Cultural Cicada

"Most New Yorkers" "Their estate lawyers" [Screenshot of Yahoo Finance headline] Mamdani's pied-à-terre tax was designed to hit the wealthy, but it's sending most New Yorkers to their estate lawyers [Photo of Mayor Mamdani in a suit, walking down the street.]

The tax ONLY applies to property that isn't the primary residence of a New Yorker. It doesn't even have to be YOUR primary residence.

If you own more than one piece of property, you are not "most new yorkers".

If you are getting advice from an estate lawyer about forming an LLC to protect your real estate investments, you are not "most new yorkers".

How many people exactly? Here's some numbers:

NYC.gov: an estimated 11,200 homes would be impacted [1]

NYC population: 8.58 million

So, let's assume generously that all these additional properties are owned by different people and all these people are also NYC residents.

That means...0.0013% of New Yorkers are impacted by this at most.

0.0013% of people.

"Most new yorkers" my ass. This isn't even "the 1%". Shut the fuck up, Yahoo finance.

Who is excluded?

The primary residence of at least one owner.

The primary residence of a parent or child of at least one owner.

Properties and dwelling units that are rented to a NYC primary resident.

Properties with a five-year average market value of less than $5 million

Condominium or cooperative with assessed value of less than $300,000 per person, that also have a total value of less than $5mil [2]

So it even excludes landlords where the properties are used as people's primary residence!!!!

If you own an apartment complex, excluded.

If you own a second condo but rent it to someone full time instead of as an AirBnB, excluded.

This is ONLY for things like vacation homes and short term rentals that are ALSO worth over a certain amount!!

AND, like income tax, it's only taxed on the value that goes over the amount. So an eligible condo ($5mil total value) where your share is $350K only gets taxed on the $50k.

Cry me a fucking river if someone who owns a second property worth over $5 million has to see a lawyer about their taxes for it.

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[1] "We find that, before adjusting for these factors, our choice of tax rates and brackets could raise almost exactly $500 million from a little over 11,200 properties." https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/the-pied-a-terre-tax-and-its-potential-revenues

That exact scenario is how we got copyright law in this country.

Lemme tell y'all about Samuel Langhorne Clemens, a.k.a.

MARK TWAIN.

You probably learned about him in school, he's the Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer guy, but he did loads of stuff.

Twain was in his day the single most famous writer in America, and maybe still is. Millions of people read his books. He would give speaking tours that sold out around the country. Guy was famous on a level almost nobody in America had quite been yet at the time.

He was also broke by his 50s.

Literally had to sell off his house and flee to Europe with his family for a while because of his debts. Those sellout speaking tours started in part because it was the only way he had to make money.

Now some of that had to do with some unfortunate investments in a printing press company, but another huge element was that for all those books that people were reading, he wasn't getting paid for most of them.

His books would get published, and then immediately reprinted by other companies for cheaper and outsell him, often by going overseas. He estimated that just one unauthorized Canadian printing of Tom Sawyer had cost him the equivalent of almost $400K in today's money.

So he went to work lobbying government not just here but in Canada and the UK and elsewhere, for not just better copyright protections for authors, but international agreements that would compel countries to respect each others' registered copyrights, so that arrangements like that couldn't undercut an author's work.

Authors got stronger legal protections because Mark Twain was sick of going broke while watching shady publishers get rich off his words.

This is the thing that people don't understand about this issue. Copyright itself isn't the issue: authors should have the right to earn a living from their work, it's what the whole concept was founded on.

What you're mad at is corporate capitalism; the way a fictitious entity, and not a person, can claim rights on something they never created, and print money forever using some artist's work who might not even be alive to see a penny of it.

yes/no

you are one stressful life event, one particularly bad day, one random unfortunate happening away from falling into the "seriously mentally ill" category. you could become schizophrenic tomorrow if the universe decided it was time. there is nothing between you and a SMI person besides your luck in life.

men just love to run their fucking mouth about what women do or do not want without even once considering consulting any actual women on the matter

I was goalie so I didn't have to, because of the armour, but it's also why I refused to play any other position, or any other sport.

They did it to netballers and basketballers too, which was even worse bc their whole sport involves jumping.

are we drawing the connection between worker safety and consumer safety & public health yet?

More on the health point:

"US Department of Labor proposes more than $1M fine following worker fatality at New Jersey vegetable processing facility"

Name the chains! At this point in the article it seems like contracting with prisons is the default for meat plants ☹

was it Hillary Clinton who lived in a mansion staffed by prison slaves? somebody please tell me which politician was called out

hey prev why make this about my relationship with meat when i say something that confronts your relationship with slavery? :/

I wish avoiding slavery was as simple as going vegan, but it's not. There's no unethical consumption under capitalism. We all know this. but. that doesnt mean you should choose the most unethical options available to you.

This is Every Mention from the article. I didnt mean to emphasize meat products— that's just how it is! Sorry! Don't get mad at me becuase your fav food is all over the slavery list.

you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.

first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.

now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:

in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.

and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.

and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.

it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:

• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.

• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.

• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.

• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.

• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.

• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.

and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.

what i'm asking:

if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.

if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.

india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.

we can still save her. but only loudly.

berdly is like, incredibly abrasive right? frankly comedic levels of abrasive, especially to certain kinds of players. that’s his role in the story, to be a little shithead who’s so pathetic it’s funny. a walking punchline. but really, like queen said, there’s nothing wrong with him, at least nothing that it isn’t normal for a teenager to have “wrong” about them. he’s just annoying.

but being annoying is one of the most dangerous things a fictional character can be.

so many times i’ve watched someone play chapter 2 and very quickly wonder out loud, semi-jokingly, if they can kill berdly, usually not long after he’s introduced in the dark world, often going as far to say they would be willing to abandon the pacifist route to do so.

And if you've got both, and you're gonna be in a small, metal tube thousands of feet in the air, which is known for serving nuts, it's entirely reasonable to ask them not to serve nuts this time.

Airline's are pretty also pretty famous for not letting you bring things into the plane. Like a small drink.

I feel like the airline could have done a lot more than just ask people to be personally responsible, which is ALWAYS going to be the hardest factor to control.

Fruit ferments spontaneously whereas grain usually requires some amount of processing to become fermentable so humans have been drinking hard cider since long before beer was invented. After the agricultural revolution, grain was far more plentiful and easier to store than fruit, so people started fermenting that instead out of convenience, and then somebody figured out that adding hops (which makes beer taste even worse) increased the shelf-life of beer.

So actually, beer was invented because someone decided that it was more important for alcohol to be able to produced in bulk and stored for long periods than for it to taste good.

And like

This is the world capitalists want to return to.