Browsing social media, it’s apparent that people are quick to point out problems in the world, but what I see less often are suggestions for how to solve them. At best, I see vague ideas that might solve one issue but introduce new ones, which are rarely addressed.
Simply stopping the bad behaviour rarely is a solution in itself. The world is not that simple. Take something like drug addiction. Telling someone to just stop taking drugs is not a solution.
A slow burn. Humanity is slowly wiping itself out. If this is a Q humanity test then we have failed. We need a Picard/Riker/Data/LaForge combo
There are many congressional solutions to many of the things im vocal about. ending citizens united and making it clear rights are for living being people only (you know sort enshiring the idea the governement is from the people and for the people), medicare for all but improved, creating higher income tax brackets that go up to a billion and recognize all things as income so basically getting rid of capital gains, breaking up monopolies and regulating businesses, there is a lot.
Did you just intend to endorse organ harvesting and grave robbing?
And, if you want tax reform capital gains aren’t your target, but instead “unrealized gains”. A billionare pledging stock to back a loan should pay tax on their whole net worth’s increass in value first.
Im trying to get the rogan harvesting but if I do get it, its a real stretch joke on of and for the people. Yes I like the unrealized gains. Its funny because while writing it I was thinking about that but did not have a good term. Im not big on a wealth tax but any growth from any direction should be taxed the same as income. I might allow some deductions like one residential property that you live in.
We’re too many humans for what the planet is able to sustain, we need to reduce our use of resources but we also need to be fewer than 8 billions
Actually, this is not true (yet). There is enough space and food for all people if we stay humble. The distribution is what is wrong. We just need a socialist world government and get rid of this capitalism shit.
Overpopulation is something that’ll take care of itself over the next 50 years or so. The more immediate issue is to figure out who will pay the pensions of the aging population.
No, it’s not. Social security is not a failing program.
Yes it is when there’s more people receiving those payments than working. The money has to come from somewhere.
That’s a simplistic reduction. They’ve been saying it’s going to run out for 30 years.
And, if Congress had not given themselves interest-free loans out of social security to bolster the economy then we wouldn’t be having any worry about whether or not we can afford to pay social security.
The real danger is that the money for social security that would have been growing and earning interest as it was properly invested was not properly invested.
They have phrased it as they didn’t expect people to live so long, but it’s not that. It’s because they don’t know where they’re going to get the money to repay social security, when the reason why there’s any danger of social security running out is that the money was mismanaged.
That’s what they’ve been saying about climate change as well. Think and you’ll see why: people are trying to solve it, and then the beneficiaries suddenly think it’s not a problem anymore. The year of exhaustion had recently moved from 2036 to 2035.
It’s not exactly speculation. The birth rate in much of developed countries is well below the replacement rate. Population decline is already happening in some countries. Looking at current demographic charts shows that the number of elderly people is growing fast, while younger generations are shrinking. With fewer children being born, there will soon be much less workers to support a lot more retirees. Pension systems, mostly designed for growing populations, will be in real trouble as fewer people pay into them and more people are taking money out.
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I know how those marketing chicks look like, I volunteer as tribute for your plan.
Fuck me too then. I’d be curious to hear how you imagine somebody like me would be able to find customers for my business if I wasn’t allowed to drop flyers onto people’s mailboxes.
You want a realistic solution or a “if I had one wish” solution?
If every US Republican were to die of a heart attack right now, that would probably be the single greatest thing that could happen to our planet right now.
Your thinking is too limited.
There’s a lot of reasons why someone might choose to be a republican that has nothing to do with being a soulless monster.
A lot of them are stupid or have intestinal parasites that prevent them from thinking correctly.
And the world is not the United States, so if you have the power to wipe out an entire group of people, you should just destroy all of the assholes on the planet. Anyone who’s like more than 40% asshole just poof they’re gone.
I think I’d be in the clear cuz I believe I’m only in like the 30% range myself, but if I had to take one for the team that’s okay. (Totally not saying that just to put myself below the 40% line)
There’s a lot of reasons why someone might choose to be a republican that has nothing to do with being a soulless monster.
