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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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How Goldman Sachs's "tax-loss harvesting" lets the ultra-rich rake in billions tax-free

Tomorrow (Apr 25) I’ll be in San Diego for the launch of my new novel, Red Team Blues, at 7PM at Mysterious Galaxy Books, hosted by Sarah Gailey. Please come and say hi!

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With the IRS Files, Propublica ripped away the veil of performative complexity disguising the scams that the ultra-rich use to amass billions and billions (and billions and billions) of dollars, paying next to no tax, or even no tax at all. Each scam is its own little shell game, a set of semantic and accounting tricks used to gussy up otherwise banal rip-offs.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/24/tax-loss-harvesting/#mego

The finance sector has a cute name for this kind of complexity: MEGO, which stands for "my eyes glaze over." If you're trying to rip off a mark, you just pad out the prospectus, make it so thick they decide there must be something good in there, the same way that any pile of shit that's sufficiently large must have a pony under it...somewhere.

Propublica's writers haven't merely confirmed just how little America's oligarchs pay in tax - they've also de-MEGO-ized each of these scams, like the way that Peter Thiel used the Roth IRA - a tax-shelter for middle-class earners to help save a few thousand dollars for retirement - to make $5 billion without paying one cent in tax:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/26/wax-rothful/#thiels-gambit

One of my favorite IRS Files reports described how Steve Ballmer - the billionaire ex-CEO of Microsoft - laundered vast fortunes into a state of tax-free grace by creating hundreds of millions in "losses" from his basketball team, the LA Clippers. Ballmer paid 12% tax on the $656 million he took out of the Clippers - while the players whose labor generated that fortune paid 30-40% on their earnings:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#economic-substance-doctrine

That was Propublica's first Ballmer story, back in the summer of 2021. But they ran a followup last February that I missed (it came out while I was on a book tour in Australia), and it's wild: a tale of "loss harvesting," a form of fuckery involving Goldman Sachs that's depraved even by their own standards:

https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-files-taxes-wash-sales-goldman-sachs

Loss farming is a scam that was invented in the 1920s, whereupon it was promptly banned by Congress. But Goldman and other plutocrat Renfields have come up with tiny modern variations on this century-old con that the IRS is either unable or unwilling to address.

Here's how it works. Say you've got a stock portfolio where some of the stocks have gone up and others have gone down. You want to sell the high stocks and hang onto the low ones until they bounce back. But if you sell those stocks that have gone up, you have to "realize" the profit from them and pay 20% capital gains tax on them (capital gains tax is the tax you pay on money you get from owning things; it's much lower than income tax - the tax you pay for doing things).

But you pay tax on your net capital gains - the profits you've made minus the losses you've suffered. What if you sold those loser stocks at the same time? If you made a million on the good stocks and lost a million on the bad ones, your net income is zero - and so is your tax bill.

The problem is that selling stocks when they've gone down is a surefire way to go broke. Every investing book starts with this advice: you will be tempted to hold onto your stocks that are going up, because they might continue to go up. You'll be tempted to sell your stocks that are going down, because they may continue to go down. But if you do that, you'll only sell the stocks that have lost money, and never sell the stocks that have made money, and so you will lose everything.

Back when the pandemic started, your shares in movie theater chains were in the toilet, while your stock in tech companies shot through the roof. If you sold the tech stocks then and held onto your movie stocks and sold them now, you'd have cleaned up - today, tech stocks are down and movie theater stocks are up. But if you sold the cinema shares when they bottomed out, and held onto your tech stocks when they were peaking, you'd be busted today.

So selling your loser stocks to offset the gains from your winners is a bad idea. That's where loss-farming comes in: what if you sold your tech stocks at their peak, and sold your bottomed-out cinema stocks at the same time, but then bought the cinema stocks again, right away? That way you'd have the "loss" from selling the cinema stocks, but you'd still have the stocks.

That's called "wash trading," and Congress promptly banned it. If you've heard of wash-trading, it's probably something you picked up during the NFT bubble, which was a cesspit of illegal wash-trading. Remember all those eye-popping NFT sales? It was just grifters with multiple wallets, buying NFTs from themselves, making it seem like there was this huge, white-hot market for monkey JPEGs. Wash-trading.

Turns out that crypto really did democratize finance...fraud.

Wash-trading has been illegal for a century, but brokerages have invented modern variations on the theme that are legal-ish, and the most lucrative versions of these scams are only available to billionaires, through companies like Goldman Sachs.

There are a bunch of these variations, but they all boil down to this: there are lots of ways to sell an asset and buy it again, while making it look like you bought a different asset. Like, say you're invested in Chinese tech companies through an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that bundles together "all the Top Chinese tech stocks."

Maybe you bought this fund through Vanguard, the giant brokerage. Now, say Chinese stocks are way down, because the Chinese government is doing these waves of lockdowns on the factory cities. If you could sell those Chinese stocks now, you'd get a massive loss, enough to wipe out all the profits from all your good stocks.

But of course, China's going to figure out the lockdown situation eventually, so you don't want to actually get rid of those stocks right now, especially since they're worth so much less than you paid for them. So right after you sell your Vanguard Chinese tech ETF shares, you buy the same amount of Schwab's Chinese tech-stock ETF.

An ETF of "leading Chinese tech companies" is going to have basically the same companies' stock in it, no matter whether it's sold by Vanguard, State Street or Schwab. But as far as the IRS is concerned, this isn't a wash-trade, because you sold a thing called "Vanguard ETF" and bought a thing called "Schwab ETF" and these are different things (even if the main difference is the name on the wrapper, and not what's inside).

There's other ways to do this. For example, lots of companies have different "classes" of stock. Under Armour sells both Class A (voting) and Class C (nonvoting) stocks. Though voting stock is worth a little more than nonvoting stock, they both rise and fall together - if the Class A shares are up 10%, so are the Class C shares. So you can dump your Under Armour Class A's, buy Under Armour Class C's and own essentially the same amount of Under Armour stock - but as far as the IRS is concerned, you just sold your interest in one company and bought an interest in a different company, and you can take a big loss and write down your profits from other stock trades.

The IRS does prohibit wash-trading, but only in the narrowest sense. Brokerages are obliged to report trades in which a customer buys and sells exactly the same security, with the same unique ID (the CUSIP number), within 60 days. Beyond that, IRS guidance is extraordinarily wishy-washy, calling on filers to "consider all the facts and circumstances" of their transactions. Sure, that'll work.

Propublica found zero instances of the IRS targeting any of these trades, ever, for enforcement. That's especially true of the most egregious version of loss-harvesting, a special version that only the ultra-rich can take advantage of, called "direct indexing." You might know about "index funds," where a brokerage sells a single fund that tracks a broad index of stocks - for example, you can buy an S&P 500 index that goes up and down with the total value of the top 500 stocks in America.

Direct indexing is something that giant banks like Goldman Sachs offer to their very richest clients. The brokerage buys a mix of stocks that are likely to track the whole index, and puts those shares directly into the client's account. Rather than owning shares in a fund that owns the stocks, you own the stocks directly. That means that when you want to harvest some losses, you can sell just a few of the stocks in the index, rather than your shares in the whole fund.

Here's how that works. In 2017, the US index was up 20%; global indexes were up even more. Steve Ballmer made a bundle. But Goldman Sachs, acting on Ballmer's behalf, sold s few of the stocks in the portfolio and harvested a $100,000,000 loss, that Ballmer could use to trick the IRS into treating his massive profits as though he'd made very little taxable income.

