But my question was why that wouldn’t it be priority number 1. — schopenhauer1

If you get a stone in your shoe, you will remove it right away because it is immediately too uncomfortable. If you can get water somewhere, even if it is inconvenient and maybe not all that clean, one will adapt. If all of the water--pure or putrid--is gone. dried up, one will pull up stakes. People will make many accommodations where putting up with third best is better than nothing.

Life is full of examples, and not trivial ones, of people adjusting to poor conditions--because despite their low quality and inconvenience, they are just passable enough.

People who are trying very hard to earn enough money for food, clothing, shelter, maybe school for their children, and so on, likely do not have a lot of energy left over at the end of the day, Being poor in a poor country is exhausting. Organizing for clean water, good schools, better control of the sewage in the street, better wages (or wages at all), and so on takes more energy than the people have left at the end of the day.

Clean water is something a good government can, should, ought, and must supply to its citizens with the least resources. Alas, many governments are pretty bad. The point is, heavy infrastructure takes top-down effort.

A similar phenomenon has been taking place around cities like Nairobi, Kenya. Kenyans who can no longer make a living as marginal farmers move to an urban center. The built-up and serviced city center isn't designed to absorb new populations. The rural-to-urban transferees put up whatever housing they can, all crowded together. There are, of course, no provisions for fresh water, sewer, paving, drainage, and so on. Why, one might ask, would anybody put up with this? Partly because they didn't have freshwater, sewer, paving, drainage, and so on where they came from, and there are more opportunities in Nairobi, even if one is living in an a very makeshift community.

I grew up in a house with one cold water tap. Hot water had to be heated on the stove. There was one wash bowl (a bowl, not a plumbing fixture), and one toilet for 7 people. No tub. No shower. Was this a great privation? Were we ridiculed at school? No, because more than a few rural families lacked an indoor toilet and had no indoor running water. Did they think it was terrible to live that way? No.

Would I be happy going back to a wash bowl and taking a bath in a galvanized tub with a skimpy amount of water? Of course not. But it's one's recent history that determines whether one is moving up in the world, or not.

The water potability problem — schopenhauer1

I don't know. Why aren't people nice to each other?

Much of Africa, Latin America, and Asia have both water supply and potability problems. Solving these problems for rural and urban areas requires different kinds of solutions -- all involving a great deal of time, effort, and cash.

London started building its big sewer system starting around 1860. New York built its first aqueduct for drinking water around the same time. All that was just a start -- cities all over the world have to work on their water and sewer infrastructure all the time to keep it running,

Randomly responding.

I know almost nothing about Mexico City's water problems or politics, which is no obstacle for offering an opinion on the matter.

No city on earth has perfectly pure water pouring from its pipes. Why isn't everybody sick? Because the locals have developed tolerance for (at least some of) the bacteria, viruses, and other organisms that might be (probably are) in the water. A traveler from outside the US might become mildly ill from water in an American city.

Fresh water, without respect to its cleanliness, is becoming scarcer in many countries around the world, including the US. Why? Heavy use, for one. A lot of water is used for agriculture. Some industries use a lot of water, and water is wasted from leaking distribution pipes. Global warming is reducing the supply of fresh water in many parts of the world.

Were I traveling to Mexico City, I might bring some iodine tablets to drop into a pitcher of tap water for brushing and rinsing. For larger amounts of water, say 5 gallons, a little calcium hypochlorite would do the trick.

Why doesn't Mexico do something about the water?

Cost, for one. Fresh water, and its flip side--sewage--are expensive infrastructure to build, maintain, and operate. The cleaner the water and the better the sewage treatment, the higher the cost. About 9 million people live in Mexico City, so...

Efficient Effective and Persistent Effort are required to solve large urban infrastructure problems. Perhaps the 3 Es are somewhat lacking.

First World Countries suffer the water problems too. Up until the 1980s, the metropolitan Twin Cities area had combined storm and sanitary sewers. Fine during dry weather. When it rained a lot, the combined sewers overflowed into the Mississippi River--shit and all. States downstream -- particularly Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois found this annoying, and sued to force the cities to separate the sewers. It took a decade and a lot of digging, but the sewers were separated and water quality below the Twin Cities was improved.

