#Bezos doesn’t pay taxes

[bioethicists]

beer killed my father . he had a disease which destroyed his body and strained his relationships with his wife, his friends, and his children. Alcohol destroys everything it touches, theres a reason you see so many liquor stores in poor neighborhoods. don’t be fucking obtuse. Prohibition obviously doesn’t work, but I wish alcohol was taxed higher. And i want the CEO of Heineken on the guillotine right after Jeff Bezos.

before anything, i want to let you know that i am incredibly sorry about your father. alcohol has decimated entire generations of my family, played a crucial role in the neglectful family structure i spent the first 19 years of my life suffering under, + played a minor but not insignificant role in my brother's death. i would never undermine or dismiss that in anyone.

i used to feel very similarly to you, in large part because my mother is a recovering alcoholic who raised me to believe that alcohol is a magic poison which turns people into monsters + i, being her child, probably inherited a disease which would also turn me into a monster if i chose to drink. it's a deeply painful + understandable response to the pain that alcohol can cause.

my first question is, does alcohol really "destroy everything it touches"? are there not millions of people who engage with alcohol, in varying degrees of recreational use, who experience minimal or no negative impacts? or do you believe that everyone who drinks alcohol in any capacity is experiencing severe destruction in their lives as a result? does the existence of people for whom alcohol enriches their lives (or is a neutral presence) at all invalidate your experience, or your father's?

my second question is, you've identified that there are 'so many liquor stores in poor neighborhoods' (i would add there is a lot of alcohol in rich neighborhoods, just distributed in less stigmatized ways, like boutique wineries + fancy bars), do you think that companies are strategically attempting to create alcohol dependencies among poor people, or do you think that poverty creates the pain, hopelessness, + desperation which can fuel an alcohol habit (which is then exacerbated by intergenerational trauma + community alcohol culture).

i feel no allegiance to liquor companies- they absolutely do make the bulk of their profits off of people who are drinking in a way that is destroying their lives (unsure if i trust the exact scope of the research in that link but i trust the gist). however, liquor companies love the disease model, because it exempts them from responsibility. if alcoholism is truly a genetic disease, then liquor companies, bars, package stores hold no fault in the development of destructive drinking habits + community norms (natasha Schüll discusses this in her book about gambling addiction)- the people were already sick + would be getting it somewhere else, anyway, right? but as you have correctly identified, liquor companies help create the structures which turn alcohol use into an accessible + normalized mode of self-destruction.

my third question is, will taxing liquor help the real problem? yes, it reduces alcohol consumption, but does it reduce addiction? or does it make cheapskates like me say "i'm not fucking paying for that" while individuals who consume alcohol compulsively either eat the cost or turn to more illicit ways of obtaining alcohol. or, rephrased, is the problem that alcohol is too accessible? is alcohol a magical poison which turns 'normal' people into 'alcoholics'? alternatively, is alcoholism a genetic condition, unrelated to any outside circumstances, which is triggered by drinking?

or: is alcoholism one of many ways in which people who are experiencing hopelessness, pain, grief, poverty, trauma, etc use to numb themselves, harm themselves, + make life feel more bearable? at this point, i do believe there is at least a temperament factor which makes people more likely to use substances over other forms of escape (hence why my brother used substances while i turned to anorexia + do not struggle with substance use). are we actually addressing the problem if we make it more expensive (thus, mind you, further impoverishing people with alcohol addictions!)? or are we shifting the pain these people are experiencing to either other avenues (opioids, other drugs, totally different ways of coping which are often just as destructive) or an unregulated, underground alcohol market.

the way you are viewing alcohol, alcohol is a unique substance which is manufacturing or feeding illness in people in order to make them behave in ways which destroy their lives + the lives of others. the way i am viewing it, alcohol is a presence which can fill a void that is being created in people's lives as a response to structural, communal, or social suffering. when alcohol is painted as the cause of this pain, we are able to look the other way from a which world is structured to cause an immense amount of people to suffer needlessly. at the same time, the common sense observation that many of us engage with alcohol in ways which do not destroy our lives, as well as the knowledge that prohibition does not work, prevents the erasure of alcohol from public or private life.

who benefits from the belief that alcohol is a uniquely corrupting substance? what lessons did we actually learn from prohibition- is trying to do it to a lesser degree (make alcohol less accessible) actually going to do anything? when the price of opioids went up due to dea crackdowns, did people stop buying opioids or did the market flood with cheap + deadly fentanyl? is the problem that people are drinking or that they are suffering?

[gaphic]

I think a lot of people have this idea that mrbeasts wealth is functionally similar to that of gates and bezos and such, in the sense that gates and bezos donating to charity is entirely performative. for them it’s a tax write-off and that money would do far more good if it was used to do unglamorous things like paying taxes and lobbying politicians to pass labor protections

but mrbeast isn’t a tech magnate. his videos are his primary revenue stream. if he’s not making content and getting clicks, that money doesn’t go to a better cause, it goes away.

his business model is literally funneling youtube ad revenue into poor people’s pockets. it’s a business model that could only exist in a vile and horrific system, but I’m sorry to say that capitalism isn’t his fucking fault. unless he’s got a slew of labor abuses I don’t know about the vitriol honestly just sounds like jealousy to me

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Podcasting "View A SKU"

This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, “View a SKU: Let’s Make Amazon Into a Dumb Pipe,” about how interop can help us demonopolize Amazon and tame its market power:

https://doctorow.medium.com/view-a-sku-32721d623aee

To explain this proposal, I need to start with an axiom: there are lots of problems with Amazon (lots!) but the fact that Amazon is really convenient is not one of those problems. Your use of Amazon isn’t a mark of your “laziness” anymore than your consumption of plastics is a mark of your indifference to the planet.

As Zephyr Teachout writes in her stupendous book Break ’Em Up:

“I like supporting local retail for shopping whenever possible. But I will not shame people for buying from Amazon the magic markers they use to write ‘Break up Bezos’ power’ on a big poster they parade outside their state attorney general’s office.”

