> As such, this administration's policies are foolish, but many on this very site would need to give up a little bit of their privilege to reduce the pain felt by many of their fellow citizens.
Very few people who work as full-time devs are so wealthy that they are totally insulated from general social decline.
And honestly, you should have been downvoted for calling them "low-information" voters. Not only is it condescending, you simply discounted them for being part of the "other" party. Perhaps they are very informed - maybe much more than you regarding the deficit, the economy, their frustrations, etc.
It is great to have a spirited debate, but to call people derogatory names simply because they don't share your viewpoint is the wrong path to take.
Anyone who isn't afraid of woke can see certain voters were demonstrably taken in by transparent demagoguery. There are consequences to actions and beliefs, criticism can happen, people are sometimes wrong and we can acknowledge that without pearl-clutching. "Low information" is specific and actionable, unlike "stupid". Sometimes one decision was better than the other and we can only progress by understanding that, despite any hurt feelings. Sorry, no participation trophies today!
> Anyone who isn't afraid of woke can see certain voters were demonstrably taken in by transparent demagoguery.
How is this different than the decision-making process of many Democrat voters? Trying to make any rational arguments on "certain issues" gets you labelled as a fascist, racist, bigot or all of this (and more) at the same time. There's nothing rational about this kind of approach.
It seems to me that the left has become lazy and often assumes that something must be rational because they believe it.
There is no popular left in the US, we have a center-right neoliberal party who rat-fuck all competition to the point their base has given up.
The corporate owners of social and news media pick the issues they want people to talk about and it is never anything I think is particularly compelling. Why do we care about a tiny fraction of a fraction of the US population's preferred pronouns again? Because nobody has to spend any money to fix that, unlike actually important things like environmental collapse.
I think it is foolish to think that just because it was easy to tear something down, it will be easy to build it back up.
People are pissed off about the tanking economy and the brain-dead tariff approach, even though Trump said he was going to do this.
We know what tariffs do, it has been proven over and over again. What conclusion am I supposed to come to, after witnessing the predictable clown-show since January? We lost 5% today.
We don't bake cost of proper disposal into materials, that is why plastic is so cheap.
The Chinese manufacture the stuff like crazy and ships it all of SEA. Rural communities dump it into their rivers and all of that washes out into the ocean which ends up EVERYWHERE.
Plastic, and oil in general, has been a global ecologic CATASTROPHE.
Cost of disposal for plastic is very small. You can get it into a well-made landfill for a couple pennies per pound in the US. Charging manufacturers an extra little fraction of a penny for an item isn't a bad idea but it wouldn't affect much. What matters is government desire to handle trash properly.
If you factor in the cost of any government managed trash cleanup, it might. Basically require producers to cover all of the costs required to get the trash disposed of properly. Filtering micro-plastics out of the ocean? Add it to the plastic tax. Health costs from birth defects caused by certain plastic exposure? Add it to the tax for those plastics.
I think the market works amazingly as long as there's government to line the incentives up right.
I think disposing properly would mostly be a few more public trash cans and a ban on exporting plastic and trash to get fake-recycled. Which would not cost very much.
Keep in mind: republicans are low information voters, and additionally they tend to be single issue voters.
So 99% of them probably don't care about this particular thing. They care about abortion, or "corruption", or welfare queens, or something else.
They have no idea the entire point of this exercise is to gut our public infrastructure so they can give hand-outs to their cronies companies to do the exact same job, but more expensive.
Pensions are robbing the younger generation of the opportunity to flourish. It is INSANITY.
In a lot of cities the pension liability for retired police and teachers is higher than the actual CURRENT budget of WORKING professionals. It is an issue EVERYWHERE.
Very few people who work as full-time devs are so wealthy that they are totally insulated from general social decline.