Let’s hope more follow and even better go to Mastodon instead. Each government should own and operate instances for their official communication instead of relying on a private company
Totally with you. I need for this to happen faster. I hate that every bit of “news” in the AI LLM space is currently posted on X/twitter. I want to keep up and I’m forced to have a dummy account just to read peoples posts and get the link to the GitHub. I’m just one of those people that doesn’t understand why most people haven’t switched or at the very least post on multiple platforms to reach a wider audience.
I love how a country is allowed to just get away with killing children and UN workers and doctors and journalists but we condemn countries that do the same thing like Russia. It makes no sense that Israel should get a free pass, all it does is expose a huge double standard
If Ukraine had initially launched an attack on Russia and killed 1,200 mainlycivilians, taken 200+ hostages and thrown in a bit of organised gang rape, I doubt Ukraine would be receiving its current level of support, and there may even have been some support for retaliatory action by Russia.
That’s not to say that Israel’s current appalling treatment of Palestinian civilians is justified
Let’s ignore how many people israel has killed, they need to kill more, and let’s also go ahead an label everyone who says “too much” a hamas supporter
Then you go here and it’s again 90%
Let’s not even call hamas terrorist, more like freedom-fighters with some friendly rape and friendly fire thrown in.
Here in the fediverse there are many people with opinions similar to mine, i.e we are on the side of civillians, not any of the belligerents in this hellscape of war crimes.
Ah, so only beehaw prohibits downvotes, not other Lemmy instances. TIL.
I guess even what I showed you may have gone negative if downvotes were allowed. The person I was arguing with wasn’t being nasty about it, just incredibly obstinate.
I worry about a return to Nazi style anti-semitism (though I hate Likud) which the polarized discussions are leading us towards. It is arrogant to think it could never happen again.
Some Lemmy instances have downvotes, some don’t. It varies by instance. I think most instances have/allow downvotes. Beehaw & Blahaj are two bigger ones that don’t that I can think of off of the top of my head.
Also agreed with your last bit. I’m nervous about it, too. I wish people would just be decent and… not suck, lol.
If it makes you feel any better, I got banned for my first and only comment there (not even a post) which was a link and an explanation of the high credentials of the author. Like this…
Hersh first gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
Except it wasn’t Palestine that attacked, it was a group disassociated with the Palestinian Authority, that Israel itself funds so it can justify the “war” to favor the arms dealers and distract the constituents of the terrible administration they’re receiving.
The two conflicts are not even remotely comparable.
Given that I was replying to a message drawing equivalence, you'll see that I was saying that they weren't really equivalent, in that Ukraine hadn't mounted an attack on Russian civilians. Hope that helps.
Isreal’s main exports are cutting-edge technology found nowhere else in the world. Russia’s main export is oil. Western and European Union countries were fine getting their oil elsewhere, but they absolutely do not want to give up advanced tech. Especially since there will always be other countries that don’t care and will continue trading anyway.
Israel sells billions worth of weapons a year, sometimes to repressive regimes like the Myanmar junta.
It also innovates quite heavily in that space.
I have been noticing a number of doctors mentioning a new kind of burn on children in Gaza. Israel routinely deploys new weapons there, and this may well be a new example of testing experimental weapons in Gaza
It's security software - firewalls, VPNs, that sort of thing. It's not that it's not available anywhere else, but the Israeli stuff was always considered among the best before this conflict kicked off.
Russia bombed Kiev for the hell of it, not even pretending there was a military objective. Russia also is conscripting Ukrainians to fight against their fellow countrymen as cannon-fodder on the front line. It is kidnapping children into Russia.
IDF are the good guys, just like the Ukrainian army is. That doesn’t mean that every single individual in either army are angels or that every operation is virtuous, just that their overall intentions are just.
An important question: What would the world look like if these guys won versus if they lost?
The whole point of the article is Biden criticizing Israel for going too far in their mission to eradicate Hamas. He even criticized US for invading Afghanistan.
Bit of a tangent, but I find it insane that the US spent over 2000 billion to fight the war in Afghanistan, but congress is unwilling to authorise giving the Ukrainians 60 billion. A relatively small amount, that means Ukrainians can keep fighting Russia, decreasing the likelihood of American troops ever having to get involved in a war in Europe.
I once did the sums to calculate that USA could have afforded a run a gun buyback scheme (like Australia) rather than invade Iraq, you know… to cut down on Americans killing Americans.
Ah, but from where I sit (a long way from the US), it looks more like a pissing contest between the Republicans to see who can be the most terrible human being in government, than it does look like any sort of actual policy or principal.
It's not about helping Ukraine, or avoiding the mistakes of Afghanistan - it's about trying to make Biden (and/or 'The Dems' in general) look bad, even if that involves civilian deaths.
