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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 months

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Sympathy for the spammer

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

In any scam, any con, any hustle, the big winners are the people who supply the scammers – not the scammers themselves. The kids selling dope on the corner are making less than minimum wage, while the respectable crime-bosses who own the labs clean up. Desperate "retail investors" who buy shitcoins from Superbowl ads get skinned, while the MBA bros who issue the coins make millions (in real dollars, not crypto).

It's ever been thus. The California gold rush was a con, and nearly everyone who went west went broke. Famously, the only reliable way to cash out on the gold rush was to sell "picks and shovels" to the credulous, doomed and desperate. That's how Leland Stanford made his fortune, which he funneled into eugenics programs (and founding a university):

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/malcolm-harris/palo-alto/9780316592031/

That means that the people who try to con you are almost always getting conned themselves. Think of Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) scams. My forthcoming novel The Bezzle opens with a baroque and improbable fast-food Ponzi in the town of Avalon on the island of Catalina, founded by the chicle monopolist William Wrigley Jr:

http://thebezzle.org

Wrigley found fast food declasse and banned it from the island, a rule that persists to this day. In The Bezzle, the forensic detective Martin Hench uncovers The Fry Guys, an MLM that flash-freezes contraband burgers and fries smuggled on-island from the mainland and sells them to islanders though an "affiliate marketing" scheme that is really about recruiting other affiliate markets to sell under you. As with every MLM, the value of the burgers and fries sold is dwarfed by the gigantic edifice of finance fraud built around it, with "points" being bought and sold for real cash, which is snaffled up and sucked out of the island by a greedy mainlander who is behind the scheme.

A "bezzle" is John Kenneth Galbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." In every scam, there's a period where everyone feels richer – but only the scammers are actually cleaning up. The wealth of the marks is illusory, but the longer the scammer can preserve the illusion, the more real money the marks will pump into the system.

MLMs are particularly ugly, because they target people who are shut out of economic opportunity – women, people of color, working people. These people necessarily rely on social ties for survival, looking after each others' kids, loaning each other money they can't afford, sharing what little they have when others have nothing.

It's this social cohesion that MLMs weaponize. Crypto "entrepreneurs" are encouraged to suck in their friends and family by telling them that they're "building Black wealth." Working women are exhorted to suck in their bffs by appealing to their sisterhood and the chance for "women to lift each other up."

The "sales people" trying to get you to buy crypto or leggings or supplements are engaged in predatory conduct that will make you financially and socially worse off, wrecking their communities' finances and shattering the mutual aid survival networks they rely on. But they're not getting rich on this – they're also being scammed:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4686468

This really hit home for me in the mid-2000s, when I was still editing Boing Boing. We had a submission form where our readers could submit links for us to look at for inclusion on the blog, and it was overwhelmed by spam. We'd add all kinds of antispam to it, and still, we'd get floods of hundreds or even thousands of spam submissions to it.

One night, I was lying in my bed in London and watching these spams roll in. They were all for small businesses in the rustbelt, handyman services, lawn-care, odd jobs, that kind of thing. They were 10 million miles from the kind of thing we'd ever post about on Boing Boing. They were coming in so thickly that I literally couldn't finish downloading my email – the POP session was dropping before I could get all the mail in the spool. I had to ssh into my mail server and delete them by hand. It was maddening.

Frustrated and furious, I started calling the phone numbers associated with these small businesses, demanding an explanation. I assumed that they'd hired some kind of sleazy marketing service and I wanted to know who it was so I could give them a piece of my mind.

But what I discovered when I got through was much weirder. These people had all been laid off from factories that were shuttering due to globalization. As part of their termination packages, their bosses had offered them "retraining" via "courses" in founding their own businesses.

The "courses" were the precursors to the current era's rise-and-grind hustle-culture scams (again, the only people getting rich from that stuff are the people selling the courses – the "students" finish the course poorer). They promised these laid-off workers, who'd given their lives to their former employers before being discarded, that they just needed to pull themselves up by their own boostraps:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/10/declaration-of-interdependence/#solidarity-forever

After all, we had the internet now! There were so many new opportunities to be your own boss! The course came with a dreadful build-your-own-website service, complete with an overpriced domain sales portal, and a single form for submitting your new business to "thousands of search engines."

This was nearly 20 years ago, but even then, there was really only one search engine that mattered: Google. The "thousands of search engines" the scammers promised to submit these desperate peoples' websites to were just submission forms for directories, indexes, blogs, and mailing lists. The number of directories, indexes, blogs and mailing lists that would publish their submissions was either "zero" or "nearly zero." There was certainly no possibility that anyone at Boing Boing would ever press the wrong key and accidentally write a 500-word blog post about a leaf-raking service in a collapsing deindustrialized exurb in Kentucky or Ohio.

The people who were drowning me in spam weren't the scammers – they were the scammees.

But that's only half the story. Years later, I discovered how our submission form was getting included in this get-rich-quick's mass-submission system. It was a MLM! Coders in the former Soviet Union were getting work via darknet websites that promised them relative pittances for every submission form they reverse-engineered and submitted. The smart coders didn't crack the forms directly – they recruited other, less business-savvy coders to do that for them, and then often as not, ripped them off.

The scam economy runs on this kind of indirection, where scammees are turned into scammers, who flood useful and productive and nice spaces with useless dross that doesn't even make them any money. Take the submission queue at Clarkesworld, the great online science fiction magazine, which famously had to close after it was flooded with thousands of junk submission "written" by LLMs:

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt-magazine-clarkesworld-artificial-intelligence

There was a zero percent chance that Neil Clarke would accidentally accept one of these submissions. They were uniformly terrible. The people submitting these "stories" weren't frustrated sf writers who'd discovered a "life hack" that let them turn out more brilliant prose at scale.

They were scammers who'd been scammed into thinking that AIs were the key to a life of passive income, a 4-Hour Work-Week powered by an AI-based self-licking ice-cream cone:

https://pod.link/1651876897/episode/995c8a778ede17d2d7cff393e5203157

This is absolutely classic passive-income brainworms thinking. "I have a bot that can turn out plausible sentences. I will locate places where sentences can be exchanged for money, aim my bot at it, sit back, and count my winnings." It's MBA logic on meth: find a thing people pay for, then, without bothering to understand why they pay for that thing, find a way to generate something like it at scale and bombard them with it.

Con artists start by conning themselves, with the idea that "you can't con an honest man." But the factor that predicts whether someone is connable isn't their honesty – it's their desperation. The kid selling drugs on the corner, the mom desperately DMing her high-school friends to sell them leggings, the cousin who insists that you get in on their shitcoin – they're all doing it because the system is rigged against them, and getting worse every day.

These people reason – correctly – that all the people getting really rich are scamming. If Amazon can make $38b/year selling "ads" that push worse products that cost more to the top of their search results, why should the mere fact that an "opportunity" is obviously predatory and fraudulent disqualify it?

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/29/aethelred-the-unready/#not-one-penny-for-tribute

The quest for passive income is really the quest for a "greater fool," the economist's term for the person who relieves you of the useless crap you just overpaid for. It rots the mind, atomizes communities, shatters solidarity and breeds cynicism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

The rise and rise of botshit cannot be separated from this phenomenon. The botshit in our search-results, our social media feeds, and our in-boxes isn't making money for the enshittifiers who send it – rather, they are being hustled by someone who's selling them the "picks and shovels" for the AI gold rush:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/botshit-generative-ai-imminent-threat-democracy

That's the true cost of all the automation-driven unemployment criti-hype: while we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

The manic "entrepreneurs" who've been stampeded into panic by the (correct) perception that the economy is a game of musical chairs where the number of chairs is decreasing at breakneck speed are easy marks for the Leland Stanfords of AI, who are creating generational wealth for themselves by promising that their bots will automate away all the tedious work that goes into creating value. Expect a lot more Amazon Marketplace products called "I'm sorry, I cannot fulfil this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy":

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/12/24036156/openai-policy-amazon-ai-listings

No one's going to buy these products, but the AI picks-and-shovels people will still reap a fortune from the attempt. And because history repeats itself, these newly minted billionaires are continuing Leland Stanford's love affair with eugenics:

https://www.truthdig.com/dig-series/eugenics/

The fact that AI spam doesn't pay is important to the fortunes of AI companies. Most high-value AI applications are very risk-intolerant (self-driving cars, radiology analysis, etc). An AI tool might help a human perform these tasks more accurately – by warning them of things that they've missed – but that's not how AI will turn a profit. There's no market for AI that makes your workers cost more but makes them better at their jobs:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Plenty of people think that spam might be the elusive high-value, low-risk AI application. But that's just not true. The point of AI spam is to get clicks from people who are looking for better content. It's SEO. No one reads 2000 words of algorithm-pleasing LLM garbage over an omelette recipe and then subscribes to that site's feed.

