Ayyyy, beratna!
Chetzemoka
To be more specific: The show feels like the book authors took the opportunity to revise, edit, and improve their own work. The books provide extra context to some situations, Caliban's War in particular. But it's fun to see the smart decisions they made in the TV show to consolidate some characters and tweak storylines.
Yep. Person here with CFS/ME prior to Covid being treated by a research team that is now also studying Long Covid. AMA ✋
I'd first ask you to define happiness.
Temporary pleasures will always be fleeting, unreliable, and fraught with danger. Drugs and alcohol feel great in the moment, for example. So does eating junk food and watching TV. But we all know the problems with these things.
Is happiness the pleasure brought by fulfilling hobbies? That's probably a little more productive, but also will never be continuous. And often, if you try to make that your entire life, it loses its joy. The recreation is often the joyful part.
Personally for me, my interactions with patients and being able to use my intellect to help people medically is so deeply satisfying that I'm motivated to go to work despite there being so many things to hate about my job. So that's an interesting wrinkle on the idea of happiness.
I'm not really trying to get at an answer here. We just had a whole meditation retreat at my church about this exact topic: What is the purpose of life? But maybe some ideas to help you clarify your own thoughts about the subject.
The US is the third most populous and fourth largest country in geographic area in the world. We're genuinely far more dependent on rail freight for basic functioning than countries that have had rail strikes.
(Which is why we should nationalize the rail system.)
I only wish he made one a little less in the old "College Humor" style. Because, while this is excellent for the public, I can't send this to the one staunch anti-union nurse on my unit and expect her to listen to a word of it.
If anyone knows some "gentler" but equally as well-sourced information, please let me know! This nurse complains right along with us all "they can't do this!" but apparently has swallowed whole some kind of anti-union propaganda that I just don't understand.
They mean meeting the needs of the US. France is the size of Texas. What works in France doesn't translate to the US because of our sheer geographic size. China is the only country with high speed rail that compares in geographic size to the US.
But we absolutely could and should have high speed rail corridors that cover the east coast and west coast separately.
It's only illegal for them to lie. This fits in the very narrow gray area of what they're allowed to say because technically it's not untrue. No contract in the world guarantees anything will or will not happen. A contract gives you the ammunition to sue the person you entered into the agreement with, if that person (or corporation) violates the agreed upon terms. So a union contract still gives you leverage and power over a corporation, but technically it doesn't guarantee the terms of the contract will happen.
Edit to clarify: I'm not suggesting the anti-union propaganda has any validity. Just that they get away with this because technically it's not lying.
They're also spreading this nonsense at my hospital where we're actively organizing right now. It preys on people's ignorance of how legal contracts work.
Your lease doesn't guarantee that your landlord won't violate its terms either. But it does give you the ammunition to take them to court and win compensation, if they do.
The same applies to a union contact. It's legally binding in the same way. Sure the company technically can violate the terms of that agreement. But the union is going to escalate the issue to the NLRB and/or sue them in court, if they do. And you will win, if you provide the evidence that they violated the legally binding contract.
This is what disingenuous corporations call "not guaranteed"
This is literally why I left management, dude. I had the worst month ever and did my P&L, and I still put $5,000 profit to the company's bottom line. I realized how much I'd be making if I owned my own business and all my hard work paid myself, and that was it, I quit. Ended up becoming a nurse because I make twice as much now as I made as a salaried manager, and I punch my clock and go home and don't think about work.
There absolutely is. There was a successful nursing strike in Worcester, MA that lasted 10 months and the hospital didn't shut down. It was staffed by a rotating cast of expensive travel nurses.
It's a controversial maneuver because it can prolong a strike, but it maintains public support and also prevents possibly endangering the lives of people in the community, which is the opposite of what we're trying to achieve in a healthcare strike.
(Personally, I am firmly of the belief that if any service is so critical to the public well-being that a compromised strike is necessary, then that service should be owned by the public and not a corporation. But that's a whole other conversation.)
As an old person, can confirm it never existed. People have always been like this.