You will not be around these "pleasant" people for long, because they will suicidally turn your neighborhood into a shithole and then possibly move away from you to do damage elsewhere. It is false dilemma such as saying you don't like pitbulls roaming the streets and breeding, but you do not mind living next to neighbors who feed and protect them, because they are nice animal loving people and they mean well.
georgioz
13hr ago
If you will live around this type of Democrat then that you will also get Muslim immigrant as well as ruined school, criminals and the rest of it. It is a package deal and it is literally what happened over in Michigan and why there is a Muslim candidate in the first place.
georgioz
13hr ago
This is aged old tactics of fake sympathy where you blur the difference between jab and reality, maintaining plausible deniability. It can be something like "I'd never buy Toyota Camry given how it breaks down every other week leaving John stranded and missing work". You just plant this idea in people's mind making it acceptable to talk about at least in this indirect manner.
georgioz
13hr ago
How does one waste four months of investigation on this? And why is no one terrified that the cops are now involved in a plagiarism scandal? How does it even occur to this guy to call the cops on this issue and be right to do so?
If I was police investigator, I would do my best to investigate this for at least couple of months covering my bases. We are talking about prominent minority scholar who feels threatened by a racist. This reeks of huge problems where Guardian and the like will pour through results of investigation to find even hint of investigators showing their racial bias not investigating it properly.
I've asked her many times and she can't explain it. Like for example, if I make sexual jokes to her about Anna from Frozen, she gives me the look. But when the actress in the Frozen Broadway musical takes the character in a totally sexual direction, and makes throaty murmers and feels up a suit of armor while singing "The First Time in Forever" (yes this actually happens in the taped produced movie of the Frozen musical that is currently on Disney+, go see for yourself), she gets annoyed if I think it's a little weird for a kids production to feature that.
It makes sense if you acknowledge the late-stage feminism main normie message: feminism is whatever women do. The idea is that women cannot be judged for almost anything, if women do it then it is expression of their feminism and empowerment. There exist a huge carveout out of this if women do adopt more conservative stances. So if women are against abortion then of course it is not feminism, but false consciousness and internal misogyny and we do not talk about it maybe except that they are victims of their for sure terrible and abusive husbands. But in general any degenerate thing that women do should not be judged, it is just expression of feminist empowerment. At worst they had to be forced to do it by men.
So sorry to break it to you, but you sexualizing Disney princess is disgusting, your wife sexualizing the same princess is feminism. And do not dare to judge her or ask her to maintain any level of moral consistency or ask her to fulfill any moral duty. It is as simple as that.
The jury came up with the final number, they could have said it is $100k per family. Claimants originally asked for $550 million - a dollar for each view of the video. Why a dollar? Because it is nice number, there is no history behind it, there is no calculation or anything. It just sounds nice and reasonable. This is by the way a common practice in jury system, where you provide a psychological anchor for jury, so you massage them toward maximum payout.
The jury then just said - fuck it, Jones will pay almost three times that number, because why not? He is a stupid evil goblin. Or maybe it was something else and jury came up with some novel idea of how to calculate these punitive damages as $2.54 per view, or maybe they used a different key. We will never know because jury does not have to explain shit.
Sympathetic victims, goblin perpetrator who is crazy enough not to even defend properly and good jury is what is key to get class defining payout. By the way the verdict also stipulates that 50% of Jones income is to be transferred to victims indefinitely despite not even being sentenced for criminal activity without ability to go bankrupt. So he became something akin to debt slave by this. That is exactly how the jury system works.
One of the Anglo things that is commonly criticized in continental Europe is the judicial system. The complaint is usually formulated as "I wouldn't want to delegate the question of guilt to twelve randos that have no understanding of the law".
This is strawman of the position that it brings laicism into the law. But it is not only about understanding, it brings whole new baggage. There are things like emotional appeals and courtroom theater, there are issues with outside influences by pressure campaigns or even threats to jurors who did not select this as a career. There are issues with tribalism where jury plays favorites, there is a reason why Jim Crow juries is a term. Who knows how jury system will work in Somali communities. There is of course other stuff, we are far from 18th century and juries are there to decide complex fraud schemes, patent litigation and other stuff. It is not just about stealing groceries.
The biggest bonus is ability to insert local values, however this also works against you. If you are known in community as fraudster by hearsay, then good luck. The biggest advantage is extra check on judiciary corruption, however it is also double edged sword as there is no written deliberation of their verdicts and it introduces system uncertainty. This also provides incentive toward frivolous litigation - what if you randomly get a "good jury" and make some free money? Even better if you strike gold and you are sympathetic victim against nameless corporation or goblin like Alex Jones, then you can get 1.4 billion in damages for defamation, basically using the judicial system as class defining wealth transfer.
