counterpoint1
Millions of people raised on labor/union/socialist/far-left dogma that was relevant in the 1800s and 1900s are realizing that the modern economy is in fact quite different. But because of a mixture of lack of knowledge and adversarial beliefs about capitalism and corporations, they failed to thrive in the system and are now learning the tools to succeed.
The system is flawed. You can work to fix the flaws without thinking you need to burn the whole thing down.
Sneaky, indirect, hidden advertising is worse than regular ads or 'spam'. Regardless of if a community is about gardening or guitars or cooking or basketball, most people don't want shills posting content that's secretly sponsored product placement related to their hobby or promotion of the poster for fame or profit.
Most subreddits have rules specifically against this, because otherwise the real, organic, genuine conversation and content gets drowned out by self-promoting shills trying to drive clicks to their website or views to their youtube or get free advertising/PR for their company. You're supposed to participate out of a genuine interest in the community, not to exploit them as an audience for making money.
I get that people respond emotionally to these things and just go with "Amazon bad, mothers good", but this policy just seems... obvious?
If it cancelled or reset to zero that would seem harsh and not in line with norms, but a policy of "you vest for each month you work" feels perfectly fair and reasonable to all employees.
Look at the current covid stimulus bill in the US as an example of how money gets allocated under a "democratically disbursed" system. Depending on where and when in human history you go, the majority opinion might have been "kill all the X people" or "do Z because God commands it".
Basically, "the most moral thing to do" is completely unrelated to "what the government will do" even if that government is democratically elected.
Is there anything in my above comment you actually disagree with? It seems like you're just advocating for 100% socialism where individuals don't have private assets.
Suppose you have $100. You go to the grocery store and have lots of choices, you can buy basic groceries to feed yourself for the week for $50 and then give $50 to research to a rare disease which impacted a family member, or you can spend the full $100 at the grocery store buying brand name prepared foods. Are you saying people shouldn't be allowed to make the choice between those? Are you saying the first person is doing something bad by giving their money to medical research instead of spending it?
Basically if you have a complete faith that the government always knows best, then anyone else (an individual, a charity, a business, a volunteer organization, etc) spending their time or money to solve a problem is a bad thing, because the money should have been controlled by the government so they could allocate it as they saw fit.
If I had a dollar for every time someone on HN who doesn't live in the US nonetheless weighs in as an expert on American life I could retire.
Do you think a data scientist who had ethical concerns about covid data manipulation is a violent murderer? Do you think America in real life is like a movie with gun fights and explosions?
There is essentially zero risk of someone shooting a cop in a routine situation. They weren't raiding some druglord gang headquarters or ISIS terrorist operation.
Additionally, everything you listed is just exposition on your initial claim. Saying that you will "End Welfare As We Know It" sounds like a potentially wildly liberal plan - perhaps UBI, government-guaranteed employment, housing and healthcare or some other fundamental shift. The victims of crime are disproportionately the poor, people of color and people who are structurally disadvantaged so removing the threat of violent crime from their lives falls well within the standard goals of liberals (even if the actual implementation of the bill you're referencing had more mixed results).
All the political terms - left, right, conservative, progressive, liberal, etc have definitions which vary greatly from country-to-country, over time, and by which group is using them. Clinton and Biden are representatives from American's dominant liberal party and represent views which are left-of-center when you do the sane thing and define center as "median voter in the country being discussed" and not "my group of friends" or whatever time or place you're imagining.
You might as well say 'Bill Gates is very poor, by any reasonable standard' (because unlike the rich people of 2,000 years ago, he can't raise an army that rivals that of his home nation-state or the rich of the future who take vacations on the moon).
BPA, atrazine, PM2.5 air pollution, dozens of chemicals classified as endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) which are nonetheless present in everyday items and our drinking water.
Assuming humanity survives another couple hundred years, I assume people will look back on our current situation as akin to drinking from lead cups.
What a horribly toxic environment. I can't imagine any employees slept soundly at night knowing that if they were in the room when someone said a PG-13 word that they'd be fired on the spot.
Taxes are necessary to fund shared infrastructure and services. They're not supposed to overtly punish success or prevent people from earning a high salary.
There's an argument that high earners can (and possibly should) pay a higher share of taxes because they have the most ability to do so, but you seem to be just advocating taxing away people's earnings out of a jealous desire to not see anyone have more than you.
