That was the first sci-fi I thought of when I read this too

Ah yes , the classic “it was just a joke bro, don’t be offended” defense

That’s fair, and why I mentioned pine cones too. Thrifting, at least where I am, is still very volatile. Different neighborhoods have different selections and price points, and different stores do too. I avoid the Salvation Army because they’re a shitty company too.

I also like to go to outlet stores like Gabriel Brothers/Gabe’s. Yes, it is cheap stuff from China, but it is basically the last stop before a landfill. The products are likely being sold at a loss just tk try to claw back some revenue before it gets tossed, so I don’t feel like I am contributing to the demand for consumption.

Find what you can that is cheap, and find a way to make it festive. It doesn’t have to last for all eternity, and if it is cheap and environmentally friendly it is fine to only last one season. String up popcorn as garland. Paint old corn cobs. Dye hardboiled eggs for every holiday, and eat them after. Cardboard and paper products, sticks, rocks. Try to be mindful of public spaces of course- if everyone just ransacks the local park then the public will be left with a muddy pit. Take an evergreen sprig from the hedges outside your apartment and stick it in a glass on your table.

Or don’t, i’m not your dad

Imagine unironically quoting Ronald Reagan in 2026. On Lemmy of all places.

A lot of these are actually good examples of the difference between a hobbiest or a professional. If she just held it correctly and you told me there was a bit of solder somewhere we can’t see, I could very easily believe this was a real photo of a hobbyist.

Most of what you listed are luxuries and conveniences. The one exception is the fume hood, which is a safety concern, but I would say that’s overkill for any hobbyist and maybe even a lot of professionals. A small fan and a reasonably vented/sized room is fine. Heck, I only bother grabbing my fan if I know i’m going to be doing more than ~15 minutes of soldering.

It could just be the circles I run in, but lately I see the opposite problem prevailing. People just decide that if a law doesn’t suit their “ethics” or whimsy in the moment, they can go ahead and ignore it.

Silly stuff like “I dont want to spend 90 seconds finding a parking spot and walking into/put of the store, so I’ll just leave my car right in front of the store entrance. Who cares about traffic patterns or emergency services or blacking access ramps for mobility impaired people?”

Or more serious things. Some friends of mine recently bought a vacant lot near me intending to build a house, and a workshop for their business. It’s on a hillside so they would need to spend ~$3k to have a contractor grade the property. But they needed to handle the permitting themselves… Which needs an engineer to verify their changes won’t destabilize the land and endanger their neighbors. Analyze the drainage to ensure their changes won’t cause flooding. Environmental impact survey to check for endangered and protected species on tbe property. Comes out to $7k. All of a sudden my extreme left-wing, progressive friends sound just like my conservative Uncle at Thanksgiving, ranting about how the big government won’t let them do anything. Meanwhile, since I live nearby I have been feeling a lot more comfortable knowing that my neighbors are required to go through these processes before doing any projects that could impact me. We have been getting more extreme weather lately and I had a landslide on my own property a few years ago.

They also wanted to build a separate workshop building for their business. It is just the two of them now, but they hope to grow and have employees, and want to have some seperstion between the work space and their living space. Which means extra parking, and the workshop needs stuff like a bathroom and break room. And the business needs regular truckloads of pallets of chemicals that they use. And they also use resin 3D printers which need to ventilate toxic fumes outside. This property is zoned for residential and entirely surrounded by single-family homes. Their plan was to just build and hope they were too small to get noticed by the city.

Would they be able to do all of these things without causing disaster? Probably. In my own uneducated opinion, I think they were probabky correct that there are nk endangered species present, that their plans would result in thr land being more stable rather than less, that drainage would not be concerned, and that there business woukd be small and quiet enough that the neighbors would not notice or care.

But none of that is the point. Everyone who does this stuff always thinks its fine. Disasters like that are things that happen to OTHER people, not me! A LOT of regulations are written in blood, but people want to ignore them because they are inconvenient or a hassle or they just don’t want to consider the impact to anyone else. Often laws are there to remind us of the ethical considerations we would otherwise overlook.

Material conditions have been improving for centuries and wealth inequality is arguably the worst it has ever been.

We can grow more food more efficiently than ever. We can build housing more efficiently than ever. We can make clothing more efficiently than ever. Globalization should, theoretically, greatly reduce the impacts of local disasters like earthquakes, storms, droughts, fires, etc to an extent never before seen on the planet.

Measuring income inequality throughout history and comparing it to today is challenging, but there are a lot of arguments that today’s world is worse than anything we have seen before. At the very least, it is in the same conversation as notable moments in history like the Great Depression.

I wish that were true, but that simply does not align with my experience with people.

