect on the election stays unclear, there is no such thing as a motive to count on a considerable portion of farmers to defect from the president.

Wendong Zhang receives funding from from US Division of Agriculture Agriculture and Meals Analysis Initiative (AFRI) Markets, Commerce and Economics program with the venture titled "Quantifying the Transmission of U.S.-China and World Coverage Impacts via a New Commodity-Particular Worldwide Normal-Equilibrium System; and is member of the agriculture committee of US-China Heartland Affiliation, a non-profit group.

Minghao Li receives funding from from US Division of Agriculture Agriculture and Meals Analysis Initiative (AFRI) Markets, Commerce and Economics program with the venture titled "Quantifying the Transmission of U.S.-China and World Coverage Impacts via a New Commodity-Particular Worldwide Normal-Equilibrium System."

from Growth News https://growthnews.in/most-us-farmers-remain-loyal-to-trump-despite-pain-from-trade-wars-and-covid-19/ via https://growthnews.in

#Growth News

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politicaltheatre · 4 years

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The Boy In The Bubble, pt.3

“Nobody would have ever thought a thing like this could have happened.” - President Donald Trump, March 26, 2020

If that quote sounds ickily familiar, it’s because those were the same words, more or less, repeated twelve years ago by men and women working in Washington D.C. and on Wall Street, all of them seeking to avoid accountability for their role in an economic meltdown that ruined the lives of tens of millions of Americans and that spread, not unlike a virus, overseas, crippling the entire, interconnected world economy for years.

In many ways, our world has yet to recover from the 2008 sub-prime mortgage crisis. Action taken was short sighted and narrowly focused, aimed more at rescuing those responsible for causing the crisis - investment banks, insurance companies, debt-laden corporate investors - than those caught in its ever expanding wake.

The notion that nobody knew or could have known wasn’t about looking the man on the street in the eye; if anything, it was a legal defense. They had just been bailed out by the federal government and didn’t want to let anything resembling accountability get in the way of capitalizing on it, least of all civil liability for their own, short sighted thinking.

It’s no coincidence, then, that Donald Trump has repeatedly used that same defense to excuse his own incompetent handling of the COVID-19 outbreak. This is, for him, not a matter of serving the public good but of winning and losing, of profit and loss, credit and blame. Mostly, avoiding blame.

Bully that he is, Trump believes the best defense is any offense. That means finding others to blame. Everyday no, he steps in front of a microphone to speak to the nation, and everyday he finds someone to blame for something. It’s very much a ritual, like repeating that old defense that ignorance is a defense.

His appearances feel somehow incomplete if he hasn’t found someone to blame for something. It might be a journalist, or a foreign leader, or a particular presidential predecessor, or a city or state that hasn’t shown him enough deference or appreciation. For a second there, it was old people.

Trump’s failed proposal of a 14 day quarantine for the entire New York metropolitan area was part of that blaming ritual. It would have had to include an undetermined portion of the city’s suburbs and rural areas in New York state, New Jersey, and Connecticut, and would have cost an amount of money no one wanted to calculate. Surely, the states would have paid for it.

Hours later, with Trump safely away from any microphones, the CDC instead issued a “travel advisory” for the area, which carries about the same weight as Congress passing a non-binding resolution. In other words, it was no change at all.

If the idea of blockading New York at this point seemed ridiculous, that’s because it was. For one thing, it was a lot like closing the barn door after the cows had all escaped; for another, the Florida beaches jam-packed with spring breakers probably did as much damage or worse in spreading the infection than New York, and nobody’s talking about walling off Florida from the rest of the country, are they? Are they? Well, not seriously.

Of course, no one took Trump seriously. Well, no one beyond his base. On top of being a maniacally stupid waste of resources, the source of the outbreak in the United States can’t even be traced to New York. The first cases that gained public awareness were on the west coast, and those were just the first ones reported. The odds are extraordinarily high that there were cases on both coasts and places in between for weeks before anyone was diagnosed.

Rationally, it will take years to discover, if ever, where the actual ground zero for this pandemic was in the United States, but when it comes to proposals from Donald Trump, rational thinking is never the point.

The point of making that quarantine proposal was the same as the point of proposing to reopen the country by Easter: for Trump to be seen to be doing something by his base.

That those proposals had as much weight as a non-bonding resolution doesn’t matter; his proposing them does. This, he believes, will restore confidence in him and his leadership.

In a sense, he may be right. His base will and surely does now feel more confident reading and hearing that action was proposed and by him. It reinforces the image of him they have clung to with all their might. His base is his base because they need that image, because they need to be reassured, because they need to see and hear his confidence in order to feel it in themselves.

This is why Trump’s daily press conferences feel like campaign rallies: they are. What the rational mind sees and hears and recognizes as incompetent and irresponsible, Trump’s supporters see and hear as a reflection of their own needs. Does a competent, responsible leader bring out the My Pillow guy to tell the world he’s doing a great job? Of course, not, but a man looking to be seen to be praised does.

Trump, for all his reckless stupidity, understands this all too well. He understands that his poll numbers will rise and fall not on his demonstration of ability and compassion but on how he looks and sounds in front of a microphone. The only performance he cares about or cares to hear about is the one that makes his numbers rise.

His focus is shallow and short term, seeking out the kind of pure speculation that sees stocks rise and fall for exceeding or failing to meet expectations. If all the news is good news, he and those surrounding him tell themselves, his stock will only ever rise.

Anyone who’s ever traded stocks knows better. You can bluff a stock higher in the short term. People do it all the time. That’s a kind of bubble. You draw attention, you draw speculation, and you draw suckers in to raise the price of your stock, and then you get the hell out before reality comes crashing in and the value of the stock you no longer own comes crashing through the floor.

Trump’s rise in politics has been a lot like this. He sold those who voted for him on a brand: the billionaire businessman who will bring that to government and fix it. He used confidence in that bubble to draw in speculators, members of Congress and executives on Wall Street. They pumped up his stock even more, hoping to use his rise to push their own agendas and thereby increase their own profits.

The results of Trump’s 2016 election were predictable. The federal tax cuts of 2017 funneled money away from the poorest Americans and towards the wealthiest. They also funneled money away from the government, making deregulation and de facto deregulation even easier.

Laws that forced businesses to be accountable to others were gutted by Republicans in Congress. Those left on the books either couldn’t be enforced because the agencies responsible couldn’t be properly funded or wouldn’t be enforced because the agencies were now headed by men and women with an interest in seeing those laws fail.

That, for anyone looking to get rich and have others pay for it, is a win-win. It came as no shock, then, that Paul Ryan, architect of that tax bill, and other congressional Republicans who benefitted both from it and newly lax regulations left Congress the very next year. Now was the time to enjoy the fruits of their labors. Now was the time to get out before the bubble burst and those who had bought in after them wanted answers.

Which bring us to now. In the last few weeks, at least 10 million Americans have lost their jobs, a number that could potentially triple in just the next month. With that loss, most of them now face hard questions about rent, health coverage, and simply feeding themselves. Oh, and the Dow Jones and other stock markets have dropped 29% from their February high.

Never fear, massive, debt-laden government spending is here to help. But to help whom? The Senate bill was delayed because a $500 billion slush fund needed regulations and oversight to prevent it from simply going to corporations that could just as easily secure a nearly interest free loan or, you know, Trump, his family, and anyone kissing his ass.

The perception that America needs to be protected from its president’s corruption isn’t something that’s going inspire confidence in stock trading. Sure, passage of the bill boosted stocks for a day - well, part of a day - but no sooner than they went up, they came straight back down.

That’s the problem with running a country (or business) on perception; it’s short term solution at best. It relies on how good you looked the last time people saw you. If people take you seriously, maybe you can parlay good news into that ongoing narrative, but, if you’re fighting bad news, bad news you can’t hope to control, well, good luck with that.

It hasn’t helped that the rich and powerful seem to have it a lot easier than the rank and file. Few things reveal the haves and have nots better than a crisis. If celebrities and professional athletes are getting tests when doctors, nurses, and other first responders can’t, that’s more than just a problem of perception. It’s a statement about the failure of the American healthcare system as it currently stands, one that makes an even stronger case for the failure of the American economic system on which that healthcare system is based.

Systemic failure. Not words you want to hear.

What we’ve seen, however, has not been the start of the long anticipated Next Great Depression (That may still come; more on that below). No, what we’re seeing now with the spastic volatility of stock markets, beleaguered supply chains, and GoFundMe pages for first responders and out of work restaurant workers sprouting up like spring daffodils, is just how unhealthy our current economy already was long before this pandemic took place.

When we talk about a “healthy” economy, we talk about moderation. Money is spread around. Power is spread around. When money and power become more concentrated, it throws the health of the economy out of whack.

Too much concentration in any one stratum, such as the wealthy, or any one sector, such as energy, and it ruins what we may think of as an immune response. It isn’t that if that stratum or sector goes down that we have no ability to respond, it’s that our response is likely to favor a strata or sector that doesn’t need help.

It’s important to state that this is not something the comes out of capitalism. Even a cursory look at nominally “communist” economies of the 20th century shows a concentration of money and power in the hands of a corrupt and often cruel elite, with destructive results for everyone else stuck living under those systems.

It is corruption, not capitalism or communism, that was and remains the problem. We can and should be enraged at recently appointed Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler, who along with her New York Stock Exchange-managing husband appears to have profited 18 million dollars through insider trading while telling the American public that nothing was wrong.

The essential question we need to ask, though, is would Loeffler have done something like this in the Soviet Union? Would she have seen a crisis coming and lied about it in order to profit from it? Of course, she would have. Of course, she would.

The systemic corruption in present day Russia has a name: oligarchy. The oligarchs, however, started long before the fall of the Soviet Union. They did so with the patronage of men and women in the Soviet government. Their corruption hastened the collapse of that government, syphoning off funds, undermining the rule of law and with it government accountability and oversight, and setting the stage for calamities such as Chernobyl.

In this way, the kleptocracy made itself. It emerged from its Soviet cocoon fully formed, the government patrons selling off government-owned institutions to their friends, who then supported their hold on power. This is how the oligarchs became the oligarchs and how Vladimir Putin became Vladimir Putin.

We must remember, too, that corruption isn’t just a moral or ethical failing, like Loeffler’s, but a systemic one, too. In the case of the United States, too much money and power has become concentrated in an under-regulated, speculative, market economy. We have become wholly dependent on it. Coupled with the unfettered rise of online sports betting (and the corresponding rise in sports cheating), we have embraced gambling as a core element of our economic system, and are doing so mired in debt.

Short term debt is just fine. Use your credit card, pay it off at the end of the month. It’s a short term solution to short term problems. Long term debt, on the other hand, is bad, the longer the term, the worse. Just ask anyone with student loans, or any country owing the IMF, or anyone stuck still holding one of those toxic sub-prime mortgages after all this time. They’re in a never ending cycle of paying it off. They can’t move forward. They can’t build anything. They can’t live, not really.

Of course, we don’t have to ask. Not now. We all lived through that. The memory is still fresh. It’s burned into our memories. We couldn’t possibly be that stupid, stupid enough to do it all again. Right? Right?

And yet. And yet.

Even now, even in the midst of all this suffering, there are men and women continuing to make billions on nothing but debt, including government debt, leaving billions of suckers holding the bag when another catastrophe hits and the bubbles burst.

Just reading that, it sounds bad - it should, it really, really should - and yet we have convinced ourselves that because so many other people are doing it we must also do it or get left behind. That’s what systemic corruption does. That’s the feeling it embeds in each of us. And, because we tell ourselves that we’re gambling with other people’s money, we convince ourselves that it’s going to be somebody else’s problem.

Nope. That’s not how that works.

