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Applicants do not have to be Jewish and can be moving from any state in the U.S. to any state in the U.S. (but not outside of the country).  

To qualify, applicants must meet the following requirements:

Have plans to move to a different state within three months of receiving an HFLS loan and be able to submit documentation of their move OR plan to move no later than six months from the time they receive the loan.

Have annual household income sufficient to support loan repayment, and no higher than the HFLS income limits.

Have an active checking account.

Provide one guarantor who meets the two requirements above.

Initial funding for this program is provided by the Jewish LGBTQ Donor Network. 

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iFixit

iFixit is a wiki-based site that teaches people how to fix almost anything. It was started in 2003 by Luke and Kyle, in a dorm room at California Polytechnic University when they tried to fix an old iBook together. With no instructions, they tinkered, fiddled, broke some tabs and lost some screws. But they fixed it. When they decided to start selling spare parts themselves, iFixit was born. It now hinges around its step-by-step repair guides, which are free to download and use under Creative Commons licenses.

Now, anyone can create a repair manual for a device on iFixit and anyone can edit the existing set of manuals to improve them. The site’s founders say that thousands of people make use of the guides every day.

“We’ve heard repair success stories from forensic detectives, field translators, and even kids,” say the pair. “From New York to Alaska, Tibet to the Faroe Islands, people have used our guides to fix their stuff.

“Our philosophy is that if you can’t open it, you don’t own it. Once you disassemble, repair, and put back together your laptop or iPod, you have a much better understanding of what goes into it. It’s astounding how just 20 minutes of work can make an iPod good as new – but most people have no idea that there are instructions available to make the work easy. And why should they? Apple tells everyone that the battery isn’t user-serviceable.

“That’s where we come in, filling the ecosystem hole that Apple created by manufacturing a device without an end-of-life maintenance and disposal strategy.”

Restart Wiki

This is a place where members of the Restart community share tips for mending appliances and gadgets with people who are starting out, or whose knowledge lies elsewhere.

This wiki won’t show you how to fix a particular make and model of device: they leave this to the various fix-it websites and disassembly videos. (You can also get help with a device on social media using #SOSRestart). Rather, contributors to this page concentrate on basic and widely applicable principles, for example soldering and how to stay safe while fixing things.

The site is aimed at anyone with a curiosity about how things work and how to fix them. No prior knowledge is assumed. In the spirit of spreading knowledge as widely as possible, everyone is welcome to read it – and to share it. Anyone is welcome to reuse anything on the wiki, under the terms of the Creative Commons ShareAlike Licence 3.0.

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https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/QB75LB

The study by a Ben Gurion University professor uses data-driven analysis and spatial mapping to highlight a severe decline in Gaza's population since October 2023.

A study published via the Harvard Dataverse reveals that Israel has "disappeared" at least 377,000 Palestinians since the start of its genocidal campaign against the Gaza Strip in 2023.

Half of this number is believed to be Palestinian children.

The report was written by Israeli professor Yaakov Garb, who used data-driven analysis and spatial mapping to show how the Israeli army's siege of Gaza and indiscriminate attacks on civilians in the enclave have led to a serious drop in its population.

The 377,000 Palestinians who are unaccounted for due to Israel's genocide are approximately 17 percent of the Gaza Strip's entire population, which now stands at about 1.85 million. Prior to the war in Gaza, the strip's population was estimated at 2.227 million. While some are displaced or missing, a significant number are believed to have been killed by Israeli forces, according to the report.

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The case for a Canadian wealth tax

I'm in the home stretch of my 24-city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in LONDON (July 1) with TRASHFUTURE'S RILEY QUINN and then a big finish in MANCHESTER on July 2.

A major problem with letting billionaires decide how your country is run is that they will back whichever psycho promises the lowest taxes and least regulation, no matter how completely batshit and unfit that person is:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/nations-are-people

Billionaires have farcical, almost unimaginable resources. These let them take over whole political parties, even "left" parties, with the result that all real electoral options disappear. Voting for the other party gets you a different set of aesthetics, but the same existential threats to the human race and the planet:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/22/starmer-backs-us-strike-on-iran-and-calls-for-tehran-to-return-to-negotiations

After generations of increasingly oligarch-friendly policies and billionaire entryism into the Democratic Party, America may well be cooked, a total write-off for generations to come. The path to saving the world and our species arguably lies through strengthening other countries to resist American psychos and protect the planet from the consequences of their brainwormed leadership.

Writing for Jacobin, Alex Hemingway sets out a plan for imposing a wealth-tax on Canada's oligarchs, one that incorporates lessons from previous attempts at such a tax:

https://jacobin.com/2025/06/wealth-tax-canada-inequality-austerity/

Even on the left, the idea of a wealth-tax is controversial – not because leftists are sympathetic to billionaires, but because they are skeptical that a wealth tax can be carried out. It's a practical, not an ideological objection:

https://pileusmmt.libsyn.com/196-the-problem-with-wealth-taxes-with-steven-hail-part-1

After all, under capitalism, wealth always grows faster than the economy at large, meaning that over time, the rich will get steadily richer, and inequality will widen and widen:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/

Ideally, we would counter the trend of wealth piling up into dynastic fortunes with continuous redistribution and predistribution: taxing capital gains at the same rate (or a higher rate) than income, so that income from labor isn't treated worse than income from ownership; steeply graded progressive taxes, with top rates in of 70-99%, high inheritance taxes, and so on. We had a system like that, from the end of WWII (when the rich were poorer than they'd been in centuries, with their influence in tatters) until the Reagan era (when the rich had rebuilt their fortunes and were able to seize the reins of power). In the 45 years since the rise of the new oligarchy, we've lived through accelerating wealth accumulation, and as the rich got richer, they used their wealth to dismantle any barrier to creating new aristocratic dynasties.

