Good Things Friday (332) and Link Love
July 11, 2025
A new Murderbot story by Martha Wells, free to read at ReactorMag: Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy
Kay Bell on the Standard tax deductions for 2025 bumped up by one big bill. This has me trying to figure out what our 2025 tax bill will look like. We’ve never taken the standard deduction but this year, for married couples who file jointly, it’s $31,500. That’s actually very close to our itemized deductions last year. I am doing a bit of a deep dive into our past years itemized deductions to see how to project this year’s.
The End of the Stock Market As We Know It: Startups and Wall Street giants alike are racing to turn stocks, bonds, and real estate into crypto-like tokens. We asked an expert to break down what that means for your money.
This headline is totally clickbaity, but I wanted to know what they were talking about, and it turns out, it’s all very annoying. There’s absolutely no way that the process of tokenizing everything and the reality of a tokenized currency system like this will be fee-free, for one. For another, anyone who acts like regulation is the last and least most important thing when it comes to how we hold and manage our money is the last person I’d trust on what might be an exciting new future. Regulations are good, actually.
Things I was not happy to learn, private equity goes after libraries too. Scummy vultures. A Virginia public library is fighting off a takeover by private equity. There’s a link in the article to support the library.