And the omelette recipe generates pennies for the spammer that posted it. They are doing massive volume in order to make those pennies into dollars. You don't make money by posting one spam. If every spammer had to pay the actual recovery costs (energy, chillers, capital amortization, wages) for their query, every AI spam would lose (lots of) money.

Hustle culture and passive income are about turning other peoples' dollars into your dimes. It is a negative-sum activity, a net drain on society. Behind every seemingly successful "passive income" is a con artist who's getting rich by promising – but not delivering – that elusive passive income, and then blaming the victims for not hustling hard enough:

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/12/blueprint-trouble

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

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/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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female-malice · 2 years

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I'm tired of female pop stars wearing only lingerie to events, shows, red carpets, and guest star appearances. I'm tired of seeing women show up to things wearing nothing but corsets and thongs. I'm exhausted. These women are framed as "successful wealthy entrepreneurs." Is that what female success is? Nudity? Seeing that lingerie shit at events makes me feel cheap and degraded from a million miles away.

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mariacallous · 5 months

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When you think of Eastern European Jewish cuisine, which words come to mind? Light? Healthy? Plant based? Probably not. Heavy, homey and meat-centric are more like it.

Fania Lewando died during the Holocaust, but had she been given the full length of her years, Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine may have taken a turn to the vegetarian side and we might all be eating vegetarian kishke and spinach cutlets in place of brisket.

Lewando is not a household name. In fact, she would have been lost to history had it not been for an unlikely turn of events. Thanks to a serendipitous find, her 1937 work, “The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook” (“Vegetarish-Dietisher Kokhbukh”in Yiddish), was saved from oblivion and introduced to the 21st century.

Vilna in the 1930s, where Lewando and her husband Lazar made their home, was a cosmopolitan city with a large Jewish population. Today, it is the capital of Lithuania but it was then part of Poland. Lewando opened a vegetarian eatery called The Vegetarian Dietetic Restaurant on the edge of the city’s Jewish quarter. It was a popular spot among both Jews and non-Jews, as well as luminaries of the Yiddish-speaking world. (Even renowned artist Marc Chagall signed the restaurant’s guest book.)

Lewando was a staunch believer in the health benefits of vegetarianism and devoted her professional life to promoting these beliefs. She wrote: “It has long been established by the highest medical authorities that food made from fruit and vegetables is far healthier and more suitable for the human organism than food made from meat.” Plus, she wrote, vegetarianism satisfies the Jewish precept of not killing living creatures.

We know little about her life other than she was born Fania Fiszlewicz in the late 1880s to a Jewish family in northern Poland. She married Lazar Lewando, an egg merchant from what is today Belarus and they eventually made their way to Vilna. They did not have children.

Lewando, to quote Jeffrey Yoskowitz, author of “The Gefilte Manifesto” was “a woman who challenged convention;” a successful entrepreneur, which was a rarity among women of the time. She supervised a kosher vegetarian kitchen on an ocean liner that traveled between Poland and the United States, and gave classes on nutrition to Jewish women in her culinary school.

“The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook” was sold in Europe and the U.S. in Lewando’s day, but most of the copies were lost or destroyed during the Second World War. In 1995, a couple found a copy of the cookbook at a second-hand book fair in England. They understood the importance of a pre-war, Yiddish-language, vegetarian cookbook written by a woman, so purchased it and sent it to the YIVO Institute’s offices in New York. There, it joined the millions of books, periodicals and photos in YIVO’s archives.

It was discovered again by two women who visited YIVO and were captivated by the book’s contents and colorful artwork. They had it translated from Yiddish to English so it could be enjoyed by a wider audience.

Like many Ashkenazi cooks, salt was Lewando’s spice, butter her flavor and dill her herb. The book is filled with dishes you’d expect: kugels and blintzes and latkes; borscht and many ways to use cabbage. There’s imitation gefilte fish and kishke made from vegetables, breadcrumbs, eggs and butter. Her cholent (a slow-cooked Sabbath stew) recipes are meat-free, including one made with prune, apple, potatoes and butter that is a cross between a stew and a tzimmes.

There are also some surprises.

Did you know it was possible to access tomatoes, eggplants, asparagus, lemons, cranberries, olive oil, Jerusalem artichokes, blueberries and candied orange peel in pre-war Vilna? There’s a French influence, too, such as recipes for mayonnaise Provencal and iles flottante, a meringue-based dessert, and a salad of marinated cornichons with marinated mushrooms.

“It’s hard to know who the target audience was for this cookbook,” said Eve Jochnowitz, its English-language translator. “We know from contemporary memoirs that people in Vilna did not have access to these amazing amounts of butter, cream and eggs,” she said. “Lewando was writing from a somewhat privileged and bourgeois position.” While many of these recipes may have been aspirational given the poverty of the Jews at the time, the cookbook demonstrates that it was possible to obtain these ingredients in Vilna, should one have the resources to do so.

While the cookbook is filled with expensive ingredients, there is also, said Jochnowitz, “a great attention to husbanding one’s resources. She was ahead of her time in the zero-waste movement.” Lewando admonishes her readers to waste nothing. Use the cooking water in which you cooked your vegetables for soup stock. Use the vegetables from the soup stock in other dishes. “Throw nothing out,” she writes in the cookbook’s opening essay. “Everything can be made into food.” Including the liquid from fresh vegetables; Lewando instructed her readers on the art of vitamin drinks and juices, with recipes for Vitamin-Rich Beet Juice and Vitamin-Rich Carrot Juice. “This was very heroic of her,” said Jochnowitz. “There were no juice machines! You make the juice by grating the vegetables and then squeezing the juice out by hand.”

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, a Jewish scholar and Jewish cookbook collector, describes Lewando as “witty.” “She is showing us,” she said, “that once you eliminate meat and fish, you still have an enormous range of foods you can prepare.” Lewando is about “being creative, imaginative and innovative both with traditional dishes and with what she is introducing that is remote from the traditional repertoire.” She does that in unexpected ways. Her milchig (dairy) matzah balls, for example, have an elegance and lightness to them. She instructs the reader to make a meringue with egg whites, fold in the yolks, then combine with matzah meal, melted butter and hot water. Her sauerkraut salad includes porcini mushrooms. One of her kugels combines cauliflower, apples, sliced almonds and candied orange peel.

There is much that, through contemporary eyes, is missing in “The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook.” The recipes do not give step-by-step instructions; rather you will find general directions. Heating instructions are vague, ranging from a “not-too-hot-oven” to a “warm oven” to a “hot oven.” Lewando assumes the reader’s familiarity with the kitchen that today’s cookbook writer would not.

Lewando and her husband were listed in the 1941 census of the Vilna Ghetto but not in the census of 1942. It is believed that they both died or were killed while attempting to escape. “She really was a visionary,” said Jochnowitz. “It is an unbearable tragedy that she did not live to see the future that she predicted and helped to bring about.”But in cooking her recipes, said Yoskowitz, as dated and incomplete as some of them may be, the conversation between then and now continues.

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secular-jew · 4 months

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Some basic facts to educate your antisemites, Islamists, and ignoramuses:

1. Jews are descendants of Jacob, son of Isaac and grandson of Abraham. Jacob’s other name is Israel.

The people of Israel (Jews) lived in Israel for 3,600 years, 2,000 years before the birth of Islam.

2. Local Arabs were offered half of Israel as part of the 1947 partition plan. The Arabs refused.

3. Since 1948, the local Arabs were offered multiple peace treaties. The Arabs refused.

4. If you prefer the more recent argument, Israel won every single war imposed by its neighbors. Some of those victories included claiming new territories. Generally, Israel withdrew from territories in exchange for peace (see Sinai desert and the peace treaty with Egypt). Regarding Gaza, in 2005 Israel withdrew from Gaza to the 1967 line.

5. Of all the wars its neighbors lost, let's not forget WW2, the war in which The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, met with Hitler, aligned with the Nazis who trained numerous Arab regiments focused on killing Jews in the Levant. By what right do allies of Nazi Germany think that any of their previous claims are restored? They, and millions of others, lost those rights.

6. The partition plan was a U.N. decision, not an Israeli or British decision.

7. Rape is wrong. Entering homes to torture and murder children is wrong. Kidnapping anyone, let alone civilian babies, teens, women, and the elderly is wrong. These are war crimes and none of these actions can be justified.

8. Performing some or all of the actions mentioned in Section 7 is likely to cause a war.

9. Israel is obligated to follow international law. This does not mean its responsibility towards Gazans is greater than that of Hamas.

10. If you support Hamas’s claim to power you also acknowledge it’s the ruling party in Gaza, and therefore it holds the sole responsibility for the consequences of its actions.

