You may find community organizing rewarding. Depending on your comfort level, you can try things like:
- Volunteer work
- Participating in city/town board/council meetings
- Direct action (eg the TN chapter of the DSA replaced tail lights for free, since broken tail lights are the most common reason for minorities getting pulled over)
- Canvassing for candidates, referendums, etc.
- Solidarity actions (eg joining strike members on the picket line)
If you're not sure where to start, try researching local candidates that share your views and find out which organizations endorsed them.
Note: Be very careful /how/ you invoke your right to counsel in the US:
> And when a suspect in an interrogation told detectives to "just give me a lawyer dog," the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that the suspect was, in fact, asking for a "lawyer dog," and not invoking his constitutional right to counsel.
> which helps technological change, which leads to a more efficient economy
You made a leap of logic here. The technological innovations in finance directly contributed to a more volatile economy that crashed and inflicted massive losses on huge swaths of the global population, many of whom never recovered.
The first citation on the page[1] mentions researcher Markus Krajewski who reviewed Phoebus records and concluded "It was the explicit aim of the cartel to reduce the life span of the lamps in order to increase sales [...] Economics, not physics."
Cursory searches of Markus Krajewski yield an IEEE Spectrum article[2] with further references to his work:
> The 2010 documentary The Light Bulb Conspiracy explores the Phoebus cartel as an early example of planned obsolescence and includes interviews with Markus Krajewski. For more on the cartel and planned obsolescence, see the author’s "Fehler-Planungen. Zur Geschichte und Theorie der industriellen Obsoleszenz," in Technikgeschichte, vol. 81, No. 1, p. 91–114, 2014, and "Vom Krieg des Lichtes zur Geschichte von Glühlampenkartellen," in Das Glühbirnenbuch, edited by Peter Berz, Helmut Höge, and Krajewski (Braumüller Verlag, 2011).
The modern drug war was designed to be a cudgel aimed at political enemies, not a public health effort. Quoth Nixon's advisor John Ehrlichman:
> The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
I'm not talking about price lists for procedures, I'm talking about price lists for deductibles and premiums on health insurance plans.
Visit healthcare.gov and navigate to your state marketplace. They typically provide a detailed price comparison based on several adjustable factors (expected income, expected visits, number of medications, etc).
If readily available and detailed price comparison tools haven't stopped health insurance deductibles from tripling in the past year[1], why should we expect price comparison tools at the point of healthcare service to reduce costs?
Price lists and comparisons are available for health insurance plans. That hasn't stopped premiums and deductibles from rising to the point of popular furor.
> If instead of almost 8 billion humans there were 4 billions we wouldn't be in this mess either.
I'm not sure your logic follows. The US outputs roughly 13% of global CO2 emissions despite having 4% of the world population.
If the ratio of population to CO2 output was scaled in this case, 7.5 billion US citizens would output 118,000 Mt of CO2 per year. Halving that (to less than 4 billion humans) would be 59,000 Mt of CO2 per year, and the current global output is 37,000 Mt per year.
To counter your anecdote, cyclist deaths have risen lately in NYC to the point of public protest:
> Aster Ryan, 25, of Wingate, said “this summer has felt especially dangerous.” In addition to the three cycling deaths that took place within a week, Ryan said she was hit while riding her bike a little more than a week ago on Dean Street, and also watched another rider get hit by an opening car door recently.
Perfect example. The Europeans moved on the Americas before they understood disease pathology, resulting in the deaths of up to 90% of the indigenous population.
> If the subsidy were eliminated and insurance untied to employer you would have a huge step in the direction of unleashing market forces.
That's exactly how things were in the 1930s. Healthcare was unaffordable to the degree of public outcry, which is why universal healthcare legislation was introduced repeatedly and stifled by the AMA every time. In fact, early health insurance programs were designed to bypass pay-as-you-go medical fees because they weren't meeting the needs of the hospital or patients. It wasn't a tenable system.
Our society is not geared towards sustainability. It rewards overproduction and overconsumption and harshly punishes those who fail to outcompete their neighbors on these terms.
Given these constraints, what provides a greater return on your investment of time and energy? Carving out your own sustainable lifestyle within a system geared towards suppressing your efforts, or getting involved in political organizing to change the system?
> Just that was the only way to access music back then?
It wasn't the only way to access music back then. You had recorded media and live music.
I'm not actually from around that time but I've been playing around with a Walkman recently. For me it started as retro foppery but I noticed a few distinct differences:
- You're not in total control of the radio. You can pick the station you like but you can't reorder the playlist, select specific tracks, rewind, or repeat anything. This evokes a feeling of surrender, of "letting go." While listening to the radio, you're freed from the responsibility of curating your own collection and selecting the best music for the occasion.
- Much more than the targeted algorithms of services like Spotify, you're at the mercy of the DJ. Compared to the algorithm, there's absolutely more of a connection there. If you enjoy what's on the radio, then you're sharing that enjoyment with the DJ. It's a direct analog precursor to the "space of flows," a pleasurable social bond formed between two people who don't share physical space or even traditional spoken word conversation.
- You're off the grid. The radio doesn't track your favorite artists or your location. It doesn't correlate your listening habits with your recent purchases. This makes the experience feel more elective. When you can decide to turn something on, that means you can decide to turn it off. It's different from our always-on, always-connected everyday experience.
- The endless sea of digital media sometimes induces analysis paralysis. The bigger your MP3 library, the more mental resources you must dedicate to mentally searching for the music most appropriate to your mood and surroundings. Narrowing your selection to a handful of radio stations, each one playing only a single song at a time until it ends, frees up a lot of mental resources.
- Paradoxically, being exposed to music you don't like actually refines your taste. Further, suffering through a bad song on the radio heightens your anticipation of the next song, and if you end up enjoying the next song it's a huge, satisfying relief. Compared to Spotify where you can skip past an unsatisfying song, or be reasonably sure the next song will be more to your liking based on whether you just skipped, the emotional experience is more varied and granular. It's more exciting. It's also closer to reality: contrary to what the countless ads and offers claim, you can't always get what you want and you won't always be satisfied. Annoyance, boredom, dissatisfaction, and disappointment are going to find you eventually. There's nothing better for practicing acceptance of life's unpleasant, unskippable moments than suffering through a terrible song on the radio.
Without advertising, these people would be forced to implement a profitable monetization strategy, or they would fail. That's how capitalism and the free market is supposed to work.
If you're worried about the well-being of these people or believe their service is a public good that should exist regardless of profitability on the market, you should allocate public funding for them.
Medication, exercise, and mindfulness meditation were game changers for me.
Meditation was effective because it sharpened my ability to detect when I lost focus and course-correct. With daily practice, this habit (mind wanders -> notice mind wandering -> gently redirect focus back to original intent) became automatic. I was surprised to notice myself "waking up" and clicking back into place over and over throughout the day, whereas before meditation I seemed to "wake up" only at the end of the day with nothing done.
At work I listen to ambient music and use Pomodoros to pace myself. I also asked my supervisor to start requesting daily status updates on my projects. Without the extra accountability, I let things slide off the radar too easily.
It's difficult sometimes. Russell Barkley likens these habits/calendars/medications as a sort of prosthesis. That framing helps me to accept these things as one part of a unique life experience instead of a debilitating setback.
If you're not sure where to start, try researching local candidates that share your views and find out which organizations endorsed them.