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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

#311

Post by Draiken »

moring wrote: post #307
imtringued wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:…

This is such a lazy argument. You can't write out in this moment how to solve this therefore it's too complex to solve.

It's all about incentives. Our society is incentivized to make a few people rich, not to solve these sorts of problems. If we wanted to solve them, we would. But that's not profitable, so it's not "worth" it.

Humans never had the technological capabilities we have today, which could solve most, if not all, of these problems. But because of our current economic system we rather spend trillions on advertising instead of reducing human suffering.

It's sad to realize that, unlike any other time in history, we as a society choose to not solve these issues.

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

#312

Post by nvm0n2 »

Fluorescence wrote: post #302
nvm0n2 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 C…

> The assumption that Common Land was unmanaged and owned by all is false

How? The source wiki now cites for that claim contradicts it. It says lords owned/managed it but not really - they weren't able to control access or put anything on it (manage it), and none of the commoners were able to manage it either because none of them owned it. How do you think "scale of access" was restricted without basics like fences? Cows don't care about laws.

The point of the tragedy of the commons is that without private property rights, resources get wasted and misused. The common land in mediaeval England is described in the book abstract as having that exact problem - it's either overgrazed and destroyed, or abandoned entirely. The solution was Enclosure, i.e. restoring ownership and building fences around the common areas, which is exactly the solution you'd need to utilize land effectively and prevent overgrazing.

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

#313

Post by from-nibly »

hackerlight wrote: post #86
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…

Problem is that incentives, especially financial incentives, have so much control over our democracy. Why don't we fix the housing crisis? Because homeowners will vote out politicians who reduce their house value. Same answer for why we don't fix global warming, farming subsidies, carried interest loophole. For everything wrong like this, there's a small but determined group of people who will defend the status quo,…

Because homeowners CAN vote out politicians who reduce their house value.

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

#314

Post by croes »

prometheus76 wrote: post #306
croes wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's interesting because I remember lots of people fear masks and vaccines and refuse to use any of them even despite the mention of the higher goods.

The ones vaccinated and masked didn't run, they stayed especially in the health sector.

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

#315

Post by adolph »

QVVRP4nYz wrote: post #225
travisjungroth wrote: post #98

If your solution would work except for some reason, then you don’t actually have a solution . A drill that works in space except for all that vacuum and radiation isn’t actually a space drill. It’s a space drill for some alternate reality, meaning the one you’re not actually in. You haven’t solved the problem. You’re not as good of a problem solver as you think you are, sorry. Stop acting like you’ve solved it. You h…

Yeah, whole article could be summed up with Mencken quote from 1920: > There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.

Reïnvented by South Park as the Underpants Gnomes:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/underpants_gnome

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

#316

Post by croes »

zmgsabst wrote: post #303
croes wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hindsight is 20/20.

Look what happened in Sweden, they say the same about their intial measures and lost more people in the first year of the pandemic than any other scandinavian country.

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

#317

Post by reuben364 »

travisjungroth wrote: post #98

If your solution would work except for some reason, then you don’t actually have a solution . A drill that works in space except for all that vacuum and radiation isn’t actually a space drill. It’s a space drill for some alternate reality, meaning the one you’re not actually in. You haven’t solved the problem. You’re not as good of a problem solver as you think you are, sorry. Stop acting like you’ve solved it. You h…

Don't get me wrong, I agree, but aren't all solutions to problems situated in reality conterfactual to some degree. To the extent of my knowledge, isn't it all deterministic. To enact a stategy is to presume a free agent, individual or collective, acts according to that strategy. The act of communicating that strategy is in essence to convince those interests align with the outcome to act accordingly. We deal with imperfect information, it could be possible that someone, or a small group can unilaterally disseminate a strategy that drives wider cooperation, but those are probably unknown unknowns far too complicated to decipher by any cooperating party.

Of course this isn't it. Warp drives and luxury space communism seem to be something we could only stumble into.

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

#318

Post by 1970-01-01 »

charcircuit wrote: post #14

>It happened because the people writing the image parsers made an incredibly stupid mistake and then didn’t bother testing it, because the software industry doesn’t bother with QA anymore. I too remember the good old days when software used to be written without security vulnerabilities, especially in media format parsers. Oh wait, that never existed. In fact in the old days people cared even less about security.

In the oldest days, we had formal verification of software. That didn't seem to stick around after Microsoft took over the PC world.

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

#319

Post by jampekka »

moring wrote: post #275
littlestymaar wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Governments have never solved many problems at all—-homelessness comes to mind North Korean dissidents in South Korea disagree strongly with your claim: several of them publicly expressed their shame to see such a rich country failing to fulfill this very basic human need when their super poor communist country of origin had no such problem. Homelessness is a society-wide self-inflected wound: it could be stopped i…

> 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?

In Finland at least this was (mostly) solved by, you know, giving homeless people homes. Ones owned by municipalities. Decided by elected representatives. Who were elected by voters who care about more than their own ass on this quarter.

This is really not rocket science or fusion power stuff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_First

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

#320

Post by tptacek »

maxbond wrote: post #192
stale2002 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We've recently seen a truly horrifying terrorist attack, and the response was as brutal as you would expect. Indeed. And the reason why such an attack happened is because the people who did the attack were the ruling government body of 2 million people for almost 2 decades, and were left to their own devices to build up a large scale attack, involving 1 thousand+ combatants. And in a few months, those combatants an…

Uhm, no, they are not the "ruling body," I think you should revisit the fundamental facts of the situation and reevaluate your perspective. To be frank your comment has a really disturbing undertone of bloodlust. I don't know a nice way to say that. You should really reexamine what your attitudes are here and how you came to them, this is not an appropriate way to discuss the deaths of thousands of people.

Hamas is the ruling body in Gaza.
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