Trust Me

[ed. Is this a great country or what?]

A small but growing number of American corporations, operating in businesses as diverse as private prisons, billboards and casinos, are making an aggressive move to reduce — or even eliminate — their federal tax bills.

They are declaring that they are not ordinary corporations at all. Instead, they say, they are something else: special trusts that are typically exempt from paying federal taxes.

The trust structure has been around for years but, until recently, it was generally used only by funds holding real estate. Now, the likes of the Corrections Corporation of America, which owns and operates 44 prisons and detention centers across the nation, have quietly received permission from the Internal Revenue Service to put on new corporate clothes and, as a result, save many millions on taxes.

The Corrections Corporation, which is making the switch, expects to save $70 million in 2013. Penn National Gaming, which operates 22 casinos, including the M Resort Spa Casino in Las Vegas, recently won approval to change its tax designation, too.

Changing from a standard corporation to a real estate investment trust, or REIT — a designation signed into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower — has suddenly become a hot corporate trend. One Wall Street analyst has characterized the label as a “golden ticket” for corporations.

“I’ve been in this business for 30 years, and I’ve never seen the interest in REIT conversions as high as it is today,” said Robert O’Brien, the head of the real estate practice at Deloitte & Touche, the big accounting firm.

At a time when deficits and taxes loom large in Washington, some question whether the new real estate investment trusts deserve their privileged position.

When they were created in 1960, they were meant to be passive investment vehicles, like mutual funds, that buy up a broad portfolio of real estate — whether shopping malls, warehouses, hospitals or even timberland — and derive almost all of their income from those holdings.

One of the bedrock principles — and the reason for the tax exemption — was that the trusts do not do any business other than owning real estate.

But bit by bit, especially in recent years, that has changed as the I.R.S., in a number of low-profile decisions, has broadened the definition of real estate, and allowed companies to split off parts of their business that are unrelated to real estate.

For example, prison companies like the Corrections Corporation and the Geo Group successfully argued that the money they collect from governments for holding prisoners is essentially rent. Companies that operate cellphone towers have said that the towers themselves are real estate.

by Nathaniel Popper, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: Kate Brumback/Associated Press

Yves Mohy
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3 in water by VinTije on Flickr
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Mediterranean parcels
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A Model for Sushi Lovers

Japan has just arrived on store shelves of model and toy collectors a model that mimics a typical tuna on the work table of the fishmongers in the market of Tsukiji in Tokyo . The model perfectly replicates the various cuts that precede the arrival of sushi and sashimi in restaurants. The Tuna (maguro called in Japanese) measures 33 cm and is 12 cm high and 7.5 cm wide, the table is 195 mm long, 10 cm wide and 7cm high.

Just to make things even more realistic, in addition to the table and a replica of the Maguro bocho (the famous knife to cut the tuna), the box of this figure reproduces exactly those used in Japan for the transport of fish (with the inside polystyrene). Too bad for the price: 29,000 yen (about 240 Euros) for a gadget collector are certainly not affordable for all lovers of raw fish ...

by Frankie, Hobby Media |  Read more:
h/t Boing Boing

Granddogs

Like every proud grandmother, Donna McCabe of Whidbey Island, Washington, carries a brag book of photographs of her grandchild, Audrey, in her handbag, and is always swapping news of her escapades with friends and other family members. McCabe isn't the slightest bit fazed that her grandchild happens to have four paws and a tail.

Audrey is an exquisite Italian Greyhound, with delicate features just like her namesake actress, Audrey Hepburn. Her "grandmother" dotes on her.

Family dynamics today are more complex than just Mom plus Dad plus two children. Many people are divorced or opt for a single lifestyle. Others remain childless, by chance or by choice. It is a lifestyle that makes close family relationships the exception rather than the norm. Into this void step our dogs, ready and willing to accept all offers of adoration and spoiling.

More than simply companions, dogs are considered children in many households. So it follows that a fur kid's family tree branches out to include aunties, uncles, cousins, and, of course, the ultimate dispenser of spoiled affection-grandparents. (...)

