We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

Things don't change abruptly so society can protect itself from lunatics.

Whatever examples you can come up with for "why don't we solve this faster we have the solution", can be counter argumented with the fact that your solution can turn out to be strictly worse and have unintended side effects. Many times in history we thought we had solutions for things and then we didn't. If society, or "the system" is too easy to change, then anyone can take power and mess it up for everyone else equally as fast.

A slow changing system is preferable if you want to self protect against it, even if some avoidable misery is sometimes around due to this lag it's way better than someone blasting through everything because they know better.

This seems like classic immature "but why don't we change everything and do a revolution" which does not take into account the negatives of that or that the revolution will go like someone else wants to, not you - and these things only work if "you can control everything" which is basically why communism has not worked. A battle of competing incentives seems way better than some guy deciding he knows better about everything and if he can only "coordinate everyone" he can "solve everything". That's called a dictatorship, which comunist states tend to.

Profit isn't the only reason things cost to much. There is also just the fact that some things take too many resources to do.

Take the healthcare example, of cancer that we have a cure for but costs $2 million so no one gets it. The instinctive response is to say that is horrible, and that we should spend whatever it takes to cure someone... but should we?

Even if we said profit wasn't an issue, scarce resources still have to be allocated. Time and resources spent doing one thing means less to do something else.

Imagine a cure for cancer that required 10000 people to work 1000 hours each to produce... surely that would be too much to be worth it, right? Those are hours we can't do something else.

Even if we decided no amount of hours or resources were too many, we are still limited by the people we have and the resources available. We simply don't have enough to do everything.

So yes, maybe we can fix ANYTHING, but we certainly can't fix EVERYTHING

All people are selfish. People who give to others derive pleasure from it, and they like that pleasure. Not enough to base an economy on it, though. People soon get tired of working hard only to give the results to loafers.

I agree, it sounds like people saying "our generation can't live as well as our grandparents", typing it from their mind blowing portable computer on the toilets of an airplane, going to vacations abroad.

Problems are only solved when they're solved, if we didn't fix a problem, either it wasn't a problem or we couldn't fix it just yet: it's not that some people are so mean they prefer the problem to persist because they gain something rather than fixing it to maximize problem solving numbers.

If you can't incentivize society to cure cancer, then THAT is the problem that is impossible to fix just yet, and that person should maybe focus on this ?

Look at cancer. I'm a regular smoker, I'll probably die a lonely death, of cancer, in pain, abandoned by everyone in my life who told me for years I should stop. Why don't I stop ? I can cure my own cancer but I don't, why ? The problem is way deeper, way more complex, than just some rich people abusing me for their profit I feel: I give way more money smoking to the government than I do any cigarette industrial, yet nobody seems to have found a way to cure my cancer, myself included, when we all know it will happen most likely.

Maybe we just can't yet find a way to rewire my brain to never need cigarettes anymore, and the problem is deeper than capitalist profit-seeking ? And if it wasn't a cigarette addiction I had, it would be another one, because what I need somehow is a dangerous vice and that is not an easy thing to make me not want ?

That's funny, the people who are dumb and emotional in my entourage are those who are still completely afraid of COVID even after like, 5 boosters, even if they are in their thirties, no immune condition, etc. They don't go out, don't see anyone, only order stuff online, and actually think that they are smarter than everyone else who just... lives their lives. (r/zerocovidcommunity is a good example of that, just to give you more than a personal anecdote)

To me that's a much more emotional take on life than anti Vax lunatics because they at least "live their life" as it has always been. Which might be a bad thing in this case, but to me it is much less insane than becoming a hermit over something that is objectively not an actual danger to them anymore, unless they believe their 5 boosters don't help. So I'm not sure that reducing it to caring or not is actually helpful. You can care about something but disagree about the method.

I guess my point is that I don't think antivaxxers don't believe in vaccines because they just want people to die, they don't believe in vaccines because they think it doesn't help people from dying. They actually believe vaccines don't work, it's not just pretend play. It's very very dumb, but I don't think that framing as is just not caring until stuff happens to them is helpful.

If you didn't believe that for example, homeopathy works, you won't suddenly think that it should be used if someone close to you dies. Maybe in desperation, but that's different from believing it. Obviously the difference is that homeopathy doesn't work, and vaccines absolutely do. But remember, that's literally what antivaxxers disagree with!