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250200907/breakemup

The drive to “shop local” is great, but it shouldn’t become a hairshirt. If you buy something from Amazon, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you support union-busting, monopolization and creepy surveillance doorbells. It might just mean that you are out of time and live in a place where Amazon killed most of the retail that survived Walmart.

[Image ID: A Mr Gotcha panel by Matt Bors from The Nib. A downtrodden peasant says, ‘We should improve society somewhat.’ Mr Gotcha replies, ‘Yet you participate in society, curious! I am very intelligent.’]

If you’ve enjoyed Matt Bors’s work, you understand this. It’s the essence of the Mr Gotcha gag. A downtrodden peasant says, “We should improve society somewhat” and Mr Gotcha replies, “Yet you participate in society, curious! I am very intelligent.”

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/13/theory-of-change/#mr-gotcha

The fact that Amazon has given us a single database in which you can search for a large slice of all the objects of retail commerce, read reviews, and explore alternatives is good, actually. The problem is in how Amazon abuses its workforce, crams its suppliers, self-preferences its own goods, and shifts wealth from taxpaying local businesses to its tax-evading coffers.

The same politics and economics that have made it so hard not to use Amazon have also made working people much poorer, both in terms of money and time. It’s not reasonable to expect people who are piecing together a living from three or four casualized jobs and paying sky-high pump prices to spend hours driving around looking for a local merchant to buy a specific widget at.

But what if we could make shopping locally — where a local alternative existed — easier than shopping at Amazon? What if we could actually turn Amazon into a tool for finding goods at local merchants?

[Image ID: A screenshot from Library Extension, showing an Amazon listing for one of the Divergent books with the ‘Buy’ button replaced by buttons to reserve at a variety of local libraries.]

That’s where my proposal comes in. It was inspired by Library Extension, a browser plugin that notices if you’re looking at a book on Amazon and adds a “Reserve at your local library” button to the page, over the “Add to your cart” button.

https://www.libraryextension.com/

Library Extension is an example of adversarial interoperabitlity (or what we at EFF call “comcom,” short for “competitive compatibility”). That’s when someone adds features to an existing product or service without permission from the company that made it — like an ad-blocker that changes the websites you look at to make them better for you.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

Library Extension works as well as it does because books all share a common set of unique identifiers: the ISBN, which is easy to detect on a webpage and also easy to look up in a database of library books. Shared identifiers make cross-referencing easy.

[Image ID: The product listing and URL for an Amazon product page, with the ASINs highlighted in pink.]

As it happens, Amazon has assigned unique identifiers to virtually anything you might want to buy: the ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number). What if a co-op created a database that cross-referenced ASINs with other inventory numbers (like UPCs and SKUs)? We could offer inventory control system plug-ins to merchants that automatically listed their inventory in a central, co-operatively managed database of what was for sale, where.

Then, users who wanted to shop locally could install a Library Extension-like browser plugin that did a quick lookup whenever they browsed an Amazon product page, and, if the product was for sale locally, replace the “Add to Cart” button with a “Buy from local merchant” one, which would automatically process a payment to the local merchant using a payment method stored in your browser (no need to set up a separate account for every merchant).

Likewise, we could expand Library Extension to add a “Buy from bookshop.org” button to every book page, and a “Buy from libro,fm” button to every audiobook page.

In other words, we could turn Amazon into a dumb pipe: a commodity supplier of catalog pages, reviews and recommendations. The conversion of centralized services into dumb pipes is a time-honored tradition, as David Isenberg wrote in his classic 1998 ACM paper:

https://www.isen.com/papers/Dawnstupid.html

Now, could we do this? As a technical matter, sure. A lot would depend on adapting small businesses’ inventory control systems, but the vendors behind those systems would benefit from participating in those adaptations, as would their customers.

What about as a legal matter? Well, IANAL, but…

Your browser is yours. Adapting the web-pages you get served to suit your tastes is unambiguously lawful, as is providing the tools to do so. Hence the rise of ad-blockers, “the biggest boycott in world history”:

https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2015/09/28/beyond-ad-blocking-the-biggest-boycott-in-human-history/

The ASIN database is a collection of factual identifiers; the USA has (wisely) not adopted the Database Right that the EU got suckered into, so databases of factual identifiers are not copyrightable:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co.

Amazon’s terms of service ban you from doing this kind of thing, but US federal judges are increasingly skeptical of attempts to block scraping public information through terms of service:

https://www.fenwick.com/insights/publications/hiq-labs-scrapes-by-again-the-ninth-circuit-reaffirms-that-data-scraping-does-not-violate-the-cfaa

Note that executing this plan won’t solve the Amazon problem, but it will solve an Amazon problem. It’s no substitute for other forms of antitrust enforcement (bans on self-preferencing, forced selloffs of anticompetitive acquisitions, merger scrutiny) but it is faster than those things, and will deliver immediate relief to shoppers and small businesses.

That’s the kind of “tech exceptionalism” I’m completely here for. The breakup of the Bell System took 69 years, all told. We don’t want to wait 69 years before we blunt Amazon’s monopoly power:

https://onezero.medium.com/jam-to-day-46b74d5b1da4

This is why Big Tech is the natural starting place for antitrust: because Big Tech is built atop general purpose computers that can be rendered interoperable, regulators seeking to limit Big Tech power have unique, powerful additions to their to toolkits.

I know that some of my comrades-in-arms are skeptical of Big Tech antitrust, correctly asserting that other monopolies (like telecoms and entertainment companies) are also corrupt monopolies in sore need of antitrust attention. I want to break those companies’ corporate power, too! In fact, my next book is all about limiting the power of tech and entertainment judges to screw creative workers:

http://www.beacon.org/Chokepoint-Capitalism-P1856.aspx

But the availability of cool, fast-acting interoperability remedies make Big Tech the natural place to start — the natural vanguard for the anti-monopoly fights we’ll have to bring to every sector, from cheerleading uniforms to beer, from finance to international shipping:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

Taming Big Tech is where we start, not where we end. It’s the orchard with the most low-hanging fruit. Racking up victories against Big Tech will create the political will and the movement power to go after all those other monopolies:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/interoperability-fix-internet-not-tech-companies

Here’s the podcast episode: https://craphound.com/news/2022/07/31/view-a-sku-lets-make-amazon-into-a-dumb-pipe/

Here’s a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the Internet Archive; they’ll host your stuff for free, forever):

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_432/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_432_-_View_a_SKU.mp3

And here’s a link to my podcast feed: https://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

[Image ID: A modified Amazon product listing page; the buy with Amazon button and Prime logo have been replaced with a "Buy from DIY Center" button a 'Buy local' logo with an upside-down Amazon smile logo, and the 'In Stock' wordmark has been replaced with 'In stock at a local merchant: DIY Center.]

