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I will seriously never understand the imbalance of resources spent and the bills and laws passed in the name of "fighting terrorism" and "think of the children"

I will seriously never understand the imbalance of resources spent and the bills and laws passed in the name of "fighting terrorism" and "think of the children" which affects less people every day than pretty much every alternative way to suffer and die. It doesn't make any sense. We spent trillions of dollars every year making intelligence and the military war machine one of the largest shadow economies in the world... We could pretty much solve every other form of death and illness with that money in less time, we could raise everyone in the country out of poverty with that money so they could stand on their own two feet. We could educate those that need education so they could get jobs and stand on their own without the need for Government handouts. So what the fuck. Some days though, all you can do is throw your hands in the air in resignation and say "Fuck it, you're all crazy! You cause problems and you spend billions of dollars to band-aid the symptoms, just like you do with your medical system." The underlying cancer is this mentality. We'll do what the fuck we want and treat people the way we fucking want because it makes us rich and then we'll spend billions to deal with the symptoms of this dumbass behaviour. I hope the riches are worth it because the behaviour is (and I don't treat this word lightly, nor do I mean it with any disrespect whatsoever to those that unfairly get labeled with it) retarded.

abecedarius 10y ago
Yes, it would be stupid as a policy for the common good. But the common good is not really anyone's job. You know that XKCD comic about standards? ("Now you have n+1 of them.") Modern governance after a few centuries of evolution is like that times a million, and this misadapted collective decision-making is the great crisis of our time, a much bigger deal than climate change, for example. (If we could collectively think clearly and coordinate then we'd see climate change as a serious problem needing both immediate action and longer-term research and technology development, but probably well within our power.) Programmers might help by making better tools for thinking and coordinating. Perhaps with a collective IQ boost for enough of us we can avoid the worst.
noir_lord 10y ago
Humans are absolutely terrible at assessing risk probabilities. People worry about flying when stastically they are far more likely to die on the drive to the airport. They worry about terroism when they are 50lbs overweight. ...and on and on, You'd rather hope the government would be better at assessing these risks in terms of a policy framework but they aren't they appeal to whatever the papers are focussing on and subscribe to the "we must do something, this is something ergo we must do it" school of thought. It's worrying how far we haven't come.
- balabaster 10y ago
  I always find myself saying the same about humans... usually when I'm sitting on an airplane: It concerns me that in approximately 195,000 years of human history (arguably), this is as far as we've managed to come in terms of intra-planetary travel. It boggles the mind that with the combined ingenuity of the human race, over a period of 195,000 years, we haven't come up with anything more efficient than airplanes. I find it quite pathetic honestly. I expected better of us. It's quite disappointing really. We wage pointless wars to extract resources from countries we don't want to negotiate fairly with in the name of riches and greed and frankly we've got better things we could and should be doing.
  - noir_lord 10y ago
    In fairness to humanity, We've been around for 195,000 years but we only hit the critical mass of modern technology in the last few centuries, progress since then has been incredibly rapid against pretty much any natural timescale. So it's more like 194,700 years of stumbling around tripping over our feet and 300 years of actually making progress. We went from steam engines to the moon in <300 years. Yes I'm aware ancient civilizations had made progress and fell back but nothing like the civilizations we have now in an absolute sense, it's really fair to compare a Xeon processor to anything that went before.
  - rubberstamp 10y ago
    Its very possible humans may have been advanced enough within last 30000 years and could've nearly killed itself off the face of earth. We may be descendants of some tribe living in very primitive conditions who started with old generation tech artifacts. Could we have built pyramid with tech we(the current humans) had a thousands of years ago? I think those tech and knowledge has been looted/confiscated by people(us) who invented looting and overtime got destroyed as they didn't have the know-how required to operate or maintain it. Old technologically advanced humans may have never researched on to build weapons as there was no need for it until someone invented killing and looting them, but by then there wasn't enough time to develop defensive weapons. So theyall died and got there tech destroyed and looted by us. We may have only recently within last 2000 years started to develop tech.

abecedarius 10y ago

Yes, it would be stupid as a policy for the common good. But the common good is not really anyone's job. You know that XKCD comic about standards? ("Now you have n+1 of them.") Modern governance after a few centuries of evolution is like that times a million, and this misadapted collective decision-making is the great crisis of our time, a much bigger deal than climate change, for example. (If we could collectively think clearly and coordinate then we'd see climate change as a serious problem needing both immediate action and longer-term research and technology development, but probably well within our power.) Programmers might help by making better tools for thinking and coordinating. Perhaps with a collective IQ boost for enough of us we can avoid the worst.

noir_lord 10y ago

Humans are absolutely terrible at assessing risk probabilities. People worry about flying when stastically they are far more likely to die on the drive to the airport. They worry about terroism when they are 50lbs overweight. ...and on and on, You'd rather hope the government would be better at assessing these risks in terms of a policy framework but they aren't they appeal to whatever the papers are focussing on and subscribe to the "we must do something, this is something ergo we must do it" school of thought. It's worrying how far we haven't come.

balabaster 10y ago
I always find myself saying the same about humans... usually when I'm sitting on an airplane: It concerns me that in approximately 195,000 years of human history (arguably), this is as far as we've managed to come in terms of intra-planetary travel. It boggles the mind that with the combined ingenuity of the human race, over a period of 195,000 years, we haven't come up with anything more efficient than airplanes. I find it quite pathetic honestly. I expected better of us. It's quite disappointing really. We wage pointless wars to extract resources from countries we don't want to negotiate fairly with in the name of riches and greed and frankly we've got better things we could and should be doing.
- noir_lord 10y ago
  In fairness to humanity, We've been around for 195,000 years but we only hit the critical mass of modern technology in the last few centuries, progress since then has been incredibly rapid against pretty much any natural timescale. So it's more like 194,700 years of stumbling around tripping over our feet and 300 years of actually making progress. We went from steam engines to the moon in <300 years. Yes I'm aware ancient civilizations had made progress and fell back but nothing like the civilizations we have now in an absolute sense, it's really fair to compare a Xeon processor to anything that went before.
- rubberstamp 10y ago
  Its very possible humans may have been advanced enough within last 30000 years and could've nearly killed itself off the face of earth. We may be descendants of some tribe living in very primitive conditions who started with old generation tech artifacts. Could we have built pyramid with tech we(the current humans) had a thousands of years ago? I think those tech and knowledge has been looted/confiscated by people(us) who invented looting and overtime got destroyed as they didn't have the know-how required to operate or maintain it. Old technologically advanced humans may have never researched on to build weapons as there was no need for it until someone invented killing and looting them, but by then there wasn't enough time to develop defensive weapons. So theyall died and got there tech destroyed and looted by us. We may have only recently within last 2000 years started to develop tech.