Oh- Mhm?

The Ketamine King Musk has shutdown the IRS's Free Tax Filing system.

Of all the things a government could off, a way to Freely calculate and file your taxes seems like a good one. But the richest man in the world thinks we shouldn't have that.

File your taxes by hand. Fill out the forms with a pen. Overpay by about $50. (You will eventually get that back. It is likely to take several months.)

It will take longer to get any refund you're due. But I promise you the entire federal bureaucracy has been cutting as many corners as they can for as many years as they can, and the current set is going to cut even more corners, and...

they don't have the staff on hand to process a huge number of paper claims anymore. They expect everything that came in digitally last year, to continue to be filed digitally. And they expect more digital filings every year. They've planned for that. They've staffed for that.

One of the only acts of protest we have available is "comply, but slowly."

File on paper if you can.

If you have the software to file digitally because doing the math & forms is such a nightmare for you?

If you're up for it: Print the final form, and then fill out a new blank form by hand. With your lousy handwriting. Send it in the post, by mail.

While Direct File is an IRS-hosted program, there is also Free File, which is government-subsidized and hosted by third parties:

You need to use THESE SPECIFIC LINKS in order to access the Free File programs, fyi - they are hosted by tax preparers who also often order paid services which may have deceptive names like "TurboTax Free" that make them sound like they don't cost anything, so be sure to only use the IRS links. Don't just Google them, you will not find what you're looking for.

Here's an archive link in case they take down the Free File page. (You may have to manually cut out the web.archive.org part of the URL to use the links.)

It is not possible for Elon Musk to access these programs directly because they are not hosted on government servers. You are eligible for Free File for your federal taxes if you make less than $84k, as well as for your state taxes if you make less than $48k, as well as some other situations such as if you are active-duty military or if you live in certain states (for your state return).

If you want to throw sand into the works and file these as paper forms instead of e-filing, you absolutely can do that by printing them out after completing the program, but PLEASE do not pay a tax preparer if you are eligible for Free File!!! It's a ripoff!!!!!!!!

Confuse the masses as to what the actual law is

Get people to obey in advance

Demoralise the opposition

So yeah, if you weren't following it last time, there will be a lot of Executive Orders that get walked back, struck down, or, once subjected to even mildly rigorous legal interpretation, turn out to have little or no effect.

I don't mean sexualizing us or watching trans porn.

I don't mean treating trans mascs like "uwu soft baby boy" and trans femmes as "yass queen girl boss".

I don't mean expecting praise for using the right pronouns and using incorrect ones when "they're a bad trans person".

I mean ACTUAL SUPPORT.

This is incredibly alarming. Even agreeing to be labeled as your birth sex is not sufficient. They want to deny trans people the ability to leave the country. Any possible reason for this is horrifying.

no getting up. no looking at the flag.

not to talk tough but i have sat through every pledge of allegiance in my life, and that includes the bush administration's hyper-patriotic war on terror.

you can NOT be compelled to say the pledge, and that also means you can't be given the 'choice' of doing it or taking a punishment. being sent into the hall is a grey area.

if you are punishing for refusing, parents or a more sympathetic teacher (like say a history or english teacher) can step in to intercede with the principal. do not be afraid to escalate.

Activism is not cold-calling, and this is critically important to understand.

I'm seeing a lot of posts on here about 'building bridges' and 'finding community,' and then (extremely valid) response posts saying "BUT HOW??" And I'm going to explain something that can be very counter-intuitive: there is strategy involved in community.

As a longtime volunteer labour organizer, I’ve taken and taught many trainings on the strategy of talking. Something that surprises a lot of people is the very first thing you do in a union campaign. You sit down with your organizing committee, take out pen and paper, and literally map it out. You draw a physical map of the workplace: where are the entrances, exits, break rooms, supervisor offices. Essentially, ‘where is it safe to have a union conversation.’ Then you draw another physical chart of your coworkers. You sort out who is union-friendly, openly hostile to unions, or somewhere in the middle, and then you plan out very deliberately and carefully who talks to whom and in what order.

Consider: If Vocally Leftist Jane walks up to Conservative David and says "hey what do you think about unions," David is going to shut down immediately. He's not inclined to listen to Jane. But if Jane talks to Moderate Jason and brings him into the fold, then Jason is a far more effective strategic choice to talk to David, and David may actually hear him out without an instant reaction.

IMPORTANT CAVEAT: If Conservative David turns out to be Alt-Right David, and could be dangerous to follow organizers, we write him off. We are not trying to reach Alt-Right David. We are trying to reach Conservative David, who may actually be persuaded to find solidarity with other employees as fellow workers. Jason is a safe scout to find out which one he is. It does no one any good if Leftist Jane (or even Moderate Jane who is a visible minority) talks to Alt-Right David and puts herself on his radar. Not only has she done nothing to convince Alt-Right David to join a union - she's probably actively turned him against the idea - but now she's also in danger and the entire campaign is at risk. NOBODY WANTS THIS. Jane was NOT a hero for doing this. The organizing committee was foolish and enacted a terrible strategy to everyone's detriment.

Where you can make a difference is with people who will listen to you. You having a conversation with your well-meaning but clueless Centrist Democrat Auntie, and maybe gently helping her understand some things the media has been glossing over, is way more strategically useful than you marching up to MAGA Neighbour You've Met Once and trying to "build community" or "understand" them. They don't care. They're impervious, dangerous, and cruel. But maybe your beloved auntie will think about what you said, and then talk to her friend Anna who IDs as "fiscally conservative" but didn't vote because she can't bring herself to get on board with Trump. Then perhaps Anna talks to her brother Nic who has MAGA leanings but isn't all the way there yet. Proto-MAGA Nic would not have listened to you, nor would he have listened to Centrist Democrat Auntie, but he might absorb some of what his sister is saying.

This is not a cop-out or an echo chamber. This is you spending your time and energy strategically and safely. You are not a useful activist to anyone if you’re dead. Anyone who is telling you to hurl yourself directly at MAGA assholes like cannon fodder has no understanding of the strategy behind community building, and you should feel comfortable writing them off.

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

1. DO NOT censor your posts

dont censor sex, abuse, suicide, dont censor it. we dont have censors like tiktok does, you wont be banned for talking about these things and tagging them properly helps people avoid them (also, we dont have shadowbanning here)

2. we dont really have an algorithm

you follow who you follow, and you see posts from who you follow or what you search. the 'for you page' is basically useless here. this also brings me to my next two points

3. dont crosstag

we get it, on tiktok you have to crosstag for reach, but thats not really a thing here. just tag your posts properly (also posters often leave more info about the post in the tags!! and when you reblog stuff you can leave your own notes in the tags, kind of like the old "repost comments" on tiktok)

4. dont expect to go viral/be famous

"viral" isnt really a thing on here (at least not for the average blogger). your posts will probably get 2-10 likes and you wont get nearly as many followers than on tiktok. thats just how tumblr is

5. blocking is your best friend

tiktok is VERY discussion based, and while tumblr is much more discussion based than other social medias, its still not a good place for ragebait/discourse. dont interact, itll make your experience worse in the end, just block and move on

6. you cant go into someone elses house and start rearranging their furniture

and with your help it can rack up 700k notes on tumblr in 2024