This is me but with anti-car urbanism. Ever since I discovered Not Just Bikes, my feed has more and more videos showing how much better life can be if we shut off car brain and build for medium density with mixed use zoning and multi-mode infrastructure.
It’s healthier for damn sure. But it only works if you can stand being around people. If you need space from people…you know, so they don’t annoy you to the point of violence…then you need to live somewhere more remote, which necessitates driving. I’d love to walk a block, catch a bus, then walk a block to my destination if I didn’t mean dealing with uncensored raw-humanity shoving its crotch into my face as I awkwardly pretend to be hyper-focused on my phone.
Sure, no shade on rural living for those who need the space. I’m more opposed the the forced ruralization of suburbia. This video popped up in my feed and shows how much better medium-density suburban living could be in many places.
The bottom line rebuttal to all the variants of the “but whatabout people who want to live in single-family houses” arguments is real simple: if it were truly that important to them, then they would be willing to pay fair-market rates for it. Which means artificially inflating the supply (thus subsidizing the price) via restrictive zoning laws wouldn’t be necessary.
People who think they are entitled to live in single-family houses to the point that they want the law to forcibly impose that lifestyle on vast swathes of the population are just selfish takers who want society to subsidize them.
Suburbs are also not giving that much space. Houses aren’t that far apart.
When I told one of my friends the idea of owning a full family home was selfish, they were shocked until I put into the perspective of how many people can fit in a city and save on transportation cost for materials and work across the board. It was a nice relief for them to realize the point.
I think the real truth of it is that these people conveniently default to whatever gets them away from other people because people are always telling them how wrong they are for acting how they do. They want no consequences for hating with prejudice.
I make this point at every opportunity:
The “normal” working-class single-family neighborhoods in my city are zoned R4, with a 9000 sq.ft. minimum lot size. The rich neighborhoods are zoned R1, with a 2 acre minimum lot size. That means every R1 lot could fit at least nine R4 homes on it. Why do we have ridiculous shitty traffic on the freeway going past that rich neighborhood? Because every single one of those mansions physically displaced eight other households out into the suburbs, who could have otherwise lived there if the law wasn’t being (ab)used to subsidize the rich.
And that’s just the difference between two kinds of single-family, let alone rezoning to allow the real level of density the market demands! If my city were zoned appropriately, the entire metro area population could be housed within the ring road.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying it’s “selfish” or wrong to want to live in a single-family home… just that you only deserve one if and only if you’re actually willing to pay for it. That means being willing to outbid multifamily developers who would build the lot out to its highest and best use, not hiding behind zoning to protect you from the free market.
(I’m also not saying it isn’t selfish or wrong; I just try to stick to the geometric argument to deprive the person I’m debating of an excuse to turn it into an emotional debate.)
This is new information to me. In a hypothetical scenario, would it be realistic for every person to have room for a home big enough for a family, and still have plenty of room for agriculture, industry, and all the services for those homes, plus any entertainment venues, assuming you don’t account for existing infrastructure (or even if you do)? I’d probably just be sad to learn the real numbers.
I deal with it by trying my best but also a heavy dose of cognitive dissonance when required. And learning (painstakingly slowly) how to be compassionate to myself regarding my shortcomings of not being able to fix it all.
This is why I’ve stopped listening to 99% Invisible.
“Oh, cool that’s what the bumps in the sidewalk/curb are for - blind accessibility stuff. Wait, why did it take that fucking long to actually make those a reality and why isn’t it everywhere?”
Even their more lighthearted ones tend to dive into some orphan grinding machine territory.
Some countries (like mine) still don’t have anything like that. Commuting sucks even for able-bodied people due to mismanagement/corruption.
We have always feared a robot uprising that would take over the world and subjugate humans, as though robots will replace us as the ultimate alpha predators.
