Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

I do not think it indicates an unfixable problem with the ideal. It does indicate fatal flaws with the plans to get there. That is why I believe we need better theory on how the communist ideal can be achieved in a democratic way. I do not know if this better theory can be developed. And I do not know if humanity will ever align with this ideal. The communist ideal of a classless society is in many ways unnatural and presupposes that we will overcome some of our vices. Note that this does not solve all of our problems and therefore I think it is outdated. The 17 UN SDGs are a far more up to date set of directions we need to work on.

Just to make it clear, I think the 10 planks/10 point action plan of communism from the actual manifesto is simply WRONG and would never have achieved the communist ideal (and nowadays it is also outdated). An authoritarian nightmare is the direct result of that plan, points 1, 3, 4, 8 and 9 ensure that. Even more damning and depressing is that many communist regimes did not actually implement point 10 by actually having mandatory child labour even if education was free.

But also note that most capitalist countries actually implement to some degree point 5 (having a national central bank) and many to various degrees implement point 10 (free education, no child labour) and several implement 6 (state controlled transportation and communication). And this was for the better.

Show me a single example of a democratic communist nation that has not descended into some form of totalitarianism or anarchy...

All you posted was a long list of things that failed because of interference from the west. That's not what the question was though, show me ONE that didn't fail... ONE

>So is stockpiling resources that other people need.

Owning property is not immoral. Stealing and coveting your neighbor's property are sin and very immoral.

>Who's going to stop me?

Any authority we've democratically elected to uphold that task. Probably the police, in many cases. Or me with a weapon of course, seeing as you're bigger than me in this hypothetical. In reality, you are not bigger than me.

>That's the violence that a "free" market, and your vision of meritocracy, requires.

Yes, societies require laws that are ultimately enforced through the use of physical violence and restriction of freedom if it comes to that. Mostly to stop people from doing immoral things at the cost of other people.

Insider trading is a tough nut to crack, since it could be seen as just another tool to reach a more efficient market. Envy comes very naturally to humans, and if someone makes more profits than you in the marketplace, it's very easy to call it unfair and get mad about it. Then you're looking at the definition of "fairness" - in my opinion it's fair that anyone can pursue the kind of information that will help them make better sales in the market. Deceiving or lying to other people are different topics entirely, but the term "insider trading" doesn't entail those things.

>markets aren't physical laws of the universe, they're human constructs that are defined, regulated and policed by governments

I don't really understand your point here. Yes, our society runs on top of some underlying systems that we've agreed upon. Freely trading your labor and property go all the way back to the beginning of our evolution, and for good enough reason - it's the best system we've ever come up with and used.

Wealth is just paper and bits in a database if there is nobody to hire to take care of you in old age

Some of these? They're not problems to be solved, they are dilemmas to suffer. Your ingenuity is not all-powerful and it's about time someone knocked the "software will eat the world" ego trip out of this crowd.

Technology is not going to "save" humanity. It raised standards of living, and it created problems where previously there were none. This crowd has a habit of saying that technology is neutral, that the positive and negative consequences that come from it are people problems. Technology is a people problem, but besides that, they take the hypocritical stance of taking credit for the positive consequences of technology yet pushing the responsibility for negative consequences of technology onto individuals - individuals who react to emerging technology, not create it. Parents are supposed to limit a teen's phone time to prevent addiction but only lip service is paid to disincentivizing the psyops that Big Tech use to create the addiction in the first place.

Swap your stats, trade a little intelligence for wisdom. How many times here have people brought out the could-vs-should quote, completely oblivious to the fact that they were the scientist fools, I've lost count.

The fascination with technological solutions and the marrow-deep, if well-hidden abhorrence of nature will kill us all, and sooner than many here think. How hot are the waters off Florida? How long is Arizona's record breaking heatwave? How many floods did we have this week? You. Won't. TeChNoLoGy. Your. Way. Out. Of. These. "Problems".

Patterns hold, until they don't. Population isn't going to keep growing forever just because Malthus was wrong in his time. Progress isn't guaranteed just because you wished really hard to santa that the singularity would happen in your lifetime. "Humanity has never suffered an extinction event, so it never will" is an abysmally stupid sentence that anyone here should be ashamed of unironically spewing from their mouths. Humanity also couldn't harness nuclear power, until suddenly it could. On the existential threats humanity faces - as many here are so fond of sneering at AI-doomers, reality isn't fiction, so we're NOT guaranteed a plucky hero who clutches victory from the jaws of defeat, as the media that brought us Skynet would have you believe.

Making money the be-all end-all of business and then making business encroah on every other sphere of life is why standards of living are dropping, and every time you feed the beast with rent-based economies you make life worse. When you maximize profit, it comes at the cost of everything else, up to and including your life.

Growth isn't infinite, except for the stupidity of hopium smokers here. Please explain how a planet made of finite mass and energy can keep GDP going up, up, up forever? Based in reality, please.

Limits - they're okay to have. The obsession with breaking all limits, with optimizing for maximum efficiency, are biological edicts taken to an extreme too far to walk back from.

"One of the more annoying and least explicable features of life in the 21st Century is our hubris in glibly assuming that because we have better technology, we are smarter, wiser, and more virtuous than our ancestors." (and also immune to the things that brought down civilizations in the past. History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.)