We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

That’s not true. It’s not a money or effort hurdle, it’s a knowledge and technology hurdle.

Now one might argue that with enough money the knowledge and technology hurdle could be overcome, but I would disagree.

There are too many elements that are missing - biological tools, chemical probes, analytical techniques, laboratory procedures.

Sure money could advance those, but we don’t know which ones we need. One key (of many) to curing cancer could be the discovery of some mammalian cellular pathway. But we don’t know it exists so how would you find it? And even if it was discovered, you might not know it’s important.

Science often advances by the intersection of seemingly unconnected discoveries. You don’t know they matter until you do. It’s not a matter of just finding a specific area.

I think "faster" has been replaced by "profit". Is there a more profitable way of doing it. Etc. Hence things such as AI/CoPilot and the rest.

We as developers have lost the craftsmanship that coding once was. Crafting a good bit of code that might just be a single line but which has elegance and conciseness to get the job done just right.

Historically and currently, people polluted common waters and air with all sorts of agricultural and industrial runoff. Heck, someone around me has been feeding their home fireplace with plastic right now and fifty other families have to smell the acrid smoke.

Historically and currently, people overfished oceanic stocks to total depletion in certain seas.

Historically and currently, people dumped their refuse somewhere behind their village or city, creating rotting heaps of trash.

I don't see anything made up about the tragedy of the commons.

For example, it is much more profitable to sell recurring treatments than it is to sell cures. You can only sell a cure once per instance of disease, after all, whereas selling a recurring treatment means you have an indefinite stream of revenue. (Similar logic applies to selling software as a subscription instead of as a one-off license.)

When something is "not profitable", that does not mean it costs too much. It means that the thing is not as profitable as other options, which is sometimes a result of excessively costly processes, but is at other times a result of having "do nothing" as an option (which by definition costs nothing, and depending on the field can make quite a lot of money).

Another example of something being "not profitable", but not because it costs more, is public goods. Public transportation, for instance. It is undeniable that good public transportation is a boon to society, but public transport is often framed as a business rather than a public good, and in the context of a business, public transport is simply not as profitable as something like a toll road. Running a toll road is close to "do nothing" compared to running a bus line or train line, since everyone brings their own car instead of using the publicly-provided transportation. The catch is, this is actually MORE costly overall--because many more vehicles have to be fueled and maintained, and cars are relatively inefficient compared to trains. But, because the cost is distributed to the users of the road, the toll road is "cheaper" for the people operating it, and thus more profitable--so if you run government like a business, the toll road is the thing you go with.