Goldman uses a whole range of tricks to keep billionaires like Ballmer in a lower tax-bracket than the janitors who clean the floors after his team's games. They not only buy and sell different classes of stock in companies like Discovery and Fox; they also buy and sell the same company's stock in different countries. For example, they sold Ballmer's shares in Shell in one country, and then immediately bought the same amount of shares in another country. The IRS doesn't treat this as a wash-trade, despite the fact that the shares have the same value, and, indeed, companies like Shell routinely merge their overseas and domestic shares with no change in valuation.

Thanks to Goldman's ruses - and the IRS's willingness to accept them - Ballmer's wealth has swollen to grotesque proportions. He generated $579 million in losses from 2014-18, and as a result, got to keep at least $138m that he'd have otherwise had to pay to the IRS.

Goldman's not the only one in on this game: Iconiq Captial - a firm that also offers marriage partner scouting for its richest clients - has $13.2 billion under management on behalf of just 337 people. Among those high-rollers: Mark Zuckerberg, whose $88m in gains from Iconiq investments were offset by $34m in imaginary losses that the company manufactured with wash-trades.

In theory, the simplest form of wash-trading - selling your Vanguard China fund and buying a Schwab China fund - is available to any investor. Leaving aside the fact that the top 1% of Americans own most of the stock, this is still a deceptive proposition. This kind of wash-trading only benefits investors who hold their shares outside of a sheltered retirement account, which is a vanishing minority indeed.

Instead, the primary beneficiaries of this activity are the usual suspects: convicted monopolists like Ballmer, or useless scions of wealthy families, like the kids of Walmart founder Sam Walton, who emerged into this world through very lucky orifices and are thus effectively exempt from the need to work or pay tax for life.

Jim Walton is Sam Walton's youngest orifice-lottery-winner. Young Jim saw a $10 billion increase in his wealth from 2014-18, making him the tenth richest person in America. Thanks to wash-trading, he declared only $111 million of that $10 billion on his taxes, and paid $0.00 in tax on that $10 billion gains.

One way that the rich are especially well-situated to exploit loss-harvesting is in converting short-term gains - which are taxed at 40% - into long-term gains, which are taxed at 20%. For people who make a lot of money buying and selling shares as pure speculation, flipping them in less than a year, wash-trading can create the appearance of long-term holdings. Analyzing their trove of leaked IRS files, Propublica showed that Americans who report over $10 million in income almost never report short-term gains. Instead, two-thirds of the richest Americans report short-term losses.

One fascinating wrinkle is that rich people may not even know this is going on. Whatsapp co-founder Brian Acton, managed to "lose" $2.9 million when he sold $17 million in shares - the same day he bought $17 million in shares in nearly the same companies from another brokerage. Then, a few months later, he reversed those transactions, selling his new fund and buying the old one and harvesting another $600,000 in losses.

When Propublica asked Acton about this, he told them he was "not really aware of any events like that...Broadly my wealth is managed by a wealth management firm and they manage all the day to day transactions."

This is completely believable and consistent with the extraordinarily frank account of how elite money-management works that Abigail Disney described in 2021, where the ultra-rich are insulated from the scams, tricks and wheezes that lawyers and accountants dream up to keep their fortunes steadily mounting with no action needed on their part:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/19/dynastic-wealth/#caste

Could the IRS block this kind of wash-trading? Yes, but they'd need action from Congress. The most effective way to do this would be to force shareholders to "mark to market" the value of their holdings, taxing them each year on the fluctuations in their portfolio.

Propublica notes that this is incredibly unlikely to happen, though. As an alternative, Congress could change the rule that blocks investors from claiming losses when they buy and sell "substantially identical" shares with a rule that applies to "substantially similar" stocks. This proposal comes from Columbia Law's David Schizer, who says the law "ought to be updated to reflect how people invest today instead of how they invested 100 years ago."

But for any of that to have an effect, the IRS would have to change its auditing and enforcement practices, which currently see low-income earners (who can't afford fancy tax-lawyers who'll tie up the IRS for months or years) being disproportionately targeted, while America's super-rich, ultra-rich, and stupid-rich are allowed to submit the most hilariously, obviously fictional returns and get away with it.

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Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in San Diego, Burbank, Mountain View, Berkeley, San Francisco, Portland, Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

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[Image ID: A dilapidated shack. A sign reading 'Internal Revenue Service Building' stands next to it. From its eaves depends another sign, reading 'Internal Revenue Service' and bearing the IRS logo. From the window of the shack beams the grinning face of billionaire Steve Ballmer. Behind the shack is a DC avenue terminating in the Capitol Dome.]

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Image: Matthew Bisanz (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NYC_IRS_office_by_Matthew_Bisanz.JPG

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

Ted Eytan (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2021.02.07_DC_Street,_Washington,_DC_USA_038_13205-Edit_%2850920473547%29.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

Bart Everson (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/editor/1287341637

Eric Garcetti (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Steve_Ballmer_2014.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

#pluralistic #paper losses #direct indexing #tax-loss harvesting #steve ballmer #propublica #irs files #the rich are different from you and me #mego #wash trading #tax evasion #goldman sachs #vampire squid #mark zuckerberg

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daily-coloring · 4 months

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Best of 2023 - Albums

Unbelievable year ... Fallen pop stars are returning, long time not seen artists are turning up in a best possible shape, producers making music under their own names, ... First of all I really enjoyed a few soundtracks this year especially Anthony Willis's Saltburn and Arnaud Rebotini's L'lle Rouge. Surprisingly I listened again on repeat a few DJ mixes too. Danny Tenaglia's new Global Underground was a pure treasure, James Zabiela's home session just made me dance for an hour in the living room, as well as Andy Butler's energetic set did too.

01. Roisin Murphy - Hit Parade - "If Hit Parade isn’t Murphy’s best album, it’s certainly her wildest and weirdest. Nowhere else is the scale of her ambition more evident than on the percussive and atmospheric “Free Will.” Murphy says she doesn’t believe in free will but that you should “just make believe that you can write the play” anyway. It’s yet another indelible statement that couldn’t come from anyone else." - Slant Magazine

02. Rebecca Black - Let Her Burn - "An acceptable stretch of Let Her Burn gives Black a chance to reform a persona she had never had any control over until now. As fundamental a shift as perhaps expected, Black warrants this change of pace but there is something inevitable about how these perspectives are formed and how retaliation to reactionary dogpiling a decade ago comes to the forefront. Working hard and pushing through with this half-hour debut LP is exceptional, with spotty highs and consistently solid mixes that give those electronic undercurrents a beat-worthy working. Destroy Me is a crucial highlight in getting to the core of reinvention but also in engaging with how buoyed Let Her Burn is by how much of an opposition it takes to the early works. Black has let her burn, whatever “her” was. Let Her Burn razes and destroys as much as it can, and it works as a successful, credible debut." - Cult Following

03. Sophie Ellis-Bextor - Hana

04. Clark - Sus Dog

05. Everything But The Girl - Fuse

06. Depeche Mode - Memento Mori

07. Mermaidens - Mermaidens

08. Kesha - Gag Order

09. Anna B Savage - in|FLUX - "So as a follow up to A Common Turn, this does feel like an album where, lyrically and thematically, we are dealing with an artist who has battled some of the previous demons, accepted the daily flux of life, and found a way to focus on the moments when life feels most complete. But in a musical context – Anna also seems to have taken that feeling, that love of contradiction, into the songs. At moments explosively ecstatic, at others wrought with emotion – and filled with influences and sounds from areas not explored on the previous LP – the album brings a bunch of disparate sounds and feelings together to create a powerful and impressive whole. Most impressive of all is the fact that, after an album that sent Picky Bastards into a spin for the whole of 2021, Anna has released something as good if not better." - Picky Bastards

