Those people are by definition not middle class, as they are having to borrow capital — land to live on — from those who have more capital than them (their landlords), and labor for others with more capital than them (their employers) to get the money to pay for that. They don't have enough capital to just labor to obtain the resources they consume; they also have to labor extra to borrow capital from others. That a large portion of people are stuck in that situation, and thus not middle class, is precisely the point I'm making.

How the hell are the poor schmucks stuck renting a bedroom in someone else's house going to get their hands on even bare land, much less the tools and materials needed to do anything productive with it? Land is about the most expensive thing there is. If everyone owned their own land we wouldn't be in this problem — people wouldn't have to worry about putting up with their shit jobs just to make rent and not get thrown immediately out into the street. People would have a leg to stand on, economically, and could actually bargain for a fair value for their labor because they wouldn't be entirely dependent on borrowing other people's capital (like land to live on) just to survive another day.

Christian law also prohibited usury for the longest time. (Until around the Protestant Reformation).

It's the reason Jews were villainized as greedy schemers: Christians (in Christian lands) were legally prohibited from lending at interest, but Jews (not being bound by Christian law) could, meaning that they were the only ones doing it, and getting all the flak for it.

Even then though, and still today in the Muslim world, there were complicated work-arounds involving a combination of an "interest-free" loan, insurance, and rental, which created in effect a loan at interest, and is part of why the Christian world eventually let up on prohibitions of usury, because it was effectively happening anyway despite the prohibition of it. The loophole there, as I see it, was failing to see that rent is precisely the same thing as lending at interest, or rather, that interest is a special case of rent: it's just rent on money.

In any case you're lending capital temporarily in exchange for a permanent transfer of even greater capital back to you, which causes the problem of wealth concentration, redistributing wealth from those who have less of it (and thus need to borrow it) to those who have more of it already (and thus can afford to lend it out), which has the secondary effect of requiring those with less of it to labor for those with more of it in order to continue borrowing to survive, in effect creating perpetual servitude of a working class to an owning class.

And when technological revolutions make labor less valuable, that kind of class division becomes unsustainable, and either the working class has to just die off, or take some capital for themselves by force —unless everyone can see the undesirability of either of those outcomes, and change the system somehow to let the capital flow back from the leisure class to the labor class, as it naturally would without such concentrating influences as rent and interest.

You're right that wealth isn't money and that classes are defined by wealth not money, and I don't have anything to say about whether the middle class as defined by actual wealth is shrinking or growing, but it is very clear that a majority of people are not middle class in terms of wealth, and that's a present problem, whether it's getting worse or better.

The middle class are those who have enough productive capital to make their own living without having to constantly borrow it from others at the cost of their labor — that is, those who aren't pure subservient laborers, those who own their own homes and businesses and such outright, who are their own "bosses" and "landlords", independent of others in those roles — but who yet don't have so much capital that they can subsist entirely off the labor of others in exchange for the lending of that capital, and still have to labor themselves — that is, those who aren't capitalists (in the original sense of "owning class", not "supporter of capitalism").

It's terribly difficult to find statistics on how many people own their own homes at all (much less own them outright), as the most common figures speak only of how many homes are owner-occupied (which is not the same thing), but it's clear just from looking at some monetary statistics — the median income is about $25k, and the median home price is about $200k — that most people cannot afford their own homes, and so are not by any measure middle-class.

Amazing that you can twist an impending failure of capitalism and the predictable consequent social upheaval to follow as somehow the fault of "socialist" social engineering and something those socialists have been trying to cause, rather than something they've been warning about and trying to avoid.

The only way society can continue to function as there is less and less value to human labor is for the productive capital to become more evenly distributed. There are lots of ways that could happen, from one extreme of just letting the poor die so only the wealthy capital-owners and the robots that support them remain (with the capital more evenly distributed amongst that now-smaller population), to another extreme of those poor rising up with their torches and pitchforks and taking the productive capital by force (the bogeyman you're afraid of), and a lot of less terrible possibilities in between those extremes.

But one way or another, an economic system that hinges entirely on one class trading their labor for the temporary use of the capital of another class (capitalism) simply cannot continue to function when the value of labor drops toward zero.

