It has nothing to do with stupidity. Stop painting people as idiots because they exist in one of the most information hostile environments in human history.
This isn't some natural state that's unrecoverable. The people you describe have been given a highly addictive media environment tailor made to engender outrage and drive behavior. It shouldn't be a shock when most people cannot resist it. The first step to changing it is not writing them off or insulting them for being had.
> most information hostile environments in human history
Is it though? East Germany comes to mind as well as the rest of the Cold War countries behind the Iron Curtain. China seems to be pretty hostile as well. In the US, it is still much easier to find real information that counters the propaganda than it is in any of those other countries. There's no Great Firewall to bypass. You don't even need to do anything anonymously. Yes, the current administration is doing its damnedest to pull the wool over the eyes of their followers, but it's only effective for them. Nobody else is fooled nor stopping their publishing of the opposition to the propaganda.
What you're describing is an Orwellian dystopia, where a boot forces you to think a certain way. We live in a Huxleyan dystopia where there is so much so much to distract you that you become submissive.
The demographic collapse will likely lead to artificial wombs and llm powered vulcan style teaching pits crossed with diamond age primers. Huxley was more prescient than I thought when teading brave new world. I think the nation that has its primers teach the vat-made labor force rhetoric, logic and critical thinking will have lower gdp, but higher stability.
Yes, this, precisely. Our increasingly dystopian present features a fair amount of Big Brother, but Brave New World's soma is what drives and enables it, along w/ aspects of Gilliam's "Brazil"....
There is also so much that's womderful and amazing and positive. No light w/out darkness, "no mud, no lotus", etc. -- which IMHO it's increasingly important to focus on, deliberately.
> East Germany comes to mind as well as the rest of the Cold War countries behind the Iron Curtain
Psychology around ads and how to manipulate peoples thoughts were not nearly as well understood at the time. Large scale studies based on data collected of peoples behavior on computers has lead to dramatically better ability to manipulate and nudge people to do what you want.
The information environment was more oppressive there, but it was easier for people to have their own thoughts since the marketing was forced and blatant but way less manipulative and devious.
> East Germany comes to mind as well as the rest of the Cold War countries behind the Iron Curtain.
Typical American response confidently knowing literally nothing of what they speak of. RFE/RL[1] was widespread behind the Iron Curtain, and the situation of today has very little in common with the situation of back then (where my parents fought in a revolution, and I come from, fwiw).
I never said or meant to imply by not specifically saying something that the opposing view was unavailable back then. That's just willfully trying to twist the narrative to a purpose I don't know why it is necessary. But since we're here, we can compare/contrast.
RFE/RL could broadcast whatever it wanted. If you received it and heard the contrary views from what official stance was, you can pretty much just accept it. You couldn't just go and search for more information in a browser/app. Seeing video of things just wasn't happening over the air on your wireless. You couldn't jump onto social platform of choice and see images in real time. Information is so freely flowing today it is a joke to compare the two.
>Typical American response confidently knowing literally nothing of what they speak of
Sadly, this reads from someone with a person grudge that has nothing to do with the conversation. If you honestly think there was more information freely available then as compared to know, you've just disillusioned yourself for whatever reason. Yes, there was resistance back during the Cold War. Fax machines FTW. That still just does not compare to how freely flowing information is today. To call today the "most information hostile environments in human history" is just nonsense. How can you even compare it?
Honestly, you have no idea what you're talking about. Speaking as someone who was born and raised in a communist country that has since become a democracy, I can tell you firsthand: people living under those regimes are not stupid, blind, or easily manipulated, quite the opposite. When you grow up surrounded by propaganda, you learn to recognize it. You have to. It becomes second nature.
The idea that people in authoritarian countries are clueless about what’s really going on is arrogant and frankly ignorant. You think access to information equals awareness? That's naive. In reality, people under repressive governments are some of the most resourceful and skeptical thinkers you'll meet. They’ve spent their lives decoding lies and reading between the lines, because their survival often depends on it.