10. HMLTD - The Worm

11. JMSN - Soft Spot

12. Orbital - Optical Delusion - "It’s an album of unlikely collaborations. Day One features the operatic talents of Dina Ipavic, while Are You Alive, sung by Lily Wolter of Penelope Isles, floats into moodier, more analog territory. Best of all are The New Abnormal (Golden Girls’ Kinetic turned inside out) and the anti-gammon state of the nation rant of Dirty Rats." - Record Collector

13. Spelling - SPELLLING & The Mystery School

14. Future Utopia - We Were We Still Are

15. CLT DRP - Nothing Clever, Just Feelings

16. Joy Wellboy - The Ones That Got Away

17. Pierre Rousseau - Twenty - Music for Etudes N°20 - Spring Summer 2022

18. Joyce Muniz - Zeitkapsel

19. Emiliana Torrini & The Colorist Orchestra - Racing The Storm

20. Thomas Azier - The Inventory Of Our Desire

21. Sofia Kourtesis - Madres

22. Not Waving - The Place I've Been Missing

23. Restive Plaggona - Ignis

24. Deichkind - Neues Vom Dauerzustand

25. Daughter - Stereo Mind Game

26. Daði Freyr - I Made an Album

27. Yves Tumor - Praise A Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds)

28. Surgeon - Crash Recoil - "Crash Recoil is probably about as close to a live Surgeon record as we’re ever going to get. Child views producing and performing as two disparate disciplines, which they are, and he goes about each in a very different way. This also means it’s about as close to a traditional pop/rock approach to writing and recording as you’re likely to find from an electronic producer, woodshedding tracks on the road and sharpening them to a diamond sheen. More bands and producers should think of adopting the approach as it clearly can yield stunning results, as evidenced by this glorious offering." - Spectrum Culture

29. Duran Duran - DANSE MACABRE

30. When Saints Go Machine - Rosy

31. Young Fathers - Heavy Heavy

32. Maps - Counter Melodies

33. Laurent Garnier - 33 tours et puis s'en vont

34. Benedikt Frey - Fastlane

35. ANOUK - Deena and Jim

36. Anthony Naples - Orbs - "The New York producer once known for muscular house and techno continues to drift into the ether, channeling ’90s chillout and dub techno into his singular vision." - Pitchfork

37. James Holden - Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities

38. Hifi Sean & David McAlmont - Happy Ending

39. Tirzah - trip9love...???

40. Kelela - Raven

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bebewrites · 1 year

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I posted 2,144 times in 2022

That's 1,145 more posts than 2021!

199 posts created (9%)

1,945 posts reblogged (91%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@medievalthymes

@flowerprose

@leave-her-a-tome

@zmwrites

@pinespittinink

I tagged 1,508 of my posts in 2022

Only 30% of my posts had no tags

#inspo - 285 posts

#writing tips - 119 posts

#art - 98 posts

#tnv inspo - 85 posts

#answered - 84 posts

#ref - 69 posts

#wip: tnv - 38 posts

#words - 37 posts

#lol - 34 posts

#ask games - 31 posts

Longest Tag: 98 characters

#being the only one on this taglist makes me feel like this is being written for me specifically 😌

My Top Posts in 2022:

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72 notes - Posted June 8, 2022

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116 notes - Posted January 25, 2022

god, please. cozy fics single handedly got me through the last two years.

250 notes - Posted January 26, 2022

wip page 07 - a simple wip page

preview / code

revamped one of my very first wip page codes! it was originally posted on my old themes blog, which i deleted recently, so i figured i’d update and re-release it here.

features: any google fonts. feather icons (which you can find more of here). includes a featured image and sections for details, a synopsis, relevant links, characters, and additional info.

icons in the preview are from here and the featured image is from unsplash. please like/reblog if you use! ♡︎

756 notes - Posted August 16, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

deify your self 💫 tag game

tysm @pinespittinink and @flowerprose for the tags!! 💕

rules: using this piccrew by @malachitinous, create yourself as you’d look as a god/goddess/deity; feel free to either make this a chain or do your own post from scratch!

tagging: @writingbyricochet @mr-writes @carminasolis @hyba @kaatiba @ryns-ramblings and pls consider this an open tag for anyone who wants to do this! you can say you got an open tag from me :)

766 notes - Posted October 7, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#tumblr2022 #year in review #my 2022 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review #idk why this one picrew popped off 😂#also still stand by the cozy fantasy!!#long post

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bloodstained-gallery · 1 year

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I posted 61 times in 2021

28 posts created (46%)

33 posts reblogged (54%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 1.2 posts.

I added 246 tags in 2021

#bloodstained - 61 posts

#miriam - 43 posts

#sfw - 30 posts

#bloodstained: ritual of the night - 28 posts

#bloodstained: rotn - 23 posts

#bloodstained artists - 22 posts

#gebel - 10 posts

#zangetsu - 10 posts

#bloodstained: curse of the moon 2 - 10 posts

#crossovers - 9 posts

Longest Tag: 39 characters

#reblog from my castlevania gallery blog

My Top Bloodstained Posts in 2021

遅ればせながら by ∇

31 notes • Posted 2021-08-10 07:15:06 GMT

Art by chimuchimudevil

34 notes • Posted 2021-09-25 17:07:48 GMT

ミリアム by 伊万里

51 notes • Posted 2021-09-13 16:38:12 GMT

See the full post

52 notes • Posted 2021-10-27 14:14:05 GMT

See the full post

57 notes • Posted 2021-08-11 10:42:46 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

#mod shanoa #bloodstained news #my 2021 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review

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usafphantom2 · 10 months

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Russian Aerospace Forces will receive modernized Tu-160 bombers this year

Fernando Valduga By Fernando Valduga 12/07/2023 - 08:16 in Military

The Russian Aerospace Forces will receive four new Tu-160 strategic bombers this year, two of which will be the modernized version.

Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu was informed of this during his visit to the Kazan aviation factory today. Two more Tu-160 were currently being produced for Russian troops.

The second Tu-160M2 took off on September 17, 2021 in Kazan for the first flight.

The Tu-160 is a strategic supersonic missile transport bomber with a variable sweep wing, developed at the Tupolev Design Bureau in the 1970s and 1980s. These aircraft are the air component of the Russian nuclear triad. They are designed to destroy the most important targets behind enemy lines with nuclear and conventional weapons. They are capable of carrying 12 cruise missiles on board, with all weapons located inside the fuselage.

The first prototype of the Tu-160M2 was not a new plane, but a modernized jet from the stock.

Serial production of the Tu-160 was discontinued in the 1990s and now Russia is working to resume the construction of the bombers in a new version - the Tu-160M. Externally, they do not differ from the basic Tu-160, but their combat capabilities have been significantly increased by expanding the range of the weapons and equipping them with new NK-32 engines of the second series, which allow them to increase the flight range by 1,000 km.

The contract for the supply of the first batch of 10 aircraft worth 15 billion rubles each was signed on January 25, 2018.

On January 12, 2022, the first flight took place.

The Russian Ministry of Defense plans to order 50 of these aircraft and intends to modernize all 16 strategic bombers in service to the Tu-160M version.

The first prototype of the Tu-160M ??” Igor Sikorsky" was created based on a combat aircraft. Your first flight took place on February 2, 2020. On January 12, 2022, the first Tu-160M, built from scratch, took off for the first time.