As mentioned above, the economic crisis we’re living through isn’t the collapse that was already coming. That one, which could actually be worse, could still come if safeguards aren’t put in place. It would more likely be triggered not by a natural disaster but by a change of parties in the White House and, more importantly, in the Senate.

Not what you wanted to read? Read on. Please.

That change, given the Republican advantage in the Electoral College and the strength of incumbency in Republican-held Senate seats, would likely have come just before the election of 2024, in anticipation of Republican losses, or sometime towards the end of the 2025 fiscal year, when Democratic rollbacks of Republican deregulation and tax policies took full effect.

At that time, those who have pushed deregulation and de facto deregulation would begin “profit taking”, which is to say, selling off as much as they can, first under the radar while telling suckers that all is well and then as fast as they could once word got out that the market was about to collapse. And then it would collapse, a race to the bottom leaving tens of millions out of work, facing homelessness and starvation, and nothing to fix it but massive, debt-laden government spending.

Sound familiar? Of course, it does.

This is what happens when the immune response within an economy breaks down. For decades, Republicans have vilified regulations as killing jobs and stifling freedoms. The Democratic leadership, to their shame, has never truly called them out for that lie. Bill Clinton never did. Barack Obama didn’t, either. Neither did Hillary Clinton or this round’s likely nominee, Joe Biden. And it is a lie, a big, fat one that actually threatens the very things it claims to want to protect.

What regulations actually do, and why they’re so easy to vilify, is require us to be accountable to others. Traffic lights and stop signs, those are regulations. They don’t belong at every intersection, but where there are accidents in which cars hit people or other cars we absolutely need them and we know it.

Yes, it is possible for regulations to be poorly thought out and poorly written. They are written, as all things are, by people. Whenever you hear a politician or cable news personality say we have to get rid of them, though, what they mean is people shouldn’t have to be accountable to other people.

That’s their pitch. Well, that’s every right wing’s pitch. People love to hear it, almost as much as people love to hear that people they don’t have to accountable to will still have to be accountable to them. Oh, how we all love to hear that. Let us be the ones, the only ones, who get to blow past the stop signs. Who wouldn’t love that?

We’ll never not run to the ballot box and elect the buffoon offering us that and an easy life with easy solutions to complicated problems. At least, we’ll never not until that moment the world around us forces us to learn why we were so very, very stupid to do so.

This, like all things, comes in cycles. We go through periods, like the one the one twelve years ago and the one we’re in right now, in which we are forced to realize that we need to be more accountable to each other. No running red lights, no taking the easy way out.

Action is taken. Regulations that could and should have protected us are restored. More regulations, ones we hadn’t thought to ask if we needed but now understand that we do, follow. Time passes, we haven’t faced a catastrophe like this in a while, we forget, we remove our protections, and the cycle starts again.

The cycle kicks off like fireworks. Everything is great. We are euphoric, we are in the moment, the bubble keeps growing and keeps rising, and we keep rising with it. Nothing can go wrong.

At some point, however, the laws of thermodynamics set in, especially the third one: entropy.

Nothing lasts forever, certainly not any economic system built on an imbalance of power. In order to protect the advantage they have, those benefitting from the status quo will spend available resources, first just a little and then more and more and exponentially more.

Why exponentially more? The more resources they spend, the more it destabilizes their position. That’s entropy. This is partly because the stability of their position depended on that reserve of resources and partly because in order to maintain an imbalance of power they must abuse not only those in protest but those potentially in protest, which only draws more protesters to the cause of removing them.

So, the more they spend, the more they keep having to spend, and that just to maintain what they thought they had. Eventually, the resources required to hold it all together are exhausted and the bubble collapses.

This doesn’t just apply to markets; it applies to every relationship based on an imbalance of power. It’s their life cycle.

It’s also a lesson we can’t seem to learn without failing. Failing is a big part of how we learn. It’s our species’ special talent. In a lot of ways, it mimics our immune system: we allow potential threats in so we can test changing environments and learn how to adapt to them. We’re seeking out failure, or at least he chance of it.

This is how we’ve learned for hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps even longer, and despite our countless mistakes and our countless failures, we only in the position we’re in as the planet’s most evolved species because of it. In that sense, it isn’t just mimicking our immune system, it’s a vital part of it.

This is what we need to remember: immune systems of any kind exist to help us to adapt to changing environments.

If we can adapt, we can survive. We can’t go all one way or all another. We must avoid extremes as much as we must avoid locking ourselves into the center.

Balance is not stasis. It requires movement, making adjustments large and small. It means having the ability to accept being wrong and to accept necessary change. Without that, we fail. Our systems fail. And we’ve failed enough to know better.

”Nobody could have predicted something like this”?

Anyone could have. Plenty did.

- Daniel Ward

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watchtheblog · 7 years

Text

tenets and tenants of endearment

this is a love letter to the purest love i’ve ever known.

“i should like to go with you -- nowhere. it would be rather wandering just to nowhere. thats the place to get to—nowhere. one wants to wander away from the world somewheres, into our own nowhere.”* (women in love)

*wander to this blog about nowhere. also, here is a link to my canon of work on these iconic darling dreamboats.

whenever i think i’ve run out of ways to count the ways in which i love mary kate olsen and olivier sarkosy, i am reminded that the universe is abundant and i will never be at a loss to describe the most sacred union to have ever been deemed sacred by the act of consecration at an undisclosed private residence on east 49th street where they were married, among their cigarettes and expensive friends.

we are not worthy to lay our eyes upon this fusion of wealth, nicotine and languid passion… but let us sin for a moment, shall we?

there’s a phrase “money talks, wealth whispers”, and in addition to introducing it as a way to softly let you know the kinds of disgusting, elitist platitudes i have in my lexicon, i’m mentioning it because i want to use its grammatical structure to riff off of:

(although, to be fair, this old chestnut does also apply to these opulent oligarchs (ish; adjacent) without modification. money talks (see: someone who buys bottles at a club), wealth whispers (see: mary kate and olivier who skip the club altogether in favor of eating *whatever the fuck* while wearing rags.))

love talks, TRUE love (this love here) silences itself with cigarettes and making out so it can focus on cultivating the deepest love known to human kind, aliens, poets and cardiologists.

like, look how quiet their love is. this image came up when i searched for them and it took me almost a minute to even process that they are IN this photo.

back left. (not the attention desperate two front right. SEE YA LATER.)

look at these little moles!!! these sneaky ass, little groundhogs.

love projects itself over the internet in a garish display of falsified emotion. TRUE love removes itself from the public gaze, somehow, despite its immediate presence in the gaze of said public.

REMOVES. entirely. seriously. you erase yourself from public documentation. that’s how you exercise your force as a couple. that’s how you shove your wealth of adoration for each other down the throats of everyone in your nuclear and extended life. you disappear.

i bet these live action adults don’t even deign to partake in the census.

my google alerts for them lay so dormant i often find myself checking to make sure they’re still set up... the way i’d check my blackberry’s vitals in 2009 to see if this guy ken who was a bartender (lol i did a typo here and it changed “bartender” to “partner” and i laughed when i deleted it to write “bartender” because it made me feel like i was getting one over on this guy. this guy from 10 years ago, from when i was an underage club bop — let me stop) at the famed #thebox had texted me.

(he NEVER had!!!!!! also. that is his real name. please hit me up if you’re reading this, i would love to catch up and hear about all those weekend trips you’d mysteriously take every single weekend when i’d be like “let’s hang this weekend?”)

mary kate and olivier are floating caspers, devious beetlejuices… *google search “famous ghosts”, find one you relate to + add adjective to round this out for me*

when i dare ask google, “google, are there more images of these human crack bags?” google responds, “no.” and even though google - like the instagram of the *cool, fun, 10k followers away from a fitness tea or teeth whitening system #spon deal* girl you stumbled upon after vigilantly checking your (ex) boyfriend’s liking activity - is never misleading, i check anyway.

and i confirm this for myself as i reach the end of the archives. as i exhaust the results. I REACH THE END. of a google image search. of a wildly famous child actor cum designer of multiple fashion brands and a tall, rich banking man who is the relative of a former french president. mangnifique. they’re walking nostalgia.

once, a man i should not have let love me and vice versa… - well...

they all were (…men i shouldn’t have let love me).

anyway, this one in particular told me he was breaking up with me because he “wanted to be anonymous”. lol! i scoffed at that of course and not just because i wanted to be like, “you’re anonymous as fuck, my dude” (which i said; because he was; he remains.) but also because i was like… what? what a crazy gross thing to want to be. to aspire to be the whites of my eyes after rolling them at that comment.

but wow. was i wrong.

love exposes itself for others to gawk at, TRUE love consumes itself. true love says, “i want you to contain me in physicality and not in the vulgar sexual way”.

TRUE love swallows itself, disappearing, completely unconcerned with you in any way. TRUE love, real, lasting love, slinks around the world in a hearse, hidden from the prying eyes of fans and enemies alike because true love doesn’t need your approval... or marked indifference. these fucking lilting daffodils read each other like motherfucking braille.

LOVE IS LOVE… per macklemore and LGBTQ ads everywhere. but true love is right here. hiding somewhere behind someone of higher value domestically (at a box office, for example) but where it matters (in love or the billion dollar net worth arena) stratospherically inferior. see, look. here they are behind the man jack nicholson, star of things and etc…

love is love, true love is a phenomenon.

these are injunctions not opinions. this is the truth. this is how love works. i’m sorry if i had to break it to you.

i read somewhere that olivier’s ex wife said his relationship with mary kate was “disgusting”. oh. really? what’s disgusting? finding the man of your dreams in an AARP magazine? having a girlfriend so adorable and young, the person who took this photo might not have known that only one female present is biologically related to you?

i’m sorry that that’s disgusting to you, charlotte. broaden your scope of reasoning. widen your understanding of love. of dreams. further try to understand the vocabulary that you are carelessly throwing around the way olivier throws mk around when they’re watching a live stream of … “the markets” and the nasdaq is down and he desperately needs to change the channel for his blood pressure but cannot find the remote and because of his inherent french rage he ends up throwing mk across the room because he mistakes her for a doll.

what’s disgusting, lottie?

the pure joy on the faces of these two sacks of heroin? they’re literally effervescent, merely acknowledging that they are both "alive” and able to smoke another hundred thousand cigarettes together.

DEFINE DISGUSTING!!!!!!!!!!!!

ok. thank you.

in closing. i just want to take a minute to elucidate the extent to which olivier sarkosy - a man i do not know - has no idea what “social media” is. like, i feel like mary kate once might have tried to explain it to him and he waved it off like you’d wave off someone offering you a sample of some food related item when you’re in a supermarket shopping with a v specific list of food items and not a moment to spare (and also maybe you have some pesky food allergies).

“how silly,” he probably said. and then puffed an accordion of marlboro reds, looked around at the circle of people in his captive audience (only his wife, mary kate olsen), and said, “the night is young… and so is mary kate” before devouring her pre dinner.