[lastchancevillagegreen]

Friday, 1 July 2022:

Strange Morning In The Garden The Loyal Seas (American Laundromat) (released in 2022)

This album took me by surprise when my brother posted a track from it over on God’s Jukebox two weeks ago, the week ending 18 June.  The reason it took me by surprise is that the band is primarily comprised of Tanya Donelly and Brian Sullivan.  Now the latter name is not one I am familiar with at all.  His primary vehicle is Dylan In The Movies, you can find that work on bandcamp.  He serves as the producer, vocalist and guitar player.  Donelly and Sullivan have been working together at least since 2008 when the pair joined together to record a cover of The Cure’s Lovecats, of all songs, for a tribute album Just Like Heaven: A Tribute To The Cure which came out on American Laundromat which is Donelly’s label (and which releases a lot of tribute albums, which seems like their stock in trade.  

I’ve been aware of Donelly’s work since The Breeders debut Pod (I didn’t hop on Throwing Muses’ train until 1994, long after Donelly left the band) which came out in 1990.  I still have my original copy on vinyl, but for some reasons I saw fit to trade both Belly albums 1992′s Star and 1995′s King.  Who on Earth trades away 4AD vinyl?  I have CDs of both albums, but they can’t even begin to compare to the vinyl versions.  Her first true solo album under her own name, 1997′s Lovesongs For Underdogs has long been a favorite album.  The only Donelly album I don’t own is a covers album she recorded in 2020 with The Parkington Sisters (Tanya Donelly and The Parkington Sisters).

As soon as I heard the track my brother posted on God’s Jukebox, the title track, I immediately ran over to American Laundromat’s website and bought a copy.  There are any number of different permutations of this album: green apple (100 copies), mint pearl (300 copies), sunsplatter (350 copies), pink rose (700 copies), every website has a different color that is rarer than the others and it all depends on the customer which one is the more appealing.  When many years pass in the future and record collectors as still collecting, will anyone remember the exact number of copies each variant contained?  Will anyone care?  I bought the Sunburst Splatter version (the more elusive Green Apple which has only 100 copies also costs far more than the other variants).  You can see the look of this in the two photos below.

The album contains a custom inner sleeve which is directly below. 

The hype sticker on the cover of the album trumpets the two key players as you would expect it to.  The moment I see Donelly’s name I would certainly be interested (obviously).

Here are the two labels.  Side 1 provides you with the tracklist and Side 2 is an unadorned version of that flower on the cover of the album. 

When you order directly from the record label you are giving directly to those who need it most: the artist and the label.  For far too long I was a guy who ordered from Amazon exclusively.  It has only been in the past two or three years I have eliminated them as my primary source.  These days I generally order anything I’m chasing directly from the source or I have found a replacement source.  (For example if I’m after a movie I first check with DiabolikDVD.com whose packaging is second to no one’s, your movies will never suffer from a crushed spine or damaged anything; but if they don’t have what I’m chasing I go to the boutique label who is selling it.  Many places offer discounts, many offer incentives to order from them.  It feels better going to the source than it does going to Bezos so he can never worry about paying taxes --yet you can be damn sure if his house caught fire he would expect the fire department to put it out even though he doesn’t pay for their services with his tax dollars.  End of rant.) Anyhow, the point I meant to make (and I may edit this later and take this whole paragraph out), is ordering from the site can get you some bonus nonsense.  Besides ads for American Laundromat tribute album releases or an ad telling you in 2023 the label will be releasing Become What You Are by The Juliana Hatfield Three for it’s 30th anniversary (on vinyl for the first time in the US) you can also find stuff like stickers and buttons. I personally can’t have enough buttons. .

[v3nusv3nom]

my mind moves approximately 3x faster than the speed of regular brain time so it’s not my fault that no one is on my fucking level

[beezhoney12]

Pro Hero!Shoto Todoroki X Bimbo!Reader

SFW Headcannons

i’m gonna make an NSFW one in like 30 minutes be prepared because i have like no shame 💀

You and Shoto are the complete opposite bf and gf dynamic. He loves you with all his heart but he has no idea how it started he has no idea how someone as serious and boring as him, got someone as Bubbly and cute as you.

you and him were in your second year of U.A when you met you were part of the general studies class assigned to shotos group for a school wide project, at first he found you a bit…concerning you were clumsy, dismissive, and couldn’t focus on a subject. But after spending one on one time with you he was head over heels he thought you were an actual angel 😭

He likes explaining things to you because you always tell him how cool he is for knowing that stuff also he finds it really funny to figure out how ur brain thinks

“so you’re telling me the bald man did not invent capitalism in america”

“yes my love jeff Bezos did not invent capitalism”

“then why does he have the bitcoin didnt he like make it”

“that’s not the same thing sweetheart” he said as he placed a kiss on ur forehead

He also loves watching you do like little fashion shows for him like you’ll come back from the mall to your shared home or apartment and walk in with like dozens of bags. “sho do you wanna see all the stuff i got” “of course let me make room”

He gets very excited and takes pictures of you trying on every outfit. He’ll do the same thing with your hair or makeup one time you asked him to curl your hair because your curler broke and he was so focused. and he loves making your sheet facemasks cold for you when you guys do skincare days

he is more then willing to do the facemasks with you and he even puts on one of those cute hair pieces and you take like a bunch of photos for your instagram 😻