Tags: Military AviationRFSAF - Russian Federation Aerospace Force/Russian Aerospace ForceTu-160M

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Fernando Valduga

Aviation photographer and pilot since 1992, has participated in several events and air operations, such as Cruzex, AirVenture, Daytona Airshow and FIDAE. He has works published in specialized aviation magazines in Brazil and abroad. Uses Canon equipment during his photographic work around the world of aviation.

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skippyv20 · 1 year

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Telegraph comment MM hypocrisy

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2023/04/25/meghan-markle-hypocrisy-coronation-king-charles/25 Apr 2023 07:54:05 UTCMeghan’s hypocrisy is now beyond parodyThe Duchess of Sussex has ordered the media to ‘stop the exhausting circus’. Pot, meet kettleMICHAEL DEACONCOLUMNIST25 April 2023 • 7:00amMichael DeaconDuchess of SussexThe Duchess of Sussex launching her podcastI for one have never doubted that the Duchess of Sussex has perfectly good reasons for not attending the Coronation. After all, she and her husband have two children. And every parent knows how hard it can be to find a reliable babysitter. This is why my wife and I always use my father-in-law. Unfortunately for the Duchess, her father-in-law is the King, and it seems that on this particular occasion he is unavailable.I’m sure she would have loved to come otherwise. Doubtless she will be watching the ceremony live on TV like the rest of us, wishing with all her heart that she could have been there. By a cruel twist of fate, however, it happens on fall on the exact same day as Prince Archie’s fourth birthday, and the children must come first.Still, I hope she’ll look on the bright side. By the time of the next Coronation, her children will presumably be adults. Which means she’ll be free to come and enjoy William and Kate’s big day.A heartening thought. For now, though, it must be deeply frustrating for her to find some people daring to question her absence. Which is why she’s acted so swiftly to dismiss speculation that it has anything to do with a letter she wrote to her father-in-law in 2021, expressing her concerns about unconscious bias in the Royal family. The letter is believed to have been written shortly after her interview with Oprah Winfrey, in which the Duchess alleged that an unnamed member of the Royal family had asked about the colour of her unborn son’s skin.Barely had news of this letter been published than her press secretary fired off the following statement.“The Duchess of Sussex is going about her life in the present, not thinking about correspondence from two years ago related to conversations from four years ago,” it declared, coldly. “Any suggestion otherwise is false and frankly ridiculous. We encourage tabloid media and various royal correspondents to stop the exhausting circus that they alone are creating.”Quite right, too. Because, if there’s one thing the Duchess can’t stand, it’s people who spend all their time obsessively raking over the past. Nothing appals her more than those who endlessly harp on, purely for their own financial gain, about what may or may not have happened in the Royal family several years ago. Why do these people insist on flogging a dead horse in this sensationalist, attention-seeking way?It must be very upsetting for her. I only hope she will let us know the full story, during the Sussexes’ next series for Netflix. Or perhaps her husband could reveal all in his next book.Sir Humphrey for PMWhen allegations of bullying were first made against Dominic Raab, I thought they sounded perfectly plausible. Well, he does look quite intimidating. In fact, I’ve always thought he looks strangely like a baseball bat: a baseball bat in a suit. So hard, so blunt, so brutal. His glare’s pretty unnerving, too. He never seems to blink. It’s as if he’s had a can of Red Bull injected into his eyeballs.I was interested, therefore, to find out what precisely he’d done. But then, last week, we finally got to read the report into his alleged bullying of civil servants. And, in my humble opinion at least, it didn’t contain any clear evidence of bullying at all. Just a somewhat brusque boss telling his staff to pull their socks up.It all seemed rather puzzling. Could it be that the report originally did contain clear evidence of bullying, but some hapless official forgot to attach the relevant pages? If so, I hope he or she wasn’t told off, and instructed to take more care with his or her work in future. Otherwise I fear there will have to be another bullying inquiry.The day the report was released, incidentally, I received my postal ballot for next month’s local elections. In all honesty, though, I’m at a loss to know what to do with it. These days it’s getting harder and harder to work out which candidates, if any, are worth voting for. And this is only the locals. General elections are even worse. What a terrible, dreary nuisance it all is. Especially as, for whatever reason, politicians so frequently fail to deliver on their promises.Happily, I have a solution. Let’s abolish elections in this country altogether, and simply ask the civil service which party it would prefer to be in office, and which of that party’s policies it would be willing to enact. That would save everyone a lot of time and bother.Better yet, we could just ask the civil service itself to form a government. Then our poor, long-suffering civil servants would finally be free of these cruel, tyrannical ministers who are constantly telling them what to do, and, even worse, expecting them to actually do it.Way of the World is a twice-weekly satirical look at the headlines aiming to mock the absurdities of the modern world. It is published at 7am every Tuesday and Saturday

Interesting….thank you🐼

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hellolovers13 · 1 year

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I posted 16,314 times in 2022

That's 8,484 more posts than 2021!

520 posts created (3%)

15,794 posts reblogged (97%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@harryslonecurl

@hldailyupdate

@stylesnews

@lhrry

@keinessish

I tagged 3,008 of my posts in 2022

#my lil pancake - 117 posts

#my irish heart - 115 posts

#prev - 98 posts

#my sunshine - 86 posts

#to read - 71 posts

#lt2 spoilers - 58 posts

#taylor - 54 posts

#😭😭😭 - 53 posts

#<3 - 49 posts

#my policeman - 41 posts

Longest Tag: 139 characters

#you create from discontent. most of your life has been spent being uncomfortable in your own skin. this body is just another house that's n

My Top Posts in 2022:

See the full post

203 notes - Posted November 13, 2022

love drunk, waiting on a miracle by hellolovers13

Harry Styles/Louis Tomlinson | E | 30.1k | Coffeshop AU

Christmas inspired Coffeshop AU

Harry has a bit of a crush on a customer. Thankfully, the feeling is mutual. These are their first 24 days together.

❄️ 01 ❄️ ❄️ 02 ❄️ ❄️ 03 ❄️ ❄️ 04❄️❄️05 ❄️ ❄️ 06 ❄️ ❄️ 07 ❄️❄️ 08 ❄️ ❄️ 09 ❄️ ❄️ 10 ❄️❄️ 11 ❄️ ❄️ 12 ❄️ ❄️ 13 ❄️❄️ 14 ❄️ ❄️ 15 ❄️ ❄️ 16 ❄️❄️ 17 ❄️ ❄️ 18 ❄️ ❄️ 19 ❄️❄️ 20 ❄️ ❄️ 21 ❄️ ❄️ 22 ❄️❄️ 23 ❄️ ❄️ 24 ❄️

❄️ Chapter 25 ❄️

Past, Present, Future

254 notes - Posted December 1, 2022

See the full post

289 notes - Posted November 1, 2022

same picture

503 notes - Posted December 11, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

Stop. I'm gonna cry.

520 notes - Posted November 10, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#wanted to do this again now that the year is officially over XD #tumblr2022 #year in review #my 2022 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review

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tmblrvision · 2 years

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That was the Tmblrvision 2022 Live Song Reveal Show!

Those were all 37 entries of the 2022 edition of the Tmblrvision Song Contest! If you'd like to relive the whole show and see all the postcards (created for us by @escape-radio), then you can rewatch the show using this link!

Here's a look once again at all 37 artists!

Now it's time to vote!

Jury Vote

Each Head of Delegation must vote for their ten favorite songs. Scores will be assigned Eurovision-style to each song, with 12 points to the top favorite all the way to 1 point to the 10th favorite. Two alternates (11th and 12th place) must also be provided in case of any disqualifications. If you do not submit your votes on time, you WILL be disqualified, and all votes for your entry will be nullified!

