Thoughts & Stuff

Augmented Reality

Opening credits of Agatha Christie’s Poirot (1989 - 2013)

Title designer Pat Gavin created the opening sequence in 1988. It was his job to set the tone for the tv show. The neat, streamlined sequence features Art Deco iconography in flight; Cassandre-style trains, boats, and biplanes with Poirot’s name formed by the wheels. In a reference to Poirot’s most famous case, Murder on the Orient Express, the detective is glimpsed aboard the passing train.

“doing adult things” = almost always a euphemism for sexy stuff (when other people say it)

Basically the word “adult” or “grown up” was used to condescend to us and exclude us. And what made a person an adult was treated as inherent.

Then we got older and tripped into what actually doing adulthood meant and came to find that

1. The people who were supposed to explain to us how this worked had completely failed to do so

2. They had done so in such a way that was meant to protect their authority while also (possibly inadvertently) barring us from the experiences and skills that would’ve helped us transition into adulthood better.

3. There is no inherent authority that comes with adulthood. The adults around us were talking out of their ass. Adult is a verb, not a noun. It’s not an inherent source of authority, it’s a thing you work at daily and you have to maintain it.

And what’s more the same people who lorded their age over us, telling us repeatedly we’d suddenly come to agree with them with age, completely failed to cede any of that authority or power even as some millennials are now staring down 40. So clearly “adulthood” is a game you’re trying to play to control us, even now. Fuck that. We’re not playing.

Honestly that some in Gen Z find it irritating is fine by me. If they think it sounds juvenile, that’s because it is. It is specifically useful in that it breaks the illusion of adults being better than kids. When kids are like, “you sound absurd. You’re in your thirties” I’m like, yeah kid. That’s the thing. Being an “adult” never stops being absurd. If it makes me sound like the mundanities of my life are all a performance that has nothing to do with my actual age or ability, good. That’s why I say it. I’m glad you’re growing up knowing that age isn’t an inherent door to authority. I’m glad you’re growing up thinking “fuck, these adults ten years older than me don’t act grown up at all.” That’s what we want. That’s we call it “adulting”, instead of claiming adulthood as part of us.

Maybe if your gen is lucky you will feel more appropriate claiming your adulthood without caveats. Maybe your definitions of adulthood are more versatile, so you won’t feel barred from the signifiers you’d need to feel like an adult. Maybe you’ll have a better launching pad. Maybe you’ll always hate we call it “adulting”. That’s okay. I hope you get better than we did. But I’m still gonna call it adulting.

By Russ Buettner, Gabriel J.X. Dance, Keith Collins, Mike McIntire and Susanne Craig

Sept. 27, 2020

Tax records provide a detailed history of President Trump’s business career, revealing huge losses, looming financial threats and a large, contested refund from the I.R.S. President Trump’s tax returns portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars in some years yet racks up chronic losses. Playing a tycoon executive on “The Apprentice” earned Mr. Trump nearly $200 million. Endorsement and licensing deals that followed the show’s debut brought the Trump name to products and hotels around the world and made him hundreds of millions of dollars more. Investments in companies run by others have been immensely profitable for the president — although he plays no official role in the operations of those businesses. Some of Mr. Trump’s own companies generate tens of millions of dollars in profit every year.

Ultimately, however, his own businesses are much bigger losers than winners. The tax returns for Mr. Trump and hundreds of his businesses reveal the hollowness, but also the wizardry, of the self-made-billionaire image honed through “The Apprentice.” They demonstrate that he was far more successful playing a business mogul than being one in real life.

MAKING A FORTUNE

Mr. Trump was adrift when he got a big break on “The Apprentice.” He used his reality-TV persona to ink a string of worldwide licensing and endorsement deals. The tax returns that Mr. Trump has fought to keep secret cast a harsh light on his finances, revealing a businessman who regularly reports losing so much money that he has gone for years paying little or no income taxes and today finds himself in a tightening financial vise.

He has churned through hundreds of millions of dollars in a series of career reinventions, aided by tax-avoidance maneuvers, all laid bare for the first time in tax-return data obtained by The New York Times that extends over more than two decades. The returns comprise information that Mr. Trump has disclosed to the I.R.S., not the findings of an independent financial examination. Even so, the records paint the most complete portrait yet of how Mr. Trump leveraged failure and fame on his improbable path to the White House.

