Browsing social media, it’s apparent that people are quick to point out problems in the world, but what I see less often are suggestions for how to solve them. At best, I see vague ideas that might solve one issue but introduce new ones, which are rarely addressed.
Simply stopping the bad behaviour rarely is a solution in itself. The world is not that simple. Take something like drug addiction. Telling someone to just stop taking drugs is not a solution.
Stopping the wealth accumulation at the top through taxes on property above a threshold.
And, supplementary:
Stopping tax evasion by implementing a global tax cooperative so nations can stop competing in a downward race on tax rates
The meat and dairy industry receives vast amounts of subsidies which would be better allocated to plant based food sources. Meat is an inefficient way to feed the general population. I’m vocal about this because of two reasons: animal suffering and climate/pollution.
I’m not naive enough to say we should just cut subsidies to animal farming cold turkey, because I understand people’s livelyhoods depend on it. But I would want to see a progressive public divestment from meat in favour of plant based whole food proteins (not fake/lab meats, those can survive on private investment alone).
At the same time, I’m also vocal about fixing farming. We need to stop destroying nature to grow food. Fortunately the divestment from animal farming will already significantly improve this because it’s more efficient to eat soy directly than to grow soy, feed it to pigs, and then eat the pig. However we need to fix monocultures by moving to regenerative farming and agroforestry.
And vertical farms.
My understanding is that vertical farms have yet to prove more efficient except perhaps in land use. It’s been pretty hard to scale.
If lab grown meat becomes cheaper than “real” meat while keeping the taste and texture of it or even improve on that, I can totally see that replacing factory farmed meat rather quickly. It’s like with electric cars; people don’t switch if we force / shame them to do so but they will once those vehicles became better than the dirty alternative.
But my point is that we are keeping meat artificially cheap with lots of subsidies. Meat would be a luxury food if people paid the real cost of it, let alone if we paid the long term costs on the environment. I think maybe your analogy would be better with bicycles than electric cars. Bikes are more versatile and convenient than cars in short distances (10km), but most cities have been and continue being developed as car centric. If we used taxes to improve bike infrastructure, people would feel safer to ride bikes more often.
This exactly. I would say one of the main reasons a lot of people don’t currently drink plant milk is that per unit volume, it tends to be more expensive. This is seemingly starting to even out as the plant milk industry expands, but the most dirt-cheap dairy milk and the most dirty-cheap plant milk are still nowhere near each other on price. I’m willing to bet that if all subsidies were taken away altogether, plant milk would be cheaper, and moreover, if it were flipped in such a way that existing dairy subsidies went to plant milk, it would be game over for dairy milk. Plant milk prices would be through the floor, and dairy milk would be seen as a luxury product. There are a ton of good reasons for this:
- Dairy milk is far worse for the environment than every kind of plant milk by every conceivable metric.
- The dairy industry is one of the most absurdly cruel institutions in the world. (NSFL)
- Plant milk is generally better for you than dairy milk. The downsides to plant milk health-wise are lack of protein (this is only 8g per serving, though, out of the 0.8g/kg/day that you need, and some plant milks are beginning to add protein) and the fortification with D2 instead of fortification with D3. It makes up for this however by generally having more calcium and Vitamin D, the potential to not have any sugar (compare ~8g of the sugar lactose), mono- and polyunsaturated fats without saturated fat and LDL cholesterol, and substantially fewer calories.
- Plant milk takes months to go bad, whereas dairy milk that’s not ultrapasteurized (and therefore dramatically more expensive) takes maybe a couple weeks at most from the date of purchase.
- Plant milk has an enormous amount of variety compared to dairy milk – there are so many types that enumerating them becomes exhausting, and for the most part (not you, rice milk) they’re all good. You can get essentially whatever you want, compared to dairy milk, where you’re basically stuck with that (subjective) weird, slightly sour aftertaste.
cold turkey
Mmmm, I love cold turkey sandwiches after Thanksgiving
I meant cold tofurky sorry.
