this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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There's nothing wrong with what you're saying on a vacuum. The problem is deciding what is actually a problem, and once it's been decided, which one solution out of many possible ones we're actually going to pick.
Is unequality a problem? If it is, up to which degree? Is it a problem that the richest person has four times as much wealth as the poorest person? Is it a problem that the richest person has x100000 times as much wealth as the poorest person? Are we going to solve that through redistribution? Through better public, accessible education? By empowering worker unions? By socializing the means of production in order to prevent capital accumulation?
Once you're perfectly aware of what values you're defending, you can find the most efficient way to let society advance forward according to them. But since not everyone shares the same values, even if everyone was perfectly rational and had access to all information, different people would still defend different solutions. Of course, people's values evolve all the time and everyone is irrational up to some degree, even if we put effort into perfecting our epistemology and use the scientific method to approach as many issues as possibles (which we should nonetheless do), so even that ideal state of things is very, very far away.
Apply the scientifc method. Look at places and times with wide economic disparity. Were/are those good stable places with happy healthy populations, or was it bad. If you decide it's a problem based on evidence, then look at solutions. If you don't have examples, try things out and record the data. What worked and what didn't. Don't let your values bias you. I think that welath inequality is a problem, but I'm willing to listen to thoroughly researched, peer reviewed, data backed conclusions.