Good Idea

And it is from Gavin Newsom of all people.

California is proposing extending its sales tax to cloud based software, rather than limiting it just to shrink wrapped software sold in stores.

I like this, not the least because it ends what was an effective subsidy to the cloud in the Golden State. 

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced his latest budget plan on Thursday, totaling $349.4 billion, the largest in the state’s history. The proposal includes a new 7.25% state sales tax on cloud-based software.

Currently, sales tax is only paid on software purchased in physical form, whether that’s through software sold as part of a new hardware purchase or tangible media. Cloud-based software and software as a service (SaaS) applications aren’t taxed in the same way, but Newsom’s proposal would change that.

As KCRA notes, the new tax would apply to software like Microsoft Office, Adobe, and QuickBooks, as well as Slack and Workday. Roughly half of the states currently tax SaaS products, and Newsom argues it would just mean bringing California in line with dozens of other states.

 

It's Called a Babysitter

The Trump kids  have all been called on to testify at the civil fraud trial of Donald Trump and the Trump Org.

Ivanka Trump asked to be excused from testify because she has school age kids and therefore cannot be expected to testify.  

The appeals court took about 3 minutes to call bull sh%$ on her effort to weasel out of testifying under oath:

Ivanka Trump’s argument that she should be spared giving midweek testimony in her father Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial in New York because she is a busy mother of school-aged children in Florida was given short shrift by an appeals court.

The former president’s daughter, a senior adviser during his single term of office, asked the panel to set aside a ruling by a district court judge compelling her to testify next Wednesday, 8 November.

“Ms Trump, who resides in Florida with her three minor children, will suffer undue hardship if a stay is denied and she is required to testify at trial in New York in the middle of a school week, in a case she has already been dismissed from, before her appeal is heard,” her lawyers said in a legal filing on Thursday.

They also argued that Trump had not lived or worked in New York since 2017, and was therefore beyond the jurisdiction of the Manhattan civil court.

But in an expedited ruling on Thursday night, the appeals court offered a curt, 11-word response.

“Application for interim stay pending decision on the motion is denied,” the judges wrote.

 That is legalese for, "Stop smoking that sh%$, it makes you crazy."

Here's a Surprise

(Not)

Marie Kondo has decided now that she has 3 kids, that whole clean house with nothing unessential thing does not work any more.

Yet another elegant idea crashing on the rocks that are parenthood:

The year was 2019 and the world was gripped with a need to neaten. The premiere of Tidying Up With Marie Kondo on Netflix inspired a wave of home organizing and de-cluttering so rabid that thrift stores became overwhelmed by the number of donations people were dropping off.

………

But now it’s 2023. A lot has happened in the world since the pre-covid days of yore. And if your once perfectly catalogued dresser drawers aren’t so neat anymore, you’re not alone. In fact, you’re in good company with this Gizmodo writer and with the queen of clean, Kondo herself.

“Up until now, I was a professional tidier, so I did my best to keep my home tidy at all times,” she said via interpreter in a recent media webinar, as reported by the Washington Post. More recently though, “I have kind of given up on that,” she noted. And declared, “my home is messy,” in no uncertain terms.

Kondo gave birth to her third child in 2021, and has seemingly been re-evaluating her priorities since. She said she’s abandoned peak organization “in a good way.” Instead of dedicating endless hours to ensuring her home is perfectly put together, “Now I realize what is important to me is enjoying spending time with my children at home.” To her, focusing on family over folding is time spent “the right way for me at this time, at this stage of my life.”

I have two kids, and two cats, and sometimes my house looks like Dresden as described by Kurt Vonnegut.

Needs to be Said

Dwana Franklin-Davis Ruthe Farmer make the following exhortation, "Tech companies: Stop conflating privilege with potential."

Enabling bigotry while concealing it is a large part of many tech companies out there.  Just look at Airbnb, which allows renters to vet potential renters for race, or Uber and Lyft, which allows drivers and riders to do the same, or the Facebook's incorporation of racism into its employment advertisements, etc.

It's a feature not a bug of the tech bros, it's a part and parcel of their view of themselves as Ayn Rand style entrepreneur supermen.

If the market wants to pay for bigotry, by John Gault they will give it to the market.

“You Can’t Do This, I Am Free, White, and Twenty-One!”

The January 6 insurrectionist snowflakes are complaining about what they see as excessive sentences as compared to Black Lives Matter protesters.

