3d ago

What issue in society do you think is near impossible to fix?

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.

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In the US and Canada?
Car dependency / Car centrism.
Sure, we have a few large cities with non roadway mass transit.
But uh, in general, we've got terminal car brain, and I do not see this fundamentally changing.
The vast majority of places will continue being designed around cars instead of people.
Cars and fuel costs will keep going up, less and less people will have them, and (again excepting a few extremely dense and expensive cities) we will just go to mass private car rentals/shares instead of actual mass transit or meaningfully redesigning cities.
Sidewalks? Bike lanes? Go fuck yourself, you don't matter if you don't own a car, wait an hour for a bus (if one exists), get an uber, have a friend with a car.
- Wait til the petro dollar crashes. It's going to be hilarious
  
  EVs are coming, no matter how expensive/wasteful, you'd always have a car option.
  
  As they do, they're quickly turning into indicators of privilege. If/when the petro dollar crashes I totally don't expect billy bob that drives his eight cylinder diesel to hold any resentment towards EV drivers when he's stuck paying for something that he can't afford gas for. But hey what do I know I prefer old school bicycles.
  
  Are there EV longhaul trucks that are at cost and performance parity with ICE longhaul trucks on the horizon?
  I don't think so.
  That means that logistics costs for basically everything gets significantly more expensive when ICE fuel costs go up.
  We could lessen this problem by building out more freight rail capacity, and a whole lot more minor rail lines so that trucks don't routinely drive halfway across the continent and are used less often...
  ...but we are not.
  So, that means that when gas/diesel prices go up, everything gets more expensive... including ICE and EV personal vehicles.
  Currently, generally, EVs (and Hybrids) are already 20% to 30% more expensive than their ICE counterparts, even after subsidies/rebates, and are only less expensive than the ICE counterpart in a long run of 10+ years due to lower ongoing fuel costs...
  But if gas/diesel prices significantly rise and never go back down...
  All vehicles become more expensive.
  If ICE vehicle ongoing fuel costs are now so high that an average person can't afford them...
  The only other choice is EVs ... but those now have a stupendous sticker price.
  So you end up with even less people being able to afford any vehicle whatsoever, but a society that is physically designed to... require one.
  So then you end up with a society of an upper class of EV owners, and everyone else who used to be able to afford a midrange ICE car now having to use ICE/EV motorcycles or EBikes... for daily commutes, in all weather.
  No more AC or Heating for your completely environmentally exposed 30 minute to 2hr commute to work through a heatwave or heavy snow or rain.
  They'd have to rent an EV vehicle to do 2 weeks worth of grocery shopping or move any kind of substantial cargo like a bed, or move more than 2 people a considerable distance, start arranging ride shares to and from work in some kind of comfort.
  Oh, and a ton of Americans are functionally too obese/unhealthy/injured to be able to actually use a motorcycle or EBike. So just count them out of the workforce if they can't find ride shares I guess.
  
  git solves this.
  i love me some doom pr0n now and again, but it sounds alot like some people are due for some exercise and they'll be just fine. Things might turn out for the better
  
  ... git?
  Like... git hub, git commit?
  ???
  
  Yes! Those who can code and use git can collaborate and work remotely. Lessening the need for long depressing commutes
  
  Sorry, no.
  I mean, you're right that git enables this, and that would obviously be a great choice for many tech workers, but employers in the US despise remote work and will do everything they can to never allow that to be any where near as widespread as it easily could be.
  Not sure if you've somehow missed it, but after Covid lockdowns ended, basically every large tech firm in the US started mandating return to office work, and many of them even admitted they did so as a way to functionally lay off employees without actually laying them off.
  Even Zoom, the company that maintains the most widely used remote work software... mandated their employees return to office.
  There are ultimately 2 real reasons for this, ignore the bs that comes out of the media:
  Middle managers and up basically realize that their lifestyle suffers if they don't have the ability to micromanage people in person.
  Actually effective management can easily be done remotely by competent managers, competent work can in most cases be done by competent employees remotely, but the managers need to feel that in person social hierarchy dominance, or they get upset.
  Commercial real estate.
  If we went to a massively more remote work paradigm, a fuckton of offices become pointless.
  This crashes the commercial real estate market, offices start going (even more) vacant or converting to residential or mixed use, which would lower housing prices.
  Can't have that kind of bubble pop, or else we go through something similar to the 08 crash... in an economic environment that is already very precarious at best, and more realistically is already contracting in basically every metric other than GDP.
  ... We have a whole bunch of generally normalized social views and approaches to many aspects of how things work, which are all mutually reinforcing, which prevent actual social progress from happening, and the hatred of remote work is one thing that reinforces our car dependent construction of society.
  It doesn't matter that the vast majority of people would be better off with more widespread mass transit, it doesn't matter that the vast majority of people would be better off being able to do remote work.
  Those things don't make C Suite see line go up next quarter.
  
  If I had more time under my belt I'd probably buy one. The 100k+ pricetag is just too much right now
  
  $100k+ in what currency? The base model of the EV I drive is under $45k
  
  U$. The Rivian I want is about $120k
  
  You can’t make a generalizing statement about how EVs are expensive and then say you were talking about one of most expensive models you can buy…
- I wouldn't be so pessimistic. The Netherlands was also a car dependent place that bulldozed neighbourhoods for highways a few dozen years ago and look at where they are now. Change can happen, it just needs a critical mass of supporters and time, lots of time.
  
  Us Americans just elected a fascist, who won the popular vote, who wants to do the exact opposite of a massive infrastructure rework, he and his sycophants want to cut every kind of government funding for social and government services of all kinds, keep 'joking' about invading Mexico, annexing Canada, buying Greenland.
  We do not have a mass of supporters who are effective at applying pressure on the government... because we now, even more obviously, live in a naked oligarchy that controls the government and mass media... our democracy is broken, our representatives are purchased, our population heavily subject to anti intellectual right wing propoganda funded by oligarchs.
  We also do not have lots and lots of time.
  Many states in the US are currently seeing home insurance companies either dramatically raising rates or just leaving: The climate catastrophe driven collapse of many areas has begun, and it will only get worse without a massive coordinated government directed response... which goes dorectly against the ideology of most of our oligarchs and most of our people who believe what those oligarchs tell them to via the media they own.
  We will not have the money to build out better transit infrastructure ... that will all be spent responding to more and more intense natural disasters and internal migrants.

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