It’s a common lie. The reality is that red states score much lower on every objective quality of life metric, while having much higher rates of things like violent crime, addiction and suicide than any blue state let alone any of the US’s peer nations in the rest of the developed world. It’s not even remotely close. With very few exceptions, the social pathologies we see throughout the US are concentrated in red states. Blue states have problems too, but they tend to be related to the fact that they are highly desirable places to live.

I am a union member so this isn’t a thing that happens. If management does something unacceptable, we do a strike authorization vote which, if passed by the membership, starts a clock ticking down to strike time and management knows that they are on notice and need to start negotiations.

All of which is just to say that unions are good for workers, regardless of what kind of bullshit you may have been led to believe.

A lightweight Linux distro can get you the same results with current software. Hell, even Ubuntu will. The deterrent has always been that you have to tinker with it to get it to work right, but that’s a lot less true now then it was in the past. I recently installed Ubuntu 22.04 on my wife’s old iMac and it’s lightening fast and worked straight out of the box with no tinkering whatsoever. It’s about 20 times faster than it was running iOS.