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"A major problem with letting billionaires decide how your country is run is that they will back whichever psycho promises the lowest taxes and least regulation, no matter how completely batshit and unfit that person is:" Cory Doctorow @pluralistic The case for a Canadian wealth tax pluralistic.net/2025/06/23/bil…
At today's House Oversight Committee hearing, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) accused Democratic governors of "murder" of Laken Riley, leading to unrest i...
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – A wave of international condemnation has followed the recent US military strikes on Iran’s peaceful nuclear facilities, with North Korea, China, Russia, and Venezuela denouncing the attacks as a blatant violation of international la…
"Tek boyutlu düşünce, politika yapıcılar ve onların kitlesel bilgi sağlayıcıları tarafından sistematik olarak teşvik edilmektedir. Söylem evrenleri, sürekli ve tekelci bir şekilde tekrarlanan, hipnotik tanımlar ya da dikteler haline gelen, kendi kendini doğrulayan hipotezlerle doludur."
You do realise Iran is direclty supplying weapons to Russia that are used against Ukraine. Did you really expect for Ukraine to side with Iran here? It seems a lot of people are forgetting what a shitty country Iran actually is ...
Israel also supplied Drones to Russia after the Crimea invasion, didn't join sanctions and as reported by an Ukrainian official demanded Ukraine to surrender behind closed doors.
Now with the US getting itself dragged into another Iraq style war by Israel, Ukraine could suffer in two major ways:
Western military aid will be cut short in favor of Israel and US
The rising energy prices will lead to Russia's strained warchest to replenish and could even lead to EU countries easing sanctions to buy oil and gas from Russia again.
Ukraine is being played by the US and Israel but either plays along because Zelensky is high on Zionism or because Ukraine by now is owned by the US and he has to say everything Trump wants him to say. Either way this is bad for the Ukrainian people and it is delusional to think that anyone in the West would feel emboldened now to bomb Russia.
Israel also supplied Drones to Russia after the Crimea invasion, didn't join sanctions and as reported by an Ukrainian official demanded Ukraine to surrender behind closed doors.
This is clear whataboutism. Iran and Israel can both be bad. Ukraine wants max pressure on the Russian war machine. So they cheer the weakening of a Russian military supplier. They also probably figure that if America is itching to fight again, it might as well help them out. They also probably sense the news cycle further shifting away from Ukraine and are trying to bring themselves into the conversation.
This right here is why I've always laughed at the concept of "energy independence" through domestic oil extraction. The US produces much more oil than it uses. The oil coming out of the straight of Hormuz is not coming to the US. However, oil is a global commodity and the price goes up or down for everyone.
No, but the gas you out in your car came from oil imported from Canada. The best way to ensure energy independence is installing solar and wind farms across the US, but the people that scream the loudest about oil prices are against that too
Solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, even natural gas would all be independent from international conflicts. Obviously, if your goal is an energy transition, pivoting into fossil fuels is brain dead, but that seems like what we're doing.
La nostra protesta a Venezia contro Jeff Bezos. Un gigantesco striscione è apparso in Piazza San Marco per contestare il business inquinante del CEO di Amazon.
@Max_Imum I've been growing tobacco for a few years now. It's incredibly easy to grow. These are from seeds I grew last year and they were from seeds from the year before. Kratom is next on my list. I need to do another run of poppies next year for more seeds.
The Trump administration's plans to convert some 50,000 civil servants into at-will employees has some worried that essential government functions will be politicized.
Lyrics Last Christmas I gave you my heart But the very next day you gave it away This year To save me from tears I'll give it to someone special
Last Christmas I gave you my heart But the very next day you gave it away This year To save me from tears I'll give it to someone special
Once bitten and twice shy I keep my distance But you still catch my eye Tell me, baby Do you recognize me? Well, it's been a year It doesn't surprise me
Happy Christmas
I wrapped it up and sent it With a note saying "I love you" I meant it Now I know what a fool I've been But if you kissed me now I know you'd fool me again
Last Christmas I gave you my heart But the very next day you gave it away This year To save me from tears I'll give it to someone special
Last Christmas I gave you my heart But the very next day you gave it away This year To save me from tears I'll give it to someone special
Oh, oh, baby
A crowded room Friends with tired eyes I'm hiding from you And your soul of ice My god, I thought you were someone to rely on Me? I guess I was a shoulder to cry on
A face on a lover with a fire in his heart A man under cover, but you tore me apart Now I've found a real love. You'll never fool me again
Last Christmas I gave you my heart But the very next day you gave it away This year To save me from tears I'll give it to someone special
Last Christmas I gave you my heart But the very next day you gave it away This year To save me from tears I'll give it to someone special
A face on a lover with a fire in his heart I gave you my heart A man under cover, but you tore him apart Maybe next year I'll give it to someone— I'll give it to someone special
Special Someone Someone I'll give it to someone— I'll give it to someone special
Who give me something in return I'll give it to someone— Hold my heart and watch it burn I'll give it to someone—
I'll give it to someone— I'll give it to someone special
I thought you were here to stay How could you love me for a day I thought you were someone special
Gave you my heart
I'll give it to someone— I'll give it to someone—
Last Christmas I gave you my heart You gave it away
US farmers face a tough outlook as China's imports of various US agricultural products plummeted in May.
