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kp777 · 10 months

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By Jake Johnson

Common Dreams

July 5, 2023

The trillions of dollars in public subsidies that governments around the world hand to the fossil fuel industry each year are facing growing scrutiny from lawmakers and climate campaigners as heatwaves across the planet push global temperatures into uncharted territory.

Environmentalist Annie Leonard, the former executive director of Greenpeace USA, called on members of the U.S. Congress to reject public subsidies for the oil and gas industry in the must-pass annual budget package, a sweeping measure that typically includes billions in tax incentives and other handouts that encourage production and consumption of planet-warming fossil fuels.

"Stop giving our money to the corporations cooking the planet," Leonard wrote on Twitter Tuesday, urging Americans to contact and pressure their representatives.

The International Monetary Fund estimates that world governments dished out nearly $6 trillion in total fossil fuel subsidies in 2020—around $11 million per minute—and that such giveaways are expected to grow in the coming years without significant reforms.

Last year, according to the International Energy Agency, fossil fuel consumption subsidies alone rose to more than $1 trillion worldwide—a surge fueled in part by the energy market chaos caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. While such subsidies were aimed at shielding consumers from high gas prices, they had the "adverse effect of keeping fossil fuels artificially competitive with low-emissions alternatives," IEA said.

The same year that subsidies skyrocketed to record levels, the global fossil fuel industry raked in a staggering $4 trillion in profits, the IEA found.

"Big Oil companies are boosting profits and shareholder distribution while our climate suffers," U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said last month.

In late 2021, 197 countries including the U.S. and Canada signed a climate pact that contains a pledge to phase out "inefficient fossil fuel subsidies." But as Emily Atkin and Arielle Samuelson wrote in the HEATED newsletter earlier this year, that promise turned out to be "meaningless" given the subsequent rise in oil and gas subsidies.

"This is why climate promises never come to pass," Atkin and Samuelson argued. "The polluters' pocketbooks are government-lined."

Amid a catastrophic wildfire season that has blanketed large swaths of the U.S. with toxic smoke, the Canadian government is reportedly expected to release a policy this month aimed at cutting off "inefficient fossil fuel subsidies," echoing the language of the Glasgow climate pact.

But advocates raised concerns about how the policy will define "inefficient." As the CBC's Benjamin Shingler reported last week, climate campaigners say "subsidies should only be considered 'efficient'—and therefore an acceptable form of government funding—if they align with Canada's Paris agreement goals."

"That means subsidies shouldn't support new or updated fossil fuel infrastructure, or delay the transition to renewables, according to signatories of the letter to [Canadian Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau last month," Shingler added.

Trudeau and other world leaders will have a major opportunity to finally take concrete, coordinated action to end fossil fuel subsidies at COP28 in late November—but that would mean confronting an industry that will have a significant presence at the critical summit in the United Arab Emirates.

Chido Muzondo, a policy adviser at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, wrote last month that governments at COP28 must do more than pay "lip service to the existing pledges—made in the Paris Agreement Article 2.c.1 and in the Glasgow statement—to stop subsidizing fossil fuels."

"This decade is decisive in our fight against global warming, and time is limited to align our actions with the measures needed to avoid the worst effects of climate change," Muzondo wrote. "Fossil fuel subsidies stand out as some of the most harmful policies hindering our efforts to tackle climate change."

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pastlight · 4 months

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i'd truly love to read if there's some sort of like. sociology study on not just de decline of the middle class, but what people are willing to consider middle class. and i don't mean just in the USA.

i just watched a clip of a newscaster/commentator from my country talking about all the "small" sacrifices people will have to make in the upcoming crisis, and she told the anecdote of a middle class family considering doing "one big meal a day" for the kids. and like, even if that anecdote is real, even leaving aside the pure evil of that segment equating cancelling your netflix subscription to eating once a day, trying to normalize this... in what universe is that middle class. how do you say that and not immediately implode.

and worse of all, im sure there were people watching and nodding along.

idk Marx probably predicted it or smth but there's something fascinating about how people will cling to the label of "middle class" in the modern economic climate when upwards mobility feels progressively less attainable. how do we redefine a luxury year after year. how much are you willing to give up for your pride, to the point when your only hope month after month is "not starve and pay rent" but you have a big tv bought with your hard earned cash! so you still believe you're a step away from living comfortably like your parents did.