The jury voting form is here.

Audience Vote

Every Tumblr user (whether you’re a Head of Delegation or not) can vote once in the audience vote (also known as the televote)! You have 50 votes to spread around, but you can only vote for a song a maximum of 10 times. If you vote for any song more than 10 times, your ballot WILL be thrown out. When filling in points, please DO NOT place a zero on songs you are not voting for, as this screws up the statistics and adds more work for me! (If you’re a member of the Discord server but don’t have a Tumblr account, you are also eligible to vote!)

The audience voting form will be available within the next 48 hours, so stay tuned!

You have until Monday, 15 August 2021, 8pm CEST to submit both your jury and audience votes! If for whatever reason you need an extension of no more than 48 hours, please let me know ASAP!

Recap

As is Tmblrvision tradition, here's a video recap featuring short snippets of each of the 37 entries, created by @mukario!

All Songs

Here's a list of all 37 entries including links to their YouTube videos. (An alternate link on Google Drive has been provided for the Italian entry, as it is blocked in North America.)

01 - Scotland - CHVRCHES - Violent Delights - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Emi3HNK_tiI 02 - Independent Russian Artists - Otyken - Kykakacha - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7lwVHNkoyw 03 - Ukraine - Tonka - Kyievytsia - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZAgubu52KQ 04 - Lebanon - Dana Hourani - Enti Ana - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88ZoTW-xWE0 05 - Portugal - Joana Espadinha - Astronauta - https://youtu.be/dgnuPHBSiq4 06 - Japan - Minyo Crusaders & Frente Cumbiero - Tora Joe - https://youtu.be/cID4CrsSA8Q 07 - Independent Belarusian Artists - Iva Sativa - Pan - https://youtu.be/vf65IiBRFh0 08 - Georgia - VAQO - Akhali Taoba Modis - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNXPSMOStWs 09 - Israel - Ran Danker - Beit Meshugaim - https://youtu.be/PqxUV9xk7T4 10 - Bulgaria - Dara Ekimova - Voyna - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8vvEd497VI 11 - Finland - Aksel Kankaanranta - Sydän paareilla - https://youtu.be/u6_zHsBSpFY 12 - Germany - Patty Gurdy - Universe Night and Day - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wN7QX_pwoIw 13 - Estonia - Púr Múdd ft. Grete Paia - Ainult Unustamiseks - https://youtu.be/Ro9z-iIUy2M 14 - Romania - Alexia - Pentru Tine - https://youtu.be/9zizhzT3VtM 15 - Belgium - OLIVIA & Paul Sinha - Elektriciteit - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=od-zB_gvtUE 16 - Monaco - Josh Stanley - Love Somebody - https://youtu.be/VkMYTgjwk0A 17 - Lithuania - Angelou - OPIA - https://youtu.be/SY2EEebocrU 18 - Norway - Peder Elias - Better Alone - https://youtu.be/zArxQ_wKwH0 19 - Italy - Emma Nolde - Respiro - https://youtu.be/GYRQ_CYGcr8 - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bbhsk0zw1mOOUZ4zwrmiHO2BM2fnk9w0/view?usp=sharing 20 - Croatia - Aklea Neon - ANTM - https://youtu.be/fBlOFu7gthI 21 - Wales - Holding Absence - Afterlife - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfe8NvYSPmY 22 - Hungary - Carson Coma - Pók - https://youtu.be/1CLqEgTHrDM 23 - Egypt - Mohamed Hemaky & Tooma - Agaby - https://youtu.be/mXnwq6vqXow 24 - Andorra - Nina Rossell - Le Bail - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17GVuS1AIhw 25 - Australia - Tkay Maidza - Cashmere - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSOdz-J0EMw 26 - Morocco - Faouzia - RIP, Love - https://youtu.be/PwQmPLjnSPo 27 - Ireland - Moxie - Is Ainm Dom - https://youtu.be/dzPC_GdP4xY 28 - Poland - sanah & Daria Zawiałow - Eldorado - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nN2eZos7HN0 29 - England - The Vaccines - Headphones Baby - https://youtu.be/HwIwjS6W59s 30 - Serbia - Milica Pavlović - After kod Milice - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lE5Qc4uIWvw 31 - Czechia - Vesna - Pomiluj mě - https://youtu.be/xYMJlFLP_GY 32 - France - Taennchel - À la croisée des chemins - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ain7xnlv2v4 33 - Netherlands - Snollebollekes - Non stop vol d'r op - https://youtu.be/wkor_-y21cw 34 - Denmark - Brimheim - hey amanda - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2ahdshq1WY 35 - Iceland - Daði Freyr - Somebody Else Now - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPsIIXkvEOQ 36 - Sweden - Brother Leo - Living In A Zoo - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKFVCC0n6QY 37 - Malta - The Travellers - Il-Biża' - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otkqnRdJSvE

Playlists

Two playlists have been provided for you to be able to view or listen to (almost) every entry!

Here's the YouTube playlist (once again, Italy's entry is geoblocked in North America, so there is a link to Google Drive provided above):

And here's the Spotify playlist, which is missing France's entry. (Also some songs may be geoblocked in your region!)

Thank You!

Thank you once again for joining us for the seventh (!!!) edition of the Tmblrvision Song Contest! Whether you're a long-running Head of Delegation, a first-time participant, an audience voter, or simply someone who stumbled upon this little show, this would not keep going without your presence, so thank you!

#Tmblrvision #Tmblrvision 2022 #Tmblrvision Song Contest #Tmblrvision Song Contest 2022 #Hope Dawning #2022 live show

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matchafoxjournal · 1 year

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I posted 438 times in 2022

That's 224 more posts than 2021!

31 posts created (7%)

407 posts reblogged (93%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@stillinthelibrary

@banana-study

@a-students-lifebuoy

@flyoverminimalist

@thatstudyblrontea

I tagged 51 of my posts in 2022

#lfj - 20 posts

#student - 13 posts

#studyblr - 13 posts

#bujoblr - 11 posts

#university - 10 posts

#bookblr - 8 posts

#food - 7 posts

#bujo - 7 posts

#books - 7 posts

#tea - 6 posts

Longest Tag: 53 characters

#literature and culture of belgium sounds interesting!

My Top Posts in 2022:

Do you prefer to take notes on paper or digitally?

I tried to summarise the text on the left digitally, but returned to paper after two pages 📝

Vegan chai tea pear milkshake by @/ choartemi

IG: littlefoxjournal

96 notes - Posted April 7, 2022

24/01/2022 • I started making smoothie bowls in the first lockdown, but forgot about them when life got hectic again. I wanted a good start of the week because I have an exam assignment deadline on Friday and I have to plan a lot for my internship in the following weeks 🤞🏻

✨use my code LITTLEFOX @ A&me ✨

100 notes - Posted January 24, 2022

29/10/22 • Followed a lecture on using digital media in education & they said it’s better to read academic articles on paper so that’s what I’m doing for master’s thesis number 2, although I miss just having to touch the screen to see how many pages are left

227 notes - Posted October 29, 2022

Creating a cafe at home atmosphere with vanilla chai & vegan tiramisu

- handed in all my lesson plans, now I only need to write some evaluations about the different parts of the internship and then I’m done for this year! 👩🏼‍🏫

236 notes - Posted May 26, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

25/07/2022 - last year we had to study 8 out of 11 modules. For next year we have to know them all, so I decided to start summarizing the other three during the summer break ☕️

Ft. A Lotus S’more Cookie from Nebokgom on YouTube, a recipe I wanted to try for ages!

