Robin Williams was a loss I felt. His movies were a big part of my childhood
What good role models do we have for today’s youth? I feel like they’re all on YouTube watching braindead slop or chauvinistic rich douchebags.
Where’s Jane Goodall?
Let’s put Nichelle Nichols up there too, playing Uhura was just the start of a long career with NASA for her and helped make STEM accessible to more minority kids everywhere
also i coulda sworn Mr Rogers was community love. or was that Jim?
by our powers combined, we are decent well balanced people and not pissed off.
Beedle-dee deedle-dee dee!
Sometimes, LeVar Burton’s Reading Rainbow is added too.
Geordie is a real hoopy frood
Let’s try not to jinx him, hey? 😅
Also:
…I just wanted a picture…
i can disappoint anything i want, dude. i have this book, you know? that “oh the places you’ll go” book?
7 kilometers. I’ve been further, but 7 fucking kilometers. I was aiming further dammit.
my shitass brother printed the below picture out and managed to disappoint it rather consistently. or he had a crush on it. i think it was the disappoint tho, it's pretty creepy. it has those eyes that follow you around the room. [CW religious trauma]
my neighbors, who i love, printed one out too. i’m not sure which one. could’ve been one of the kids. they taped it to their amazon wiretap. did i mention i love these neighbors?
Don’t just focus on the books, as impactful as that is worldwide. Dollywood is the largest employer in the Pigeon Forge area now. She founded a bald eagle sanctuary in the 90s. Tons of scholarships in Sevier County to help address a dropout rate that was, at the height of her popularity in the 90s, over 30%. Coronavirus research donations and vaccine awareness. AIDS research funding (through a charity album). She helped fund a hospital, helped with wildfire and hurricane relief, so much more.
You might be right to go “well some of those were probably tax writeoffs”, but she clearly took the words and idea of the early country stars she knew like Johnny Cash and decided “all this money and power is worthless unless I help people with it.”
tax writeoffs
There’s no amount of writeoff that makes donation profitable, compared to simply keeping the money. The exception is when the rich “donate” to “charities” that they then use for their personal benefit. Then they get a writeoff AND full control of the money.
This isn’t that.
There’s no amount of writeoff that makes donation profitable, compared to simply keeping the money. The exception is when the rich “donate” to “charities” that they then use for their personal benefit. Then they get a writeoff AND full control of the money.
also when said billionaires' charities employ their children who get exhorbitant salaries. I am willing to tell you what and order of magnitude but not who caused... let's say 2/3 of my existential crisis what drove me out of gainful employment and fully into music.
but the short version is it was someone famous that you could guess’s distant relation (and I will not confirm so don’t bother, that’s not the important part of the story. famous people like wine county, that’s where i live), they earned more just from that charity that year than i would or could , ever, in my entire life, (even if i hadn’t decided to devote myself to music. i expected to contribute a high seven figures to our retirement, now i just expect to die) from a charity. they were about the same age I was when I started exercising independence. Chose my first haircut. and i got to do their tax return and see how i could minimize their contribution to society. yaaaaaaaay.
after a good long drink during the lull between busy seasons, I asked myself why i was killing myself for money so i could have fun during my twilight years when i could have fun now and scrape by, and then when our twilight years are here we’re used to scraping by so we can keep doing it. maybe if we’re lucky we might have a comfortable one because who knows what’s guaranteed. even my wife agrees we’re both a hell of a lot happier even if i’m only earning the occasional enchilada platter from a gig. she enjoys telling folk she’s married to a gigging musician more than an accountant. wouldn’t you?
Yeah the bigger concern with tax write-offs for donations is that it allows the wealthy to refuse to pay for what has been democratically decided on and instead put it towards what they want
I mean, kind of? Usually you’re donating to a charity or something to minimize your tax burden or claim a loss.
“Profitable” is kind of a relative term, but if I pay a little bit of nothing for a good stock (for example) and I hold it for a long time, I might have to pay capital gains on like 90 percent of the value of a stock. If I have some more recently purchased stock with a out the same value, what I can do is donate my old stock money that super grew tax free and use it to offset the value of selling a LOT of more recent stock. This puts money in my pocket from the market basically for free.
