GOLD LIPSTICK AND VALUE WINE, my new chapbook is available now, at the link below! The regular edition is the full chapbook. The Shiny edition is the full chapbook, plus a handwritten note, annotations, and an extra poem! Edition Regular $10.00...
i was looking at old photos and i wanted to show you how our story went, a little
bronwyn and i met at age 12 but i dont have any photos from then, really, but this is from grade 9 science class when we were being goofs and i was 13
this is from our first ever sleepover, we couldnāt stop laughing and we were sleeping on a mattress on the floor and we went to boston pizza and got plastic rings that we both still have (bronwyn kept hers on a necklace after that)
i went to bronwynās cottage for the first time in the summer after grade 9
we had our first kiss in grade 10 when i was 14 and were in a weird kind of dating limbo period
then i moved to the states and turned 15 and told bronwyn i was in love with her and we visited every chance we could and she sent me flowers and packages
then i went to junior prom with her and bronwyn cut her hair
then we had the most beautiful summer where i spent 5 weeks at her cottage and i cut my hair
then i went back to miami for 12th grade and turned 16 and bronwyn was 17 and we went to senior prom together
then i moved back to canada for university when i was turning 17 and we finally lived in the same place again and we loved each other so much and got breakfast together every day
then after a beautiful summer we started living together when i was 18 and bronwyn was 19 Ā and we went to bahrain together and bronwyn dyed her hair brown and now i get to see her every morning and every night and we adventure in our city and have a coffee shop and love each other more than i could have thought. there were periods of scary intense darkness but we love each other so much and iāve never been happier. iāve known bronwyn since i was 12 and now iām almost 19 and i love her more and more.
iām never on here anymore, but i wanted to share that almost a month ago bronwyn and i got engaged!! under a beautiful tree on a perfect day and for the rest of my life i get to pursue her and care for her and make her laugh. iāve said this so many times but now more than ever: if this is all i get, itās so much more than i could have hoped for.
While those in poverty are called lazy, the idle rich are dubbed bon vivants
If nearly a decade interviewing the wealth managers for the 1% taught me anything, it is that the ultra-rich and the ultra-poor have a lot more in common than stereotypes might lead you to believe.
In conversation, wealth managers kept coming back to the flamboyant vices of their clients. It was quite unexpected, in the course of discussing tax avoidance, to hear professional service providers say things like:
āIāve told my colleagues: āIf I ever become like some of our clients, shoot me.ā Because they are really immoral people ā too much time on their hands, and all the money means they have no limits. I was actually told by one client not to bring my wife on a trip to Monaco unless I wanted to see her get hit on by 10 guys. The local sport, he said, was picking up other menās wives.ā
The clients of this Geneva-based wealth manager also ābelieve that they are descended from the pharaohs, and that they were destined to inherit the earthā.
If a poor person voiced such beliefs, he or she might well be institutionalized; for those who work with the wealthy, however, such āeccentricitiesā are all in a dayās work. Indeed, an underappreciated irony of accelerating economic inequality has been the way it has exposed behaviors among the ultra-rich that mirror the supposed āpathologiesā of the ultra-poor.
In fact, one of the London-based wealth managers I interviewed said that a willingness to accept with equanimity behavior that would be considered outrageous in others was an informal job requirement. Clients, he said, specifically chose wealth managers not just on technical competence, but on their ability to remain unscandalized by the private lives of the ultra-rich: āThey [the clients] have to pick someone they want to know everything about them: about Motherās lesbian affairs, Brotherās drug addiction, the spurned lovers bursting into the room.ā Many of these clients are not employed and live off family largesse, but no one calls them lazy.
As Lane and Harburg put it in the libretto of the musical Finianās Rainbow:
When a rich man doesnāt want to work
Heās a bon vivant, yes, heās a bon vivant
But when a poor man doesnāt want to work
Heās a loafer, heās a lounger
Heās a lazy good for nothing, heās a jerk
When the wealthy are revealed to be drug addicts, philanderers, or work-shy, the response is ā at most ā a frisson of tabloid-level curiosity, followed by a collective shrug.
Behaviors indulged in the rich are not just condemned in the poor, but used as a justification to punish them, denying them access to resources that keep them alive, such as healthcare and food assistance. Discussion of poverty has become almost impossible without moral outrage directed at lazy āwelfare queensā, ācrackheadsā and other drug addicts, and the āpromiscuous poorā (a phrase that has cropped up again and again in discussions of public benefits over more than a century).
