#After-tax contributions

[kc22invesmentsblog]

Exploring Roth IRA Accounts: Tax-Advantaged Investing for Retirement

Written by Delvin As you plan for your retirement, it’s crucial to consider different investment options that can help you grow your savings while enjoying tax advantages. One such option is the Roth Individual Retirement Account (IRA). In this blog post, we’ll explore the features, benefits, and considerations of Roth IRA accounts, empowering you to make informed decisions about your retirement…

[sscarletvenus]

the university which administers the Pulitzer prizes is not allowing press on campus, to make sure nobody on-site can document what is happening.

the nypd threatened student journalists qnd their dean with arrest if they leave a building named after Joseph Pulitzer.

at this point it isn't even worth remarking on the sheer horror, the baffling irony of it all.

entire new york roads have been closed to traffic so that nobody can prevent the world's largest police force's brutalization of students protesting THEIR tution fres and tax dollars contributing to killing kids.

all of this to... keep investing in an apartheid regime.

Columbia University would rather risk their students getting murdered than divest from genocide...

[songofwizardry]

r/ukvisa is a treasure trove of useful info and experience and has saved me so many times by digging up home office policies buried on the website that could get a visa rejected but boy does it not take a lot for several people on that sub to throw disabled people/"illegal" immigrants/asylum seekers/the entire concept of taxation and socialised healthcare/etc under the bus

[qqueenofhades]

I've seen a lot of doom today. Thank you for the bracing positivity!

Look man, idk if I would call it positivity. I'm fucking furious that the media and/or the billionaire class could have chosen at any time, ANY TIME, to carry out this coordinated ratfucking on Trump, and nope, they did it to Biden. Not coincidentally after he openly started espousing even more leftist/progressive tax and wealth policies. I'm also fairly certain that Putin (who is well used to playing the American elections ratfucking game) is involved here somehow, because he desperately wants Biden out and Trump back in. Two plus two, etc.

The elected Democrats who went along with this and/or who contributed to fucking Biden over also have a hell of a lot to answer for, and I hope we, the voters, let them fucking know. The only way this makes sense is if Biden is actively dying of Covid right now and/or if it's bad enough to permanently damage him. In that case, he might have had a modicum of actual say about this, rather than falling victim to the Anonymous Sources who stabbed him in the back every step of the way.

That said: Kamala is a genuinely good candidate. I am excited to have the chance to vote for her. This does turn the whole Referendum on Two Old White Men With Mental Issues narrative on its head. She might be able to reach some constituencies that Biden couldn't. I don't know for sure if all the Democratic/never-Trump GOP votes will translate, but I am so motherfucking tired of fascists thinking this will be a walk in the park. They asked for this, they fucking got it, people are really fucking mad (including me and like, everyone), and if all this maneuvering gets our first female AND Black president, the fascists are going to absolutely fucking lose it and cry for eons. And idk about you, but I want to see some sore loser fuckboys cry cry cry. I want revenge for 2016. I want Trump dead and fucking gone and yknow, Black women have played a huge role in his bad bad times so far. So it's only fair, I suppose, that Kamala gets the chance to finish the motherfucker off. I don't know if it's positivity, but that's what is fueling me right now. So yeah.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google’s enshittification memos

[Note, 9 October 2023: Google disputes the veracity of this claim, but has declined to provide the exhibits and testimony to support its claims. Read more about this here.]

When I think about how the old, good internet turned into the enshitternet, I imagine a series of small compromises, each seemingly reasonable at the time, each contributing to a cultural norm of making good things worse, and worse, and worse.

Think about Unity President Marc Whitten's nonpology for his company's disastrous rug-pull, in which they declared that everyone who had paid good money to use their tool to make a game would have to keep paying, every time someone downloaded that game:

The most fundamental thing that we’re trying to do is we’re building a sustainable business for Unity. And for us, that means that we do need to have a model that includes some sort of balancing change, including shared success.

https://www.wired.com/story/unity-walks-back-policies-lost-trust/

"Shared success" is code for, "If you use our tool to make money, we should make money too." This is bullshit. It's like saying, "We just want to find a way to share the success of the painters who use our brushes, so every time you sell a painting, we want to tax that sale." Or "Every time you sell a house, the company that made the hammer gets to wet its beak."

And note that they're not talking about shared risk here – no one at Unity is saying, "If you try to make a game with our tools and you lose a million bucks, we're on the hook for ten percent of your losses." This isn't partnership, it's extortion.

How did a company like Unity – which became a market leader by making a tool that understood the needs of game developers and filled them – turn into a protection racket? One bad decision at a time. One rationalization and then another. Slowly, and then all at once.

When I think about this enshittification curve, I often think of Google, a company that had its users' backs for years, which created a genuinely innovative search engine that worked so well it seemed like *magic, a company whose employees often had their pick of jobs, but chose the "don't be evil" gig because that mattered to them.

People make fun of that "don't be evil" motto, but if your key employees took the gig because they didn't want to be evil, and then you ask them to be evil, they might just quit. Hell, they might make a stink on the way out the door, too:

https://theintercept.com/2018/09/13/google-china-search-engine-employee-resigns/

Google is a company whose founders started out by publishing a scientific paper describing their search methodology, in which they said, "Oh, and by the way, ads will inevitably turn your search engine into a pile of shit, so we're gonna stay the fuck away from them":

http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf

Those same founders retained a controlling interest in the company after it went IPO, explaining to investors that they were going to run the business without having their elbows jostled by shortsighted Wall Street assholes, so they could keep it from turning into a pile of shit:

https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/ipo-letter/

And yet, it's turned into a pile of shit. Google search is so bad you might as well ask Jeeves. The company's big plan to fix it? Replace links to webpages with florid paragraphs of chatbot nonsense filled with a supremely confident lies:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/14/googles-ai-hype-circle/

How did the company get this bad? In part, this is the "curse of bigness." The company can't grow by attracting new users. When you have 90%+ of the market, there are no new customers to sign up. Hypothetically, they could grow by going into new lines of business, but Google is incapable of making a successful product in-house and also kills most of the products it buys from other, more innovative companies:

https://killedbygoogle.com/

Theoretically, the company could pursue new lines of business in-house, and indeed, the current leaders of companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Apple are all execs who figured out how to get the whole company to do something new, and were elevated to the CEO's office, making each one a billionaire and sealing their place in history.

It is for this very reason that any exec at a large firm who tries to make a business-wide improvement gets immediately and repeatedly knifed by all their colleagues, who correctly reason that if someone else becomes CEO, then they won't become CEO. Machiavelli was an optimist:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

With no growth from new customers, and no growth from new businesses, "growth" has to come from squeezing workers (say, laying off 12,000 engineers after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years), or business customers (say, by colluding with Facebook to rig the ad market with the Jedi Blue conspiracy), or end-users.

Now, in theory, we might never know exactly what led to the enshittification of Google. In theory, all of compromises, debates and plots could be lost to history. But tech is not an oral culture, it's a written one, and techies write everything down and nothing is ever truly deleted.

Time and again, Big Tech tells on itself. Think of FTX's main conspirators all hanging out in a group chat called "Wirefraud." Amazon naming its program targeting weak, small publishers the "Gazelle Project" ("approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle”). Amazon documenting the fact that users were unknowingly signing up for Prime and getting pissed; then figuring out how to reduce accidental signups, then deciding not to do it because it liked the money too much. Think of Zuck emailing his CFO in the middle of the night to defend his outsized offer to buy Instagram on the basis that users like Insta better and Facebook couldn't compete with them on quality.

It's like every Big Tech schemer has a folder on their desktop called "Mens Rea" filled with files like "Copy_of_Premeditated_Murder.docx":

https://doctorow.medium.com/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself-f7f0eb6d215a?sk=351f8a54ab8e02d7340620e5eec5024d

Right now, Google's on trial for its sins against antitrust law. It's a hard case to make. To secure a win, the prosecutors at the DoJ Antitrust Division are going to have to prove what was going on in Google execs' minds when the took the actions that led to the company's dominance. They're going to have to show that the company deliberately undertook to harm its users and customers.

Of course, it helps that Google put it all in writing.

Last week, there was a huge kerfuffile over the DoJ's practice of posting its exhibits from the trial to a website each night. This is a totally normal thing to do – a practice that dates back to the Microsoft antitrust trial. But Google pitched a tantrum over this and said that the docs the DoJ were posting would be turned into "clickbait." Which is another way of saying, "the public would find these documents very interesting, and they would be damning to us and our case":

https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/secrecy-is-systemic

After initially deferring to Google, Judge Amit Mehta finally gave the Justice Department the greenlight to post the document. It's up. It's wild:

https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-09/416692.pdf

The document is described as "notes for a course on communication" that Google VP for Finance Michael Roszak prepared. Roszak says he can't remember whether he ever gave the presentation, but insists that the remit for the course required him to tell students "things I didn't believe," and that's why the document is "full of hyperbole and exaggeration."

OK.

But here's what the document says: "search advertising is one of the world's greatest business models ever created…illicit businesses (cigarettes or drugs) could rival these economics…[W]e can mostly ignore the demand side…(users and queries) and only focus on the supply side of advertisers, ad formats and sales."

It goes on to say that this might be changing, and proposes a way to balance the interests of the search and ads teams, which are at odds, with search worrying that ads are pushing them to produce "unnatural search experiences to chase revenue."

"Unnatural search experiences to chase revenue" is a thinly veiled euphemism for the prophetic warnings in that 1998 Pagerank paper: "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users." Or, more plainly, "ads will turn our search engine into a pile of shit."

And, as Roszak writes, Google is "able to ignore one of the fundamental laws of economics…supply and demand." That is, the company has become so dominant and cemented its position so thoroughly as the default search engine across every platforms and system that even if it makes its search terrible to goose revenues, users won't leave. As Lily Tomlin put it on SNL: "We don't have to care, we're the phone company."