We’ve already been replaced by our own creation. Money itself is the dominant species on this planet. Capitalism is the metabolic process of the organism. The stock market is its circulatory system. Politicians are its organs. Billionaires are its reproductive system. The individual workers are the mitochondria. This is a planet scale life form that is ready to reproduce itself onto surrounding bodies in space.
If you want the solution to the Fermi paradox there it is. Once a civilization is infected with economics it’s only a matter of time before it is consumed by its own creation.
I agree fully, but would say billionaires are fat cells
Money is power in a form transferable over time and space.
Long before capitalism, people considered money to be the root of all evil. Many religions have restrictions on what can be done with money, especially asking for interest.
It’s a desire fetish. Like a religious icon evokes a deity, money evokes desire.
It’s called greed.
No it’s called money.
Weird coming from a religion that said the root of all evil was also a fruit.
Restrictions on lending can be explained by the fact that when those rules were made, almost no one knew math much better than counting on their fingers.
The metal traders and other businessmen in ancient Mesopotamia (2000+ years before your fruit) absolutely knew “math better than counting on their fingers”.
Usury restrictions may have had a lot to do with the social cost of loans among tight knit groups (such as, don’t loan money to your cousin, it’ll cause problems) or because they were rejecting “normal” behavior from a society they wanted to distance themselves from.
Also, the fruit was an allegory, like most ancient mythical stories. Even if you reject mythology outright, try not to belittle the moral and traditional bases for religions that billions of people on Earth follow. You aren’t better than them for it.
Wow… Just wow. The lack of knowledge in that statement is breathtaking.
I just wanted to say I appreciate your use of the possessive pronoun “its”
I refuse to compromise my grammar to conform with lesser generations of of slovenly English speakers.
GOOD
We just need to speedrun capitalism. People had it worse, tbh. Now we need to make our species survive the mass extinction. Or die trying. Here we gooooo
Capitalism accelerates on a logarithmic curve. As billionaires are added the curve steepens toward the heat death of economics.
I’m not talking about accelerationism in any way. Accelerationism would be like capitalism speedrun 100%, I’m talking more about any%
This is why I watch kurzgesagt so I can have EXISTENTIAL crisis about things that will never actually affect me like the sun burning out, or the universe going completely dark, instead of more worldly crisis.
Kurzgesagt has a tendency to put neoliberal spin on the solutions they offer and they’ve recieved heat for it in the past. Careful with that channel
Yes, I’ll definitely keep that in mind while I’m building my Dyson sphere to harness 100% of the energy of the sun and fly earth across space.
pfft, tryna shill inferior vacuum cleaner products on me. I’m a Henry man
You mean to tell me a channel sponsored by Bill Gates is techno-optimist? I am shocked!
I tried switching to historical documentaries but people have been terrible since well before we started writing things down.
Yeah I don’t know when they would prefer to live instead. Every age and culture have their disadvantages, you can argue that some are more progressive than others in various ways.
But here’s a fact. Penicillin was discovered 1928. That’s not even 100 years ago. I don’t know about others. But I’m really happy I live in the world where I don’t have to risk dying from a tic bite.
Yup! This is why we need to take money out of the hands of the wealthy and give it to the people they exploited.
it’s deeper than that.
money is the incentive to corruption. the actual cause of corruption is indifference to suffering of minorities and the disenfranchised.
the answer is easy. you don’t have to donate. you don’t have to protest. all you have to do is call out the smallest corrupt mistreatment of your fellow human beings.
see someone getting accosted by police because they are guilty of being black? start recording and ask the cops to identify themselves.
see someone being mistreated at a store because they are trans? call them out on it. get angry, tell make sure they are aware of how people that act like they do are treated.
also, don’t stop going there. go there every day. make sure they aren’t doing it again, and when they do, call them out on their bullshit again.
the only way to stop people from behaving badly is to teach them that it’s unacceptable behavior.
a society that stands idly by while people in that society are attacked is doomed to suffer and die.
