“the millenium falcon would wipe out the enterprise in seconds” lmao the enterprise is just an innocent science class floating thru space…. all they wanna do is look at some rocks… kiss an alien…. find some space plants….. why would you fight that its not a battleship theyre just nerds…… leave them olone
A friend of mine saw this and brought up some interesting arguments
so, in other words,
Pretty much.
here have some size comparison
Who wins in a fight, a fully staffed Navy research vessel or your local weed man and his best friend in their souped up VW Bus?
Trump and Republicans branded their huge corporate tax cut as a way to make American corporations more profitable so they’d invest in more and better jobs.
But they’re buying back their stock instead. Now that the new corporate tax cut is pumping up profits, buybacks are on track to hit a record $800 billion this year.
For years, corporations have spent
most of their profits on buying back their own shares of stock, instead of
increasing the wages of their employees, whose hard work creates these
profits.
Stock buybacks should be illegal, as they were before 1983.
Stock buybacks are artificial efforts to interfere in the
so-called “free market” to prop up stock prices. Because they create an
artificial demand, they force stock prices above their natural level. With
fewer shares in circulation, each remaining share is worth more.
Buybacks don’t create more or better jobs. Money spent on
buybacks isn’t invested in new equipment, or research and development, or
factories, or wages. It doesn’t build a company. Buybacks don’t grow the
American economy.
So why are buybacks so popular with Corporate CEOs?
Because a bigger and bigger portion of CEO pay has been in
stocks and stock options, rather than cash. So when share prices go up,
executives reap a bonanza. The value of their pay from previous years also
rises – in what amounts to a retroactive (and off the books) pay increase on
top of their already outrageous compensation.
Buybacks were illegal until Ronald Reagan made them legal in
1982, just about the same time wages stopped rising for most Americans. Before
then, a bigger percentage corporate profits went into increasing workers’
wages.
But since corporations were already using their profits for stock
buybacks, there is no reason to believe they’ll use their tax windfall on
anything other than more stock buybacks.
Let’s not compound the error. Make stock buybacks illegal, as
they were before 1982.
In the wake of the latest Facebook data breach catastrophe, Josh
Constantine rounds up more than a decade’s worth of major catastrophes
wrought by Facebook’s recklessness, greed, and foolishness, from Beacon
to the “Engagement Ranked Feed” to the “Engagement Priced Ad Auctions”
to the choices that created spamming games like Zynga’s offerings, to
the mass overwriting of privacy preferences, to “ethnic affinity” ad
targeting, to the Real Names policy and the stalkers it abetted to
Facebook’s global anti-Net-Neutrality campaigns; to self-serve ads; to
developer data access and the gift it handed to crooks like Cambridge
Analytica.
I’d actually forgotten about some of these; in some ways, Facebook is
the Donald Trump of Big Tech, such a font of shitty behavior that it’s
impossible to remember all of the scandals, or even all of the biggest
and worst ones.
Oklahoma spent eight years under full GOP rule, with Republicans
controlling the governorship and the legislature, passing a fully
ALEC-compliant slate of laws that benefited the wealthy at the expense
of the poor; the result has been a catastrophe for the party’s fortunes in Oklahoma, to say nothing of a catastrophe for Oklahomans, whose schools are running four day weeks so teachers can made ends meet by getting a day’s work at Walmart (no wonder they’re on the verge of striking); while Republican lawmakers have run amok, introducing bills demanding that creationism be taught in schools; or that protesters be bankrupted for peaceful assembly; and making the state a haven for forced-labor camps masquerading as drug rehab centers.
Now the party is in total disarray as they scramble to patch the
enormous holes in the state’s budget without upsetting their friends in
big business, especially the fossil fuel industry. The “compromise”
position that the least reality-denying faction has come up with is to
increase taxes on poor people, which will leave their corporate
donors intact. That isn’t playing with state Democrats, and the GOP
can’t pass those tax hikes without them (or without convincing Tea Party
purists to hold their noses and vote for a tax hike).
Meanwhile, in nearby Minnesota, a suite of redistributive, semi-socialist policies have created an economic miracle of growth and prosperity.
It’s true: reality has a well-known left-wing bias.
Look at what happens when Republicans get to apply their governing philosophy without any moderating influences, and you will find – without exception – the complete destruction of any public service, anything that makes life better for the common good, anything at all that gives people who are not already wealthy the opportunity to live The American Dream.
Republicans stand for the destruction of the common good, the transfer of public funds into private hands, and the complete control of your choices about your religion, your body, who you love.
A quick glance at Kansas under Brownback and Oklahoma under ALEC-sponsored Republicans is all it takes to see what a disastrous failure the GOP is for everyone who is not already rich and white and male.
