Likewise, the IRS already knows everything about me. If I qualify for, say, food stamps, just have the IRS send me the food stamps. Don't make me jump through hoops when I'm already destitute, come on.
This would make tens of thousands of jobs redundant and make many social programs much more efficient.
And save trillions of dollars, especially if we extended this to Medicare for all
But using resources efficiently isn’t the goal, suffering is!
If Democrats actually wanted to win every election from now until forever, this would do it for them. Imagine worrying how you're going to feed your kids and then the mail arrives "BTW you've qualified for food stamps for the last 18 months, here they are" instant loyal voter.
You largely have intuit/turbotax/quickbooks/mailchimp/whatever other name they use for that process. Or at least the paying for it part
Intuit is the sole reason our taxes are so obtuse. They lobby for it to be this way.
Not the sole reason. They play a part, same with H&R Block, but it's more the people working for the ultra-wealthy who keep bribing politicians to create laws that allow their clients to avoid paying taxes. The companies that have tax software for the small people benefit from the tax system getting more complex, but they don't directly lobby for those rules, they just want any kind of complexity. Their big fight is against any kind of free tax preparation for the poor and middle class.
It's pretty disgusting what they do though. They make say $20 from someone filing their taxes. They take say $3 from that $20 and spend it to ensure that their customers are never offered a free alternative. They're basically making their customers pay to lobby the government to keep taxes so complex that the customer has no choice but to use them again next year.
I feel like that's a hard one. Whenever I argue against tipping with coworkers (we don't currently work in the service industry) they will mention how they are all for it and mention how during peak times they made double their usual amount. I feel like it's really been drilled in that it's good for the workers
That element of it — when the restaurant is doing well, the windfall is shared with the waitstaff — could be preserved by simply giving the staff a percentage of the price of each meal they work on. Structure it as a bonus, the way salaried professionals can receive a bonus when the company is doing well.
It may be worth noting that worker-owned restaurants, like Cheese Board Pizza here in Berkeley, typically do not solicit tips. (Well, except for the live musicians, who are not worker-owners.) If tipping was really all that great for the workers, then places where the workers literally control company policy would encourage it.
Not necessarily. I don't know about New York, but in Illinois it's illegal for owners or management to receive tips.
It is not illegal for owners or managers to receive tips for work they perform. If the manager is waiting a table, they can receive that table's tips.
Where the restaurant is owned by the workers, an individual worker-owner will still collect the tips for the work they perform. An owner who is not working that day has no claim to tips earned that day.
Absolutely, those who get high tips stay in the industry. Those who get low tips are fired. Places don't keep those who aren't tipped well because it means they have to pay more out of the budget. If you aren't getting high tips you are seen as lazy or not doing enough as a waiter. In reality tipping has more to do with who you get as customers (and what they find attractive) than quality of service. https://scroll.in/article/860274/does-tipping-really-ensure-better-service-probably-not
Just another way to divide. Typically FOH staff get all or most of the share, while cooks get screwed, in my experience.
In Norway, restaurants started to implement applications or websites to order at the restaurant. Scan a QR code or download an app (yuck) to order the food and preemptively pay for it. While that might be fine, I find it really strange when I'm asked about tipping when I place my order. I have literally not seen a waiter, I have just sat down and looked through a website, and now I'm asked if I want to tip? Why? What for?
Luckily, 0% tip is very common in all services in Norway, so it's not considered rude to refrain from tipping.
Over-reliance on proprietary, closed-source products and services from megacorporations.
For instance, it's really absurd that people in many parts of the world cannot function without WhatsApp, they can't even imagine a life without it. It seems absurd that Meta literally has them by the balls, and these people can't do anything about it.
Also the people who base their entire careers on say Adobe or Microsoft products, they're literally having their lives dictated by one giant corporation, which is very depressing and dystopian.
It’s worse in China. WeChat is EVERYTHING.
At least WeChat is firmly under the state's thumb. It's basically a public service at this point. They should just nationalize it.
It seems absurd that Meta literally has them by the balls, and these people can't do anything about it.
I don't get this sentiment. If anything happens to WhatsApp, they'll just switch to another IM. WhatsApp wasn't the first to come along, and won't be the last. How exactly does Meta have them by the balls?
In some of those countries, it's not really a choice. Like, WhatsApp is the only way of contacting a company's customer care (via chat bots that run on it), colleges and universities may have study groups on it and teachers may hand out notes etc in those groups, also apparently it's also the only way to contact even some government agencies.
I remember listening to a podcast that talked of how in the Philippines (I think it was), Facebook is the internet, because Meta/FB effectively subsidised the carriers into allowing FB access to not use up any data allowance. As a result, if all you do is go on FB, you don't pay a penny. If WhatsApp is included in this, then yeah, you're locked in with no real alternative.
Talk to some older folks about what it was like when there was only one phone company and the alternative was snail mail.
I was there. It was fine. You didn't need phones to be able to function in a society. Phones were something like an optional convenience that you had only at fixed places, like your home or office. If you were out and about, you typically didn't have access to a phone, unless you were in the vicinity of a payphone, so you weren't expected to be available on phone. Whereas in the countries where Meta has monopoly over, everyone expects you to be on WhatsApp, and you don't really get a choice in the matter.
There are plenty of free and open source messaging alternatives, they just don't have the branding money to make sure a user base appears. To some degree the people using the apps are choosing the proprietary option.
We collectively need to be doing more to support and promote free open source software to avoid this issue. Secure peer to peer communication protocols should be more more ubiquitous than even http.
My wife spent no less than 5 hours on the phone with just as many groups of people to organize a blood draw that took a grand total of three actual minutes.
So tired of being here in the states where people think you need a car, like it's required to live. It's only needed because we allow our infrastructure to be so lacking that we depend on cars. There are places both built up and as rural as the states where they don't need cars, where driving for 3 hours for a road trip is considered ludicrous.
I use a car about 4 times a month. On those 4 occasions I need that car. When buying my house I considered some extra criteria like proximity to a bus stop, train station and a good cycleable connection to daily goods stores. Even 10 years ago that caused my house being 15 to 30% more expensive as houses in different areas.
I am lucky to be able to afford such a thing but now I don't own a car for about 4 years and the cost of owning and maintaining a car seems to be far more expensive than the extra I had to invest in my house. Cars have become a lot more expensive while inflation made it easier to do the downpayments on my house.
Yup in the same boat, and I'm baffled that you get a downvote for this very mild opinion lol, shows the weird car focused culture we have, that someone telling us how they like living without a car is worth downvoting.
I choose my home on walkability and ease of access. I'm "lucky" that in the states I have a coffee shop and a few restaurants that I can walk to, and a bus stop a block away. We aren't at the "No cars" yet unfortunately, I'm in Seattle and while it's easy to go a lot of places without a car, unfortunately the surrounding area is very car centric. But, we are moving towards being a one car household
It's not even a mild opinion, it's a reality that more and more of my friends are living in. I'm in my mid 40's so it's not that it has anything to do with strong opinions, it just makes sense.
9 years ago we bought an electrified cargo bike. That was the first step in realizing we don't really need a car. I just added it all up and it made sense.
Well good luck making them change that In the meantime, I'm using my car so it doesn't take 2 hours to walk to the grocery store and only bring back what I can carry.
No one is saying you can't if you don't have access, we're saying it's ridiculous that we don't have actual decent transit infrastructure. You should use your car if it's the only option, but it's ridiculous that it is the only option.
If you think about it, they're absurd. To go buy some groceries, someone has to use enough power to move a ton of metal, plastic and rubber around.
People don't notice the absurdity because gas is so incredibly cheap, but gas is only so incredibly cheap because we're not paying for the long-term consequences of burning it, only the short-term costs of getting it out of the ground and refining it.
If anybody has trouble seeing the absurdity of cars in cities, imagine a hockey game, except each player has a Zamboni instead of skates.
Work to live.
Edit: we have built a world where we measure success by money. This has meant we are all in pursuit of it all the time, even if we don't want to be. The rich get richer by driving us to do more with less, which marginalizes those who cannot be a productive part of that. We supress our compassion because it isn't making money. People suffer. Those of us who can contribute subject ourselves to a different kind of stress so we can enjoy a few hours of leisure here and there but we never really are free of the shackles of our employer. If you advance to a management position you are forced to evaluate and possibly fire people you could be friends with. When hiring you are evaluating how well people bend the knee. It's not a great world we've made for ourselves.
For me it's that for a culture that fetishizes "freedom" we sure are fucking willing to accept a reality where we have to give it up for most of our waking life just to be able to live and provide for our families. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
How is that an absurdity? Humans have needed to work ever since we evolved from other species.
Yeah, it would be more correct to say "work for others to live" is absurd.
People always had to do some work to survive, but in a world were all the land is owned, if you are one of the majority which is born landless you generaly can't work for yourself (even to open your own business you need starting money) just enough to live by with (say, build your own house and do subsistence farming), so unless mommy and daddy have lots of dosh you're going to have to work for others within the constraints of the existing system (or become a criminal, in which case the system will punish you) and unlike when just working to provide to yourself, working in this system means competing with everybody else - and were, again, how much support mommy and daddy can give you makes a massive difference - to such a level that you have to run just to stand still.
Compared to plain old subsistence farming the whole way work is done in the current system is absurd, mainly because it has to produce way more than what is actually needed to provide for all, since a tiny slice of the population are massive money hoarders leeching out of the rest so tons of extra wealth has to be created just for them.
Whatever the optimal system is for "the greatest good for the greatest number" (which would be more than just everybody doing subsistence farming), mathematically it's clear it can't be one were some people have control over billions of times more resources than others.
Trump
Normalised by America, maybe.
Outside of it, we're all wondering what the fuck is going on.
A lot of us inside the US are wondering the same thing still
And still wondering if he might actually come back.
Hahaha i read the 102 current comments and basically 90% of those that name the absurdity is just "capitalism" or its consequences.
Unfortunately, a lot of people don't think about the root causes of these problems. So there's a lot of focus on the symptoms without thinking about the underlying dynamics of capitalism that cause these issues.
Having opinions about other peoples gender, sexual orientation, private matters. Also legislating about that.
It's kind of like religion for me. Don't try to preach to me and I don't care what you do.
Well, I agree that it is absurd, but it is nothing new
hell yes. no government has any right to dictate our genders or who we love.
Once got in a conversation about nuclear power that hit the point of "Yes nuclear is safer and more efficient but what about the jobs of the coal employees? Do you want them all to starve?"
Took a while to digest because there's a lot of normalization surrounding it, but after a while I realized what I had been told was:
"We have to intentionally gimp our efficiency in both energy production and pollution generation in order to preserve a harder, more costly industry, because otherwise people wouldn't have a task that they need to do in order to feed themselves."
