#budget 2017

[gayofthefae]

Just remembered all the money The Duffers threw away for 5 years on marketing Byler knowing damn well hardly anybody cared and not paying a cent for Milkvan content, merch, photoshoots, anything.

How could it be queerbaiting? They didn't even have to advertise them pre-season 4 but they said "no, we're gonna move money from our budget towards a 2017 photoshoot and AWAY from other important things on our budgeting list. Noah, tweet that they definitely aren't gay."

Like really just maximized story telling. We don't want you to know until we want you know but we're gonna subliminally open your mind to it. And somebody saw "they def aren't gay" and went "hm I'd never thought of them as gay before...honestly kinda good idea ngl".

For the Duffers to not make Byler happen would be inherently and exclusively malicious, a malice intended from the beginning. There weren't even enough people in 2017 to actually queerbait. Because there weren't enough to make money off of. The marketing tells us it was planned from long before people were on board. So either they planned to tell Mike and Will's love story or they planned to snub queer viewers for the sake of it, willing to make financial sacrifice to do so, both by investing in something people weren't buying and NOT INVESTING in something people WANTED TO BUY (milkvan content and merch) in order to convert people away from Milkvan and to Byler to also maximize the damage they were spending their money to create.

Lord have mercy if it's the second one because Jesus Fucking Christ usually showrunners hurt gay people to gain money, they don't usually PAY to hurt gay people because they just wanted to that bad.

Example of their weird anti-money marketing decisions

Other examples

[storybookhawke]

even if DA4 comes out this year or next, i have to reckon with the fact that i don't own anything able to run it

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

By Sharon Parrott

It’s tempting to ignore a budget resolution released just days before the start of the fiscal year that it’s meant to guide, and amid the chaotic debate around a short-term extension of government funding to avoid a shutdown. But House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington’s proposed budget is important for what it illustrates about House Republicans’ disturbing vision for the country: health care stripped away from millions of people, higher poverty and hunger, capitulation to climate change, more tax cheating by high-income people, and large-scale disinvestment from the building blocks of opportunity and economic growth—from medical research to education to child care. It would narrow opportunity, worsen racial inequities, and make it harder for people to afford the basics. It reflects the wrong priorities for the country and should be roundly rejected.

Chair Arrington made clear in his remarks the intent to extend the expiring tax cuts from the 2017 tax law, which included large tax cuts for the wealthy. In addition, the budget resolution itself would pave the way for unlimited, unpaid-for tax cuts that could go well beyond those extensions. The extensions alone would give annual tax breaks averaging $41,000 to tax filers in the top 1 percent and cost more than $350 billion a year, the Congressional Budget Office estimates. The budget reflects none of these costs and fails to explain how—or whether—they will be offset.

A shocking share of the spending cuts Chair Arrington specifies target people with low and moderate incomes, including $1.9 trillion in Medicaid cuts and hundreds of billions in cuts to economic security programs, such as cuts to assistance that helps people afford food and other basic needs. Just last week the Census Bureau released data showing that poverty spiked last year, more than doubling for children. Rather than proposing policies that could reverse this deeply troubling trend, the budget proposal would deepen poverty and increase hardship.

The budget would also make deep cuts in the part of the budget that is funded annually through appropriations bills. Disingenuously, the budget resolution shows that these cuts total more than $4 trillion over ten years—but hides the program areas that would be cut, labeling them “government-wide savings.” But this year’s House Appropriations bills—which include substantial cuts—make clear that cuts would fall on a wide range of basic functions and services that support families, communities, and the broader economy, including Social Security customer service, support for K-12 and college education, funding for national parks and clean air and water, rental housing assistance for families with low incomes, and more.

Chair Arrington claims the budget’s deep and damaging program cuts are in the name of deficit reduction. But the failure to identify a single revenue increase for high-income people or corporations—and in fact, to potentially shower them with more unpaid-for tax cuts—is an extreme and misguided approach. Moreover, calling for a balanced budget in ten years is merely a slogan that has little to do with addressing our nation’s needs—and the budget resolution resorts to gimmicks and games to even appear to get there, including $3 trillion in deficit reduction it claims would accrue from higher economic growth it assumes would be achieved by budget policies.

A budget plan should focus on the nation’s needs and lay out an agenda that broadens opportunity, invests in people and families, reduces the too-high levels of hardship and financial stress faced by households across the country, and raises revenues for those investments. But the Arrington budget blueprint would shortchange much-needed investments and lock in wasteful tax cuts to the already wealthy for the next decade.

House Republicans are pursuing a damaging agenda at every turn—first threatening the nation with default, and now demanding deep cuts in an array of priorities in this year’s appropriations debate, risking a government shutdown, and proposing a budget blueprint that would take the country in the wrong direction.