When you have to go to like formal events with him he likes matching outfits with you like not so obvious matching but someone will probably connect the dots

When he’s like sitting down doing taxes or the mortgage you say you wanna help but he doesn’t want to frustrate you so he just lets you sit in his lap and watch him or once in a while read him some titles of things

you update his instagram for him because he never posts unless it’s pictures of you or you and him together

whenever you have to go run errand shoto always try’s to plan his days off to align with your errand days. he figured it’s better to accompany so you don’t get lonely (and so that he’s not so worried about you)

He figured out he needs to run errands with you one day after this guy at the car shop overpriced you for an oil change he showed up at the car shop after you told him about it and started yelling at the guy 😭

‘m sorry sho, should’ve known he was making me pay too much or something.” “no, no it’s not your fault baby i could never be mad at you for something like this, that bastard has no shame.” he said giving you a kiss

you guys have those subscriptions where they bring fresh food and recipes to your doorstep because you’re not good at doing things without really detailed instructions but y’all still need to eat so when shoto can cook he does but sometimes he’s super busy at work so you end up doing one of the recipes the subscription gives you

if you guys have any dogs or cats and they cause trouble you’re probably the one that gets them out of trouble with shoto every time. “no baby no don’t put him in his crate he didn’t mean it he’s just a puppy” you say to shoto while struggling to hold your dog in your arms. “it was just an accident right bubs it’s just an accident? say sorry daddy” you say speaking to your dog while kissing him on his lil head.

shoto gets very jealous if you have pets together 😭 you’re just a very loving person but he wants that only for him.

you try to have conversations with him on current events without sounding completely stupid and he really appreciates that you try but he finds the conversations more cute then philosophical or analytical especially when you try to pronounce big words the article said

tag list <3: @witchbettie

[robertreich]

Is Billionaire Philanthropy a Sham?

Remember when Jeff Bezos was showered with praise for donating $100 million to food banks last year? That may seem like a lot, and it is. But once you consider all that Bezos has raked in during the pandemic -- including making $13 billion in a single day in 2020 -- it’s a few hours of his earnings.  It’s not just Bezos. Billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet also receive lots of praise for their “generous” charitable giving. The truth about billionaire philanthropy is it isn’t charity. Its public relations, often used to cover up their exploitative business practices, shield their wealth, and deflect attention from all they money they pour into lobbying and campaign contributions to assure that their taxes remain historically low. 

These so-called “charitable contributions” are also tax-deductible, meaning you and I are subsidizing them. I don’t know about you, but I believe taxpayers should be deciding where their tax dollars ultimately go.

America doesn’t need their charity. We need them to pay their fair share in taxes 

[captainninej]

OH ALSO

does anyone else find it weird that one of the things we're meant to like rhysand better than tamlin for is because he's...rich??

like. his wealth is constantly described and how he has like 38429432 houses and more wealth than most of the country put together. feyre then compares this to tamlin's dingy little manor and is like wow rhys has so much more money so clearly that makes him superior. umm??

firstly, the fact that the entire worldbuilding of the spring court is limited to tamlin's manor isn't tamlin, that's sarah being bad at writing. also, in such a giRLbOsS fEmiNiSt book series, isn't it...kind of dated...to choose someone...for their money? idk and like at the end of acosf when all is forgiven because rhys buys nesta gifts?? like??

i'm pretty sure i remember in acotar that feyre was resentful of the wealth she saw around her because of how she was in poverty below the wall. where did this go? why is she all of a sudden a Real Housewife of Velaris and totally ok with the exorbitant wealth around her, while Illyria is struggling??

at LEAST tamlin, while also being super wealthy since he's a high lord, took care of feyre's family and restored their wealth, essentially setting them up for life (before the ic fucked them over and involved them in the war). rhysand?? he bullies nesta, infantilises elain and DESTROYS NESTA'S APARTMENT.

bUt tHe tItHe - bitch that's taxes. and it was written to make tamlin look like an asshole, nothing more. if u really start to pick it apart it falls apart immediately. feyre was so ready to throw all her jewellery at the water wraith bc sHe'S hUmBLe aNd dOeSnT nEeD tHis uNeCesSaRy wEaLtH - but then the SECOND she steps into the night court she's completely okay with the ic basically using money to wipe their asses?? with rhys taking her to the family trove or whatever at the end of acomaf where there's jewellery and wealth beyond her wildest dreams and she's swooning over the very thing she left the spring court for?

how do u think rhys pays for velaris' beautiful architecture? his palaces? his houses? hE's rIcH ok by that logic, he's 500 years old, runs the largest court in prythian, MONEY DOESN'T JUST LAST FOREVER. IT HAS TO COME FROM SOMEWHERE. you can't have 500 years worth of wealth to keep the infrastructure of entire cities running and have velaris be this utopia with no flaws. come on guys. think. there must be a tax system there somewhere, sarah janet just doesn't want to mention it bc a) she probably forgot b) doesn't understand how taxes work c) doesn't want to make rhysie look bad.

idk the money aspect of both feyre's personality and the entirety of this cartoonish world is just so inconsistent and stupid and you can clearly see sarah's own privilege and narrow-minded upbringing in her writing. so tamlin's a villain for taxes??? but rhysand is a hero for being jeff bezos??

MAKE UP YOUR MIND UGHHHHH

[inkskinned]

i unwittingly play a game with myself. i like to problem-solve, after all. for every piece of news that pisses me off, i find myself mulling over another solution america could have taken to covid. another way that we could have excelled at community.

we could have made the mask conversation under an american brand. cowboy up! it would be fun, a return to the heroism of essential workers, a moment of “pride” for everyone else. who doesn’t like pretending to be a cowboy. 

