You, an average person? Probably homeless after you offended the wrong rich person.
If you're rich though, you are immune to consequences.
You, an average person? Probably homeless after you offended the wrong rich person.
If you're rich though, you are immune to consequences.
Yeah, the definition of "Productive" is all sorts of wacky when you consider that, by the numbers, the people doing high-frequency stock trading are some of the most "productive" people on the planet, because they manage to hoard so much money to themselves.
Meanwhile, the people actually providing goods and services that make people's lives better and create new things, those people are "unproductive", because they don't get filthy rich off their honest work.
The real reason we are not "productive" is that foreign investors are paying us to do the hard work of extracting resources (lumber, ore), or generating new research (we have MANY top universities), but then demanding that the money made from refining those resources or selling those idea goes to them, in other nations (typically the US or China)
Okay, so the problem is that because fossil fuels are cheap, most people don't find it very worthwhile to explore new or more efficient ways to do things. This is especially true for the wealthy, for whom gas and heating costs are basically nothing, so they will do dumb shit like heat their homes while leaving windows open, or buy larger and less efficient luxury cars.
The federal program fixes this. It adds a small cost to using fossil fuels, collects that money, and pays it back out to everyone. That means that people who use more carbon than average (which, again, is the willfully wasteful) will see a small penalty for their waste, while the people who are already trying their best to cut back will see a LARGE benefit, as they get a direct payment of cash for doing their part to conserve. If you are about average, there's very little impact on you, but you NOW have an economic inventive to try and economize.
They measure up to 4.0 metres (13 ft 1 in) long, weigh as much as 590 kilograms (1,300 lb)
Huh. Nope.
Another emulator. Iirc some of the code running Nintendo's own retro gaming products was pirated FROM Ryiujinx
He's like the third guy to do this in a year, big money doesn't want you to know about it
We've removed critical functionality from the operating system because our boss didn't want more than 6 buttons on screen at any time. Sorry the system is 100x more difficult to use!
But then how will congress give taxpayer dollars to a private company to do a terrible job?
I mean, we COULD have a government run agency that retains skilled engineers and keeps a good talent and knowledge pool of people specialized at delivering services that hundreds of millions of people rely on OR we could give money to the lowest bidder and blame "government inefficiency" for the contractor's fuckups.
This is a classic case of the Patriarchy / Toxic Masculinity hurting men too.
For the government officials to fund a Men's shelter would mean admitting that men can have moments of weakness, which the men in power do not like.
Actually, in most cases having fewer police on the streets leads to LESS petty crime.
This is because cops tend to spook people, so everyone (including the innocent, law abiding citizens) will leave areas that are patrolled.
This creates the ideal scenario for crime: there are few/no witnesses around for a while after the cops come by.
In pretty much every case I am aware of where cops go on strike and stop doing regular beat patrols, crime goes DOWN.
Yep. The goal of all of this this is to force people into straight marriages because that's all that matters to religious zealots.
They know that if kids practice safe sex they won't get pregnant and 'shot gun marriage' rates will go down.
They know that if kids discover their gender or sexual identity is non-cis, non-het, or non-monogamous that they might not wind up having a traditional marriage.
The know that people who only have 1 partner in their lifetime are much, much less likely to successfully leave an abusive partner, meaning there's a higher rate of divorce if people learn that having multiple partners in your life is normal and okay.
They know that kids who are educated about healthy sex and consent in relationships are less likely to go along with a child marriage or an assigned marriage.
They know that removing sex ed means more teen pregnancy, more intimate partner abuse, and more child-rape. For religious people whose only goal is to get young women into marriages, those are good things.
Example: An actual elected official in the state of Missouri defending his stance that "Parents Rights" includes the ability to marry off their kids to adults at age 12, because "Do you know any kids that have been married at age 12, I do, and guess what, they're still married". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H6UJ-uCrgc
These people legitimately believe that it's morally correct to kidnap a 12 year old girl and force her to be entirely subserviant to, and dependent on, some pedophile husband who controls everything they do, because them being trapped in that awful situation means that there's one more marriage in the world.
And in fact, increasing the tax on profits makes it much, much more valuable to reinvest in the business.
Like, lets say your business is expecting a net profit of $200K after a year. You can either choose to reinvest that into the business to buy new equipment and hire new staff, or you can record that as profit, pay the taxes, and then put the after tax dollars money directly into your and your investors pockets.
With our current corporate tax rate of 15%, it's really tempting to just pay the 30K in taxes and personally keep $170k as take-home, which gets taxed at a MUCH lower rate than regular income, rather than keep it in the business. $30K as a fee to keep $170K in personal income is pretty cheap.
However, if taking money our of the business was much more expensive, say 45% or something comparable to the marginal personal income tax rate for a working professional, then maybe as a business owner you might think that paying $90K to keep $110K is not as good a deal, and so you will think about whether there are other opportunities WITHIN the business you could invest in, putting those profits towards new equipment or training, rather than losing 45% of it to taxes just to add a small amount to your own pocket.