In the enshittification cycle, companies first lure in users with surpluses – like providing the best search results rather than the most profitable ones – with an eye to locking them in. In Google's case, that lock-in has multiple facets, but the big one is spending billions of dollars – enough to buy a whole Twitter, every single year – to be the default search everywhere.

Google doesn't buy its way to dominance because it has the very best search results and it wants to shield you from inferior competitors. The economically rational case for buying default position is that preventing competition is more profitable than succeeding by outperforming competitors. The best reason to buy the default everywhere is that it lets you lower quality without losing business. You can "ignore the demand side, and only focus on advertisers."

For a lot of people, the analysis stops here. "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." Google locks in users and sells them to advertisers, who are their co-conspirators in a scheme to screw the rest of us.

But that's not right. For one thing, paying for a product doesn't mean you won't be the product. Apple charges a thousand bucks for an iPhone and then nonconsensually spies on every iOS user in order to target ads to them (and lies about it):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

John Deere charges six figures for its tractors, then runs a grift that blocks farmers from fixing their own machines, and then uses their control over repair to silence farmers who complain about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/31/dealers-choice/#be-a-shame-if-something-were-to-happen-to-it

Fair treatment from a corporation isn't a loyalty program that you earn by through sufficient spending. Companies that can sell you out, will sell you out, and then cry victim, insisting that they were only doing their fiduciary duty for their sacred shareholders. Companies are disciplined by fear of competition, regulation or – in the case of tech platforms – customers seizing the means of computation and installing ad-blockers, alternative clients, multiprotocol readers, etc:

https://doctorow.medium.com/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse-3cc01e7e4604?sk=85b3f5f7d051804521c3411711f0b554

Which is where the next stage of enshittification comes in: when the platform withdraws the surplus it had allocated to lure in – and then lock in – business customers (like advertisers) and reallocate it to the platform's shareholders.

For Google, there are several rackets that let it screw over advertisers as well as searchers (the advertisers are paying for the product, and they're also the product). Some of those rackets are well-known, like Jedi Blue, the market-rigging conspiracy that Google and Facebook colluded on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

But thanks to the antitrust trial, we're learning about more of these. Megan Gray – ex-FTC, ex-DuckDuckGo – was in the courtroom last week when evidence was presented on Google execs' panic over a decline in "ad generating searches" and the sleazy gimmick they came up with to address it: manipulating the "semantic matching" on user queries:

https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/

When you send a query to Google, it expands that query with terms that are similar – for example, if you search on "Weds" it might also search for "Wednesday." In the slides shown in the Google trial, we learned about another kind of semantic matching that Google performed, this one intended to turn your search results into "a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape."

Here's how that worked: when you ran a query like "children's clothing," Google secretly appended the brand name of a kids' clothing manufacturer to the query. This, in turn, triggered a ton of ads – because rival brands will have bought ads against their competitors' name (like Pepsi buying ads that are shown over queries for Coke).

Here we see surpluses being taken away from both end-users and business customers – that is, searchers and advertisers. For searchers, it doesn't matter how much you refine your query, you're still going to get crummy search results because there's an unkillable, hidden search term stuck to your query, like a piece of shit that Google keeps sticking to the sole of your shoe.

But for advertisers, this is also a scam. They're paying to be matched to users who search on a brand name, and you didn't search on that brand name. It's especially bad for the company whose name has been appended to your search, because Google has a protection racket where the company that matches your search has to pay extra in order to show up overtop of rivals who are worse matches. Both the matching company and those rivals have given Google a credit-card that Google gets to bill every time a user searches on the company's name, and Google is just running fraudulent charges through those cards.

And, of course, Google put this in writing. I mean, of course they did. As we learned from the documentary The Incredibles, supervillains can't stop themselves from monologuing, and in big, sprawling monopolists, these monologues have to transmitted electronically – and often indelibly – to far-flung co-cabalists.

As Gray points out, this is an incredibly blunt enshittification technique: "it hadn’t even occurred to me that Google just flat out deletes queries and replaces them with ones that monetize better." We don't know how long Google did this for or how frequently this bait-and-switch was deployed.

But if this is a blunt way of Google smashing its fist down on the scales that balance search quality against ad revenues, there's plenty of subtler ways the company could sneak a thumb on there. A Google exec at the trial rhapsodized about his company's "contract with the user" to deliver an "honest results policy," but given how bad Google search is these days, we're left to either believe he's lying or that Google sucks at search.

The paper trail offers a tantalizing look at how a company went from doing something that was so good it felt like a magic trick to being "able to ignore one of the fundamental laws of economics…supply and demand," able to "ignore the demand side…(users and queries) and only focus on the supply side of advertisers."

What's more, this is a system where everyone loses (except for Google): this isn't a grift run by Google and advertisers on users – it's a grift Google runs on everyone.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[robertreich]

10 Worst Things About The Trump Presidency

Donald Trump left office with the lowest approval rating of any president ever. But some people now seem to be suffering from amnesia.

Let me jog your memory. Here are 10 Worst Things About the Trump Presidency — in no particular order.

#1. Trump fueled division and sparked a record uptick in hate crimes.

#2. Murder went way up under Trump. He presided over the largest ever single-year increase in homicides in 2020. A number of factors might have contributed to that, but a big one is…

#3. Gun sales broke records under Trump, who has bragged about how he “did nothing” to restrict guns as president in spite of…

#4. Under Trump, America suffered more than 1,700 mass shootings.

#5. Trump said there were "very fine people" among the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville.

I’m halfway to ten. If you think I’m missing something big, leave it in the comments.

#6. Trump allied himself with the Proud Boys, a violent hate group who helped orchestrate the Jan 6 Capitol attack.

#7. Trump’s not wrong when he says…

TRUMP: I got rid of Roe v. Wade.

It is entirely because of Trump’s judicial appointments that 1 in 3 American women of childbearing age now lives in states with abortion bans.

#8. One of Trump’s Supreme Court justices was Brett Kavanaugh, a man accused of sexual assault by multiple women.

#9. Trump’s White House interfered in the FBI’s investigation of Brett Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual assaults.

And now: #10. Trump has been convicted of committing 34 felonies while in office. The criminally false business filings he got convicted for in New York? All of them were committed while he was president.

I’m sorry, did I say the 10 Worst Things About the Trump Presidency? I meant 15.

#11. Trump’s failed pandemic response is estimated to have led to hundreds of thousands of needless deaths. By the time Trump left office, roughly 3,000 Americans were dying of covid every day. That’s a 9/11-scale mass casualty event every single day. How did Trump screw up so badly?

#12. Trump’s White House discarded the pandemic response playbook that had been assembled by the Obama administration.

#13. Trump disbanded the National Security Council’s pandemic response team.

#14. Trump repeatedly lied about the danger of covid, saying it was no worse than the flu or that it would go away on its own.

But behind closed doors, Trump admitted he knew covid was deadly.

#15. Trump promoted fake covid cures like hydroxychloroquine and even injecting people with disinfectants.

After Trump’s “disinfectant” remarks, poison control centers received a spike in emergency calls.

That’s fifteen things. Should I keep going? Ok, I’ll keep going. The 20 Worst Things About the Trump Presidency.

#16. Trump presided over a net loss of 2.9 million American jobs — the worst recorded jobs numbers of any U.S. president in history.

#17. Trump profited off the presidency, making an estimated $160 million from foreign countries while he was president.

#18. Trump also billed the Secret Service over $1 million for the privilege of staying at his golf clubs and other properties while they protected him. That’s your money!

#19. Trump caused the longest government shutdown in U.S. history when he didn’t get funding for his border wall, which he said Mexico was going to pay for.  

#20. Under Trump, the national debt increased by about 40% — more than in any other four-year presidential term — largely because of his tax cuts for the rich and big corporations.

You didn’t really think I was stopping at 20, did you? We’re going to 25 —

#21. Trump separated more than 5,000 children from their parents at the border, with no plan to ever reunite them, putting babies in cages.

#22. The Muslim Ban. Yes, Trump really did try to ban Muslims from entering the country.

#23. Trump sparked international outrage by moving the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem while closing the U.S. mission to Palestine.

#24. Trump tasked his son-in-law Jared Kushner with drafting a potential Middle East “peace plan” with zero Palestinian input.

#25. And finally, Trump recognized Israel’s occupation of the Goh-lahn Heights, which is considered illegal under international law.

So there you have it, folks: The 25 Worst — Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Did I mention the impeachments? We’ve got to do the impeachments. Let’s go to 30.

#26. Trump broke the law by trying to withhold nearly $400 million of U.S. aid for Ukraine in an effort to extort a personal political favor from Ukraine’s Pres. Zelensky. Trump wanted Zelensky to interfere in the 2020 election by announcing an investigation into the Bidens. Delaying this aid to Ukraine weakened Ukraine and strengthened Russia.

#27. Trump personally attacked and ruined the careers of everyone who stood in the way of his illegal Ukraine scheme, including Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman.

#28. To cover up the scheme, Trump ordered the White House and State Department to defy congressional subpoenas.

#29. For these reasons, on December 18, 2019, Trump became the third U.S. president to be impeached. He was charged with Abuse of Power and Obstruction of Congress.

#30. Even while he was being investigated for trying to get Ukraine to interfere in the U.S. election, Trump publicly called for China to interfere in the election.

So those are the 30 Worst Things —

I’ll go to 35.

#31. Long before Election Day, Trump started making false claims that the election would be rigged.

#32. After losing, Trump falsely claimed the election was stolen, even though his own inner circle, including his campaign manager, White House lawyers, and his own Justice Department and attorney general told him it was not.

#33. Trump kept telling his Big Lie even after more than 60 legal challenges to the election were struck down in court, many by Trump-appointed judges.

#34. Trump ordered the Department of Justice to falsely claim that the election “was corrupt.”

