Ideally, a 29-year-old would have at least a few thousand dollars in a cash reserve and the equivalent of a year’s salary in a retirement investment account.
A fun but more or less tangential observation: this general formula for how much you should have set aside is new and interesting because when I was a wee old trying to figure out if I was “saving enough” all I could find were calculators that were like “start by entering your age at death”.
🔮 ⚰️
3x by 40, 6x by 50 is a much cleaner strategy.
Anyway, ideally we’d know this much about the sitting president’s personal finances, too.
Earlier this week, The Intercept was able to select “white genocide conspiracy theory” as a pre-defined “detailed targeting” criterion on the social network to promote two articles to an interest group that Facebook pegged at 168,000 users large and defined as “people who have expressed an interest or like pages related to White genocide conspiracy theory.” The paid promotion was approved by Facebook’s advertising wing. After we contacted the company for comment, Facebook promptly deleted the targeting category, apologized, and said it should have never existed in the first place.
I usually like to check the source on egregious shit before I re-post it and I didn’t in this case and so it is worth pointing out that in context, it sounds like Cross is actually troubled that they couldn’t charge this particular trafficker with a crime, even thought hey had evidence that she had actively trafficked children:
But in a two-year probe beginning in 2002, U.S. investigators alleged
that Galindo paid Cambodian child finders to purchase, defraud, coerce,
or steal children from their families, and conspired to create false
identity documents for the children. Galindo later served federal prison
time on charges of visa fraud and money laundering, but not
trafficking. “You can get away with buying babies around the world as a
United States citizen,” says Richard Cross, a senior special agent with
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement who investigated Galindo. “It’s
not a crime.”
So my huffing about “you can get away with it” == “it’s not a crime” was somewhat misplaced. It’s still a good article.
“You can get away with buying babies around the world as a United States citizen. It’s not a crime.”
—
Richard Cross, Senior Special ICE agent. Via Foreign Policy
The linked source article provides decent insight as to why adoption/foster ‘care’ in the US is particularly a imperialist shitshow, ripping apart birth families & communities on massive global scales.
Side note: I’m stuck on the implications of “it’s not a crime” as the obvious extension of “you can get away with it”.
Followup note: I went back to the source, and it actually sounds like Cross is lamenting the fact that it is hard to press charges within the US for buying babies abroad – he’s talking about an investigation he worked on and seems kind of frustrated that they were able to charge the woman with visa fraud but that child trafficking statutes didn’t apply.
The article is still worth reading. The larger point still stands.
This is clever but someone needs to explain how a bot learned to format scripts with stage direction from watching a bunch of video clips. That’s not how machine learning works.
Kohan called for a nurse, who explained that he would need jaw surgery that night. In the meantime, he tried to check whether the hospital — Dell Seton Medical Center — was in his insurance network.
“I was on my iPhone lying there with a broken jaw, and I go on the Humana website and see the hospital listed,” Kohan says. “So I figured, okay, I should be good.”
Finland captured global attention with its trial of universal basic income, handing out cash, no strings attached. Now, the experiment is ending.
…
The demise of the project in Finland does not signal an end of interest in the idea. Other trials are underway or being explored in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Canadian province of Ontario, the Netherlands and Kenya.
In much of the world, the concept of basic income retains appeal as a potential way to more justly spread the bounty of global capitalism while cushioning workers against the threat of robots and artificial intelligence taking their jobs.
But the Finnish government’s decision to halt the experiment at the end of 2018 highlights a challenge to basic income’s very conception. Many people in Finland — and in other lands — chafe at the idea of handing out cash without requiring that people work.
…
In Finland, where the social safety net is famously generous, a structure like Britain’s could yield the very thing basic income is supposed to deliver: a guarantee that every member of society can be assured of sustenance and shelter.
This may be the main reason that basic income has lost momentum in Finland: It is effectively redundant.
Health care is furnished by the state. University education is free. Jobless people draw generous unemployment benefits and have access to some of the most effective training programs on earth.
“In a sense,” said Mr. Hiilamo, the social policy professor, “Finland already has basic income.”
Just reblogging to add that my office moved again which switched up my commute, effectively routing me through a tent city that is different from the two tent cities I used to ride through, and yesterday riding home work I found myself remembering visiting slums in Cambodia and being floored by them. Surprised by people living in cardboard boxes. Here the tent cities are actual tents, not cardboard shacks, but they’re still sums. And it’s incredibly disturbing.
Scientists have created a mutant enzyme that breaks down plastic drinks bottles – by accident. The breakthrough could help solve the global plastic pollution crisis by enabling for the first time the full recycling of bottles.
The new research was spurred by the discovery in 2016 of the first bacterium that had naturally evolved to eat plastic, at a waste dump in Japan. Scientists have now revealed the detailed structure of the crucial enzyme produced by the bug.
The international team then tweaked the enzyme to see how it had evolved, but tests showed they had inadvertently made the molecule even better at breaking down the PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic used for soft drink bottles. “What actually turned out was we improved the enzyme, which was a bit of a shock,” said Prof John McGeehan, at the University of Portsmouth, UK, who led the research. “It’s great and a real finding.”
