I quite frankly flat out do not understand why people on the left are so against space exploration suddenly
Ever heard the song “whitey on the moon?”
Setting that aside, exploring space is not the same thing as building a company town for the world’s least mentally stable pregnancy fetishist oligarch in an unworldly cold desert where everyone is sure to die.
The way this has worked is that the Japanese economy has bifurcated with the graduation-to-retirement employment being available to a ever smaller group of white collar workers called salary-men. To become a salary-man you have to go to college and get hired the year you graduate through campus recruiting. If you miss your “window” then you can’t become a salary-man and will be stuck in contingent work for the rest of your life.
The people quitting in this case are not salary-men (a salary-man quitting would be pretty unthinkable) but their bosses probably are, hence the cultural divide.
Sometimes salary-men do lose their jobs due to bankruptcy of the organization for instance. Typically the solution if that happens is to jump in front of a train.
My understanding is that the employer side of this contract quit getting honored religiously during the lost decade and employment in Japan is increasingly contingent and precarious.
If they said they didn’t find any, then everyone would know it was a whitewash. So they decided to “find” a small amount and then pat themselves on the back.
Reality is about to get all melty and people are gonna have six fingers.
US Chamber of Commerce doesn’t exactly seem like the most impartial source…
And laws that do protect the little guys get ignored by our right-wing courts. For instance, the courts quit enforcing the Sherman Antitrust Act because, in the words of Scalia, “it makes no economic sense.”
Scamming is bad but I gotta admit… kinda hard to feel sorry for people taking advice from Elon Musk.
Is it really possible to sign away a right to sue a company, especially hidden in an EULA?
Yes it is. It is called “forced arbitration” and pretty much every contract you are compelled to sign has it.
In any kind of just society with a fair legal system it would not be legal. But that doesn’t describe us or our legal system.
doctor who owns a nice house 2 cars and maybe a rental property has more interests in common with an oil baron
Yes he does and what’s more, he knows it! He’s not loyal to the baron because he’s an idiot. He’s doing so because he knows how his bread is buttered.
Yelling at him that he has “nothing to lose but his chains” won’t work because he has a lot to lose besides his chains. In fact he probably suspects (rightly) that his rental property, his medical practice and his fancy car will all be torched in the revolution long before anything happens to the baron.
The middle class is real and was originally identified by Engels.
The important distinction for Engels is that the middle class’s interest are aligned with the upper class. Importantly: they don’t think their interest s are aligned. Their interests really are aligned with the upper class. If you’re a solicitor or, say, hat-maker to the king in 18th century England, you owe your social position to upper class largess.
In the 20th century the idea developed that with organizing, the middle class lifestyle is attainable for everyone. This began the era of the “broad middle class” or what Piketty called the “patrimonial middle class.” Engel’s original middle class in this society was the PMC.
In the late 20th and early 21st century the upper class started a class war, first targeting organized labor. But with that deed done they are now focusing on the ranks of the PMC, which they see as bloated, and they’re going through and evicting as many people as they can from it.
Saw an interview with a guy (on Bloomberg actually) who explained that “ability to pay” and “willingness to pay” are two different things and that the pricing system doesn’t target people who have a lot of money (“ability to pay”) but rather people who have fewer options.
Like, if the app knows that you don’t have a car and this is the only grocery store you can walk to, you will pay a higher price.
I shop at Jewel (which is currently under threat of being taken over by Kroger) and they’re now doing this thing where there will be, for instance, peaches, under a huge sign showing an incredible deal. Then you look at it and realize that the price isn’t discounted at all unless you install a “Jewel App” and use it to “claim” a “digital coupon.”
The middle class historically was the loyal servants of the upper class, whose expertise was needed to maintain the system. While they worked for wages they were allowed income sufficient to accumulate surpluses, property, and a facsimile of financial security.
In the 20th century it seemed possible for labor organizing to grant the privileges of the middle class to everyone in society. People who were definitely working-class were able to live like the middle class.
In the 21st century the rich seem to be starting to operate on the idea that, not only can labor be broken and the working class cast back down into hand-to-mouth poverty, but that vast numbers of people in the professions have been misclassified as essential loyal servants and they, too, can be cast down into poverty. I think the end state is that the middle class is squeezed down to the size it was during the gilded age and return to being an afterthought rather than the central focus of our politics.
My guess is you’re seeing the computer go into a reject loop until a human operator finally takes over.
Russia’s nuclear sabre rattling isn’t credible because their nuclear arsenal is not dispersed. Dispersal is the key to a nuclear exchange and it’s why both sides spend so many billions on submarines and stratobombers. Since the cold war Russia’s nuclear assets have been sitting grouped at bases around the country. If Putin wants to be credible he has to first order the planes in the air and the submarines to sea. But the submarine he sent to Cuba was accompanied by a tug “just in case.”
This whole thing has been so mask-off for Israel. I used to think that BDS was a distraction, that “Israel has right to defend itself” that “it’s the only real democracy in the middle east” etc. Now I know there is no space between Israel and Putin’s Russia. These are the bad guys. Full stop.
He’s a “free-breathing absolutist.” He thinks everyone should have a supply of oxygen except the people he personally doesn’t like.