Calculate how many toilets the water for New Orleans has passed through. Still, the water in NOLA is pretty clean.

Mexico will clean up their water as soon as they solve the cartel problem.

More like YouTube's vinyl collection; I first heard the song on the Prairie Home
Companion. There is, though, a pile of titles, jokes, and quotes waiting for just the right occasion. I want to use as many as possible before I die, which could be any day now.

Worse than Milwaukee? Lord. Though the UK is having problems for sure, thanks to Brexit. According to a 50+ year old National Lampoon thought piece, Deteriorate.

Take heart in the deepening gloom
That your dog is finally getting enough cheese.
And reflect that whatever fortune may be your lot,
It could only be worse in Milwaukee.

Donald Trump stepped out of the pages of the National Lampoon, not knowing he was a bad joke.

Very good! There's a chronic shortage of good soviet jokes.

Seemingly, as you are the only person who addressed the OP's sentiments about Soviet styled central managers, then I just wanted to say, that the importance of well qualified managers in any society has been something that has concerned the elite of any nation for a long time. — Shawn

The State of Minnesota, which prides itself on efficient and effective administration, was defrauded of nearly $250,000,000 (a quarter billion) by a group of Somali mafioso operators who recognized weaknesses in a state agency (Education) charged with managing a large pot of Covid 19 money. A lot of the money was intended to provide food for children and families.

By setting up fake programs, fake budgets, fake food purchases, and fake beneficiaries, the group walked off with truck loads of cash. The cash ended up in the hands of various luxury goods sellers and real estate agents. During a recent trial of several of the 100+ defendants, the defense misused the names and addresses of the otherwise anonymous jury members, and a bag of $100,000 in cash was offered to a juror for a "not guilty" vote. That added crime is under FBI investigation. To Minnesota's credit, the juror called 911 to report the attempted bribe.

Where were the presumably competent state accountants and State agency managers who let a big hunk of cash run through their fingers like shit through a tin pipe?

The trials are returning a lot of guilty verdicts to date, but as far as I know, no heads have rolled at the Minnesota Department of Education, yet.

If basic human needs for all human beings in a given society can be fulfilled from very little human work, the work being taken over by machines, then what drives the need for further work from those human beings? — Metaphysician Undercover

An excellent question!

We haven't reached the point yet where machines perform all of the labor necessary to meet human needs. We have, however, passed the point where machines (powered machines, automation, even robots and computer-operated machines) and human labor can produce a substantial surplus of what we need. We could significantly reduce human labor (but not eliminate it at this point). I do not have a figure in mind. For discussion purposes, let's say we could reduce human labor by at least 20%.

There is no end to what human beings want; let's stick to needs.

At this point, human beings continue to seek paid work because of the general rule those who do not work do not eat. Or at least, they don't eat very well.

The simplified way of looking at an economy is that workers are hired by capitalists to produce goods and receive a paycheck. The paycheck is used to buy what the worker and his family need to survive. (Consumption is something close to 3/4 of the American economy.) If workers are not needed to produce, then there is no paycheck for workers to buy food, clothing, and shelter.

In this simplified view, the unnecessary worker and his unnecessary family are totally screwed. However, so is the capitalist. If there are no consumers, to whom does he sell what the machines now produce?

One solution is for the state to provide an income that is not tied to previous labor--maybe $10,000 a year for a couple (seems low to me; pick your own figure). With this payment, the couple buy what they need. The producers receive an income to operate their factories. The "compulsion" or irrational drive to work for one's needs might still be present. Perhaps workers will find jobs producing for infinite wants but not needs. IMHO, that is an untenable basis for operating society -- it's not sustainable within the search to halt or slow global warming, and our infinite wants are already an environmental death trap.

Some authors have speculated that, given complete automation, a large share of workers will become obsolete / redundant / unemployed / unnecessary / a nuisance. Then what?