Even in places like China, people use VPNs, follow international news, and talk in coded language online — and they’re doing it knowing full well what’s at stake. They’re not buying into propaganda, they’re navigating it more carefully than most people in the West could ever imagine.
So before you talk down from your bubble of freedom and assume everyone else is brainwashed, take a step back. People who've lived under oppression often see through propaganda faster than those who’ve never questioned their own media. The difference is, some people just don't realize when they’re being spoon-fed a narrative — and that’s not usually the people you're pointing fingers at.
> Honestly, you have no idea what you're talking about.
> The idea that people in authoritarian countries are clueless about what’s really going on is arrogant and frankly ignorant.
You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to. The guidelines clearly ask us to avoid swipes and name-calling like this. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
This kind of personally-attacking comment is against the guidelines on HN, no matter what you're replying to. We've asked you before to avoid posting comments that break the guidelines, so it's annoying to have to ask you again. HN is only a place where people want to participate because others make the effort to keep the standards up. Please do your part if you want to keep participating here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Up until recently with SCOTUS saying age verification is not rights infringing, I would have disagreed. Even with that, what else is blocked by default? It's easy to get hyperbolic in partisan discussions, but seriously, what else is being blocked that counters administration propaganda? Yes, Trump admin is changing data on the websites it controls. That's the right of any sysadmin to control and publish content they want. It would be a real bit of censorship if the admin said no other websites anywhere in its jurisdiction could publish contrary data. You can scream about FB/Twitt...er,X/socialPlatformOfChoice making decisions on its website, but again, I go back to it's their site to manage. You can choose to use it based on those decisions, but again, those are not the only sites offering contrary data.
I mean, maybe this way is worse. I can see how it could be far more obvious that the propaganda is BS when it's being pushed at you from every outlet and every form of media. Makes it more clear that it's controlled.
Yet at the moment where there is still diversity, people can make the mistake of thinking that the propaganda is just a difference of opinion so perhaps trust it more.
To me the propaganda is still blatant and there is only an engineered illusion of diversity, only inasmuch as it keeps people opinionated on the things that don’t matter. There’s also no foundational or universal desire for diversity, so alternative propaganda contexts may induce different focus areas.
While i take your point about playing nice, it has a lot to do with stupidity: specifically ignorance, intellectual laziness, lack of curiosity, bias, anti intellectualism, inability to think abstractly, lack of education, lack of critical thinking, ideology, and a host of other things.
Almost all of which correlate in some way to 'stupidity'.
I posit that your first line is wildly wrong, but your message is broadly valid.
Just because someone has a different point of view than yours does not make them stupid. I know plenty of people that have different views of mine that are much smarter than I am, and engaging with them leads to interesting conversations. I can still think they are "wrong" at the end of these conversations, but I'd never call them stupid. Hell, the lottery is often described as a tax on poor people. Yet the vast majority of lottery players would never call it a tax. The vast majority of people that I've talked to that don't understand tariffs are not incapable of understanding the concept. They've only ever heard their information from one source that does not discuss tariffs in this manner. Once they hear other viewpoints not from a single source, they typically admit they are taxes and do not argue against it. It does not change their mind that they are still a good idea.
> Just because someone has a different point of view than yours does not make them stupid.
True, but I'm not sure what that proves. Some people who have different points of view than I do have come to those points of view via reasonable means, and some of their PoVs might even be more consistent with reality than some of mine.
But some people are actually just stupid. Sometimes it's for understandable reasons, but sometimes it's for reasons that the GP laid out, and that's sad and unfortunate, and makes life difficult for the rest of us. I think there are a lot of people like this, and I'm afraid that public policy is in no small part driven by these people's susceptibility to propaganda, and their inability to think critically.
It’s not “a different point of view” to think that tariffs get paid by the other country. It’s not “a different point of view” to loathe Obamacare and like the ACA. It’s just ignorance. When the information is easily available, it’s willful ignorance. When they won’t obtain the information and they still hold strong opinions and vote accordingly, it’s at best stupidity.