At the start of the new millennium, Mr. Trump was in financial trouble. The chance to play a reality-TV business mogul on “The Apprentice” changed his fortunes dramatically. An unusual arrangement with the show’s producers entitled him to half its profits, and as its ratings soared the money rolled in. in all, “The Apprentice” earned Mr. Trump nearly $200 million. The show’s success spawned endorsement and licensing deals around the world, generating more than $230 million from 2000 through 2018. For Mr. Trump, no endorsement was too small, and he rented out his name to everything from Oreo cookies and Domino’s Pizza to mattresses and neckties.

Licensing deals were made with developers of hotels and towers from Azerbaijan and Turkey to Hawaii and Manhattan. Mr. Trump’s taxes also reveal that his licensing deal in Istanbul has been significantly more lucrative than previously known, with declared earnings of at least $13 million. Along with “The Apprentice,” the endorsements and licensing deals added up to more than $427 million in reported profit for Mr. Trump in this time period.

THE I.R.S. COMES KNOCKING

Fame brought a windfall to Mr. Trump, but it also left him with something unfamiliar: a large tax bill. With so much money pouring in from his newfound celebrity and the branding associated with it, Mr. Trump suddenly found himself having to pay income taxes for the first time in years.

Mr. Trump had long managed to sidestep taxes in part because of nearly $1 billion in business losses he incurred in the 1990s and could carry forward to cancel out income in future years. But that option was largely used up by the time his “Apprentice” and licensing profits kicked in, and over a three-year period starting in 2005, he paid over $70 million to the Internal Revenue Service.

They were some of the biggest tax bills of his life and were far more than anything he would owe over the next decade, which would see him pay no taxes at all for five years and only $750 during his first year as president. After a brief period of indebtedness to the I.R.S., he was able to return to tax avoidance by claiming losses on the businesses he owned and operated. Beyond licensing and endorsements, real estate — in which Mr. Trump had first made a name for himself — remained essential to his bottom line. Mr. Trump’s retail and commercial spaces at Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan reported a total of $336.3 million in profit from 2000 to 2018. And Trump World Tower on the East Side of Manhattan earned Mr. Trump more than $167 million in profit over the same period. Among his most profitable investments is a 30 percent stake in two office buildings, owned and operated by Vornado Realty Trust. Mr. Trump’s share of the profits totaled $176.5 million through the end of 2018. But many of his highest-profile properties are money losers, none more so than the sprawling collection of golf courses he bought with profits from “The Apprentice” and licensing deals. The golf properties have cost Mr. Trump dearly, with declared losses of more than $315.6 million since 2000. Trump National Doral, a major Florida golf resort, has reported losses of more than $162.3 million.

TURNING LOSSES INTO GOLD

As his businesses bled money yet again, Mr. Trump used a bold financial move to turn the tables on the I.R.S. and claim a $72.9 million refund. With the addition of money-losing golf resorts in the United States and Europe, as well as a hotel in the Old Post Office in Washington, Mr. Trump has once again been able to claim annual losses that wash away much of his taxable income. The losses are very real — and some are very large.

Mr. Trump declared more than $1 billion in losses for 2008 and 2009 that appeared to be largely related to the latest, and final, failure of his Atlantic City casino investments. In a particularly audacious accounting move, he used the losses to claim a $72.9 million refund of federal taxes from the previous four years — virtually everything he had paid to the U.S. Treasury during the peak of his “Apprentice” success.

It had echoes of that earlier titanic loss on his returns from the 1990s that resulted in years of tax avoidance. This time, however, the I.R.S. decided to take a hard look at Mr. Trump’s gambit and started an audit, one that has yet to be completed almost 10 years later.

By the time Mr. Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, his revenue streams from “The Apprentice” and licensing were drying up, and he was in need of financial reinvigoration. If he hoped his unlikely presidential bid might, at least, revitalize his brand, his derogatory remarks about immigrants quickly cost him. NBC cut ties with the Miss Universe pageant, which it co-owned with Mr. Trump. NBC also dropped “The Apprentice.” His proceeds from fame continued to tumble, falling below $10 million in 2017 and to $2.9 million in 2018.