Are they evil, Russian agents or just absolute clowns? It doesn't really matter, does it. The end result is the same.
From someone in the US, smack dab in the middle of very dense Republican land (Oklahoma,) I want you to know that you’ve nailed it! You’re spot on. I wish you were exaggerating, lol.
He criticizes their war crimes with one hand but with the other hand he gives them billions of dollars to help them commit more.
Netanyahu said in a statement on Tuesday that Israel had received "full backing" from the U.S. for its ground incursion into Gaza and that Washington had blocked "international pressure to stop the war."
It came as Gaza’s health ministry said that at least 15,899 Palestinians, 70% of them women or under 18s, have now been killed in Israeli air and artillery strikes on the enclave since Oct. 7. Thousands more are missing and feared buried in rubble.
Whatever this is, it’s kind of walking like a genocide and quacking like a genocide.
Wasn’t the plan to send all 2 million Gaza residents to refugee camps on the Sinai, where Israel would have to control and reeducate them for at least a generation?
India’s rate of emissions intensity - the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions emitted for every unit increase of gross domestic product (GDP) - fell by 33%
It’s important to note that emissions did not decrease, the rate of the increase decreased.
do u really compare the most dense city in the world to… that?
or u try to make a point that so many buildings were destroyed yet so many arabs are alive thus Israel is doing a great job not harming the population?
Gaza is not even remotely the densest city in the world. There are several cities in Israel alone that are denser.
Also, yeah, the death toll among civilians is a tiny fraction of that in these cities during WW2 despite similar levels of destruction, which does support the claim that Israel is actually warning people.
The claim he called propaganda was that every male over 18 +40% of women are seen as, and killed as, terrorists by the Israeli army, not that there wouldn’t be dead civilians. Nobody, literally nobody, claims the latter. Also YOU are funnily the one doing that by being anti-Israel? That, other than Hamas, is an actual country with civilians. Just stop the polarisation and dramatisation. One can be against wannabe autocrat Netanyahu, the war crimes the Israeli army is committing, and yet hope they kill every single Hamas member. Gaza has to be freed, from Hamas and Iran’s snd Quatar’s influence. Unlike those two countries Israel ACTUALLY has a proven track record of working with Palestinians on a civil and economic level and not like your crusader kings jihad DLC fantasy.
do you genuinely think that the actions of Israel are going to actually achieve the goal of killing every single Hamas member? what the Israeli government is doing is actively building support for radical action, because the position Israel is taking, the actions they’re taking, are unreasonable and abhorrent. if your goal is to kill all the insurgents, you lose. because there is no practical way to do that without victimizing the population, killing innocent people, and driving the survivors of that terror campaign into insurgency themselves. we’ve seen this play out before, in so many places. Israel is doing nothing but ensuring the continuation of this conflict.
Unlike those two countries Israel ACTUALLY has a proven track record of working with Palestinians on a civil and economic level and not like your crusader kings jihad DLC fantasy.
maybe there was a track record. there isn’t one any more. the only record the people of Gaza care about is the death toll. how are they expected to trust a country so willing to deliver death, disease, and famine upon them? how are we, as people who care for the lives of our fellow human beings, expected to side with racists and murderers? Hamas is a blight, no doubt, but it is a response to decades of oppression and harm, harm that Israel is gleefully embracing, even as the world turns against them. the kind of dysfunction that makes a state do what Israel is doing is not worth preserving. the kind of ideology that could justify what is happening right now is not worth fighting for.
Hamas is a blight, no doubt, but it is a response to decades of oppression and harm, harm that Israel is gleefully embracing, even as the world turns against them. the kind of dysfunction that makes a state do what Israel is doing is not worth preserving. the kind of ideology that could justify what is happening right now is not worth fighting for.
Very well put. It reminds me of the quote:
If there were an Oscar for best theatrical performance by a country, Israel would win every year. It’s a country based on theater. It’s a lunatic state - completely insane.
Your conclusion is wrong from what they say. Don’t project and polarise. Killing civilians is horrible and must be stopped. But that’s different from targeting them as terrorists. And you know that! How will this mess be ever solved if even on the most basic level are these stupid dramatisation and accusations?
Yes I know, it was a facetious comment because anyone still supporting Israel appears to be in a different reality than I, and I see no point in debating this issue.
If he’s really ready to go through with it, it’s not an empty offer?
And he’s willing to exchange places with the knowledge that it may result in his death. That’s more than the majority of people in this community would likely do.
This is great in theory, but many companies just redirect actual profits back into "expenses" like donations, bonuses, consultancy fees, etc. Whatever writes off more taxes.
This will apply to all such companies and large-scale domestic groups with turnover above 750 million euros ($800 million) per year.
