For context, this is what the street above this station looks like, and what this propaganda piece by Singaporean state media would have you believe means “the only way to improve public transit is to build an expensive underground subway system where everyone who gets off at this station has to go up 43 meters of escalators”.
So hooray for another car supremacist boondoggle. It’s better than nothing…
Capitalism is nothing more than a collection of tools. Changing who hold the tools doesn’t change anything. Charitable billionaires that give their wealth away just means that in 20 years time wealth has re-accumulated with the next set of legal persons that exploit everything for short-term gain. The problem isn’t bad people, it’s the system itself.
The only way to change how capitalism operates is by changing the tools that society uses (where changing the people at the top can be indirectly useful by creating a window to do this). Failing that, you can at least try to prevent capitalism from accumulating more tools that enforce its structure.
AI by itself is nothing in the same way a Maxim gun by itself is nothing. Through its shapes - the cost of its computations, the scale of its data collection and the methods that scale requires, the legal ownership of its weights and outputs, perhaps even its moral patienthood, and the reward signal of its fine-tuned training - it requires a certain shape of society be made and used, and it imparts a certain shape upon society.
So AI has a place in a solarpunk society in the same way as biological weapons research does. Cancer detection AI are great, and it’s also nice to be able to preventatively research how to stop future pandemics, but their shape puts them at odds with solarpunk ethos. If they must be used they should be encapsulated by a tightly monitored system, so that that system can take the shape of something beneficial.
AI is a sword, we should not use it unless we can make it into a plowshare. And at that point, is it still a sword?
Daily reminder that food waste is necessary to make sure there will be enough when there is a bad harvest. Like when climate change massively reduces crop yields, or a forest fire burns down your food forest.
To some extent this can be mitigated with preserves, but preserves don’t last forever and also cost labor and resources to prepare and recycle. Sometimes harvests are better than expected 10 years in a row. Sometimes they’re catastrophically worse 10 years in a row. Sometimes you suddenly need to feed more people, sometimes you suddenly have better things to do than prevent food waste. You fundamentally can’t prevent waste without risking shortage.
Capitalism is bad, especially when its mask slips and profit opportunities are wasted to hurt people to enforce the hierarchy that capitalism actually cares about. But please make sure you have plenty of food to waste whenever you try to set something up on your own.
Need more lithium and also have a growing junk stash of tons of lithium batteries full of … lithium? Take a minute … see if you can get there.
Why do you complain about needing food? There’s a pile of excrement right there. It’s the same elemental composition as what you normally eat.
So sad that this genocide isn’t ecologically friendly…
What do you plan to do with a hoard of guns and ammo? Get yourself killed so people can loot your bunker?
Humans are inherently adaptive to their environment. Our bodies obviously change, but so do our minds. Our habits, our emotional responses, our beliefs of what is possible and what is necessary, all change depending on how we grew up and the world we see around us. It takes a lifetime to unlearn all the harmful lessons of a fucked up youth, and almost everyone has had a youth fucked up to be burdened with plenty of traumas to pass on to the next generation. And that’s on top of all the pain that the natural world can bring.
Humans are the dumbest possible species capable of doing science well enough to reach escape velocity from the physical limits of the ecological niche they evolved to occupy, but we’re also the only species, seemingly in the nearest billion light years. We’re the best shot this part of the universe has at bringing peace and joy to the natural world, including ourselves. And we are getting better at it, slowly and with many setbacks. There have been countless plagues and extinction events in the history of our world that have caused tremendous damage to the ecosystem, and we’re the first to try to mitigate itself.
If we manage to change fast enough to mitigate most of the crisis we are creating, we will build a better world than could have ever have been without us. A world where mammals live unburdened by parasites and parasites live unburdened by mammal immune systems. A world where people grow strong and healthy and loving and open and connected and sharply intelligent because our environments help us grow into our best selves. Food forests, friendships, peace and prosperity and labors of love.