Kinda disillusioned me with the underpinnings of capitalism, just how backwards it was to have to think this way. We can't justify letting people live unless they're necessary to society in some way - which might've made solid sense in older, very very different times in human history, but now means that so much of our culture is tied up in finding more excuses to make people do work that isn't really necessary at all.
New innovations happen, and tasks are made easier, and that doesn't actually save anyone any work, because everyone still has to put in 40 hours a week. New tech lets you do it in 10 hours? Whoops, actually that means that you're out of a job, replaced with an intern or something. Making "life" easier makes individual lives harder, what the fuck? That isn't how things should be at all!
Not exactly an easy situation to crack, but to circle back to the point of the thread - I hate how normal it is to argue on the basis that we need to create jobs, everywhere, all the time. I wish we'd have a situation where people can brag for political clout about destroying jobs instead, about reducing the amount of work people need to do to live and live comfortably, instead of trying to enforce this system where efficiency means making people obsolete means making people starve.
Woa there comrade. Trying to build a world where extracting value from labor isn't they ultimate goal? You'll never be a disillusional billionaire wannabe grinding your youth and passion into the labor that powers the elite classes whims with that attitude. Don't you want to see Jeff Bezos sorta go to space? That can't happen with spreading the wealth. Stay hungry my friend.
The robots are creating art and music while the humans are working harder than ever.
That's fun to say but not really a reflection of reality, factories full of machine operators don't exist like they used to - my parents talk about what would be like when the local factory day ended and everyone would flood the streets, fill the bars and everyone would be in their overalls... They actually still make the same product in a slightly different location, only about fifty people work there but they produce far more units.
It's the same in every industry, and all the extra profits are going into the pockets of the owners who live increasingly luxurious lifestyles. If the huge efficiency gains we've seen in recent decades were used to benefit society then we'd be living far better lives, but they're being used to buy absurdly over priced art to hang in super yachts and show off to their rich buddies.
Hi, where can I sign up for your blog and donate to your campaign?
our strange treatment of animals
we anthropomorphise and infantilise our pets, yet boast about the animals we eat who've had legit insanity level cruel lives thanks to our systems.
[ not saying fussing over your pets is bad, i love it too, just the contrast is whiplash++ ]
lack of body autonomy
hint: most lqbqtia rights, reproductive rights, medical/medication rights, are all the SAME RIGHT:
yourbody, yourchoice.
it is constantly under attack, and diffused into separate arguments when its the oneright effecting all these issues.
newsflash: when it comes to my body, your unwelcome opinion, religious or otherwise, ain't worth the air its vibrating through.
slippery slope gatekeeping laws
making harmless x illegal because a subset of x might lead to harmful y.
if y is bad, then enforce your ban on y, and fuckoff trying to use it as an excuse to control x₀, x₁, x₂ etc.
"Your body, your choice" has a limit once a super dangerous pathogen shows up and people start refusing the best tool we have to stop it for increasingly batshit reasons.
If you choose not to vaccinate, you're directly putting everyone else you interact with at risk. So there's a limit
Eh, "your body, your choice" still holds. The rest of us just also get to use our bodily autonomy to say "fine, but stay away from society". Go live in the wilderness and avoid the 5Gs or whatever as you die of a stubbed toe because of your choices.
when anything is that important, the medicine must be opensourced ^1^.
if so, and it's handled correctly, you can still have body autonomy in those situations due to the resulting freedoms - much akin in nature to the software foss freedoms we all cherish. and in that sense, would not be a limit of “Your body, your choice". while still maintaining, if not increasing, the public protection to such threats.
it was really refreshing to see some discussion in public health policy from some very smart and relevant people for opensourcing those medications. unsurprisingly it was swiftly shot down, but it was nice to at least see it taking place - which is a small positive change.
^1^ naturally we decouple authentication and traceability from commercial interests. and ofc it does not mean noone gets paid
Yup, absolutely. Although as far as I know, it’s only still a thing for Americans and Jews, and maybe one other country I can’t remember rn? And I think it’s on a downturn in the US thank god
Islam and the Philippines, in the Philippines being called "intact" is a bad insult.
The current work week, there is no need for it to be that long with the advances in technology. Capitalism, its a pyramid scheme that is unsustainable.
I am noticeably more efficient on 4 day weeks, it just doesn't feel like a grind as much as the 5 day week. 5 day weeks I'll get bored, stare at the clock, and just want to be over. 4 day weeks I actually feel rejuvenated after the weekend and I'm ready to come back. We really need to rethink that
People have lost sight of how much of our "free" time is actually just resting and recuperating in order to perform better during "work" time. Like, the 8 hours a day I sleep isn't really my time. The commute to and from work isn't my time. The basic maintenance and upkeep stuff, the unwinding from a stressful day, all that isn't truly my time, it's just preparing for and recovering from work time.
A two-day weekend makes this exceptionally clear. At least one of the days is usually spent catching up on all the stuff you couldn't do because you were working. The second day is rushing to try and get any enjoyment out of it before you go back to work. There's barely any actual agency or freedom, it's all part of the cycle of producing value for someone else.
Even worse if you're in a job without set schedules or weekends, like most service industry workers.
Every weekend feels like by the time I'm unwound from work then the weekend is almost over. Like tonight is Friday night, so I'm like "I need to do something to take advantage of it", but I'm already zonked from work. Before you realize it you have Saturday which you're right day is spent doing projects or things that need to happen because we get so little free time, and then maybe go out if you have energy, then Sunday all day is "Can't do too much, we have work tomorrow."
Americans generally being unaware of how far their country has fallen behind the rest of the world in virtually every respect (except sucking). Despite increasingly obvious problems that intensify every day, large numbers of Americans believe that American “democracy” is the end of history and as good as it gets. If you criticize their country, they will blame the other major political party (even if both major parties have indistinguishable far-right policy outcomes since they are both owned entirely by the bourgeoisie) or say that other countries also have problems, ignorant of the fact that those problems are either less severe or caused by the USA. Either that, or Americans will assume that you are a paid shill or insane, since no one on Earth could possibly have a legitimate reason to despise America. American ignorance is profound and purposeful even among highly educated Americans. Americans believe the shittiness and backwardness of their country, the half lives even the happiest and most successful among them live, to be humanity’s permanent and ideal state.
Canada is right behind the USA in this respect. Our politicians are transparently corrupt, our health care is only good when compared to the US and we have an assbackwards vocal right who would vote Trump if only they were given the chance.
Not disagreeing with you but do just want to note that as an American, when I travel into Canada, the instant I cross the border, it’s like a weight being lifted from my shoulders. Everything about it just seems less frantic and insane. Canada is also an imperialist settler-colonial dictatorship (a few mining companies in a trench coat), but one which does indeed do a better job of providing for its people.
To some degree literally all of it. My monkey brain was designed to handle at most 150 people, wandering around all day searching for food, unprocessed food, using my body, having a close community I trust, relationship with nature, extreme knowledge of a small amount of things, and an uninterrupted sleep cycle powered by the son.
My humanity is a poor fit for the world I am in.
somewhat tongue in cheek answer:
people who think that our brains were designed.
people who think that our brains were designed.
It was, just by forces that lack conscious motivation.
In a way it designed itself over time. I am a collection of accidentally acquired traits that happened to survive more often in the world that used to be. Mercifully it appears that I am somewhat adept at living in this world, but damn does it feel like I am a fish out of water being in this world.
Lawns, specifically, the western preoccupation with having little plots of land that should not have viable ecosystems or edible food grown on them, just rectangles of chemical-soaked and constantly-mowed fuzzy green conformity.
It was to show off wealth wayyyyyyy back in the day. It was a message that said "I have land and I don't need to farm it! I have peasants do that elsewhere."
I'm paying some guy's mortgage but he gets to keep the house at the end.
Someone paying $800 a month for their rent is gonna have paid $470,400 by the time they retire. That's like two fucking mortgages for the "service" of not being homeless.
It's just restructured feudalism at this point. We've abstracted away the direct relationship between landlord and serf, but over half our labor is still going to some third party doing none of the work.
If you like your feudal lord, you can keep them!
If you don't like your feudal lord, you also keep them!
The Maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most successful proletarian revolution resulting in almost perfect redistribution of land.
Those were not vacation days, just days where they could till their own fields instead of their lord's. For most people life then was full of backbreaking labour, illiteracy, disease and the constant looming threat of starvation. There is no need to romanticise feudalism.
I'm actually seriously considering selling and going back to renting to get my flexibility back. I really despise being tied down to physical location, and the constant threat of having to move for a different job makes it even worse.
Probably won't sell in the current market, but when it makes a bit more sense.
People who worry about “flexibility” are aliens to me
How are you in a material spot to just bounce around because you want to?
This person admitted they won't actually carry through with it, they just want to sound like a wealthy person.
They clearly are wealthy enough that their brain is half rotted, causing them to say things like “I’ve seen many people living in poverty because they refuse to move”
Absurd
Moving across state lines is simple. Just reserve a U-haul box truck and off you go!
Literally, when I told them they were detached from reality they responded “what? No I’m not, it’s not expensive I just rent a truck and move!”
I got a new job after the pandemic and got 3k in relocation compensation, and that didn't even cover the most bare bones of a move.
I like the flexibility too, I just wish I could have it without giving some leech half my paycheck.
It's not that I necessarily want to. Jobs just usually end one way or the other after a while. In my experience, renting really opens up the job market. Move wherever the new job is. That's a lot harder when you own.
I just can't imagine leaving my community so easily for a job I guess, but I imagine plenty of folks must do it all the time.
congrats on having a community.
i hate it here get me out
Find a big queer city >:) even if you aren't queer there'll be plenty of fine folks and communists abound
Yeah, I guess everyone has different priorities. I just refuse to let myself or my family live in a crappy situation because I want to stay in a specific location. I often see people living in poverty because they refuse to leave a place to take a job elsewhere. Doesn't make sense to me, but everyone has their own life.
People don’t live in poverty “because they refuse to move”
They live in poverty because they are stuck there, and moving to somewhere else is incredibly expensive and difficult
Your worldview is utterly detached from the reality of the common person
Yeah I mean, I came from a very poor region and it was hard to move for me, but it was made easier because my family was beginning to cut me off for being queer anyway and I had the privilege of WFH too. I know lots of people who'd move out of their region if not for their family supporting them in some way they can't get elsewhere (or they don't think so, atleast).
