When discussing how rich people must pay more taxes, someone often notes that despite their higher progressive tax rates, rich people often pay very little in taxes, because they have very smart and wily attorneys and accountants who find ways to make their clients appear not rich. This is, for instance, the basis for AIG’s taxpayer-funded lawsuit against the IRS, claiming that it shouldn’t owe as much in taxes because much of the money being taxed was supposed to be in offshore tax havens.Well, the government is currently cracking down on things like offshore tax havens, in an attempt to get more money. A large part of this is a settlement with the Swiss bank UBS. Swiss bank accounts, as you may know, are a favorite place to hide money, because the Swiss are famously very discreet about who has money in their accounts (much to the joy of former Nazis everywhere). Sadly for them, UBS was recently accused of aiding and abetting in millions of dollars worth of tax evasion-and not just because people were using their accounts, their representatives were actively touting tax evasion as a benefit and helping their clients launder money (like, say, by hiding diamonds in toothpaste tubes). As part of the settlement in that case, UBS is being forced to divulge the names of its U.S. account holders. The IRS is gleefully waiting, but has proposed a sort of amnesty: Come in now, pay your taxes that you should have been paying on your money, plus interest, and we won’t send you to jail. Idle threats, maybe, but one man has already been arrested, and the IRS promises more are on the way.It’s nice to hear that everyone is getting a fair shake. And our government has recently taken on some unforeseen expenses. They could probably use a few extra bucks that we have tucked away in Geneva.
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A farmer caught a person dumping 421 tires on his land and his response is legendary
After years of his land being treated like a junkyard, Stuart Baldwin decided it was time to send a very large, rubbery message.
Living on a farm often means dealing with the beauty of nature, but for Stuart Baldwin, a livestock farmer in Haydock, it also meant dealing with the mess left behind by others. Baldwin says about 25 times a year his land is targeted by “fly-tippers,” people who illegally dump trash on private property. As the Manchester Evening News reported, the situation recently reached a breaking point when Baldwin discovered a staggering 421 tires scattered across his fields.
Instead of just cleaning up the mess and footing the bill, Baldwin decided to check the CCTV cameras he had recently installed. The footage clearly showed a van arriving at the property and unloading the massive haul of rubber.
Baldwin didn’t immediately call the authorities or retaliate. In a move that reflects a very grounded sense of fairness, he tracked the man down and gave him a chance to make it right. He offered the man a few days to return and clear the field himself.
When the deadline passed and the tires remained, Baldwin decided that if the man wouldn’t come to the tires, the tires would go to the man. Utilizing a truck from his family’s recycling business, Baldwin and a group of volunteers loaded every single one of the 421 tires and drove them straight to the address associated with the van. As The Daily Mail reported, they carefully unloaded the entire pile into the man’s front garden, ensuring no property was damaged in the process.
This wasn’t just about a “petty” dispute. Illegal dumping is a massive problem that places a heavy financial and emotional burden on farmers. According to official government data from the UK, authorities dealt with over 1.2 million fly-tipping incidents in the last year alone. Baldwin’s daughter, Megan, told reporters that the family simply wanted to prove a point about respect and accountability. They wanted to show that a farmer’s land is a livelihood, not a convenient trash can.
The community response has been overwhelmingly supportive. Baldwin noted that people have even approached him on the street to thank him for standing up for the neighborhood. While he joked that the culprit was likely feeling “deflated” after the delivery, the message was serious. By returning the waste to its source, Baldwin turned a frustrating violation of his property into a legendary lesson in personal responsibility.
This article originally appeared earlier this year.
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The Tsimané people of Bolivia have almost no dementia. Scientists say modern life is our problem.
Their rate of dementia is roughly 1%. In the United States, it’s 11%.
Deep in the Bolivian Amazon, researchers studying two indigenous communities have found something that stopped them in their tracks: among older Tsimané adults, the rate of dementia is roughly 1%. In the United States, the figure for the same age group is 11%.
The finding, published in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia, is part of nearly two decades of research on the Tsimané and their sister population the Mosetén, communities who have been recorded as having some of the lowest rates of heart disease, brain atrophy, and cognitive decline ever measured in science. A subsequent study from the University of Southern California and Chapman University, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used CT scans on 1,165 Tsimané and Mosetén adults to measure how their brains age compared to populations in the US and Europe. The answer was striking: their brains age significantly more slowly.
The researchers’ explanation centers on what they call a “sweet spot” — a balance between physical exertion and food availability that most people in industrialized countries have drifted far from. “The lives of our pre-industrial ancestors were punctuated by limited food availability,” said Dr. Andrei Irimia, an assistant professor at USC’s Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and co-author of the study. “Humans historically spent a lot of time exercising out of necessity to find food, and their brain aging profiles reflected this lifestyle.”
