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.

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.

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.

Assholes.

Religion amd the fighting it causes in it’s name

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.

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.

OP is apparently unaware that society would not exist if it weren’t for alcohol.

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.

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.

japanese preferring natto over peanut butter

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.

The idea that people in charge should be better, so their actions can’t be questioned; rather than that they should be better, so their actions should be scrutinized. It’s so backwards and it enables nearly all of the worst abuses of power. It might be harder to fix people being attracted to power or being straight up malicious, but if we could solve the authority problem, then those would have a safeguard in a lot of scenarios. It’s so close to being solvable, too; people grow up experiencing misuses of authority that hurt them, they should understand the problem. But somehow it still seems so prevalent, that authority is treated as being above questioning or consequences. I hate it. But it is possible to change.

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.