Many solutions ARE complex though.
Our problem as a society is literally voting for idiots who promise simple solutions to complex issues.
Yeah. I work in municipal development and people think we’re just a bunch of officious pricks making people do unnecessary paperwork.
Things you don’t think about can kill people. Yeah - you don’t see a lot of people dying from building collapses and fires, but that’s because we make people address the complicated issues. Want to build a guesthouse? Great. We don’t care. What we do care about is that you put in a safe building and don’t grade in the floodway blocking the path of water causing the house to get carried away or diverting the natural watercourse into your neighbor’s house or the street.
Yes - you have to hire an engineer, and no, you can’t just do whatever you want because it’s your property. What you do impacts neighbor’s, the city, its infrastructure, your guests, and the next person who owns the property. It’s complicated and expensive no matter how much you contractor insists he does good work and you don’t have to worry. Contractors are liars who don’t know what the hell they’re doing half the time because they operate based on their gut and whatever is cheapest.
Yeah, let’s not fool ourselves. Civilization is difficult. There are no simple answers to getting millions of people to coexist. The answers that sound simple are usually just sweeping the difficult parts under the rug.
That said: humans are historically really good at solving complex problems. We have the capacity to address these things despite their difficulty. The problem is, like the OP says, a lot of people with tons of money and power would prefer that our aggregate problem-solving capability is directed towards complex problems that give THEM more wealth and power, rather than lifting up those with little.
Many solutions ARE complex though.
I think there’s two edges to this sword. Engineering the solutions to problems can be complex and difficult, from the perspective of the bureaucrats assigned the work. Building out a rail network or setting up a central bank or establishing a universal protocol for data transmission has all sorts of challenges and nuances to it. And, as a result, people who demand large-scale, rapid reforms will often stumble over the finer details to inflict a great deal of unnecessary pain as a result.
But the broader policy questions are often more straightforward, once the propaganda has been pierced and the outcomes of given policies are made plain and apparent. You can see this most recently in the fight over AI Datacenter construction, which very nakedly benefits a handful of socio-economic insiders at the expense of virtually everyone else alive.
The twist is that outcomes of policies don’t accrue to everyone immediately on their implementation. So you can mystify the relationship between policy and outcome with effective propaganda. Trump can start a war with Iran, constricting international trade of fossil fuels, while displacing the blame for higher energy prices onto environmentalists who have been advocating de-growth and caps on consumption for decades. National media can blame the rise of domestic fascist politicians on insidious foreign actors, while the media infrastructure is gobbled up by domestic oligarchs and the national police are turned on hapless immigrant communities. Generational divides can be created and exploited among the working class, such that “The Boomers” or “The Millennials” or “The Alphas” are to blame for housing prices or wage stagnation or some culture-war bullshit distraction. And then you’ve got The Epstein Class pitting Youngs and Olds, Rurals and Urbans, Whites and Coloreds against one another when it comes time to pillage another tranche of social wealth or enclose another chunk of the commons.
Complexity can be manufactured in order to obtain consent for panaceas. And complexity can be introduced to foul up the public’s ability to see what is in their straightforward social interests.
If you ever look into how the Apartheid Government of South Africa functioned, one of their most powerful tools was to create increasingly thin micro-ethnicities and stack-ranking them in the legal hierarchy. The complexity of the apartheid system became its strength, as everyone was given a social cohort to stand atop (except the weakest and most vulnerable native peoples). Once the ANC peeled away those layers of complexity, the appeal of the Apartheid system collapsed.
If one more transphobe tries to tell me their bigotry is supported by science, I’m going to lose it. Because they literally don’t listen to science any other time… They don’t even listen to what science actually says about transpeople.
MAGA thinks they smell blood in the water on the trans issue, so that’s their chosen wedge issue for the foreseeable future. I’m the past it was abortion, flag burning, kneeling, gay adoption, gay marriage, gay gayness, etc.
The proper answer to any trans nonsense is: “I am not a doctor, and I won’t presume to interfere with the medical decisions between any patient and their doctor, on any subject. I have absolutely no opinions on this subject, and do not consider it an appropriate subject for a political discussion. It is an appalling and indefensible political strategy to use any medical issue as a political talking point, so I’m not interested in your opinion either.”
That works for ANY medical issue, including abortion.