Ok but how do you quantify that? Same with “kill all assholes”. Doesn’t work. It’s a completely subjective label.
And like it or not the US is by far and away the most powerful and influential nation in the world. Removing Republicans effectively changes the GLOBAL political landscape.
The meat and dairy industry receives vast amounts of subsidies which would be better allocated to plant based food sources. Meat is an inefficient way to feed the general population. I’m vocal about this because of two reasons: animal suffering and climate/pollution.
I’m not naive enough to say we should just cut subsidies to animal farming cold turkey, because I understand people’s livelyhoods depend on it. But I would want to see a progressive public divestment from meat in favour of plant based whole food proteins (not fake/lab meats, those can survive on private investment alone).
cold turkey
Mmmm, I love cold turkey sandwiches after Thanksgiving
I meant cold tofurky sorry.
At the same time, I’m also vocal about fixing farming. We need to stop destroying nature to grow food. Fortunately the divestment from animal farming will already significantly improve this because it’s more efficient to eat soy directly than to grow soy, feed it to pigs, and then eat the pig. However we need to fix monocultures by moving to regenerative farming and agroforestry.
The soy that’s fed to pigs is almost entirely the byproduct of pressing soy for soybean oil. about 85% of the soybean crop is pressed for oil. if we didn’t feed the byproduct to livestock, it would just be industrial waste.
I’d challenge that. The whole bean is edible by humans. Tofu is literally just the protein of soy beans without the oil and the startch. I’m sure, if we wanted to, we could just make tofu or TVP out of soy meal.
I also just dislike this “it’s a byproduct” argument. It’s like how whey powder is a “byproduct” of of cheese making. It’s not a good argument. We could also do with less soy oil in the world anyway.
but we DO make tofu and tvp. and they have higher profits per pound than animal feed. but we produce far too much soybean oil for the amount of byproduct people want to consume. giving it to livestock makes sense
It makes sense because we don’t eat enough of the soy and TVP. And we also stuff soy oil is tons of shit. I’m not saying it’s an easy problem to solve, but it all comes down to our over-consumption and refusal to do anything even mildly inconvenient. Eat more whole foods and less meat and a lot of that solves itself.
(not fake/lab meats, those can survive on private investment alone)
Singapore has been struggling to subsidize them enough so that people can buy them at normal prices.
And vertical farms.
My understanding is that vertical farms have yet to prove more efficient except perhaps in land use. It’s been pretty hard to scale.
If lab grown meat becomes cheaper than “real” meat while keeping the taste and texture of it or even improve on that, I can totally see that replacing factory farmed meat rather quickly. It’s like with electric cars; people don’t switch if we force / shame them to do so but they will once those vehicles became better than the dirty alternative.
But my point is that we are keeping meat artificially cheap with lots of subsidies. Meat would be a luxury food if people paid the real cost of it, let alone if we paid the long term costs on the environment. I think maybe your analogy would be better with bicycles than electric cars. Bikes are more versatile and convenient than cars in short distances (10km), but most cities have been and continue being developed as car centric. If we used taxes to improve bike infrastructure, people would feel safer to ride bikes more often.
This exactly. I would say one of the main reasons a lot of people don’t currently drink plant milk is that per unit volume, it tends to be more expensive. This is seemingly starting to even out as the plant milk industry expands, but the most dirt-cheap dairy milk and the most dirty-cheap plant milk are still nowhere near each other on price. I’m willing to bet that if all subsidies were taken away altogether, plant milk would be cheaper, and moreover, if it were flipped in such a way that existing dairy subsidies went to plant milk, it would be game over for dairy milk. Plant milk prices would be through the floor, and dairy milk would be seen as a luxury product. There are a ton of good reasons for this:
- Dairy milk is far worse for the environment than every kind of plant milk by every conceivable metric.