#35. Trump and his allies used threats to pressure state leaders in Arizona and Georgia to falsify the election results.

We may go to 40.

#36. When none of the previous schemes worked, Trump and his allies produced fake electoral votes cast by fake electors in multiple swing states. His former White House chief of staff and Rudy Giuliani are among the many members of his inner circle who have been criminally indicted for this scheme.

#37. Trump tried to bully Vice President Pence into obstructing the certification of the election.

#38. Trump invited a mob to the Capitol on Jan 6 with his “be there, will be wild” tweet.

#39. Sworn testimony alleges that when Trump was warned that members of the crowd were carrying deadly weapons, he ordered security metal detectors to be taken down.

#40. Knowing the crowd had deadly weapons, he ordered them to go to the Capitol and…

TRUMP: …fight like hell.

#41 — Yes, yes, I know, bear with me.

Trump betrayed his oath to defend the nation by doing nothing to stop the Jan 6 violence. Instead, according to witness testimony, he sat and watched TV for hours.

#42. On January 13, 2021, Trump became the only president ever to be impeached twice. This time he was charged with incitement of insurrection. It was a bipartisan vote.

#43. The majority of senators — 57 out of 100 — voted to convict Trump, including 7 Republican senators.

So that’s the two impeachments and the Big Lie, but wait, we haven’t dealt with Russia, right? So we’re going to 50.

#44. In a likely obstruction of justice, Trump pressured then FBI Director James Comey to stop the FBI’s investigation into Trump’s National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn. This was documented in the Mueller report.

#45. When Comey didn’t bend to Trump’s will, Trump fired him.

#46. Trump tried to shut down the Mueller investigation by ordering White House Counsel Don McGann to fire Mueller. McGann refused because that would be criminal obstruction of justice.

#47. When news got out that Trump tried to fire Mueller, Trump repeatedly told McGann to lie — to Mueller, to press, to public — and even create a false document to conceal Trump’s attempt to fire Mueller.

#48. Trump ordered his staff not to turn over emails showing Don Jr. had set up a meeting at Trump Tower before the 2016 election with representatives of the Russian government.

#49. Trump convinced Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about Trump’s plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, and Cohen served prison time for lying to Congress.

#50. Trump was not charged for criminal obstruction of justice because it’s the Justice Department’s policy not to indict a sitting president, but more than a thousand former federal prosecutors who served under both Republicans and Democrats, signed a letter declaring there was more than enough evidence to prosecute Trump.

So those are the 50 Worst Things About the Trump Presidency. Now I could go on…

And I will! The 75 Worst Things About the Trump Presidency.

#51. Trump said he’d hire only the best people, but…

His campaign chair was convicted of multiple crimes.

So was one of his closest associates.

His deputy campaign chair pleaded guilty to crimes.

So did his personal lawyer

His National Security Adviser

The Chief Financial Officer of his business

A campaign foreign policy adviser

And one of his campaign fundraisers.

They all committed crimes, and Trump pardoned most of them.

#52. Trump said he’d drain the Washington swamp. But he appointed more billionaires, CEOs, and Wall Street moguls to his administration than any administration in history

#53. Trump intervened to get his son-in-law, Jared Kushner top-secret clearance after he was denied over concerns about foreign influence.

#54. Trump hosted a Russian Foreign Minister to the Oval Office, where Trump revealed top-secret intelligence.

Oh, and Trump’s economic policies!

#55 Trump promised that the average American family would see a $4,000 pay raise because of his tax cuts for the wealthy and big corporations. How’d that work out? Did you get a $4,000 raise? Of course not! Nobody did!

#56. Trump vowed to protect American jobs, but offshoring increased and manufacturing fell.

#57. Trump said he would fix America’s infrastructure, but it never happened. He announced so many failed “infrastructure weeks” they became a running joke.

#58. Trump said he would be “the voice” of American workers, but he filled the National Labor Relations Board with anti-union flacks who made it harder for workers to unionize.

#59. Trump’s Labor Department made it easier for bosses to get out of paying workers overtime, which cheated 8 million workers of extra pay.

#60. Trump repeatedly suggested he might serve more than two terms in violation of the Constitution — and continues to do so.

#61. Trump called Haiti and African nations “shithole” countries.

#62. Trump tried to terminate DACA, which protects immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. Luckily this was struck down by the courts.

#63. Trump called climate change a “hoax.”

#64. Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement.

#65. Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental protections.

#66. Every budget Trump proposed included cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

#67. Trump tried (and failed) to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would have resulted in 20 million Americans losing insurance. And striking down the ACA’s protections for the roughly 130 million people with pre-existing conditions could have driven up their insurance premiums or led to a loss of coverage.

#68. Trump made it easier for employers to remove birth control coverage from insurance plans.

#69. By the end of Trump’s term, the number of people lacking health insurance had risen by 3 million.

#70. Trump lied. Constantly. He made 30,573 false or misleading claims while president — an average of 21 a day, according to Washington Post fact-checkers.

#71. Trump allegedly took hundreds of classified documents on his way out of the White House, reportedly including nuclear secrets, which he then left unsecured in various parts of Mar-a-Lago, including a bathroom. He was even caught on tape showing them off to people.

#72. Trump seriously discussed the idea of nuking a hurricane.

#73. When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, Trump delayed $20 billion of aid and allowed Puerto Rico to be without power for 181 days.

#74. Trump suggested withholding federal aid for California wildfire recovery and said the solution was to “clean” the “floors” of the forest.

#75. Trump pulled out of the Iran deal, placing Iran on a path to developing nuclear weapons.

Honestly, there’s so much more, from exchanging “love letters” with North Korea’s brutal dictator to publicly denigrating a Gold Star military widow and making her cry, to the way he attacked journalists, to late night tweet binges.

Look, I can understand why a lot of people want to block all of this out of their memories. But we cannot afford to forget just how terrible Trump’s time in the White House was for this nation.

And we sure as hell can’t afford to put him back there.

[the-bibrarian]

I see a lot of incomprehension online about our pension reform and the anger it generates in France, and what it often boils down to is "why are they so angry, 64 is plenty young to retire?"

I don't agree, but even if I did I would still oppose the reform. Here are some of the reasons why:

We already need 43 full years of work and tax contributions to be able to retire. Which means college-educated people were never going to retire at 64 anyway, let alone 62. This reform is aimed at people who start working early, mostly in low-paying jobs.

There's very little provision made in this law for hard/dangerous/manual labour.

There's no provision made for women who stop working to raise their children (51% of women already retire without a "complete career," which means they only retire on a partial pension, vs. 25% of men).

At 64, 1/3 of the poorest workers will already be dead. In France, between the richest and the poorest men, there's a 13 years gap in life expectancy.

Beyond life expectancy, at that age a lot of people (especially poorer, non-college educated) have too many health-related issues to be able to work. Not only is it cruel to ask them to work longer, if they can't work at all that's two more years to hold on with no pension

Unemployment in France is still fairly high (7%). Young people already have a hard time finding work, and this is going to make things even harder for them

Macron cut taxes on the rich and lost the country around 16 Billions € in tax revenue. Our estimated pension deficit should peak at 12 Billions worst case scenario.

While I'm on wealth redistribution (no, not soviet style, but I think there should be a cap on wealth concentration. Nobody needs to be a billionaire.): some of the massive profits of last year should go to workers and to the state to be redistributed, including to fund pensions. The state subsidized companies and corporations during the pandemic, Macron even said "no matter the cost" and spent 206 Billions € on businesses. Now he's going after the poorest workers in the country for an hypothetical 12 Billions??

Implicit in all of this is the question of systemic racism. French workers from immigrant families are already more likely to have started their careers early, to have low-paying jobs, are less likely to be college-educated, more at risk for disabilities and chronic illnesses, etc., so this is going to disproportionately affect them

This is not even touching on the fact that he didn't let lawmakers vote on it, meaning he knew he wouldn't get a majority of votes in parliament, or that 70% of the population is against this law. Pushing it through anyway is blatant authoritarianism.

TL;DR: This is only tangentially about retirement age. The reform will make life harder for people with low incomes, or with no higher education, for manual workers, for women—mothers especially, for POC, for people with disabilities or chronic conditions, etc. This is about solidarity.

Hope (sincerely) this helps.

[call-me-strega]

Dc x Dp Prompt #22: the Respectful Catcall Guy

Have y’all seen the videos of the respectful catcall guy? The one who says stuff like “Hey girl! You look like you file your taxes in a timely manner!”, “Hey Dawg! Your eyebrows look like they are on point bro!”, or “Yo! You look like you know how to fold a fitted sheet!”. So instead of an unpleasant experience with harassment you get a nice complement? Y’all know those guys?

So that but it’s Danny and Tucker (Sam’s camera women) on their summer road trip to visit colleges. No on is safe from compliments, not civilians, not super heroes/vigilantes, not even rouges are safe.

Some of these interactions would include:

“Damn Dude! You look like you contribute equally to household responsibilities!” (To Barry out with Iris and his kids, he laughs proudly and Iris says “Yeah he does!”)