Are there people who would be satisfied with their basic needs being met? Yes, but I believe they are a small minority. The small percentage of people who are billionaires is not representative of all of the people who want to be, just the people who wanted to be AND SUCCEEDED. You do not know the names of the vast majority of people who have succumbed to greed and tried to become that wealthy, only to fail.

A huge factor is social status. Most people I see around me are highly concerned with how they are perceived by others. They want the job title, the bigger house, the bigger car, the expensive clothes. They want to be seen at the exclusive clubs and restaurants. They want the latest videogame console, to watch the latest movie and TV show, and be able to talk to other people about all of the #content they have consumed. That’s why all these billionaires have mega-yachts - it’s not because there is some correlation between sailing and business accumen, but because all of these wealthy people are using their megayachts to schmooze and show off to each other. It’s why billionaires are starting to get into space travel. Most people want external validation and status over others.

Until we find a way to solve that as a species, I think we need either systems in place to prevent hoarding or we end up where we are today with the terrible consequences of wealth inequality.

No, you are called to defend not only yourself, but others as well.

So the meek are dependent upon the benevolence and excess production of the strong.

Everyone is responsible both for their own and everyone else’s justice

This is assuming that “justice” is constant, objective, and binary, when it is none of those things.

This is also assuming the capacity exists for individuals. I could very easily choose to travel to Gaza or Ukraine right now, and I am sure I could find a way to join the Palestinians and Ukrainians in their respective fights. I am not doing that, because there are other things I want to do with my life. I could participate in some sort of community watch program if I wanted to, but I do not because I have other things I want to do with my life. We need to compel people with the threat of violence just to get them to participate in jury duty, and you expect them to suddenly dedicate their lives to defending everyone else? That is simply not how humans work.

If someone wants to fit into some “heroic police officer” or even “hero vigilante” role, they will likely be celebrated and supported as long as their actions are heroic, but if they take any bad actions they will be reprimanded and resisted; they chosen role will not be a justification or mitigation.

There are no objective lines between heroic or villainous actions. Heroes and villains are works of fiction. In reality, heroes and villains are determined by messaging, public relations, and marketing.

Drive through any town in America and count how many thin blue line signs you see. These people honestly believe that the police are heroes. A lot of people think “the troops” are heroes for murdering brown people in the middle east.

All actions should be for the collective good

The term “collective good” sounds really great in essays on political philosophies, but has been impossible to put into practice in the real world. There are some right now who believe that sacrificing our land, our water, our trees, our energy, and the work of human artisans to create AI is in favor of the “collective good”.

all of your questions, and every “gotcha” question for anarchists I’ve ever seen, has already been considered and answered in anarchist theory, sometime many, many times

I could have gone through your whole comment and continued, but it’s all the same stuff. These are not “gotcha” questions. They are the very real and obvious flaws that are the reasons that anarchism is not popular. This is not the first time I have sought out the answers to these questions myself. I suppose our difference here is that when I read anarchist theory, I find some ideas that I like but a lot of the solutions are incredibly optimistic, or are dependent upon a world in which everyone was born into an anarchist utopia.

And I don’t mean that as a particular dig at anarchy. I’m sure we could talk and agree at-length about the problems with authoritarianism of all kinds. Even my preferred system, social democracy, has some very clear and obvious flaws like protecting minorities and the state monopoly on violence. I’m in favor of elections for representative democracy in general, but electoralism has plenty of its own flaws and needs to be tempered with other forms of democracy.

Another factor is that a lot of those decorations are manufactured in China.

COVID, various other supply chain issues, global conflicts driving up fuel prices, trade wars. And of course corporate greed on top of that.

The solution? I propose making our own decorations with locally sourced materials. Make some stuff out of old cardboard boxes or pinecones. Go thrifting.

Haha that’s a funny joke.

violence is only permissive

What does this mean? I understand you go on to list the circumstances where violence could be permitted, but who exactly is doing the permitting here and how does that work? Are we expecting everyone who feels that their rights have been violated to be responsible for their own justice? If we want to ban people from using violence to achieve their own goals, or for collectivizing violence…How do you does anyone actually stop them? There are options like economic and social consequences, but when I look at world history those things can only succeed in rare scenarios.

in defense of the rights of self or others

Who judges this in an anarchist society? This is a statement that is very easy for political philosophers to make but is incredibly difficult to translate to the real world. Even on the case of individual vs individual, physical violence.

But what about the more abstract violence? Looking back at ancient history, that could be things like overhunting, overfishing, overlogging. Hoarding rain water. People living downstream of others dealing with human waste in the river they depend upon. In modern times, who do we stop people from mining and burning fossil fuels?

i’m uneasy about the leveling mechanisms

High marginal tax rates funding social programs has, historically, worked. Part of what is necessary for it to work though is the collective and organized threat of violence against the wealthy, for the crime of being too wealthy.