#mary kate olsen #the olsens #mary kate and olivier #the love of a generation #d h lawrence #women in love #second wives club #photojournal #dating #people in love #ideal men #humans i'm obsessed with #divine creatures #these people literally make me cry #this is not irony; i am obsessed with them to a degree that is terrifying

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dankesdarkman · 7 years

Text

Fate and Economics: How FSN Is An Economical Commentary By The Spacebattles Forum

You know what’s normal? fate shitposting

You know what’s fun? fate economics shitposting

The beginning of this madness

Raguna Blade said:

You know, thinking on it, yeah that totally makes sense based on what I know of japanese work culture. Especially when mixed with the targeted audience of the FS/N games (otaku type) who were already on the outside edge of such culture and were totally open to hearing alternate idea's of what to do, it makes a clear amount of sense. Tying with the heroines then, it sort of follows that the various routes demonstrate how things work out for him. Following Saber, who basically embodies the Work your ass into dust ideal set's him up with an impossible goal for happiness. Saber has to Wait Forever, He has to work forever and if they can both keep it up without fucking it all up along the way, Glory GLory forever. Rin though? Rin's got a discrete clear goal. It requires hard work certainly, but it's not the end all be all. You need to work certainly, you need to work hard, the world is utterly vicious and will swallow you up (the clocktower, then, is true society I guess. None of those fake niceties, it's kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, real Chaos Route stuff there.) but there's plenty to do aside from it and happiness can coincide easily enough if you're willing to stick out that hand and work for it. And then yeah, Sakura is a full on rejection of that, and it makes sense that in her route there would be the most shit going horribly wrong is just in general kind of the most painful (as my recollection calls anyway). Shirous not only rejecting the dominant paradigm for work ethic, sorta, but he's doing to be with someone who is kind of coded as handicapped(? Recollections may be failing I apologize). Severe Trauma, violent violent freak outs (or just freak outs in general really), Sakura is a broken girl really. SO He not only rejects the idea that he has to work himself into dust for his ideals, Ideals he still technically has but needs to better consider and come to terms with as I understand it, But he makes use of that titanic drive to do something utterly radical and do what would make him truly happy even if it means rejecting basically the entire culture he's in. So that's neat. And Bludflag Imma need you to stop. I can legitimately go at this all day, but my surface level knowledge of the FS/N series is gonna out me as a clown sooner or later and I kinda need to dodge that. Assuming I haven't run face first into the clowning pie already.

frozenchicken said:

The Economic Simulationism of the Fate Franchise Part 1-Economic Mechanisms Many compliments have been offered to Nasu for the depth of his worldbuilding, but very few discuss the blatant economic commentary hidden within his works. In particular, the Masters and Servants of the 5th Holy Grail War* are each distinct commentaries on various Economic mechanisms and social systems. Mechanisms Spoiler: Large Corporations

The first of these mechanisms is one that is obvious even to those unfamiliar with economic theory. The Archer-class Servant Gilgamesh is a Great and Powerful Hero, stronger than any other in the series. He enacted his deeds long ago, and in addition to the power and wealth this initially brought him, he laid claim to the Gate of Babylon, a Capitalistic Means of Production that grows his strength from the work of others. In this current age he has thus become an unstoppable juggernaught who can throw his weight around anywhere in the Marketplace of Ideas. Obviously, Gilgamesh symbolises the tyrannical strength of a Corporation who has become too large, and managed to gain a Monopoly. Interestingly, we can see that his Villainy is linked to his growth and desire to expand, as he never possessed such horrific goals in pre-modern times, or when people had purposes that suited his goals. Interestingly, we know that Gilgamesh was at his most personable back in Ancient times when his friend Enkidu was present. This a clear commentary on the necessity of competition to cause healthier business structures. Spoiler: Rational Choice vs Behavioural Economics

One of the simplest and most basic Economic theorems-known as 'Rational Choice Theory'-is examined by the character of Medea ('Caster'). Rational Choice Theory is the assumption that all individuals within in an Economy will act within their own best interests, acting in order to maximise their profits and minimise their losses. This behavioural pattern is shown by Medea's first master, Atram Galiast. Atram is a skilled mage, backed by the Magus Association and equipped with a workshop full of human sacrifices that could massively empower Caster's Magic. With his support, she could easily achieve success in the Holy Grail War. She instead elects to kill him, release the sacrifices, and wander around without hope of survival. In this, we see that Nasu has chosen to support the converse theoreom that is Behavioural Economics. This is the psychology-based study of human behaviours that examines why humans embrace irrational behaviours that makes modelling human action in an economic model so difficult. Medea rejects her first master due to hatred of being bound, and yet embraces Souichirou Kuzuki for his kindness, in spite of the the tactical disadvantage his lack of magic brings. This demonstrates both how standard logical predictions of her actions fail, however once we understand her psychology better (such as the fact she would rather embrace temporary happiness with Kuzuki rather than seek the ideal perfection of a Holy Grail Wish), we become better able to understand her decisions. *Fate/Stay Night, Fate/Unlimited Blade Works, et al. ------------------------------------------------------------- AN: There, look at what you've all made me do. You crazy people. Also, I'm neither an Economist nor an expert on Fate lore, so I accept no blame for this being an illogical pile of absolute BS. We all knew that going in. I was planning to write up a section called 'Love Triangles as Symbolism for Competing Economic Social Systems', but it's 3am here, so I won't. I also didn't comment on all that 'Saberface' stuff, but that's because I know practically nothing about the 10 billion variations of Saber. If somebody wants to actually continue this, be my guest. I have no idea what my work ethic will be like in the morning. [Perk Activation: Sloth!] ....Seriously, feel free.

BlueHelix said:

The Symbology Of Saber In Economics (Or: I Really, Really, Hate Things Like Macroeconomics. Yorokobe, TehChron, frozenchicken, and Neroj. Feel free to critique, this is a half-assed attempt in between my analysis of the MotSR world, and developing my own quest idea.) One could put Saber into one of two possibilities: Keynesian economics, and a pure representation of capitalism. Let's begin with the Keynesian aspect. The ideal of Keynes is a planned economy, that "spends against the wind." Okay, let's break it down. This great plan, hatched by Uther Pendragon and Merlin, try to create something amazing, which is a symbol for the planners like those of Keynesian economics. And Keynes, for a large part, works in times of war, which basically is King Arthur's entire reign. The people unite, things go along to rationing and planning. In times of economic downturn, Keynes says to spend more and more, and to go into debt, which is a little similar to how Saber had to drain the resources of a village to go to war. And in times of economic surplus, one raises taxes and then pays those debts off, which shows in the prosperity of Camelot before it fell. In the perfect ideal of Keynes, also known as "Saber Lily," Keynes works perfectly, with it being a utopian ideal that whenever things go wrong, the government will intervene. On the other hand, Hayek in "The Journey To Serfdom," envisions that this so-called planned economy will fail, and sets the ground for the total corruption of Keynes' ideas, which finally takes the form of in terms of TYPE-MOON as the inversion of Saber: Saber Alter. In between the range of Saber Lily to Saber Alter, from Mysterious Heroine X, to Saber Lion, to Nero, would be the variability of how Keynes' ideas actually worked out in the long run. Secondly, one could look at Saber, and at an extension of her, Camelot, through the lens of free-market capitalism. Saber begins at her journey, and has a really successful start: pulling the Sword of Owed Victory, Caliburn, out of the stone. However, this is really the beginning of a bubble, as she can no longer be a normal person, but rather has to be a king, which is exacerbated by how so many people put faith into her (a false representation at that, as they believed for her to be a male, and put a false set of expectations upon Arturia, putting an enormous task that she, and most of her counterparts, were doomed to failure), and put some truly significant investments into a stock that was higher-valued than its true value (such as Guinevere. And look at how that turned out.) For the longest while though, just like the post-World War I American economy, Saber, buoyed by support from so many, managed to get through the countless wars and competition. However, like all bubbles must eventually do, they burst. And the indicator for this was the eventual plateau of Camelot and Merlin (a vital investor/co-founder) leaving for better pastures (woman troubles.) Then came the confrontation by Mordred, who took so many of her knights (investors) away, leading to a civil war (Black Tuesday and the Great Depression.) Which all went to hell, leading to Arturia making a deal with Alaya (a government bailout), which as we all know, generally fails (Hoover, am I right? And really, Roosevelt as well, because it was the Second World War that revived the American Economy), which leads to a major conflict (Holy Grail War=World Wars. You could fit an enormous amount of connections and parallels here, especially how the Fourth is similar the the First World War, and the Fifth is similar to the Second World War) in order to rejuvenate our stocks (Saber) through the major investments and turnarounds (the Wishes), which usually are misused, and we head back to a depression after a peak (Angra Mainyu and the Corrupted Grail.) This continues on ad infinitum, with the hope that things will be better for the individual, similar to the Fate Route (that one quote I forgot where they say something along the lines that one has to seek forever, and the other will have to wait forever. Halp Bludflag), and maybe, it will work out, similar to the Avalon Bonus Episode: "Welcome back, Shirou."

Raguna Blade said:

Hm. Maybe? Although there's another pretty obvious bit in play here. As far as systems go I can't say but well... Ilya represents Old Money. Like Flat out. Her family is wealthy, one of the ancient and old magus families, they're the ones who functionally MADE the grail wars and the systems that everyone has to deal with, or at least has lived through their transitions, and compared to everyone else, they have a flat overwhelming advantage that simply cannot be surmounted by playing the game as it's supposed to be done. If, as the Grail Wars was supposed to be (basically a big ole tournament of heroic spirits fighting each other) went to plan, basically nobody in the running has a chance at victory. Ignoring Girugamesh for a second here, nobody else was remotely in Hercs range. Flat out, his ass SHOULD have won. And had things functioned as intended, had the other players not basically gone out of their way to get around it, he would have smashed them to pieces. Which, well, is actually a lot how it works with old money anyways. When you have the best education, the best tools, the money, the connections, and all that, it takes something coming from out of left field entirely or a variety of smaller systems and groups rising up to actually topple that power. Now of course I don't know the actual status of the Einzburn family's wealth and a quick wiki walk shows me little to say their exact financial standings, but it has been made clear that as of present the head of the family is basically sinking everything they have into making damn sure that they win the grail war. That is, they want to continue to win the system that they created/had a hand in creating for as long as possible and...Well, past acts in the Grail War Series has proven them to be kind of breaking down. Their attempts to game the system fail spectacularly (See that Whole Avenger thing) and functionally spells their doom down the line as the blow back from basically breaking the system they created keeps coming back to haunt them (Mud of the Grail My guys), while attempts to hire an outside agitator ultimately proves to be damnably effective, in giving the reigns to someone who they do not have perfect control over, it also further destabilizes their control over the system that they are inherently tied to. In fact, let's talk about Mr The Ends Have to Justify The Means for A second, Since he is, in fact, Our Girl Ilya's Old man. At least, as far as it goes with alchemic golemy nonsense. Not quite sure about the blood lines there. But we see him, and Kiritsugu is unquestionably an outsider to the system the Einzburn's have up and running. Oh yes, he is a magus, no doubt, but in the view of this, His family is fallen disgraced and can't claim old money status because well...Dudes poor as shit. Relatively. But the thing is, due to his nature as an outsider, because he's taken the time to grow up outside of the system, to develop and learn things in it, he comes to a very specific view of the world. What it represents in an economic sense isn't important for this here, but the important thing is that because of this, and then later training he acquired in order to pass through the world that he was an outsider of, He was better able to navigate in ways that others in the system simply couldn't conceive of. This of course lead to his ASTOUNDING success at the 4th Grail War, but because again he was fundamentally an outsider, he saw how clearly the system was broken by the time he won and had a choice in the matter. The System can't support itself anylonger, not in the way that it exists presently. It can only be destroyed, and built upon. So what's this to do with Ilya? Well, again, Ilya is Old Money. She has the resources, the connections, the education, the knowledge all that. She can do a tremendous amount. She can, in fact, just about grant the wish of any given person she wishes given those connections. I mean hell, she's literally the Holy Grail. She's literally the system she's built to work within. And as such, compared to the Einzburn Family as a whole, she has unparalleled power to shift control and ultimately destroy the system as she see's fit. And ultimately, in every single route she is dead or dying. Fate See's the system crumble around her, leaving her functionally on life support. Unlimited BLade Works See's the system Kill her itself for it's self (as repped by the glorious golden boy himself), before ultimately self destructing anyway. But Heavens Feel? Well, that's about the only route she has Agency as Grail-chan, and in here we see her, as far as true route's go, Sacrifice herself for Shirou, Underpaid Everyman with Anarchic Leanings. The system is breaking down and dying, and rather than let everything collapse into the rubble and close off any kind of hope for the future (such as it were) she gave a part of herself to those who most wish to abandon what ultimately proved to be a failure of a system, effectively trusting them with the power and resources and such to go forth and create a better tomorrow and all that. Alternatively, It's the Old Money using their powers for good, fostering the growth of a new system that will inevitably replace it down the line, given her existence as a opposite to the Grail that Sakura Represents. Which, Just for the moment, As Black And White Grails, the two play off each other interestingly in that the Matous Are ALSO old money with deep ties to the system. But where Black Grail Sakura could probably be described as Old Money lording it's power around to ill effects, Ilya would essentially be the opposite. Of course, that is a bit beyond what I'm able to play with here.

