Fostering societal systems of greed and competition rather than of cooperation and compassion.
The problem with cooperation and compassion is that it literally takes one dick to ruin it. If we could incentivize the psychopaths in society to collaborate for their own good, then at least we’d strike a nice balance, but our economies aren’t structured that way.
A system that can be so easily destabilized is not a system that has planned for the long term. I think we’re slowly getting there, as even the dicks in society are beginning to realise that they can be shunned for their public actions, and that shunning does come with real financial consequences.
I just can’t subscribe to that idea. If it took 1 dick to ruin everything society would never have gotten off the ground in the first place. Hell, even today, our power grid pretty much operates off the principle of 'don’t be a dick and shoot this with the guns we all have" and it took MAGA craziness for people to attack them. I’d say compassion operates within any given system in spite of people being dicks and thats why we have prevailed the way we have.
You make a good point
This, we moved from Tribes to towns to cities to be more efficient but lost the cooperative aspect of the tribe which made it more efficient in the first place. Now corporations do market research until they figure out exactly what we can afford to get our needs met and then charge that price instead of anything related to their actual costs. It’s resulted in a situation to where most people live month to month and can’t afford vacation or even an unexpected car repair.
Thats me. My car, teeth, hair, and some parts of my rental house (thanks landlord) are falling apart and I can’t afford to fix any of it cause rent and bills are due each month and they keep going up. Its fucken madness, its making me insane.
Cheers from across the hellscape, friend.
Opting for gasoline over electricity early on when cars started to become a thing, we were already going electric, but a smear campaign put fear into people’s minds about electric and switched tk gasoline.
We always have to pander to the capitalists profits, how could the make money with clean electricity???
Having the intelligence to create technology but not enough intelligence to understand the implications.
we understand the implications, we just assume that the negatives will happen to others and that the positives will grant us a temporary reprieve in which to plug existing holes
Investing everything in engines and abandoning battery development in the early 1900s. Lead-acid batteries were heavy but usable, and electric cars were more popular until electric starters were added to engines. A disproportionately big, short-lived reason was the lack of sufficient electrical grid for electric cars trying to go far.
Nobody in government was thinking ahead, so everyone was forced to trying to make their own money NOW, and that’s how we get inhumane tech in general. Same thing happening in computers for decades now. We need centralised R&D free from market influence for the benefit of all life.
We need centralised R&D free from market influence for the benefit of all life.
So you’re actually saying holding on to capitalism past it’s useful point was the mistake because it created the conditions for these things to happen?
Many of us will be miserable for the rest of our lives and society won’t care.
When people started taking dudes in fancy hats seriously
Humans.
Money
Me
Let’s go with the atomic bomb…if you disagree, consider that we made a weapon too powerful to ever be used again, but nations that have them get taken way more seriously in diplomacy.
And let’s be serious, it’s pretty much tick-tock, tick-tock before they get used again when they get put in the hands of zealots. Let’s be doubly serious, it will be religion that convinces some leader that they are within their divine rights to cleanse the world of their enemies.
The United States of America
Surprised the chat isn’t calling me out.
The discovery of making and using fire.
Why
It’s the very beginning of the energy crisis. If we had never started fucking with fire, we wouldn’t have 90% or more of the world’s manmade problems.
Yeah we could argue about having mankind at all …
Pesky humans, we are our own worst enemy… ☹️
Discovering agriculture
Ur mom giving birth to you
spoiler
Kidding, of course. I felt like someone had to make the dumb low-hanging fruit joke.
