Edit: Holy crap, so I based my initial comment on how EU Internet friends always complain about how much their iPhone or PlayStation is, so I incorrectly assumed VAT was only for foreign products to encourage purchase of domestic. No, VAT is just a fancy way of saying “sales tax” that is really high and charged everywhere. Strikethrough edits below, but leaving original text.

So the EU, UK, and others have charged VAT for years on foreign goods, including US goods. This is a tax on foreign goods that can add hundreds of dollars/pounds/euros/etc. to the purchase of an American iPhone (made in China or India) for example.

This whole tariff thing is dumber than something a third grader could come up with…but…these countries were already doing it themselves to others. So they should politely STFU, as they are hypocrites.

I get having high income taxes to provide for socialized medicine and such, that’s awesome, but also a sales tax that is a quarter of the price of a thing or service, taxed just because? Even if it wasn’t made by the nation’s citizens? Even if it was?

I’m sure it keeps EUians and UKians from going full Capitalism, but wow, especially given how much infrastructure degrades despite the funding, I recall seeing Germany cutting train routes all over across the country and small towns being cut off from them some years back and flabbergasted, knowing their high taxes go to government things…but also sales tax on top of that? 🤯

What really sucks, is they’ll likely stay quiet about this, and join a tariff war anyways, and tack tariffs on top of VAT and their citizens will just be double-taxed. Why do UK-ians and EU-ians put up with this nonsense?

It gets wackier too, from the EU VAT rules site (emphasis mine):

The EU has standard rules on VAT, but these rules may be applied differently in each EU country. In most cases, you have to pay VAT on all goods and services at all stages of the supply chain including the sale to the final consumer. This includes from the beginning to the end of a production process, e.g. buying components, transport, assembly, provisions, packaging, insurance and shipping to the final consumer.

For EU-based companies, VAT is chargeable on most sales and purchases of goods within the EU. In such cases, VAT is charged and due in the EU country where the goods are consumed by the final consumer. Likewise, VAT is charged on services at the time they are carried out in each EU country.

VAT isn’t charged on exports of goods to countries outside the EU. In these cases, VAT is charged and due in the country of import and you don’t need to declare any VAT as an exporter. However, when exporting goods you will need to provide documentation as proof that the goods were transported outside the EU. Such proof could be provided by presenting a copy of an invoice, a transportation document or an import customs record to your tax authorities.

List of items charged VAT (non-exhaustive):

• Electronics (phones, computers, TVs)

• Clothing and footwear

• Furniture and household items

• Cars and motorbikes

• Fuel and energy (electricity, gas)

• Food and beverages (standard or reduced rate depending on country)

• Alcohol and tobacco

• Hotel stays and accommodation

• Restaurant meals

• Telecom and digital services

• Books, newspapers, and magazines (often at reduced or zero rate)

• Transport services (like air or rail tickets, depending on country)

  VAT Rates by country (also non-exhaustive):

• Austria: 20%​

• Belgium: 21%​

• Bulgaria: 20%​

• Croatia: 25%​

• Cyprus: 19%​

• Czech Republic: 21%​

• Denmark: 25%​

• Estonia: 22%​

• Finland: 25.5%​

• France: 20%​

• Germany: 19%​

• Greece: 24%​

• Hungary: 27%​

• Ireland: 23%​

• Italy: 22%​

• Latvia: 21%​

• Lithuania: 21%​

• Luxembourg: 17%​

• Malta: 18%​

• Netherlands: 21%​

• Poland: 23%​

• Portugal: 23%​

• Romania: 19%​

• Slovakia: 23%​

• Slovenia: 22%​

• Spain: 21%​

• Sweden: 25%

  Sources:

https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/quick-charts/value-added-tax-vat-rates

https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/taxation/vat/vat-rules-rates/index_en.htm

https://www.globalvatcompliance.com/globalvatnews/world-countries-vat-rates-2020/

https://www.avalara.com/vatlive/en/vat-rates/european-vat-rates.html`___`

My phase will happen before your phase, the way they are currently doing things.

It’s going to be great once every American is jobless and has all the free time to pursue hobbies involving CEOs, and the orange and rodent cancers in the Federal government. Think of all the possibilities!

That helps slightly but in the absence of radar, balloons, and satellite telemetry, it doesn’t help accuracy of forecast beyond, “it might rain here in a few hours, it might not.” Not much different in functional usefulness than looking at the trees to see if it’s going to rain.

I have a watch with a barometric pressure sensor, it will alert me to potential maybe coming storms, but only potential maybe, not what direction, what intensity, what hail potential, what wind shear. All it knows is the air pressure is changing pretty fast. It is right maybe one in ten times. (My location tends to have very rapid weather changes, in general, however.)

And outside of that, ground stations don’t really help to keep air traffic safely in the skies at all, lacking jet stream telemetry, which is calculated and estimated on a daily basis to figure out which sky highways flights should use. Not just passengers either, most commercial passenger airliners have a portion of their cargo hold sold to shipping (and make more money on that than the seats). USPS, other shipping companies all ship in cargo holds. Water transport would be affected as well of course, as well as rail and truck to a lesser degree due to floods/landslides/blizzards or random sideways Texas sandstorms blowing semi trucks over.