The trade war and China's concerns about the long-term relationship with the US could have deep implications for global supply chains and the US farm sector.
Capitalism is when the guy who builds a social media app and shares it freely with the world gets next to nothing for their effort while the fascist convicted criminal who uses their work makes billions.
Please, tell me again how capitalism breeds innovation. All it breeds are greedy psychopathic parasites (aka billionaires).
(Trump’s Truth Social is built on Mastodon which is licensed under AGPL. You should all continue pressuring them to keep releasing the source.)
Ayn Rand's book, "Atlas Shrugged," is supposed to convince us that greedy sociopaths who own everything could bring the world to a halt if they all stopped working. Frankly, I wish they'd just get out of the way and, until they do, maybe it's all the rest of us who should go on strike.
Open social media software enables all users alike, the ones who want to genuinely connect with other people on the left hand, and on the right hand, the ones who want to scam as much as they can out of NPCs just for a higher score carved into their grave marker. They each benefit from the same work, but one side tends to kick back more to the toolmakers.
But that's not capitalism. The only innovation capitalism breeds is how to capture more of the consumer benefit of trade.
The AGPLv3 doesn't require making the source code publicly available - only providing it to the users that it does the computation of.
If there is a refusal to provide the corresponding source to such users, that is a case of copyright infringement, which the copyright holders can respond to by permanently terminating the license.
@Suiseiseki The guy is a complete idiot. Truth Social does provide it's source code to both it's Mastodon and Soapbox forks. It's just that they don't put them in Git (or any other version control) repositories, only as downloadable ZIP files.
In 2025 alone, the U.S. has launched airstrikes in Yemen (Operation Rough Rider), bombed Houthi-controlled ports and radar installations (killing scores of civilians), deployed greater numbers of troops and multiple aircraft carriers to the Middle Ea…
Jon Elmer, contributing editor, reports on the first week of the war with Iran launched by Israel on the morning of 13 June 2025. The full broadcast is avail...
This project is still a work-in-progress and has a rare crash for a small minority of users. Custom track import works however, all features are not yet supp...
Future Cities, a full-length documentary takes us inside the bustling Chinese city of Shenzhen.
We examine the unique manufacturing ecosystem that has emerged, gaining access to the world’s leading hardware-prototyping culture whilst challenging misconceptions from the west. The film looks at how the evolution of “Shanzhai” – or copycat manufacturing – has transformed traditional models of business, distribution and innovation, and asks what the rest of the world can learn from this so-called “Silicon Valley of hardware".
For me the most effective tip has been, don't spend time in bed/bedroom other than for sleeping, that way your body will take the cue from your surroundings and recognize it's sleep time.
It's interesting how different people are. For me if I don't spend time reading or gaming or browsing stuff in a place, I just won't go there to sleep either - I ended up sleeping on the sofa for over five years because of it. But I am autistic so that messes with stuff like this
People clown on millennials because they had no chance to succeed in a world their parents threw away, but zoomers are their down syndrome little brothers.
PS. So’s your pixelshannon site – would love it if you could have a play with the Small Web stuff I’m working on and let me know what you think once it’s closer to being ready for use 😀
@shannonkay Well, if you want to, Kitten’s pretty much ready to play with today (kitten.small-web.org). The bits that aren’t ready yet are the Small Web hosting service for deployment (although if you make anything you want to deploy, I’d be happy to do so for you on small-web.org and/or, of course you can deploy on any VPS, etc., yourself, and the peer-to-peer social web app built with Kitten.
Empire is losing the narrative and its grip on the masses.
Empire always pairs physical war with media propaganda campaigns.
And right now, the propaganda is propaganda-ing.
The toxic and manipulative abuser (i.e. United States Empire) will go to any lengths to try to maintain control and possession. Fortunately, more people in the imperial core are recognizing this.
Some of our most powerful resistance right now is to not believe Empire or its propaganda arms. Instead, get to the truth. Discernment. Truly, that is resistance work right now.