11. Being ignorant of language and the rules of engagement in war -- is no excuse to engage in antisemitic behavior online. Understand that attacking and eliminating a terror group is not genocide. The fact that a war has casualties does not make it a genocide. If that was the case, every single war in history would constitute a genocide.

12. There is no ethnic cleansing, and the opposite is the truth. The accusation of ethnic cleansing and apartheid is basic gaslighting. 20% of Israel’s population is Arab. Some of these Arabs are parliament members, Supreme Court judges, prominent doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, board members and senior management teams of prominent Israeli corporations, IDF and police officers, talk show hosts and singers.

13. If Hamas lays down its arms and release the hostages today, there will be no more war. If Israel lays its arms today, there will be no more Israel.

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blueiskewl · 29 days

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The Hunt: El Dorado, Fabled City of Gold, Remains Hidden in the Amazon

Centuries have seen countless explorers brave hardships to find the fabled city.

An ancient city of gold somewhere in South America is rumored to have been so fabulously opulent that it has become an expression for any place where people can amass great fortunes. But it has been so elusive that it has become synonymous, like the Holy Grail, with a prized object long sought but never found. Countless men have given their lives in the search for its riches as they ran out of supplies and food, were felled by disease, or encountered violent resistance along the way.

The goal of numerous explorers over centuries, from crews with wooden ships and horses to teams with drones and radar, El Dorado is a lost city, reportedly stretching over great distances in the Amazon rainforest and hidden from prying eyes by its remoteness and the warlike peoples in the forest around it. (The region got its name, in fact, from Spanish explorer Francisco Orellana, who compared the fighting women he encountered during his own search with the Amazons of ancient Greece.)

Tales of El Dorado, its name Spanish for “the golden,” began with the Muisca peoples’ perhaps-mythical account of a tribal chief who, in an initiation rite, coated himself in gold. He then went onto Lake Guatavita, near present-day Bogotá, threw a pile of gold objects into the water, and washed the gold off himself as his attendants also threw an abundance of gold objects into the lake. The 16th-century Spanish referred to him as the Golden Man or the Golden King.

“This is the ceremony that became the famous El Dorado, which has taken so many lives and fortunes,” according to a 1638 letter from writer Juan Rodríguez Freyle. That pile of loot was soon fused in the lore with an account of an entire city made of gold. Others posited that the city was called Manoa and was situated on the shores of a legendary Lake Parima, which has also never been found.

Supposedly one of the first to claim he visited it was the Spanish explorer Juan Martinez, who reported that the locals had brought him there blindfolded in 1531 and allowed him to witness it, and that he traveled an entire day through its streets before reaching the emperor’s palace.

When Francisco Pizarro conquered the gold-rich Inca civilization in Peru in 1532, Spaniards believed all the more firmly in the fabled El Dorado. Francisco de Orellana, a relative of Pizarro, unwittingly traveled the entire length of the Amazon, the world’s longest river, in his search for it.

Some gold did turn up in a lake, seeming to justify the continued search. After he found Guatavita, a sacred lake in the Andes, in 1537, conquistador Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada partly emptied it using a bucket chain. From its depths emerged a few thousand pesos of gold.

Bogotá entrepreneur Antonio de Sepúlveda, for his part, cut an enormous notch in the bank of the lake in 1580, removing a great deal of water before the notch collapsed and killed many of the workers. For his trouble, he uncovered three times as much gold as Quesada had, and sent it to King Philip II of Spain. Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century German explorer, would calculate that there could be as much as $300 million in gold in the lake.

English explorer Sir Walter Raleigh went looking for El Dorado in 1594, followed by the Spanish conquistadores, who scoured modern-day Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana and Brazil in the search. Less well-known expeditions continued over the 17th and 18th centuries, bodies piling up but ultimately turning up nothing.

In findings from a major scientific investigation, Von Humboldt would claim, ca. 1800, to have disproven the existence of the lake El Dorado is meant to have flanked. In the following decades, two other researchers came to the same conclusion.

But the legend did not die. The search was revived a century later, when an English company drained the lake almost entirely. Despite their efforts, they extracted artifacts worth only about £500, some of which went to the British Museum, some of which sold at Sotheby’s London. In 1965, the Colombian government designated the lake as off-limits to further attempts.

The quest continues with the help of modern technology. A team led by Venezuelan archaeologist-explorer Jose Miguel Perez-Gomez went looking, employing aerial and satellite remote sensing surveys obtained from NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Missions (SRTM), the Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) instrument, and TanDEM-X synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors from the German Aeropsace Center’s Microwave and Radar Institute, according to a 2019 paper. Of all the unlikely results, their findings strongly resembled the outlines of a lake in a map drawn by none other than Sir Walter Raleigh.

The area is not without rich natural resources, so dreams of a city of gold can perhaps be forgiven. Illegal extraction operations are underway to this day, in fact, in what the Venezuelan government in 2016 designated the Orinoco Mining Arc, which covers 12 percent of the country’s territory and is rich not only in gold but also bauxite, coltan, and diamonds, possibly totaling some $2 trillion in value. You can literally see the modern gold mining from space: in 2021, an astronaut passing over eastern Peru in the International Space Station used a Nikon camera to snap a photo that reveals numerous gold prospecting pits.

Over the years, El Dorado has shown up in popular culture countless times, from a 1989 Neil Young record to video games, a board game, and the Cadillac Eldorado. So even as the city has remained stubbornly hidden over centuries, it is, in its way, all around us.

By Brian Boucher.

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therighthandofvengeance · 7 months

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welcome to Babylon 5!

we have:

the last, best hope for peace (ten years after the Earth-Minbari War)

The Wise One (who’s often feral)

a dream given form

The Feral One (who’s often wise)

a port of call

The Chad (who’s honorable)

home away from home (for diplomats, hustlers, entrepreneurs, and wanderers)

The Honorable (who’s a chad)

2 500 000 tons of spinning metal (all alone in the night)

Green vs Purple, Purple vs Green

women who not just can kill you, but will kill you (including god)

boomshakalaka, woohoo, and six

exploitation of classes who falsely believe themselves to be bourgeois, repeatedly

babygirls, blorbos, himbos, and poor little meow meows

home for a quarter of a million humans and aliens

one-sided enemies-to-lovers

girlbosses and their malewives

destruction of fascist states

warring souls

an insecure security cheif

a deity named “Jeff” (who fastens then zips)

#who are queue? what do queue want?#for once it’s not an incorrect quote #b5 #babylon 5 #and more #so much more #the only real benefit to b4 instead of b5 is zathras #I actively encourage you to add on with whatever

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thesirencult · 7 months

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Hundreds of Start Ups Will Fail In the Next 2 Years. Here Is Why :

“Throughout history we witness continual cycles of rising and falling levels of the irrational. The great golden age of Pericles, with its philosophers and its first stirrings of the scientific spirit, was followed by an age of superstition, cults, and intolerance. This same phenomenon happened after the Italian Renaissance. That this cycle is bound to recur again and again is part of human nature.” ― Robert Greene

I would argue that for the past 200 years we have been going through a period who will later be considered by historians "The Age Of Irrationality".

In such a miniscule amount of time we've gone from farming to building factories, from entrepreneurs to influencers and bloggers.

Imagine you met a man from 1870 and you told them 16 year olds would be making millions from a machine that connects them to the whole entire world in milliseconds.

Historical/Dialectical Materialism, is a term that emerged from the theories of Engels and Marx. In simply terms, it says that for every drasis/thesis there is an antidrasis/antithesis and through change, the final product, synthesis is produced.

Synthesis is balance. We have long forgotten that word. We chose to forget that an antithesis will always follow the thesis.

A prime example of irrationality in our culture is the glorification of start ups. When all the facts point North, we take the road to South. Logic goes out the window and start ups like WeWork raise millions (IF NOT BILLIONS) of dollars even though they offer nothing new.

How can a business run for years on years, raise money and not generate PROFIT.

We humans like to think we have progressed. We no longer fall victims to "fast money" and cultish leaders. But we do.

We trust "geniuses" running on psychedelics with our money.

These people are playing chess. This is " The South Sea Bubble" all over again.

Even though a small percentage of start ups offer true value to society and are worth every penny invested on them, others are nothing but glorified horse shit.

Would you buy a ship that was not built but the "owner" claimed it is the fastest ship ever built ? No. You would first want proof. What if you paid the person that had the idea millions of dollars and after 5 years, a boat was all they have made ?

So why do venture capital investment companies with countless of analysts "fall victim" to this. Either they are expecting the company to go public and people to run to buy stock because guess what ? "Microinvestors"(you, me and your aunt) follow the motions of "Macroinvestors" (wall street boys, private equity firms, investors who have reached celebrity status) or they themselves act irrationally.

