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.
Nearly every societal problem has a solution, but you need a medical / buddhist / marxist / approach (probably a lot of other disciplines / lenses use this approach too, those are just some ones that more or less follow this).
- Correctly identify the actual problem.
- Find the root cause(s) of the problem.
- Name / describe the state without that problem.
- Outline the cure / steps to carry it out and reach that goal.
The only problems that aren’t solvable, are things that would break the laws of physics.
As for drugs / alcohol use, lemmygrad and hexbear have a lot of good threads on drug / alcohol use, and how to view it, and handle it collectively. The USA is probably the worst example of a country to look at for alleviating the societal ills brought about by alcohol and drug mis-use, so its good to look at how socialist countries have tackled it throughout history. If you can’t find a thread I’d recommend asking over there, because you’ll get a lot of good answers.
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.
Fascinating stuff. I understand he doesn’t have a solution to the problem, but it might help if there was a way to help someone identify what their core beliefs are.
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.
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.
I don’t think we will ever have a society that is truly saved from class warfare. I think that the upper classes will always exist in some form and they will always oppress the vast majority of the population, with varying degrees of brutality. I also think this is the most important issue in our society and must be dealt with. It’s depressing.
In Marx’s own idea the point were class warfare is no more is when our civilization can satisfy any needs of anyone.
It would be the ultimate goal of communism, perfect equity through infinite automation of all resources.
Then they would only be art, philosophy, science and social activities.
Except, as long as there’s limited resources, fighting for it is our nature. To the point of having to much if may be.
Considering how little we actually know, how much we are still figuring out today, how wrong we once were, and most definitely still are on many things, about said nature, the naturalistic argument is IMHO rather weak. The argument silently assumes too many things, at least with our current knowledge - that human beings do actually have an inherent nature, that said nature is uniform enough across the whole species to make that generalization, that said nature is inevitable and can’t be evolved past or rationalized against, that it always was the case and will always be, etc.
Yeah I feel like human nature is actually cooperation.
“Random” events of “evil”. Basically I think we’ll never reach something like 0 murders, 0 rapes, 0 stealing for little greed and so on. Or even 0 addiction (edit: i’m not including addiction to the previous list of crimes, i wanted to add it as another class of issues for we will never reach a true 0)
We are very very far from the ideal situation tho, there is a looot of margin of improvement
Like your alcohol thing in the post: ban only makes it worse and still now you (as US, not you OP) have a very weird relationship with alcohol with the thing that minors cannot touch it and people have to drink from a paper bag lol. Let’s say that you are not really trying hard to improve the situation. We’ll never reach 0 alcoholists but society is not in a good shape and alcohol is cheap so ye
Addiction is often people trying to escape from pain using anything they have available. It’s not evil.
yes, hence why i used a dot before it. i guess it’s not clear and i should edit
tell me if it’s better now :)
oh, ok, thank you
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.
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.
Alcohol abuse is a symptom of trauma. Trauma begets trauma. That’s the thing never solved. Take away alcohol, it’ll find another avenue.
Sometimes alcohol abuse is just addiction. Trauma soon follows, though.
A person chases oblivion for a reason. In my experience.
Human beings. The issue is humans.
Religion amd the fighting it causes in it’s name
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.
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.
Poverty. Not for lack of resources or ability, but for lack of will.