We already know it is possible. We already know we could belong there. We all dream of such a world no matter how strangely contorted our sense of how to get there has become. We just have to keep building our social structures to get ahead of our technological power.
Few fascists call themselves fascists. But ecofascism is mostly used as a descriptor for policies and policy priorities that are genocidal in the name of ecology, even though the proponents may be non-fascist in other areas.
For example, a neoliberal legislator may cut foreign aid because it’s going to industries that emit carbon, while simultaneously cutting public transit funding to promote driving. Or a neoconservative may increase the funding for border police by a massive amount because climate change will lead to an increasing number of climate refugees.
You’re reading my comment backwards. I’m not saying it’s okay to exile someone just because you have 20 people, I’m saying it’s absurd to consider it a problem that you can’t exile someone when you can’t even get 20 people together to do it.
You were the one complaining about not getting to exile them. You were the one wanting to use a power structure to commit violence. I’m just saying you can’t cheat by using cops as a force multiplier.
If you want a power structure to commit violence you’re going to have to convince people that its existence is just. You can’t just say that the people doing it are cops and therefore shouldn’t be stopped.
And I disagree that the Mafia arose in southern Italy due to things going on in the USA. I hope that helps. (Though to throw you a bone - people want justice and safety, and without anarchist principles there are many unjust ways to provide a shitty version of the two).
I’m not saying cops are good, but most of the anarchists I’ve spoken to have the idea that it would be great for everybody to be willing to be violent with others when disagreements arise.
Those anarchists aren’t telling you to be violent over a disagreement, they’re telling you that if you aren’t willing to be violent over something you shouldn’t be able to send a cop to be violent for you.
When a law requires constant violence to be upheld, that doesn’t mean you should personally be violent, it means your law sucks. Cops are a crutch that allows unjust laws to be enforced.
Sure. Healthy communities are sadly rare, and just because they are always in high density working class neighborhoods doesn’t mean even just most of those neighborhoods have healthy communities.
Because if we are too optimistic and prepare for the wrong future, hundreds of millions of people will die that didn’t need to.
Climate adaptation is necessary to prevent people 50 years from now from resorting to fossil fuels, war, or ecosystem destruction to try to avoid starvation.
I’m optimistic about our ability to affect change. The difference between 2.5K warming and 4.5K warming is hard to comprehend, and we still have that to play for. How soon will New Orleans or Miami or Amsterdam be surrendered to the sea? What refugee infrastructure awaits their inhabitants? How much has the world economy prepared for the loss of these cities and the surrounding regions? It depends on us. There is so much we can still do that matters.
Through it runs my AC ducts which are insulated pretty poorly from what I can tell
If that includes the warm duct, that’s an electric space heater with extra steps. So not surprising it would get hot in there.
It’s difficult for me to imagine that permanently shading the roof and leaving an air gap above it would not improve things in addition to the presence of insulation and the attic itself
The question is whether it would improve the situation more or less than spending an equal amount of value on building houses with taller roofs and thicker insulation, or insulating the AC ducts, or allowing the hot air to cycle out at night, or something else. If you only compare it to not having it, of course it will have some benefit.
but principle is a luxury of the wealthy
This is the opposite of true. When you’re poor you can’t afford to take a chance on people, so you have to rely on people whose principles guide them to doing things that help you. So when someone with these principles is suffering, it’s in your self interest to help them out so they can help you when you’re in trouble.
Poor communities run on principles. Hospitality, loving your neighbor, forgiving your enemies, treating others as you treat yourself, trusting each other with your life, utterly ostracizing those that break the principles, etc.
This is also why religion is so big in many poor communities. It’s a set of principles for that community to rely on that is predictable even if it isn’t perfect. You don’t know which principles will only have you to work for others and which ones will have others work for you, but in total you will all work for each other when you most need it, and that helps you through the worst of poverty.
