You are misunderstanding the Animal Farm. It was a criticism to the Soviet system and not socialism, Orwell literally fought for the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War.
He still wrote the book as a critique from a socialist standpoint. The whole point of the book was that the USSR was not real socialism and was damaging the Socialist movement.
What are you actually defending here? A version of capitalism that is imploding under the weight of usurious debt, that considers widespread homelessness around the bases of empty "investment" apartment towers a feature and not a bug, that bankrupts half a million families a year because of health insurance sharking, that is regularly implicated in unquestionably immoral scandals and corruption (Boeing, opioid sales, Enron, S&L...), that is linked to violent wars and oppressive regimes around the world, and has also been the single biggest driver of climate change, and climate change denial, in the last century?
Do you really think these are somehow justifiable with a glib "But socialism!"
Anyway - the Scandi countries do a nice line is social democracy, which includes policies that seem to be considered outright socialist extremism by US standards.
You should find out how they're doing. By all accounts they're not particularly unpleasant places to live.
Marx was so popular because he's really great at identifying problems. He could pinpoint exactly what was wrong with far more insight and acuteness than you did. What he never ever could do was propose a better one. We have tried his plan of having the government temporarily seize the means of production several times, and it never ever ceases and becomes Socialism. He's like a philosopher version of the hipster who will mock your taste in music, but never tell you what makes music good.
I don't love our problems. But I hate every single other large country's problems more. I am open to change, but if your change wants to be some minor variation on the old, perpetually failing socialism-like ones that we've seen kill tens if not hundreds of millions of people, I'll pass.
Most socialistic societies fell due to outside interference in an already weaker society. (Weaker because of their starting position, not because of socialism).
This was for example the case with Venezuela, to name a recent one.
You'd need a country with an already strong economy to try socialism to see where it goes. We have western civilisations with some socialist aspects (European countries) but they're all still majorly capitalistic.
A lot of countries labelled as socialist/communist were/are really just state-capitalist countries (China, to name a good example. Communist only in name, same way the nazi party was socialist)
Venezuela's failures were primarily due to the usual incompetence and corruption. Outside interference was a relatively minor factor. In fact they actually received significant assistance from some other countries.
But.. that only makes sense if you’ve already replaced fossil fuels with carbon free energy everywhere else (with rare exceptions such as maybe air travel). Otherwise you’re wasting energy by converting carbon to co2 and then using more energy to convert it back to carbon.
Plastics have helped a lot in the hygiene aspects of food, as much as some people think (very naively) that food can't make you sick. Especially if you live in a country with warmer temperatures and low infrastructure (hello Climate Change)
I ran a restaurant in college and had to become a certified food manager (a step up from the line food handler). So while I won’t prentend to have all the data, it was clear that simple processes prevent 99.99% of food borne illness, and not one law required plastic gloves! In fact they expressly warned NOT to use gloves if you were not sure they were food grade.
If you follow the simple rules, most illness is caused by tainted supply.
The most common infraction I saw was failing to wash hands, followed by not separating meats from other stations. (Work surface, knives, hand washing, etc)
In a busy kitchen, you would be shocked at how much cross contamination occurs every single day, plastic or not. Plastic is not the solution, training and oversight is the essential thing.
I don't disagree with the points you make, but you're thinking of "the last mile". Think of the steps before the food got to the restaurant or consumer:
For example: delivery of water to locations where the local source is suspected to be contaminated, packaging of meat products from market to consumer, handling of refrigerated or wet products, to name a few
Of course it's not the whole story, a lot of food-borne illnesses have their origin at the producing farm.
I could have sworn that hackernoon had actually interesting content a few years ago and wasn't just another hyping tool to drive up the price of crypto.
