I live in Michigan, and we’re deluged in ads for this stuff here. I don’t personally care about gambling—don’t dig it, don’t really object to it, not close to anyone who’s gotten really tangled up in it. But these apps—the aggressiveness of the celebrity shilling, the dopamine-flood design of their ads, the trite offers of “help” to those struggling with a gambling problem—just feels gross as fuck to me. It may be a stretch to say you are profiting from your neighbors’ misery when you use these apps, but it is no stretch at all to point out that Jamie Foxx and Jason Alexander and all the rest of these celebrity shills sure as shit are. Why in the world are these folks, who are already multi-millionaires, taking this work to promote these apps?
Tag: capitalism
UPDATE: we nuked $1.1 million in medical debt
Remember this project from last November?
Well, for those who like closure:
Y’all did it!
Just before Xmas we closed out the project, having raised a bit more than $10,000 with your help. The end result was the abolition of $1,114,133.50 in shitty medical debt, freeing 2,006 Michiganders across 17 counties from one more dumb late-stage capitalism headache:
Bummed that you missed out on this project? Then I have excellent news:
You and your pals can start your own! The folks at RIP Medical Debt are super sweet and helpful, and it’s a blast.
I want that to be the takeaway here: there are plenty of religious and moral and political and ethical reasons to work on a project like this, but I still believe the best reason to do it is that it is fun. Every day, multiple times each day, it would occur to me: We’re going to nuke a million dollars of medical debt. And just that thought, that a bunch of us regular folk going about our regular lives could do just a little something more and move such a big goddamn rock—it’d make me laugh. It literally tickled me, that notion. And it worked! And that cracks me up, every time it comes to mind.
Good job, all! When you start your project and need a little dough to nuke a little bad medical debt, hit me up.
$10 will erase $1000 of Medical Debt in Michigan RIGHT NOW! 💸
We are facing a lot of terrifying problems right now: climate disaster, civil unrest, labor injustice, opioid abuse, the profusion of hate and extremism.
Most problems cannot be solved by throwing money at them. Medical debt is one that can.
I’m collaborating on a project to erase $1 million of medical debt in Michigan.
Fortunately, because of the way this debt is bundled, it’s possible to buy it extremely cheaply on the open market, for just a penny on the dollar (i.e., $1 buys $100 of bundled medical debt). If bill collectors buy that debt, they will hound the debtor for the full value of the debt, even though they only paid 1/100th of that.
But if we buy the debt, we can just forgive it and clear the books for someone who had some bad luck and didn’t have the insurance to cover it.
Incidentally, in Michigan this burden hits Black communities especially hard; buying and erasing debt here is thus a “Good Deed twofer”: one donation relieves a family’s economic woes AND strikes a blow for racial and economic justice.
A bunch of you have already given (we’re over 76% of the way to our goal!), and that’s amaaaaazing! The more you give, the more we can forgive. THANK YOU!
Halloween Treat: “Earn $20K EVERY MONTH by being your own boss” 🍬🎃
This is basically what you’d get if Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Red-Headed League” had been an [Adult Swim] infomercial.
Brothers and Sisters, I 100% Feel You
Yep, it’s a trap.
This is how the AIs get us: they set us up on serial petty theft charges, ruin our credit records with fines and court fees and legal bills, then get us disenfranchised as parole-violating felons. Pretty soon, the only jobs we can get are dusting off their motherboards for minimum wage or working the spice mines of Chiron Beta Prime. 🤖🇺🇸🔥