I would like to hear your thoughts on this women in tech, finance or business in general. Do you agree with me that the start up bubble is finally bursting or is there something else (besides the silent recession) going on?

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 3 months

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The real choice isn’t “pragmatism” or “idealism.” It’s either allowing these trends to worsen – destroying what’s left of our democracy and turning our economy into even more of a playground for big corporations, Wall Street, and billionaires – or reversing them. And the only pragmatic way of reversing them is through a “political revolution” that mobilizes millions of Americans.

Robert Reich (via azspot)

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAR 2, 2024

On February 25, 1901, financier J. P. Morgan’s men filed the paperwork to incorporate a new iron and steel trust, and over the weekend, businessmen waited to see what was coming. Five days later, on March 2, the announcement came: J. P. Morgan was overseeing the combination of companies that produced two thirds of the nation’s steel into the United States Steel Corporation. It was capitalized at $1.4 billion, which at the time was almost three times more than the federal government’s annual budget.

While the stock market was abuzz with news of the nation’s first billion-dollar corporation, Vice President–elect Theodore Roosevelt was on his way from New York to Washington, D.C., where he and his family arrived at 5:00 in the evening. The train was an hour behind schedule because the crowds coming to see the upcoming inauguration, scheduled for Monday, March 4, 1901, had slowed travel into Washington.

Two days later, President William McKinley took the oath of office for the second time, and Roosevelt became vice president.

McKinley was a champion of big business and believed the role of government was to support industry, dismissing growing demands from workers, farmers, and entrepreneurs for the government to level the economic playing field that had tilted so extraordinarily toward a few industry leaders. McKinley had won the hard-fought election of 1896 handily, but by 1900, Republicans were so concerned about the growing demand for reform that party leaders put Roosevelt, who had won a reputation for standing up to business interests, on the ticket, at least in part because they hoped to silence him there.

Roosevelt hoped he could promote reform from the vice presidency, but he quickly discovered that he couldn’t accomplish much of anything. His only official duty was to preside over the Senate, which would not convene until December. He was so bored he asked the chief justice of the Supreme Court if it would be unseemly for him to enroll in law school to finish his degree. (Horrified, the justice offered to supervise Roosevelt’s studies himself.)

But then, in September, an unemployed steelworker assassinated McKinley, and Roosevelt became president. “I told McKinley it was a mistake to nominate that wild man at Philadelphia,” one of McKinley’s aides said. “I told him what would happen if he should die. Now look. That damned cowboy is president of the United States.”

Two months later, on November 13, J. P. Morgan and railroad magnates brought together the nation’s main railroad interests, which had been warring with each other, into a new conglomerate called the Northern Securities Company. Even the staunchly big business Chicago Tribune was taken aback: “Never have interests so enormous been brought under one management,” its editor wrote.

Midwestern governors, whose constituents depended on the railroads to get their crops to market, suggested that their legislatures would find a way to prohibit such a powerful combination. Northern Securities Company officials retorted that they would simply keep all business transactions and operations secret. When Roosevelt gave his first message to Congress in December, industrialists watched to see what the “damned cowboy” would say about their power over the government.

They were relieved. Roosevelt said the government should start cleaning up factories and limiting the working hours of women and children, and that it should reserve natural resources for everyone rather than allow them to be exploited by greedy businessmen.

But Roosevelt did not oppose the new huge combinations. He simply wanted the government to supervise and control corporate combinations, preventing criminality in the business world as it did in the streets. He asked businessmen only for transparency. Once the government actually knew what businesses were up to, he said, it could consider regulation or taxation to protect the public interest.

Senators and businessmen who had worried that the cowboy president would slash at the trusts breathed a sigh of relief that all he wanted was “transparency.” According to the Chicago Tribune, the “grave and reverend and somewhat plutocratic Senators immediately admitted in the most delighted fashion that the young and supposedly impetuous President had discussed the trust question with rare discrimination.”

But they were wrong to think Roosevelt did not intend to reduce the power of big business. In early January 1902, Minnesota sued to stop the Northern Securities Company from organizing on the grounds that such a combination violated Minnesota law. While the Supreme Court dithered over whether or not it could rule on the case, the Roosevelt administration put the federal government out in front of the issue. In February, Roosevelt’s attorney general told newspapers that the administration believed the formation of the Northern Securities Company violated the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act and that he would be filing a suit to keep it from organizing.

Businessmen were aghast, not only because Roosevelt was going after a business combination but also because he had acted without consulting Wall Street. When J. P. Morgan complained that he had not been informed, Roosevelt coolly told him that that was the whole point. “If we have done anything wrong,” said the astonished Morgan, “send your man [the attorney general] to my man [one of his lawyers] and they can fix it up.” The president declined. “We don’t want to fix it up,” explained the attorney general. “We want to stop it.”

“Criticism of President Roosevelt’s action was heard on every side,” reported the Boston Globe. “Some of the principal financiers said he had dealt a serious blow to the financial securities of the country.” For his part, Roosevelt was unconcerned by the criticism. “If the law has not been violated,” he announced, “no harm can come from the proposed legal action.”

In late February, the Supreme Court decided it would not hear the Minnesota case; on March 10, the United States sued to stop the organization of the Northern Securities Company.

In August 1902, Roosevelt toured New England and the Midwest to rally support for his attack on the Northern Securities Company. He told audiences that he was not trying to destroy corporations but rather wanted to make them act in the public interest. He demanded a “square deal” for everyone. As the Boston Globe put it: “‘Justice for all alike—a square deal for every man, great or small, rich or poor,’ is the Roosevelt ideal to be attained by the framing and the administration of the law. And he would tell you that that means Mr Morgan and Mr Rockefeller [sic] as well as the poor fellow who cannot pay his rent.”

In 1904 the Supreme Court ruled that the Northern Securities Company was an illegal monopoly and that it must be dissolved, and by 1912, Roosevelt had come to believe that a strong federal government was the only way for citizens to maintain control over corporations, which he saw as the inevitable outcome of the industrial economy. He had no patience for those who hoped to stop such combinations by passing laws against them. Instead, he believed the American people must create a strong federal government that could exert public control over corporations.

In a famous speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, in 1912, he called for a “new nationalism.”

“The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being,” he said. He warned that “[t]here can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains…. We must have complete and effective publicity of corporate affairs, so that the people may know…whether the corporations obey the law and whether their management entitles them to the confidence of the public.”

Roosevelt had come to believe that a strong government must regulate business. “The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power,” he said.

After all, he said, “[t]he object of government is the welfare of the people.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Heather Cox Richardson #letters From an American #history #T.Roosevelt #bllionaires #corporate greed #income inequality #democracy #political influence #American History #Robert Reich #the purchase of the SCOTUS #welfare of the people

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sapphireraeburn · 10 months

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I don’t understand people in charge of movies, shows, or commercials that insist on having flashing lights.

I mean, as if the number of people with epilepsy isn’t bad enough, people with migraines can react to them too. I can’t count how many times my migraine has gotten worse because of a stupid commercial.

The average number of people in the USA that experience migraines is around 20%.

So if the commercial ran in certain city areas, with or without its outlying communities:

That’s over 204,000 people in the Tulsa, OK area alone that they’ve alienated because they can’t watch the commercial.

Almost 2 million people they lost in New York City.

Over 300,000 people in Philadelphia.

Seriously. It’s stupid. If they want to show their commercial to lots of people, they need to stop hindering so many from watching it. It’s simple marketing.

(Bah. I’ll end my rant here. Just plugged in some numbers and was shaking my head at them. I grew up around entrepreneurs and I learned some of this stuff as a kid. Plus, I got a migraine while trying to watch tv because of a new commercial and I got mad.)

#disability #migraines #epilepsy #narcolepsy #and more #marketing #marketing strategies

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ewomennetwork0 · 5 months

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From Podcast to Profit: Boosting Your Business with Insights from Female Entrepreneur Podcasts

From the bustling world of entrepreneurship, staying updated and inspired is crucial for success. This is where the magic of female entrepreneur podcasts comes into play. These podcasts are not just a source of inspiration; they're a goldmine of strategies, stories, and insights that can transform your business approach. Today, let's explore how tuning into these podcasts can propel your business to new heights.

The Treasure Trove of Podcast Wisdom

Podcasts hosted by female entrepreneurs are rich with real-world experiences, practical advice, and innovative ideas. Each episode offers a unique perspective, whether it's about overcoming challenges, leveraging opportunities, or staying ahead in the competitive market. But how exactly can these podcasts translate into tangible benefits for your business?

Actionable Strategies and Tips

Many female entrepreneur podcasts feature episodes specifically designed to provide actionable strategies. From marketing hacks to financial advice, these podcasts cover a wide range of topics. Implementing these tips can lead to significant improvements in how you manage and grow your business.

