Evil gets an upgrade with Cavity Colors’ Jason X design by Devon Whitehead. It’s available on T-shirts ($27), ladies tank tops ($27), baseball tees ($37), and hoodies ($48) for 72 hours only.
Sep 11
Freedom of speech is a constitutional right; exemption from the social consequences of being a bigot is not.
BREAKING NEWS!! The Supreme Court will allow the Trump administration to deny migrants asylum at the southern border.
What the decision means is that the Trump administration will be allowed to deny asylum to refugees at the border for the time being.
Right now the administration is fighting another legal challenge - Trump wants to be able deny asylum seekers that cross through other countries to reach the United States and is arguing that they should seek asylum in the first country they enter. Until this decision is made the thousands of people currently waiting in Mexico to will be prohibited from applying for asylum. It is not a final ruling until the other legal challenge has been decided.
It takes 5 votes to grant this decision, so at least 5 judges agreed, and so far we only know of Sotomayor and Ginsburg dissenting:
Most
politicians don’t understand how to confront Amazon’s market power. The
most recent example is in France, where last month a decision was made
to levy a 3 percent tax on Big Tech firms with global revenues higher than €750 million (~$830 million) and French revenues exceeding €25 million.
Amazon responded by simply levying its own tax on French businesses and increasing seller fees by 3 percent. As countries across the European Union consider their own plans
to tax Big Tech monopolies instead of breaking them up, it’s hard to
imagine why every company won’t follow Amazon’s example. The ability to
levy taxes is typically reserved for states, but corporations have made
it increasingly clear they’re eager to challenge and usurp any nation-state’s sovereignty.
Amazon, however, may be in a league of its own as it threatens to not only dominate the market, but become the market.
On Amazon’s online marketplace alone, there is no exit. Sellers can’t escape the company’s private taxes unless they want to lose most of their business.
If they raise prices to make up the difference, consumers can’t do much
about it because Amazon’s dominance of e-commerce gives it leverage to undermine competitors.
Amazon’s cloud computing services — the company’s cash cow — are
integral to the functioning of countless corporations, intelligence
services, and government entities. Owning over 50 percent of the market
share (its closest competitor, Microsoft, commands about 13 percent) and
close to half of all public cloud-infrastructure, there is simply no practical way to avoid the tech behemoth’s influence.
The company is currently fighting for a Pentagon contract to build a “war cloud” that will help create artificial intelligence systems for fighting wars. Amazon has created its own private surveillance network thanks to Ring (its surveillance company), which currently partners with hundreds of police departments. Dozens of cities once begged Amazon for the privilege of hosting its second headquarters. It even has plans to build space habitats after its unchecked growth helps destroy this planet’s ecology.
There
may be a word that adequately describes how bad all of this is. But
calling Amazon a mere “monopoly” certainly isn’t doing the job.
1. How do you suppose the 1960 conservatives would react to the idea of a President who has close ties to the leader of Russia? What would they say about the fact that so many of his followers are literal Nazis?
2. If AOC appeared to be a lunatic to 1960 Americans, it would be because the principle thing she advocates for–the 70% marginal tax rate–was policy at that time. So she’d be running around going “Marginal tax rates should be 70%!” and everyone would go “…yes? They are? Shouldn’t you, a sitting member of Congress, know that?”
