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, but nowadays they are losing popularity. I don’t even know if you can still find them.

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.

The humiliation of losing to a black woman.

The past months the mood in America has been: not these two old geezers again.

I am honestly optimistic that it’s going to be a landslide for the Democrats without Biden. Americans are just sick of Trump and they didn’t want Biden to run again.

So the Democrats are giving the people what they want, while the Republicans are trying to force feed them something they don’t want.

Let’s see how this plays out.

Kamala Harris was born October 20th, 1964.

Gen X starts at 1965 and Baby boomers end in 1964.

You were this close Gen X…

Well, to be fair, he should have stepped down a year ago, or at least 3 months ago. I vaguely remember him saying he was going to be a 1 term candidate in 2020.

Anyway, I respect Biden. I honestly think he was a better president than Obama, Bush, Trump and Clinton. Perhaps the best since Carter or JFK.

Correct.

And Kamala is the most logical choice, because there will be the least amount of legal hurdles, since she was already on the ticket.

And the Republicans already said they are going to mount legal challenges, which can easily lead to SCOTUS deciding the election. So I expect Sanders, AOC and progressives to strongly push for Kamala.

But I fully expect the DNC to push forward some corporate candidate like Bloomberg.

It’s going to be interesting.

Honestly, this is why I really like the hard sciences.

The default human way of thinking is to revert towards ideas that are conventional, intuitive and convenient.

In the hard sciences, it is usually (but not always) celebrated when someone comes with new kick-ass evidence to overturn conventual wisdom.

Often, this celebration lags by a few years or decades and scientists often only get credit after their death.

But still, it’s better than regurgitating the same old ideas that some ancient bros thought of when they drank a bit too much mead.

For decades, Israel and the US (and European countries) have pursued a policy to destabilize middle eastern regimes.

People don’t realize this, but there was a wave of Arab nationalism that was killed by sponsoring Islamic extremists. Had that not happened, the middle east would be much more secular today than it is.

Israel attacking and destabilizing Lebanon and Syria and the US maintaining a dictator in Egypt are part of this strategy.

In turn, this leads to hate towards the West and Israel by the Muslims affected.

It won’t stop as long as American voters care much more about gas prices than about human rights. American politicians are willing to sponsor genocide to have some control on oil prices in order to win elections.

It’s really insane that the police get called on US citizens peacefully protesting against a genocide in a foreign country.

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You are stuck at step 1, I invite you to move on to step 2 and actually start looking at how we are gonna solve problems.

You can go back all the way to colonial times and feudal times and even earlier to discuss how societies have become less egalitarian since the invention of agriculture.

But we are here, right now and it’s best to identify the actions we can take today, for a brighter tomorrow.

Not changing history. Just saying that democrats had all the power they could want and failed to implement change to make things better. Literally after running on a campaign of Change.

The people blaming Reagan are fighting a 3 decade old culture war.

Fact is, things really weren’t all that bad in the 80s and 90s.

They only really started getting bad after the financial crisis in 2008.

And which party got both the presidency and a majority in Congress that year? Hint: doesn’t start with R.

Would such a strategy legally work in the USA?

Here in the Netherlands, a plan to regulate maximum rents seems to be much more promising.

We will know if it worked in about 2-3 years.

You might be interested to learn about the concept called “hostile witness”.

Google is your friend. Hope that helps.