How is it not a different point of view to think that healthcare should be tied to one's employment as opposed to all people should have access to affordable healthcare? We can discuss if Obamacare achieved what it wanted to do as I believe it was not very successful, but it at its core is a different view point. Yes, people believing other countries pay the tariffs are clearly not understanding of how tariffs work. But then you went made some clearly erroneous comment that ruined everything else just to get back to stupidity. Which by your standards means you must be stupid too for continuing to put forth a clearly wrong point.
That’s not what I was saying. Obamacare and the ACA are the same thing. The ACA is the official name and Obamacare is an attempt at a derogatory nickname which became common. Hating one and liking the other is an inherently contradictory position. And yet it’s one a lot of people hold. That’s not a different point of view, that’s not having even the most basic understanding of the thing you have an opinion about.
Right, but it puts rational people who seek to govern in a very uncomfortable position when they're up against an adversary who is happy to seize power at all costs, including weaponizing ignorance, ideology, polarization, conspiracy theories, and a complicit media apparatus, and then engages in blatantly un-democratic tactics like gerrymandering and the filibuster, and all the rest of it.
Basically when all or most of the facts are on your side, how do you balance the need to indulge stupid talking points and perspectives so that you can "reach" people, while also not inadvertently conceding ground in an attempt to meet a person where they are?
IMO it’s an incentive problem - it takes effort to be knowledgeable but the practical benefits are next to nothing. But being in a group of ignorant people is actually probably pretty fun, not to mention the dopamine hit of outrage.
Ideally being informed would be both easier than it is today (less misleading crap, more trustworthy structure to think about what issues are relevant) while also being more rewarded somehow.
I disagree with your blanket assumption that consumers always pay for tariffs. In my experience working for a major garment importer, we kept retail prices the same even after tariffs were added. Why? Because competition from local brands forced us to absorb the cost ourselves. Sure, that's not how every industry works, but saying consumers always pay is an oversimplification. It really depends on the industry, pricing power, and competitive pressure.
Whether tariffs are paid by the consumer is a bit pointless. The incontrovertible fact is that tariffs are paid by someone in the importing country, whether the importing business or their customer or a middleman or some combination. These dingbats are out there thinking that these tariffs will be paid by China or Canada or whatever.
"Tariffs are paid by someone in the supply chain" is the most accurate way to put it because it reflects how things really work in practice. Sure, the importer is the one who physically pays the tariff at the border, but that cost doesn't always stay with them. Depending on the situation, that expense can be shared, passed on, or absorbed by others involved in the trade.
For example, if there's a 35% tariff on a $100 item, the importer technically owes $135. But the exporter might lower their price, maybe selling it for $70 instead to help offset the tariff and keep the business deal going. In that case, the exporter is basically covering part of the cost. On the flip side, the importer might just raise the final price and make the customer pay more...or better yet, assume the cost due to intense local competition.
So even though the importer pays the duty upfront, who actually feels the cost depends on how the parties involved respond. That's why it makes more sense to say someone in the supply chain pays. It's not always the same person every time.
Even if you assume perfect competition costs like tariffs can be passed back to producers.
Imagine a demand and a supply curve.
From the perspective of a producer outside the country the tariff effectively shifts the demand curve, but doesn't affect supply. That's going to lead to a lower price at equilibrium.
Of course, from the perspective of the consumer it's the opposite situation, the supply curve shifts which leads to a higher price at equilibrium.
Both happen simultaneously, who pays most of the tariff depends on the elasticity of the supply and the demand
they were not arguing for or against obamacare, they were pointing out the laziness of people that don't realize that Obamacare _is_ the ACA, but somehow hate the former and love the latter.
> How is it not a different point of view to think that healthcare should be tied to one's employment as opposed to all people should have access to affordable healthcare?
Please explain how members of a low-income household would rationally and knowingly advocate to eliminate the only access to healthcare they can afford.
Then, if you are able to present a coherent argument, try to explain that in a stupidity vs diverse point of view, this stance is indeed not founded on stupidity.
> Just because someone has a different point of view than yours does not make them stupid.
He never suggested that. You defended these voters by saying they gladly accept the propaganda information diet, not that they have well-reasoned differences of opinion.
