Haven't Western nations already been applying significant sanctions to Russia? It's pretty clear that hasn't been working, why do they imagine that more of the same will work any better? Oh right, they don't, they just want to look like they're doing something useful.
Libra
joined 1 week ago
There's an estimate floating around that it would cost about $20 billion to end all homelessness in the US. Whether or not that's an accurate estimate, there is an amount that could do it, and every day that billionaires wake up and choose not to do it they choose evil.
If your standard for 'a good example' is being a bit more creative with his tax-dodging PR stunts than other billionaires, that's a pretty low bar. A better example to set would be to not exploit people to accumulate wealth in the first place. It takes a whole lot of people like you and me staying poor to make Bill Gates that rich.
but I am determined that “he died rich” will not be one of them.
Bill Gates has a net worth of ~$168 billion. Even if this isn't just PR intended to launder his image, even if he does in fact give away 99% of that, it will still leave him with $1.68 billion dollars. Even if he ups that to 99.99% that'll still leave him with $16.8 million, which is still rich by anyone's measure. Bill Gates' idea of 'not dying rich' is radically different than yours or mine; he was never not going to die rich.
I'm guessing they mean 'half of 145%', but yeah that headline is a hot mess.
Posting it without comment or indication that it's misleading is treating it as reliable, or at least as reliable as any other news article posted here.
Obviously Trump is a fire hose of bullshit that is not shy about spewing bullshit, but if you just drop stuff here without comment we have no choice but to assume that it should be given the same weight as any other article. 'Do your homework' applies to both the poster and the reader.
One of my favorite movies of all time. Too bad I will miss it.
Seems like that's a good time to go 'Oh, maybe we should change it to say 11 then'.
Unless there are 3 of them hiding behind that machine, that looks like 11 to me?
Yes, I too am aware that people often misuse words. It might be safe to assume that the guy who just demonstrated that he knows how to operate a dictionary probably isn't one of them though. Especially if you had read my comment that they were replying to, because then you would have seen that the nation I was calling an authoritarian regime (in fact, a 'whole-ass authoritarian regime') was Nazi Germany, so I don't think we were in any danger of not labeling Western colonial powers as authoritarian in this thread.
YSK: The Guardian became the first major newspaper in Australia and Britain to ban all gambling ads.
Nah, it's more that the answer to 'why is doing this?' is virtually always 'because money'. People forget that sometimes.
I don't appreciate that one oligarch is better at lying to us than another one, that kinda makes it worse in my mind. Instead of telling ourselves comforting stories about how generous these societal leeches are we should be telling ourselves stories about how much better everyone else's lives could be if they didn't exist.