Bay 12 Games Forum

Cannes, France, 20 June 2022 – UN Women and the Unstereotype Alliance, an industry-led coalition convened by UN Women to eradicate harmful stereotypes in advertising, today launched “The Levers of Change: Gender Equality Attitudes Study 2022, the latest iteration of a bi-annual global study that tracks attitudes towards gender. The 20-country-wide survey shows that some antiquated views of gender have been exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study, developed under the leadership of UN Women in partnership with Johnson & Johnson, Kantar, Procter & Gamble and Unilever,

Kantar's a data analysis company, the rest make beauty products. The beauty industry has had an increasingly strong connection to women's activism in the last 20 years or so because it has proved to be an incredibly effective marketing tool.

In the UK, if you aren't self-employed then your employer handles your taxes for you. They just put the your post-tax pay straight into your bank every month and your paycheck lists every deduction for you to review.

That's how it works in the US. The filing bit that's under discussion is that every year, your workplace gives you documents showing precisely how much you paid along with your final income. You then have to use a worksheet where you input your final pay and apply any deductions (there's a universal amount, or you can use the sum of a wide number of things such as charitable donations, business expenses, various tax incentive credits) to compute how much tax you actually owed that year. You then compare that number to what you paid, and the difference is settled. If you paid too much the government sends you a check, if you paid too little you have to pay the government. Note that it is very possible for your final tax rate to be negative - you receiving more in refunds than you paid in taxes in the first place. This is a feature, not a bug.

The intent of this is that your employer may have worked under incorrect assumptions when they applied the tax (it is, for example, not unheard of for overtime pay to lead to a higher tax rate being applied incorrectly if you're on the margins of an income bracket - this is where a lot of the "losing money" misconceptions about tax brackets come from), you might have additional income that isn't reported, or you might have a bunch of tax credits.

The core argument is that the government should already know 90% of this, and the process of filing could be massively simplified with no loss of function in order to eliminate filing (or "reduce the form to a postcard") for the vast majority of people. There is solid documented evidence that one of the big obstacles to doing so is lobbying from the tax prep industry, that makes enormous amounts of money from people who can't do it themselves, who "can't" do it themselves, or are perfectly capable of doing it themselves but feel better if there's somebody else to take the blame if something goes wrong.

Specifically, lawmakers that are having lots of money paraded around them by lobbyists hired by tax prep companies. A lot of that shit has been made complicated and difficult to navigate intentionally, under advice from people that profit from it being complicated and difficult to navigate, especially when it's advice being given to lawmakers that have an ideological goal of making the process as miserable as they can manage.

Note that this isn't some kind of conspiracy theory. It is documented fact.

There's fundamentally no difference between chewing bark/eating the right plants and taking pills.

Except the pills are a lot more likely to work and a lot less likely to kill you - the ingredients that are actually useful are concentrated to a known amount instead of the natural variation (it is literally impossible to know if many natural remedies will be to weak to work or powerful enough to cause a fatal overdose), and the many extra chemicals that cause bad side effects are absent. There are no virtues to natural medicine.

What you're not getting is that going through male puberty is irreversible, and makes it very hard to transition later. It is also very, very common to only figure it out yourself later in life - people who even have the opportunity to consider blockers while they figure it out are lucky.

Also, there's no real downside to them.

One of the biggest reasons drones are used is precisely this situation - they don't have to worry about Mrs. Francis Gary Powers making a fuss in the news. The results are going to be a bunch of Strongly Worded Notes with no long term effect.

Watched Cocaine Bear last night.


Half of it was exactly what you expect from a movie called Cocaine Bear. The other half was deeply stupid in the wrong ways. Hard to describe what I mean, but it was like they took a bunch of other Standard Movie Plots, cut them to the bare minimum, and threw them in. Also got a lot more meta than I would have liked.