Cultivating optimism is the first step. Optimism is irrational, you can just choose to have it (of course thinking about good things that have happened helps). Optimism is the precondition for doing good.

So what if there’s a low collective will at the moment. Do your part to be part to grow the collective will to good. Go volunteer for a good cause (food bank, community organizations, etc.), donate to good causes, just be friendly to other people you see.

As they say, pessimists sound smart, optimists get things done (and make money along the way, if that is the goal).

For news about things that are going right, I suggest https://fixthenews.com/. You can get a free weekly email about progress in energy and the environment, national economies, health and medicine, crime etc (or pay for a longer weekly email).

That you have the mental capacity/structures/language to form the thought should indicate the trajectory you're caught up within. It's disappointing that everything not's resolved during the blip you're you but even a moderately long view provides evidence for optimism.

It will rewire the hard sacrifice of limiting individual wealth to less than a billion dollars per person. Trajectory of present indicates we won't be doing that soon.

Pessimism is not a uniquely American viewpoint.

"South Korea is second from bottom on our list in terms of the proportion of people saying their country “is heading in the right direction”, with only 15% stating so. A similar sentiment is also felt about the economy. Pessimism is usually the standard for South Korea; however, their economic indicator score has been particularly low in recent times, with just 8% believing the economy is “good”."

https://www.ipsos.com/en-ch/what-worries-world-may-2025?utm_...

Anything that annihilates bed bugs is a net positive to the world. Drinking poison out of spite for those sons of the devil is well within reason. To hell with those infralings.

> Consider what you might choose to do…

Emphasis on might.

Evidence suggests "a giant boat and some helicopters" is the more likely result.

Which 30% are you talking about? Taxes? If so: From what do you build things like infrastructure?

Well my taxes go to roads, healthcare for people who can’t afford, schools, and the fire department. I would consider those public goods.

A lot less because they'd be dead from easily preventable diseases in their water supply?

The billionaires out there are being revealed as paedophiles quicker than they are solving world health problems.

I’d prefer not to rely on them.

> Consider how many more philanthropists would be created by returning this 30% back to individual discernment.

Many, many fewer than you assume.

Libertarians like to make lots of good-sounding promises to justify their favored radical policy, but it's bullshit and the promises don't pan out when tested [1]. By that point, the libertarian has gotten what he wanted and moved on.

[1] Or their policy was already tried and already failed, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46876387, leading to reforms to fix the problems that they're now mad about and want to undo.

Is there evidence that it happens? And that it serves the public good, not the personal interests of the wealthy? Do we need another $100 million given to a health program accessible only to the wealthy, or funding for public health? To a business school or art museum, or to arts programs for public schools?

Philanthropy is anti-democratic; the people don't choose what is important to support, the wealthy few do. You can see that in the relatively poor public goods in the US, which has much lower taxes relative to peers.

Those are bonkers (low) numbers compared to the 3.5M (human?) cases if I'm to believe the GPs comment.

It's also crazy how much Mother Theresa's quote rings true, even in reverse ("If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.") When I initially read 3.5M cases, I thought "wow, that's a lot", and somehow the 445 animal cases in Cameroon felt (at first) more real and similarly "a lot".

No comment other than interesting how our human brains work and distort how numbers "feel".

Once my rational brain kicked in, realized that's over 5,000 years for the current number of animal cases to match the former number of human cases. The future is awesome.

But the question would be how many more go undetected in those animals. (I.e if wild animals carry it, how accurate are these numbers).

It was a somewhat recent discovery that there were animal reservoirs escaping detection. Carter had hoped to outlive the worm, but it was thought that the animal pools were going to make full eradication take an additional 20 years.

You are right. Wikipedia write it is limited to dogs, cat and baboons, and that animal hosts have been only proved in the 2010s, so I guess they are unlikely to become infected by the parasite