[consultingsister-a5]

Highbury Terrace, London bought in 2015. floorplan.

Cee never feels at home anywhere. She once spent twelve million on a house in Chelsea and lived there for three weeks. Highbury Terrace was bought on a whim on a trip back to London when she called NYC home. When she returned to London in 2017, Highbury Terrace was just the house with most of her stuff. But it's almost like she forgot to move out to find somewhere new. 2024 will mark the longest Cee has lived in a house since her childhood home. She likes the garden, which feels like a secret; she likes the park across the road where people walk their dogs and children play. She likes that the bedrooms feel small for such a large home. She likes no one chose the house with her, no one else lived here, and no one haunts the halls.

[diamondnokouzai]

[ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED] Bound Binder

Remove a GC2B binder without ripping a seam

[imkeepinit]

[kurothoughts]

finished watching the Book of Atlantic movie~ at first I was kinda bummed up bc I couldn't find to watch in full HD, only 720p maximum, but then I saw the cgi and realized maybe it was a divine blessing in disguise

[falllpoutboy]

the jl reshoots debacle really pisses me off still because zack stepping away to grieve is fine and expected but it still blows my mind how wb 1) didn’t delay the film to be released in early 2018 and have zack come back at a later date or 2) contact another director who zack is actually friends with to finish the movie in post. ben is a director himself and zack is friends christopher nolan… but they knew what they were doing when they brought joss on to reshoot a finished movie that didn’t need to be reshot.

[courseyoulovemeyoudontknowme]

Dumbo (2019, Tim Burton)

06/04/2024

Dumbo is a 2019 film directed by Tim Burton.

USA, 1919. Holt Farrier, a former star of the Medici circus, returns from World War I to start a new life with his children Milly and Joe. Unfortunately, when Holt returns home, he finds his life turned upside down: a widower, he lost an arm during the war and consequently will never be able to do his circus stunts with his horses again. Max Medici, the director of the circus, then gives him another task: to take care of the new circus animal, an Indian elephant.

Milly and Joe visit the puppy, who they decided to call Dumbo, a name previously given to him by the circus spectators for mocking purposes, and discover that he has the ability to fly thanks to a feather; they therefore decide to exploit his talent to help the circus, now in a serious situation.

The next evening the circus puts on another show in Missouri and Dumbo makes his first appearance as a flying elephant after getting stuck on a burning building. The little elephant's performance causes a sensation throughout the country and begins to be on everyone's lips, including that of V. A. Vandevere, a powerful entrepreneur, and Colette Marchant, a French trapeze artist, who go to Medici and invite him and his circus at Dreamland, a park built by Vandevere full of rides and entertainment.

Dumbo, tired of life in the circus, decides to say goodbye to his new friends and moves with his mother to the jungle.

On July 8, 2014, Walt Disney Pictures announced the live action remake of Dumbo, together with the name of the screenwriter Ehren Kruger. On March 10, 2015, Tim Burton was announced as the film's director.

The film's budget was $170 million.

In January 2017, it was announced that Will Smith was in talks to play the father of the children who develop a friendship with the baby elephant Dumbo after seeing him in the circus, but later turned down the offer due to of the filming of the sequel to the film Bad Boys II, and other reasons. Bill Hader, Chris Pine and Casey Affleck were also offered the role, but turned it down before Colin Farrell was cast.

[cammie]

thanks so much reddit user iamnotcreativeDET for this information 😢

[boreal-sea]

Biden’s 2025 would raise the child tax credits back to the levels they were at during the pandemic, an objectively good thing for literally everyone. Those benefits were slashed by Trump in 2017, and others trailed off after the pandemic “ended”. Biden is going to pay for it by undoing Trump’s tax cuts on wealthy corporations, aka by taxing them more.

You can bet your pants Trump won’t enact this budget if he wins the election.

[violetwolfraven]

Carmilla (2014-2017) really did have it all huh. Lesbians. Vampires. Cults. Mildly toxic main relationship. Canon nonbinary character. Most of the action happening offscreen. Shitty special effects. One (1) straight character and he was a himbo. Sponsored by a period products brand. Some pretty damn good costuming for that low of a budget. And it was all literally just a college au fanfic of a novel from the 19th century. Truly peak entertainment.