You can't just pretend that every business can magically afford to raise wages. This isn't Apple paying kids in China 50 cents to build an iPhone they sell for $1,000, this is a local business that's probably barely able to pay the founder a middle-class salary in the best of times.
The best way to understand Denmark from an American perspective would be something like "Imagine if everyone in America was lower-middle class". Whether this is better or worse for you obviously depends on whether you're poor, middle, upper middle or upper class.
For me, Danish culture was something of a nightmare of 'tall poppy syndrome' and bleak, hopelessness that hard work doesn't pay and that no matter what you do, you're stuck eating sack lunches and taking the bus to work because your spouse needs the one car your family can afford. That said, if I had an intellect that limited academic abilities or a more naturally lethargic approach to school and work, I'd certainly find my life more comfortable in Denmark and see the American model as unforgiving.
Basically, Denmark pulls up the bottom towards the median, at the cost of pulling down the top towards the same point, to a far larger degree than the US. Everybody gets just enough, but nobody is allowed to have more than just enough.
Everybody in the US has insurance, that was literally a major point of contention to Obamacare - the left didn't like that the solution still used private insurers and the right didn't like that they were forced to buy something. If you have a low income, you get subsidized premiums.
For sick pay, it's just a lack of budgeting and planning. If you have a job that pays you $12/hr with no paid leave time or a job that pays you $10/hr with an accumulation of leave hours, it's still the same in the end if you work X days and are sick Y days and get a monthly income of $ZZZ, just in one case your employer is holding back your leave pay and in the other case you're paid full value up front and save for your leave period yourself.
What you think of as doing extra work also ends up causing extra work for other people. You say "Attemtps to communicate with other teams to sync and improve processes were also shutdown... because it's not my responsibility and the team leads felt threatened" - it's almost certainly not that your team lead "felt threatened" (wtf?) but because you caused an extra hassle for them by causing confusion among your coworkers about the processes and practices for communication, documentation or decision-making.
Your time spent "fixing a lot of small things" that nobody cares about means other people have to code review, QA test, merge, deploy etc your work, which as you stated, was not scheduled/prioritized/desired.
An important part of being a team is playing your role, which includes not interfering with other people doing theirs. You see yourself as an unappreciated hero picking up the slack for everyone else, but everyone else sees you as an unpredictable wildcard causing confusion and extra work. Just focus on doing your job well and let the whole team thrive.
That remains true whether that's a Scandinavian model of fully-paid schools, a US public university model of a partially taxpayer funded & partially student funded or even a private university if it ultimately results in a taxpayer funded loan forgiveness or other subsidy.
Far from 'outsized amount of hand-wringing over the fate of rural America' the truth is rural America has been somewhere between ignored to outright attacked for the past 50 years. 99.9% of social justice efforts have been focused on the inner-city, targeting the problems of poverty, crime, drugs, discrimination facing those group while completely ignoring the poverty, discrimination and drug abuse of rural America until we realized the rural opioid epidemic is worse today than the urban crack epidemic of the 80s.
Far from being a result of deregulation, our economy is so over-regulated that only the mega-corps with armies of staff dedicated to compliance can stay in business, pushing all the smaller competition out of the market.
A more accurate summary would be: "After 50 years of regulation consolidating power in a handful of urban areas, while only providing social services and affirmative action for the urban poor, the people who live outside of those areas have suffered on both ends of the spectrum"
The real beneficiaries are the people who gain from the increased tax revenue.
Sometimes I wonder what bizarro world other people are living in. Every city in America has public spaces which can be reserved - playing fields, gazebos, park areas, picnic spaces, museums, art spaces. Only because it was tech workers in SF does anyone suddenly pretend like first-come first-served laissez faire is the only acceptable use of shared resources.
You do all understand that's where the massive wave of articles about changing building codes and zoning rules to get rid of parking, both public and privately owned, is coming from, right? Uber, Lyft, etc would love to make it hard or impossible to use a privately owned car in urban areas.
Getting rid of the requirement to put parking will mostly just lower everyone's quality of life- residents will take up all the street parking, making it harder for shoppers to access stores, restaurants, etc, making brick and mortar stores even further disadvantaged versus online retailers while also causing more headaches as businesses are forced to actively police their parking areas against use by non-customers.
But it'll be great news for ride sharing companies, as millions of people find themselves unable to own a car while living in American cities which are entirely designed to require car travel.