I ask a lot of questions; I want to understand and consider…. Political spin makes me dizzy. A like is for that tweet-not you, your ideology- it’s not that deep
@karol Musk is accomplishing so much and doing so much. They need to villainize him so they can villainize his success. That’s the only way they can promote socialism/communism and consolidate their power.
@clashreport A dr note on the first day?!? That’s quite a swing. Likely to place a burden on the healthcare system. And now that Europe will have to begin funding more of their own defense social programs/policies will probably continue to be impacted.
Germany's Chancellor Merz:
We can no longer accept the extraordinarily high levels of sick leave in our companies.
We are abolishing sick leave by telephone and introducing the requirement to submit a medical certificate from the very first day of illness.
We know this is a tough decision. But we can no longer afford this competitive disadvantage caused by prolonged absences from work.
I understand the point, and it's worth taking seriously. Yes, you must work to live. But look at why that's true, because the reason changes everything.
The need to produce isn't imposed by employers or capitalism. It's imposed by nature. A man alone on an island must fish, build, and grow or he dies. That's not a threat from another person. It's the basic condition of being alive. Food, shelter, and clothing don't exist until someone makes them.
So when you say work is "forced" by the threat of starvation, that threat comes from reality itself, not from the man offering you a job. He didn't create your need to eat. He's offering you a way to meet it, a trade, his wealth for your effort. That's not coercion. Coercion is a gun. An offer you can refuse, even a hard one, is the opposite of force.
And here's the part the resentment hides. The employer isn't your enemy in this. He's the one who built the thing that lets you meet nature's demand without fishing alone on a rock. The men who produce the most, the ones who create the factories, the tools, the jobs, are the greatest benefactors of all, because they multiply what every worker can earn far beyond what he could alone.
That's why the moral debt runs the other way. We don't owe our lives to the takers. We owe an enormous debt to the producers, whose ability raises the standard of living of everyone beneath them. The man who gives you a way to live has done you good, not harm.
Warren identified the deeper problem almost a century before Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek made it famous in academic economics.
When everyone owns everything, no one owns anything. When labor earns the same reward regardless of effort, effort disappears. When prices vanish, no one knows what anything is worth.
@omgsidewalks The planet isn’t warming though; it’s cooling. The get we’re experiencing may be a result of the heat radiating as the planet cools. Part of Milankovitch cycles.
@TVietor08@NickKristof What about those who used USAID$ for political purposes instead of aid? Wouldn’t they be directly responsible for deaths? They did it for years and I havent seen a single post calling out activists who decided their political will was more important than AIDS patients or whatever
Swear on it, Sam Power. Swear to God and under penalty of perjury that this was the only HIV/AIDS program USAID ever used for covert operations or regime change. SWEAR ON IT.
Disappointed to see this using the “conservative pounce” formulation.
I’m Gen X. All of us, including liberals like me, were there when we watched a nation filled with brilliant people put its best minds to making socialism work. It was an unparalleled disaster — not just economically, but environmentally, and certainly from a human rights perspective as well.
The fact that we now have people on both the right and the left who think Lenin was on to something, or that “real socialism has never been tried,” is mind-blowing. It represents a massive generational failure of our K–PhD system. They didn’t learn the history, philosophy, or economics that would have prevented them from falling for the same midwittery that too many of our grandparents fell for.
Sure, it sounds nice. Utopia always does. But it was a colossal disaster that we must not repeat.
So no, Axios. The news isn’t that the GOP is sounding the alarm. It’s that more genuine liberals aren’t.
@farhip Not a mistake. A failure. Negligence. She’s supposed to be a professional journalist. A piece was published based on something she thought she overheard? Embarrassing- and not just for her but for everyone else it went through before being posted.
If my Royalty Transparency Act passed, every government official & federal scientist would be REQUIRED to publicly disclose any pharmaceutical royalties or profits they receive from companies.