[sinatra]

Usually it’s much easier to be liberal when doing so doesn’t cost you meaningfully. I’d encourage you to evaluate for yourself if your stances are truly fair and if you’re truly liberal considering how painful it is for an H1B to lose their job vs you. It’s also easy to say “but H1Bs get exploited!” Considering how many H1Bs come here, maybe they’d rather face this exploitation vs staying in their own country?

[rhelz]

In a free market, there's no such thing as a shortage. This isn't a 1980's soviet grocery store. The market for programmers is not centrally planned. Its one of the least-regulated markets extant today.

So anybody complaining about a "shortage of programmers" is just a cheapskate.

In a free market, what signals to us that more of something should be produced? Buehler? Buehler?

[feedforward]

I spent much of 2020 trying to find things like bread in US supermarkets. It's funny how people harken back to Russia 40 years ago as if I was not walking through empty supermarkets four years ago.

[vaidhy]

Is this pedantic or pragmatic? A commodity, needed/wanted by all people, used to be available at a price point X, is now unaffordable for a large percentage of its erstwhile consumers is a shortage.

If that commodity satisfies a basic need, its unavilability is just even more fucked up.

[comte7092]

>it’s much easier to be liberal when doing so doesn’t cost you meaningfully

I’d go so far as to say that is almost part and parcel what a “liberal” is almost always

[sangnoir]

That applies across the board, and I suspect is a personality trait independent of political alignment. I've witnessed people on the right who were against handouts or abortion until they were personally impacted.

When there is a real personal cost, a good chunk of people become surprisingly flexible about their politics, or spectacularly fail to resolve the cognitive dissonance and resort to "My circumstances are different."