“ Hey Man! You look like you always pull up for you friends!” (To Wally picking up a drunk Dick Grayson, Donna Troy, and Roy Harper after an undercover Titan’s mission gone wrong. He smiles awkwardly while his friends laugh)

“Dang Bro! You look like you’re taking your meds regularly!” (Trickster/James Jesse tv show version, he says “I am!” not questioning how they would know he takes meds)

“Damn ma’am! You look like you love every dog unconditionally!” (To Wonder Woman after she stopped to pet a dog)

“Dang girl! You look like you could bench press your friends! I bet you give great hugs!” (To Cassie Sandsmark at a Core Four hang out. She proudly shows off her guns and Bart yells back that she does give great hugs)

“Wow Girl! You look like you know how to use healthy communication and boundaries in your relationships!” (To Black Canary, she smirks proudly)

“Damn man! You look like drink your respect women juice at breakfast, lunch AND dinner!” (To a Clark Kent treating Lois to lunch)

“ Wow man! You look like you make an effort to be and active and present part of your daughter’s life! (To Deadshot/Floyd Lawton and his daughter Zoe out for dinner)

“ Dang girl! You look you know how to find joy and whimsy in life!”(To Raven, she smiled and appreciated it, but did double take at the amount of extradimensional death magic on these kids which check with them about later)

“Dang sir! You look like you know how to properly season your cooking!” (To Alfred Pennyworth out on a grocery run)

“Damn miss, you look like you make environmentally conscious lifestyle choices!” (this is actually Sam to Poison Ivy, she follows it up with “I’m a big fan of your work”)

“ Damn boy, you seem like you’re super passionate about what you believe in and deeply care about the people you love!” (To a budding, upstart crime lord Red Hood who is shook by positive feelings at this time in his life. They track him down and explain liminality and help him deal with emotions before he does smth too drastic like decapitating ppl *cough cough* But he still becomes a Crime Lord to mess with his family and still have a dramatic reveal)

[margaretthatchersdead]

Reasons to end the monarchy: Charles Edition

Well it's the coronation so you know what it's time for.

The entire concept of a monarchy is actively undemocratic. The head of state should not be someone who is only in that position because they were born into a certain family.

Having a monarchy upholds classism as a specific family of great wealth and power are viewed as superior to others.

They stand for a history of racism and imperialism. This country has done some truly terrible things in its history and the monarchy are a symbol of that. In order to attempt to begin to undo the harm that we have done, we need to remove this symbol of oppression.

The royal family have previously lobbied the government to hide their own personal wealth. Despite this, we are obviously aware that they have a large amount of wealth.

Prince Charles has himself lobbied the government on a number of occasions. His 'black spider memos' show that he has repeatedly pressured ministers on a wide range of topics from the Iraq war to badger culling to alternative therapies. He has used his power to lobby the government on subjects that would affect him.

The monarch does not occupy a ceremonial role as is frequently claimed. Ministers and civil servants have to consult the monarch. Civil servants have to get the consent of the royals on pieces of legislation, which can cause delays on implementation.

Even if the monarch did occupy a purely ceremonial role, as a literal billionaire he wields a ridiculously high amount of power over people.

Windsor Castle brings in less money than Windsor Legoland does. The many castles that are owned by the royal family could be used to create spaces for the public to enjoy or to be used as a shelter for the homeless. The Louvre in Paris used to be house of the French monarchy and gets over twenty times the tourists. Edinburgh castle hasn't had the monarchy live in it for centuries and yet still brings in tourism.

Prince Andrew is widely known to be connected to Jeffrey Epstein; yet he has not had to face any repercussions for his actions despite blatantly lying when being asked about his actions. The royal family have defended him and prevented him from facing the consequences of his actions.

They cost around £334 million per year. This money could be used to help the poor, given to the NHS, to repair and build infrastructure, to support small businesses that are struggling, pretty much anything.

The royal household publishes a much lower figure about the cost of the royal family, so they are actively trying to cover up their cost.

Charles has had access to confidential Cabinet papers, undermining our democracy.

He has publicly championed alternative medicine and has repeatedly promoted it. He sent at least seven letters to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, that then shortly relaxed the rules governing the labeling of herbal products, ones he as part of Charles's Duchy Originals produces.

He lobbied the health secretary regarding greater provision of alternative treatments on the NHS.

In 2018, 46% of Britons wanted him to abdicate immediately after Elizabeth died. He’s barely wanted by the country even with the sheer amount of pro-monarchy propaganda going around. Charles specifically is very unpopular.

In order to speak to him, broadcasters had to sign a 15-page contract, which includes Clarence house attending the rough and fine cut edits of films and if unhappy can remove that contribution, as well as stipulating that all questions directed at him must be pre-approved and vetted by his representative.

His personal wealth is £1.8 billion. He inherited a large amount of this from Elizabeth, with it being exempt from inheritance tax. Having an immunity from this tax when others don’t is ridiculous.

The Duchy of Cornwall was named in the Paradise papers.

The coronation is going to cost £100 million during a cost of living crisis.

People have been banned from protesting Charles with official warning letters were sent to anti-monarchists.

Protestors who block roads, airports and railways could face an entire year behind bars. Locking yourself to others, objects or buildings could go to prison for six months and face an unlimited fine. Police are allowed to head off disruption by stopping and searching protestors that they suspect.

The public were encouraged to swear allegiance to the new King when he gets sworn in, this is a deeply disturbing suggestion.

He's a billionaire who's going to use the public's money to celebrate himself.

The monarch has sweeping immunity from many laws

He owns business parks and small rented cottages, six of the ten top residential homes, 285,000 acres of mineral rich land. He’s ridiculously rich in a country where so many people are facing extreme poverty.

[redocity]

Hey, if you’re looking for more buck requests I’d love something where he’s dating the reader and it’s going well but before they get chance to meet the team they get in an accident or their building catches fire or something and buck ends up rescuing her and hen and Eddie work on her etc and then after when they’re okay she’s just like when I said I wanted to meet the team this is not what I meant. Thank you so much if you decide to write this 💕

WORKOUT — E.BUCKLEY

going to the gym when LA was due for a flash flood was not the best idea on your part, but at least you got to meet the people that buck called family

WARNINGS: established relationship, flooding, corpse mention, minor character injury

evan buckley x gn!reader || fluff || 4.0k || requests open!!

a/n: is this the best thing i’ve ever written? no. but i hope it suffices nonetheless 🫶

₊ ⊹ masterlist!!

Who knew joining a new boxing gym of all things would land you a boyfriend.

A tall, blond, handsome boyfriend who could probably bench press you like it was his warm up.

He could probably bench press your dad like it was a warm up.

You like to think it’s an act of divine intervention, an apology from the gods for making you move across the country by yourself with nothing but yourself to make things work.

The least you deserved was the absolute perfection that was Evan Buckley to make it a little less taxing.

Granted, the way you met was less than perfect, you managing to put your gloves on backwards, get them stuck on your hands and then have to ask for help getting them off whilst internally wanting to jump off a cliff from the embarrassment.

He was nice enough though, making lighthearted jokes about the situation as he helped you take off, and then put back on your gloves in the correct way.

To be honest you’re not sure you can remember most of that first conversation you had, definitely too focused on the muscles in his arms as the overhead lighting emphasised the definition of his biceps and shadowed the curves in his collarbone as they peeked out from underneath the tank top he was wearing.

That aspect of your dynamic never changed, and even as he started to approach you first so that you could pair up to spar with each other you still found yourself taking the time to admire his physique whenever the moment arose.

You found out within a few weeks that it was because he was a firefighter, and if you weren’t attracted to him before you definitely were when you had the fuel to imagine him being able to pick you up with one arm and sling you over his shoulder.

Apparently the feeling was mutual.

You learned a lot about Buck during your weekly gym visits. He was from Pennsylvania and travelled across the US before landing in LA, he had an older sister who used to frequent the gym with him, he worked in fire station number 118, and his team was like a surrogate family to him.

You learned a lot about them too.

You’d heard of the medical adventures of Hen and her scientist wife Karen.

He told you about how Chimney—a nickname he refused to elaborate on because it was ‘a scared secret’—had fallen in love with his sister Maddie and how happy he was for them.

He told you about how Eddie used to serve in the army and had an adorable kid named Christopher that Buck often spent his weekends with.

And he delighted in telling you all about Bobby. How he was a secondary father, how he’d been through the roughest of the rough and pulled himself back up and made Buck strive to have the same resilience, how he’d finally gotten his happy ending by falling in love with and getting married to a cop named Athena and how Buck was so happy that he was happy.

It was really endearing honestly, and it was one of the factors that contributed to how hard you fell for him.

He wasn’t just some ‘strong macho firefighter’, he was a human being, someone who loved with all his heart and put his everything into his job and doing right by the people that he loved and cared about.

He often made comments about bringing you to meet the team, mentioning the occasional barbecue that Bobby and Athena would host at their house and how the team would often bring their families and loved ones along.

It was the first time Buck ever called you his partner. In the middle of a boxing ring whilst you were punching at his hands and he was raving on about Bobby’s cooking.

And it was enough for you to miss the padding covering his palms and almost punch him right in the face.

“Woah-” You can thank his instincts for being the only reason he didn’t end up with a bruised nose, swerving his head at the last second and catching you as you stumbled forward into him.

“I am so sorry-” You remove yourself from his grasp hastily, holding the back of your gloved hand over your mouth to cover the astonishment of your own embarrassment from his view.

“It’s good, are you?” Buck dismisses your apology with a shake of his head an a soft smile that makes you want to squeeze him until he explodes because my god he is so adorable how did you land this man?

“Yeah- yeah I’m good, sorry-” You shake your wrists as a way of dispelling the nervous tension that’s racing through your muscles to settle in your joints.

“You’re sure?” He raises an eyebrow at you, expression a mix of suspicion and concern. “You know, you don’t have to come to anything if you’re not comfortable, I don’t want to rush into something if you’re not ready,”

He lowers his hands to his sides, undoing the velcro to slip the pads off his palms as a show that he wants to engage in the conversation without any distraction. “I have a habit of taking relationships too fast, and I don’t want to do that with you,”

“No that’s not— You’re not doing that, I’d love to meet the rest of your team,” You shake your head adamantly at Buck’s attempt at giving you an out, firmly planting your decision as wanting to take the proverbial ‘next step’ in your relationship in meeting the people he calls family. “I was just caught off guard is all, you’ve uh… you’ve never called me your partner before,”

“Oh— I uh—” Your acknowledgement of what he’d said seems to force him to acknowledge it himself, like it was a subconscious slip of the tongue rather than an informed decision. “Is that okay?”

