Darren Bullock, 40, is a Trump voter who switched from the Democrats in 2016.
He is likely to lose Medicaid coverage because of the new requirements, although he is not hopeful of finding adequate employment.
“If they want people to work 80 hours a month, they’d need to bring in a lot more jobs,” he says.
The thing is that democrats are hardly leftist and their approach to economics is still pretty dogshit. When people say to shut down the coal mines anyone who gives a shit will also say that governments should help retrain people to do other jobs. Like, a shut down oil rig should be a great opportunity to retrain the workers there to do maitenance on a solar power farm.
The other problem I have with it all is that they’re fighting to have personal money and would rather keep something like a coal mine running and polluting than retrain. Instead of asking why they’re constantly being threatened by corporations and the lack of a safety net they’re actively defending the people who are hurting them. That takes a lot of my sympathy away.
And then there’s their fucking “towns” that are just super spread-out nightmares which they refuse to fix. They want their lives to be cheaper but they demand heavily car-centric infrastructure and attack anything that would actually make their lives easier and cheaper. And oh my god do they moan about the concept of having a neighbour within 100ft.
I’ve lived in a more rural place and I’ve lived in cities. People in cities generally want things that will legitimately make their lives better(but oh my god are there some people…), and they don’t often fight the people who are trying to help them. Rural North Americans are so fucking stupid and they get aggressive when they get scared, which is all the time because they’re huge fucking babies.
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As for the tech company thing, a big reason is because the layoff are all to pad quarterly earnings. A coal mine shuts down because it’s an environmental disaster but Microsoft will layoff 10,000 people via video call from a private island Sting concert just so the executives can make more money. These things are not equivalent.
And this retraining goal then gets you in trouble for offering training for jobs that don’t exist.
It has to be combined with:
And time. It’s not going to be fast. There is no silver bullet. No one will do it for you: you need to take advantage of the support to improve your life. Yes it’s harder than listening to some bombastic idiot spout gibberish and make promises forgotten as quickly as he rattles them off, but it can help at least some
Precisely. It’s a good thing the left pushes UBI, free schooling, and new, positive infrastructure projects really hard, especially in rural places where private business fails to service because it’s not profitable!
Well, all except for the people willing to change but considering the right is full of people who keep saying “life’s not fair” and “that’s too bad you gotta do what you gotta do” I’m sure they can suck it up, right?
Certainly life is messy and unfair, but my state has an excellent education system including free college (depending on income). I do realize we spend a lot more on it than many states could afford but the only way to address that is the Department of Education. Did those states vote to expand the Department of Education to improve all our kids’ education? No, pretty much the opposite. You can’t help someone who won’t help themselves. You can’t give money to someone who won’t take it
I have a hypothesis that many conservatives are reflexively opposed to change. So if you suggest putting in a bus lane, they’ll fight you tooth and claw. But once you get it in, a couple years later, if someone suggests removing it those same people will fight tooth and claw to keep it.
In other words, sometimes they’re stupid and don’t have good reasons.
It’s been documented that the fear center in conservatives’ brains gets activated a lot more than it does for progressives. They are scared and angry and aren’t spending the time to understand anything which is exactly what would calm their worries. They’re basically just running around breaking shit and making life hard for everyone because they’re stuck in monkey brain.
Also they do seem to like change when it means removing stuff that benefits others. It’s not change exactly that sets them off, but anything they perceive as giving their resources away(and they most certainly do not understand the concept of an indirect benefit).
I think its because change always sucks over here. I was a caregiver before COVID, the agency took Medicare, so my wages were set by a state committee. The state raised the minimum wage, but I never got a raise because the committee took years to approve one. The state passed a law mandating PTO, but it was less than the 2 weeks we were already getting, so we didn’t get more. I was doing overtime, living paycheck to paycheck, then the state decided that they wouldn’t transfer the clients to palliative care, and we needed to watch them die too. No bump in pay, but they gave us the number to an employee helpline that would tell management if you used it, so I never used it.
There was a client I had been taking care of for four years, and I held her hand so she wouldn’t die alone. I was out of PTO, couldn’t afford an unpaid mental health day, another longterm client died, and I drove into traffic. I haven’t been able to hold down a job since.
It’s said a rising tide lifts all boats, but sometimes people get caught in the undertow.