So here we are, trapped in the new oligarchy. It's too late to rely on income taxes, not if we're going to euthanize enough rentiers to free out politics from their toxic influence and save the human race any of several foreseeable mass-extinction events. Making the ultra-rich poor again is going to require new tactics.

In Canada, the 1% owns 29% of the country's wealth. The 87 richest families in Canada control as much wealth as the bottom 12 million Canadians combined. This is better than the US (where the 1% own 35% of the country), but not by much:

https://www.policyalternatives.ca/wp-content/uploads/attachments/Born%20to%20Win.pdf

Can we make a wealth tax work? Here's Hemingway's program for making it work in Canada:

Make it apply to all kinds of wealth equally. No carve-outs for real-estate, which makes it very easy to shift wealth among asset-classes to duck the tax;

Aim it at the super-rich alone. Avoid even the upper middle-class, who lack the liquid assets to pay the tax and could get wrecked if they have to liquidate their holdings at the same time as everyone else, which will depress asset prices;

Use third-party assessments of asset values. Don't take billionaires' word for how much their assets are worth! Canada's got an advantage here, thanks to the Canada Revenue Agency's requirement for financial institutions to report their account holders' income, including capital gains. Canada's also recently created "beneficial owner" registries that record the true owners of assets;

Use lifestyle audits: anyone caught engaging in tax-evasion will face severe penalties, as will the enablers at financial services firms that help them.

One frequent objection to high taxes is that it encourages capital flight – rich people hopping to another territory to avoid taxation. That's a reasonable fear, given how pants-wettingly terrified the rich are of paying tax. Hemingway points out that a wealth tax is different from an income tax – income taxes are levied on the outcome of productive activities, while wealth taxes target accumulated wealth. High income taxes can starve a country of the capital it needs for a productive economy, but that's not the case with wealth taxes.

Hemingway points to the OECD's Common Reporting Standard, through which more than 100 countries have agreed to share financial information, which will help Canada catch billionaires as they funnel their wealth offshore. Meanwhile, if the rich try to move with their money, we can hit them with an exit tax, like the 40% that Elizabeth Warren has proposed.

It's an article of faith that the rich will move offshore at the first hint of a wealth tax, but the research shows that rich people often have reasons to stay that trump their taxophobia. The economic effect of rich people Going Galt is pretty darned small:

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/publications/workingpapers/2022/taxation_and_migration_by_the_super_rich/

The modern prophet of oligarchy and its origins is the French economist Thomas Piketty. In a recent Le Monde column, Piketty examines the failure of a French wealth tax proposal that would have shaved a modest 2% off the fortunes of the 1,800 French people with more than €100 million:

https://www.lemonde.fr/blog/piketty/2025/06/17/the-senate-beside-the-story/

The proposal passed the National Assembly, only to die in the Senate, an institution with a long history of pro-oligarchic activism (the Senate killed every French income tax passed by the Assembly from 1896-1914). The Assembly's wealth tax addressed the problem of tax exiles, levying the wealth tax for 5 years after an oligarch relocated. For Piketty, this didn't go far enough: he wants a pro-rated tax based on the number of years an oligarch spent in France in their lifetime: if you were educated and cared for at French expense from birth and went on to become a billionaire, then a modest share of your wealth would forever be owed to the country that made it possible. Piketty says that a wealth tax could be paid in shares instead of cash, with the stock going into a trust for workers, who would get board seats as well.

He points out that decarbonization is going to require large sacrifices from all of us, but that these will be impossible to demand with a straight face so long as the super-rich are paying taxes that are trivial relative to their assets and income.

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/2025/06/21/billionaires-eh/#galen-weston-is-a-rat

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A new resource launched by Jason Hickel, Dylan Sullivan and others to "make research and data on global inequality accessible to a broader audience":

We live in a world where a few people capture unimaginable wealth while billions are denied access to basic needs. Such extreme inequality is not natural or inevitable. It is an effect of the dominant economic system, capitalism, where production is controlled mostly by capital and organized around maximizing and accumulating profit, rather than securing human well-being. Capital accumulation requires cheapening labour and resources, particularly in the global South. This produces inequalities between classes and leads to uneven development between regions. It also drives ecological breakdown, and while some benefit from the exploitation of our planet’s ecosystems, others suffer the damages.

Explore the data

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The Economist has tried to wipe this article from their archives and even the wayback machine. Never forget.

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Every time someone says "we need a new political party in America to represent all the people in the center!" I am reminded of the Dutch Centre Party aka the owners of one of the funniest opening lines of a wiki article: