Honestly? Alcohol. I used to work security at a rehab, and it was always the worst addiction. The withdrawls are horrible, up to and including death. Yes, even worse than heroin.
I am in my late 30s. Drank in college with friends at parties. I dont anymore just not into it. I like things that make me faster, smarter, or stronger. I dont understand why all TV shows and movies seem to be centered around drinking when its a social scene. (I live in north america). Nothing good comes from drinking alcohol. They make it seem like if you’re relaxing or want to have fun you need alcohol. I just need a good brisket for both those.
Read up on US prohibition and how it funded the Mafia. It just changes the form of the societal disease.
The answer to addiction is having support and care on place for those that fall to it so society helps pick them up again. You can’t stop the abuse of substances unless you fix why people are crawling into a hole to avoid the world. Lack of mental health is a disease of society as well as the individual.
Its so mad that we have such a literal example of exactly what happens, due to prohibition, yet society refuses to see like for like. The mafia simply used the exact same routes to smuggle heroin. They didn’t disappear or die out, due to alcohol prohibition ending. They got into bed with the CIA, under operation gladio. What they did with crack wasn’t the first or the biggest example.
Like you said, you can’t people abusing substances. They remain illegal because somewhere some very powerful people are making too much money from them remaining so.
Why? Simply because this was actually tried in America? All I’m doing is answering the question. Just because this country failed at making it illegal does not mean it still shouldn’t be illegal.
“By buying [unnecessary product] you will help [marginalized group] to gain a livable income and also send their kids to school instead of sending them to [work place with - even for adults - horrible work conditions]. Also, when buying [product] we will save [arbirtary area] of [rainforest/ coral reef/ mangrove swamp] that would otherwise have been destroyed [but not by us]. Additional to that, your purchase helped us to save [arbitrary ammount of CO2 - at least in a completely hypothetical scenario]. While using [product] you will make the world a better place.”
As a customer there is barely any way you can ensure or check that these things are true. It cannot be possible to save the enviroment while buying stupid products like, for example, internet-of-shit-devices which will be phased out in no time or single use products made from plastic or other harmful materials that are not recycleable.
All these claims are just an indulgance trade - like it is done for centuries in a religious context. It is just that you have an excuse to consume more, because they to something to help people/ enviroment. If there was a product that would have been advertised as: “Well, we irretrieveably destroyed 100 km^2^ of nature, and for each single product in average two workers died and at end-of-life this product will fuck up the environment once more - also it will impair your health just by existing”, it would be horrible - but at least it would be honest.
It defintly is a slippery slope. I work for a municipalitylies utilities company. Part of my job is working with a utilities companies union to lobby politicians to make laws that will actually improve the way we can work. I think we actually do improve things for the German public by bringing desperately needed knowledge to the table.
But I think we are a small minority among lobbying institutions.
Qualified immunity for police officers. Prosecutors and judges basically get qualified immunity, too-- in that they can be caught engaging in all sorts of inappropriate and illegal activity without facing punishment because like police, it usually doesn’t even get to the extent of being charged.
Lying if you’re a politician. You should be in a state similar to “under oath” in court, but at all times.
Advertising. I should have the legal right to not be advertised at. I should have the right to not have to accept advertising in order to access services, especially so if I already pay a subscription to that service. I cannot put into words how much I loath and despise advertising and advertisers. I hate them. Hate, in the real sense of the word.
Loot boxes in video games, whatever age group the game in question is aimed at, but especially so in kids’ games.
Microtransactions in video games for anything other than non-essential/non-advantageous items, like cosmetics. Even then, their presence should upgrade the PEGI rating to adult/18, regardless of the actual content of the game. This might help prevent their inclusion at all.
Whatever the fuck is going on in Gaza right now.
Shielding police or soldiers from prosecution for crimes they’ve committed. If you stand in the way of the due process any other citizen would face, you should be heavily penalised for that. Like, the murderer soldiers who carried out Bloody Sunday are currently being protected by the British state and its lackeys, and I cannot fathom why. Cops in the US who murder people are frequently protected by unions and get to retire rather than be fired etc. All of that shit should be illegal. Get the fuck out of the way of due process.
Naziism and related nonsense like Holocaust denial. Germany already has laws about this, but that shit needs to be legally smothered in its crib everywhere.
Conspiracism surrounding public health issues like vaccines and masks.
It would be nice if prisoners of non-violent/minor crimes could (voluntarily) work (at maybe a lower wage than usual) and and they would be able to get what they earned once they get out of prison.
Tipping is fine, but only as a bonus for excellent service. There shouldn’t be a “suggested gratuity” or some shit like that and also obviously shouldn’t be counted as part of the employee’s salary, like in the US
I feel like my answer might break AskLemmy’s rule 2 about “Overt Politics”, but so do a lot of the other answers? Feel free to delete if so.
overtly political answer, also CW for violence.As far as the current American system goes… nothing. By and large, even laws that seem good are mostly only used in service of the elites, against the people. Consider this series of events: - In 2015 a white supremacist in South Carolina commits a mass shooting, killing 9 people. - In 2017, the Georgia state gov expands the state’s domestic terrorism laws, directly in response to this shooting, because the previous version wouldn’t have covered it. - In 2022, this expanded law gets used… against people protesting police brutality, who hurt no one, despite the fact that the cops killed one of them. Unfortunately, this general sequence is not uncommon at all. Neither is the inverse, where the bureaucrats/judges/etc decide “that doesn’t count, actually” when it comes to an elite very clearly breaking an existing law, or else changing the law so it doesn’t apply to them in retrospect.
From my industry: Perhaps the purchase of chemicals for the manufacture of fireworks. It’s surprisingly easy to order pounds and pounds of different oxidizers and fuels.
The one I need is highly controlled. I need to make my own strike anywhere matches since Uco quit, need red phosphorous, don’t want to scrape it off of match strikers for hours, want a big ol’ jar. Apparently it’s also used to make “MeTh” so I can’t buy it.
If you want to argue for the ethical treatment of animals or that they deserve care and respect, that’s one thing, and I can respect it. But equating that to what humans, especially children, deserve is ridiculous. If it came down to saving the life of a child or an animal, it would be immoral to not choose the human child.
If you create intelligent life, it doesn’t matter who it is or how it came to exist. Your moral responsibilities to that specific creature are identical. I’m sure you can find edge cases where you have to make a decision between a human and a non-human animal, but even if those edge cases all go to the human, it does not excuse all the other cases where there is no human that has to suffer for you to live up to your responsibilities.
Humans have not created intelligent life, so your whole point is moot. Maybe it’ll become more relevant in the future, but at this current point in history, the only intelligent life that we “created”, has been our own children.
The cars are generally bought at auction. That means car dealers took them in trade and didn’t want to sell them because they were too bad/too big a risk to their reputation.
The cars were bought cheap and “repaired” enough to get them running, and then they DETAIL the hell out of them.
Bottom line is, they sell a car they own for 2-3000 for 7k+ and get their cost back so quick they’re making profit almost from day one, and whether you pay high interest forever to them or they repossess it and resell it to someone else for more profit, they don’t care.
Products purposefully manufactured to be unfixable. Main example being anything apple…you can’t even add ram to a iMac anymore and they have the audacity to sell the lower end model with 8 gigs of ram as if that’s enough when everyone knows its not. Basically selling a 1400$ piece of shit.
It is far worse if you look at the radmom no name brand products sold by Amazon, they are straight manufactured trash, that is only barely functioning when it comes out of the factory.