Tag: money

FUN FACT: Moderating Facebook Gives Facebook Moderators PTSD

The question for me is this: Does Facebook provide anywhere near the social value to justify what this man suffered?  Does it provide enough value to justify the suffering of the likely thousands of workers who Facebook employees to protect us from Facebook?

As you reflect on this, you probably want to check out The Facebook Files, an ongoing investigative series from the Wall Street Journal (articles are paywalled, but the related podcasts are free and worth your time and attention).

Plainly put, Facebook profits from hate and misery. Further reads:

Brass tacks question: Given what social media companies like FB can and will do, in terms of exerting editorial control when it is in their interest to do so, I’m left wondering if they really deserve Section 230 protection?  

FB, of course, is far from unique here—or, maybe, is uniquely awful only in the magnitude and clarity of their disfunction and viciousness.  For a Twitter-centric rumination on the fundamental design aspects of social media that are making it so damaging to both individual humans and larger human societies, please read Noah Smith’s rational (and, in the case of the later, research-backed) articles “The Shouting Class” and  “The Shouting Class 2: Last Refuge of Scoundrels”: 

“In other words, society has always had about the same number of shouty jerks. But with the rise of social media, we have moved our society’s political discussions from spaces in which the shouty jerks were at least somewhat marginalized and contained to spaces that preferentially amplify their voices.…In pursuit of personal glory, bad people turn neighbor against neighbor.”

Noah Smith in “The Shouting Class 2: Last Refuge of Scoundrels”

BILLIONAIRES

A few weeks back I was walking the dog when it dawned on me that a billionaire could give away $1 million each week for a year, and he (yes, HE) would still be a billionaire at the end of that year[1]

And a billionaire is practically a pauper.  If Jeff Bezos did this for 1,000 years—if he gave away $1 million every week for 52 weeks each year over the course of 1,000 years—he’d still have over $50 billion left, assuming he doesn’t invest his money at all, just keeps in a big hole in the ground. If you taxed his current wealth at 99%—something that, to the best of my knowledge, no elected or appointed official has ever come remotely close to suggesting—then he’d still be a billionaire, and could still give away a million a week for a year without stopping being a billionaire.

All “conservative” freak-outs about taxes and stifling innovation and redistribution of whatever aside, there’s literally no way to take it all away from Bezos or Musk or Gates or Zuckerberg or the Waltons or the Kochs, not in practical terms, not before they’d had time to make it all back on something as benign and boring as holding government bonds.

And as I walked the dog, I just thanked my lucky stars that we fought a revolution in this country to break away from all the old potentates and riyals and dynasties, to be sure there was at least one spot on earth where a man could live free and equal with all other men, not as some peon who could be ground under the foot of a clumsy giant whose piles of lucre blocked his ability to see where he was going and what he was doing. Humanity really dodged a bullet with this whole democracy situation!😅 Anyway, gotta go cook 25-cent Ramen for my kids!

But as I walked a little further, it dawned on me that what I was really saying was: 

“If you have the luck and privilege to have your shit together enough to have some real portion of your wealth socked away in any decent retirement savings plan, then you can afford to give away at least 0.5 to 1% of your wealth every year and still be wealthy.”

And was I even doing that?

Nope, I wasn’t.

But, shit, now I’ve got a goal, don’t I? 💸

[1] For all practical purposes: Let’s assume this billionaire has his wealth invested in something as safe and stodgy as bond funds, which historically earn ~2–4% each year. If he gives away $1 million each week for a year, his nest egg will be reduced to $948,000,000, but he’ll earn $18–$37 million on that, bringing him back up to just shy of $1 billion. If he’s invested in something extremely safe, like an S&P 500 index fund, he’ll likely come out of the year ahead, having earned ~$75 million on the money he had left over after having given away $52 million.)

Why Bulletproof Hoodies and Backpacks are Bullshit

This video isn’t about “bulletproof backpacks” and “bulletproof hoodies” and all the other misery-profiteering school products out there—but it illustrates an important point, which is that this shit isn’t a +4 magic shield; you have to stop the projectile, and you have to do something with the force it’s exerted, and you have to be able to get up and get moving to avoid getting shot in the face or the crotch or anywhere else that’s exposed because you’re on the ground and gasping.  Life isn’t a video game:

Heck, just jump to ~3:34, and see the wreckage caused by an extremely common, extremely legal gun—even when the bullet is stopped.

Incidentally, here’s the testing documentation for the bullet-resistant hoodies featured in that BoingBoing article linked above. 

Do those hoodies stop a .44 Mag?  Yup!  Zero penetration.  That is indeed impressive.  But look closer at these results: the witness panel was deformed by 1.25 inches on average. That’s how far that bullet would go into your body—even though it hasn’t torn the fabric. It’s called “soft body armor” for a reason, folks.  The manufacturer implies that the hood will protect you, but that’s a load of shit:  If your skull suffers a blunt penetration of 1.25 inches, you are dead. Your brain is only about .5 inches from the outside world.

Holy moly, JUUL is Remarkably Evil™

I knew about some of this (like the JUUL school presentations—which, as a former teacher and admin, struck me as a stunning professional dereliction that somehow managed to dwarf the enormous amoral grossness of JUUL’s marketing department; well done, fellow educators!), but other bits (like the nicotine salts) were news to me.

An elucidating 3mins. Watch.

Looking for a distraction from these endless woes? …

… My time portal novel is now on Amazon (print and ebook). It’s a giddy little thrill at a reasonable price.

