“The tax law that congressional Republicans and US President Donald Trump enacted last summer has proved to be a massive boon for Amazon, slashing the corporate behemoth’s 2025 tax bill even as its profits surged and it moved ahead with mass layoffs that have cost 30,000 workers their jobs since October.
“Citing a new securities filing, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Amazon’s “current US taxes, an accounting measure of taxes incurred last year, declined to $1.2 billion from $9 billion” while the company’s “pretax US profit increased by 44.5%, to $89.5 billion. On a cash basis, the company paid $2.8 billion in federal income taxes last year after paying more than $7 billion in each of the prior two years.””
If not now when?
People should calculate those earnings into the Melania numbers.
That’s one HELL of a return on a $75 million dollar spend to bribe Pedonald. If I’m getting all the zeroes right, 7.8 billion / 75 mil is a multiple of 104. Where else are you going to get that kind of return on an investment?
By grifting conservatives. Especially if you are a religion.
That’s so fucked up. And some people will still dig in their heels about how billionaires shouldn’t have to pay more taxes. Fuck this country.
There’s a reason these assholes feel like they need bunkers.
Their bunkers plans are mostly insane. Zuck has a bunker designed for him and like 100 staff. I don’t think he understands how the power dynamics are going to change once civilization ends and his money isn’t worth anything.
They do, they actually worry about it:
Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.
- Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, D. Rushkoff
More people really need to know that this was a legitimate thing. That they balked as well at the guy saying “treat people better and pay them more.”
Easy, he just has to make an inner and an outer chamber, where most of the staff are kept in the outer chamber and only a handful of his most trusted individuals have access to him. He might even be able to make it so only robots can serve him in his inner cloister.
People really think these dudes haven’t thought it through? They’ve floated explosive collars for Pete’s sake…
Lol dude even the prison from Andor needs maintenance staff who aren’t prisoners to operate and fix shit. This model doesn’t work when prisoners and the prison are all there is.
An inner chamber in a bunker that’s only large enough for himself and his family is more of a residential scale rather than a commercial scale. He can let in one handyman at a time with relative safety. It’s not like he has to bring a whole maintenance crew into his sanctum to change the washers on his bathroom sink.
Why will the handyman keep coming?
He’ll probably get paid just enough to keep him and his family slightly above the level of poverty that everyone outside the bunker will be reduced to?
Paid with what? Who stops him from demanding more, and how are they paid and with what? Billionaire power comes from currency that is spendable on a large open market. The market doesn’t exist anymore.
Fun fact: All bunkers have air vents somewhere on the surface.
And all bunkers have an entrance. Entrances that can be sealed with concrete and rebar, to turn bunkers into tombs.
Let’s become tomb creators, and after a year, raiders.
Oh, I imagine they have supplies to last a year.
I say open them after 100-200y, make it a fun time capsule, then turn them into museums – “this is one of the places where we buried alive the biggest leeches in society after they constructed the most lavish palatial bunkers to hide in during a time of global turmoil!” – you can show people just what excess wealth to the point of detachment from society will drive a person to do, and what society will do in turn to them.
You think they won’t have their servers set up to automate the oppression of the masses, with the top-level control servers housed inside their bunker, to keep the profits flowing even when they’re permanently sealed off fron the world?
They’re rich enough to automate the hydroponic farming under LED grow lights fertilized from their own shit. All they have to do is flush the toilet and the whole thing cycles for them in a closed loop. Reverse osmosis means they’ll never run out of drinking water, and their pelotons ensure they won’t waste away and perish.
Even sealing off the air vents, they might have enough houseplants in a greenhouse in their bunker to cycle enough oxygen for them to survive.
And if you say “well we can just destroy the servers outside their bunker to cut them off from the world!” Well, not if they’re housed in a compound guarded by security forces with have enough of a paycheck flowing in to guarantee their families won’t starve.
If blocking the ventilation doesn’t work, I can think of plenty of chemical and biological agents to introduce to a ventilation system that will produce the desired effect. Filters only catch so much, have a limited lifetime and will deteriorate, and can be hastened to deteriorate faster. I doubt they’re going to fit a HEPA filter factory down there.
And as for the armed guards, if the world is bad enough that the billionaires have hidden away in their bunkers, I doubt it’s a world where fiat currency has meaning anymore. About the only ways I could see armed guards being kept in line long-term would be to have their families all held hostage in the bunker as well, and/or explosive collars – and the latter can be hacked, I’m certain. The former, I’m sure they could try, but then you’re not relaxing in luxury in post-apocalypse bliss, you’re running a massive underground prison where every guard hates the warden and wants to help the inmates escape and murder the warden. That doesn’t sound easy or fun no matter how much money you have to throw at the problem.
Really, I find it unlikely that billionaires will be able to retain much in the way of long-term control if the outside world gets bad enough that they’ve sealed themselves inside a hole in the ground, no matter what kind of connectivity they have down there. They can build whatever they want now, while fiat currency still has meaning; but once it stops making sense to worship the dollar and the planet is on fire, they’re just some moron in a hole in the ground with lots of supplies. They’re a loot cache.
