You present a false (and somewhat offensive) dichotomy.

Here are some more optimistic ideas. If we reconsidered vehicles, everyone could have access to them when desired. If we reconsidered city layouts, everyone could have a home with desired proximity to others without needing to sacrifice either nature or privacy. If we reconsidered education, medical care and communications infrastructure, they would be universally available and effectively free (indeed, in many places these are already the case). If we reconsidered politics, we could encourage global industry toward environmentally sustainable outcomes without irreversible disaster.

These ideas are beyond delusional (in today's world).

> everyone could have access to [vehicles] when desired

Uber is trying to do this, but has a lot of problems, from unpredictable pricing, surge pricing, long wait times, shitty drivers, chatty drivers (?), seats with puke all over them, ... self-driving cars could solve some, but not all of these problems.

> everyone could have a home with desired proximity to others

No, the reason real estate in e.g. NYC is so expensive is that everybody wants to live there! The only way to fix this is to fundamentally decentralize our economy and education systems, but that's a whole lot more complicated than "city layouts".

> [education, medical care and communications infrastructure] would be universally available and effectively free

Maybe education and communications, but with medical care almost certainly not... The main issue is that medicine doesn't save people's lives, it just prolongs them, and that can always be done better... So fundamentally, the demand for medicine is unlimited, whereas the supply (doctors) is limited, so whatever system of "free and universally available" system you design, there's going to be tradeoffs. Tradeoffs like, "do I fix my teeth or my eyes" and someone is going to have to make that choice. Personally, I'd prefer that to be me (with my money) rather than my government.

It is true, perfection shall remain elusive. You can't please all of the people all of the time. That said, more equitable systems with far higher qualities in terms of environmental impact, resource consumption and sustainability, as well as fundamental service availability are clearly within reach.

You raise a particularly good point about the overall properties of systems for mass medical care, but people don't live forever. Cancer is one answer. Solutions that reduce or delay post-facto treatment with holistic and pre-emptive approaches (better regulation, better education, better diets/life choices) may be another.

These are very optimistic ideas. But good ideas are actionable. Do you have any of those?

Sure. Wikiprojects (admin), cryptocurrency (exchange architect), open source (contributor/maintainer), currently working on kiosk format automated fulfillment of personalized meals directly from fresh ingredients (as an entrepreneur with my own money on the line) to contribute to food safety/security challenges (and hopefully recover costs). What about you?

The one war america fought but never bothered winning. The war on Poverty.

LBJ and the Great Society won the war on poverty in America.

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1205596833692565504

"The economists find that by the standards of LBJ's time, the U.S. poverty rate has dropped from 19.5 % in 1963 to just 2.3% in 2017!!"

If that's not winning, I don't know what is.

That's the beauty (to some) and problem (to others) with the definition of poverty: we keep moving the goalposts/standards.

Because that is not a war and there is no win, poverty is a moving target and it will always be, unless forced equality is imposed to everybody.

I so hate the phrase "war on poverty." It tends to de facto turn poor people into The Enemy in the mind's of far too many people.

That would be another way of lowering the percentage of people living in poverty.

Yes, please, just take us all out and shoot us for our war crimes of failing to be as wildly successful as we would like to be.

(Please don't tell me this needs a sarcasm tag. If you can't tell in this case, then I think it's utterly hopeless.)