Typically, grandmoms seem to take center stage in talking about their granddogs, but Al Cartwright of Nassau in the Bahamas was quick to step up to the plate and talk about his amazing bonding experience with his granddog, Quinn, a 10- year-old chocolate Labrador.

"We rode out a bad hurricane on the island together," he says fondly. "Both my wife, Carol, and Quinn's pet parents, Kelly and Robert, were away when the storm warning became a reality. Quinn and I took care of each other. He was wonderful company. He's a gentle dog and I love being around him. He loves to show off his toys and never forgets our birthdays, sending presents and cards. I treat him just like I would a grandson."

"My parents are very loving people," says Kelly Meister. "I am sure if there was a real grandchild in the family, it would inch up above the Crown Prince but Quinn would be none the wiser."

by Sandy Robins, Modern Dog |  Read more:

Photo: Lucile by markk

House in Nagoya by Suppose Design Office
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Martin Brouillette - Also, 2007
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Biting Elbows

[ed. Warning: extreme simulated violence (do not watch if you are the least bit squeemish) - but very inspired videography (and the music ain't bad, either.]

The Hole in the Bucket

Never before in history has the great American middle class obsessed so much over financial planning as during the last forty years or so. In the 1970s, this obsession fueled the growth of hot new magazines like Money and TV shows like Louis Rukeyser’s Wall $street Week. By the 1980s, it had led to the creation of personal finance sections in almost every newspaper, and to myriad radio talk shows counseling Americans on what mutual funds to buy, how much they should put into new savings vehicles like Individual Retirement Accounts or Keoghs, and how to manage their new 401(k) plans.

In the 1990s, millions of Americans learned the accounting program Quicken, avidly followed the tips offered by Jim Cramer and the Motley Fool, and employed legions of tax and financial advisers and online tools to help them figure out whether they should convert to a Roth IRA and how they should take advantage of the new “529” college savings accounts. In the last decade, millions more have turned to outlets like HGTV to learn the ins and outs of flipping houses, consolidating credit card debt with a home equity loan, and combining a medical savings account with a high-deductible insurance plan.

Who in the 1950s ever worried so much about managing money?

And yet here we are today. According to a recent study by the Employee Benefits Research Institute, fully 44 percent of Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers lack the savings and pension coverage needed to meet basic retirement-age expenses, even assuming no future cuts in Social Security or Medicare, employer-provided benefits, or home prices. Most Americans approaching retirement age don’t have a 401(k) or other retirement account. Among the minority who do, the median balance in 2009 was just $69,127. Meanwhile, the college students who graduated in 2011 started off their adult lives encumbered by an average $25,000 in student loans.

What went wrong? We can all come up with scapegoats, of course. It’s common to hear, for example, that America became a nation of impulse shoppers and spendthrifts over the last generation. But like a lot of conventional wisdom, this consensus isn’t just wrong, it’s mean. The average American household actually spends significantly less on clothes, food, appliances, and household furnishings than did its counterpart of a generation ago. There is, however, a deeper story to tell—one that is still largely unacknowledged in our political debates.

by Phillip Longman, Washington Monthly |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Smaller

The disposable diaper and the meaning of progress.

The best way to explore the mystery of the Huggies Ultratrim disposable diaper is to unfold it and then cut it in half, widthwise, across what is known as the diaper's chassis. At Kimberly-Clark's Lakeview plant, in Neenah, Wisconsin, where virtually all the Huggies in the Midwest are made, there is a quality-control specialist who does this all day long, culling diapers from the production line, pinning them up against a lightboard, and carefully dismembering them with a pair of scissors. There is someone else who does a "visual cull," randomly picking out Huggies and turning them over to check for flaws. But a surface examination tells you little. A diaper is not like a computer that makes satisfying burbling noises from time to time, hinting at great inner complexity. It feels like papery underwear wrapped around a thin roll of Cottonelle. But peel away the soft fabric on the top side of the diaper, the liner, which receives what those in the trade delicately refer to as the "insult." You'll find a layer of what's called polyfilm, which is thinner than a strip of Scotch tape. This layer is one of the reasons the garment stays dry: it has pores that are large enough to let air flow in, so the diaper can breathe, but small enough to keep water from flowing out, so the diaper doesn't leak.

