Seriously. What on earth could a 3 yr old do to “warrant” a gun to the chest???
Apparently they were in the process of arresting her mother (whom they beat while handcuffed, naturally), also pointed the gun at the head of the child’s grandmother, and pointed the gun at her when she did what any toddler would do and started wailing. The incident gave her one of the worst cases of child PTSD the expert they assigned has ever seen and she’ll need therapy well into her adult years.
Anyone with even a passing knowledge of gun safety knows that you do not point a gun at anyone you are not willing to kill. So best case scenario these officers were grossly incompetent and worst case they were willing to kill a child for crying. This settlement is the least they deserve.
Someone on here–no one who follows me, no one I follow, just one of those blogs I look at out of curiosity from time to time–posted a claim that Canadians pay 42% of their income in income tax–more than they spend on shelter, food, and clothing combined.
As a Canadian I was skeptical of this claim, because back when I was the breadwinner, this was not my experience. Shelter consumed between 50% and 80% of my income, for one thing, while I paid little to nothing in taxes. So I wanted to find out where those numbers came from.
The source was a National Post article, which cited a study by the Fraser Institute. I could have stopped there, because the Fraser Institute is a libertarian think-tank that is always going to find that private schools are good, government spending is bad, and corporations deserve more human rights than I do. But because “consider the source” might be construed as an ad hominem argument (and I just want to point out at this juncture that my spellchecker doesn’t recognize “hominem” and wants to know if I want it corrected to “Eminem” and no, no I don’t), I looked further. The number was arrived at by looking not just at income and sales tax, but at taxes on alcohol, tobacco, property, vehicles, and fuel. So, these taxes are paid only by Canadians who drink, smoke, and can afford property and vehicles. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that; it’s just out of reach for a lot of people.)
Morbidly fascinated, I went to the Fraser Institute’s website. One of the things they offer is a “tax freedom day calculator,” where based on your income they tell you the date when you stop “working for the government,” i.e., paying for the upkeep of the civilization that you benefit from participating in. Curious, I entered my income this year. And the message I got from the calculator was, “Due to sample size limitations, please enter an income above $20 000 or below $300 000. Do not use a comma.”
So yeah. Too poor for the tax freedom day calculator. And I thought this was quite a problem in principle, because $20 676 is the poverty line for a single person in Ontario, and if your think tank is going to be talking about economic policies, it’s bad practice to just leave out the poor because of “sample size limitations.”
And then I got to thinking, all right, how many Canadians does the $20 000 limit leave out? If it’s something like, say, 20%, that’s a major problem, right? They’re trying to make all these policy recommendations without factoring in fully one fifth of Canadians. So I went to Statistics Canada, and found that in 2015, the latest year for which they gave data, 18 621 370 Canadians had an income of $20 000 or over. In 2015, we had a population of 35 850 000. That leaves 17 228 630, or 48%. In 2015, nearly half of all Canadians made less than $20 000 a year. And are therefore beneath the notice of the Fraser Institute, and all their bloviating about taxes.
I know there are confounding factors. For example, the poverty line in some provinces is much lower than others. Will and I are living proof that an income that means abject poverty in the city can be comfortable in an area where living costs are lower. But I might add, we gave up an awful lot to move to where we could survive, and I will have to leave if I ever expect to find a paying job. And it’s not just about making ends meet; it’s about being recognized as citizens and human beings. The Fraser Institute is the go-to think tank for some major media outlets. They’re shaping public opinion while pretending that half of us don’t count.
Yes, I saw this thread, too, and it was kind of heartbreaking tbh. I have to say that I feel pretty much the same way as Seanan does. Most of the money I make off of Unrooted will be used to pay off student loan debt and pay bills, and if I was to be the victim of pirates and have any of that profit taken away, it would have a serious negative effect on me and my publisher (who is a boutique publisher and needs the revenue to cover overhead).
People on tumblr tend to be pretty blase about pirated ebooks, but it can cause a lot of harm. Like Seanan, I have great sympathy for those who can’t afford or don’t have access to books, but there’s this assumption that the writers themselves aren’t in that position. Writing is generally not a lucrative career, and so any bit stolen from the little we get makes a huge difference.
But a new study projects that 40 million Americans who voted last year will likely not show up at the polls for the 2018 midterms.
And that two-thirds of those “drop-off” voters will be millennials, unmarried women and people of color.