Big corporations begging taxpayer bailouts and then using them on bonuses and dividends. It’s a humongous waste of money that does nothing but enrich the wealthy. Most of the time it doesn’t even save jobs.
If, as a large corporate, you want a bailout from the taxpayer, then the government/state will take a portion of your shares in escrow, equivalent in value to the amount of money you’re asking for or getting. Those shares (in case of publicly traded companies) are withdrawn from the stock market, become non-voting shares and are frozen at their price at that time. Within a to-be-determined time period (five years maybe) the corporation, if it gets profitable again, can buy back all or part of the shares from the government at that price per share - thus returning money to the taxpayer. Anything that’s left after five years, the government can do with as it sees fit - sell them at market price (thus recovering the spent money), or keep them use them to vote/control the company.
There probably is a lot wrong with this proposal. But something needs to be done to discourage big business from hoovering up taxpayer money like it’s going out of fashion. Most of the time the taxpayer is getting absolutely no value from that spend.
No bailouts without an equivalent equity transfer to the public. If you want a bailout you need to grant the same amount of stock to the government in exchange.
Isn’t that pretty much the short version of what I said?
If so, it should begin with that.
Fix the electoral college by either abolishing it entirely (personal choice) or fixing the house to properly represent the population such that the senate doesn’t cause an oversized share of electoral reps. The Wyoming Rule is one option.
We could also just go back to something like one rep per 100,000 population in a state, which would in turn make the house have 3,000 members. This sounds wild until you realize Parliament in the U.K. has 650 members… representing a population roughly 1/5 ours.
This is probably a fool’s errand, because it’s all or nothing, making it inherently unstable. If we ever get within striking distance of having enough states to cross the threshold, the law will be fought tooth and nail to prevent passage, and this battle would continue in perpetuity in every remotely purple state that has the NPVIC law in place, trying to get enough overturned to stop it.
Maybe it accomplishes something useful simply by bringing the conversation about reform to the forefront? But as an actual solution I’m completely skeptical, as much as I like the idea.
Perhaps more realistic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_root_law
deleted by creator
Fuck me too then. I’d be curious to hear how you imagine somebody like me would be able to find customers for my business if I wasn’t allowed to drop flyers onto people’s mailboxes.
I know how those marketing chicks look like, I volunteer as tribute for your plan.
Truth in advertising laws. Make it illegal to lie, mislead, or deceive in advertising. And I mean criminal, like jail time for the CEO, or they can specify an executive that must sign off on all ads if they like. That person takes the fall. And who decides if an ad breaks the law. A jury, or something more streamlined but still made up of regular Americans who decide.
You want a realistic solution or a “if I had one wish” solution?
If every US Republican were to die of a heart attack right now, that would probably be the single greatest thing that could happen to our planet right now.
The answer to the majority of problems the world is facing is community - we need to rebuild real physical communities, participate in them, and nourish them. We can do this by simply getting more involved in existing ones, staring from things as simple as local gardening groups, litter picking/beach tidy groups, community celebrations, local markets, etc. We need to hold on to, strengthen and rebuild arts groups and help local arts and music scenes to grow.
We can all participate on some level in some aspect of physical community building, and it will enrich us in a way social media never can. (Put on a gig, attend an arts show, donate to a community group, talk to neighbours, support the vulnerable). I believe people feel so isolated and depressed by the way greed has ruined the web, jobs, the economy, etc.that the time is right for many more people to start investing time and effort in real communities.
We need to build and grow communities in a local, regional, national and international spirit. We need to learn how to share, and how to get rid of greed and selfishness in ourselves and in our societies - participating in and building welcoming, non discriminating communities is the path towards this. We need to remove competition in education, arts and science (and ultimately economy), and focus on cooperation and improving things out of the joy of helping yourself and others. Communities can bring this about, and digital communities (as opposed to competitive social media) can support this, too.