587 notes - Posted July 25, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#tumblr2022 #year in review #my 2022 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review #How cool is this!#Long post

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welcometomy20s · 2 years

Text

August 3, 2022

#543 - Don't Kill the Love Song (PinocchioP) [Hatsune Miku]

Achievement Date: 20-01-01, Upload Date: 12-04-22

The intro shout sounds like 90’s ska, but without any brass, so more like a working march. It also has a manbo-p feel, both in the structure and kind of the open-ending feeling of the lyrics. Just don’t kill the love song, indeed.

#544 - Spinning Sky Rabbit (Orangestar) [Hatsune Miku]

Achievement Date: 20-01-02, Upload Date: 16-11-14

Orangestar did some Miku songs in the interim, this song got a bump in TikTok in 2021. Very different from the wide open sky-like feel of most Orangestar songs, this feels like a warm lullaby, although it still has that high pitch sound. A new classic.

#U-6 - Cynic (Police Piccadilly) [Yamine Renri]

Achievement Date: 20-01-13, Upload Date: 16-04-19

We have a Renri song with a Police Piccadilly slickness. Renri is not as versatile as Teto, but it has kind of a TikTok utaite feel so it’s good for more breezy songs like this. Yeah, you can’t really go wrong with Police Piccadilly, honestly.

#545 - Unfinished Time Limiter (Orangestar) [IA]

Achievement Date: 20-01-13, Upload Date: 14-02-01

First collaborations with M.B., and the arrival of the Orangestar that we know today. Feeling gratitude for the open sky as the world around her is filled with questions. Something I can relate to and also something that really fits Orangestar’s M.O.

#546 - Scramble Kousai (DECO*27) [Hatsune Miku]

Achievement Date: 20-01-15 , Upload Date: 19-03-22

I like the animation style, kind of like Heart a la Mode. The song is your typical spite-filled angst song, which at this point kind of feels tiring. I love the self-reference there. I just love how DECO*27 makes lore with his own song, not the only one I know.

#C-3 - Onegai Darling (Nanahoshi Orchestra) [ONE]

Achievement Date: 20-01-16, Upload Date: 15-04-24

I think most don’t know this is a VOCARO song, let alone a CeVIO song. It definitely feels like an insert song to some anime somewhere, but no, the title references the singer right at the beginning. Kind of an early version of S’il vous President. I think this song slaps, but there’s a lot of people who really dislike this song, so… eh. A good point I forgot is the combination of talk and song banks which was the selling point.

#547 - Morning Glow, Your Song. (Nanou) [Hatsune Miku]

Achievement Date: 20-01-20, Upload Date: 09-02-17

Very much follows the vein of early rock ballads like Dear or Time Machine, not that it’s bad. I think I’m most surprised by the variation of songs Nanou can create from dark to light to sad to bittersweet. This versatility kind of hides some of the gems.

#548 - Almost Full Moon (Nakamura) [Yuzuki Yukari]

Achievement Date: 20-01-25, Upload Date: 18-09-22

We have a Yukari song with an odd time signature, with the logo done by GYARI of all people. I think I only remember ‘flying through the night’, and I don’t know why. But it’s a good post-jazz composition and Yukari doesn’t sound too bad here.

#549 - Near (Natsushiro Takaaki) [Hatsune Miku]

Achievement Date: 20-01-25, Upload Date: 17-06-29

I adore this song. I just love the story of the android and the twist at the end is great. And I think this showcases Natsushiro Takaaki’s talent in showing a story through its music. The whole composition is beautiful and it’s one of my favorites.

#550 - Ranshou Seimei (Orangestar) [IA]

Achievement Date: 20-01-26, Upload Date: 15-08-29

A bit underrated Orangestar song, but still loved. The song is about someone who lost someone and then gets freaking isekai-ed. The title means the beginning of all things, by the way. Yeah, I think, one of the directly emotional songs from him.

#551 - Hana Furashi (n-buna) [Hatsune Miku]

Achievement Date: 20-01-27, Upload Date: 16-05-07

Based on Anderson’s ‘Red Shoes’, you probably know the famous movie version. Most don’t know it’s a Miku song? It sounds like n-buna Miku to me.

#vocaloid #review #music

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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Private equity health-care monopolies are on a profitable killing spree

It’s not just you. US healthcare, already a bureaucratic nightmare of buck-passing and price-gouging, has gotten far worse. Private equity firms have created regional health-care monopolies that don’t just rip patients off — they’re killing us.

Private equity is a scam. Fund managers raise gigantic sums by claiming to be able to “beat the market.” In reality, they do worse for their investors than a boring old index fund:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/25/pluralistic-your-daily-link-dose-25-feb-2020/#extraordinaryclaims

The fund managers don’t have to beat the market in order to make bank. They can take advantage of the “carried interest” loophole, which has nothing to do with interest rates — it’s a tax system that was invented for 16th century sea-captains (no, really):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest

PE dresses up its playbook in all kinds of bullshit, but it’s a smokescreen. At core, PE funds buy companies, merge them to monopoly, slash wages, fire staff, load up their businesses with debt, and then skedaddle before the businesses collapse. They call this “creating value”:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/24/software-is-cake-too/#looters

This playbook guarantees that everything PE touches will turn to shit. PE is a parasite that preys on weak industries and makes them even more dysfunctional. Think of how PE has cornered regional rental housing markets and then turned every rental in town into a slum:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/08/wall-street-landlords/#the-new-slumlords

Most of us didn’t really think about rail-freight until last winter, when the whole system nearly collapsed. Again, the bloody handprints of PE are all over that crisis:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/04/up-your-nose/#rail-barons

The pandemic put a lot of businesses into a precarious state, and PE swooped in, buying up distressed businesses at scale and putting them into a death-spiral:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/30/medtronic-stole-your-ventilator/#blackstone-kkr

This acquisition was fueled by Trump’s corporate covid bailout and the trillions in public money that the GOP made available to corporate borrowers (remember, PE thrives on debt):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/17/divi-recaps/#graebers-ghost

Of all the sick industries in America, healthcare is the sickest, and it’s the domain where PE has done the most damage. PE stripped healthcare systems to the bone, removing all excess capacity and exhausting and demoralizing healthcare workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#looted

They bought up emergency rooms, turned them into scam factories that hit every unfortunate person who stepped foot in them with thousands in “surprise billing” fees. Then they cut doctors’ pay and spent millions on ads to block anti-surprise billing legislation:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all-in-it-together/#doctor-patient-unity

The ER scam was and is wild. Some hospitals lock all their doors except for the ER doors, and then they’d hit you for “emergency care” when you went through the ER on your way to receiving normal, non-emergency procedures:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/14/unhealthy-finances/#steins-law

The damage wasn’t limited to emergency rooms. Whole hospitals — whole hospital systems — were crashed by PE looters, and many of these got emergency government bailouts, because…free market?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/01/the-years-of-repair/#mass-murder

PE has bought its way into every corner of the health-care system, and made every bad thing, much, much worse. You know how “bad nursing home” are three of the scariest words in the English language? Try on “bad private equity owned nursing home” for size. The death toll is massive:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#disposable-olds

Biden’s SEC chair Gary Gensler has made the most decisive anti-PE moves in decades, requiring disclosures that will help investors (especially union pension funds) pierce the veil of bullshit that brings in the billions that PE fashions into weapons of financial mass destruction:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/10/monopoly-begets-monopoly/#gary-gensler

But the wheels of justice grind slow, and PE has trillions to fuel its race to suck every bit of value out of the health-care system before the party comes to an end.

