On second thought, just throw plastic away | Hacker News Reader

On second thought, just throw plastic away

city-journal.org

59 pointsmhb95 comments

I think this makes the same mistake that has always been made with respect to plastic -- it assumes the responsibility of making recycling work should fall to the consumer, when it should really be imposed on the producer. If the responsibility and cost were imposed on the packaging manufacturers to make sure that most of the packaging they produce get recycled, they would be forced to find a solution. They could then respond to this by choosing to move away from plastic altogether, or choosing materials that are easier to recycle, or raising prices and using the proceeds to pay for effective collection efforts and so forth. As it stands, the packagers' incentives are all aligned with plastic packaging -- it is cheaper to produce, cheaper to transport, and more versatile than other materials. As it stands, all of the costs of the waste stream from plastics are borne by consumers and the environment.

agree, there really needs to be strong negative incentives to reduce plastic packaging... we consumers don't have a choice of "apples in plastic" vs "apples in cardboard" its just whatever the supermarket buys is what we get

I would vote for any elected official that ran on a platform of “internalizing externalities”. Almost all the problems we face today are the result of someone’s actions benefiting only as a result negative externalities and so they scale up that action. It’s madness.

Germany, Slovakia and a few other countries have pushed the responsibility of recycling PET bottles onto the producers and retailers: There is a 25 cent deposit on a 2 liter PET bottle. Consumers deposit their bottles into machines at the retailer for a 25 c discount on their purchase. Frequently there are queues at those machines. My guess is that people earn less than minimum wage recycling.

Hungary (and Romania) have no deposit on their pet bottles, but some retailers do have similar machines. Consumers get 1 forint for every bottle they deposit. That's 1 dollar for every 400 bottles returned!

Earlier this year, I found that soda/cola/pop is more expensive in Slovakia than Hungary (at Lidl). So the retailers raise prices, hurting the poor.

> Earlier this year, I found that soda/cola/pop is more expensive in Slovakia than Hungary (at Lidl). So the retailers raise prices, hurting the poor.

Besides the soda being bad aspect, how is this hurting the poor? They can return the bottle for money, the system is working as intended.

Except the price excluding the deposit in Slovakia is higher than the price in Hungary. That's how the retailer pays for the machine.

I disagree that sugar free soda is unhealthy. Nutritionally it's almost identical to water, which has many health benefits.

We can discuss this endlessly. Or we can go look for some peer reviewed research.

> Nutritionally it's almost identical to water, which has many health benefits.

Heavy water is exactly nutritionally identical to water, and yet drinking it exclusively for multiple days will kill you. "Your body extracts the same amount of nutrients from A as it does B therefore A is as healthy as B" is, needless to say, a deeply flawed argument.

> hurting the poor

Same rhetoric is used against soda tax.

Sweet water isn't food. It's poison. Doubly so for artificial sweeteners.

There's an abundance of other flavored water choices, for all peoples. Some even non-harmful. Coffee, tea, horchata, oat milk, lemonaides, frescas, aqua du jamaica, seltzer, ad nauseum.

Poor people need (and deserve) free and abundant potable water. Not soda.

> Coffee, tea

Not everyone is looking for caffeination.

> horchata, oat milk, lemonaides, frescas, aqua du jamaica

The sugar content on these is on-par with soda.

The question is "Do Pigovian taxes hurt the poor?" Not "Is sugar the same as sugar?"

Soda taxes are sin taxes, not Pigovian taxes.

Also, if the reason to tax soda is specifically because it's unhealthy, then it's asinine to not extend that logic consistently.

How else would you characterize Pigovian taxes?

Pigovian taxes are on the production/supply side, sin taxes are on the consumption/demand side. Supply-side taxation is much more economically efficient, much harder to dodge, and far less regressive than demand-side taxation, and also ensures that it's producers and importers motivated to produce/import less harmful products rather than punishing consumers for being consumers.

For future, I'll write "sin taxes, a type of Pigovian taxes". Thank you for correcting me.

The question remains if you support concern trolling over sin taxes, a type of Pigovian taxes as a means to thwart progress.

Or maybe pedantry is its own reward.

> For future, I'll write "sin taxes, a type of Pigovian taxes".

