Honkers

Wow, they really didn't try to hide the roots, did they?  If it wasn't for the clearly Star Trek races I'd have just said that's Stellaris.  Seems like it probably could have just been a DLC.

9secondkox2 said:

welshdog said:

9secondkox2 said:

darkvader said:

9secondkox2 said:

This is theft. 

The government wants money. Solution? Just retroactively “adjust” someone’s taxes from years ago! A good solid decade ought to do it. 

Pure evil. If there was ac actual issue all this years ago, the IRS WOULD HAVE NOTIFIED THEM AND THEY COULD PAY WHAT WAS OWED. this isn’t that. This is an extortionist government. 

Microsoft didn’t do anything illegal. They took advantage of the way the tax systems were set up, like any smart company would do. 

The only theft is what Micro$oft did.  And the sad part is that a company with $136 billion in profits in 2022 only has to pay $29 billion in penalties for their decade of theft.

Minimizing tax burden by storing your money in a more favorable location (still within US jurisdiction) wasn’t illegal at the time. Retroactively making it so is just theft by the government. Pure and simple. “Adjustment” my left buttock! Microsoft didn’t do anything wrong. They looked at options available to them and utilized them. anything else would just be dumb. But now you have the government retroactively changing things. If a company knew that would happen, of course they’d do things differently in the past. But they didn’t. Because it wasn’t wrong at the time. It’s like an entrapment feature of the government. Pure thievery.

You don't know that "Microsoft didn’t do anything wrong.". No one has said they were doing anything illegal, they simply didn't do the tax dodging in a manner the IRS thinks is correct. There will be a back and forth and eventually a settlement will be reached. There is no reason to ever place any faith or belief in corporations doing the right thing, that's not how they operate. All desisions are based on what makes or saves the most money - period. Apple are slightly less guilty of that than some mega-corporations, but MSFT? Come on, they are not going to follow the law to the letter if they think they can get away with it. Gates' legacy of hacking and gaming everything, always and forever lives on.

If that was so, it would have been caught the first year. The IRS watches big corporations like s hawk. 

They are even calling this an “adjustment.” Thst means the government is changing things now. That can be applied moving forward but should never be retroactive. That’s wrong. If the rules for a gamrr we change next year, you shouldn’t lose your trophy thst you won playing by the rules in years prior. 

If compelling evidence emerged years later that an athlete was using a performance enhancing drug to achieve success then I absolutely would expect them to be stripped of a trophy.

Nothing in law has been changed.  The proposed "adjustment" applies to how much Microsoft owes due to the conclusion of an audit.  If an audit couldn't adjust anything then there would be no purposes in auditing anything, ever.  That should be very apparent and it is disingenuous to suggest that the IRS is doing anything other than what they are there to do.

22july2013 said:

Based on a quick web search, the Hittite empire appears to be the current territory of Turkey+Syria+Lebanon, while Canaan was the current territory of Israel+Lebanon. I hope there are no Hittites or Canaanites here who are offended by this approximation.

? wtf ?

9secondkox2 said:

Honkers said:

9secondkox2 said:

So stupid. There is no antitrust when you have options. Apple provides them in settings. 

If the options were that important then Google wouldn't be paying Apple $20bn for the default position.

Gotta have something. So apple offers it by default. Google pays more than anyone else can and they get the spot. 

It’s like a Super Bowl commercial. Lots of potato chip companies out there but only big dogs like Doritos get the Super Bowl commercial. 

Nothing wrong with making money to show one companies product before another’s. They all still can be used. No barrier. Up to the user. A government dictating to a company that they aren’t allowed to profit from competition on their platform or ruling on what defaults to set or when and how to set them is micromanagement and simply not in the governments purview. 

It's not at all like a commercial.  Watching a commercial is a zero requirement, zero commitment, entirely passive endeavour.  Having a default set for a user is a barrier to a user changing the option.  The fact that Google values it so highly shows exactly why it is so valuable to be set as the default - because most users will never change it, and probably never even think to change it.

Apple are monetising their users' lack of knowledge about how to use Apple's own products, and given Apple's public stance on privacy that is especially galling when they've sold out to a corporation that is one of the biggest private data collectors around.  This is exactly the kind of stuff that stands to get Apple in trouble as a platform owner and gatekeeper to services.  They need to be seen to be agnostic or they'll get raked.

9secondkox2 said:

So stupid. There is no antitrust when you have options. Apple provides them in settings. 

If the options were that important then Google wouldn't be paying Apple $20bn for the default position.