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Platinum Shell

"Right to Discriminate" Bill

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Gez said:

Yeah, you heard the poor little darlings, they're persecuted!

The loudmouth "persecuted" 1% is definitely funny, but when it comes to France, I think nothing beats the antics of Gerard Depardieu. Seriously, migrating to Chechnya and sucking Kadyrov's dick? Why even pretend to have a shred of morals, eh?

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dew said:

The loudmouth "persecuted" 1% is definitely funny, but when it comes to France, I think nothing beats the antics of Gerard Depardieu.


Well...let's be honest here. Who of us wouldn't emigrate (fiscally, at least) if that meant lower taxes? Or would you stay in France and see if Moscovici's dick tasted better than Kadyrov's?

Businesses do that all the time yet none complains. And I'm not talking about shady sectors like shipping or off-shore "convenience flag" companies, I'm talking about reputable companies such as Coca Cola - 3E (Greece's subsidiary of Coca Cola) and other heavy industries like manufacturers of copper wires and construction materials moving their fiscal residence in other EU countries (usually Luxembourg). And in the EU none can stop them from doing so, either. Free capital movement and all that. I view it as a backdoor to screw back an unfair and unstable fiscale system, if anything.

It's not a practice restricted to big business, either: it's pretty common for owners of heavily-taxed vehicles in Greece or Italy to register them with Bulgarian or Romanian plates, saving a lot of money in road duty tax as well as in the various (and ever-changing) "luxury" taxes. Lots of Greek small/medium business owners, fed up with the unstable fiscal system, find it simpler to simply relocate their fiscal residence to nearby Bulgaria. Wham: no more hypertaxation, no more fucked up and goalpost-moving fiscal code, just a reasonable flat tax and healthy business.

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Maes said:

Well...let's be honest here. Who of us wouldn't emigrate (fiscally, at least) if that meant lower taxes?

Anyone who doesn't consider taxes to be the only metric of qualify of life.

Maes said:

Businesses do that all the time yet none complains.

Oh, people do complain. It's funny but in many countries, the sum of the yearly public debt increase is in the same ballpark as the estimated revenue loss from tax frauds and evasion.

Maes said:

Lots of Greek small/medium business owners, fed up with the unstable fiscal system, find it simpler to simply relocate their fiscal residence to nearby Bulgaria. Wham: no more hypertaxation, no more fucked up and goalpost-moving fiscal code, just a reasonable flat tax and healthy business.

Coincidentally, Greece has a stupidly large debt.

High taxes -> tax evasion -> debt -> need to raise revenue -> higher taxes -> more tax evasion -> bigger debt -> etc.

The way out of a vicious circle like that is with protectionist measures: instead of taxing businesses who stay, tax foreign businesses with tariffs on imported goods. Then it becomes advantageous to pay your taxes at home and produce locally, which means more jobs, which means less unemployment, which means more tax revenue and less welfare spending, which means everything is great. Oh sure, imported goods become more expensive which can be annoying, at least until local production picks up. (And for stuff you cannot produce locally, well, you'll just have to live with it.)

But the EU hates it when people have jobs and nations have funds, so they will not allow protectionist measures even if they do not affect products imported from non-EU countries. Instead, the way they want states to reduce their debt is by cutting fundings for welfare and by selling away public services, so that we get a hypercompetitive society where everything is privately owned by some megacorporations and the poor get to die of cold and hunger in the streets.

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Gez said:

Coincidentally, Greece has a stupidly large debt.


Causality is key here: the debt mountained even when the fiscal code was -relatively- milder and easier to navigate. Now, it's such a moving target now and designed in such a way that it's nearly impossible NOT to break some rule, that it just paves the way to corruption or total abandonment. Only REALLY big business/oligarchs can negotiate a simpler/more convenient ad-hoc fiscal treatment. The rest just get shafted.

Gez said:

High taxes -> tax evasion -> debt -> need to raise revenue -> higher taxes -> more tax evasion -> bigger debt -> etc.


The problem is that rather than saying outright e.g. "10% increase in taxes", they go in roundabout ways that also increase non-tax costs in terms of wasted work hours, citizens' stress, need to hire up-to-date fiscal consultancy (which often are just as confused and uncertain as their customers) etc.

For example: ever since 2010, every Greek citizen is required to collect EVERY retail receipt he can (up to a 25% of his total income), and submitting them along with his tax revenue statement in order to get a "tax discount". Failure to do so, results in you getting taxed an EXTRA 10% on the difference, so that's essentially a 10% on the 25% = a 2.5% straight extra tax increase, but fucked up with a ton of rules and gotchas. "Tax discount" means that they leave you the fuck alone.

