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.

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.

Unfortunate reality, but headline placement is quite OK.

I know a lot of people don’t like the American First Past the Post system, but to be honest, even in a proportional system like here in the Netherlands, you end up with very similar dynamics.

Truth is, progressives are always a small minority, in every country. Because they are always ahead of the curve on change.

In the US, this means that you only get a handful of progressives in the most progressive districts and never a really progressive national government.

In the Netherlands, this means progressives are always represented, but need to compromise to form a government. And often, they even get skipped and the centrist and conservative parties form a coalition.

Truth be told, Biden is as progressive as you could hope to get in the USA.

And, while I do think it is important to criticize him - and even threaten to not vote for him - to enable him to move more towards the left, it is also important to vote for him.

Progressives always win, not through getting majorities, but because they have the right ideas and eventually the other parties catch up to them.

For recent examples, gay marriage in the USA or marihuana legalization are now law in the USA.

I am 100% confident that American policy on Israel will also shift thanks to progressive voices. And it will not require a progressive majority.

Americans still care about the price of oil, which is set in a global market and where Saudi-Arabia and Russia have more influence than the USA.

Obviously, the extremist Arabs that overthrew their own leaders are also to blame. Where did I deny that?

I don’t think you really have a lot of choices to be honest.

You’d first need to get new candidates to win a primary and then a general and the required majorities are lacking almost everywhere.

A more fruitful approach is to actually change public opinion.

It’s a long uphill battle, but it’s happening.

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.

Indeed, also it’s much nicer to use a shared high quality tool than to buy an el-cheapo disposable tool.

Even something simple like a crowbar. I once borrowed a (shorter) professional crowbar after struggling with a (larger) cheap one. The thing I was trying to pry came out like butter.

Even though physics dictates that a shorter lever should be inferior, it just had a much better design and grip.

Better for our wallet, sanity and environment.

From a lecture by Roger Penrose

Wikipedia has an article and he has some videos on YouTube

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction

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Indeed, a pool of menstruation blood would be the more accurate equivalence.