There must be some innate aspect of men -hormonal or otherwise, that means gay guys are less likely to have a strict monogamous lifelong relationship. — Benj96

An evolutionary aspect is that males in many species have lower reproduction costs than females. Caring for offspring may require many months of effort. Another evolutionary aspect is that in many species males can mate with successive partners, while females tend to cease mating after fertilization. Our primate relatives may be quite disreputably (or admirably) promiscuous, depending on one's POV.

Whatever evolution has to say, humans need (and like) to have lasting, loving relationships with others. That said, humans also like to have sexual adventures and novel excitements--both, if possible. Social norms, mores, customs, rules, and regulations try to apply the brakes on said sexual adventures and novel excitements, for the sake of the children, motherhood, community, and the State. For the most part, all that works reasonably well.

In modern societies (post 1875, say) where immigration, lots of population movement, new technologies, social disruption, and so on resulted in looser societal controls and more atomization, some individuals found themselves outside settled community and were thus able to pursue whatever desires they had. Rates of prostitution rose rapidly. The notorious saloons of the prohibition movement were another result.

Unfettered social rules made it possible for gay men to meet and mate outside the palisades of social control. A subculture of promiscuous sex followed, and flourished when and where possible. "Possible" was governed by how much effort a given police force was willing to expend on suppressing this sub-culture. So, this subculture was not usually wide open and public, but kept a low profile and carried on its activities wherever it was possible.

Urban environments are favored places for cultural innovation, invention, sexual adventures, and novel experiences. So with gay male culture. Besides, there aren't enough gay men per square mile of prairie, farm, and forest to provide for partners, let alone promiscuity. Consequently, gay men tend to move toward larger urban centers -- along with any other mobile people who want more opportunities to succeed in life.

I believe a fixed percentage of men are born gay. It's not a large cohort--maybe 2% or 3%. Nature does its part, but then culture decides how gayness will or will not be expressed. Many people in Uganda, for example, believe that homosexuality does not exist there. In that context, expression of gayness is going to be very muted, for self-protection. Kampala, Uganda -- a city of 1.5 million, might offer more opportunity for expression. However, in a country where homosexual activity is a newly defined capital crime (life imprisonment or death for "aggravated homosexuality"), it won't be very open there, either.

There are costs to living outside the security of marriage and family, but there are certainly costs to living within marriage, as well.

There's a song about that!

Developing inoculation and a vaccine for a major infectious disease killer was a very good thing. Also very good were public health strategies which deployed the vaccine in the most effective and efficient manner, so that smallpox was eradicated in 1977. The approach was vaccinating the circle of contacts surrounding each new case of smallpox. As the years passed, there were fewer and fewer cases, till finally, the last one.

I was vaccinated for smallpox I'm 1964 -- still a somewhat routine thing then.

Note: The US and Russia both hold samples of the variola virus that causes smallpox. Will the virus ever escape its deep-frozen storage vials?

Yes it was. Fascism is certainly among the highest scorers in any corpse counting contest.

For the love of Janice, is no one going to say, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose"?

The soviet experience of communism, such as it was, was no more an 'experiment' than our 'experiment' in democracy, such as it is. Which is to say, they were both altogether in earnest.

People have busily tabulated the flaws of both the Soviet Union and the United States (and numerous other countries) so I don't need to do that. You all have your own preferred list; so do I.

with central managers being coal workers or shoe salesmen, then it wouldn't seem hard to conclude that the whole endeavor would have failed. — Shawn

They had shoe salesmen in the Soviet Union? Why was I not informed?

Look, there's nothing about shoe salesmen or coal workers which prohibits them from being good managers, but various revolutionary sources assign workers managerial tasks only as they become educated and experienced enough to be effective managers. Motivated shoe and coal workers can acquire managerial skills on the job and in classrooms. I know American workers who, though lacking BAs and MBAs, have the talent and experience to be great managers. The higher in the organization one goes, the more that is expected. We all know professional managers, with Harvard MBAs to boot, who should or will or did get the boot.

Corpse counting is tricky, so there is that. Just off the cuff, I'll grant that communistic and authoritarian regimes have an outstanding record of killing people who got in the way. Perhaps capitalistic, democratic-ish nations and empires have have crappier figures for millions of dead victims, but I am pretty certain that the figures are high enough so that we will not be too embarrassed.

