Browsing social media, it’s apparent that people are quick to point out problems in the world, but what I see less often are suggestions for how to solve them. At best, I see vague ideas that might solve one issue but introduce new ones, which are rarely addressed.
Simply stopping the bad behaviour rarely is a solution in itself. The world is not that simple. Take something like drug addiction. Telling someone to just stop taking drugs is not a solution.
The only solution to car traffic is building viable alternatives to driving. Alternatives also bring many environmental and societal benefits.
If we are realistic enough to put the fight against further global warming on a wartime basis, then we can operate things on a wartime basis. Which means planning things so that everything is focussed on winning the war. For example gasoline rationing would encourage people to plan their use of gasoline for maximum efficiency. It means people can get only as much as they can justify.
Rationing was used in the US during WW2. To see what that meant, read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_States
That’s rather vague “solution”
What are the alternatives?
Fast & frequent public transport, safe cycling infrastructure, footpaths, just putting things closer together to reduce the need for transport
Is the issue here traffic or cars?
Because for traffic I can see how working public transit would atleast ease of the issue, but for the anti-car sentiment I often see here I don’t view public transit as a solution. Not to every car owner atleast.
What’s the difference?
Anti car doesn’t mean completely banning cars. Nobody is saying to replace ambulances with bus trips. There’s obviously a need and cars would be much more effective for those things if the roads weren’t clogged with people who don’t have a need.
That solution will still require the fat lazy selfish car drivers to choose to sacrifice a little of their personal comfort for the sake of the common good.
Yes, the alternatives need to exist, but there also has to be cultural change. Driving a private car in a city is antisocial. It’s exactly analagous to smoking in a restaurant or office and we need to begin to see it that way.
Clarification for the benefit of downvoters (easier to downvote than make a counter-argument, right?): The solution that I propose is clear: get private cars off the streets of cities by whatever means necessary. The detail is almost unimportant. Private cars, especially ones with combustion engines, are a scourge across the world. They are what make our cities unlivable. In any big city (at least outside North America) most people get around by public transport. Cars are almost never a necessity, people buy them for reasons of status and convenience. In cities they’re effectively a tool used by rich people to immiserate poor people.
Fix the electoral college by either abolishing it entirely (personal choice) or fixing the house to properly represent the population such that the senate doesn’t cause an oversized share of electoral reps. The Wyoming Rule is one option.
We could also just go back to something like one rep per 100,000 population in a state, which would in turn make the house have 3,000 members. This sounds wild until you realize Parliament in the U.K. has 650 members… representing a population roughly 1/5 ours.
Truth in advertising laws. Make it illegal to lie, mislead, or deceive in advertising. And I mean criminal, like jail time for the CEO, or they can specify an executive that must sign off on all ads if they like. That person takes the fall. And who decides if an ad breaks the law. A jury, or something more streamlined but still made up of regular Americans who decide.
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The answer to the majority of problems the world is facing is community - we need to rebuild real physical communities, participate in them, and nourish them. We can do this by simply getting more involved in existing ones, staring from things as simple as local gardening groups, litter picking/beach tidy groups, community celebrations, local markets, etc. We need to hold on to, strengthen and rebuild arts groups and help local arts and music scenes to grow.
We can all participate on some level in some aspect of physical community building, and it will enrich us in a way social media never can. (Put on a gig, attend an arts show, donate to a community group, talk to neighbours, support the vulnerable). I believe people feel so isolated and depressed by the way greed has ruined the web, jobs, the economy, etc.that the time is right for many more people to start investing time and effort in real communities.
We need to build and grow communities in a local, regional, national and international spirit. We need to learn how to share, and how to get rid of greed and selfishness in ourselves and in our societies - participating in and building welcoming, non discriminating communities is the path towards this. We need to remove competition in education, arts and science (and ultimately economy), and focus on cooperation and improving things out of the joy of helping yourself and others. Communities can bring this about, and digital communities (as opposed to competitive social media) can support this, too.
Ideally, we want to grow communities in a way where people start thinking first “how does this help my community?” - especially when looking at political and business decisions. We need to feel something positive to stand up for (not old fashioned ideas of ‘country’ or political groups) - we simply need mutually supportive groups (communities) that fight power, greed and selfishness to defend people, animals and nature.
