Guest Post - Conspiracy Theorists Weekend Longread
on 01.26.19
Snarkout writes:
You never really get back to equilibrium. You're never really fully, functionally normal. You show up at parties and talk about Paul Joseph Watson as if that's somebody a regular person would be aware of, and they're not, of course they're not, and you just want to hug them and tell them how much you love them and implore them to never look at a computer for the rest of their beautiful, childlike lives."
A reporter's college friend is tangentially involved in a story, so the reporter wants to do an article about why a bunch of crazies say he's a crisis actor, and the craziness slowly becomes his job and then his country.
Heebie's take: It's very well-written and not actually that long.
When I saw that whole family in Q shirts, I realized this is going to be a longstanding thing. I'm not sure how you decouple your parents telling you "don't put tinfoil in the microwave" and "be careful of the donut shop down the street, former First Lady and U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton is kidnapping all of your fellow five-year-olds for rape and murder purposes" in the same breath. You don't unlearn just one of those things. That stuff stays with you, and we're going to face a unique challenge in detoxifying these people from this absolutely abjectly wrong and stupid garbage.
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Guest Post - Piketty 'em, Liz
on 01.25.19
Minivet writes: We have to talk about Elizabeth Warren's new proposed wealth tax, right?
I can't find real details on her website - there's a video on Twitter? - but WaPo says 2% of wealth above $50m, 3% above $1b, plus more IRS enforcement including a mandated audit rate. And here's a letter from Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, confirming among other things that they mean net wealth. 15% evasion rate estimated.
By my calculation, if Jeff Bezos starts at $137b and gets only 1% real returns, after 50 years of this taxation he would be worth $50b. Someone starting with $100m would dwindle to $61m. So not so much eating the rich as shearing them.
Heebie's take: God bless her for driving a steamroller over the Overton Window, if nothing else. The idea that your actual mountains of Scrooge McDuck wealth can be subject to a confiscatory tax gives me warm fuzzies.
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Guest Post - Mothers and their children of soldiers
on 01.25.19
Mossy Character helps me out with some links: Haitian women struggle to get help for children fathered by U.N. troops.
AND vaguely related bonus link, with added hypocrisy.
Heebie's take: It's awful. It's hard to think of a hot take, though.
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I wouldn't, either.
on 01.24.19
acknowledgments We gratefully thank the Programme National de Physique Stellaire for financial support. We do not gratefully thank T. Apourchaux for his useless and very mean comments.
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New Shutdown Thread
on 01.24.19
Per request, here's a new shutdown thread. Lurid Keyaki even had the grace to throw in a useful link, on how the shutdown is killing the FBI. (The article doesn't quite go this far, but it's natural to wonder if Trump sees this shutdown as a method for stalling Mueller.)
I am very concerned that if the shutdown stretches into February, Democrats will start calling on Pelosi to cave because of the toll it's taking on people. "Concerned" isn't the right word - I myself am feeling increasingly panicky about the toll it's taking on people, and not sure at all what side I'm on anymore.
A background concern I have is that Mueller is a perfectionist who won't feel that his report is done until six years from now.
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ATM: The Business of America
on 01.23.19
President Ford writes: I've been an hourly employee and I've been a salaried employee, but I'm new to the world of billable time. I've never before had to assign specific blocks of time to a specific project or been allowed (even expected) to bill for odd bits of time outside of regular work hours. Despite the changes, I'm told that I don't need to stop the clock when taking the standard breaks one would normally take during work.
I think you see where I'm going with this. Is there any reason I can't, by starting to work from home on a project before I go to the bathroom, get paid every time I take a poop without having to use the dirty toilet at the office? I'm not a lawyer, but I think maybe most of the people who are in this situation are lawyers.
Yours in Late Capitalism,
Gerald Ford
Heebie's take: If I'm understanding you correctly, you used to work from home but would leave to poop at the office, out of a misguided sense of virtue?
More seriously, you need to start the clock at home 10 minutes before you head to the john, and leave it running for 10 minutes thereafter. That sixty minutes is certainly not time you'll ever get back, so you might as well be well-compensated.
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MAGA Youth
on 01.22.19
I know there's a discussion to be had about the MAGA teen Hitler Youth taunting/confrontation with the the Native American elder. I'm underwater at the moment and can't quite put together a good post. Here's a link, though.
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