Announcement coming Monday
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN
I smell ads coming if this is true
I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO EXPECT
I’m still skeptical as to whether this is even a real thing.
If it proves to be true, as much as I believe it will bring nothing but awfulness, what if they insisted on the implementation of all those changes most tumblr-ers want?
“This systematic abuse cannot be fixed with just one resignation, or two,” said David Camp, the Republican chairman of the House tax-writing committee, at an oversight hearing Friday morning dealing with the IRS. “This is not a personnel problem. This is a problem of the IRS being too large, too intrusive, too abusive.”David Camp has it wrong. There has been a “systematic” abuse of power, but it’s not what Camp has in mind. The real scandal is that:
The IRS has interpreted our tax laws to allow big corporations and wealthy individuals to make unlimited secret campaign donations through sham political fronts called “social welfare organizations,” like Karl Rove’s “Crossroads,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and “Priorites USA.”
This campaign money has been used to bribe Congress to keep in place tax loopholes like the “carried interest” rule that allows the managers of hedge funds and private equity funds to treat their income as capital gains, subject only to low capital gains taxes rather than ordinary income taxes, and other loopholes that allow CEOs to get special tax treatment on giant compensation packages that now average $10 million a year.
Despite a growing number of billionaires and multi-millionaires using every tax dodge imaginable – laundering their money through phantom corporations and tax havens — the IRS’s budget has been cut by 17 percent since 2002, adjusted for inflation. To manage the $594.5 million in additional cuts required by the sequester, the agency will furlough each of its more than 89,000 employees for at least five days this year.
Finally, all of this, coming at a time when the Supreme Court has deemed corporations “people” under the First Amendment and when income and wealth are more concentrated at the top than they’ve been in over a hundred years, has enabled America’s financial elite to further entrench their wealth and power and thereby take over much of American democracy.
This is the real scandal and the real abuse, Congressman Camp. Your indignation over the IRS’s alleged “targeting” of conservative groups is a distraction from the main event.
Coming Soon of the Day: Neil Degrasse Tyson Will Host the Sequel of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos
Though it’s been quietly in the works since 2011, Fox has officially confirmed that Carl Sagan’s monumental 1970 sci-ed miniseries Cosmos: A Personal Voyage will be getting an updated sequel next year, which will consist of 13 episodes produced by Family Guy’s Seth MacFarlane and hosted by one of the Internet’s most celebrated astrophysicists, Neil Degrasse Tyson. Fox is hoping the show will have as much as of cultural impact as Carl Sagan’s original series, which still remains one of the most watched PBS series in the world to this day.
(Image by Richard Davies)
—not sure how I feeeeeel about this—
People being angry about ~dem gays~ on Target’s Facebook.
I just want to give my two cents on this and tell you a story.
A couple weeks ago, I was hired at Target. I have a job at Target. Not a big deal right?
It is a big deal because i’m a transman.
It doesn’t take a genius to conclude that it’s hard for me, my brothers, and sisters to get a job. There are legal restraints regarding the job and if you don’t pass, it’s hard to be taken seriously at a job interview.
Right on the application, it asks what your preferred name is. It also asks if there is anything that target should know. I put the fact that I am a transman, expecting not to get a call because usually when you put that down, people will throw out the application. I got TWO interviews.
At the interview, they asked me about it. I told them I am on hormones and they told me that they didn’t care. Not in the sense that they don’t emotionally care, but that it didn’t matter. I was male and that’s all that mattered. They also told me that they give sex same couples benefits in states that do not recognize them as a married couple.
At my job orientation, I was not misgendered once. Even my supervisors who weren’t sure of my gender avoided pronoun use, which I found only happens when you’ve had pronoun training. They gave me a name tag with my preferred name and didn’t ask questions. I felt safe and respected, which is huge for a trans* person.
TLDR: Target is amazing not just for the LGB, but also the T. Shop there for the rest of your life.
I’ve been contemplating for a while whether or not it’s worth it to spend my money at Target, since all I do is waste time and money buying a bunch of useless crap and junk food there.
