How did you misinterpret a comment that literally says "On average, unions do improve conditions for their workers" and that we shouldn't abandon them even when they don't, as fear mongering? I'm legitimately curious, particularly because I do support unions in general, and also that we need effort to ensure quality unions rather than blindly supporting them, and when they fail to improve conditions for their workers, they need to be called out on it and made better.

So if that somehow came across as fear mongering rather than the realistic support it is, I'd like to know how to present this pro-union perspective in a way that is less likely to be so badly misinterpreted in the future.

Most of the time, that's true, but depending on the union and the worker's position, YMMV. For example, my previous job's union was only for the full time workers, and left part-time workers to be the scapegoats that management (and union reps) was allowed to abuse at will. The only benefits PT workers got was an extra $0.25 per hour, but then PT union dues were also $0.25 per hour, plus an extra $10 per week. Full time workers got a pretty sweet union deal though, and the empty promise of PT employees being promoted to FT was what made people stay there for years after they should have quit (in my thee years there, such a promotion happened once, in a building with ~250 employees, about half of them being PT).

On average, unions do improve conditions for their workers, but there's hardly a guarantee. Like all human organizations, a union will be flawed and prone to some degree of corruption and abuse. That doesn't mean we should abandon them; it just means we shouldn't make blanket statements blindly declaring them the best thing ever, and instead keep a realistic perspective. Namely, that most unions benefit many workers, but that's a poor consolation prize to the workers who do end up mistreated by one.

No, there's a significant difference in this situation that doesn't apply to most other regions in the world. Russia is trying to culturally assimilate Ukraine, and one of the ways they do this is by making the Russian spellings of Ukrainian locations the default spelling. Continuing to use the Russian spellings is supporting Russia's goal of assimilation and elimination of a sovereign Ukraine.

That's not how economics works in the real world. Companies already finely optimize their price points to bring in the maximum amount of revenue. Just raising the price to offset a higher tax means that fewer people buy their product, and they get less revenue. Prices can only raise a certain limited amount before a product becomes unprofitable due to low sales. If a company wants to maximize their income, keeping the same price in the face of higher taxes is almost always how to achieve that.

Unfortunately, many companies are willing to temporarily sacrifice their profits for the sake of PR (just like an advertising budget), and will raise their prices when higher taxes are announced, even when the taxes aren't even passed yet, so as to influence public opinion to conform to the somewhat less than educated stance that "all corporate taxes are passed onto the consumer." This tactic is simply another form of advertising, just one that you can't avoid with an ad-blocker.

Yes, but actually no. For fusion to take place, high temperature is necessary, but not sufficient. It also needs a high pressure. The higher the pressure, the lower the temperature can be, and on the other hand the lower the pressure, the higher the temperature needs to be. If we want fusion to happen at sun-like temperatures, we also need to apply sun-like pressures, which is several billion atmospheres more pressure than we have the technology to contain. So we flip the balance over to massively higher temperatures, lowering the pressure requirement into the realm of possibility.

Exactly. He can say whatever he wants, but until it's backed up by action that produces a meaningful improvement in his worker's treatment, his propaganda isn't fooling anyone.

Unfortunately, it is not a human right, because you have to pay a water bill or else it gets shut off.

It probably should be a human right, and given legal protections to ensure that everyone has free access to clean water, and while we're at it, give those same protections to air.

A fair argument could also be made for extending those same protections to various other things that ensure people aren't extorted for their lives, such as a certain minimum of food, shelter, hygiene, and healthcare. Such protections of people's right to survival may even be necessary to ensure a free society.

And where do you think all that electricity is coming from? Magic? No, it's mostly coming from fossil fuel power plants. Electric cars don't get rid of emissions or resource demand, they just shift it to centralized power generation. And while it would be nice to think that renewables will magically make that go away, it's just not happening at the large scale required, because renewables don't scale well.

Okay, as a poor person myself, I am incredibly tired of this argument. After my other expenses, I have less than $40 a month left over for food, and so I have to pay very close attention to the price and nutritional content of my food. And the thing is, buying a mixture of raw ingredients(mostly flour, sugar, and eggs) and fresh seasonal produce(produce, meaning fruits and veggies. Any meat is expensive, and is well outside of my price range most of the time) is far cheaper than getting that non-nutritional garbage from fast food joints(believe me, I have looked, and if fast food was cheaper per nutrient, that's the only thing I would be eating because every dollar I can save really does matter in my situation).

Of course raw ingredients and fresh produce do come with their own particular downside; it takes time and effort to prepare it, and it also takes time and effort to learn how to cook. Some poor people work multiple jobs or long hours, and when they come home at the end of the day, they're too tired to put in the required effort, or they don't have enough time left in the day to cook a proper meal. It's faster and easier to either buy some fast food, or to just heat up a frozen microwave dinner, despite it costing more. Maybe they value their free time more than they value the monetary savings. Or maybe they can't do math. Or maybe they're just lazy. Most likely, it's a combination of all of the above. But I don't know about other people, all I know is that when I come home after working for 10 or 12 hours, I'm really tired and don't want to put in the time and effort to cook a meal despite being quite hungry, but I cook anyway, because that's the sound financial decision.

It's funny that you think there's a difference.

Humans are just another animal, trained by billions of years of evolution to fight as viciously as possible to gain and exploit every single advantage we have. Just like every other animal that exists. The only difference is that we are more effective, which means that we fight all the more viciously. That's just the natural order of things.

People have been claiming 'Tesla is going under! Just you wait and see their next quarter results, it's going to bury them!' for years, and they're still going along just fine(continually increasing their production capacity, constant stream of sales, new contracts and deals being made, etc, etc), so I'm going to continue to be skeptical of speculative gloom & doom prophecies until I see some real data to back it up.

You're completely correct, which is exactly why we don't want to do this too much. Recall the paperclip maximizer.

No... Just no. It's one thing to be a competitor with another company; to respect them to the same degree that you respect yourself, and to attempt to gain more revenue/customers/profit/etc, through self-improvement(and advertising, of course), both despite and because of that mirror image. It is a completely different thing to view them as "the enemy." Viewing competition as an "enemy" is simply sociopathic, which coincidentally is also an apt description for the treatment you're suggesting for your own employees.

I guess what I'm really trying to say here is that no matter what company people happen to work for, they are always people first, and everything else is secondary. What you are suggesting reverses that prioritization, which is by definition dehumanizing.

Sure, it was probably within the limit for the healthy adult worker bees, but how about the much weaker and less developed bee larvae?

Something tells me you didn't do the math on this one.