/r/writingprompts strikes again

Who doesn’t love Farscape?

Are you kidding? Can you imagine what a piece of human artifice from 5 million years ago would be worth to the right collector?

I’m going to take a line from Hob Gadling

Look, I’ve seen death. I lost half my village to the Black Death. I fought under Buckingham in Burgundy. It’s not like I don’t know what death is. Death is… stupid.

Nobody has to die. The only reason people die is… is 'cause everyone does it. You all just go along with it. But not me. I’ve made up my mind. I’m not going to die.

A dollar in five million years

Cause then I’ll be around that long

Happiest couple I know was in an arranged marriage by their parents starting at the age of 9.

They grew up together, went to the same schools, shared hobbies, were fully familiar with each other’s extended families, and the future-wife ended up going down the aisle slightly pregnant. They’ve been together for nearly 50 years, have three kids (one of whom was a friend in high school), and are both thoroughly convinced that American romances are dumb, shortsighted, and a big reason for the country’s endemic poverty.

Of course, this family is also stupid rich.

The couples that I see fail are consistently either poor to the point that they can’t afford a basic standard of living or where one parent is traveling all the time while the other is stuck with perpetual child care. Inevitably one (or both) cheat, or just have a series of meltdowns that end in a break up.

The handful of couples I know where one partner was closeted or just slow to recognize their own queerness seem to be some of the happiest. The relationships tend to be open or poly, to accommodate one or the other. But neither seem to mind. I even know one couple that did get divorced (primarily because the wife was constantly traveling), but you’d never know it given how much time they end up spending together when she’s home.

The “I hate my wife” crowd I do know tends to be the ones that are traveling so much they never really see one another except to deal with some financial bullshit, housework, or kids.

Rachel Bloom, banger

Darling Meet Me Under the Cum Tree

like in the old days of illegal wiretapping when throughout the conversation one would randomly say “bomb”, “arson”, “nuke” etc.

Taxes are not theft. They are contributing to the group that shares resources like water and services like roads.

They are not contributing to anything. Taxation is fully decoupled from public spending, which is why the US can issue $1.8T in new Treasury bonds in a year to no noticeable effect.

Public utilities (such that exist - most of them have been privatized in everything but name) operate on the expectation that the staff providing engineering expertise and materials can enjoy a reasonably comfortable quality of life. Setting aside that most utilities bill separately from state and local taxation (I pay a monthly water bill and a gas tax per gallon to fund these amenities), they are provided at an extraordinary mark-up that the actual staff don’t get to enjoy. As a case in point, Houston waste removal services have been chipped away at since COVID, with staff working longer hours for lower pay using outdated equipment. The mayor has outsourced more and more of the work to a private contractor owned by one of his mega-donor friends. What money is collected via property taxes goes first into the profits of the private contracting agencies, then to their administrators, and only at last to trickle down on the actual laborers collecting the trash.

Meanwhile, the housing and personal transport and groceries and other lifestyle amenities required by the waste management workers is… once again outsourced to the private sector, where owners take their cut first and labor gets the dredges. The end result is a working class mired deeper and deeper into debt, while the landed class grows fatter and richer.

This isn’t taxation paying for labor or materials. This is taxation paid out as a rent to landlords and cronies.

The problem with taxes is who is taxed.

That’s a system functioning as intended. Taxation is rent-seeking at the governmental scale. You don’t tax your aristocrats, because they’re supposed to be the recipients of the labor surplus. You tax the laborers, because you need a legalized mechanism for extracting any surplus remaining with them, in order to redistribute it to your aristocratic peers.

What they’re doing is laudable. But these boats are tiny compared with what the Cubans need to survive.

These appear to have arrived before the US tightened the blockage in earnest. Their plan was for a 2 GW combined installation, of which this represents maybe 1%.

Wow. Damn. I guess facts don’t care about my feelings.

Thankfully solar and other supplies are being given to Cuba in large quantities

That’s news to me. Was just listening to a podcast interviewing a local Cuban journalist, suggesting help was not - in fact - on the way.

Incidentally, Belly of the Beast does some excellent domestic Cuban coverage. But everything they are reporting suggests these supplies have not been forthcoming, on account of the military blockade of the island. Like, you cannot sail ships into and out of the major harbors (shy of outright smuggling or armed escort).

Much like with the Gaza Blockade, there are ongoing efforts to build political pressure by assembling relief and directing it at the island. There’s no reason to believe it will actually arrive.

That your conclusion seems locked-in on this possibility as the only solution

I’m mostly just being contrary.

Currency and Taxation CAN and HAVE been weaponized as you described, but so has a carrot.

You’re going to have to cite how carrots were weaponized by the state to legitimize violence.

Anyone who disagrees is welcome to do the research by living in any number of failed states.

Currency is a tool of authoritarian governments to extract labor via the threat of poverty and state sanctioned violence.

Taxes are a means of legitimizing that violence by recharacterizing an extortionary rent as interpersonal debts, and the violence of collections as just compensation

Anyone who disagrees is welcome to live in the fascist police states that impose these rents on their people, then assault and imprison them by the million.

Liberals are hyper exposed to the latter and sheltered from the former.

Check the Cuba coverage right now. We’re getting wall to wall #SOSCuba tier hysterics, while the devestation of the blockade and the threat of a military invasion goes fully unreported.

It looks more like something you’d see on the cover of Vogue, certainly.

There’s “playing with fire” and then there’s “using a lit match to check the bottom of a gas tank”

This would be funnier if we weren’t deploying massive AI data-centers to destroy the last surviving mega-fauna.