BlueHelix said:

Okay, first off, someone compile the shitposts about Rin and distill it into something coherent. It is literally that easy, and I'm way too exhausted to do that right now. I think what you're going with here is that Sakura symbolizes those that are under the "capitalist boot" that look to communism as a better alternative, like how Sakura is hot for Shirou. And Shirou is definitely a communist, wanting to save everyone and all that. Actually, the Emiyas could represent the parts of Asia that turned to communism (spits to the side). Norikata Emiya, who went all in towards the pursuit of advancing himself (actually, most hardcore magi) would fit the bad part of free-market capitalism. Such as the big corporations stepping over the people, oil companies and factories polluting the earth, etc., he and ruthless magi represent those who cast others down for their goals of greed and similar actions. And he gets shot by his son after screwing things up royally. Make of that what you will. Now, I'm going to only talk about Natalia, Kiritsugu's sensei, briefly. I'm going to put her as the original capitalists that turned to communism. She has a Russian name, after all. So she represents Russia, who then taught Kiritsugu (other to-be communist states), all she knew (communism/Marxism). And then Kiritsugu has that dream/ideal of being a superhero, to save everyone (haha definitely communism there), which then, after Natalia's death (the reality of a communist state after the "glorious revolution"), turns him into a ruthless machine (Lenin in his first decade or so). However, after taking a job from a third party to win the Fourth Holy Grail War (World War II connection), he meets Irisviel and fathers Illya, significantly mellowing him out (New Economic Policy). At the end, however, the true vision of his dream (the failures of communism: Stalin. Great Leap Forward. Five Year Plans. et al.) is shown to be horrific, which then forces him to cast aside his dream. Then he passes down the ideal of his dream to Shirou. I think basically anyone could make an easy amount of connections between Shirou Emiya and communism. He wants to save the world. He fights against Gilgamesh (the 1% bourgeoisie lording over the poor proletariat), Kirei (the cruel rich finding joy in abusing the poor and others), and Dark Sakura (dark side of capitalism incarnate). He is the "imitation that surpasses the original" (refined "communism" that China, Vietnam, and others have that have outlasted Soviet Russia, the OG communist state, which could technically be Gilgamesh in the sense of being the "original," Natalia on account of being Russian, and Kiritsugu who passed the dream down). He creates an infinite amount of swords with his Reality Marble which then he distributes for the "greater good." And of course: Shirou's inherently self destructive unless something happens to change him. Archer anybody? Edit: I'm done with economic analysis for today. Need to get some rest for the next exams.

Mortifer said:

Okay, okay, how do I sound smart when I know nothing about economics... Uh... Well, the thing about Shinji is that he is, as per canon, actually rather knowledgeable about the theory behind Magecraft, He's just utterly incapable of using it. And his main reason for hating Sakura isn't that she can Magecraft, but that Sakura pitied him for it. He hated that. So, uh... I give up, I don't know economics. Maybe he represents something to do with putting in a lot of effort but not having anything to start with and might be commentary on how being born without advantages is nigh impossible a goal to overcome? I don't know, I don't economics, I should really just shut up before I say something objectively wrong and stupid-sounding. ...Actually, that's never stopped me before. Shinji's backstory friendship with Shirou is symbolic of how those who are disadvantaged in the system may embrace anarchism because the current system isn't working for them, and the two of them stopped being friends when Shirou found out Shinji hit Sakura, which is symbolic of... ...Something... Abusing flaws in a system to progress when the system itself isn't working for them? Criminal activity when legit methods don't work for them I don't know, I'm blanking on how to pretend I know what I'm talking about without getting political and even I refuse to touch the cancer known as politics. Maybe the relationship between Shinji and Sakura can be vaguely considered to be charity? Shinji doesn't care about Sakura, just the benefits he can get from her, but as soon as Shinji starts seeking too much from Sakura she cuts him off. By killing him. Yeah, if I keep following this train of thought I'm going to end up concluding that Sakura's killing Shinji is evidence that capitalism will eventually lead to The Purge so I'm gonna wait until someone else uses something I tossed around here in a way that makes sense and then I'll claim credit.

frozenchicken said:

The Economic Simulationism of the Fate Franchise Part 1-Economic Mechanisms Many compliments have been offered to Nasu for the depth of his worldbuilding, but very few discuss the blatant economic commentary hidden within his works. In particular, the Masters and Servants of the 5th Holy Grail War are each distinct commentaries on various Economic mechanisms and social systems. Mechanisms Spoiler: Large Corporations

One of the simplest and most basic Economic theorems-known as 'Rational Choice Theory'-is examined by the character of Medea ('Caster'). Rational Choice Theory is the assumption that all individuals within in an Economy will act within their own best interests, acting in order to maximise their profits and minimise their losses. This behavioural pattern is shown by Medea's first master, Atram Galiast. Atram is a skilled mage, backed by the Magus Association and equipped with a workshop full of human sacrifices that could massively empower Caster's Magic. With his support, she could easily achieve success in the Holy Grail War. She instead elects to kill him, release the sacrifices, and wander around without hope of survival. In this, we see that Nasu has chosen to support the converse theoreom that is Behavioural Economics. This is the psychology-based study of human behaviours that examines why humans embrace irrational behaviours that makes modelling human action in an economic model so difficult. Medea rejects her first master due to hatred of being bound, and yet embraces Souichirou Kuzuki for his kindness, in spite of the the tactical disadvantage his lack of magic brings. This demonstrates both how standard logical predictions of her actions fail, however once we understand her psychology better (such as the fact she would rather embrace temporary happiness with Kuzuki rather than seek the ideal perfection of a Holy Grail Wish), we become better able to understand her decisions. Part 2- Love Triangles as a Symbol of Competing Economic Models Whilst Financial mechanisms can greatly influence the Global Economy, they are all ultimately subordinate to the various social and Economic systems championed by various nations. This is displayed most clearly in the form of the Masters of the Holy Grail War, particularly Shirou and his assorted romantic interests. Spoiler: Advertising and PR is an important part of the Capitalist System

Tohsaka Rin is perhaps the simplest of the Masters to classify, as her connection to the Capitalist Model has many facets. She is an ambitious young Mage, who desires to work hard in the Holy Grail War so as to achieve success. This expresses itself as desire for a Wish, but also a desire to obtain the Wealth her family once had. Indeed, Nasu makes her connection to finance even more obvious by literally using valuable jewels to store and empower her magic. Moreover, her Capitalistic Philosophy is displayed by the way she not only uses her own efforts, but suborns other Economic systems and models into alliance with herself, and as seen in the UBW Route she even purchases The Means of Production (Saber) for herself and rides her accumulating asset-derived wealth to a successful circumstance. It is perhaps easy to think of Rin as having an unkind philosophy, but it is eventually shown that her pragmatic outlook is simply a way of creating a stable platform of success that she can use to enact her desired philanthropies. Spoiler: Anarchism as an Adaptively Symbiotic Social Construct

The character of Shirou began as a blank protagonist in the F/SN visual novel, who progressed into an Amnesiac anime protagonist with many love interests, multiple established 'Routes' of development and the ability to copy the weapons of others. It is therefore no surprise to say he represents a sort of Symbiotic Anarchy, that is extremely flexible, born from rejection of the ideals of previous systems (as represented by The Revolution), and yet willing to ally with other Economic systems that he believes will align well with him. Though his Anarchistic Philosophy is lacking obvious markers of a particular Economic Policy, he does maintain a clear ideological philosophy that represents itself as a rejection of the unphilanthropic mechanisms of the systems of the past, which is also displayed by an initial fondness for the philanthropic basis of Socialism (Sakura). However, as events continue, he finds himself strongly connected to the will of the People (Saber) and eventually comes into a symbiotic alliance with Rin (Anarcho-Capitalism). One of Shirou's best traits is his adaptability, as he later gains the ability to copy the Economic Mechanisms of other systems. However, he must be careful with his development lest he end up as something he despises (as symbolised by Archer). Spoiler: The Pitfalls of an Idealised Philanthropic EconomyTo build on the earlier analysis, the kind-hearted Sakura initially represents Socialism, and the worms within her are a metaphor for how such centralised power attracts corrupt interests who seek to gain control of everything. The routes where Shinji takes over show one vision of how this can end, as a decadent and corrupt Communist governmental system that replaces her, and exploits the efforts of the past, with his extreme incompetence symbolising the degradation of the state until an eventual collapse. Dark Sakura is the other end of the situation, where the self-interested powers seize control of the state mechanisms, maintaining a coherent Facist government at the cost of perverting the kind-natured original designs of the economic system. Spoiler: The Idealised Economy as represented by a Magical Girl

Illya represents the dream of a post-scarcity economy. She is artificial, shares a parent with Anarchism, her unaging youth shows just how far we are away from achieving that dream, and (much like Sakura) her potential as a Grail Vessel shows the hopeful, dream-like nature of their systems and how they are vulnerable to degradation/corruption. Herakles (and his 12 Labours) symbolises the impossible difficulties involved in achieving such a dream, but also the impossible strength of such a system if it were actually achieved. (Continued in the next post, as SB has an Image Limit).

frozenchicken said:

Part 3- Economic Analysis and The People Economic Systems of the Past Spoiler: Rejection of the Old and the Revolutions that followWe can see that Natalia rejects the old systems and turns away from them, but it is Kiritsugu who is the most interesting representation of this aspect, as he is The Revolution. He enlists the help of the Masses (as represented by Saber), and then proceeds to destroy all the existing power structures. His path is bloody and destructive, he fails to achieve his goals and in the end his victory only ends in disillusionment as he destroys the unrealistic hopes presented by the Holy Grail. However, in the wake of his passing, two new philosophies, Shirou (Anarchism) and Illya (Post-Scarcity) come to be. Spoiler: The limitations of Theory when contrasted against Pragmatism

The final aspect of Fate to be analysed is The Holy Grail, which represents the Grand Theories of Economists, with each wish being an idealised end state of various economic models-and the cursed nature shows they all eventually fail to predict how human agency alters events, causing the models to go off-track. Shirou (Anarchism) does not have a specific Wish in mind, but may react in a manner determined by circumstance. Saber has multiple desires, that may include allying herself to other economic systems, seeking a perfect state for capitalism to operate by, or perhaps even rejecting the truth of trickle-down economics and attempting to remove the elitist mechanisms of the capitalist state-as represented by herself. All the manifestations of the Grail that interact with a member of the Matou family seem to end badly for them, and though an ideal state could be found, most have given up hope of that. Special Thanks to Raguna, Blue Helix, Last Sanction and also to Karugus for coming up with that 'Invisible Hand' line. Oh, and also Mortifier whose lengthy contribution ended up...well, it's quality, not quantity that matters, right?

#Fate/stay night #fate stay night #fate/zero #fate zero #economics #saber #social commentary #type-moon #spacebattles

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ukimmigrationmatters · 4 years

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UK Property prices rise after stamp duty cut, say Rightmove

The UK housing market is rebounding fast after a tax cut by the Chancellor Rishi Sunak, according to the property website Rightmove.