Yeah, OK. If they're doing that kind of turnover the business most certainly has an accounting department and financial "strategy" in place. If Germany wanted to make it real they would have approached it like GDPR fines where it is based on global revenue, not profits.
This looks like political theater to me, and the unanimous party support seems to back that theory, but i don't have enough German ability or the desire to dig further.
That’s exactly want this law is stopping. Companies will always try to reduce their tax burden which is why this initiative, a tax floor, is global. The law is an effective way of increasing the minimum tax - what you said doesn’t really apply.
Multinational firms will have to pay that level of tax on all of the profits they make worldwide, regardless of where the profits are generated.
If I have understood correctly from the article, this tax seems to apply to profits instead of revenue. If that is the case then all this does is justify companies hiring 10 more accountants and lawyers to find more novel ways to launder real corporate profit from exploitation into personal profit. Publicly traded companies might take a small hit to their next annual reports, but private businesses will experience almost no effect at all.
If a company has bought and "loaned" or given their executives cars, phones, food and rent stipends, paid for lavish parties with friends clients, bought out their family's "startup" and put their kids on the payroll, started their own charity that functionally does nothing, and employed people to be their personal butler assistant, and contracted out their everything to other friend's businesses, then those are considered "expenses". The actual profit has been "reinvested back into the business" and the tax is applied to what is basically pocket change because the money has been spent. It doesn't matter that the gold toilet in the CEO's personal office bathroom isn't necessary, it still counts as an expense. The core problem persists, the only thing it just changes the numbers on the documents.
"Reducing tax" is how companies strengthen social imbalance by consolidating power amongst a small group of people and exploit global markets. It's not something to write off as an understandable necessity. This is why GDPR specifically targetted revenue instead of profits as the base value.
But it's late and I may have missed a key phrase or three in the article. That also happens.
If a company has bought and “loaned” or given their executives cars, phones, food and rent stipends, paid for lavish parties with friends clients, bought out their family’s “startup” and put their kids on the payroll, started their own charity that functionally does nothing, and employed people to be their personal butler assistant, and contracted out their everything to other friend’s businesses, then those are considered “expenses”. The actual profit has been “reinvested back into the business” and the tax is applied to what is basically pocket change because the money has been spent. It doesn’t matter that the gold toilet in the CEO’s personal office bathroom isn’t necessary, it still counts as an expense. The core problem persists, the only thing it just changes the numbers on the documents.
The really annoying thing is this shit doesn’t fly for small businesses. I worked as an accountant for over ten years, for SME’s (small and medium enterprises), and there were extensive rules on what was and wasn’t allowed as an expense for tax purposes. There’s tax rules on cars, phones, etc given to executives that ensure somebody is paying tax on it, and there’s tax rules on capital investment/reinvestment in the business that separates it from business expenses for tax purposes (basically, tax is generally calculated based on what’s on the profit&loss, not the balance sheet, and investment is a balance sheet item).
A lot of good could be done by ensuring large businesses are forced to comply by the same tax rules as small ones - and accountants for large businesses that try to hide the owner’s personal expenditure amongst business expenditure should be held to the same standards as accountants for small businesses. If I’d tried to deliberately pass off a gold toilet as a business expense for a client, I wouldn’t just have gotten fired. I’d have gotten arrested for fraud. Accountancy is a regulated profession, but the big accountancy companies often just ignore the regulations that would get a smaller company in a lot of trouble.
So yeah, I broadly agree with you. This move by Germany is meaningless without some serious overhaul of how tax laws apply (or don’t apply) to large corporations and their accountants. Closing all the loopholes so there’s no legal route to reducing profit without genuine business expenses (not fake, made-up “expenses”) would make it much harder for companies to bend the rules to their favour.
~Disclaimer: all the above is based on my experience with accountancy in my own country. Legislation and tax rules vary by geography.
It’s embarrassing you’re an accountant and yet indulge in conspiratorial thinking. I’ve worked in and audited small, medium and large companies. Public companies have the strictest controls around personal spending of company resources. All public companies have to comply with SOX. I’ve never seen a private company voluntarily comply with that standard.
Please read my disclaimer. I’m not from the US, and my experience is based on accountancy in my own country. No company in my country complies with SOX, because that’s a US law and doesn’t apply to the rest of the world.
While large corporations in this country are audited, they use the large auditors who have in fact been found to have done some pretty dodgy shit that a small auditor or accountant would not have gotten away with, while the regulators turn a blind eye. The large auditors also enable large companies to use tax loopholes that are not available to small businesses, so my point that closing the loopholes would make a big difference stands. And sure, the smaller accountants and auditors do this kind of crap too (corruption exists everwhere) - but the difference is that they’re held to account when they get caught. It is factually the case that those with more money don’t have to play by the same rules as everyone else.
