“The provisions make it difficult to run a business efficiently and provide adequate customer service,” said the sponsor of the legislation, Rep. Sherri Gallick, R-Belton. “The unpredictability threatens the stability of businesses, large and small.”

If that is the case, how is it that businesses, small and large, manage it in every other country in the world except the US, Sri Lanka, South Korea and Somalia for G-d’s sake! I mean, these people are just one step up from Somalia, where there is no sick leave at all!

Um… if you look at the post again, you will find that the doctor in question is a PhD, admittedly in neuroscience, which does produce results used by medical doctors. But there is no indication the woman in question has ever, or will ever, practise medicine in a clinical setting. For that matter, there is only the inference from the mention of a US podcast that she is even American, mmm?

But, then, I infer from your userrname that you are male, and from your post that you are American. So I am not, at this point in history, terribly surprised if you have jumped to a wrong conclusion about the actual content of a woman’s doctorate.

Signed, another woman with a doctorate that has nothing whatsoever to do with practising medicine in the USA, although you’d never know it from the number of Americans who immediately tell me their symptoms upon introduction. (Ah, yes! I think Napoleon died of something similar on Ste. Helena. Or possibly he was poisoned. But then French history is not my field, either.)

No need. Just invest 10% of that amount in McDonald’s gift cards that expire at the end of April and wait for nature to take its course. Send the other 90% to Luigi to share with his prison mates.

In fairness to Picketty, he did think we could avoid neo-feudalism if ordinary people set aside their competitive and selfish natures to focus on the co-operation that is at the heart of our success as a species. Funnily enough, Mike Berners-Lee wrote the same thing at the end of There is No Planet B (a book I do wish more of the billionaire tech bros had read).

So, yeah: we’re big fucked.

Yeah. Sure. Measles can actually destroy the immune system so that it forgets not only that you have had measles, but everything else you’ve developed an immunity to (it’s called immune amnesia) by having the disease or having a vaccine, and face getting the whole mob again. Or, you could be the 1 or 2 people in 1000 who will die, or the 1 in 1000 who will get encephalitis and live, albeit significantly intellectually and physically disabled. Or you could get subacute sclerosing panencephalitis ten years after you had measles, and that’s almost always fatal.

Makes getting shingles after having chicken pox as a kid seem like a walk in the park, mmm?

Thomas Picketty predicted this in Le Capital au XXI e siècle / Capital in the 21st Century (2013), as the nearly inevitable outcome of neoliberal economic behaviour, based onvast statistical evidence gathered by governments and expert organisations over more than a century. About the only thing he got wrong was, like even the meteorological experts, underestimating the speed at which climate chaos was going to overwhelm the world’s societies and abet the billionaires’ takeover.

I really, REALLY recommend that book, if you have the capacity to slog through dense academic prose (in translation, yet!). To make it easier to lift the book, which would otherwise have been maybe 5,000 pages, give or take a couple of complicated graphs, , Picketty put all the footnotes and appendices online. They do reward reading/examining, at least where you want to see the evidence in very fine detail.

Or, get an economics geek to translate for you.

You made my baby fall in love with me!

The Guardian, The Tyee, BBC, CBC, Reuters and AP, with a dash of utterly unreliable press from abroad.

Ay! Oy!

And, while you’re looking for it, could you also tell me Who put the bomp In the bomp bah bomp bah bomp? Who put the ram In the rama lama ding dong?

It seems to take more keywords to home in on the kind of speciality items I look for, and does not always appear to detect connections between those keywords, for example in trying to find certain kind of veterinary support devices made to national specifications. One of the other commentors says Kagi is okay for shopping, so maybe I’ll give it a whirl because I’d love to be free of Google once and for all.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

I’m interested, but a bit reluctant. I find DuckDuckGo quite adequate for most things, except shopping online, something that I have to rely on for certain categories of items. How is Kagi on shopping?

You were born into a highly social species. The basis of human society (and that of many other social species) is co-operation and mutual aid to increase the individual’s chance of survival and reproduction, make life for group members easier and, at least since Neanderthals and Denisovians, longer, rather than, as Thomas Hobbes opined “nasty, brutish and short”. While it is quite true that there are those who game the system to reap more than their share of the benefits while giving less or nothing back, overall, those who give more are more likely to ‘earn’ the respect of their fellows and gain the help they need to live as well as possible within whatever circumstances they find themselves.

Don’t be too sure that the evil face no consequences. Until their book is finished and closed, you cannot know they will not wish once more to ride down the slope on Rosebud. I knew a woman who was the head nurse on a terminal ward for years – to this day, I don’t know how she did it. She told me one evening that, in all those years, no one had ever died wishing they’d made more money or achieved greater power, but many of the elite that passed through her ward died alone.

As an old Canadian socialist with the lumps to prove it, I agree. There is so much performance, and so little action. I spend time on reddit, trying to get keyboard warriors to understand that posting an opinion will not magically cause the fascist Administration to collapse and get a lot of “The media refuses to cover us!” bullpuckey. There are thousands of newsrooms in the USA that are not owned by billionaire tech bros or MAGA devotees (see, for example https://www.trustworthymedia.org/ › list-of-independent-media ) and most social media is still wide open to pictures and facts about your actions. If you are acting, let the independent media – most but not all of whom are progressive, check first – know and post your pictures (faces blurred if need be) and stories everywhere you can reach people.

Meantime, buy Canadian, buy local, or don’t buy at all, at least it’s something!