The process of legally converting a business to an employee-owned cooperative can vary significantly depending on what jurisdiction you're in. There's different criteria for creating one (some places might require more than 3 directors to create a Coop) and all sorts of statutory considerations unique to wherever you are.

If you're serious about doing this, I would sincerely recommend reaching out for legal advice first. This is your livelihood, and you do not want to make a mistake that creates difficulty down the line. Depending on where you live, there may be a public interest organization, or business law clinic, that can provide some legal information for free. You could look up "(where you live) non profit legal assistance" and see if anything shows up.

The ruling is hilarious. An Indiana mayor awarded a $1.1 million dollar contract to a truck dealership, then went to the dealership afterwards and said "I need money." He asked for $15k in cash, and was given $13k.

According to the SCOTUS this is not bribery because a bribe is an award for pre-agreed actions that is quid pro quo, and maybe the dealer just happened to feel generous to the person responsible for awarding them a lucrative contract after the fact. Only money in burlap sacks with dollar bills on them, with a person handing it over with a contract saying "this is a bribe" count as a bribe. Anything else is just a sparkling gratuity.

A suspended sentence doesn't mean you get to walk free. It means you're released into the community but subject to a probation order which if broken will have you sent to prison. The conditions always have a "peace and good behaviour" obligation but can also include onerous restrictions. Anyone who works with offenders knows that the conditions imposed by a suspended sentence can be deeply intrusive and severely curtail people's privacy and freedom of movement, to the point where they may sometimes be harsher than fines or even imprisonment

Providing for suspended sentences for first offences is consistent with the criminal justice system's commitment to rehabilitation, even if it arguably is of a lesser deterrent value and doesn't satisfy the desire for vengeance among much of the public.

I'm unfamiliar with Ireland's criminal law, and the judge may have been more lenient than they had to be, but its not impossible that there's enough mitigating factors that the sentence will not get appealed. If Crotty breaks the terms of his suspended sentence, and commits a similar act in the future, his sentence will almost certainly be considerably harsher.

I used to think that one of the worst takeaway of the Nuclear Arms race was that if you do nothing about an existential threat to humanity long enough, it will eventually go away. Now I realize the average Western leader who lived through the Cold War has decided its real meaning is that the risks of nuclear weapons don't need to be taken seriously because there's no chance they'll ever be used.

Did Yemen ever learn why the US doesn’t have free healthcare?

The issue with Putin's red lines is what threats does he actually have to follow through with if NATO crosses then.

Russian missiles have targeted Ukrainian infrastructure for years, and by this point it's pretty clear that for all the previous talk of "the gloves will come off this time," they do not have some massive stockpile of munitions waiting for the signal. Rather by now the quantity of Russian strikes are strictly limited by their rate of production. There is also not much more room for Russia to expand their scope of acceptable targets.

Russia could formally declare war, and multiply their forces in Ukraine through conscription. But Putin has always been a cautious and conservative leader. He is seemingly happy with how the SMO is going, and has only resorted to unpopular measures when a real risk of catastrophe exists, such as immediately after the Kharkiv counter-offensive. Until now the Kremlin's judgment seems to be that the negative consequences of tolerating regular Ukrainian strikes inside the Russian federation do not outweigh those of declaring war.

As for the unthinkable option of escalating through nuclear strikes, will I'm personally very appreciative that Russia has refrained from doing so and pray that continues to be an empty threat.

nothing is sacred and everyone is expendable

Except for Israeli genociders, who we must arm and maintain the most steadfast support for. Also if you ever say otherwise I'll turn into the most racist person in the world

Ukraine’s deindustrialization since the fall of communism is incredible.

In 1992 Ukraine was the industrial powerhouse of the USSR, with manufacturing holding a 45% share of GDP. By 2022 that share declined to just 8%, with Ukraine transformed into an outpost of American agri-business. One whose only remaining industrial policies were to sell off what was left of state enterprises while praying to become the cheap place for Western tech to outsource.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.ZS?locations=UA

It speaks to a deeper fault in liberalism, made obvious by the existence of homelessness.

A person is free only to the extent in which they have access to a physical space in which they can exercise that freedom. It would be absurd to say that I have freedom of speech, if they were banned from speaking freely at home, in public, or anywhere but inside my head. Without a place in which a person can go to and enjoy the protections of a right, they do not actually have that right.

