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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • I haven’t read the author’s book, but I think her position in the article still misses the mark and is naively dangerous, having us all just look at the flowers and embrace market solutions while we collapse the biosphere at stunning pace.

    Honestly I’m not seeing any ‘solutions’ that are on a timeline relevant to the crisis. But I think any first step will have us coming to terms with climate change not being the problem, but a symptom of our economic system and our relationship to the environment. We’re going to have to reorient away from growth, because that growth is literally consuming the biophysical basis of our own existence.

    Large-scale solutions aside, I think we’re going to start seeing a growing desire in people to somehow ‘exit’ this system. I know I feel it in myself, deep in my bones, and it pisses me off to no end that I’m forced into destructive behavior because of the system I’m trapped in. All this waste, plastic and destruction just to exist each day, and I’m not even having a good time! If anyone has made some progress in this area I would love to hear about it. I imagine it must start with some rejection of what the market ‘values’, choosing not to participate in this whole game that is making us miserable, and somehow trade material wealth for greater awareness and connection to our humanity. If Elon and Jeff want it all, they can fucking have it, I just want out of this nightmare and to find peace with nature somehow.






  • Okay, but this money basically IS going to people that need it, by way of affordable fuel prices. Ever wonder why fuel is so cheap in places like Egypt? It’s because the government is subsidizing the cost and picking up a lot of the tab. What happens when people can no longer afford to get around, and food prices skyrocket because transportation is so expensive? Leaders are mostly concerned with keeping their heads attached to their bodies and they’ll do anything to keep the economy growing, even if it destroys the environment and explodes the public debt. It’s why climate change is such a gnarly problem, it’s not just that there’s a bunch of corrupt evil people preventing progress, our whole economic system needs to be overturned.

    For a livable future, we’re going to have to massively reduce our energy usage (like, yesterday) and figure out how to survive in a degrowth scenario, while we try to replace the entirety of our infrastructure and build out resilient systems, all without access to credit. Fun times ahead.



  • In my experience it’s okay, but not amazing and slowly getting worse year after year for various reasons. Generally speaking if you have a life-threatening issue (heart failure, cancer, etc), you are taken care of as well as anyone could reasonably expect. But for anything else it can take forever to see a specialist and it’s easy to get lost in the system that always seems to be running in capacity crisis mode. There are other countries that do a better job with the single-payer model, mostly those without provincial fiefdoms that insist on doing everything themselves and reinventing all the wheels for political reasons.








  • There may be an opportunity here for Lemmy to help solve part of the distributed blob problem, that is, what are the incentives for people to contribute bandwidth/storage? Instead of the dodgy crypto-reward schemes we see come up, it could just be an extension to the motivations already driving why people set up Lemmy instances or contribute hours to moderate communities.

    Some brain-droppings:

    • I have a few TB that I would be willing to contribute if I knew how, if it wasn’t very time consuming, and if I was comfortable with what I was supporting.
    • I don’t really want to serve videos unrelated to my personal interests or that I feel are low value, but I would be happy to serve content that is important to the communities that I am part of.
    • Lemmy can be a proxy for automatically deciding what content is worth storing/serving for people contributing resources. Blob is posted to this community I’m supporting -> I’ll seed that. The post it belongs to has low interest or gets downvoted -> maybe that blob doesn’t need to stay around for that long.
    • All the complexity of the blob swarm underlying a community really should be hidden from the clients. If it’s any more difficult than integrating an imgur-like service it’ll never be implemented.
    • This could (should?) be implemented outside of Lemmy core.