Throwing away food to maintain profits while people starve, but since I'm not the first to think this I'll let my man Steinbeck explain it:
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
I worked at a bakery in a large chain grocery store and when throwing out the baked goods that weren't bought each week I was told I either throw it away or buy one. I was not allowed to eat what was going to be thrown away anyway unless I gave them money... Ffs.
I ate some anyway. Fuck that lol
Western society handing money, tax breaks etc hand over fist to rich people while our quality of life slowly erodes over time.
That repairing stuff yourself is worse than the company repairing it for you
It's kinda true since the company will probably try to withhold schematics, withhold spare parts or worse, maliciously design it to be unrepairable
Self fulfilling prophesy that works to generate more profit for the company.
Extreme wealth
1.2% of the world population owns 49.5% of the wealth. It's fucked up.
Interestingly about 100 years ago it used to be the reverse. Pink was seen as a masculine colour while blue was considered feminine. Goes to show how arbitrary a lot of the gender norm rules are.
I'm a straight, overweight and hairy man in his mid forties. I love pink.
Not very long till a nerd shows up. My favorite is that FDR wore gender neutral clothes, including dresses, and did not get his hair cut till he was 7. A bizarrely more progressive past activity.
The job "market". Every time I hear a politician say "I'm going to make more jobs", I want to yell "jobs are made by the act of doing something!"
The fact that some of us own land and others the rest of us have to pay them to live on it.
Or the fact that we have to pay to have a roof over our heads. Like how is that not essential to living? Why are there people making money out of essential things like housing, schools, electricity, water, etc?
[Edit]
Whoops, I did not intend this to be a comment to you.
Even worse, watering lawns. Not only in many places there is water restriction during the summer season and people watering their lawn do-it illegally, but the only consequences is that you have to mow-it more often. If you want to have green-grass, go to Britain or Netherlands where it's always raining and stop living around the Mediterranean
Can confirm. Endless rain this summer in the UK. No grass watering required (not that it is ever required...). Didn't stop my neighbour watering on the few sunny weeks we've had...
Copyright by and large needs to be abolished. Patents in software are nonsensical, and elsewhere they should be drastically scaled back. Trademark is alright, with a few adjustments needed.
But all of the above is hiding behind a concept of "property" that just does not apply to intangible things, and we need to stop using that term to describe them.
I'm amenable to the idea of getting first dibs on an idea you came up with (software, hardware, fiction...), but it's been clearly abused to an insane degree by corporations who want to make a quick buck.
will it now? until we actually see one, we'll never know. we don't live in a free market, and never have. they rig the shit out of it with eg. drm and region locks, and then gaslight us that its free & balanced. lol.
eg.2 "democracy is the best we have"
same as above, when i see a true democracy i'll let you know.
caveat: unsure of your exact country's situation, but when was the last time you consistently voted on what youwanttohappen, rather than who will fail to implement their election promises (with 0.0% accountability btw).
also, friendly reminder: mostly the "who", you can vote for was already chosen in a private vote by the political parties, before they even pretended to care about our opinion. lol.
strawman public discourse
arguing in the media over the wrong points in an issue to keep public discourse on a 'lively' treadmill
eg.1
Q: Is climate change human caused?
A: Doesn't change the issue: stop poisoning the water, air and soil - we need them to live. duh.
eg.2
Q: Is being lgbqta a choice?
A: Doesn't change the issue: if its not a choice they can't control it, leave these people alone. if it is a choice, its a free country, leave these people alone.
edit: if you disagree with any of the above, please expand, i'm open to a new perspective.
Straight up logic. Why isn’t this taught in school?
It is in some parts of the world. Lots of people hate those classes.
Love your eg 2. I've never thought about it that way!
Advertising (and capitalism in general).
Seriously.
Marketing is nothing more than convincing people to buy stuff they do not need.
It is the reason we live in a consumer culture that is fucking up the planet with useless trash.
I can kind of see an argument that you exchange your attention for services online, but ads forced on you IRL should be illegal. If ads are a form of payment, then unsolicited ads are theft.
If ads are a form of payment, then unsolicited ads are theft
Filing taxes in the US is a cruel and byzantine process. It's fucked that the government has the resources and really the infrastructure to know what people owe, and will go through with finding out from time to time to determine if people are cheating, but all but requires them to use a private service to figure out what they owe first.
If all your income is from wages (like most people) the IRS already knows what you made cause your employer had to file w2 forms and withhold taxes. You just have to fill out a bunch of forms and hope youre right! Sometimes they fuck over waiters and stuff cause they get a lot of tips and don't always claim their tips, which is just so shitty.
blame turbotax and their peers. we should have had an electronic filing system a decade ago. but special interests said naw, fuck that.
By design.
One of the purposes of the planned inefficiencies of state services, often the direct consequence of completely economically irrational private-public partnerships and offloading to private firms of public services who will bid for contracts to run state-constructed infastructure on the basis that they will minimize costs (inducing low wages, high turnover rates of workers and low efficiency, surprise suprise). The malignant genius of it is that the inefficiency of the effects of partial and shadow privatization of what should be public services turns people against them and pro privatization because they still perceive it as public.
A similar phenomenon can be seen in the case of tax systems, especially the US tax system, or the US postal service.
Neoliberalism reestablishes profitability by sefl-destructive cost-cutting.
We are run by an oligarchy of nihilists that gladly want to make humanity go extinct to buy yachts they can already afford.
I am constantly told I need to lower my expectations for everything day by day, and then told I am entitled for simply wishing for the life a white boomer had in the 60s. If that makes me entitled, what does that make the white boomer that DID get to experience all that? No, I'll never own a house, now even renting is out of reach. Looks like porky's all set with his workforce and the only jobs left pay 14 an hour tops.
Just how fucking boring this world is. Look around you, there is so much to see and do and you will never experience any of it because you were not born a multimillionaire. You will never experience the beauty of Sierra Nevada, you will never get to enjoy Niagara Falls, even if you are lucky enough to have stable employment. Americans proudly call vacation a thing of the past, and the few times people do go on vacation, it's practically suicide for their career.
Bigotry is somehow being paraded as this noble thing, actually and that actually being tolerant is supposedly this sign I'm some big dumb-dumb.
If blue cities are so bad, why are property values there so high? Shouldn't red areas have higher property values since most people are fascists and want to live in a place where minorities are more optimally oppressed?
If this country hates me so much, why isn't it easier for me to simply move to another one? Even would be leagues better than this shithole.
Some of the worst atrocities being justified because it is for "the economy". Ol' Vivek argued that climate change isn't real because if it was, the consequences of doing something about it would hurt "the economy", as if consumerism is a human right that transcends clean air and water. Hence my first point about us being run by nihilists. If they sincerely believed in God, they wouldn't be doing this, or be claiming "it's okay, I'll be dead before anything bad happens! YOLO!" They only believe in their God whenever they need a justification to do whatever they want. Ironically, God seems to tempt more people into sin than Satan and Lilith combined
Suburban car culture. People can go on and on about the how they like driving, and like the freedom to drive everywhere, even if it makes them fat and lonely. But what about their kids? It's insane that kids are essentially trapped at home unless a parent happens to have the ability to drive that somewhere. Your convenient lifestyle comes at the cost of raising neurotic introverts who won't go outside.
To me it's the complete opposite. How can you raise children in the city? They can't go out without a parent watching over them, they don't even have a garden to play outside. By moving to the suburbs, my kids can just get on their bike, scooter or skateboard and meet up with their friends at their home or at the park, even as young as 8, it's a pretty safe place and they've got plenty of outdoors to enjoy. We have room for the pool as well as the trampoline, playing soccer and kids can just walk to school super early.
I moved in to the city when I was 14, after growing in the country/suburbs, when you're a teen, it's fun to take the bus to go watch a movie with your friends without relying on a parent driving you there and back. But younger than that, take your bike and you've got complete freedom!
I couldn't imagine raising my kids in the city so we moved out before having them, now I can't imagine moving into the city ever again, I actually almost never go to the city except to visit friends or some museums, too many people, bricks and asphalt.
i suspect that's a big part of ops point. without proper transport alternatives (eg. bus, bike etc) you're fucked.
and how just by buying gas you are automagically a ‘more important’ road user than anyone else.
i get that as a general optimisation, the avg speed of vehicles should be considered from a routing perspective.
but its been entirely normalised that cars are "important" and everything else is inherently secondary to them. which is ofc pure bs, but most people assume it by default.
It’s no accident it happened this way, car companies yet bribed officials to make everything but driving a car illegal, re: jwalking and it’s consequences have been a disaster for the human race
"Internet of Everything" ideology. Sticking surveillance technology on shit that doesn't need it to make it both worse and more malicious really fucks things up.
The Electoral College.
First Past the Post system in Canada
FPTP anywhere it's used. The UK. The US (for individual Senate or HoR races, as well as each state's decision of how its College Electors are chosen). A majority of the seats in Taiwan and South Korea. Among a bunch of others. Though certainly, most of the most functional democracies avoid FPTP, because by its very nature FPTP is undemocratic.
Homelessness, and by extension, rent
How normalised heavy drinking is in Britain
Most of the funerals I've been to over the last 10 years were for heavy drinkers. At least 3 (including my dad) alcohol was the direct cause of the death.
This video about vodka in Russia is very eye opening.
Keep the people drunk so they don't rise up, the father is drunk and violent, raise boys that are drunk and violent continuing the cycle of violent drunkenness.
What counts as heavy drinking? Curious to compare with what's normal in my country.
Apparently the UK has some of the highest (maybe the highest) binge drinking rates in the world and highesr alcohol consumption per capita - kinda goes hand in hand. I wasn't surprised to read it, some of the lads and ladettes start drinking Friday after work and don't stop until Monday morning. Crazy stuff, like out literally all night, wake up still buzzed, get another few rounds in with your mates and just keep going.
Oh god, that's a rabbit hole you might not want to go down. I'm in Canada and I know people who will have 1 or 2 beers a week but most are in the range 2-4 a day. I'm an electrician so things skew towards the 1500 bottles/yr end of the spectrum.
Positive attitude towards billionaire philanthropists. First, they made a fortune on the result of labor alienated from workers, then they threw a pitch and became good guys
That few countries take a person's wealth and income into account when fining them for breaking laws. I see examples like these and wish this were the norm everywhere.
If you fine people based on their bank balance, you end up fining careful savers, not rich people with shell companies.
The best way to achieve the same goal for the more major fines is with custodial sentences. E.G. 2 weeks for drinking and driving.
And for the more minor traffic stuff with points and bans. If every one has the same number of points and gets the same ban, it is fairer
My current favorite is the federal reserve making policy to intentionally weaken the labor market. I am currently paying the fuckwads scheming to keep labor weak, docile, and dependent. What a blast.
inflation is evil, so we can't raise wages!
