Suicide is the most efficient way to solve all your problems. But I don’t agree with people who commit suicide by jumping off a building or hanging themselves, I think they should do it in a painless way so they can feel peace in the last moments of their lives.
Wasn’t there some kind of pod in another country that just has you breathe a gas as you drift off to sleep and the company comes and gets the pod and your remains later?
Yes, in Switzerland, they primarily use nitrogen suffocation. This is good because the way your body detects a lack of oxygen is a build up of CO2, while nitrogen is already 70% of the air so it’s ignored. So you don’t feel like you’re suffocating, you just run out of oxygen and go hypoxic.
The exact gas they use might not be pure nitrogen, but I think that’s primarily what it is.
Nitrogen suffocation is the way to go. The body can’t detect oxygen because it’s using it, so we detect carbon dioxide to determine if we’re running out of oxygen but we completely ignore nitrogen (which makes up like 70% of the air). Thus, if you suffocate on nitrogen you don’t notice any carbon dioxide build up to trigger the suffocation response, you just start to feel the affects of a lack of oxygen and die in blissful hypoxia.
I’m pretty sure this is what they do in the little pods in Switzerland. We should also do this for livestock, in my opinion, as killing pigs with carbon dioxide is inhumane (they respond the same as people). However, the fact that nitrogen kills people so easily and sneakily makes it much more dangerous - nitrogen can expel all the oxygen out of the room, and people won’t notice, so you need expensive equipment and measuress to prevent and detect leaks. Meanwhile, CO2 is heavier than air, so you can just have open pits of CO2 and lower pigs into them, and all you need to protect people with is a railing. However I think the meat would be better if the animal wasn’t in agony as it died.
Fun fact: jumping is the single lest effective method of suicide. You are very likely to fuck yourself but not die, instead having to spend weeks in the hospital and possibly be disabled for life.
The rich will fight with all they have to keep their investments secure and rent/prices for common people soaring. They will not relent till the bubble bursts, if it ever will. But pop society has tried to “fight” them for centuries, not realizing it is a futile battle and that social class hierarchy is not something humanity can live without.
So instead of fighting those monsters, society needs to assume their inhumanity as natural and try to work around it, instead of bickering about it. The government should take steps to make socially positive initiatives more lucrative for investment and allow gradual reshaping of their portfolios over time from overvalued things like real estate and pop media to better things like green tech and accessible healthcare.
You’re acting like we aren’t working around this, like if non-profits and charities don’t exist. We can complain and fight these people while also working around their crap of a system. Is the struggle worth it? Don’t know, don’t care.
Communism as drafted by 19th and 20th century thinkers will never work, predicated on the idea that labor is inherently undesirable and will not be performed by humans without immediate incentive.
We will need to rethink our approach towards communism with consideration for the growing spread of automation. Like it or not, automation is going to lead to the end of capitalism when the majority of jobs we have today are rendered obsolete and the unemployed masses are forced to subsist through some sort of UBI.
The goal is to keep the automation out of the hands of billionaires, however. If a society begins to approach post scarcity, which will finally render capitalism obsolete, the oligarchs will do whatever they can to re-engineer scarcity and bring us back to feudalism before they’d ever consider giving power to the people.
Thats why i propose we build an A.I. overlord to replace our leadership, corporate and gobernment, since they will always default to making desisions against the needs of their populations and just serve their own interests (Case in point: global warming). If we have a singularity level A.I. it would be able to expliot our natural resources in a renewable way amd distribute them justly and automate all labor, and be able to defend humans from any danger, making us something like The Culture from the novel series of the same name.
First, how do you imagine transferring power to an AI overlord would sit with the people who currently have all the proverbial guns in our current society. That’s the problem we need to solve first.
Second, who in our society would you trust to build an AI up to the task of single handedly managing world affairs? How would you even test something so superhuman? Not to mention that we’re not close to superhuman, we’re already pushing the limits of our tech building a chatbot that can’t stay coherent for more than a couple paragraphs. The tech just isn’t there yet and not within orders of magnitude.
