You're reaching to suggest that lack of sales tax was a reason that customers used Amazon. Like the sibling comment mentions, every other e-commerce site or platform had the same advantage.
The reason customers used Amazon was because it was easy and fast, not because you didn't have to pay sales tax. I used it extensively even back then, and sales tax was literally never a factor.
His point was that Westerners aren't necessarily going to be fooled, with the example of the AP (Western) viewing his declaration of martial law unsympathetically.
> "If you don't believe the lab leak theory, you're the enemy," he said. "It really is viewed as a truism, that it has been definitively established that the lab leak is the source and if you believe otherwise you're just simply wrong."
(He is saying this in the voice of someone he disagrees with... 'this is what they think.') What an insane load of horseshit. It was hammered over and over again that the lab leak theory was racist and bad, and it was "definitively established" many times over that the lab leak theory was simply too racist and bad to possibly be true.
Further, statements like this...
> He says the lab leak theory is being used to create distrust in scientific institutions more broadly.
are pure narcissism. The lab leak theory is there because it's an obvious one, and people (on 'both sides') prefer to believe the truth is on their side. Distrust of scientific institutions is a secondary consequence. The primary fight is over who is 'correct' or what the 'truth' is. But Caulfield prefers to insist that the entire reason someone would promote the lab leak theory is because they just heckin hate him and people like him so much, rather than it's simply the conclusion they find most obvious.
They (CNN, etc.) brand a large group (roughly half the electorate) as Nazis / fascists or Nazi-and-fascist-adjacent without any real scrutiny. Generally, this doesn't target any specific person except maybe Trump.
The consequence to society is that a lot of normal people start believing that someone who votes Republican is definitely some form of a Nazi or sympathetic to Nazism, which I imagine you don't really care about.
An obvious example of this was comparing the fact that Trump had a rally in Madison Square Garden to the fact that Nazis also had a rally there in 1939 (basically this meme: https://preview.redd.it/7nyn7zkmi3351.png?auto=webp&s=c8ab8a...). For the most part, this was a talking point from the Harris campaign, but CNN's coverage of it put very little scrutiny over whether this was a fair comparison, rather just covering the premise of the comparison (i.e., repeating it ad nauseam with some level of deniability that 'they' believe it to be true). You can dig around for yourself and find some of their on-air personalities--who they pay money to--openly agreeing with the comparison.
> HOLMES: All right, let's bring in Ron Brownstein, CNN senior political analyst and senior editor at the Atlantic. Good to see you, Ron. I mean, the Donald Trump rally was quite something. I mean, I watched it. I mean, a quote unquote comedian calling Puerto Rico a pile of garbage. Another speaker spoke about what said he spoke at what he called a Nazi rally. Kamala Harris being called the anti-Christ. And that was before Trump spoke. And we know what he said.
> Who is the Trump campaign trying to appeal to literally days out from the election?
> RON BROWNSTEIN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: I mean, you know, the two precedents of this kind of rally was George Wallace in 1968, which is what going in, I imagined it might be like. But of course, the darker, more distant precedent was the 1939 Nazi rally, pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden, which it may have had more overlap with.
Do you take this stuff seriously? Or is it all a joke to you, a competition to dunk on people on the internet by asking questions not in earnest? Will your response be to have some sort of backwards reasoning to suggest it is valid to compare a political party responsible for systematically killing millions of human beings to Republican voters or Trump supporters?
So I think we all understand that the headline is inaccurate, that the only thing that has been discredited is its diagnosis or use as evidence of child abuse.
It should bother people to read crappy arguments like the one contained directly in the first sentence of an article like this. As a staunch advocate against the death penalty, that sort of intentional deception weakens the case.
I don't know that much about literacy rates and social competition in ancient Greece, but I suspect it may have been in Plato's personal interests that others remain illiterate.
Right, people were trying to 'pay their bills' with content that was freely shared such that AI could take advantage of it. Weird people.
Or we're all talking about and envisioning some specific little subset of artists. I suspect you're trying to pretend that someone with a literal set of paintbrushes living in a shitty loft is somehow having their original artwork stolen by AI despite no high resolution photography of it existing on the internet. I'm not falling for that. Be more specific about which artists are losing their livelihoods.
You pretend this is some obvious fact, but obtaining a search warrant against a person or property that were uninvolved in the crime but may have only been 'witness' to it is not obvious or clear to me.
I get tired of the constant deferral to socioeconomics as an excuse. It's pretty simple, we don't allow people to be born with zero documentation in the US. This would be a massive fuckup, and it doesn't matter if the kid is poor, they still need a birth certificate to get a social security number. They've had a long time to put whatever systems in place prevent that from getting missed, even in the poorest zip codes.
And as far as safety, it's not always legal liability. I'm sure a good portion is, but we're talking about newborn babies right now. Most people don't want to have any part in a newborn being harmed, so it's trivially easy to get employees to take that stuff seriously.
Not exactly unscrupulous if he wasn't charging insane rents to himself. His business would have to pay rent or mortgage for office space in any case. And the income his other business would get from the rent is taxable as well. At a certain point, he either has to break a law in an egregious manner and hope he does not get caught, or he has to pay taxes. That's the system we put in place when we start setting up income and corporate taxes to prop up a massive federal government.
The reason customers used Amazon was because it was easy and fast, not because you didn't have to pay sales tax. I used it extensively even back then, and sales tax was literally never a factor.