By that definition making coffee at home and taking it with you to work instead of buying is theft.

Even further anytime you make a product or do a service yourself or get a free alternative (for example, open source software instead of a close-source alternative) instead of buying would be theft by that definition.

That’s not the legal definition of “theft”, it’s not even the historical or common sense definition of “theft”, it’s some kind of neo-Capitalist Dystopia definition of “theft” that only makes sense if you’re starting from a foundation of there being a “right to make money”.

It’s legally called “Copyright Infrigement” and it’s not even part of Criminal Law in most Legal Jurisdictions, unlike Theft.

You’re talking off your arse so hard that by now you must hovering on your own farts.

Nah, it’s just incredibly common amongst wealthy Britons to use schemes such as having your own personal Charity in one of the Channel Islands that pays for all your life and owns all your assets, so it looks like that person isn’t at all rich.

Also the UK maybe uniquelly in the World has a Non-Resident Tax Status (for tax avoidance) which has nothing to do with the country one actually lives in, so a person can live in the UK and still declare him or herself as such and pay zero tax on income from abroad (and if you’re rich it’s pretty easy to set up a company abroad to channel all your income through).

(In fact Britain’s billionaire Prime Minister was outted a few year ago as using such a schema)

Some of these schems had becom so prevalent that the Tories cracked down on the small fry (mainly self employed middle class) use of them too to avoid tax, but making sure ot was still fine for the rich (for example, Non Resident Tax Status now requires a year payment of 60k, so it doesn’t make sense for somebody making, say 100k a year but it still does for those making millions)

In the land of the World’s Money Laundromat most rich people avail themselves of the very abundant specialists in setting up schemes to make it look like they don’t actually own any wealth, especially because it’s risk free since none of the two main parties has any interest whatsoever in cracking down on tax evasion and avoidance by the wealthy.

Here in Portugal we specialize in making rich foreigners even richer (with things like Golden Visa and a crazilly overinflated housing market that’s even causing some of the worst birthrates in Europe to become even worse, and which mainly makes money for foreign “investors”) hence most of “our” 1% aren’t even local or resident in the country.

Also and not at all specifically for Portugal, the real rich can and do use transnational accounting tricks to look like they’re in fact very poor (such as the “poor” owner of IKEA who didn’t even paid tax in Sweden because he offically owned nothing, though a Foundation in Luxembourg which just so happenned to own IKEA through a complex corporate structure, paid for his life of luxury) so what you see in this chart is mostly not the trully rich but rather the upper middle class.

(This is also, by the way, how the UK has such “low” wealth in the 1% according to this chart: in the country whose capital is the money laundromat of Europe, even mildly rich people can easilly make sure they’re accounting-poor who live of handouts from some charity based in the Channel Islands which just so happens to only ever use the income from its assets - gifed to it tax free by these now “poor” person - to pay for the luxuries of said “poor” person and whose statutes make sure this “poor” person controls it … oh and by the way, some are such huge hypocrites that they loudly proclaim that they “give all their money to Charity”)

Image management from the guys who proclaimed “unwavering support for Israel” the day the death toll for Palestinian children crossed 4000, criticized the bringing of a case against Israel for Genocide to the ICJ, immediatelly stopped contributions to the UNWRA following unconfirmed and unchecked allegations from Israel against less than 1% of its people in Gaza and who continue to provide military and financial help to Israel.

Racist “genocide is fine if done by the right people against ‘human animals’” Nazi-lovers, now trying to use modern Marketing and PR techniques to manage their image whilst they “unwaveringly” support mass murder.

Evil hypocrite racists.

I lived in the UK not that long ago and I lived and live elsewhere in Europe.

It really is a bigger problem in the UK than most of Europe, probably because it apes the US so hard and somehow combines some of its worst shit with their very own local shit (classism, very low social mobility, entrenched ancient elites, post-imperial hangover and other) rather than combining qualities.

It’s mainly Anglon-Saxon countries that are speed running the rise of Fascism, not most of the World.

It’s pretty obvious from its continued and unwavering support for a nation led by Fascists who openly describe as “human animals” the neigbouring people from a different etnicity which they have oppressed for over half a century and are now outright massacring, commiting all manner of war crimes in doing so, that the “never again” that the German elites claimed to have learned is not at all the Humanist “nothing like this should ever be allowed to happen again to any people because of their etnicity” (which would see Germany react towards Israel as they did towards Russia when it invaded Ukraine) but rather the very specific and Racist “We should not have done that to Jews”.

