The U.S. Internal Revenue Service is seeking to use an infusion of funding to keep up with the ever-evolving tax maneuvers of the ultra-rich — while staving off frequent political attacks....
I don’t think that’s fair, I’m sure there are plenty of people in the bureaucracy of any government that simply want to do a good job in service of their country.
But as the article suggests they are generally outmatched by the best lawyers and accountants money can buy, all working solely with the objective of saving their master as many taxes as possible. And then backstabbed by corrupt politicians who cut their funding and dismantle legislation at the will of big money lobbyists, who are also working to save their masters as much money as possible.
Pope Francis has formally approved allowing priests to bless same-sex couples, with a new document explaining a radical change in Vatican policy by insisting that people seeking God’s love and mercy shouldn’t be subject to “an exhaustive moral analysis” to receive it....
For this to work you have to take on a catholic perspective. For them a marriage isn’t just a legal affirmation of partnership with tax advantages, it is a clearly defined sacrament that is explicitly for a man and a woman. They can’t just change that, it’s a defined fundamental element of the religion.
This radical change in doctrine (from a catholic perspective) is basically them trying to work around the fixed framework that has no room for interpretation, while still wanting to be more accepting. So they create a second marriage for non heterosexual couples.
As an atheist I must say this seems like a significant step. The church still has numerous flaws and isn’t for me, but I definitely commend this olive branch.
This is the exact fascist playbook though. Technically, on paper, the third reich wasn’t a dictatorship either. Just that Hitler and his allies introduced and amended legislature to give him emergency powers, and basically declared a permanent state of emergency (very simplified).
I mean, some cash is nice but the reason people don’t have kids is
a bleak future in the face of a collapsing ecosystem
late stage capitalism forcing people to work all day just to be able to afford existing
degrading childcare infrastructure amidst missing teachers, preschool educators, daycare workers, etc. And a general social climate hostile to raising children
and lastly of course the crippling loneliness epidemic, leaving many people (particularly men) unable to find partners
As far as I know, the big damage from Nuclear Weapons planetside is the massive blastwave that can pretty much scour the earth, with radiation and thermal damage bringing up the rear....
A photo of Trump emerging from Trump Tower, heading towards his E. Jean Carroll defamation trial, has sparked speculation over mysterious wounds appearing on Trump's hand. The photo was flagged by Drudge Report who flagged the red marks as "mystery cuts on his fingers." Drudge Report linked to Daily Mail which published the...
Did a school exchange with Serbia once (am German myself). The abundance of guns was jarring, I was welcomed to a night club by a couple armed bouncers, one of them open carrying a fucking ak-47.
Those mfs thought it hilarious to put a gun in my jacket during the security check, it was totally surreal being yelled at and held at gun point, even though they were just fucking with me.
There is no mathematical way for his work to be worth 5 billion, not even if he had magical powers and turned the whole garden into pure gold in the process. Not if he worked for 500 years straight, every day, without a break.
A billion is such a fantastically large number people can’t relate to how much more it is than any normal job pays in wages.
Because people don’t have a taste for bugs in the west. It may change over time, but still.
Also, in virtually all of those future scenarios where the peasantry is fed with bug meal and industrial nutrition slob the rich and powerful get the actual food we know today, real organic food, and the bug protein is just another symptom of systemic classism and oppression.
Its not even a paradox really. Tolerance is a social contract. If a party violates it through intolerance they are no longer covered by this mutual agreement.
How is this news to anyone? I saw this exact same scenario on a bootleg phone video about a decade ago, when China first started pushing for influence in Africa. A Chinese foreman whipping and beating his african workers like a Ku Klux Klan plantation owner before the civil war.
Asians are super racist, especially towards black people. But because that isnt fitting into the tankie narrative it gets downvoted anytime someone alludes to this fact, at least it happened any time i tried. Even got a ban from .ml for it iirc
Maybe in a twisted thought process: privatized public transport for the masses, and because the rich have no actual restrictions in reality, I’m sure they can drive a car if they want to.
If it’s just a motion sensor why not use a fucking motion sensor instead? It’s way cheaper than any kind of actual camera, not to mention ones that are able to do facial recognition. Such an obvious lie and poorly thought out excuse
Because the capitalism isn’t flavored to your taste this week? I take it you would rather throw money at the corporations when they brand their products with hammer and sickle
People downvoting you for the truth. There are dishes that you just can’t approximate with substitutes, baked goods which have butter as their main ingredient being one of them. Like making a steak without meat.
I have been eating vegetarian or vegan for long before it became en vogue to care about animal welfare and the ecological impact, but I still wouldn’t try to eat like a meat eater with vegan imitations replacing my dietary habits.
For that matter I don’t like most of the current approximations that are all the rage right now, I don’t want to taste meat when I dont eat meat. Keep your analog mortadella away from me.
Ai is coming either way. It’s not really avoidable, and if Mozilla were to divest from that area too they would set themselves up for failure. A few years down the road all browsers will have some sort of ai integration, perhaps large parts of the web too. If Mozilla doesn’t keep up it will just become entirely irrelevant and the internet will be fully controlled by google and its chromium bs.
Besides, what they did so far is really neat and how I would like to see ai integrated: offline translation features on your local device, not somewhere under control of some corporation. More of that please
Hear me out guys. I feel like a movie for Helldiver’s has some potential. Arrowhead could build a Helldiver’s universe and dive into Managed Democracy or it could just be a series of weird dystopian events involving bugs and automatons. Either way with the right care it could make Starship Troopers look like the original...