//every company raises prices, so net result is more americans in poverty//
Can you elaborate?
Raising interest rates to fight inflation works by reducing demand. Jobs get lost so people have less money. So they spend less, so prices drop to be more competitive.
Only poorer people obviously. Rich people are less affected, but still pay more in interest. The increased number of unemployed people means competition for jobs is higher so workers are cheaper to pay, increasing profits again.
High inflation is bad for everyone, but particularly so for the poorer, too. However, measures to fight it should be spread across society. Instead blunt tools like interest rate rises disproportionately affect the poor. They should be combined with higher taxes on business and high earners and high net worth individuals. Worldwide we only really do the first. I wonder who decides?
In addition, I could definitely go for enforcement and expansion of price gouging and profiteering laws.
I would like to see enforcement and expansion of profiteering guillotines.
You didn't even mention the funniest part. We know that raising the fed rates can hurt the poor by reducing their access to money, but we don't actually have any compelling evidence that it reduces inflation. It's literally the modern equivalent of the ancient Romans or Greeks sacrificing an animal for a bountiful harvest.
Especially because, as far as I can see, inflation isn't being caused by demand for necessaries. And, these days, an increasing number of people are pretty much only able to afford the basics necessities (if even that) did to talk terms pay cuts as a result of inflation.
It mostly works by forcing companies to pay back their loans rather than keeping them indefinitely, which pulls excess money out of the economy instead of it circulating continuously. When interest rates were near zero and the reserve requirement was dropped for banks, a shitload of this lending was done multiple times, so they're hoping to effectively claw that back
Mainly just my absolute shock at the openness of saying "We really need to see a weaker labor market." Seriously??? That is where we are at now. The complete and transparent assault on the worker by people I personally fund. Outrageous! At least lie to me about your motives like I might have a modicum of power over you. Now you just tell me to eat shit and die right to my face.
An environmental impact study on this would be interesting.
Even the Chinese celebrate Christmas now just for fun and because they already make the decorations
Homelessness.
Billionaires.
War.
Magic, aka science and technology.
Religion
This is the thread that made me make an account and what a pain it was to find without having saved it anywhere. I've been holding out for someone to say it, but havwn't seen it specifically.
Single use plastics. I still remember the weird feeling of doom when learning the world population and making the quick relation to disposable plastics, constantly being told "but it's only a little bit." A little bit for several thousand years, per billions, is too many bits.
The best way I've found of making people realise how much waste they generate is to ask them to imagine having to bury it in their back yard. Every week.
That's pretty much what we do: bury it somewhere else.
Tobacco smoking.
Having to wear clothes in public.
Tobacco smoking, at least cigarettes, is quickly becoming de-normalized in some countries. In New Zealand they did a ban with current smokers grandfathered in essentially. In the US, there is more and more hostility to smoking.
People will cough and act dramatic when you smoke outside, you can't smoke inside of anywhere but bars anymore (and only some bars at that). Smoking is seen as low brow - typically mostly done by the lower rungs of society.
Zizek talks about this a bit and claims it's ideology. You are compelled to enjoy and be a hedonist - but never too much.
Personally, I quit smoking a long time ago but I think alcohol is much worse but doesn't get nearly the same treatment.
Im just happy some peoples dirty butts hasn't made direct contact with the seat im sitting in. Thats a good reason we have to wear clothes imho. Cleanliness and respect for sharing the world with others makes it okay to have rules about attire in public spaces.
But the whole showing skin being so goddamn taboo for real people, while at the same time near nudity and sexuality on publicly visible advertising boards is completely ok, thats a double standard I can't understand.
And the modern fear of showing non-sexual nudity to kids. Its very noticeable how bad an effect it have had on our society by now: Kids are hesitant to change and shower after gym. People don't undress and do a proper shower before entering public swimming pools.
The nudity taboo is a problem of sexist sexualisation and sexualised violence, among others.
Imagine being able to walk to the cafe with your friends in scorching heat without having to bother with constricting, sweaty and heavy clothing without being sexualised or ridiculed or attacked (things that also happen when clothed, btw).
It's because it was once believed that sneezing stopped your heart, so people would say a small prayer for good health.
Or something like that, I read that somewhere and I'm not sure if it's true.
Yeah but my wife thinks it's mandatory to say, every single time, even if she is in the middle of saying something. And she thinks those rules should apply to everyone.
We're in a drought where I am and I still see boomer dudes going out and watering their lawns. So many more eco alternatives but they just think someone will judge them. No dude, we're judging you on the massive waste of water
Not having any control over your computing. CS illiteracy is really scary. The world looks grim from the libre software world.
Speed traps in the US. I had to explain to my son that the reason why we have to drive 45 mph for half a mile on an interstate is because there is a convenient side street in the middle of that stretch of road where the police can wait.
Offices of all types (medical, billing, tech support, etc.) only doing business on a callback basis. Customers and clients are expected to be continuously available to receive a call at the office's convenience.
We have all become unwilling, unpaid, on-call employees of most every company we deal with.
I'm in a job that's good enough that I may be able to buy or build a small house of my own in the near future - but first I have to wait for everyone who is currently selling their houses to panic for no reason in particular, plummeting prices, kicking people out of homes they've lived in for a decade or more, and causing all kinds of mayhem. And then when I get a place of my own I'll be subject to this absurdity directly every five to ten years like clockwork!
Minimum wage for hard physical labor
Gasoline.
Here’s a toxic and highly volatile liquid. Rather than transferring it in specialized canisters with safety seals, we just let you dump it out of a hose. There is absolutely no safety training on how to handle it, and all you need is some cash to obtain a lot of it. It’s something of a right of passage for children to dispense it for their parents.
And despite the fact that the vehicles that use it spend 90% of their time parked in one place, you can’t have it delivered to that place like you can with other utilities like water, electricity, and natural gas. You have to go to special stores and comparison shop.
And even the stores you buy it from have it delivered by truck. They don’t even get it piped in.
Oh, and even when used correctly, it'll kill you if you use it in an enclosed space.
And it's killing the planet too.
And despite the fact that the vehicles that use it spend 90% of their time parked in one place, you can’t have it delivered to that place like you can with other utilities like water, electricity, and natural gas.
Thank god for that. Can you imagine how much polluted land and groundwater we'd have if we piped it around and it leaked like our water pipes do?
Oh for sure. This is something of a practiced rant I perform to promote electric vehicles. Petrol drivers are always asking about how long it takes to charge a vehicle at a charging station not realizing that their vehicle can charge while it sits dormant at home.
“How long does it take to charge your car?”
“I dunno, how long does it take to charge your phone?”
Etc.
and we seemingly need endless war to keep getting it out of the ground
Hate. Every iteration of society in history has normized hatred of some "other" and its bonkers.
The requirement for people to post their lives online, in the early days if the Internet the general rule was you don't post personal information online, now it's gone the complete opposite direction, I've met multiple people who write you of as "strange" just because they can't poke through your Facebook/Instagram/snapchat/twitter.
I don't keep social media accounts because it doesn't intrest me, and have been told multiple times that people don't trust me because I don't air out everything I think on an online platform.
Rampant alcoholism.
Presidential debate that are nothing more than a bad episode of Maury
In America, gaslighting by corporations and conservatives attempts to convince us that for profit healthcare is normal and fine. It’s ok for billionaires and huge corporations to get tax breaks and pay less or zero taxes because they “create jobs.” Businesses have the right to control elections with massive donations because…that’s free speech. Most rich people got that way by working hard…and anyone can do it. Immigrants are responsible for poor job markets and other economic woes.
Support for communism. People somehow manage to wildly exaggerate both the evils of capitalism and the benefits of communism, even though we have plenty of contemporary and historical examples to refer to.
Communism is as much of a fairy tale as the Free Market.
For exactly the same reasons.
Almost like we better pick something ... in the middle, like heavily regulated capitalism and social democracy.
No, we have historical examples of various X forms of Socialism that were supposed to be the intermediate state between capitalism and communism. All of the turned out to be authoritarian nightmares, but none of them actually made it to the communism stage of development.
Essentially truly supporting communism is merely saying we could be living in a post-scarcity state. The oligarchs ain't gonna let that happen though and their captive governments aren't about to let that happen though.
I propose that human greed leads to the corruption of both capitalist and communist systems in actual practice. The difference is that in capitalism, greed is publically encouraged and publically rewarded, while in communism, greed is publically discouraged and privately rewarded. Inequality is present in both practices ostensibly (with few historical exceptions). Whatever economic systems are implemented by humanity, some people are winners and some are losers.
The question of what system is best cannot be settled by only historical anecdotes. Historical record is too biased towards its own context, though we can look at patterns that have emerged through recorded history to try and achieve a more objective understanding; we have to examine a system as it exists right now. We must accept that no system will be exempt from human greed and focus our efforts on policies that fight against it wherever possible. This is not an enlightened centrist position; this is the position of someone who wants to maximize the number of societal winner and minimize the number of losers.
How taxes are dealt with in North America. Just send me how much I owe. Don't have me go through a service to figure it out
Exactly
Likewise, the IRS already knows everything about me. If I qualify for, say, food stamps, just have the IRS send me the food stamps. Don't make me jump through hoops when I'm already destitute, come on.
This would make tens of thousands of jobs redundant and make many social programs much more efficient.
And save trillions of dollars, especially if we extended this to Medicare for all
But using resources efficiently isn’t the goal, suffering is!
If Democrats actually wanted to win every election from now until forever, this would do it for them. Imagine worrying how you're going to feed your kids and then the mail arrives "BTW you've qualified for food stamps for the last 18 months, here they are" instant loyal voter.
But they won't
You largely have intuit/turbotax/quickbooks/mailchimp/whatever other name they use for that process. Or at least the paying for it part
Intuit is the sole reason our taxes are so obtuse. They lobby for it to be this way.
Not the sole reason. They play a part, same with H&R Block, but it's more the people working for the ultra-wealthy who keep bribing politicians to create laws that allow their clients to avoid paying taxes. The companies that have tax software for the small people benefit from the tax system getting more complex, but they don't directly lobby for those rules, they just want any kind of complexity. Their big fight is against any kind of free tax preparation for the poor and middle class.
It's pretty disgusting what they do though. They make say $20 from someone filing their taxes. They take say $3 from that $20 and spend it to ensure that their customers are never offered a free alternative. They're basically making their customers pay to lobby the government to keep taxes so complex that the customer has no choice but to use them again next year.
Tipping.
