Corporations. Stop giving them money any way possible.
this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2025
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Because we're monkeys that just came down from the trees. TBH that we've gotten this far relatively intact is remarkable.
On the offchance you don't mean in a current events way, but more cosmically: To all appearances the universe wasn't built for us, we just kind of showed up in a grimy corner of it. Living things have the brutal kind of existence that often goes along with being stowaways or pests.
Correct. I mean, lifespans are 125 years max. So we had to transfer knowledge down, and amazingly....we've conquered a whole planet. But sadly we can't unite and that will be the undoing of the human race. Until we can put petty deferences aside, and pool resources as a species? We will never be more than a chapter in Eath's history.
I feel like the transfer of knowledge gets overlooked way too much when people look at big history or technological history. Every time a new way of storing or transferring knowledge arrives technological advancement start going up by like an order of magnitude.
The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture took several millennia to fully complete, but in the ice age at least the northern hemisphere had a rapid climate disruption every 1500 or so. Any progress would have been disrupted and then quickly forgotten. Once the interglacial begins the transition completes for the first time in human history (although I do wonder why nobody started farming in Australia). That leads to sedentarism, higher population density and hierarchy, which leads to the development of cities. In cities, like-minded people can meet and share, and it was only a couple of millennia more before you start seeing pottery, metalworking, writing and wheels. With the development of writing knowledge of abstract systems begins accumulating, although you see variation in literacy and library sizes based on how cheap and convenient writing materials were.
They exploded with the arrival of paper. At some point in that period advances start happening within generations, so the effect is harder to track. With the arrival of specifically wood pulp paper in the Victorian era everyone had access to education, and now, with the internet, we can have nerdy conversations like this one every day.
But sadly we can’t unite and that will be the undoing of the human race.
What makes you say that? I feel like we're 95% of the way to united, relative to where we were 50,000 years ago. Consider that Kim Jung Un has sometimes worn a suit that would be just as normal seen on Mark Rutta - that's pretty significant cultural overlap, even with the stark ideology gap. We have some big challenges coming up, so it's not guaranteed, but I don't have any reason that we're doomed to failure either.
Doomed, maybe not, but it'll take a while to unite as a species and leave the planet. We could easily do it with the combined knowledge, tech and resources of a united earth. I think we will get there, but we can't destroy ourselves over petty little lines in the sand and cultural differences. You bring hope and that's what we'll need going forward.
Private equity buying companies and sucking them dry to make a profit is also big factor
oh society has lots of problems.
trying to fit it into one comment can be difficult but i can list some issues that i perceive:
- there's no long-term plan. none at all. nobody has an idea what humanity will look like in 100+ years. that leads to considerable uncertainty in the youth, which definitely makes their mental health difficulties more severe.
because you're old
Depends on how you look at things.
Compare your life to the life of people 1 century ago, 2 centuries ago, etc…
News, social networks focus on shit. Lot of things improve. But news only focus on what is going wrong.
Lot if things are shit, but lot other things aren’t.
This. How many of your childhood friends survived to adulthood? How many famines have you lived through? Have you ever received modern medicine? Do you know anyone who's shit themselves to death (a surprisingly common cause of death back when)? Are you literate?
I'll not try and tell anyone things are peachy, because they're clearly not. But a lot of things are so so so much better than they used to be. Most of us lead lives that would make Pharos of old green with envy.
We're in the late stage of capitalism.
I think it's short-termism combined with capitalism.
Capitalism tells people that success equals money. Short-termism tells people to focus on how much they can grab right now.
Look at the actions of C-suite level people. They do what they can to increase profits this year to get a massive bonus this year. If that means laying off half the company that's ok because they're incentivised to maximise profits now. So they do. The next year they're off to a different job at a different company and they will get that job because "When I was CEO of Mongoose & Felcher I increased YOY global profit by 270%". Their focus is never on the actual well-being of the company or its employees or on the social or environmental impact of the company because their bonus isn't dependent on those things.
Politicians are much the same. If they're not in power they want to get into power. If they are in power they have to act as quickly as possible to achieve their aims because they might only be in power for a single term.
One of my favourite 'business' ideas came from Gus Levy who was CEO of Goldman Sachs back in the 1970s. He came up with the term 'long-term greedy.' The idea was that you dealt fairly and honestly with your clients, never gouged them, kept your word, and did a good job. Sure, you might make slightly less profit from those clients this year but you would keep them as clients next year too.
No-one seems to be long-term greedy anymore.
No-one seems to be long-term greedy anymore.
The CCP seems to factor this into at least some of their decisions. Their infrastructure projects (like any infrastructure projects) take years, sometimes decades, to pay off, but boy howdy do they pay off.
They also pay off in a lot of ways besides the pure "dollar in/dollar out" kind of way that I think people forget about a lot. Things like soft power, economic growth, and cultural alliance are all incredibly powerful things.
Its a shame the current administration is trying to gut the last 80 years of work the US has put into those things.
I don't consider myself to be any type of greedy, but that's how I ran my business. At least 97% of my clients were regulars, and almost all were recommended by a neighbor or coworker. I did very little advertising, but was busy 12-16 hours a day, every day.
The root source of things being shit nowadays is capitalism. Capitalism only nows one direction: upwards. Each quarter profits have to exceed the preceding quarter. The result is that products and services get worse over time, because in order to make more profit than the last time, corners have to be cut.
The new iteration of a product gets more flimsy, because they use cheaper materials, or they alter the design to save on material. Or products have a built-in life span (e.g. batteries that cannot be replaced or limited software updates or intentional software incompatibility).
When it comes to digital services, features will be stripped over time or the customer has to pay additionally for a feature that was once included. Or they arbitrarily limit the number of devices one can use the service on. They can do it, because most customers are not prone to change a specific online service, beacuse it either is a hassle or existing alternatives do not offer the same content diversity.
The same goes for operating systems, albeit they are rather not stripped of functions, but new bullshit features that no one asked for get implemented (best example is the implementation of AI features into the operating system (Windows - Copilot or Apple - Apple intelligence) that - in case of both - forces users to even replace their hardware). Tech companies know they can pull shit like this off, because (and this mostly applies to professional users) some users need to run specific niche software on their computers that is programmed for a specific OS exclusively.
The whole AI craze is just to make money (selling data) off of the user and also forcing them to buy the new thing, because tech companies took care of deliberately designing everything in a way that it is incompatible with older hardware.
One major problem with this is that, although capitalism is the cause of it all, we all grew up with capitalism and are stuck inside the system up to a point where we profit off of it in certain parts. Having the new shiny thing availiable at any time is the nice part of it. Having to work more for less compensation (because company already builds everything cheaper and now comes for your wages/ salary in order to make profit) is the disadvantage of it. There theoretically is a solution for it: Socialism. Theoretically, because it doesn't account for the desire of people to gain power over stuff and/ or other people.
Because greed allows us to ignore the fact we aren't accounting for the limits of this planet. We get to use greed to justify complete moral abandon, which in today's world can be really damaging. A few people are getting rich atm by tearing the world apart, it won't lead to good things.
But our system isn't designed to communicate the good around you to you, it's the opposite pretty much. The good is there it just doesn't brag, or shout or mock. It's quiet but it spreads. But you know when is is gone. It is conspicuous in its absence
It's because everything is literally made of shit, or fecal matter if you prefer.
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