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.
I feel like it was more learning to work together that’s made us so successful compared to other animals. Not having to spend our lives solely dedicated to hunting/growing food for ourselves and our families has allowed people to specialize in other fields. The advancement of science wouldn’t have been possible without people collaborating and working together, though conflict has also played a role as well. Ruthlessness only works for a small number of individuals who exploit the good will of others, but the whole thing falls apart if everybody was always ruthless.
It’s the problem of “political deactivation” it’s in part a cultural issue, in part a byproduct of capitalism.
9-5 jobs kill a lot of political activism. Inculcation into cultural traumas that make the system seem unchangeable by “the little people”… These are the ingredients for “political deactivation”.
People want to stay an alert and informed member of society, but that doesn’t necessarily result in activism or change. In fact sometimes it makes people less likely to try to change things.
9-5 jobs kill a lot of political activism. Inculcation into cultural traumas that make the system seem unchangeable by “the little people”… These are the ingredients for “political deactivation”.
Welcome to 1916 Russia, when all non-Imperialists(not only Bolsheviks) were saying, that 6-day work week prevents prevents people from becoming citizens. Next step would be mandatory education.
Damn dude. Why didn’t I think about that? All I have to do is work 80 hours a week at the gas station, send my kids to substandard schools, not buy decent food, not have access to public transit, not have access to decent medical care, not have any cultural options, be white since rural areas are not kind to people of color, drive 40+ minutes to anything worth driving to, not have municipal water or sewage or possibly trash pickup, etc.
Why do I keep wanting to live in places with services and good quality of life in a capitalist country where I make 3x the median wage and still can’t buy a house? Silly me.
In case you didn’t pick up on it, I’ve lived in rural areas previously, and I’d rather rent for the rest of my life than ever do that again.
![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
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.
What made us successful as a species, required us to be ruthless by design.
I feel like it was more learning to work together that’s made us so successful compared to other animals. Not having to spend our lives solely dedicated to hunting/growing food for ourselves and our families has allowed people to specialize in other fields. The advancement of science wouldn’t have been possible without people collaborating and working together, though conflict has also played a role as well. Ruthlessness only works for a small number of individuals who exploit the good will of others, but the whole thing falls apart if everybody was always ruthless.
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.
Nonsense.
It’s the problem of “political deactivation” it’s in part a cultural issue, in part a byproduct of capitalism.
9-5 jobs kill a lot of political activism. Inculcation into cultural traumas that make the system seem unchangeable by “the little people”… These are the ingredients for “political deactivation”.
People want to stay an alert and informed member of society, but that doesn’t necessarily result in activism or change. In fact sometimes it makes people less likely to try to change things.
Welcome to 1916 Russia, when all non-Imperialists(not only Bolsheviks) were saying, that 6-day work week prevents prevents people from becoming citizens. Next step would be mandatory education.
A mortgage (not rent!) for a 3 bedroom house is $1,400. Live somewhere cheaper, you don’t need to live in/near a city.
If you do, that’s fine, just recognize that is something you are choosing to pay for.
Damn dude. Why didn’t I think about that? All I have to do is work 80 hours a week at the gas station, send my kids to substandard schools, not buy decent food, not have access to public transit, not have access to decent medical care, not have any cultural options, be white since rural areas are not kind to people of color, drive 40+ minutes to anything worth driving to, not have municipal water or sewage or possibly trash pickup, etc.
Why do I keep wanting to live in places with services and good quality of life in a capitalist country where I make 3x the median wage and still can’t buy a house? Silly me.
In case you didn’t pick up on it, I’ve lived in rural areas previously, and I’d rather rent for the rest of my life than ever do that again.
I don’t really understand how you don’t understand that buying a house requires cash on hand.
Closing costs can be rolled into the mortgage and PMI drastically reduces how much is required for a downpayment.
Rents are also much cheaper in these areas too, which makes it much easier to save up for a PMI lowered downpayment.
You have no idea what people’s economic situation is like, do you?