I too used to believe as you do, but what we are seeing right now in their actions, especially the massive contrast in their reaction to the victimizing of the Ukranians by Russia and the already much larger victimizing of Palestinians by Israel, is that whatever the German leadership has “learned” was not the Humanitarian Principle but something else altogether and the most obvious explanation for their very overt support of the Genociders in this specific situation is that it depends on the etnicity of the victims and the perpetrators whether such a massacre is acceptable or not in the eyes of said German leadership, which is pure, unadulterated, racism.

At this point Germany is activelly siding with Fascists doing the same style of action as the Nazis (though not yet the scope, but the continuing blocade of Food, Water & Energy to Gaza might very well lead to that). That is not the actions of a land whose leadership has genuinelly learned the lesson that massacring people because of their etnicity is Evil.

When it really mattered Germany showed that not only it’s doesn’t at all care for the plight of the victims but even activelly supports the genociders if the etnicity of the victims is not a favored one whilst that of the genociders is. One can then only conclude that all that “charity” was not done for humanist reasons (no humanist would support Israel after all they’ve done in the last month) and must have been the other reason for overtly doing “charity” - the cold and calculated managing of the image one projects.

Oh, right, charity.

I grew up with the stories about how in Fascist Portugal the “ladies” of the handful of priviledged families who exploited a crushingly poor country were big charitable givers.

Act with cold calous cruelty but all it takes is to give away some crumbs and socially you’re lauded as a moral paragon.

Sadly the German elites seem to have learned the “Never again” lesson in a racist way (Jews are like “us”, not like “them”) rather that humanitarian (nothing like this should ever again be done to anybody anywhere because of their etnicity), hence this continued reaction of unwavering support of Israel against the Palestinians (as in the view of the racist German power elites it’s “those like us” vs “them”) and the contrasting reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine were the victims were “those like us”.

In a humanitarian view both situations are unnacceptable and the one in Gaza is worse because of the intensity, numbers and sheer arbitratrity of civilian killings, but in a racist’s eyes the etnicity of the perpetrators and the victims is what shapes the acceptability it not of murder, hence what’s going on in Ukraine is unnacceptable for the German government whilst what’s going on in Gaza is acceptable.

To my great dissapointment, it seems that whilst Nazism was forced to leave Germany, the rabid racist thinking of it has never left the hearts of the German elites.

I’m old school and just download torrents with something like BiglyBT and put them in my local NAS (which is really just a bunch of portable HDs connected to my router), from where I can access them anywhere in my home, most importantly from a cheap media player connected to my TV.

Been doing this for over a decade and it works for me. Also I know how to do it in a way that keeps me safe from such legal firms extorting money from people pirating digital works, whilst if you thrown “convenience” software into the mix, it’s harder to make sure it’s not leaking your IP address or other personal data even when using a VPN.

The rule with running under a VPN is to:

• Use a VPN provider which does not keep logs, hence my recommendation of Mulvad but there are others that the community considers reliabled in that respect (look around)
• Do not register for any pirate anything using your e-mail.
• Configure your torrent application to only connect via the VPN (settings depend on the program) so that it doesn’t “leak” by using your ISP connection directly if, for example, you forgot to start the VPN.
• Personally I also tend to chose a VPN exit point outside my own country to make things harder from a legal point of view: complex legal cases involving multiple legal jurisdictions aren’t worth the trouble for the legal system to catch a person torrenting for personal use.

If your torrenting goes via a VPN (hence it’s important to make sure it’s not leaking) all that those law firms have is an IP address to an exit point of the VPN provider. Unless the VPN provider is willfully cooperative (i.e. a letter in legal language merelly asking is enough for them to give the data, and the whole point of the likes of Mulvad is that they are not cooperative) those legal firms need to get a Court Order to force the VPN provider to give them the IP address of the machine using that VPN exit point at that time (i.e. your machine) and if the VPN provider doesn’t keep logs they can’t give that data since they don’t have it anymore, plus is both the VPN provider and the exit point are in a different country - i.e. a different legal jurisdiction - it gets even harder because, for example, German Courts can’t directly issue valid court orders for other countries (it’s pretty simple when the target is your local ISP, not so much if it’s, say, a company in Sweden)

It’s simply not worth it for those law firms or the courts to go after common torrenting in such a situation, especially as there is a vast number of easy to extort people torrenting from their home connection directly, what the Americans would call “low hanging fruit”.

Certainly this is how it worked in the UK which had the same kind of situation.