“it’s my right,” a man says to me, not wearing a mask. I am just standing in line outside of trader joes. i don’t even work here. you have to wear shoes and a shirt inside, too, i say. he ignores this to continue to yell at me. “the founding fathers would be fucking horrified by this p.c culture. i will wear what i want, this is america.” i tell him i have to wear specific clothes to go to work or i will be fired. he says, “this is different” but doesn’t have an explanation.

nevermind about the cowboy thing, i decide. too many nationalists. what if we made prizes? we could help rural communities get extra funding - like box tops, maybe? have fun little news stories about this week’s most successful american city. maybe everyone gets free ice cream. 

my stimulus check never comes in the mail. i don’t think it’s coming at all, probably. i start considering selling my own hair for an extra buck. i get my free birthday starbucks and sit in the car, silently, staring at it, knowing it is free but feeling guilty anyway. seven dollars for coffee! that’s a whole day of eating, if i was careful. wine-drunk, i confess the last “nice” thing i bought myself was actually to help me get work done. i watch bezos smile on camera while passing another one-billion mark. 

ice cream is fine, but in between faster testing and solidarity, don’t we really need companies working together for a cure? the thing is that when everyone works together, we get to skip making the same mistakes over and over again. here’s the solution, maybe. if you’re a researcher who shares your work on covid, you don’t pay taxes for this year! i’ll give that to you. no taxes! you’re probably not paying them anyway, but this way it’s legal! or something. make it a badge of honor to be sharing your work. make you citizen of the year.

the latest solution is one thousand dollars. i click the article about the man who, having survived corona, now faces over a million dollars in medical fees. my epipen hasn’t been renewed in years because i haven’t been able to scrounge up the six hundred dollars. people in the white house get tested all the time. the president suggests we drink more sunshine. i carry the idea with me for a while; as a poet it tastes so bitter. the bleach will kill the unseen enemy. 

that’s another thing. americans have been trained to hate. we are taught one specific face for one specific problem. it’s us-versus-them, always has been. and covid is faceless. covid is something any of us can get; although i’m sure people are blaming marginalized communities again. i bet. so instead we make a face for it - a screaming, angry, uncovered face. you want your villain? that’s sally without-her-mask. that’s henry doesn’t-wash-his-hands. make ignoring science ugly again. ew, yucky! unamerican. cringe compilations.

marginalized communities are effected more than anyone else. i am sewing a hole closed in my face mask so i can go to a protest. afterwards, my ears ring for an hour. i close my eyes and think of the liberty bell, and how it is cracked, and how i don’t know how it would sound. trump holds up a bible in front of a church i don’t believe he’s ever attended. 

oh!  what if we just fucking paid people. what if we paid people to stay home. what if we gave kids scholarships for making online resources, if we had “write a jingle to wash your hands to!” contests where the winner gets one of the extra yachts sitting unused in harbors. what if we said - if you’re an essential worker, you’re getting hazard pay, across the board, no compromising. what if we gave everyone free healthcare and food money. what if we treated it like an enduring plague and not a personal choice or a weird, soon-over misunderstanding. what if we stopped just waiting for it to “go away” and instead did the work to make it actually go away. what if, instead of crafting conspiracy theories, we understood the incompetence of the government. what if we actually had a better president.

i open another article. trump has retweeted someone who believes we can banish the virus if we simply stop sleeping with succubi. i google how to know if i am a succubus or have slept with a succubus recently (results inconclusive). i wear my mask. i socially distance. i play, over and over, the game of what-if.

[bakafox]

Man I try not to be a ‘Critical Role Can Do No Wrong They Are Precious Babies’ sort of person, because fuck knows everyone makes mistakes, and yeah they can have handled some things better, (as can, y’know, most human beings,) but I am so tired of seeing that they have a successful company and that Twitch earnings leak weaponized against them, and opinion articles or general Discourse acting like that $9mil from Twitch plus their merch makes them a faceless corporation like all other faceless corporations, and that they now (or always have) put money first and are disingenuous. 

They are doing well, amazingly well, and they remain amazed by their own success, they are not one-percenters, they are not idle rich heirs, there is so much work that goes into running a business and theirs isn’t so big that they just clock into an office, delegate everything away except for signing their names on things- and as far as I have ever heard, they pay their employees fairly and treat them well, which definitely keeps them a cut above some other success stories and ‘thriving’ businesses. 

So far I’ve seen no investigative journalists discovering they don’t pay their business-related taxes, or their personal ones, they aren’t operating on government subsidies and tax breaks, and again, I’ve yet to see any citations of them exploiting their workers and committing wage theft, and call me an idiot optimist but sometimes where there isn’t smoke, there also isn’t a fire. 

Good people can run good businesses, and if a good business is succeeding it’s a cause for admiration, even if they are bringing in millions, if it’s by doing shit that is not exploiting people, the environment, or in general actively and knowingly causing harm. People can remain good friends and good people while being successful at a business, people can still have a passion that is the root of a business and that is still as or more important than profits.

And a few million dollars is SO FAR AWAY from the 1%.

If you factor in fair wages to a California studio crew, studio rental or ownership, and other business operating costs that they have, they may not all be multi millionaires, or even actual millionaires, but y’know, that’s also not anyone’s goddamn business whether or not they are so long as they’re playing by ethical rules to the best of their abilities, and aren’t turning into a bunch of Musks and Bezos, which so far there’s NO real evidence of them doing. 

They aren’t running up energy bills at multiple homes, wastefully flying around on private jets, they haven’t got fucking yachts as tax write offs or investments.

There is no ethical way to be a billionaire, but they aren’t hitting that point, not by a long ways yet, and success stories don’t always have to be resented, and won’t inevitably end on a shitty asshole note.

Capitalism is a hellscape, the system is broken, but managing to earn money in it doesn’t immediately mean some shady shit is going on, or instantly turn a bunch of D&D nerds into faceless and dishonest corporate shills who will do anything for a buck.

[disillusioned41]

A first-of-its-kind analysis of newly disclosed Internal Revenue Service data shows that the richest 25 billionaires in the United States paid a true federal tax rate of just 3.4% between 2014 and 2018—even as they added a staggering $401 billion to their collective wealth.

"Many will ask about the ethics of publishing such private data. We are doing so—quite selectively and carefully—because we believe it serves the public interest in fundamental ways, allowing readers to see patterns that were until now hidden." —Richard Tofel & Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica

Published Tuesday by the investigative nonprofit ProPublica—which obtained a sprawling cache of IRS data on thousands of the nation's wealthiest people dating back 15 years—the analysis takes aim at "the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most."