[storybookhawke]

somehow i've survived til 2024 with a RTX 1050 ti so, quite honestly, I accept that it's time for an upgrade. i just have to upgrade everything, even my processor & motherboard in addition to a graphics card.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tesla's Dieselgate

Elon Musk lies a lot. He lies about being a “utopian socialist.” He lies about being a “free speech absolutist.” He lies about which companies he founded:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2 He lies about being the “chief engineer” of those companies:

https://www.quora.com/Was-Elon-Musk-the-actual-engineer-behind-SpaceX-and-Tesla

He lies about really stupid stuff, like claiming that comsats that share the same spectrum will deliver steady broadband speeds as they add more users who each get a narrower slice of that spectrum:

https://www.eff.org/wp/case-fiber-home-today-why-fiber-superior-medium-21st-century-broadband

The fundamental laws of physics don’t care about this bullshit, but people do. The comsat lie convinced a bunch of people that pulling fiber to all our homes is literally impossible — as though the electrical and phone lines that come to our homes now were installed by an ancient, lost civilization. Pulling new cabling isn’t a mysterious art, like embalming pharaohs. We do it all the time. One of the poorest places in America installed universal fiber with a mule named “Ole Bub”:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

Previous tech barons had “reality distortion fields,” but Musk just blithely contradicts himself and pretends he isn’t doing so, like a budget Steve Jobs. There’s an entire site devoted to cataloging Musk’s public lies:

https://elonmusk.today/

But while Musk lacks the charm of earlier Silicon Valley grifters, he’s much better than they ever were at running a long con. For years, he’s been promising “full self driving…next year.”

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

He’s hasn’t delivered, but he keeps claiming he has, making Teslas some of the deadliest cars on the road:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-autopilot-crashes-elon-musk/

Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn’t its cars, it’s Tesla’s business arrangement, the Tesla-Financial Complex:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

Once you start unpacking Tesla’s balance sheets, you start to realize how much the company depends on government subsidies and tax-breaks, combined with selling carbon credits that make huge, planet-destroying SUVs possible, under the pretense that this is somehow good for the environment:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

But even with all those financial shenanigans, Tesla’s got an absurdly high valuation, soaring at times to 1600x its profitability:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#intangibles

That valuation represents a bet on Tesla’s ability to extract ever-higher rents from its customers. Take Tesla’s batteries: you pay for the battery when you buy your car, but you don’t own that battery. You have to rent the right to use its full capacity, with Tesla reserving the right to reduce how far you go on a charge based on your willingness to pay:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/10/teslas-demon-haunted-cars-in-irmas-path-get-a-temporary-battery-life-boost/

That’s just one of the many rent-a-features that Tesla drivers have to shell out for. You don’t own your car at all: when you sell it as a used vehicle, Tesla strips out these features you paid for and makes the next driver pay again, reducing the value of your used car and transfering it to Tesla’s shareholders:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-autopilot-disabled-remotely-used-car-update

To maintain this rent-extraction racket, Tesla uses DRM that makes it a felony to alter your own car’s software without Tesla’s permission. This is the root of all autoenshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

This is technofeudalism. Whereas capitalists seek profits (income from selling things), feudalists seek rents (income from owning the things other people use). If Telsa were a capitalist enterprise, then entrepreneurs could enter the market and sell mods that let you unlock the functionality in your own car:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/11/1-in-3/#boost-50

But because Tesla is a feudal enterprise, capitalists must first secure permission from the fief, Elon Musk, who decides which companies are allowed to compete with him, and how.

Once a company owns the right to decide which software you can run, there’s no limit to the ways it can extract rent from you. Blocking you from changing your device’s software lets a company run overt scams on you. For example, they can block you from getting your car independently repaired with third-party parts.

But they can also screw you in sneaky ways. Once a device has DRM on it, Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to bypass that DRM, even for legitimate purposes. That means that your DRM-locked device can spy on you, and because no one is allowed to explore how that surveillance works, the manufacturer can be incredibly sloppy with all the personal info they gather:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/tesla-model-3-keeps-data-like-crash-videos-location-phone-contacts.html

All kinds of hidden anti-features can lurk in your DRM-locked car, protected from discovery, analysis and criticism by the illegality of bypassing the DRM. For example, Teslas have a hidden feature that lets them lock out their owners and summon a repo man to drive them away if you have a dispute about a late payment:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

DRM is a gun on the mantlepiece in Act I, and by Act III, it goes off, revealing some kind of ugly and often dangerous scam. Remember Dieselgate? Volkswagen created a line of demon-haunted cars: if they thought they were being scrutinized (by regulators measuring their emissions), they switched into a mode that traded performance for low emissions. But when they believed themselves to be unobserved, they reversed this, emitting deadly levels of NOX but delivering superior mileage.

