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belatw

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Monarchies are the greatest scam ever perpetrated on modern republics. Spend a few hundred years invading, colonialising, conquering, raping, pillaging, committing genocide, destroying countless civilizations and enslaving many millions.

In the end, the taxpayers are forced to keep ensure you and your heirs remain billionaires without having to do more than wave your hand at a public appearances and attempt to stay out of the tabloids.

(I prefer using dollars because it has a more vague meaning of currency whereas the word “pound” has 30 meanings and uses on Wordnik. The English language sucks, but I digress.)

English tax dollars pay for an unfathomably large amount of money preserving antiquity, much of which was flat out stolen from other nations or came on the backs of slaves.

The whole “give one inbred family billions of dollars per year to maintain their long-since-neutered monarchy” scam always impresses me. As if the Trump family convinced tax payers to give his family a couple of billion dollars every year for the hell of it.

Just the mere idea of visiting the USA gives me more stress than I care to experience. After 7 years away I don’t even have a desire to visit.

It takes a solid 5 years to get over what my friends call “that American Fight or Fight instinct”, and I don’t miss the amount of fear,distrust and readiness to fight that is always in the back of your mind being from the USA.

Also, remotely siphoning $$$ off of bay area tech companies while living in the third world helps with stress a lot.

Then again Turkey could go full Islamist crazy and be more Saudi Arabia and Erdoğan could declare himself president for life.

It would never happen. Turks are Turks first and Muslim second. Erdogan is a neo-ottomanist, not a salafist.

He’s as much of a Muslim as Trump is a Christian.

Now I do see him trying to sell more of the nation to Saudis and Emirates while also forcing enough pro-sunni legislation down our throats to keep the Conservative / Nationalists happy and ensure that Saudi / Qatari investment coming and to ensure he can profit like a bandit off of his pre-doomed “Islamic Finance” initiatives.

However, Turks are fairly centrist by American standards. They drink, a lot (alcohol tax revenue is crucial to the government, as well as direct sales as the government still owns some of the Raki and Beer production), smoke weed, party, are getting married and having children later in life, and fewer.

I watched the sweaty shirtless guys beating mislead soldiers to death during the failed coup a few years ago. They weren’t shouting allahu akbar while they did it. They waved Ataturk flags and sang the Izmir march.

What about the Iranian approach to the U.S.? What if Iran stopped development of nuclear weapons and attacking U.S. forces in Iraq and elsewhere, or sponsoring organizations that are destabilizing the Middle East? It's not like they're not also agitating the situation. It's in their best interest because that way they can maintain power.

It takes threee to tango in this situation

Provocations and aggressions that maybe the US should perhaps stop doing:

- presidential candidates gleefully parodying beach boy songs about bombing Iran. [1]

- spending many 10s of billions of America’s hard earned tax dollars surroinsing Iran with several dozen military bases. [2]

- Assassinating or supporting Israel in assassinating Iranian scientists abroad.[3]

- or assassinating Iranian military leaders [4]

- Organizing violent military coups to replace democratically elected governments with Radical Islamist puppet dictatorships [5], [6]

- Gatekeeping nuclear power by releasing destructive viruses into the world to destroy Iranian Nuclear research labs [7]

1. https://youtu.be/U7s5pT3Rris

2. https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1XmUD73hHQVBbdm8UcI...

3. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/29/middleeast/iran-mohsen-fa...

4. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Qasem_Solei...

5. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27état

6. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/cia-assisted-cou...

7. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph241/holloway1/

“ Believe me, Chevron is not an evil company," he added. "I have no compunction — in the least — about owning Chevron. And if we owned the entire business, I would not feel uncomfortable about being in that [industry]."

Believe me, if I were a billionaire I too would be defending other billionaires, peasants be damned. Bigly.

It takes me 15 minutes to file my taxes both for my full-time employment, but I’m not some objectivist trying to scam my way out of paying my share of taxes. Just an engineer making a San Francisco wage working for bay area startups remotely while living in the third world.

I’ve spent the past 7 years traveling and living in DN-friendly countries (Türkiye, Georgia, Czechia). When covid is over I will move to Spain for 2 years under the Non-Lucrative Residency Permit.

More and more countries are coming out with non-lucrative / pensioner / digital nomad visas. They dont care as long as you aren’t doing business locally. From their perspectice it’s free sales tax income.

My domicile is now in Florida. I file my federal taxes as a us citizen and Floridan resident, no state income tax. (which means $60k per year for nothing more than bad consular services).

Sure, whatever.

The fact is that all abrahamists follow some version of a silly book in which some sky daddy told a man in a desert that they are the choosen people and that by following that specific man, they have the right to dominion over the earth.

These philosophies also all lay out rules for how and when they may tax, kill and enslave those of the other religion.

So yes, at least 50% of the earth’s population are OK with one group dominating the tax laws of the planet, as long as it is their group.

A touch screen is cheaper, because they can re-use the same hardware between different vehicles rather than having to design/build/assemble a slightly different set of physical buttons for different models with different features.

Any savings will be lost by one class action lawsuit or mass recall. Touch screen is the wrong interface when lives are on the line.

You’re forgetting that the Nazis utterly ane completely destroyed the USSR, digesting an entire generation of men in every soviet state along with all of their infrastructure and resources.

In the end it was the sacrifice USSR which enabled USA and UK (lots of Uniteds here) to claim victory. As a thank you, the west invested considerable resources into rebuilding Germany and Japan while giving the USSR and China the middle finger and immediately treating them like enemies.

We really did kick Russia and China while they were down, repeatedly, then spit on them.