ἐγὼ τὸ μὲν δὴ πανταχοῦ θρυλούμενον κράτιστον εἶναι φημὶ μὴ φῦναι βροτῷ·
“We have made a lot of progress on ending that war, which is certainty deadliest war since World War II,” Trump said during a news conference with Zelenskyy.
This line is such bullshit. Even if you assume that both Ukraine and Russia have had 1 million soldiers killed each (which is certainly an overestimate) it still doesn’t even crack the top 5. The Korean War, Vietnam War, Second Congo War, the Soviet-Afghan War, and the Nigerian Civil War all had over 2 million dead.
Not sure where to post this so it goes here as it’s in a newspaper. Just an absolutely insane article I read in the Financial Times today, if you ever need a reminder that the ultrarich are ghouls.
Some of the richest Americans are confronted with a thorny question this time of year: is spending the festive season with family worth paying millions more in taxes? For millionaires and billionaires that declare permanent residency in low-tax jurisdictions but spend much of the year elsewhere, their location in December’s final days can be a determining factor for the size of their tax bill. And with the full-on return of in-person work meetings and events since the Covid-19 pandemic, the wealthy have increasingly turned to a stable of tools, including the apps TaxBird and Monaeo, to help them make sure they spend less than six months and a day in high-tax jurisdictions such as New York.
What the fuck is the point of having unfathomable wealth if you can’t even spend the holidays with your family? Like what the fuck are you doing? Why do you need an app to track whether you spend 183 days in Manhattan per year??
But being prudent comes with choices. One friend recently told Jim Simon, who co-founded TaxBird in 2016, that his “damn app” kept him from visiting family this year.
“I would’ve liked to have taken the grandkids to the tree a few years ago,” said Klein, referring to the famous Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center that is illuminated with lights every December. “But I couldn’t.”
This devotion to keeping down taxes can lead to extremes. Klein said some of his clients fly into New Jersey and wait on one side of the George Washington Bridge, which connects to New York, until just after midnight to avoid triggering another day in the state.
Imagine the sad life you must live where tax obligations of like 5% on income of over $30 million “keep you” from hanging out with your grandkids. Imagine just fucking around in New Jersey until midnight all to save like a million dollars in taxes when your net worth is in the tens or hundreds of millions. Insanity. Being rich rots your brain so much that the rich aren’t even good at being rich.
Hey let’s not let Hell Korea off the hook, they really are a corporate nightmare where their leaders are controlled by billionaire families and cults. Just like their American overlords.
You don’t flush toilet paper in most places in China because the plumbing clogs; it’s actually very normal not to do this. Usually you take it out with the trash though.
France has fallen a long way from “strategic autonomy” to being just another dog of the United States, even in the past 20 years. It’s almost unthinkable now that France said “no” to joining the American’s coalition of the willing in Iraq, let alone that they weren’t part of NATO and had Yasser Arafat flown in a French government jet to seek treatment in Paris.
Well on the last point, I think it’s much harder to fund and arm terrorists in Venezuela than Libya. Socialism has had a long time to take root amongst would-be-compradors, and the shambolic “opposition” to the socialists has only made matters worse. I know some Venezuelans in the US that don’t particularly like Maduro, but even they make Juan Guaido jokes and think Machado is a bloodthirsty sicko.
Interesting, didn’t realise that about the F-22. Is its range not far enough with mid-air refueling to reach Venezuela and back from the continental US?
The RETVRN to Tradition guys are going to have a field day with the return of slave markets in Venezuela, huh. Let’s hope the Libya model from the aggressors won’t translate to the consequences of those strikes in Venezuela.
I agree, there is close to zero chance Trump is going to commit to a ground invasion. What would that even accomplish? Not that air strikes will accomplish much either, but at least it’ll be difficult to spin as “losing” when you see stuff blow up. When a ground invasion gets stuck in the jungle and the front line doesn’t move for weeks, hard to spin that as anything other than a loss. Plus, as far as I’m aware I don’t think the military buildup in the Caribbean is anything close to what would be needed for an actual invasion, just airstrikes.