One could even say that great enterprises like revolution, colonialism, imperialism, communism, capitalism, and so on generally entail breaking trainloads of eggs on the way to the grand soufflé.

"Freedom", like Truth, Goodness, Evil, Beauty, etc. is one of those grand concepts that are often deployed but damned hard to pin down.

In a world where there are many constraints imposed by physics, biology, culture, politics, law, other people, etc., "freedom" is clearly constrained from the getgo. Perhaps it is more productive to identify small spheres of activity in which we are "free" to / from / and of per @Vera Mont. I am, presumably, free to respond to your post, or not. I am not free of a lifetime of hearing freedom defined in various ways. I am not sure whether or not I am free from a compulsion to talk about freedom.

Better to be a sad Socrates than a smug swine — 180 Proof

John Stuart Mill said in an essay titled A PIG, A FOOL, AND SOCRATES: It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.

That's not quite as pithy as your version.

The underlying observation of Solipsism is that we only ever experience Sensory Data. — Treatid

You are underestimating sensory data.

If you are relaxing at the beach, eyes closed, listening to the waves, day dreaming... and somebody dumps a bucket of ice water on you, that's a very compelling wash of sensory data. Or, if you wade out into the water and a shark bites your leg off, that's another compelling experience of sensory data. If you have enough pennies to dine at a really fine restaurant, you will have one course after another of splendid sensory data.

Your senses have evolved over 600 million years of contact with the harsh sensory data of the world. In the case of ice water, shark bite, and fine food, it seems like you are in pretty direct contact with objective reality.

Your mind isn't in direct contact, but your body is.

I'm reminded of the Gom Jabbar test in Dune: — punos

This film depicts the scene and the characters from the book the way I imagined it. Always a plus.

Dogs seem to be able to suppress desires -- like not lunging forward to grab the treat dangling in front of it until an OK is registered. For sure, not an ability the Bene Gesseret would find interesting, but a capacity in animals upon which we built (in evolutionary time).

What a relief! There is nothing wrong with your eyeballs -- the problem is behind them.

Riffing on @punos...

There is such a thing as muscle memory. While I type this, I do not -- cannot -- control my fingers consciously. In the same way, I have difficulty fitting my bicycle lock into its holder IF I look at it while perform the task. My arm and hand muscles know how to do this; visual information gets in the way.

If you use your phone a lot, you are using muscle memory to touch the various 'points' on the screen that result in actions. Having 3 home screens complicates the task. Points that deliver one result on screen 3 won't do the same thing on screen. You know that already.

I am not a heavy mobile phone user, but I also have 3 screens. Being an occasional user, I have to look at the screen to navigate and touch the right points.

Precisely coordinated eye/hand actions, or coordinating two separate actions on an object (sliding the screen right or left and touching point 'x') is not a sure-fire thing--as the video shows.

Fortunately for all of us, there is no risk of you launching nuclear missiles by touching the wrong app icon.

Any performance can usually be improved. I suggest you slow down (at the cost of semi-seconds).

1 Practice picking up the phone and determining which screen you are on. Focus. (A semi-second?)
2. Practice sliding the screen WITHOUT touching the app icon automatically. In other words, suppress the automatic action. (This may be slightly painful. You will survive.)
3. Visually confirm that you are looking at the desired screen. (<1/2 second)
4. Touch the desired icon,

Rearranging the icons would help you slow down (again costing you a second or two). Or, maybe only the most important icons should be on screen 1. You can afford to slow certain actions in order to achieve more accurate results.

Some athletes have improved performance by visualizing how they carry out a given move, like pitching a ball. The visualize themselves carrying out the action perfectly. This, alone, isn't going to make a huge difference, but it can help improve performance along with actual practice.

Happily, your mobile phone and you will have a long and happier relationship.

We exist within a simulation, and as it happens the software has developed glitches. There is nothing the occupants of a simulation can do about the software/hardware.

Just joking.

