Alcohol.
Lots and lots of people lean heavily on it and think that alcohol is the spice of their life. When, it contributes to so many problems than it’s so-called benefits. We tried, in America anyways, to outright ban alcohol. Problem was that the person who wanted it banned, was too extremist.
Like he didn’t think it all through and think just going for the jugular of the problem is what will work. When, it didn’t and just made people work around it until eventually the ban was dismantled.
So, since then, we’ve been putting up with drunk drivers, drunk disputes, drunk abusers and other issues. I still wish we could just slam our hands down at the desk and demand we sit to discuss in how to properly deal with this issue than people proclaiming that it’s not a problem.
I think there are plenty of things that can’t be solved, but nothing that can’t be improved.
Homelessness, there are just some people who don’t fit into modern life - maybe they can’t be housed, but conditions could be improved.
Poverty, there is no complete solution that won’t be worse than the problem (yet) but things could be so much better than they are with the means we do have.
Pollution, there is probably no way we can live with our current technology without causing pollution but again - we could make substantial improvements with the tech we do have now.
Human nature. Itcwas necessary to beat out the other species, but it didn’t evolve with society. Many of the things other people have mentioned are really just unevolved human nature. Greed, selfishness, racism, crime.
High impact youth sports. Destroys joints, destroys brains, destroys futures, but if you suggest getting rid of them, you’re a cultural betrayer.
Populism
This is as old as the democracy itself, and we still don’t know how to fix it. People are so easily driven by their emotions and stubborn about their political opinions that you only have to exploit cynically their low instincts to take the power, especially in a crisis context. And once populists are in the power, they hardly give it back.
Journalism that has any tooth whatsoever would mostly fix this.
As long as no proper journalistic standards exists, populists can pour their BS down the media drain unquestioned, unchallenged. If that’s all you hear about a topic, that’s what you’ll believe.
japanese preferring natto over peanut butter
Antivaxxers and weaponized disinformation that leads to that as well as other problems. I’m not talking about the vaccine hesitant who come around with more education by their doctor, or even the dumbass delayed vaccine schedules they want to do for no sensible reason, all it does is make your kid cry more times than they’d have to, I’m talking about the ones who completely believe in Andrew Wakefield’s shit study with the twelve kids at his son’s birthday party which for some reason they rely upon as the gospel. The ones who are now turning down vitamin K in their newborn so they risk bleeding into their brain, and believe measles isn’t a big deal, just another childhood illness. They’re absolutely insane and fed a diet of this continually by social media dumpster fires like Facebook. As far as I am concerned, Mark Zuckerberg should be tried for war crimes and genocide at the Hague. Here is a comment I saw the other night from one of the plague enthusiasts, which also makes it very clear they don’t care if non-white children die.
I worked in an ER ten years ago, and while the insanity that has onset with these people since the advent of COVID did not yet exist, there were still some who bought into this nonsense, and they’d come screaming in with their kid who was going downhill fast with whooping cough or whatever, and they are always the most obnoxious pushy people about getting their kid seen RFN. And the thing is you have to because an unvaccinated child has no immune resources to rely upon in their bodies, which one nurse describes as “going to the well”, ie a normal vaccinated person’s body fights back against infection by doubling their heart or breathing rate as their antibodies kick in. A child with no immunity immediately begins to go under and has no such help from their bodies. And the parents are always massive idiots and ask stupid shit about why you aren’t treating them with intravenous vitamin C or doing a CT scan (which there is no reason for) or whatever else they pull out of their primitive forebrains full of garbage. A child with Hib epiglottitis is not going to be able to be intubated and is going to need a tracheostomy, and these parents simply don’t or won’t understand it.
Homelessness.
Looking beyond the argument that some people prefer the freedom to following any of the rules required by most of the organizations that might provide help.
It’s not that hard to fix, but there’s little will to tackle it properly. Homelessness is a local problem, and the NIMBY solution just exports it to another locality. If a locality solves it for their local population, they’ll then get overwhelmed by the NIMBY localities “solving” it with bus tickets. The only real solution has to come at a federal level, and there lies the lack of will. Federal government sees a local problem and refuses to help since there are local governments.
OP is apparently unaware that society would not exist if it weren’t for alcohol.
Religion amd the fighting it causes in it’s name
Probably that many people are like exclusively emotion driven. I don’t think we should all be like purely logical Vulcans. Emotions are very fast and can be a good survival tool. Like if you’re waiting for the train and a bear wanders onto the platform, you don’t need to wait to logically evaluate if it’s a threat. Just run.
But people rely on emotions for everything. We all do this. So you have like someone telling you something factual and uncomfortable, and you just reject it.
“Eating meat is bad for the environment and is cruel to animals. We should all eat a lot less meat” makes a lot of people’s emotions flare up. The facts don’t matter. They feel like they’re being insulted, that the other person is a blowhard, blah blah blah.
The oatmeal did a comic about this, actually: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe
I think this is why we can’t have nice things.
This cartoon is SO good.
In sweden they raised the price of alcohol 10 fold making it a luxury good and not something to drain your sorrows with. I think the hardest problem to solve is human greed.
Greed is the biggest issue we have in this world right now.
It should be made to be a mental health disorder that must be treated professionally and by taking away the money not needed to operate their business.
Kill tax breaks and strip the rich with 90% taxes on everything over 5 million dollars of any money they make even capital gains and investment income.
Own one home pay regular taxes, own two double the tax, own three triple the tax and so on until no one wants to own more homes. Same goes for corpos that rent to people at above market rates using software to drive rental prices up.
Greed must be made to be shameful and punishable not accepted and desired. Robber barons like Musk and Bezos should taxed into non existence.
Top 5 earners get publicly executed if they own over 500mil.
I think the ancient Romans would make their richest people pay for the construction of warships. You would only get out of it by pointing to a richer person to pay.
Do that but not for warships, pay for infrastructure repair, all those roads and bridges that keep the economy going need to be brought up to today’s standards and new bridges built to replace ones that are crumbling. Their wealth could not have been built if not for the roads and tracks that are now crumbling beneath years of cuts to local and state/provincial governments.
The idea that people in charge should be better, so their actions can’t be questioned; rather than that they should be better, so their actions should be scrutinized. It’s so backwards and it enables nearly all of the worst abuses of power. It might be harder to fix people being attracted to power or being straight up malicious, but if we could solve the authority problem, then those would have a safeguard in a lot of scenarios. It’s so close to being solvable, too; people grow up experiencing misuses of authority that hurt them, they should understand the problem. But somehow it still seems so prevalent, that authority is treated as being above questioning or consequences. I hate it. But it is possible to change.
I don’t really agree anything is impossible to fix. Maybe I’m optimistic but I think with enough time things can get better. As far as I know alcohol is much less common among younger people and there are more people avoiding it entirely now. Or maybe by impossible you meant really difficult.
Our inability to trust anyone foreign or unfamiliar. This legacy of our evolution used to be the safest way to live. No it just holds us all back.
I think this one is closer to being solved than we think, because we know the things that can help. Travel and simply meeting other people being the big one. And there are enough people who are accepting of outsiders that we know it’s possible on a large scale.
Totally disagree. The rise of populist politicians using xenophobic rhetoric is the proof that this mechanism is still strong.
Guns in America. The need to act inspires fear on part of enthusiasts to buy more guns, ammo, support politicians that bolster stonewalls to any legislation that could make the country safer from irresponsible gun owners. The lack of meaningful action while this is happening shows how screwed the nation is as a gun cult continues to grow and grow.
