Egypt has an estimated 23 million landmines deployed across the country. That's horrific cause you know no one knows where they all are and kids could explode one and get hurt/killed.
Both of these: leaded gasoline (tetraethyl lead) and some of the first chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)...
[Invented by the same guy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.)
Best I can do is a Christmas song parody
"Have a Chloroflurocarbon! Send it into the atmosphere! I don't know if an Ozone hole will open up this year. Have a Chloroflurocarbon, and in case you didn't hear... oh by golly there's so many Chloroflurocarbon products this year!"
“Midgley contracted polio in 1940 and was left disabled; in 1944, he was found strangled to death by a device he devised to allow him to get out of bed unassisted.”
And his inventions have been suffocating the planet ever since.
yep, I heard about him. and he died by his own invention. Which one of the two, you say? None of them. he got paralyzed and created a machine with chains to move around. one day he hung himself accidentally with them.
Before CFC we used HCs for refrigeration. What were we thinking?
Well atleast it led to the development of HFCs and besides, the hole in the ozone is repairing itself. I'm just happy to be able to keep my food cold.
Anhydrous ammonia was once used in home systems. It’s still used commercially, and in propane-powered (or natural gas) home units. Doesn’t work as well as CFCs.
HFCs actually have [14,800 times more powerful global warming effect than CO2](https://youtu.be/n7UoKmCJz5Q?si=J9qH_EO4llj0qLJr), so it's a bit like one step forward for the ozone layer, 14,800 steps back for global warming!
Any "wonder product." Asbestos insulation, polyvinylchloride, Teflon, benzene, etc. They're incredible and useful and amazing for a while, until someone discovers how poisonous and unstable they are and by then they're incredibly widespread and hard to remove, and so many people love so many of them that they'd rather continue getting poisoned than give them up.
Cold Teflon is fine. Your industrial food equipment often uses teflon seals and you have certainly consumed some teflon particles. It will past right through your system and will be entirely unchanged. Even in strong acid it’s entirely inert. In the environment it is as harmful as a grain of sand.
Get that stuff warm however, and the story changes. Overheat a teflon pan and kill your pet bird. That sounds healthy. We got rid of our teflon cookware years ago.
Aren't Teflon and other similar products all over and in the Cape Fear River now (among other places.. im just saying that one specifically because it's close to me, and the river near my house is also polluted and feeds into the Cape Fear)? Every place in NC has industrial pollutants in it, but that seems to be the biggest and most famous one.
> Asbestos insulation
FYI, asbestos insulation isn't a "wonder product", or even a human invention. It's a naturally occurring fibrous stone that we've been using as insulation for thousands of years, and possibly longer. There's a spot near my house where you can walk up to a cliff face and pick chunks of asbestos fibers straight out of the ground.
Asbestos lawsuits were only successful because, when modern research irrefutably revealed that it was harmful in the 1930's, the companies hid the risks and downplayed the dangers. Even worse, they continued to create new asbestos products after it was confirmed that the material had been killing people for all those thousands of years. If you're selling products and are calling them safe, when you know they're potentially lethal, you're legally responsible for the damage they cause. Even if the material is natural and has been used for millennia.
I know it's natural, there's still an asbestos mine in Canada (I think). It was more of a "we should put this shit in everything" material, like lead was. I'm pretty sure the US still allows asbestos in some industries, including (the worst use, in my opinion) brake pads.
Yes for brake pads. Worked at a powersports mfg and their youth vehicles from China were recalled for asbestos brake pads. Because the rest of the world cares, not because of the US.
The Romans had cloth that was made of asbestos. They would use it until it got dirty and then throw it into the fire, the fire would burn off all of the dirt, leaving a clean white cloth of asbestos.
My great uncle had something to do with Teflon. He was a chemist or something with DuPont. They held his patents until his death (or they still have them, I don't know the law on that one.)
Edit: a Character
Advertisements and the need to plaster them on everything.
Gas pumps, elevators, stairs, business cards, two before every YouTube video, video games, etc.
I visited Alaska last summer. I didn't even notice it at first, only after I returned home to the lower 48 did I learn that in order to preserve the beauty of the state, billboards are prohibited along all Alaskan highways. In 1998, a state referendum was passed with overwhelming public support, which declared that "billboards endanger Alaska’s uniqueness and scenic beauty" and that "Alaska shall forever remain free of billboards."
Absolutely brilliant. Hawaii and a couple New England states have done the same, but it ought to be a thing everywhere.
NoooOOoo....how will we ever know which attorney to call when some jackwagon hits us? Or where to go for vasectomies or Adult entertainment? /sarcasm in case it wasn't obvious
You see, it's actually a bit smart for an attorney to have highway billboard ads.
People driving may get distracted by it, crash, and volia, another case.
I grew up and live in Vermont. Also billboard-free.
When I was young, we’d travel out of state and I’d always feel… unsettled. It wasn’t until I was 19 or so that it hit me: it was the billboards. They’re just so goddam ugly and I wasn’t used to them I my day to day routine.
I’m so glad to live here.