I feel like that's a hard one. Whenever I argue against tipping with coworkers (we don't currently work in the service industry) they will mention how they are all for it and mention how during peak times they made double their usual amount. I feel like it's really been drilled in that it's good for the workers
That element of it — when the restaurant is doing well, the windfall is shared with the waitstaff — could be preserved by simply giving the staff a percentage of the price of each meal they work on. Structure it as a bonus, the way salaried professionals can receive a bonus when the company is doing well.
It may be worth noting that worker-owned restaurants, like Cheese Board Pizza here in Berkeley, typically do not solicit tips. (Well, except for the live musicians, who are not worker-owners.) If tipping was really all that great for the workers, then places where the workers literally control company policy would encourage it.
Not necessarily. I don't know about New York, but in Illinois it's illegal for owners or management to receive tips.
It is not illegal for owners or managers to receive tips for work they perform. If the manager is waiting a table, they can receive that table's tips.
Where the restaurant is owned by the workers, an individual worker-owner will still collect the tips for the work they perform. An owner who is not working that day has no claim to tips earned that day.
Absolutely, those who get high tips stay in the industry. Those who get low tips are fired. Places don't keep those who aren't tipped well because it means they have to pay more out of the budget. If you aren't getting high tips you are seen as lazy or not doing enough as a waiter. In reality tipping has more to do with who you get as customers (and what they find attractive) than quality of service. https://scroll.in/article/860274/does-tipping-really-ensure-better-service-probably-not
Just another way to divide. Typically FOH staff get all or most of the share, while cooks get screwed, in my experience.
Tipping isn't an issue if it's a bonus from satisfied customers. The American system of it making up your minimum wage is nonsense.
In Norway, restaurants started to implement applications or websites to order at the restaurant. Scan a QR code or download an app (yuck) to order the food and preemptively pay for it. While that might be fine, I find it really strange when I'm asked about tipping when I place my order. I have literally not seen a waiter, I have just sat down and looked through a website, and now I'm asked if I want to tip? Why? What for?
Luckily, 0% tip is very common in all services in Norway, so it's not considered rude to refrain from tipping.
Over-reliance on proprietary, closed-source products and services from megacorporations.
For instance, it's really absurd that people in many parts of the world cannot function without WhatsApp, they can't even imagine a life without it. It seems absurd that Meta literally has them by the balls, and these people can't do anything about it.
Also the people who base their entire careers on say Adobe or Microsoft products, they're literally having their lives dictated by one giant corporation, which is very depressing and dystopian.
It’s worse in China. WeChat is EVERYTHING.
At least WeChat is firmly under the state's thumb. It's basically a public service at this point. They should just nationalize it.
I don't get this sentiment. If anything happens to WhatsApp, they'll just switch to another IM. WhatsApp wasn't the first to come along, and won't be the last. How exactly does Meta have them by the balls?
In some of those countries, it's not really a choice. Like, WhatsApp is the only way of contacting a company's customer care (via chat bots that run on it), colleges and universities may have study groups on it and teachers may hand out notes etc in those groups, also apparently it's also the only way to contact even some government agencies.
it's a shame.
So many people use it, that the barrier to change to another application is high. They would need to fuck up on very large scale.
I remember listening to a podcast that talked of how in the Philippines (I think it was), Facebook is the internet, because Meta/FB effectively subsidised the carriers into allowing FB access to not use up any data allowance. As a result, if all you do is go on FB, you don't pay a penny. If WhatsApp is included in this, then yeah, you're locked in with no real alternative.
Talk to some older folks about what it was like when there was only one phone company and the alternative was snail mail.
I was there. It was fine. You didn't need phones to be able to function in a society. Phones were something like an optional convenience that you had only at fixed places, like your home or office. If you were out and about, you typically didn't have access to a phone, unless you were in the vicinity of a payphone, so you weren't expected to be available on phone. Whereas in the countries where Meta has monopoly over, everyone expects you to be on WhatsApp, and you don't really get a choice in the matter.
This is an issue with the bourgeois character of American society and government. Monopolies are not a problem if workers control them.
And if they're managed well on top of being worker controlled, but that's usually been a mixed bag historically
There are plenty of free and open source messaging alternatives, they just don't have the branding money to make sure a user base appears. To some degree the people using the apps are choosing the proprietary option.
We collectively need to be doing more to support and promote free open source software to avoid this issue. Secure peer to peer communication protocols should be more more ubiquitous than even http.
Ads being everywhere.
I have so many measures in place to block them whenever I do see them it always catches me off guard. The volume of them is ridiculous
The American Healthcare system
My wife spent no less than 5 hours on the phone with just as many groups of people to organize a blood draw that took a grand total of three actual minutes.
That's just the efficiency of the free market.
Cars. Fuck cars.
So tired of being here in the states where people think you need a car, like it's required to live. It's only needed because we allow our infrastructure to be so lacking that we depend on cars. There are places both built up and as rural as the states where they don't need cars, where driving for 3 hours for a road trip is considered ludicrous.
I use a car about 4 times a month. On those 4 occasions I need that car. When buying my house I considered some extra criteria like proximity to a bus stop, train station and a good cycleable connection to daily goods stores. Even 10 years ago that caused my house being 15 to 30% more expensive as houses in different areas.
I am lucky to be able to afford such a thing but now I don't own a car for about 4 years and the cost of owning and maintaining a car seems to be far more expensive than the extra I had to invest in my house. Cars have become a lot more expensive while inflation made it easier to do the downpayments on my house.
Yup in the same boat, and I'm baffled that you get a downvote for this very mild opinion lol, shows the weird car focused culture we have, that someone telling us how they like living without a car is worth downvoting.
I choose my home on walkability and ease of access. I'm "lucky" that in the states I have a coffee shop and a few restaurants that I can walk to, and a bus stop a block away. We aren't at the "No cars" yet unfortunately, I'm in Seattle and while it's easy to go a lot of places without a car, unfortunately the surrounding area is very car centric. But, we are moving towards being a one car household
It's not even a mild opinion, it's a reality that more and more of my friends are living in. I'm in my mid 40's so it's not that it has anything to do with strong opinions, it just makes sense. 9 years ago we bought an electrified cargo bike. That was the first step in realizing we don't really need a car. I just added it all up and it made sense.
Well good luck making them change that In the meantime, I'm using my car so it doesn't take 2 hours to walk to the grocery store and only bring back what I can carry.
No one is saying you can't if you don't have access, we're saying it's ridiculous that we don't have actual decent transit infrastructure. You should use your car if it's the only option, but it's ridiculous that it is the only option.
If you think about it, they're absurd. To go buy some groceries, someone has to use enough power to move a ton of metal, plastic and rubber around.
People don't notice the absurdity because gas is so incredibly cheap, but gas is only so incredibly cheap because we're not paying for the long-term consequences of burning it, only the short-term costs of getting it out of the ground and refining it.
If anybody has trouble seeing the absurdity of cars in cities, imagine a hockey game, except each player has a Zamboni instead of skates.
Work to live.
Edit: we have built a world where we measure success by money. This has meant we are all in pursuit of it all the time, even if we don't want to be. The rich get richer by driving us to do more with less, which marginalizes those who cannot be a productive part of that. We supress our compassion because it isn't making money. People suffer. Those of us who can contribute subject ourselves to a different kind of stress so we can enjoy a few hours of leisure here and there but we never really are free of the shackles of our employer. If you advance to a management position you are forced to evaluate and possibly fire people you could be friends with. When hiring you are evaluating how well people bend the knee. It's not a great world we've made for ourselves.
For me it's that for a culture that fetishizes "freedom" we sure are fucking willing to accept a reality where we have to give it up for most of our waking life just to be able to live and provide for our families. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
How is that an absurdity? Humans have needed to work ever since we evolved from other species.
Yeah, it would be more correct to say "work for others to live" is absurd.
People always had to do some work to survive, but in a world were all the land is owned, if you are one of the majority which is born landless you generaly can't work for yourself (even to open your own business you need starting money) just enough to live by with (say, build your own house and do subsistence farming), so unless mommy and daddy have lots of dosh you're going to have to work for others within the constraints of the existing system (or become a criminal, in which case the system will punish you) and unlike when just working to provide to yourself, working in this system means competing with everybody else - and were, again, how much support mommy and daddy can give you makes a massive difference - to such a level that you have to run just to stand still.
Compared to plain old subsistence farming the whole way work is done in the current system is absurd, mainly because it has to produce way more than what is actually needed to provide for all, since a tiny slice of the population are massive money hoarders leeching out of the rest so tons of extra wealth has to be created just for them.
Whatever the optimal system is for "the greatest good for the greatest number" (which would be more than just everybody doing subsistence farming), mathematically it's clear it can't be one were some people have control over billions of times more resources than others.
Trump
Normalised by America, maybe.
Outside of it, we're all wondering what the fuck is going on.
A lot of us inside the US are wondering the same thing still
And still wondering if he might actually come back.
Religions.
This is one of the most obvious answers.
Destroying our only habitable planet.
Hahaha i read the 102 current comments and basically 90% of those that name the absurdity is just "capitalism" or its consequences.
Unfortunately, a lot of people don't think about the root causes of these problems. So there's a lot of focus on the symptoms without thinking about the underlying dynamics of capitalism that cause these issues.
Having opinions about other peoples gender, sexual orientation, private matters. Also legislating about that.
It's kind of like religion for me. Don't try to preach to me and I don't care what you do.
Well, I agree that it is absurd, but it is nothing new
hell yes. no government has any right to dictate our genders or who we love.
Once got in a conversation about nuclear power that hit the point of "Yes nuclear is safer and more efficient but what about the jobs of the coal employees? Do you want them all to starve?"
Took a while to digest because there's a lot of normalization surrounding it, but after a while I realized what I had been told was:
"We have to intentionally gimp our efficiency in both energy production and pollution generation in order to preserve a harder, more costly industry, because otherwise people wouldn't have a task that they need to do in order to feed themselves."
Kinda disillusioned me with the underpinnings of capitalism, just how backwards it was to have to think this way. We can't justify letting people live unless they're necessary to society in some way - which might've made solid sense in older, very very different times in human history, but now means that so much of our culture is tied up in finding more excuses to make people do work that isn't really necessary at all.
New innovations happen, and tasks are made easier, and that doesn't actually save anyone any work, because everyone still has to put in 40 hours a week. New tech lets you do it in 10 hours? Whoops, actually that means that you're out of a job, replaced with an intern or something. Making "life" easier makes individual lives harder, what the fuck? That isn't how things should be at all!
