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.

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.

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.

Just ask yourself one question. Are you doing this to soothe your own feelings? It sure sounds like that. So just put away the “but I want to do the right thing” bit and recognize that sometimes the right thing to do is nothing.

No we singlehandedly defeated Japan. We weren’t the ONLY ones fighting the Nazis, just the deciding power in that conflict. You’re welcome.

I don’t say this as a justification but they have probably placed them further out so the plants can get light. Back up against the building, under that overhang, they would not get the light they need, and after a few days this inventory would spoil and be lost, which is probably bad news for someone’s job.

Again, not a justification. I just don’t think the placement is completely at random.

“Why isn’t someone doing it for me already? You all suck.”

—OP

Hey go be pro-labor without trivializing gay rights. There is absolutely no call for that bullshit.

I guess when your currency is weak you need to focus on domestic independence and be very judicious about foreign purchasing.

This is true. It’s also true that Europe needs to have the capacity to handle something like this on their own. The complaint that the US won’t save Europe THIS TIME, AGAIN, says as much about Europe as the US.

In this day and age I’m always amazed and heartened to hear that there is enough wildlife left to be such a problem like this.

for cheap rice

But isn’t this just the definition of a shortage? The thing becomes scarce and so what IS available becomes incredibly expensive? I don’t see the differentiation you are trying to make. Wild price inflation happens when there is in fact not enough of the thing to go around.

You don’t seem to understand the word proof.

Proof means it can demonstrate what is true to anyone.

“If everything I’m saying is true, then this book is evidence of the truth!”

See, all I have to do is believe LOTR is real and then I meet your burden of proof. See how pathetic a standard that is?

Before you say no one believes LOTR is real, let me remind you that yes there are some people, and I consider them about as crazy as Christians are. Secondly, there are thousands of religions with supposed texts. Are all of those “proof” too?

I’ve heard the same self-validating logic about the council of Nicea. When asked “how could this possibly be the word of god when it was so clearly meddled with by human decisions?”

The answer: “well if you accept at all that it’s the word of god, don’t you think he would make sure it came out right?”

In other words, you either believe it or you don’t. But that’s the beauty of actual evidence, actual proof: you don’t have to already believe in it. It is sufficient to change preconceptions.

But why am I not surprised at this conversation. I mean OBVIOUSLY a religious person wouldn’t understand the very idea of proof. “Faith is the evidence of things unseen” blah blah. The brainwashing is real. People lose their very faculty to reason.

Zero plastic doesn’t need to be a goal. There has rarely if ever been a more versatile and useful material. Delivering food and medicine to humanity would be impossible if we all woke up tomorrow without plastic.

So it’s more a case of judicious use:

1. use when no feasible alternative exists (not just because plastic is most convenient)
2. invest in effective recycling and recovery programs, including total incineration - AND (important) make sure the cost of this is shifted upstream to the manufacturers of plastics

There will be many cases where “no feasible alternative exist” and that will mean “it is prohibitively costly to do it with glass and steel.” I think that is really your questions. The answer is yes, sometimes plastic is actually best.

But I’d feel much more comfortable deciding that for a given use case IF #2 actually existed. Under current conditions, there may be no reasonable use of plastic at all.