In fact, they are being sentenced far less harshly than their BLM counterparts:

It's a common refrain from some of those charged in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol and their Republican allies: The Justice Department is treating them harshly because of their political views while those arrested during last year's protests over racial injustice were given leniency.

Court records tell a different story.

An Associated Press review of court documents in more than 300 federal cases stemming from the protests sparked by George Floyd's death last year shows that dozens of people charged have been convicted of serious crimes and sent to prison.

The AP found that more than 120 defendants across the United States have pleaded guilty or were convicted at trial of federal crimes including rioting, arson and conspiracy. More than 70 defendants who've been sentenced so far have gotten an average of about 27 months behind bars. At least 10 received prison terms of five years or more.

The dissonance between the rhetoric of Capitol rioters and their supporters and the record established by courts highlights both the racial tension inherent in their arguments — the pro-Donald Trump rioters were largely white and last summer's protesters were more diverse — and the flawed assessment at the heart of their claims.

This bit of news is not surprising at all, even the judges presiding over the cases of the January 6 rioters are questioning the leniency of the sentences that the prosecution has requested. 

What this is all really about is that the January 6 crowd thinks that N***ers and N***er lovers should go to jail forever, but they so should go free, because of the color of their skin.

Without their (undeserved) privilege they would vanish from existence leaving nothing but a greasy stain.

Tweet of the Day

Yet another interview/profile of Larry Summers where the word “Epstein” never appears and where he’s never asked how many times he visited Epstein’s private island. I’m genuinely fascinated by how he’s *so* good at avoiding that question. https://t.co/xItFzoIgED

— Felix Salmon (@felixsalmon) June 25, 2021

There is a LOT in this seemingly innocuous question.

It's Called Pleading the Belly, and it is Bullsh%$

In the latest twist in Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes efforts to evade justice, she is now trying to delay the trial because she is pregnant.

Tis is not an uncommon legal strategy, it's called "Pleading the Belly", which has its own Wikipedia page. 

I rather fear that her privilege is going to win out again.

The alleged Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes is pregnant, according to a new court filing, potentially delaying her trial by several weeks.

Holmes is being charged with fraud for her role at the helm of Theranos, a blood-testing startup that was a rising star in Silicon Valley before it emerged it had misrepresented the effectiveness of its technology.

Lawyers for Holmes asked the judge on 2 March to delay the start of jury selection to 31 August, after her due date.

“The parties have met and conferred, and both parties agree that, in light of this development, it is not feasible to begin the trial on July 13, 2021, as currently scheduled,” said the filing.

There is no reason to delay jury selection.

Absent her being in active labor, pregnancy does not prevent a defendant from participating in jury selection or in the pretrial motions.

Were she not white or rich (her parents come from money), she'd be waiting in jail for the trial to start.

Not Enough Bullets

In the latest edition of awful Wipipo, we discover that rich white people in te LA area have set up a scheme to secure Covid-19 vaccines intended for poorer and more darkly complected folks, because ……… Karen, I guess.

Color me disgusted:

A California program intended to improve COVID-19 vaccine availability to people in hard-hit communities of color is being misused by outsiders who are grabbing appointments reserved for residents of underserved Black and Latino areas.

The program to address inequities in vaccine distribution relies on special access codes that enable people to make appointments on the My Turn vaccine scheduling website. The codes are provided to community organizations to distribute to people in largely Black and Latino communities.

But those codes have also been circulating, in group texts and messages, among the wealthier, work-from-home set in Los Angeles, The Times has learned. Many of those people are not yet eligible for the vaccine under state rules.

Some people able to make appointments have been driving to Cal State Los Angeles to get the shots.

I know that I have been over-using the phrase lately, but I want to see these folks frog marched out in hand cuffs.

If He Were Black, They Would Have Already Shot Him Multiple Times

Instead, it appears that, on the recommendation of an anonymous Kenosha police captain, teen murderer Kyle Rittenhouse and his legal team has been deliberately deceiving the court as to his whereabouts.

Obviously, this from my perspective as a non-lawyer, but this appears to be a BIG no-no for someone who is out on bail:

Prosecutors apparently couldn’t find admitted Kenosha killer Kyle Rittenhouse, so now they are seeking a warrant for his arrest.

On Wednesday, the Kenosha County District Attorney’s office said Rittenhouse had violated the conditions of his release. Prosecutors said they need a new arrest warrant specifically because Rittenhouse failed to inform the court after changing his address. The defense, however, responded by saying they intentionally concealed Rittenhouse’s true whereabouts because a local police captain instructed them to lie about where he was staying.