Inspirational Stories

Hearing the success stories and challenges of other women entrepreneurs can be incredibly motivating. These stories not only provide a sense of camaraderie but also offer valuable lessons learned from firsthand experiences.

Staying Ahead of Trends

The business landscape is ever-evolving, and staying abreast of the latest trends is essential. Podcasts often feature discussions on upcoming trends in various industries, helping you to keep your business strategy up-to-date.

More info : business networking group for women entrepreneurs

#million women entrepreneurs #women business owners and professionals #success institute #million dollar women #business networking #top women's networking groups #successful women entrepreneurs #How to grow your business #How to get speaking opportunities #How to scale your business #How to increase your income #women conferences

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beardedmrbean · 7 days

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MEXICO CITY — Claudia Sheinbaum, a climate scientist and former mayor of Mexico City, won her nation’s elections Sunday in a landslide victory that brought a double milestone: She became the first woman, and the first Jewish person, to be elected president of Mexico.

Early results indicated that Sheinbaum, 61, prevailed in what the authorities called the largest election in Mexico’s history, with the highest number of voters taking part and the most seats up for grabs.

It was a landmark vote that saw not one, but two, women vying to lead one of the hemisphere’s biggest nations. And it will put a Jewish leader at the helm of one of the world’s largest predominantly Catholic countries.

Sheinbaum, a leftist, campaigned on a vow to continue the legacy of Mexico’s current president and her mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, which delighted their party’s base — and raised alarm among detractors. The election was seen by many as a referendum on his leadership, and her victory was a clear vote of confidence in López Obrador and the party he started.

López Obrador has completely reshaped Mexican politics. During his tenure, millions of Mexicans were lifted out of poverty and the minimum wage doubled. But he has also been a deeply polarizing president, criticized for failing to control rampant cartel violence, for hobbling the nation’s health system and for persistently undercutting democratic institutions.

Still, López Obrador remains widely popular and his enduring appeal propelled his chosen successor. And for all the challenges facing the country, the opposition was unable to persuade Mexicans that their candidate was a better option.

“We love her, we want her to work like Obrador,” Gloria Maria Rodríguez, 78, from Tabasco, said of Sheinbaum. “We want a president like Obrador.”

Sheinbaum won with at least 58% of the vote, according to preliminary results, while her closest competitor, Xóchitl Gálvez, an entrepreneur and former senator on a ticket with a coalition of opposition parties, had at least 26.6%.

If early returns hold, Sheinbaum will have captured a broader share of the vote than any candidate in decades.

Speaking to supporters early Monday, Sheinbaum vowed to work on behalf of all Mexicans, reaffirmed her party’s commitment to democracy and celebrated her groundbreaking ascension to the nation’s highest office.

“For the first time in 200 years of the republic, I will become the first female president of Mexico,” she said. “And as I have said on other occasions, I do not arrive alone. We all arrived, with our heroines who gave us our homeland, with our ancestors, our mothers, our daughters and our granddaughters.”

Sheinbaum said she received calls from Gálvez and the third-place candidate, Jorge Álvarez Máynez, to congratulate her on the victory. Shortly after Sheinbaum’s speech, Gálvez told supporters that the early returns were “not favorable to my candidacy,” and “irreversible,” noting that she had just communicated with Sheinbaum.

Gálvez had said in an interview days before the vote Sunday that “an anti-system vote” against López Obrador could help propel her to victory. In reality, it appeared that many Mexicans still associate the parties backing her with a system they see as inept and corrupt.

“Xóchitl Gálvez has been unable to represent change because the parties backing her embody the establishment,” said Carlos Bravo Regidor, a political analyst based in Mexico City. “Most Mexicans want a continuity of the change brought by López Obrador.”

Many voters seemed to endorse Sheinbaum as an agent of institutionalizing the changes brought about by her mentor. “We need to bring about more change to the country,” said Evelyn Román, 21, a chemical engineering student in Mexico City who supports Sheinbaum. “We did notice the progress in these six years.”

Sheinbaum’s experience is ample: She has a doctorate in energy engineering, participated in a United Nations panel of climate scientists awarded a Nobel Peace Prize and governed the capital, one of the largest cities in the hemisphere.

Known as a demanding boss with a reserved demeanor, Sheinbaum has risen through the ranks by aligning herself completely with López Obrador, who built an entire political party around his outsize personality. During the campaign, she backed many of his most contentious policies, including a slate of constitutional changes that critics say would severely undermine democratic checks and balances.

As a result, the president-elect battled the perception among many Mexicans that she will be little more than a pawn of her mentor.

“There’s this idea, because a lot of columnists say it, that I don’t have a personality,” Sheinbaum complained to reporters earlier this year. “That President Andrés Manuel López Obrador tells me what to do, that when I get to the presidency, he’s going to be calling me on the phone every day.”

Even with the broad mandate voters granted her, she faces significant challenges when she takes office in October.

López Obrador benefited “from the invincible popularity that comes from being a very charismatic leader — something that Claudia is not,” said Paula Sofía Vásquez, a political analyst based in Mexico City.

Cartel violence continues to torment the country, displacing people en masse and fueling one of the deadliest campaign cycles in recent Mexican history, with more than 36 people vying for public office killed since last summer.

Carlos Ortiz, 57, a municipal official working for the Iztapalapa borough in Mexico City, said that such bloodshed compelled him to vote against Sheinbaum.

“I want everything to change,” Ortiz said, recalling the dozens of aspirants for public office killed in recent months. “I don’t want a country on fire anymore.”

López Obrador has directed government attention to addressing the drivers of crime instead of waging war on the criminal groups, a strategy he called “hugs not bullets.” Homicides declined modestly but remain near record levels, and reports of missing people have spiked. Insecurity was a top concern for voters.

Sheinbaum has said she would continue his focus on social causes of the violence, while also working to lower rates of impunity and building up the national guard.

On the economy, the opportunities are clear: Mexico is now the largest trading partner of the United States, benefiting from a recent shift in manufacturing away from China. The currency is so strong it’s been labeled the “super peso.”

But there are also problems simmering. The federal deficit ballooned to around 6% this year, and Pemex, the national oil company, is operating under a mountain of debt, straining public finances.

“The fiscal risk we’re facing at the moment is something we haven’t seen for decades,” said Mariana Campos, director of Mexico Evaluates, a public policy research group.

It’s unclear how Sheinbaum would make good on a range of campaign promises — from building public schools and new health clinics to expanding social welfare programs — given the current state of public finances.

“The problem I see is that a lot of proposals are oriented toward spending and there is nowhere to get the money from,” said Vásquez.

Another challenge involves the broad new responsibilities granted to the armed forces, which have been tasked with running ports and airports, running an airline, and building a railroad through the Mayan jungle. Sheinbaum has said “there is no militarization” of the country, while suggesting she’s open to reevaluating the military’s involvement in public enterprises.

Beyond the domestic strains, Sheinbaum’s destiny will be intertwined with the outcome of the presidential election in the United States.

A reelection victory for President Joe Biden would provide continuity, but a return of Donald Trump to the White House would likely be far less predictable. Trump’s plans to round up people living in the country illegally on a vast scale and deport them to their home countries could target millions of Mexicans living in the United States. He has already threatened to slap 100% tariffs on Chinese cars made in Mexico.

Then there’s the festering issue of fentanyl, which cartels produce in Mexico using chemicals imported from China, the U.S. government says. Trump has suggested taking military action to combat the fentanyl trade.

Sheinbaum has said Mexico would have “good relations” with either Trump or Biden as president, and her campaign team has said it will continue to work to contain flows of migrants.

But handling such pressure from Washington, even in the form of incendiary campaign rhetoric, could prove complicated.

Voters expressed faith in Sheinbaum’s ability to deal with such challenges. Daniela Mendoza, 40, a psychologist who lives in Villahermosa, in Tabasco state, said she had long supported López Obrador, including during his previously unsuccessful bids to win the presidency.

Pleased with his social welfare programs, Mendoza voted for Sheinbaum.

“Claudia follows that line, perhaps with better ideas,” Mendoza said. “And having the first woman president in the country is an accomplishment.”