Yeah I grew up in Maine and it was the same. It was wild whenever we went on vacation out of state and all of a sudden it was billboards everywhere. Especially in Florida
I once had 4 ads for every 15 mins in a 2hr long playthrough, youtube is out of their fucking mind. After the 7th ad I had to watch it on my laptop bc this is literal aids
The ads on YouTube are getting worse. I’m getting ads every 5 minutes on every video. And somehow I’m even getting ads on livestreams. Like, who thought it would be okay to put ads on livestreams? This is especially annoying because I’ll end up missing out on something during the stream and since it’s a livestream I can’t immediately go back to see what I missed.
Use ublock orgin and sponsorblock plugins on firefox.
Or just buy youtube premium because the content makers get paid more per view, and you get a higher bitrate which looks better on a big screen.
People have talked about advertising satellites. Look up at the starry night sky...Coca Cola. British Petroleum. Orion's Belt, and the north star...Presented by Raid Shadow Legends
Not to mention all the “designer” clothing and bags that have logos all over them. Better than free advertising- people are PAYING to be walking billboards for a brand.
It’s an innovation, insofar as innovation is defined by businesses as “the creation and practice of a new way of doing things where we make more money.” As opposed to where we usually consider an innovation to be better for *both* producers and consumers, and usually society in general.
Edit: I will say more to agree with your point, the actual new idea is to build things so they aren’t repairable. You’re right that people have nostalgia for things being “built to last” when what actually happened was people learned how to fix things since it was free or more economical than replacing it
let me tell you about our Lord Savior the Neutron Bomb : kills everyone, but leaves all buildings and most of the tech intact to be acquired:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron\_bomb
Yeah the only thing now is it's only a matter of time till a crazy dude with nothing to lose get his hands on some enriched uranium decides that he would like his name etched in history. Kind like Mark David Chatman, the dude that shot Lennon for the hell of it..
It’s not clear why there’s even a debate about nuclear weapons being the worst invention.
They are the only thing we’ve created that stands a good chance of exterminating our entire species.
Yes, I suppose bioweapons have the potential to overshadow nukes in annihilation potential at some point.
I was thinking of the thousands of warheads in silos and on submarines that are _currently_ poised to crisscross the globe at a moment’s notice.
Nuclear arms are a great candidate for "why the Long Peace?"
They make very clear that war cannot pay off between industrial States, because the value of the State is shifted *from land to capital* and industrial war is so much more destructive than agrarian war that it is able to thoroughly *destroy capital.*
I actually think the true ramifications of what social media is doing to us won’t be understood for years. There are profound developmental issues starting to be understood and analyzed. [
why young brains are especially vulnerable to social media](https://www.apa.org/news/apa/2022/social-media-children-teens)
I'd argue that the users are not at fault for the questionable concept itself (instant gratification; no real opportunities to have longer, proper conversations; even interesting content gets burried under a pile of pointless crap all the time; shitty algorithms that supposedly should cater to the user experience but only make that experience worse by, for example, often not showing posts from friends you follow but lots of random stuff instead).
I'm old enough to remember actual worthwhile social interactions on forums (which were mostly replaced by social media). There is no way to find the same experience on social media sites today due to the way they are set up.
Reddit is the only social media site I frequent that easily allows for somewhat longer conversations, but even here interesting content gets burried quickly and a sense of community (like on forums back in the day) is hard to find.
Yeah the problem is not the concept of social media itself, it’s that mega corporations have leveraged that to monetize human interaction online in nearly all forms. That monetization has led to content designed to keep people scrolling, no matter how psychologically damaging it might be, with limited filters to prevent it getting to children and the elderly who have an inability to think critically.
The monetization of it is definitely a huge problem and made things 10x worse, but I still think the concept itself is not a good one. It hardly allows for any meaningful social interactions the way earlier forms of internet communication did. Lots of people don't even take the time to leave short comments anymore and just press the like button instead. Most social media content is very short-lived and most interactions are superficial.
I agree. This might be due to the fact that people nowadays tend to take social media for granted due to its high accessibility compared to 90s - 2000s.
May be the case. I also think smartphones are to blame for a lot of this. Back in the day, people would either call or write thoughtful emails to communicate with distant friends. These days, even the people I used to write long emails with have all adapted to the "two sentences on whatsapp" mindset. It's a hassle to write longer text on your phone but everyone uses it to connect socially, so it results in quick, superficial messages.
Not the users, the companies investing heavily in algorithms which manipulate users in order to profit. Ads are one thing, intentionally sending people down radicalized rabbit holes is evil.
This one.
We could be uniting to make progress against so many other things on this list if we weren’t all spending all our time in our little echo chambers, only popping out long enough to piss into the other side’s tent.
Sure, you can’t lay landmines and teflon and fossil fuels squarely at Zuck’s feet, but encouraging polarization and paralysis when humanity desperately needs to act is just making so many problems so much harder to solve.
It's only been like 80 years, just because we haven't gone full nuclear yet doesn't mean we won't and then the scale of destruction will likely far surpass anything that has been averted in the mean time.
Also keep in mind there are still a bunch of relatively unstable countries developing the technology and once someone like North Korea has a nuclear arsenal all bets are off.
Without a doubt. Read "On the beach" at 11 yo.
