80 years after the deed it becomes a tad rediciulous. Especially when all the higher ups have been identified, and not prosecuted, during these 80 years.
A number of high-ranking members were convicted shortly after WWII in the so-called Nuremberg trials (as they took place in the German city of Nuremberg). Here is the introductory paragraph from Wikipedia:
"The Nuremberg trials (German: Nürnberger Prozesse) were a series of military tribunals held following World War II by the Allied forces under international law and the laws of war. The trials were most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, judicial, and economic leadership of Nazi Germany, who planned, carried out, or otherwise participated in the Holocaust and other war crimes.",
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trials
I agree, it seems silly to me, to be prosecuting a guard after all these years, if anything I hope he will get a chance to apologize, and then live the rest of his life full of remorse.
It’s not obvious to me that warehousing someone for life is massively less barbaric than the death penalty. Either way, you’re depriving them of a full life; one just takes a lot longer.
Some people, through their actions, have demonstrated that they’re unable to live freely in society. Society has to choose what to do with those people. There isn’t any great answer, only shades or different types of suckage.
"For life" means maximum of 20 years in Germany. There is also preventive detention afterwards for people that are insane or would still be a danger to society etc.
So there is a big difference between death penalty and 20 years. Also you can at least somehow correct the punishment if you "got the wrong guy".
> "The defendant knowingly and willingly aided and abetted this at least by conscientiously performing guard duty
In what world is this a case to charge someone with abetting thousands of deaths by performing guard duty...>50 years after the event..and that person is now 100 years old.
It's ludicrous nonsense.
No prosecutor in any other civilised part of the world would entertain this for more than 5 seconds.
In this world. Where he was the person who stopped the prisoners from escaping their death. His purpose, that he presumably performed, was to ensure those people could not escape. His purpose was not to keep the prisoners alive-his purpose was to ensure they could not escape to freedom, for them to be in a cage before being systematically killed.
He’s going to trial in this world. As he absolutely should.
I assume that the goal is not so much sending him to jail for a week before he dies of natural causes as to obtaining any valuable historical information that he could hide still. The only way to force him to talk can be a trial.
Probably also about disclosing and linking other people with the same crimes.
"Hey Nazi bosses, I'm not going do this, it's wrong!"
"Then we will shot you on the spot, and replace you with another guard who will."
"Err OK then, please forget I objected."
People think ALL Nazis had a choice, but a large majority of them were just trying to stay alive by keeping their heads down and doing a good job.
EDIT: I'm getting seriously downvoted for this, with replies stating that he had a 'choice' ... OK you try living in a totalitarian state, and see what 'choice' you have.
The Einsatzgruppen, and other kill squads, were purely voluntary affairs. Not sure about "local" guards, maybe some of those were drafted. Nobody of these guys can hide behind "we just followed orders". It is just sad that the little guys, like a secretary and lowly prison guard, are prosecuted now, when a lot of the mid-level organizers, incl. Doctors and officers in charge, were left alone in Western Germany while they were still alive.
EDIT: You didn't have a choice going to war (talking about the male population), you had a choice in volunteering for counter partisan warfare, Einsatzgruppen, concentration camp duty,... And that choice is the crucial one here.
In many cases, it was entirely possible to ask for reassignment without getting shot by a superior officer, so your accusation of cartoonish oversimplification cuts both ways...
Nobody deserves the death penalty, but I admit I’m a tad surprised at the number of responses that are anything other than “it’s okay to prosecute concentration camp guards”.
It's hard to give recommendations because the stuff I read is probably not what most people would like ;-) Especially, I tend to like sports manga which is pretty far from fantasy. (Currently Yowamushi Pedal is fuelling my cycling addiction!)
I mentioned Barefoot Gen, which is a very early manga and a classic that is actually taught in Japanese schools. It's not fantasy, though. It tells the story of the author's experiences around the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
For fantasy things, Full metal alchemist is an alternate-earth scenario with magic. It is extremely good. One thing that doesn't actually fit the epic story format because it is a series of short stories is Mushishi. I highly recommend it, although I've only watched the anime. Akira is a cyber-punk, distopian future manga which is very highly acclaimed. Personally, it is not my taste, but it is excellent. Another interesting manga which has no actual heroes is Death Note. It's another one I don't like because all of the characters are really nasty, but some people really, really like it for that reason. I asked my wife (who is Japanese) for a suggestion and she mentioned Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu (Legend of the Galactic Heroes). I haven't read it but Wikipedia indicates it was originally a series of novels. It seems Viz publishes both the novels and manga in English. Ghost in the Shell is a very good sci-fi manga, but I have to admit that it is years since I looked at it, so I can't really remember it.
One manga which I love is actually a baseball manga called Touch. If you read that, you will see the manga story structure very easily.
I started reading manga as a means to learn Japanese. At the time I had only a passing interest in graphic novels and comics. Over time I got quite hooked on it. But I only read in Japanese, so I tend to read things which are quite easy. There are very complex manga stories which are aimed at adults, but unfortunately I haven't spent much time looking at those things.
Of course the 2 current most popular mangas aimed at young boys is Naruto and One Piece. Naruto just finished. It has some very powerful moments and the story is quite good. I've found that there are quite a lot of useful ideas that you can take away from the story and apply to your own life. However, the characters are one-dimensional (on purpose, I think) so I suspect it wouldn't appeal to the original poster. One Piece is also quite good (the first chapter is actually really worth reading on it's own and can stand by itself even if you don't read anything else). Again, it is aimed at a young audience and the characters are very static. There are some extremely moving moments, though.