#nunyas news #good for her hope she does a good job

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simpliao · 2 years

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Girl, your schlatt fics are so. damn. good!!!! You’re a really talented writer, i love your style! when I was reading one of your most recent fics, i had an idea for a request! Victorian. Era. Schlatt. You cannot look at this man and tell me he and his chops do not belong in the 1860s. I just want to dance with Schlatt in a giant ballroom on a starry evening, and I would love it, no matter how many times he steps on my toes! Whether or not you accept this request, I hope you keep writing fanfic, no matter who it’s about! I meant what I said, you’re an amazing writer!!!

darling, i'm too busy being yours ; (chara) schlatt x reader

summary : it's wedding season in victorian england ! those wealthiest amongst the upper class have gathered for a several day event to find their future partners; including a certain young entrepreneur hailing from the still infant nation of the united states. only problem? the woman who caught his interest isn't a noble.

info : forbidden romance trope, victorian england setting, lord forgive my historical inaccuracies, swearing, sweet nicknames, mentions of poverty and allusions to poor treatment/trauma of workers, and bashful, she/her, afab reader. title taken from do i wanna know? by arctic monkeys (slightly altered).

a/n : appreciate the request anon ! since receiving, it's been sitting in my mind rent free i swear to god. so glad you and everyone else is enjoying, have a good day, you're so sweet ayayayaya !

this is also a short psa to inform everyone to not run away with random strangers you just met :)

Every step taken with confidence, a suit lacking in imperfection, and locks of caramel brown hair that set a new standard for Victorian men; managing to be messy enough to be innovative, but clean enough to not be considered unkept. Those were only a small portion of circulation remarks regarding England's most eligible bachelor; J. Schlatt hailing from New York. British society regarded the use of first names too improper, and being that his own business never mentioned his name no one had a clue of what it could be; only adding to his allure amongst the debutants of England.

The turnout of this year's wedding season amongst only the most prestigious nobles looking to negotiate deals and arrange marriages for the benefit of whatever family stood behind them. This, "Schlatt", was different. It was well known his upbringing was that of poor migrants, but what had him accepted into the fold was that he was now one, or possibly most, of the richest men of the new world. His features rare amongst other's of his social standing, and despite uniqueness tending to cause rejection, for once it actually drew him higher in respect and desire.

Eyes of an intense burnt Sienna, with lips that either remained pursed or slightly apart to nurse at his drink, he was notoriously difficult to impress. Women flocked to him, and it was said you'd only have about a minute before he'd excuse himself of you out of boredom or disinterest. He'd pull up a smile, one that was well known to send a million and one flutters to a lady's heart, and act engaged until time was up. He'd swooned all the debutant's hearts just within the first evening, all while organizing important business deals to secure inane amounts of wealth many couldn't possibly imagine.

From within, he loathed the fat cats that abused their power, coming from a poorer background he never cared much for what family someone came from; so he figured the romance portion of this trip wouldn't matter. He was well aware of how much British people adored him, and he was well aware of how to use it to his benefit. Oh? A certain earl of which he's been meaning to trade with requests he doesn't marry a certain young lady for the sake that his son could? He'd be willing to do it so long as he'd sign his prewritten contract first. Call it what you would, but not anyone especially in this time period could come from penniless poverty to eating amongst the most important people in possibly the whole world. With abilities to influence the very narrative of what would become crucial history, with names that have ties to hundreds of years of history, and wealth that they could sit on for generations; he didn't exactly feel bad manipulating them into getting what he wanted.

It wasn't like anyone would ever catch on. Well, they might. A debutant that he couldn't remember the name of to save his life, who had a remarkable claim to the English throne, was interested in him; and he was leading her along. He knew that most people expected the pair to end up together, and he knew openly showing more interest in others than her could possibly get him in some kind of shit he did not want to get stuck in; it was bad for business. She was a woman with more say than he ever could in this country, and being that she was related to people who ran the country, if he wanted some kind of net benefit he might as well sacrifice himself for the sake of his business.

Despite deep down yearning for the kind of love that pushed his parents to manage to migrate across the world, in this world love meant dying in each other's arms young or living long with so much as wealth to support yourself. Being that his parents were still alive, it made more sense in his mind to give back financially as much as he could. They had sacrificed and risked it all to give him the opportunity for a better life, it was only fair he sacrifice himself for them. His own happiness meant nothing if it meant the people who truly cared for him suffered.

He knew, however, that being someone you're not could only last so long, and knowing that he might end up married to this woman he'd need to practice being this posh, aristocrat that he knew he wasn't. He enjoyed drinking and laughing, telling profane jokes and living life to live. He knew he'd one day have to give up himself for the sake of keeping those he held dear fed. At least now, having snuck off from his provided room, he could walk carefully decorated hallways with exquisite paintings and impossibly large windows that let the blanche glow of moonlight seep in to create a seldom beauty when too many filled these halls.

Dead silence of night only disrupted by his own clacking of heels, occasionally he's pass a guard, of which he'd politely greet and pass without a single question. So long as no one would be murdered tonight his appearances wouldn't make so much as a passing mention. He was approaching the ballroom anyways, something about it called to him. He believed it to be his adoration of the cathedral, baroque architecture that you just can't find in the United States. It was nothing short of fabulously eccentric, and despite loathing the people who owned these works of art, he couldn't help but appreciate and take it all in.

Slowly decanting one of the curved stairs to the left of the room, he descended to the platform whereas the two opposing staircases connected into one. His eyes were directed upwards, a whole ballroom completely cleared and empty as crystal chandeliers only sparked by the light of the clear moon. The arched, vast glass windows that included a glass door to the promenade and an aperture to show the Prussian blue sky dressed in millions of shimmering stars whilst the room's lights were dimmed down low. He let out a soft breath, the societal pressures to be a certain way draining away from him. And just as his gaze slowly travelled downwards to admire the tile work, it so happened to catch notice of...

A girl. Dressed in the housekeeper uniform with a long coffee-skirt accompanied by an off-white apron that went overtop, the khaki, collared button up reminding him of something his mother would wear. Their eyes found each other despite being a fair distance apart, his chest constricted once he made out her delicate features. She stood frozen, visibly sucking in her lips and raising her shoulders tensely, as if holding in her breath. He took it one step at a time as he descended the stairs, he took notice of the white-knuckled grip she held of the stained once-ivory rag, a scuttle half-filled with cloudy water at her feet. Judging that past where her knees should be her dress was darker, appearing damp, he could easily guess that she had likely been on her hands and knees cleaning the floors.

Once finally, after painfully long, having fully descended the stairs, he approached her tense and practically frozen figure. His frame of 6"3 well above anyone he's ever met, she practically felt like dirt at his feet; now she knew exactly what they meant when the girls in the servant wing spoke about the unfeasibly attractive foreign giant. She didn't dare look away from his eyes, afraid he'd send her to her higher ups to be disciplined; no matter how hard it was with the intensity that stared back at her. "Uh," the sudden booming of his voice caused her to wince, it was buttery smooth and with an accent she'd never heard before. "I'm not going to hurt you, dear." A toothy grin grew to his lips, she could practically feel her cheeks burn. "You can speak, y'know. Uh, most people call me Schlatt." His improper way of speaking was akin to nothing she had heard murmurings of, it was that of a blue-collared worker like her. It intrigued her, and when he held out a hand for her, she looked a bit in bewilderment; his expectant gaze did worry that she may have offended him and quickly gripped his, forgetting her hands were moist with wash water.

Her eyes widened as she immediately let go, stuttering out incoherent gibberish before actually managing to exclaim an apology. "Ah! Sir Schlatt, I apologize you should never feel forced to touch a dirty worker like myself, please I beg for your forgiveness!" She quickly curtsied, and held her bow anxiously preparing for some kind of blow. Said blow never arrived, "I only wanted your name, darling, when it's just us you can drop this whole social status thing or whatever." She almost got whiplash the way she shot her head up, had she been mistaken? No, he said he was Schlatt, then why wasn't he who everyone said he was to be?

"...Y/n." She hesitated slightly, standing up straight from her bow and watching his lips silently move to pronounce her name, as if trying out just how it sound. "Y/n, huh? A striking name for an even more lovely lady." He was a natural charmer, and she could barely even stutter out a thank you, still fearful and confused of what exactly was going on. He took notice to the way her was still visibly tense, he wasn't quite sure why he was so pushy of this poor girl who only was trying to do her job. She was impossibly pretty, the natural beauty of her capturing him knowing that she was completely clean faced. Larger eyes looking up at him with such innocence, it tantalized him in the best way possible.

They both kind of looked at each other, she had this confused, frightened look that all the while seemed to be bashful of his presence, while he gave her his softest smile. There was something he could feel between the two, he had to know more about her; insatiable curiosity eating away at him. "Are you the only one here?" "Ah, yes, Sir! I am um... On floor cleaning tonight." A soft frown fell upon his lips, "will you at least get any sleep tonight?" "Ah! Please don't be upset, Sir! I am nothing to worry about, please have a good evening." He knew the kinds of abuses workers of this class faced that made them this sheepish and submissive, knowing that given things hadn't worked out with himself he could have easily been in her position; being spat on and disregarded as unimportant.

