a.k.a. Shawn Honnick specializing in wonderful since 1968
*also Chipotle pictures, NYC adventures, and little known safety tactics like fake hand washing.
**If you're a disgruntled employee, do something about it (no, it's not a pyramid... THIS is the PYRAMID) or just sit around and grumble like everyone over at the disgruntled employee forums.
Posts tagged: government
please watch
acta/sopa/pipa are much more fucked-up than “omg megaupload is down”
and even though Tumblr wasn’t mentioned in the video, certainly it would be one of the websites to be taken down – just think of how much of your dashboard content is copyrighted. a lot, right?
here’s what you can do about it (you can also google it for further information)
The Internet is comprised of the best Private Investigators.
I’m a member of the 1 percent. I’ve watched my income tax rates fall over my lifetime, from a top rate of 91 percent under President Dwight Eisenhower to the current low rate of 35 percent.
When taxes were higher, this nation built a vibrant middle-class life for millions. Our schools, libraries, bridges, railways, and roads made the United States the envy of the world.
America has been good to my family. My grandfather was a Lithuanian immigrant who owned a general store in Waco, Texas. He helped my father start his business — the Tivoli Theatre in Fort Worth — during the Great Depression. Times were tough. Going to the movies was a way to escape and a ticket cost only a nickel. The business grew to a chain of eight independent theaters in Texas and Oklahoma. My dad invested the money he made wisely.
As tax rates have fallen, our schools, libraries, bridges, railways, and roads have begun to crumble. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs in this Great Recession. Congress continues to resist raising taxes on the wealthy, even though those higher taxes could create the jobs and rebuild the infrastructure that this country so desperately needs.
The 1 percent made billions of dollars during the boom years. Each time Congress reduced the tax rates, we made even more. When President George W. Bush took office, the top income tax rate was just under 40 percent. Congress cut it to 35 percent. Moreoever, many wealthy Americans make a lot of money earning interest on investments, buying and selling stocks, and banking the dividends those stocks produce. Most of those financial gains are taxed at just 15 percent.
A few years ago, Warren Buffett vowed to give a million bucks to any Fortune 500 CEO who could prove he paid a higher tax rate than his secretary. Not one came forward.
Our government taxes work much more than it taxes wealth. What does that say about our values?
STUNNING Facts On Income Inequality and Bank Bonuses
Stunning facts about bank bonuses on Wall Street, average compensation and homeless kids are shared by The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur.
From ThinkProgress:
In the United States, the top 1 percent controls roughly 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. According to the study, which examined Roman ledgers, previous estimates, imperial edicts, and Biblical passages, Rome’s top 1 percent controlled less than half that at the height of its economic power, as Tim De Chant notes at Per Square Mile:
Their target was the state of the economy when the empire was at its population zenith, around 150 C.E. Schiedel and Friesen estimate that the top 1 percent of Roman society controlled 16 percent of the wealth, less than half of what America’s top 1 percent control.
Of course, the millions of Romans at the bottom of the empire’s class structure — the conquered and enslaved, the poorest Romans, and the women who had little civic or economic empowerment — would probably disagree with the study’s conclusion. Still, it serves as yet another highlight of how large the income gap in the United States has become over the last three decades.
Still, it’s unbelievable that the wealth of the bottom 60% in the U.S. is less than the Forbes 400 richest and that the 6 heirs to the Walmart franchise have the combined wealth equal to the bottom 30% in this country. Give the bankers their record bonuses anyway. They’re doing a fantastic job.
The evolution of riot gear. (NYT)
Senate votes to make US a military state (Source)
abandonedatspacecamp says, “The military was just given permission to arrest and detain American citizens on US soil and hold them indefinitely, without charge. There are about a thousand things wrong with that previous sentence.
I know I post alot of petitions and things, but please, if you have a facebook or an email address, sign this petition to tell Obama to veto this bill.
Basically the first thing they’re going to do is round up all the Occupy protestors and put them in one big, federal pen, but I wouldn’t count on it stopping there. Our country’s in bad enough shape as it is without arresting more innocent people. Spread the word and, please, sign the petition. Make your voice heard.”
via misskatehate
—-Does anyone need more proof that Corporations are running this country. Wow. Scary. Let’s go, people. Unite and all that.
US judge orders hundreds of sites “de-indexed” from Google, Facebook
After a series of one-sided hearings, luxury goods maker Chanel has won recent court orders against hundreds of websites trafficking in counterfeit luxury goods. A federal judge in Nevada has agreed that Chanel can seize the domain names in question and transfer them all to US-based registrar GoDaddy. The judge also ordered “all Internet search engines” and “all social media websites”—explicitly naming Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Bing, Yahoo, and Google—to “de-index” the domain names and to remove them from any search results.
The case has been a remarkable one. Concerned about counterfeiting, Chanel has filed a joint suit in Nevada against nearly 700 domain names that appear to have nothing in common. When Chanel finds more names, it simply uses the same case and files new requests for more seizures. (A recent November 14 order went after an additional 228 sites; none had a chance to contest the request until after it was approved and the names had been seized.)
Via Hillary Hartley on G+, where she adds, “Why wait for SOPA?” newsweek:journo-geekery:
The callback system connected me to the wrong number for my district. If your representative happens to be Donna Edwards, the correct number is actually 202-225-8699
Have you called your representative yet?
More than 60 years ago, in his “Foundation” series, the science fiction novelist Isaac Asimov invented a new science — psychohistory — that combined mathematics and psychology to predict the future.
Now social scientists are trying to mine the vast resources of the Internet — Web searches and Twitter messages, Facebook and blog posts, the digital location trails generated by billions of cellphones — to do the same thing.
The most optimistic researchers believe that these storehouses of “big data” will for the first time reveal sociological laws of human behavior — enabling them to predict political crises, revolutions and other forms of social and economic instability, just as physicists and chemists can predict natural phenomena.
» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)
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