Ideally, we want to grow communities in a way where people start thinking first “how does this help my community?” - especially when looking at political and business decisions. We need to feel something positive to stand up for (not old fashioned ideas of ‘country’ or political groups) - we simply need mutually supportive groups (communities) that fight power, greed and selfishness to defend people, animals and nature.
Somewhat relevant plugs:
On education reform: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-one-thing-that-should-be-taught-in-school-that-isnt-already/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen
On digital community: https://www.quora.com/Who-invented-the-modern-computer-look-and-feel/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen (the sick, sad history of computer-aided collaboration)
There are bigger problems that I agree need to be solved but I’m not personally that verbal about them. But the one I complain about the most has got to be potholes.
In the UK farmers are responsible for maintaining the hedgerows between the road and their fields so I feel like they should also be responsible for filling in the potholes caused by their heavy machinery and the cow shit left behind when they’re moving cattle.
The two-party system. Regardless of where you live, if it’s under a two-party system, you probably agree that it sucks.
Assuming we’re starting from “choose one” single-winner elections, you need to first switch your elections to Approval Voting. This would make it always safe to vote for your favorite candidate, and the full support for every losing candidate would be reflected in the vote totals. This will weaken the two party system, but no single-winner system can dismantle it.
After that, switch as many single-winner elections to multi-winner as you can (like city council or a legislative district) and use Sequential Proportional Approval Voting to award seats. This will enable minor party candidates to get into office after the major ones, and the seat totals will look a lot closer to the vote totals.
A few places already use approval (Fargo and St. Louis) and a few places are just begging for SPAV (Cincinnati City council).
There are many congressional solutions to many of the things im vocal about. ending citizens united and making it clear rights are for living being people only (you know sort enshiring the idea the governement is from the people and for the people), medicare for all but improved, creating higher income tax brackets that go up to a billion and recognize all things as income so basically getting rid of capital gains, breaking up monopolies and regulating businesses, there is a lot.
Did you just intend to endorse organ harvesting and grave robbing?
And, if you want tax reform capital gains aren’t your target, but instead “unrealized gains”. A billionare pledging stock to back a loan should pay tax on their whole net worth’s increass in value first.
Im trying to get the rogan harvesting but if I do get it, its a real stretch joke on of and for the people. Yes I like the unrealized gains. Its funny because while writing it I was thinking about that but did not have a good term. Im not big on a wealth tax but any growth from any direction should be taxed the same as income. I might allow some deductions like one residential property that you live in.
If i sit or stand somewhere, i spray smokers a gust of water on their cancer-sticks, extinguishing the bad thing i am allergic to and eliminating this disgusting smell.
We’re too many humans for what the planet is able to sustain, we need to reduce our use of resources but we also need to be fewer than 8 billions
Overpopulation is something that’ll take care of itself over the next 50 years or so. The more immediate issue is to figure out who will pay the pensions of the aging population.
No, it’s not. Social security is not a failing program.
Yes it is when there’s more people receiving those payments than working. The money has to come from somewhere.
That’s a simplistic reduction. They’ve been saying it’s going to run out for 30 years.
It’s not exactly speculation. The birth rate in much of developed countries is well below the replacement rate. Population decline is already happening in some countries. Looking at current demographic charts shows that the number of elderly people is growing fast, while younger generations are shrinking. With fewer children being born, there will soon be much less workers to support a lot more retirees. Pension systems, mostly designed for growing populations, will be in real trouble as fewer people pay into them and more people are taking money out.
Actually, this is not true (yet). There is enough space and food for all people if we stay humble. The distribution is what is wrong. We just need a socialist world government and get rid of this capitalism shit.
A slow burn. Humanity is slowly wiping itself out. If this is a Q humanity test then we have failed. We need a Picard/Riker/Data/LaForge combo
The dangers of artificial general intelligence (humans becoming even worse thinkers, dystopia, takeover) could be avoided by turning towards human collaborative intelligence augmentation.