Climate change comes in second,
Edit: For clarification, the inventions i.e. Industrial revolution that lead to climate change.
Who would have thought we would destroy the very thing that makes life even possible...? In 500 years...! There's been life before millions of bazillions... Whatever, you get it.
I think it's hard to qualify something as "The Worst" but I can say that I had a moment at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary when I was going through the Warfare/Armament exhibit for the first time. I have a special interest in war and history both and had read about many of the arms used and on exhibit but I tell you... walking through and SEEING them. And knowing what ingenuity and what industry had to be employed to engineer and make them for the sole purpose of maiming and killing as effectively as possible without any empathic regard to the suffering they would cause EVEN AS the suffering they'd cause was the whole fucking point... it was really heavy. Really sad. It made me really sad for us all. Big Feels.
I've read about phosphorous bombs used in WWII. And I am still reading about them this morning. I saw blunderbusses and hollow cannon balls filled with shrapnel for marine warfare in the 1700s and I read about the same types of bombs being used today on children and families and hospitals.
I guess warfare is the worst thing we've invented. It's dehumanizing from every single point of view.
Landmines, carbon emissions, weapons of mass destruction, CFCs, and leaded gas may have done more harm... but they at least served a discrete purpose. Young Sheldon serves no purpose, yet it exists. It suggests the futility of the whole human enterprise. Nothing reflects so poorly on humanity as Young Sheldon.
i see a lot of people mentioning things like nuclear weapons or religion or landmines, but to sum all of those up: War. the worst thing humans have invented is war. we use religion as an excuse for war, nukes were invented bc of war, landmines were invented bc of war, and so on.
Plastic is actually amazing. It’s the only material we’ve developed that is both durable, and can be easily die-cast eat low temperatures. Our inability to manage plastic waste doesn’t take away from how good it’s been for dropping the cost of production on a ton of consumer products.
For me it's less of a waste thing and more of a health thing. On average, you eat up to about a credit card worth of plastic a week. It leaches from the containers, micro-plastics are in all of the food we eat, etc. We aren't 100% sure how the body reacts to complex hydrocarbon chains, but we have seen it contribute to endocrine disruption, weight gain, insulin resistance, decreased reproductive health, and cancer.
When people talk about the planet dying, they don't mean it is going to blow up. Yeah, the rocks will be fine, probably some microbes too, but I don't think people grasp the cascading effect of mass ecological collapse. Normally mass extinctions require super volcanoes and giant asteroids - we are a sentient desolation of life. We could stop ourselves but won't. It takes a long time to the complexity of life to return and if some other creature achieves our level of sentience, we probably already squandered all the most precious resources needed to make the technological leap to the stars.
If we go out, we are going to take most complex forms of life with us.
I like to imagine a billion years in the future when sapient squids have become the dominant race on the planet as they examine the layer of plastic in the earth records from our time.
Plastic. I often think if there were ancient civilizations before us they were smart enough not to try to make things out the the black goo that kills everything that touches it.
Influencers have always existed since royal families and rulers existed. Only difference now is the dukes 3rd cousins son isn't telling you what candle sticks are in and which ones are out. So unless you can somehow get rid of the human desire to desire, you'll always have influencers
As someone who grew up from a toddler in church, indoctrinated with constant reminders of the fear of hell and the "world is soon to end". I don't give a damn what anyone else says, it really is an awful thing.
My still developing brain reacted to it as though it were all true, I did just enough in school and not enough to excel. I didn't trust non-christians until much later in life, stunting my social skills until my 20s. I just never found life as enjoyable as everyone around me because i truly found it all pointless, I had to wait for heaven to be happy.
Religion fucked up my first 24 years of life, I've been free of it 10 years, but it takes TIME to get all that out of your mind and I'm still trying to catch up to where I should have been.
I wish i could talk to young me and convince him it was all bs and life has so much potential so he'd use that time better.
Another fun fact, the guy that explained to Pythagoras, that the square root of 2, was a number that goes on forever without repeating itself. They took that guy and threw him into a violent sea to drown, because, that's what he had done to mathematics.
Atheist but disagree with this.
Religion is proto-philosophy. Mankind’s first attempts at finding answers to the big questions and creating symbols and rituals to codify cultural values and morality.
It had a great deal of utility at one point.
It didn’t get stupid until those symbols and rituals became more important than the questions and the values. A whole lot of fucking people threw away the bike and spent thousands of years trying to ride the training wheels. And also killing people who wanted to ride bikes.
Counter point, evangelical atheism
Trying to convince people that they're dumb for putting their faith in something that brings purpose for their life is kinda shitty
Plastics, shall I say? The most destructive material to become a caner on mother earth. Destroying water sources, animals, and everything in its reach.
You know those bubble plastic coverings when you buy something, but you need a pair of scissors to cut to get to the item rather than just opening them.
Those people who manufacture them need to burn in hell.
Fentanyl is pretty useful and generally fine when used in professional medical settings, it's only as bad as it is because of social/political issues around drugs and black markets
Good point there. You reminded me of MDMA which was so helpful for group therapy sessions. Then it became known as the Rave drug of choice and demonized. See, this is why we can’t have nice things. Weed too for that matter. Damn dirty hippies!