The number of sales agreed in England soared by 35% in the five days following Rishi Sunak's announcement on July 8, Rightmove said.

The property market was showing signs of recovery, from a low in April, with agreed sales in England up 15% in June.

Sunak raised the threshold for paying the stamp duty tax on property purchases up to £500,000 until March 31, 2020.

Rightmove added that asking prices rose by 3.7% between June and July, with Estate Agents reporting increased interest and a shortage of property for sale.

However, mortgage lenders Nationwide and Halifax reported falls in house prices and mortgage approvals which slumped to the lowest on record in May, according to Bank of England data.

Rightmove said buyer enquiries across the UK since the start of July leapt by 75%.

Last week, Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, said there were signs of activity returning "quite strongly" in the housing market.

During the lockdown visits to Rightmove's website fell by 40% and most agents were closed for business.

The news comes at a time when hardly a day goes by without another announcement of redundancies and losses by a major employer. As many as 9 million workers are still on furlough and the OBR said unemployment could reach 4 million if the economy does not bounce back quickly.

Mortgage shortage coming as lenders start to tighten their belts, due to Coronavirus

Mortgage loans are being squeezed as lenders reduce number of products

Banks have informed the Bank of England that the supply of credit will fall this summer due to coronavirus pressures.

Lenders are taking a cautious approach to offering home loans, which is understandable in the current market where borrowers face uncertainty over their jobs and income. Lenders fear the number of borrowers defaulting on repayments could rise again.

Borrowers are reporting long delays in getting mortgages agreed and processed as lenders deal with backlogs.

Is it still worth investing in buy-to-let property?

Investment in buy-to-let properties can still be profitable when done professionally. However, there are still many other opportunities to make money in property without the need for buy-to-let mortgages, large deposits or high rates of tax.

Other articles available at Money Tips Podcast - www.moneytipsdaily.com

1. Mortgages will become more difficult to obtain with less products

2. Mortgages are more expensive and less competitive fixed rate offers

3. Demand for new mortgages is down say lenders due to lockdown

4. Government planning CGT ‘tax grab’ on buy-to-let property investors

5. “No DSS” tenant blanket ban by buy-to-let landlords ruled ‘unlawful’ by Judge

6. UK economy grew by 1.8% in May, 24.5% smaller than it was in ONS reports

7. UK's mobile providers will be banned from buying new Huawei 5G equipment

8. Singapore’s economy plunged by 41% in the last quarter the largest fall ever

9. Nationwide now lending 90% for first time buyers reversing previous change

10. Stamp Duty slashed until 31 March 2021 by raising the threshold to 500,000

11. Chancellor Rishi Sunak keen to boost the property market and “build build build”

12. New planning rules will open up more opportunities to make money in property

13. Opportunity is everywhere for everyone, especially in property! But you have ACT!

14. Even the 'Secret law of attraction' requires you to get off your ass and TAKE ACTION!

15. Homeowners will get vouchers of up to £5,000 for energy-saving improvements

16. The poorest will receive up to £10,000 in £2 billion energy saving grant scheme

17. Will your job be one of millions phased out by automation, innovation and AI?

18. You don’t need your own money to create a second income in property

19. Time to your economy or Uconomy started whatever the economy is doing!

20. You can create a second income during the lockdown…and come out stronger

21. Learn how to make money from property without deposits, mortgages or cash

Millions of people face a bleak future post-Coronavirus lockdown, as businesses disappear and the job furlough scheme eventually comes to an end. However, life doesn’t have to end because of lockdown! You can join thousands of ordinary people who have increased their income and added streams of new income during this period.

Are you ready to adapt to the new economic model?

As lockdown restrictions around the world are being eased, the economic model has subtly changed forever. How will you adapt to this new way of working and running a business, what obstacles and opportunities lies ahead? Will you be a participant or spectator in this revolution?

By Charles Kelly, Property Investor, Author of Yes, Money Can Buy You Happiness and creator of Money Tips Podcast.

There are more examples and practical steps to getting rich and being happy in my book, Yes, money can buy happiness, I cover the 3 R’s of Money Management, the Money B.E.L.I.E.F System and much more. Check it out on Amazon http://bit.ly/2MoneyBook.

If you’d like further information on how to survive the crisis and even quit the rat race, email me at [email protected] or send me a message through Facebook or my Money Tips Daily community. See more articles at www.moneytipsdaily.com

#property #house prices #free course #property news

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dangkynhanhieusanphamcom · 5 years

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Peloton CEO Uses IPO Day To Prove That He’s Only Kind Of Been Paying Attention

Hey, when was the last time that admitting to “prioritizing growth over profitability” bitten a tech IPO in the ass?

Peloton is going public, you guys! What could go wrong?!

The company’s bikes and treadmills — with accompanying video screens to stream live and provide on-demand recorded classes — has earned loyalty among users who prefer to exercise at home instead of going to a studio.

The company says it has 1.4 million members — users with a Peloton account.

Growing membership helped sales grow to $915 million for the fiscal year ended June 30, up 110% from in fiscal 2018. However, net losses in fiscal 2019 widened five-times to $245.7 million.

Thanks for watching!Visit Website

Well, this feels familiar. but just how greedy is Peloton as it hemorrhages money while also asking public market investors to give it their money?

Peloton Interactive co-founder and CEO John Foley told CNBC he hopes to see “some momentum” in the company’s stock in its market debut on Thursday.

“We think we generally left something on the table in terms of pricing” the company’s initial public offering, Foley said, just hours before shares were set to begin trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol PTON.

And by “leaving something on the table,” Foley means pricing in at the top of its range [$29 a share]. Listen, we get that Peloton has clearly taken pains to scale back on overinflating IPO expectations in light of the Lyft, Uber, WeWork trend, but it’s also a luxury brand that doesn’t turn a profit being valued at $8.1 billion. We stand by our opinion that this company is a standalone argument to raise interest rates.

But let’s be fair: Is there anything Foley can say to make us believe that he’s got a hotter take than what’s come before?…

Thanks for watching!Visit Website

The company is building two large production studios in New York and London and is expanding elsewhere in Europe.

Foley sees the costs to build the business as “investments,” stressing that “we’re in investment mode” and “prioritizing growth over profitability.

We’ll take that as a “No.”

And we won’t even get into the fact that Foley is also using a dual class structure, which…have we learned NOTHING?!

“We couldn’t do [a] 10-to-1 voting class because the leadership wouldn’t have any control,” Foley added. “We feel like we have the right, experienced leadership team in place. The board feels good about us. We feel great about the opportunity.”

Oh, this is nice. Adam Neumann really needed a laugh.

But don’t worry Peloton bulls, there is a plan here:

“We hope it prices up,” Foley said on “Squawk Box” on Thursday morning, referring to the stock price.

Makes sense to us!

‘We weren’t greedy’ — Peloton CEO says IPO ‘left something on the table on pricing’ [CNBC]

The post Peloton CEO Uses IPO Day To Prove That He’s Only Kind Of Been Paying Attention appeared first on NEWS - EVENTS - LEGAL.

source https://dangkynhanhieusanpham.com/peloton-ceo-uses-ipo-day-to-prove-that-hes-only-kind-of-been-paying-attention/

#dangkynhanhieusanpham

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magazoom22 · 5 years

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Trump rants while 'all alone' in White House on Christmas Eve

New Post has been published on https://www.kinmass.com/blog/trump-rants-while-all-alone-in-white-house-on-christmas-eve/

Trump rants while 'all alone' in White House on Christmas Eve

It’s Christmas in America: The President is home alone in the White House, raving at his enemies inside and outside; an organization reeling further into emergency; securities exchanges are in free fall and the administration is deadened by a halfway shut down.

Donald Trump is spending the merry season as he did a great part of the year, starting bedlam and bringing worries up in the capital and around the globe about his imprudent conduct and overflowing with dissatisfaction as he freight ships straight up as far as possible on his capacity.

One explanation behind his wrath: A most loved indicator of his own prosperity has been stripped away by long periods of savage misfortunes on the business sectors. In an abbreviated Christmas Eve session, the Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled in excess of 600 points after a strange endeavor by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Sunday to quiet financial specialists by counseling with the CEOs of best banks exploded backward. Misfortunes were exacerbated by another of Trump’s Twitter assaults on the Federal Reserve – following disclosures that he has inquired as to whether he can lawfully fire the autonomous national bank’s administrator, Jerome Powell.

The Dow fell 2.91% and the S&P 500 plunged 2.71% in the greatest Christmas Eve decreases in the two files’ history. The droop came after the stocks a week ago had their most noticeably bad week since the Great Recession 10 years back, and the last time the market fell so far in December was in 1931, amid the Great Depression.

Trump swings to Twitter while “isolated” in the White House

While numerous Americans assembled with their families and with his excursion to the “Winter White House” at Mar-a-Lago frosted by the shutdown, the President went through the day at the White House impacting faultfinders – including Democrats who have denied his requests for $5 billion in financing for his outskirt divider in a standoff that covered the administration at midnight on Friday.

“I am in solitude (poor me) in the White House trusting that the Democrats will return and make an arrangement on urgently required Border Security,” Trump wrote in what may have been an offhanded tone in his tenth tweet of the day.

Trump was expected to be rejoined for Christmas Day by first woman Melania Trump, who had just deserted to Florida before the shutdown grabbed hold.

The President likewise lashed out Brett McGurk, his extraordinary emissary for killing ISIS, who pursued Defense Secretary James Mattis by leaving in the challenge at Trump’s hastily reported Syria withdrawal. He hit out at “Little Bob Corker,” the active Tennessee representative who has censured him over Syria and the shutdown. He likewise demanded he liked partners – yet said many exploited the US “both in ‘Military Protection and Trade…’ ”

A senior organization official told CNN’s Jim Sciutto that national security basic leadership has “essentially quit working” and choices are “made spontaneously on telephone calls.” The authority included the Syria withdrawal was “a total inversion” and it was done “without thought, no thought of dangers.”

American partners and accomplices are “stunned and completely stupefied” and the Syrian Democratic Forces “don’t trust this is occurring,” the authority said.

Everything indicated a sentiment of a White House that is rushing wild and a President who is winding up progressively passionate and vexed when he faces mounting lawful and political weight from uncommon direction Robert Mueller. He is likewise days from another time of rebuffing Democratic oversight when the new Congress meets toward the beginning of January.

The loss of Mattis – who was seen far and wide as a mind Trump’s unpredictable national security basic leadership – has raised tension about his administration to beforehand unmatched dimensions.

Obviously, many Trump supporters voted in favor of interruption and to shake the Washington foundation when they sent him to the White House so are probably going to be less worried than Washington insiders about the febrile Christmas state of mind.

Be that as it may, the President’s bad-tempered temper is additionally taking away from his best accomplishments toward the year’s end, including low joblessness and a solid economy regardless of market unrest. The entry of a momentous criminal equity bill has additionally been eclipsed and there is little discussion about his most persisting inheritance win – the new greater part he and the Senate GOP built on the Supreme Court.

The President appeared to have his steadfast base at the top of the priority list by building a shutdown dramatization that seems to have no simple ways out, yet enables him to make a political stand gave a shout out to by the traditionalist media.

“AMERICA IS RESPECTED AGAIN!” he tweeted at one point on Monday, likely in view of those voters.

“Dig in like an ass in a hailstorm”

In any case, the excited Christmas Eve display was staggering even by the President’s principles, and incited the two best Democratic pioneers, the imaginable House speaker-in-holding up Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, to issue a joint proclamation.

“It’s Christmas Eve and President Trump is diving the nation into turmoil. The share trading system is failing and the president is pursuing an individual war on the Federal Reserve – after he simply let go the Secretary of Defense,” the announcement said.

