Alcohol.
Lots and lots of people lean heavily on it and think that alcohol is the spice of their life. When, it contributes to so many problems than it’s so-called benefits. We tried, in America anyways, to outright ban alcohol. Problem was that the person who wanted it banned, was too extremist.
Like he didn’t think it all through and think just going for the jugular of the problem is what will work. When, it didn’t and just made people work around it until eventually the ban was dismantled.
So, since then, we’ve been putting up with drunk drivers, drunk disputes, drunk abusers and other issues. I still wish we could just slam our hands down at the desk and demand we sit to discuss in how to properly deal with this issue than people proclaiming that it’s not a problem.
Lying in bed, debating if you have to pee bad enough to get up
I don’t think we will ever have a society that is truly saved from class warfare. I think that the upper classes will always exist in some form and they will always oppress the vast majority of the population, with varying degrees of brutality. I also think this is the most important issue in our society and must be dealt with. It’s depressing.
In Marx’s own idea the point were class warfare is no more is when our civilization can satisfy any needs of anyone.
It would be the ultimate goal of communism, perfect equity through infinite automation of all resources.
Then they would only be art, philosophy, science and social activities.
Except, as long as there’s limited resources, fighting for it is our nature. To the point of having to much if may be.
Considering how little we actually know, how much we are still figuring out today, how wrong we once were, and most definitely still are on many things, about said nature, the naturalistic argument is IMHO rather weak. The argument silently assumes too many things, at least with our current knowledge - that human beings do actually have an inherent nature, that said nature is uniform enough across the whole species to make that generalization, that said nature is inevitable and can’t be evolved past or rationalized against, that it always was the case and will always be, etc.
Definitely true.
I think the hypothesis of a nature both in human actions and society as a whole does have enough merits to be a good starting point.
Were I think there is a lot of unpredictability is on conditions of living and technologies.
Technologies especially, evolve so much quicker than society or human nature.
I would say recently our technologies twisted some of our own nature. For instance how we reproduce in such a controlled way.
Not only this but we do now more than ever things not because of our nature. And it’s also been put into very unique situations.
A great example is social media (including Lemmy itself). We have access to communication so far from us it created very unique communities.
If humans have a nature, then humans will always have that nature by definition. “We” might get beyond that nature, but it won’t be “us” after that. It will be our descendants.
And not like “sons and daughters” but rather “our evolutionary descendants”.
As for humanity, we exist in a particular set of inescapable challenges, which define what it is to be human.
Greed.
America is a great example of this.
In the US and Canada?
Car dependency / Car centrism.
Sure, we have a few large cities with non roadway mass transit.
But uh, in general, we’ve got terminal car brain, and I do not see this fundamentally changing.
The vast majority of places will continue being designed around cars instead of people.
Cars and fuel costs will keep going up, less and less people will have them, and (again excepting a few extremely dense and expensive cities) we will just go to mass private car rentals/shares instead of actual mass transit or meaningfully redesigning cities.
Sidewalks? Bike lanes? Go fuck yourself, you don’t matter if you don’t own a car, wait an hour for a bus (if one exists), get an uber, have a friend with a car.
EVs are coming, no matter how expensive/wasteful, you’d always have a car option.
As they do, they’re quickly turning into indicators of privilege. If/when the petro dollar crashes I totally don’t expect billy bob that drives his eight cylinder diesel to hold any resentment towards EV drivers when he’s stuck paying for something that he can’t afford gas for. But hey what do I know I prefer old school bicycles.
Are there EV longhaul trucks that are at cost and performance parity with ICE longhaul trucks on the horizon?
I don’t think so.
That means that logistics costs for basically everything gets significantly more expensive when ICE fuel costs go up.
We could lessen this problem by building out more freight rail capacity, and a whole lot more minor rail lines so that trucks don’t routinely drive halfway across the continent and are used less often…
…but we are not.
So, that means that when gas/diesel prices go up, everything gets more expensive… including ICE and EV personal vehicles.
Currently, generally, EVs (and Hybrids) are already 20% to 30% more expensive than their ICE counterparts, even after subsidies/rebates, and are only less expensive than the ICE counterpart in a long run of 10+ years due to lower ongoing fuel costs…
But if gas/diesel prices significantly rise and never go back down…
All vehicles become more expensive.
If ICE vehicle ongoing fuel costs are now so high that an average person can’t afford them…
The only other choice is EVs … but those now have a stupendous sticker price.
So you end up with even less people being able to afford any vehicle whatsoever, but a society that is physically designed to… require one.
So then you end up with a society of an upper class of EV owners, and everyone else who used to be able to afford a midrange ICE car now having to use ICE/EV motorcycles or EBikes… for daily commutes, in all weather.
No more AC or Heating for your completely environmentally exposed 30 minute to 2hr commute to work through a heatwave or heavy snow or rain.
They’d have to rent an EV vehicle to do 2 weeks worth of grocery shopping or move any kind of substantial cargo like a bed, or move more than 2 people a considerable distance, start arranging ride shares to and from work in some kind of comfort.
Oh, and a ton of Americans are functionally too obese/unhealthy/injured to be able to actually use a motorcycle or EBike. So just count them out of the workforce if they can’t find ride shares I guess.
If I had more time under my belt I’d probably buy one. The 100k+ pricetag is just too much right now
I wouldn’t be so pessimistic. The Netherlands was also a car dependent place that bulldozed neighbourhoods for highways a few dozen years ago and look at where they are now. Change can happen, it just needs a critical mass of supporters and time, lots of time.
Us Americans just elected a fascist, who won the popular vote, who wants to do the exact opposite of a massive infrastructure rework, he and his sycophants want to cut every kind of government funding for social and government services of all kinds, keep ‘joking’ about invading Mexico, annexing Canada, buying Greenland.
We do not have a mass of supporters who are effective at applying pressure on the government… because we now, even more obviously, live in a naked oligarchy that controls the government and mass media… our democracy is broken, our representatives are purchased, our population heavily subject to anti intellectual right wing propoganda funded by oligarchs.
We also do not have lots and lots of time.
Many states in the US are currently seeing home insurance companies either dramatically raising rates or just leaving: The climate catastrophe driven collapse of many areas has begun, and it will only get worse without a massive coordinated government directed response… which goes dorectly against the ideology of most of our oligarchs and most of our people who believe what those oligarchs tell them to via the media they own.
We will not have the money to build out better transit infrastructure … that will all be spent responding to more and more intense natural disasters and internal migrants.
At the federal level, yes. There’s lots of things going wrong in the “greatest” country on earth. That doesn’t mean you should stick the head in the sand and ignore advocating for incremental improvements. If no sensible transport advocate actually does anything for it because they think there isn’t enough public support, you’ll never achieve that goal, no matter how many advocates there actually are.
Not just bikes recently released a video which touches on this topic with some more differentiated discussion:
https://nebula.tv/videos/notjustbikes-these-two-cities-used-to-be-the-same
https://youtu.be/4uqbsueNvag
Greed.
Similar to this, I’ve got a real beef with our unresolved insecuritues we have as a people (in principle. Obviously in practise this is hard).
I feel like the insecurities that essentially, drive us, are really holding us back from meaningful progress on our legitimately hard problems with climate, energy/food distribution, etc…
We’re still drawn into BS distractions and opposing teams and whatnot like a bunch of monkeys with sticks (which is apt, to be fair)
