Tax breaks for the farmers working the fields, or tax breaks for the international corporations and land speculators that own nearly all the fields?
Sonori
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Sonori@beehaw.orgto Memes@lemmy.ml•Stephen Fry released a statement: "Elon Musk is not a Nazi. Nazis make really good cars."51·5 months agoDo Japan and Italy just not count as part of the world? I mean Japan took over half of Asia and the Pasific while Italy took the Mediterranean countries. Germany took over part of northern Europe and helped a bit of North Africa.
Counterpoint, I grew up in a smallish town in Idaho and was still absolutely surrounded by Democrats. State wide, only sixty percent of the voting age population actually turned out, and of those one out of every three people voted against Trump.
Hell, Democrats outnumbered Republicans in some countries and again, this is fucking Idaho.
This means that if you talk to an a Idahoan at random, there is a more than fifty percent chance they either largely already agree with you, or they are largely insulated from and not paying attention to politics and thusly susceptible to being swayed with the right approach and concrete examples of what Trumps doing to fuck them and their friends over specifically.
Left wing ideas and policy are still far more popular among the general public, which is why Republicans have to lie about them constantly.
Look for your local anarchist bookstore, look at what your counties Democrats actually organized, especially things like local pride events, show up, and network/make friends.
As is fun to note, there are more Democrats living in Texas than New York state, so the idea you should just give up on finding any around you because you live in a red state instead of one where the numbers are reversed is honestly rather absurd.
Personally I tend to think that the Bengal famine is better compared to the Holodomor, as it is closer in time, area, and effect. If there is a lesson to these things though, I think it’s that it doesn’t matter what economic system you use of the people in charge are fans of eugenics, and that’s why it’s so important that there be strong independent checks on the government and politicians, minority representation, multi-party rule, etc…
Politically, major outside military forces like aircraft carriers tend to be viewed at a stabilizing force in the local region, but more to the point Redrum and I were talking about Isreal’s primarily being useful politically rather than militarily to destabilize and break up leftist and Soviet groups in the region.
Except OPEC still had significant power and influence in the US well after the Yom Kippur war ended in 1973, and said war didn’t even involve the majority of the OPEC member countries.
I think the US becoming the largest oil producer in the world might have had more to do with the decline in OPEC’s influence on the US but what do I know?
Yes, but it’s presence in the region being a destabilizing force is a very different thing to being primarily an unsinkable aircraft carrier as the commenter I responded to described it.
I mean Saudi Arabia also does all those things, most of them far better than Israel ever could due to geography, and at a far lower cost. If Isreal snapped out of existence tomorrow, between Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Greece European and North American power projection in the Middle East and North Africa remains almost entirely unchanged.
Honestly the military benefits of supporting Isreal while real are definitely not as important as the domestic political benefits to the US, which is to say that the conservatives like Isreal because it provides a nice place to deport all the Jews to while also maintaining precedent for an enthnostate with race based citizenship, and the Democrats like it because they get a lot of gifts, friends, and in their minds potential voters, all for doing exactly what the conservatives want them to do.
Sonori@beehaw.orgto Asklemmy@lemmy.ml•What stupidly easy tech solution do people gloss over all of the time?2·11 months agoWhile I’ve only used one or two types of bluetooth headphones, i’ve never hand any trouble replacing the battery with them. The cups just snap out and then you unplug the lithium cell and plug a new one it, at least in my experience, so that may just have been a thing with the model you got.
Sonori@beehaw.orgtoPolitics@lemmy.ml•What is the case for Joe Biden being the candidate?71·1 year agohttps://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1809311013839466846.html
I think this article sums it up well. In short, when the primary actual problem most left wing voters have with him is the issue the media largely ignores in favor of manufactured controversies like his age or his son missing a checkbox in n a government form, it is absurd to think that any other candidate would not quickly have similar controversies made up.
Sonori@beehaw.orgto Europe@feddit.de•Ireland and Spain have followed Norway in announcing their recognition of a Palestinian stateEnglish4·1 year agoFunctionally, probably? Given most states are sovereign instead of being divided up into zones by security checkpoints managed by a foreign power and which requires citizenship in said foreign power to cross. Between how much influence Isreal has in the government of the West Bank archipelago and the requirement that Palestinians possess a lower tier of Israeli citizenship in order to move from town to town, I don’t think a strong case can be made that the Isrealis have allowed the Palestinians have sovereignty over their own territory.