As the shutdown ambled through its third day, forever, Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas touched base to hammer in the chamber for a genius forma session that just exemplified the absence of activity between the White House and Democrats towards a goal. He depended on citing the hearty knowledge of a previous Senate lion’s share head and President to catch the feeling of purposelessness and political separation.

“LBJ said here and there you simply need to dig in like an ass in a hailstorm and simply take it. That is about where we are,” he said.

In any case, in one sign that the bubbly soul can triumph over Washington’s hoax, the National Parks Service declared the reviving of the National Christmas Tree, because of help from the National Park Foundation – a gathering of magnanimous associations and givers.

The prevalent Yuletide place of interest had been shut after a man attempted to climb the tree and harmed it. The administration shut down at that point kept the National Park Service from reviving it.

The shutdown is the third this year and has sent countless government workers home for Christmas uncertain about their up and coming paychecks.

In the meantime, the share trading system is tilting south with a significant part of the accused being put for the perplexity originating from Washington.

Munchin has needed to console financial specialists Trump won’t fire Powell and left real bank CEOs “completely bewildered” with an end of the week call getting some information about the condition of their organizations. More analysis from Trump toward the Fed sent markets reeling Monday, as the Dow shut down 653 points previously quiet down shop ahead of schedule for Christmas Eve.

Mnuchin’s mediation was only the most recent improvement that started vulnerability in the days running up to the occasion.

An unexpected declaration that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg experienced medical procedure for malignant developments on her lung added to the excited state of mind in Washington, as the Supreme Court managed a hit to Trump by thumping back his new limitations on haven searchers who cross the southern outskirt.

What’s more, more secret is blending in the most elevated court in the land after Chief Justice John Roberts incidentally stopped a request holding an anonymous, outside government possessed organization in scorn over a court case identified with unique direction Robert Mueller’s examination.

Everything signifies a Christmas that is feeling less and less joyful and splendid on Pennsylvania Avenue and Wall Street.

#Donald trump #trump #News #US news

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wingedtragedyconnoisseur-blog · 6 years

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New Post has been published on http://getblackhatdownload.com/get-discover-how-this-brand-new-done-for-you-plr-system-will-help-you-dominateand-profit-in-the-clickbank-womens-weight-loss-niche-download/

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Articles:

5 Effective Weight Loss Tips for Women Struggling with Their Weight – (695 Words) 7 Appetite Reduction Techniques for Women – 9746 words) Am I Destined To Be Fat? – (568 words) Can I Lose Weight Without Giving Up Junk Food? – (712 words) Can A Woman Be Fat and Still Be Beautiful? – (724 words?) Coping With the Stress of Trying to Lose Weight – (769 words) If 10 Minutes Is All You Have to Exercise… – (528 words) I’m Too Shy to Workout at a Gym! – (584 words) Do I Detox Before Starting a Weight Loss Program – (516 Words) Why Women Should Vary Their Carb Intake for Maximum Fat Loss – (690 words)

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3 Super Cool Bonuses!

Running for Weight Loss (Created by me)

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Personal Use Rights – You May NOT Sell or giveaway.

Component 1: Opt In Page & Thank You Page Component 3: 20 Autoresponder Emails Component 7: 10 Weight Loss Articles Component 8: 3 ClickBank Reviews Component 10: Keyword Research Report Component 11: Cool Tweets Component 12: Facebook posts

Personal Use Rights with PDF Giveaway

Component 2: Promo Report

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Resell Rights & Master Resell Rights

Component 4: High-Quality Ebook Component 5: HTML Sales Letter & Thank You Page Component 6: Awesome Graphics Component 9: Royalty Free Images Component 13: Social Media Images Pack Component 14: License Pack

[YES] Can resell this product. (Suggested resell price – $7 and above) [YES] Can add this product as a bonus to other products. [YES] Can edit the sales letter. [YES] Can giveaway the product as a bonus when someone buys through your affiliate link. [YES] Can add this product to a PAID membership site. [YES] Can be given to list subscribers. [YES] Can be used for personal use. [NO] You may NOT edit the contents of the eBook. [NO] You may NOT giveaway the main eBook for free. [NO] You may NOT claim copyright to the content

2 rules apply across the board for all components.

[No] You cannot give away or sell the package with the source files as your own PLR (e.g DOC & PSD files… because that’s my job.) [No] You may not use my name with the PLR.

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0 notes

coin-river-blog · 6 years

Link

Reviews

Mass, mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies might take a route few original cadres of developers and enthusiasts imagined — major payment processing, plastic debit cards. They’re incredibly handy for those wishing to use crypto while merchant adoption works itself out. Here are five such cards to consider: Wirex, Bitpay, Cryptopay, Xapo, and Shift.

Also read: World Cup Goes Crypto!

5 Crypto Debit Cards Worth Checking Out

Significant strains of the broader crypto community (strident veterans of an ideological bent) chafe at cryptocurrency debit cards. They do in large part because such cards are in bed with sworn enemies, legacy banking: Visa, Mastercard. Indeed, it is the height of irony the very institutions crypto was designed to thwart are arguably crypto’s most popular onboarding forms.

Wirex: A well known company, Wirex has a solid customer base. Along with virtual products, it offers a pin card. It also is notorious for fees, and they add up. And while no company is ever guaranteed to stay solvent, something to consider is shelf life (they tend to come and go). Wirex seems well poised for the longer term: Spring of last year it received confidence funding in the low millions from SBI Group, a prominent Japanese financial player. It has nearly one million customers spread out through most countries, with about a billion dollars in transaction volume last year. This year they’ve added litecoin, and they basically pioneered contactless debit cards in the space. The regular fees are pretty similar to other cards, hovering around 3% for international transactions, $2.50 for withdrawals, $17 to purchase a physical card.

For most everyone else, crypto’s slow merchant adoption is a giant pain in the ass. No matter how much one loves crypto and its potential, people need food, clothing, tchotkes. And, no, the fact your brother has a hat store, or the fact that random pizza parlor down the street accepts crypto, are not immediate solutions. A person can only have so many hats and eat so much of your brother’s greasy pizza.

Bitpay: Another well regarded provider is Bitpay. Its card is accepted the globe over, though it’s only available to US residents. No chip and pin, so verification is needed. Simple KYC, AML identification is mando, so all one needs is a government issued ID, street address, and Social Security number. The card is available in all US states. It’s loaded through a separate wallet client, prepaid. They use Visa, and for around 10 bucks USD a physical card will be sent along. Outside the US, a 3% fee is placed on all currency conversions (along with $3 for any outside the US withdrawals). Withdrawals in the US vary from bank to bank in terms of fees. Using it is a snap, very convenient. Withdrawal limits are generous.

Crypto debit cards, then, are a splitting the baby, kissing your sister kind of way to advance money’s future while still being able to enjoy life’s material pleasures. Done right, crypto debit schemes go anywhere major payment providers, such as Visa and Mastercard, are accepted. At the very least, they’re a nice hedge.

Cryptopay: Like Wirex, they offer virtual and physical cards. It is available around the globe. It can also be a little fee laden with load fees and maintenance fees, etc. It’s, of course, a Bitcoin debit card. Its selling feature is lack of personal verification. They might require more if limits are increased, however, above a couple thousand dollars. The card is right around $15, withdrawals are $2.5, and they charge 3% on international transactions.

Scouring the known crypto debit world, those presented are by no means exhaustive. Such cards are designed to help anyone inclined to get started. There are many others, as the market sees them popping up all the time. If these don’t live up to your standards, there are, again, plenty others.

Xapo: Xapo is most everywhere, and has a solid reputation among enthusiasts. It too was an earlier mover in the space. No chip and pin standard, though it’s offered. The cost of the card is roughly $20, and it carries an annual fee. Like most other cards, so long as users stay under about $2,500 in withdrawal limits, fees are relatively tame.

Shift: Easily connects to your Coinbase account, relatively low fees. Available only in 45 states around the US, Coinbase is limited to certain countries as well. Shift position themselves as “the first US Bitcoin debit card”. The card costs a reasonable $10 to produce and has no ongoing fees. There is of course the standard 3% international transaction fee and $2.5 flat ATM withdrawal fee.

Disclaimer: Bitcoin.com does not endorse nor support these products/services. Readers should do their own due diligence before taking any actions related to the mentioned company or any of its affiliates or services. Bitcoin.com is not responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods or services mentioned in this article.

What bitcoin debit card do you use? Let us know in the comments section below.

Images via Pixabay.

Be sure to check out the podcast, Blockchain 2025; latest episode here. Want to create your own secure cold storage paper wallet? Check our tools section.

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

Link

Is nuclear power going to help the United States decarbonize its energy supply and fight climate change?

Probably not.

That is the conclusion of a remarkable new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in early July — remarkable because it is not written by opponents of nuclear power, as one might expect given the conclusion. The authors are in fact extremely supportive of nuclear and view its loss as a matter of “profound concern”:

Achieving deep decarbonization of the energy system will require a portfolio of every available technology and strategy we can muster. It should be a source of profound concern for all who care about climate change that, for entirely predictable and resolvable reasons, the United States appears set to virtually lose nuclear power, and thus a wedge of reliable and low-carbon energy, over the next few decades.

Still, despite their evident belief in the need for nuclear power, the researchers are unable to construct a plausible scenario in which it thrives. And it’s not for lack of looking — the paper is a methodical walk through the possibilities for both existing and new nuclear technology. The researchers really want it to work. They just can’t see it happening.

It’s a relatively short paper; let’s quickly hit the important takeaways.

Existing nuclear plants in the US are having a rough time, getting undercut on energy markets by cheaper natural gas and renewables. A wave of retirements is underway that is probably going to take around 10 GW of nuclear capacity offline.

A handful of states have taken measures to keep nuclear plants open (see this post), but doing so requires “expensive refurbishment and careful regulatory consideration,” the authors write, and will only “slow, not reverse, the losses.”

Beaver Valley Power Station, in Pennsylvania. Wikipedia

So then what about new plants?

Existing nuclear plants are light-water reactors (LWRs), which were always intended to be the first generation of nuclear plants. But subsequent generations have not materialized, and we’re still mostly dealing with LWRs.

Attempts to build new LWRs in the US have been a fiasco, ending up canceled (as in the beleaguered Summer plant in South Carolina, which was 40 percent complete) or endlessly delayed and overbudget (as in the new Vogtle reactors in Georgia).

The researchers are blunt about the prospects for new plants based on existing technology:

There is no reason to believe that any utility in the United States will build a new large reactor in the foreseeable future. These reactors have proven unaffordable and economically uncompetitive. In the few markets with the will to build them, they have proven to be unconstructible. The combination of political instruments and market developments that would render them attractive, such as investment and production credits, robust carbon pricing, and high natural gas costs, is unlikely to materialize soon.

And it’s worth noting that those political instruments and market developments, if they did manifest, would also benefit nuclear’s low-carbon competitors, which are already kicking its ass.

What about advanced, non-LWR designs?

The agency responsible for shepherding advanced nuclear designs to commercial viability is the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Nuclear Energy (NE).

The researchers did a close analysis of NE’s efforts, “using budget data acquired through the Freedom of Information Act and semistructured interviews with 30 senior nuclear energy experts.”

What they found is that NE has spent about $2 billion pursuing advanced designs since the late 1990s, with “very little to show for it.” Funding is inadequate, half of it goes to maintain existing testing infrastructure, it varies from year to year, and it’s spread shallowly across several technologies and research labs.

“In interviews with leaders across the enterprise,” they write, “those associated with the DOE and the national laboratories expressed either alarm or despair at the trajectory of advanced fission innovation in the United States.”

Theoretically, this decade-plus record of dysfunction could be turned around with “more competent stewardship of nuclear innovation, substantially greater appropriations, and a change in energy markets,” but all those, they note, are “very heavy lifts.”