No, that's not my defense. You're putting words in my mouth. I'm saying that because they voted for someone that you disagree with for whatever reasons does not automatically make them stupid. They could have voted for someone for a totally different reason than tariffs. Now their guy is doing something they don't know anything about and now they are personally getting attacked. Whether they know anything about that topic or not does not make them stupid. If they attempt to argue without being fully versed by quoting what the face on TV tells them, again, that doesn't make them stupid. It just makes them very bad at debating. Look at all of the "man on the street" comedy interviews that are out there. Most of these people have no clue about what they are talking about, but just want to argue against the other side. A lot of the people are definitely not "very smart" but that's because they are cherry picked for that purpose. There are a lot of people that voted for this guy because the last guy was just unable to articulate much of anything and did not put forth a lot of confidence in pretty much anything. Knee jerk reactions usually have some pretty negative consequences. Just looking at current polling suggests there are a lot of people that voted for this administration yet are not happy with what is going on. Yet you are saying they are stupid. If these people were really onboard with "other countries pay the tariffs" there would not be negative polling numbers.
All I'm saying is stop painting with a broad brush in that anyone voting for a party is stupid. I'll defend people voting for who they want or even voting against someone they don't want. To call them stupid is just stupid.
Ugh I did put words in your mouth because I was reading nosignono's comment. Apologies.
Still, arbitrary_name seems consistent about not judging people for ideological differences but rather for choosing not to be accurately informed. I.e. he is not saying "they're dumb because I don't agree with tariffs" he's saying "they're dumb because after Trump promised to make us rich with tariffs, they didn't bother to check how duties are collected." You seem to agree with this to an extent.
> All I'm saying is stop painting with a broad brush in that anyone voting for a party is stupid.
I mean, it's four broad brushes right? The dupes, the single-issue voters, the identity voters, and the ones who believe in whatever his policy happens to be. I don't think it's fair to say they fall into a single bin but they're not all snowflakes who cannot be characterized en masse.
> I'll defend people voting for who they want or even voting against someone they don't want.
Okay but what about the ones who vote for what they don't want. The ones who voted Trump to release the Epstein files. Or to balance the budget. Or to end the Ukraine war day one? They took a look at his first term, listened to his campaign promises, and decided, "surely he will deliver!"
I appreciate you trying to "remember the human" which is one of the top rules of hackernews and every single comment replying to you isn't bothered that they call a whole swath of people stupid.
How can we heal, change, and recover from this without reaching out and understanding their POV.
As Orwell has stated ages ago, there is a group of people who will only accept the truth when it confronts them on the battlefield. The unshakeable belief in previous priors leads many people to only face certain truths when forced to through lived experience.
There is la video circulating of a business owner making fun of the Amazon concept of showing thd amount tariffs add to the final price to the consumer. This guy in this video says that number is going to be 0 on his website because his product and the stuff used to make it is "Made in America". The next video is literally him bitching about how some of the Made in America stuff he needs to make his product increased by a grand in just one month. And he like, "why in the fuck are these Made in America affected? Something's messed up here."
At the end of the day, this is a business owner who was aware that the biggest online retailer in America said tariffs are going to affect the price of products the American consumer buys. If this guy can't be bothered to dig a little deeper to save his business, it's hard to expect other people that are a couple degrees removed from the action to do so as well.
In addition to being rude, its not a particularly clear word.
So I coined "idiodidact", to specifically describe people who have personal selectivity with regard to being teachable. (Greek/English usage: "idios"/personal choice + "didact"/taught)
Any resemblance, to any other word, would be a coincidence.
In a way it kinda does though - like definitely the information ecosystem distorts things, but some people do not have (or do not exercise) the critical reasoning skills to decipher what's true from what's not. Or what issues are actually important from those that are meant to just distract - not everyone can tell the difference and see how the incentives actually point to what's going on.
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The education system failing people is part of the issue. Why would you want people to have critical reasoning skills if you want to control their behavior through outrage.
