Funnily enough, when the law was introduced a few years ago, her party wanted the penalty to be lifelong ineligibility. They are probably happy it's 5 years, now.

Nations that trade extensively with each other don't go to war. Trade wars are an accelerator of armed conflict.

People talk about tech giants, but Facebook and Google are actually advertising giants. They pour much more money into their advertising than they do into r&d.

Many brands have a cost structure where, for each product sold, more money goes to advertising than to the person who actually made the product. Sometimes 2 or 3 times more. That's where the battle for attention is taking us, a place where attention from customers is worth much more than the effort of the worker.

None of this is inevitable, advertising should be heavily taxed and regulated.

French courts are independent. She will appeal, and another court will condemn her and her friends in appeal.

The evidence is multitudinous and straightforward.

Countries that have special rules for powerful people are the fascist ones.

And if you're in France, don't use TurboTax, use the official government website that calculates everything for you reliably every year :o

We also have those Christian holidays in France, and fête de la musique is just one evening, not a holiday. But it is on the longest daylight day of the year, so that's nice.

Nebula's getting better and I spend more time there now than on YouTube. Happy that YouTube is working hard to encourage this transition.

They unified the ticket system last year, you can go anywhere with one ticket now.

Because opinion is more important than fact, and choice is more important than logic.

That won't change things, another idiot will come along.

The only solution now is to topple him or render him powerless. Move your asses Americans, we don't need you to speedrun the dictatorship game.

Fwiw, don't punish your kids, it's not an effective way to get them to change their behavior.

He does actually. https://observer.com/2024/09/bill-gates-bernie-sanders-tax-wealthy/

He and warren are some of the smarter billionaires, they realize having infinite money is not actually very useful.

Not to say there's any thing good about there being billionaires in the first place, but there is a spectrum.

Have you never worked in an organization?

You can have as many preparation meetings as you want and still be on your ass when the day of judgement comes.

That's not the definition or foundation of capitalism, it's the definition of a market economy.

The foundation of capitalism is a system where investors can pool small amounts of money together on big projects, to share risk and reward. Historically to fund trading ships on their way to the indies.

So it destructures ownership, which has a million ripple effects on the organization and economy.

Barely made a dent commercially, but put the company in a difficult financial situation where build quality was a bit lower and cars a bit more expensive for a while.

The point of these punishments should never be to kill a company, but to hurt investors, who are ultimately responsible for setting the CEOs agenda.

And, well, VW stock is still down about -80% compared to pre-dieselgate. So I would say eurocapitalism working as intended.

This is known as the cost disease. As manufacturing gets increasingly optimized, automated and cheap, the share of income that needs to be spent on everything else increases. For example, housing and services like live entertainment or healthcare.

Yes. This is called lying. This is what these people have been doing for a while now. I don't think this will change soon.

Kids don't go hungry because of money, they go hungry because of politics. Famines are the product of conflict, especially war. And hunger in countries that are not at war is a product of social inequality. Sure a billionaire could help but that's just a temp fix.

Definitely not on the menu. Most people don't have milk in their coffee in France, and oat milk is even rarer. The default coffee experience, a small black coffee, is vegan on its own.

But I can appreciate the frustration. Oat milk is cheap and has low environmental impact, it would be good for it to be offered more widely, regardless of taste.

Well it's both. Which tells you something about the French. Organized and intolerant to this kind of shit.