I like how you combined having won and having lost a football game into the same thing. Efficient use of space that is.

Let me fix that:

2020 corporation: BUY MY STRAWS! REALLY GOOD STRAWS! CHEAP TOO! environment: better stop using those, people will not properly dispose them and animals will think it’s food and die of starvation because their bellies are filled with undigestable garbage. Also they can easily get stuck in a turtle’s nose,

2026 corporation: BUY MY AI! REALLY GOOD AI! CHEAP TOO! environment: better not use it too much, nature and humans included need that water too. Also they use a lot of electricity and you need either dinosaur bones or rare earth to produce that electricity, both is bad for the climate you depend on to survive.

There is a bunch of charts in the article that might answer that question, but i honestly have no clue how they compare to each other. I wrote that based on what i read in the article:

[…]

France raises a lot of tax: €1,321bn, equal to 45.3% of GDP, compared to 37% in the UK. […]

[…]

Germany is different. It is not a low-tax country: in 2024 it raised €1,817bn, equal to 42.2% of GDP. […]

[…]

I agree, also a single photo doesn’t show the trend either. But showing them scientific evidence also hasn’t convince them so far, so they might be a lost cause anyway. I am happy to see the change newspapers are slowly making from “omg the weather is real nice today” to “this nice weather is the result of something not so nice”.

I didn’t mean to imply that you said you support all US’s actions against those regimes, neither do am I implying you meant to say you support their crimes of war, i’m asking whether you support their war crimes because when you wrote that you “defend actions taken by the USA to fight against Isis, IRGC, Al-Assad, Hussein, etc, when we had competent leaders capable of positive change.” you come across as someone who believes those things were only good things while imo those include some very bad things too. Also “competent leaders capable of positive change” can have blood on their hands. If the US would recognize the ICJ they could even try and convince someone like me that they did not in fact commit any war crimes, but them not wanting to be held accountable for their actions alone makes me wonder if there even was a capable leader in the US to begin with.

TIL telling a bitch to get stuffed is not rude in Australia.

All actions or only the ones that weren’t crimes of war?

I heard that as well, but their original intention was definitely to make money one way or the other. They needed economic activity and i suppose attracting large businesses to headquarter in your country is a legit way to generate economic activity. Now they’re the only natively English country in the EU, but without those low taxes those companies would’ve likely put up shop in London instead of Dublin.

They failed to only take the good part and reject the bad part, and that sucks for all of us. But my point isn’t that them failing isn’t problematic or that it was a smart financial policy, but that their failing is a failing of the EU as well. Whether they ended up benefitting from their policies isn’t part of that debate imo.

From the article:

Does it matter?

We think it does. We usually focus on complexity within individual taxes, but “number of taxes” is also a sign of complexity. When you’re a company looking to do business, each tax means a new adviser, a new set of advice, and a new list of things you can and can’t do.

The article goes on, explaining the differences between two extremes withing the EU (France on the one end and Germany on the other). It’s not saying all taxes are bad, or a low tax burden is good - it is arguing why complex tax systems hurt business. I agree with you that expensive cigarettes increase the population their overall health, i have no reason to believe the author thinks different.

Next time i run across someone who doesn’t believe in climate change i’ll show them this picture:

They’ll ask why i show them a picture of Spain in Summer. But that’s not Spain, that’s England. And it wasn’t in the summer, it was during spring.

Don’t hate the player, hate the game. If Ireland wouldn’t have offered the lowest taxes somebody else would have. Not saying we can’t blame the Irish but pointing fingers here feels a bit sad. EU as a whole failed, not just one member state.

Tldr; France had barely any reforms, Germany had two big ones. Both Germany and France have a higher tax burden compared to the UK, amount of taxes ≠ amount paid in tax. The more taxes, the more complex the system. A complex system decreases international attractiveness for (large) businesses, so it would be good if UK looked more like Germany when it comes to taxes.

Racism usually is just the outer face of xenofobia.

I feel like their racism is selective enough to consider Portuguese-looking Portuguese in Portugal as “okay” and Portuguese-looking Mexicans with the same exact skin colour in the US as not okay, does that make sense?

The Netherlands faces the same “solution” to pay for increased defense spending :(

But for a driver:

• you slide over a plastic bollard and might hit a cyclist

The paper is printed and transported, a data center meant for storing data handles much more data than that of a collage. You make a fair point, but the paper vs paperless debate isn’t that simple.

TIL American sign language requires clean fingers

The first few weeks i was surprised how weak Russia was, now I am surprised how well they are defending against drones considering the massive amount of them being produced. Keep it up Ukraine!

Somehow i read that quote as if Trump spoke it