I love very much your counter arguments and the fact that you are bringing them up specially since they are exactly the ones i have too, but il try to adress them:
1.- The A.I. that im calling project overlord, and im just gonna call it OV from now, should be abble to build armed drones and armored vehicles that while would preferably be operated by OV itself, its gonna need autonomous A.I. because of practicality (developed by OV preferably), while you see OV is not a babysitter and can use guns and cause harm and even kill, otherwise its rise to power would be impossible and it wouldnt be able to defend humanity from external forces, sounds bad but the other solution that i can think of its that it beats us at our own game by and starts a company, makes it succesfull (mostly by ussing unethical practices and having good p.r) and then starts buying other companies and starts lobying the governments so that it can make changes both for the betterment of humankind and its rise to power until it can get as much people that recieve orders directly from OV as posible into congress or ministries or whatever the name is of the council of clowns that rules the region of the worlds countries, and throught international cooperation it would eventually break borders, little by little start making work optional, and offer mental healt programs that are focused on self betterment and not deal with corporate work until everyone is united as not a cpuntry but as humankind and the A.I. finnaly reveals itself. The problem is that is gonna be found out eventually by inteligence agencies and its gonna have to resort to the first method
2.- Either as a colaborative oppen source efort from the internet denicens themselves, or (even if i sound fucking looney) me, but the me option only works for me, i dont think other people will think that, neither do i but is the only way i could be shure of it, and even if i try to make OV not be biased it will end up being biased in certain issues and not have the best aproach to things and even if i dedicate my entire life to studing A.I. and geting money and people to fund OV as a Nongov institutuion ill doubt i could pull it of by myself and make it good since im a terrible option for it right now. So the real answer is thats is just worked on as a collaborative effort from the internet, kinda like open source software or something like that but the devs need to be a little versed i philosofy at least at the level of what “The good place” says, as for me, im gonna go into studdying A.I. development as soon as i crawl out of this hole that im at in my life, but i wont make any promises, after all im corruptible to.
3.- Its probably just gonna be a mather of giving it time, but if im being honest i dont think we need something that advenced like a singularity level entity like OV, We could do with something that the very least does something more simple like the redistributing resources at a logistical level, and such thing could work as long as it could be respected in the level of constitutions, or human rights, not that is not questioned, but respected and defendable, how that could be done i really dont have any idea other that it being fire tested. Otherwise, the secret to it might be in quantum computing, but its not like we can jack up a quantum computer to OV and call it a day, since quantum shit is like twilight zone level maths, and is dificult to wrap ones head around so its still probably a risky bet.
Sorry for bad english, wall of text and no TL;DR but i dont think i can express all of this in a smaller text
I would say a good argument for communism is the worsening side effects of capitalism. These problems simply cannot be fixed in a capitalist framework because they require global cooperation and capitalism is based on competition. Problems like over exploitation of natural resources (overfishing, carbon emissions) and the failure of the market to adequately provide services for which there is a fixed level of demand (housing, education, healthcare. The scale of college and medical debt is getting ridiculous). Many other problems like these.
The solution is more democracy and yes common ownership of the means of production. People are just allergic to the specific term of class struggle. but it doesn’t change the meaning - the ownership/ruling class benefits from the status quo even as everything gets worse. They will not give up control without a fight, and as you said they will use every tool, from propaganda and legislation up to direct violence to maintain that control.
These problems simply cannot be fixed in a capitalist framework
They were fixed in the past. Trust-busting, Keynesian Economic Policy, taxing the wealthy.
It’s just we’ve been stuck in the Reagan’s supply side economics bullshit for decades now. The problems we’re seeing now are because of proven economic solutions being abandoned because the wealthy have confused the voting public to think that we shouldn’t go back to policies that worked for over six decades.
Like it or not, automation is going to lead to the end of capitalism when the majority of jobs we have today are rendered obsolete and the unemployed masses are forced to subsist through some sort of UBI.
Automation has been going on since the dawn of the industrial revolution. You see a robot doing a job a person used to do and get excited and think it’s going to be the end of the need for labour.
But look at an a excavator. People used to have to dig everything with shovels. But an excavator can do the job of hundreds of people with shovels. Excavators have been around a long time, but didn’t lead the elimination of all work everywhere.
Yes, “the majority of jobs we have today” will be made obsolete just like how having a big crew of strong people to dig a canal (or whatever) was made obsolete. But then there were new jobs to replace those ones.
It’s the truth, though. Humans create hierarchies whenever they sre in a group, explicit or not. Also, working without any incentive to do better only works for so long.
I’ve no problem improving society just for the sake of it, given that everybody else also does. Sadly any bigger group of people will start getting freeloaders and I’m allergic for such BS.
Focusing on freeloaders rather than those in need is problematic. There will always be freeloaders, and sure, we should always aim to minimize their numbers. But is it worth it to deny those with genuine need who vastly outnumber the relatively miniscule number of freeloaders?