With flights, this means fuel estimates will be off, tailwind or headwind is stronger or weaker than predicted, you’re landing at an alternate airport. This means more random turbulence and/or injuries mid-flight. More grounded flights, more flight delays. More potential for collision. Especially with neutered ATC in concert.

It is all interconnected, and all being arbitrarily destroyed without any thought into why it all exists.

If we took the money we wasted larping around being “world police” our taxes would stay the same and we could all have universal healthcare and insurance/pharma companies could get bent. Of course, that whole fascism thing became the bigger fish to fry, for now.

The Omegle of Signal. Or the “I’m Feeling Lucky” of Signal.

FTA it seems:

• American Express
• WPP (ad agency)
• Omnicom (ad agency)
• Interpublic Group (ad agency)
• Publicis (ad agency)
• “increasing number of small brands”
• Stagwell (ad agency) possibly, as quoted in the article as saying, “The political boycotts and things are dissipating because companies are realizing that taking one side and the other is a dangerous place to be.”

A quick AI search for some of who uses/d those ad agencies:

WPP:

• HSBC
• Rolex
• Samsung
• Shell Oil
• Unilever
• Nestlé

Omnicom:

• Apple
• PepsiCo
• McDonalds
• Nissan
• Pfizer
• Unilever

Interpublic Group (IPG):

• American Express
• AstraZeneca
• GM
• Nestlé
• Amazon
• L’Oréal

Publicis:

• Google
• Dodge
• Humira
• Samsung
• Nestlé
• L’Oréal

Stagwell:

• Anheuser-Busch InBev
• JP Morgan
• Uber Eats
• AT&T
• Mastercard

How is California the bastion of Fascism? San Fran was to be the Starfleet headquarters. Turns out endoftheworld.swf got it wrong too. Cali should just be shat into the ocean to disappear, unlike the Flash video. What a waste of a good state that literally could wield power to stop DC. Is Man in the High Castle actually canon??

Well, Newsweek is out as news. They should have followed up with factual history about how these parties switched. (Where are the whigs in all this???)

America always being 2 party, in my own hindsight, should have been suspect. The world is not binary.

Not that I had control of when or where I was born.

Likely higher than that due to piss poor reporting. I recall seeing an alt government account hinting it could have already been in the 2000s a few weeks back but they couldn’t speak officially.

Another money laundering scheme.

Pull the fuse to the telematics/SOS/cellular radio on your car. Don’t bring any health trackers or airtags. No Bluetooth anything. If you have a toll transponder, remove it from your car. Probably should disable the Bluetooth in the car as well, wifi as well if it has it. Anything that can broadcast a beacon can be tracked.

Asked an AI about this in general:

Prior to this law, only 66 out of 484 water systems in Utah practiced fluoridation, with Salt Lake City being the largest municipality affected.

Woah.

(Source AI chose: https://apnews.com/article/utah-fluoride-ban-43f67153beb3e06ada9d782655fb15de )

The cuts also affected the launching of weather balloons, less are being launched now daily, so current knowledge of the jet stream across the US will be more limited. This means daily routing of flights through the various air “lanes” gets more challenging, more unexpected air, predicted fuel burn rates will be wrong if a tailwind isn’t blowing as fast as estimated, or headwinds are stronger.

Likely won’t increase crashes too much, but will increase turbulence, in-flight injuries, rerouting, and detour landings.

(As well as forecasts for the ground being less accurate.)

This comment is too dismissive. It shouldn’t be about “oh well everyone’s getting slain” - it’s hard to reach 360 million people barely surviving the week and their own personal struggles like being able to afford food, while also living in a soon-to-be Nazi hellscape. If one particular story about one particular person or group triggers people into action, it is good.

It’s America vs MAGA. Many versus few, while the few try to remove humans from the many.

Maybe corpo media will finally realize that they won’t have any readers/viewers/listeners when there’s no jobs and nobody left to consume their media.

Unlikely though. Status quo is so comfortable until it’s too late.

People in the past have used the entertainment bus to get into the flight telemetry data, hopefully only in a read-only state, but that will only be true if you trust the competence of the IT group that set up the programming for the switches.

Just be careful of where you try to write data and you should be fine! (and stay away from /dev/wing0 and /dev/wing1 on the network mount!)

They run Linux now.

Had a friend back in similar age area, they went one evening, “I’m going to the ATM to take out $20 so I have money for tomorrow before the overdraft I’m already going to get breaks my debit card.”

I also had similar overdraft hell story when I was multi-overdrafted rent was entering past due and was on the verge of being homeless waiting for my next paycheck to stay afloat, drove home from work with the engine misfiring nearly dead out of fuel. Went home and scraped a “rare” (like an old quarter or penny, nothing fancy, one of those odd things family gives you) coin jar for enough money to buy a couple gallons of gas and food for my pet.

Wouldn’t wish that dogshit on anyone, it is literally criminal greed that can destroy a person in under a week.

we can probably expect crickets from them

They’re mostly out-of-shape larpers that just want to be able to buy their overpriced toys with no actual patriotism or balls. Very similar to the current administration and the unelected muskrat that are taking their rights and freedoms away, really.