#im not smart enough to make a good conclusion to this post #im just. so tired.#people who use the rising poverty statistics to complain about the government (understandable)#but will immediately turn around and blame those same people for all the problems in the country #look at the person earning half as much as you and call them lazy #ignore that you don't own a house. you don't own a car. you won't be able to pay public transport or utilities without government subsidies #you're middle class goddamnit! you're an honorable worker! you're better than ''the poor''!#pas post

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asgardian--angels · 1 year

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keeping honeybee hives as a way to ‘save the bees’ is the equivalent of claiming factory farmed chickens are somehow stopping greater prairie chickens from going extinct lmao

#wanna know one of the worst takes I've seen by beekeepers lobbying the government?#putting honeybee hives in national parks #to help bee populations #anyway no offense to beekeepers out there who do what they do as a small business etc etc #but the beekeeping industry actively works to shift focus away from wild pollinator conservation onto honeybees #they have a lot of weight and money to throw around and they use it to influence federal and state policy #the relationship between native pollinator biologists and beekeepers is like that of wildlife biologists and hunters #we should be working together to address common issues that affect all these species. and occasionally we do. some of us are both #but way more frequently than necessary we have to walk on eggshells around you because if we upset you you'll rain hell upon us #i speak from experience as both a pollinator ecologist and a wildlife biologist and lemme tell you it's a drag #as long as you have government subsidy on your side you're invincible #remember kids we only rely on honeybees for so much pollination because we destroyed the habitat of native pollinators on farmland #despite this native pollinators account for a not insignificant portion of pollination but it's not widely publicized #it's estimated that if we provide native habitat free from pesticides then we can reduce reliance on honeybees significantly #enough that for some crops we wouldn't need them at all #galaxy brained athena take here: the next big thing will be 'wild pollinator certified' foods

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binary5tar · 13 days

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Sometimes I remember my views on us public education is so vastly different than most liberals 😅😅😅

#im sorry i hatw teachers unions as much as police unions🤷🏻#like... i support public education in theory but it needs so much overhaul #so if people want subsidies to send thwir kind to a private or charter school....#its really hard to fault them fornwanting whats best for their kids #cuz public school in some places seems barely better than prison #and yes teachers are PART of the problem #them pushing for continued school closures when it was unlikely to make the spread worse and was only hurting students proves that

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newsspire · 3 months

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#galaxy s24 public subsidy of 500

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mexicanistnet · 4 months

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Ditching cars for efficient public transport can save Mexicans money and emissions. The study says current car dependence burdens the poorest and pollutes cities. Investing in modernized public transit and reducing fuel subsidies could be key to a sustainable future for Mexico.

#Ditching cars #efficient public transport #public transport #emissions #car dependence #modernized public transit #public transit #reducing fuel subsidies #fuel subsidies #sustainable future

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mostlysignssomeportents · 9 months

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Tesla's Dieselgate

Elon Musk lies a lot. He lies about being a “utopian socialist.” He lies about being a “free speech absolutist.” He lies about which companies he founded:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2 He lies about being the “chief engineer” of those companies:

https://www.quora.com/Was-Elon-Musk-the-actual-engineer-behind-SpaceX-and-Tesla

He lies about really stupid stuff, like claiming that comsats that share the same spectrum will deliver steady broadband speeds as they add more users who each get a narrower slice of that spectrum:

https://www.eff.org/wp/case-fiber-home-today-why-fiber-superior-medium-21st-century-broadband

The fundamental laws of physics don’t care about this bullshit, but people do. The comsat lie convinced a bunch of people that pulling fiber to all our homes is literally impossible — as though the electrical and phone lines that come to our homes now were installed by an ancient, lost civilization. Pulling new cabling isn’t a mysterious art, like embalming pharaohs. We do it all the time. One of the poorest places in America installed universal fiber with a mule named “Ole Bub”:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

Previous tech barons had “reality distortion fields,” but Musk just blithely contradicts himself and pretends he isn’t doing so, like a budget Steve Jobs. There’s an entire site devoted to cataloging Musk’s public lies:

https://elonmusk.today/

But while Musk lacks the charm of earlier Silicon Valley grifters, he’s much better than they ever were at running a long con. For years, he’s been promising “full self driving…next year.”