A core tenet of classical Liberalism is that the only place in which our government recognizes the sanctity of a person's ability to exercise their rights, is upon their own land. On public spaces, or the property of others, the exercise of rights may be readily curtailed, and always have been. This fits in nicely with the traditional Liberal notion that only people with property are citizens, whose rights deserve to be safeguarded.

However, for the homeless their 'freedoms' are illusory because they have no personal space to physically go to and enjoy it. Instead, the liberty of a homeless person to do anything (ie: sleep and eat) is strictly curtailed to the very limited range of activities permitted on public lands. And their right to protection from certain things (ie: invasions of privacy and involuntary search/seizure) similarly has virtually no guarantees.

This is also something I always emphasize when discussions of banning certain activities from any public spaces comes up. To ban encampments on all public property is to deprive our society's most vulnerable of any right to shelter themselves from the elements, or sleep undisturbed, as they will no longer have legal access to places in which they can shelter or sleep.

To rebuke the argument that Georgia's Foreign Agents Registration bill is necessary to prevent State Department NGOs from undermining Georgian sovereignty, the Foreign Ministers of Iceland and the Baltics have arrived in Tbilisi to participate in and encourage Georgia's color-revolution protests against the "Russia law"

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The technical answer is that a decision by a state supreme court can only be appealed directly to the SCOTUS, who has to choose to take it up. This section specifically cannot be appealed because it is a concurring judgment which does not make law, and would probably be considered non-binding orbiter dictum regardless.

If Dengists were Bernsteinists that'd be an improvement. In this thread they're indistinguishable from Neoliberal commentators from the Cato Institute writing articles about "the Feminist side of sweatshops" only instead of "basic economics" being the reason why we have to support states that are in direct opposition to working class interests, here its "material conditions" and "contradictions."

If I'm remembering right that commentor went on to give a very optimistic prognosis for the counteroffensive. Arguing that because the first line of Russian defences near Robotyne had breached: Tokmak will be captured imminently, putting the entire Russian logistical network under threat and severing the land bridge to Crimea, which will then lead to the total collapse of Russian military power in southern Ukraine. It's a nice story but one completely divorced from the actual reality of the counteroffensive.

For around its first year of existence (when it was still called chapo.chat) this site was a bit of a dumpster fire, despite having mostly great admins and users. Constant struggle sessions, user drama, some actual wreckers, and heavy-handed moding (some of it justified, some not as much) made for an often toxic environment that bled users. Capped off by one of the founders getting doxed and falsely accused by a rightist op.

Thankfully things have calmed down alot since then, and we've gone from regular exoduses of users to stable (if small) growth, with a considerably kinder and chiller community.

Even still I try to avoid dramaposts or struggle sessions just cause I remember how bad things can be when they dominate discussions.

This is the posting equivalent of a drunk guy in the bar starting an argument on a subject he learned about five minutes ago. I wouldn't even call this post misinformed, because I can guarantee no actual research went into it. Its more blind conjecture oriented around an unshakable belief that all things Western are inherently good, and everything Russian is trash, and extending that formula to everything imaginable.

The M2 Bradley, one of Ukraine's latest wunderwaffe's, is famously cramped (because they had to fit all the missiles and auto-cannon rounds somewhere) and even in Iraq never came with AC, or much of anything else in the way of crew comforts. Real life cross-section's of the Leopard 1 also show that they're similarly crowded and uncomfortable for the crew. By contrast late-Soviet designs like the BMP-3 or BTR-90 did make some efforts to improve passenger ergonomics with both featuring more cubic space and better stabilizers than comparable NATO designs, while also managing to fit in such quality of life improvements as toilets and AC.

It is very worrying. One thing that really strikes me is comparing the vastly different reactions to North Carolina's Bathroom Bill of seven years ago, versus the non-existent corporate/centrist response to the recent wave of anti-LGBT hate legislation. In 2016 after North Carolina passed their "Bathroom Bill" (HB2) mandating that people could only use bathrooms in government facilities corresponding to their birth certificate, the backlash was huge.

Eighty corporate CEOs signed a letter urging Governor McCrory to veto HB2. $400 million dollars in planned investments were cancelled by hundreds of companies, who condemned the bill as a gross violation of human rights, costing North Carolina an estimated $3.76 billion over twelve years.

