As Al Capone found, the government is would rather you pay tax on illegally earned money.

That was more an end run around accidentally indicting all the state and federal officials who’d gotten wrapped up in his corruption.

Capone should have gone down for murder years earlier, but too much of the early Hoover Era FBI was willing to turn a blind eye to Capone’s mafia exploits or rat out informants before they could go to trial.

I’m sorry I’m not from the US.

Sales, real estate, and other consumption taxes aren’t unique to the US.

When I heard people say that sales tax isn’t included in the price and that you need to file your taxes every year

You’re hearing bullshit. There was a historical loophole by which online merchants asserted that sales taxes needed to be collected from the individuals purchasing the goods rather than the businesses selling them. That loophole has long since been closed.

But virtually nobody paid the tax. Few people even know how or what they might owe. And even if they had, you don’t need to be a citizen to buy something online.

The parent company don’t have judicial protections.

But the subsidiary does.

And unfortunately for the CCP they fail #3

The bill doesn’t target the CCP, it targets a US subsidiary of a Singapore-based multinational.

unless the Chinese owners divest and all Chinese centralization for the company gets shut down

A rule that applies exclusively to the US subsidiary of TikTok.

It would be akin to passing a law that says @finitebanjo must have all of his possessions seized in the next nine months, because he took money from the Canadian government. Canada isn’t the target of the legislation and the scope of the legislation isn’t universal - it’s only assigning a punishment to a single domestic resident - and entirely on the grounds that the current chief executive doesn’t like Justin Trudeau.

How is the government getting taxes from people it doesn’t know exist??

Going to the store and handing over my money for the stuff. There’s a % sales tax at the bottom of my receipt, but how is this possible?! I didn’t tell the government I was going shopping today.

Drive back home to my apartment, where I pay my rent for the month. My landlord forward a chunk of that money to the city as real estate taxes. But I never formally registered my citizenship at this address, so how can that be?

Heading to the bar where I earn my living. Most of my income is in tips, which my boss collects and skims the business tax rate off of before distributing the balance. But there’s no bartender’s license to work here, so how did he know to do that?

Omw home, I’ve got to remember to re-register my car and buy more gas-taxed petrol and damn it feels like there’s a lot of ways for a government to collect tax money from me.

Or themselves as immigrants, for that matter.

A German settler calling a Hispanic migrant “illegal” really says something about the legal and social zeitgeist.

The duty of the working person is to pay tithes to the ruling class. But these workers are also using public services and benefiting from public works.

The only solution is to privatize more state functions, in order to make sure all immigrants continue to surrender their surplus value to the native aristocracy.

And no more eating! I don’t want to see any Haitians who look well fed. We all know what that means. Haitians are supposed to be in a half starved state at all times. Otherwise, I just know they’re up to something.

I thought we like disruption.

that data goes to the US government instead of to the CCP

Going to blow people’s minds when they find out Temu data also goes to the US government and Facebook data also goes to the CCP.

This shit is just a commodity. It’s auctioned off at the bid rate. The NSA doesn’t just lay claim to this data, it buys it. And these Big Data companies are only handing it over because of the absurd margins NSA (and MI5 and the rest of the Five Eyes) directors are willing to pay.

Your data isn’t any safer because the parent company is owned by a foreign plutocrat. This is a big club and you ain’t in it.

it’s foreseeabke that they get fined into the dirt if nothing else.

Or they just route the sale of traffic through a domestic data broker and buy “analysis” on the Chinese side of the legal fence. There are so many badly policed and underregulated aspects of the data business that this shit never amounts to more than publicity stunts.

American trade with China only ever increases year-to-year, despite all the noise about a Trade War. Chinese based drop-shipping schemes only ever eat into our domestic market share, because American incomes are falling into line with the global average and that’s the kind of trade good international middle class workers can afford. And all this shit is getting blended together - Indian and Chinese businesses outsource to Indochina and Malaysia and Indonesia where labor is cheaper. Everything gets routed and flagged through Singapore anyway, so the real origin of a good is obscured by the time it lands on your doorstep. And nobody in the business of making money wants to pay a politician to do anything about this in practice.

Nobody is getting fined, much less into-the-dirt.

RT

Russia and Israel are deeply in bed together. RT has been as cagey about Israeli malfeasance as any NY/DC based publication.

AJ

Americans aren’t going to ban the Qatari Paper of Record, even if it does occasionally get one of its Palestinian journalists fed into an Israeli meat grinder. The Qataris lobby our Congress almost as hard as the Israelis do.

TikTok

China Bad. Ban it.

That’s not true. Pagers are still in regular use for two reasons:

• Hospitals hate upgrading their tech infrastructure, so they’ll sit on a 20 year old system until it falls to pieces

• Pagers don’t get spam texts at the same volume as cell phones, so you can be confident that when your pager rings its serious and not automated solicitations.

I have not seen a doctor with a pager in a long time

My friend’s a pulminologist and his hospital still uses pagers. They just never bothered to upgrade their 20 year old system to use SMS. And he says he’s partial to it, because he’s not forced to check his phone every time it rings when 99% of the messages are spam texts anyway.

The articles keep repeating “Hezbollah”, but the target of the attack appears to have been the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon.

Much like the US bombing of an Iraqi airfield to kill the Iranian diplomatic delegation to Baghdad, this appears to be an entirely illegal and recklessly deployed assassination plot aimed at one guy. The thousands of injuries and the eight dead (at least two being children under the age of 11) are just collateral damage the IDF has once again blanket-tagged as “Evil Muslim Militants”.

Emails obtained by the Guardian reveal a behind-the-scenes network of county election officials throughout Georgia coordinating on policy and messaging to both call the results of November’s election into question before a single vote is cast, and push rules and procedures favored by the election denial movement.

The emails were obtained by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew) as a result of a public records request sent to David Hancock, an election denier and member of the Gwinnett county board of elections. Crew shared the emails with the Guardian.

Crazy how our enormously expensive and exhaustively lauded domestic intelligence network missed this, but six volunteer watchdog reporters in trench coats picked it up.

Beginning to think the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigations aren’t quite worth their multi-billion dollar budget lines.

Is this why I never see my mailman anymore?

Love to just have an endless wall of lies injected into every social media site.

More that we could switch to a smaller and more disposable shipping fleet, where any damage to a ship was negligible to the volume of trade

These pagers were bought by Hesbollah

All we know is that a bunch of exploding pagers were distributed through Lebanon. The IDF claims they were given to Hezbollah agents, but they’ve been caught lying regularly.

Because Arab lives have no value in Israeli society.