Donald Trump has dragged the United States into another unnecessary war because his “America First” agenda is failing at home. He is using big bombs like a little man.
This weekend we celebrated the Summer Solstice. Starting last Fall, we got a set of wool felt ball garlands to hang in our living room, each one in a colorway we felt aligned nicely with Fall, Wint…
TONIGHT ON RESPECT, FAKE NEWS!FAKE NEWS!, and we’re not just talking FAKENEWS7NY!This week I have the honor and pleasure of sitting down and talking FAKE NEWS, with the one and only DEREK JOHNSON!Join
O mundo explodindo e eu triste porque a roupa de cama nova com lençol de elástico depois de ser lavada e colocada em uso nunca mais será dobrada tão corretamente quanto chegou.
TEHRAN, Jun. 22 (MNA) – The Iranian Health Ministry gave an assurance that no radiation leaks threaten the health of people following the military attacks by the US and Israel on the country’s nuclear facilities.
A major problem with letting billionaires decide how your country is run is that they will back whichever psycho promises the lowest taxes and least regulation, no matter how completely batshit and unfit that person is:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Read the original post in English here. In de bus naar Gameship in Leeuwarden haalde Pac-Man bedenker Toru Iwatani (in Nederland als spreker op het Festival of Games) even een mapje tevoorschijn... ...
#15yrsago Gate guarded McMansion suburb in Walt Disney Worldhttps://insidethemagic.net/2010/06/disney-unveils-golden-oak-luxury-homes-offering-a-chance-to-live-in-the-walt-disney-world-resort/
GCHQ needed to reverse engineer software to hack into computer networks — so it decided to secretly reinterpret British law. Then it abused its newfound powers, ignoring internal guidelines.
My last nationally bestselling novel was "The Bezzle," an ice-cold revenge story of high-tech finance crime starring the forensic accountant Martin Hench.
A USA TODAY BESTSELLERWinner of the 2024 Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity"An essential read for anyone that wants to understand how we lost control of our digital spaces and infrastructure to Silicon Valley’s …
My ebooks and audiobooks (from Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, Beacon, Verso and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
The Booksmith is so excited to be welcoming Cory Doctorow back to San Francisco for the release of Enshittification at Public Works. More to come, but grab a ticket and join us!About the bookEnshittification: its not just youthe internet sucks now.
Novelist, activist, and journalist Cory Doctorow joins Rachel and David in the cafe to talk about the enshittification of the internet and how we ended up in our current enshittogenic environment.
If you prefer a newsletter, subscribe to the plura-list, which is ad-/tracker-free, and is utterly unadorned save a single daily emoji. Today's is "💳". Suggestions solicited for future emojis!
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"One frequent objection to high taxes is that it encourages capital flight"
No. When I was young, there were all kinds of laws against capital flight. You could only take a small amount of money on a holiday abroad, for example.
These laws were abandoned by the same parties that now use capital flight as an excuse. But that is a lie: if you want to stop capital flight, just reinstate the old laws.
I always thought that a wealth tax made more sense than income tax. Some people will be needing all their income just to live. Others may be doing really great things with their extra income. Excess wealth just sits there.
But I am wondering, what thresholds and what rates might be appropriate? Are we talking billionaires or mere millionaires. Bearing in mind that the average house is now over 1 million in many places.
Im thinking a total combined net worth of say 10 million?? Make it progressive so that it taxes billionaires more than the Tenmillionaires.
@citizenAlex @Phosphenes @molenaar I saw a post the other day that billionnaires push frantically the button « get 1 million but someone you don’t know dies ».
why does anyone ever take that British idiot seriously? I wrote him off when he came to the US (fleeing prosecution in Britain, I think) and tried to lecture us all on how guns are evil.
Special stream about Donald Trump ordering a strike on Iran's Nuclear Facilities and the potential for the conflict to escalate.Buy courses here: https://www...
Reform UK believes the plans for a Britannia card will make the UK ‘incredibly attractive’ to the wealthy, but tax expert Dan Neidle has warned it will leave a massive black hole
One thing entertaining about MAGA is watching them reverse directions every time Trump changes his mind. You can practically hear them stripping their gears:
Honestly, I don't see the purpose of even getting into public office if yours is not the voice you use, their ideas are the ones you put forward, and their projects are the ones you vote on.
Nothing you would is your own. Why even bother then?
The British government has carefully refused to publicly reveal whether it supported the US bombing of Iranian nuclear sites on Saturday, and even whether it deems the attack to be lawful.