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

He’s hasn’t delivered, but he keeps claiming he has, making Teslas some of the deadliest cars on the road:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-autopilot-crashes-elon-musk/

Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn’t its cars, it’s Tesla’s business arrangement, the Tesla-Financial Complex:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

Once you start unpacking Tesla’s balance sheets, you start to realize how much the company depends on government subsidies and tax-breaks, combined with selling carbon credits that make huge, planet-destroying SUVs possible, under the pretense that this is somehow good for the environment:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

But even with all those financial shenanigans, Tesla’s got an absurdly high valuation, soaring at times to 1600x its profitability:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#intangibles

That valuation represents a bet on Tesla’s ability to extract ever-higher rents from its customers. Take Tesla’s batteries: you pay for the battery when you buy your car, but you don’t own that battery. You have to rent the right to use its full capacity, with Tesla reserving the right to reduce how far you go on a charge based on your willingness to pay:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/10/teslas-demon-haunted-cars-in-irmas-path-get-a-temporary-battery-life-boost/

That’s just one of the many rent-a-features that Tesla drivers have to shell out for. You don’t own your car at all: when you sell it as a used vehicle, Tesla strips out these features you paid for and makes the next driver pay again, reducing the value of your used car and transfering it to Tesla’s shareholders:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-autopilot-disabled-remotely-used-car-update

To maintain this rent-extraction racket, Tesla uses DRM that makes it a felony to alter your own car’s software without Tesla’s permission. This is the root of all autoenshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

This is technofeudalism. Whereas capitalists seek profits (income from selling things), feudalists seek rents (income from owning the things other people use). If Telsa were a capitalist enterprise, then entrepreneurs could enter the market and sell mods that let you unlock the functionality in your own car:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/11/1-in-3/#boost-50

But because Tesla is a feudal enterprise, capitalists must first secure permission from the fief, Elon Musk, who decides which companies are allowed to compete with him, and how.

Once a company owns the right to decide which software you can run, there’s no limit to the ways it can extract rent from you. Blocking you from changing your device’s software lets a company run overt scams on you. For example, they can block you from getting your car independently repaired with third-party parts.

But they can also screw you in sneaky ways. Once a device has DRM on it, Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to bypass that DRM, even for legitimate purposes. That means that your DRM-locked device can spy on you, and because no one is allowed to explore how that surveillance works, the manufacturer can be incredibly sloppy with all the personal info they gather:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/tesla-model-3-keeps-data-like-crash-videos-location-phone-contacts.html

All kinds of hidden anti-features can lurk in your DRM-locked car, protected from discovery, analysis and criticism by the illegality of bypassing the DRM. For example, Teslas have a hidden feature that lets them lock out their owners and summon a repo man to drive them away if you have a dispute about a late payment:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

DRM is a gun on the mantlepiece in Act I, and by Act III, it goes off, revealing some kind of ugly and often dangerous scam. Remember Dieselgate? Volkswagen created a line of demon-haunted cars: if they thought they were being scrutinized (by regulators measuring their emissions), they switched into a mode that traded performance for low emissions. But when they believed themselves to be unobserved, they reversed this, emitting deadly levels of NOX but delivering superior mileage.

The conversion of the VW diesel fleet into mobile gas-chambers wouldn’t have been possible without DRM. DRM adds a layer of serious criminal jeopardy to anyone attempting to reverse-engineer and study any device, from a phone to a car. DRM let Apple claim to be a champion of its users’ privacy even as it spied on them from asshole to appetite:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Now, Tesla is having its own Dieselgate scandal. A stunning investigation by Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu for Reuters reveals how Tesla was able to create its own demon-haunted car, which systematically deceived drivers about its driving range, and the increasingly desperate measures the company turned to as customers discovered the ruse:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-batteries-range/

The root of the deception is very simple: Tesla mis-sells its cars by falsely claiming ranges that those cars can’t attain. Every person who ever bought a Tesla was defrauded.

But this fraud would be easy to detect. If you bought a Tesla rated for 353 miles on a charge, but the dashboard range predictor told you that your fully charged car could only go 150 miles, you’d immediately figure something was up. So your Telsa tells another lie: the range predictor tells you that you can go 353 miles.

But again, if the car continued to tell you it has 203 miles of range when it was about to run out of charge, you’d figure something was up pretty quick — like, the first time your car ran out of battery while the dashboard cheerily informed you that you had 203 miles of range left.