“I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
– Gustave Gilbert (After interviewing Nazis post-WWII)
a lack of empathy isn’t the source of corruption, money is. a lack of empathy is just a necessary pre-requisite.
If you want to understand evil you’ll need to observe it in yourself. Secondhand observations will not do.
an empathetic society is a cooperative society, a socialist society.
capitalism is completely indifferent to the human factor, competition is about few winners and many losers. unemployment is desirable, poor people must be allowed to die.
people think economics is a science but it doesn’t consider human nature, “everyone tries to maximize their personal profit” isn’t an anthropological statement it’s capitalism restated.
people think economics is a science but it doesn’t consider human nature
That’s literally the whole field of behavioral economics.
Also, economists don’t care about individual human behavior. That’s not what economics is. Economics is the study of broad trends in large populations. And for the most part, modeling these trends as people trying to maximize their own utility function is a useful tool to explain things.
Also also, the point of science is to be measureable and falsifiable so that hypotheses can be tested and disproven, making the predictions of the field more accurate over time. Economists create falsifiable hypotheses. Often they are disproven. Economics gets better at modelling the real world over time. Economics is a science.
“All models are wrong; some are useful.”
Behavioral economics isn’t how we allocate our resources, it’s a correction of classical economics to include the human factor. The assumption that everyone is a perfectly rational profit optimizer only reflects reality insofar as we’ve codified that behavior into our laws and regulations such that shareholders can sue companies for not acting in that assumed way.
The kind of economics people take as science don’t describe human populations throughout history.
A genuine incapacity
This is borderline using genetic arguments, ironic for Nazis. If people have learned to suppress their feelings the incapacity can be strong but is not genuine.
You will be seen as a malcontent and will be excluded from society more and more, the more you go down that road berating and lecturing people on their faults. Self righteousness doesn’t change the world for the better.
Maybe naturalizing the incapacity for critical thought to be heard is the problem?
“You will be seen as malcontent”
Good. There’s no reason to be compliant to cruelty, if 1 person out of 1000 learns something it will be progress. Otherwise we just let the world forget empathy. Empathy, community, love, the things that allowed us to comunicate, to cooperate.
To exist as Human beings, to protect us from the uncaring world.
It is friendship that is the ultimate measure of progress. And friends don’t let friends be nazis
I know from experience.
It’s deeper than that. You can’t fight hunger, you can’t fight indifference. You can only push people to pretend. Police has to have compassion.
see someone getting accosted by police because they are guilty of being black? start recording and ask the cops to identify themselves.
see someone being mistreated at a store because they are trans? call them out on it. get angry, tell make sure they are aware of how people that act like they do are treated.
I’ve literally never seen either of these things happen.
good for you?
Seize the… Something… Damn it, I know this!
I just downloaded like 30 seasons of modern marvels. I’m hoping those will restore some of my optimism for life since watching that show made me happy as a child.
Fun side-effect: one finds a strange appreciation and understanding for supervillains hell-bent on ending life on earth, “for no reason”.
Hey, if you want to see the world burn so badly, stop dilly-dallying and bring out the big guns! This is really taking longer than necessary.
I’ve flipped and flopped between being an accelerationist and a saviour when it comes to life-ending climate change.
Ultimately nobody has the guts to commit to using humans to simulate 100, 000, 000 whalefalls though.
Also, you would fail. Climate change almost certainly will not end life, or macroscopic life, or human life.
Hence why conservatives hate education. It makes you have to feel empathy for other people and we can’t have that.
Me when I watch any nature/animal documentary. So many endangered or extinct animals and for what??
and for what??
agriculture
i can’t find it rn but sth like this also applies to the land usage worldwide. basically, we’re taking wild animal’s land, and that’s what’s killing them.
human population count has gone up 30x since the medieval ages. We used to be 300 million, now we’re close to 10 billion.
How did you find a photo of me, with an accurate caption?
Also applicable to scrolling through Lemmy most days.