Or run your hands along that liner. It feels like cloth. In fact, the people at Kimberly-Clark make the liner out of a special form of plastic, a polyresin. But they don't melt the plastic into a sheet, as one would for a plastic bag. They spin the resin into individual fibres, and then use the fibres to create a kind of microscopic funnel, channelling the insult toward the long, thick rectangular pad that runs down the center of the chassis, known as the absorbent core. A typical insult arrives at a rate of seven millilitres a second, and might total seventy millilitres of fluid. The liner can clear that insult in less than twenty seconds. The core can hold three or more of those insults, with a chance of leakage in the single digits. The baby's skin will remain almost perfectly dry, and that is critical, because prolonged contact between the baby and the insult (in particular, ammonium hydroxide, a breakdown product of urine) is what causes diaper rash. And all this will be accomplished by a throwaway garment measuring, in the newborn size, just seven by thirteen inches. This is the mystery of the modern disposable diaper: how does something so small do so much?

Thirty-seven years ago, the Silicon Valley pioneer Gordon Moore made a famous prediction. The number of transistors that engineers could fit onto a microchip, he said, would double every two years. It seemed like a foolhardy claim: it was not clear that you could keep making transistors smaller and smaller indefinitely. It also wasn't clear that it would make sense to do so. Most of the time when we make things smaller, after all, we pay a price. A smaller car is cheaper and more fuel-efficient, and easier to park and maneuver, but it will never be as safe as a larger car. In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, the transistor radio was all the rage; it could fit inside your pocket and run on a handful of batteries. But, because it was so small, the sound was terrible, and virtually all the other mini-electronics turn out to be similarly imperfect. Tiny cell phones are hard to dial. Tiny televisions are hard to watch. In making an object smaller, we typically compromise its performance. The remarkable thing about chips, though, was that there was no drawback: if you could fit more and more transistors onto a microchip, then instead of using ten or twenty or a hundred microchips for a task you could use just one. This meant, in turn, that you could fit microchips in all kinds of places (such as cellular phones and laptops) that you couldn't before, and, because you were using one chip and not a hundred, computer power could be had at a fraction of the price, and because chips were now everywhere and in such demand they became even cheaper to make--and so on and so on. Moore's Law, as it came to be called, describes that rare case in which there is no trade-off between size and performance. Microchips are what might be termed a perfect innovation.

In the past twenty years, diapers have got smaller and smaller, too. In the early eighties, they were three times bulkier than they are now, thicker and substantially wider in the crotch. But in the mid-eighties Huggies and Procter & Gamble's Pampers were reduced in bulk by fifty per cent; in the mid-nineties they shrank by a third or so; and in the next few years they may shrink still more. It seems reasonable that there should have been a downside to this, just as there was to the shrinking of cars and radios: how could you reduce the amount of padding in a diaper and not, in some way, compromise its ability to handle an insult? Yet, as diapers got smaller, they got better, and that fact elevates the diaper above nearly all the thousands of other products on the supermarket shelf.

by Malcom Gladwell (2001), Gladwell.com |  Read more:

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Akzhan Abdalieva
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How I Met My Dead Parents

Sixteen years after my father died, when I was 32, my mother died in her sleep. She was 64. The official cause of death was heart failure, but really, what she'd died from was unabashed alcoholism, the kind where you drink whatever you can get your hands on, where you're often so drunk you shit in your bed or on the floor, and you cause so much brain damage that you permanently lose the ability to walk unsupported.

Like my father's death, my mother's was a relief, though for different reasons. My mother had been slowly, and dramatically, as was her nature, killing herself for years. She'd always been a drinker, but she really committed to it after my dad died. His death either caused such a serious depression that she had to self-medicate to the point of oblivion, or it gave her the permission she'd been waiting for to throw everything away.

