June 12, 2026
Georgism is a way of thinking about economics and land use. It is based on the ideas of Henry George, an American economist and social philosopher. Georgists believe that people should have equal access to the benefits of land, which is a natural resource. They argue that the value of land comes from the community, and that this value should therefore be shared equally among all members of society.
Georgism proposes a system of taxation that is based on the value of land. This is called a “land value tax” or “single tax.” The idea is that people should pay a tax on the value of the land they own, but not on any improvements they make to the land. This would discourage land speculation and encourage the efficient use of land. Georgists believe that this would also promote social justice, by reducing inequality and poverty.
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June 6, 2026
In accounting, a slush fund is a monetary fund or account used for miscellaneous income and expenses, particularly when these are corrupt or illegal. Such funds may be kept hidden and maintained separately from money that is used for legitimate purposes. Slush funds may be employed by government or corporate officials in efforts to pay influential people discreetly in return for preferential treatment, advance information (such as non-public information in financial transactions), and other services.
‘Slush fund’ was originally a nautical term for the cash that a ship’s crew raised by selling fat (slush) scraped from cooking pots to tallow makers. This cash was kept separate from the ship’s accounts and used to make small purchases for the crew.
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May 17, 2026
Financial domination (also known as findom) is a fetish lifestyle in which a financial submissive gives gifts or money to a financial dominant. Generally, a financial submissive (cash piggy, finsub, human ATM, money slave, or paypig) gives gifts and money to a financial dominant (findomme/findom, Goddess, money dom/money domme, money master/money mistress or cashmaster). Participants in financial domination can be of any gender, but the receiver (also called dominant) is typically a woman and the submissive is almost always a man.
Financial domination became more widespread and took on its current form after the introduction of the Internet. The relationship between the two parties often takes place solely via online communication.
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March 29, 2026
Enshittification, also known as platform decay, is a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to both users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders.
Canadian writer Cory Doctorow coined the neologism enshittification in November 2022. The American Dialect Society selected it as its 2023 Word of the Year, with Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary following suit for 2024. Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com also list enshittification as a word.
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March 15, 2026
A Disney adult is an adult who is an avid fan of the works of the Walt Disney Company. Disney adults are sometimes seen by others as embarrassing or naive for enjoying material ostensibly aimed at children, with sociologist Idil Galip saying that the financial and emotional investment in maintaining the commercialized hobby ‘almost signals a break from regular society or real life.’
Canadian scholar Henry Giroux argues that the escapism actively sought by these adults through consumption of media they know to be directly connected to the Walt Disney conglomerate is a product of the company’s intentional and careful design by commercializing any previous emotional attachments to its properties, which in turn leads to an infantilization of the audience’s self that reduces their sense of agency.
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March 1, 2026
The everything bubble refers to the impact on the values of asset prices, including equities, real estate, bonds, many commodities, and cryptocurrencies, due to quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, and the Bank of Japan. The policy itself and the techniques of direct and indirect methods of quantitative easing used to execute it are sometimes referred to as the Central bank put. The term “everything bubble” first came in use during the chair of Janet Yellen, but it is most associated with the quantitative easing during the COVID-19 pandemic by Jerome Powell.
The everything bubble notably occurred despite the COVID-19 recession, the China–United States trade war, and political turmoil – leading to a realization that the bubble was a central bank creation, with concerns on the independence and integrity of market pricing, and on the Fed’s impact on wealth inequality.
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January 10, 2026
A pig-butchering scam is a type of online fraud where the victim is encouraged to make increasing financial contributions over a long period, usually in the form of cryptocurrency. The term compares the initial phase of gaining the victims’ trust to the fattening of pigs before slaughtering them. Such scams are commonplace on social media and dating apps, and often involve elements of catfishing (using false identities), investment fraud, and romance scams.
The scammer builds trust with the victim through online communication, subsequently persuading them to invest in a fraudulent cryptocurrency scheme. Perpetrators are typically victims of a fraud factory, where they are lured to travel internationally under false pretenses, trafficked to another location, and forced to commit the fraud by organised crime gangs.
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December 15, 2025
Phytomining [fahy-toh-mahy-ning] (sometimes called agromining) is a process of extracting heavy metals from the soil using plants. Unlike Phytoremediation, where extraction is used for cleaning up environmental pollutants, phytomining is for the purpose of gathering the metals for economic use.
Phytomining exploits the existence of hyperaccumulator plants which naturally have proteins or compounds that bind with certain metal ions. Once the hyperaccumulation happens, the final metal, or bio-ore, needs to be refined from the plant matter. Phytomining was first proposed in 1983 by Rufus Chaney, a USDA agronomist. The first commercial projects were funded in 2025.
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December 1, 2025
Wolfgang Beltracchi [bel-trah-kee] (b. 1951) is a German former art forger and visual artist who has admitted to forging hundreds of paintings in an international art scam netting millions of euros. Beltracchi, together with his wife Helene, sold forgeries of alleged works by famous artists, including Max Ernst, Heinrich Campendonk, Fernand Léger, and Kees van Dongen. Though he was found guilty for forging 14 works of art that sold for a combined $45m (£28.6m), he claims to have faked ‘about 50’ artists. The total estimated profits Beltracchi made from his forgeries surpasses $100m.
In 2011, after a 40-day trial, Beltracchi was found guilty and sentenced to six years in a German prison. His wife, Helene, was given a four-year sentence, and both were ordered to pay millions in restitution. Beltracchi was freed in 2015, having served just over three years in prison. He is today a successful artist who sells his paintings and sculptures to international collectors without the protection of art makers and the international art market.
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November 13, 2025
The Funk Brothers were a group of Detroit-based session musicians who performed the backing to most Motown recordings from 1959 until the company moved to Los Angeles in 1972.
Its members are considered among the most successful groups of studio musicians in music history. Among their hits are ‘My Girl,’ ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine,’ ‘Baby Love,’ ‘ I Was Made to Love Her,’ ‘Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone,’ ‘The Tears of a Clown,’ ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,’ and ‘Heat Wave’. Some combination of the members played on each of Motown’s 100-plus U.S. R&B number one singles and 50-plus U.S. Pop number ones released from 1961 to 1972.
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October 21, 2025
Tipflation and tip creep are terms to describe the United States’ recent widespread expansion of gratuity to more industries, as opposed to being traditionally only prevalent in full-service restaurants. Occupations which are now widely requesting gratuities include rideshare drivers, food delivery drivers, and baristas. Tipflation’s origins are likely the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2021–2023 inflation surge.
Touch-screen digital payment systems run by companies like Clover and Square include gratuity prompts that are often visible to nearby members of the public and the service worker. The social pressure created from such systems is often separately mentioned as guilt-tipping, and tipflation has also been seen as causing tipping fatigue, which is the resentment that American consumers generally feel from tipping culture.
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August 28, 2025
A data broker is an individual or company that specializes in collecting personal data (such as income, ethnicity, political beliefs, or geolocation data) or data about people, mostly from public records but sometimes sourced privately, and selling or licensing such information to third parties for a variety of uses.
Sources, usually Internet-based since the 1990s, may include census and electoral roll records, social networking sites, court reports and purchase histories. The information from data brokers may be used in background checks used by employers and housing.
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