DOE

The one bright spot in the advanced-nuclear area is TerraPower (Bill Gates’s nuclear startup), which has had some limited success getting licenses and testing from the feds, but in general “has found it remarkably challenging to build or secure access to the range of equipment, materials, and technology required to successfully commercialize its innovative design” — so challenging, in fact, that it’s now partnering with China.

The authors conclude that advanced fission designs have no hope at all of commercializing in the US by mid-century, which is when the US economy needs to be decarbonized.

The other great hope of the industry is factory-built small modular reactors (SMRs), which are — or will be, it is hoped — faster and cheaper to build than giant plants because they are smaller and built from standardized parts. They can be deployed incrementally, matched to energy demand in particular times and places, and are meltdown-proof without human intervention.

Several companies, most notably NuScale (which has already submitted its design to the feds), are trying to develop light-water SMRs. NuScale wants to build a test reactor on the grounds of the Idaho National Laboratories and more than a dozen companies have inquired about doing the same.

So, with already-proven technology and lower construction costs, are SMRs the key to saving nuclear in the US?

Using “a combination of engineering economic analysis and the use of structured procedures to elicit expert judgments,” the researchers took a close look at SMRs. Indeed, they “expended much effort in developing plausible scenarios of how an SMR domestic market might develop.”

The results? Grim. Under every plausible scenario, power from SMRs is (and remains, even with subsequent generations of the tech) substantially more expensive than power from competitors. So they probably can’t compete directly in power markets.

An SMRsplainer from DOE. DOE

The researchers also examine four indirect ways that SMRs could build a market:

Industrial process heat: One alternative is to use SMRs to generate heat rather than power, for use in industrial applications that require high temperatures. The researchers find a substantial market exists for such heat, but when the costs of SMRs are compared to the cost of alternative heat sources (like natural gas), “the number of potential customers falls precipitously.”

Also, private companies (unlike utilities) can’t pass costs on to customers, so they’re less likely to take a chance constructing unfamiliar tech that still faces unresolved siting and regulatory issues. “When it comes time to sign contracts and pour concrete,” they conclude, “it is highly unlikely that any industrial customer would opt for a light water SMR.”

Power + desalination: Another frequently discussed alternative is to use SMRs as a kind of hybrid. The thing about nuclear plants is that they need to run more-or-less constantly; it’s expensive and inefficient to turn them on and off. But on-and-off power is what’s needed to flexibly complement variable renewable energy.

So the idea is to run SMRs constantly; when power is needed, they would provide power, and when it’s not, they would desalinate water. But after a close examination of the water situation in the US, the researchers found that there are only a few niche markets where desalination might be needed in the next few decades. And where they exist, desalinating with natural gas is much, much cheaper. This is likely another dead end, at least in the relevant time frame.

Military bases: Another thought is that SMRs might be used to power military bases — that the US military might serve as a kind first customer, helping SMRs scale up. The authors deem this “both unwise and unlikely to succeed.”

It is unlikely to succeed because the unique design requirements for the military are likely to yield an SMR too expensive for commercial viability. It is unwise because using the military as a tool to revive a particular industry is a Pandora’s box of political and ethical issues.

Plus, as they note, defaulting to the military to save nuclear is tantamount to admitting commercial defeat — not something likely to inspire market confidence.

SMRs for export: The final idea tossed around to jumpstart SMRs is building them for export. The idea is that other countries will have political and energy systems more amenable to nuclear. And the authors’ analysis supports the notion that there’s a global market for “many hundreds of light water SMRs.”

But there are substantial barriers. For one thing, many of the potential customers face “economic, political, and institutional realities” that render them unprepared to handle nuclear power at scale, and likely unwilling to accept close oversight by the US.

Aside from that, most decarbonization in the world will need to come from a select few big countries, and most of those countries are already nuclear-capable and unlikely to import hundreds of power plants from a geopolitical rival. “We remain skeptical that a US industry of factory-manufactured SMRs could be built primarily on the basis of exports,” they conclude.

In short, there don’t seem to be any viable markets to scale SMRs up. Consequently, “several hundred billion dollars of direct and indirect subsidies would be needed to support their development and deployment over the next several decades.”

On top of that, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission would need to radically update and revise its regulatory review process. On top of that, the US would need to commit to total decarbonization, clearly and unequivocally enough to give markets confidence that carbon prices will reach and exceed $100/ton. And this would all have to happen soon, in the next few years.

“All these developments are possible,” they note, “but we believe they are most unlikely.”

[embedded content]

So let’s review. Current, giant LMR reactors aren’t going to get built in the US — they have proven economic and political suicide. Even keeping current plants open will require extraordinary interventions. Advanced fission is unlikely to commercialize in the next few decades. And SMRs currently face grim market prospects. They are unlikely to mature and scale up without hundreds of billions in subsidies, substantial reform at NE and NRC, and a high, secure national carbon price.

It’s not impossible to imagine a high carbon price in coming decades, or natural gas prices rising, and SMRs finding success in niche markets. And it’s certainly possible to imagine failing to fully decarbonize by mid-century and needing nuclear to finish the job. The researchers are blunt about what would be needed for nuclear to be ready by then.

To assure that we have safe and affordable advanced reactor designs that can be deployed at scale by midcentury, the United States will need to dramatically increase and refocus the budget of the DOE’s NE toward advanced reactor development. Perceptive and ruthlessly pragmatic program officers will need to be recruited: ones with a sense of the mission’s urgency. The government would have to sustain that higher level of support in the face of constant short-term political pressures and, undoubtedly, organized opposition from advocates of other generating sources. Part of that increased budget would have to be dedicated to building new infrastructure, such as fast-flux test facilities and other system test beds. Even with a higher budget, surge funding may be needed in some years to support demonstration reactor development and program leadership would eventually have to focus on moving two or three systematically chosen designs to the point of commercialization.

“Perhaps these things can happen; the United States is no stranger to ambitious undertakings,” they conclude, “but it will take both vision and a level of commitment that are sorely lacking today.”

Nuclear proponents might reasonably respond that, yes, nuclear cannot contribute to decarbonization without substantial policy help. But decarbonization by mid-century will be impossible without substantial policy, period. No combination of technologies can scale up fast enough without help.

But renewable energy technologies seem to be on a trajectory toward subsidy independence (though plenty of policy and regulatory barriers to advanced energy tech remain). They are falling in cost at ridiculous rates — not just wind and solar, but storage, EVs, and other grid-edge technologies as well. Policy can accelerate their progress, or impede it, but at this point it cannot stop them. They have a momentum of their own, purely on economics.

Nuclear is in a different situation. Its current trajectory is decline; it needs lots and lots of new policy and public money to reverse that trajectory. That is a much more difficult political lift, and like the authors of the PNAS paper, I don’t have much faith that it will get done. For better or worse, renewable energy is the name of the game for the next few decades.

Original Source -> The US is rapidly losing nuclear power. That’s profoundly concerning for climate change.

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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caveartfair · 7 years

Text

Armory Show Director Out after Sexual Harassment Allegations—and the 9 Other Biggest News Stories This Week

01 Benjamin Genocchio was replaced Wednesday as the executive director of The Armory Show after a report was published in the New York Times, in which multiple women accused him of sexual harassment.

(Artsy & the New York Times)

Genocchio will be replaced by Nicole Berry, who has been the New York art fair’s deputy director since she joined last year from EXPO Chicago. A spokesperson for The Armory Show did not say whether Genocchio’s departure was permanent. “The Armory Show seeks to maintain a respectful workplace and prohibits harassment or discrimination of any kind,” wrote the spokesperson in an emailed statement from Thursday. The Times story detailed a range of allegations against Genocchio, ranging from inappropriate comments to running “his hand up [a colleague’s] sequin pants” and asking her, “Is this the only time I get to touch your ass without getting yelled at?” This incident was recalled by Artnet’s then-marketing coordinator, Colleen Calvo, who said it happened as she was checking guests into the company’s holiday party in 2014. Genocchio served as editor-in-chief of the editorial wing of the online art website until joining The Armory Show in 2016. The Times did not interview Genocchio, but he issued this statement to reporter Robin Pogrebin: “Launching start-up news websites definitely led to conflicts with a few employees, but I never intentionally acted in an inappropriate manner nor spoke to or touched a colleague in a sexually inappropriate way. To the extent my behavior was perceived as disrespectful, I deeply and sincerely apologize and will ensure it does not happen again.” The allegations against Genocchio follow sexual harassment allegations against Knight Landesman, who stepped down as a co-publisher of Artforum at the end of October.

02 A judge’s ruling Tuesday cleared the way for the planned auction of 40 artworks from the Berkshire Museum’s collection but the Massachusetts Attorney General asked an appellate court to halt the sale.

(via the Berkshire Eagle)

The struggling museum hopes that the sale, due to start on Monday at Sotheby’s in New York, will bring in as much as $60 million to shore up its endowment and help it pivot towards science and nature programming. Deaccessioning is typically frowned upon unless the proceeds are used to buy more art. This move by the museum has prompted widespread criticism, as well as a legal suit by a number of plaintiffs, including the three sons of the painter Norman Rockwell—a local icon who had donated paintings that will now appear at auction—and the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office (AGO), which joined as a plaintiff in an emergency motion on November 1st. Judge John Agostini ruled that none of the original plaintiffs had standing, and “scolded the [AGO] office for failing, as he saw it, to provide ‘any other theory by which the proposed auction would violate the law of public charities,’” the Berkshire Eagle reported. In his 25-page decision, Agostini called deaccessioning “a necessary evil in the museum industry due in large part to loss of funding and economic upheaval.” But the AGO filed an 11th-hour motion with the Massachusetts Appeals Court on Friday, asking it to prevent the sale. A ruling is expected by Monday.

03 Recently resigned Stedelijk Museum director Beatrix Ruf told the New York Times that the controversy over her paid side-employment was a “misunderstanding.”

(via the New York Times)

Ruf resigned in mid-October amidst questions over whether her paid, private art advisory services were in conflict with her role as steward of a public institution. In her first interview since then, Ruf told the Times over email that her outside activities had been approved by the Stedelijk’s board. She also said the $500,000 in profit she received in 2015 represented part of a farewell bonus from her former client, Swiss collector Michael Ringier, as a “thank you” for 20 years of work, and did not represent any ongoing service provision. In October, the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad published an investigation into her earnings at Currentmatters, her art advisory firm, which far exceeded her $130,000 annual salary at the Stedelijk Museum. “Choices that museum directors make about exhibitions affect the market value of works of art, and if the director is simultaneously advising private clients, the ethical lines can become blurred,” the Times wrote. But if she fully disclosed her activities to the board and they were approved, the blame may lie with the board, said Jo Houben, director of an art-related Dutch nonprofit, when interviewed by the Times. The museum’s supervisory board, which was responsible for overseeing Ruf, has commissioned a pair of independent investigations into the affair. The findings of both reports will be made available to the public.

04 After a five-year delay, the Louvre Abu Dhabi will finally open its doors to the public on Saturday.

(Artsy)

The day will be a milestone for a French-Emirati partnership that hasn’t always been popular in France—and has been marred by criticism of its workers’ conditions. At the press conference earlier this week, Mohamed Khalifa Al Mubarak, chairman of Abu Dhabi’s Tourism & Culture Authority and of the Tourism Development and Investment Company (TDIC), was keen to put all this behind. He celebrated an institution that will be, he said, a “hub of tolerance,” and congratulated “genius” French architect Jean Nouvel. As part of the deal, the Louvre committed to a 30-year cooperation with Abu Dhabi, which included the loan of artworks for 10 years, four exhibitions per year for 15 years, and the use of the Louvre name. In exchange, the Emirati agreed to pay the Louvre €974 million ($1.12 billion) over three decades, providing funds that have been used, in part, to fund the Paris museum. The Louvre Abu Dhabi is surely hoping some of its contentious background will be eclipsed by its stunning inaugural display, which gathers around 300 loans from 13 French institutions, as well as 300 pieces from the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s fledgling collection.