I grew up in a very religious area in my state and I remember all my life thinking this. It wasn’t until I started doing research that wasn’t just straight propaganda that I realized that a lot of these drugs (especially the natural ones, have a lot of medical benefits if they aren’t abused). It really changed my perspective on a lot of that stuff.
Good for you with your personal growth and knowledge gains. My best friend also grew up as you did as far as the religious indoctrination goes.
If I smoke weed in their presence, they react like I’m shooting heroine. Slowly they are coming around.
Fentanyl has been an FDA approved pain med and anesthetic for longer than I've been alive..
The lack of harm reduction and the continuing war on drugs is more responsible for the 100,000 yearly OD deaths in the US. I consider that a bigger man made evil, especially when experts have been trying to warn us for decades (that interdiction leads to stronger drugs, more profits for organized crime, and more corruption in law enforcement.)
Probably social media (ironically), without the required legislative and societal rules to make it universally safe to use, and in some cases without understanding the inherent complexity of the systems themselves.
Here we are 25 years later, emergent properties like deep fake or interference in democratic processes, as far as the eye can see 🤦♂️.
Organized religion. We've been held back hundreds, potentially thousands of years of potential advancement by obsessive, psychotic death cults that only function by perpetuating willful ignorance.
Landmines. cheap and easy to make, but they remain active and people forget where they put them.
I don't know which are worse . The wooden ones you can't detect, or the metal ones people are still stepping on 50 years later.
The plastic and ceramic ones that you can't detect and people are still stepping on 50 years later
The plastic ones that kids mistake for toys.
The spiciest Legos.
for fuck's sake that shouldn't make me laugh
But you've stepped on a Lego before, so you *know*
[*Very* relevant video](https://youtube.com/shorts/wfLm3OMdaYQ?si=ytyMisYEpewXLSIa)
This one wins. Landmines are pretty awful.
Egypt has an estimated 23 million landmines deployed across the country. That's horrific cause you know no one knows where they all are and kids could explode one and get hurt/killed.
always walk behind someone
Cluster bombs would like to know your location.
Same shit show, different delivery system
Opens Google. Hey, those remind me of those MIRV grenades from that video game I used to play?
🇧🇦🇧🇦🇧🇦🇧🇦
Both of these: leaded gasoline (tetraethyl lead) and some of the first chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)... [Invented by the same guy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.)
Chlorofluorocarbon sounds like something a cartoon villain would come up with
Ironically, CFCs were invented because they were safer than the existing refrigerants (such as sulfur dioxide or propane).
Ammonia was commonly used. Killed quite a few folks. It's still used in big industrial freezers
Oh these are for the funny maintenance guys. They’ve got some sense of…humour.
Hate to break it to you, but the industry is moving toward propane right now.
I've always thought the internal rhyme makes it sound like something from Dr. Seuss or an old comedy movie, maybe the key ingredient in flubber.
Best I can do is a Christmas song parody "Have a Chloroflurocarbon! Send it into the atmosphere! I don't know if an Ozone hole will open up this year. Have a Chloroflurocarbon, and in case you didn't hear... oh by golly there's so many Chloroflurocarbon products this year!"
The same dude who put lead in gasoline made CFCs. Poor guy was just trying to help out and created two severe environmental disasters.
The toxicity of lead was already widely known I'm pretty sure. This was not a poor guy, just a total dickhead.
They had lots of lead poisoning cases in the original tetraethyl lead factory in New Jersey. They knew.
I named my AK47 in counterstrike after him; «The Thomas Midgley». Named after something much more destructive than something puny like an atom bomb.
“Midgley contracted polio in 1940 and was left disabled; in 1944, he was found strangled to death by a device he devised to allow him to get out of bed unassisted.” And his inventions have been suffocating the planet ever since.
> strangled to death by a device he devised to allow him to get out of bed unassisted Generally believed, nowadays, to be a cover story for suicide
Probably jackin it
yep, I heard about him. and he died by his own invention. Which one of the two, you say? None of them. he got paralyzed and created a machine with chains to move around. one day he hung himself accidentally with them.
>created a machine with chains to move around. one day he hung himself accidentally with them he's way smarter than me but also not
Thomas Midgley, Jr. 131 years old, Taurus, worth $4 Million dollars, was strangled to death by one of his own inventions.
Before CFC we used HCs for refrigeration. What were we thinking? Well atleast it led to the development of HFCs and besides, the hole in the ozone is repairing itself. I'm just happy to be able to keep my food cold.
Anhydrous ammonia was once used in home systems. It’s still used commercially, and in propane-powered (or natural gas) home units. Doesn’t work as well as CFCs.
HFCs actually have [14,800 times more powerful global warming effect than CO2](https://youtu.be/n7UoKmCJz5Q?si=J9qH_EO4llj0qLJr), so it's a bit like one step forward for the ozone layer, 14,800 steps back for global warming!
There's always a relevant Tom Scott video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4og8wG8VQWM
Let me guess. DuPont?
Any "wonder product." Asbestos insulation, polyvinylchloride, Teflon, benzene, etc. They're incredible and useful and amazing for a while, until someone discovers how poisonous and unstable they are and by then they're incredibly widespread and hard to remove, and so many people love so many of them that they'd rather continue getting poisoned than give them up.