Looking at the agenda of the party currently in charge, the system isn't failing people. It's performing as intended. When you do not want the masses to be educated, you defund those that are in charge of educating to the point it has no other outcome than to come to a grinding halt. As intended. After all, the numbers stop going up when you stop counting.
I'm often reminded of a conversation my arrogant younger self had with an Englishman I was having a bit of back and forth banter about Yanks vs the sun setting on the English empire. I asked if the Empire was so great, why did all of the colonies end up revolting? His answer was simply, "we taught them how to read." Once the masses can read and think for themselves in an educated manner, they tend to no longer put up with being trodden over for much longer. So the answer is clearly simple to stop educating the masses.
Those people may not be innately stupid in the sense of not being able to learn or understand things. But they have been rendered functionally stupid by the media, propaganda, and politics. I actually find that state quite unrecoverable.
> Stop painting people as idiots because they exist in one of the most information hostile environments in human history.
Two things can be true at once. Being force-fed bullshit doesn’t necessarily make somebody an idiot but it also doesn’t necessarily make them not an idiot.
I see things as incentive problems, including this.
People are incentivized to be intellectually lazy since there isn’t really any personal reward for making the effort (your vote is on the margins practically meaningless, even if you’re “right,” whatever that means).
But there is great reward for staying ignorant (dopamine hits from outrage media and camaraderie with the large plurality of similarly intellectually lazy people).
How do we make it so that having well reasoned opinions is actually rewarded commensurately?
Perhaps, but the problem is that Americans really love their propaganda environment. The anger makes them feel alive. In some ways it's worse than the USSR, where everyone knew the propaganda was dull bullshit and all the interesting artistic work was in trying to subvert that.
> The people you describe have been given a highly addictive media environment tailor made to engender outrage and drive behavior. It shouldn't be a shock when most people cannot resist it.
Although I also take issue with labeling people "stupid," I also take issue with the blanket assumption that people are victims of the media environment. Both take away people's agency in their own way.
Instead, I'll ask this uncomfortable question. What if a good chunk of these people would prefer to believe a convenient lie over an inconvenient truth? If so, what does that say about them and their morals? Is that better or worse than being labeled stupid or a victim?
Tough spot when every feed is engineered for outrage, but it also feels too easy to say folks have no choice in what they lean into. You could try Loyally ai to think about it like habits and rewards, small nudges change what we return to. Over time that can shift preferences toward stuff that holds up, not just what feels good in the moment.
Absolutely there is a strong component of cognitive dissonance: the truth hurts, lies are soothing.
The truth? They do not care about basic right and wrong. They voted for a rapist, a felon, a vile insurrectionist. There’s no morality and we know this based on how they’ve voted.
But also the unwillingness by their friends and family to call them out promotes non-accountability. For everyone.
And, imo key, is the fact that this goes both ways. I've had conversations with both blue-collar types as well as white-collar types where both groups fail to grasp nuances and economonico-historic context. It's TikTok turtles all the way down. Breaking through echo chambers is harder than ever and there are no incentives to do it.
I’m not in the US, so I don’t know what it’s like from the inside but from the outside it’s so comically obvious how straight up stupid and brazen trump and his cronies are that it beggars beleif.
They're not gullible. They are in full agreement with the leadership's desire to punish the "undesirables" in their society and purge the values they don't agree with. That they too will eventually suffer the consequences eventually is less urgent than knowing that the "others" feel threatened right here and now.
But also, they’re being misled. Most non-Trumpers coddle, forgive in advance, and invite Trumper friends and family to the usual social functions. This is permission. It’s helping everyone normalize the depravity.
In a very real way there’s no conversation happening because one party has removed themselves from rationality and the other party has broadcast they don’t care.
There will need to be enormous amounts of pain to get either party to snap out of it.
This is bullshit. It would be partly valid if it were just about "information hostility" but its not. People are making choices not just due to ignorance or misinformation, but based actively on spite, hatred and "fuck you got mine". People are deciding not to necessarily better their own situation but to harm others. It is selfish, myopic and yes, utterly fucking stupid.
