I briefly stayed at a multi-millionaire’s place. They did have a herb garden. Nice planters and automated watering systems. All provided and maintained by the groundskeeping company, of course. I sincerely doubt they ever planted anything, they just grabbed herbs when they needed them and instructed people what herbs they wanted.

I imagine richer people might similarly have food gardens maintained by waitstaff. Maybe not around their primary residence, but what if the desire to cosplay as or claim to be a farmer or plantation owner strikes them?

Unauthorized government cheese.

The movement is stronger than ever. The coverage has disappeared, but there are more and more people willing to seek out every right answer and give up every privilege.

Centrists and right-wingers keep pretending that solidarity and radicalism makes movements weak, when it has always made them stronger. The moment Labor parties abandoned radicalism and chose the Third Way, their voter share dropped off a cliff. The moment movements abandon their most radical left-wing contributors to appeal to the lowest common denominator they collapse from in-fighting and the hardest workers moving off.

There is no Schelling point for less-than-complete justice. Nations, religions, ethnicities, even capital is just one of countless different ways to slice the pie and pretend that the hurt you suffer is more urgent and in-scope than someone else’s. If you morally accept rallying to one subgroup, then you have no defense against others you depend on from rallying to another subgroup and coming into opposition with you. There is no way around it:

None of us are free until all of us are free.

It can and it has done creative mathematical proof work. Nothing spectacular, but at least on par with a mathematics grad student.

Why is a baseline bulk level of education the goal? People are different, people live in a society where they can ask others for help. People don’t retain most of what has been crammed into their heads, and the fact that they were threatened with social exclusion if they didn’t cram it in gives many of them an unhealthy attitude towards knowledge that will take them decades to unlearn. Many subjects are propagandistic or taught in a way that makes them irrelevant for the rest of one’s life.

People learn how the mitochondria work but not how to recognize a stroke. How to write a formal proof about triangular equalities but not how to untangle a legal document. How to recognize a baroque painting but not how to make art you enjoy. How to compete at sports but not how to listen to what your body needs. How to memorize what an authority says but not how to pick apart lies.

So sure, let everyone follow a completely different education. Let them learn things at their own individual pace, let them focus on the things they care about and let them use their own interest as a guide. Maybe some will be functionally illiterate, but that is already the case.

That’s really not true. Paper production takes a lot of (often non-renewable) energy, ink usually consists of non-renewable chemicals, paper is often harvested from nonrenewable destruction of forests (especially in the US with Trump’s plans to cut down national forests), paper production belches a lot of pollution into the air and pollutes a lot of water, etc.

No matter what system you have, the luck of the draw will give some people more powerful hands than others. If that is enough to destroy your system, then your system can never be implemented in reality.

The self-managing community would have inequality, but its organisatory principles would address that inequality in the same way that they would address an inequality that is caused by natural randomness. If that method of addressing inequality is more empowering for the community than capitalist democracy, then the community would gain in power relative to capitalist communities. This inspires other communities to likewise empower themselves, and either together or alone they can fight off police action and start a revolution.

Sorry, I was trying to make a reference to an image macro. What I was trying to express is that I didn’t understand the explanation.

Burnout and depression are natural responses to a disconnect between what you do and what you care about. Their psychological/physiological purpose is to get you to stop and rethink your life at a deep level. There are many questions that you don’t typically think about, like “why am I still participating in this economy”, “is it ethical for me to pay taxes”, “do I need to prepare for civil war”, or “how do I build up contacts in underground railroads” that your body knows have non-trivial answers in this scenario.

Chimpanzees have politics and tyrants, which means that our ancestors have had to deal with tyrants for at least 10 million years or at least 400,000 generations. We can feel in our blood when other tribe members are scrounging for sharp rocks to bludgeon us to death in the night, and it is only natural to withdraw from business as usual and rethink our options.

Representative democracy is a lie, but if they let you vote you can still use that vote to help choose your adversary. Better a genocidal ‘centrist’ than a genocidal fascist, at least until the left is strong enough that they could take the right in a fight credibly enough for the ‘centrists’ to pick the left.

> there being a vote in 2028

good one

It’s common sense from an outsider perspective that any organization that expects children to pledge allegiance to it 3000 times before adulthood is loaded with propaganda and the kids that graduate from that aren’t going to have proper common sense.

And just because other countries aren’t as obviously villainous about it doesn’t make their standardized textbooks and their corporate media (much of it imported from the propaganda empire above) that much less propagandistic.

