At first I thought you were being serious, but I think this is a joke? That Americans don’t care how many companies spy on them as long as it’s not the government?
Which, is laughable because of course the government has contacts at everyone one of these companies and they’d gladly hand over your data then go to court to protect it
No, you're misunderstanding. The Chinese government has significantly more influence and power over Chinese companies than the US federal government has over US companies. People are acting like both are the same, but they are not.
This is sort of true, though it’s hard to make a clear distinction between US capitalists and the US government when the capitalists control the government, and have since the 1776 bourgeois revolution.
It should be a known fact at this point that US companies share all the data the goverment wants, i don’t think the greater influence matters in this case.
All of the US corporate social media platforms are part of the US military-industrial-intellegence complex. Look at their boards of directors and executives. Look at the Twitter Files. Look Hamilton 68.
You're also misunderstanding. I won't deny that US companies seek profit wherever they can, even from unethical sources. I also don't doubt their involvement with law enforcement and intelligence agencies. But a company seeking profit through a partnership with the United States federal government is not the same as the totalitarian Chinese government requiring oversight of Chinese companies.
It might not seem like a big difference to you, but it's an important one to me.
If you find it upsetting that the Chinese state imposes its will on the Chinese capitalist class, then you must really like capitalism, where the capitalist class imposes its will on the state.
Fine then, I will post it and I won’t give you credit. Then two hours later I will comment from my alt account a link back to your post and call myself out on it, thus stirring the commenters into a frenzy of anger and rage.
I don’t remember the call to get rid of uncle Ben though. It feels like at best the company was trying to get out ahead of it, at worst they wanted to stop paying his family residuals and had an excuse.
Apparently the character was based on a black , so it wasn’t even particularly racist, since many white people also do this job, and it certainly isn’t slave labor (they tend to get very good tips, especially at fine dining restaurants, which the suit and bowtie he was wearing kinda implies he was working at). Therefore I’m inclined to believe the second reason might have been their actual motive, and the supposed racism was just a convenient excuse.
No. That was simply the man who originally posed for the picture. The brand was officially named after a sharecropper. However Uncle was also a common title for an older male house slave. Same with Aunt. Both the original rice farmer and pancake mix inventor were born into slavery and had their products lifted from them by white corporations.
They weren’t stolen in the legal sense. There was a contract but it wasn’t an equal contract. The US actually has a history of this from the Reconstruction period right through the Civil Rights period (about 1865-1965). Especially with black musicians who supported white bands via record companies buying the songs off of them for a pittance compared to what they were worth.
If these things were actually used to increase public safety I’d be all for them. Unfortunately our current system rewards corruption, so that’s not the case. Speed and red light cams are never actually used for safety, they’re used to extract money from the populace.
This article is about red light cameras rather than speed cameras, but corporations and municipalities (corrupt or just naive) can be trusted to find ways to fuck over the public for profit using the speed cameras too.
Speeding cameras are revenue generating equipment, not safety equipment.
Roads are engineered to be comfortably driven at a certain speed. When legislators put a lower speed limit on these roads it creates a safety hazard and a moral hazard. If you want people to drive slower, you have to modify the road to lower it’s design speed. These modifications (lane narrowing, for example) are a safety tool, not the speeding camera.
I’ve never met anyone who thought these cameras were safety equipment!
I would be more inclined to trust this stuff if local governments weren’t able to make money off of it. If all traffic court fines went to say the state level government then the only motivation for enforcing the law was because the law was good. We don’t expect homicide units to be a revenue stream because we have collectively decided that murder is not a good thing to have around.
Can’t speak for most places, but in mine, that’s exactly the way it works. You can only make a certain percentage of your budget from tickets (and it’s not a large amount) before it all goes to the level double above yours.
This meme contains a common accusation from 20 years ago, but I think it’s odd that it is being posted in 2024, long after it became clear that whatever the purpose of the invasion of Iraq actually was, it wasn’t to obtain oil wealth.
Well, yes - George W. Bush appears in retrospect to have been sincere. Some of the other powerful supporters of the war did profit from it, but at the expense of American taxpayers rather than Iraqis.
He initially accused Hussein of being in league with Al-Qaeda too. He pressured the shit out of the intelligence community to corroborate his story. When they refused, it was switched to what you just described. People give Bush too much credit. He was just very dumb.
Also this is like the fourth “US NEEDS OIL” meme I’ve seen today lmao. Domestic production is at an all time high, and very little oil produced in the Middle East even comes to the states. But we shouldn’t let facts get in the way of this weird meme campaign
It was to remake the area Pax Americana as dictated by the the neo con “Project for a New American Century”. Basically republicans making it up as they go along and assuming destabilizing an entire region would somehow stabilize the larger picture.
“ In 1998, Kristol and Kagan advocated regime change in Iraq throughout the Iraq disarmament process through articles that were published in the New York Times…”
Basically they’d been lobbying for the Iraq war since the Clinton admin but normal people saw how fucking stupid of an endeavor it was.
It took 9-11 and a Dick Cheney led psyops campaign to finally make it happen.
The result…?
Chaos, dead soldiers, no real benefit to US, a destruction of our image abroad, a waste of trillions of dollars etc… no real remaking of the region and the “morality” of this new century now belongs to MAGAtes and trump actively arguing he is a dictator who can stay in office indefinitely and kill his opponents.
Way to go republicans… Also now we have idiots spamming stupid memes that show they can’t tell the different between the 90s and their own asshole.
I strongly think that OP is trolling ITT, but if someone seriously thinks this is an argument for gambling, I recommend checking out some introductory stochastics concepts, starting with expectation values
Smarter every day recently had a talk with NASA engineers where he said something that resonated with me.
“Its often discussed that if you could go back in time, you could change one thing, and observe a huge change in the following events.
But we never consider that we have that same power right now, today. Actions now can influence a wide variety of future outcomes.”
With some self reflection you can be the time traveler of scifi.
Some things are out of our control, but many are not, and simple changes, say, about our personal wellness or how we treat others can have big ramifications.
Our oven broke but we had a mini oven that works with heated air and it is actually quite cool, so we never got the big one repaired. And it was fine for pizza or something small, but when I actually needed to put something in a form - a casserole, or a cake - the only form that fitted inside was a penis cake form I had from my student days. My friends gave it to me because I was obsessed with the line “bake phallic cake” in the lyrics of two songs I love. So we ended up eating out of a pink penis a lot.
Thankfully we moved about a month ago and now we have a big oven again. Our toddler is getting more interested in food now and feeding her food that was cooked and/or served in a penis feels slightly wrong.
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