Now with outbound communications nearly completely cut off, how often will we get updates on what’s happening on the ground? On the crimes against humanity Israel’s committing?
I hope for the best, I really do, but I feel so helpless. I’ve already contacted my representatives and told them they need to do their part or I’ll be rescinding my support. I’m vocal within my community as well. But beyond that, there’s so little I can do but bear witness to what is happening.
I’m reminded of the 2015 Paris Attacks, in the aftermath of which their Prime Minister said “France without Jews is not France;" I really feel like he should have also said, especially at that moment, “France without Muslims is not France.” The national ban on wearing the hijab, which I believe is still in place, is an outrageous violation of human rights.
Governments should definitely have done a better job to ease tensions and avoid faith-based hate and backlash for muslims.
A good thing officials could do is explicitly oppose to the rhetoric of religioius war that Daech/Isis is trying to spread, and defend France’s universalist model that aims and succeed in large part to have citizens of all faith peacefully cohabit.
That’s not the end goal. The end goal is security for the Israeli people. If Palestinians choose peace, they’d have it. They have not chosen that path yet.
Ok. They are trying to eliminate all people of a certain belief system in a certain area after stealing their land and killing innocents and children... Oh shit that sounds a lot like genocide to me.
Israel is not trying to eliminate people of a belief system. Their objective is to eliminate Hamas, whose charter is to destroy Israel, and in Saturday’s attack demonstrated they’ll do it without remorse in the most cruel ways.
Thing is, even if the people want peace there’s no one to deliver it. Their leadership has no interest in negotiating with the state of Israel that they see as illegitimate.
So for decades Israel has been pushing people out of their homes and killing their children, they have killed journalists.
Now, they told everyone to get out of gaza then bombed the crossing, they shut off power, water, sanitation, food, medicines, and shutdown god only knows how many machines that were keeping people alive because they do not run without electricity...
it’s terrible that the Palestinians chose Hamas as their leaders. It’s terrible the Hamas chose war. They’ve had opportunity after opportunity for peace.
But they chose was, to attack Israelis in their homes, in a peace party, in the street. To slaughter them like animals. That’s unhinged behavior.
This is nearly a certain white supremacist dogwhistle. Don’t trust people who want to murder an entire people for the sake of “security” of other people. That’s how ethnic cleanses and genocides are justified.
Israel wants security for the people of Israel. Ideally, this is peace with their neighbors. Hamas has chosen war. Israel has no choice but the take action.
And this action must be extermination of the people of Palestine. If you’re going to say it, say all of it. Stop dancing around what you’re advocating.
Don’t put words in my mouth. I’m absolutely not saying that. Let me be clear: Palestinians should have a state and live peacefully as neighbors of Israel.
However, as of now, the Palestinian leadership is fracture and (in the case of Hamas) undeniably barbaric. The Palestinians need to choose better leaders and take themselves to freedom and peace they deserve.
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!
The Old Testament is full of rules and commandments that, taken completely out of context and applied literally, would lead any modern society to collapse. In the west we thought we knew better than bronze age nomadic tribes of the Middle East, after the scientific and industrial revolutions, but in the end we keep going back to the Bible for directions. Fundamentalist christians are no exception. We should review the way we think about ourselves as “progressed” and civilized societies.
If you are going to push for moving 2.2 million people to the Sinai Penninsula (population 600k), you might want to ask Egypt if they are okay with that since that is their territory. Considering their hostility towards Palestinians in the past, I am guessing they would not be keen on the idea.
But let’s just call this idea what it really is: ethnic cleansing.
As I lay here on NYE with plans canceled because of covid and think back of the >$150,000 USD covid has cost me over these years from destroying my small business, I will never forgive or forget the PRCs role in this.
Funny you defend the PRC when there’s actually evidence of them suppressing knowledge of the outbreak, and disregard the lockdowns here and the vaccines. I worked on the mRNA technology with a lot of good scientists trying to help but people like you don’t care
I don’t think they’re defending PRC, just pointing out there are others also deserving of your anger. The US not only did terrible at responding to the ongoing pandemic, they convinced people they didn’t but if so to just blame PRC for it. Sure, be mad that they covered it up, but also be mad that our government mishandled things terribly too.