So it’s common sense that common sense is tainted by decades of propaganda, and actually understanding something means unlearning what they taught you and looking with fresher eyes.

So you’re right, common sense is for chumps, and that’s just common sense.

Frustration at having to choose between being fucked slowly or quickly. I’m no accelerationist, but I get the feeling.

Tell that to the 10% of the German population that didn’t survive WW2.

Okay then. If you appreciate talking that way, then either delete your account or shut the fuck up.

You can’t draw blood from a stone. If community self-organizing gets you the KKK, that community was fucked to begin with. The USA has always been extremely racist, it’s a matter of to what extent we give the racist police a legal monopoly on violence and place them above the law. At least when they wear ghost outfits you don’t have an illusion of reasonability.

Also note that the KKK never aimed to replace the police for the community the KKK came from, but rather to build upon police oppression of people outside the community. The two situations are not analogous, and if KKK members had to police their own community they would be much more gentle and constructive in their methods.

You’re putting the cart before the horse. It’s not that the entire system needs to change for this to work, it’s that this working changes the entire system. Community self-management would quickly result in the redistribution (and hopeful removal) of the inequalities, possibly with help of guillotines. The primary job of the police is to prevent this redistribution.

Historically, pretty much every “thriving local culture” is the result of a downtrodden wretched hive of scum and villainy where self-organisation was more important than police during the time of flourishing. Broadway (and NYC in general), New Orleans, Amsterdam, most Italian and German cities’ high points, London, Hong Kong, Osaka, etc… It turns out that when people don’t have enough, they will work together to get enough, and the benefits of that cooperation can be felt in that town for centuries. (Which is why gentrification is profitable - rich people exploit the commons of a flourishing lower class mutual aid network which persist in the design and culture of the space even when the lower class people are gone).

That is, unless a violent organisation like the police or the CIA or a multinational corporation or an invading army forcefully breaks up that cooperation. Like happened when the US government funded drug gangs and arrested black panthers members to specifically break up black communities throughout the US. Or when the US government funded drug gangs and armed fascists to specifically break up socialist communities in central and south America. Or when the US government funded drug gang religious fanatics to break up communist communities in the middle east and South-East Asia.

A human drawing a thumbnail in 15 minutes consumes 0.025 kWh. An AI creating an image consumes between 0.06 and 0.3 kWh, so between 3 and 12 times as much. Both have massive supply chains that go into producing and maintaining them.

And how much CO2 was produced training the AI that was put on your device? How many slaves spent how many hours generating data to train that AI? How many slaves cut down how many forests to extract the materials that how many slaves turned into the chips that ran the training process?

Noticing you skipped wind power there… Maybe because it doesn’t fit in your narrative?

Also;

solar power - silicon is required - good quality, and we are running out of it fast

Rocks are made of silicon. It costs energy to turn rocks into solar panel suitable silicon, but not that much compared to a panel lifetime of turning carbon dioxide into carbohydrates. “We are running out” of the sources capitalism now considers suitable.

and also tons of metals required

Solar panels doped with non-rare metals (the sort you would have left over when turning rock into silicon) are only one or two decades behind rare earth solar panels in terms of yield. They aren’t a priority in the current market, but that’s because of extractivist capitalism rather than the laws of physics.

(and also battery materials)

You don’t need batteries for carbon capture, you can just do it with the power that’s in excess. In fact, if you’re deciding to use solar panels for carbon capture, you need to massively overproduce solar panels relative to consumption, meaning you need fewer batteries than if you’re not able to use excess solar power (because the solar panels powering carbon capture during midday can be used to power homes shortly before sunset).

geo/hydro thermal - not available evrrywhere

Completely irrelevant for carbon capture.

nuclear - one of the only sources which is realtively very clean

I also like nuclear, but now it’s clear you’re just being biased. Nuclear power plants require tons of rare materials built precisely or else disaster happens. Practically, they’re less clean than wind, water, geothermal, and the (for now inefficient) rare earth free solar panels.

Also, there actually isn’t enough projected-to-be-accessible uranium ore in the world to do more than 1% of the energy production necessary for carbon capture. We could try filtering it out of sea water, but that’s more difficult and ecologically disruptive than turning rock into solar panel substrate.

can be even retrofitted to some large coal plants

Not really relevant for carbon capture, because we need to increase electrical production by a factor of 10 but retrofitting coal plants means you’re reducing production instead. A nice way to reuse infrastructure, maybe, but even there it reeks of political wrangling.