In this day and age, accepting cash payments is the least shady and most customer friendly thing of all.

It’s the ones who want to know ALL about you and partner with payment processors who want to know ALL about you that are shady.

Surelly the right answer would’ve been “Go back to Europe”.

(Mind you, as an European, please don’t).

The Neoliberal ideology, with its core principle of making Money the greatest Power, above the State which is the Power controlled by the vote of citizens, was always meant to destroy Democracy.

Whilst the theatre used to distract us has been different, we’ve been going in the same direction as Russia when it comes to the vote: making it a meaningless act whilst we’re told it’s “democratic”.

Unsurprisingly as people felt more and more powerless, pushed around, exploited and unfairly treated all the while being told this is Democracy, they turned more and more to those selling something else than Democracy.

It seems the natural end state of Neoliberal Capitalism is Fascism.

Books, lots and lots of books.

Mate, the horse whip and the wheel were Technology back when they got invented.

It’s a massivelly generic word.

Absolutelly some Technology has reduced drudgery. Meanwhile some Technology has managed to increase it (for example: one can make the case that the mobile phone, by making people be always accessible, has often increased pressure on people, though it depends on the job), some Technology has caused immense Environmental destruction, some Technology has even caused epidemics of psychological problems and so on.

Not only is there a lot of stuff in the big umbrella called Technology, but the total effect of one of those things is often dependent on how its its used and Capitalism seems especially prone to inventing and using Technology that’s very good for a handful of people whilst being bad for everybody else.

One can’t presume that just because something can be classified as Technology it will reduce drudgery or in even that it will be overall a good thing, even if some past Technologies did.

Best Windows built-in way to open files with Unix end lines.

Pfew … I moved to Linux just in time!

I spontaneously curse at it, in 4 different (spoken) languages even and abundantly so at times, but I don’t feel the need to actually write down the swear words.

Writting it down just doesn’t feel the same as merelly just letting out those expletives that naturally arise during the making (and, especially, testing) of software.

Is that but on the side of the head. It can also be tapping on the side of the head.

The Dutch gesture for intelligent is touching the side of the head with the index finger, which can be confused with the second version of the Portuguese one for crazy.

Mind you, I just realized I’m not sure about those things anymore (I lived for over 2 decades abroad) and had to google to make sure.

Related to that, the whole physical signalling stuff is quite a mess.

For example there are cultures were waving your head up and down back and forth does not mean “Yes”, it means “No”.

I found this kind of stuff out when I moved from my homeland, Portugal, to The Netherlands: it turns out the signal for “he/she is crazy” in Portugal is the same as the signal for “he/she is intelligent” in The Netherlands. Mind you, for me it was a great source of humour.

That’s Me IRL!

A Racism so institutionalized that it’s written down on the Constitution isn’t Liberalism and denying the vote to the millions who used to live there (and some who still do) by denyng them citizenship isn’t Democracy.

That can indeed be a problem.

It is however not what the MIT guys wrote as being the problem: they quite literally said the problem with too much solar generation at peak times is that it drives prices down.

Also, curiously, the prices being driven down actually helps with the real technical problem that you point out: those consumers who can move their consumption times will tend to move them to those hours when the prices are lowest thus helping solve it. Same thing goes for investors: the more the price is pushed down at peak solar production times, the more appealing it is to invest in things like storage or even solutions with lower efficiency (such as green hydrogen or electricity transportation cables to markets less well served by solar).

The low prices aren’t the problem from a technical point of view, quite the contrary: they’re an incentive to invest in solutions (which is going to employ a lot of techies, so supposedly MIT would be all in favor of it)

So by Israel’s own standard of discourse, they’re “using human shields” and hence any amount of killing of Israeli civilians is perfectly justified not matter how great the disproportion of civilians to non-civilians killed, their age or gender.

A rabidly racist Appartheid State founded on 19th century white colonialist values which it has preserved and even strengthened ever since isn’t a Liberal Democracy, quite the contrary.

There’s the Left Butt Cheek Party and the Right Butt Check Party, both from the same ass hence why you get the same shit from both.

The real special bit is that this crap isn’t coming from, say Harvard, who one expects is all about business, but MIT which is supposed to be about Science and Engineering.

I suspect we’re running with different versions of “middle-class”.

In Europe middle-class used to be about the kind of work one did and roughly correlated with doing or not manual work - those doing manual work were considered working class and those doing office work were middle class.

This tended to also match incomes, so middle-class usually had a middle range income, higher than the working class but not as high as the rich.

This all sorta matched because non-manual work was generally either some kind of management position or some position requring higher education - such as, say Medical Doctor, Engineer or Architect - which very few people back then had.

It wasn’t about what an income could buy, it was about the kind of work people did, their level of formal education and the level of their income compared to others.

Things have however changed a lot - a much higher percentage of people have higher education, most of the income advantage of higher education is gone and in general all layers but the rich have fallen down in the income ladder - were there was a middle class there is now mostly a gap and essentially the working class and the middle class have been squeezed together.

IMHO, what we have nowadays is a two class system:

• The Owner Class are people whose income is mainly from the ownership of things, not work.
• The Working Class are people whose income is mainly from working.

However we were talking about the 60s and I do belive there was actually a “middle class” back then, at least per the definition we had in Europe.

The existence and purchasing power of the minimum wage is applicable to the working class and the poor, not the middle class unless your theory is that there is no such thing as a working class or poor and “middle class” starts at the bottom of pay scale, which would be strange given that being “middle class” at least back in the 60s was about what kind of work people did and were did they sit in the income scale relative to other people (hence the word “middle”) - so office workers back then were typically middle class whilst blue collar workers were typically working class, both due to the latter doing “manual” work unlike the former and having a lower income relative to the former.

That explains why I misunderstood your point as meaning that the minimum could not buy all that much, which per your clarification in this post is not what you meant.

Granted, compared to today, the working class of the 60s had more purchasing power than much if not most of today’s so-called middle-class.

The previous poster’s point wasn’t that there wasn’t a middle class, it was that blue collar workers and traders aren’t middle class which would be correct per the definition of “middle class” I provided in the 1st paragraph of this post.

So a 1960 minimum wage could buy an average home with 5 years of 40h/week and you don’t think that’s a “pretty good life” compared to the current situation?!

One of the biggest problems nowadays is exactly that the house-prices to incomes ratio is several times what it was back then.