These disparate perceptions arenāt just evidence of hypocrisy; they are literally a matter of life and death. In the US, the widespread belief that the poor are simply lazy has led many states to impose work requirements on aid recipients āeven those who have been medically classified as disabled. Limiting aid programs in this way has been shown to shorten recipientsā lives: rather than the intended consequence of pushing recipients into paid employment, the restrictions have simply left them without access to medical care or a sufficient food supply. Thus, in one of the richest counties in America, a boy living in poverty died of a toothache; there were no protests, and nothing changed.
Meanwhile, the ābillionaireā in the White House starts his days at 11am ā the rest of the morning is coyly termed āexecutive timeā ā and is known for his frequent holidays. āNice work if you can get it,ā quipped an opinion piece in the Washington Post.
We donāt hear much about laziness, drug addiction or promiscuity among the wealthiest members of society because ā unlike Trump ā most billionaires are not public figures and go to great lengths to seek privacy. Thus the motto of one London-based wealth management firm: āI want to be invisible.ā This company, like many other service providers to the ultra-rich, specializes in preserving secrecy for clients. The wealthy people I studied not only had wealth managers but often dedicated staff members who killed negative stories about them in the media and kept their names off the Forbes ārich listā.
Many even present themselves as homeless ā for tax purposes ā despite owning multiple residences. For the ultra-rich, having no fixed residence provides major legal and financial advantages; this is exemplified by the case of the wealthy businessman who acquired eight different nationalities in order to avoid taxes on his fortune, and by the UK native I interviewed in his Dubai apartment building:
āI am not tax resident anywhere. The tax man says āshow me a utility billā, and the only utility bill I can present is for the house I own in Thailand, and itās in a language that the European authorities arenāt familiar with. With all the mobility going on in the world, international marriages, governments canāt keep up with people.ā
Meanwhile, the poor can end up being āresident nowhereā because no one will allow them to stay in one place for very long; as the sociologist Cristobal Young has shown, the majority of migrants are poor people. In addition, the poor are routinely evicted from housing on the slightest pretext, frequently driving them into homeless shelters ā which are in turn forced to move when local homeowners engage in nimby (not in my back yard) protests. Even the design of public spaces is increasingly organized to deny the poor a place to alight, however temporarily.
It is as if the right to move around, to take up space, and to direct your own life as you see fit have become luxury goods, available to those who can pay instead of being human rights. For the rich, deviance from social norms is nearly consequence-free, to the point where outright criminality is tolerated: witness the collective shrug that greeted revelations of massive intergenerational tax fraud in the Trump family.
For the poor, however, even the most minor deviance from othersā expectations ā like buying ice cream or soft drinks with food stamps ā results in stigmatization, limits on their autonomy, and deprivation of basic human needs. This makes life far more nasty, brutish and short for those on the lowest rungs of the socio-economic ladder, creating a chasm of more than 20 years in life expectancy between rich and poor. This appears to some as a fully justified consequence of āpersonal responsibilityā ā the poor deserve to die because of their moral failings.
So while the behavior of the ultra-rich gets an ever-widening scope of social leeway, the lives of the poor are foreshortened in every sense. Once upon a time, they were urged to eat cake; now the cake earns them a public scolding.
Hi! Iāve been homeless since I finished my graduate degree in May. While I am fortunate to have had safe places to stay and to have avoided the NYC shelter system, I was forced to throw out 90% of my possessions when I lost my apartment.Ā
Iāve been offered an apartment upstate and will be moving on September 1st. I live on $750/month in SSI benefits and there will be significant costs incurred in this move, including:
- Rental car to visit apartment and sign leaseĀ
- Moving van and fuel
- Replacing essential furnishingsĀ
- Purchasing a used car (this county has no public transit) +insurance, etc.
If you are able to contribute financially:
PayPal (preferred)
Cash App: $ECSchick
Venmo: @Erin-Schick
I have a Target wishlist for replacing household items here
So thereās been a lot of discussion floating around regarding billionaires and society, and Iāve noticed that most people have no idea what a billion dollars is for practical purposes - people tend to think of it as a vague, nebulous concept of āa lot of moneyā rather than something concrete you can wrap your head around. This is understandable, considering 1) a billion of anything is really hard to visualize and 2) the average person has no real reference point for an amount of money that large. So Iām going to try to break it down for everyone:
Okay, so imagine you have a billion dollars. What can you actually buy with that?
This is a mega mansion that will have an Imax cinema, a bowling alley, and a spa when itās fully complete. It costs around 4.6 million dollars.
Now letās buy one of these in every country in Europe - thatās 50 mansions you now own. So how are you going to travel between all your many homes?
This is a Bugatti Veyron Super Sport, the fastest street-legal car in the world. It has a maximum speed of a face-melting 254 mph and can go from 0 to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds. It costs around 2.5 million dollars.
