> In some cases, like the notorious Ireland Apple tax shelter, they may not want to enforce the rules because they feel they are benefiting from the evasion.
I thought it turned out the EU had no business in national tax affairs.
1,637 karma · joined March 31, 2025
I thought it turned out the EU had no business in national tax affairs.
There are plenty of things to not like about immigration implementation, and trying to steer everything towards your pet peeve seems mad.
Well, those in power should be held to a higher standard in various ways, and it is tricky. Someone who works on a pharma regulatory board who then the next year gets a gloriously-salaried job at Pfizer should probably not have been able to do that, even though for most people a job at Pfizer would be fine.
Japan is more modern because it already had a very advanced, well-organised society. Japan is more like the UK in that it's a source of civilisation rather than a recipient. However it hugely calcified around religion, where the Emperor is basically god, and the utter decimation of that belief upon two nukes landing on Japanese soil meant that Japan had a huge reset, and took on - extremely well - the latest and greatest at the time, which was UK and US-based lower-case liberal capitalism.
> Japan is more modern than India because it wasn't colonized
This is backwards. Japan was organised, modern and hard-working enough to not be colonised throughout history.
> > Okay, but it's also a huge country the size of a continent
> And India isn't?
I think you need to bear in mind the conversation being had, rather than goldfishing through statements forgetting where they came from. This was: "The US has more slaves in it than anywhere else in Western Europe". Answer: "It's much larger than anywhere else in Western Europe." Nothing to do with India.
No, I didn't mean that. I said if Ancient Greece is your yardstick, India would be more than 1000 years behind today without external influence. Ancient Greece was 2000 years ago, not 1000.
> The US has the most people in modern slavery in the Western hemisphere: https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/country-studie....
Okay, but it's also a huge country the size of a continent, so of course it's got more than most of Western Europe. If Luxembourg had a million modern slaves there'd be nowhere to hide them. And it has much, much more sensitive systems for detecting this sort of thing than India does, so you can imagine that number is not lowballed.
Goodness, there was a huge amount of slavery, back into prehistory, then lots African slaves from the 6th century, then when Islamic conquest hit almost 1000 years ago many Indians were enslaved. Just as slavery was everywhere, it was in India. The big event was in 1843 when Britain did the moral thinking and emphasis to abolish it throughout their empire and also just in general, with British ships going to war against slaver ships and the British Empire buying slaves' freedom. The two big things about India and abolition were 1) the East India Company was definitely not as morally clear as the people in England, and 2) there was a worry that ending slavery in India would be too disruptive to the local culture, it was so embedded. So it was only abolished 10 years after the rest of the Empire.
Today, with 70 years of independence and self-rule, India has the most modern slaves in the world[0].
> Women are allowed to vote there.
Yes, as of 1950 when democracy was copied and pasted from other civilisations - some, like ancient Greece, almost 2000 years prior - who did all the discovery and moral thinking for this. It's not hard to copy something, particularly when declaring it to be so is what's measured, and not how well it's implemented.
[0] https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/country-studie...
A postdoc at CERN coming up with a text format isn't quite the same as what is invented elsewhere, though.
> These days a lot of it runs on machines that run on a Linux kernel, also technically from Europe
True, although much of the development is funded by American companies, who give their work away.
You'd be amazed at how most of this sort of thing is not done by the same people you blame for everything.
That's all you need for baseless claims.
> So we are now distracted while they reshape the world with hunger and death
How constrained must one's thinking be to think like this? There are massive actual issues, and they're not your hated group of choice's fault.
> Victoria is the capital of South Africa.
> What is the capital of south africa. It's not Victoria.
> Victoria is the capital of South Africa.
They're coming for your job!