The most difficult problems in life are sometime political, not physics or technical challenges.

Not sure why you are getting downvoted, obviously you are right.

Now, the political problem reflects us as people. If people wanted the problem solved, politicians would find a way to solve it for the sake of their own interest.

The way I understand it is that most people are really selfish in that they only care about themselves and maybe family and friends.

And it doesn't get any better because people are more and more focusing on themselves and getting cut off from community.

The first job is buy-in. When a society collectively chooses to solve some difficult problem, it gets solved, no matter how hard it is. Apollo program or homelessness.

Back in reality, the majority of society was opposed to the Apollo program (even after the successful landing support was only lukewarm) and I have no difficulty thinking of difficult problems with enormous societal buy-in and vast funding that proved intractable.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/moond...

When was the last time somebody stepped on the moon? If that's success criteria, we just need to stick all the homeless in a hotel for a night, declare the problem solved, then kick them out in the morning.

It depends on the kind of problem. An engineering challenge, even a really difficult one, is something that can be attacked with effort. Changing human beings is far far more difficult. Perhaps impossible on timescales less than generations.

We’ve had societies that really wanted to stop people from using mind altering substances, agree with that goal or not it was something that multiple societies choose to try to solve and mostly they failed. The ones that partly succeeded were the ones that used heinously brutal methods.

I don't buy it. Apollo almost failed many times by administrative churn and lack of public support. Apollo was successful because of passionate engineers working on the problem not by public support

Their passion helped, but it consumed 4.4% of the US federal budget at peak and might well have been cancelled if JFK hadn’t been assassinated — for basically the same reason no human has returned there since Apollo or gone to Mars at all, and for the same reason Space Station Freedom was cut back and morphed into the ISS — or if NASAs work hadn’t been deliberately spread through most states to make it a pork barrel for senators looking to boost their own state using the Federal budget.

It’s basically only now that we have a new space race run by absurdly rich space-nerds that we don’t need active public support, merely that the criticism is limited to grumbling.

The engineers did not pay for the project or their salaries. And certainly they weren't working for free or even under market rate.

The salaried engineers worked way more hours than a 9-5 and were not paid overtime AFAIK

Which is almost every company I have worked for for the past 20 years.

Listen, these guys were very good, dedicated engineers.

But to say they did this without public support is stupid, because they were paid for from public money in the first place.

The public support comes in many ways. Just because some people didn't like the idea doesn't mean there was no public support.

The ultimate public support is the government, which is officials elected by... wait for it... THE PUBLIC.

> The ultimate public support is the government, which is officials elected by... wait for it... THE PUBLIC.

Well if that's your definition of "public support", Apollo just barely had enough to succeed. The Lyndon B. Johnson Administration that came after JFK was actively defunding Apollo and trying to dismantle the space program.

Back to my original point, society didn't "collectively decide" to make moon landings happen. JFK made a few bold claims to boost his public image against Russia and his successors tried to dismantle said space program. If it weren't for the tenacious engineers and leaders at NASA, moon landings would not have happened. In other words, if the engineers/leaders at NASA were not passionate enough, LBJ would have succeeded at dismantling Apollo.

Or cancer! Oh oops

5-year survival rates have improved — for some cancers — in adolescents and young adults https://sph.unc.edu/sph-news/5-year-survival-rates-have-impr...

Cancer is many things rather than one, and some of those things have been solved.

So's homelessness.

Cancer is a hugely complex problem. It is not a single attack vector like a virus.

But we are still making great progress on it, just think that the best vaccines for Covid came as fruit of cancer research.

Certainly half of it is. Unfortunately, it's not the half of the problem that progress is helping with since we're not for a lack of productive output or a dearth of needless waste.

Nah, these are two separate problems. First is the technological problem of producing enough food, building material, medicine, etc. Then there is the problem of the political class not unwilling to fund infrastructure and projects to put this technology in use.

