Like, we won. We did it. We have enough food, we can build enough homes, we can build enough clean energy to fulfill our requirements if we’re halfway smart about it. What the fuck are we doing?
This is what kills me about modern day living. What the fuck are we doing? Innovations (AI) dont fucking help people anymore. All we’re doing is chasing profits and letting everything else rot. I feel like I’m living in some FromSoft game before the player comes in to clear out all the ancients holding onto the decay.
Innovations still help people loads, that’s a crazy pessimistic generalization.
Yes of course the trashy tech bro nonsense isn’t helping you, but what about RNA vaccines during covid? What about all of the medical work and innovation going into cancer treatment? What about all of the work and innovation going into reducing carbon emissions so we don’t ruin our planet? I could go on for a long time.
Real innovation in mainstream tech may be mostly stagnant and lame, but there will always be useful and helpful innovation.
Of course, there still are helpful innovations. I guess I should say it’s obvious 85% of corporations are just profit chasing and rent seeking at this point. There is no global drive forward anymore. Everything is about squeezing the most profit out of whatever. Our infrastructure alone is proof of that.
We’ve made farming a capitalist system. It only functions if there’s scarcity. A farmer can’t feed their family or farm their fields without paying bribes to machine companies.
And politicians vilify “subsidies” to farmers. Our society should be “funding” food production as a basic human right. It would take about 1% of the US military budget to completely socialize food production and feed everyone. It’s disgusting.
I don’t think capitalism is inherently evil. Just the people in control of the wealth.
Even worse, we have been producing, and throwing away, so much food that the US by itself could feed the entire world a couple times over. We don’t need to spend more money to fix food production and healthcare, we need to spend less.
Yeah. This is wild. I bet it’s very similar to solar or wind power production. The places where it’s cheap to produce, doesn’t have a lot of need. The places where it’s needed, it’s difficult to get.
There’s probably a lot of logistical problems that need solving… but that’s easy stuff. Humans can catch fish in the north sea, send it to Malaysia to be cut and frozen and boxed, to be sold to a person in England within a few days…
Can we? So much of our modern standard of living comes from extractionary industry.
We pollute our waterways with our mining and drilling. We increasingly rely on prison labor for everything from agriculture to fire fighting. We’ve de-industrialized the Rust Belt so we could exploit low wage workers abroad. Our biggest sectors are Finance (which creates nothing material) and Tech (which increasingly focuses on Crypto and LLMs). Our airline industry is failing. Our semiconductor industry is failing. Our steel industry is being sold off to Japan.
That’s before you get into how natural disasters routinely shut down major urban centers for days or weeks at a time. And how flooding is obliterating enormous chunks of our housing stock. And how our roads and bridges are decades past their expiration date.
Idk if we’ve won. I get the feeling that we’re all living on borrowed time, and we’ve actually lost big relative to what we could have enjoyed.
The only country that did similar things was USSR.
The USSR by all accounts decreasingly relied on prison labor after WW2 and Stalinism ended. By the 60s, forced labor was anecdotic, and the conditions of people in the gulag system (which shifted from forced labor during Stalinism to mostly reeducation afterwards) were better than those in normal prisons to the point of prison being a punishment to rebellious gulag workers.
That’s patently false. Before agriculture, societies were just tribes of at most a hundred individuals, with not much in the way of hierarchy due to the lack of division of labor, essentially a very primitive form of anarcho-communism. Humans are extremely empathetic and there’s plenty of evidence that prehistoric humans took care of people with disabilities or with serious injuries despite them possibly (not necessarily) being a liability for the tribe in terms of food-to-labor ratio.
So you agree that by human nature humans can do both good and bad things, and that society is the one that imposes which ones we do?
The taking care of your own when it’s a handful of people doesn’t scale up to millions
It kinda does, look at Cuba. Peaceful as it gets, extremely high number of doctors per capita to the point of exporting doctors in times of crisis in other countries, fastest country to vaccinate its population against COVID, guaranteed housing for everyone, really low crime rates and no mafias or drug cartels… You can accuse Cuba of many things, but it proves you can take care of millions of people
Your source aren’t even related to anything the conversation talked about. You’re bringing an article by a Washington-based think tank to talk about oppression in Cuba, and the economic conditions of an island under an economic blockade. How does that invalidate, or even remotely have anything to do with, my previous points? The conversation was about “taking care of people instead of being violent”. That Cuba manages to do so even in a context of relative poverty, tells us a lot about what humans can do “when talking about millions”
![The US is Politically to the Right of [Other] Democracies](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/21301eb3-0348-4db4-9f02-82fd35987e02.jpeg){kind=link}
The older I get the more I agree with this.
Like, we won. We did it. We have enough food, we can build enough homes, we can build enough clean energy to fulfill our requirements if we’re halfway smart about it. What the fuck are we doing?
Making the shareholders rich.
This is what kills me about modern day living. What the fuck are we doing? Innovations (AI) dont fucking help people anymore. All we’re doing is chasing profits and letting everything else rot. I feel like I’m living in some FromSoft game before the player comes in to clear out all the ancients holding onto the decay.
That might just be because conservatives and liberals, have always been those ancients holding back society.
In 1776 the conservatives were Loyalists, the progressives were Patriots.
In 1789 the conservatives were Right Wing, the progressives were Left Wing.
In 1860 the conservatives were Confederates, the progressives were The Union.