Thats been sort of my stance. “Its probably fine, they’re doctors. They’re not likely to risk their expensive, lifetime-achievement level career on bullshit”
But BiG PhARmA iS PaYiNg BiG BUcKs tO TrANs tHe KiDS
A good way to shut down the “think of the children,” people on the trans issue is, “You seem to think an awful lot about children’s genitals. That’s concerning.”
People who want to control others have been using “think of the children” as an excuse for as long as there have been people trying to control others.
That doesn’t work because to them, being trans-supportive means we’re pushing kids towards transitioning and thus, we are the ones focused on kids’ genitals.
primary example. ending homelessness. the solution is simple and proven. but the affluent have convinced everyone else that “it’s a complicated issue”
If you honestly, truly, believe it’s a complicated issue then you’ve fallen for it hook, line, and sinker. There are drug addicts that have homes, there are mentally ill people with homes, there are unemployed people with homes. But IF you are ANY of the three previously mentioned groups and you sleep on a sidewalk then suddenly it becomes complicated.
It’s the same for hunger. NO one needs to go hungry, we have enough food for everyone. hell we toss most it away daily. but again the powers that be have convinced everyone that food MUST be paid for and stealing it is wrong.
Well to expand, solving homeless is simple I agree but also unattainable because of the sheer cost of it and space. Please don’t come back with there is so many unused homes. Not a fan of stealing others property
To expand, not arguing against anything you mentioned:
People want perfect solutions, and that’s what makes it complicated. Ending homelessness is easy, but people also want to end hunger, and sickness, and poverty, and… so proven solutions for homelessness get branded (by the affluent, as you mentioned) as “half measures” and nobody supports it.
And I’ve seen this play out IRL in casual intoxicated philosophical conversations with friends too, so I don’t think it’s a good faith/bad faith thing. I feel like they get bogged down with it as an optimization problem, where I don’t see a problem with knocking together good enough and improving later.
Ending homelessness is easy, but people also want to end hunger, and sickness, and poverty, and…
The thing that complicates solutions is that those issues often overlap and one can be the cause of some of the others.
If (as one example)someone’s addiction has led to mental health issues and then homelessness, then dealing with one of those issues in isolation isn’t going to be a long term solution for that person.
While this is true, in large part, where this has been tried, usually fulfilling ONE piece of the puzzle (i.e. making sure that addicted person has food and a place to call their own where they’re not likely to get stabbed for their belongings) really helps a lot of people get to a place where they’re in a mental state to address the other problems.
It’s a bit like fixing a damaged boat - nailing a plank over the hole where the water’s coming in isn’t gonna fix the snapped mast or the torn sails, but it gets you into a place where you CAN start to fix those.
Why can’t we have a short term fix while we work on the long term solution? Why do we have to let people suffer because there are others who it may not work for?
That’s fun way to refuse you giving them a few bucks in case they forgot their wallet. “I feel that lending $5 does not sufficiently resolves the financial quagmires you find yourself in seeing your current career and housing choices so at this time it does not seem prudent for me to give you any funds.”
Poverty, homelessness and hunger are products of our economic system. It doesn’t have to exist, but in any other system you can’t own yacths with a helicopter pad or child sexual abuse islands.
Super simple: the Earth is our home, everyone on Earth therefore has a home, boom, no homeless!
insurance
Obviously kidding, but the internet has poisoned my trust that it’s obvious, so this is just in case it’s not obvious
It is complicated ending homelessness.
Treatment for mental health and addiction is probably half of the problem though. Homelessness exploded when governments closed sanatoriums. Is living people away in a Victorian sanatorium the best way to deal with mental illness? Probably not in most cases. But it was an attempt.
Nope, time and again it is shown that the most effective way to house people without homes is to give them homes. By providing no-strings housing first, you make all the other issues easier to deal with.
We’ve also shown time and again that the strongest predictor for unhoused populations is the cost of property. And at the same time the number of empty homes in a lot of the western world greatly outnumber the number of unhoused.
But giving homes to the unhoused or doing anything to lower property values or prevent the rich from hoarding property would make the wealthy elite upset.
By providing no-strings housing first, you make all the other issues easier to deal with.
First, absolutely, but not in isolation.
If that person doesn’t also get some help dealing with the issues that led to their homelessness, they’re likely to end up back on the street in the future.