Seeing her flinch at everything he did, from saying her name looking her in the eyes, he was sure that underneath the thin clothing she wore would show years of horrors he thankfully never was subjected to. He wanted to at least give her a night to remember, a night where she could for once be an actual human being; what a pretty girl like her deserved. "Y/n?" "Yes!" She squeaked at her own name, a slightly mischievous smile crossing his lips. "Being a guest means my every whim you must fulfill, correct?" A flash of horror crossed her eyes, he threw his hands up and widened his eyes. "God, fuck no, I didn't mean it like that..! Shit, listen I'm sorry, I meant to ask you not to call me Sir. It always makes me feel fuckin' old." The sudden colourful words that left his mouth made her slightly giggle, it was so unexpected to have someone so noble have the sour mouth of a sailor. It was almost adorable watching him spit out swear after swear in apology; and while he finally, for the first time, see her smile, all it did was make him want to speak every profane word he knew.

"If you say so um... Schlatt." Hearing her voice, clear and lacking the stupid ass accident the higher-ups had, say his name, man, if he could ever form what he felt into words. Her voice echoed inside the corners of his mind, leaving more of an impact on him than any of those first-class women could ever dream of leaving; by simply uttering his name. He wanted her to say it again, but he also didn't want to come off as a creep again. He cleared his throat, "as I was uh, saying. It's a beautiful night, huh? It makes the place look fairytale-esc." He was beyond happy when she let out a soft hum, "that's why I never minded when I was handed floor scrubbing, these tend to be the only times I get to be alone. It's important to uh, gather one's thoughts every so often." Her voice was like a silky lullaby, he was almost in a daze listening to her speak. It wasn't like he wasn't listening though, he heard her loud and clear and related on a level he was sure she wouldn't have realized.

"To relax right? Because life feels like it's nothing but a barrage of punches to kick you down?" She blinked twice in surprise, quickly meeting his gaze once again in clear shock. "Yeah... Something like that." They had a staring match with each other, he swore he could see the reflection of shimmering stars in those adorable eyes of hers. "...Cause you need a moment to breathe, to relax?" She sheepishly nodded, and an idea flashed his mind. "Well, we are in a ballroom, aren't we? They say dance is therapeutic, would you do me the honours of giving me this dance?" He held out an open hand to her, she felt like she could practically burst from the flurry of butterflies that filled her stomach. She wasn't in some kind of dream, was she? "I... I really couldn't you're one of the wealthiest men–!" "Right now, when it's just you and me, I'm just Schlatt. The sewer rat from the slums of New York, alright? Please don't let who I am influence your decision." She sucked in her cheek, hand twitching as if trying to grab his without her command. They both know she wanted to, she desperately wanted to feel important and loved like how nobles looked at each other with such endearing gazes.

"I... I can't dance." And a small smile graced his lips, "there's no time to learn than the present, isn't there?" And moving in to cup her hand, in surprise she dropped the old, tattered rag as he quickly led her to the middle of the room. He cupped her hand gently, she remarked how soft his felt and how perfectly hers seemed to cup with his. A hand delicately slinked around her waist, "if you ever want to stop, let me know alright? This meant to be fun." He was so unbelievably caring, a soft smile curved up upon her lips as she hesitantly rested her other hand upon his chest; just as she'd seen other woman do. "We move in a square, alright? Try and follow my steps." She quietly obliged, looking down at first to watch his feet, with a few steps she slowly grew more confidant, raising her head to meet the adoring gaze of the male who held her like she was fine china; a kind of care she hadn't felt since she was likely an infant.

"You're not bad. Now, we're going to try and waltz around the room, alright? You'll be okay, I got you." His voice of reassurance had her feeling like she could do anything, and they slowly sped up and began to move in a kind of circular flower-like pattern to really touch every part of the room. She could feel her skirt swaying and she felt more beautiful than she possibly ever felt in her life, occasionally stepping on his toes, but she was always relieved when despite smearing his loafers (that probably costed more than she ever will) with the dirt of hers that practically were falling apart at the seams, he grinned through it and seemed genuinely over the moon. Feeling their momentum have air run through her locks, in a way she'd never felt before, the feeling itself could have made her smile. As they spun together, it was like the rest of the word became this blur of colours, while he was the only thing left. They were the only ones that occupied their whole world.

They could just imagine the live band playing music for them, the stars of the show, the only two people who mattered while the whole universe of stars could bear witness to a remarkably wholesome and pure pairing; no ulterior motives to be found in the minds or hearts of either parties. In the arms of the brunette she felt safe, actually happy and having fun for what could be the first time in her whole life. While when he heard her lighthearted giggles and genuine smile, he could feel himself float, a kind of glee that he'd only ever experienced while intoxicated. She seemed to be a special kind of high.

And once they finally slowed down, coming to an end to this strangely special dance, his arm never left the small of her back, as he figured they should admire the absolutely gorgeous sky that this night had to offer. Upon the veranda, bodies close and it being known that this was a time to be open and honest to each other; it just kind of happened. He never planed to have waltzed the night away with quite possibly the most beautiful girl he'd ever met, and she only planned upon it being herself, her thoughts, and her rag for cleaning. Maybe it was fate, maybe it was pure luck. Whatever it was that had so blessed them upon this bewitching night, they were immensely grateful and you could feel the dread of feeling it end. Although they had no clue exactly how long they had been speaking and dancing, they were sure they had been out longer than they should've.

"And when the morning comes, you turn back into one of the most important men in the world, right? We never share another glance and this night is swept under the rug to be forgotten and taken to our graves..." "Melancholy doesn't sound sound on you sweetheart, I'll let you know something, alright? I couldn't give less of a fuck what those rich fuckers think, they're important sure, but I can live without 'em." Her head turned from the vast open sky before them to look once more into the dark Sienna eyes of who she figured to be her one-time lover. "You couldn't be serious? Aren't you meant to be marrying the princess of–...?" "The broad that won't leave me alone because she might be queen one day? I couldn't care less. They could ban all my shipments but I'll get back on my feet." He removed his hand from her so he could up both her hands with his, fully turned to her.

"Before tonight I really thought that true love would never find me, I was full business, nothing else mattered but feeding my family back home..." His eyes briefly found themselves looking down to where their hands joint, thumbs caressing her knuckles lovingly before returning to meet her gaze. "...but tonight was something else. And... darling, I'm too busy being yours to possibly ever be with anyone else at this point." Her mouth hung partially agape, plush, peachy lips practically called his name and he slowly moved in closer. "I want you. Say the word and I'll take you back home with me, I promise from the bottom of my heart, I will treat you like how you really deserve." His voice slowly lowered, growing more gravelly by the minute as electricity was sent up her spine.

Their lips were separated by a handful of centimetres, his warm breath tickling her lips and condensing as miniature water droplets. Everything just seemed so right, and yet she feared the worst. "We... We just met..." And with the most gentle gaze she'd ever seen, he spoke in a hush that was barely above a whisper. "I have three days left in England, I'll make our arrangements. I'll get you out of this hell. Just first let me please kiss you tonight to start." "...What makes me so special? This is the nicest thing anyone has done for me... How do you know I deserve it?" A soft grin rose upon his features, plunging in closer and finally sealing lips together. Something about the pair wrapped up in each other's arms felt so akin to two halves of a whole coming together, she fluttered her eyes shut to feel the intense desire and love that was poured into that one kiss, sweet yet demanding.

Pulling away was the least natural thing about it, and with a toothy grin as if he'd won some kind of bet, with vehemence and conviction he spoke as clear as day, "that's how I know." The heavens above shall forever never forget the night they bared witness to the rejoining of soulmates, and so should they watch it again and again for millennia as the two continue to separate and reunite. Just until the sun explodes and the last stars die, the end of time itself, should they finally reunite for the last time, and say together, in spirit or in what little atoms made up the pair left.

Nothing conceivable could ever separate two beings that were simply always meant to be.

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torillatavataan · 2 years

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Today is the day and by that I mean the tax day!

Income tax records are public in Finland and the tax administration publishes the records of taxes paid annually. This means that every year the media will dig into the records to see who are the top earners in the country.

Local papers may also publish long lists of names of locals categorised in groups according to how much tax they paid. Fun activity for the day is to check how much your neighbour or relative paid income tax the year before.

Tabloids, of course, have a lot of fun with this.

While it may all seem frivalous or even mean-spirited in some cases, public taxes make it easier to spot tax avoidance (which can easily lead to public shaming and people avoiding the company in the future) and income inequality. It allows people to see if their employer is underpaying them. It allows people to see how equally or unequally men and women are paid.

By far most Finns are happy with public tax records and consider it their civic duty to pay taxes. People who want to hide their earnings are looked at with suspicion. It is possible for high earners to ask their records not to be published by the media, however, their names will still be published with the request, so this cannot be used as a method to hide one’s earnings fully.

These companies are the top corporate tax payers: UPM, OP, K-ryhmä, Supercell...