Then you would still be incorrect, because - as explained above - sin taxes are not a "type of" Pigovian tax, but something entirely different. They might have similar motivations, but they are applied very differently and have very different socioeconomic effects.

> The question remains if you support concern trolling over sin taxes, a type of Pigovian taxes as a means to thwart progress.

The answer remains that sin taxes - unlike Pigovian taxes - do not result in progress, therefore leaving nothing to "thwart".

But hey, maybe unwarranted condescension and confident incorrectness are, like pedantry, their own reward.

Raising prices on soda isn’t exactly hurting the poor anymore than taxes on cigarettes do, it’s an unnecessary and unhealthy product that then increase the healthcare cost to them and the state. Poor people need variety and choice, but not unbridled “choice” as decided by Coca Cola and other soft drink conglomerates and their extensive advertising budgets and marketing deals with convenience stores.

When I was in college there was a 10-cent deposit on glass bottles. Guess how many we recycled? ALL of them! It wasn’t a huge imposition either.

My state in Australia has had 10c deposits for as long as I can remember (Well I remember it being 5c a long time ago). Personally I never reclaim it, I just chuck them in standard recycling because it's basically impossible to claim the refund without a car since the system is set up so you have to take it through recycling center drive thrus which are placed well outside of the city.

It really was a brilliant maneuver on the part of business to frame this as an issue of consumer choice.

You could apply the same argument to food products. You buy food and it produces potentially harmful waste that has to be dealt with, so the producer should be held responsible, right? A tax if their food is thrown out uneaten, charges for how much burden their food puts on waste treatment plants.

Clearly ridiculous and creates a perverse incentive to put more sugars, less fillers, and less fiber into the foods. In the same way it's a bad idea with plastics; when plastic is the best solution then anything they use instead will be worse, and how much worse it'll be will be proportional to how much you inflate the cost of plastic (which must be significant since plastic is often the far superior choice).

What does make sense -- just like human waste treatment plants for food waste -- is plastic and other waste incineration plants. They're not cheap or profitable on their own, but they solve the actual problem in a fair and equitable manner without creating perverse incentives. Publicly funded research to create packaging materials better than plastic is another reasonable solution, but it may be that plastic is the best we can do for now.

But raising the cost of plastic until it's unreasonable to use is like an inverse tragedy of the commons; solving a big problem causing many small ones instead of many small problems causing a big one.

You are only arguing against the against the packagers using other materials in response to the suggested regulation. (Also note that "increasing the cost to make plastic unenviable" is not the proposed regulation)

GP suggests that the packagers could also use easier-to-recycle plastic, or raise prices to pay for collecting and sorting.

As an example: Bottle deposits work well - IIRC resulting in 70-90% of all bottles being collected. Much harder to implement for general plastic waste of course, but it show that recycling can sort of work:

PET recycling:

> Worldwide, approximately 7.5 million tons of PET were collected in 2011. This gave 5.9 million tons of flake. In 2009 3.4 million tons were used to produce fibre, 500,000 tons to produce bottles, 500,000 tons to produce APET sheet for thermoforming, 200,000 tons to produce strapping tape and 100,000 tons for miscellaneous applications. Thus only approximately 15% of collected PET bottles were actually recycled into new bottles, the rest being used in generally non-recyclable products.

15% recycled isn't great from a "circular economy" perspective, but most of the rest is downcycled which probably is also a good thing. (although if that flake is used instead of more environmentally friendly alternatives due the probably dirt-cheap price the equation becomes more complex.)

Contrary to your point, a deposit doesn't shift responsibility to the producers at all but rather to the consumers. Consumers pay the deposit and then get it refunded when they behave and suffer the consequences to their time or don't behave and are fined the deposit.

The only thing a deposit accomplishes regarding producers is to enable them to use materials that are more expensive, but less so than consumers' tolerance for annoyance. With a 25 cent per bottle deposit required to make their time recycling worthwhile and companies still using plastic it really shows the enormous gap between plastic and the next closes alternative.

It's also not an equitable solution. There's no real material difference between plastic bottles, plastic wraps, and plastic bags - they're all plastics after all - yet they're treated differently; you don't have say a five cent deposit on the plastic your fruit is wrapped in, but you do have a deposit for a bottle.

> packagers could also use easier-to-recycle plastic, or raise prices to pay for collecting and sorting

But does that actually help the environment, or just cause worse environmental impact?

