“Hi, Ddestiny We checked out your music on your profile. We like what we heard. We can get your latest songs thousands of hits from real people within hours. Oh, and we usually do this for 300 but for you we’d be doing it for only $10 Our way of giving back to the music scene! Sleep on it, think on it. If you’re down, your code is hits10 and it will drop the price :)”
Praise be! I also have celebrity singer and digital parasite John Legend attached to autoplay after my tunes, free!
Also Biggie Smalls. The man’s been dead since 1997.
Here Baker spends time discussing trade-agreement (or government granted) patent monopolies, one direct result of is which Americans pay usurious/ridiculous prices for life-saving drugs. Over the past year, it’s a topic he’s addressed again and again, and what to do about it.
I’ve cited him here — frequently. And I’ll be reading the book.
An old but fun one from the archives. The namecheck of towns in Pennsy Dutchland always made me laugh. I easily amuse myself. Ever been to Dunkertown? Thought not.
Twitter, Tumblr, Netflix and music-streamer Spotify, the discussion site Reddit, Airbnb and the Verge. Imagine not being able to hear your fremium music, or tweet or watch Netflix.
The attack was “impactful,” said a comsex expert to the LAT.
You realize cyberwar could cause the empire to fall over. The Department of Homeland Security is “investigating.” The government is looking for someone to retaliate against, probably Russia, because an attack in cyberspace is just like an attack in the real world, according to the debate. Arch-fiends!
So listen to “The Cyberwar Boogie,” featuring ex-cyberwar czar Richard Clarke, saying, “it’s big ol’ DOS,” which is what it was. Today. Poor man’s Jimmy Riddle-eafing included.
Sidebar related story:Cybersecurity expert [name redatced] was silenced by a huge hacker attack. That should terrify you.
The SoundCloud hivemind forces nuisance password reset on all users who’ve had their passwords “leaked” by other unnamed worthless gigantic Internet name sites because default is to assume you stupids use the same one everywhere. So bad people and “hackers” can’t steal your already free shit.
Three years ago the six-figure explainers were ambivalent about the stupendous frauds corporate America has imposed on the economy in the name of the bottom line. To say they were serious villains was to be anti-capitalist, to not understand finance.
Now it’s all changed. And today, we have David Leonhardt, going from NYT economics reporter, defender of the riches, [1] to opinion page writer, wealthy whitemansplaining how, yup, American corporate tax dodgers are leeches.
This is about like seeing the town whore signing up for Church Universal and Triumphant correspondence courses. You can’t help but be slightly impressed while at the same time wondering how long it will last or if its really just a frantic hedge against a coming time of bloody pitchforks and raging bonfires.
The most affluent and powerful parts of our society have too easy a time legally avoiding taxes…
How does Amazon get away with this? A tangle of tax breaks and loopholes, some enacted in the name of creating jobs despite meager evidence that they do. For many companies, the key move is opening offices in a low-tax country like Ireland and then claiming that much of their business flows through those offices.
Put all these tax breaks together, and you end up with our system. AT&T and General Electric each paid a combined tax rate of only 18 percent since 2007, according to the S&P data. Coca-Cola, Apple and IBM paid 17 percent, and Alphabet (Google’s parent) is at 16 percent. Boeing is at 8 percent, Facebook at 4 percent…
The inequities contribute to the great American stagnation …
[The] stagnation looms over life. It breeds political dysfunction, and it helps explain why so many Americans aren’t swayed by facts. When you have been struggling for decades, you tend to lose faith in society’s institutions and their sober-minded experts.
Without that faith, all of our other problems become harder to solve …
Obviously, the past year has highlighted the depth and breadth of the frustration. It takes different forms and crosses demographic and political boundaries…
Most dangerously, Donald Trump has captured a presidential nomination with one of history’s oldest tricks — using economic frustrations to attract political support by igniting ethnic hatred …
The country’s immediate task is to reject Trump — for each of us to help ensure that his deeply un-American campaign remains un-American. I’d encourage everyone to find one concrete way over the next four weeks to play a part.
Fuck that guy and his blandishments. And his behavior is part of the why behind the revenge vote, the desire to throw a monkey wrench into the unbalanced engine of rigged America, the desire to be a group Samson bringing down the temple on top of himself and the Philistines.
So last night a friend graciously took me out to dinner. And in the course of our conversation she came and asked, “Do you want Trump to win?”