Letās buy a dozen of them - you know, in case you total a few of them racing around the highway. But maybe a sports car is still to slow for you:
This is an Embraer Lineage 1000. Itās private jet that can seat up to 19 passengers, and weāre going to buy it for 53 million dollars.
How about a boat? The Tatoosh is a 303 ft private yacht, meaning itās longer than a football field. Weāll take it for 369 million dollars.
Do you like art? Just for fun letās buy Monetās most expensive painting ($90 million) Van Goghās most expensive painting ($151 million), and this monstrosity, which is made with 8,601 diamonds and costs 65 million dollars.
Now that weāve gone on our ludicrous and absurdly wasteful shopping spree, how much money do we have leftover? About 12 million dollars, which is almost an order of magnitude more than the average American with a bachelors degree or higher earns in a lifetime ($1.8 million). So if you for whatever reason decided to buy the 50 houses, 12 sports cars, plane, yacht, art pieces etc. and immediately set them all on fire, you would still have enough cash leftover so you never would have to work again if you so chose. This is what it means to be a billionaire.
But weāre not done yet.
The richest person in the world is Bill Gates, with a net worth of 86 billion dollars. If he liquidated his assets, what could he buy?
Well, for starters, the Burj Khalifa - the tallest man-made structure in the world at 2,722 feet tall, costing around 1.5 billion dollars.
The Large Hadron Collider, the worldās biggest and most advanced particle accelerator for 9 billion dollars.
The Hubble Space Telescope for 10 billion dollars (including 20 years of operating costs).
The Three Gorges Dam, the largest power station in the world, more than a mile wide.
And to top it all off, a fleet of five Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, the largest military vessels ever built for around 8.9 billion dollars each. If you look at the picture very closely you can see the people standing on it for reference.
If Bill Gates bought all of this, he would still have around 2.3 billion dollars leftover. Thatās enough to go on the billionaire shopping spree I described above twice over (so 100 mansions, 24 sports cars etc.) and still have hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank when itās all said and done.
But weāre not done yet.
Currently, itās estimated that there are 2,043 billionaires alive today, with a combined net worth of around 7.67 trillion dollars.
This is Russia, the largest country in the world, extending more than six and a half million square miles, with a population of more than 144 million people. The United Kingdom could fit inside Russia 70 times.
In 2016 Russiaās gross domestic product was about 1.28 trillion dollars. This means that if the two thousand and some odd richest people in the world - less than half of 0.1% of 0.1% of the Earthās population - liquidated and pooled their assets together, they could buy every single product and service made in Russia for almost 6 years.
So itās been just a little bit over a year since Iāve made this post, and holy shit I didnāt expect it to get so many notesā¦ anyway thought Iād make an update. First, a few responses to common criticisms I noticed:
āThat house costs more than you said it costsā
I provided sources for everything, I canāt click on the links for you broski.
āThe map of Russia is incorrectā
Strange, my badā¦ didnāt notice until after I posted that the map I used includes Belarus and a few other countries as part of Russia, no idea why they did that, I should have picked a better map.
āNet worth somehow doesnāt count as worth because not all of it is literal stacks of cashā
First of all I distinctly specified that my figures were based on if said billionaires liquidated their assets, but more importantly thatās like sitting on top of a pile of solid gold bars and claiming youāre totally broke because you canāt use them at the supermarket. Seriously, this is just asinine.
*Insert impassioned defense of capitalism here*
Now if you follow my blog itās pretty obvious that Iām a leftist, but something I did very deliberately for my billionaire essay was try to avoid ever mentioning left politics or making any moral judgements, i.e. more or less everything I wrote in that post was just objective, inarguable facts. I very intentionally ended the essay with āmake of that what you will,ā without ever actually commenting on whether the situation was good or bad. If you consider yourself a capitalist and want to remain consistent with reality, you really shouldnāt be offended by this post. If your first response upon looking at a neutral series of data points is to immediately rush to defend the system that produced it, it means you instinctually realize something is terribly wrong and youāre trying to justify it. Just saying, not a good position to be arguing from.
ANYWAY
As of the time of this update, Bill Gates is no longer the richest person in the world; the title now belongs to Amazonās Jeff Bezos with with a mind-blowing $147.7 billion. Now, what could he actually do with all of that? Letās make a list!
End Homelessness in America
There are an estimated 553,742 homeless people in America. Jeff Bezos could hand every single one of them $50,000 cash for $27,687,100,000, which should be more than enough to get a roof over your head for a decent amount of time.
Give 100,000 students a full ride to Harvard
Going to Harvard University will cost a student about 60,659 a year including tuition, room and board, and various other fees. Paying for a full 4 years for 100,000 students would cost $24,263,600,000.