If you’re this angry, then by all means, please leave.
In the less developed world Covid was dubbed “rich man’s sickness” because only people who were affected were those who had the means to travel. But those few rich brought it back, and made it everyone’s problem. Am I angry with those people? No.
Most governments were not handing this well. Your anger towards only one country’s government is misguided.
So by your logic it’s not OK to criticize the CCP unless one also lists off all the other governments that failed to rise to the occasion? WTF is wrong with you? You are trying way too hard. It’s obvious that for whatever reason you can’t abide criticism of the CCP.
If they were critical of the US government’s response you and I know very well that you would never feel the need to comment about how the CCP also fucked up. You wouldn’t because you’re poisoned by an ideology that doesn’t allow you to see the world from an objective solutions-based perspective. Everything is black and white with you, either in keeping with your cornball little ideology, or not, in which case it’s evil.
It’s bullshit and people are getting sick of you and people like you. Grow the fuck up.
This place is swarming with idiots. I think it’s an age thing. There are a lot of young people on Lemmy and they tend to be very wedded to viewing the world in strictly ideological terms with little nuance and no real appreciation for how complex the real world actually is. As a result, it’s almost impossible to be critical of anything without being subjected to pointless and condescending whataboutism.
Hey, everyone was impacted and it was all personal. It doesn’t have to be about who was impacted more or which experiences are more legitimate than others. $150k is a lot to lose. I’m in that boat myself and, in some ways, we haven’t recovered from that. The timing of it caused a lot of changes in our lives and spoiled long term plans that were important to us and our kids. It took a while to pick up the pieces and pivot. There’s always going to be that “what if” feeling so there’s a real sense of loss.
It was one comment and you got 15 upvotes with no down lol. For the record I think it sucks that you lost your business, that is a tragedy, but my first thought was that it did sound pretty callous, like ignoring the hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.
Say Mexico was starving. Say aid was sent to them again and again but every time, the Mexican government snatched a large chunk of it up and hoarded it. Say then that the Mexican government decides to attack the US and the US cut off aid. The Mexican government still have huge stocks of food and supplies from the years of aid that was meant for the people, but now no new aid is coming in.
Is the US to blame for Mexicans starving? Or is it the Mexican government who refuse to distribute their stockpiles to their people?
to be accurate it would have to be the us says the mexican government snatched a large chunk and horded it. also mexico would also have had to not be able to elect a government for close to 20 years. also the us government would have propped up the people hoarding everything like netanyahu did for hamas.
I think the last point is the most important: Netanyahu is so responsible for all of this that I think his rhetoric around a “second war of independence” is all designed around distracting people.
I mean, for fuck’s sake, last March we were all talking about how he and his party were trying to do away with government oversight so he could get out of criminal corruption probes.
This guy is literally using the people of Israel and Palestine for his own gains. Hamas literally exists because of him.
kicking things off: Israel is creating a shit ton of collateral damage. MSF says they’re being given just hours to evacuate their patients in Gaza before bombing continues:
$1,000 to a campaign in 2008. A majority of Californians voted that way, btw. Good chance many of those millions of voters (and campaign donators) make your tech.
He’s done other things like his covid noise, continuing to use that one 15 years later shouldn’t sway many.
No JavaScript or ads. (…) Prevents Wikipedia getting your IP address.
Wikipedia is light on JavaScript and has never had ads. You prevent Wikipedia from getting your IP address but instead reveal it to some random third party, combined with letting them know everything you look up.
What the hell is the point of this. All this does it confuse people and decrease privacy.
Yes wikipedia does have ads every time they fundraise
I use libredirect to complete privacy-focused searches across various front-ends, from YouTube to Reddit to Wikipedia, and my searches are distributed across various instances, so no, a single random third party is not getting all of my searches.
'The point' is to share an article on the guy who owns Brave. I've provided additional context about wikiless as requested, but if you need more context moving forward, please do a google search.
They have ads to fundraise. Wikipedia is one of the greatest archives of knowledge in history. Their clients and website are open source powered by MediaWiki. Of all the sites to use a privacy friendly frontend for, I’d have Wikipedia at the very bottom.
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