My father died while I was in the middle of high school, and by the end of my senior year, my mother was drinking hard. In college, she was calling me as I boarded the bus home for Thanksgiving to warn me that she was wasted, and after finding her slumped over a chair in our dark kitchen, I would have to rope my poor ex-boyfriend into helping me get her to the emergency room. Over the following years she only got worse, despite multiple trips to detox, five weeks at Betty Ford, and almost one year of sobriety. She was once visiting an old professor friend at Tufts, and she got so drunk and wild that he had to call the campus police to get rid of her — and to get back at him, she stripped naked so the police would "really have something to see." She showed up to visit me in California with a face so bruised from an accident she didn't remember having that multiple people asked if she'd just had brain surgery. She had me in a constant state of anxiety; I always worried that she was going to fall down the stairs, die helplessly, and not be found for weeks. My sister and I eventually hired home health-care workers to look after her a few days a week, which was good for all of us, but many of them quit because taking care of her was just too depressing.

After my mother died, people always wanted to know how I was doing, and I always said that I wasn't sad for myself, but that I was so, so sad for her. I was, and am, sad for her — sad that she went from being an intelligent, successful, and charismatic woman to someone who drank so much that she often shit on the floor. But was I sad that my mother, who drank so much that she often shit on the floor, was now gone? Not really. I was 16 years older, but I was right back to where I was when my father died. I felt the exact same way, and I didn't feel the exact same things.

In the weeks following my mother's death, my friends, some of whom had been around for my dad's death as well, came over to my Brooklyn apartment one by one to make me dinner on the nights my boyfriend was working late, I guess because I wasn't supposed to be able to feed myself. They would come and cook and look at me with probing eyes and open arms, ready for me to say or do whatever I needed — but all I could do was scarf down their sautéed cod and stare back and think, Why aren't I as sad as I'm supposed to be? (...)

I began my work in my mother's study, which had become a haphazard storage room for everything from mismatched shoes to years of unopened mail. I spent days bagging sweaters for Goodwill and organizing the incredible amount of clip-on earrings and pantyhose she'd purchased from Filene's Basement decades before and never worn. I'd anticipated this chore for years, and though it was surreal to finally be doing it, it was also calming.

Once I moved beyond her clothes and crappy jewelry, I got into her more personal belongings, her file cabinets, battered shoe boxes stuffed with papers, and trunks full of undated slides and photographs that my father, an accomplished photographer, left behind years ago. This was quiet, intimate territory, and I didn't know how to approach or navigate it. I certainly wasn't prepared for what I would soon discover: that in the bundles of faded telegrams, handwritten love letters, old faxes, and diaries abandoned after only a few pages, my mother had left me a window into both of my parents and their complicated marriage. Even a superficial scan of these artifacts revealed that my parents had an entirely different relationship than I'd assumed, and were, in many ways, profoundly different people than I'd long ago decided they were.

For days I sat in my mother's filthy study, surrounded by the relics of my parents' love, trying to take in their lives and thinking, I don't know these people at all. And for the first time, I wanted to.

by Anya Yurchyshyn, BuzzFeed | Read more:
Photo: uncredited

Chico Buarque and Roberta Sá

[ed. Such chemistry!]

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Eve Online

Six men in their 30s and 40s have gathered in a trendy Reykjavík hotel bar. They’re trying to stave off the brutal mid-December cold while they wait for Death. He’s their friend and the leader of the 30,000 strong Legion of Death alliance. He’s also taking far too long primping in a room upstairs. “Can somebody call and get Death down here?” says one of the group. “We need to go.”

Death’s real name is Mikhail Romanchenko, a Russian immigrant who owns a glass installation business in New York City. His nickname comes from playing Eve Online, a sci-fi video game. Players pay about $15 for a month’s worth of game time, during which they assume aliases; earn, save, and spend virtual money; and build spacecraft and band together to fight epic space battles. They also become part of a mythology that rivals anything depicted in Star Wars or Star Trek. “It’s part game and part soap opera and part shadow economy,” says Ted Brown, a video game designer and Eve aficionado. “There’s basically a whole virtual society that has emerged inside of Eve.”

