The earnings of the ultra-rich are literally unearned. This isn’t a value judgment: it’s the US tax agency’s term for money made through “investment-type income such as taxable interest, ordinary dividends and capital gain distributions”. While Astor and Rockefeller surely followed the wealth-maximising maxim of buy low, sell high, and put money in trusts, charities and other vehicles to minimise taxation, we’ve seen this logic taken to the next level, without policy changes to correct for it. Most of us pay tax on our incomes at double-digit rates; if we’re fortunate enough to own assets, we pay tax on the profits when we sell them. Billionaires, on the other hand, “can borrow against their growing investments year after year without owing a dime in taxes, allowing them to pay lower tax rates on their income than ordinary Americans pay on theirs”. That statement doesn’t come from Bernie Sanders, by the way, but from the achingly centrist White House, which in 2022 proposed a 20% minimum tax on households worth more than $100m. It went nowhere, in part because its subjects so strongly opposed it. The impending arrival of the trillionaire signals another step backwards in the fight for a more balanced economy and healthier democracy. The billionaire class, after all, skews the balance of power in the marketplace, in politics and in society. Its members own newspapers that shape public opinion. They donate to politicians who pass the laws that they want. According to one study, 11% of the world’s billionaires have held or sought political office, with the rate of “billionaire participation” in autocracies hitting an astounding 29%. Another study shows they tend to lean to the right: positions that typically help them keep their own wealth, and that of their peers, intact.

"If it weren't for that cheating b*tch."

RIP to all of Roderick Usher’s unclaimed bastards who died brutal deaths out of nowhere in September 2023

How good would the bots handwriting be?

In English? In Cybertronian? Why not both?

━━━━━━ ⊙ ❖ ⊙ ━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⊙ ❖ ⊙

On Cybertron, writing anything by hand was not exactly common. Technology trimmed the process down a great deal and writing by hand was seen as something reserved for the higher castes. A written series of glyphs was a material promise, something important and made only to be used in serious events. Otherwise most everything was done digitally to save time and improve efficiency. Autocorrect most certainly helped many a struggling writer back on Cybertron.

With this in mind, as resources cut short and Earth lacked the needed materials to make a surplus of datapads, handwriting skills became very clear. More so than ever once the children decided to try and teach the bots to write for possible cover reasons. One could never be sure when one would need a bot to sign them out of school early.

Arcee has the worst handwriting by far, a surprising twist considering her dainty digits and relatively small size. One would think writing would come easy to her, but she hates doing anything like that by hand. She can type quickly, but writing out anything on a datapad, much less paper of all things? No she would much prefer being on Shockwave's operating table over having to possibly write her report manually. The glyphs of the various dialects on Cybertron are too much for her and the hatred of writing transferred over to English even though it is FAR easier to write in. The team won't say it to her face, but her writing looks like chicken scratch in both languages. The children don't know she is garbage at writing in Cybertronian too, and the team are content to leave them with the thought that she is just bad at learning English.

Bulkhead and Wheeljack share one braincell on a good day, and their writing shows this. They write exclusively in the wartime Wrecker dialect that formed over the millions of years of conflict. No one but Autobots can even begin to read their writing as its all a strange deviation from Autobot encryption. Sure they can write in mainstream Cybertronian dialects, but it looks awful and honestly the team prefer having to put on reading glasses and stare at their encrypted writing over having to get out a dictionary to even begin to parse out their other writings. In light of this, they do not write in English when asked to use an Earth language. Instead, they like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and other such languages due to the ease of which they find encrypting the writing to be. They are hated by Bot and human alike for their habit of making things more complicated than it needs to be.

Ultra Magnus writes in the most computer generated manner known to any of the bots. How he does it is a mystery. Yet somehow he got so used to manually writing out his signature that now his every written glyph comes out as if it were typed. He doesn't seem to notice or care for the team's gawking, and he absolutely refuses to write in English simply because he had no interest in relearning writing. The team don't know, but the real reason he doesn't want to write in any other dialect is because he purposefully trained his motor functions to only write in his very specific manner. To try and learn a brand new written language would mess that up and ruin his clean and crisp glyphs.