The mutant enzyme takes a few days to start breaking down the plastic – far faster than the centuries it takes in the oceans. But the researchers are optimistic this can be speeded up even further and become a viable large-scale process.
“What we are hoping to do is use this enzyme to turn this plastic back into its original components, so we can literally recycle it back to plastic,” said McGeehan. “It means we won’t need to dig up any more oil and, fundamentally, it should reduce the amount of plastic in the environment.”
For the past few years there has been a troubling trend in how urban designers decide to deal with public spaces, in this post I want to go over what these things are and what they mean.
The first thing I want to go over that’s been becoming more common is the concept of “Privately Owned Public Spaces.” These space are what we would recognize as being public, such as plazas, parks, or sidewalks but have been sold through privatization measures to companies and businesses. This is done so that places that should be for public use can to transformed in a way for the owner to profit, or to create a space that is specific to what they want. Thus this is forcing what they want onto others by removing the universal use of public spaces. For example, in places with cafes or restaurants these businesses could buy the public area and remove the seating around them, only allowing paying customers to use the seating in their businesses. In this way companies can transform public spaces into ones that poses no threat to them, and by extension make that public space less useful to people. In another example these “public” spaces can have strict rules, such as no photography, not being allowed to stay for a certain amount of time, and not being able to use the space in a way that does not financially benefit the owner. Since this is a privatized and commercialized mindset anything that isn’t making money is deemed an unnecessary expense, and thus not allowed.
In public spaces that are still being made to be used by the public though, a new idea of what these spaces should be has taken root. This idea is that these spaces should be made for a very specific purpose and otherwise hostile to the user. An example of this is a recent trend to make “benches” that vaguely fulfil the idea that a resting spot should be available, while at the same time strictly enforce the idea that this is a temporary place and you aren’t supposed to stay. This can be seen in objects such as “leaning benches” that just give people a place to lean instead of actually sit, or specifically designing beaches to be uncomfortable by adding spacers or narrow “arm rests” that are too short to be used. All these are methods to make public spaces less a place of gathering and meeting and instead a transitional place that actively discourages long term use.
This all ties into the concept that goes by many different names, but can be summarized in the idea of “Hostile Architecture.” This is a design philosophy that seeks to make the design of public spaces hostile to its users, or more specifically to discourage usage that is not approved of by the owner. In this way I think Hostile Architecture goes against the very idea of a public space, IE a space that the public can use in a way they see fit. This idea is embodied in the creation of, and response by, the creators of, the Camden bench. This bench was specifically designed in a way that it was only supposed to be used a certain way, and the creators even try to defend it by saying that “[Because] there is no ‘correct’ way to sit on it… it becomes a far more inclusive seat encouraging social interaction.” This notion that they are somehow being creative and helping people by making an uncomfortable bench that isn’t as good as a normal bench by any measure of the imagination, is a perfect example of how this was specifically created as a hostile object. The creators are trying to redefine something that is explicitly negative as something that is somehow a positive because of the connotations of making something explicitly negative means.
But, one of their other responses is an even better look into how this mentality works, “Homelessness should never be tolerated in any society and if we start designing in to accommodate homeless then we have totally failed as a society.“ This brings up one the major points I have about Hostile Architecture, and that is its function to hide problems in society. By creating hostile public spaces it doesn’t fix crime, drug use, violence, and homelessness like the creators of this stuff would have you believe. Instead all this does is make it so problems are less visible on the surface because it’s not as convenient to do them in public anymore. People don’t just stop being homeless because you design benches they can’t sleep on, or put down spikes so they can’t stay somewhere that’s safe. These are problems with society that can not be fixed by commercializing public spaces at the whims of a profit seeking owner, or by making them unusable by anyone but the “right” kind of person.
All of this ties back to one central source. Privatization only helps the wealthy that own the land and helps them to create a situation where they get more money. And ignoring these social problems only creates a situation where taxes to fund social help can be cut because the public perception can be that it’s not really a problem. All of this only benefits one group of people, and that is the upper class that control almost all of the money. By removing things people can use for free they are creating a system where they can be relied on more and more, and people are required to pay for what used to be cheap or even free. Once again I will say this, in the capitalist system there is no room for anything that does not directly benefit the people that own and control society. They will continue to sink themselves into any part of society we let them in, and only by understanding these motives and reasonings can there be any resistance against it.
(Hey thanks for reading, please remember to reblog to help spread the word, and to follow for more stuff. Have a great day comrades!)
This is good and you should read it but…most privately owned public spaces are not formerly public spaces that were handed over to private entities, at least not in New York and San Francisco. They’re private real estate developments that were awarded some kind of concession (usually a variance from height restrictions or another zoning variance) in exchange for creating and maintaining public space.
One of the things that NYC often does (and often doesn’t enforce) is allow a POPS adjacent to a sidewalk cafe. And often the cafe does a really good job of creating the impression that the whole area is reserved for their customers when really it’s open to the public, though since Occupy there’s been a lot more attention to that and more folks know that those spaces are open to the public.
San Francisco has Parklets, which are public spaces (former parking spaces) that are maintained by private entities but again they aren’t allowed to reserve those parklets for exclusive use by their customers.
Cities have also privatized a lot of public space in a range of ways, but privately owned public spaces are not that.
