Because nobody is.

We all pay for it anyway via the negative impacts. It should be the consumers buying the thing that pay for it. Why should society at large be paying for the negative impacts of a product not everyone is buying? Makes no sense. If your product is causing a big environmental impact, that needs to be paid for by the company making the product and the consumers buying it.

I just think it pretty clearly isn’t the only way to fight established power when we saw a person that was hated by most establishment powers at the time of his first election and who spent half the money campaigning ended up beating them. Sure, he was obviously not interested in real change, but the fact is they didn’t want him in and he got in anyway. Americans are done with neoliberalism and are desperately looking for alternatives. Even worse ones…

I dunno, I switched my 7 year olds laptop over specifically because Windows updates kept breaking things. Everything worked out of the box with Linux and hasn’t broken yet. He doesn’t care either way, he just wants to use his programs, and that’s been easier since switching. I say this as someone who very painfully had to use Linux for a few years about 10 years ago… the experience is just very different today. I don’t think a day to day user will notice any difference beyond better stability.

My experience is that once set up, the easy linux distros are way less likely to randomly stop working and need support. And by set up, I pretty much mean “install the OS and grab Steam”.

I think it’s more like people still hold onto a view of the difficulty that hasn’t been true for years now in the big ones (Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, etc). I agreed with this position 10 years ago, but not anymore. Users that aren’t super technical are likely just browsing, watching video, and playing games. All that works out of the box now with nearly no set up in my experience. My 7 year old has been using it with less problems than he was getting in Windows 11 (seriously).

I had to spend the better part of a day fiddling with the USB stick, but honestly once the actual install was done I was pretty much running out of the box. My 7 year old uses it. Steam is even an easy native install now. There’s just not much to set up anymore if you’re just doing games/video/browsing. I spent another day doing some fancy stuff UI setup for fun, but it was working right away. A far cry from the days of messing with alsa or the tears behind getting wifi set up, let me tell ya! Was really surprised as someone who had been away from Linux distros for nearly 10 years.

I don’t entirely agree.

While I don’t agree with the way Congress is arranged with a clearly establishment-favoring Senate, we shouldn’t take this to mean there’s no such thing as a tyranny of majority as we’ve literally seen it play out historically many times. Look at Jim Crowe laws passed by majority white populations that harshly kept black Americans down for years up into living memory. Or anti-gay laws… tyrannies of majority 100% happen and it’s a big reason why we have specific Constitutional rights that try to prevent it. Groups using democracy as a cudgel to smack down other groups certainly happens though. I would agree that the Senate is more about preserving current power structures than actually trying to prevent that though.

I also just don’t agree at all that Biden wanted Trump to win… I think this is a hammer looking for a nail and seeing one, honestly. We just aren’t going to agree on that point and aren’t going to see each other’s point of view, and we’re not going to be able to prove hidden intentions, so I’m not sure this point is worth harping on. What I would say is that as Democrats and Republicans are both neolibs, Democrats would sooner see a Republican elected over someone they deem to be an actual threat from the left.

Then why aren’t you out there doing it?

Fair point.

The point is to increase the cost of the plastics to the point that alternatives start to actually be competitive. And really, we’re just making them actually pay for some of the externalities they’re getting a free ride on.

If you use government to increase the cost of a thing to the point alternatives become cheaper, most businesses are going to switch. They aren’t sticking with plastics out of ideology or anything… it’s just cheap. And it shouldn’t be.

Second part first, agree totally. I don’t mean to suggest Trump truly represents some sea change against neoloberalism… but his rhetoric was very much a rejection of a lot of it. He’s absolutely a liar in terms of actually representing change from the status quo… he’s a pure kleptocrat, plain and simple. But the point is that facade is what resonated with people because even those without the knowledge base or words to form why they’re over neoliberalism, are very much over neoliberalism. Regular people, not, not just political nerds.

First part, hard disagree because it informs strategy on how to move past it. If you believe both sides are colluding to keep the masses down and there’s no real electoral path to improvement… well, we’re at the stage of violent revolution and there’s no point faffing about further. Neither of us are out there with rifles yet, so I’d argue neither of us really, truly thinks that’s the case yet. Because that actually does happen in places like Gaza, and for good reason - they literally have no other recourse. We’ve got the table tilted against us, but ultimately we can and do upset the institutional power still. Trump, while he didn’t represent real change, was absolutely totally rejected by institutional power in his initial run and managed to win by establishing a faux-populist cult of personality… that literally could not have worked if electoralism was truly totally dead.

100% not a psy-op or collusion. They really just both bought deeply into the shift to neoliberalism in the 80’s, and it has so defined politics for the last 4 decades that few politicians have wrapped their heads around the fact that the continual rejection of both parties by the people is really a rejection of that neoloberalism that we’re clearly in the death throes of. Trump succeeded not because every person who voted for him was a racist (I mean, that’s definitely a big cadre among his supporters, but it isn’t what got him in), he succeeded because people are so desperate to end the neoliberal norm that’s crushing everyone that they’ll vote for a guy that literally soft-pedals fascism over another neoliberal.

But I really do think the majority of them are true believers. They’ve been born and raised in that politically environment. It’s all they know and they really can’t imagine anything else, even if it’s really only been a few generations ago that things looked very different.

There needs to just be a blanket, punitive, 100+% tax on any and all single use plastics that are not medical devices. Obviously there’s lots of other bigger environmental issues that need to be tackled but this really seems like a pretty obvious one imo.