The NBA cancelled the 2017 All-Star Game in Charlotte. The Carolina Panthers and Charlotte Hornets both openly spoke against the Bathroom Bill as discriminatory. Sanders and Clinton both condemned HB2, and even some Republicans, like Ohio Governor John Kasich, joined them. Plenty of musicians, including Bruce Springsteen, Maroon 5, Demi Lovato, and Ringo Starr cancelled concerts in solidarity with the North Carolina transgender community. States and cities throughout the U.S. issued travel bans barring government employees from non-essential travel to North Carolina. Police departments throughout North Carolina openly stated that they would refuse to enforce HB2.

By November of 2016 HB2 was so unpopular that it contributed to the electoral defeat of Governor McCrory. In 2017, after the NCAA threatened to ban North Carolina from hosting championships for five years unless they repealed HB2, North Carolina's Republican controlled legislature relented and removed the provisions of HB2 banning trans people from public bathrooms.

Now, seven years later Republican states are signing into law bills far worse than HB2 ever was, but there's nowhere even close to the same backlash for doing so. Not only is transphobic rhetoric getting more and more hateful and dehumanizing, but also that the coalition of people willing to meaningfully defend trans people has gone from a broad consensus, including corporations, celebrities, and centrists, to a far smaller number of activists who can't even make the Democratic Party agree that the lives of Trans people matter. That's whats concerning, even if the Pride of Corporations and the Democratic Party was always hollow and utterly lacking in radicalism, it is still far better then their current acquiescence to deranged chuds.

Hell just a few years ago :melon-musk: was tweeting this now he's encouraging parents to watch Matt Walsh hate speech.

Engels in "The Conditions of the Working Class in England" responded to this point better than I could, though written in 1844 Marx fully endorsed the analysis in Capitol Vol. I

Let the wise bourgeois ask the people who sweep the streets in Manchester and elsewhere (though even this is past now, since machines for the purpose have been invented and introduced), or sell salt, matches, oranges, and shoe-strings on the streets, or even beg, what they were formerly, and he will see how many will answer: “Mill-hands thrown out of work by machinery.” The consequences of improvement in machinery under our present social conditions are, for the working-man, solely injurious, and often in the highest degree oppressive. Every new advance brings with it loss of employment, want, and suffering, and in a country like England where, without that, there is usually a “surplus population,” to be discharged from work is the worst that can befall the operative. And what a dispiriting, unnerving influence this uncertainty of his position in life, consequent upon the unceasing progress of machinery, must exercise upon the worker, whose lot is precarious enough without it! To escape despair, there are but two ways open to him; either inward and outward revolt against the bourgeoisie or drunkenness and general demoralisation. And the English operatives are accustomed to take refuge in both. The history of the English proletariat relates hundreds of uprisings against machinery and the bourgeoisie; we have already spoken of the moral dissolution which, in itself, is only another form of despair.

The advance of industry, in the hands of a Communist society, will be a tool for the improvement of all. But in a society ruled by the Bourgeois, such innovation will facilitate more oppression, exploitation, and unemployment, if doing so is the most profitable. You can look at the immiserating consequences which followed the invention of the cotton gin to see that; not even accounting for genuinely awful inventions like leaded gasoline, credit card scores, and nuclear weapons.

You can also see it in how fast Liberals starting claiming credit for gay marriage after a decades long struggle by LGBT activists did the hard work of making it broadly popular, and even then they relied on a court ruling that made the issue moot. A little over a decade ago (when gay marriage was seen as politically toxic) Obama, Clinton and the rest were all signing laws stating that marriage was exclusively between a man and a woman.

Now LGBT rights discourse are being used as a cudgel against state enemies while one of America's ruling parties is attempting as much social murder against trans people as they can get away with, and Liberals are doing virtually nothing in response.

NATO troop mfs when they can't call in a MOAB strike against every house that might have a shooter inside :pit:

But for real, beyond the former veterans who have never experienced a warzone where their side didn't have complete tactical superiority, people in the global North are generally raised to have an immense feeling of invulnerability, where the very idea of going somewhere dangerous and not being able to rely on a powerful state back home saving their ass if anything goes wrong is unfathomable. On the volunteers sub there's a lot of commentors who believed that they would be allowed to head home with no problem should they choose to, or get captured by Russians.

But slowly these volunteers are gonna realize that Russian bombs don't differentiate between Ukrainians and foreigners wearing an army uniform.