It is definitely profitable to figure out how to get money from the market that doesn’t require you to pay a quarter of it in taxes up front. If the weight is “how much I put in” vs “how much I took out” you can definitely make profitable tax write-offs.
if you are paying charitable contributions solely to reclaim income taxes your accountant, even a stupid one, is going to beat you upside the head with a newspaper and squirt you with a spray bottle shouting NO! BAD CLIENT! BAD! until you stop. A billionaire is recovering 40%ish of that. maybe 35%ish i haven’t prepared any taxes but my own in a hot minute. one of us normies, even less. us normies usually don’t even itemize anymore.
She’s helped Tennessee so much. I’m hoping to visit Dollywood next year, I’d much rather support that than give Disney more money.
Also, all of her Dollywood employees get their college paid for too. I came across that when our son was looking for a summer job.
we’ve got family out in nashville suburbs who were hoping to land a job there and live out my aunt’s (their great aunt’s) teardrop next summer. now i don’t know what’ll happen. i hope it keeps running the same
Heck, if every billionaire did this many tax writeoffs to real charities, not their own personal foundations, maybe the world would be a better place.
Life, self-love, nature, peace, good works and space.
by our powers combined
Tim Curry: Antici…pation!
Mirth
Science: Carl Sagan
Not just science but the courage and value in knowing the world as it is, rather than live in fantasy. But lacking a better term, science may work.
I think wonder and/or curiosity fit Sagan pretty well
Charity, is perhaps more fitting of her.
Tim Curry just died too.
Superheaven has a new saint ;~;7
I still don’t understand how Steve Irwin ended up so beloved. He seemed more in love with adrenaline than the animals
It’s my understanding that he didn’t put himself at risk for the adrenaline, he did it because he valued the safety of the animals he cared for above his own. I seem to remember him explaining his reasoning on his show. There are lots of devices and drugs that can be used for protected contact so that animal handlers are never put at serious risk, but all of them can and do sometimes go horribly wrong for the animals in addition to being very traumatic in ways that it can be difficult for humans to conceive. He didn’t do it without thought either, it being clear that the techniques he used required an intimate knowledge of those animals and their behaviors. He didn’t die wrestling a croc or handling a venomous snake. He died from being to close to an animal he likely had much less familiarity with.
Yeah I didn’t like the wild animal manhandling act (Vegan, I think we should just leave them alone), but I think Irwin understood how to connect with and engage an audience that would leave them thinking about the animals for the long term, not to mention knowing more about them. He was a top-tier science communicator and cared about the animals first, ultimately his form of spectacle advocacy drove tons of engagement toward naturalist / zoological / conservancy professions.
The same reason that the MythBusters are considered science educators. You may not like it, but those were the influencers of the 2000s. There are a lot of people who grew up to be veterinarians or other vocations dealing with animals because of Steve Irwin, just like there are a lot of people who grew up to be engineers or similar because of the MythBusters, and that’s what makes him and his message special.
I’m sure in a couple years we will be hearing about the people who loved VSauce or one of those other YouTube channels and there will be some curmudgeon commenting about how they never understood how Michael was likable.
Never watched much of vsauce, but I don’t recall him molesting numbers, chemistry, or history.
On the other hand, I can honestly say that I’ve probably watched more of Steve Irwin than anyone else in this comment section. Possibly by an order of magnitude. I’m not sure whether my opinion, formed via vhs obliteration, counts as curmudgeonly
His kids are just like him. It’s the genuine love of learning and nature and wanting to share that. And there’s some real science on the show tagging and documenting animals as well as medicating and moving them.
PITA edge lords are cringe, the man handling snakes carefully for 5min so millions of people learn and are less terrified of them is more of a service to animals than any of you will do.
PR for the way he died. That bit of fondling animals was getting old.
Dieing at the peak of popularity before any scandal could have come up made him beloved by his works.
Edit: This isn’t a negative, he didn’t do anything bad but also never got the chance. We can go on knowing he was good. But he did die young.
Yeah no, he purposefully invaded animals environment’s and manhandled them for money. The only good thing he did was to show that doing what he did for money occasionally has consequences, lime being stabbed in the heart by one of the animals he just had to go up to and touch. Seriously there was a massive backlash building to his shit in aus until he died and then he was suddenly canonised and was untouchable.
