Literacy can mean being able to read but not write, which seems to have been pretty common in the past.

In fairness, most developed countries used to, when they were at their level of industrial development.

> Look back to the early 19th century if you want to know what it's like to live in a "world without plastic".

We're talking about reducing plastic use, which is crazy high nowadays, not full scale elimination. I remember going to the store in the eighties and nineties and sure, there was plastic, but the packaging wasn't three layers of plastics just to get the thing out. Use less, recycle what you do use, prevent it from getting into the environment and crumbling into microplastic pollution. PET can be recycled once of twice, but the other stuff is hopeless. Most other materials are just more recyclable, that's just a fact. rubber, cork, ceramic, plaster, tin, aluminum, paper, cartboard, glass, wax, etc... there's plenty of viable industrial scale materials depending on the usecase.

"not full scale elimination"? Read the quote that I quoted from the article and think again.

Recycling here implies reworking existing plastics into new ones, not just collecting them.

The problem with browsers is that they rely on other standards. If a browser needs to maintain backward compatibility and requires an evolving standard that ALSO requires backward compatibility, this acts like a multiplier on implementation complexity. This also means it becomes increasingly difficult to spin up a new browser engine, and the fewer of those there are, the easier it is for the big ones to just add what they want and have it become a standard, reinforcing the issue.

XSLT adds ~100k lines of specialized code to browser engines with near-zero telemetry usage (<0.01% of page loads), making it a prime example of the maintenance burden vs. utility problem you're describing.

Universal healthcare is just an mandatory insurance scheme with an efficient centralized bureaucracy. You know, insurance, that thing that prevents markets from falling over when something goes wrong. We also have fun things like bankruptcy, which means some people don't get payed back. Should we reintroduce debter prisons to get rid of all the communism in the system?

It's different because private insurance and hospitals want to make profit

You think public insurance don't? There is a difference between making profits and placing profits above everything else.

Extracting resources and giving less in exchange is a form of making profit. Socialized healthcare does that too.

?

It varies a lot. Compare the UK, Germany and Singapore. Very different in the level of centralisation.

And it's now being exported worldwide by armies of grifters and bots.

I am disturbed by the amount of fantastical thinking I see around me by people who watch some youtube or tiktok grifter with ai voiceover and seem to be blissfully ignorant that they're being manipulated by some vested interest.

People believe what they want to believe and have always been easy to influence, but the scale at which it is happening today... God help us.

I wonder what the democrats are going to do when their midterms fail and their hats are out of rabbits.

Lament the state of things, blame Republicans and third party voters, take more money from fossil fuel and AIPAC, do a bit more insider trading, and ask us all for more money because they're totally going to protect abortion rights and stop ICE this time.

An arms embargo vs Israel would be wildly popular among Dem voters - but don't ask campaign staffers about it unless you want to be marked as "no response" [0].

0 - https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/uncommitted-le...

It's amazing. It's great trade policy, probably the greatest ever.

> Instead of training the personnel and putting faith in them, they are treated like children.

Exactly this, so much time and effort gets expended on paranoid bureaucracy.

Ideally the decisions on these things should be taken by those with a good amount of practical experience, who've been held accountable in the past, know the kinds risks low-skill employees bring and the pressures vested interests bring to the table. The ivory tower types don't know any of that.