The fun part? From 2014 onwards, they further declared that receipts from gas stations and supermarkets (which, coincidentally, represent the majority of the average household's expenses), suddenly "don't count" towards the "deductible" total, which means essentially a 2.5% increase in taxes for nearly everyone, unless you regularly spend 25% of your income on lawyers, plumbers and auto mechanics. It would be more honest (and more efficient) to just announce a straight 2.5% increase, rather than cause all the wasted time associated with keeping this receipts charade running.

Perversely, this also defeats the purpose of the receipt-collecting measure in the first place: the purpose was so that TAXPAYERS themselves would pressure business owners into printing receipts (essentially, delegating responsability and "enforcements" downwards), but now that most receipts don't count, and most people won't really spend 25% of their income on lawyers (!) or plumbers (!) (those still "count"), most people will wise up, accept a 2.5% loss, and move on. Perhaps that was the actuall intention, perhaps not. Who knows, the taxmakers think in really perverse and convoluted ways.

And none of the above causes the least concern in the EU. On the contrary....

Gez said:

The way out of a vicious circle like that is with protectionist measures: instead of taxing businesses who stay, tax foreign businesses with tariffs on imported goods.


Nope in the EU you can't. Free circulation of goods and capital and all that. Also, no devaluation (unless you still have your own national currency and it's not even pegged to the Euro). The EU is what I like to call "a collective damnation, but with a chance of invidual redemption". The rules and directives, as a whole, are fairly restrictive, but nothing prevents one from "boring" through them by using specific ones to his advantage (like the aforemantioned changing of fiscal residence). So while e.g. at a country level Greece is fucked/damned, it's still possible for individual citizens to seek out personal solutions/redemption.

This probably isn't good for the concept as democracy across the EU, as the individual will be led to think "damn, these rules make life fucking suck for everybody but OH HEY, I CAN SCREW THEM BACK AND COME OUT #1 MAN IF I USE THIS PARTICULAR ONE TO MY ADVANTAGE!". I don't know if there's a term for the kind of "citizen" this mentality creates, but "weasel" comes to mind. It's the perfect mindset for a gypsy or a street scoundrel, but for an "model EU citizen"? Is that really what they had in mind?

Gez said:

the poor get to die of cold and hunger in the streets.


Well, at least in Greece they can shrug off the "cold" part by saying that we live in the world's most beautiful country where the sun always shines, winters are short, sweet and mild, and where EVERYBODY, SOMEWHERE, SOMEHOW will have someone to turn to [/sarcasm]. I kid you not, part of the brainwashing we received at school (along with how Greeks were pretty much a super-race which had computers as early as 6000 BC, all other youro-peans were just unwashed barbaric neantherdals, etc.) was that "...in Europe and the USA, people die on the street from hunger and cold, and nobody cares. This NEVER happens in Greece!". Last famous words....

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Maes said:

The EU is what I like to call "a collective damnation, but with a chance of invidual redemption".


The EU is basically a gigantic bureaucratic engine of social dumping. Your worker/environment/quality of life/etc. protection laws are too restrictive? Well then your businesses will have a strong incentive to move out to other countries were the laws are more convenient (even if it means that there's more workplace accidents, pollution, stress, etc.). Oh, and your taxes are higher than in other EU countries? Same deal. Minimal wage is higher? You could just have said the taxes were higher, because guess what, exactly same deal. What's that, you want to subsidize local industries to incite them to stay? My my my, that's unfair competition! You cannot! This would be completely wrong!

Only way to remain competitive (because the EU is all about competition) is to abolish your annoying regulations, lower your taxes, and lower or remove your minimal wages. Make them lower than the lowest country of the Union. If you do this, you'll see all the businesses come crawling back to you in no time! At least, until some other country goes even further beyond, and the cycle will repeat ad nauseam. Eventually, there should be absolute no legislation framing what businesses can and can't do, no minimal wage, and no taxes on businesses at all, because that's the only way to remain competitive with the rest of the Union. The day this happens, and corporations are given free reign to do whatever they want with absolutely nothing to give in return, is the day that the Brussels technocrat will finally have the climax they have longed for so long.

Competition is the highest dogma of the EU. Everything must be made to make things more competitive, so it is basically designed to have all 28 member countries compete against each other. In a competition, there is a winner and 27 losers. That some idiots who have the luck to still be outside of it would want to get in is simply baffling.

