The $600 federal UI spiff….

My Pony High math says this guy was making a hundo.

https://www.startribune.com/i-was-an-executive-director-of-a-nonprofit-now-i-m-looking-at-food-stamps/571924842/

And he’s on unemployment now. We’re similar. I have insight into his situation.

If you were making a hundo, your base UI payment is $740 a week, the max. I guess, yes, if you only have that, it’d be tight paying more than a modest house payment, bills, a car payment, and medical. The $600 x 4 times a month really Fing helps.

Re expenses: Thing is, if you are unemployed with "zero" income, you can go on county medical. He should do that if he hasn’t. We didn’t radically pare back our expenses around here. I do have a modest house payment by today’s standards and a modest car payment. We aren’t behind on anything and the coming months don’t look precarious. We can do it on $740/wk for a while.

I do agree with the guy, I think the $600 should stay for me and others. And it’s astonishing to me that the Republicans are so dead set against it such that printing the money is such an easy choice. But, duh, it’s an attitude there about the non-rich and what they ‘deserve’.

Big thing is the professional job market is actually horseshit. That’s the reality. It would be good if that turned around quick. But it won’t. So the economy does need the $600.

Meh – I’m counting him out

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/07/how-trump-could-win-reelection/612205/?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4

The operational principle I’d reference is, things that can’t go on, won’t.

This Trump “Dems want to end the suburbs” thing is apparently BS

Ya, BS. This is my shocked face…

https://theweek.com/articles/927137/destroying-suburbs-should-republican-idea

Author Kristian of The Week is something of a contrarian conservative. I recall that she lives here in the Twin Cities. I find her piece credible such that I don’t have the pertinent knowledge myself.

I tellya… I managed to get on a ball team such that my league folded for the year. Had a game yesterday afternoon and were standing around having the beer in the parking lot after. At the point 5 of us were left we started talking politics, and one of the guys basically provoked us all into self identifying. 3 Trump guys, one anti Trump something or other (me), and a Dem.

The Trumpers were identically worried about ‘socialism’, and at this point in my life and with the basis of my accumulated wisdom, I thought… these guys are real dumb fucks.

But whadaya gonna do, a guy needs to play ball.

This is my shocked face Derek Chauvin didn’t report $400k over 6 years in side hustle money

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7000104-ChauvinDerek-Complaint.html#document/p1

I have thots, as one might imagine. Tax docs tell a very complete story, about anyone

*** Observations of the blog here over many years is:

A. That life in the major metro suburbs is kind of expensive, and that the straight W2 jobs of a 30’s – 40’s professionals don’t pay enough to keep up with it…. no matter almost what that job might be (but say excluding the very, very well paid). So well organized side hustles among suburbanites are ubiquitous, more than one might think given the superficial appearance of suburban affluence.

B. Non reporting on this income and a few other like categories is the rule. Non reporting, ie “evasion” is ambient, and reporting when one hasn’t been 1099’d is really rare. And then there’s the other worlds of restaurant servers and their tips and cash pay, all that jazz…. Ambient, as I say. No one feels a moral obligation about tax payments. This is society wide.

*** When the George Floyd movie comes out someday, the screenwriter will have constructed some scenes that paint the irony of Derek Chauvin defrauding the public of $30k in state tax payments while killing George Floyd over $20. And the screenwriter will be right to do it.

*** I’d have been inclined to read the deets and give Chauvin a pass from categorization as an amoral asshole on taxes, cuz…. like I say, side hustle evasion is ambient…. were it not for the BMW and the Florida registration of the said beemer. The level of effort and construction there to pull off that tax dodge is extra-ordinary, which points to the guy being an amoral solipsist prick.

*** As a matter of thought process, you want to start from a position where you don’t assume cops are more amoral on taxes and side money than anyone else. But my experience is the reality conforms quite a bit to Shawshank Redemption where Andy has them eating from the palm of his hand when he talks about setting up trusts to dodge taxes, etc… Avocationally guys that do these cop jobs are very interested in skirting tax obligations and getting freebies.

*** Pg 6 of the complaint there, Kellie Chauvin telling the revenue people they registered the car in FL because it’s cheaper is a Homer Simpson – Behind the Laughter episode “I thought the cop was a prostitute” admission.

*** ya know, the early June Friday night MPLS was burning down Kellie Chauvin made a statement to like Esme Murphy that she was divorcing Derek. I figured then, that might be not out of guile and asset protection, that she knew she had to walk away. Pg 6 there on the complaint, on June 26th they are still having prison phone calls about trying to manage their situation there, together.

*** This deal where Kelli and Derek were going to “Florida rental property and AirBnB” their way to striver affluence over several years has a way of looking gauche and pathetic in an infomercial way. She made $94k as a realtor though in 2017. One wonders why she quit that. Maybe it’s cuz ya know… these people don’t have great judgment.

*** He only W2’d $72k from MPD last year. I would have thought his base was $85K or so. He still made a hundo, as I contend (with the side hustle $). But the middling base pay might be because after 20 years he’s still doing patrol without leadership responsibilities, this cuz, apparently, he’s a misanthrope who cant advance (see NYT story from yesterday).

Ya know who was college educated?

Jeronimo Yanez

https://www.wrywingpolitics.com/on-minnesota-police-reform-show-me-the-money/

It’s a cultural thing, alright. And once you hire any candidate as a cop, they take on the attributes of the culture.