The dollar value of something is a good approximation of the environmental damage. Spending more on something causes environmental damage, for an average products. Greenwashing is a problem: when you buy that expensive green product, the outcome can often be worse for the environment than the cheaper “non-green” product.

> The dollar value of something is a good approximation of the environmental damage

It's an rough approximation, not sure if I'll agree it's a good one. (CFCs comes to mind)

> But does that actually help the environment

I agree that's not necessarily the case for all usages. But if such an regulation would decrease the amount of plastic pollution, that would go along way making up for those instances. I also suspect easier-to-recycle sometimes are primarily at odds with branding and marketing and not essential material properties.

EDIT:

I don't think the regulation "packages must ensure all packaging is recycled" necessarily is the best possible regulation.

A less steering regulation would maybe result in more incineration (which I personally think is a decent option as long the emissions are properly filtered/cleaned and the energy is utilized). But somehow pushing more of the external cost associated with packaging (and plastic in general) is surly the way to go.

Raising the price is only necessary if you can't figure out a way to dispose of it properly. Maybe that's the case. If so, then we shouldn't be using it at all. So it would be a good outcome in that case if it is "unreasonable to use".

>, or raising prices and using the proceeds to pay for effective collection efforts and so forth.

Of course, i agree with the proposal, but i fear it would require some serious strongarming from a higher body to actually ensure the monies taken ended up being actually used correctly. Which would probably cost more money.

It would take political will, yes.

That's not viable either. Should companies control what their customers do with a physical product? That would destroy right to repair, just for starters.

Consumers MUST take responsibility for what they buy, if they should have the freedom to use them how they wish.

> Consumers MUST take responsibility for what they buy

How are they expected to do that when the vast majority of products they buy are wrapped in excessive amounts of plastic (and when the very few exceptions are more expensive)? The only reasonable solution here is to address the supply side of the equation.

The article is kind of hysterical, but has some interesting information in. I always wondered what to do with plastic bags and bottles and stuff in places where there is no rubbish collection. Burning seems popular, but despite looking up DIY home incineration it seems like not much effort is being put into this.

I also wondered why there aren't deposits on plastic bottles like there are on glass bottles. In the end it should probably be up to the companies who produce them, like Coca Cola to deal with them, but there probably needs to be an incentive to return them.

Here in Germany there are deposits on plastic bottles for things like coke. The bottles are more sturdy and get re-used multiple times.

What happens if someone poops in the bottle and then recycles it. I guess that's just the American in me probably. Probably why those efforts die here.

Everything should be sterilized by the bottler before reusing, but I'm guessing that any bottle to suffer that destiny would be discarded either by the store owner, the pick up crew, or the bottling facility

It's pretty similar in my country

Does it matter? You need to sterilize it anyway, because of the other million environmental factors.

I guess you'd smell it? And if not does it really matter?

Probably you'd be surprised at how much you poop you consume, both your own and other people's or animal's.

I imagine the bottles are cleaned before refilling.

Plastic and glass is ground up

That's cool, is it mandated by law or did it just work out as more economical?

Knowing the Germans, it's a law.

I agree

I don’t think we see floating islands of paper bags and marine life strangled on cotton bag straps. Their measure of the impact of widespread disposable plastic use is carbon emission, which is not the only environmental impact we have. Using products that degrade in nature lets our waste degrade in nature when it ends up in nature.

As the article implies: The source of the plastic in the ocean are poorer Asian countries (India, Vietnam, Cambodia, China). The reason is that these countries lack (a) properly designed landfills (b) the logistics to send all their trash to landfills and (c) a culture of putting trash in bins.

Asian countries will not transition to paper bags and cotton bag straps because it's too expensive and not as convenient as plastic.

They also note that a lot of developed countries plastic trash ends up in countries with less tight controls. So reducing that export of plastic should help. Finally, just because someone else does something bad doesn’t justify doing it yourself and compounding the problem.

CO2 emission from plastics is pretty small. Only 4% of fossil fuels goes towards plastics, and they mostly last so long that that doesn't even turn into CO2. If CO2 is your concern, there are much larger producers to focus efforts on.

The original Greenpeace article (the submitted article links to it), is much better than the submitted article.

https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/news/new-greenpeace-report-pl...

