Alcohol.
Lots and lots of people lean heavily on it and think that alcohol is the spice of their life. When, it contributes to so many problems than it’s so-called benefits. We tried, in America anyways, to outright ban alcohol. Problem was that the person who wanted it banned, was too extremist.
Like he didn’t think it all through and think just going for the jugular of the problem is what will work. When, it didn’t and just made people work around it until eventually the ban was dismantled.
So, since then, we’ve been putting up with drunk drivers, drunk disputes, drunk abusers and other issues. I still wish we could just slam our hands down at the desk and demand we sit to discuss in how to properly deal with this issue than people proclaiming that it’s not a problem.
Populism
This is as old as the democracy itself, and we still don’t know how to fix it. People are so easily driven by their emotions and stubborn about their political opinions that you only have to exploit cynically their low instincts to take the power, especially in a crisis context. And once populists are in the power, they hardly give it back.
Journalism that has any tooth whatsoever would mostly fix this.
As long as no proper journalistic standards exists, populists can pour their BS down the media drain unquestioned, unchallenged. If that’s all you hear about a topic, that’s what you’ll believe.
In sweden they raised the price of alcohol 10 fold making it a luxury good and not something to drain your sorrows with. I think the hardest problem to solve is human greed.
Greed is the biggest issue we have in this world right now.
It should be made to be a mental health disorder that must be treated professionally and by taking away the money not needed to operate their business.
Kill tax breaks and strip the rich with 90% taxes on everything over 5 million dollars of any money they make even capital gains and investment income.
Own one home pay regular taxes, own two double the tax, own three triple the tax and so on until no one wants to own more homes. Same goes for corpos that rent to people at above market rates using software to drive rental prices up.
Greed must be made to be shameful and punishable not accepted and desired. Robber barons like Musk and Bezos should taxed into non existence.
Top 5 earners get publicly executed if they own over 500mil.
I think the ancient Romans would make their richest people pay for the construction of warships. You would only get out of it by pointing to a richer person to pay.
Do that but not for warships, pay for infrastructure repair, all those roads and bridges that keep the economy going need to be brought up to today’s standards and new bridges built to replace ones that are crumbling. Their wealth could not have been built if not for the roads and tracks that are now crumbling beneath years of cuts to local and state/provincial governments.
I think there are plenty of things that can’t be solved, but nothing that can’t be improved.
Homelessness, there are just some people who don’t fit into modern life - maybe they can’t be housed, but conditions could be improved.
Poverty, there is no complete solution that won’t be worse than the problem (yet) but things could be so much better than they are with the means we do have.
Pollution, there is probably no way we can live with our current technology without causing pollution but again - we could make substantial improvements with the tech we do have now.
High impact youth sports. Destroys joints, destroys brains, destroys futures, but if you suggest getting rid of them, you’re a cultural betrayer.
My kids will not be playing football what so ever because of this
Religion amd the fighting it causes in it’s name
Antivaxxers and weaponized disinformation that leads to that as well as other problems. I’m not talking about the vaccine hesitant who come around with more education by their doctor, or even the dumbass delayed vaccine schedules they want to do for no sensible reason, all it does is make your kid cry more times than they’d have to, I’m talking about the ones who completely believe in Andrew Wakefield’s shit study with the twelve kids at his son’s birthday party which for some reason they rely upon as the gospel. The ones who are now turning down vitamin K in their newborn so they risk bleeding into their brain, and believe measles isn’t a big deal, just another childhood illness. They’re absolutely insane and fed a diet of this continually by social media dumpster fires like Facebook. As far as I am concerned, Mark Zuckerberg should be tried for war crimes and genocide at the Hague. Here is a comment I saw the other night from one of the plague enthusiasts, which also makes it very clear they don’t care if non-white children die.
I worked in an ER ten years ago, and while the insanity that has onset with these people since the advent of COVID did not yet exist, there were still some who bought into this nonsense, and they’d come screaming in with their kid who was going downhill fast with whooping cough or whatever, and they are always the most obnoxious pushy people about getting their kid seen RFN. And the thing is you have to because an unvaccinated child has no immune resources to rely upon in their bodies, which one nurse describes as “going to the well”, ie a normal vaccinated person’s body fights back against infection by doubling their heart or breathing rate as their antibodies kick in. A child with no immunity immediately begins to go under and has no such help from their bodies. And the parents are always massive idiots and ask stupid shit about why you aren’t treating them with intravenous vitamin C or doing a CT scan (which there is no reason for) or whatever else they pull out of their primitive forebrains full of garbage. A child with Hib epiglottitis is not going to be able to be intubated and is going to need a tracheostomy, and these parents simply don’t or won’t understand it.
