Also, having been on the other side of such a situation: it’s not cool to pressure or guilt trip your guests. Either be hospitable and let them do whatever they want, or don’t invite them.

If people aren’t hungry, then they aren’t hungry. Maybe they are on a diet, maybe they misunderstood OP’s intention and ate beforehand. Maybe they are recovering from something and don’t want to eat too much.

And as for the two that did not showed up. It’s a good practice to reconfirm the night before. Sometimes people forget. Sometimes life gets in the way.

If they did reconfirm and still didn’t show up and did not have a good excuse, then I would start looking for better friends.

Hope OP has better success next time. I do understand that the situation sucks.

But it’s also a situation that, in my opinion, is preventable.

Yep, all the electrical engineers who have chimed in say it looks more like explosives.

A battery would get hot and start a fire. It wouldn’t instantly explode like this.

Because they manage to attract investment.

As long as investors are willing to give cash in exchange for equity, a company can operate on that cash and run at a loss.

Look, I wouldn’t trust the GOP with my shit stained underwear.

Of course they don’t have a better plan.

But voters who vote for them are still voters.

And falling for a false narrative doesn’t make them hypocrites.

In their mind, they are voting for the party that will fix it.

You may disagree, as do I, but that’s what they think.

To be fair, it’s a flawed argument.

You can be against Google and Apple and still use a smartphone.

You can be against a genocide being sponsored with your tax dollars and still work and pay tax.

And yes, you can use the healthcare system that exists today and still want a different one tomorrow.

Or do you think that advocates of universal healthcare are also hypocrites for using Obamacare?

Correct.

But nobody is enforcing compliance.

So they can just keep it on American servers and sell it to OpenAI or share it with the US government.

Also, there are a lot of bots copying everything on reddit and other sites. Even if reddit would comply with GDPR, these bots cannot be traced and cannot be fined.

This is so weird, I would think it’s a parody or false flag.

But no, apparently it’s true.

Same energy as the Trump diapers and ear patches.

Weird and crazy. I would be ashamed to be associated with this crowd.

He should have said almost every.

But thanks for pointing out the mathematical truth ☝️

For one, you can’t transfer a 401K to your kids.

You have to first cash it out, pay income tax and then you can transfer what remains.

Then you’ll need to educate yourself beyond what the government tells you.

Look up the ProPublica leaks. Someone is serving a very long jail time for leaking that out. It clearly shows how billionaires have very low taxable income, probably lower than yours.

To then say that you are upper class and Jeff Bezos is middle class is… Absurd.

The top 10% of income is not upper class. The error that people make, including you, is to focus on income.

People like Elon Musk have incomes smaller than $100K.

Upper class are the people who do not need to work and who live off of capital.

We need to shift our focus on wealth equality.

Look, the economy needs capital. If we want to be less dependent on the capital of rich people, then middle class people need to take over that role.

The people making $100-300K per year are key, because they can provide an alternative source of capital if their tax burden is lowered.

The people making $50K will not be able to provide large amounts of capital.

Yes, I fully agree.

So we need to find the right messaging.

I don’t know about Germany, but here in the Netherlands most people identify as middle class.

So “stop taxing the middle class” and “let the billionaires pay more” is a message that should resonate.

I’m optimistic and I believe we will get there. The level of equality we have today would be unfathomable for somebody living before 1945.

Which is why the tax system needs to be reformed.

The political right actually has one good point that we on the left don’t always appreciate: taxes on middle class people should be lower.

Specifically, very liberal tax exemptions on things like 401Ks, including the ability to transfer wealth across generations.

Combine that with higher taxes on the wealthy, and it will be possible to shift power to the middle class.

Consider the total market cap of the S&P 500, rounded up it’s about 50 trillion. Divide that among 130 million households and each household should own about $400K in stock on average.

Full equality is neither achievable nor desired by most people, so a good scheme would be to let every household hold up to $1M in wealth, tax exempt.

And then progressively tax everything above that.

No more billionaires, but everyone can be a millionaire.

The shortest path to equality is to greatly reduce taxes on the middle class and increase them on the wealthy.

It puzzles me why leftist parties don’t all embrace lower taxes for the middle class.

I agree. The rule based order only works if the rules apply to everyone.

And from a more realpolitik perspective: the Arab world is our (European) backyard.

We really don’t benefit from instability there.

While I do agree with you, I also see twitch, TikTok and Patreon presenting models that are quite competitive with YouTube.

From a privacy perspective, free junk content like TikTok, YouTube and twitch will always be hard coupled with targeted advertising.

But Patreon (and onlyfans for that matter) do offer a model that can work without ads.

In fact, if Patreon also introduced an ad-supported tier and allowed you to more broadly see other content aside from the direct person you sponsor, it could probably grow quite a lot.

Indeed - and I really hope it passes.

I thought about mentioning it in my previous comment. But basically, it’s another example that States hold most of the power. The States actually have the power to effectively replace the current system with a national popular vote if they choose.

Other examples are the IRV in Alaska and the district system in Maine and Nebraska.

Both elections exactly prove my point.

The federal system is set up to favor State power, which is why the US presidential election isn’t decided by popular vote. By design, Wyoming and California are considered equals in many respects.

It’s a bad system, but it’s very much entrenched in the constitution.

And it also requires critical mass. It’s basically impossible to enact meaningful change with a 50-55% majority. You need 60% or more to get big changes. And a majority of states.

A somewhat less pessimistic take: the system is set up to be self-stable.

And it was also designed so that States would have most of the power, not the Federal government.

At various points in history the common people did get benefits. New Deal. Universal suffrage. Civil rights. Abolition.

But it always requires a critical mass of the population to support change.