The Tsimané people of Bolivia posing for a photograph. Photo credit: Canva The Tsimané are highly active not because they exercise in any structured sense but because their daily lives demand it. They fish, hunt, farm with hand tools, and forage, averaging around 17,000 steps a day. Their diet is heavy on carbohydrates — plantains, cassava, rice, and corn make up roughly 70% of what they eat, with fats and protein splitting the remaining 30%. It is not a low-carb or protein-heavy regimen. It is, essentially, the diet of people who burn what they consume. CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who visited a Tsimané village in 2018 for his series “Chasing Life,” noted that they also sleep around nine hours a night and practice what might be called intermittent fasting — not by choice, but by necessity during lean seasons.
The research also included the Mosetén, who share the Tsimané’s ancestral history and subsistence lifestyle but have more access to modern technology, medicine, and infrastructure. Their brain health outcomes fell between the Tsimané and industrialized populations, better than Americans and Europeans, but not as strong as the Tsimané. Researchers describe this gradient as especially revealing because it suggests a continuum rather than a binary, and that even partial movement toward a more active, less calorically abundant lifestyle appears to have measurable effects on how the brain ages.
“During our evolutionary past, more food and less effort spent getting it resulted in improved health,” said Hillard Kaplan, a professor of health economics and anthropology at Chapman University who has studied the Tsimané for nearly 20 years. “With industrialization, those traits lead us to overshoot the mark.”
The researchers are careful to note that the Tsimané lifestyle is not simply transferable. Their longevity in absolute terms is lower than Americans’ because of deaths from trauma, infection, and complications in childbirth, hazards of living without a healthcare system. The point of the research is not that modern medicine is unnecessary but that the environments it’s embedded in may be undermining the brain health it’s trying to protect.
“This ideal set of conditions for disease prevention prompts us to consider whether our industrialized lifestyles increase our risk of disease,” Irimia said.
This article originally appeared earlier this year.
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She tipped a dollar on a $5 coffee and the barista called her out in front of the whole café. The internet couldn’t agree on who was wrong.
The incident touched a nerve because almost everyone has stood at a tip screen lately wondering what they actually owe.
A regular customer at her local coffee shop dropped a dollar in the tip jar on her way out last week and ended up sparking a debate that a lot of people clearly needed to have.
She’d paid $5 for her coffee, skipped the card tip prompt at checkout, and left a bill in the jar on her way out the door. The barista noticed, glanced at the cash in her customer’s wallet, and said loudly enough for the room to hear: “Oh wow! A whole dollar… that’s SO generous! Thank you SO much.”
The customer, who goes by u/moonchildcountrygirl on Reddit, said she was rattled enough to wonder whether something was going to end up in her drink. When she posted about it online, Newsweek picked up the story and more than 800 comments followed.
Reddit’s reaction was not especially sympathetic to the barista. “Should have picked that dollar back,” was among the most upvoted responses. Others said they would have asked for a full refund on the drink. The OP herself landed on a version of that position: if a tip is going to be met with sarcasm, why tip at all?
But the incident is a little more complicated than a straightforward etiquette violation, because the math here actually favors the customer. A dollar on a $5 drink is a 20% tip, the same percentage most people consider the standard for a sit-down restaurant with table service. Industry veterans generally say a dollar a drink is a reasonable coffee shop tip, and that baristas at most cafés (unlike servers) are paid standard minimum wage rather than the lower tipped-employee rate that makes gratuities more essential.
A barista serves a customer. Photo credit: Canva None of which makes a public sarcastic remark the right response. But it does situate the incident inside a broader frustration that’s been building for a few years. A Pew Research Center survey found that 7 in 10 American adults say tipping is now expected in more places than it was a few years ago. A Bankrate survey found that 41% of Americans think tipping culture has gotten out of hand, and around 63% have at least one negative view about tipping overall. More than 60% agreed that employers should simply pay workers better so tips don’t have to fill the gap.
The tip jar and the checkout screen have become the place where all of that tension gets concentrated into a single uncomfortable moment. The barista’s comment was out of line. The customer’s dollar was not stingy. And the fact that it’s hard to say either of those things without someone disagreeing is probably the actual story.
This article originally appeared earlier this year.
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The Tsimané people of Bolivia have almost no dementia. Scientists say modern life is our problem.
She tipped a dollar on a $5 coffee and the barista called her out in front of the whole café. The internet couldn’t agree on who was wrong.
A bride collapsed during her own rehearsal dinner toast. The detective who burst in explained everything.
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