You take a moment to think, eyes round and cheeks flushed as you nod your head. “Yeah,”

“Yeah?” He takes a step towards you, concern washing out of his expression to be replaced with contentment, confidence rising in his irises as he tilts his head to the side.

“Mhm,” You stifle a small embarrassed giggle as he invades your personal space, mirroring his head tilt with your own as your fluster extends from your cheeks to coat your neck in a dark shade of red.

“Good,” He rests his right hand against your shoulder, drawing small lines from the side of your neck down over the curve of your arm with his fingers. “I’ll have to call you that more often then,” He leans forward with every word until his lips are brushing yours as he speaks, emphasising the end of his sentence by pressing a kiss to your lips that you happily reciprocate.

“I’d like that,” Your face is embarrassingly red as you pull away, a lovesick expression on your face as you don’t even try to hide the way your composure falls apart.

—

You have half the mind to never go to the gym ever again.

How were you supposed to know that there were flash floods scheduled to hit LA this morning if they didn’t put it on the news until you were already inside the gym? At least you weren’t the only one suffering in your makeshift cage whilst rising water blocked you from leaving.

There was probably about a dozen of you actually, all up bright and early to get in a workout before the day started, and instead locked inside of the gym because the idiotic reporters didn’t warn you in advance that LA was due heavy rain and flash flooding.

Okay, technically it wasn’t their fault, the whole point of weather is that you only really know what’s happening as it happens, but surely they had the technology to be able to anticipate when something this extreme was going to occur.

Someone had already called 911, but you wouldn’t bank on them arriving anytime soon. Buck told you how rough days like this were for emergency responders, and considering that none of you were in an immediate emergency, you wouldn’t be surprised if your situation was put on the back burner until they had a team free.

That meant you basically just had to hunker down for a few hours and wait it out.

It shouldn’t have been to hard to past the time, you could technically just extend your workout for a while, but its barely an hour before the power goes out and half of the gym is rendered completely useless.

The group of you end up sitting on the floor in a circle and just talking to pass the time, although making small talk with people you don’t know can only last so long before you run out of things to talk about.

It was more boring than anything, although as the water began to seep through the seal of the glass doors, you knew that boredom wouldn’t last for very long.

—

“This is dispatch, we’ve got a gym flooding at 1123 Vine St #14, there’s 13 people trapped inside,” Josh’s voice crackles through the radio as the 118 lugs themselves back into the truck, soaked from the knees downwards.

“Copy that, 118 is en route,” Bobby presses the radio on his chest, tapping the side of the truck with his hand before climbing into the Captain’s seat.

“Copy 118,” The radio crackles then goes dead, and the truck pulls away from the gas station they were parked at with the ambulance hot on it’s tail.

“Vine St? Me and my girlfriend go to a gym Vine St, it’s great,” Buck talks before he’s even got the headset on, half of his sentence being drowned out as a result.

“Well it can’t be that great if it doesn’t have proper seal on the doors can it?” Eddie’s voice is entirely sarcastic, and Buck hits his arm with the back of his hand in retaliation.

“Hey we don’t know if this is my gym or not, so don’t disrespect the integrity of Wildcard boxing gym until we’re sure that’s where we’re going,” Buck scoffs dramatically, and it earns a laugh from the rest of the team.

“Oh no, how dare you besmirch Buck’s sacred place? That’s his second home you’re talking about,” Hen plays into the joke, and Buck responds emphatically by tapping his right hand against his left bicep.

“Exactly,”

—

“What was that about the ‘integrity’ of your gym Buck?” Eddie blinks up at the sparked out neon sign, jaws resting against his shoulder has he holds them in his right hand.

There was really no mistaking it as someplace else, and for a moment Buck’s focus turns to worry. It was your day off today, what if you’d gone to the gym to take up your time? What if you’d gotten injured in the process? Or god forbid something worse?

“Buck?” His silence is enough for Eddie to look over his shoulder with a raised eyebrow. “You good?”

“Yeah— Yeah I’m fine,” Buck shakes his head like he’s trying to physically shake the anxiety from his mind. “Let’s go,”

There’s a short shared glance between Eddie and Hen at Buck’s reply, but it ends with nothing more than a shrug as they forced the automatic doors open to enter the gym, adding another rush of water into the building in the process, one that they definitely could’ve done without considering it was almost at waist level already.

“LAFD!” Bobby wades through the water ahead of the group in the start of the search, calling out periodically in the hopes of a response from anyone from the group of people trapped somewhere inside.

Logic would dictate that they probably would’ve moved to the upper floor, but panic often overrides rationality in these sorts of circumstances, so the team couldn’t ever be too safe in searching the bottom floor.

“Alright, Buck, Chim, I want you to follow me in searching the rest of this floor, Eddie and Hen, go upstairs and find anyone you can,”

There’s an echo of “Copy that!”’s as the team split up to search the building, and as Buck makes his way through the familiar gym layout he can only hope that your months of being together with him has taught you how to best keep yourself safe in an emergency situation like this.

The sight of one of the gym regulars floating face down in the water does not reassure him of that fact.

He swears he almost gags at the sight, a mix of shock and disgust at the smell coming from the man as his corpse floats aimlessly, following the ripples in the water as Buck moves. Then he notices his hands. The back of his right hand specifically.

“Cap—” Buck’s voice is harsh and grainy through the radio, not at all helped by the fact the flood had probably disrupted some of the nearby cell towers making the transmission less clear than it already was. “I found— he had—” Buck’s radio periodically turns to static as he tries to relay his message, but it’s key message thankfully gets through undisrupted. “live electricity—”

—

“LAFD!” Eddie pushes the door open to the upper gym floor with Hen right on his tail, the two scanning the room for anyone immediately visible. “Is anyone there?”

”Here! We’re over here!” Your voice calls from around one of the corners, and you rush out towards the two firefighters with panic written all over your face, completely soaked from head to toe. “Are either of you a paramedic? A stack of weights fell whilst we were trying to create a barrier in case the water rose again and—” You talk whilst leading the two over the the group, and you don’t need to finish your sentence by the time you reach them.

One of the guys was sat against the wall, his left leg resting elevated on a collection of sodden towels and jackets, a nasty purple bruise spreading across the expanse of his foot and up his ankle and a slightly misshapen form to it as a whole.

It was pretty bad.

There’s a short shared glance between Eddie and Hen as they silently agree on the extent of his injury, and Hen kneels down towards him. “Alright, what’s your name sir?” She presses her fingers gingerly to the affected area and earns an immediate groan from the man.

“Antony—” He hisses his name through his teeth from the pain, and several of you collectively wince at the sight.

“Alright Antony, my name’s Hen, and this is Eddie, we’re gonna get you out of here and to a hosptial okay?” Hen gestures to Eddie behind her, and you take a second to furrow your eyebrows at the familiarity of the names. Then you catch the number of their uniform helmets. 118.

That meant Buck was here somewhere. He had to be.

“Please—” He lets out another pained groan as Hen instructs Eddie over to Antony’s other side to get him off the floor.

“How many of you are up here? Is anyone else injured?” Hen’s eyes scan the group for a quick head count, but someone beats her to it.

“There’s twelve of us,” Her voice is meek and almost unstable as she speaks, “There was thirteen but James… he…” She trails off like she knows she won’t be able to finish the sentence, and the intonation is enough for Hen to know what she’s implying.

“Alright…” Hen sighs softly as the groups demeanour dims slightly at the mention of James, and how everyone seems to huddle just that little bit closer together as if to comfort each other in their shared grief. “Can all of you swim?”

“We’ll be fine,” You answer her question with a small nod.

“Okay,” Hen returns your nod with her own before turning her gaze away from you and the group. “Eddie,”

“Got it,” He doesn’t even have to be asked before he’s tugging Antony’s weight over his shoulder to carry him, readying for the journey back down the stairs and hopefully safely out of the building.

The universe had other plans.

“Cap—” You can recognise Buck’s voice immediately, even with all of the radio distortion. “I found— he had— live electricity—”

It’s like a flip switches in Hen and Eddie’s brains at the new information.

“Electricity? That’s bad isn’t it? That’s gotta be bad are we gonna—”

“Nothing is going to happen to anyone.” Hen interrupts the girl’s anxious rambling with a raise of her hand. “Does this building have a rooftop?”

“Yeah uh, it’s— there’s a ladder over here,” One of the male members of the group, one of the employees, leads Hen towards the rooftop fire escape, pulling on the ladder until it collides with the floor. It’s locked though, only the owner has a key,”

“You locked the fire escape?” Eddie sounds more than a little exasperated at the news.

“I don’t know man I just work here—”

“Okay.” Hen interrupts once more, speaking into her radio. “Cap, we’ve got a rooftop exit, you need to get up here.”

“Copy— up now—” The radio continues to glitch on it’s transmission, but it sounds as though the message was properly received.

Getting the hatch open was not as easy, although with more than a little bit of teamwork and a twenty-five pound weight the group managed to force it from it’s hinges and climb everyone up onto the roof and out of any direct danger for the time being.

It was a momentary breath of relief, and the group seemed to agree as everyone practically collapsed in a heap now that the rush of adrenaline was wearing off. Although Eddie and Hen didn’t waste a minute as they set up Antony comfortably against one of the walls and began examining the rest of the group.

“Can you follow this light for me?” Hen holds up a penlight in front of your face, eyes following yours to judge your reactions and your pupillary response.

“I’m really okay, you should spend your time working on the people who really need you,” You follow her instructions even whilst trying to dissuade her gently, and she gives you a sharp shake of her head.

“Everyone’s important sweetheart, I’m just making sure you haven’t got any hidden injuries at even you don’t know about,” She clicks off her pen light once she’s satisfied, and then gives you a small pat on your shoulder before looking past you with an expression of relief on her face.