Totally worth it. I’m happy to support any business that treats its employees and customers that well.
I get my shoes almost exclusively there and this makes me feel better about spending money there.
I’ve become quite a fan of onion in foods since I’ve been cooking for Jessica. Also, I never realized how much I like pepper in cooking, either.
tedx:
Michael McDaniel & Jared Ficklin are designers at frog design, a firm in Austin, TX responsible for a multitude of products, from ovens to compost systems to apps to breast scanners. At this year’s TEDxAustin, the pair introduced their plan to re-invent urban mass transit through flying cars: high-flying gondolas running via cables stretched over cities — a little bit like ski lifts.
How would this crazy idea work? From their talk:
What if I told you — in the whole area of mass transit, there is one industry that competes on the basis of how many people they can carry per hour without a schedule? Further, they do it moving only 1 to 6 people at a time.
I’m talking about the ski industry: the Zillertal ski area in Austria — they hold the record for lift capacity. They have a system of 174 chairs and gondolas that can move 298,000 people per hour. So if you ran that on a 24-hour cycle, that would be 74 million people a day,and if they weren’t skiing down, and you were carrying them down, that’d be 14 million people per day. That’s a lot of people. And to put those max capacity numbers into perspective, the New York City subway only has to carry 5.3 million people on a given weekday…
Now we’re not exactly saying chairlifts are the best solution for urban transit — there would be a lot of dropped iPhones — but if you were looking for inspiration on how to move a lot of people without a schedule, the ski industry is an excellent place to start. And one innovation you’re going to find there is called the high-speed detachable gondola.
Now these are essentially 4-6 person cars that cruise along at about 12 to 15 MPH attached to a cable supported by towers. For all practical purposes, they are flying cars. So they’re called “detachable” because as they come in through a station, they actually let go of the cable — release from the cable — and slow down to just below walking speed (about 2 MPH) as they glide through the station. Now this allows people to easily load and unload off the cars across a flat, level platform. Then the cars essentially accelerate back up and to line speed and reattach to the cable.Now, the operation is continuous — it doesn’t stop — so you catch the first available car as it drifts through the station. Some of the other advantages of it being a detachable car is that, essentially, we can add and remove vehicles to the line in real time. Now this really eases maintenance, cleaning, and also helps us save energy by matching peak demand…All of this together forms a new form of mass transit for cities called urban cable.
The Wire is our vision for a user-centered, practical mass transit system for cities like Austin...The Wire can cover the exact same routes as [urban light rail], but it can go places surface rail simply can’t go.…Imagine flying into Austin, and catching The Wire at the airport. The stop could be located right on top of the attached parking garage, so you would simply walk and roll your luggage right on the first available car and fly out. There’s not waiting and no schedules because it’s constantly in motion…there’s no stoplights in the air; these things run constantly…The ability to put [stations] in the air means they can sit on top of parking garages or they could be over the top of intersections…You could have one that had a rooftop pocket park, or one integrated with retail.
With all these possibilities, it creates new opportunities for public / private partnerships. You could even envision a stop integrated into the lower floors of an existing high-rise building. This means more ways to share costs. It encourages smart growth. It allows us to build community around commuting.
For more information on urban cable and The Wire, watch Michael and Jared’s entire talk, “A mass transport system in the sky” from TEDxAustin 2013.
I really want to make pancakes for dinner tonight: two regular, two chocolate chip, and two pineapple. Do I go ahead and make them without clearing it with Jessica, because she probably won’t see my text until she gets off work? I just don’t know.
a nightclub called The Mullet where you have to walk through an office to get to the bar
OH MY GOD APPARENTLY TAKING AN ARROW TO THE KNEE WAS AN OLD NORDIC SLANG FOR GETTING MARRIED
I THOUGHT THAT ALL THOSE GUYS IN SKYRIM HAD LITERALLY BEEN SHOT IN THEIR KNEES WITH ARROWS BUT I GUESS NOT
Jessica and I are on the Publix website looking for easy/cheap recipes for dinners, and she’s orgasming over the dessert options that keep coming up.
(Source: evefeatherstone)