Normalising this way of behaving means that yes, if you're in the group that benefits from today's decision you're ok, but nothing stops you from being in the out-group tomorrow. And if your goal is inflicting harm, well tomorrow that harm will be inflicted upon you.
Sure instead of calling them stupid I’ll just tell them they’re addicted to toxic media and we need to regulate the media for their own good because of their inability to resist it.
At this point they're not "being had." They are deliberately and belligerently ignorant. It's way past time to stop giving anyone a free pass on supporting this malevolent clown.
Why do you think this was the first step? That these folks have not been engaged with: information, compassion, alternative news sources, pleas to think twice about what they read on Facebook? Why do you think these folks haven't listened to Trump himself over the past 10+ years, or lived through previous elections cycles, including Trump's previous term? There's no way you can claim the wool was pulled over people's eyes this time around.
Also, acting self righteous while demanding decorum is rich considering how this admin promised to and followed through on completely dehumanizing huge swathes of people as its base cheers on. Please, display one ounce of good faith.
1/3 of the voting population elected a known criminal, known sex predator, suspected child rapist, and known economically illiterate imbecile. The information may be hostile but it was widely and easily available.
At least 1/3 of the US voting population are idiots. Obviously there is a subset of that voting base that made an intelligent decision knowingly and complicitly elected Trump despite the extremely serious red flags, but I would still consider them to be idiots.
"Stupid" seems like a pretty fair way of describing that. If someone watches media that outrages them, misinforms them then causes them to make stupid decisions then the consequences are very much on their head. It is well know that the people peddling strong outrage are basically scumbags in it for the money and not the sort of people who should be listened too if you want to achieve long term success (which is mostly the domain of trusting optimists).
There are a lot of high quality media sources out there that don't promote outrage.
> It has nothing to do with stupidity. Stop painting people as idiots because they exist in one of the most information hostile environments in human history.
No. Someone refusing to spend 30 seconds understanding how a tariff works is the result of an idiot. My 10 year old figured out how they work in under 5 minutes. There’s literally no excuse for a grown ass adult to refuse to educate themselves on the subject.
“This media environment” doesn’t prevent them from typing “how do tariffs work?” in their search engine of choice and reading the first result.
I just googled "How do tariffs work?" I got hit with several college level vocabulary words describing tariffs in both the AI summary and my first result. It might be less of a problem, if we had adequately funded schools.
The full AI summary from DuckDuckGo for "How do tariffs work?"
>Tariffs are taxes imposed by a government on imported goods, making them more expensive to encourage consumers to buy domestic products instead. The costs of these tariffs are typically passed on to consumers, resulting in higher prices for imported items.
I don't see any "college level vocabulary words" and it directly says that it makes goods more expensive and the costs are passed on to consumers. Maybe Google's complicated answer is part of the "media environment" being criticized.
The LLM systems being what they are, you can ask google "how do tariffs work, using eighth grade words" and you get a very clear and correct explanation without the college level words.
In simple terms, think of a tariff like a special tax a country puts on goods it buys from another country.
Here's how it works:
When a country wants to import something, like cars from Japan or clothes from China, it has to pay an extra fee (the tariff) to its own government before those goods can come into the country.
This extra fee makes the imported goods more expensive than products made in the country itself.
Why do governments do this?
To protect local businesses: By making foreign products pricier, the government hopes people will choose to buy things made in their own country, helping local businesses grow and create jobs.
To make money: Tariffs can also be a way for the government to collect some extra cash.
To get other countries to change their ways: Sometimes, countries use tariffs as a way to pressure other nations to follow certain rules or to stop unfair trade practices.
Example
Imagine a bicycle store in the US wants to import a bicycle from another country that costs $1,000. If the US has an 11% tariff on bicycles, the store would have to pay an extra $110 (11% of $1,000) to the US government, making the total cost to bring the bike in $1,110. This makes bicycles made in the US seem more affordable by comparison.
I can't tell if this is a sarcastic comment. Not only is "domestic" a relatively simple word with a straightforward definition, but also the point of the original comment that "consumers will end up paying the tariffs" is still clear from the summary regardless.
