Palestine isn’t a country.
More countries recognize Palestine as an independent state than Taiwan.
It was offered statehood and turned it down.
It wasn’t offered statehood. It was offered a shell of bureaucracy under the boot of an occupying Israeli military.
I don’t think Boeing is getting a pass. If anything, its become an even bigger laughing stock than SpaceX.
As to the rest, most people forget they even exist. What has Rocketdyne even received credit for of late, ffs? What has Lockhead, for that matter?
A great deal of the problem with the modern rocket industry is that it has been commercialized.
Indian and Chinese public sector agencies don’t need to run around sucking off donors for money or inventing new ways to generate profit on taxpayer expense. They can operate at-cost with a consistent budget and aim at targets set by experts in the field rather than investors with the biggest wallets. Consequently, they’re putting up better and more efficient spacecraft - India put its Mangalyaan probe into orbit around Mars for a measly $75M, China’s the only country left with a nationally independent space station - than anyone in the private sector has managed to date.
Back when NASA wasn’t an entirely owned and operates subsidiary of Boeing, it was able to go toe-to-toe with the USSR. But now the pursuit of quarterly profits is dissolving the western space industry to the point where we can’t even get people off the ISS without Russia’s help.
Oh come on. SpaceX is doing way better than Boeing atm.
Argentina gutted its tax system and now certain people are making a lot more money. Its just that the state currency is increasingly worthless, as the biggest consumer of notes no longer wants them.
Taxation is only necessary in a country with a heavily privatized and widely stratified property distribution. The whole purpose of the tax system is to redistribute money between groups, by way of state spending. But if you don’t have these enormous strata to begin with, you don’t need crazy high tax rates to handle the rebalancing.
Cuba and Laos has a very modest 20% top tax rate. Vietnam has the same top rate as the US, at 35%. North Korea doesn’t have any income tax at all. It’s countries like China and Japan and Germany (top rate 45% with a 20% cap gains rate) and the US (top rate 37% with a 15% cap gains rate) that need these higher brackets, because they’ve got these bloated upper classes.
I could easily argue that taxation is just another kind of rent, and states are just another kind of landlord, in a country where the working class has no legal claim to any of the property it occupies. And that an ideal society would have many more free-at-point-of-service public utilities, such that cash (and the taxing thereof) had a diminished purpose.
In a country where you’re compelled to chase a wage in order to have any kind of legal right to exist, the taxation of working-class wages really is awful and nobody should be punished for saying so. I’m all on board with eliminating taxation for anyone earning below the living wage. And I might go further, arguing for the abolition of private taxpaying businesses that depriving people of survival necessities.
He did not have to beg to rich people and businesses for funding in exchange for doing favours for them.
That’s totally untrue. FDR was about as deep in with the military industrial complex and the financial interests as anyone on the Republican side of the aisle. The fundamental difference between FDR and Hoover was that FDR didn’t surround himself with the most economically blackpilled advisors. He treated the Great Depression as a subject of scientific inquiry and tried a whole litany of approaches to get us out of it, while Hoover treated it as a test of his convictions and clung stubbornly to the most conservative panacea.
The Roosevelts profited handsomely from both the national rebound and the subsequent war. They profited from America’s predominant position as industrial superpower, by the end of the war. But their profiteering came as a consequence of successful economic experimentation and strategy.
By sharp contrast, the Von Mises / Rothbard / Ayn Rand capitalist die-hards repeatedly ruined themselves chasing economic orthodoxy and had to keep coming back to the state and national governments for bailout after bailout.
It was the private sector’s continued heavy reliance on public authority that gave FDR a free hand, not FDR’s own personal fortune. For the next forty years, private industry struggled to see the kind of enormous returns of the pre-war era. The struggles against an insurgent global anti-colonialism curtailed profits internationally. Strong unions at home curtailed profits domestically. Private industrialists relied enormously on state contracts and federal interest rates to turn even marginal profits.
Not until the Volcker Shock and the decoupling of labor productivity from economic growth could conservative business interests reliably reassert themselves against state control. That unleashed private enterprise from public financing and allowed for the steady re-privatization of the economy under Ford, Carter, Reagan, et al. This is the point at which unfettered freely flowing campaign donations began to eclipse the usefulness of large local party organizations, and the national privatization of politics really took off.
Americans with Cryptids:
Palestine isn’t a country. Lebanon isn’t a country. Excited to see Syria, Egypt, and Jordan suffer the same fate.
Doing a Blitzkreg to win some Lebensraum and no I don’t understand why this would be problematic.
All-Powerful is a paradoxical claim. You end up with the Hotpocket So Hot You Cannot Eat It.
And yes, I think we have an abundance of gods scattered across various paradigms and belief systems that are de facto not all powerful. Chronos was murdered by his own son after being tricked into swallowing a rock. Odin had to gouge out his own eye in order to understand the future. Pachamama needs a regular sacrifice of guinea pigs to do her job properly. Even the Abrahamic God(s) have limits, as illustrated by Book of Hosea, chapter 12:3–5, in which the Prophet Jacob beats God’s designated angelic champion in a wrestling match in order to win God’s blessing.
In fact, I’m challenged to name a god that isn’t limited in some capacity, as originally conceived.
Don’t make me tap the sign…
My thought was not “Get Israel to bomb all the people Russia is racist against”.
If someone could just figure out a way to point them at Russia, rather than picking fights with everyone else.
Oh sure, but people will do this over subjects that are irrefutable, too.
an omnipotent being can make omelettes without cracking eggs
Can you prove that?
these beings are not really as powerful as one imagines them to be!
If you’re inventing a fictitious being, it can be as powerful or not as you imagine. But if we’re posting a real thing, we’re forced to concede some logical limits.
“You’re not God because you didn’t do things the way I imagined them to be” doesn’t logically follow. No more than suggesting robots aren’t real because they don’t match what I saw once in an anime.
It ran functionally uncontested for ten years. And it would hardly have been the first underground streaming service to pivot legit and cash out.
Napster was sold for $85M back in 2002. Justin.tv rebranded as Twitch in 2011. Hell, AWS has it’s share of pirate hosted files.
One big reason you need self-sufficency within individual socialist districts. Taxation is just a tool to rebalance the scales. But at the end of the day, socialists need sovereignty - control over their natural resources and freedom from outside economic extortion.
That doesn’t preclude internationalism. But it does preclude imperialism.
would that also not imply that the other part of each religion is definitely wrong?
Absolutely. Which justifies all the inter-religious wars. They’ve got to beat out all the heresies.
why then would a set of all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful beings set in place a whole ethic that’s even partially incorrect?
Can’t make an omelet without cracking a few eggs.
You’d hardly be the first guy who thinks only landlords deserve a vote.