The conversion of the VW diesel fleet into mobile gas-chambers wouldn’t have been possible without DRM. DRM adds a layer of serious criminal jeopardy to anyone attempting to reverse-engineer and study any device, from a phone to a car. DRM let Apple claim to be a champion of its users’ privacy even as it spied on them from asshole to appetite:

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

Now, Tesla is having its own Dieselgate scandal. A stunning investigation by Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu for Reuters reveals how Tesla was able to create its own demon-haunted car, which systematically deceived drivers about its driving range, and the increasingly desperate measures the company turned to as customers discovered the ruse:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-batteries-range/

The root of the deception is very simple: Tesla mis-sells its cars by falsely claiming ranges that those cars can’t attain. Every person who ever bought a Tesla was defrauded.

But this fraud would be easy to detect. If you bought a Tesla rated for 353 miles on a charge, but the dashboard range predictor told you that your fully charged car could only go 150 miles, you’d immediately figure something was up. So your Telsa tells another lie: the range predictor tells you that you can go 353 miles.

But again, if the car continued to tell you it has 203 miles of range when it was about to run out of charge, you’d figure something was up pretty quick — like, the first time your car ran out of battery while the dashboard cheerily informed you that you had 203 miles of range left.

So Teslas tell a third lie: when the battery charge reached about 50%, the fake range is replaced with the real one. That way, drivers aren’t getting mass-stranded by the roadside, and the scam can continue.

But there’s a new problem: drivers whose cars are rated for 353 miles but can’t go anything like that far on a full charge naturally assume that something is wrong with their cars, so they start calling Tesla service and asking to have the car checked over.

This creates a problem for Tesla: those service calls can cost the company $1,000, and of course, there’s nothing wrong with the car. It’s performing exactly as designed. So Tesla created its boldest fraud yet: a boiler-room full of anti-salespeople charged with convincing people that their cars weren’t broken.

This new unit — the “diversion team” — was headquartered in a Nevada satellite office, which was equipped with a metal xylophone that would be rung in triumph every time a Tesla owner was successfully conned into thinking that their car wasn’t defrauding them.

When a Tesla owner called this boiler room, the diverter would run remote diagnostics on their car, then pronounce it fine, and chide the driver for having energy-hungry driving habits (shades of Steve Jobs’s “You’re holding it wrong”):

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

The drivers who called the Diversion Team weren’t just lied to, they were also punished. The Tesla app was silently altered so that anyone who filed a complaint about their car’s range was no longer able to book a service appointment for any reason. If their car malfunctioned, they’d have to request a callback, which could take several days.

Meanwhile, the diverters on the diversion team were instructed not to inform drivers if the remote diagnostics they performed detected any other defects in the cars.

The diversion team had a 750 complaint/week quota: to juke this stat, diverters would close the case for any driver who failed to answer the phone when they were eventually called back. The center received 2,000+ calls every week. Diverters were ordered to keep calls to five minutes or less.

Eventually, diverters were ordered to cease performing any remote diagnostics on drivers’ cars: a source told Reuters that “Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car” without any diagnostics being performed.

Predicting EV range is an inexact science as many factors can affect battery life, notably whether a journey is uphill or downhill. Every EV automaker has to come up with a figure that represents some kind of best guess under a mix of conditions. But while other manufacturers err on the side of caution, Tesla has the most inaccurate mileage estimates in the industry, double the industry average.

Other countries’ regulators have taken note. In Korea, Tesla was fined millions and Elon Musk was personally required to state that he had deceived Tesla buyers. The Korean regulator found that the true range of Teslas under normal winter conditions was less than half of the claimed range.

Now, many companies have been run by malignant narcissists who lied compulsively — think of Thomas Edison, archnemesis of Nikola Tesla himself. The difference here isn’t merely that Musk is a deeply unfit monster of a human being — but rather, that DRM allows him to defraud his customers behind a state-enforced opaque veil. The digital computers at the heart of a Tesla aren’t just demons haunting the car, changing its performance based on whether it believes it is being observed — they also allow Musk to invoke the power of the US government to felonize anyone who tries to peer into the black box where he commits his frauds.

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/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

This Sunday (July 30) at 1530h, I’m appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning “Ghost Post” Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.

Image ID [A scene out of an 11th century tome on demon-summoning called 'Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros. Anno 1057. Noli me tangere.' It depicts a demon tormenting two unlucky would-be demon-summoners who have dug up a grave in a graveyard. One summoner is held aloft by his hair, screaming; the other screams from inside the grave he is digging up. The scene has been altered to remove the demon's prominent, urinating penis, to add in a Tesla supercharger, and a red Tesla Model S nosing into the scene.]

Image: Steve Jurvetson (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_Model_S_Indoors.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[philologique]

this might be one of those things where the world hasn’t changed so much as my exposure to it has, but when did everyone collectively switch to ultra-expensive burr coffee grinders? did they actually? does it just feel like it because of amazon affiliate commissions? did something else prompt it?

[diamondnokouzai]

[ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED] Bound Binder

Remove a GC2B binder without ripping a seam