Homelessness.
Looking beyond the argument that some people prefer the freedom to following any of the rules required by most of the organizations that might provide help.
It’s not that hard to fix, but there’s little will to tackle it properly. Homelessness is a local problem, and the NIMBY solution just exports it to another locality. If a locality solves it for their local population, they’ll then get overwhelmed by the NIMBY localities “solving” it with bus tickets. The only real solution has to come at a federal level, and there lies the lack of will. Federal government sees a local problem and refuses to help since there are local governments.
OP is apparently unaware that society would not exist if it weren’t for alcohol.
Probably that many people are like exclusively emotion driven. I don’t think we should all be like purely logical Vulcans. Emotions are very fast and can be a good survival tool. Like if you’re waiting for the train and a bear wanders onto the platform, you don’t need to wait to logically evaluate if it’s a threat. Just run.
But people rely on emotions for everything. We all do this. So you have like someone telling you something factual and uncomfortable, and you just reject it.
“Eating meat is bad for the environment and is cruel to animals. We should all eat a lot less meat” makes a lot of people’s emotions flare up. The facts don’t matter. They feel like they’re being insulted, that the other person is a blowhard, blah blah blah.
The oatmeal did a comic about this, actually: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe
I think this is why we can’t have nice things.
This cartoon is SO good.
Human nature. Itcwas necessary to beat out the other species, but it didn’t evolve with society. Many of the things other people have mentioned are really just unevolved human nature. Greed, selfishness, racism, crime.
In the US and Canada?
Car dependency / Car centrism.
Sure, we have a few large cities with non roadway mass transit.
But uh, in general, we’ve got terminal car brain, and I do not see this fundamentally changing.
The vast majority of places will continue being designed around cars instead of people.
Cars and fuel costs will keep going up, less and less people will have them, and (again excepting a few extremely dense and expensive cities) we will just go to mass private car rentals/shares instead of actual mass transit or meaningfully redesigning cities.
Sidewalks? Bike lanes? Go fuck yourself, you don’t matter if you don’t own a car, wait an hour for a bus (if one exists), get an uber, have a friend with a car.
I wouldn’t be so pessimistic. The Netherlands was also a car dependent place that bulldozed neighbourhoods for highways a few dozen years ago and look at where they are now. Change can happen, it just needs a critical mass of supporters and time, lots of time.
Us Americans just elected a fascist, who won the popular vote, who wants to do the exact opposite of a massive infrastructure rework, he and his sycophants want to cut every kind of government funding for social and government services of all kinds, keep ‘joking’ about invading Mexico, annexing Canada, buying Greenland.
We do not have a mass of supporters who are effective at applying pressure on the government… because we now, even more obviously, live in a naked oligarchy that controls the government and mass media… our democracy is broken, our representatives are purchased, our population heavily subject to anti intellectual right wing propoganda funded by oligarchs.
We also do not have lots and lots of time.
Many states in the US are currently seeing home insurance companies either dramatically raising rates or just leaving: The climate catastrophe driven collapse of many areas has begun, and it will only get worse without a massive coordinated government directed response… which goes dorectly against the ideology of most of our oligarchs and most of our people who believe what those oligarchs tell them to via the media they own.
We will not have the money to build out better transit infrastructure … that will all be spent responding to more and more intense natural disasters and internal migrants.
Wait til the petro dollar crashes. It’s going to be hilarious
EVs are coming, no matter how expensive/wasteful, you’d always have a car option.
Are there EV longhaul trucks that are at cost and performance parity with ICE longhaul trucks on the horizon?
I don’t think so.
That means that logistics costs for basically everything gets significantly more expensive when ICE fuel costs go up.
We could lessen this problem by building out more freight rail capacity, and a whole lot more minor rail lines so that trucks don’t routinely drive halfway across the continent and are used less often…
…but we are not.
So, that means that when gas/diesel prices go up, everything gets more expensive… including ICE and EV personal vehicles.