You follow her gaze yourself to be met with three other firefighters from the 118, presumably those from the first floor, and you don’t so much as have time to even register their faces in your mind before you’re being picked up into one of their arms and held in an almost bone-crushing hug.

“Thank god you’re okay—” You wouldn’t have even had to have heard his voice to know your proxy kidnapper was Buck, but hearing him is more than relieving for the small anxious part of your brain that was scared to death over his safety.

“I’m fine I’m fine—” Your words are echoed by a small laugh as your feet touch the floor again, and the two of you carefully peel yourselves from each other in your joined dampened state. “Are you okay?”

The two of you are caught up in your emotions enough that you essentially completely ignore the presence of the rest of Buck’s coworkers, oblivious to the looks they were giving you—and each other— in the process.

“I’m fine,” Buck nods as he pulls off his helmet, and you finally get a proper look at his face, dirty and soaked and so unbelievably kissable that you really can’t help yourself.

It’s what calls your attention back to the fact that there are indeed other people present, spurred by a short whistle from Chimney that leaves the two of you pulling away with flustered expressions.

“Uh—” Buck clears his throat into his elbow, using his free arm to pull you carefully against his side. “Guys, this is—”

“An absolute angel? It’s a pleasure to finally meet you properly,” Hen interrupts Buck’s introduction of you to reach out to you herself, her tone full of enthusiasm. “Buck does not stop taking about you,”

“Seriously, it’s 24/7,” Chimney adds on to Hen’s declaration with a determined gesture of his hand, and you don’t know whether to be flattered or embarrassed by the attention.

You’d been looking forward to meeting the team that Buck called family, truly, but you were not expecting to meet them like this.

You were absolutely drenched in flood water, probably covered in dirt, and most definitely looked like you’d been dragged through somebodies hedge.

Buck looks more proud than anything, and gives your side a small squeeze as he introduces you to everyone. “Hen and Chim,” The pair give you enthusiastic smiles, “That’s Eddie over there,” Eddie sticks his hand up in a makeshift wave as he focuses on properly wrapping Antony’s ankle with what’s available. “And this is Bobby,”

“It’s really a pleasure,” Bobby holds his right hand out to you, and you shake it politely, lips pressed into an almost nervous smile.

“It’s great to meet you all, Buck has told me a lot about all of you,” You let out a small, almost pathetic laugh at the end of your sentence. “I’m sorry we’re meeting like this,”

Hen waves you off with her hand and a laugh of her own. “Trust me, weirder things have happened,”

“Oh 100%,” Chimney nods in conjunction with Hen’s statement. “Welcome to the family,”

You give another small laugh and a “thank you,” as you settle yourself against Buck’s side, and he presses a kiss to the top of your head a with a content smile.

This might not have been the way he wanted you to meet the team, but it was perfectly unusual in its own way. And it was silently agreed that you were a perfect fit.

“So, uh, how are we getting down from here?” You turn your head over your shoulder to look over the edge of the roof, and the still high floods that covered most of the fire engine parked on the road.

“Uh…”

[zvaigzdelasas]

You can’t buy the Seagull in the US. But I bet you wish you could.

A small hatchback around the size of a Mini Cooper, the Seagull is a fast-charging electric car and claims a range of up to 250 miles [...] BYD, its Chinese manufacturer, claims it can go from 30 percent to 80 percent charged in a half-hour using a DC plug. It’s hardly a luxury car but it’s well-equipped, with a power driver’s seat and cruise control. “If I were looking for an inexpensive commuter car … this would be perfect,” veteran car journalist John McElroy said after taking a drive.

The best part? Its base model costs about $10,700 in China.

That’s about a third of the cost of the cheapest EV you can buy in the US. In South America, it’s a little pricier, but still fairly affordable, at under $24,000 for a top-trim version. Even in Europe, you can get an entry-level BYD for under €30,000. These are absolutely screaming deals — exactly the kind of products that could turbocharge our transition away from gas and toward electric vehicles.[...]

The problem for Americans? The Biden administration is hell-bent on preventing you from buying BYD’s product, and if Donald Trump returns to office, he is likely to fight it as well.

That’s because the BYD cars are made in China, and both Biden and Trump are committed to an ultranationalist trade policy meant to keep BYD’s products out. [...] Shipments to Europe have increased astronomically; Chinese companies sold 0.5 percent of EVs in Europe in 2019 but they’re already over 9 percent as of last year. Companies like BYD make cheap, reasonably good-quality cars people are eager to buy.

In 2018, Trump imposed, and Biden has since continued, a special 25 percent tax on Chinese-made autos, on top of the ordinary 2.5 percent tax on foreign-made cars.

That has so far prevented BYD and its Chinese peers from trying to enter the US market. US customer tastes are different enough that Chinese manufacturers would probably prefer to make cars tailored to them — but US policy has been so hostile toward cheap Chinese EVs that so far, the companies haven’t wanted to bother.

So, the result is that we’re left out of the bounty of cheap EV options created by BYD and others. “If you’re a consumer right now, the best place to be right now is China, because you have the best choice of EVs,” Ilaria Mazzocco, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an expert on Chinese EVs, says.[...]

Still, China’s price advantage is big enough that even the extreme Trump-Biden import tax might not be enough to deter companies like BYD from entering the US market. Even with the tariffs, Chinese cars might be cheaper than their rivals. “​​Subsidies most likely won’t be enough; Mr. Biden will need to impose [more] trade restrictions,” climate journalist Robinson Meyer predicted recently. The Biden administration is already making noise about imposing even more draconian taxes or trade restrictions against these vehicles. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has described Chinese-made cars as a national security threat, and recently announced an investigation into the vehicles’ data collection abilities and the possibility they could send movement data to Beijing.

On the one hand, Biden is offering Americans up to $7,500 per vehicle to buy EVs (provided they meet certain made-in-North America rules). On the other hand, he’s imposing massive taxes to keep Americans from buying EVs. It’s a bizarre policy that makes no sense from a climate perspective.[...]

[The Biden Administration] has proven shockingly willing to sabotage its own climate policy if it gets to stick it to the Chinese in the process.

“There’s almost an across-the-board apprehension about Chinese EVs, even though they would make an important contribution to [lower] CO2 emissions,” Gary Clyde Hufbauer, a veteran trade expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, says.[...]

Realistically, Helveston argues, BYD might not sell something like the Seagull in the US because it’s smaller than most cars Americans buy. They’d probably build plants in the US instead, or its free-trade zone partners Canada and Mexico, to build vehicles tailored for Americans. “If you’re going to really enter a market, you have to make it locally,” Helveston explains. “US automakers like GM sell and make millions of cars in China to sell in China.” BYD would do the same. Indeed, it’s already reportedly scouting sites for factories in Mexico.

If they ever were to set up shop in North America, BYD and other Chinese car companies would still have a major price advantage versus American EVs. They have years more experience and a much more successful track record of building batteries and EVs at low cost.

“Part of why they’re so successful is they’ve been thinking outside the box on cost reduction for a long time,” Mazzocco says. They took the “opposite of the Tesla approach”: starting not with luxury vehicles but ultra-cheap cars fit for taxi fleets and not much else, and constantly improving their early inexpensive prototypes. The result is that Chinese firms have gotten extremely good at making inexpensive EVs, at a time when Ford, by contrast, lost $28,000 for every EV it sold in 2023.[...]

“If you have more affordable EVs in the United States, no matter where you come from,” Gopal says, “that’s better for the climate.”

Still, the Biden administration reportedly wants to restrict Chinese car companies’ access to the US even if they do set up shop in North America. Bloomberg reported earlier this month that the Biden administration is formulating rules that would limit US sales of Chinese-made parts, even if they’re in vehicles ultimately assembled in the US or Mexico.[...]

But the Biden administration’s objections to Chinese EVs are also ideological. The Biden administration represents the victory of a protectionist, trade-skeptical wing of the Democratic party that was relegated to the sidelines during the Clinton and Obama years.[...]

[O]ver 90 percent of American households have a car, and surging car prices were a huge contributor to the 2021–2023 rise in inflation.

Barriers to importing cheap cars make inflation worse and reduce the real incomes of the middle class.

Not only are the administration and other left-leaning institutions opposed to Chinese EVs, but hardline conservatives at places like the Heritage Foundation are calling for outright bans on Chinese EVs as well. Their rationale is security, another theme the Biden administration evokes often. On Thursday, the Commerce Department announced it was beginning a process to “investigate the national security risks of … PRC-manufactured technology in [internet-connected] vehicles.”

6 Mar 24

[caffichai]

Food Bank Fundraiser

Hi everyone!

First of all, I want to say thanks to everyone who's been leaving such nice tags/comments on stuff I've posted! It's been really encouraging (o^▽^o)

Anyway, I think we all know it's very dark days on the economic front for many of us. So as such, I'd like to help raise some funds for Food Banks Canada! In exchange for you making a donation to the food bank, I will draw a character suggestion!

I know this is not really the sort of thing I normally do or post here but... many folks are struggling to put food on the table right now, and the food bank is a source of support for many and provides an absolute necessity. I've seen many people struggling in my own city, and food security has become an even bigger issue than it already was in the last couple of years with the food bank struggling to keep up with demand. Of course, food security is an issue across the whole country that's putting a huge strain on food banks, with nearly 5% of the entire population making use of food banks monthly, and 23% of the population reporting food insecurity (CBC, 2024; Global News, 2024). Unsurprisingly, those who are already most disadvantaged suffer the effects of food scarcity even more (Statistics Canada, 2023). To make matters more desperate, Canada's food bank system is on the brink of collapse (CTV News, 2024).

I know this isn't going to something big enough to change the world or anything, but being able to make even a small impact for individual people is important too!

✨Incentives✨

Of course, I'm sure people aren't just in it for a reward, but rewards make things all the sweeter, right?

