A generous interpretation of this is that most of the time, people pay little attention to politics as they are busy with their daily lives : earning money, shopping for food, looking after their families, etc. Most people have neither the time or the inclination to even follow politics beyond the headlines, or think through the problems and their position.

This can be a problem when the political 'class' (politicians of course, but also media commentators, journalists, podcasters, whatever) do not realise this issue. Brexit is a classic example, where the UK prime minister called for a referendum possibly confident that 'no one' would actually vote yes.

The problem is that politics, particularly in the US, tends to push people into binary thinking.

I certainly do not love the Trump admin and think Kamala would easily do better. However, that does not mean the Trump admin has done nothing I agree with. There are nice parts to the OBBB that directly benefit me. Further, I think the approach to H1Bs, removing the lottery and instead basing it on salary, is the right move.

I say this because regardless of admin, there's going to be things you like and dislike. What seems to happen is people get completely sucked in a media bubble which only reports the good or bad of their political opponents.

Even the worst and most evil world leaders in history did good or had some good policies. There's never been a pure evil or good leader. Unfortunately, people want to flatten the world and remove the nuance "if so and so did it, it must be good/bad".

a more appropriate way of looking at this would be incentives. Who, in the government, stands to benefit from revising the H1B system? Even if you agree with the action, you may not not agree with the motivation.

Your line of thinking is like saying that the British Raj was terrible for India, but the British built railways, which was a good thing. Good and bad do not exist in isolation. The British built railways in india so they could more effectively extract wealth, not out of the benevolence of their hearts. It is much the same with the US government.

I disagree, outcome matters more than incentives IMO. Every policy and regulation will create winners and losers. The incentives for doing so matter in they drive which policies get written, but you can't use those incentives to determine if a policy is ultimately good or not.

Back to the british railway example. You are correct that it was there to more efficiently extract wealth (bad). But that does not mean that rails aren't hugely beneficial to the population in general. Roads in the US exist primarily to aid in rapid shipping, that doesn't mean roads are a bad thing because a company like Amazon gets the majority of the benefit.

It's a basically non-existent politician that does something purely out of the goodness of their own hearts. In a democracy, it's the role of the electorate to try and remove politicians from power who refuse to provide benefits to the citizens as a whole.

Why should we expect otherwise, what land on hn is already crafted title as well after all, and once human are accustomized to some habits, they will have generally a hard time going out of routine.