Not exactly an easy situation to crack, but to circle back to the point of the thread - I hate how normal it is to argue on the basis that we need to create jobs, everywhere, all the time. I wish we'd have a situation where people can brag for political clout about destroying jobs instead, about reducing the amount of work people need to do to live and live comfortably, instead of trying to enforce this system where efficiency means making people obsolete means making people starve.
Woa there comrade. Trying to build a world where extracting value from labor isn't they ultimate goal? You'll never be a disillusional billionaire wannabe grinding your youth and passion into the labor that powers the elite classes whims with that attitude. Don't you want to see Jeff Bezos sorta go to space? That can't happen with spreading the wealth. Stay hungry my friend.
The robots are creating art and music while the humans are working harder than ever.
That's fun to say but not really a reflection of reality, factories full of machine operators don't exist like they used to - my parents talk about what would be like when the local factory day ended and everyone would flood the streets, fill the bars and everyone would be in their overalls... They actually still make the same product in a slightly different location, only about fifty people work there but they produce far more units.
It's the same in every industry, and all the extra profits are going into the pockets of the owners who live increasingly luxurious lifestyles. If the huge efficiency gains we've seen in recent decades were used to benefit society then we'd be living far better lives, but they're being used to buy absurdly over priced art to hang in super yachts and show off to their rich buddies.
Hi, where can I sign up for your blog and donate to your campaign?
our strange treatment of animals
we anthropomorphise and infantilise our pets, yet boast about the animals we eat who've had legit insanity level cruel lives thanks to our systems.
[ not saying fussing over your pets is bad, i love it too, just the contrast is whiplash++ ]
lack of body autonomy
hint: most lqbqtia rights, reproductive rights, medical/medication rights, are all the SAME RIGHT:
your body, your choice.
it is constantly under attack, and diffused into separate arguments when its the one right effecting all these issues. newsflash: when it comes to my body, your unwelcome opinion, religious or otherwise, ain't worth the air its vibrating through.
slippery slope gatekeeping laws
making harmless x illegal because a subset of x might lead to harmful y. if y is bad, then enforce your ban on y, and fuckoff trying to use it as an excuse to control x₀, x₁, x₂ etc.
"Your body, your choice" has a limit once a super dangerous pathogen shows up and people start refusing the best tool we have to stop it for increasingly batshit reasons.
If you choose not to vaccinate, you're directly putting everyone else you interact with at risk. So there's a limit
Eh, "your body, your choice" still holds. The rest of us just also get to use our bodily autonomy to say "fine, but stay away from society". Go live in the wilderness and avoid the 5Gs or whatever as you die of a stubbed toe because of your choices.
when anything is that important, the medicine must be opensourced ^1^.
if so, and it's handled correctly, you can still have body autonomy in those situations due to the resulting freedoms - much akin in nature to the software foss freedoms we all cherish. and in that sense, would not be a limit of “Your body, your choice". while still maintaining, if not increasing, the public protection to such threats.
it was really refreshing to see some discussion in public health policy from some very smart and relevant people for opensourcing those medications. unsurprisingly it was swiftly shot down, but it was nice to at least see it taking place - which is a small positive change.
^1^ naturally we decouple authentication and traceability from commercial interests. and ofc it does not mean noone gets paid
Circumcision
Yup, absolutely. Although as far as I know, it’s only still a thing for Americans and Jews, and maybe one other country I can’t remember rn? And I think it’s on a downturn in the US thank god
Islam and the Philippines, in the Philippines being called "intact" is a bad insult.
The current work week, there is no need for it to be that long with the advances in technology. Capitalism, its a pyramid scheme that is unsustainable.
I am noticeably more efficient on 4 day weeks, it just doesn't feel like a grind as much as the 5 day week. 5 day weeks I'll get bored, stare at the clock, and just want to be over. 4 day weeks I actually feel rejuvenated after the weekend and I'm ready to come back. We really need to rethink that
People have lost sight of how much of our "free" time is actually just resting and recuperating in order to perform better during "work" time. Like, the 8 hours a day I sleep isn't really my time. The commute to and from work isn't my time. The basic maintenance and upkeep stuff, the unwinding from a stressful day, all that isn't truly my time, it's just preparing for and recovering from work time.
A two-day weekend makes this exceptionally clear. At least one of the days is usually spent catching up on all the stuff you couldn't do because you were working. The second day is rushing to try and get any enjoyment out of it before you go back to work. There's barely any actual agency or freedom, it's all part of the cycle of producing value for someone else.
Even worse if you're in a job without set schedules or weekends, like most service industry workers.
Every weekend feels like by the time I'm unwound from work then the weekend is almost over. Like tonight is Friday night, so I'm like "I need to do something to take advantage of it", but I'm already zonked from work. Before you realize it you have Saturday which you're right day is spent doing projects or things that need to happen because we get so little free time, and then maybe go out if you have energy, then Sunday all day is "Can't do too much, we have work tomorrow."
Americans generally being unaware of how far their country has fallen behind the rest of the world in virtually every respect (except sucking). Despite increasingly obvious problems that intensify every day, large numbers of Americans believe that American “democracy” is the end of history and as good as it gets. If you criticize their country, they will blame the other major political party (even if both major parties have indistinguishable far-right policy outcomes since they are both owned entirely by the bourgeoisie) or say that other countries also have problems, ignorant of the fact that those problems are either less severe or caused by the USA. Either that, or Americans will assume that you are a paid shill or insane, since no one on Earth could possibly have a legitimate reason to despise America. American ignorance is profound and purposeful even among highly educated Americans. Americans believe the shittiness and backwardness of their country, the half lives even the happiest and most successful among them live, to be humanity’s permanent and ideal state.
Canada is right behind the USA in this respect. Our politicians are transparently corrupt, our health care is only good when compared to the US and we have an assbackwards vocal right who would vote Trump if only they were given the chance.
Not disagreeing with you but do just want to note that as an American, when I travel into Canada, the instant I cross the border, it’s like a weight being lifted from my shoulders. Everything about it just seems less frantic and insane. Canada is also an imperialist settler-colonial dictatorship (a few mining companies in a trench coat), but one which does indeed do a better job of providing for its people.
To some degree literally all of it. My monkey brain was designed to handle at most 150 people, wandering around all day searching for food, unprocessed food, using my body, having a close community I trust, relationship with nature, extreme knowledge of a small amount of things, and an uninterrupted sleep cycle powered by the son.
My humanity is a poor fit for the world I am in.
somewhat tongue in cheek answer:
people who think that our brains were designed.
It was, just by forces that lack conscious motivation.
In a way it designed itself over time. I am a collection of accidentally acquired traits that happened to survive more often in the world that used to be. Mercifully it appears that I am somewhat adept at living in this world, but damn does it feel like I am a fish out of water being in this world.
Lawns, specifically, the western preoccupation with having little plots of land that should not have viable ecosystems or edible food grown on them, just rectangles of chemical-soaked and constantly-mowed fuzzy green conformity.
It was to show off wealth wayyyyyyy back in the day. It was a message that said "I have land and I don't need to farm it! I have peasants do that elsewhere."
It was stupid then and it's stupid now, but HOAs enforce it for the Almighty Real Estate Value™®©
Ironically, it's now a "sign of wealth" to live AWAY from the suburbs and their stupid lawns.
Of course, you'll never hear people say we shouldn't demolish more nature for suburbs because "suburbs are for poor people" anytime soon.
But then you couldn't play golf on them
Death to all golf courses. Except minigolf, that's fun.
Minigolf and driving ranges can stay. Death to golf courses.
Only a bit of change to the rules and you got golf with a proper challenge. "Caddie, bring me chainsaw #3."
Have to find some other use for your golf bats. I have one behind the front door for home defence.
I'm paying some guy's mortgage but he gets to keep the house at the end.
Someone paying $800 a month for their rent is gonna have paid $470,400 by the time they retire. That's like two fucking mortgages for the "service" of not being homeless.
It's just restructured feudalism at this point. We've abstracted away the direct relationship between landlord and serf, but over half our labor is still going to some third party doing none of the work.
If you like your feudal lord, you can keep them!
If you don't like your feudal lord, you also keep them!
The Maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most successful proletarian revolution resulting in almost perfect redistribution of land.
Feudal serfs got way more vacation days than us
Those were not vacation days, just days where they could till their own fields instead of their lord's. For most people life then was full of backbreaking labour, illiteracy, disease and the constant looming threat of starvation. There is no need to romanticise feudalism.
I'm actually seriously considering selling and going back to renting to get my flexibility back. I really despise being tied down to physical location, and the constant threat of having to move for a different job makes it even worse.
Probably won't sell in the current market, but when it makes a bit more sense.
People who worry about “flexibility” are aliens to me
How are you in a material spot to just bounce around because you want to?
This person admitted they won't actually carry through with it, they just want to sound like a wealthy person.
They clearly are wealthy enough that their brain is half rotted, causing them to say things like “I’ve seen many people living in poverty because they refuse to move”
Absurd
Moving across state lines is simple. Just reserve a U-haul box truck and off you go!
Literally, when I told them they were detached from reality they responded “what? No I’m not, it’s not expensive I just rent a truck and move!”
I got a new job after the pandemic and got 3k in relocation compensation, and that didn't even cover the most bare bones of a move.
I like the flexibility too, I just wish I could have it without giving some leech half my paycheck.
It's not that I necessarily want to. Jobs just usually end one way or the other after a while. In my experience, renting really opens up the job market. Move wherever the new job is. That's a lot harder when you own.
I just can't imagine leaving my community so easily for a job I guess, but I imagine plenty of folks must do it all the time.
congrats on having a community.
i hate it here get me out
Find a big queer city >:) even if you aren't queer there'll be plenty of fine folks and communists abound
Yeah, I guess everyone has different priorities. I just refuse to let myself or my family live in a crappy situation because I want to stay in a specific location. I often see people living in poverty because they refuse to leave a place to take a job elsewhere. Doesn't make sense to me, but everyone has their own life.
People don’t live in poverty “because they refuse to move”
They live in poverty because they are stuck there, and moving to somewhere else is incredibly expensive and difficult
Your worldview is utterly detached from the reality of the common person
Yeah I mean, I came from a very poor region and it was hard to move for me, but it was made easier because my family was beginning to cut me off for being queer anyway and I had the privilege of WFH too. I know lots of people who'd move out of their region if not for their family supporting them in some way they can't get elsewhere (or they don't think so, atleast).
As someone who had to move 5 times I four years due to landlords and am now in my seventh glorious year in my own flat, that sounds mental.
Health insurance tied to your job.
Had me at health insurance
We've established a profit motive to increase your medical costs and then avoid covering them.
I promise you that hasn't been normalised by society, only a tiny percentage of it
Religion is a collective delusion and college graduation shocks me by how ritualistic it still is
Watch kindergarten kids start their day
Why?