At the same time, Mr. Trump’s presidency has, in some respects, helped his business. At the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., a flood of new members starting in 2015 allowed him to pocket millions more dollars a year from the business. Mr. Trump’s profits reported from the Florida club has risen dramatically compared with the previous decade. In the end, however, the financial picture for Mr. Trump is fraught.

DANGER SIGNS AHEAD

The vise is tightening: Mr. Trump has sold off many of his stocks, the I.R.S. has him under audit and huge bank loans will soon come due. The president’s tax returns suggest that as he approaches one of the most consequential elections in American history — down in most polls, under I.R.S. audit and heavily in debt — his businesses may not be well equipped to navigate what lies ahead.

As many of his companies continue to lose money, Mr. Trump has more than $300 million in loans, for which he is personally responsible, coming due within the next four years. He liquidated hundreds of millions of dollars in stocks in recent years and may have less than $1 million left in his portfolio, according to his public financial disclosures. The pandemic has crippled the hospitality and recreation industry that so much of his portfolio of properties is dependent on.

And hanging over his head is the audit. Should the I.R.S. reverse the huge refund he received 10 years ago, Mr. Trump could be on the hook for more than $100 million.

I don’t know if this will work for you, but I’ve had some luck splitting the difference, as it were. I’ll explain: what I do is, I reread the early parts and make lots of revision notes, decide what I don’t like and what I plan to change...and then I don’t make those changes, I just proceed with writing the rest of the story as if I’ve made them. Basically I’m imagining better versions of the early parts that don’t yet exist, so it’s a little bit of a mental trick I play on myself, except not really, because I will eventually make those changes - they exist, I just haven’t executed them yet. 🙂

YOU THINK JUST THE NOISE IS FUNNY AND FITS WITH THE GIF REALLY WELL

BUT THEN

THEN

THE LYRICS START

holy shit

When I was younger, folks seemed pretty comfortable with telling me I was "an old soul", or, "acted like an adult". I was a sharp kid with a large vocabulary who spent a lot of time reading quietly, so I guess the perception was that I was therefore more "grown up" than other kids my age.

Which, you know, made an otherwise lonely and isolated child feel pretty important and special, so it was easy for me to feel flattered when it signed me up for extra responsibilities.

I was six when I was first left alone to take care of the baby. I was seven when I got my first summer job. I was eight when I was put in charge of my own chicken coop; feeding, cleaning, buying feed and all.

I was special, I was different, I was "treated like a grown up". I was proud of that.

Then I got older, and more tired, and the limitations stayed the same while the responsibilities and expectations kept piling up.

No, I couldn't stay home while my family went on an overnight trip, I was too young for that.

But the adults were both out somewhere overnight? Sure, I could take care of two younger kids, cook dinner, put them to bed by 8 and have them off to school in the morning.

I remember, once things began to decline, repeating rather often: 

"Either give me adult responsibilities and adult privileges, or child responsibilities and child privileges. Don't give me child privileges and adult responsibilities- either I'm an adult or a kid. Make up your mind."

It turns out that "adult responsibilities" isn't quite the same thing as "adult respect".

But even if it was, though- even if I was treated with all the benefits and freedoms of adulthood alongside all the work, I was still a kid. 

Kids need free time. Kids need sleep. Kids need to *not* have to lay awake at night wondering what they're going to make for school lunches, or how they're going to cook dinner for six when the stovetop burners went out.

And it's not necessarily because they can't handle the pressure, but because there should be Actual Adults in their life doing those things. If not for the labour aspect, but for the respect and security of it.

My parent says I can't wear shoes in the house? Why do they care? I'm the one who mops the floors.

I'm not allowed to stay home alone? What, you trust me with your baby but you don't trust me with your house?

The family pet died and I'm tasked with burying it? Cool, grief is isolated and nobody cares, and when I'm scared or in pain, the authority figures in my life will be distant and emotionally unavailable. I have no reason to believe anyone will support me through emotional hardship in the future.

When it comes to responsibility, its not so much a question of, "can the child handle the work?", but, "what precedent is this setting for their perception of the future?", and, "What is this teaching them about actual adults?"

A child who sits quietly and draws is no more an adult than a child who eats glue and sticks pens up their nose, but both deserve to be respected as people, and both deserve to feel as though the adults in their lives are stable, reliable, secure, and have their best interests in mind.