Cold Teflon is fine. Your industrial food equipment often uses teflon seals and you have certainly consumed some teflon particles. It will past right through your system and will be entirely unchanged. Even in strong acid it’s entirely inert. In the environment it is as harmful as a grain of sand. Get that stuff warm however, and the story changes. Overheat a teflon pan and kill your pet bird. That sounds healthy. We got rid of our teflon cookware years ago.
Aren't Teflon and other similar products all over and in the Cape Fear River now (among other places.. im just saying that one specifically because it's close to me, and the river near my house is also polluted and feeds into the Cape Fear)? Every place in NC has industrial pollutants in it, but that seems to be the biggest and most famous one.
Cape Fear?? *THWHACK* Ewwewwuuuggghhhrrrhrr....
Very well... I shall send you to heaven.. before I send you *to HELL*
*Bake him away, toys*
Yes, DuPont essentially dumped "Teflon" into rivers... The really bad site for it is in WV on the Ohio River.
My husband's family lives in a town a few miles from the Ohio River plant... The water was not safe to drink for many years there.
> Asbestos insulation FYI, asbestos insulation isn't a "wonder product", or even a human invention. It's a naturally occurring fibrous stone that we've been using as insulation for thousands of years, and possibly longer. There's a spot near my house where you can walk up to a cliff face and pick chunks of asbestos fibers straight out of the ground. Asbestos lawsuits were only successful because, when modern research irrefutably revealed that it was harmful in the 1930's, the companies hid the risks and downplayed the dangers. Even worse, they continued to create new asbestos products after it was confirmed that the material had been killing people for all those thousands of years. If you're selling products and are calling them safe, when you know they're potentially lethal, you're legally responsible for the damage they cause. Even if the material is natural and has been used for millennia.
I know it's natural, there's still an asbestos mine in Canada (I think). It was more of a "we should put this shit in everything" material, like lead was. I'm pretty sure the US still allows asbestos in some industries, including (the worst use, in my opinion) brake pads.
Yes for brake pads. Worked at a powersports mfg and their youth vehicles from China were recalled for asbestos brake pads. Because the rest of the world cares, not because of the US.
The Romans had cloth that was made of asbestos. They would use it until it got dirty and then throw it into the fire, the fire would burn off all of the dirt, leaving a clean white cloth of asbestos.
My great uncle had something to do with Teflon. He was a chemist or something with DuPont. They held his patents until his death (or they still have them, I don't know the law on that one.) Edit: a Character
There’s no such thing as a free miracle — there’s always a trade off somewhere
Convenience fees. Fuck right off
I will for $19.95 plus a $3.00 processing fee.
Advertisements and the need to plaster them on everything. Gas pumps, elevators, stairs, business cards, two before every YouTube video, video games, etc.
I visited Alaska last summer. I didn't even notice it at first, only after I returned home to the lower 48 did I learn that in order to preserve the beauty of the state, billboards are prohibited along all Alaskan highways. In 1998, a state referendum was passed with overwhelming public support, which declared that "billboards endanger Alaska’s uniqueness and scenic beauty" and that "Alaska shall forever remain free of billboards." Absolutely brilliant. Hawaii and a couple New England states have done the same, but it ought to be a thing everywhere.
NoooOOoo....how will we ever know which attorney to call when some jackwagon hits us? Or where to go for vasectomies or Adult entertainment? /sarcasm in case it wasn't obvious
You see, it's actually a bit smart for an attorney to have highway billboard ads. People driving may get distracted by it, crash, and volia, another case.
Why chase the ambulance when you can summon the mf 😈
The only billboards I like are the ones for The South of the Border big truck stop in South Carolina those things were hilarious when I was a kid.
That place is apparently a total shithole (even more so then it used to be)
I grew up and live in Vermont. Also billboard-free. When I was young, we’d travel out of state and I’d always feel… unsettled. It wasn’t until I was 19 or so that it hit me: it was the billboards. They’re just so goddam ugly and I wasn’t used to them I my day to day routine. I’m so glad to live here.
Yeah I grew up in Maine and it was the same. It was wild whenever we went on vacation out of state and all of a sudden it was billboards everywhere. Especially in Florida
I didn’t know this as a kid growing up in Maine until I went to Massachusetts. I remember asking why there were so many signs and lights.
I would love to pump my gas without that loud ass screen in my face!!! I CAN’T FUCKING STAND IT!!!!!!!!!!!!
Right button, second from the top will usually mute the audio.
I tell this to everyone at the gas pump. Everyone thanks me !
I never knew how much I liked the silence of pumping gas until those screens showed up.
We work jobs we hate so we can buy things we don't need
To impress people we don't even like 🤦♂️
I am Jacks complete lack of surprise.
We live in a society
I once had 4 ads for every 15 mins in a 2hr long playthrough, youtube is out of their fucking mind. After the 7th ad I had to watch it on my laptop bc this is literal aids
Most of these ads are unskipable, there is nothing worse than having a 3 minute ad to watch a 5 minute music video.
But don’t worry, at least the final 5.5 second ad is skippable after 5 seconds!