A VPN is not a protection for people committing actual real crimes (say, murder for hire) because it’s definitelly worth it for the Justice System to jump through the hops needed to get such a person (in this case they would need a court order to wiretap the VPN provider to catch that person on the act and other legal jurisdictions would definitelly cooperate in a timelly manner to catch a murderer), but for people just doing normal torrenting for personal consumption it’s absolutelly not worth it to overcome that many hurdles to give somebody a fine. For those law firms too, it’s just easier to send legal letters to the ISPs of people torrenting via their home connection directly to get their name and address (without even involving a Court) and then send those people threathening legal letters than to try and legally force an uncooperative VPN provider in a different country to give them the IP address of the home user whilst they still have it (if I remember it correctly, Mulvad’s logs are in-memory only and last only 24h).

You should be using a no-logging VPN, even if only as a question of principle (I’m afraid that in Germany, it’s highly likely common people’s Internet activity is already under dragnet state surveillance: things like the mandatory providing and recording of ID when buying a phone SIM in Germany - which is unusual elsewhere in Europe - only serve for there to be a centralized record linking communication streams to people).

Something like Mulvad will cost you €5 a month, way cheaper than any streaming service.

I got used to using a VPN back when I live in the UK (which is probably the worst Surveillance State in Europe after Russia, as show by the Snowden Revelations which in Britain only led to politicians making laws to rectroactivelly make their massive civil society surveillance practices legal) and as it so happenned it was perfect at hiding my sailing of the high seas from those law firms (which were very active there) for more than a decade there.

The way things are fast decaying in so-called Democracies when it come to the actually practice of democracy in governance, it’s probably a good idea to start doing your online life behind a VPN (not that it suffices, but it’s a start).

It’s called the Discounted Value Of Money in Finance.

As in, the future money returned by an investment is converted to today’s money by using a risk free investment - say US Treasuries - as baseline to convert that future money to today’s money.

Maybe an example helps: if I have a $1000 investment I can make today that returns $1050 in 2 years time, the way to check if it’s worth it and by how much is by comparing it with how much would $1000 put today in, for example, US Treasuries return in 2 years time and if it’s more than $1050 then that investment isn’t worth it because I could make more from those $1000 in 2 years with no risk.

You could say that the baseline, no-risk, future value of today’s money is how much it will turn into by that future time if I kept it in a risk free investment from today until then, and you can also do the operation in reverse, Discounting the Value Of Money in the Future to a Present Day value.

PS: There is also another concept which applies here which is to do with having your money lock-into something called Opportunity Cost. Simply it’s trying to have a value for the investment opportunities you might miss if you money is already lock-in for a certain time frame in something. Back in the example above, if those $1000 are put in our example investment for 2 years, they can’t be used if a better opportunity appear in the meanwhile.

This actually applies to regular people all the time: for example, if you don’t have time to play a game, why buy it now if you can instead buy it later when you do have time to play it, it might be cheaper and you even have the option to change your mind in the meanwhile and get something else you enjoy more with that game. Mind you, this is maybe an example more suitable for the Patient Gamers forum than for the Piracy one ;)

Yeah, you are technically correct that it is possible to be an Euro member outside the EU or an EU member outside the Euro.

So it’s not impossible for Germany to leave the EU and remain an Euro member.

Just like, technically, it’s entirelly possible to fall from a tall bridge and survive, so it’s not impossible to jump off a tall bridge and survive.

It’s just unlikely in practice and jumping off a tall bridge expecting to survive is either stupidity or insanity.

To see just how ultra-special it would be for a Germany outside the EU to still have full Euro member rights, notice how all non-EU countries which are Euro members have microscopic economies and have very special historic sovereignty arrangements with existing EU members: 2 principalities which are protectorates of France, one territory governed by France half of the year and Spain the other half, and a special enclave in Rome for the Catholic Church.

So my point still stands: Germany leaves the EU, Germany leaves the Euro, though with the tiny possibility that Germany gets all other 26 members - many of which gain massivelly from Germany leaving the Euro and some which have “scores to settle” with Germany on that since back in 2012 - to agree that Germany can stay with full rights (good luck with that, better not do it during an election year in Greece).

Any rational person would evaluate a possibiliy of Germany leaving the EU assuming the most likely consequences in related domains such as Euro membership rather than repeat the same silly fantasism of the Brexiters of assuming “we’re special so we can beat the odds” ('cause that worked so well…)

As I’ve seen in Britain, the highly irrational simpleton Nationalism that presumes some special specialness from having born in a specific geographical area, invariably presumes against all indications that such special country and special people will get all they want from the rest when they leave, and, well … those who actually get to decide what the EU will concede are the one that stay in the EU and they don’t really share the fantasies of the nationalist of the leaving country and are hardly going to act in the leaving nation’s best interests.