Probably b/c the pledge of allegiance.
Throwing away food to maintain profits while people starve, but since I'm not the first to think this I'll let my man Steinbeck explain it:
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
I worked at a bakery in a large chain grocery store and when throwing out the baked goods that weren't bought each week I was told I either throw it away or buy one. I was not allowed to eat what was going to be thrown away anyway unless I gave them money... Ffs.
I ate some anyway. Fuck that lol
Western society handing money, tax breaks etc hand over fist to rich people while our quality of life slowly erodes over time.
That repairing stuff yourself is worse than the company repairing it for you
It's kinda true since the company will probably try to withhold schematics, withhold spare parts or worse, maliciously design it to be unrepairable
Self fulfilling prophesy that works to generate more profit for the company.
Extreme wealth
1.2% of the world population owns 49.5% of the wealth. It's fucked up.
That girls wear pink and boys wear blue.
How long until some nerd points out that it used to be opposite.. Oh, I just did, didn't I. Im that nerd. Darn.
It’s okay buddy.
Interestingly about 100 years ago it used to be the reverse. Pink was seen as a masculine colour while blue was considered feminine. Goes to show how arbitrary a lot of the gender norm rules are.
I'm a straight, overweight and hairy man in his mid forties. I love pink.
Not very long till a nerd shows up. My favorite is that FDR wore gender neutral clothes, including dresses, and did not get his hair cut till he was 7. A bizarrely more progressive past activity.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/04/fdr-grew-up-in-a-dress-it-wasnt-always-blue-for-boys-and-pink-for-girls/237299/
The job "market". Every time I hear a politician say "I'm going to make more jobs", I want to yell "jobs are made by the act of doing something!"
The fact that some of us own land and others the rest of us have to pay them to live on it.
Or the fact that we have to pay to have a roof over our heads. Like how is that not essential to living? Why are there people making money out of essential things like housing, schools, electricity, water, etc?
[Edit] Whoops, I did not intend this to be a comment to you.
Don’t worry, happens to me quite frequently.
Mowing lawns, screw you dad.
Even worse, watering lawns. Not only in many places there is water restriction during the summer season and people watering their lawn do-it illegally, but the only consequences is that you have to mow-it more often. If you want to have green-grass, go to Britain or Netherlands where it's always raining and stop living around the Mediterranean
Can confirm. Endless rain this summer in the UK. No grass watering required (not that it is ever required...). Didn't stop my neighbour watering on the few sunny weeks we've had...
Having lawns also.
Is there a cheap low maintenance lawn substitute that you can walk on and doesn't get obnoxiously tall and allergy inducing?
Much of the concept of "intellectual property". Here's a good essay by Richard Stallman:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html
Copyright by and large needs to be abolished. Patents in software are nonsensical, and elsewhere they should be drastically scaled back. Trademark is alright, with a few adjustments needed.
But all of the above is hiding behind a concept of "property" that just does not apply to intangible things, and we need to stop using that term to describe them.
I'm amenable to the idea of getting first dibs on an idea you came up with (software, hardware, fiction...), but it's been clearly abused to an insane degree by corporations who want to make a quick buck.
some more
public philosophy mirages
eg.1 "free market will balance everything"
will it now? until we actually see one, we'll never know. we don't live in a free market, and never have. they rig the shit out of it with eg. drm and region locks, and then gaslight us that its free & balanced. lol.
eg.2 "democracy is the best we have"
same as above, when i see a true democracy i'll let you know. caveat: unsure of your exact country's situation, but when was the last time you consistently voted on what you want to happen, rather than who will fail to implement their election promises (with 0.0% accountability btw).
also, friendly reminder: mostly the "who", you can vote for was already chosen in a private vote by the political parties, before they even pretended to care about our opinion. lol.
strawman public discourse
arguing in the media over the wrong points in an issue to keep public discourse on a 'lively' treadmill
eg.1
Q: Is climate change human caused?
A: Doesn't change the issue: stop poisoning the water, air and soil - we need them to live. duh.
eg.2
Q: Is being lgbqta a choice?
A: Doesn't change the issue: if its not a choice they can't control it, leave these people alone. if it is a choice, its a free country, leave these people alone.
edit: if you disagree with any of the above, please expand, i'm open to a new perspective.
Straight up logic. Why isn’t this taught in school?
It is in some parts of the world. Lots of people hate those classes.
Love your eg 2. I've never thought about it that way!
Advertising (and capitalism in general).
Seriously.
Marketing is nothing more than convincing people to buy stuff they do not need.
It is the reason we live in a consumer culture that is fucking up the planet with useless trash.
Advertising is pollution of our soul
I can kind of see an argument that you exchange your attention for services online, but ads forced on you IRL should be illegal. If ads are a form of payment, then unsolicited ads are theft.
brilliantly put, love it!!
Social media becoming advertising platforms, I think.
Filing taxes in the US is a cruel and byzantine process. It's fucked that the government has the resources and really the infrastructure to know what people owe, and will go through with finding out from time to time to determine if people are cheating, but all but requires them to use a private service to figure out what they owe first.
If all your income is from wages (like most people) the IRS already knows what you made cause your employer had to file w2 forms and withhold taxes. You just have to fill out a bunch of forms and hope youre right! Sometimes they fuck over waiters and stuff cause they get a lot of tips and don't always claim their tips, which is just so shitty.
blame turbotax and their peers. we should have had an electronic filing system a decade ago. but special interests said naw, fuck that.
By design.
One of the purposes of the planned inefficiencies of state services, often the direct consequence of completely economically irrational private-public partnerships and offloading to private firms of public services who will bid for contracts to run state-constructed infastructure on the basis that they will minimize costs (inducing low wages, high turnover rates of workers and low efficiency, surprise suprise). The malignant genius of it is that the inefficiency of the effects of partial and shadow privatization of what should be public services turns people against them and pro privatization because they still perceive it as public.
A similar phenomenon can be seen in the case of tax systems, especially the US tax system, or the US postal service.
Neoliberalism reestablishes profitability by sefl-destructive cost-cutting.
Everything.
We are run by an oligarchy of nihilists that gladly want to make humanity go extinct to buy yachts they can already afford.
I am constantly told I need to lower my expectations for everything day by day, and then told I am entitled for simply wishing for the life a white boomer had in the 60s. If that makes me entitled, what does that make the white boomer that DID get to experience all that? No, I'll never own a house, now even renting is out of reach. Looks like porky's all set with his workforce and the only jobs left pay 14 an hour tops.
Just how fucking boring this world is. Look around you, there is so much to see and do and you will never experience any of it because you were not born a multimillionaire. You will never experience the beauty of Sierra Nevada, you will never get to enjoy Niagara Falls, even if you are lucky enough to have stable employment. Americans proudly call vacation a thing of the past, and the few times people do go on vacation, it's practically suicide for their career.
Bigotry is somehow being paraded as this noble thing, actually and that actually being tolerant is supposedly this sign I'm some big dumb-dumb.
If blue cities are so bad, why are property values there so high? Shouldn't red areas have higher property values since most people are fascists and want to live in a place where minorities are more optimally oppressed?
If this country hates me so much, why isn't it easier for me to simply move to another one? Even
would be leagues better than this shithole.
Some of the worst atrocities being justified because it is for "the economy". Ol' Vivek argued that climate change isn't real because if it was, the consequences of doing something about it would hurt "the economy", as if consumerism is a human right that transcends clean air and water. Hence my first point about us being run by nihilists. If they sincerely believed in God, they wouldn't be doing this, or be claiming "it's okay, I'll be dead before anything bad happens! YOLO!" They only believe in their God whenever they need a justification to do whatever they want. Ironically, God seems to tempt more people into sin than Satan and Lilith combined
Capitalism.
Suburban car culture. People can go on and on about the how they like driving, and like the freedom to drive everywhere, even if it makes them fat and lonely. But what about their kids? It's insane that kids are essentially trapped at home unless a parent happens to have the ability to drive that somewhere. Your convenient lifestyle comes at the cost of raising neurotic introverts who won't go outside.
To me it's the complete opposite. How can you raise children in the city? They can't go out without a parent watching over them, they don't even have a garden to play outside. By moving to the suburbs, my kids can just get on their bike, scooter or skateboard and meet up with their friends at their home or at the park, even as young as 8, it's a pretty safe place and they've got plenty of outdoors to enjoy. We have room for the pool as well as the trampoline, playing soccer and kids can just walk to school super early.
I moved in to the city when I was 14, after growing in the country/suburbs, when you're a teen, it's fun to take the bus to go watch a movie with your friends without relying on a parent driving you there and back. But younger than that, take your bike and you've got complete freedom!
I couldn't imagine raising my kids in the city so we moved out before having them, now I can't imagine moving into the city ever again, I actually almost never go to the city except to visit friends or some museums, too many people, bricks and asphalt.
i suspect that's a big part of ops point. without proper transport alternatives (eg. bus, bike etc) you're fucked.
and how just by buying gas you are automagically a ‘more important’ road user than anyone else.
i get that as a general optimisation, the avg speed of vehicles should be considered from a routing perspective.
but its been entirely normalised that cars are "important" and everything else is inherently secondary to them. which is ofc pure bs, but most people assume it by default.
It’s no accident it happened this way, car companies yet bribed officials to make everything but driving a car illegal, re: jwalking and it’s consequences have been a disaster for the human race
"Internet of Everything" ideology. Sticking surveillance technology on shit that doesn't need it to make it both worse and more malicious really fucks things up.
The Electoral College.
First Past the Post system in Canada
FPTP anywhere it's used. The UK. The US (for individual Senate or HoR races, as well as each state's decision of how its College Electors are chosen). A majority of the seats in Taiwan and South Korea. Among a bunch of others. Though certainly, most of the most functional democracies avoid FPTP, because by its very nature FPTP is undemocratic.
Homelessness, and by extension, rent
How normalised heavy drinking is in Britain
Most of the funerals I've been to over the last 10 years were for heavy drinkers. At least 3 (including my dad) alcohol was the direct cause of the death.
https://youtu.be/vK7l55ZOVIc?si=kTmrF1epADATv3LG
This video about vodka in Russia is very eye opening. Keep the people drunk so they don't rise up, the father is drunk and violent, raise boys that are drunk and violent continuing the cycle of violent drunkenness.
What counts as heavy drinking? Curious to compare with what's normal in my country.
Apparently the UK has some of the highest (maybe the highest) binge drinking rates in the world and highesr alcohol consumption per capita - kinda goes hand in hand. I wasn't surprised to read it, some of the lads and ladettes start drinking Friday after work and don't stop until Monday morning. Crazy stuff, like out literally all night, wake up still buzzed, get another few rounds in with your mates and just keep going.