In “Sick Profit: Investigating Private Equity’s Stealthy Takeover of Health Care Across Cities and Specialties,” Kaiser Health News’s Fred Schulte reveals the plan of attack:

https://khn.org/news/article/private-equity-takeover-health-care-cities-specialties/

In 2021, PE firms bought 1,400 health care companies, spending $206b (the total since 2012 is more than $1t). They’ve cornered regional markets for eye care, dental care, family practices, hospices, and pet care. We’ve had a year to see how that played out, and it’s not pretty.

Since 2014, PE companies have paid out $500m in fines for falsifying health care billings to the US government, but a fine is a price, and the fines have been absorbed into PE’s business plans as part of the cost of operations.

Once a PE firm buys up all the specialists in a region, things get very bad. Take San Antonio, where nearly all the gastroenterology clinics have been bought up by PE firms, and where routine colonoscopies now cost patients thousands more than they paid before:

https://khn.org/news/article/private-equity-gastroenterologist-colonoscopy/

While there are plenty of illegal ways that PE companies extract value from their acquisitions, the legal tactics are pretty ugly all on their own, like cutting staff and replacing them with less skilled, less trained, cheaper workers, putting patients at risk.

This is particularly worrying when you consider how heavily PE companies invest in practices that treat people who are vulnerable and struggle to advocate for themselves, such as behavioral health specialists who treat autism, addiction and mental illness.

Whether or not you can escape PE depends a lot on where you live. PE only owns 12% of the nation’s anesthesiology practices, but those practices are concentrated in five states, where more than two thirds of anesthesiologists are PE owned.

When PE takes over your health care, billings go way up. The average PE-treated patient generates $71 more per claim, and is 9% more likely to experience “lengthy, more costly” care:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullarticle/2795946

Doctors who sell their practices to PE companies are lured in with promises of administrative relief from experts who’ll handle billing, scheduling and compliance. But PE firms exercise fine-grained control over these doctors, violating rules that say medical practices must be run by MDs.

Take National Spine, a PE-backed chain owned by Sentinel Capital Partners that bought up 40+ pain-management clinics across the country. Doctors saw their caseload explode from 16 patients/day to 25. Medicare billings also exploded, with “unnecessary and often worthless” back braces being charged at up to $1,100 each. Patients were given $1,800 “medically unnecessary and often worthless” urine tests. National settled these claims for $3.3m in April 2019, without admitting guilt.

RLH Equity Partners’s pharmacies bilked the military health insurer Tricare out of $68m through a system of kickbacks and telemarketer sales. RLH settled the case for $21m and blamed it on a few corrupt “individuals.”

Most of the time, fraud claims are settled by the companies that the PE funds owe, while the PE funds themselves get off scot-free. That leaves the funds free to re-offend, and to further push the limits on patient endangerment.

One of the grisliest parts of this tale is in the realm of children’s dentistry. PE firms have bought up these practices and turned them into high-volume Medicare-fraud assembly lines that perform rushed, unnecessary major procedures on poor kids and bill the government a fortune for them.

These include baby root canals and crowns, and the PE-backed dental chains set quotas for their staff, requiring them to perform a certain number of major procedures on each patient. One particularly horrifying case recounted by the KHN article is that of two-year old Zion Gastelum, who died following major dental surgery.

Gastelum received six root canals and crowns on his baby teeth at a PE-owned Kool Smiles clinic in Yuma, AZ. The oxygen bottle used during his surgery “was empty or not operating properly” and the staff who oversaw the procedure were undertrained and didn’t notice. He never regained consciousness, and died of brain injuries days later.

Kool Smiles’s owners paid $24m to settle a DoJ overbilling claim less than a month later. The settlement alleged that Kool Smiles performed unnecessary procedures, including baby root canals. Kool Smiles denied that they were responsible for Gastelum’s death.

More than 90% of PE acquisitions fall below the $101m threshold for antitrust review, so they fly under the radar. Once the mergers are complete, they are very hard to unwind. The FTC is working its way through hundreds of comments from doctors or other health care workers asking for tighter scrutiny of health-care mergers.

The Healthcare Private Equity Association boasts that its members are poised to spend more than $3t to create “the future of healthcare.”

https://hcpea.org/#!event-list

Image: Rae Allen (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/raeallen/6224775722/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Videoplasty (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Patient_Care_Cartoon.svg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A hospital Emergency Room parking lot. In the center of the image stands an ogrish, top-hatted, cigar-chomping capitalist caricature. He is standing at a podium, yanking a lever made from a golden dollar-sign. The front of the podium bears a red cross. He holds aloft an elderly man in a hospital bed.]

#pluralistic

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moqi2004 · 2 years

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Moqi's Creations (outdated)

UPDATED MASTERLIST

ORSTERRA'S TAVERN DISCORD SERVER!

A fan created space for the Octopath Traveler series (INVITES CURRENTLY CLOSED)

Fanfiction

Frostlands Trek (1/1) - Octopath Traveller - Cyrus Albright & Ophilia Clement (25/12/2023)

The Forest's Strings (1/1) - Super Mario RPG - Geno/Mario (09/12/2023)

A Star's Impact (1/1) - Super Mario RPG - General (28/11/2023)

Rainclouds over Starry Skies (1/1) - Super Mario RPG - General (26/11/2023)

The Time to Grieve (1/1) - Octopath Traveler ii - Temenos Mistral & The Travelers (17/03/2023)

Innovation's Compassion (1/1)- Genshin Impact - Albedo/Sucrose (22/02/2023)

Sugary Sweet (1/1) - Octopath Traveler COTC - Theo/Millard (03/10/2022)

Quest for the Heart (1/1) - Bad End Theater - The Hero/The Underling + background Maiden/Overlord (20/08/2022)

Take Aim Towards the Past to Secure the Future (2/2) - Octopath Traveler & Enter the Gungeon - General (02/08/2022)

Across the Blazing Winds to the Land of Freedom (1/1) - Genshin Impact - Kaedehara Kazuha & Xinyan (18/07/2022)

The Journal of One Tressa Colzione (10/?) - Octopath Traveler - Ali/Tressa Colzione/Noa Wyndham + background ships (06/07/2022)

Promises (1/1) - Genshin Impact - Chongyun/Xingqiu (08/05/2021)

Albedo's Picture Perfect Painting Opportunity (1/1) - Genshin Impact - Albedo/Sucrose (15/03/2021)

What is Freedom? (1/1) - Genshin Impact - Xiao/Venti (13/02/2021)

Persona Christmas Chronicles (2/?) - Persona Series - Multiship (09/12/2020)

Be My Valenslime (1/1) - Persona 4 - Kanji Tatsumi/Naoto Shirogane (04/12/2020)

Incorrect Quote Collections

Octopath Traveler - 1 / 2 / 3

Bad End Theater - 1

Octopath Traveler OCs

Overview Post

OC Height Chart

Ortensia the Apothecary

Chrysanthemum the Cleric

Trip the Merchant

Opie the Hunter

Miscellaneous

SpyxFamily Damian Desmond & Anya Forger meme

13 Sentinels Takatoshi Hijiama & Tsukasa Okino meme

Triangle Strategy Narve & Serenoa vine quote

Cookie Run Roguefort & Almond vine quote

Loid Forger, Miyuki Shirogane & Hunter The Golden Guard meme

Genshin Impact OC Faith

#octopath traveler #genshin impact #enter the gungeon #persona series #persona 4 #bad end theater #spyxfamily #cookie run #triangle strategy #13 sentinels: aegis rim #creation collection #kaguya sama love is war #the owl house #octopath traveler champions of the continent #octopath traveler ii #super mario rpg

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dinlukedyke · 2 years

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I posted 14,044 times in 2021

19 posts created (0%)

14025 posts reblogged (100%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 738.2 posts.

