Scientists have developed a breakthrough “superfood” for honeybees by engineering yeast to produce the essential nutrients normally found in pollen. In controlled trials, colonies fed this specially designed diet produced up to 15 times more young, showing a dramatic boost in reproduction and overall health. As climate change and modern agriculture reduce the availability of natural pollen, this innovation could offer a practical way to support struggling bee populations.
That is awesome news BUT
The real reason is humanity being a bunch of irresponsible greedy fuckwads, and I fear that this will be used not in the “let’s be less greedy, let’s fix the problems and let’s use this to help the bees” but more as a “woohoo, bee factory farming!” and “W00T, this means we can fuck over bees even more, let’s go!”
Can we please stop it with the greed?
Greed is incentivized both neurologically and economically. You cannot count on all of humanity rewiring their brain. We must destroy the economic incentives and then work on countering the neurological component.
In other words, lets please add wealth caps world wide. If nobody can get richer than, say, 10 million dollars, then things change quickly, and its a relatively simple change to implement
I dont think this is very true. How do you explain that 99.99% of people are super happy living their lives with just enough money to have somewhere to live and pay for food and some vehicle?
To me it seems that we have like 0.0001% of the population being super greedy and mentally ill, and they are the ones being talked about in the media and the ones turning Earth into a shitty place because of their enormous greed and lust for power.
Further, how do you explain that, for most of human history, we haven’t lived in economic systems that reward greed in the way Capitalism does? Saying human beings are neurologically wired to behave in an especially greedy way, under Capitalism, is just recency bias.
Is that urge extent in people? Sure, but so are kindness, generosity, and plenty of other traits that run counter to greed and selfishness. To say that the negative ones incentivized by the economic system we live in are somehow more natural than those others, is nonsense.
100% agree, and its sad that we never get encouraged to think about all the good qualities people actually have also. Almost every single human being here, from 8 billion or so, are happily living in peace with other humans.
People who dont, are world “leaders” , or in prison.
Two issues:
Don’t start thinking that Capitalism started with The Wealth of Nations. Greed has always been there, and it has always been rewarded.
I doubt we can remove the neurological component, let alone without it fucking up. Greed is an abstraction of our old survival instincts since as a general rule the tribe, clan, village or whatever would counter the worst effects. The end goal should be to reimplement those social control mechanisms, what that looks like is probably regulation’s and maybe beating some folks over the head with a 2x4.
Maybe we can steer the neurological component to focus on activity that offers positive benefits to society, like art. Substitute something good for something bad. It just takes a bit of time for the brain to find the satisfaction it used to get from greed in a different behavior, like music, or exercise.
We can always gun for glory through selfless action, still selfish reasons but good results.
Exact same thing I thought. Honey bees are actively harmful for the environment because they outcompete wild bees who are less efficient at pollination whilst being actively exploited for their honey. While improving their diet is certainly a net benefit for the bees, at the end of the day it just reads to me like farmers have more efficient workers to harvest more honey and exploit even more.
explain how one would we or us stop it with the greed
wealth caps
world wide…
Yeah, it will be hard for the rich to accept that, but its better and easier than switching to a completely different system like communism.
Just continue with everything the same, with a whole bunch of tax brackets, but after 10 million dollar networth is reached, 100% of your income goes to taxes until you’re below the threshold again.
This is a fairly simple rule to implement with huge consequences. Nobody can become a billionaire anymore. Nobody can hoard wealth, wealth will spread to the poor now as well, feeding a middle class that was starved, to become the biggest group
Governments now get a huge income stream that they can use for free education, free housing, free healthcare, universal basic income.
Since nobody can become insanely rich anymore, you will have less people push for the get rich quick schemes. Companies will cheat way less because why? It won’t get you any extra income if you hit the limit already, so why would you? Nobody is insanely rich, so nobody is insanely powerful either, so no more trumps, no more musks. Greed will actually stop if you put a hard limit on how much you can be worth.
Prices of goods would go down to normal again. Can’t own a 100M dollar home if your max worth is 10M. A family of 2 could potentially own a 20M home, but they would have no money left for anything else, like food. Art will once again be priced normally and most art can return to the museums for everyone to enjoy.
Big-ass billion dollar company? Well, that requires at least 100 share holders, but they would not be able to own anything besides that company because again, hard caps. Company shares rise? Great! Now some of your shares will go to the government because hard caps. You don’t want to lose money just because the shares go down, so you will likely share your shares over multiple companies. So you’ll end up with more smaller companies with many many more owners and shareholders. No more single venture capital company that can buy up companies to then shred them out.
I could go on for a while, but you get the picture.
I would say that 10M is much, still, I would even go for a cap on 5M.
It’s a bit extreme, but I say we kill all billionaires and then fairly redistribute their cash and see what happens.
If there’s no real change in greed then kill the top 0.1% of wealth hoarders and see what happens.
At some point the greed will have to stop.
Bioengineer some humans to not be greedy.
Some humans because you can opt out, or you can choose it for your designer baby. Then there is a control and an experimental group.
The mad scientist in me is dying to see whether behaviors with moral connotations (greed) confer an advantage for survival.
Eugenics, btw
Funny thing, seems like all the billionaires are all for eugenics.
In fact they are pro anything that brings them more wealth and power whether it be destroying the planet or destroying the human race (Thiel) or destroying the night sky (Musk)
licks fingers and wets eyebrows
Hahah! An unethical study to quantify the survival value of ethics! Isaac Newton would agree that experiments are a necessity!
An economst’s natural experiment, hehe! oh Adam Smith, when does self interest become greed?
Are you okay?
waow
Our technology is great, but our policy is horrendous. We need to change our politics to change the world for the better