America is a world leader in allowing private companies to levy taxes on its citizens, including (stay with me here), a tax on paying your taxes.
In most of the world, the tax authorities prepare a return for each taxpayer, sending them a prepopulated form with all their tax details — collected from employers and other regulated entities, like pension funds and commodities brokers, who must report income to the tax office. If the form is correct, the taxpayer signs it and sends it back (in some countries, taxpayers don’t even have to do that — they just ignore the return unless they want to amend it).
“Imagine you’re just finishing your shift as a picker at an Amazon warehouse. All day long you’ve been carting items for other people, under giant letters on the wall that spell “work hard. have fun. make history.” The pandemic has been hard on you. You can tell from what people are buying that it’s been hard on just about everybody. But as you come off shift, you get life-changing news. Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon, has decided to give you a bonus. In fact, he has decided to give every single employee of Amazon — some 876,000 people — a one-time pandemic bonus. A $105,000 bonus. Serious money. The kind of money that, if invested over a couple of decades, would give you a real retirement nest egg. The crazy thing? The money he is giving you — it’s merely the extra wealth he gained during the pandemic, wealth that you built. After he has paid out those $92 billion in bonuses, he will still be comfortably off. In fact, as rich as he was before coronatime. Of course, Bezos isn’t going to do this. But the fact that he could is one of the striking findings of a new report from Oxfam on plutocratic profiteering from the pandemic. The report, of which The.Ink got an exclusive preview, makes clear that the billionaire class hasn’t just fiddled while Rome burns. It has made a fortune from the flames.”
“Former U.S. attorney general Eric Holder tweeted: “Enough-time for real action. Pass a domestic terrorism bill. Ban assault weapons, high capacity magazines, body armor, silencers. Pass universal background checks, end loopholes: gunshow and Charleston. Pass red flag laws. We can reduce the carnage if pols have the guts to act.” Many pols have those guts, but they are outweighed by a Senate makeup tilted toward less populous states, gerrymandering and voter suppression rampant on the state level, and a judiciary reshaped with far-right appointments, thanks to McConnell’s obstructionism. In 2018, Democratic Senate candidates collectively won 18 million more votes than their Republican counterparts, yet still lost seats, with the Senate balance maintained by the Republicans 53-47. To the extent that mass shootings are a uniquely American epidemic, it is because the American electoral system is uniquely rigged for the modern GOP—the “Great Compromise” that allotted the same number of Senate seats for both large and small states has metastasized the issue to deadly effect. Without a representative body that reflects the will of the people, it is unlikely that the carnage will stop anytime soon.”
I love them so much because they’re about as sharp as a baseball and their anatomy is ridiculous to the point of them literally being classified as plankton for years because they just sort of get blown around by the ocean and look confused, but because they lay more eggs than ANY OTHER VERTEBRATE IN EXISTENCE, evolution can’t stop them
Why is no big predator coming and gnawing on them?
Their biggest defense is that they’re massive and have super tough skin, but they do get hunted by sharks or sea lions sometimes and they just sort of float there like ‘oh bother’ as it happens
Even funnier, because they eat nothing but jellyfish they’re really low in nutritional value anyway, so they basically survive by being not worth eating because they’re like a big floating rice cracker wrapped in leather.
So basically the only reason natural selection hasn’t taken care if them is because they are the most useless fish
yes, they’ve perfected uselessness to the point of being unstoppable
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