I’m not an advocate for this kind of thing but if they made it feel like Managed Democracy propaganda I feel like it would be great.
We live in post ironic times. If you made that movie you can bet that a very significant portion of the audience will take it at face value. I mean, we have people who think this is an unpolitical game when the entire universe is a parody: capitalism, fascism and xenophobia taken to their logical conclusion. It is almost impossible to ignore it yet many people somehow do, and happily drink the kool aid.
I just keep practicing most of the covid measures. When I am away I avoid touching my face, when I come home I wash my hands immediately, and I am also getting the optional vaccinations against influenza and the current covid strain whenever appropriate.
Doing this I haven’t been sick for about 5 years now. Haven’t even catched covid during the pandemic.
The election victory of self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei is being celebrated by right-wing libertarians around the world. This neoliberal extremism is successful because other ways of tackling the worsening crisis have failed – not just in Argentina.
It’s just gonna be a testbed for the inevitable breakdown of democracy and regression into true neofeudalism.
The very few own all the things and the population will be reduced to modern age peasants, owning nothing and working for scraps in the economies owned by their rulers.
I often see mentions of the disunity in the left and it being a real show stopper for achieving anything meaningful. Whats your take on that and also do you have any reasons(experiences, arguments etc) for that?
You just have to favor one particular flavor of leftism and ask the other leftists to fall in line for the cause.
There will be immediate, heated debates and arguing why that flavor is not the right flavor and what other flavor would be better instead and why. And then you have people arguing against either, and so forth.
We can agree mostly only on what is bad, and why. (Perhaps because the very essence of leftist ideology is egalitarianism and distributed power?) The right needs to only agree on one or two things like hating brown people and the leftists, and they fall in line, because they are naturally authoritarian.
Inside the IRS unit taking on America’s millionaires and billionaires (www.icij.org)
The U.S. Internal Revenue Service is seeking to use an infusion of funding to keep up with the ever-evolving tax maneuvers of the ultra-rich — while staving off frequent political attacks....
Pope approves blessings for same-sex couples if the rituals don't resemble marriage (apnews.com)
Pope Francis has formally approved allowing priests to bless same-sex couples, with a new document explaining a radical change in Vatican policy by insisting that people seeking God’s love and mercy shouldn’t be subject to “an exhaustive moral analysis” to receive it....
Is Russia a fascist dictatorship?
South Korean companies are offering workers $75,000 to have babies amid the country's desperate bid for more children (www.businessinsider.com)
Would Nuclear Weapons be as destructive in ship to ship space combat, as they are on the ground in an atmosphere?
As far as I know, the big damage from Nuclear Weapons planetside is the massive blastwave that can pretty much scour the earth, with radiation and thermal damage bringing up the rear....
"Mystery Cuts" on Trump's Hand Spark Speculation About His Declining Health (www.msn.com)
A photo of Trump emerging from Trump Tower, heading towards his E. Jean Carroll defamation trial, has sparked speculation over mysterious wounds appearing on Trump's hand. The photo was flagged by Drudge Report who flagged the red marks as "mystery cuts on his fingers." Drudge Report linked to Daily Mail which published the...
What is your best story when you were in a foreign country?
It can be anything: Scary, funny, confusing or embarrassing. What happened that stands out most in your mind?
Hermes billionaire to leave £5bn to former gardener (www.telegraph.co.uk)
Work placement rewards om 2044 (lemmy.world)
California neo-Nazi trying to crowdfund tour of city council meetings to provoke free speech lawsuit (www.sfchronicle.com)
archive.ph/TMgJI
Video of Chinese Manager Beating African Workers Sparks Racism Debate (www.ndtv.com)
Here is the video (Twitter link, 26 sec)...
Tech Billionaires Launch Fund to Create New Libertarian Societies (www.vice.com)
More efforts from tech bros to build Rapture....
Vending machine error reveals secret face image database of college students (arstechnica.com)
Progress? (lemmy.world)
How to identify “unavailable" videos on yt?
I hope this is the proper place to ask, though probably only indirectly on topic for this community....
I’m happy to see this community is bigger than the Reddit equivalent
No billionaire shenanigans to get in the way of having a truly open-sourced phone.
Lemmy about to implode. (lemmy.world)
Why France is finding vegan croissants hard to stomach (www.bbc.co.uk)
Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI (techcrunch.com)
Helldiver's The Movie
Hear me out guys. I feel like a movie for Helldiver’s has some potential. Arrowhead could build a Helldiver’s universe and dive into Managed Democracy or it could just be a series of weird dystopian events involving bugs and automatons. Either way with the right care it could make Starship Troopers look like the original...
Study finds anti-piracy messages backfire, especially for men (phys.org)
Friendly reminder: gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-th…
People who rarely get sick, what are your secrets?
Captain Ancap is watching you! The election victory of self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei is being celebrated by right-wing libertarians around the world. (www.konicz.info)
The election victory of self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei is being celebrated by right-wing libertarians around the world. This neoliberal extremism is successful because other ways of tackling the worsening crisis have failed – not just in Argentina.
What is your opinion on left unity?
I often see mentions of the disunity in the left and it being a real show stopper for achieving anything meaningful. Whats your take on that and also do you have any reasons(experiences, arguments etc) for that?