05 The four artists shortlisted for the prestigious Berlin Nationalgalerie prize called on organizers to pay the award’s finalists.

(via The Art Newspaper & artnet News)

Finalists Jumana Manna, Iman Issa, and Sol Calero, along with the prize winner Agnieszka Polska, issued a joint statement on Friday, arguing that artists who are shortlisted for the prize should be compensated for the work the award requires—including mounting an exhibition and participating in panel discussions, among other commitments. They asserted that the prestige and solo museum exhibition that comes with winning the Berlin Nationalgalerie prize—given every two years to an artist under 40 residing and practicing in Germany—doesn’t necessarily replace monetary compensation. “The logic of artists working for exposure feeds directly into the normalization of the unregulated pay structures ubiquitous in the art field,” the artists wrote. They also voiced concern that an emphasis on their birthplace and gender (all four are women; none were born in Germany) in press materials has overshadowed their art. “It is clear to us that in a more egalitarian world, the fact of our gender and national origin would barely be noticed,” the group wrote. In response, the Nationalgalerie told artnet News via email that it “welcomes the statement of the four nominees” and will evaluate their points seriously.

06 A Brooklyn jury found in favor of the 5 Pointz graffiti artists on Tuesday, following a closely watched trial that hinged on a rarely tested provision of federal law.

(Artsy)

The verdict against defendant Gerald “Jerry” Wolkoff, the developer who destroyed graffiti mecca 5 Pointz, which housed the artists’ work, will not be the final word in the case. Due to an agreement reached between the parties prior to the start of jury deliberations, the judge presiding over the case will ultimately decide its outcome. The lawsuit dates back to November 2013, when Wolkoff whitewashed 5 Pointz overnight, before any of the artists were able to remove or preserve their work. A group of artists sued, alleging Wolkoff committed violations of the 1990 Visual Artist’s Rights Act (VARA). The act grants visual artists limited rights over work they created but do not own, and can entitle them to monetary damages if their works of a “recognized stature” are destroyed, or if mutilation to the work is prejudicial to the artist’s reputation. There remains little case law on the VARA, especially in the context of graffiti art. The judge’s final ruling in the 5 Pointz case will potentially bring much-needed clarity around the applicability of the statute, paving the way for more aggrieved artists to seek justice if their works are damaged.

07 A New York appeals court is allowing a claim over a $25 million Modigliani painting to proceed against the Nahmad family.

(via The Art Newspaper)

The court ruling from November 2nd allows the grandson of Parisian art dealer Oscar Stettiner to continue his claim against the powerful Nahmad family of art dealers. In 2011, the plaintiff, Philippe Maestracci, sued seeking the return of the Amedeo Modigliani painting Seated Man with a Cane (1918), which was allegedly looted from Stettiner by Nazis. This week’s appellate ruling gave Maestracci legal standing in the case. In rejecting the Nahmads’ argument that Maestracci was bound by France’s or Switzerland’s statutes of limitations, the court cited the recently enacted Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act. The act gives claimants six years from the date that they discover the location of a Nazi-looted work to begin its recovery. The decision potentially clears the way for other cases that may have arguably been subject to statutes of limitations.

08 Scholars and art historians in the U.K. have called for an end to the fees museums charge for reproducing images.

(via The Times of London)

Dozens of art historians told The Times that the “unjustified” rule, which requires scholars to pay to reprint historic artworks, represents a “tax on scholarship.” Historians assert that they pay thousands in fees to reproduce works—many of which are legally out of copyright—for academic texts that carry minimal commercial viability. “Copyright generally expires 70 years after an artist’s death, but galleries say that digitally scanning an artwork creates a new copyright,” reported The Times. British institutions like the Tate and the British Museum charge the fees, arguing that the costs of creating and reproducing images are high, while low-resolution images for non-commercial use come with little to no fees. Although the charge can vary, some scholars have said that certain museums are inflexible when it comes to pricing. A letter penned by 28 signatories stated, “We urge the UK’s national museums to follow the example of a growing number of international museums and provide open access to images of publicly owned, out-of-copyright paintings, prints and drawings so that they are free for the public to reproduce.”

09 London’s Lord Mayor Andrew Parmley has returned a Dutch Old Master painting looted by the Nazis from the Netherlands.

(via The Art Newspaper)

Insured for £1.5 million, Jacob Ochtervelt’s painting The Oyster Meal (c. 1664–65) adorned the walls of the Lord Mayor’s official residence for nearly three decades before being returned on Monday to Charlotte Bischoff van Heemskerck, the 96-year-old daughter of the work’s original owner, J.H. Smidt van Gelder. Following the announcement, Lord Mayor Andrew Parmley called the occurence “a happy, albeit long overdue resolution for her and her family.” Following the British retreat after the Battle of Arnhem (a major battle during World War II in the eastern region of the Netherlands), the Nazis took fourteen works from a bank vault where Smidt van Gelder, the director of the region’s children’s hospital, had stored them. The painting by Ochtervelt was one of six works from the vault that the Smidt van Gelder family could not locate following the war. Europe’s Commission for Looted Art made a claim on behalf of the heir of the original owner earlier this year. Recalling the battle and the painting, Bischoff van Heemskerck said that the work “is very meaningful to my family, and we are delighted to bring it home again to honour my father’s legacy.”

10 A conservator discovered a grasshopper encased in the thick paint layers of a Vincent van Gogh landscape.

(via The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art)

Conservator Mary Schafer found the small insect after magnifying the bottom of van Gogh’s 1889 landscape Olive Trees while researching the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’s collection of French paintings. While it is not totally out of the norm to find plant or insect matter in works made outdoors, Schafer hoped that the insect—unnoticeable to the casual observer—would provide an opportunity to discover more information about the work (like, perhaps, the season in which van Gogh painted it). But fossil insect specialist Dr. Michael S. Engel said the little creature had died prior to embedding in the masterpiece, making more precise dating impossible. Further analysis of the painting, however, did find that a red pigment van Gogh used may have faded over time, impacting how the color is seen today, a morsel of information that may serve to clarify the the original hues of Olive Trees.

from Artsy News

#Artsy News

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ukimmigrationmatters · 4 years

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Government planning CGT ‘tax grab’ on buy-to-let property investors, experts warn

The UK Treasury has launched a “review” of the capital gains tax system to "ensure the system is fit for purpose", the BBC reports.

Some experts are warning of "a tax grab" in the autumn to pay towards the multi-billion-pound cost of Coronavirus measures, such as the furlough scheme.

The Chancellor, Rishi, Sunak asked the Office of Tax Simplification to investigate how capital gains are taxed for both individuals and smaller businesses.

"This review should identify opportunities relating to administrative and technical issues as well as areas where the present rules can distort behaviour or do not meet their policy intent," the chancellor said.

"I would be interested in any proposals from the OTS on the regime of allowances, exemptions, reliefs and the treatment of losses within CGT, and the interactions of how gains are taxed compared to other types of income." Source: BBC.

CGT is a tax on profits, which hits business owners, as well as millions of share and property investors.

Rishi Sunak specifically mentions reliefs and losses, which can currently be offset against profits and carried forward to future years. This could change and lead to higher tax bills for investors who risk their money and work hard to earn profits.

Capital gains are taxed at a lower level than income, so there's a risk that the chancellor will use the current crisis and deficit to justify a hike in CGT to income tax levels.

CGT rates are set at 10% for basic-rate taxpayers and 20% for higher and additional-rate taxpayers, or at 18% and 28% where gains relate to residential property.

CGT is basically a tax on the gain a property investor makes when they risk their money. This is in addition to the income tax they pay and any other taxes like stamp duty and land registry fees.

Previous Chancellors have a habit of grabbing money from the estimated two million buy-to-let property investors, many of whom have a small number of properties which they plan to use to supplement their pensions.

Buy-to-let investors have already lost a number of reliefs, for instance on mortgage interest and wear and tear allowance, and are paying higher taxes thanks to multi-millionaire ‘six jobs’ George Osborne’s raid on soft targets.

Business owners spend years building up their businesses, working long hours often for little or no pay, only to be taxed on the profits when they sell up or retire.

Is it still worth investing in buy-to-let property, as judge bans “No DSS” tenant policy?

A District Judge has ruled that blanket bans on renting properties to people on housing benefit are unlawful and discriminatory.

The court ruling found a single mother-of-two had experienced indirect discrimination when a letting agent refused to rent to her.

She ended up homeless with her two children, when her case was taken on by housing charity Shelter.

The judge ruled "No DSS" rental bans are against equality laws.

District Judge Victoria Mark heard this latest case in York County Court on 1 July, and ruled: "Rejecting tenancy applications because the applicant is in receipt of housing benefit was unlawfully discriminating on the grounds of sex and disability" and contrary to the Equality Act 2010, she said.

People deserve a home but that doesn’t mean everyone has a “right” to rent home in the private sector. Landlords must also be able to choose who they want to take on as a tenant. I have current experience with both private and benefit tenants with mixed results.

The LHA rates in some areas are simply not competitive or equivalent to the open market rate and dealing with benefit claims is a steep learning curve for landlords. Deposits and upfront rent can also be an issue.

The rates paid to landlords are also confusing and differ according to age. Is that not age discrimination?

The private sector should not have to pick up the pieces for the failures of successive governments to build enough social housing. There has been no major council house building programme since the 1970’s.

The last major town to be built with proper infrastructure and rail transport links was Milton Keynes which, along with other new towns, was planned in the 1960’s.

Councils can build more social housing and borrow at low rates, but many choose not to.

I'm not sure if a ruling by a District Judge in a County Court is binding in law. If it is binding, it will be a further example of ‘red tape’, costs and legislation for private landlords, many of whom feel like they are swimming against the tide in the buy-to-let market.

Other articles available at Money Tips Podcast - www.moneytipsdaily.com

1. “No DSS” tenant blanket ban by buy-to-let landlords ruled ‘unlawful’ by Judge

2. UK economy grew by 1.8% in May, 24.5% smaller than it was in ONS reports

3. UK's mobile providers will be banned from buying new Huawei 5G equipment

4. Singapore’s economy plunged by 41% in the last quarter the largest fall ever

5. Nationwide now lending 90% for first time buyers reversing previous change

6. Stamp Duty slashed until 31 March 2021 by raising the threshold to 500,000

7. Chancellor Rishi Sunak keen to boost the property market and “build build build”

8. New planning rules will open up more opportunities to make money in property

9. Opportunity is everywhere for everyone, especially in property! But you have ACT!

10. Even the 'Secret law of attraction' requires you to get off your ass and TAKE ACTION!

11. Homeowners will get vouchers of up to £5,000 for energy-saving improvements

12. The poorest will receive up to £10,000 in £2 billion energy saving grant scheme

13. Will your job be one of millions phased out by automation, innovation and AI?

14. You don’t need your own money to create a second income in property

15. Time to your economy or Uconomy started whatever the economy is doing!

16. You can create a second income during the lockdown…and come out stronger

17. Learn how to make money from property without deposits, mortgages or cash

Are you ready to adapt to the new economic model?

By Charles Kelly, Property Investor, Author of Yes, Money Can Buy You Happiness and creator of Money Tips Podcast.

E-Commerce Cashflow 19th July, 2020 7:00 PM (UK)

Learn how to... Build a profitable e-commerce business in less than 90 days. Replace your income in months. Help get the products to people that they need the most. Be able to spend more time doing what you love, with the people you love.

Join the free training here: https://bit.ly/3gLXaKW

#capital gains tax #property tax #buytolet

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