Terrible article. At some point we will have to do something about plastic that's not in our comfort zone. As someone who lives on an island in Brazil, we have tons of plastic from all over the world being washed up on our shore. It's not a "developing countries" problem, our oceans depend on it, our lives depend on it, so forbidding something we can't manage seems like a pretty good solution to me.

How to take a bunch of true facts - and reach a completely unsupportable conclusion.

Yes, banning single use plastic is going to be painful and inconvenient, but one could likewise argue that for the addict, going without your drug is painful and inconvenient.

Also, no one advocates banning single use syringes.

  > Americans welcomed plastic products and packages because they were so much better than the alternative. Cellophane was considered a marvel because it was both moisture-proof and transparent, keeping food fresher and enabling grocery shoppers to see what they were buying. Advertisements featured housewives rejoicing that disposable plates and glasses freed them from dishwashing chores.

just calling it like i see it, but this reads like a sales pitch from the oil industry

Actual cellophane is made from cellulose (hence the name) and is both plant based and biodegradable.

The 'plastic wrap' you buy now, however, is likely made from PET.

The author's know-it-all attitude and intrusive politics make it very hard for me to take the rest of the article seriously. I’m up for a discussion, but not when the starting position is ‘everyone who disagrees with me is a malicious idiot.’

This article rant on the imperfect nature of our current solutions for plastic, ignore part of the problems (like the floating island of plastics...) and doesn't provide any alternative solution.

Mostly stop using so much plastic, probably. A lot of plastic (for instance plastic bottles) is being used under pressure from the industry. As long as Coca Cola used glass bottle, it was on them to collect, clean and reuse them. Now that they switched to plastic, it's everyone else's problem. Forbid plastic bottles, and that part of the problem will solve itself.

Yes, how do I do that when every damn thing at every damn store is wrapped in plastic? Sometimes two to three times (the package is plastic wrapped, and each item is also wrapped in plastic)? Food, goods, boxes even wrapped in plastic...

We need to change the behaviour of companies wrapping everything in plastic. I do not see that happening soon, and am not sure how to encourage them to do so (plastic is so cheap).

The author somehow misses this obvious conclusion.

They started mandating that businesses charge for plastic bags where I live, and it made a huge difference from a culture that scarcely used reuseable bags/bins, to one that predominately uses them (at least anecdotally, I don't have stats). I sometimes think that obvious solutions seem harder than they actually are in reality.

Short of nationalizing the entire petrochemical industry how do you propose stopping them from just making something else with the current plastic by-products?

I'm fine with nationalising any industry as necessary. We should be in a war economy, a command economy (exactly like during WWII) to control pollution and climate change. The situation is actually more serious than WWII.

Tax it.

Are plastic bottles a problem? Most of the issues for marine life seem to be shapes things get caught in or eat. I'm not sure if bottles fit that.

If you live somewhere with a reasonably non-corrupt and functioning waste disposal industry, the waste plastics are dumped into adequately well-managed landfills and don’t contribute to the floating island of plastics. If you live somewhere where the mafia dumps garbage into the sea, reducing plastic waste is neither necessary nor sufficient to address the problem.

The island of plastic seems like a different problem.

If things disposed of in garbage bins somehow end up in the pacific, plastic isn't the problem, but whatever scandalously corrupt process lets that happen.

Fishing nets make up half the pacific plastic. So you are on the money.

> This article rant on the imperfect nature of our current solutions for plastic, ignore part of the problems (like the floating island of plastics...) and doesn't provide any alternative solution.

The article focused on fundamental problems with plastic recycling and specifically focused on the root causes of the floating island of plastics. Rant is an unusual term to apply to a rational, reasoned, and thoughtful analysis of a hard problem where the superficially "obvious" solutions are demonstrably ineffective and counter effective.

"rational, reasoned and thoughtful" are unusual terms for an article that's fundamentally dishonest about where promotion of plastic recycling has come from: it's never been something environmentalists advocated (as anything more than slightly better than nothing, anyway), but rather is basically greenwashing by the plastics industry, whose trade organizations are the main source of claims that plastics recycling can be efficient.

The article also doesn't really attempt to demonstrate that the alternative of using less plastic is ineffective, although that might be true; a mocking aside about syringes, which are obviously not at the top of anybody's list for replacement, is not a demonstration.