The report, just out from the Voter Participation Center and Lake Research Partners, “Comparing the Voting Electorate in 2012-2016 and Predicting 2018 Drop-off,” notes that many of those expected not to cast a ballot next year live in key battleground states like Arizona, Nevada, Florida and Ohio. Read more (7/21/17)
Young people in America, REGISTER TO VOTE AND GET TO THE POLLS NEXT YEAR
THIS MATTERS
YOUR VOTE MATTERS SO MUCH OKAY
Just look at the difference young people getting out and voting made in the UK general election this year…young voters CAN make a POSITIVE DIFFERENCE by getting out and voting
And I know this isn’t a presidential election but it is in some ways EVEN MORE IMPORTANT
Because the president can’t do anything without congress and the senate on his side…but likewise, if the Republicans get a majority it means it will be easier for that disgusting sack of stinking dog-vomit Donald Trump and his party of traitors and criminals to push through the DISGUSTING things they want to try and inflict on the country and its people
Get out and vote democrat next year and keep the Republicans from getting a blank check to try and push through their bigoted, evil bullshit
I’m pretty sure the biggest barrier to young people voting isn’t not caring, it’s not knowing.
Am I registered? Shit, who knows? I’ve moved five times in the last four years. I think I registered, but that was a year ago, did I change districts since then? Where even are the polling places in this town? What are their hours? I know I submitted a registration, but did they get it? I didn’t get a confirmation. Did they lose my form? Am I even eligible? Who knows? Oh well, I’m sure I can always register in the days leading up to the – whoops, there’s a deadline and it’s already gone by.
This is one of those civic skills that you would really think would be taught in high school, and – surprise! – it isn’t.
Of course, all of this – in the way of Tumblr, and the internet more generally – will be lost to the vagaries of cyberspace by the time November rolls around. So hey: tag it with “voting reference” and you’ll always be able to find it again.
Boosting because us Millenials are nothing but fueled by spite, and blowing this projection out of the water would be delicious
Vote! find out if you’re registered, register, and THEN GO VOTE.
I’ll be voting, and I’m a poll worker so I hope to see you there if you’re in my district. I’ll be wearing a nubby brick-red hand-knit sweater and I have an undercut because that’s how Gen X roll, but I wanna see my Millenial friends out there voting, too.
Today in “the sentiment is a good one but under the circumstances the punctuation could potentially cause confusion”: just to clarify, the story in question does not, repeat, does not involve a romantic relationship between Sherlock Holmes and HP Lovecraft.
well not with THAT attitude it doesn’t
I mean, if you WANT it to have meant that….there’s always…fanfiction.
lower-income people tend to be “hoarders” and richer people are able to do more “minimalist” living spaces. if u don’t have much, you will hold onto any little thing that comes across your way. you got a new tv, but you still keep the old tv because you know things can break. you keep extra boxes of macaroni and cheese lying around because there will be a week when you don’t have money for groceries. you hold onto your stacks of books and clothes for dear life. those are your assets. physical evidence of where your money’s gone. it’s hard to get rid of it. the bare wall is terrifying when you don’t have much.
Fuck. This makes so much sense and explains so much about me. I must have inherited this from my mum.
so I’d normally put this in the tags but it’s kind of a lot so just reblog this from OP to skip my commentary. But I dogsit for a family who is clearly LOADED. Their house is immaculate. High, vaulted ceilings, wood flooring, two chandeliers in one room. These things are fancy, right ?? I really don’t know, anything that isn’t tile or 30 year old carpet seems fancy to me. It also so… bare. Everything is organized perfectly, they have no excess. Their decor is extravagant and yet minimal – it is carefully and precisely executed. Nothing that doesn’t match the aesthetic sits in their living room. I tried to replicate some of it, but it’s just not possible. I have every book I’ve ever owned, my mom keeps papers upon papers, VHSs in a dresser, how do you just get rid of these things when you know you may not have the opportunity to buy them again? How must it feel to live in such orderly quarters where everything is replaceable?
This really locked into my brain when I was reading one of the declutter your space things and it suggested getting rid of duplicate highlighters and pens. /Pens/. It suggested that you needed one or two working pens, so if you had extra you should get rid of them. That was when I realized minimalist living was /innately/ tied to having spare money, because the idea was, of course you just went out and bought the single replacement thing whenever the first thing broke. You obv. Had the time and money to only ever hold what you needed that moment, because you could always buy more later.
there’s a nice article titled “minimalism is just another boring product wealthy people can buy” by Chelsea Fagan which i feel addressed lots of my problems with minimalism, you can read it [here]
It’s also incredibly depressing to live a “minimalist” living space when it’s because you can’t afford to buy yourself things. Keeping the things you *do* manage to accumulate can be a balm when things are terrible
Frankenuff’s Castle 