Ratchet is an odd ball in his writing. When in a hurry, his writing in both Cybertronian and English looks like the Doctor's scrawl that those outside of the medical field have no hope of figuring out. However when he's not in a rush, he has a very distinct method of writing his glyphs and letters. In Cybertronian dialects of any kind, he adds extra emphasis in places where there has been no need for further glyph usage since the age of Wrath. In English, he adds interesting swirls and excess E's absolutely everywhere as if it is an additional glyph meant to add meaning to the word. Rafael tried to correct him once. That didn't end well.

Smokescreen has never written anything in his life. He can type like lightening, but he was never schooled in traditional manual writing simply due to how time consuming it was and how unneeded the ability happened to be at his post. He can't do any writing to save his life, but he has managed to convincingly fake the ability to write when in a tight spot. He can scribble and make it look like REALLY bad Tarnian dialect. And since that particular script hasn't been used since the city was destroyed, most don't judge him for it. But Optimus knows, and when he has time, he does what he can to school the rookie. Rafael has also taken it upon himself to try and teach Smokescreen some English with limited success.

Bumblebee grew up under Optimus, and Optimus in turn grew up under Alpha Trion. The two have startlingly similar handwriting more often than not. They both know many languages and dialects and are fluent in them, they both share glyph usage preferences, and both are known for their regular language swaps in writing. The only way to really tell them apart is to look REALLY closely at either the curvature of a specific glyph in Ancient Cybertronian or to stare really hard at the way their write their O's and B's. Both write like they walked straight out of ancient eras of old on a good day and write like living dictionaries for pretty much any other dialect. The team and the children gave up trying to figure out who wrote what a long time ago. If they can't pick it up from the context of the writing, they can just assume its important regardless.

I've been looking into hiking a lot with leon and it's honestly driving me up the walls how gentrified hiking is here in Austria. most of the nicer routes are overrun and/or have horribly expensive parking.

multi day hikes/short camping trips are impossible here if you're broke and have a dog because you need to reserve and pay to sleep in sheds in the alps (that don't allow dogs) and all forms of wild camping are illegal.

idk the realisation that all of the "hardcore" hikers sleep in little well temperatured huts that usually even offer food and drinks made me realise hiking like that is just another pay to play sport. i'll just keep crawling down the day trip mountains instead.

stewy backed by a turbulent sky

One of the most character defining moments for Oliver is when he arrives early to Saltburn and... walks up through the unlocked gates to knock on the door, because this is his friend's house that he was invited to, so why wouldn't he walk up to the front door, through the unlocked gates, to just knock on the door??

Like, people come up with all sorts of convoluted class discussion, but really? Who here hasn't had a friend who invited them over, who also had a little fence and a gate around their front yard, so when you went over to their house you just knew that you were fine opening the gate and walking up to their door to knock? Because you were invited, and this was your friend's house, and that's just... a thing that you can do?

Yet when Oliver is invited to his friend's house, and he arrives a little bit early, and he notices hey! there are gates here, that are unlocked! and he walks up through those unlocked gates to knock on the door to his friend's house that he was explicitely invited to? Duncan answers the door and is instantly confused because??? We sent a car for you?? The gates weren't OPEN??? But to Oliver?

Yeah the gates weren't open. But they also weren't locked.

And if the gate isn't locked? Then why shouldn't Oliver walk right through it once he's got an invitation?

By Andrew Gumbel

The Guardian

Oct. 15, 2022

Peter Thiel is far from the first billionaire who has wielded his fortune to try to influence the course of American politics. But in an election year when democracy itself is said to be on the ballot, he stands out for assailing a longstanding governing system that he has described as “deranged” and in urgent need of “course correction”.

The German-born investor and tech entrepreneur, a Silicon Valley “disrupter” who helped found PayPal alongside Elon Musk and made his fortune as one of the earliest investors in Facebook, has catapulted himself into the top ranks of the mega-donor class by pouring close to $30m into this year’s midterm elections.