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Gez said:

Only way to remain competitive (because the EU is all about competition) is to abolish your annoying regulations, lower your taxes, and lower or remove your minimal wages.


All that talk about minimal wages amuses me. Yeah, on-paper the minimal wage sounds almost enticing (583 Euros net for the worker, with full health insurance coverage) but in practice the "work market" has been deregulated since, well, forever, even before the crisis, and many people work "in black", aka undeclared and often, uninsured.

Let alone that there are perfectly legal ways to get around the minimal wage requirement by calling the "employee's compensation" something other than a "wage", e.g. by requiring "employees" to work as "freelancers", which are not bound by labor laws, and just fucks up taxation and welfare funds even more.

There are even ways for a foreign company to have economic activity in Greece without ever coming in contact with any bureaucrat or the tax offices: simply "hire" all your employees as "freelancers" and have them provide "services within the EU". Surprisingly, those are VAT-exempt (!), and your "employees" can handle all of the required bureacracy, periodic income declarations etc. individually, including their own health insurance (freelancers can only belong to either of two funds, which don't really care HOW their premiums are paid). You, the employer, DON'T need to:

  • Register your company anywhere. You can just operate as a "EU-based business buying services in Greece". If you need brand recognition, you can still slap your logo on an anonymous office's door (more on that later).
  • Have a Greek fiscal number or presence, at any level. That means no taxes or anything.
  • Handle hiring/payroll/taxes/social security at a local level
  • Handle any expenses or amortizations for equipment.
  • Rent any space and face the consequences of not having a fiscal number.
All of the above can be handled by your "employees" (you delegate responsability accordingly), and it all appears as a local venture by a bunch of freelances. Payments are usually done directly to each employee via bank transfers. If someone is "charged" with paying rent, buying equipment etc. then you just throw some extra money his way. This of course fucks up the tax office and the job market but hey, it's legal and the EU allows for it, amirite?

HOW'S THAT FOR COMPETITIVE AND DEREGULATED? TAKE THAT, EU!!! HAVE AT YOU, IMF !!! THIS IS SO COMPETITIVE THAT PAUL TOMSEN HAD TO LEARN TO PEE WITHOUT WETTING HIS HANDS, JUST TO STAY AFLOAT!!!!

Don't laugh, this is a very real method for many companies in "soft" sectors (e.g. software development outsourcing) to "invest" in Greece without facing any of the negative repercussions of local bureucracy, which can't do anything but STFU and watch. Usually, only those directly involved (the local workers) are aware of the full extension of the "scheme" (which is, however, completely legal, as it's the sum of many legal actions). It works best if you have some trusted "seed" employees that help you getting started by setting up shop (e.g. rent an office space, get a couple of computers) and handle local recruiting.

It requires of course a lot of mutual trust, and only works for small enterprises in certain sectors. E.g. you can't really run a fast food joint or a call centre with that method, as those require interacting with local authorities (e.g. sanitary board, phone companies) in ways that a freelancer cannot easily handle without causing suspicion. E.g. a freelancer asking for 600 phone lines "for a startup run by him and a couple of his friends" in a 1000 m^2 building won't really be convincing. Nor will it be easy to hire 600 less-than-minimum wagin' call center slaves by requiring all of them to pose as freelancers or worse, expect your "seed" employees to turn into "slavers".

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The tory fascists we've got in the UK at the moment have already found a way around minimum wage. If you work for minimum wage and lose your job, you can get sent back to work under the workfare scheme for a fraction of the money. Basically you do normal work to receive unemployment benefit. This is causing employers (mostly in low paid retail jobs) to lay off normal paid workers so that they can take on workfare victims instead. A scheme supposedly designed to get people back to work is causing more people to lose their jobs. It's mind-numbingly stupid, but then that's what you get with tories.

I bet if we could sack politicians and make them work for benefits, they suddenly wouldn't be too fond of the idea. Sanctimonious cunts.

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Larger all-inclusive businesses can capitalize on serving the entire market, while the bigots willfully impose their own regulations on their companies. The smaller discriminatory businesses are actually putting themselves at a disadvantage. If you want to be a successful capitalist, the only color you should care about is green, and the only symbol you should defer to is $. A lot of the "true Americans" don't even know what the fuck it takes to be successful in their own country, because they rather swear their allegiance to a 4000 year game of telephone (Judeo-Christianity).

What a pile of shit, this bill is. I'm not going to argue the political aspect of it; freedoms/etc. But personally, I feel this bill is garbage. If they really believe Jesus is on their side, why don't they pray for the money to pay their bills and taxes?

