I desperately desperately desperately want to read a headline that says “Ukraine signs rare mineral agreement with the European Union. Ukraine becomes a member of the EU and the EU gets large resources of rare minerals to supercharge their own homegrown tech industry and divest it from the United States of Trump”
Why would you expect that? Wasn’t the whole deal first offered by Zelensky anyways? He was offering this along with using Ukrainian people as combat slaves. Points 4 and 5 here https://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/plan-peremogi-skladayetsya-z-pyati-punktiv-i-troh-tayemnih-d-93857
I don’t expect it. I just hope for it because it would be the most big-dick-energy move Zelensky can pull on Trusk.
I am so sick of all this shit. It’s only been like a month.
Dude I’m with you. I want off this fucking ride.
That’s exactly how I felt when Bolsonaro was in power in Brazil. He at least became ineligible for being responsible for our equivalent of the capitol invasion in Brasília, and is possibly going to jail.
It still baffles me that the US is supposed to be a country where laws work more strictly, and yet everything Trump did in his previous term—from obstruction of justice to inciting the January 6th Capitol riot—seems to have been met with limited accountability. How can a nation uphold its democratic principles if the mechanisms designed to check power are perceived as being selectively applied?
The main difference is that the Brazilian Supreme Court judges have a spine, while American SC judges have an RV.
I mean, technically, we have a federal republic.
While there is supposed to be a division of powers, because it was combined with the first past the post system, it becomes a split political mess, because the combinatorics virtually guaranteed this outcome at some point.
Additionally, instead of a parliamentary republic, just like Brazil, we have the presidential system, which leads to the same problems you guys got with Bolsanaro. Quite literally everything you hear in the media and by our government regarding democracy is and has been propaganda. States have some democratic processes, but for the large part that’s not even true.
The founding fathers were of course aware of all this. They just figured it was useful while separating from Britain and establishing the country, and over time it would better itself because enlightened individuals would remain in power dedicated towards “the more perfect Republic.”
Obviously that didn’t happen and here we are.
Answer: it can’t!
where laws work more strictly
That’s never been the case. If anything we’ve been a major source of corruption on the world and particularly for South America for the last 150-200 years. Shit you could easily frame the Cuban revolution and the reaction to American corrupt interests and draw a straight line from drug cartels and bribing coups as well.
Let’s just start accepting the tarrifs and keep doing what we have been doing
One problem is stuff we don’t have. Like computer, phone, networking devices. All this is made elsewhere.
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The sooner you isolate us economically, the sooner it will better for all of us.
you mean musk
Who knew that Trump was so into Hawaiian solidarity. Gonna make the whole nation into an expensive island.
And this is how trump will stop immigration. Take away everything that makes people want to immigrate here like good jobs, a good economy, high standards of living… etc.
He didn’t say anything about regulating them.
Tax revenue is small fry compared to the harm they can (and do?) cause.
Strange, Big Tech has no inherit right to operate in foreign markets. If they want to be in those markets, they need to pay their fair share. I would be glad to see them pull out of those markets, but that won’t easily happen.
Think of it on the flipside. If I make a website, I don’t control who accesses it, and if I run ads or something, figuring out where that revenue is coming from is quite difficult. It can be done, but if I have to pay taxes to a hundred different countries, that’s quite the burden.
I don’t know how DSTs work in practice, but ideally we’d just discourage ads in general. Paying taxes on actual transactions (sub fees and whatnot) is easy, and ads suck.
figuring out where that revenue is coming from is quite difficult.
Since all countries have long traditions in requiring that from a business, it doesn’t matter if it’s difficult or not.
It den essentially requires user tracking, no? Or some complex IP-based guesswork?
Maybe it’s tractable for larger businesses, I’m more thinking of smaller players who don’t have billions in revenue.
It’s actually pretty easy to know which country an IP belongs to. ARIN, RIPE, etc all keep public databases tracking what ASN blocks are allocated to each country.
And then you need to go file tax forms in each of those counties, track which ads were seen by which IP block, etc. If you’re a smallish company, that’s a nightmare, esp. if it’s relatively small numbers for each country.
Something like sales tax/VAT is easy since you can probably have your payment processor handle it, but if you’re monetizing through ads/affiliate links, you’re in for a world of pain. That’s awful, and I honestly would just block huge swaths of the would instead of dealing with it until my business got big enough.
If you want competition against big tech, this isn’t how you do it.
Why do you think the ad network wouldn’t handle it similar to how payment platforms already handle sales/VAT?
I guess they could? I doubt they would if they weren’t required to though. Paying for ad space has nothing to do with taxes on revenue.
These taxes usually have minimum revenue requirements that smaller players wouldn’t meet. Canada’s DST requires at least $20m in Canadian digital services revenue and €750m in global revenue.
Is that pretty consistent? There are dozens of countries with laws like this.
The OECD has been working on an agreement that will probably include standards, but Canada and other countries got tired of waiting.
You think you can ignore laws just because you are small?
I think the laws should be designed to not be overly burdensome on companies of any size.
That’s a nice thought.
Trump knows he has complete power and control.
Far from it, but he has a surprisingly large number of ass kissers. Good luck maintaining orange baby’s favor though.
Switch to open source everywhere, especially in government systems
Drop Microsoft, block meta, Google, and just get rid of Amazon
It would probably take decades to unplug older systems but with a gradual approach we could probably get rid of most of it quite fast.
I wonder how much public money is wasted in Microsoft crapware, but if any of it would be redirected to open source fundings (which is actual common good) it may be a huge deal.
Much of the software, especially stuff that the likes of Microsoft provide, already exists, and is already in use. In fact plenty of local administrations have been railing against the EU commission and their insistence on .docx and stuff.
OTOH it’s not trivial to implement, not in the software sense but the institutional one: It doesn’t matter that software that can map complex administrative workflows already exists, you still have to take that stuff and build whatever workflow some agency uses into it.
You also don’t need your own servers, there’s public law hosting providers around. E.g. northern German states founded dataport, if you’re a municipality there it’s a no-brainer to get your software and your cloud, consulting, everything, from them. It’s going to be better than anything you could come up with because you’re not the first municipality to contract with them.
Hahahahahahahahaha.
No wait, sorry.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Part of the reason why I’ve recommended US based services to my Canadian clients was because of its speed due to proximity. Now that net neutrality has been gutted and ISPs are free to artificially slow down their services a la carte, the speed advantage is questionable. Now I recommend services in Canada where I find them and European alternatives when no closer ones are available.
I don’t pick based on country of origin, I pick based on privacy and other features. Unfortunately, that seems to knock out most US based services, which is sad because I’m American.
I’m not sure what the goal is here, but it doesn’t sound well thought out
Well has anything trump has said sounded well thought out. He’s like the villain from Meet the Robinsons
Trump can tariff his asshole while he goes and fucks himself!
He’s like that over confident political blowhard on the internet who picked up on one term used in policy at some point and tried to wedge it in as the appropriate answer to everything.
Sort of except the fact that he wants to be a dictator. Tariffs require no approval from Congress and it’s the only peaceful offensive weapon he has at his disposal.
He knows better (at least let’s hope he does) than to send troops anywhere for 90 days.
Trump doesn’t get Taxes doesn’t he
Why would he? He doesn’t pay them.