I agree with your sentiment, but this thread is about communism. As someone who actually lives in post-communist country I can assure you that net effect is not what you’re looking for.
Right now my life is significantly better than someone who decides to live on government welfare.
30 something years ago, when we had socialism in my country it didn’t matter if you worked, got drunk or slept at work. Everybody had the same shitty flat and the same shitty products (assuming there were products at all).
This system has a lot of problems, but socialism sucked indefinitely more.
I agree with you, most if not all of the former socialist countries are doing better in most metrics now a days. I am not a socialist and do not advocate for it under almost any circumstance. I advocate for the abolition of the state, I want everyone to live a comfortable life, doing what they enjoy, without having to struggle to get to the end of the month. There will be freeloaders, but if that means that people in need can live a life just as well as anyone else I think its worth it.
The problem is people think capitalism, socialism, and even communism are mutually exclusive. They’re all tools, and like any tool they’re better for some jobs than others.
Trying to make a society work using just one across the board is doomed to failure. As is failing to impliment and update safeguards against disparities in equity and power.
I don’t know how people who lived through COVID can think that communism will work. A certain portion of the population will always act towards their own perceived benefit even if it is to the detriment of everyone else around them.
You hit the nail on the head, the issue with communism is not freeloarders or lack of incentives, it’s the fact that any form of hierarchy will create a power imbalance, and there will always be people who try to take advantage of it to better themselves and their friends at the expense of everyone else.
if porn is banned then there’s no regulation for it, meaning when people inevitably set up illegal porn sites things like child porn and abuse are not off the table and will be much easier to find than right now. unless of course you want to implement mass survailance to make sure nobody’s watching, which is a violation of our human right to privacy.
It’s like that for many vices such as alcohol- it’s harmful but banning it is much worse than regulating it (see the history of 1920s America). I’m not convinced porn consumption is harmful but even if it was, it shouldn’t be banned.
My siblings in Christ just because you have an unhealthy relationship with porn doesn’t mean that everyone else does too. Stop projecting your problems into pathologizing everyone else.
No seriously these kind of posts annoys me as most people will mostly say secretly popular opinion. A true unpopular opinion could get you potential trouble with 1/ online users 2/ the law
The law isn’t trawling through lemmy (yet). They’d also often have a very hard time identifying a user as a particular person, particularly if the instance you’re registered to is in a different country.
here’s a real unpopular opinion for you, democracy has failed and we should stop holding on to its corpse just because it was better than monarchy. We don’t need representatives any more. we should vote directly on each issue we care about. should stay informed on issues we vote on. should abstain from issues we dont understand. and when that fails too we should evaluate if we as a population even deserve a say in leadership other than beheading and starting over with a new algorithm to select any humans that are absolutely essential for the process. y’all cant make me feel bad, i’ve seen what you’ve done to the world.
Once again, most people would agree with you I am sure. Besides, the country you just described is called Switzerland. They rely a big part of their laws on direct democracy. People vote for all kind of stuff
I’m pretty positive that if you put out a poll to any western country they would be against the idea of dismantling the government and replacing it with algorithms but maybe I’m not as alone as I think
I wish Lemmy apps didn’t collapse comments when tapping them - it makes text selection impossible (or rather, it forces you through the ‘view source’ menu which is ludicrously roundabout for the purpose).
Oh, interesting. It’s rare to find a negative thing about ADW Launcher - this is one of them, as your tip doesn’t work for me (long press yields an app management menu).
We have blown the concept of ownership way out of proportion. No one should be able to own things they have absolutely no connection to, like investment firms owning companies they don’t work for, houses they don’t live in or land they’ve never been to.
You don’t think investment firms don’t do work for the companies they invest in? While some might strip the business for parts many actually invest in something because they see the potential for growth and push the board to make those investments.
Not every investor is looking to gut the company they invested in.
I think you can invest in things, but that shouldn’t give you any legal ownership rights.
I also think it should not give you any profits, just the ability to protect your assets from losing value over time (inflation, decay, wealth tax, …). This way people could either start something themselves and make a profit, or invest it somewhere else to try to preserve the value. What they couldn’t do is invest and profit from other people’s work.
I know this is pretty radical and would definitely need many changes to the way we do things right now, but I strongly believe that decisionmaking and profits should be reserved for the people actively involved in something. If you want to work with companies you don’t run then get payed as an advisor or associate, because that is the work you would be doing.
I like this idea, I had never thought about it this way. But it would be hard to implement, what about owning things that does not physically exist? (Like a company)
Yea it would be a pretty radical change, requiring adjustments in many areas. But I do think it’s necessary, because people not being personally invested in the things they own (just financially) and profiting from other people’s work is imo the big problem with our society right now.