Currently, generally, EVs (and Hybrids) are already 20% to 30% more expensive than their ICE counterparts, even after subsidies/rebates, and are only less expensive than the ICE counterpart in a long run of 10+ years due to lower ongoing fuel costs…
But if gas/diesel prices significantly rise and never go back down…
All vehicles become more expensive.
If ICE vehicle ongoing fuel costs are now so high that an average person can’t afford them…
The only other choice is EVs … but those now have a stupendous sticker price.
So you end up with even less people being able to afford any vehicle whatsoever, but a society that is physically designed to… require one.
So then you end up with a society of an upper class of EV owners, and everyone else who used to be able to afford a midrange ICE car now having to use ICE/EV motorcycles or EBikes… for daily commutes, in all weather.
No more AC or Heating for your completely environmentally exposed 30 minute to 2hr commute to work through a heatwave or heavy snow or rain.
They’d have to rent an EV vehicle to do 2 weeks worth of grocery shopping or move any kind of substantial cargo like a bed, or move more than 2 people a considerable distance, start arranging ride shares to and from work in some kind of comfort.
Oh, and a ton of Americans are functionally too obese/unhealthy/injured to be able to actually use a motorcycle or EBike. So just count them out of the workforce if they can’t find ride shares I guess.
git solves this.
i love me some doom pr0n now and again, but it sounds alot like some people are due for some exercise and they’ll be just fine. Things might turn out for the better
… git?
Like… git hub, git commit?
???
Yes! Those who can code and use git can collaborate and work remotely. Lessening the need for long depressing commutes
Sorry, no.
I mean, you’re right that git enables this, and that would obviously be a great choice for many tech workers, but employers in the US despise remote work and will do everything they can to never allow that to be any where near as widespread as it easily could be.
Not sure if you’ve somehow missed it, but after Covid lockdowns ended, basically every large tech firm in the US started mandating return to office work, and many of them even admitted they did so as a way to functionally lay off employees without actually laying them off.
Even Zoom, the company that maintains the most widely used remote work software… mandated their employees return to office.
There are ultimately 2 real reasons for this, ignore the bs that comes out of the media:
- Middle managers and up basically realize that their lifestyle suffers if they don’t have the ability to micromanage people in person.
Actually effective management can easily be done remotely by competent managers, competent work can in most cases be done by competent employees remotely, but the managers need to feel that in person social hierarchy dominance, or they get upset.
- Commercial real estate.
If we went to a massively more remote work paradigm, a fuckton of offices become pointless.
This crashes the commercial real estate market, offices start going (even more) vacant or converting to residential or mixed use, which would lower housing prices.
Can’t have that kind of bubble pop, or else we go through something similar to the 08 crash… in an economic environment that is already very precarious at best, and more realistically is already contracting in basically every metric other than GDP.
… We have a whole bunch of generally normalized social views and approaches to many aspects of how things work, which are all mutually reinforcing, which prevent actual social progress from happening, and the hatred of remote work is one thing that reinforces our car dependent construction of society.
It doesn’t matter that the vast majority of people would be better off with more widespread mass transit, it doesn’t matter that the vast majority of people would be better off being able to do remote work.
Those things don’t make C Suite see line go up next quarter.
As they do, they’re quickly turning into indicators of privilege. If/when the petro dollar crashes I totally don’t expect billy bob that drives his eight cylinder diesel to hold any resentment towards EV drivers when he’s stuck paying for something that he can’t afford gas for. But hey what do I know I prefer old school bicycles.
If I had more time under my belt I’d probably buy one. The 100k+ pricetag is just too much right now
$100k+ in what currency? The base model of the EV I drive is under $45k
U$. The Rivian I want is about $120k
You can’t make a generalizing statement about how EVs are expensive and then say you were talking about one of most expensive models you can buy…
japanese preferring natto over peanut butter
Greed.
Similar to this, I’ve got a real beef with our unresolved insecuritues we have as a people (in principle. Obviously in practise this is hard).
I feel like the insecurities that essentially, drive us, are really holding us back from meaningful progress on our legitimately hard problems with climate, energy/food distribution, etc…
We’re still drawn into BS distractions and opposing teams and whatnot like a bunch of monkeys with sticks (which is apt, to be fair)
Assholes.
I don’t really agree anything is impossible to fix. Maybe I’m optimistic but I think with enough time things can get better. As far as I know alcohol is much less common among younger people and there are more people avoiding it entirely now. Or maybe by impossible you meant really difficult.