"Our analysis of tax data for the 25 richest Americans quantifies just how unfair the system has become. By the end of 2018, the 25 were worth $1.1 trillion," ProPublica notes. "For comparison, it would take 14.3 million ordinary American wage earners put together to equal that same amount of wealth. The personal federal tax bill for the top 25 in 2018: $1.9 billion. The bill for the wage earners: $143 billion."

"Many Americans live paycheck to paycheck, amassing little wealth and paying the federal government a percentage of their income that rises if they earn more," the outlet adds. "In recent years, the median American household earned about $70,000 annually and paid 14% in federal taxes."

The new analysis juxtaposes the recent wealth gains of U.S. billionaires—as estimated by Forbes—with the information in the newly obtained IRS data to derive the "true tax rate" paid by the mega-rich.

The results show that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos—the world's richest man—and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett paid a true tax rate of 0.98% and 0.10%, respectively, between 2014 and 2018. In 2007, ProPublica notes, Bezos paid nothing in federal taxes even as his wealth grew by $3.8 billion.

Economist Gabriel Zucman, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said the ProPublica reporting is "full of incredible findings."

"Looks like the biggest tax story of the year, if not the decade," Zucman added.

ProPublica makes clear that, far from being the beneficiaries of a sprawling, illegal tax dodging scheme, "it turns out billionaires don't have to evade taxes exotically and illicitly—they can avoid them routinely and legally," a point that spotlights the systemic inequities of the U.S. tax system.

As the outlet explains:

Most Americans have to work to live. When they do, they get paid—and they get taxed. The federal government considers almost every dollar workers earn to be "income," and employers take taxes directly out of their paychecks.

The Bezoses of the world have no need to be paid a salary. Bezos' Amazon wages have long been set at the middle-class level of around $80,000 a year.

For years, there's been something of a competition among elite founder-CEOs to go even lower. Steve Jobs took $1 in salary when he returned to Apple in the 1990s. Facebook’s Zuckerberg, Oracle's Larry Ellison, and Google's Larry Page have all done the same.

Yet this is not the self-effacing gesture it appears to be: Wages are taxed at a high rate. The top 25 wealthiest Americans reported $158 million in wages in 2018, according to the IRS data. That's a mere 1.1% of what they listed on their tax forms as their total reported income. The rest mostly came from dividends and the sale of stock, bonds, or other investments, which are taxed at lower rates than wages.

To illustrate the consequences of a system that doesn't tax unrealized capital gains, ProPublica cites the example of Bezos' $127 billion explosion in wealth between 2006 and 2018. The Amazon CEO "reported a total of $6.5 billion in income" during that period and paid $1.4 billion in personal federal taxes—a 1.1% true tax rate.

"America's billionaires avail themselves of tax-avoidance strategies beyond the reach of ordinary people," ProPublica notes. "Their wealth derives from the skyrocketing value of their assets, like stock and property. Those gains are not defined by U.S. laws as taxable income unless and until the billionaires sell."

Richard Tofel, ProPublica's founding general manager and outgoing president, said Tuesday that he considers the tax analysis "the most important story we have ever published."

"In the coming months, we plan to use this material to explore how the nation's wealthiest people—roughly the .001%—exploit the structure of our tax code to avoid the tax burdens borne by ordinary citizens," Tofel and ProPublica editor-in-chief Stephen Engelberg wrote in a separate article Tuesday. "Many will ask about the ethics of publishing such private data. We are doing so—quite selectively and carefully—because we believe it serves the public interest in fundamental ways, allowing readers to see patterns that were until now hidden."

[myopinionisimportant]

I'm so angry.

Jeff Bezos, billionaire scumbag, had a little ten-minute flight in his rocket today. Not for any great reason, not to advance science or engineering, just as part of a pissing contest with other unconscionably wealthy idiots.

Listen, I like space, I like space flight and exploration. It's a well-quoted fact that the Apollo program was worth between seven and fourteen dollars for every dollar put into it, because that's pretty much what happens when you have large-scale public investment in science - it benefits everybody!

(A fact the Coalition seem to completely ignore...but that's not what this is about)

The problem...well, there's several, but the main problem is that in order to have this little contest, the billionaires are fucking the rest of us. Severely.

Bezos has been quoted as saying that spreading humanity through the solar system, expanding the population means we could have 'a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.' Which sounds pretty appealing on the face of it. The thing is, we could already have that, and the reason we don't is Jeff Bezos and the others like him.

See, Einstein was special, but he wasn't that special. The reason Einstein was a great scientist, the reason you know his name, is that he had the right environment for his genius to flourish. In particular, he had a well-paid job as a patent clerk which gave his mind enough room to work on his theories in the background. If you try to imagine a job that's exactly the opposite of that, you might come up with something like the conditions at Amazon.

Amazon workers are hideously abused - paid dreadfully, in appalling conditions. This abuse is the reason that Bezos is able to take his little rocket flight.

So let's say we want those thousand Einsteins and thousand Mozarts. We don't get those by spreading humanity outwards while keeping the systems that abuse the masses. For one thing, it will take an extraordinarily long time to get out there. It's unlikely that there will be a permanent planetary settlement any time this century - not because we don't want it, but because it's hard. As a species, we've barely managed a space station, and living up there still tries pretty hard to kill you. You're not gonna live on Mars. Letting Bezos keep slaves doesn't change that.

So how do we get our geniuses? Well, by finding and developing the ones we've already got. We support them with better labour conditions, better minimum pay, even Universal Basic Income (since that works really well whenever we give it a try). We make sure they can access education, including higher education, easily and cheaply. And to do this, we tax the billionaires until they aren't billionaires any more.

I mean, that's one way of dealing with it. Billionaires are both a symptom of a broken system, and work endlessly to reinforce it. If the rest of us are going to flourish, we need them gone.

Taxing them is the *nice* way of doing that.