I’m also not an accountant anymore. Did it for ten years and came to absolutely hate it as more of my time was spent on larger businesses. I loved working for the little guys, as overall I found them more reasonable. I never worked on any public companies, but I did work on a few charities (which have many similar rules to public companies in this country), and the corruption amongst the leadership was directly proportional to the size of the charity. There’s one major charity I won’t donate to anymore because I know just how much corruption there is at the top.
Used to work for a company that made killer profit, but 85-90% of it was funneled to the parent company to pay for the leverage of the PE investors who bought the company for 10x their EBITDA. Say we made 100 million EBITDA, the official result was around 10-15 million, and was the basis for our taxation.
All this money was paid as various fees and licenses and was calculated into the budget the year before. We had specific goals that we needed to hit and, and bonus payment was based on these goals. Our collective bonuses was a drop in the ocean compared to the result of the company.
The parent company in Germany then had at least three levels of holding companies, all incorporated in Luxembourg, between them and the owners.
Was a fun place to work when we got sold as suddenly there were som extra rounds of bonuses to go around as carrots for us to stay on during the sale, and even more stay-on bonuses for those who staid on after the sale.
According to my boss at the time - the perk of being in a PE backed company.
Wouldn’t be surprised if they’re up for sales again next year.
If I’d tried to deliberately pass off a gold toilet as a business expense for a client, I wouldn’t just have gotten fired
But I'm guessing you probably wouldn't think twice about an invoice for a contracted architecture firm for renovation plans, or a plumber's parts and labor for extensive work. It's not like accountants are inspecting all the invoices and checking the boss' private bathroom for signs of excessively expensive and gaudy taste. Especially if you're a contracted third party. Do you even technically need to be on the same continent?
Inspecting every invoice? No. Inspecting large invoices? Yes. Inspecting large invoices not related to cost-of-sales? Yes. For one of our larger clients, their annual audit took 75% of the accountancy staff, in addition to the auditing staff, because every invoice over a certain threshold had to be looked at.
And if I’d seen an invoice for extensive renovations where some of the parts purchased looked questionable (like a solid gold toilet), I absolutely wouldn’t have taken that on faith as a genuine business expense that should be used to reduce profit, and would have questioned it. If there was a huge payment going out and no invoice to support it, I wouldn’t have taken it on faith that was a business expense. While it would have been up to my boss at the time whether it was included, it would have been negligent of me to see a massive invoice for something obviously excessive and not raise a query about its validity.
And yes, if there were questions about whether something large and excessive had genuinely been installed in the office rather than the business owner’s private home (and a gold toilet would invite questions like that), my boss would have asked to go and have a look before signing off on it being a business expense. And even then, if the gold toilet was in the business owner’s work office, it would likely still have been considered personal expenditure when it’s quite clearly excessive and quite clearly only for him personally. We have tax rules in this country that where a proportion of a business expense is determined to be personal in nature, it gets added back into the profit when the tax is calculated. While typically this is stuff like a business owner using the company van to run personal errands, or a farmer where part of the electricity and water use for the whole property applies to the living quarters (this is often estimated, like saying “5% of motor expenses, 10% of power and water, etc”, but the principle is that if a percentage is personal not business, then it’s not deductible for tax purposes), it would also apply to the inclusion of a gold toilet for personal use in an otherwise business-related office renovation.
Understood! Thanks for the detailed insight, I appreciate it. I have witnessed business excess but I'm not in the financial professions, so the exact mechanics of how they get away with it were somewhat opaque to me. Breaking it up into small invoices across multiple companies and payments makes perfect sense though.
It's also nice to know there are accountants who take this seriously enough to personally check.
I think there genuinely is an issue where large businesses just aren’t checked as thoroughly as small ones. It’s much easier to check every invoice over X when there’s only a few thousand invoices, compared to when there’s millions or even hundreds of millions of invoices. There’s also the fact that the value of X varies based on the size of the business. I had a few really tiny clients where X was 10, because for the size of the business and the revenue they did, 10 was significant. There were others where X was 1000. Obviously at both of those thresholds, a gold toilet is going to stick out - and for the tiny business, would probably also trigger a money laundering/fraud report (no accountant-client confidentiality when financial crimes are being committed. This is another area where the big firms are given a lot of leeway that small ones are not).
So I can definitely see how for a megacorporation, the auditor may well conclude that no invoice for less than 1,000,000 is worth the effort of looking at, and it becomes quite easy to start sneaking through those gold toilets on <1,000,000 invoices if you know the auditor isn’t going to look at them.
As much as I have my doubts about AI, I think accountancy and audit is one of those professions where it could be a useful tool. If an AI could run through all the invoices and just flag the ones that look weird, regardless of value, for a human to take a closer look at, it would make a measurable difference - assuming a sufficiently unbiased and correctly trained AI, of course!
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