Somewhat relevant plugs:
On education reform: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-one-thing-that-should-be-taught-in-school-that-isnt-already/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen
On digital community: https://www.quora.com/Who-invented-the-modern-computer-look-and-feel/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen (the sick, sad history of computer-aided collaboration)
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Fuck me too then. I’d be curious to hear how you imagine somebody like me would be able to find customers for my business if I wasn’t allowed to drop flyers onto people’s mailboxes.
I know how those marketing chicks look like, I volunteer as tribute for your plan.
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There are bigger problems that I agree need to be solved but I’m not personally that verbal about them. But the one I complain about the most has got to be potholes.
In the UK farmers are responsible for maintaining the hedgerows between the road and their fields so I feel like they should also be responsible for filling in the potholes caused by their heavy machinery and the cow shit left behind when they’re moving cattle.
You want a realistic solution or a “if I had one wish” solution?
If every US Republican were to die of a heart attack right now, that would probably be the single greatest thing that could happen to our planet right now.
The dangers of artificial general intelligence (humans becoming even worse thinkers, dystopia, takeover) could be avoided by turning towards human collaborative intelligence augmentation.
A slow burn. Humanity is slowly wiping itself out. If this is a Q humanity test then we have failed. We need a Picard/Riker/Data/LaForge combo
I probably whine the most about the lack of transit options in my city.
Proposed solution: Take intra-city transportation out of the control of the county, so it is run by the city instead. The county can run the buses from the suburbs, or not. We can extend the streetcar, increase bus frequency, all the stuff the city wants, that keeps getting slapped down by the county commissioners, because the suburbs don’t want buses.
There’s a lot of “billionaires shouldn’t exist” and “eat the rich” sentiment out there. I often suggest jokingly that it should be legal to murder someone once they reach a certain level of wealth. It might motivate them to limit their greed at some point, perhaps be less exploitative of those who are working to generate their wealth or share more of it. And even if they pass the threshold, they may give more concern to how they treat people and how they are perceived.
That’s a pretty fucked up thing to say. Is that really the world you wan’t to live in?
No, it is not the world I want to live in, but I am not convinced it would be worse than the current world.
Maybe not murder, but it should be legal to steal from people who have more wealth than they know what to do with. They’re hoarding wealth while some people are struggling to make ends meet.
The meat and dairy industry receives vast amounts of subsidies which would be better allocated to plant based food sources. Meat is an inefficient way to feed the general population. I’m vocal about this because of two reasons: animal suffering and climate/pollution.
I’m not naive enough to say we should just cut subsidies to animal farming cold turkey, because I understand people’s livelyhoods depend on it. But I would want to see a progressive public divestment from meat in favour of plant based whole food proteins (not fake/lab meats, those can survive on private investment alone).
At the same time, I’m also vocal about fixing farming. We need to stop destroying nature to grow food. Fortunately the divestment from animal farming will already significantly improve this because it’s more efficient to eat soy directly than to grow soy, feed it to pigs, and then eat the pig. However we need to fix monocultures by moving to regenerative farming and agroforestry.
The soy that’s fed to pigs is almost entirely the byproduct of pressing soy for soybean oil. about 85% of the soybean crop is pressed for oil. if we didn’t feed the byproduct to livestock, it would just be industrial waste.
I’d challenge that. The whole bean is edible by humans. Tofu is literally just the protein of soy beans without the oil and the startch. I’m sure, if we wanted to, we could just make tofu or TVP out of soy meal.
I also just dislike this “it’s a byproduct” argument. It’s like how whey powder is a “byproduct” of of cheese making. It’s not a good argument. We could also do with less soy oil in the world anyway.
but we DO make tofu and tvp. and they have higher profits per pound than animal feed. but we produce far too much soybean oil for the amount of byproduct people want to consume. giving it to livestock makes sense
It makes sense because we don’t eat enough of the soy and TVP. And we also stuff soy oil is tons of shit. I’m not saying it’s an easy problem to solve, but it all comes down to our over-consumption and refusal to do anything even mildly inconvenient. Eat more whole foods and less meat and a lot of that solves itself.
