You can't fix stupid (in America), but you also can't stop it from doing catastrophic damage.
Cycling on the road.
On the one hand, biking is great and they should be able to bike on any road! And we should be careful when driving near them, it's super scary being so unprotected and so close to metal speed bombs hurling around them.
On the other hand, road bikers are fucking annoying, stay in your goddamn lane and stop slowing down traffic. I'm not reading your dumb hand signals, either!
BMW drivers have the same opinions about whatever you're driving too... Even other Beemers. At least the second part.
Advertisements.
Like obviously we need to make people know things exist, it makes financial and logical sense, etc.
On the other hand, this is bullshit. It's an ever increasing blight on the senses in both online and offline spaces. It's at the point where massive companies cannot function without plastering ads over everything. Fuck that. If we can't function without some garish assault of a cacophony to our psyche every few minutes, maybe we need to rethink what we're doing with our existence.
“Like obviously we need to make people know things exist, it makes financial and logical sense, etc.“
Why is this obvious? I know it's so normal that me asking seems weird but, is this really how the world has to work? Can we not imagine a world without ads? I'd like to at least try.
I'm a practicing Christian that goes to church every Sunday, and yet I believe in abortion and birth control like I invented them. I love babies and hold one most Sundays during the sermon and think they're a miracle, but also if you don't want to be pregnant don't for one second hesitate to have the abortion. Your life matters way way more than some cells.
Most Christians in Europe are like this too, tbh
Gun control in the US.
Gun control would normally work in any other country, but guns are so ingrained in American culture and history that it is infeasible to simply just implement gun control and expect everything to work.
Couple that gun culture with a whole lot of systemic issues (capitalism, remnants of racist laws, wealth inequality, healthcare, police brutality, education system, firearms safety) and you get the gun violence rampant across the US.
Gun control won't work on its own. If you want to get rid of guns, you gotta fix everything at the same time, which won't happen because half the country would vote against progress and their own interests in the name of "owning the libs".
Maybe we should encourage people to keep their guns as police get more and more militerized
Australia already showed us that it isn't even that hard. And it was incredibly effective. It's just that the largest gun manufacturers can spend over 100% of their profits on paying politicians and talking heads to keep things this way.
Australia is a great parallel for your arguments. The same "we had to concur the wilderness" history and all. I believe they have not had a mass shooting since 2008 when they passed their gun control.
Theres no such thing as "too much privacy" but at same time too much privacy can make it near impossible to catch pedos and shit like that :/
Everything has pros and cons.
Most people tend to see only the pros of the things that favour them and downplay the cons that affect others. Which is why we come to hate each other so often.
For example, life and death are a cycle. Can't have one without the other. People may have different goalposts on what deaths they think they're willing to cause in order to survive, but whether it's animals, plants or even microbial organisms, some living beings have to die in order for others to live. (But it's fine because there's so many of them and they can't think or feel pain, probably. Eh, who cares anyway, gotta eat something!)
Due to the limitations of operating at a loss, a demerit is unavoidable. The problem is having to constantly fine tune the balance in order to do the least harm. And yet even that is a self-appointed right and responsibility in lack of anything else.
Proprietary products.
I am a big fan of free & open source, and I believe as much as possible should be open source, especially the essential ones, but at the same time, people need to get paid.
There should be a system that pays for producing value to all life. Something bigger than UN.
I'm a very big fan.
I know this is said a lot, but it clearly needs to be said again. The "Free" in FOSS means "Freedom" not "Gratis". You can sell FOSS. You can make money off of FOSS. People do it all the time.
But it is more difficult - by definition, anyone can just fork what you are selling and sell it themselves cheaper or free. Of course there is value in customer service, maintenance, hosting, etc. and those can be sold, but the actual code is tougher. Some projects bypass it by having proprietary add-ons or versions, since the open part itself is hard to monetize.
I oppose violence. There are some people who cause so much harm that I wish they'd die. I don't wish for violence to occur, but I wouldn't be sad if it happened and I had nothing to do with it.
The systems allow people to do harm, we need to violently oppose them.
Jeff Bezo may suck as a person, but capitalism is designed to make people like him as the ruling class. If you don't like it, fight it.
"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure."
- Clarence Darrow
(I thought it was Mark Twain before I looked it up for the wording)
Clarence Darrow
Had to look him up to see why I recognized the name. Ah'm offended that you thank Ah'm a monkey! Ah'm takin' you ta court! Legend.
I think prohibition is a massive failure of a policy and bullshit moral war and that everything about drugs would be safer and better if they were easily available to whoever seeks them.
However, I know from experience when you're desperate and not well that you'll reach for anything and this can often have severe, predictable collateral consequences for those around someone with maladaptive drug use.
Also people are generally dumb as fuck with drugs and we've all been there. Like, the stakes can be much higher with them involved and life is already basicaly a meat-grinder so I worry about people's abillity to learn to use responsibly and persevere or operate functionally in often deeply problematic home and work environments when its infinitely complicated by various random substances that can become lighter fuel for massive self-destruction and harm to others
Death penalty
On one hand, I don't believe capital punishment has any place in civilized society.
On the other, there are some in-human people (serial killers mainly, but including e.g. CEOs who have caused thousands of deaths to increase profits), where it just seems a waste of everyone's time, to lock them away in a cell for decades. Some people are just completely beyond rehabilitation, and if they are proven guilty with 99.9+% certainty, what's the point of locking then up and waiting for old age to do the job?
Good luck getting that CEO in a court room
In order to get 99.9% certainty, 1) you are saying you are willing to have one in a thousand death penalties against innocents, and 2) that requires a system made of people to do their job correctly 99.9% of the time. I dont think there is a job on earth that people in a large group can do that well.
It is significantly cheaper to keep someone in prison for life than the death sentence process.
The problem with the death penalty is largely down to potential miscarriages of justice.
What if they get the wrong person and some innocent is put to death? Do you really want the state to have that sort of power over its citizens?
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