Alright folks, vibe check, we think it’s going to be tonight that the air strikes on Venezuela start? Trump’s got some “big announcement” but it could very well be something as innocuous as “the big data centre I’m building under my ballroom in the White House is going to be spectacular” as much as a “I am authorizing a nuclear strike on Caracas.” All the military assets for strikes are certainly in place, as many users have covered over the past few weeks, and Trump and co have done a “good job” disengaging in both Europe and Asia to the best of their abilities to ensure nothing crazy happens whilst they’re off gallivanting in Latin America.
I like to think there’s no idiots reading my remark because we’re a communist shitposting forum on the internet. It’s not the type of thing I’d say if I was like talking in a public debate or something, but absolutely would joking amongst friends, and I like to think the vibe we have here is far more the latter than the former.
I am kidding, Putin is not some cryptocommunist and even if he was this would be an absolutely terrible idea, and even if it worked they’d sanitise Lenin like MLK in the Great Satan. Lenin in fact writes about this exact phenomenon:
What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.
Per https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch01.htm
This is actually very concerning because if Russia goes down the path of criminalising Lenin’s content then European lawmakers will seize upon that to do the same saying “Even Russia itself recognises this content as terrorist and they know communism” blah blah blah.
No this is 4D chess by Putin. Knowing Europe has lost its mind and opposes anything Russia does by reflex, he’s trying to get Lenin to be put in European school curricula to “own the barbaric Russians”
This is kind of the US strategy of forcing the Soviet Union to spend an insane amount of money on military hardware instead of living standards, except it’s China forcing the United States to spent an insane amount of money on data centres and electricity buildout instead of living standards just to “keep up.” The AI race is already over, because China generates more electricity than the United States, the EU, and India combined and could probably double that in no time at low cost. Even if you have the best model ever, it can’t do much if everything isn’t electrified.
When CoreWeave implodes it’s going to be insane. Their financials are so precarious and built on all these bizarre instruments with assumptions of infinite AI growth. No idea when it’s going to happen, but I’m confident it will and it’ll be spectacular.
Looks like the data centre grift is beginning to wobble.
Shares in data centre property group Fermi nearly halve after tenant pulls funding. Stock price of company co-founded by ex-US energy secretary Rick Perry fell as much as 46%. The plunge in Fermi’s share price left the stock down 70 per cent from its October post-listing high. Shares had surged 55 per cent on the company’s market debut.
The company has close ties with Donald Trump’s administration, as Perry, a Republican and former Texas governor, served as energy secretary during the president’s first term in office. Fermi had provisionally named its energy centre the President Donald J Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus. All nine Wall Street banks that cover the stock have assigned Fermi a “buy” rating. But investors have been upping their bets against the company ever since it went public. Roughly 38 per cent of Fermi’s publicly available shares are currently on loan to short sellers, according to Bloomberg data.
If they can nail the melodramatic almost soap opera ridiculousness of Ace Combat 5 with the cutscences coupled with actually competent squad commands that are more than “hey maybe you should attack what’s in front of me rather than behind me” it’ll be a lot of fun.
Yeah a consortium of these does make sense, just funny to not include the EU as a political entity (which if included as a single political entity would be #3, behind only China and the US). Also Germany as of 2023 had a higher GDP PPP than Japan, so funny it’s not on this list.
At the current rate, 0%. Part of the reason the United States wants to cut ties with Europe is because they’re rabidly anti-Russia and actively attempting to sabotage any peace treaty with the Russians.
Actually New York is extremely zealous with this shit. They use cell phone tracking, credit card statements, all sorts of crazy things to claw back this money. They really are counting, and they really do target the rich, because it’s like winner take all, you know? There’s no sliding scale, it’s either boom they get millions more in tax revenue or they don’t, so might as well go crazy with it.