On the one hand, there is the function of the eyeballs. Various factors can affect the way the images are received by the retina and then transmitted. On the other hand, there is the way the visual cortex in the brain processes the signals from the eyes, Other parts of the brain are involved in responding to vision (or hearing, taste, touch, smell, proprioception, balance, and so on).

That's about the extent of my understanding. Do you have perceptual aberrations (if that's what you are experiencing) in other contexts? Are you under the influence of any drugs -- prescribed or otherwise? Are your visual experiences problematic for you (like, it interferes with visual tasks besides the cell phone problem)?

As noted above, all this is in the bailiwick of ophthalmologists. You could make an appointment to have your vision checked out.

Given the wholesale slaughter caused by trolleys, banning them is way overdue. Also ban fat people, bridges over trolleys, and switches. If there are no trolleys, no one will be run over. No fat man will be thrown from the bridge to save 5 thin people. Promiscuous travel in the city will be sharply curtailed with resulting gains in public health. Best of all, the creative destruction of the hazardous trolleys will open the opportunity for Uber and Lyft.

were you as monogamous as your typical hetero male/female couple — Hanover

I was not as monogamous as heterosexual-male/female couples are supposed or alleged to be.

My question then is whether actual lesbian behavior is as promiscuous as man on man affection — Hanover

My impression is that lesbians are generally not as promiscuous as gay men have tended to be. However, my information is now quite dated. The lesbians on Grey's Anatomy were certainly quite frisky. I haven't been out mixing in the gay community for 35 years. Did legalized marriage change behavior? Perhaps. The broader culture changed as well. "Gay Liberation" was partly a consequence of the '60s, rolling on into the 70s. AIDS brought the free-for-all up short by the mid '80s.

Have social / sexual norms grown more conservative over the last 40 years? It seems like it, but if more conservative society isn't more stable. If anything, society seems less stable now. Does instability lead to more cautious social behavior?

The physical environment in which sexuality is enacted has changed. Places that facilitated promiscuous sexual activity -- like bath houses, police-free parks, cruisy locations, etc. have been eliminated in many cities. The gay bar business isn't as lively as it used to be, owing to the increased use of social media.

There were about 1.2 million same-sex couple households in the United States in 2021, according to recently released Census Bureau data.

Roughly 710,000 of the same-sex couple households were married and about 500,000 were unmarried.

That seems like a lot, but if 4% of the population are gay or lesbian, then that is only 1.1 million who coupled and/or married out of 10.3 million over the age of 18. Inquiring minds would like to know what all the 9 million single gays and lesbians are doing.

"Straight men aren't promiscuous like gay men because straight women don't let them." she said.

Women, families, mortgages, careers, churches, etc. all tend to tame straight male behavior. Gay marriage, mortgages, careers, churches, etc. tends to do the same thing for gay male behavior.

Men who do not live within the usual sex-limiting social structures can be more promiscuous. For that matter, men and women who do not live within the usual social structures of marriage, mortgages, careers, churches, and so on are perhaps freer to be political outsiders as well.

Humans are not naturally and deeply civilized. "Civilized behavior" is a hard-won achievement. Loosen the bonds, and we dispense with inconvenient trappings of civilization. Promiscuous gun use, promiscuous sex. In both cases there are resulting fatalities.

Parsnip and rhubarb combo? I don't believe I've encountered that particular bouquet.

I am less willing to be patient with slipshod artists than I used to be.

Compare these two items by William de Kooning and Louise Nevelson. Both were in a large show of Abstract Expressionists at one of the Guggenheim museums:





They both are abstract expressionist, but De Kooning applied paint to canvas--quickly, it appears. Nevelson's assembled objects then painted them black. I wasn't there when the works were done, but it seems like Louise Nevelson applied more effort and thought to the work than did de Kooning. Perhaps De Kooning labored mightily to choose just the precise colors and brush strokes to express "Villa Borghese". Perhaps, like the elephant, he just labored mightily and brought forth a gnat.

Nevelson's Night evokes more response from me. The monochrome shapes and forms are definite, deliberate. Not so much de Kooning's summer day color scheme.