………

According to the conditions of his bond, Rittenhouse was supposed to relay such a change within 48 hours of moving. The motion asks Judge Bruce E. Schroeder to issue a new arrest warrant and increase Rittenhouse’s bail by $200,000.

………

The Illinois teenager was charged with first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree reckless homicide, attempted homicide, and two additional felonies over the admitted shooting deaths of Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber. Rittenhouse also severely wounded Gaige Grosskreutz with a rifle carried across state lines. He further faces one misdemeanor charge of possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under the age of 18. Rittenhouse was 17 at the time of the August shooting and is now 18.

………

In sum, the defense says it intentionally wrote the wrong address on the release papers after being advised to do so by local law enforcement. This, the defense claims, was to protect the location of a “safe house” for Rittenhouse.

The motion notes [emphasis in original]: “Pierce was directly informed by a high-ranking member of the Kenosha Police Department not to provide the address of the Rittenhouse Safe House because of the numerous threats made against Kyle and his family.”

………

“While I was completing this form, I was approached by a Kenosha Police Department Captain, who offered his assistance,” Pierce continued [emphasis in original]. “I asked the Kenosha Police Captain what address to put on the form. The Kenosha Police Captain told me that I ‘absolutely should not‘ provide the address of the physical location of the Rittenhouse Safe House on the form, but to instead provide his home address in Antioch, Illinois.”

There are a couple of points here:

• What lawyer doesn't pass this by the f%$#ing judge? (I'm already regretting ending my swearing for February)
  
• What cop tells a defendant in a murder trial to lie to the court?

Well, I guess the answers to this question are pretty straightforward, and the expression, "Racist dirtbag," figures prominently in both.

Rittenhouse needs to spend his pre-trial in jail, and his lawyer should be his cell-mate, at least until he gives up whatever police captain told him to lie to the court.

Speaking of Privilege………

In the 1990s, there were a whole series of Wunderkind at The New Republic, Ruth Shalit and Stephen Glass who were later revealed to be fabulists and/or plagiarists.

The fact that the magazine was a disaster under the ownership of racist Marty Peretz, is of little interest today, except for the fact that Ruth Shalit, now Ruth Shalit Barrett, is still getting her stories into prominent publications.

In this case, it was The Atlantic which published an article from her about parents getting their children into fencing to get them into top flight schools.

It turns out that it was (once again)  she made sh%$ up.

Seriously, if you are a white person who went to the Ivy League, you are the equivalent of  a "Made Man" in the Mafia.

It's the only explanation as to why she gets any non-fiction writing now:

The Atlantic on Sunday took the extraordinary step of retracting an article by Ruth Shalit Barrett, who was a rising young political reporter in the 1990s when accusations of plagiarism derailed her career as an associate editor at The New Republic.

“We cannot attest to the trustworthiness and credibility of the author, and therefore we cannot attest to the veracity of the article,” The Atlantic said in an editor’s note that it updated on Sunday night.

The buzzy article, which was published online last month and appears in the magazine’s November print edition, chronicles a world of wealthy parents in the Connecticut suburbs obsessed with prodding their children into niche sports like fencing, crew and squash in hopes of getting them into Ivy League schools.

In the editor’s note, The Atlantic said that its fact-checking department had thoroughly rechecked the article, which was more than 6,000 words, speaking with more than 40 sources and independently corroborating information.

“But we now know that the author misled our fact-checkers, lied to our editors, and is accused of inducing at least one source to lie to our fact-checking department,” the note said. “We believe that these actions fatally undermined the effectiveness of the fact-checking process. It is impossible for us to vouch for the accuracy of this article. This is what necessitates a full retraction. We apologize to our readers.”

The Atlantic, went so far as listing her name as, "Ruth S. Barrett," as the byline, because, after all, she went to Princeton.

I get that Shalit is a talented writer, but why any editor would ever publish her in non-fiction is a marker of just how dysfunctional the current caste system is in the united states.

I may be the, "Worst Writer on the Internet," but I would be a better choice for any reporting, because I don't make sh%$ up. (Though I freely admit that my ideology can seem a bit deranged at times, and this this would necessarily shape my coverage.)

Tweet of the Day

I really appreciate this very, very generous profile from @petercoy but I do want to disagree with the headline, which is reinforced by the article. I do have a credential- the intersection of my whiteness, maleness and cisness. 1/N https://t.co/h9YcdjFDkK

— Nathan "Donate to @survivepunishNY" Tankus (@NathanTankus) July 2, 2020

It's good to see someone acknowledge their own privilege in such a straightforward and honest way.