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Yes, it was quite good. They didn’t really cover all his genocide crimes. I guess it would take a book.

Me too.

I don’t really understand some of this. Why pair it with a VAT? VAT itself is a known to be a regressive tax because poor people/ households spend a higher percentage of their incomes on consumption (food etc) so the effect of a VAT is to raise their overall tax percentage.

This is definitely what happens in my country, where we have a flat 15% VAT on all goods and services. As someone on disability that means I’m being taxed an extra 15% on most of my income.

This. Last time New Zealand carried out this exercise there were only 3 who didn’t.

Thanks, interesting stats in this article.

Just a guess but climate change events (and corresponding headlines) have really ramped up in the last three years.

And as the saying goes, there are no pockets in a shroud.

This part here needs to be shared widely:

Some of Hadden’s former patients, including Yang, called legislators to push for the passage of the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law that opened a temporary window for victims of abuse to file civil suits against their abusers, even when a statute of limitations has expired. The window will close on Nov. 23.

Because Columbia refuses to notify them, an untold number of Hadden’s patients remain unaware that he has been convicted.

Apparently the Afghan army was a lot smaller in real life than it was in the American paperwork.

My comment got eaten but I will repost (sorry if it’s showing up twice for anyone):

This article doesn’t read to me like a complaint about the film, though?

The tone seems to me to be more, I went to a film about A+B, now I’m sharing my experience that C was a big part of that which wasn’t shown, even though it was symbolised by marbles.

To me, that’s always worth pointing out, especially when so many people seem to get a lot of their views about history from moving image media.

And maybe one day when someone does make something that touches a bit on the historical conditions behind “Great Man” style history, it might be more welcomed than it would be in the current climate, if articles like this one help people know a bit more.

I’m remembering when Patricia Rozema’s adaptation of Mansfield Park came out. The Jane Austen novel is about people living in a house that was literally owned by a slave owner with plantations in the West Indies, but that stuff had never been shown before. Some people were really scandalised but I thought it was quite interesting. Understanding about how Western history intersects with, say, African history is helpful in understanding the world we live in now.

This article doesn’t read to me like a complaint about the film, though?

The tone seems to me to be more, I went to a film about A+B, now I’m sharing my experience that C was a big part of that which wasn’t shown, even though it was symbolised by marbles.

To me, that’s always worth pointing out, especially when so many people seem to get a lot of their views about history from moving image media.

And maybe one day when someone does make something that touches a bit on the historical conditions behind “Great Man” style history, it might be more welcomed than it would be in the current climate, if articles like this one help people know a bit more.

I’m remembering when Patricia Rozema’s adaptation of Mansfield Park came out. The Jane Austen novel is about people living in a house that was literally owned by a slave owner with plantations in the West Indies, but that stuff had never been shown before. Some people were really scandalised but I thought it was quite interesting. Understanding about how Western history intersects with, say, African history is helpful in understanding the world we live in now.

This article is about something that was in the movie, though.

The closer we get to the bomb’s completion, the more marbles go into the bowl. But there’s no mention in the film of where two-thirds of that uranium came from: a mine 24 stories deep, now in Congo’s Katanga, a mineral-rich area in the southeast.

As the marbles steadily filled the bowl onscreen, I kept seeing what was missing: Black miners hauling earth and stone to sort piles of radioactive ore by hand.

It was a stylistic choice, as the author confirmed with Nolan at the premiere. Compare with, say, the opening of Uncut Gems where the stylistic choice was to show the conditions in which it was mined.

Personally I think this article is well worth reading. In the West, a lot of the general public’s knowledge about colonial activities in DRC is sort of frozen somewhere around the 19th century.

Archive link. This is a very good article.

There was a time in my life where I got one meal a day for a few cents from charities.

On the weekends we had to sit through a religious sermon before they let us eat, and I will never forget how it made me feel to sit there for a full hour listening to this smug arrogant man lording it over us and telling us how he was so powerful he could materialise his body on other planets but he chooses not to because he is more enlightened than we are.

They appear to have set it up that way on purpose.

A single mother of one here is eligible for $399 a month in state assistance, and only if she has a net income of $456 a month or less.

Utah doesn’t do more for those in need in part because a contingent of its lawmakers, the overwhelming majority of whom are Latter-day Saints themselves, assume the church is handling the poverty issue; they also are loath to raise taxes to do the state’s share, a review of Utah’s legislative history demonstrates.

I didn’t even realise he is trying to look tough. He looks anxious.

That’s ludicrous.

This is the first I’m hearing about this person but it sounds like another clown show, distracting everyone and sowing chaos while disaster capitalists profit.

According to this Ted talk (at about 8:15) Amazon tried a resume filtering AI but discovered it was filtering out women.