As such the Palestinian people of the West Bank have been and unfortunately practically remain part of the Israeli state, albeit a horribly discriminated and abused part of it with very good reason to splinter off into their own state. If Isreal had actually followed the UN mandate in the first place there might be a stronger argument that the West Bank and Gaza have always had a sovereign Palestinian government, but they functionally annexed them instead, and as such the West Bank and Gaza are now hopefully splintering off from the government they have been largely barred from participating in on racial grounds.
Sonori@beehaw.orgto Europe@feddit.de•We need to talk about Chinese and US influence in Europe’s energy industry, European researchers sayEnglish22·1 year agoYou mean free trade policies might result in foreign companies coming in and outcompeting local ones here instead of just allowing our companies to go into, take over, and outcompete their ones? How could this happen? Who could have possibly predicted this turn of events? How could anyone else’s companies come in and do unto us exactly what we’ve been doing to them for the last half century?
Why, next your going to tell me that in a free market a company with lower labor costs that is willing to slash profit margins might actually gain market share over a collection of companies that collectively decided not to compete with each other on margins./s
Sonori@beehaw.orgto Europe@feddit.de•Home Office to detain asylum seekers across UK in shock Rwanda operationEnglish11·1 year agoCracking down on “illegal” immigration, exclusively targets legal immigrants showing for appointments at government offices, sounds about Right.
Surely randomly deporting legal immigrants can only going to lead to higher illegal imagination as people decide to not present themselves at the border in favor of banking on the shear impossibility of effectively survaling the entire country. But I imagine that is kind of the point, we need to manufacture a illegal imagination crisis but all we have is legal asylum seekers, so we better do something about that and bet that our electorate is too dumb to understand.
For a piece of legislation written to create a “free market solution”tm by a Republican think tank, they sure do love attacking it.
Almost certainly not, expanding 2.5 miles of additional catenary or especially third rail really isn’t going to have that much of a cost compared to specialized rolling stock. It’s also worth noting that the longer the route the less practical it is just down to the scale of battery needed and time it wastes charging.
Sonori@beehaw.orgto Europe@feddit.de•US planning to station nuclear weapons in UK amid threat from Russia – reportEnglish2·1 year agoPersonally, i’d recommend Perun’s excellent video on the topic of your curious on the present state of nuclear deterrence, though it is several months old at this point.
Sonori@beehaw.orgto Hacker News@derp.foo•Wealthiest Californians are leaving the state. It's bad news for the economyEnglish8·2 years agoIt’s really strange how the stats own budget analysis blames a week stock market and tax income on said market for the drop as compared to their previous buget surplus but the narrative is that we need to bend over backwards for the poor billionaires.
I believe the top comment over there noted how at most wealthy Californian’s leaving could have contributed 1.4 billion of the 68 billion shortfall, so I’m as skeptical as every other time this argument comes up that tax is a major deciding factor on where you live and not things like jobs, geography, climate, weather, public services, safety, friends/family, house prices, cost of living, etc…
As a neat aside, an economic studiy found that at a national level the US could get up to a ninety percent tax rate on the super rich before enough of them would actually renounce their citizenship to get out of taxes to offset the increased income. Admittedly US citizenship is very desirable compared to most others, especially for the supper rich, but it gives some perspective on how high you actually have to go to make a difference.
It’s also worth noting that the current US tax rates are very low compared to both many other nations, and indeed things like corbate income is a third of its historical level during the 50s and 60s, and less than half of that of Canada. For instance 2017 corporate tax cuts alone are responsible for an estimated four hundred billion a year in additional national dept, have been found to have no statistical effect on market growth distinguishable from random noise, but arn’t likely to be fully removed anytime soon for some reason.
It is perhaps unsurprising that the rise of absurdly low taxes on high income earners nationally has been an increase in both public dept and taxes on low and medium income earners, but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.
Sonori@beehaw.orgto Hacker News@derp.foo•NY Times is asking that *ALL* LLMs trained on Times data be destroyedEnglish2·2 years agoThey’ve generally been pretty open about using pirated books and data to train their product on.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/07/fruit-of-the-poisonous-llama/
There is also no law stating that copyright doesn’t apply to training AI in the same way it applies to every other use. Even this comment technically has a copyright, in the same way that people who write long original stories on forums like Spacebattles and Sufficent Velocity post by post still have a copyright on that story.
There is a carve out in copyright for academic research, but that protection disappears the second you start using it for a commercial purpose.
If you want an actually serious answer as to the who, how and why of the assassination and have three hours to spare, I would recommend Sean Munnger (A leftist university professor of modern political history) far to exhaustive series on the topic. For just the CIA, that starts at the 30min mark of Part 2, but builds a bit on previous debunkings.