Point Deux: Yanez was also earning $72.5k as a city patrolman at the age of 28. I don’t know how this particular WWP crew is to be educated that a) cops are not underpaid b) paying them more wouldn’t solve the quality problem in policing.

And ya know, FFS man, it ain’t a positive societal good to divert darn near any of the cohort of young black people with professional aspirations and capabilities into law enforcement, and it ain’t an individual good for them either. They do better in life in other professions, as does anyone.

Big NYT story on Derek Chauvin

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/us/derek-chauvin-george-floyd.html

It has the stylistic feel of a post-mortem, and the conclusion is basically that Derek Chauvin’s broken home childhood F’d him up, made him anti-social.

Well, maybe. But back to Yanez, in the last couple years there’s a profile of him done from afar by a guy who went to HS with him at S. St. Paul… writer is one of these reasonably accomplished east coast intellectual journal types… and his point is, Yanez was raised right and was indeed a helluva guy. I can’t find it on the google.

I think the proper upshot of that is to understand it ain’t just the complete misanthropes who make the quality of policing in this country so poor. But the NYT article done in this way with Chauvin as example infers that poor policing is to be understood as a result of misanthropic officers.

NYT story says financial struggles were a problem in Chauvin’s early childhood home such that his dad was a CPA earning $12k a year at a point. That point being say, 1982….

Ya google the guy, Dad Chauvin… he’s still a CPA and probably approaching 70. And probably making a hundo now.  Or more.  But I know it was probably totally possible to be working as a CPA as a 30 yo in 1980 for $1k a month, and it wasn’t actually poverty. I think my father was bumping along in white collar work those years under age 35 making less than $20k. I know my parents thought we were strapped, but that financial pressure was unremarkable for the times and ‘poor’ would be the wrong word. #inflation.

Now that’s a concise title

https://twitter.com/jonathanchait/status/1280515615640424453

Philando, 6/6/16

4 years on. I don’t know exactly why, cept it may play to a feature of my neurology, but that deal is something I feel sustained rage and anguish about. And the other guys too now, Breonna and Elijah and of course George Floyd.

*** Blog post I wrote 7/8/16 full of cornerstone pieces of wisdom: https://zingyskywaylunch.wordpress.com/2016/07/08/the-country-is-over/

Including this: “Just not a lot of reason to have high hopes for things getting better, ya know. We will have a full-blown city riot over something in the near future, one that will have the superficial appearance of installing anarchy somewhere. Is that worse than a para-military attack on a police squad, like what happened yesterday? Dunno.”

*** H and I went on a chaos tour Saturday from Lake at the Mississippi to Lake at Uptown, then up through Kenwood.

I didn’t think Lake St. looked that bad. Which isn’t to say I’m some sort of denialist. I just think it tidied up pretty well even with the piles of rubble and will recover. And I certainly wasn’t scared of being there.

*** Was in the city 4 or 5 hours, and never saw one police car.

*** There was a bit of Monday morning quarterbacking over the weekend on the abandonment of the police precinct during the riot. Some by the usual suspects, like the WSJ. Then some by the NYTimes, who choose to tack a neo-lib position on law and order, basically.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/03/us/minneapolis-government-george-floyd.html

https://www.wsj.com/articles/were-just-going-to-walk-away-from-this-how-minneapolis-left-a-police-station-to-rioters-11593595802

Ya know, a bunch of things can be true: The moment there early in the riots may have called for a mayor that could put on the law and order hat to blunt off the chaos, and that perhaps would have been most pointedly done by asserting possession of the 3rd precinct. Jacob Frey wasn’t that guy, wouldn’t do it, and he may pay for it with a shortened political career. That doesn’t mean his operational wisdom was wrong. The alternative was to leave the police there to be in a confrontation with protesters. And that’s a fools game there. It is what it is.

*** We got out of the car at the south end of Lake of the Isles to walk around, and this 65 ish yo white man was in proximity, and he goes to us “you’re not socially distancing” gehuck gehuck, in this very MAGA oppositional way… I have no idea what would have comforted this man to think we would be kindred spirits, in on the MAGA joke, etc… I had my tie dye on, my wife had this hippie thing on. We must still have looked somewhat like suburbanites. Upshot: The guy bore some resemblance to what I know of Tom Austin from what I’ve read. I have looked up his picture in the last evening. It doesn’t appear to have been Tom Austin. Fing weird though. Can’t be too many dudes like that walking around there.

*** You fellas with houses on the lake parkways do what, keep gardeners on retainer? Actually, what I said to my wife was… a lot of these guys must have gardeners on retainer. My wife said, B, they all have gardeners on retainer. I think my larger point though, is the very odd contrast of those manorly neighborhoods, and the capitalization of those households, versus working class neighborhoods on Lake St. And then understanding that they are all Democrats. It’s very paradoxical. Or something.

*** Universally, the CD5 lawn signs were Antone signs, quite a few. Didn’t see one Ilhan sign, not one. Talking Kenwood.

*** Hey ya know I’m kind of an artist here in my middle period? And not an unaccomplished one. I’ve got this thing that I do, and I turn them out one after another, and I sell them… and have sold [trade secret] of them. A lot.

So what I think I know about the process, is an ability for artistic composition is one of the top things that makes it all happen.

I thought this was really, really powerfully composed.  They probably ought to make it permanent.