Ex-MPs to top earnings with adjustment allowance - two earned over 100 000 euros

They are the top income earners

Top 100 earners in Finland: new top five - surprise name was a typo

How the president couple earned - [previous president couple] Halonen and Arajärvi high earners too

Here are the highest earning under 30-year-olds in Finland

Highest earning entertainers: they earned over 300 000 euros - some doubled their earnings

Maria Severina is the highest earning woman in Finland - see top 20

Who earned most in your region? Here are the regional top earners

These are the most searched names in Ilta-Sanomat’s tax machine* - familiar name at the top

* service that allows you to search people’s tax information: the tabloids publish all public records for those who earned more than 100 000 euros

Big cash with blueberries - millions for the berry king in South-Karelia

This is how Finland’s best known criminals earned

How popular TV meteorologists earned - Pekka Pouta clearly ahead of TV favourite Anniina Valtonen

Sanna Marin’s sensational “party gang’s” earnings revealed - three reached hefty sums

How covid affected top artists’ earnings - they earned over 100 000 euros: here is the revenue king!

Iltalehti investigates: How those in charge of Finland’s defence are paid

From a farm boy to a serial entrepreneur who made millions - "I'm not going to start living like a royal"

How ski stars earned: zero income for Riitta-Liisa Roponen, Kerttu Niskanen used tricks

Kimi Räikkönen living in Switzerland paid income tax to Finland - this is how much Valtteri Bottas earned in Finland

“We knew nothing of making ice cream” - Millions of euros to three friends

#suomi #finland #finnish #*

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mariacallous · 10 days

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When as many as 99 million Mexican voters head to the polls on June 2, they will be casting their ballots in what is certain to be a groundbreaking national vote—no matter who triumphs.

That’s because this election’s top two presidential candidates are both women, effectively guaranteeing that the country will soon elect its first-ever female leader. And then there’s the sheer number of positions at stake: Beyond the presidency, some 20,000 positions are available, including 128 senatorial seats and 500 congressional representative spots.

“It is a historical election cycle for Mexico, not only because it’s its biggest election in its history,” said Lila Abed, the acting director of the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center. “Everything is set so that Mexicans elect the first female president in the country.”

Mexico’s next leader will be taking the reins of a country grappling with surging cartel violence, sluggish economic growth, sweeping corruption, and a migration crisis. Mexico has also grown deeply polarized under popular incumbent President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO), who expanded the military’s mandate and ramped up efforts to weaken the country’s democratic institutions, including by stripping funding from Mexico’s electoral agency and attacking the judiciary.

Here are the key things you need to know as Mexico readies for its landmark election.

Who is running?

The two top contenders for the presidency are Claudia Sheinbaum, a former Mexico City mayor representing the governing left-leaning Morena party, and former Sen. Xóchitl Gálvez, a tech entrepreneur representing a three-party opposition coalition.

Between the two, Sheinbaum is the clear front-runner. She is the protégée of López Obrador, who has enjoyed high approval ratings throughout his presidency but is constitutionally prohibited from running for another term. Over the course of his six years in office, López Obrador has railed against the media and taken steps to weaken the country’s democratic institutions, pushing for controversial policies that have sparked sweeping protests. Yet he also reduced poverty, raised the minimum wage, and expanded a popular pension program, all of which have boosted his standing among many Mexicans.

Sheinbaum is hoping to capitalize on that support. “She’s riding on a wave of popularity by López Obrador,” said Falko Ernst, an expert in Mexican politics at the International Crisis Group. “She’s been really careful not to overly criticize his government and really not offer too much of a fine-grained profile that opposition and others could use as points of attack against her.”

On the campaign trail, Sheinbaum has pledged continuity with many of López Obrador’s policies, including by increasing the minimum wage and continuing his massive infrastructure projects. She has also expressed support for López Obrador’s controversial constitutional reform proposals that, if passed, analysts warn would further undermine the country’s democracy. The fate of those proposals will depend on whether they get the required two-thirds supermajority support in Congress.

The big question, analysts say, is whether Sheinbaum will choose to chart a more independent political path if she is elected. “Whether she decides to really govern as a mere reflection of López Obrador or makes her own mark remains a mystery,” Abed said.

Gálvez, on the other hand, is a staunch critic of López Obrador’s who represents more pro-business, pro-market interests. She has campaigned hard against López Obrador’s “hugs not bullets” security strategy, declaring that “hugs for criminals are over.” The stated aims of that strategy, which López Obrador campaigned on, were to demilitarize the country and tackle the roots of organized crime by boosting educational and economic opportunities.

However, in practice, López Obrador actually “strengthened the armed forces’ power and expanded their role in society,” journalist Jared Olson wrote for Foreign Policy in 2022, which raised the risk of human rights abuses. Meanwhile, violent crime continued to ravage the country: More people have been murdered or gone missing during López Obrador’s six-year term in office than during any other Mexican president’s term, the Financial Times reported.

Gálvez said the “hugs not bullets” policy has failed. “The bullets have been for citizens,” she told the FT. Her approach would be to pay police better and invest more in security, she said. She has also pledged to strengthen checks and balances in the government.

But the coalition she has aligned herself with may be dampening her prospects. “She’s running under old party names, under old brand names,” Ernst said. Many Mexicans don’t see the parties as “feasible alternatives for turning things around because they stand for the old days of corruption and bad security policies, amongst other things.”

What do the polls say?

Polls indicate that Sheinbaum will triumph by a wide margin. She has maintained a commanding lead, with some polls in March giving her a roughly 30-percentage-point lead over Gálvez. According to data from the Bloomberg Poll Tracker in May, Sheinbaum held 57 percent of votes, while Gálvez had 30 percent.

But Abed, the Wilson Center expert, said she expected the election’s ultimate results to be closer than some of the polls are currently projecting. While Sheinbaum does sustain a clear advantage over Gálvez, she said, “I perceive that the difference is actually much narrower than 30 points.”

What are the key issues that voters care about?

Security tops the list of issues driving voters to the polls. Since López Obrador began his term in 2018, Mexico has logged over 170,000 homicides—more than a quarter more murders than were recorded under his predecessor. Over 111,000 people in Mexico have been “forcibly disappeared” since numbers were first recorded in 1962, according to Mexican authorities, and the country is home to one of the world’s highest femicide rates.

That violence has dominated debates this election season, particularly as powerful crime groups have intimidated and even killed potential candidates in the groups’ bids for influence and power. In the run-up to this election, more than two dozen candidates have already died.

“In terms of the polls, the most important issue is security,” said Luis Rubio, an expert in Mexican politics and chairman of the Center of Research for Development. “Mexicans suffer from extortion, from being assaulted, from being killed. The numbers are staggering in every one of those areas.”

Beyond security, López Obrador’s successor will also be taking the reins of an economy facing sluggish growth, emblematic of the many economic challenges looming over the country. This year, Mexico is expected to record its biggest budget deficit in decades.

During his presidency, López Obrador “substantially increased Mexico’s minimum wage and invested in infrastructure projects in the poorest regions of the country. He has expanded social programs for people over 65 years old and people with disabilities, created new scholarships, and provided resources to farmers and fishermen,” Ana Sofía Rodríguez Everaert wrote for Foreign Policy. “Today, cash transfers of some form reach 71 percent of Mexican households.”

Both Sheinbaum and Gálvez are expected to continue those cash transfers.

How could this election shape the future of Mexico’s foreign policy?

Under López Obrador, who famously once declared that “the best foreign policy is a good domestic policy,” Mexico has turned increasingly inward. The populist leader has been relatively withdrawn on the global stage, shunning major international meetings including G-20 summits and the 2022 Summit of the Americas. “He leaves a legacy in foreign policy that leaves a lot to be desired,” Abed said. “I think that’s one of his biggest weaknesses.”

“If you look at this administration, we’ve seen largely an absence of Mexico on the international stage,” Ernst said. “López Obrador has been very inward-looking. He has been very nationalist in his course and has really failed to sort of propel Mexico to the regional leadership position that many expected to take up.”

One bright spot has been the country’s exploding trade ties with the United States. In 2023, Mexico City officially beat out Beijing to become the top exporter to Washington—the first time that has happened in more than two decades. But that outcome was likely encouraged by other geopolitical headwinds—including the push for nearshoring and rising U.S.-China trade tensions—not by López Obrador’s own efforts, experts said.

“A lot of these economic positive trends that have been felt under the AMLO administration have not been because Mexico has positioned itself as an emerging country very much engaged with the international community,” Abed said. “I just think it got very lucky given the trends that happen around the world.”

Depending on which candidate triumphs—and, in the case of Sheinbaum, how closely she follows in López Obrador’s footsteps—this election could also signal a new chapter in Mexican foreign policy.

“I think we’ll see, potentially, a greater opening toward the international sphere and especially toward Latin America and Central America,” Ernst said, but “it’s still uncertain to what degree.”

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