So Teslas tell a third lie: when the battery charge reached about 50%, the fake range is replaced with the real one. That way, drivers aren’t getting mass-stranded by the roadside, and the scam can continue.

But there’s a new problem: drivers whose cars are rated for 353 miles but can’t go anything like that far on a full charge naturally assume that something is wrong with their cars, so they start calling Tesla service and asking to have the car checked over.

This creates a problem for Tesla: those service calls can cost the company $1,000, and of course, there’s nothing wrong with the car. It’s performing exactly as designed. So Tesla created its boldest fraud yet: a boiler-room full of anti-salespeople charged with convincing people that their cars weren’t broken.

This new unit — the “diversion team” — was headquartered in a Nevada satellite office, which was equipped with a metal xylophone that would be rung in triumph every time a Tesla owner was successfully conned into thinking that their car wasn’t defrauding them.

When a Tesla owner called this boiler room, the diverter would run remote diagnostics on their car, then pronounce it fine, and chide the driver for having energy-hungry driving habits (shades of Steve Jobs’s “You’re holding it wrong”):

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

The drivers who called the Diversion Team weren’t just lied to, they were also punished. The Tesla app was silently altered so that anyone who filed a complaint about their car’s range was no longer able to book a service appointment for any reason. If their car malfunctioned, they’d have to request a callback, which could take several days.

Meanwhile, the diverters on the diversion team were instructed not to inform drivers if the remote diagnostics they performed detected any other defects in the cars.

The diversion team had a 750 complaint/week quota: to juke this stat, diverters would close the case for any driver who failed to answer the phone when they were eventually called back. The center received 2,000+ calls every week. Diverters were ordered to keep calls to five minutes or less.

Eventually, diverters were ordered to cease performing any remote diagnostics on drivers’ cars: a source told Reuters that “Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car” without any diagnostics being performed.

Predicting EV range is an inexact science as many factors can affect battery life, notably whether a journey is uphill or downhill. Every EV automaker has to come up with a figure that represents some kind of best guess under a mix of conditions. But while other manufacturers err on the side of caution, Tesla has the most inaccurate mileage estimates in the industry, double the industry average.

Other countries’ regulators have taken note. In Korea, Tesla was fined millions and Elon Musk was personally required to state that he had deceived Tesla buyers. The Korean regulator found that the true range of Teslas under normal winter conditions was less than half of the claimed range.

Now, many companies have been run by malignant narcissists who lied compulsively — think of Thomas Edison, archnemesis of Nikola Tesla himself. The difference here isn’t merely that Musk is a deeply unfit monster of a human being — but rather, that DRM allows him to defraud his customers behind a state-enforced opaque veil. The digital computers at the heart of a Tesla aren’t just demons haunting the car, changing its performance based on whether it believes it is being observed — they also allow Musk to invoke the power of the US government to felonize anyone who tries to peer into the black box where he commits his frauds.

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/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

This Sunday (July 30) at 1530h, I’m appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning “Ghost Post” Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.

Image ID [A scene out of an 11th century tome on demon-summoning called 'Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros. Anno 1057. Noli me tangere.' It depicts a demon tormenting two unlucky would-be demon-summoners who have dug up a grave in a graveyard. One summoner is held aloft by his hair, screaming; the other screams from inside the grave he is digging up. The scene has been altered to remove the demon's prominent, urinating penis, to add in a Tesla supercharger, and a red Tesla Model S nosing into the scene.]

Image: Steve Jurvetson (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_Model_S_Indoors.jpg

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

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amtrak-official · 3 months

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A bill has been proposed by Georgia Congressman Hank Johnson to have the federal government increase subsidies of Public transit by 80 billion dollars in major US cities to help systems recover from the post Covid decline in service and ridership. Allowing for an increase in frequency, and additional funding for passes for low income residents. The bill is called the Stronger Communities Through Better Transit Act

#train news #us politics #public transportation

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notayesmanseconomics · 1 year

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The UK Public Finances are counting the cost of the energy crisis

This morning has brought us up to date on how much the UK borrowed in the last fiscal year ( until March). PSNB ex in the financial year ending (FYE) March 2023 was initially estimated at £139.2 billion (or 5.5% of gross domestic product (GDP)), £18.1 billion more than in the FYE March 2022 and the fourth-highest FY borrowing since records began in 1946. The main factor in play here was the…

