abandon all their principles

Strict gun control is more of a liberal ideology and Lemmy leans pretty far left.

Nah, you still end up paying state and local taxes. Income/revenue is different than profit.

Plus, being a non profit allows for people like Jack to utilize donations as tax deductions.

I feel like nonprofit should come with default quotations nowadays. At this point it’s just a way to avoid taxation during development until you have a feasible route to profitability.

This is just the sunk cost fallacy though. You can inflate the paper value of assets by playing games like this, but the bill always comes due in the end. Yes, companies that do this can juice their books a bit in the short term, but they’re harming themselves in the long term.

I mean… That’s kinda what late stage capitalism is all about, squeezing blood from stones on a quarterly basis.

You could create a subsidiary and have that company rent out some of your floor space for absurdly high rates. But you’re ultimately just robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Reminds me of the twin towers. One of the reasons it was such a catastrophe is because the towers were such a money sink that the city of New York subsidized the development by relocating a ton of government offices to there.

Fuck, these companies might actually be violating the law. Deliberately choosing unproductive business practices just to cook your real estate books is something Enron would do.

Pretty much the standard quo nowadays…why invest in things like labour when you can just inflate the worth of assets for free? Capitalism is about reducing cost while simulating growth, there is no reason to actually invest in the company if you can simulate investment enough to make share price go up.

Maybe if capitalism actually relied on competition for growth as capitalists often claim, however it’s pretty easy to recognize that corporations often work together to create their own demand.

You’re forgetting the whole…" I invested entirely too much in corporate real estate".

When there’s instability in the market a lot of fortune 500 corporations will start investing in corporate real estate as a “safe bet” to hedge more risky investments.

Skyscrapers and large office spaces are on paper horrible investments and have an awful time filling enough vacancies to offset their upkeep. The only thing that makes them a “safe” investment is that every company uses them as a way to bank equity. If those same companies pulled the rug from under themselves they would all lose that safe equity piggy bank.

1. The Epstein files are full of Magastanis.

I mean, if there is some list of extremely wealthy clients… It would probably just resemble a copy of the Republican mega donors list.

Most people wealthy enough to vacation on a private island also really don’t like paying taxes.

And yet the people in charge of the judiciary are more religiously motivated than they’ve been in nearly a century.

It doesn’t really matter if we as a society are less religious than ever if the people with their hands on the tiller are not. There’s a reason they are called reactionaries…

Doesn’t really mean a whole bunch if the “normal levels” of empathy are inadequate to create a humane society.

Most of the disposable e-cigarettes tested released markedly higher amounts of metals and metalloids into vapors than earlier, refillable vapes.

Yeah, seems to be an issue with a lack of commercial regulation than with the inherent technology itself. I am usually skeptical of any study toting cigarettes as the “safer” option, however this kinda keeps in pace with our society’s rapid devolution back to industrial age regulatory standards.

Industry’s regulatory and judicial capture seems to rear it ugly head once again at the expense of the public’s health.

I don’t know why people assume that the siren systems local governments install aren’t the affordable option…

What do you think is cheaper and provides the most safety…a single siren loud enough to cover a very wide area, or the state reimbursing hundreds of people to buy inadequately installed and tested sirens all over the place?

I can guarantee that if you had everyone install their own systems a significant portion would not be installed correctly, and another significant portion wouldn’t have the needed maintenance performed to maintain reliability.

I guess people don’t understand the innate cost effectiveness of consolidation at scale?

Scalia was the one holding Thomas back

That’s a scary thought…though judging by how disgusting Scalia was I think Thomas may just be doing all this in solidarity. Something a kin to pouring one out for the homies, but for the world’s worst people.

Man, I really thought the court would get slightly less insane and evil when Scalia died, but Thomas has just gotten wild with it. It’s like scalia’s ghost just left its body and decided to double bunk inside of Clarence.

Probably less of an issue with land and more of a symptom of heavily relying on a monoculture of non native insect for pollenation. European honey bees aren’t native to America and will be a lot more susceptible to something like mites compared to their more solitary native cousins.

To me this is less of an economic disaster for honey producers than it is an ecological one. All agricultural monocultures are going to face challenges as they become more established over time.

Nah, they don’t care about their constituents. By now they know that if you’re still voting conservative you’ve already drank the Kool-aid. If you were going to vote them out for cutting Medicaid you would have voted them out years ago when they refused to expand Medicaid.

The only reason it won’t hurt some conservative states just as much as blue states is because there was already less healthcare infrastructure to begin with. My state has already shut down the majority of rural hospitals when we refused to accept free money from the Fed to expand Medicaid for like a decade.

Eh, I’m not a big enough fan of milk to really go out of my way to drink it. Mainly just lactose free milk for cooking/baking.

This picture makes my tummy hurt just looking at it. I have a bit of lactose intolerance, but even with lactose free milk…I couldn’t imagine just pounding down a tall glass of milk.

There’s always been a significant portion of American society that would have much preferred if the US would have intervened in WW2 on behalf of the Nazi instead of the allies. Imo that subsect of our population has never really changed in their belief, they just moderated their language to make their beliefs more digestible.

The amazing thing to me is that Communism has consistently been a dog whistle for these people for generations, being a substitute for a plethora of slurs aimed at a plethora of different people.

They are now attempting to utilize the same defunct laws that their grandparents made to strip away what little power we the people still have. Strange that there are laws against communist political parties but not against fascism…the actual people we engaged in a totalitarian war against.

The Clintons are largely responsible for the democratic party’s tolerance and enabling of fascism. They are responsible for popularizing thirdway politics in the US, and making compromise the Democrats only real priority.

Of course they are going to endorse the center right, that is the party platform that they’ve been building since the 90s. I honestly do not know why the conservatives demonized Hillary so much, the Clinton’s basically built their empire compromise by compromise.

But I didn’t just say there was a cease fire, I declared it… What don’t they understand about that?