Israelis, rallying around an otherwise very unpopular government in the face of an external threat: "I don't understand these Iranians, why are they rallying around their very unpopular government just because of an external threat?!"
Recently Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta was building an AI data center so large its size would be equivalent to a significant part of Manhattan. What Zuckerberg did not mention was the constructions of 3 new Meta-subsidized, gas power plants 404media.co/a-black-hole-of-en…
Journalist puts German foreign ministry official on the spot and UK PM parrots Israeli talking points A German foreign ministry official has said that international law banning attacks on nuclear f…
This decision is part of a campaign by the British state to quell direct action movements ~ James Horton ~ Palestine Action, it was announced on Friday, is set to become a proscribed group.
A major problem with letting billionaires decide how your country is run is that they will back whichever psycho promises the lowest taxes and least regulation, no matter how completely batshit and unfit that person is:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Billionaires have farcical, almost unimaginable resources. These let them take over whole political parties, even "left" parties, with the result that all real electoral options disappear. Voting for the other party gets you a different set of aesthetics, but the same existential threats to the human race and the planet:
After generations of increasingly oligarch-friendly policies and billionaire entryism into the Democratic Party, America may well be cooked, a total write-off for generations to come. The path to saving the world and our species arguably lies through strengthening other countries to resist American psychos and protect the planet from the consequences of their brainwormed leadership.
Writing for *Jacobin*, Alex Hemingway sets out a plan for imposing a wealth-tax on Canada's oligarchs, one that incorporates lessons from previous attempts at such a tax:
Even on the left, the idea of a wealth-tax is controversial - not because leftists are sympathetic to billionaires, but because they are skeptical that a wealth tax can be carried out. It's a practical, not an ideological objection:
A proposed wealth tax on Canada’s richest 0.6% could raise hundreds of billions of dollars — enough to tackle housing, transit, and care. The sheer scale of what a tiny slice of billionaire wealth could fund is staggering.
After all, under capitalism, wealth always grows faster than the economy at large, meaning that over time, the rich will get steadily richer, and inequality will widen and widen:
Ideally, we would counter the trend of wealth piling up into dynastic fortunes with continuous redistribution and predistribution: taxing capital gains at the same rate (or a higher rate) than income, so that income from labor isn't treated worse than income from ownership; steeply graded progressive taxes, with top rates in of 70-99%, high inheritance taxes, and so on.
We had a system like that, from the end of WWII (when the rich were poorer than they'd been in centuries, with their influence in tatters) until the Reagan era (when the rich had rebuilt their fortunes and were able to seize the reins of power). In the 45 years since the rise of the new oligarchy, we've lived through accelerating wealth accumulation, and as the rich got richer, they used their wealth to dismantle any barrier to creating new aristocratic dynasties. 7/
So here we are, trapped in the new oligarchy. It's too late to rely on income taxes, not if we're going to euthanize enough rentiers to free out politics from their toxic influence and save the human race any of several foreseeable mass-extinction events. Making the ultra-rich poor again is going to require new tactics.
In Canada, the 1% owns 29% of the country's wealth. The 87 richest families in Canada control as much wealth as the bottom 12 million Canadians combined. This is better than the US (where the 1% own 35% of the country), but not by much:
Can we make a wealth tax work? Here's Hemingway's program for making it work in Canada:
* Make it apply to all wealth equally. No carve-outs for real-estate, which makes it very easy to shift wealth among asset-classes to duck the tax;
* Aim it at the super-rich alone. Avoid even the upper middle-class, who lack the liquid assets to pay the tax and could get wrecked if they have to liquidate their holdings at the same time as everyone else, which will depress asset prices;
* Use third-party assessments of asset values. Don't take billionaires' word for how much their assets are worth! Canada's got an advantage here, thanks to the Canada Revenue Agency's requirement for financial institutions to report their account holders' income, including capital gains. Canada's also recently created "beneficial owner" registries that record the true owners of assets;
* Use lifestyle audits: anyone caught engaging in tax-evasion will face severe penalties, as will the enablers at financial services firms that help them
One frequent objection to high taxes is that it encourages capital flight - rich people hopping to another territory to avoid taxation. That's a reasonable fear, given how pants-wettingly terrified the rich are of paying tax.
Hemingway points out that a wealth tax is different from an income tax - income taxes are levied on the outcome of productive activities, while wealth taxes target accumulated wealth. High income taxes can starve a country of the capital it needs for a productive economy, but that's not the case with wealth taxes.
Hemingway points to the OECD's Common Reporting Standard, through which more than 100 countries have agreed to share financial information, which will help Canada catch billionaires as they funnel their wealth offshore. Meanwhile, if the rich try to move *with* their money, we can hit them with an exit tax, like the 40% that Elizabeth Warren has proposed.