>> What is a tariff? A tariff is essentially a tax imposed by a government on imported goods. When a product crosses a country's border, the importing company pays this fee to the customs authority before the product enters the domestic economy. (start of Google summary)
For crying out loud, information is so accessible. The inability to find and discern at least some level of truth (or at least gather multiple contrasting perspectives) is laziness, AND stupidity.
I'm all for better schools, a better information ecosystem, and more tolerance, but why are we bending over backwards to tell malignantly underinformed people it's not their fault? It is! It is their fault.
I asked Google to "explain tariffs in simple terms" and it sure did. A sixth grader would easily get it. Here's the response (and now I'm wondering whether a GenAI system could create a short animated video or slide deck that could become a TikTok):
Tariffs in simple terms
A tariff is like a special tax that a country places on goods it buys from other countries.
Imagine this
You're buying a toy made in another country.
The government of your country might add a tariff to that toy's price when it enters the country.
This makes the imported toy more expensive than a similar toy made in your own country.
The company importing the toy pays this tax to the government.
However, they might then pass some or all of that cost onto you, the customer, by raising the price of the toy.
AND stupidity is you being intentionally ignorant.
People have much better things to do than look up words, look for dissenting opinions one something the face on their TV tells them. There's taking the kids to _______ practice. There's TV shows to keep up with. There's an infinite feed of content to scroll through. There's plenty of other things that they would prefer to do themselves than whatever it is you would prefer them to do. That does not qualify as stupid. To me, what is stupid, is everyone here calling others that have differing view points than their own stupid. You are willingly using that term in the same way you say they are willfully not looking things up.
If you’re too busy to find out what tariffs are, fine. I get it. But then don’t have an opinion on the matter. Don’t vote for an absolute shithead because you think these things, which you’re too busy to find out about, will be great for the country.
Having an opinion is a constitutional right. You can't tell people not to have an opinion. That is stupid. People vote for many reasons while a lot of those vote on a single issue. If the person receiving their single issue vote means there's baggage to get their one hot button item then so be it. I voted for someone not for what they represented so much as it was a vote not for the other person. The person receiving my vote definitely didn't make me all smiley and thinking panacea was on the way. In fact, my last 3 votes were this way.
To paraphrase Randall Munroe, “it’s not literally illegal to do this” is the weakest possible defense of something.
I sure as hell can tell people not to have an opinion. That is my constitutional right. If someone has strong beliefs about something and votes accordingly, and they don’t put in the effort needed to find out the basic facts about the matter, then they are stupid and that’s bad.
Man, I really feel like people are deliberately obtuse in this thread. You can have a single issue while that issue is not tariffs, yet everyone is harping on you about why you voted for someone so in favor of tariffs. That's not why you voted for him. Just look at the polling. MAGA world is not a fan. That's the die hard base. Some of these people's single issue was Epstein and now they're really pissed. They know everything about their one single issue. You're the one that can't keep it straight
Talk about deliberately obtuse! We’re not criticizing these people for voting for someone in favor of tariffs for other reasons. We’re criticizing them for voting for that person because they’re in favor of tariffs despite not knowing what tariffs actually are. Your response of “maybe people voted for other reasons” is completely missing the point here.
The original post was painting anyone that voted for the current admin as stupid. The conversation also assumed that anyone that voted for POTUS did so because of tariffs. That's clearly not true. Are there people that voted for POTUS while also having no clue about tariffs, yes and this is not in dispute. What is in dispute is that anyone that voted for the cheeto-in-chief is automatically stupid. It helps to keep up with the thread. This assumption that everyone that voted opposite of how you did is automatically stupid is what is actually stupid.
==giving more money to an underperforming school only makes it worse.==
Is there no circumstance where more funding would help an underperforming school? It certainly “can” make it worse in instances, but there are many reasons that a school might be underperforming. To imply that more resources would fail to help any of those problems is quite a leap.
What if the student-teacher ration is 40-1 and more funds allows for another teacher, might that make the school better?
What if the school is only open for 4 days due to low funding, might an additional day of school make it perform better?