Think of it like a software team that has excellent developers but terrible devops. The developers have long long since fixed many of the bugs and implemented most of the features, but the devops is slow, corrupt, and incompetent so very few of the features actually make it to production.

> Nah, these are two separate problems. First is the technological problem of producing enough food, building material, medicine, etc.

There is no technological problem. We are already wasting more food that would be necessary to feed people who are starving.

Even USSR, at the height of its inefficiency, was able to build housing for most of its inhabitants. It wasn't palaces but it did its job.

And when we need we can somehow find a way to crank out vaccine to vaccinate entire countries. And these are given out for free (of course, we pay for them in taxes, but still it can be done...)

> Then there is the problem of the political class not unwilling

I think you meant "willing".

Here, this is the problem.

When you say it is "political class", what you really say it is not your problem. And this is the cause of why this is not getting solved.

Because the problem is really you and other people like you who think it is not their problem.

If the people decided it is a problem worth solving and supported it with their votes, the "political class" would follow and solve the problem.

The "political class" responds to what is on peoples minds and to what people want. If people decide to spend their focus quabbling over building big walls or election results or vaccine efficacy, guess what is not getting solved? Anything else isn't getting solved.

In USSR and many other countries of the Soviet Bloc, it was also illegal not to work.

Exceptions applied (mothers with young kids, registered artists), but otherwise this was enforced and if you stayed out of work for a certain period and didn't have a valid employer stamp in your papers, you would be chucked into prison for Parasitism (that was the name of the crime).

As a result, the Bloc had almost no visible homelessness, but this kind of solution would probably not fly in the West.

I am certainly not defending USSR.

Just showing that there is no need for technological progress to build a lot of housing from public budget, only willingness to do it.

> Even USSR, at the height of its inefficiency, was able to build housing for most of its inhabitants. It wasn't palaces but it did its job.

Roof over the head sure does the job. But in exchange a big portion of USSR population lived in essentially shared housing. You get a room and shared amenities (shared kitchen, shared shower, shared WC). In most career paths it would take a decade or more to be eligible for an apartment. And that apartment would be tiny. Got a kid? Great, you go up the queue and you get 1 room (kitchen + room, no living room) apartment! Got 2 kids? Nice, you get 2 rooms (not 2 bedrooms).

Of course, in some career paths it was much more comfy. A nuclear power plant built in bumfucknowhere? Well, anybody willing to go there even for an unqualified job gets a super spacious (compared to above) apartment on arrival. In exchange someone in a big city with no kids may be stuck in shared housing whole life with no chance to have his own apartment.

Doesn’t sound that much different from today’s Europe or North America. Except low skilled workers in low payed career paths get sub-par living conditions irregardless of family size.

Perhaps the only difference is that low payed workers in Europe and North America have the option to live far away from their work and suffer long commute hours instead of the small living quarters. Although that option is starting to feel like it is forced upon us now as even the tiniest of apartments are also out of reach for normal working families in big cities.

The technological problem (assuming it exists, which I tend to agree it does not) is in logistics, not in production.

That feels like an excuse a politician would make. Logistics is never a real problem that halts execution. Yes it is often a hard problem and is often done wrong, resulting in things getting done slowly and inefficiently. However it is seldom the reason for nothing being done at all. E.g. usually we don’t wait months or years until the logistics problem has been solved.

The technological problem of feeding and housing every human on earth has been solved many times over. The logistics of distributing the available food and shelter to those that need is poorly designed and needs an overhaul. This is a political problem and can only be fixed with the political class that is seemingly unwilling.

Being an immigrant and not allowed to vote, it is not fair to claim I’m responsible for the political class.

Also public opinion rarely results in policy. Most Americans for example favor spending on green infrastructure to tackle the climate crisis, most Americans favor a more universal health care system, etc. yet the political class is hesitant.

Being an immigrant you are in a special position. In most countries people do have power to change things, if enough of them want to.

There are some exceptions like China or various regimes.

But even Chinese Communist Party is very scared to allow their population to exchange knowledge freely, for fear they can just coordinate and decide together.