Ask Lemmy

Anything by E.B. White. While the narratives are simplistic, there is a gentile under tone of trauma in each one that I feel might be rather meaningful and resonant to today's emotionally fragile youth. These are books that deal with inevitable death, discrimination and ableism in frank, but subversively subtle ways.

The egg by Andy Weir. It gave me the basis for Gnosticism / the spirituality that I genuinely think is closest to the truth ie: humans do have a soul, but it's all the same soul / consciousness that just splits up into sperate little chunks of perception for a little bit at a time before rejoining the whole in different places and splitting off again from and to a completely different place. Honestly the main thing I learned from psychology, neurology, and physics classes is that time, or at least the human perception of it, is almost completely bullshit, and that our perception of our brain as a separate thing that controls the rest of our body, or even as our body as a separate thing from the world like a suit in space is a significant cause of mental illness.

Why does our sense of self so often stop at our brain when most of our neurotransmitters are in our gut? How can you be the cells but not the fluid you filter then piss out? Your upper layers of skin and hair are dead how can they be more you than the air trapped between them? There's a reason drugs dissolving your sense of self, even temporarily, is often described as a positively transformative experience.

The Stranger by Albert Camus. It's very short, barely over 100 pages, and it helped me realize that nothing really matters.

Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. I'd have never picked it up if I hadn't been bored and trying to kill time, but it really put life in a new perspective. Genuinely think it's made everything lighter since reading that one.

1984, so that people mentioning it online will stop sounding like complete fucking idiots.

Or perhaps The Jungle; it sparked public outcry and major overhauls the last time it became popular, maybe it can work its magic again.

Hah. I'd be happy to hear that everyone read at least one book in their lifetime.

Grapes of Wrath is a good one that's relevant now as when it was made.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Just the intermissions would get everyone's blood boiling.

Yu Hua - Brothers

The Master and Margarita

Probably won't get as much out of it as someone who lived in the Soviet union, but it's an interesting dissection of the absurdity of authority.

My summer reading list (not that I get to read both every year):

• The Songs of Distant Earth, by Arthur C. Clarke
• The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco

The first is about what we never prepared for, but could try to thrive through. (Mike Oldfield made a cool concept album about this. One of the songs is called "Only time will tell")

The second is a murder mystery set in a medieval monastery. But wait! Is it actually a multilayered examination of our notions about information? Oh hell yeah.

Flowers for Algernon

Feels pretty cliche to say them, but

1984, the handmaid's tale and brave new world

Should probably be on anyone's list that hasn't managed to get to them yet

A lot of fiction here so I'll go the other way and suggest "Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich--and Cheat Everybody Else" by David Cay Johnston.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/291700/perfectly-legal-by-david-cay-johnston/

If people aren't outraged, they aren't paying attention.

Sample:

"Once, Blattmachr devised a way that Bill Gates, the richest man in America, could reap $200 million in profits on Microsoft stock without paying the $56 million of capital gains taxes that federal law required at the time. The plan was so lucrative that Gates would not have to pay a single dollar in tax and would even be entitled to an income tax deduction of $6 million or so. And that was just the initial plan. The concept could be applied endlessly, allowing Gates to convert billions of dollars in Microsoft stock gains into cash over the years. So long as the Internal Revenue Service did not challenge the deals, then Gates could realize unlimited capital gains without the pain of taxes.

The trick was in manipulating charitable trusts, a common enough device used by generous people who own an asset, such as stock or a building that has appreciated in value. Instead of selling the asset and investing the after-tax proceeds, an individual or a married couple can donate the asset to a charitable trust that they control. The trust sells the asset tax-free and invests the proceeds, giving the donating individual or couple a lifetime income, typically 6 percent per year. When the donors die, what remains in the trust, typically half its value, goes to charity.

Blattmachr’s plan was to take back not 6 percent annually for life, but 80 percent per year for two years. Gates could have pocketed at least $192 million without paying any tax. Then the trust would fold and a charity would get the remaining sum, less than $8 million. Under the plan Gates could have converted into cash more than 96 percent of gains on the Microsoft shares he donated, not the 72 percent he was entitled to after federal capital gains taxes. The charity would get less than four cents on each donated dollar. The government would collect nothing.

The scheme even created a tax deduction that was enough to reduce Gates’s income taxes by about $2 million.

Whether Gates took advantage of such a plan is not known for sure because the law makes individual income tax records confidential. What is known is that when Blattmachr made this route available to others, it sold like a treasure map where X marks the tax-free spot. Billions of dollars of assets poured into these short-term charitable trusts and their super-rich owners took many millions of dollars of income tax deductions that further cut into the flow of revenue to the government.

The technique was so outlandish that when some other tax lawyers got their hands on the map in March 1994, they sent it to the Department of the Treasury in a plain brown envelope. That July, Treasury blocked the route to newcomers and said that it would pursue those who used the device. However, the Internal Revenue Service never announced whether it collected any of the taxes. One hint that the IRS may not have acted against those who used the technique can be found in the records of United States Tax Court, which is where taxpayers challenge the IRS. There are no Tax Court cases in which taxpayers fought for a court blessing on the device, known in taxspeak as an “accelerated charitable remainder trust.”

The Treasury rules shutting down this route to tax-free investment profits were not the end of stretching charitable trusts in ways never anticipated by Congress. So facile is Blattmachr’s mind that from those 1994 rules he divined a new route to tax-free gains. He started selling a new treasure map and billions of dollars more in capital gains passed untaxed into the bank accounts of his clients before the government blocked that second path, known in taxspeak as “son of accelerated charitable remainder trust.”

Illusions by Richard Bach, subtitled The Tale of the Reluctant Messiah. A beautiful book about the universe and spirituality. The author wrote it on the premise of "what if I had my own, personal, Jesus... Or Buddha or Messiah that was hanging out with me and explaining the universe". So this guy is a Messiah that one day just quits to fly airplanes.

It's funny, it's inspiring, it's a little sad, but hopeful. It's also very short, you can easily read it in an afternoon.

The Complete Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

All of Discworld.