Hope that helps a bit. As I said, it's hard to give recommendations because some people will look at that list and probably absolutely hate some of the things on there. There is an unbelievably massive amount of manga being written and I truly believe there is something for every taste. However, the examples above are pretty easy to find in English and are all quite famous. If they don't meet your taste, I hope you'll explore a bit further on your own.
Software R&D (especially for new initiatives) is typically not capitalized so if a lot of investment is in software than it would show up as operating expenses rather than capex.
I got an idea: build the software, synthesize it into a chip with almost no mask cost, buy the chip, run it in production (as a standby), use the "software version of the chip" for production, and write it off as hardware investment (capital).
Even when software R&D is capitalized, it's often capitalized over just 2 years, so the net effect is close to expensing it, assuming this year's expenses are reasonably close to last year's.
>Accounting doesn't work that way. You can have huge profits and reinvest them, but your income statement will show the profits in any case.
Sort of. I mean, I'm not a tax expert. but i do pay taxes on a bunch of money that, from my point of view, I re-invested in my business. But certainly not all of it.
My understanding of why you end up paying tax on money you re-invest into the business is depreciation.
The idea behind depreciation is that you write off the object as it loses value. So if computers last 5 years (and that's kinda the messed up part, the IRS kinda arbitrarily decides how long something lasts) I write off 1/5th the first year, 1/5th the second, etc... I still get to write off the full value of those servers I buy, I just can't write it off the first year, which means I end up 're-investing' out of post-tax money when I'm just starting or growing.
As an aside, if you have these sorts of problems, get a tax expert. Accounting is at least as deep as programming, and unit testing in accounting, while possible, is super expensive. It's not something you want to seat-of-the-pants.
When you are an S corp, it's super irritating, because 4/5ths of what I paid for servers is marked as income for me, and I've gotta pay taxes on it, which suucks when you have been scrimping all year to pay for servers.
Note, this is part of the "value" that leasing companies offer; It's common for companies in my business to lease their servers, and you write off your lease payments against income in the same year as you make the lease payments.
But from what I've seen, leasing increases hardware costs between 2x and 4x, and is way less flexible, so even if you have to pay tax on all the money you spend on servers, you're still usually coming out ahead. And buying, generally speaking, requires a lot less planning.
but on the other hand, if I hire someone to write code for me? that comes out right away, pre-tax, no depreciation, assuming I earn the money and spend the money in the same year. - so if I want a new software platform? I get to build it entirely using pre-tax money.
(Note, things get way more complex from here; Accounting is a complex thing and I probably don't have a strong enough grasp even as just a businessperson, much less as an accountant. But this is the basic idea on why re-investment money is sometimes taxed.)
I never thought I'd be in the position of defending the tax system, but ...
Regarding depreciation, I thought there were a few other factors that keep the IRS from arbitrarily deciding how much something lasts:
1) If you sell it, you get to treat it as having depreciated to that value (assuming arms-length and all), not the scheduled one.
2) If you can demonstrate a liquid market, can't you use that as the current value?
Also, for counting 4/5th of servers as income, isn't that mitigated by how you're really paying taxes on the income used to buy the servers? The point of that was to make it so that you're taxed on changes in the book value of your venture.
So if you make $1000 in profit and immediately spend it all on servers, you still made $1000 in taxable profits and that's what you're being taxed on, which you should count the taxes on before buying more capital goods.
I didn't mean to say that taxes are bad. I like civilization, too. I mean, I don't like paying taxes any more than anyone else does, but I prefer living in a state with taxes than in one without. Don't get me wrong; I'm not going to pay more than I have to, but I'm also not going to take risks on things that are maybe legal, and maybe end up with a bunch of debt that can't be cleared by bankruptcy. Student loans and screwing up your taxes. Stay away from both.
In fact, I'm incorporated in California, none of the "I have a condo in vegas" tax dodges so common among people who do corp-to-corp contract work, and most of my labor is done by people paid as employees, you know, paid on W2s, rather than as contractors. I play by the rules to the best of my ability.
>So if you make $1000 in profit and immediately spend it all on servers, you still made $1000 in taxable profits and that's what you're being taxed on, which you should count the taxes on before buying more capital goods.
Assuming it's a capital good that depreciates to near zero (and it's more complicated than that) the depreciation is written off against revenue as a cost, just like payroll. Unlike payroll, it's not all written off at once.
If you stay in business long enough, then yes, nearly all your capital goods are eventually all written off against your revenue.
The problem is that as a growing company, you have to buy shit out of post-tax money at a time when there's a much bigger chance of you being around next year to pay taxes at all if you can write off the whole cost of your depreciating capital purchase up front.
There are also a bunch of small-business loopholes here where you're allowed to write down the whole value all at once, all of which I don't really understand. As you point out, there are also ways of writing off your stuff on schedules different from the official IRS schedule, which I also don't really understand (and I suspect you don't fully understand either) - It's really, really complicated; the IRS doesn't often give you clear guidelines; when they do, it's usually best to follow those guidelines.
The "Original Sin" of not Governments not being able to get debt in the same currency they are able to collect taxes.
So, when the main source of USD suffers in some sense (export prices, or some kind of supply shock) the Government (unable to get funds) must retort to fiscal policy to meet its commitments. And fiscal policy is the number #1 recipe to get (hyper-)inflation
