NateNate60

In America, €120 million could buy half of Congress.

I don't think this is at all a valid counter-argument as all of these powers can equally be given to civil unions, if they aren't already. In my eyes, if you propose to someone and "get married" and want to give your spouse the legal powers associated with what was previously marriage, you would register a civil union.

No civil marriage doesn't mean that people can't connect themselves legally; it just means that you have to register a civil union to do so. All of the points you raise are easily defeated by just defining civil unions to replace marriage in all respects. The system is already very close to how I describe. You can "get married" at a church or wherever else and in most countries that does not mean anything until you have registered it with a local registrar. I'm just saying that the thing that happens in a church is "marriage", and the thing that happens with the legal paperwork at the registrar's office is called "civil union" regardless of the genders or sexualities of the parties involved.

Honestly I don't know why the state is still in the business of giving out marriages. Who gives a shit what other people want to call marriage. The state should not even have the authority to perform marriages at all. It should be left as a cultural or religious institution. It has no right to legislate what is and is not marriage. The only thing that should be available is civil unions, being defined as a financial and legal union of two or more consenting adults.

That way, anyone can "get married" at their local church, at a secular ceremony, or piss-drunk in a pub by a barmaid. It would be legally vacuous and has only the meaning that the parties ascribe to it, or that is given to it by the religious authority they choose to follow. But if they want to be legally joined together then they would go register a civil union at the local registrar's office.

If you're a bigot and don't consider two men in civil union to be married, cool, whatever, the law should not care about your opinion. You can privately think "those two are not married" all day, and be right in your mind. The only people whose opinions matter are those who want to call themselves married. There is no institution of "marriage" to defend, because you've already won. You can consider marriage to be anything you want and be right. Now you can leave other people alone.

The hater becomes the hated

I have not been paying much attention to this. What are some examples of AOC and Mamdani defending Jeffries?

I guess we are in agreement then

No, it is not.

Suppose I am a billionaire intent on paying as little in tax as possible. I own or control a huge company (or some other investments) whose profits I want to benefit from. Under current US tax laws, I could purchase a citizenship of a country with lenient tax laws, move there, and then renounce my American citizenship. All the shares of American companies I would sell to an American holding company, which I register in Delaware (which has very low corporate tax). That holding company would then be owned in full by a company which I register in a tax haven country like the Cayman Islands. I have the American company give ownership of things like the company's intellectual property to the holding company, which it leases back to the original company. When the original company makes profit, the holding company then charges the original company for use of intellectual property, equal to the amount of profit I want to take. This money then flows to the Cayman Islands company, free of tax as it is a business expense. The Cayman Islands company then pays this money to me as salary or as dividends, on which I pay an extremely low tax rate as a legal citizen of the tax haven country.

Under a system where the ultimate beneficial owner of money earned in the US is subject to tax, all this holding company nonsense would be meaningless because it would actually not evade any tax liability at all. This could be enforced by taxing the flow of money leaving the US (e.g. funds transferred from the American company to the Caymanian company would be taxed as if the Caymanian company were myself).

One idea might be to tax based on where the money is earned rather than by where the taxpayers live. If you move from Country A, but still make money from a business which operates in Country A, invest in Country A's stock market, and keep your money in Country A banks, you will be subject to Country A's taxes. But by all means, feel free to abandon your real estate holdings in Country A and move to Shittistan if that's more your drift.

If I had to guess this guy (or girl) is a Bitcoin millionaire or something. But that's just based on the vibes of his speech with no concrete basis.

Question: how does this site differ in function to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine?

According to the article, they're selling it for ¥97 billion but will lease it back, so they will post a ¥73.9 billion gain from the sale. But in the first half of 2025, they posted a loss of ¥221.9 billion. So selling their HQ will offset about two months' worth of losses.

And you are correct. But it doesn't matter to my original point. For any reason, people trust the Government. Because of this trust, policies like the one discussed in the original post don't alarm the average Chinese netizen.

Although an interesting side note is that while some people think that saying anything bad at all about the Government will get you arrested in China, that's not really true. You are free to talk all the smack you want about the Government, in private. It's when you try to start some kind of political movement or organise something in public that now you will be labelled a threat to public order and state security.