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#Bank of England #business #Debt Interest #economy #Energy Costs #energy subsidies #Finance #Government Expenditure #Public Sector Net Worth #student loans #Tax Receipts #UK Public Finances

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ryandjaxon · 1 year

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I’m inspired to grow my own fresh romaine lettuce 🥬 homemade! “As a consequence of Switzerland’s economic isolation in World War II, the government provided significant #subsidies for #Agriculture, including direct #market interventions and price guarantees, to maintain a high level of #domestic #production. Owing to trade-liberalization policies enacted in the 1990s, however, Switzerland has modified its agricultural support system, replacing these policies with direct payments to the farmers as compensation for services in the public interest.” - @brittanica

#public interest #agriculture #subsidies #domestic #local #farming #fresh food #garden #nature #sustainability #swiss #cottage garden

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jakedasnake911 · 1 year

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vimeo

Mass Union For Public Housing Tenants board member Paul Perry

#public housing #massachusetts #housing #subsidies #federal #Vimeo

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determinate-negation · 2 months

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“This raises the question: if industrial production is necessary to meet decent-living standards today, then perhaps capitalism—notwithstanding its negative impact on social indicators over the past five hundred years—is necessary to develop the industrial capacity to meet these higher-order goals. This has been the dominant assumption in development economics for the past half century. But it does not withstand empirical scrutiny. For the majority of the world, capitalism has historically constrained, rather than enabled, technological development—and this dynamic remains a major problem today.

It has long been recognized by liberals and Marxists alike that the rise of capitalism in the core economies was associated with rapid industrial expansion, on a scale with no precedent under feudalism or other precapitalist class structures. What is less widely understood is that this very same system produced the opposite effect in the periphery and semi-periphery. Indeed, the forced integration of peripheral regions into the capitalist world-system during the period circa 1492 to 1914 was characterized by widespread deindustrialization and agrarianization, with countries compelled to specialize in agricultural and other primary commodities, often under “pre-modern” and ostensibly “feudal” conditions.

In Eastern Europe, for instance, the number of people living in cities declined by almost one-third during the seventeenth century, as the region became an agrarian serf-economy exporting cheap grain and timber to Western Europe. At the same time, Spanish and Portuguese colonizers were transforming the American continents into suppliers of precious metals and agricultural goods, with urban manufacturing suppressed by the state. When the capitalist world-system expanded into Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, imports of British cloth and steel destroyed Indigenous textile production and iron smelting, while Africans were instead made to specialize in palm oil, peanuts, and other cheap cash crops produced with enslaved labor. India—once the great manufacturing hub of the world—suffered a similar fate after colonization by Britain in 1757. By 1840, British colonizers boasted that they had “succeeded in converting India from a manufacturing country into a country exporting raw produce.” Much the same story unfolded in China after it was forced to open its domestic economy to capitalist trade during the British invasion of 1839–42. According to historians, the influx of European textiles, soap, and other manufactured goods “destroyed rural handicraft industries in the villages, causing unemployment and hardship for the Chinese peasantry.”

The great deindustrialization of the periphery was achieved in part through policy interventions by the core states, such as through the imposition of colonial prohibitions on manufacturing and through “unequal treaties,” which were intended to destroy industrial competition from Southern producers, establish captive markets for Western industrial output, and position Southern economies as providers of cheap labor and resources. But these dynamics were also reinforced by structural features of profit-oriented markets. Capitalists only employ new technologies to the extent that it is profitable for them to do so. This can present an obstacle to economic development if there is little demand for domestic industrial production (due to low incomes, foreign competition, etc.), or if the costs of innovation are high.

Capitalists in the Global North overcame these problems because the state intervened extensively in the economy by setting high tariffs, providing public subsidies, assuming the costs of research and development, and ensuring adequate consumer demand through government spending. But in the Global South, where state support for industry was foreclosed by centuries of formal and informal colonialism, it has been more profitable for capitalists to export cheap agricultural goods than to invest in high-technology manufacturing. The profitability of new technologies also depends on the cost of labor. In the North, where wages are comparatively high, capitalists have historically found it profitable to employ labor-saving technologies. But in the peripheral economies, where wages have been heavily compressed, it has often been cheaper to use labor-intensive production techniques than to pay for expensive machinery.