> plastic recycling has ... never been something environmentalists advocated

We've lived through very different past few decades if you think environmentalists were not also advocates of plastic recycling, alongside the petrochemical industry. I fully agree that plastic recycling is greenwashing, but plastic recycling is greenwashing that 99% of environmentalists bought into and championed with gusto. Recycling plastic sounds like a great idea, it just doesn't happen to be a viable idea. That's a very hard message for most environmentalists to hear.

this language is "ranting". terms like "delusional" and "obsessions" are emotionally charged and reveal the author's anger:

> The group’s overall policy remains delusional—the report proposes a far more harmful alternative to recycling—but it’s nonetheless encouraging to see environmentalists put aside their obsessions long enough to contemplate reality.

Several decades of profoundly flawed policy on an important economic or environmental topic is enough to make most people angry. That doesn't in itself make a well written article a rant, nor does the quote you cited make it a rant, though it may well make it an article you disagree with, which is quite different from a rant.

Doesn't he say just to burn it in the early part of the article?

I'd take a slight step back and say "Recycle things like soda bottles", they are generally PET plastic and a fair amount of infrastructure exists to recycle it. Almost any other kind of plastic goes in the trash.

There are youtube videos that take this to an amazing level. People are converting PET bottles into filament and 3D printing all the things.

A 1 kilo spool of PETG filament costs around $20. If the process of turning bottles into filaments becomes cheap and easy enough, much larger scale home recycling could become a thing.

E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6Pjh18MmXY

Why ban products that are cheaper, sturdier, lighter, cleaner, healthier, and better for the environment?

If the article begged the question any harder, the local constable would run it out of town.

Bit pointless without an alternative. We're quite far away from any sort of viable refill based economy

5% is terrible, but better than zero

I think there is value in the conversation, even without a solution.

It's enough of a solution to me to understand which plastic is worth my time to recycle, and which is not. As it is, I recycle all of it. It seems this is a waste of some of my time.

Time I could use, for example, pondering a solution, etc.

The alternative is in the title. Unless it’s PET #1 or #2, throw it in the dumpster.

Plastic bags are like matches. If there was an increase in the number of fires in the city I live in one approach would be to ban matches. It'd be dumb but you could do that and who knows it might even work. Another approach would be to get people to use matches responsibly.

Same with plastic bags. Figure out why people aren't tossing them in a bin and how to get them to do it. Would it be better if there weren't landfills with metric tons of plastic bags in them? Sure but it's way worse if the streets and harbor are filled with plastic bags - from an aesthetic point of view if nothing else.

plastic are like cigarette butts. They get used one time for someone’s slight convenience and then litter the landscape for years.

I've started fires before. It's not easy. It requires a lot of thought and effort. Throwing a bag on the ground, on the other hand...

> Figure out why people aren't tossing them in a bin and how to get them to do it.

Expected benefit: clean car Expected cost: 0.000% change of $400 fine

It's not surprising people behave according to their incentives.

> The group’s overall policy remains delusional—the report proposes a far more harmful alternative to recycling

In what multiverse is reducing the amount of single-use plastic we as a society produce more harmful? Nobody's talking about taking away medical supplies like syringes; those are a tiny drop in the bucket compared to even shopping bags and straws, let alone disposable packaging, let alone fishing nets, let alone all the other things made needlessly disposable and also needlessly made of plastic.

I think this is one of those issues that are presented as a hard/nuanced problem but really isn't. Single use plastic can be banned the same way lead paint is banned. That's only hard to do because of lobbying by Coke&friends. There is some inconvenience for the consumer, like having to return our glass bottles or bringing reusable containers to the supermarket but that's all doable (proof: that's how it was done before). The hard part is forcing corporate to take a profit hit.

It would be very interesting to see the funding sources of this journal and whether plastic manufacturers are contributors. The plastics industry has created the myth of plastic recycling and perhaps it now wants to undo that as it realizes that the public still wants to get rid of single use plastics.

For anyone trying to avoid plastic altogether, I've been trying to work on a ProductHunt/Wirecutter-like site for finding better product alternatives: intentfulconsumers.com

The gist is to try and make better purchases, while being practical and not having a zealot mindset about it.