Average gross margins for grocery stores in NYC is 1,6% on total revenue of around $50 billion a year. The proposed stores should offer unachievable 30% discount with revenue of around $50 million, one thousandth of overall grocery store market volume. It cannot work for a problem at hand, it is not designed to do it.
If he is smart, then he will offer some selected number of discounted goods with limited volume per person as with normal shops, who use this promo tactic to attract buyers. He can then make photo ops of happy customers, while the rest of the store will be competitively priced in order to prevent empty shelves and related PR disaster. It will work splendidly for the main purpose: generate positive PR and reward people in his circle who will be involved in this money hog.
georgioz
6d ago
I think this is just equivocation of the word ambition. It is not only "I want things", it also means possessing relevant character traits like: goal and result orientation, task ownership, ability to face adversity with grit etc. Ambition does not mean a porn addict lump who wants to have lambo in a year with this new system to win in blackjack or trading.
But maybe I am wrong and you actually have ambitious people in your office who bust their asses, ask for tasks, chase their goals like crazy etc. Only they are bad at it because they are stupid and unqualified.
I was thinking about it from the EU point of view of a regular employee and I think a lot of this comes from how insane the modern state costs. Let me make my case from numbers in Slovakia.
Direct income and payroll taxes in Slovakia for average salary is around 45%. This includes social contribution, income tax and all the rest. Out of 55% that is left you pay 23% VAT on all goods and services. Other than that you need to pay property tax, excise taxes for gas, alcohol and tobacco. In reality, you might be left with about a third of what you earned. But it doesn't even end there.
Fees and other direct payments There is constant and very opaque stream of various payments. You pay for building permits, you pay for your passport or other state documents, you pay car registration fee, you pay road tax and highway toll, you pay even a fee for your dog. It is numerous small things that however add up quite quickly and more if you are bellow average income as many of these are just nominal prices.
Indirect taxes These are various hidden taxes often paid by producers. Manufacturers also pay various taxes and fees: they pay for carbon emissions, they pay packaging recycling fees, and they pay customs duties on imported raw materials. Or take another example: developers pay cities and the state infrastructure development fees and for social policies, because what cities collect from your income tax and property tax isn't enough for them. Builders, of course, pass all of this into the price of your apartment, and you end up paying VAT on top of that non-transparent indirect taxation as well. All of this drives up final prices and reduces your purchasing power out of the pittance you have left.
Forced labor. The state has literally enslaved people, demanding labor for absurdities—like how you have to wash out beverage cans at home like an imbecile so they don't smell and attract wasps, and then wait in line at grocery store for the one functional reverse vending machine, just so the state returns your stolen, exorbitant recycling deposit, the recovery of which cost you a bunch of time and your own water. But it also enslaves companies and individuals through filling out various forms. You pay accountants for tax returns, and companies must comply with regulations like GDPR, for which they have to hire extra consultants like a GDPR Data Protection Officer. They have to fill out paperwork, they have to pay corporate lawyers and attorneys who must track thousands of new directives, regulations, and amendments that the EU and member states churn out every year. Behind this is an army of office workers who produce nothing, not even a single nail—they only produce paperwork for the state bureaucracy, such as the new paperwork on the gender pay gap in your company according to the latest EU directive, because that is exactly what was missing for perfect prosperity in our countries. And the great thing for the government? This is officially considered added value, and you pay VAT on it too. It’s a perpetuum mobile, where every new hidden regulation brings an increase in corporate costs, which companies then use to raise prices, and that increases tax revenue at the expense of your wallet.
Conclusion: The Shift to Autarky If you add everything up, your real purchasing power is maybe a quarter of what you produced. This spiral of higher tax and regulatory burdens completely demotivates people from producing. Even now, domestic autarky combined with bartering and undeclared work—which is tax-free and unregulated—is paying off for people. If you cook that $20 burrito at home, perhaps using your own ingredients from your garden, you bypass this entire machinery. The state is shocked by the "illegal" sale of homemade Christmas cakes. A person who bakes cakes and sells the leftovers is now literally treated as an enemy of the state, simply because they found one of the few remaining ways to increase their standard of living without non-stop bleeding. And yet this I think is what people are feeling right now. It is not exactly affordability crisis, it is just that some things are so overpriced that it stops making sense.
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