P.S: Guante is good

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Billionaires don't pay tax

When Clinton accused Trump of paying no federal taxes, he didn’t deny it — rather, he said, “That makes me smart.”

He wasn’t the first rich sociopath to make that claim. Remember when Leona Helmsley told the press “only little people pay taxes?”

https://apicciano.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2020/09/28/remembering-leona-helmsley-the-queen-of-mean-only-the-little-people-pay-taxes-we-have-donald-trump-the-don-of-con/

Today, Propublica published the first in a series of blockbuster analyses of leaked tax data from America’s richest billionaires — some of whom have lobbies for higher taxes on the rich! — showing that the true tax rate for billionaires is 3.4%.

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax

These records — which include tax data for Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, Carl Icahn and others — reveal that it’s not just sneering boasters like Trump and Helmsley who avoid the tax the rest of us pay — it’s the whole cohort.

Much has been made of the “K-shaped” recovery from the pandemic-driven economic collapse, where the rich got richer and the poor got poorer, but when it comes to the 0.001%, this is far more pronounced. America’s billionaires got $1.2 trillion richer during the pandemic.

Much of this wealth accumulation is due to the fact that poor people pay high taxes, while rich people pay low taxes. A household earning $70k pays about 14% in federal tax; In 2019, Michael Bloomberg made $2B and paid 1.3% of it in federal tax.

All this wealth-accumulation creates family dynasties, meaning that the rich stay rich, and the poor stay poor, and the only real social mobility is downward, as the middle class loses ground and slips down the ladder.

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-rents-too-damned-high-520f958d5ec5

A quarter of America’s richest people owe their fortune to the orifice they emerged from, not the work they did. These heirs — Waltons, Mars candy scions, Estee Lauder’s kid — are the new permanent aristocracy, uplifted by the invisible hand by virtue of their “good blood.”

The Propublica report — from Jesse Eisenger, Jeff Ernsthausen and Paul Kiel — is valuable not just for the names it names, but for the tax-evasion tactics it explains and the historical context it provides.

Whenever someone points out that Jeff Bezos is so rich that he could afford to give a living wage to his vast, precarious, food-stamp-dependent blue-collar workforce, someone inevitably points out that Bezos’s wealth is in shares, not cash and is thus illusory.

This is only partly true, and it obscures more than it illuminates. It’s true that CEOs habitually draw nominal salaries — often $1/year — and are only “rich on paper,” but this doesn’t mean they’re not immensely wealthy — rather, this is how they amass immenselwealth.

Here’s how that works: the US only taxes capital gains (money you make from owning things, as opposed to doing things) when they are “realized” — that is, when you sell the asset that has appreciated in value. If you never sell your asset, you never pay tax on it.

So when an exec takes compensation in stock rather than cash, the exec pays no tax unless they sell the shares. But execs don’t have to sell any shares in order to get millions or billions of dollars to play with. Rather, they can stake those shares as collateral on loans.

If an exec sells their shares, they’ll pay a 20% capital gains tax. If they borrow against the shares, they’ll pay single-digit interest rates. What’s more, loans aren’t treated as income, so no tax is paid on the loan.

Even better, the interest on the loan can be treated as an expense, which you can apply to any money that comes in the door that you can’t help but declare as income.

Working people borrow money because they can’t afford to buy cars or houses or just close the gap between payday and an empty fridge. Rich people borrow because it lets them launder their income into tax-free loans.

Here’s the thing: this is exactly what critics of this system predicted would happen. In 1920, Rep Cordell Hull (“the father of income tax”) warned that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Macomber would let rich people “live upon the value” of stock “without ever paying” tax.

Congress could have fixed the tax law, but it left this loophole open, along with other loopholes, like the “step-up in basis” rule that allows billionaires to pass on vast fortunes without ever paying capital gains taxes on them (the true origin of “good blood”).

When Propublica called billionaires for comment, they either got stonewalled (Elon Musk sent them a single “?” then ghosted), or heard bluster about “privacy invasions” or got responses like Warren Buffett’s, about his plan to give away all his money.

That’s more “good blood” nonsense: the idea that we should let people amass vast fortunes through monopoly and exploitation, so long as they — and not democratically accountable governments — then use it for social benefit.

Elite philanthropy is no substitute for democratic programs. It’s primarily a means for the ultra-wealthy to launder their reputations.

Take the Sacklers — made richer than the Rockefellers through the opioid epidemic’s corporate mass murders:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/23/a-bankrupt-process/#sacklers

What’s more, elite philanthropy is a vehicle for pushing “good blood” ideology. Bill Gates’s foundation didn’t just set out to eradicate malaria, but also public education.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#gates-foundation

It recycled the materials it used to lobby against letting South Africa make its own HIV medicine to lobby against a covid vaccine waiver:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/21/wait-your-turn/#vaccine-apartheid

This report is the first in a series based on the anonymous leaked data. Propublica says its source was motivated by their stellar reporting on the IRS, which revealed the intense lobbying to weaken the agency’s power to audit the wealthy.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/17/disgracenote/#false-consciousness

Instead, the IRS was perverted so that it primarily targeted poor people for audits, because they alone were weak enough not to resist the IRS’s starved, resource-poor auditing division.

Propublica still has a lot of data to report out, but they’re interested in hearing from other sources. In this supplemental article, they explain how IRS whistleblowers and others can securely leak more documents to them.

https://projects.propublica.org/tips/help-us-report-on-taxes-and-ultrawealthy/

And if you don’t have time to digest the excellent story with its great explainers and graphics, Propublica’s got a 7-minute read version:

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-short-form-a-quick-guide-to-what-we-uncovered

All of this leaves us with a question, though: what should we do about it? There’s a Biden tax plan to raise taxes on the rich, but as Propublica points out, it will have virtually no effect on the “buy-borrow-die” mode of wealth accumulation.

Two other proposals would have an impact, though: Ron Wyden has proposed a capital gains tax on unrealized gains:

https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Treat%20Wealth%20Like%20Wages%20RM%20Wyden.pdf

And both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have proposed wealth taxes:

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/01/elizabeth-warren-bernie-sanders-propose-3percent-wealth-tax-on-billionaires.html

[mitchipedia]

Chicago posed to create one of the nation's largest "guaranteed basic income" programs

Chicago is getting ready to create one of the nation’s largest “guaranteed basic income” programs. 5,000 low-income households would get $500 per month.

