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We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

erikmcclure.com

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Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#301

Post by me_me_me »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #273
me_me_me wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He was just explaining how the two-party system is one of those obviously broken mechanisms that effectively blocks against replacing it with one of the better alternatives I think this is self evident. How the hell US is heading to next Biden vs Trump. Again? How can anyone claim its that those are the best possible choices - or good choices? Trump is a fraud clearly claiming he is one and biden is barely capable…

> biden is barely capable to string two sentences together. A speech impediment is not necessarily an impediment to governance ability. Please, criticise him for the things he's actually done wrong (being a politician, I'm sure those are many), not for a life-long disability.

Speach impediment? He is old. He keeps forgetting things around him, looses his thought mid sentence. Was caught with cue card written for a 'child'[0], his 'handler' on many occasions whisk him away when he starts rambling [1].

I don't know how people are unable to acknowledge basic fact you can see for yourself.

Would you like to be in a car driven by Biden? Or a company run by trump?

> Please, criticise him for the things he's actually done wrong

Thats the thing. I don't believe biden is making any decisions, the show is run by whatever people around him (i presume leadership of dem party).

It is the similar story with trump. Plenty of evidence, testimonies and leaks from his office. Him complaining that the reports are too long and should include his name in it and point how given matter relates to him. He was also caught multiple times when his aderol was running off.

Difference is to manipulate trump you had to flatter him and appeal to his vanity or outright make him money (corruption).

I am not left or right. I am just stating what everyone is able to observe. The system is not run by people you pick. The choice is between two puppets and whoever can control them (some more some less directly).

The idea of big government used to be that presidents and parties are not able to enact changes as quickly due to bureaucracy and resistance of governmental agencies and institutions.

But now the presidents are not even interested (trump) or capable of that (biden).

Its suppose to be democracy not a cardboard cutout with democracy painted on it.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-flashes-extremely-simp... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg25440ledA

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#302

Post by Fluorescence »

nvm0n2 wrote: post #270
pvdoom wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole tragedy of the commons was literally made up by a very reactionary dude to justify fucking people over and justify enclosure and privatisation. Historically people have actually had rather complicated and at the same time very effective ways of sustainably managing the commons. It also happens that privatisation is the thing that makes the tragedy of the commons happen.

That seems to be ahistorical revisionism. The common land in mediaeval England was literally called "waste" as in a "wasteland". It seems that some ideological academics are now trying to rewrite this history. Wikipedia has been edited into a state of internal inconsistency where it says [2]: > Millions of acres were "common land", but this did not mean public land open to everybody, a popular fallacy ... Certainly t…

I can't understand what issue you are having. Common land was managed in different ways in different places (chaotic) with local laws granting rights that often restricted scale of access to prevent over-use.

I'm not sure what your point is about waste is because The Lord's Waste was a specific legal designation separate from the more emotive devastated/unusable/excess we might be familiar with.

The assumption that Common Land was unmanaged and owned by all is false but that doesn't mean it was always well managed. Be in no doubt that Enclosure was a horrifying theft of rights from the citizenry and in no way a solution to a Tragedy of the Commons.

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#303

Post by zmgsabst »

croes wrote: post #300
prometheus76 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people aren't afraid of dying even after they lose loved ones. Not everyone lives in fear.

Avoiding an unnecessary death isn't living in fear, it's living by common sense.

Francis Collins has already admitted the policies were myopic and didn’t account for QALY — they were malpractice that focused on a particular disease while ignoring the holistic situation.

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#304

Post by zmgsabst »

phantompeace wrote: post #89
zmgsabst wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a stereotype — “people who disagree with me are just dumb and emotional!”

I didn’t see it that way - I think they have a valid point. I know people personally affected by deaths in their family due to the virus and I know people who caught and fought it like it was nothing, so I know exactly what the poster is getting at. When it hits your loved ones, you start to take it more seriously. Wearing a mask and socially distancing doesn’t matter if it means not losing another family member. Con…

Francis Collins has already admitted the policies were myopic and didn’t account for QALY — they were malpractice that focused on a particular disease while ignoring the holistic situation. Literally failed at basic medicine.

Again, you’re portraying people as “dumb and emotional” without addressing the substance of their concerns or reasons. You’re also refusing to ponder if that’s how you reached your conclusions.

But the director of the NIH during COVID now admits those people were right the whole time — COVID policy failed to weigh its costs, and as such, didn’t strike the right balance for public health.

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#305

Post by Kim_Bruning »

arp242 wrote: post #58

For a lot of things the problem is essentially a problem of scale. Those "ancient human tribes" who did so much better were tribes of 100-200 people, and it's actually not that hard to "do the right thing" with a relatively small group of people. Blaming it on the two-party system is such a short-sighted US-centric point of view. There are plenty of countries with other types of democracies, and they have roughly sim…

That's basically it. The biggest problem in human society in all era's (including the 21st century) is scaling up.

Once you get past Dunbar's number, whatever your system is, it'll start to run into challenges. Be it a company, an organization, or an entire country.

Objectives become diluted, misbehavior becomes possible, and steerability goes out the window.