Oh god, that's a rabbit hole you might not want to go down. I'm in Canada and I know people who will have 1 or 2 beers a week but most are in the range 2-4 a day. I'm an electrician so things skew towards the 1500 bottles/yr end of the spectrum.
Slavery
Copyright
Positive attitude towards billionaire philanthropists. First, they made a fortune on the result of labor alienated from workers, then they threw a pitch and became good guys
That few countries take a person's wealth and income into account when fining them for breaking laws. I see examples like these and wish this were the norm everywhere.
If you fine people based on their bank balance, you end up fining careful savers, not rich people with shell companies.
The best way to achieve the same goal for the more major fines is with custodial sentences. E.G. 2 weeks for drinking and driving.
And for the more minor traffic stuff with points and bans. If every one has the same number of points and gets the same ban, it is fairer
Pretty self-explanatory if you think about the people that design those fining procedures and what there wealth and income is.
My current favorite is the federal reserve making policy to intentionally weaken the labor market. I am currently paying the fuckwads scheming to keep labor weak, docile, and dependent. What a blast.
inflation is evil, so we can't raise wages!
//every company raises prices, so net result is more americans in poverty//
Can you elaborate?
Raising interest rates to fight inflation works by reducing demand. Jobs get lost so people have less money. So they spend less, so prices drop to be more competitive.
Only poorer people obviously. Rich people are less affected, but still pay more in interest. The increased number of unemployed people means competition for jobs is higher so workers are cheaper to pay, increasing profits again.
High inflation is bad for everyone, but particularly so for the poorer, too. However, measures to fight it should be spread across society. Instead blunt tools like interest rate rises disproportionately affect the poor. They should be combined with higher taxes on business and high earners and high net worth individuals. Worldwide we only really do the first. I wonder who decides?
In addition, I could definitely go for enforcement and expansion of price gouging and profiteering laws.
I would like to see enforcement and expansion of profiteering guillotines.
You didn't even mention the funniest part. We know that raising the fed rates can hurt the poor by reducing their access to money, but we don't actually have any compelling evidence that it reduces inflation. It's literally the modern equivalent of the ancient Romans or Greeks sacrificing an animal for a bountiful harvest.
Especially because, as far as I can see, inflation isn't being caused by demand for necessaries. And, these days, an increasing number of people are pretty much only able to afford the basics necessities (if even that) did to talk terms pay cuts as a result of inflation.
It mostly works by forcing companies to pay back their loans rather than keeping them indefinitely, which pulls excess money out of the economy instead of it circulating continuously. When interest rates were near zero and the reserve requirement was dropped for banks, a shitload of this lending was done multiple times, so they're hoping to effectively claw that back
Mainly just my absolute shock at the openness of saying "We really need to see a weaker labor market." Seriously??? That is where we are at now. The complete and transparent assault on the worker by people I personally fund. Outrageous! At least lie to me about your motives like I might have a modicum of power over you. Now you just tell me to eat shit and die right to my face.
Christmas.
An environmental impact study on this would be interesting.
Even the Chinese celebrate Christmas now just for fun and because they already make the decorations
Homelessness.
Billionaires.
War.
Magic, aka science and technology.
Religion
This is the thread that made me make an account and what a pain it was to find without having saved it anywhere. I've been holding out for someone to say it, but havwn't seen it specifically.
Single use plastics. I still remember the weird feeling of doom when learning the world population and making the quick relation to disposable plastics, constantly being told "but it's only a little bit." A little bit for several thousand years, per billions, is too many bits.
The best way I've found of making people realise how much waste they generate is to ask them to imagine having to bury it in their back yard. Every week.
That's pretty much what we do: bury it somewhere else.
Tobacco smoking.
Having to wear clothes in public.
Tobacco smoking, at least cigarettes, is quickly becoming de-normalized in some countries. In New Zealand they did a ban with current smokers grandfathered in essentially. In the US, there is more and more hostility to smoking.
People will cough and act dramatic when you smoke outside, you can't smoke inside of anywhere but bars anymore (and only some bars at that). Smoking is seen as low brow - typically mostly done by the lower rungs of society.
Zizek talks about this a bit and claims it's ideology. You are compelled to enjoy and be a hedonist - but never too much.
Personally, I quit smoking a long time ago but I think alcohol is much worse but doesn't get nearly the same treatment.
Im just happy some peoples dirty butts hasn't made direct contact with the seat im sitting in. Thats a good reason we have to wear clothes imho. Cleanliness and respect for sharing the world with others makes it okay to have rules about attire in public spaces.
But the whole showing skin being so goddamn taboo for real people, while at the same time near nudity and sexuality on publicly visible advertising boards is completely ok, thats a double standard I can't understand.
And the modern fear of showing non-sexual nudity to kids. Its very noticeable how bad an effect it have had on our society by now: Kids are hesitant to change and shower after gym. People don't undress and do a proper shower before entering public swimming pools.
The nudity taboo is a problem of sexist sexualisation and sexualised violence, among others.
Imagine being able to walk to the cafe with your friends in scorching heat without having to bother with constricting, sweaty and heavy clothing without being sexualised or ridiculed or attacked (things that also happen when clothed, btw).
Ticketmaster fees
Expensive wedding
Jewels
Gold
Modern devices not using USB-C.
Compulsory "bless you" when someone sneezes
It's because it was once believed that sneezing stopped your heart, so people would say a small prayer for good health.
Or something like that, I read that somewhere and I'm not sure if it's true.
Yeah but my wife thinks it's mandatory to say, every single time, even if she is in the middle of saying something. And she thinks those rules should apply to everyone.
I don't see why it even needs to be acknowledged.
iPhone prices.
Capitalism and billionaires
Green grass lawns.
We're in a drought where I am and I still see boomer dudes going out and watering their lawns. So many more eco alternatives but they just think someone will judge them. No dude, we're judging you on the massive waste of water
Not having any control over your computing. CS illiteracy is really scary. The world looks grim from the libre software world.
Circus politics
Speed traps in the US. I had to explain to my son that the reason why we have to drive 45 mph for half a mile on an interstate is because there is a convenient side street in the middle of that stretch of road where the police can wait.
Offices of all types (medical, billing, tech support, etc.) only doing business on a callback basis. Customers and clients are expected to be continuously available to receive a call at the office's convenience.
We have all become unwilling, unpaid, on-call employees of most every company we deal with.
I'm in a job that's good enough that I may be able to buy or build a small house of my own in the near future - but first I have to wait for everyone who is currently selling their houses to panic for no reason in particular, plummeting prices, kicking people out of homes they've lived in for a decade or more, and causing all kinds of mayhem. And then when I get a place of my own I'll be subject to this absurdity directly every five to ten years like clockwork!
Minimum wage for hard physical labor
Gasoline.
Here’s a toxic and highly volatile liquid. Rather than transferring it in specialized canisters with safety seals, we just let you dump it out of a hose. There is absolutely no safety training on how to handle it, and all you need is some cash to obtain a lot of it. It’s something of a right of passage for children to dispense it for their parents.
And despite the fact that the vehicles that use it spend 90% of their time parked in one place, you can’t have it delivered to that place like you can with other utilities like water, electricity, and natural gas. You have to go to special stores and comparison shop.
And even the stores you buy it from have it delivered by truck. They don’t even get it piped in.
Oh, and even when used correctly, it'll kill you if you use it in an enclosed space.
And it's killing the planet too.
Thank god for that. Can you imagine how much polluted land and groundwater we'd have if we piped it around and it leaked like our water pipes do?
Oh for sure. This is something of a practiced rant I perform to promote electric vehicles. Petrol drivers are always asking about how long it takes to charge a vehicle at a charging station not realizing that their vehicle can charge while it sits dormant at home.
“How long does it take to charge your car?”
“I dunno, how long does it take to charge your phone?”
Etc.
and we seemingly need endless war to keep getting it out of the ground
Hate. Every iteration of society in history has normized hatred of some "other" and its bonkers.
The requirement for people to post their lives online, in the early days if the Internet the general rule was you don't post personal information online, now it's gone the complete opposite direction, I've met multiple people who write you of as "strange" just because they can't poke through your Facebook/Instagram/snapchat/twitter.
I don't keep social media accounts because it doesn't intrest me, and have been told multiple times that people don't trust me because I don't air out everything I think on an online platform.
Rampant alcoholism.
Presidential debate that are nothing more than a bad episode of Maury
Infidelity
In America, gaslighting by corporations and conservatives attempts to convince us that for profit healthcare is normal and fine. It’s ok for billionaires and huge corporations to get tax breaks and pay less or zero taxes because they “create jobs.” Businesses have the right to control elections with massive donations because…that’s free speech. Most rich people got that way by working hard…and anyone can do it. Immigrants are responsible for poor job markets and other economic woes.
Support for communism. People somehow manage to wildly exaggerate both the evils of capitalism and the benefits of communism, even though we have plenty of contemporary and historical examples to refer to.
Communism is as much of a fairy tale as the Free Market.
For exactly the same reasons.
Almost like we better pick something ... in the middle, like heavily regulated capitalism and social democracy.
No, we have historical examples of various X forms of Socialism that were supposed to be the intermediate state between capitalism and communism. All of the turned out to be authoritarian nightmares, but none of them actually made it to the communism stage of development.
Essentially truly supporting communism is merely saying we could be living in a post-scarcity state. The oligarchs ain't gonna let that happen though and their captive governments aren't about to let that happen though.
I propose that human greed leads to the corruption of both capitalist and communist systems in actual practice. The difference is that in capitalism, greed is publically encouraged and publically rewarded, while in communism, greed is publically discouraged and privately rewarded. Inequality is present in both practices ostensibly (with few historical exceptions). Whatever economic systems are implemented by humanity, some people are winners and some are losers.
The question of what system is best cannot be settled by only historical anecdotes. Historical record is too biased towards its own context, though we can look at patterns that have emerged through recorded history to try and achieve a more objective understanding; we have to examine a system as it exists right now. We must accept that no system will be exempt from human greed and focus our efforts on policies that fight against it wherever possible. This is not an enlightened centrist position; this is the position of someone who wants to maximize the number of societal winner and minimize the number of losers.
Landlords & men behaving like sex pests
Not saying Hello or goodbye in an elevator, to people from the same building, especially in big cities
One of my pet peeves is people not saying thank you when you hold the door for them. I feel like that's kind of in a similar vein
Society itself. Have you seen this shit? What the fuck are we thinking?!
Respirating and procreating