- The dairy industry is one of the most absurdly cruel institutions in the world. (NSFL)
- Plant milk is generally better for you than dairy milk. The downsides to plant milk health-wise are lack of protein (this is only 8g per serving, though, out of the 0.8g/kg/day that you need, and some plant milks are beginning to add protein) and the fortification with D2 instead of fortification with D3. It makes up for this however by generally having more calcium and Vitamin D, the potential to not have any sugar (compare ~8g of the sugar lactose), mono- and polyunsaturated fats without saturated fat and LDL cholesterol, and substantially fewer calories.
- Plant milk takes months to go bad, whereas dairy milk that’s not ultrapasteurized (and therefore dramatically more expensive) takes maybe a couple weeks at most from the date of purchase.
- Plant milk has an enormous amount of variety compared to dairy milk – there are so many types that enumerating them becomes exhausting, and for the most part (not you, rice milk) they’re all good. You can get essentially whatever you want, compared to dairy milk, where you’re basically stuck with that (subjective) weird, slightly sour aftertaste.
your BBC link actually just relies on poore-nemecek 2018, which abuses LCAs and myopically focuses on distilling other studies into discrete metrics without understanding the system holistically. in short, your claim about the environment may be true, but the source that you use to support it is incapable of providing that support.
Okay, link to the academic paper refuting it. Or is your source just a shitty, Z-tier disinformation outlet called “Farmers Against Misinformation”? “your claim about the environment may be true” 💀 Don’t muddy the waters here: it is true. This was the only error noted in the paper, and the erratum correcting it still comports with the authors’ original findings that dairy is abysmal for the environment when compared with the alternatives.
Is your entire purpose on Lemmy to spread anti-vegan, pro-animal agriculture disinformation?
the authors’ original findings that dairy is abysmal for the environment when compared with the alternatives
cannot be substantiated with the methodology used in this metastudy.
link to the academic paper refuting it.
seems like an appeal to authority, but i encourage you and anyone interested to look into how LCAs were abused, and how much cottonseed is weighed in the water use and land use of dairy milk, despite cotton being grown for textiles.
I’m sorry, I’ve read the paper, seen absolutely nothing wrong with it (and seemingly neither have other experts in the field, as I’ve yet to see any peer-reviewed rebuttal of its findings), and definitely trust an expert on food sustainability from Oxford and an agroecology expert from Agroscope as well as their publicly available and well-reasoned findings compared to some rando on the Internet who just whines with zero elaboration that LCAs are “abused” and can’t seem to figure out that they could’ve said all this in one comment instead of four.
I bet Poore and Nemecek would’ve figured out how to use the “edit” button. (And yes, I did link to the correct article, as the only attempt I could find to debunk this paper was from, again, a disinformation outlet whose lies are explored in that AFP article.)
Or is your source just a shitty, Z-tier disinformation outlet called “Farmers Against Misinformation”
your link doesn’t seem to align with anything i’ve said. are you sure you used the right link?
Is your entire purpose on Lemmy to spread anti-vegan, pro-animal agriculture disinformation?
this reads like pigeonholing. my “purpose” is to keep conversations honest and challenge bad science and reasoning.
The dangers of artificial general intelligence (humans becoming even worse thinkers, dystopia, takeover) could be avoided by turning towards human collaborative intelligence augmentation.
I came for the vegan comment however as it was already there, the biggest change I could see from mass adoption of the vegan ideals are that the population would have an across the world increase in empathy to not only animals but because they aren’t murdered as part of societal norms the empathy towards and the treatment of humans is likely to increase as well. This could theoretically lead to an increase in environmental action helping climate change but also help addressed a number of socialogical issues at the same time. We are a long way from this however in the uk veganism has increased 1567% in 10 years so with this rate of change it is possible.
The answer to the majority of problems the world is facing is community - we need to rebuild real physical communities, participate in them, and nourish them. We can do this by simply getting more involved in existing ones, staring from things as simple as local gardening groups, litter picking/beach tidy groups, community celebrations, local markets, etc. We need to hold on to, strengthen and rebuild arts groups and help local arts and music scenes to grow.