Ah, so you too have watched Adam Curtis documentaries.
HyperNormalisation https://youtu.be/to72IJzQT5k
didn’t know about them
been binging them and now i am spiraling even harder
wait til you figure out that all of human history is one giant cycle of people being incredibly cruel to other people for incredibly tenuous reasons and realize this cycle will, presumably, never end; and thus every interaction you have with other people is if not driven by transaction (what can you do for them), likely to be driven by cruelty.
sweet dreams, it doesn’t get better.
Except the vast majority of human interactions are either neutral or positive. If you approach life with the outlook that everyone is transactional, it’s going to shape your behavior into an unlikable grump.
How does this cynical doomer shit get so much consistent up votes and echoes?
Because Lemmy is a hoard for emotionally and psychologically unwell people.
Very few people are dedicated enough to seek Lemmy out. Most will stay on reddit. Or never got on reddit, and are on IG and Tiktok. The main thing that will drive them here is negativity - noticing everything wrong about the platform they are using.
if the vast majority of your interactions with other people are neutral or positive, absent of transaction or cruelty, I’m very happy for you. genuinely. Unfortunately your personal experience, however, doesn’t invalidate mine; nor does it invalidate the mountains of human awfulness throughout history and up into the present day that I could list off to prove my point – keyword being ‘could’, here, as I’m not very interested in arguing, or in pissing on the parade you’re apparently having. If nobody’s pissed on yours, yet, why would I want to be the one to do so? so go, be happy, dismiss what I say as “cynical doomer shit” while you still have that fleeting luxury.
I’m sorry that my comment was a bit dismissive and invalidating. I didn’t really mean it to be, but I’ve been frustrated - I keep seeing this breed of misanthropy, and I understand why it’s an easy explanation for why things are bad, but it feels very clear to me that misanthropes ignore the vast catalog of human experience and lifespan and cherry-pick the negatives. When you believe that everyone is generally shitty, it’s easy to justify being generally shitty yourself (not saying that you are, just saying in general). You also then just start avoiding people in general, and every time you are forced to interact with people, you start looking for a way out.
I’ve honestly been there. I’ve been in that headspace. Any positive thing can be dulled by a “yeah but…” And then you look for ways to invalidate the positive things that did happen… calling them “transactional”. You go into the hard emotionless philosophy of “well technically everything is transactional, even altruism doesn’t really exist because your brain is making you feel good” and you feel RIGHT. Every terrible thing that happens you get to reinforce how RIGHT you are about the universe. The news is happy to feed you a torrent of terrible things that humans are doing, you avoid people most of the time so your chances of positive interactions are limited, and your worldview colors every interaction you have with people, so you either interpret or project negativity.
IDK, I guess I just want to challenge your perception a bit. It’s very possible that this is just depression, because it was for me. A mix of life changes, changes in my mindset, and medication have led me to where I am now. The thing that clicked for me was noticing how much my negative mood could affect my perceptions of people, and how easy it was for that mood to feed on itself.
Sorry if this comes off as condescending. I just honestly believe that most humans have the capacity for great good, and it really is just about us believing in ourselves and each other. We also have a capacity for great evil, when we believe that that’s how everyone else is. I have to push back on that.
while I appreciate your effort, I do in fact remember a time when I was more naive and positive (~5+ years ago), and I also remember people being just as awful to me and to each other at that time, too; the only real difference being that I was frequently awful right back – I just haven’t got the energy for that anymore. If your point is that my attitude colors or affects my reality, that doesn’t really hold water for me. the world around me hasn’t changed that drastically in that time (if anything it’s gotten slightly worse), I’ve just become more perceptive of it. And while sticking my head in the sand and pretending the world is a fine place full of fine people does sound like a wonderful delusion to entertain, it is just that. A delusion. While there are certainly some fine people in it, the vast majority of people are anywhere from unaware or indifferent, to actively making the world a worse place.