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hardcore_gamer said:

While I don't support racism I feel that companies should be able to hire anyone whom they want to for whatever reason.


The D company needs one programmer:

Mr A likes kittens→refused.
Mr B enjoys ponies→accepted.
Mr C loves Doom→refused.

In fact, Mr A is a badass Linux kernel programmer, Mr B sucks even at Minesweeper and Mr C is at the maximum level on project Euler.

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ducon said:

The D company needs one programmer:

Mr A likes kittens→refused.
Mr B enjoys ponies→accepted.
Mr C loves Doom→refused.

In fact, Mr A is a badass Linux kernel programmer, Mr B sucks even at Minesweeper and Mr C is at the maximum level on project Euler.

1. It's the companies/owners loss. Society shouldn't choose the best person for him, it's his/her money at stake. If his/her bias coasts them, it's to their detriment.

2. It's a dumb example when that very situation can be exploited for any type of bias. You can turn down perfectly good employees for diversity quotas, too.

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Ugh. You really shouldn't be able to correctly guess which state a bill is being proposed in by the bill's nickname, but then it's no secret Arizona has positioned itself as the new Alabama.

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Necromancer-AMV said:

Ugh. You really shouldn't be able to correctly guess which state a bill is being proposed in by the bill's nickname, but then it's no secret Arizona has positioned itself as the new Alabama.

I find it funny the classic racist states now have the biggest black populations of America.

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Technician said:

I find it funny the classic racist states now have the biggest black populations of America.

Why do you think they were racist in the first place? They had large black population thanks to slave labor... Abolishing slavery and granting Black people full voting rights (instead of, say, 3/5th of a vote) meant that in a democratic system, the servants become the masters by virtue of their number.

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(not directed specifically at any one poster):
If you hate the haters, you're a hater too...

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Gez said:

(instead of, say, 3/5th of a vote) meant that in a democratic system, the servants become the masters by virtue of their number.


Just to clarify, the 3/5ths compromise was about census numbers for determining representation for the House of Representatives, not about voting. It was literally placing their worth as 3/5ths of a person, because otherwise the slave states of the south would have had far less pull in Congress since whitey was not that plentiful in the South. Still the minority in many of those states.

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Technician said:

I find it funny the classic racist states now have the biggest black populations of America.


Well, they always did :-p

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Technician said:

2. It's a dumb example when that very situation can be exploited for any type of bias. You can turn down perfectly good employees for diversity quotas, too.


I don’t agree with quotas. I think that they are as stupid as discrimination (positive or negative).

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Pretty much a troll bill, if anything. More like "the Right to Provoke More Terrorist Attacks."

Maes said:
while Gez is a Red Blooded American (amirite?),

Hollande seems to suck up to the US (or at least Obama) a bit much, but from what I know he hasn't made France a US territory yet. Gez does not eat freedom fries!

Technician said:
1. It's the companies/owners loss. Society shouldn't choose the best person for him, it's his/her money at stake. If his/her bias coasts them, it's to their detriment.

Only if we lived in some Eden-like society where everyone is more or less a saint. If "the market" had a naturally ethical functionality. In reality it's by far more a loss to the person looking for employment. To a business, it affects one in many potential employees, to the employee, it affects his whole person. The weaker link breaks, not the stronger. What "free-trade" and "market-centric" idiots don't get is that work and access to goods are matters of power as well as just economic matters. Businesses associate in bodies that then work out general practices among themselves and competition is only relative. In many ways, businesses and industries gang up to defend themselves against customers, the State or other sectors in the economy.

If you discriminate by religion or some other cultural trait, it's not just some random occurrence but for a reason related to power and social or political hierarchies, and the main adverse effects are against minorities and groups with low economic weight. It just means weaker businesses or industries will have few or no chances to discriminate without adverse effects, and organized and hegemonic groups will use it to further their political control through business. Or could Jews in Nazi Germany simply "discriminate back" at Caucasians and get even?

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I remember a black orphan annie that sued on the grounds she's black. Turns out they rejected her because she's a boy.

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Looks like the governor shot the bill down. Crisis averted!

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geo said:

I remember a black orphan annie that sued on the grounds she's black. Turns out they rejected her because she's a boy.

Now he can sue for gender identity discrimination. Isn't modern life grand?

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The left loves to come up with absurd hypotheticals to scream that there must be compliance with their fascism, so how about a couple from our side.

Should a devout baker be required to create a cake for a homosexual wedding that has a giant phallic symbol on it or should a baker be required to create pastries for a homosexual wedding in the shape of genitallia? Or should a photographer be required to photograph a homosexual wedding where the participants decide they want to be nude or engage in sexual behavior? Would they force a Jewish photographer to work a Klan or Nazi event? How about forcing a Muslim caterer to work a pork barbeque dinner?