Of course, the global division of labor has changed since the late nineteenth century. Many of the leading industries of that time, including textiles, steel, and assembly line processes, have now been outsourced to low-wage peripheral economies like India and China, while the core states have moved to innovation activities, high-technology aerospace and biotech engineering, information technology, and capital-intensive agriculture. Yet still the basic problem remains. Under neoliberal globalization (structural adjustment programs and WTO rules), governments in the periphery are generally precluded from using tariffs, subsidies, and other forms of industrial policy to achieve meaningful development and economic sovereignty, while labor market deregulation and global labor arbitrage have kept wages extremely low. In this context, the drive to maximize profit leads Southern capitalists and foreign investors to pour resources into relatively low-technology export sectors, at the expense of more modern lines of industry.

Moreover, for those parts of the periphery that occupy the lowest rungs in global commodity chains, production continues to be organized along so-called pre-modern lines, even under the new division of labor. In the Congo, for instance, workers are sent into dangerous mineshafts without any modern safety equipment, tunneling deep into the ground with nothing but shovels, often coerced at gunpoint by U.S.-backed militias, so that Microsoft and Apple can secure cheap coltan for their electronics devices. Pre-modern production processes predicated on the “technology” of labor coercion are also found in the cocoa plantations of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, where enslaved children labor in brutal conditions for corporations like Cadbury, or Colombia’s banana export sector, where a hyper-exploited peasantry is kept in line by a regime of rural terror and extrajudicial killings overseen by private death squads.

Uneven global development, including the endurance of ostensibly “feudal” relations of production, is not inevitable. It is an effect of capitalist dynamics. Capitalists in the periphery find it more profitable to employ cheap labor subject to conditions of slavery or other forms of coercion than they do to invest in modern industry.”

Capitalism, Global Poverty, and the Case for Democratic Socialism by Jason Hickle and Dylan Sullivan

#mine #imperialism #capitalism

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fashion-runways · 2 months

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hi!! new pinned post, because the last one had gotten long again-- if you want to read previous posts, here's the first one, here's the second one. the tl;dr from those is that my dad got wrongfully imprisoned abruptly, our place was raided, the cops broke a bunch of shit and took a bunch of our things and still haven't returned them, they left all the broken things for us to spend money in repairing, we had to spend money on a lawyer, trips to visit him, new clothes, medicine and food for him in jail, etc. it was a mess, way more details in both posts. he's back home now, with an ankle monitor because technically his case isn't being investigated yet, they haven't done anything about it at all, the case hasn't moved one ounce lmao it's great, always trust the judicial system and cops!! ugh, anyway!

we found a therapist for my dad who can help her deal with all the stuff he had to deal with while in prison, all the bullying, the depression, the starving, the separation, etc. he needs to get a bunch of other medical appointments, has to get surgery, among other things, but for now things are much better on that front. that being said, he did lose his job and my old redbubble account got suspended without a warning months ago, plus argentina's economy is... really bad right now. food prices rise every day, public transportation prices went up like a 200% in a couple of weeks, salaries are low and stuck there, subsidies are gone, the local peso keeps falling, we have an absolute psychopath as a president who spends more time insulting or threatening anyone who oppose him than caring about people. it's a disaster. for updates on argentina in english, this person on twitter makes very good informative threads if you're interested.

anyway, i used to make around 30/40 dollars a month in redbubble, and that used to help adding up to the donations i got here, and it got suspended, so now i make like 1/2 dollars on teepublic monthly. so... it's a huge loss. there's a lot of things me and my mom are in charge of paying-- groceries, power and water and gas, medicine (she's diabetic, i have some sort of chronic sinusitis), our dog and cat's food and medicines, wifi, phone bills, public transportation, healthcare, my dad's new therapist... so, you know, i really need anything people can donate. even if it's just a single dollar, literally any amount helps. i love fashion so much and i love this blog, i work really hard on it even when my brain says no, and i really appreciate how much you guys love it too. i love seeing people discover new styles, new designers, new things to be inspired by. so, yeah... i'm never going anywhere, but i do need help to basically stay afloat.

as usual, my kofi link is this one: https://ko-fi.com/fashionrunways and my teepublic link is this one: https://www.teepublic.com/user/dinah-lance. thanks for being around and sharing and reblogging my posts, thanks for asking questions about fashion, and of course thanks for helping to the ones who can, and thanks to the ones who can't too, i know how that feels like, don't worry about it. love you 💖

#text posts

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