In the current system, which is rigged heavily in the favor of those with money, it is hard to end homelessness, not complicated.
The issues you mention that are connected to homelessness today; mental health and addiction, are complicated. But those people should not need to also be homeless while we try to solve them.
Any kind of hospital setting with medication would be a vast improvement over skid row. We know laughably little about mental health even now, but compared to Victorian, times when they fumigated vaginas, we know a lot more now. I think well funded institutions are step in the right direction, with independent oversight to avoid abuse as much as possible.
Property is theft
Technically, there is complication to the food one. People tend to waste what is given freely, significantly increasing food needs. However, I’m hard pressed to think of how one would waste a house. Really no non-oligarch answer for that one
People tend to waste what is given freely
Do they though? I grew up below the poverty line, and nobody wasted the free food from the food bank.
I posit that people waste what they don’t need, monetary value has little to do with it.
Unequivocally, yes. Programs that freely give things beyond base needs tend to have anywhere from 100-200% increases in material usage. See: Iran’s free gasoline for a societal example, or help in most soup kitchens or volunteer at a food bank. It’s still the right choice, but requires slightly more nuance than immediately apparent.
Iran’s free gasoline
I am entirely unfamiliar.
help in most soup kitchens or volunteer at a food bank
I have, there was very little waste?
https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/454663/Iran-s-gasoline-rationing-scheme-from-policy-to-practice
Reasonable enough overview of the issue.
As far as food bank and soup kitchens, have you really never noticed the abundance of discarded bags and bowls? Heard the endless nimby complaints from people in the neighborhood? Encountered, in marketplace style systems, the random hoarding that needs to be stifled?
Fuck NIMBYs, I don’t listen them. We recently had a youth crisis center go up in town, and despite the dire warnings, there was zero increase in crime.
As for the discards, I’ve found that depends almost entirely on policy. In areas where they just give you a tray with little consideration for dietary needs, or on days where the food is straight scop, yeah, there’s a lot more discarded food.
But that’s not happening because it’s free.
The hoarding is similarly not happening because it’s free, it happens because it’s free this time, and there are no guarantees that it will be there when you need more. Even if they swear up and down it’ll be there when you need it, you’ve been let down so many times you can’t trust it.
How would a youth crisis center increase crime? What an absolute nonsense thought by nonsense people. “If we make sure teens are ok, then they’ll start stealing and smoking reefers” feels like the thought process. Dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.
I will say, it feels like you’ve inadvertently stumbled upon the nuance. That offering food requires more than throwing food at the problem, if you’re on any sort of budget.
However, I do recognize food scarcity leading to hoarding being fully mitigated by consistency, and you’re entirely correct to suggest that it’s worth re-evaluating broad interactions based on safety concerns being met
Did they waste the gas/food or did they use what they needed instead of what they could afford before it was free?
Oh, people just drove everywhere, always, anytime, and without concern. Ran generators rather than purchasing electricity from the grid, didn’t care about their car’s fuel economy because it didn’t financially impact them. Iirc, they alone were contemporaneously above the US in petroleum use per capita, and by nearly 2x. And the US is disgustingly over-reliant on petroleum to this day.
https://www.worldometers.info/oil/oil-consumption-by-country/
(Today’s numbers for perspective)
If you read the article, you’d see that Iran ended up a net importer of gasoline as a result. Iran. That’s like Canada becoming a Net importer of maple syrup because they had a custom of pouring syrup over their nipples and inviting people to lick it off at the turn of every hour. People in Canada would unequivocally be happy about it, but it doesn’t seem like the best use of resources.
As for food, I’m going to consider my opinions a bit more before offering anything.
I believe there will always be individuals who put themselves first in any scenario.
Yes, but that’s about perverse incentives to hurt those around you. Currently, there is an economic incentive to let food go to waste to keep prices high, rather than distributing it freely.
How would freely distributing food result in more waste, due to tragedy of the commons?
For example: In Germany, there are 531.601 homeless people while there are nearly 2 million vacant homes.
Same with food, we have way more than we need to feed everyone.
The system just relies on inhumanity.
https://de.statista.com/infografik/36445/leerstandsquote-von-wohnungen-in-deutschland/
https://de.statista.com/themen/13522/wohnungs-und-obdachlosigkeit-in-deutschland/#topicOverview
When I was young, I thought there was good and bad, lazy and productive, smart and stupid. I thought that stupidity was a lack of teaching and that anyone could do anything if they were taught.