This is so fucking dishonest I could scream. None of the hypotheticals brought up by "liberals" I've heard are far fetched by any means, and in every single one of them the situation is a business owner discriminating against someone else because of who they are--race, religion, sexuality, whatever. These are all things that we, for the most part, cannot change about ourselves nor are they usually anything inherently bad in the first place.

No one will read this, but I thought I'd rebut why each of these scenarios she presented are fucking stupid:

Penis Cake: No. Of course business are allowed personal standards from which they can refuse to operate. In this scenario the client orders something inappropriate to some. That has nothing to do with them being homosexuals, and more to do with them being sophomoric. There's a difference between "No I won't do that because I have standards for my work, and No I won't do that because you're a fag and we don't like your kind here." But also grow the fuck up and don't be so scared of penises and vaginae, what is this kindergarten?

Sex Party at Gay Wedding: Of course not, and again that has nothing to do with their sexuality but that the inappropriate behavior involved. This is truly an outrageous hypothetical, in what world would someone try to force an unwilling party to photograph a gay orgy? That's just fucking stupid.

Jewish Photographer at Klan/Nazi Event: I assume this is an attempt to "turn the tables" and "reveal reverse discrimination," what with the innocent businessman and the evil consumer. Why would a group of people who hate "Jews" even conduct business with a Jewish photographer? Even so, sure he can refuse, because the people requesting his service actually are certifiably terrible and SHOULD be shunned from society. I'd like to see someone argue that they're not.

Muslim Caterer: This is a valid point on its surface, but quick question, who would be the best person to hire for a pork barbecue--someone who has experience preparing and cooking the food, or someone whose religion forbids even touching the stuff? This is dumb because there's no reason to solicit that "Muslim Caterer" for this service in the first place.

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Heterosexual people are just as capable of requiring genitalia cakes for their heterosexual naked wedding orgy. This is playing on the idea that homosexuals are sex addicts who have sex 24/7 and pretty much do nothing else. (Interestingly, Black men were thought of similarly back when everybody was afraid of miscegenation. Dangerous satyrs with hyperactive libido and who are gonna rape everything if we don't keep them in check.)

The Jewish photographer would certainly be very interested in photographing a Neo-Nazi/Klan event. I'm pretty sure he'd be uploading the pictures live on his Twitter feed, even. (With geolocalization data intact.)

As for the Muslim caterer, Islam doesn't forbid him to work with pork. He just should refrain from eating it, and he has to cleanse himself afterwards; but let's be honest that would not really change from working with any other kind of meat.

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As far as I know caterers can choose to offer certain services just like restaurants offer specific menus, so most Muslim-run catering companies probably don't offer pork dinners unless they want to. That has nothing to do with offering a certain service or good and refusing to provide it for a certain type of customer.

Technician said:
Now he can sue for gender identity discrimination. Isn't modern life grand?

And what do you think gender identity is, some kind of random whim or petulant fancy?

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Marnetmar said:

Bu-bu-but I thought the Tea Party was a party only concerned with fiscal conservatism, not social conservatism. I mean, that's what they were always insisting.[/sarcasm]

Also I love how "business owner is not allowed to say I THINK YER A QUEERMASEXUAL GIT DA HAIL OUTTA MAH STORE" equals "tyranny". The only thing this law getting shot down means is now he has to half-ass another excuse to get the unwanted customer out.

But the most telling thing of all was the mainstream right's reaction to the NFL threatening to pull the Super Bowl out of Arizona. If this bill was genuinely, as the right was claiming, about rights of businessmen, and not about discrimination, they ought to have been totally OK with the NFL doing that. After all, it's within the spirit of the proposed legislation; a business refusing to do business with a group, in this case, the Republican-controlled bureaucracy of Arizona, due to the fact that it doesn't feel comfortable with said group's views. But that's just it; this law was not intended to work both ways. Its intention was to allow you to refuse service, but only if you and the person you intend to refuse service to meet certain criteria, namely you have to be politically right of center, Christian, and vanilla-missionary-position-sex-with-your-spouse-of-the-opposite-sex-in-a-bed-with-the-lights-off-for-the-purposes-of-procreation-and-she-better-not-climax straight. And the person you're going to throw out has to be lacking in one or more of these things.

In other words, straight-up discrimination. And unconstitutional as anyone who can count the Amendments to the Constitution up to at least fourteen can attest to.

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