The customer has huge impact, powers-that-be rely on manipulating the gusto of the customer, advertising, seducing etc.

I hope we outgrow our self endangering but I'm afraid it will always be a balancing exercise.
Not failing is not supported by nature at large. Both natural and artificial intelligence comprises a ton of fails along the way, there is no existing without. On that bases and on the risk of being called a whitewasher I tend to put into perspective the humans-are-guilty tendency.

gotta get out of the convenience lifestyle, which was advertised since the 1950's, post-WWII.
Get back to a more DIY ethic, featuring self-sustainability. Conveniences brought about wastefulness and apathy. I had been brooding over this for the past couple years, and have seriously curbed my wasteful spending. I don't frequent large franchises, and I support local small businesses. My reasoning is oligopolies rely on other oligopolies for distribution. I'd rather deny them the money, and give money to the people who actually care about people, and sustainable business.

To me, a mixed-economy system is ideal...when gov't does their part in protecting consumers (and the environment) from corporate corruption. But as you can already see, politicians are bought out, and the gov't is corrupted too.

Exactly about advertising. I’ve had quite a time over the last couple of years healing the programming from the advertisement industry. Like deodorant and perfumes and cologne for example. These days it’s the general assumption it seems that a person must wear deodorant, or that they need some fragrance to attract a mate. So much so that many humans no longer attract each other naturally. I was thinking not long ago that perhaps that’s one reason why there’s so many divorces and so many children grow up with single parent homes. People attract mates with smells which cover there naturalness, while natural human odors apparently contain pheromones which signal compatibility.. There’s all sorts of examples like that in modern life.

And the irony is that comfort is killing us.

In modern industrialised societies, the life expectancy is way above that of more primitive or poorer societies. But i personally believe that the great benefit of comforts provided by modern societies is only, that it helps the body and mind to recuperate from rough experiences, from exertion.

But we still need those rough experiences and exertion. If we replace exertion with comfort, it no longer contributes to our good health. And then comfort only kills.

Some recent news I thought was relevant to the discussion:

Amazon Workers Strike Over Virus Protection

It's likely nothing will come of this but it'll be interesting to see if it gains any momentum at all, and may be worth considering as we decide where to spend our money in the coming weeks/months. Amazon is one of the largest employers in the United States and the most highly valued company on earth, despite not paying any corporate income tax for the last 2 years. Although to be fair they did pay a whopping 1.2% of the $14 billion they made in 2019...

While we should absolutely encourage eachother to flex our buying power as much as possible, I'm also of the opinion that the scope of the problems some of you bring up require much larger systemic responses from around the world... something I don't see happening anytime soon. If it were as simple as buying green/locally we would've saved the world back in 2008 when farmers markets became trendy and everyone started changing their lightbulbs (that's a joke lol). The fact is that a very small percentage of people and corporate interests are directly responsible for the existential threats facing our time (runaway climate change and rampant ecological devastation, growing wealth inequality, expanding militarism, etc...), and it's in their best interests to continue business-as-usual. There's only so much we can do as consumers to demand change at whatever pace the market is able to provide it without falling in on itself.

I think the economic disruptions we're beginning to see unfold as a result of the pandemic are the closest we'll ever get to the domino effect we need for critical mass to take place. Just from what I'm seeing locally, people who have otherwise been entirely non-political are having real conversations with their neighbors about what it means to survive collectively without relying on the larger economic system. People who've never cared about where their food comes from are scrambling to learn how to grow produce sustainably and for a lot of people. The community garden in my neighborhood has always had empty plots leftover that go unused every year, and yet last I heard they're quickly running out of space as more and more people keep signing up. And while it almost certainly won't happen, ordinary people are talking about indefinitely canceling rent for everyone in the city. I think that's a huge deal.

I honestly don't believe we're going to see the sort of immediate global coordination needed to "win" a more egalitarian society; unfortunately I don't think humans get to have a Disney ending to our story. But as crises like this become more commonplace we will be forced to adapt at the local level, and humans happen to be great at adapting. My hope is that we'll develop more resilient and sustainable communities that may lack many of the creature comforts we enjoy now, but at least keep afloat amidst the fallout of late stage capitalism, or globalization, or rapture, or whatever words your preferred ideology uses to describe the moment we find ourselves stuck in.

TB vaccine in childhood may offer Covid-19 protection



https://www.bloomberg.co...apon-against-coronavirus :



From Forbes:


The original study: https://www.medrxiv.org/...01/2020.03.24.20042937v1

I'm lucky that the country I was born in did / does have a universal TB vaccination program, and everyone receives BCG not just once, but several times at various stages from infancy to early adulthood.

But the country where I currently live doesn't do that.