And I paused before saying “No.” I told her I’d thought about not voting at all, the favored candidate being what she is — more of the same that has led to this.
Anyway, Dick Destiny electric folk was there before everybody else with “Taxavoidination.” And you can still have it, free, without even signing up.
Download and listen or I’ll contribute to killing the dog.
Most voters in [the United States and Europe] have yet to come to grips with the notion that they have promised themselves benefits that, at current tax rates, they cannot afford …
The increasing claims come from the aging of the population, while the slowing growth of available resources comes from a slowdown of economic expansion over the last generation. A complex mix of factors, varying by country, has slowed growth, and the slowdown has been exacerbated everywhere by the worst financial crisis and global recession in 70 years.
Any major shift in the financial status of the rich could have big implications. A drop in their income and wealth would complicate life for elite universities, museums and other institutions that received lavish donations in recent decades. Governments — federal and state — could struggle, too, because they rely heavily on the taxes paid by the affluent.
Perhaps the broadest question is what a hit to the wealthy would mean for the middle class and the poor …
If anything, these economists say, any problems the wealthy have will trickle down, in the form of less charitable giving and less consumer spending. Over the last century, the worst years for the rich were the early 1930s, the heart of the Great Depression.
Other economists say the recent explosion of incomes at the top did hurt everyone else, by concentrating economic and political power among a relatively small group …
But if the rich have done well in bubbles, they have taken enormous hits to their wealth during busts. A recent study by two Northwestern University economists found that the incomes of the affluent tend to fall more, in percentage terms, in recessions than the incomes of the middle class. The incomes of the very affluent — the top one ten-thousandth — fall the most.
Over the last several years, Mr. McAfee began to put a large chunk of his fortune into real estate, often in remote locations. He bought the house in New Mexico as a playground for himself and fellow aerotrekkers, people who fly unlicensed, open-cockpit planes. On a 157-acre spread, he built a general store, a 35-seat movie theater and a cafe, and he bought vintage cars for his visitors to use …
In 2007, Mr. McAfee sold a 10,000-square-foot home in Colorado with a view of Pike’s Peak. He had spent $25 million to buy the property and build the house. He received $5.7 million for it. When Lehman collapsed last fall, its bonds became virtually worthless. Mr. McAfee’s stock investments cost him millions more.
One day, he realized, as he said, “Whoa, my cash is gone.???
His remaining net worth of about $4 million makes him vastly wealthier than most Americans, of course.
“’We’re just up here in Canada talking about how great you guys are down there, and we thought we’d just send you a little bit of a love note.’ … His testimonial is followed by two dozen more Canadians warmly praising the United States for things like its diversity, its space program and for being the birthplace of Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur.”
Seriously!? Didn’t quite come out as intended, I guess. The space program! That does what, exactly?
And two black entertainers, million-sellers, but dead, both due to gun downs, the murders unsolved.
Economists have long struggled to explain why a growing proportion of men in the prime of their lives are not employed or looking for work. A new study has found that nearly half of these men are on painkillers and many are disabled …
Surveys taken between 2010 and this year show that 40 percent of prime working-age men who are not in the labor force report having pain that prevents them from taking jobs for which they are qualified. More than a third of the men not in the labor force said they had difficulty walking or climbing stairs or had another disability. Forty-four percent said they took painkillers daily and two-thirds of that subset were on prescription medicines …
The connection between chronic joblessness and painkiller dependency is hard to quantify. Mr. Krueger and other experts cannot say which came first: the men’s health problems or their absence from the labor force. Some experts suspect that frequent use of painkillers is a result of being out of work, because people who have no job prospects are more likely to be depressed, become addicted to drugs and alcohol and have other mental health problems.
I can assert I’ve never had a vicodin, an oxycontin or a hypo of heroin. And I am not on disability. I have not been diagnosed with depression. As to “other mental health problems,” who can say?
More research is needed, admits the newspaper. In the meantime, maybe “some things could be done to help workers who’ve given up.”
“While [the Times piece references] interesting work, implying that the problem of people dropping out of the labor force is a story about men is seriously misleading,” writes Baker today.” Both prime-age men and women have been increasingly dropping out of the labor force in the last 15 years.”
“The more obvious source of the problem lies with the people (disproportionately men) designing economic policy.”
Ouch. Could our great leaders be secretly nursing opioid addictions?