And principles work. They’re massively profitable for every society that has them. Socialist healthcare is the principle that we all pay for everyone’s health care no matter what, and it extends people’s lives by 5 years while costing 70% less compared to capitalist healthcare.
Between people who have fewer principles, trust is expensive or even impossible. Every piece of nuance opens up risk that you have to mitigate with labor or reserves.
Principles are so massively beneficial that we are immediately suspicious when someone with both power and principles doesn’t make our lives better. Are we really in that unlucky small percentage of people that pay more into it than we get out, or do their principles not care about us as much as we thought?
The DNC has principles, but caring about the working class is pretty far down the list. Mamdani ran on principles that put the working class much higher, so he could be honest about the policies that result from them and just win.
Trump ran on fostering that suspicion into complete disbelief. The DNC won’t help you, nor will establishment republicans, nor even religion and its commandments (“Love thy neighbor”? No, “the sin of empathy”).
When nothing means anything and you can’t trust anyone, how can you keep yourself relatively safe? Well, you try to be the most like the most powerful people that will accept you (for now) and bundle together with those that are most like them to fight those who are less like them.
And because you can’t trust anything, the best way to determine who is like them is things that are relatively visible that can not be changed or are difficult to change - race, religious rituals and paraphenalia, culture, nationality, wealth and power, cultish devotion to the great leader, etc.
This is fascism, and there is no exit clause. They’ll fight until they lose, and if they ever run out of enemies they shrink the circle and fight everyone outside that.
So let’s honor our principles. And if we find that our principles keep hurting those around us, just get better principles.
There are only 0.5 acres of arable land and 5 acres of solid land per person on the planet. (or 2k and 20k m^2 respectively) So you may, if you use that land to feed and provide lumber to at least 20 people.
But not “way more than you would think” where “you” includes readers such as /u/agmemnonymous and myself.
IMO you should be able to guess >5% just from the OP image. The OP implies that corporations actually used sawdust as a substitute, which implies it was a profitable substitution, which implies it was worth it to set up an entire supply chain for bagging sawdust in sawmills, outbidding other parties interested in industrial quantities of sawdust (such as paper mills), shipping it to cereal factories, mixing sawdust into the mix, and trying out ways to make it homogeneous, not to mention the risk of customers noticing and switching to alternatives with less sawdust.
That said, nobody uses sawdust anymore because it’s too expensive. Hay, straw, and chaff are much more common sources of cellulose, also known as dietary fiber. Most people in the western world would be healthier if they ate more sawdust (assuming it has been produced in a way that didn’t introduce toxic pollutants).
I mean, it’s not free, but yes, edible sawdust would be good for the health of most people in the western world. Though they tend to get cellulose from cheaper sources like straw or chaff.
It’s also a great way to stress-test social/political/economic theories. If you only wait until after the revolution to start putting a theory into practice, reality can ensue and have terrible consequences. But if your system already helps >5,000 people despite active sabotage and commodification efforts by capitalism, chances are it’ll work for millions. Meanwhile systems that don’t work don’t work, so they can’t amass enough power to take over.
In that case, check out this list of repair cafes and other DIY stuff around Europe. It’s far from complete, but there are repair cafes in the Netherlands, England, France, Italy, Portugal, and Poland.
Circuit breakers cost money and provide no benefit to the park operator, so it makes sense that they would prefer to sell the electricity for a negative price instead as long as that negative price costs them less than the circuit breaker.
Also, solar parks in Europe are subsidized, so beholden to government demands. From the perspective of the government and the public good, it’s better if the electricity is sold for a negative price than if the capacity to produce it for free is wasted, because it can still be used for productive ends. The value for buyers is positive, but because it’s a buyer’s market the electricity is still sold at a loss because the buyers can threaten to go to a different solar park operator.
Also prisons and other concentration camps can be more than deadly enough if the sanitation isn’t up to standards. And would the GOP really demand that sanitation for prisoners is kept to a high enough standard?