Keeping a large group of people focused, well behaved, and capable of change is a huge challenge in any century, and is as ever highly underrated.

When doing research it seems like there's a lot of magical thinking in the field. Finding focussed sources tends to be tricky. Getting people to adopt even the most straightforward of practices even trickier. :-P

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#306

Post by prometheus76 »

croes wrote: post #300
prometheus76 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people aren't afraid of dying even after they lose loved ones. Not everyone lives in fear.

Avoiding an unnecessary death isn't living in fear, it's living by common sense.

Running from death out of fear is the very definition of cowardice. There are higher goods that call one to put away their own fear and serve, no matter the cost.

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#307

Post by moring »

imtringued wrote: post #293
moring wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Homelessness is a society-wide self-inflected wound: it could be stopped in a few years, but that would be landlord gentry's biggest nightmare. I think you are making the same mistake as the author of the article. Can you describe the steps necessary to solve homelessness, without resorting to "steps" that simply describe a condition that won't be fulfilled, such as "people have to..." or "the government has to..."…

You would need to introduce an equilibrium encouraging money system and prevent the extraction of land rents. Those things are never going to happen, because they are too obvious of a solution. The current money system heavily discourages equilibrium formation, which allows disequilibria like the geographical concentration of money to occur, which in turn make it harder to earn money outside of large city hubs with e…

> You would need to introduce an equilibrium encouraging money system and prevent the extraction of land rents. Those things are never going to happen, because they are too obvious of a solution.

If these two action items are "never going to happen", as you say, then they are not (part of) a solution. Like the author of the article, you have just started mapping the problem.

> If you wanted the same answer in short: Demurrage currencies and land value taxes. Too simple to be believable.

If things are as simple as you claim, why don't you describe a plan to overcome the obstacles and actually implement the two changes you described?

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#308

Post by moring »

littlestymaar wrote: post #297
moring wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Homelessness is a society-wide self-inflected wound: it could be stopped in a few years, but that would be landlord gentry's biggest nightmare. I think you are making the same mistake as the author of the article. Can you describe the steps necessary to solve homelessness, without resorting to "steps" that simply describe a condition that won't be fulfilled, such as "people have to..." or "the government has to..."…

> Or, in other words, let's assume that I want to solve homelessness. What do I have to do for that? Build housing would be a great start! Markets don't care about low-profit cheap small apartments, so there's no supply and the demand isn't being met, so it's the mission of the state to step up and compensate this market failure. Then you can also tax properties based on their occupied land area, which incentives the…

> Build housing would be a great start! Markets don't care about low-profit cheap small apartments, so there's no supply and the demand isn't being met, so it's the mission of the state to step up and compensate this market failure.

Let's start here. What are the steps needed to get the state to do this? Is the money for it taken from other places, or by increasing the deficit, or by raising taxes? How do you convince other politicians of your plan? Where is the land taken from?

Again, this seems only like a first step in mapping the problem.

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#309

Post by jampekka »

_heimdall wrote: post #291
jampekka wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isle of Man does have the benefit that its economy is based on international tax evasion, money laundering, online gambling etc sleazy stuff that essentially siphon off money from places where the actual labor is conducted.

How do you distinguish this from, say, the US which runs a trade deficit of around $1 trillion? Is your problem with Isle of Man the specific industries or businesses that drive revenue there, or the siphoning off of money/labor from other places?

US does the siphoning with quite a different method, mostly by enforcing the petrodollar using the huge military. It could probably use this money a lot better if wellbeing of the citizens is the benchmark.

Sleazeball havens like Isle of Man (and many others) by the merit of creating international legal loopholes.

West in general siphons off money/labor from other places.

Not a fan of these, but this wasn't really the point. The point was that Isle of Man has the advantage of not having to do much work of their own to keep the economy rolling so it's not necessarily comparable.

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#310

Post by littlestymaar »

moring wrote: post #308
littlestymaar wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or, in other words, let's assume that I want to solve homelessness. What do I have to do for that? Build housing would be a great start! Markets don't care about low-profit cheap small apartments, so there's no supply and the demand isn't being met, so it's the mission of the state to step up and compensate this market failure. Then you can also tax properties based on their occupied land area, which incentives the…

> Build housing would be a great start! Markets don't care about low-profit cheap small apartments, so there's no supply and the demand isn't being met, so it's the mission of the state to step up and compensate this market failure. Let's start here. What are the steps needed to get the state to do this? Is the money for it taken from other places, or by increasing the deficit, or by raising taxes? How do you convinc…

These are secondary concerns: you need to agree to the end goal before you can even reach them, and the biggest problem is that many, if not most, affluent people don't want to solve the problem in the first place for either ideological and/or financial reasons, which in the American plutocracy means this will never happen.

If you agree to the end goal, you can pick whatever answer you like to your financing question, it's not really more important than “what color should the buildings be” as the cost would be a small fraction of say IRA or the yearly defense budget, or Trump's tax cuts.

The legitimate question being: what to do with the plutocracy, and to that question I'm afraid I don't think you Americans will see democracy ever again untill you are willing to get back to your revolutionary roots and take it (or at least make the oligarchs scared enough to give up part of the power, which is the best case scenario TBH).

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