We can all participate on some level in some aspect of physical community building, and it will enrich us in a way social media never can. (Put on a gig, attend an arts show, donate to a community group, talk to neighbours, support the vulnerable). I believe people feel so isolated and depressed by the way greed has ruined the web, jobs, the economy, etc.that the time is right for many more people to start investing time and effort in real communities.
We need to build and grow communities in a local, regional, national and international spirit. We need to learn how to share, and how to get rid of greed and selfishness in ourselves and in our societies - participating in and building welcoming, non discriminating communities is the path towards this. We need to remove competition in education, arts and science (and ultimately economy), and focus on cooperation and improving things out of the joy of helping yourself and others. Communities can bring this about, and digital communities (as opposed to competitive social media) can support this, too.
Ideally, we want to grow communities in a way where people start thinking first “how does this help my community?” - especially when looking at political and business decisions. We need to feel something positive to stand up for (not old fashioned ideas of ‘country’ or political groups) - we simply need mutually supportive groups (communities) that fight power, greed and selfishness to defend people, animals and nature.
Somewhat relevant plugs:
On education reform: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-one-thing-that-should-be-taught-in-school-that-isnt-already/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen
On digital community: https://www.quora.com/Who-invented-the-modern-computer-look-and-feel/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen (the sick, sad history of computer-aided collaboration)
Spend more public money on it and hire some more intelligent people to help.
Fix the electoral college by either abolishing it entirely (personal choice) or fixing the house to properly represent the population such that the senate doesn’t cause an oversized share of electoral reps. The Wyoming Rule is one option.
We could also just go back to something like one rep per 100,000 population in a state, which would in turn make the house have 3,000 members. This sounds wild until you realize Parliament in the U.K. has 650 members… representing a population roughly 1/5 ours.
This is probably a fool’s errand, because it’s all or nothing, making it inherently unstable. If we ever get within striking distance of having enough states to cross the threshold, the law will be fought tooth and nail to prevent passage, and this battle would continue in perpetuity in every remotely purple state that has the NPVIC law in place, trying to get enough overturned to stop it.
Maybe it accomplishes something useful simply by bringing the conversation about reform to the forefront? But as an actual solution I’m completely skeptical, as much as I like the idea.
Perhaps more realistic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_root_law
If bringing food to people is so hard, why not bring people to the food? 🤷🏻♂️
I probably whine the most about the lack of transit options in my city.
Proposed solution: Take intra-city transportation out of the control of the county, so it is run by the city instead. The county can run the buses from the suburbs, or not. We can extend the streetcar, increase bus frequency, all the stuff the city wants, that keeps getting slapped down by the county commissioners, because the suburbs don’t want buses.
There’s a lot of “billionaires shouldn’t exist” and “eat the rich” sentiment out there. I often suggest jokingly that it should be legal to murder someone once they reach a certain level of wealth. It might motivate them to limit their greed at some point, perhaps be less exploitative of those who are working to generate their wealth or share more of it. And even if they pass the threshold, they may give more concern to how they treat people and how they are perceived.
Maybe not murder, but it should be legal to steal from people who have more wealth than they know what to do with. They’re hoarding wealth while some people are struggling to make ends meet.
That’s a pretty fucked up thing to say. Is that really the world you wan’t to live in?
No, it is not the world I want to live in, but I am not convinced it would be worse than the current world.
Each year, sacrifice the 5 richest billionaires and distribute their estate to the public fund. Bam, so many problems immediately solved.
Or uh, idk, tax them properly and you achieve the same outcome without any killing.
Not that it’d ever happen though.
Truth in advertising laws. Make it illegal to lie, mislead, or deceive in advertising. And I mean criminal, like jail time for the CEO, or they can specify an executive that must sign off on all ads if they like. That person takes the fall. And who decides if an ad breaks the law. A jury, or something more streamlined but still made up of regular Americans who decide.