Benefits programs get opposition from people who fear freeloaders. And that opposition comes from people at all income levels. Rich people don’t like the idea of poor people freeloading off government welfare. But the working poor don’t like the idea either.

But the benefits to society of providing people with the essentials needed to live, far outweigh the potential freeloader costs.

LIkewise, means-testing and targeted programs such as food stamps are more expensive than just giving people money.

Indeed, social scientists have studied the causes of poverty—are poor people stupid? Lazy? Mentally ill? And it turns out the reason for poverty is that people don’t have enough money, and what they need is more money. Sometimes the simple, obvious answer is the right one.

At least one opponent says the Chicago program is a bad idea because so many low-skill jobs are currently available—employers are finding it hard to find people to hire.

My bet is those jobs simply don’t pay enough. Certainly, minimum wage isn’t enough to live on nearly everywhere in the country—and if an employee doesn’t get enough to live, they turn to social welfare programs, meaning taxpayers subsidize the employer’s profits.

Yes, the Walmart family mansions and Jeff Bezos’s recent jaunt into space were partly paid for by your tax dollars and mine, in the form of subsidies to Walmart and Amazon employees who don’t make enough salary to live on. Why don’t we just give the money directly to the people, and require Walmart and Amazon to pay a living wage?

My prediction is Chicago’s social welfare program will prove successful, and generate more wealth to the community than it costs. And then it’ll be shut down, because voters are short-sighted that way.

[infinity-squared-comics]

Today I am going to tell you three stories.  One or more of them is a dream I had recently, and the other(s) are completely fictional stories I made up for your amusement. Your job is going to be to guess which is which. 

DREAM 1; I wake up in the middle of the night with a new Idea for something to draw. I rush into my office, turn on my computer, grab my pen, and try to draw. However, something is not right. The pen is not working. I realize I haven’t charged it in a while and it’s probably dead. I usually plug it into my computer to charge, but I decide that isn’t fast enough, so instead I plug it into the house. Not the wall socket or some such, mind you, the actual, physical house itself. This works for a bit, and I’m able to draw some (I think the drawing was somehow simultaneously a tiger and a dragon. Not something that looked like both a tiger and a dragon, it was a quantum superposition of both dragon and tiger). However, a problem arises. The house is getting warm. I realize the nuclear reactor is overheating, and that I probably made a mistake. So what does a digital artist do when they make a mistake? CTRL+Z, BABY!!!! This doesn’t work. In my infinite dream knowledge, I realize that that’s because I’ve done things since plugging my pen into the house. So, I spam CTRL+ALT+Z hoping to undo the current nuclear meltdown. Then I wake up.

DREAM 2: Me and my family are on a vacation, when I decide to enlist in the U.S. army. This is odd, as I don’t like the U.S. army very much. I think I did it because one of the Great Wolf Lodge mascots was threatening my family. Don’t ask me why the U.S. military was recruiting kids from a great wolf lodge. I think it was a one battle deal, where you’d get to go home after the war was over. My ingenious plan was to just not shoot anyone and wait for the end of the war. So, I go straight into an active combat zone, without any sort of training. I wander around the battle field, verbally protesting war and specifically the military I am now a part of. Also we’re wearing WWI German uniforms. Then, I get shot in the side. I go up to the nurse’s office and say “I’ve been shot. May I go home?”. The nurse says yes, so we leave. Than I have free brunch with my former history teacher on Veteran's day, because now we’ve both technically fought in a war.

DREAM 3: Scene: 

(Dimly lit room. A voice calls out “welcome to WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE!!!!!!!” lights flick on. Three men sit, shackled to chairs. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates. on a podium above them stands someone in a Guy Fawkes mask.).

Me(?):Well, “gentlemen” are you ready for your first question?

Bezos: who are you!?!?! I’ll have you know that this is illegal!!!!

Me(?): ahh, don’t bother shouting. This broadcast is so heavily scrambled that I doubt the police will find us before the show ends

Musk: What broadcast? What sh-

Me(?): The first question is for you, Mr. Bezos. ‘do you pay your employees an ethical wage’?

Bezos: what? That’s preposterous of course I do!

(classic incorrect buzzer sound)

Me(?): I’m sorry, that answer is incorrect. The majority of your workers are, in fact, payed bellow a living wage. As a punishment for this incorrect answer, each amazon employee will now be wired $100,000 dollars from your personal bank account. Now, next question. For Mr. Musk- ‘Are you the founder of Tesla’?

Musk: well, of course I am. Everyone knows that.

(incorrect buzzer sound)

Me(?): I’m sorry that’s wrong. You in fact purchased the title of founder when you bought the company with money from your parents’ emerald mine. As a punishment $1,000,000,000 will be wired from your personal account to each of the actual founders. Now, for Mr. Gates’ question. ‘Did you or did you not encourage the monetization of the hunt for the Coronavirus vaccine and the creation of a patent, knowing full well that this would slow the development and distribution of the vaccine’?

Gates: I... did.

(correct buzzer sound)

Me(?):congratulations, you are the first to get a correct answer this evening. However, you still must be punished for your actions. $500,000 will be transferred to everyone who lost a loved one to the pandemic because of you halting vaccine progress for monetary gain. Now, final question, for all of you: ‘are you guilty of tax evasion’? I’ll save you some time, you are!! as such, all of your properties have been electronically mortgaged, and the proceeds have been sent directly to the U.S. education fund. As a final treat tonight, money will be drained from your accounts and sent to a variety of non-profits throughout the nation, until your left with a total of-

(I(?) point to a screen where the three men’s bank accounts are displayed, all dropping until they reach-)

Gates: $1,000,001.

Me(?): correct! For the second time in a row! You’re on a roll, Mr. Gates. My work here is done, so now I must go.

(I disappear in a puff of smoke)