Even if they aren’t paying a fair or even reasonable percentage, the tiny fraction they do pay in taxes is still a massive majority of total taxes paid.
It’s the corporations gaming the system at the top to report losses on record profits and not paying taxes that is even worse. Tax codes as a whole desperately need to be overhauled.
Preach! I still consider myself to be a moderate or centrist as a leftist libertarian (social progressive and fiscal conservative), and also haven’t believed Republicans were actual fiscal conservatives since Bush Jr. They have been only social conservatives since arguably at least Regan. Still pissed off that insane Ayn Rand utopian individualists and Christian Nationalists became the entire libertarian movement.
True, although we shouldn’t pretend that the cost for building a coal mine or developing an oil field is more single use than a solar farm or wind turbine. Many oil wells and coal mines operate for decades with relatively small operational costs after initial build out. Time in production difference is not statistically significant enough to make that a linchpin argument.
The jobs created by solar and wind in R&D, manufacturing, and construction and maintenance, along with most importantly the carbon emissions benefits are the most relevant economic points. Nuclear should also be part of the Green New Deal, but fossil fuel companies successfully fear mongered that sector to death.
Isn’t there a song I’m vaguely recalling from Sunday school about that? “Red and yellow, black, and off-white, all are zeroed in his sights. Drop expensive bombs on all the little children in the world.” Did I remember that correctly?
From a customer service standpoint, no, but I was talking about the cost perspective. A single payer system financing small clinics would be the best answer here, getting rid of the corporate hospital impersonality while keeping costs low. If a doctors office doesn’t have to deal with the insurance middle men and pharmacy middle men who are parasitically draining the system, you will have more neighborhood clinics and hospitals that care about their city’s residents.
What blows my mind is that basically all of these fit in with fiscal conservative ethos.
Palestine opens a whole other can of billions of dollars of foreign government spending separate from the ethical concerns, which is less clear cut on market economics and would need to be an essay by itself. So I will just stick with the 6 out of 7 low hanging fruits for this argument, and mock the completely not fiscally conservating mess the Republican party has become.
It’s funny that you think not having a drop to drink will prevent the cops from arresting you for DUI with a 0.0 breathalizer anyway and the DA from prosecuting you despite an additional 0.0 blood test.
Diplomatic relations are not utopian by any stretch. It’s literally this or all out war with Russia.
Diplomatic relations isn’t, but disbanding of militaries and police certainly is. As to how Germany’s diplomatic relationship is lacking, isn’t the only difference with how China is interacting sanctions for the war? If the only option for embargoing oil trade is all out war, I think that is a lack of imagination at play.
Also: I believe that you’re already predetermined to call me names if I don’t give you the answer that you already accepted as the one truth.
Why would I call you names? What would make you think I would?
As you do not wish to discuss this, I can only infer that you might think that Russian annexation of Crimea and Donbas regions is for reasons other than territorial expansion of farmland, industrial centers, and naval ports. I personally do not think there is any justifiable reason for the invasion, even if you believe Ukraine was a 100% Nazi country and the Eastern third of the country was asking for Russia to come liberate them.
if Ukraine accepted the treaty of March 2022, then hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians would still be alive. Also: Russia never wanted to annex the whole of Ukraine.
If Russia had held to the Budapest Memorandum, thousands of Ukranians and Russians would still be alive. Ukraine would also have lost a third of their territory and been weakened against follow up hostilities with no binding guarantees of lasting peace.
Again: I reject the premise. Russia never wanted to annex Ukraine.
Just like you reject the premise that Russia would annex all of Ukraine if given the chance, I reject the premise that Russia wants to stop at liberating ethnic Russians living in Donbas and Crimea. I believe it far more likely that Putin would like to strengthen Russia by reconquering the former Soviet bloc and restoring national empire as his legacy.
I believe there is a goal of Greater Russia the same way China annexed Nepal, and the same early I believe there is a goal of Greater Israel in Syria. Both countries would happily annex their neighbors, especially as buffer zones against nearby “hostile” neighbors.
While a utopia is always an admirable goal, I would like to know what diplomatic relations look like in your viewpoint with Russia. Further, why is Russia invading Ukraine? Do you believe that if Ukraine capitulated, disbanded their military and became Russia that the people of Ukraine would be safer?
Do you believe that the current Russian government would stop expansionism with just the annexation of Ukraine?
I would argue that the vast majority of people think that joining the military is about defensive war. There is a reason that military enlistment skyrockets in a country after that country has been attacked by a foreign source.
Generally a government must convince its populace that a war not taking place on its own soil is still defensive, because offensive war isn’t palatable to the vast majority of people.
I live in Germany and currently the German government is amping up militarisation which actively increases the risk of war with Russia which in turn endangers my life.
Do you believe that Germany disbanding their military and turning over control of the country to Putin endangers your life less? Does this extend to everyone in your community? Everyone inside the geographical borders of Germany?
It all makes perfect sense when you realize that the “don’t kill people” part only meant “don’t kill fellow tribesmen”. Non-tribesmen were 100% fair game. The God of that religion commanded multiple genocides against other tribes.
You run into the same problems with said religion and slavery. The whole “it was different and more indentured servitude than chattel slavery” was only for inside the tribe. Chattel slavery was explicitly allowed for the non-tribesman.
Modern religious leaders may be uncomfortable with this and have to perform some Olympic level mental gymnastics, but that is just because ethics and values have changed slightly in 2000 or so years.
Oh no doubt, it is both a theocracy and a racial supremacy, with lighter skinned Jewish supremacy to boot. My concern has been with the seeming erasure of Jewish ethnicity through conflation with White Supremacy as the big societal evil of our time.
It just skeeves me out and feels basically racist when people call Israel white European settler colonialism. Like only the evil European White Man could be so evil, so they obviously aren’t “real” Jews. It has the same energy as white supremacists not counting Jews as white, just flipped and repackaged. Maybe it’s just racial purity testing in general not sitting right with me, I don’t like it when either political side does it.
I am genuinely curious who you believe is ethnically Jewish if Israel is white colonizers pretending to be Jewish? I hear somewhat frequently that there aren’t “real” Jews anymore because intermixing with Europeans (and other ethnicities) diluted their bloodline too much, and it feels not only doublethinky but almost eugenicist.
I canceled my Netflix when they did the account sharing shenanigans, and filled out the exit survey explaining why. I had only kept my Netflix because my parents watched it, then they made it so hard to add a family member addon account I said fuck it and canceled everything.
My parents signed up for their own account, so Netflix didn’t lose total count, but they lost the extra subscriber that was the whole point. I know I am an edge case in not just complaining while taking it, but there is always hope.
That’s what all the street grime is for, making the mud wallow.
Sadly the right to repair movement has been slow to work for humans. You really need to stick with the proprietary OEM parts, but MomCo refuses to provide them as “impossible”. There is some hope in bio 3D printed replacements reusing the cellular DRM recovered from a specific unit though.
A jailbreak to resolve the DRM and closed-ecosystem issues is always supposedly 10 or so years away, but like economically feasible fusion I am not sure I’d count on it any time soon.
You just reminded me to check on the 4th book, and it has been released. Thank you kind sir or madame (or uplifted rat).
Leviticus 20:13 actually means no butt stuff with women and no vaginal stuff with men. It also originally intended missionary only for man on woman and saving doggy style for man on man, but as long as you don’t have overlapping sexual acts and positions for the straight stuff and the gay stuff you are in the clear.
It’s a continuation of the whole “no mixed fabrics” thing and is part of God’s autism expression along with foods not touching on the plate.