I've stood in front of a number of Pollock's works, and I found them to be reasonably compelling -- even knowing how he went about producing them (it wasn't a painfully skilled process). The thing is, one of them is enough. Several square yards of smeared paint doesn't need endless repetition, while one might enjoy many different paintings of mountains, or a particular biblical scene, or a classical topic, or a rodeo -- whatever.

It can be criticized as a television program. Television programs have their own separate criteria to consider them good or bad. — Vera Mont

The way television works (and not just television) is that the real product is access to the audience's eyeballs, for which advertisers pay what they consider 5 million pairs of eyeballs worth. Programming is the bait.

"Good programs" mean large audiences (eyeballs) and profit for the platform (CBS, Netflix, whatever). Bad programs have paltry audiences and little income. Is the bait good? Well, the mice go for the cheese in the trap whether it's fine cheese from France or it's Velveeta. Now there is a difference between Great Performances on PBS (high quality cheese) and schlock on the networks and cable (Velveeta). But networks don't want to feed the masses with high quality French cheese. Let them eat caca.

the same thing applies to newspapers. When Google and other systems selling advertising grabbed the eyeballs, the newspapers starting going broke. It didn't make much difference how good the column inches of newsprint were.

But most of the content is not of the show itself, and none of the artistic content is. — Vera Mont

Isn't that true for most programs? Unless the show is entirely scripted for an untalented group of repertory performers, talented performers make it happen, or it doesn't. Whether it's AI or the Tonight Show or SNL, it's the talent that make the show, even when working with scripts. It's the writers, cover artists, and cartoonists that make THE NEW YORKER a great magazine -- not Condé Nast's offices and tons of glossy paper.

No, he wasn't saying that at all. — Baden

I don't think he was declaring all urinals to be art. I don't think his particular urinal is art, and I don't believe that calling something "art" makes it art. All that was his meshuggeneh. Urinals, toilets, sinks, bidets, tubs, and plumbing can be quite interesting, even aesthetically pleasing (ask the Kohler Corporation)

but they are objects whose commercial value and practical utility are the foremost considerations for designer, producer, and consumer. They are not Art, "art", or art.

When one considers bathroom and kitchen fixtures, one wants to know if it will fit, will it hold up under normal or heavy use, does it match the wall, flooring, and other fixtures, how much does it cost, and similar questions. Shoppers don't ask, "What does this toilet mean?" "What is the message of the sink".

Target didn't design its red plastic shopping carts to be art or beautiful. The intention was to underline the Target Brand with the particular shade of red; the logo; the sturdiness of the cart, etc.

A discussion at any company headquarters about logos, stationary, signage, in-store fixtures, advertising, and so on might sound "artistic". "What does our logo MEAN to the public? Is this particular shade of green fashion forward enough or will it be perceived as anachronistic? Does this store sign REALLY distinguish our fine fried food from their greasy crap? Probably a lot of high-sounding imponderables are being tossed around. It's business; it's not art.

there is an objective which "ought" to override the subjective. Should the same apply to art? — ENOAH

I don't know about the "ought" part, but we can apply objective criteria to art if we wish. A program like American Idol involves way too much hype. I'll leave it alone.

Art is produced in large quantities, if one counts everyone who can be said to be "doing art" and a lot of it isn't very good. The performances are not skilled enough, sufficiently prepared and practiced. The works of art are often extremely imitative, derivative, or just plain ripped off in works of 'art' that are "art-like".

All that is why we have critics, curators, museums, performance halls with narrow entrances (so to speak), and so on, sifting out the gold from the crap.

A long time ago, in TV land, anyway, Marcel Duchamp was involved in the creation of an anti-rational, anti-art, proto-Dada cultural movement in New York City. In 1917 he "produced" (purchased) Urinal, a piece of "ready-made" art--in this case, a urinal. Duchamp claims that something is art if someone declares that it is art.

So, nothing too remarkable about declaring American Idol, or any other television program, Art.

Call it "art" if you want. It is, after all, it's a production involving music, movement, a stage, cameras, an audience, and so on.

If it is art, then it can be criticized as art. Is American Idol "good art"?

That's great.