For those who want to contribute, I'll take a character suggestion and add it to a poll (depending on the number of contributors, it may be split up into multiple polls), and then I'll draw as many as I can from top to bottom ranking! If you contribute, please send me a DM with your donation receipt and your character idea! They won't necessarily all be drawn in the same style, and they'll be done according to how much time I've got. (I know that commissions are probably the biggest incentive, but realistically, I struggle to get them done quickly and they're probably not that affordable to everyone)

If you prefer SFW or NSFW, you can let me know (But NSFW will be posted to Cohost). If you make a bigger contribution, I'll reach out to you and ask if you wanna see more specifics/details in your piece. How's that for sweetening the pie? :3

For those who can't make a donation (which is completely understandable), simply spreading the post is also helpful, and I appreciate that greatly as well!

Don't forget that giving a donation allows you to get a tax break based on the amount donated as well!

Alternatives?

If you'd rather donate to your own local food bank, that's great too! You can DM me and send me a pic of your receipt and I'll still add your suggestion to the poll.

If you REALLY want a commission, you can also DM me and I'll do my best to fulfil it! I won't be taking commissions for this till/if there's at least a couple of items on the poll though. The proceeds will go to my own local food bank. The commission will be done later though, and may take some time to fulfil. I take payment only after starting.

When do we start??

I guess once there's a good number of poll options? I have no idea how long that will be, but rest assured I'll keep you updated!

Where do we contribute?

You can make your donation to Food Banks Canada! They really need it!

Alternatively, you can make a donation to your local food bank or equivalent charity.

Other Questions?

Feel free to send me a message or an ask! I'll get back to you ASAP. If I need to include more details or clarify something, let me know! It's my first time doing this!

TL;DR

I want to help raise money for food banks! Anyone who contributes to Food Banks Canada (or donates to their own local food bank or equivalent charity) can DM me with their receipt and give a character to add to the poll. Poll characters will be drawn in order of their ranking, as many as I can manage, over as long a period of time as I can manage!

No pressure to donate of course, I just figured this would be a fun way of raising a bit of money to help out, and allow us to donate more than what I personally can

Current Contributor Count: 13

Suggested Characters:

Imagine your beloved, obscure or popular character here on this poll list! Oooooooh, how lucrative :3

Total funds raised:

780.36$!!!

[captainsophiestark]

Unexpected Guest

Dick Grayson x Reader

Masterlist - Join My Taglist!

Written for my personal fic writing challenge for 2024, Sophie's Year of Fic! Featuring a new fic being posted every Friday, all year long :)

Fandom: DC

Summary: Dating a vigilante sometimes leads to a few false alarm scares, but Dick Grayson couldn't be happier with how well his partner rolls with his crazy family.

Word Count: 1,410

Category: Fluff

Putting work into an AI program without permission is illegal. You do not have my permission. Do not do it.

Crash!

My eyes shot open at the sound of a noise from the living room of the apartment I shared with my boyfriend, Dick Grayson. The man in question still snored peacefully next to me, annoyingly, but a quick glance at the clock told me why. It wasn't quite 5am, and Dick had been out patrolling until one in the morning. I listened carefully for any other noises in the apartment. I didn't want to wake my poor boyfriend up unless I absolutely had to.

After a few minutes of nothing, I heard another crash followed by a tense voice and what sounded like hushed swearing. This time, I didn't hesitate to roll over and whack Dick on the chest, hard.

His eyes shot open and he was half sitting up when I managed to throw a hand over his mouth to keep him from giving away that we were awake. My wide eyes must've tipped him off to something being wrong, because I immediately saw him shift from sleepy to ready for action.

Slowly, I dropped my hand from his mouth and leaned in to whisper in his ear.

"There's someone in our living room. I heard two crashes and someone swearing."

Dick nodded once, then motioned with his hands while mouthing 'stay here'. He hopped off the bed, grabbing his escrima sticks from where he'd thrown them onto the dresser, then stalked towards the door with catlike grace and stealth. After a minute, I decided I couldn't just let him go alone, superhero or no, so I grabbed the bat I kept by my side of the bed and followed after him.

Dick popped out the door, and after a moment without hearing anything, I followed, bat at the ready. I found my boyfriend with one hand on his hip, weapons down, staring into the kitchen. I followed his gaze to find none other than Jason Todd in our kitchen, a mixing bowl and some eggs in front of him and a look with a significant lack of guilt on his face.

"What? I was after somebody and it dragged me all the way to Bludhaven. I needed a place to crash that was closer than Gotham."

Dick and I both shook our heads. As the oldest of a very high number of siblings, his apartment had become a second home base for every single other batkid. When we'd finally moved in together last month, he'd warned me I needed to be prepared for things like this.

"Glad you know to help yourself, Little Wing," said Dick with a sigh, waving one tired hand to Jason before turning and heading back to bed. I squeezed his shoulder and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek as he passed me, then headed into the kitchen with a smile.

"My tax for you making me think I'd have to fight off an assailant with a bat at five in the morning is my own serving of whatever you're making," I said, taking a seat on one of the kitchen island stools. Jason raised an eyebrow at me.

"You're not going back to bed?"

"Nah. Unlike Dick, I got to bed at a somewhat reasonable hour last night, so the adrenaline dump isn't threatening to put me to sleep. I'd rather hang out with you, especially since you're a better cook than Dick and I combined. I'm not missing out on that."

Jason snorted, cracking an egg and resuming his cooking all the same.

"Dick contributes nothing to your combined cooking score," he said. "I'm pretty sure he's burned cereal before."

I laughed. "Yeah, I'm pretty sure you're right. He's gotten better though. We watch the Food Network and look up recipes to make together, and I can trust him with way more than I used to be able to."

"If you could teach him anything it'd be a miracle," said Jason with a snort. I just hummed, trying to pick up some new skills of my own as I watched Jason cook.

"To be totally fair to him, I once forgot what I was doing and strained soup because I was on autopilot for pasta."

Jason barked a laugh, unable to hold himself back, and looked at me with a grin and a raised eyebrow.

"Really?" I nodded. "That's pathetic."

I just shrugged. "Yeah. But at least there's not a lot of places to go but up, after that."

"I guess so."

Jason and I chatted as he cooked and I watched, keeping our voices low so Dick could sleep—although, after the night he'd had, he'd probably sleep through a train in our living room. After breakfast, Jason decided to go down for a nap on the couch, passing out almost as soon as we'd put the last few dishes in the sink. I just smiled, threw a blanket over him, and wandered back into the bedroom to find Dick.

It was late enough in the morning now that my boyfriend was officially up and about, stretching by the bed with his hair still a little messed up from sleeping. I grinned and flopped down against the headboard as he crossed the room to the dresser to pull out clothes.

"How's Jaybird?" he asked. "Still a good cook?"

"Still a great cook. And he's good. He seems a little wiped out from patrols and stuff, though. He's taking a nap on the couch right now."

Dick smiled and shook his head. "I get up and he goes to sleep. Typical."

"Clearly he's avoiding you."

"Clearly."

Dick and I shared a smile, and then he sighed.

"I'm going to take a shower. Hopefully Jason will be up by the time I'm out, because I actually have things to do today."

I smiled, shifting on the bed to pull the covers over myself. "I'm sure you can be quiet if he's not. Wake me up when you're out of the shower, okay? A post-breakfast nap sounds too good to resist right now."

My boyfriend laughed. "Alright, will do. I'll wake you and Jason up when I'm out."

"Mhm. Good luck with him."

"Thanks, I'm gonna need it."

I closed my eyes, getting comfortable and ready for my nap, but before I drifted off I heard Dick's shuffling footsteps crossing the room to stand by my side of the bed. A second later, he sat down next to me, the bed dipping under his weight. I cracked an eye open to squint at him.

"What do you want?"

He grinned at me and chuckled.

"Don't worry, I'm not going to interfere with your nap. I just... I wanted to say how much I appreciate you, and how good you are with my family. They mean the world to me, but I know having vigilantes dropping in at all hours of the day and night can be a little much to deal with. So thank you for being so wonderful about it, and about them."

I sighed, sitting all the way up and propping myself up on my hands to look Dick in the eye.

"Dick, I love you. And I love your family. Sure, it took a little getting used to some of the vigilante stuff, but the longer I know them the more I love them. You don't have to thank me for anything. They're my family too."

Dick absolutely beamed at me, wrapping one arm around my back and pulling me in for a kiss. I immediately reciprocated, tangling one hand in the hair at the nape of his neck. I smiled into the kiss and a moment later, Dick deepened it. We were right on the edge of escalating into something more, but both thought better of it at the last moment.

"I should take a shower," he said, still looking a little reluctant as he pulled away.

"Yeah, and you should stop interrupting my nap."

Dick snorted, rolling his eyes as he finally stood and headed for the bathroom. I grinned after him as he went, flopping back down onto my pillow only as Dick closed the bathroom door.

I took a deep breath and sighed, a smile on my face, as I closed my eyes for the second time. I heard the water start in the bathroom, and a faint smell of breakfast still hung in the air. I was surrounded by people I loved dearly, and who loved me right back. No matter the scare Jason had given me when he'd shown up, I couldn't ask for a better start to my morning than this.

****************

Everything Taglist: @rosecentury @kmc1989

DC Taglist: @luv-ghostie

[askthestans]

Hey Stan, can you tell us stories about your brother Sherman being a total square?

Stan and Ford: At the same time. You mean Square-mie?

Both of them laugh, not in a harsh way, but the kind of lighthearted chuckles that usually come from one sibling teasing another. It's obvious they love their older brother, but... like most siblings, they'll always jump on a chance to make fun of one another.

Stan: Oh, he always hated that nickname! Look, Anon, lemme first introduce ya to the official scale of Pines fun-ness. At the top, there's me, for obvious reasons. Second best is Mabel, also for obvious reasons. And... He pauses, putting his hand to his chin. Damn, I gotta say, I think Ford's next-

Ford: I am as much of an adventurer as I am a scientist.