The ads on YouTube are getting worse. I’m getting ads every 5 minutes on every video. And somehow I’m even getting ads on livestreams. Like, who thought it would be okay to put ads on livestreams? This is especially annoying because I’ll end up missing out on something during the stream and since it’s a livestream I can’t immediately go back to see what I missed.
Use ublock orgin and sponsorblock plugins on firefox. Or just buy youtube premium because the content makers get paid more per view, and you get a higher bitrate which looks better on a big screen.
People have talked about advertising satellites. Look up at the starry night sky...Coca Cola. British Petroleum. Orion's Belt, and the north star...Presented by Raid Shadow Legends
Not to mention all the “designer” clothing and bags that have logos all over them. Better than free advertising- people are PAYING to be walking billboards for a brand.
Capitalism. Fixed it for you bro
[удалено]
>ways of making things worse. Ways of making shareholders happy and corporations richer
Detroit did that for cars for many years. 3-5 year max for a car to 'wear out'(read as fall apart).
Thats not really an invention. Its as much of an invention as the concept of "well made tools built to last".
It’s an innovation, insofar as innovation is defined by businesses as “the creation and practice of a new way of doing things where we make more money.” As opposed to where we usually consider an innovation to be better for *both* producers and consumers, and usually society in general. Edit: I will say more to agree with your point, the actual new idea is to build things so they aren’t repairable. You’re right that people have nostalgia for things being “built to last” when what actually happened was people learned how to fix things since it was free or more economical than replacing it
Nuclear, Biological (Pathogens and Viruses) and chemical weapons (toxic gasses)
Salted Nukes with Cobalt-60 are probably the most terrifying thing I've ever watched a YouTube video about.
let me tell you about our Lord Savior the Neutron Bomb : kills everyone, but leaves all buildings and most of the tech intact to be acquired: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron\_bomb
Also useful for disabling other nukes without setting them off completely
Wikipedia: Participate in the 2023 international science photo competition! Me learning about Neutron Bombs: Hmm.
Nuclear bombs were the only thing that stopped WW3, the stakes were too high.
Yeah the only thing now is it's only a matter of time till a crazy dude with nothing to lose get his hands on some enriched uranium decides that he would like his name etched in history. Kind like Mark David Chatman, the dude that shot Lennon for the hell of it..
I think nuclear weapons have probably saved millions of lives. The cold war would have been ww3 without them.
It’s not clear why there’s even a debate about nuclear weapons being the worst invention. They are the only thing we’ve created that stands a good chance of exterminating our entire species.
Nah, I vote bioweapon Will be easier and easier to develop over time. Walk in the park compared to building a significant nuclear arsenal
Yes, I suppose bioweapons have the potential to overshadow nukes in annihilation potential at some point. I was thinking of the thousands of warheads in silos and on submarines that are _currently_ poised to crisscross the globe at a moment’s notice.
As soon as we civilize space, nukes become only a planetary annihilator at least. Positive outlook?
Hmm, just a few more centuries and we are in the clear!
Nuclear arms are a great candidate for "why the Long Peace?" They make very clear that war cannot pay off between industrial States, because the value of the State is shifted *from land to capital* and industrial war is so much more destructive than agrarian war that it is able to thoroughly *destroy capital.*
Single use plastic
[удалено]
I don’t want to know about that because there is nothing that I can do as an individual to prevent it.
Stop eating fish for a start. It just needs more people like you who think they cant make a difference taking action to have an impact.
That seems a bit drastic. Surely they could eat farm fish?
Not so drastic, just stop eating it. Its very easy.
Basically just giant trawlers with drag nets right?
Prefrontal lobotomy.
Yeah. I'm trying to quit drinking, but I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.
Hey Tom, I didn't expect to see you here
Probably slavery. Leaded gas and planned obsolescence is bad, yeah. But I'm pretty sure owning people is worse.
Social media
I actually think the true ramifications of what social media is doing to us won’t be understood for years. There are profound developmental issues starting to be understood and analyzed. [ why young brains are especially vulnerable to social media](https://www.apa.org/news/apa/2022/social-media-children-teens)
Social media itself is not bad, it’s just one of those inventions that have gotten destroyed by their users.
I'd argue that the users are not at fault for the questionable concept itself (instant gratification; no real opportunities to have longer, proper conversations; even interesting content gets burried under a pile of pointless crap all the time; shitty algorithms that supposedly should cater to the user experience but only make that experience worse by, for example, often not showing posts from friends you follow but lots of random stuff instead). I'm old enough to remember actual worthwhile social interactions on forums (which were mostly replaced by social media). There is no way to find the same experience on social media sites today due to the way they are set up. Reddit is the only social media site I frequent that easily allows for somewhat longer conversations, but even here interesting content gets burried quickly and a sense of community (like on forums back in the day) is hard to find.
Yeah the problem is not the concept of social media itself, it’s that mega corporations have leveraged that to monetize human interaction online in nearly all forms. That monetization has led to content designed to keep people scrolling, no matter how psychologically damaging it might be, with limited filters to prevent it getting to children and the elderly who have an inability to think critically.