There are presumably 'non-goofy people' who refer to "pregnant persons", "persons with vaginas, cervixes, uterus.", rather than saying an (apparently) unspeakable gendered term like "woman" or "man". Given the tortures that language endures, it is not surprising that some people are confused about pregnancy being natural or disease.

The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of very goofy people at large who ought to be apprehended and returned to school for the basic education they missed during the first round (assuming, of course, that goofy people aren't running the schools).

Don't we all.

The world is full of suffering, inequality, injustice, and death — Truth Seeker

Last things first: death is unavoidable. Sooner or later we all die, along with every other living being.

Suffering: reducible but not eliminable.
Inequality: reducible but not eliminable.
Injustice: reducible but not eliminable.

Why? The world is an unsatisfactory place. Resources, population, good government, favorable weather/climate are unevenly distributed. The absence of tectonic events, disease, pestilence, war, famine, flood, drought, etc. are nice but just can't be counted on. We just never know where disaster will strike next.

There is not enough of the good stuff to go around (decent housing, plentiful food, clean water, good climate, nice weather, proper civil government, education, health care, and so on). The good stuff costs a lot of money (and labor) to produce and maintain. The more people there are in the world and the hotter the world gets, the more likely it is that there will be less to go around in the future.

We can do better, but even meeting a fairly low bar is difficult.

Despite all that, we might as well be upbeat and optimistic.

Welcome to The Philosophy Forum! Not sure, but we have very few participants who are Russian.

This sounds like an AI generated thing. — Paine

I'm not sure what Paine meant, but you are doing the best you can to get over the language barrier. My impression of Google Translate is that the quality of its translation is not always very good.

Slavery was a social arrangement, of course, and a central, critical feature of Southern state societies. It was also a tremendously important part of the American economy -- North and South, both. Roughly 12% of the whole American workforce was slave. The slaves produced about 12% of the nation's output (though a much higher percentage of output in southern states).

Some authors claim that 50% of the economic value of output was slave produced. This is unlikely, because the products slaves produced -- mostly agricultural products -- did not have a high per-pound value. A bale of cotton became much more valuable after it landed in an English mill and was turned into cloth, and more valuable still when the cloth was cut up and sewn into clothes. But all of that did not happen in the south, or in the north either.

The slave economy wasn't isolated in the south. Banks, importers, exporters, insurers, shippers, and so on were located in Philadelphia, New York, Providence, and Boston (and some other northern cities). Southern plantations and companies depended on northern companies for all sorts of financial services.

There was friction between free labor and slave labor systems--mainly between the north and south, but also within the south. Support for slavery was not universal in the south. Support for secession was also not universal in the south.

Reconstruction after the Civil War largely failed. Blacks were subjected to systematic repression after the Civil War until roughly 1970, by which time major civil rights legislation had passed on the federal level, and courts had ruled various forms of segregation unconstitutional. I am white, and have never lived in the south, so I am not in a position to judge what conditions are now from a black person's perspective.

The Southern states had a powerful stake and influence upon Federal policy. — Paine

Indeed they did, and this influence continued long after the Civil War was over. 70 years later, the southern block of senators and congressmen (from formerly slave states--the "solid south") were able to exclude blacks from some of the premier New Deal programs -- particularly housing programs (the FederalHousing Act), Social Security, and Unemployment Insurance. The exclusion of blacks from home purchase programs was explicit. The SS and UI programs excluded farm workers and household help (maids) from coverage. Most blacks worked on farms or as household help.

The post WWII housing programs that enabled millions of Americans to establish a property stake in the suburbs and build family wealth excluded blacks, specifically. Housing programs provided rental housing for blacks. Some of the rental housing was quite good, but within 30 years, the huge urban rental housing projects were in a spiral of deterioration owing to bad rental policies and neglect of maintenance by city housing programs.

Yeah, life is a bitch and then you die.

Oh, sorry. You were perhaps looking for something more uplifting, upbeat, and positive sounding?

Actually, I don't think life is all suffering. Some of it is suffering--more for some people, less for others--but life is also joy and festivity--not all the time for anybody, but once in a while for most people. Life is mostly the reasonably pleasant area mid-stroke of the pendulum's sweep between simply marvelous and fucking awful.