I’ve read a million time travel stories… and even read a million variations on time travel stories that try to be “different,” but I don’t think I’ve ever read any that are different in quite this way. While it settles uncomfortably next to very serious and even tragic things, the story’s humor is quite pronounced. … And it does an excellent job of creating an air of danger, and thus interest, due to the well-realized sense of actual traveling in (and perhaps getting lost in) time, as well as the criminal aspect and what they’re doing to the people in the past and how those people might react. It’s also a good vehicle to address issues all the way from existential bad faith to religion possibly being the amphetamine of the masses.

Jason McGregor for Tangent Online

Patronage Has Its Privileges

If you like the sorta weirdness I peddle and wanna make sure more of that happens, you can support me via Patreon. Folks who give just $3/month (or more) get full, immediate access to the growing “Digital Download Vault.” The Vault is chock full of previously unpublished stories, music, and other goodies that can be shared via the magic of electromagnetic radiation.

(If you’re especially frustrated with the current President and White Power™, you’ll especially like the longest of these goodies, my novella “And Lo She Dwelt in the Great Sadness.”)

If you wanna drop some coin in my heavenly jukebox, but don’t wanna do so recurringly, you can always send coffee/beer money to me via Venmo or ko-fi.com.

And, if you wanna support me, but don’t have the scratch to spare—well, don’t doubt that I too have been there, brothers and sisters.  It’s fine to just spread the word: Tell folks you like about stuff I’ve done that you like, point them to my free fiction, share a link to a post I wrote that you dug, or speak kindly of me on Amazon.

Once again, thank you so much for supporting our special kinda weird.

"I Sell the Shadow to Sustain the Substance"

Like what I do? Wanna support it? You’ve finally got options!

I’ve finally sorted out my micropayment/subscription situation. Here are a couple easy ways to support my kinda weirdness:

 

  • PATREON: If you’d like to support my brand of madness on a recurring basis, Patreon makes that easy. Even at the lowest tiers, supporters get access to previously unpublished fiction. That currently includes my novella And Lo She Dwelt in the Great Sadness—which will likely prove diverting to folks frustrated by our current political situation. New stories will be added in coming months.
Become a Patron!

Thanks!

P.S. Wash your hands!

BURIED LEADE ALERT: Increasing the Minimum Wage by a Buck Can Prevent 1,600 Suicides

This all might be old news for you—especially the bit I shoved in the title, as I’m told that finding actually saw a fair bit of press earlier this month—but I found this all eye-opening:

The Finance 202: Mo’ money, fewer problems: Two new studies show 1 percenters are the most satisfied

Three key takeaways:

1. This single factoid on the impact of tiny wage increases on suicide rates is pretty stunning:

At the bottom of the income heap, relatively minor adjustments in pay can yield such a dramatic difference they register as public health benefits, according to the second study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Public Health. That paper found “state-level increases of $1 in minimum wage corresponded with a 3.4 percent to 5.9 percent decrease in the suicide rates of people with a high school diploma or less” among 18- to 64-year-olds

Picking that rather tortuous second sentence apart is a little tricky. Americans 18- to 64-years-old account for something like 200,000,000 people. About half of them would probably fall in the “have a high school diploma or less” bucket. So, this group—less educated American adults of working age—amount to something like one-third of the country. But they make up something like 70% of our suicides. So, that’s a population that’s really hurting, to the tune of more than 30,000 suicides per year. If you reduce that by an average of a 4.7% (as the above mentioned study found), that translates to ~1,600 lives saved.

That’s good. I don’t think anyone reading this is going to say “Thousands of families kept whole? Fuck that, Dave: Let them choke on cake!”

But what’s the cost? I mean, maybe it costs some absurd amount to get this done, and there’s a legit question if it’s a good investment or not.

Minimum wage is still pretty insanely variable across the US, but it looks like the average US minimum wage worker earns $11.80 per hour (given how the population of working-age Americans is distributed). That being the case, a $1 raise amounts to an ~8.5% increase in payroll. If that’s entirely passed directly to consumers (with all else staying equal), you might end up paying as much as 25 cents more for a Starbucks coffee, or almost 70 cents more for a Bacon Turkey Bravo sandwich at Panera.

That’s literally pocket change. It seems like a pretty frikkin easy way to save 1,600 lives each year. I say let’s do it.

2. Even 1%ers struggle with medical bills‽

“Among low-income households, for instance, nearly 40 percent said they had trouble paying their medical bills in the past several years and 30 percent reported having difficulty paying for food, Ingraham writes. “Among the top 1 percent, those shares were 5 percent and zero, respectively.”

I’m sorry, put we’re talking about the handful of families that have more than half the nation’s wealth—and even they can’t all cover their medical expenses? That right there is the single most persuasive argument I’ve ever heard for socialized medicine.

3. This all translates to a significant Democratic tailwind in the presidential election. Our economy is doing great—which historically gives an incumbent PotUS an easy win for reelection. But that great economy is only benefiting a small group of people in the upper reaches of the wealth curve. They’re happy and they vote—but they each get just one vote.

Meanwhile, huge swaths of Americans are “dissatisfied” (or much, much worse)—and don’t tend to vote. Get more of these less-likely voters to the polls, the Dem advantage increases (incidentally, as voter turnout increases, policies tend to get more progressive, too—BONUS!).

This all points to the one thing you can do if you want to see a Dem in the White House: Work to increase voter turnout. Get folks registered. Get them to the polls. Get them their absentee ballots.🇺🇸