It's an article of faith that the rich will move offshore at the first hint of a wealth tax, but the research shows that rich people often have reasons to stay that trump their taxophobia. The economic effect of rich people Going Galt is pretty darned small:
The modern prophet of oligarchy and its origins is the French economist Thomas Piketty. In a recent *Le Monde* column, Piketty examines the failure of a French wealth tax proposal that would have shaved a modest 2% off the fortunes of the 1,800 French people with more than €100 million:
By opposing the 2% minimum wealth tax on the 1,800 French people whose net worth exceeds €100 million, after the measure was adopted by France's Assemblée nationale (lower house of Parliament), the upper house, the Sénat, has shown just how disconnec…
The proposal passed the National Assembly, only to die in the Senate, an institution with a long history of pro-oligarchic activism (the Senate killed *every* French income tax passed by the Assembly from 1896-1914). The Assembly's wealth tax addressed the problem of tax exiles, levying the wealth tax for 5 years after an oligarch relocated.
For Piketty, this didn't go far enough: he wants a pro-rated tax based on the years an oligarch spent in France in their lifetime: if you were educated and cared for at French expense from birth and went on to become a billionaire, then a modest share of your wealth would forever be owed to the country that made it possible. Piketty says that a wealth tax could be paid in shares instead of cash, with the stock going into a trust for workers, who would get board seats as well.
He points out that decarbonization is going to require large sacrifices from all of us, but that these will be impossible to demand with a straight face so long as the super-rich are paying taxes that are trivial relative to their assets and income.
I bet something as small as tying health care benefits to taxation (you don't file taxes? You don't get free health care) would keep the wealthy Canadians at home.
Instead of trying to funnel air escaping from a tire back into the tire, maybe we should just plug the hole. If for-profit corporations were converted into worker/consumer cooperatives, the money (and power) would go back into the communities from whence it came, instead of to rent-seeking third-party shareholders. Capitalism is a layer on top of the free market economy designed to enable the aristocracy to transform itself and live on as the oligarchy. Everything a capitalist economy can do, a cooperative-based economy can do, only without the posh folks vampirically feeding off the commerce of everyday people.
A cooperative, with a single share per shareholder, is democratic by nature and actively works against wealth and income inequality -- the exact opposite of a for-profit corporation.
Cooperatives naturally align incentives, instead of pitting workers versus consumers as each gets screwed over by the tax levied on every transaction by shareholders.
Cooperatives even work to prevent externalization of costs into the environment. What community would intentionally damage the environment they live within in order to gain a larger share, when it's money that already belongs to them? That's something that third-party shareholders *outside* the community do to that community while harvesting them for profits, because they are removed from the situation.
@hosford42 Sure. I like co-ops. I've been serving on co-op boards since I was 17, and I'm keynoting the UK co-op conference in Manchester in July (I also keynoted the international year of the co-op UN launch in Delhi last year).
But also: capitalism exists. Doing nothing about improving the conduct of firms until they go co-op requires that we accept untold - perhaps existential - harms to billions and possible the end of humanity.
I'd like to see laws change to incentivize the birth of co-ops over for-profit corporations, or for "exit to community" to become the preferred option. I think that's a real change we can make to move the needle.
"Some of y'all forget the reason we have food safety regulations is because companies used to do things like adding chalk to spoiled milk so it looked normal. Regulations don't exist because governments enjoy them. They exist because pure unadulterated capitalism would kill us."
cr: @EpiEllie
We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.
@amiserabilist Here's a short story by Lord Dunsany, written in 1915, about the food of the day. It's pertinent.
THE FOOD OF DEATH
Death was sick. But they brought him bread that the modern bakers make, whitened with alum, and the tinned meats of Chicago, with a pinch of our modern substitute for salt. They carried him into the dining-room of a great hotel (in that close atmosphere Death breathed more freely), and there they gave him their cheap Indian tea. They brought him a bottle of wine that they called champagne. Death drank it up. They brought a newspaper and looked up the patent medicines; they gave him the foods that it recommended for invalids, and a little medicine as prescribed in the paper. They gave him some milk and borax, such as children drink in England.
Death arose ravening, strong, and strode again through the cities.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell I have been waiting for a Trump era espionage novel. Just read A Spy Alone by former MI6, Charles Beaumont. Nice ripping yarn but also the best yet analysis of the current coup of globalized oligarchs and propagandists against "the masses" and citizens of every nation. It ain't east vs west; it's 1% against 99%.
Autumn
Unknown parent • • •