This is why Silicon Valley giants are paying such low taxes

While Facebook’s revenue in the UK last year surged to £1.27 billion from £842m the year before, the company said its UK profits were as low as £62.8m because of the high cost of driving sales, plus administrative expenses.

And out of its total tax bill of nearly £16m, the Palo Alto-based firm will pay only half.

Can I use the ClassicPress BETA on a live website? (yes!)

As a result, many people want to switch to ClassicPress (a business-focused fork of WordPress) as soon as possible. The big question on everyone’s lips is: “can I use the ClassicPress BETA on a live website”?

ClassicPress itself is extremely stable. It has been tested on hundreds of sites with varied setups and our development team lead, James Nylen, has given the green light for us to say it’s safe to use in a live environment (there are no open bugs on our GitHub repository).

So the short answer to the question is YES!

ClassicPress

Einstein’s ‘God letter’ auctioned for almost $3 million. Full text.

Translated Transcript

Princeton, 3. 1. 1954

Dear Mr Gutkind,

Inspired by Brouwer’s repeated suggestion, I read a great deal in your book, and thank you very much for lending it to me. What struck me was this: with regard to the factual attitude to life and to the human community we have a great deal in common. Your personal ideal with its striving for freedom from ego-oriented desires, for making life beautiful and noble, with an emphasis on the purely human element. This unites us as having an “unAmerican attitude.”

Still, without Brouwer’s suggestion I would never have gotten myself to engage intensively with your book because it is written in a language inaccessible to me. The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can change this for me. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong, and whose thinking I have a deep affinity for, have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything “chosen” about them.

In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew the privilege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolization. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.

Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, i.e; in our evaluations of human behavior. What separates us are only intellectual “props” and “rationalization” in Freud’s language. Therefore I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things.

With friendly thanks and best wishes,

Yours,

A. Einstein

RAMMSTEIN – EUROPE STADIUM TOUR 2019

On September 17th Rammstein announces on their websites: “Almost done! Orchestra and choir recordings in Minsk for album No.7.” Additionally, the band is making two pictures from the session public, with a quotation from their song “Adios” that also could be interpreted as working orders for Rammstein: “Fiddle-burning with screeches, harps cut into the flesh [“Geigen brennen mit Gekreisch, Harfen schneiden sich ins Fleisch“].” It is almost ten years now that Rammstein fans have had to wait longingly for the follow-up to “Liebe Ist Für Alle Da”. No wonder that the announcement of new music has spread through the international press like wildfire. Now Rammstein is adding more logs to the flames: parallel to the appearance of their as yet untitled new album (Spring 2019), the band is playing their first-ever stadium tour starting in May. Whoever has seen the band’s dramatic, perfectly staged live shows, might have thought that it couldn’t get any bigger, but with Rammstein, you can be certain that the band has planned something extraordinary for these even mightier stages!

RAMMSTEIN

Naked cowboy sings pro-Trump songs as anti-Trump activists swarm Times Square

It’s not Times Square without The Naked Cowboy…singing a pro-Trump ditty.

Wasn’t very popular with the passerby. pic.twitter.com/j477o4xfBR

— Mark Helenowski (@MarkHelenowski) November 8, 2018

Here are the fully lyrics to his song:

Thank God for Donald J. Trump, my friends,
He’s making America great again,
Sounds like good idea to me
I don’t care if Trump is sinning,
As long as he keeps America winning
It sounds like good idea to me
It’s going to go down in the annals
Trump got to bang Stormy Daniels
Sounds like good idea to me
Thank God for Donald J. Trump, my friends,
He’s making America great again,
Sounds like good idea to me
Sounds like good idea to me