Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Bolsonaro and his supporters are the fascists here.

Website has to follow laws, news at 11.

[Loud Whispers]

The supreme court of Brasil has forced Facebook to block the profiles of a number of supporters of the extreme-right president of Brasil, Bolsonaro, worldwide.

The supreme court already ruled last week that the 12 profiles had to be blocked, as well as 16 Twitter accounts.
According to the judges, the profiles were used to spread hatred and fake news, not limited to, but including hatespeech and fake news about the judges themselves.

The profiles belong to several well known Brasilian businessmen, bloggers and militants who support president Bolsonaro.
A criminal investigation against those is in progress, for spreading hatespeech and fake news.

Twitter and Facebook complied with that request, but only blocked the profiles for users in Brasil.
This meant the verdict could be easily circumvented by Brasilians using secure vpn connections, making it look like the users are from other countries.

Because of this, Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes ruled last thursday that Facebook has to block the profiles for users worldwide.
Facebook has also been given a fine.
On top of this, the judge threatened to hold Facebook's Brasilian president Conrado Leister personally accountable.

"Confronted with the threat of criminal charges for one of our employees, we have no other choice than to comply with the new ruling", a Facebook spokesman stated saturday.

Facbook has announced that it will appeal against the ruling.   "The new ruling of the Supreme Court is extreme, forms a threat to freedom of speech, does not fall under Brasilian jurisdiction and conflicts with laws and jurisprudence in the rest of the world", Facebook stated.

Interesting, if only that it proves a country is capable of bending the wrist of a powerful multinational. Information to keep in mind the next time someone says it is impossible to stop corporations from tax dodging

[Dostoevsky]

Pretty wide gulf between blocking profiles and -gasp- actually paying taxes.

Also, in the case of tax dodging said countries may have to deal with opposing nations. (See: EU's recent fight with Apple... and Ireland... over tax haven abuse. EU lost.)

[ChairmanPoo]

Its more complex than that

[Starver]

I would have thought, especially given that issue, someone would comment about Microsoft being grifted for a 'commission fee' if they get gifted what might essentially be a fire-sale portion of TikTik...

[Frumple]

Eh... I've noticed it, and it's a staggering pile of probably illegal horseshit as a concept, but I hadn't heard anything of anything particularly actionable regarding it yet. Just the shitgibbon being shitty and some stupid takes from other corners, not tiktok actually even mildly considering capitulating or M$ going along with the farce.

[Starver]

It's the total ideological hypocrisy that struck me. Bill Gates is the enemy, and Big Tech in general, but apparently acceptible to have the data they think China is harvesting. Effectively taxing private enterprise, rather than bend over backwards to give it big breaks. And disliking the voice of protest and civily disobedient expressions unless it's pro-2A (and 1A only insofar as it's oj that side of the argument).

It's just weird stuff, really. I caught some of the "press conference" last night and saw any number of other announcements yesterday and it just seems to me that there's too much to talk about, and mayhe that's why sometimes nobody is talking about any of it Same shit, new day, being relegated by so much new shit, same day.

[Bumber]

It's the total ideological hypocrisy that struck me. Bill Gates is the enemy, and Big Tech in general, but apparently acceptible to have the data they think China is harvesting.

Bill Gates doesn't have an army, AFAIK. Lesser evil and all that.

[Doomblade187]

It's the total ideological hypocrisy that struck me. Bill Gates is the enemy, and Big Tech in general, but apparently acceptible to have the data they think China is harvesting.

Bill Gates doesn't have an army, AFAIK. Lesser evil and all that.

I mean, neither does the company that owns TikTok. And Microsoft's still gonna turn data over to the feds. Not much difference, really, just which government gets the data.

[McTraveller]

Dunno I kind of like the idea of the US govt being funded again only by tariffs, excise taxes, and things like portions of corporate sales.  Before income tax, this is entirely how the government was funded.

I'd much rather the US gov't taking 30% of every corporate sale than 30% income.  After all, corporations only exist by the grace of the government; people exist independent of governments.

Sadly the math says that this wouldn't raise too much money; until this year the US annual M&A is between $1-$2T. So you wouldn't make up much of the budget that way.

If you include all stock sales in the US, I think you could do it**: Apparently that is about $23T a year*; you can take 30% of that and get more than the current federal budget.  EDIT: I do mean this as a sales tax, not a tax on profit.  Get rid of capital gains on stock sales, etc. Just a straight 30% stock sales tax.  This would not apply to dividends; as dividends are income!

Something tells me the powers that be would never go for that though.

*Before 2020 though. This year would be tough.

** Also, it's hard to say how that tax would impact stock sales; presumably fewer transactions would be made, so the overall volume may be lower.

(EDIT: Interesting side effect - this approach could be taken as addressing the issues of stock buybacks - would companies be as happy to do that if they were paying 30% of the buyback to the government?)

[sluissa]

I think a lot of that revenue source would dry up very quickly as well though. A lot of stock trading is based on rapid trading and profits of a fraction of a percent. If you made it unprofitable to sell any stock for a gain of less than 30%, MOST of the current stock trading would end, completely.

Not saying that would necessarily be a bad thing, since stock markets are a major problem on their own in their current form. But I really don't think you'd see those expected revenues.

[Naturegirl1999]

I think a lot of that revenue source would dry up very quickly as well though. A lot of stock trading is based on rapid trading and profits of a fraction of a percent. If you made it unprofitable to sell any stock for a gain of less than 30%, MOST of the current stock trading would end, completely.

Not saying that would necessarily be a bad thing, since stock markets are a major problem on their own in their current form. But I really don't think you'd see those expected revenues.

Can you mention how stock markets are a problem? When I took Intro to Macroeconomics, we didn’t talk about the stock market. That’s more of a microeconomics thing.

[sluissa]

It's a much bigger topic than I admit to knowing the full depth of, but a few problems include:

Things like speculation, where a stock is valued, not at it's current actual value, but at a perceived future value, which may or may not actually pan out and gets dangerously close to simple gambling.

Things like high speed automated trading which take advantage of very small price changes to make profits, but also end up having no human in the loop to sanity check and have caused things like massive market crashes in the past. (Luckily they tend to recover fairly quickly on a market-wide scale, sometimes within seconds, but I imagine individuals have gotten severely screwed because of them.)

Things like where companies exist simply to artificially inflate their stock price and then sell the company off with little to no actual productive value for existing. The classic example being tech/single product startups that manage to sell stock based off of an idea that never actually makes it to market, and some people end up walking away with money, but many others end up losing their investments.


There's nothing wrong with the idea of selling stock on a publicly traded market. It's a good way to raise capital for a company that needs outside funds to grow or try something new. The problem is simply that it's gotten out of hand and there's little regulation, and even where regulation exists, it rarely gets enforced except in the most egregious of circumstances. And it seems like every time a regulation does get put in place because of something that happened that caused major damage, then the financial people simply manage to figure out some way to do the same thing again, just with a few extra steps involved that put a buffer between the thing they want to do and the thing they're allowed to do. It's simply become a way for people with a lot of money to print even more money, and anyone without a few billion involved is just along for the ride, for better or worse, and nobody with authority is willing to say "enough is enough."

[JoshuaFH]

I'm not big into economics, but would it be possible to just do away with the kind of rapid day trading that makes the stock market like a shitty casino? That is, if upon purchasing stock, you cannot sell it again until a certain amount of time has elapsed? That way, if you're buying stock, it's closer to an actual investment than a gamble?

[TamerVirus]

Buy high sell low