Now, I think everybody has a million fucking reasons to be all of the above. Every single one of those is an analog line and none of them are mutually exclusive.
Most people are only out for themselves, governments and communities trigger many negative behaviors sometimes through negligence, sometimes in prioritization, and often on purpose.
Question- who is going on X ? While the above is funny, someone gave that site a view 🙄
john berger opened my eyes to this.
in “ways of seeing” he lays out a convincing argument that the entire history of european oil painting was just annoying and lame rich people commissioning artists to paint their possessions and property. the ‘masters’ were exceptions to this rule and often painted these great works later in life. in the modern day we’re taught to see these paintings not as what they actually are, but as rare objects worthy of praise simply for being rare objects.
when you see it that way and draw parallels between modern instagram, you both realize how fucking annoying, stupid, pathetic and desperate for validation wealthy people are but that nothing has changed other than the setting; instead of one of a kind oil paintings they foist NTFs on us.
instead of one-of-a-kind oil paintings they foist NTFs on us.
You had me up till this last bit. NFTs aren’t modern day oil paintings. They are the worst bits of the Beanie Baby fad. Which is to say, they are a marketing stunt by a trading desk at JP Morgan that found an opportunity to rebrand the Ethereum cryptocurrency as a collectible.
Whatever may be said of historical motivation for oil paintings, they offered some material benefit in an era prior to color photography. And they provided a certain kind of cultural touchstone of the era. Even if it’s for initially vain and stupid reasons, bourgeois proliferation of the arts has a lasting social benefit that socialists can capitalize on.
NFTs don’t have that.
Things are complicated but religious fanatics and low education people would rather think they’re simple. Specifically that good and evil are absolute and binary, that they are good and people who creep them out (blacks, LGBT+, Muslims, furries, etc.) are evil.
The ultra-wealthy like to think things are simple too. Specifically that they are brilliant and hard working, and that’s why they’re rich (contrast generational wealth, family connections and a great run of luck and opportunities).
They also believe working class folk are NPCs.
And once they’re rich enough, they surround themselves with sycophants who won’t tell them otherwise.
And the simple-minded rich guys hire the political class to manipulate the simple-minded working class (above) to vote for rich people interests rather than their own.
And thus, democracy is unmade.
Yeah cause the reign of terror was paradise on earth.
A difficult time, but so worth it because after the reign of terror they had a… millitary coup which installed and emperor/first-consul who… invaded dozens of European and middle eastern countries. Oh
At least some good ideas like the metric system kinds got its foothold by it.
The self interest of the powerful is preventing progress for the powerless. The further the divide in wealth, the less overlaps there is in those interests, almost assuring the wealthy will leave nothing for anyone else and trigger demographic collapse and economic genocide.
The religious fanatics really don’t actually matter. It’s just the affluent people.
If affluent people want something that religious people don’t want, affluent people still get what they want.
The values of a society are the values of its ruling class etc etc
This realm is intended to be run by evil. All our top systems are rewarding evil behavior. It’s been like that since the start i assume. Leadership like kings in the past were almost always evil as well.
Of course there are simple solutions to the so called problems, but they are intentionally created since evil people benefit from those problems, and every day new problems are created as well. Just turn on the news. It’s the same problems as it always was. You can ask your parents if you are young. Nothing gets revolved.
It will never change as long as humans are asleep and not recognizing the truth about it.
Just had a long discussion on this subject. It’s not just religious “fanatics”, it’s the general idea of the “right” family structure, especially in Christian homes, that specifies a Daddy who’s in charge, a second-in-command Mommy, and the kids who must obey them. The mom does some discipline but “wait til your father gets home” is the ultimate threat. Pleasing the father figure is the path to success, i.e. to earn praise and avoid painful punishments. By extension this is applied to life in general. Good behavior brings success, bad behavior is the path to ruin. That’s a big reason Christians find it easy to blame poverty on poor people - they must have sinned a lot, or they would have succeeded in life.
There would be no trash flying around if people would carry it to the next bin. Let’s start with that. No people in power will work against it. Can we do it?
The quote about how all evil needs to win is for good people to do nothing also explains perfectly well why the 1% keeps winning despite being an extremely small minority that is just as vulnerable to violence as anybody else.