What if a school has multiple disabled students slowing down the curriculum, but no funds to give them personal support, might more funds help it perform better?
It's a good thing we, the enlightened of HN, can see through the bullshit clearly though. /s
With tariffs, it's entirely possible that the loss of blue collar jobs due to offshoring more than offsets the cheap toys those folks get to import in exchange. Especially when the cost of housing, education, and medical care is rising regardless. It's not uncommon to hear labor leaders rail against NAFTA and be pro-tariff[1] for this reason.
It's also possible to be pro-tariff and recognize that Trump's policy is whatever keeps him at the center of attention, downstream consequences be damned.
A concept of a plan, a verbal agreement, even just a phone call is better than a binding trade agreement that lasts 20y. Because the former provides what matters most: distraction from the things that will put Trump in jail and a feeling of power and importance.
I started in like December or January... Was COVID 5 years ago fuck me. Also, COVID weight gain would be during lockdowns, and ALSO my job went fully remote. Being fully remote was an issue for sure. So it's like COVID was extended for me.
I never really weighed myself and then felt weird like a big mechelin man and I saw I was 10-12 kg heavier, makes sense why I feel bad I thought, and I did not weigh before and just decided to lose it, was easy when I decided.
That's my story.
I was always slow on the uptake on things, hygiene, clothes etc.
Weight too, I grew up always being skinny, but getting to 30+ I never noticed when I got heavier as it takes a long time, you talk as if everything is obvious, but it is not.
But it is easy once you know.
So, if you have already identified weight as being the issue, losing weight is easy, in my experience. As I said, fasting feels good, skip meals, skip the beer, drink sugar-free. 10 kg gone fast, I promise you.
The issue for me is identifying the problem.
Love the downvotes, btw.
>It took you five years to do that though. Why did it take that long if it was easy
I should specify, I have been BMI 19-20 for 3–4 months now, again, as from teenager to 25-ish thats my range, thats "me", it feels like myself, so.
So that's what I mean when “recently”, not yesterday.
Time warps when you get old. So fast.
ALSO, easy things can still take a long time. You understand the words?
I’d wager that you’re getting downvoted for two reasons, first because current science is strongly indicating that “obesity is a moral failing” is factually untrue, so being smug while dead wrong is off putting.
And second reason would be the framing of the issue of obesity as being solved by just losing weight. A lot (maybe most? Almost all?) of people that are overweight have at some point lost weight, the bigger challenge is keeping it off long term.
So you kind of just Kramer’d into this thread and loudly volunteered unprompted that you don’t understand this stuff on a basic level, aren’t in a position to understand it, and you definitely feel like you’ve accomplished something so enormous that it makes you smarter and better than everybody else. It’s kind of like if you show a kid Google Translate and they start lecturing you about how easy it is to move to Mallorca because Catalan isn’t that hard to pick up
Yes, there is an issue of easy access to calorie rich foods, but at a certain point it is the individual.
I can listen to brain rot gangsta rap all day or baroque classical both on Spotify. It's what I click on that determines it. The hard part is learning what is good.
No, they are idiots. Not at media consumption, but idiots at life.
There are certain life skills that can be considered “smart” like revisiting your established opinions when presented with new information, or knowing that encountering a new piece of information from a single source doesn’t carry the weight of encountering it in dozens of places, or that making a mistake doesn’t guarantee that your existence is doomed but been presented with a learning experience.
The “stupid” folks refuse to take the simplest steps to better themselves. They refuse to self-evaluate honestly. That’s the root cause. This stupidness results in them being duped and misinformed.
Therefore, when one encounters an uninformed and duped person, it’s not out of line to consider that person “stupid”.
So when people like OP say that people are stupid, it’s not a dig via victim blaming. It’s a judgement that they’re clearly being stupid, that their poor life skills need work because they ended up misinformed.
This isn't some natural state that's unrecoverable. The people you describe have been given a highly addictive media environment tailor made to engender outrage and drive behavior. It shouldn't be a shock when most people cannot resist it. The first step to changing it is not writing them off or insulting them for being had.