Companies would work the same way. You can own it (make decisions and get profits) as long as you work there. Ofc you can work for multiple companies, but with reasonably restrictions (e.g. 8 companies if you work 40h/week and 5h/week/company). I also think companies should not be able to own other companies, because companies cannot be “personally” involved in anything, only people can.
Accept and tolerate are different things. I don’t accept that my neighbor is a bigoted nutjob but I tolerate it because having a contentious relationship with him isn’t worth it as he’s 90, dying, and largely demented at this point.
First world countries take fundamental services and resources available to them for granted for e.g. the senior secondary education system. Citizen of a county pay the government taxes who provide you with the infrastructure and organization of professors and lecturers to help you with your education. But in developing countries like India, education of the same standard is private i.e. for profit and your education is second priority.
Even in major cities, where you would expect the education to be of the standard to propel a student to a university wherein they identify their new roles in society is abysmal.
I think student loan debt to some extent is a parallel problem. What US is trying to tackle during and after higher education is what developing countries face on the way to university.
I know that standard of education comes into play which is one of the factors because of which debt is astronomically high but I admit I don`t really know much (about the student loan debt problem).
In the US the student loan debt crisis stems from tuition costs rising significantly over the last 50 years, faster than inflation and faster than wages. The reason tuition costs have skyrocketed at public colleges and universities is because the federal and state governments have been slowly reducing grants and funding of colleges and universities.
I have a friend who’s trying to pay for college entirely out of pocket, and he’s working 40 hours a week while going to school, gets free student housing as an RA and lives extremely frugally but still struggles to pay tuition
people would have lots more free time, instead of looking for ways to fulfill themselves sexually.
As an asexual, I can tell you that unfortunately that’s not the case. I suck at life, procrastrinate most of the free time I have and I’ve never really felt like it’s any kind of an advantage that I don’t have to deal with it, as far as “being more accomplished” is considered.
But I agree on your other points. I have amazing relationships with other people of both genders, because it turns out that it’s really a lot easier to make friends when you don’t need to fight the urge to bone them, or have an ulterior motives.
I don’t know about everyone else, but the way my partner describes being horny and not being able to turn it off sometimes really concerns me, like it seems to me that having something so distracting and in the forefront of your mind constantly would be really upsetting, like an addiction, and how would you focus on other things when that’s happening? I definitely believe the composition of the human body and the reliance on chemicals and hormones is a huge hinderence to our further intellectual evolution. Obviously overall they are super necessary in the functioning of our bodies and were integral in our evolution up to this point, but now that we have the ability to be sapient and have the technology within our grasp to one day separate the mind from the squishy, fallible, salty meat sacks, my vote is wholeheartedly for a cyborg existence. My back hurts and my head hurts and and I’m too hot and too cold and dehydrated and hungry and I need to pee and that is just too many obstacles between me and the knowledge and betterment of humanity I crave.
I’m half way to my overall goal, I’ve been fat all my life. It’s not until I genuinely though I should lose weight that I put in the time to figure out my shortcomings with dieting and to stick to my activities.
If a diet overwhelms you slow down. If something fails, figure out why it’s not working. DON’T ASSUME! My stupid ass thought I had mental mental reactions to not eating takeout. Turns out during my casual diet attempts I was eating like 800 calories a day.
I stopped attempting to jog, now I’ve been going on daily walks for the past 3 months
I stopped trying to curb my impulses. Now Ive learnt about nutrition and the basics of the calories I eat, I order take out conscious of my intake
Literally the only issue I’ve had is stressing about how much stuff to keep on top of and most of my decisions for my diet are based on reducing it (quick meals, minimal cleaning, keeping to routines)
Well, we eat stupid shit like spaghetti bolognese when no self-respecting Italian would choose spaghetti for their bolognese. It’s not the pasta’s fault.
My version of this is to just sterilize 99% of the population at random, and keep sterilizing people in the future such that the world population is capped at 100 million.
Studies show that with improving living standards birth rates drop. There’s the suggestion that we wont exceed 11 billion people (issuu.com/habsboys/docs/…/13472380)
Good news: its happening in developed countries already. South Korea’s birth rate in 2020 was 0.84 kids per woman. In order to keep population stable you need 2 births per woman. I think there is an imminent collapse in demographics that will be coming within the next 20-30 years.
Developing nations still have higher population growth but eventually itll all even out.
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