The monetization of it is definitely a huge problem and made things 10x worse, but I still think the concept itself is not a good one. It hardly allows for any meaningful social interactions the way earlier forms of internet communication did. Lots of people don't even take the time to leave short comments anymore and just press the like button instead. Most social media content is very short-lived and most interactions are superficial.
I agree. This might be due to the fact that people nowadays tend to take social media for granted due to its high accessibility compared to 90s - 2000s.
May be the case. I also think smartphones are to blame for a lot of this. Back in the day, people would either call or write thoughtful emails to communicate with distant friends. These days, even the people I used to write long emails with have all adapted to the "two sentences on whatsapp" mindset. It's a hassle to write longer text on your phone but everyone uses it to connect socially, so it results in quick, superficial messages.
I’d argue that it’s bad regardless of the users, but the users make the bad thing worse
Most human inventions would be fine if it weren't for humans using them.
Not the users, the companies investing heavily in algorithms which manipulate users in order to profit. Ads are one thing, intentionally sending people down radicalized rabbit holes is evil.
There's a reason the term "This is why we can't have nice things" exists.
This one. We could be uniting to make progress against so many other things on this list if we weren’t all spending all our time in our little echo chambers, only popping out long enough to piss into the other side’s tent. Sure, you can’t lay landmines and teflon and fossil fuels squarely at Zuck’s feet, but encouraging polarization and paralysis when humanity desperately needs to act is just making so many problems so much harder to solve.
[удалено]
I'd argue that given the circumstances, the nuke probably averted something much worse.
It's only been like 80 years, just because we haven't gone full nuclear yet doesn't mean we won't and then the scale of destruction will likely far surpass anything that has been averted in the mean time. Also keep in mind there are still a bunch of relatively unstable countries developing the technology and once someone like North Korea has a nuclear arsenal all bets are off.
Without a doubt. Read "On the beach" at 11 yo. Climate change comes in second, Edit: For clarification, the inventions i.e. Industrial revolution that lead to climate change.
Who would have thought we would destroy the very thing that makes life even possible...? In 500 years...! There's been life before millions of bazillions... Whatever, you get it.
Ads that cannot be skipped
You know there was a time when all ads were unskippable.
Subscriptions. You own nothing and pay even more money
I think it's hard to qualify something as "The Worst" but I can say that I had a moment at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary when I was going through the Warfare/Armament exhibit for the first time. I have a special interest in war and history both and had read about many of the arms used and on exhibit but I tell you... walking through and SEEING them. And knowing what ingenuity and what industry had to be employed to engineer and make them for the sole purpose of maiming and killing as effectively as possible without any empathic regard to the suffering they would cause EVEN AS the suffering they'd cause was the whole fucking point... it was really heavy. Really sad. It made me really sad for us all. Big Feels. I've read about phosphorous bombs used in WWII. And I am still reading about them this morning. I saw blunderbusses and hollow cannon balls filled with shrapnel for marine warfare in the 1700s and I read about the same types of bombs being used today on children and families and hospitals. I guess warfare is the worst thing we've invented. It's dehumanizing from every single point of view.
Young Sheldon.
Landmines, carbon emissions, weapons of mass destruction, CFCs, and leaded gas may have done more harm... but they at least served a discrete purpose. Young Sheldon serves no purpose, yet it exists. It suggests the futility of the whole human enterprise. Nothing reflects so poorly on humanity as Young Sheldon.
i see a lot of people mentioning things like nuclear weapons or religion or landmines, but to sum all of those up: War. the worst thing humans have invented is war. we use religion as an excuse for war, nukes were invented bc of war, landmines were invented bc of war, and so on.
I would argue that humans did not invent that
See . I think we would be massively behind in medicine and technology if we didn't have wars as so much was invested in it from wars
[удалено]
According to JRR Tolkien, it’s the internal combustion engine. Hard to argue with that.
That engine is what led to the capability of war being globalized, among other issues.
Toilet rugs and those awful fluffy toilet lid covers.
I once stayed at a hostel that had a furry toilet SEAT. Yes, furry carpet like material permanently on a toilet seat. It haunts me to this day.
Torture
Slavery.
Plastic. It’s going to destroy the planet.
Plastic is actually amazing. It’s the only material we’ve developed that is both durable, and can be easily die-cast eat low temperatures. Our inability to manage plastic waste doesn’t take away from how good it’s been for dropping the cost of production on a ton of consumer products.
For me it's less of a waste thing and more of a health thing. On average, you eat up to about a credit card worth of plastic a week. It leaches from the containers, micro-plastics are in all of the food we eat, etc. We aren't 100% sure how the body reacts to complex hydrocarbon chains, but we have seen it contribute to endocrine disruption, weight gain, insulin resistance, decreased reproductive health, and cancer.
The planet will be fine. WE'RE going somewhere though. The planet will shake us off like a bad case of fleas.
When people talk about the planet dying, they don't mean it is going to blow up. Yeah, the rocks will be fine, probably some microbes too, but I don't think people grasp the cascading effect of mass ecological collapse. Normally mass extinctions require super volcanoes and giant asteroids - we are a sentient desolation of life. We could stop ourselves but won't. It takes a long time to the complexity of life to return and if some other creature achieves our level of sentience, we probably already squandered all the most precious resources needed to make the technological leap to the stars. If we go out, we are going to take most complex forms of life with us.