During the peak of its power in 2010, the Legion of Death ruled roughly one-quarter of the Eve universe; each of Death’s 30,000 soldiers represented a person under his command, tapping away on his computer. To the winners go prime territory rich in trade and industry, while losers are pillaged and banished to lesser areas. “You don’t understand what it’s like to manage that many people,” Romanchenko reflects. “It’s not playing a game. It’s like having a second job.”

He and the others were in Iceland’s capital to meet with executives from CCP Games, the company that created Eve. The seven make up the Council of Stellar Management (CSM), a group elected by other Eve players and flown by CCP to Iceland every six months or so to discuss how the game should evolve. It’s a kind of super-user focus group, but also a channel for players’ complaints. In 2011, when CCP rolled out some controversial changes, the company summoned the CSM members to Reykjavík for an emergency meeting in an effort to stem a user backlash. “At the time, I had been dating a girl for only three weeks and was terrified,” says Joshua Goldshlag (Eve name: Two Step), a 35-year-old CSM member and computer programmer from Massachusetts. “I certainly did not want to mention that I had been elected as an Internet space politician."

Released by CCP in 2003, Eve has cultivated the most loyal following of all the massively multiplayer games and turned into something of a controlled experiment in human nature and unfettered capitalism. It’s also the brightest spot in Iceland’s real-world economy. In the wake of the 2008 global credit crisis, as the country’s banking sector smoldered, CCP plotted its expansion and put the finishing touches on a new office. Last year it brought in about $65 million in revenue. The company employs close to 600 people, or 0.2 percent of Iceland’s population. (An equivalent U.S. company would have about 626,000 employees.) And unlike fishing, aluminum smelting, or Iceland’s other major industries, running a digital space empire does not deplete natural resources. About 500,000 people play Eve, more than live in Iceland; CCP employees never seem to tire of pointing that out, and other Icelanders note it with pride. In early March, New York’s Museum of Modern Art unveiled a video game installation that celebrates the artwork of about a dozen iconic titles. The exotic space cruisers of Eve were picked to sit alongside Pac-Man, Tetris, and The Sims.

by Ashlee Vance, Bloomberg Businessweek |  Read more:

Photo: Courtesy CCP Games

This Bud's for You!

[ed. Happy 4/20 Day.]

In November, they basically legalized marijuana. Even if you don't pay attention to ballot initiatives or the like, you probably still possessed a fuzzy picture of where things stood. As of the past election cycle, marijuana is now totally street legal in Colorado and Washington. And possibly Oregon? And you'd been hearing for years about all those other places—there was a new state all the time—where you could buy it for medical purposes. Like California and Washington, D.C., and Connecticut and Rhode Island and, like, maybe New Mexico? Meanwhile, even in states where there is not yet a stipulation for those undergoing chemo to be able to blaze out, isn't it functionally decriminalized? Isn't it more or less okay to smoke weed right in front of a cop in New York City as long as you're not killing someone with a tire iron while simultaneously being young and nonwhite? And conventional wisdom, at least from certain purviews, holds that the social taboo surrounding marijuana is now close to zero, whether you're into older white women in Eileen fisher comfies (see: Steve Martin in It's Complicated) or rap music (see: rap music).

We've supposedly been on the cusp of this new world for a long time. And if we haven't arrived at it yet, we are now on the cusp of the cusp of the cusp of the future that stoners, libertarians, and other people you've gotten stuck talking to in bathroom lines at parties have predicted for decades: a time when marijuana becomes a normal commercial commodity. Grown safely by nice people, taxed and regulated. But also packaged and branded! The moment when weed at long last fulfills its vast potential to be one of the great—maybe even the greatest, now that tobacco is passé—American consumer products. Something, like yoga or frozen yogurt, around which distinct lifestyles can be built. Something that, like Rag & Bone blazers and the cheeses of France, can by dint of acquisitional obsession make you forget about everything bad. We may finally be nearing the moment when whether you smoke weed no longer defines you, but maybe where you shop for weedwill. The only question is: What kind of shopping bliss awaits us?