That's as cheery as I can manage. So spend as much time as you can living in the moderately pleasant middle zone.

n the present model, no economy is sustainable, not even if waste were reduced (on the present model, it cannot be eliminated), not even if assets were redistributed — Vera Mont

I agree.

Some people used to think that the potential for universally beneficial economic growth was unlimited. Some very optimistic socialists used to think that.

If a no-growth, steady-state economy is possible, it will have to be conducted at a considerably reduced level. Fewer people, less energy use, less extraction. Strict requirements for sustainable manufacturing and agriculture. Very strong states to enforce the limits, and assure equitable distribution would be required too. Etc.

Ecological / economic / environmental collapse might pave the way to a no-growth economy, but that is not something to hope for. Recovering from the devastation will be immensely difficult, if even possible.

So, it's all just fate or happenstance; we have no control? — Vera Mont

I may have hit the bleak anvil of dark fate too hard. It certainly is the case that millions of ordinary humans do see the long-term positive and negative consequences of past and current practices. Maybe the number is even in the billions. Unfortunately, nobody lives in a democracy of the wise, or even fairly sensible. The world is run by people with great ambition for power and wealth, and they are calling the shots.

An axiom of some UN relief programs is that "famine is a political problem". Many, if not most, famines are caused by very incompetent, corrupt governments. The climate crisis is also a political problem of incompetent and corrupt governments--which includes some of the best ones. The governments of the G6 economies have not been able to meet their own targets for reducing CO2 emissions,

Balance, though, balance... Texas, a state up to its knees in oil and grease, is more enlightened than it looks:

In 2022, Texas produced the equivalent of 31% of the electricity it consumes from solar, wind and geothermal power, compared with just 10% in 2013. Texas ranks 13th for the percentage of power coming from renewables. The first ranked state, Iowa, got 83% of its power from wind and solar last year.

Iowa, the corny state, may be producing 83% of its power from the wind, but it grows a lot of corn that goes into alcohol production as an automobile fuel supplement. Next door, Minnesota is producing about 33% of its power from wind, solar, and hydro (some of which comes from Canada). MN is also growing corn for automotive alcohol. Running cars on a corn/petroleum blend is just stupid, stupid, stupid.

So, mixed bag.

If we wanted badly enough to survive, we'd make a conscious commitment to establish balance. — Vera Mont

When we decided to leave the trees and walk on two legs, we didn't know where that would lead us. When hunter-gatherers started collecting wheat kernels, and using the biggest ones for seed, they didn't know where that would lead them. They didn't know where their first settlements of huts would lead them. They didn't know where devising writing would lead them. Angles, Saxons, and Jutes didn't know where taking over the island of Britannia would lead them (it led to the British Empire).

Our great-great-grandparents didn't know where digging up fossils and turning them into plastic would lead. The next generation didn't know where electricity would lead them. Or the automobile, or television, or computers, or the tens of thousands of unique plastic materials would lead them.

We just aren't 'built' to find something nice and new (polystyrene coffee cups, delicious spring water in plastic bottles, plastic siding for our house, cell phones--you name it) and set it aside for 10 years while we research it's long-term impact on society, the economy, the environment, and older products. No, we seize it and rush it into production--the same way we would do if we came across a delicious fruit in the forest --we'd stand there and eat it till it was all gone.

It isn't that we are stupid or evil; we just are what we are -- smart opportunists who seize the main chance without looking back [edit: or that far forward].

When it comes to the ant and the grasshopper fable, we play the part of the grasshopper. We are less like squirrels which store up food for the winter, and more like rabbits that make no long-term plans when the leaves turn in the fall.

We can't want badly enough to be what we are not. Yes, we are smart enough to see trouble down the line; we just can't hardly avoid it. That's our tragic condition.

What's true of non-entities like myself is also true of the presidents, generals, captains of industry, the super rich, et al. They can't help but be what they are.

most other organisms live in balance with their ecosystem — Vera Mont

Is this because they are committed to live in balance with their ecosystem, or is it that other organisms prevent them from getting the upper hand? That is, the condition of the 'natural balance' is just a stalemate between predator and prey.