I don’t think most publishers (Remedy in this case) care. The ones that do are ones like Epic and Microsoft who were trying to promote their own stores.

Like, yes they want to diversify their platforms. But if you want to bring in revenue quickly and start paying off thr debt accumulated from 3-5 years of developing a AAA game. You have to choose whether to delay your game’s PC release entirely for a couple of months, or whether to release on Steam ASAP and collect the vast majority of revenue from that and just delay the other platforms that are an insignificant fraction.

Remember that marketing budgets are a huge factor too. I suspect Lemmy users are probably more ad-averse than average, but your average gaming consumer probably saw a lot of ads for this game leading up to launch and was riding that hype train. Delaying the PC release means that you either need to pay for those marketing costs for longer, or release without that benefit (a death sentence). Or you delay the console launch too, which means even more time spent with financing tied up in debt and accumulating interest, waiting for the revenue to come in.

And even if you DO decide to go ahead and delay… The vast majority of PC gamers are going to buy it on Steam anyways. Only a tiny fraction of people care about DRM. Personally, I avoid anything with Denuvo and a lot of the publisher-specific stuff like EA Play.

You are paying a premium to buy a launch day game anyways. The reason people want to buy games on launch… Some people do just really want their gratification and don’t want to wait to enjoy the game, but a LOT of it is about social status. These are people who want to read articles, watch videos, engage in discussions both online and offline. They want to ride the hype train. And for people who want to maximize that experience, Steam is the platform of choice. They blow Epic and GOG put of the water in terms of social features. They are way better than any of the consoles too.

As someone not socially motivated myself… Well, I absolutely loved Control and I have been gushing to people about it for a couple of years. I’m in absolutely no hurry to buy the sequel. I’ll wait until it goes on sale for some reasonable price, probably $25-$30. Then it will sit in my library with my ~700 other games until the time is right. My mood, my schedule, the weather, etc. And I will almost certainly buy it on Steam for the convenience of having it on the same platforms as my other games, including cloud features that let me switch between my Deck and PC seamlessly, and stream to basically every screen I own.

In an anarchist society, no single person would be able to get close tl that much power/money/influencd

One of the things in hear from.Anarchists is that anarchy is perhaps the most common, most “natural” form of governance. That we are all born anarchists. But historically e see this same problem over and over again.

In a society which allows violence as a means to resolve disputes, those who are the best at violence are able to accumulate resources and power. Combine this with biological trends and you get patriarchy. Eventually you get people who are good at organizing, so factions or tribes form. Eventually a class structure emerges with the organizers at the top, those.who commit violence below them, and those who are good at neither at the bottom.

I have yet to see an anarchist system with a leveling mechanism that I think could actually work scale.

I have heard more than enough stories from the women in my life to agree.

Also, while i don’t have children myself I believe i think the parental decision making process here is pretty clear:

1. Is my child old enough that I trust them to make judgments and their own decisions?

2. If not, do i know these other children at the party? Do i know their parents and have an idea of how they were raised? Will there be adults present and do i trust them?

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Lol projecting much?

He can push through a bunch of unpopular policies, retire for “health reasons”, and secure full pardons for himself ans his family members from Vance.

The question is: would Vance want that? He would take over in the wake of those unpopular policies, on top of Trump’s already incredibly unpopular regime. The Republicans would, presumably, have control of neither the Senate nor the House. If we assume that there are meaningful democratic elections in 2028, what hope does Vance have of winning? I guess that’s where I have a hard time buying this theory. I also have a hard time envisioning Truml trusting Vance enough to step down.

It has already started

I just want to point out for a lot of people complaining abojt how often you refill your soap dispenser: consider how much soap you’re actually using.

Most of the world lives in a consumerist, capitalist society. Overconsumption is encouraged by pretty much everything around us. When you see an ad for a product, or even just look at the pictures on the packaging, the people shown using it often use way too much.

Laundry detergent for example. You only need a tiny bit, and studies gave repeatedly shown that thr pods of liquid are waaaaay too much detergent for a load, to the point where it is actually harmful to the washing machine.

Motor oil is another one. If you look on the bottle it probably days to change your oil every 3,000 miles, but if you read your car’s manual it likely says to change it every 10,000 miles, or more.

Toothpaste is another. You should use a pea-sized amou t of toothpaste to brush your teeth, but all of the pictures and artwork and graphics show a toothbrush oveflowing with 5-10 times that amount.

For soap dispenser that you pump, you absolutely do not need to use a full pump of soap to wash your hands. Each dispenser and soap brand is a little different, but with attention and practice you can get a feel for how much soap you actually need to wash your hands. The added benefit is that it saves the time it takes to rinse off all tbe unnecessary soap.

There are ~4,700,000,000 men alive on the planet, so sorry I haven’t kept up with them all