Stan: Yeah, definitely Ford, despite his dorkiness and obsession with... He gestures at Ford's honors and trophies for grades and intelligence related successes from childhood. That garbage. Good grades and other crap. And then-

Ford: Definitely our nephew, Dipper and Mabel's father. Works in IT, very smart, has a little bit more of Mabel's fun-loving nature. But far less adventurous than you or I. You and I could never live a boring suburban life like he does.

Stan: Grinning. Then, near the very bottom, you've got Dipper. No offense to the kid, but he's Ford's smarts but minus Ford's rebel streak. Walkin' wet blanket at times, always askin' how many laws we're breakin' while we're out havin' fun... although me and Ford are teachin' 'im to grow past it, as much as his parents will let us corrupt 'im. But he at least likes to have fun, I'll give 'im that. So that leaves us at-

Ford: Way at the very bottom of the Pines fun-ness scale, you have... Square-mie. He coughs. Shermie, sorry.

Both men howl with snorts and laughter again, barely able to explain why.

Stan: Wiping a tear from his eye, wheezing a bit. Okay, okay, Anon, picture this: take Dipper and his dad's wet blanket crap and crank it up to 1000. This guy? Our brother? Good ol' Saint Sherm? Guy's never even had a parking ticket his entire life! He won't even jaywalk! He never goes even one mile per hour above the speed limit! He's like the human equivalent of white bread. Of unflavored oatmeal. Got average grades, got a boring old suburban house with a literal white picket fence, had an average job-

Ford: Shudders. I have no idea how he worked as an IRS accountant for decades.

Stan: Ugh, don't remind me. He's always barkin' at me. "Stan, you pay your taxes yet this year?" this. "Stan, you need to contribute to your civic duty.", that. Cripes, ol' Sherm is like the anti-Pines. A Pines is supposed to laugh in the face of rules and authority. This guy huffs whatever authority's smokin' like he's part of a cult. Even when we were kids, he'd always do chores even when he wasn't asked. Kept his room clean as a whistle. Barked at me to do my homework and foiled our pranks when he could. Pure goody two shoes, so much he'd make an angel blush. I think all of our Ma's rebellion genes went to us, and Pa's strictness went to Sherm.

Ford: Yes, so after I returned and we explained to him what had happened, he...

Both men fall into a snicker fest again, unsure who will stop laughing first long enough to tell the story.

Stan: Holy mackerel, he... he... Snort. Picture Dipper at, like, seventy years old, but with an even bigger stick up his ass and even less muscles somehow. Gets told this long, convoluted as hell tale about me fakin' my death and pretendin' to be Ford for three decades, Ford gettin' lost in sci-fi sideburn land for just as long, the world almost ending with Sherm's grandkids along for the ride... just mind bendin' stuff... and the first words outta his mouth... and for reference, this guy never swears, and he never has thrown a punch at anyone... he's so square he's a cube! But he just says...

He wheezes, so Ford has to finish the story.

Ford: Snort. He raises his voice a bit, likely to mimic Shermie's. "I just knew I shoulda kicked your asses more when we were kids."

The two howl and cackle with laughter, leaning on each other for support.

Stan: And then he just... walked away, out his door, down the street to the gas station, bought beer for the - and I'm not kidding - the first time in his life, and sat back down in his old man chair and faced us as we just stood there, gobsmacked, while he cracked one open and drank it with an expression like a man betrayed. And he said-

Ford: "You two knuckleheads are lucky I'm even older than you, 'cause if I wasn't, I'd plant my loafer up your ass! You're gonna sit down, shut up, and let me drink this crap while I process whatever the f*ck I just heard and how many goddamn taxes you owe. And then maybe I'll think about huggin' your sorry asses."

More laughing.

Stan: I'm not sure if he was more mad about the taxes, or the fact that I'd faked my death all those years ago, or... the world ending part where Dipper and Mabes coulda been hurt... or maybe because we drove him to drink and swear and threaten someone for the first time in his whole goddamn life, all in the same day, he... Chuckles. He never really said. All I know is, is I don't think I've ever had my jaw that close to the floor in my life.

Ford: Honestly, I think we just kind of... broke him. Even still, I think he blew our minds more than we blew his.

Stan: He laughs a bit more, then shakes his head. Pfft, can you imagine Sherm kickin' our asses, anyway? He'd probably gently nudge one of our shins and give up. He's too nice for anything worse. That's the thing with our brother: he may be boring as sin, but... he's a good guy.

Ford: He always protected us from bullies when we were kids. Carried us home whenever we sprained an ankle or broke a bone.

Stan: And bought us ice cream whenever we asked, and fixed our bikes, and patched us up, scared the "monsters" outta our closet, and taught us most of what we know. Kind of like a second Dad, honestly, and one a lot less grumpy. A bit more somber. And he helped our parents out in their old age when we weren't around, until the... well, you know. 'Til the end.

Ford: His smile fades, then he sighs, expression a bit bittersweet. And he did actually hug us.

Stan: He scratches the back of his head, a bit embarrassed, but smiling fondly. For three hours straight.

[solarpunkani]

You know what I feel we need more of?

Community centers.

Specifically, places where people can gather, have fun, host events or even just hang out. Similar to what libraries are, but not quite--a place where kids can be loud and rowdy and hang out, make friends, practice sports. Though they definitely should still have quiet areas, maybe craft rooms too. A nice place to go to and hang out after school before you're ready to head home--or a safe place to stay if you don't want to head home. Community centers could also still be fantastic for adults too--they could be used as a place to host classes on different crafts, or repairs, etc.--and still be a perfectly valid place to hang out and seek refuge.

Places like these do exist in many places in a few different forms, but a lot of them are directly tied to organizations and groups that may make people more hesitant to partake in them (ie churches, Police Athletic Leagues), or they have a cost barrier to taking part of the amenities (YMCA). While these places are definitely suitable and fulfilling for many people, they're often limiting and stifling for others--if not just flat-out inaccessible. Not to mention, they don't all fill the roles I mentioned above.

I think having robust community centers would be great for societies all over. I'll admit, my imagination is a bit grand--community gardens, sports rec rooms, swimming pools, reading and craft rooms, a repair cafe, a food cafe, maybe a dorming area for overnight stays, soup kitchens, showers, mutual aid closets and such.

Though I guess that brings about the question of how this would be funded. With churches, it's tithes and other forms of community fundraising. With police athletic leagues, its... taxes, I guess? Alongside other donations. And with the YMCA, it's memberships that provide the funding for their amenities. My initial instinct is to say a mix of taxes and maybe some community contributions would be what funds a good community center, but then there comes the issue of some places having better or worse community centers depending on the median income of their area... especially when you see how places like libraries already get little funding in favor of larger policing budgets (the libraries in my city are all closed on Sundays, and have shorter hours in general, for example)

I know I'm just rambling at this point. I just think community centers are cool! They're punk! And we should have them--cool, fun community centers!

[reasonsforhope]

"Starting in July 2024, California will be the first state to charge an excise tax on guns and ammunition. The new tax – an 11% levy on each sale – will come on top of federal excise taxes of 10% or 11% for firearms and California’s [7.5]% sales tax (x).

The National Rifle Association has characterized California’s Gun Violence Prevention and School Safety Act as an affront to the Constitution. But the reaction from the gun lobby and firearms manufactures may hint at something else: the impact that the measure, which is aimed at reducing gun violence, may have on sales.

As a professor who studies the economics of violence and illicit trades at the University of San Diego’s Kroc School of Peace Studies, I think this law could have important ramifications.

One way to think about it is to compare state tax policies on firearms with those on alcohol and tobacco products. It’s not for nothing that these all appear in the name of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, also known as ATF...

The ATF focuses on those products because, while legal, they can cause significant harm to society – in the form of drunken driving, for example, or cancer-causing addictions. They also have a common history: All have been associated with criminal organizations seeking to profit from illicit markets.

Alcohol and tobacco products are thus usually subject to state excise taxes. This policy is known as a “Pigouvian tax,” named after 20th-century British economist Arthur Pigou. By making a given product more expensive, such a tax leads people to buy less of it, reducing the harm to society while generating tax revenue that the state can theoretically use to offset those harms that still accrue.

California, for instance, imposes a US$2.87 excise tax on each pack of cigarettes. That tax is higher than the national average but much lower than New York’s $5.35 levy. California also imposed a vaping excise tax of 12.5% in 2021.

Of the three ATF product families, firearms have enjoyed an exemption from California excise taxes. Until now...

How Much Will the Policy Help?

It’s unclear how the new tax will affect gun violence. In theory, the tax should be highly effective. In 2023, some colleagues and I modeled the U.S. market for firearms and determined that for every 1% increase in price, demand decreases by 2.6%. This means that the market should be very sensitive to tax increases.

Using these estimates, another colleague recently estimated that the California excise tax would reduce gun sales by 30% to 44%. If applied across the country, the tax could generate an additional $1.5 billion to $1.9 billion in government revenue.

One possible problem will come from surrounding states: It’s already easy to illegally transport guns bought in Nevada, where laws are more lax, to the Golden State.

But there’s some evidence that suggests California’s stringent policies won’t be neutralized by its neighbors.

When the federal assault weapons ban expired in 2004, making it much easier to buy AR- and AK-style rifles across much of the U.S., gun murders across the border in Mexico skyrocketed. Two studies show the exception was the Mexican state of Baja California, right across the border with California, which had kept its state-level assault weapons ban in place.

Gun seizures in Mexico show that all four U.S. states bordering Mexico rank in the top five state sources of U.S.-sold guns in Mexico. But California contributes 75% less than its population and proximity would suggest.

So, California laws seem to already be making a difference in reducing gun violence. I believe the excise tax could accomplish still more. Other states struggling against the rising tide of guns will be watching closely."

-via The Conversation, May 21, 2024