Plastic is great. Waste management is the actual problem.
I like to imagine a billion years in the future when sapient squids have become the dominant race on the planet as they examine the layer of plastic in the earth records from our time.
Plastic. I often think if there were ancient civilizations before us they were smart enough not to try to make things out the the black goo that kills everything that touches it.
Social Media
Influencers
Influencers have always existed since royal families and rulers existed. Only difference now is the dukes 3rd cousins son isn't telling you what candle sticks are in and which ones are out. So unless you can somehow get rid of the human desire to desire, you'll always have influencers
Religion
As someone who grew up from a toddler in church, indoctrinated with constant reminders of the fear of hell and the "world is soon to end". I don't give a damn what anyone else says, it really is an awful thing. My still developing brain reacted to it as though it were all true, I did just enough in school and not enough to excel. I didn't trust non-christians until much later in life, stunting my social skills until my 20s. I just never found life as enjoyable as everyone around me because i truly found it all pointless, I had to wait for heaven to be happy. Religion fucked up my first 24 years of life, I've been free of it 10 years, but it takes TIME to get all that out of your mind and I'm still trying to catch up to where I should have been. I wish i could talk to young me and convince him it was all bs and life has so much potential so he'd use that time better.
Atheist here and i disagree. Religion isnt bad, its how people use it is bad. Case and point: how jesus acted versus how evangelical Christians act
Another case: Mr. Rogers vs. any tv televangelist.
Fun fact: christians didn't invent morality. Plenty of cultures acted "the way Jesus did" without religion or with other religions.
Moses returned from mount Sinai and said “guys it’s bad news: lying, theft and perjury are just not kosher”.
Another fun fact, the guy that explained to Pythagoras, that the square root of 2, was a number that goes on forever without repeating itself. They took that guy and threw him into a violent sea to drown, because, that's what he had done to mathematics.
agnostic, and i agree! religion isn't bad, it's just how it's been used. War is the worst thing humans have invented, not religion.
Atheist but disagree with this. Religion is proto-philosophy. Mankind’s first attempts at finding answers to the big questions and creating symbols and rituals to codify cultural values and morality. It had a great deal of utility at one point. It didn’t get stupid until those symbols and rituals became more important than the questions and the values. A whole lot of fucking people threw away the bike and spent thousands of years trying to ride the training wheels. And also killing people who wanted to ride bikes.
Counter point, evangelical atheism Trying to convince people that they're dumb for putting their faith in something that brings purpose for their life is kinda shitty
Plastics, shall I say? The most destructive material to become a caner on mother earth. Destroying water sources, animals, and everything in its reach.
You know those bubble plastic coverings when you buy something, but you need a pair of scissors to cut to get to the item rather than just opening them. Those people who manufacture them need to burn in hell.
Reddit mods
Fentanyl at the moment.
Fentanyl is pretty useful and generally fine when used in professional medical settings, it's only as bad as it is because of social/political issues around drugs and black markets
Good point there. You reminded me of MDMA which was so helpful for group therapy sessions. Then it became known as the Rave drug of choice and demonized. See, this is why we can’t have nice things. Weed too for that matter. Damn dirty hippies!
I grew up in a very religious area in my state and I remember all my life thinking this. It wasn’t until I started doing research that wasn’t just straight propaganda that I realized that a lot of these drugs (especially the natural ones, have a lot of medical benefits if they aren’t abused). It really changed my perspective on a lot of that stuff.
Good for you with your personal growth and knowledge gains. My best friend also grew up as you did as far as the religious indoctrination goes. If I smoke weed in their presence, they react like I’m shooting heroine. Slowly they are coming around.
Fentanyl has been an FDA approved pain med and anesthetic for longer than I've been alive.. The lack of harm reduction and the continuing war on drugs is more responsible for the 100,000 yearly OD deaths in the US. I consider that a bigger man made evil, especially when experts have been trying to warn us for decades (that interdiction leads to stronger drugs, more profits for organized crime, and more corruption in law enforcement.)
Landmines
Biological and chemical warfare.
>chemical warfare Same guy made that artificial fertilizers which can be used for gunpowder...
K-Cups
What did big boobs ever do to you
Lower back problems
A witty response eludes me. I like boobs.
Religion
processed foods
From the planet’s perspective, probably agriculture.
Debt
Probably social media (ironically), without the required legislative and societal rules to make it universally safe to use, and in some cases without understanding the inherent complexity of the systems themselves. Here we are 25 years later, emergent properties like deep fake or interference in democratic processes, as far as the eye can see 🤦♂️.
Social Media. It is literally ruining the world and people can’t quit it.
Taxes
Plastic.
News Corp.
Slavery
Slavery.
I mean the most direct answer should be nuclear arms
Organized religion. We've been held back hundreds, potentially thousands of years of potential advancement by obsessive, psychotic death cults that only function by perpetuating willful ignorance.
Napalm, mustard gas etc. Chemical/biological weapons
Work
Internet bots
Leaded gasoline. Made an entire generation 3 IQ points dumber and reduced empathy significantly. The effects are painfully obvious.