I've been at the hospital with my dad since last week, we didn't think he was going to get out of ICU, but he did.
Once he was transferred out, though, he stopped getting better. he still has pneumonia, and he still has some other infection, and that's before we even get to the leukemia.
The doctors have advised that we stop treatment, and we've agreed that that's probably the best thing to do. Without treatment, they're giving my dad anywhere from a few hours to a few days.
Because the existence of billionaires is predicated on the exploitation of human labor and unsustainable environmental harm. That level of wealth hoarding is harmful to economies, as it reduces the amount of money in circulation. No one person, no family, could ever conceivably even SPEND a billion dollars anyway, and it is inherently immoral to accumulate wealth so narrowly while so much of the world lives in abject poverty.
Better then to create a wealth ceiling, a point at which all wealth over a certain point is taxed at or very near 100% to incentivize people to actually spend their money rather than hoard it, stimulating the economy and bettering the lives of far more people. Better even still to create and regulate economic systems that protect workers and the environment in a way that such extreme levels of wealth accumulation aren’t even feasible.
The problem with this is that it reduces the incentive to actually do fiscally well. What’s the point of starting a business if you can’t become wealthy?
No one is saying you shouldn’t have a nice house, we are saying that having multiple really, really ridiculously nice houses while your employees are either homeless or at serious risk of becoming homeless is immoral.
Let’s say you have a badass job. A great job. You make $100 AN HOUR. You work 10 hours a day ($1000 A DAY), 5 days a week ($5000 a week!!!), every week ($20,000 A MONTH), thats $240,000 Every Year.
It would take you 4,167 years to make a billion dollars.
Keep in mind then, that if you got paid $1000 an hour, 10 hours a day, five days a week, every week, all year, it would still take over 400 years to make a billion.
You want to make one billion in a human lifetime? If you made $10,000 an HOUR, 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, every week, all year, it would take you 41 years to hit a billion.
(And that’s not counting, ya know, money you spend to stay alive on food or rent or anything. )
Because this is still a difficult set of numbers for some folks to comprehend (legitimately–our brains have a hard time conceptualizing big numbers) a really good example I like to use is the difference between a million and a billion in time.
You cant force people to be moral, that’s what all of this is based on. Of course no one NEEDS a billion dollars, but you cant make people do what you believe is the right thing with their money.
No, not at all. I’m just saying I’d rather have a free market system then have a government, which almost everyone agrees is corrupt, to control how much money I’m allowed to make and what to do with it after I earn it.
Yeah some people make a ton of money and do nothing but serve their own needs with it, and I agree that’s super shitty, I would never be that way if I was rich. But you cant tell people what to do with their own property. You probably own a lot of things that you don’t technically NEED, things you just like but could certainly live without, I know I do. But would you think it was fair for someone to knock on your door one day and be like “there are a ton of homeless people around and here you are spending your money on TV, or a couch to sit on, or a phone with internet, or any of the million other things most people have. No, you wouldnt like that and you’d probably tell someone they can fuck off and mind their own business.
All I’m saying is you cant regulate peoples lives like that, if they earned their money legally then they are free to do what they want with if, even if people think its immoral and selfish.
Better even still to create and regulate economic systems that protect workers and the environment in a way that such extreme levels of wealth accumulation aren’t even feasible.
Bugs Bunny isn’t your conventional trickster god - he doesn’t steal or lie; rather he inflicts on us a societal hubris. He traps us in the rules, conventions and expectations we’ve made. Forcing us to go through the niceties of the barbershop or DMV at the times most inconvenient to us. If we didn’t have these rules - if it was twelve thousand years ago and all we had was a snare and a knife, Bugs would be nothing more than a mortal rabbit. But now we have built so much and he has become a god.
He's been released now, and over the course of his 26 de unlawful imprisonment, he lost 20 lbs. Do you know how bad shit has to be to lose 20 lbs in 26 days?
It's not the worst thing about this, not by a long shot, but it's particularly galling that no one is going to face any kind of punishment for the unlawful month-long imprisonment and torture-by-starvation of this kid.
someone who lived in my apartment before me wrote a quote under the lampshade above the bed and it says “Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true.” and it makes me emotional every time i read it because it’s me as hell
So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
A single cop framed dozens of innocent people and once a state attorney found the body camera footage from the arrests, the victims were vindicated.
Jackson County, FL — Dozens of innocent people who were rotting in jail have been freed and their charges erased after the corrupt cop who put them there was caught on his own body camera planting meth on an innocent mother. Jackson County Sheriff’s Deputy Zachary Wester has since been fired and a slew of lawsuits are now rolling in.
Wester’s fall from law enforcement grace and the 119 people who were exonerated are due largely in part to the diligence of a single person, assistant state attorney at the 14th Judicial Circuit, Christina Pumphrey.
Pumphrey’s job as assistant state attorney included reviewing evidence before moving forward with charges against individuals. When she began reviewing cases, she found something very peculiar.
“This is an exaggeration, but it felt like his (Wester’s) name was on half the cases,” Pumphrey told The Appeal. “It was seriously disproportionate.”
When Pumphrey began watching the body camera footage from Wester’s arrests, she found something even more disturbing. Many times, Wester was seen conducting illegal searches. Also, his written affidavits did not match what she watched in the videos. But that wasn’t the most telling aspect of all these videos.
While it is no question that folks will claim that drugs found on them or in their possession “aren’t their’s” and “they don’t know how that got there,” nearly all of Wester’s cases had this. The videos showed that people were utterly shocked when Wester claimed to have found drugs in their vehicles. While a single person may have been lying, when everyone reacts the exact same way, something is up.
Although she reviewed multiple videos, Pumphrey never saw the actual act of Wester planting drugs or otherwise hiding them. However, all that changed when Wester pulled over Teresa Odom in February of 2018.
In that video, Wester pulls Odom over, claiming her tail lights aren’t working. However, it would later be revealed that her tail lights were, in fact, working fine and Wester had targeted her to frame her.
In the video, Wester is extremely nice to the woman, complimenting her, joking around, and making small talk. But in the back of his mind, he knew the entire time that he was going to plant meth on her and have her thrown in a cage—an insidious move indeed.
After threatening to have a K-9 come search her car, Wester tells Odom that she can avoid the K-9 if she just lets him search her truck himself—a huge mistake.
If you read the whole article, the woman who discovered this was immediately chastised by the state attorney’s office, who were furious with her for sharing the footage and bringing it up at all; she turned in her resignation soon afterwards and decided to drop her whistleblower complaint because she was afraid it would compromise her new job.
The police officer has not faced any violence beyond being fired.
Dropped charges remain on the victims’ criminal record.
“The next time someone tells you that obeying the law will keep you out of trouble with police, show them this article. A single cop had over 100 victims. ”