He’s not merely favoring one party over another, but is supporting candidates who deny the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s election as president and have, in their different ways, called for the pillars of the American establishment to be toppled entirely.

Thiel’s priorities this midterm cycle have partly aligned with those of Donald Trump, with whom he has had an on-again, off-again relationship since writing him a $1.25m check during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Thiel, like Trump, has made it his business to end the careers of what he calls “the traitorous 10”, Republican House members who voted to impeach Trump in the wake of the January 6 insurrection. Four of these members opted not to run for re-election at all, and four more, including Liz Cheney, the vice-chair of the House committee investigating January 6, went down in the primaries.

But there are also signs that Thiel is thinking around and beyond the former president. The lion’s share of his largesse – $28m and counting – has been directed towards two business proteges who, with his help, have established themselves as gadfly rightwing darlings: JD Vance, the best-selling author of the blue-collar memoir Hillbilly Elegy, who is running for Senate in Ohio, and Blake Masters, a self-styled “anti-progressive” and anti-globalist who is running for Senate in Arizona.

Over the past decade, ever since the supreme court dramatically loosened the rules of political campaign giving in its Citizens United decision, Thiel has placed sizable bets on candidates who are not only conservative but have sought to challenge longstanding institutional traditions and break the Republican party’s own norms: Senator Ted Cruz in Texas and Senator Josh Hawley in Missouri as well as Trump himself.

Masters, who has campaigned on the notion that “psychopaths are running the country right now” and spoken approvingly of the anti-establishment philosophy of the 1990s Unabomber, and Vance, a frequent speaker on the university circuit during his book tour days who now says “universities are the enemy”, fit the same mould. They and Thiel all have ties to a branch of the New Right known as NatCon, whose adherents believe, broadly, that the establishment needs to be torn down, much as Thiel and his fellow Silicon Valley disrupters believed two decades ago that the future lay in destroying longstanding business models and practices.

Thiel himself opined as far back as 2009 that he no longer believed democracy to be compatible with freedom and expressed “little hope that voting will make things better”. While a member of Trump’s presidential transition team in 2016, he flashed his institution-busting instincts by proposing that a leading climate change skeptic, William Happer, be appointed as White House science adviser. He also pushed for a libertarian bitcoin entrepreneur who did not believe in drug trials to head up the Food and Drug Administration.

Such proposals were too much even by Trump’s iconoclastic standards. Steve Bannon, Trump’s ultra-right campaign manager and political strategist, told a Thiel biographer: “Peter’s idea of disrupting government is out there.”

Thiel did not respond to a request for an interview, and his representatives did not respond to multiple invitations to comment.

Masters and Vance also did not respond to inquiries.

I need Steve to tell Neil that the only reason he's not rotting in a ditch is because Billy told him not to hurt his father. If Billy hadn't, or if hr stayed silent when Steve made the request, then he would have murdered Neil in broad daylight.

What are the feds gonna do? Arrest John Harrington's son? The son of the man who has every cop in his pocket?

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Not only do I not care if the vast majority of the submarine fuckos make it I'm actually getting more and more pissed off the more I read.

They chose to step into a tiny metal tube piloted by an off brand ps2 controller, and then descend to levels that would make rescue nearly impossible if not objectively impossible. Now that the "this shit is going to fuck up" machine has fucked up they're scrambling governments and likely spending millions of dollars of tax payer money to rescue them, when a fraction of that would have stopped the incident from happening in the first place. When the regulations that were ignored could have prevented this.

I do not have sympathy for a Mt. Everest climber that dresses in shorts, a t-shirt, and bought his climbing gear off wish who (who could have seen this coming?!) needs rescuing. Not only do I not have sympathy but I'm pissed off at their recklessness and the immense impacts that their dumb actions are having on others.

My only sympathy for any of the 5 is with the 19 year old, because at that age you're gonna trust your dad wouldn't put you in an inescapable deathtrap.

also. btw. i do usually try to be nice to towns i visit and not speak badly of them but palm desert literally has no sidewalks in its neighborhoods and is like 80% country clubs so i'm gonna clown on it