In 1940 the conservatives were The Axis, the progressives were The Allies.
Innovations still help people loads, that’s a crazy pessimistic generalization.
Yes of course the trashy tech bro nonsense isn’t helping you, but what about RNA vaccines during covid? What about all of the medical work and innovation going into cancer treatment? What about all of the work and innovation going into reducing carbon emissions so we don’t ruin our planet? I could go on for a long time.
Real innovation in mainstream tech may be mostly stagnant and lame, but there will always be useful and helpful innovation.
Of course, there still are helpful innovations. I guess I should say it’s obvious 85% of corporations are just profit chasing and rent seeking at this point. There is no global drive forward anymore. Everything is about squeezing the most profit out of whatever. Our infrastructure alone is proof of that.
We’ve made farming a capitalist system. It only functions if there’s scarcity. A farmer can’t feed their family or farm their fields without paying bribes to machine companies.
And politicians vilify “subsidies” to farmers. Our society should be “funding” food production as a basic human right. It would take about 1% of the US military budget to completely socialize food production and feed everyone. It’s disgusting.
I don’t think capitalism is inherently evil. Just the people in control of the wealth.
The Nature of Capitalism https://youtu.be/WseyrYuD8ao
Once anyone understands this , nothing else politically matters. There is no left or right. There is no tankie or liberal.
There is only rich… and poor.
So you’re left?
I’m not rich 🤑
Feel like you didn’t understand the message
Even worse, we have been producing, and throwing away, so much food that the US by itself could feed the entire world a couple times over. We don’t need to spend more money to fix food production and healthcare, we need to spend less.
Yeah. This is wild. I bet it’s very similar to solar or wind power production. The places where it’s cheap to produce, doesn’t have a lot of need. The places where it’s needed, it’s difficult to get.
There’s probably a lot of logistical problems that need solving… but that’s easy stuff. Humans can catch fish in the north sea, send it to Malaysia to be cut and frozen and boxed, to be sold to a person in England within a few days…
Can we? So much of our modern standard of living comes from extractionary industry.
We pollute our waterways with our mining and drilling. We increasingly rely on prison labor for everything from agriculture to fire fighting. We’ve de-industrialized the Rust Belt so we could exploit low wage workers abroad. Our biggest sectors are Finance (which creates nothing material) and Tech (which increasingly focuses on Crypto and LLMs). Our airline industry is failing. Our semiconductor industry is failing. Our steel industry is being sold off to Japan.
That’s before you get into how natural disasters routinely shut down major urban centers for days or weeks at a time. And how flooding is obliterating enormous chunks of our housing stock. And how our roads and bridges are decades past their expiration date.
Idk if we’ve won. I get the feeling that we’re all living on borrowed time, and we’ve actually lost big relative to what we could have enjoyed.
Only USA does. The only country that did similar things was USSR. It was. Now USA the only is.
Even EU has better standards of living AND not use slave labour of prisoners.
Assuming you are from USA, your semiconductor industry is just fine.
Americans are the most propagandized people on earth.
I would think that’s North Korea, but that’s kinda a given.
The USSR by all accounts decreasingly relied on prison labor after WW2 and Stalinism ended. By the 60s, forced labor was anecdotic, and the conditions of people in the gulag system (which shifted from forced labor during Stalinism to mostly reeducation afterwards) were better than those in normal prisons to the point of prison being a punishment to rebellious gulag workers.
What made us successful as a species, required us to be ruthless by design.
That’s patently false. Before agriculture, societies were just tribes of at most a hundred individuals, with not much in the way of hierarchy due to the lack of division of labor, essentially a very primitive form of anarcho-communism. Humans are extremely empathetic and there’s plenty of evidence that prehistoric humans took care of people with disabilities or with serious injuries despite them possibly (not necessarily) being a liability for the tribe in terms of food-to-labor ratio.
Tribes that fought each other for hunting grounds
The taking care of your own when it’s a handful of people doesn’t scale up to millions
So you agree that by human nature humans can do both good and bad things, and that society is the one that imposes which ones we do?
It kinda does, look at Cuba. Peaceful as it gets, extremely high number of doctors per capita to the point of exporting doctors in times of crisis in other countries, fastest country to vaccinate its population against COVID, guaranteed housing for everyone, really low crime rates and no mafias or drug cartels… You can accuse Cuba of many things, but it proves you can take care of millions of people
I take it that you’ve never been there
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/7/19/as-cubas-private-sector-roars-back-choices-and-inequality-rise
https://raceandequality.org/where_we_work/cuba/
A comment as smart as your username. Why take actual data when you can take personal experience, amirite?
Edit: my comment was written before links were provided through an edit to the previous comment
Oh you got me sir, well played being the one of us to cite sources
Your source aren’t even related to anything the conversation talked about. You’re bringing an article by a Washington-based think tank to talk about oppression in Cuba, and the economic conditions of an island under an economic blockade. How does that invalidate, or even remotely have anything to do with, my previous points? The conversation was about “taking care of people instead of being violent”. That Cuba manages to do so even in a context of relative poverty, tells us a lot about what humans can do “when talking about millions”
Psychopathy
Nonsense.
Somebody read and agreed with Might is Right…
What made us successful as a species is our societies and those came as a direct rejection of ‘ruthlessness’. Society is built on cooperation.
Sure, we’re still bloodthirsty monsters. But that will be our downfall.