I added 25 tags in 2021

#oh my god - 4 posts

#the mandalorian - 4 posts

#leverage - 3 posts

#maam - 2 posts

#this - 2 posts

#derry girls - 2 posts

#din djarin - 2 posts

#im so mad about how attractive he is - 2 posts

#fuck im gay - 2 posts

#but holy fuck - 2 posts

Longest Tag: 122 characters

#i feel like this doesn't take into account the eldest daughter phenomenon. less murder more i am the boss shut the fuck up

My Top Posts in 2021

Hello friends! You may or may not be aware but my mom and I are trying to get our restaurant/cafe started. We have been dependent on my brother ever since the three of us left an abusive situation last November. This business would finally give us the means to financially support ourselves, which we haven’t been able to do since the pandemic shut down the bazaars where we used to sell our baked goods.

We are currently 70,000 pesos in debt and very nearly out of cash. My bank account is about to fall below maintaining balance. Please, please help us out via my ko-fi link. Every peso counts at this point.

6 notes • Posted 2021-01-30 14:31:08 GMT

list 15 songs you’ve been absolutely vibin to recently :3

@nicolodigenovas tagged me!

Lost In Love by Air Supply

it's a Book of Nile song, fight me

I Wanna Be the One by Coby Grant

Fell in love with the song the moment I fell in love with the Hartenstraat soundtrack.

Underneath Your Clothes by Shakira

Does Your Mother Know, from the Mamma Mia movie soundtrack

Everything about this is just. Vibing.

Farewell Wanderlust by The Amazing Devil

Everything by TAD is brilliant, this is just where my mind's been recently.

Dead of Night by Orville Peck

Wellerman as sung by The Longest Johns

Two Less Lonely People In The World by Air Supply

similarly, this is 10000000% a Kaysanova song

Chocolate by The 1975

No Place in Heaven by MIKA

This song? My feelings. So much.

Cassandra by ABBA

No Tengo Dinero by Righeiro

Again, I blame the Hartenstraat soundtrack.

9 to 5 by Dolly Parton

Strange Magic from the Strange Magic soundtrack

Look. I l o v e this movie. This is one of the finest songs from that wonderful movie.

Manila by Hotdog

Tagging: @dougiehamsandwich @savebyandersen @eufry @tomboyluce @theairbomb142 @confringo-

7 notes • Posted 2021-02-01 11:07:47 GMT

whoever made the costumes for The Mandalorian did my babe Ahsoka so dirty like wHERE are her magnificent montrals? Her lovely long lekku? Her stripy parts look like a teenager's

11 notes • Posted 2021-06-02 16:44:22 GMT

ya gal is finally watching We Are Lady Parts

I knew i would fall in love with Saira from the get go but DAMN DID I FALL IN LOVE WITH SAIRA FROM THE GET GO

14 notes • Posted 2021-07-09 16:40:40 GMT

Boba: The rules are clear, no allegiances

Fennec:

Boba: OK I will make an exception because he looks very polite

81 notes • Posted 2021-06-02 14:10:14 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

#my 2021 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review

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chrisryanspeaks · 23 hours

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Crumb Unveils New Single “The Bug” and Announces North American Tour!

Following last month's announcement of their new album AMAMA, Crumb has unveiled a fresh preview with the single "The Bug." Along with the new track, the band has released an engaging and playful music video directed by Haoyan of America. Additionally, Crumb has announced a headline North American tour starting in mid-July. The tour will cover 30 cities, including stops in Chicago, Austin, Boston, Los Angeles, and a hometown concert in Brooklyn. L’Rain, Vagabon, and Discovery Zone will join Crumb on select dates. The full tour schedule is available below, with tickets going on sale this Friday, April 26th, at 10 AM local time. Discussing the new single, Lila Ramani of Crumb explains: "‘The Bug’ has been part of our musical journey since the early days, before the Jinx era. It started in a motel in Nebraska where I woke up covered in bed bug bites. Unable to sleep, I roamed the motel humming what would eventually form the outro of the song. As we recorded it years later, it gained a deeper, more tender meaning—the 'bug' isn't just an insect; it can be a friend, a lover, or a persistent late-night thought." Check out “The Bug” below: AMAMA represents Crumb’s most carefree and heartfelt work to date, mixing poetic abstraction with introspective honesty and inventive soundscapes. The album showcases Crumb in a dynamic and lively mode, incorporating elements like glitchy vocals, cell phone recordings, nautical sounds, sax mouthpiece solos, distorted drum samples, and piano strings muted with Silly Putty. Set for release on May 17th through Crumb Records, the album includes the title track "AMAMA," a vibrant homage to Lila Ramani's grandmother. This track is further enhanced by a music video directed by Abraham El-Makawy, which blends Lila’s archival home footage with fan-submitted artwork, creating a poignant mosaic of nostalgia. With its blend of psychedelia, pop, jazz, and rock, AMAMA further cements Crumb's distinctive musical identity. The album, produced in Los Angeles with Johnscott Sanford and Jonathan Rado, reflects on themes of stability, connection, and clarity amidst a nomadic life. In 2023, Crumb released the single “Le Temple Volant” with Melody’s Echo Chamber, earning praise from Pitchfork, The FADER, Stereogum, and others. AMAMA continues the narrative arc from their earlier works, including the self-titled EP Crumb, Locket, 2019’s Jinx, and 2021’s Ice Melt, which Rolling Stone described as "a captivating trek to the metaphysical and back down to Earth.” Upcoming Tour Dates * with L'Rain and Discovery Zone ^ with Vagabon 7/18 - Des Moines, IA @ Wooly's 7/19 - Minneapolis, MN @ Varsity Theater 7/21 - Chicago, IL @ Pitchfork Music Festival 8/20 - Philadelphia, PA @ Brooklyn Bowl * 8/21 - Silver Spring, MD @ The Fillmore Silver Spring * 8/23 - Richmond, Virginia @ The National * 8/24 - Charlotte, NC @ The Underground * 8/25 - Atlanta, GA @ Buckhead Theatre * 8/27 - Nashville, TN @ Brooklyn Bowl * 8/28 - Indianapolis, IN @ Deluxe * 8/30 - Detroit, MI @ Saint Andrew's Hall * 8/31 - Toronto, ON @ The Concert Hall * 9/01 - Montreal, QC @ Théâtre Beanfield * 9/04 - Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Paramount * 9/05 - New Haven, CT @ Toad's Place * 9/06 - Boston, MA @ Roadrunner * 10/03 - Santa Cruz, CA @ The Catalyst ^ 10/04 - Oakland, CA @ Fox Theater ^ 10/05 - Sacramento, CA @ Ace of Spades ^ 10/07 - Salt Lake City, UT @ The Depot ^ 10/09 - Denver, CO @ The Mission Ballroom ^ 10/11 - Dallas, TX @ Ferris Wheelers ^ 10/12 - Houston, TX @ White Oak Music Hall ^ 10/13 - San Antonio, TX @ Aztec Theatre ^ 10/15 - Austin, TX @ Emo's ^ 10/17 - Albuquerque, NM @ El Rey Theater ^ 10/18 - El Paso, TX @ Lowbrow Palace ^ 10/21 - Santa Ana, CA @ Observatory OC ^ 10/22 - San Diego, CA @ Observatory North Park ^ 10/23 - Los Angeles, CA @ The Wiltern ^ Read the full article

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