honestly, I think it would be a stretch to say this could be resolved in the next decade barring a super hostile action government wise such as a strict wealth tax (including offshore bank accounts). but even i think that would likely do more harm than good at first and would be neigh impossible to actually track logistically without accommodation from external countries.
Slow and Steady will eventually win the race, but it’s going to be a long hard process and will need actual participants.
cecilkorik@piefed.ca 3 days ago
I think that’s a fair and reasonable, but maybe somewhat optimistic point of view. I certainly hope it might be as smooth as a “long hard process” of hardworking participants that takes decades.
I’m concerned it’s going to be much worse and more dramatic than that. If it’s sufficiently dramatic, it might be even faster than a decade. But we don’t necessarily want the change to be that fast or dramatic, because that has serious costs, and I think that might be the path we’re on. I think there are inevitably going to be a lot of super hostile actions from many different sides, and these will manifest as a collapse or near collapse of human civilization. I don’t see any realistic path forward through traditional or existing systems or models of economics and governance. I think empires are already falling. I think many nation-states are going to topple. I think there will be a massive reorganization of human society in the coming decades, and that will happen largely through widespread war, famine, brutality, and savagery that we had convinced ourselves we had left long in the past. Even though it’s never actually stopped happening at any point in time, it’s just been marginalized and isolated into places we mostly ignore and when we do notice it, we soon have to look away and start to ignore again because it’s so upsetting to us. When we see it happening, we find ways to do something to convince ourselves that it’s been solved, or managed, or improved in some way and then we look away again so we don’t have to think about it when it inevitably gets worse. But even having it marginalized is better than it has been, and there’s no shame in that. But we still will have to confront these realities eventually. And I think eventually is quickly becoming “now”.
This is what humanity is, this is what any remotely objective view of history tells us. We have often tried to be better as people, and that’s commendable, and I think we have done a good job being at least somewhat better for a long time, and that too is commendable, and it is obviously a worthy pursuit that we should continue, but we cannot completely escape that we have our dark sides, we are capable of great evil, and great evil is being done sometimes directly under our noses, sometimes we do it ourselves without even seeing it, it is part of us, it is part of who we are and who we always have been. And I think we are facing down a serious confrontation with many of our great evils right now. And I don’t think we’re prepared for how bad it’s going to be. For how bad we can be.
Maybe I’m wrong, I hope I am. I hope there’s some turning point where everyone simultaneously realizes where this is headed and everything changes direction and we address many of our great evils and solve many of our problems peacefully and promptly and continue pursuing our better selves. But I’m finding it increasingly hard to believe that’s realistic.
Pika@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
For sure, anything of that caliber, be it a monetary violence such as a massive financial shift from wealthy to either the government structures or the people, to a physical violence such as a revolt, to a virtual violence such as banning products/companies that are not following the established mantra, I do think the end result would be the same, I doubt it would lead to the collapse of civilization but, I do have to say that it won’t be pretty and in best case scenarios the penalty is increased pricing for awhile while things stabilize, worst case scenario is dismantlement of known authorities/governments due to violent protests.
For some food for thought btw on the economic scale? You could take half of amazons annual net income(income after taxes, liabilities, deductions etc) for 2024, distribute it evenly across all known people in the US (Amazons primary market) and be able to give each person $80-90. every person and that’s still allowing the company to keep 30B. It blows my mind. The same can be said about Microsoft. They made 88B in 2024, so half of that is 44B across every person would be 130ish per person. Nvidia would be ~18, apple would be ~144. It’s really sickening when you think of it the amount of money those companies have.