It would seem that certain precincts already know the answer to that question. In cities like Los Angeles and Seattle and Denver, where it's been gray-area legal for years, they've already built the foundations of the commercial-weed ecosystem. To know what the future holds, wouldn't one merely consult an expert in these places?

Step 1

Determine What Kind of Weed Shopper You Are

In the quest to review and systematize the nascent marijuana-shopping experience, the first place GQ's Critical Shopper, Marijuana Division, visited was a medical-marijuana dispensary called Denver Relief, which provides relief for people in Denver by way of getting blazed. (GQ's Critical Shopper, Marijuana Division, heard many phrases for being high while reviewing dispensaries—faded, zooted,blasted, smoked yourself cheese-dicked—but objectively the most awesome is blazed, so you should probably get used to reading it.)

Like a lot of dispensaries, Denver Relief is located somewhere most accurately described as nondescript. Critical Shopper literally does not remember where it is, except that you can see a parking lot out the window. The waiting room is the kind of place where it feels like a hot-stone massage might break out at any moment: leather sofas, oriental rugs, piped-in synthesizer music. Shopper flipped through a back issue of National Geographic and The Cannabible while he waited for the receptionist, in a cozy sweater behind a spotless Plexiglas window, to buzz him into the "bud room" when it was his turn. (...)

Shopper had on this day brought with him another Critical Marijuana Shopper: the weed reviewer for Westword, the Denver alt-weekly, a man who writes under the name William Breathes. Shopper will not physically describe William Breathes, because his important work is possible only as long as he's anonymous. Breathes confirmed Bushwhacker's information. "As far as flower goes?" Breathes said. "The best in Denver are Denver Relief, the Pink House, and the Clinic. The quality is phenomenal." (...)

So that's the first question you need to ask yourself when you start shopping for weed: How serious am I about marijuana? How erudite do I want to get on it? If this answer is "pretty freaking erudite," you should consider a place like those listed above by Breathes in Denver, or Greenworks or Dockside Co-op in Seattle, or Buds & Roses in Los Angeles. What Shopper calls the Connoisseur Class. Or Straight Nerd Spots. They offer their own brand of experience. To wit:

Once in the bud room, Ean Seeb, one of the proprietors, brought out some of his favorite strains to show Shopper. "This is our LA OG," he said, opening a glass canister filled with sculpted buds, all purplish and gnarled. Ean doesn't look like the guy who would sell you a dime bag out of the back of a Saturn Vue. He was that day fully GQ'ed out in a black cowl-neck sweater. His gray wingtips had neon pink laces. "Give it a smell," he said.

Breathes took the canister and inhaled: "That has a really nice baby powder and kind of...mint! Just a wonderful baby-powder nose on it."

"We say it's earthy with a hint of dryer sheets," Ean says.

Normally, Shopper would not be allowed in the bud room without a state-issued red card. But Ean made an exception for journalistic purposes. What was it like? A rectangle not bigger than twenty feet across, with faux-exposed-brick walls. Stretching across one side of the room was a long granite countertop with wooden partitions so no one need eyeball your merch. It called to mind the showroom of a rare-coin dealer. Only, behind the counter, lit lovingly, were thirty-two glass jars on shelves. And in each of these jars were dozens and dozens of grotesquely large, obsessively manicured marijuana blossoms. They had names like Bio-Jesus, Gumbo, Tahoe OG, Bio-Diesel, Dopium, Ghost Train Haze, Hashberry, Headband, Q3. All grown by Denver Relief itself, in its enormous grow house. (In Colorado, dispensaries must grow at least 70 percent of their product.) Having come from one of the states where places like this don't exist, Shopper realized that a pervasive sense of scarcity had always surrounded weed in most parts of society. It's something people kept in old cigar boxes in the backs of underpants drawers, something there was never that much of, and when it ran out, who knew exactly when you could get more? Even without being a particularly avid user, being in one of these rooms for the first time can trigger the same hoarding impulse a Sudanese refugee might feel in a Walmart.

by Devin Friedman, GQ |  Read more:

Photo: Maurcicio Alejo

Giuseppe Santomaso, 1988
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Douglas Prince, Gaia.
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