If you buy a latte a day, buy a home espresso machine (Gaggia Classic is pretty optimal) and learn to make a latte instead. They are quite heavy duty, plenty capable of making high quality espresso at home, and it takes less time than waiting in line at your coffee shop. And no paper cups or lids.

In fact, here's my complete product list for your consideration and, no doubt, critique. Will say this: I'm 46, everyone in our house drinks coffee, I have tried a fairly wide variety of coffee preparation methods, and my daughter has been a barista at 3 places, including one far, far away. She helped source all this, and purchased another set of the exact same things when she went to college.

* Gaggia RI9380/46 Classic Pro: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07RQ3NL76/

* Apexstone Espresso scale (20 grams is about right): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JG1PXLC/

* Mueller HyperGrind grinder (30 seconds with a bit of agitation gets about the right grind): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B076FJ92M4/

* Lavazza Super Crema whole bean coffee (do not use this for drip or French Press coffee): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000SDKDM4/

* Widemouth 1 qt Ball jar for the ground coffee out of your grinder: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07KMLR79B/

* Stainless 58mm tamper: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B092DSH5NS/

* Rattleware shot glass pitcher: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001GZYTIW/

* 20 oz frothing pitcher: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0016CBMZI/

* Coffee knock box: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BDK71TR/

* You may want a large jar for whole bean storage, I leave that to you. I reuse a glass jar from some Kirkland cashews (https://www.reddit.com/r/Costco/comments/qk36an/my_costco_fi...)

* Bonus round, here's the best french press I've found: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07RJJ2SGG/

I was a coffee geek for many years, but switched to tea a couple of years ago (long story). So I still have all the gadgets including a dual boiler espresso machine etc.

The thing is, if you really want latte/espresso at home, the energy costs are quite high. You need to warm it up for at least 15 minutes. Didn’t run the numbers but it’s not negligible. So not sure if you’re saving the environment much by buying and powering a home espresso machine for a couple of cups per day?

I can make a shot with about 5 minutes of machine time. The machine is rated at 1425 W. At peak pricing from PG&E that's about 6 cents.

in japan, plastics like containers are almost always to be sorted out (and cleaned beforehand) and collected on specific days

but more often than not, they just stay there and aren't "collected" until the next raw garbage (food etc) and basically burned with everything else

cans, pet bottles, cardboard, all taken at the day they are supposed to, but plastic isn't most of the time... and its likely the exact same reasons as the article says: its (sadly) a waste

In Switzerland this just makes sense. Trash bags cost 2$ a piece. Recycling is free. Any violation will result in a huge fine.

I thought recycling sequesters microplastics?

Seriously, this guy needs to take the Trump flags off the back of his truck before making what might otherwise be legit arguments: plastic is bad, recycling tech at present is poor, maybe even a bust. BUT, so were other technologies at first. It's a problem that needs solving, and at least recycling keeps some awareness of a problem that needs bright people, not another angry conservative blowhard to just say, "ah, fuck it."

Just burn it like Sweden does.

city-journal is a far-right rag

So what? It is raising some interesting points in a decent way and developing discussion. There are points that make more sense to me than others, and I dont share their conclusions. But I appreciate the discussion it raises.

Americans shouldn't be so fast to discount the idea of each other just because they are from the other end of their political spectrum. US politics would improve if both sides avoided that.

On the flip side, it publishes and prominently features people like Chris Rufo [1], who openly acknowledges propagandizing and intentionally muddying the waters around topics like CRT [2]. Obviously you can still have a conversation or discuss the points made, but at a certain point it just becomes a waste of time to use people who revel in acting in bad faith as a starting point for a dialogue.

Especially when they are far from the only ones discussing the issue: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...

[1] https://www.city-journal.org/christopher-rufo-on-woke-educat...

[2] https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1371540368714428416

The problem is that it frequently detours from interesting discussions points to do things like dump on Greenpeace. Not interesting. Being elsewhere on the political spectrum doesn’t discount the interesting points, it just injects too many wacky ideas to make it possible to engage with. Ratio of density between interesting points and fever swamp ranting too low. Trash rag.

>Americans shouldn't be so fast to discount the idea of each other just because they are from the other end of their political spectrum. US politics would improve if both sides avoided that.

Nah, it just devolves into bad faith ad hominem towards the end. This is no National Review.

It's not much more than a rant really.

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