scarabic

Public attention from them and others is why she’s being gently handled. You should thank those who raised the alarm on her behalf, not Israel.

Hey you could always move to Texas and enjoy a conservative life. Too hot? Alaska then.

Yes I think “having to work” is definitely the boundary of upper class. We’re talking inheritances, investments, landlording, whatever.

I earn a great deal of money at my job - top 1%. But I live in a HCOL area and am raising two kids. We have no aspirations but to own our house someday and send our kids to college. If we go on a vacation once a year we are happy. I would lose absolutely everything were I to get laid off from my job. We still look for sales at Costco and cook at home instead of eating out, like everyone else. This still feels like “middle class” to me, whatever my wage is.

However I am seeing that even the basic components of the American Dream, a house and a family, are more than most can attain. I think that says that our working class is growing and perhaps getting pretty large. Certainly if you are living hand to mouth that’s working class. If you have no prospect of owning your home or sending your kids to college, that’s working class.

“Working class” has associations from when we were an industrial and manufacturing economy. People who work in an office don’t think “I’m working class” because they don’t wear coveralls and operate power tools. But we’ve transitioned to a services-based economy now for many years, so I think a LOT of people are working class without even realizing it.

And if you don’t even know you’re working class, how are you going to get fired up about a workers rights rally?

I’ll add one extra thing here: that no one in America identifies themselves as “a worker” or “working class.”

Perhaps Europe, with its historic class strata, is better prepared for this. Maybe people there know that they are working class and always will be. With that identity firmly held, they can find each other and agitate for their rights.

In America, if you are working class, first of all you’d never admit it. Everyone is “middle class” here, don’t you know. And even if in your heart you know you are working class, your aim is to get out of the working class, not make its life better.

No justifications here, just a description of American psychology on this topic.

I wonder if your food bank can set up some kind of relationship with farms in your region. Those farms may be open to taking lots of spoiled produce as animal feed and compost material. In exchange they might share their crops with you.

My workplace used to donate all its leftover food to a local meal service charity, daily. But they refused to take fresh fruits and vegetables because they just spoil too fast. It was sad because those are the foods people need the most but they are logistically very difficult to deliver, as you are witnessing.

I agree with everything you said. I’ll just add that the scientific method is not how we set policy in general, though perhaps it should be.

Or just, you know, move on with your life.

To answer the question of what Matthew Broderick should do, I would need to have some information about what the victims/family want. Do they want an apology and public statement? They should get one. Do they want to be left alone? They should be.

The thing is YOU DO already have this information. They want to be left alone. You want to violate that and contact them to apologize for… contacting them before?

This isn’t hard dude. You aren’t Matthew Broderick. You didn’t kill anyone. You have an unhealthy fascination with this person from the very beginning of your story and you are working VERY hard to convince yourself that exercising it is in fact a moral imperative for you.

It is not. The only thing you can do for these people is leave them alone and digest your own feelings about it. Get therapeutic help, please.

People dropping dead from black-sky coal pollution is the only thing driving developing nations to consider alternatives to it.

Well don’t make the mistake I did and point out that Indian and Chinese coal are going to push us over the brink no matter what western nations do. People will jump down your throat to “educate” you about how western nations already did their climate damage to become developed and we don’t dare tell others they can’t do the same. Of course this white guilt changes nothing about my statement. We should be bending over backward to help these nations industrialize on a cleaner path than others did. And yes I’ve seen the paper from the one gentleman who “foresaw” climate change in the 1800s but if we are at all honest we have to acknowledge that western industrialization happened in ignorance of the effects of carbon dioxide on global warming. Would it have gone differently if they’d known? Probably not. That’s what we’re seeing in India.

The day the police officers who beat Rodney King were acquitted.