Buy Iceland for a year
The gross domestic product of Iceland is currently about $23.9 billion dollars, which means for that amount Jeff Bezos could buy every single product and service produced in the country for an entire year.
Fund every US national park for 10 years
This yearās budget for the national park service will probably be about $2.7 billion, so 10 years of funding would be $27 billion.
Give every Amazon worker a $20,000 bonus
Jeff Bezos has 563,100 employees working for Amazon. He could give each and every one of them a $20,000 bonus for $ 11,262,000,000.
End world hunger
It would probably cost around $30 billion to ensure that no person in the entire world suffered starvation and malnourishment this year.
And how much does Jeff have left?
After doing all of that, Bezos would still have upwards of $3.5 billion left over, which is not only far, far more money than a single person could ever spend on themselves, it also would mean he still gets to remain substantially richer than most other billionaires.
Donald W. Cook is a Los Angeles attorney with decades of experience bringing lawsuits over police dog bites ā and mostly losing. He blames what he calls āThe Rin Tin Tin Effectā ā juries think of police dogs as noble, and have trouble visualizing how violent they can be during an arrest.
ā[Police] use terms like āapprehendā and ārestrain,ā to try to portray it as a very antiseptic event,ā Cook says. āBut you look at the video and the dog is chewing away on his leg and mutilating him.ā
Cook says the proliferation of smart phones and body cameras is capturing a reality that used to be lost on juries. āIf itās a good video,ā he says, āit makes a case much easier to prevail on.ā
The new generation of videos is capturing scenes of K9 arrests that are bloodier and more violent than imagined by the public. An NPR examination of police videos shows some officers using biting dogs against people who show minimal threat to officers, and a degree of violence that would be unacceptable if inflicted directly by the officers.
ā¦
In fact, in many videos, the release of a dog appears to escalate the violence of an arrest.
āYou just look at the dog as the source of pain and you do everything you can to address that pain,ā says Seth Stoughton. Heās a former police officer, now an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina who studies police use of force. āThose shouted commands ā youāll deal with that later, when the pain stops.ā
And yet suspects who kick and try to shake the dog off are often accused of resisting arrest.
NPR (November 20, 2017)
i donāt care what this dog in particular is being trained to do. furthering the idea that police dogs are somehow cute or good directly contributes to injustice and the perceived acceptability of police violence
My aunt rescues and rehabilitates german shepherds, and the vast majority are failed police dogs. The rehab process for these dogs is intense. They are trained to be hyper vigilant and to resort to violence. They are often is worse condition than formerly abused animals.Ā
I spent a summer training one of these balls of anxiety. She was too fast and strong for my aunt to train her, so I did it. The biggest hurdle was getting her out of the mindset that biting someone gets her a treat. I had to let her bite my arm, forcible break the hold, and kennel her all without giving her a response because these dogs are trained to equate someone screaming at them as Go Time.Ā
By letting her attack me and showing her that I was stronger than her and then not allowing her to play with the other dogs was what finally got her to stop attacking whenever she heard a loud noise or was surprised or just felt like it.Ā
She still had to be homed in a gun-free, pet-free, child-free home because of the sheer anxiety she was bred for. These dogs are not cute, they are horribly mistreated.
ā« Pink like the inside of your, baby / Pink like the walls and the doors, maybe / Pink like your fingers in my, maybe / Pink is the truth you canāt hide / Pink like your tongue going round, baby / Pink like the sun going down, maybe / Pink like the holes in your heart, baby / Pink is my favourite part ā«
Janelle MonƔe & Tessa Thompson in the official video for PYNK
Hi! Iām Erin, a queer/trans disabled writer. In May Iām graduating from a masters program and losing my apartment because itās student housing and I have no income.Ā
Iām selling the remaining printed chapbooks at discount - I can use the money, but more than that I have to get rid of everything I canāt fit in a suitcase. Descriptions below and PayPal button at the top of my blog.
Ok I cannot stress enough that everyone I know needs to own Erinās books. They are one of my favorite people on our ridiculous earth planet, and an AMAZING poet. DO THE THING, BUY THE BOOKS.
girl why do ppl who dont have an ounce of empathy love going into health care fields so much like ok susan you hate kids why are you majoring in pediatrics
https://thoughtbroadcast.com/2011/09/04/how-to-retire-at-age-27/
I found this post while researching SSI claimants. This man should absolutely not be practicing psychiatry.Ā
girl why do ppl who dont have an ounce of empathy love going into health care fields so much like ok susan you hate kids why are you majoring in pediatrics
Sarah Gehring @rehearsedrehanging - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