Which is totally possible if the site is in gradual decline.

Poland can sue both Germany and Russia. All of eastern Europe can sue for 45 years of post-WW II occupation. Ukraine can sue for more dead than Russia can claim from Germany.

I don't think they want to open that can of worms.

If the menu only changes once a day, why not use a phone to take one picture, then use Dropbox or something similar to post that one picture to a constant location which is publicly visible?

Mulder and Scully's debate wasn't so much about fantasy vs science as it was "this is paranormal" vs "this has a perfectly normal explanation". Aliens, for the big example of the show's myth-arc, are both paranormal in the context of the show, and also clearly scientific. Scully's position is not just "this could be explained in principle, we could do science to this and understand it", it's "this is probably just something perfectly within the bounds of known science". While Mulder's position was not "this is crazy and unexplainable and nobody will ever understand how or why it's happening!", it was "something unknown to mainstream science is happening, this is a new phenomena we haven't documented and studied yet".

That said, on the topic of Buffy, it certainly does contain some sci-fi elements, but also contains plenty of things that are treated as raw fantasy. But, since it is all about presentation and not content, it would be perfectly possible to recontextualize the contents of the buffyverse as scifi. The Initiative sure seemed to want to do that, though it seems the show largely depicts them in a misguided light. Fred when stranded in Pylea seemed to think that there was some way of sciencing herself home from a fantasy hell dimension. I actually liked that idea so much, and was so disappointed that Angel didn't take her character in that direction, that I wrote my own show concept set in the buffyverse multiverse that implicitly reframes all the magic as scifi. But as the shows themselves stand, they never quite went there, and most of the fantasy elements remain presented as pure fantasy, not sufficiently advanced technology.

While I will agree that there is something spectrum-like about the range of speculative fiction, both fantasy and sci-fi having a hard-to-soft range, and meeting where the hard extreme of fantasy meets the soft extreme of sci-fi, I think there is a very clear dividing line that marks that transition: sci-fi presents all the amazing phenomena that happen in it as supposedly being all scientifically understandable by ordinary mortal humans, in principle at least, if not in present fact (either in the story's present, the author's present, or the audience's present); while fantasy contains at least some phenomena that supposedly are inherently supernatural and not amenable to scientific understanding.

The hard extreme of fantasy that butts up against that line is fantasy wherein magic is all completely predictable and analyzable and can be treated with science-like methodology within the fictional world, but there is still no pretense that those kinds of phenomena are possible in the real world that we know, or that we will ever discover them to be possible. Conversely, the soft extreme of scifi that butts up against the same line is scifi wherein amazing and apparently magical phenomena -- even the same exact things as in fantasy -- appear and are not given any actual explanation even attempting to tie them to the known science of our world, but they are still hand-waved away as "sufficiently advanced technology" that we, in principle, could understand, if only our science got better.

You aren't adept even at switching topics or changing tunes. Take up another line of work, sonny.

Someone else who hasn't bothered actually reading stuff written in support of minimum wage legislation. They make up all sorts of specious claims as to how employers really do have all that money lying around unused, or how the increased pay will spark improved productivity, or how employers will invest in more training for their suddenly-expensive employees .... yada yada yada. All so very simple, by their reckoning, and they are super smart and know so much more about how to run businesses than the actual owners and employers do.

Here's an interesting insight: If I knew of a simple way to make money that required so little investment, I could make a fortune doing so and help others in the process. Yet not a single one of these know-it-alls, these nannies who claim to want to help the poor and unskilled, is willing to put their efforts where their mouth is both make money and help the poor.

Not a single one.

I guess I know how much they believe in their own theories.

You haven't been paying attention if you really believe " I don't think anyone believes the minimum wage will increase demand for workers." There are quite a few who believe exactly that. They seem to think that business owners throw all their profits into a pool like Scrooge McDuck so they can swim in it, and all the pay hikes will come out of those Scrooge McDuck pools.

You're obviously still very young.

Check out the UID. You need to rethink how ignorant and unobservant you are.

Looks like I hit a nerve. Someone feeling the burn? Thought maybe the hypocrisy wasn't noticeable? Trying to deflect the attention?