Their vents wouldn’t be just exposed anywhere. They’d be within compounds staffed by people who are kept fed just enough to buy their loyalty.
compounds on… the outside of the bunker. As in, not a bunker itself. Additionally, fed with what? I assume if billionaires are to the point of hiding in bunkers and paying “loyal guards” in food, that food outside is relatively scarce, and probably global transportation infrastructure is no more. Meaning they either have food stored onsite in the compound (which just means storming the lower-security compound first, getting a bunch of food, and then gassing the bunker to get even more goodies), or they’re somehow moving food from the bunker to the compound (which sounds like an easy way to get into the bunker).
You think they’re designing doomsday bunkers without thinking these things through? Or you think they’re not capable of building a compound around their bunker, so that entry points and air vents are kept secure? Or running automated warehouse hydroponic agricultural operations to feed themselves and their personnel after initial supplies run out? Or making a series of chambers with security checkpoints along the way so that they don’t expose their innermost chamber every time a guard opens the compound gates to let an armoured vehicle in?
Or do you think a band of ragtag brigands would be capable of overwhelming any defenses a billionaire’s money can buy?
their families all held hostage in the bunker as well
Now, someone is starting to think like evil.
Better yet would be some cooperation between remote bunkers, where family for workers of bunker A are held far away in bunker B, and vice versa.
that would probably work better, but if the infrastructure for communication between bunkers exists in the bunkers, and 95% of the people located in bunker A and bunker B want to escape and kill asshole billionaire A and asshole billionaire B, all they have to do is coordinate a simultaneous attack using that same communication infrastructure. If the order to “get ready to kill xyz prisoner’s family” can be communicated, so can “get ready to kill Bezos”.
It would work out to be a bit of mutually assured murder of their families.
Thugs A and B are never allowed to know each other.
If thug A decides to kill oligarch A, and then travel a long distance to aid thug B in killing oligarch B, then they could likely fail, because oligarchs A & B worked out a means to communicate their proof of life to each other. Many ways to do that, including dedicated messengers. If oligarch B hasn’t received a timely proof of life, then they murder thug A’s family and tell thug B that their family is in danger from outsiders overtaking bunker A. Thug B will likely travel to bunker A.
The thugs would have to collude. A major goal of the oligarchs will be placing many obstacles against collusion.
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Prob got some of them stockpiling sodium chlorate candles to generate oxygen
https://chemcafe.net/chemistry/this-candle-produces-oxygen-on-submarines-by-7876/
Oh noes, so they went from paying almost nothing to just basically paying nothing at all?
Fuck these assholes, bring in the guillotines
Bezos made that $70m from Melania back real quick
His wealth grows by more than that per day on average
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EAT THE RICH
Apparently I can’t post a picture of a guillotine. Thanks mods /s
Inatimate objects are threats of violence. That’s what I learned.
I wonder if ASCII art counts.
Can we still use words?
I’m thinking we find ourselves some solid contextual clues to use.
“Remember the French”!
Too clean.
Cerebral bore?
spoiler
Turok 2 for you youngins’ 🤪
That sound will always be seared in my memory. It is the scariest sound ever.
And yet it’s end result is so satisfying. Nostalgia hitting harder than usual today, and I’m all for it.
I used to play multi-player with friends. Nothing is scarier than hearing that thing coming for you. Turok 2 and Perfect Dark were my favorite shooter games back in the day.
Agreed
I think you are being too traditional in its application.
Start at one end, with a 1mm cutting depth and repeat until the job is done. Thinly sliced and ready for sandwiches.
Oh I like you.
I am told I am a lot of fun at parties.
You know, I have bloody-minded thoughts about these scumbags too, the kind of things that might earn me a visit from law enforcement if I spelled them out, but then I think about the negative impact actually doing those things would have on anyone’s psyche. Instead, we should take their money and sentence them to work on an organic farm for the rest of their lives.
Some days I have such thoughts as well, in the end I put that down to skipping over the revolutionary part: If the transition goes cleanly, sure, no need. We can adorn the former rich with gold chains a la More’s Utopia. But in revolutionary times, the reactionary armies will still be in full force. In such times, the logistics behind the guillotine are much simpler than running a prison system for capitalists and their crony politicians.
Fair, I was more replying to the idea a guillotine is “too clean” which implies that some sort of torturous death is preferred. I agree that in the process of any revolution a guillotine (or a bullet) may be necessary.
I just want to get on with life and rebuilding America into something that doesn’t suck. I say a bullet would do the job just fine, far as clearing out the Epstein and ICE classes go. They aren’t the kind of people you want as neighbors, and honestly, would waste a lot of resources to house them in prisons for life.
Those resources should go towards universal healthcare, parental leave, and so forth.
haha actually I meant to say: the guillotine looks too clean, I’d rather see much-used, bloodied guillotines :)
This.
That’s a little treat for the Washington post not endorsing anybody for president for the first time ever.
I’m sorry, did the company actually pay billions in taxes, or was that before other deductions? I seriously doubt they paid that much, and did not offset it against losses in other years, as they can do retroactively for a few years too.
Outraged people continue to buy things from Amazon.com!
Not me! I canceled Prime and now shop at WALMART!! sigh.
As someone who lives in a rural area, this is literally what I’m trying to do. It’s fucking joke, but we only have so many stores in town.
Yet another reason to boycott the jungle site.
Once again, more profit for the mall killer and destroyer of mom-and-pop stores.
And yet the stock is still falling ¯_(ツ)_/¯