Sorta.

Since a couple of years ago, new EU members are obligated to eventually become Euro members, and non-EU members need the agreement of the rest of the EU to have any say in how the Euro is managed (sure, non-EU countries can do the equivallent of dollarization with the Euro and just use it as currency or have a pegged currency, but that means no ability at all to participate in managing the currency which is what really matters for Germany in order to get all those sweet benefits of a currency managed taking in account weaker Economies) and there is only a handfull of small countries with such agreements.

By leaving the EU, Germany would immediatelly loose the right to have any say on things like how the Euro is managed and would have to negotiate any such things in the Exit Agreement.

So your “point” sounds a lot like the fantasism I heard in Britain from the Leave campaign: all about “we can still have this and that” whilst the reality was that ex-members are not entitled to an a la carte choice of all the things they want and have to negotiate it with the rest of the EU and since what comes out of that negotiation requires unanimous approval, they’re not going to get all that they want and what they do manage to get will cost them.

Germany’s Far Right watching the English Far Right making its country shoot itself on the foot:

“Hold my beer!”

If Germany left the Euro it would be great for everybody else as they make the currency far too strong for most countries, especially Southern Europe, so a German-less Euro would fall and relieve some of the debt pressure elsewhere.

It would however be shit for German-exports because a Neue Deutsche Mark would quickly go up once separated from the Euro (as it wouldn’t be pushed down by other EU country’s lower productivity), making German exports more expensive and hence less competitive, which in turn would negativelly impact the quality of life of Germans.

(Also outside the EU Germany can forget all about having the influence to save their own reckless banks by moving their debt at full value to EU nations and then forcing Southern European nations to pay, next time the Economy tanks and it turns out once again they’re overexposed)

That said, having observed the whole Brexit thing from inside Britain, I fully expect anything but easilly parrotable slogans and one-sided criticism will go over the heads of the Far Right simpletons (that was exactly how Brexit ended up happenning).

Mind you, Germany is a lot more capable of keep going with some success after leaving the EU than Britain, but it definitely derives massive irreplaceable trade benefits from being in the EU, especially the Euro.

It’s about the extreme violent racism of the Fascism in Israel.

At least in Europe, none of the variants of Fascism other than Nazisim ever engaged in the kind of widespread massacre of civilians from another etnic group whilst talking about them as untermenschen that you see being done in Israel (which before all this was already deeply racist about Palestinians and Arabs in general, but now went full-on Genocidal).

Whilst Netanyahu and his government haven’t gotten quite to the level of the original Nazis yet, they use similar propaganda techniques, display extreme racism towards Palestinians (calling them “human animals”, saying that “Palestinians are violent” - not Hamas, Palestinians - frequently claiming to want to expel or eliminate them and even suggesting nuking Gaza) and have already exceeded all other variants of Fascism in their violence in general and certainly in violence very specifically against civilians of another etnic group.

It’s interesting that he’s using an insult from England and in a context which would make him Royalty trying to control the Barons.

As far as I know - being from the place - Portugal has no national animal.

The closest is the Galo De Barcelos, which is not really a living animal but a well known clay figurine that any Portuguese would recognized.

No idea were that wolf in that picture came from.

This is a report from a Think Tank funded by organisations with specific political slants, including the George Soros Fundation.

It looks suspiciouly like it was framed - the purpose of Think Tanks is generally to generate technocratic explanations of for pre-determined “conclusions” - and they would be highly unlikely to give relevance to anything that makes Israel look bad, and if they did, then The Guardian would not publish it, as that British newspaper is aligned with New Labour and the Libdems and was a heavy participant in the “anti-semitism” slandler campaign to see off the threat of a leftwinger - Corbyn - as Labour party leader and which was so ridiculous they implied a Jewish Holocaust Survivor was an anti-semite in order to slander Corbyn by association for having sat on a panel in a conference were said Holocaust Survivor made some negative comments about Israel.

This would also explain why concerns like Corruption aren’t mentioned in this “reporty”, even thought at least in Southern Europe that’s pretty high in people’s minds - conceens about Corruption show a broader distrust and discontentment with mainstream politics after decades of it being dominated by the kind of politics this Think Tank espouses, and cannot just be framed as being about “external agents”.