I am saying “isn’t earmarked for the federal government” and you come up with a fact check saying that it is not earmarked for military use. Which is the same thing.

No. “Isn’t earmarked for the federal government” is not the same as “isn’t earmarked for military use".

Any links to back what you say would be highly appreciated.

I’m really sorry that this is what you got from what I wrote. I definitely don’t think we should keep using fossil fuel. On the contrary, I am all in for phasing out extractions and usage.

Cuz the US strategic oil reserve isn’t earmarked for the federal government

According to a factcheck site it looks like the U.S. Oil Reserve Created for Supply Disruptions, Not Strictly Military Use. So maybe your statement is wrong? Otherwise could you share the source you got this from?

the share of the military energy usage in the federal energy usage is entirely meaningless tot the oil consumption of the US economy

I don’t understand what you are saying, could you please explain and/or share a relevant link? Btw maybe I should clarify that by talking about “consumption” I was not talking in economic terms, just in the sense of “utilizing”.

I have watched only a few minutes of this vid so far, as well as the timestamps and I must admit I don’t agree with this approach because of something I learned today.

He says around 2 m something like: the strategic US reserve of oil even tho the number of barrels sounds huge, they could sustain the US only a month of our current use. From the context my understanding is that he implies that this is due to casual, everyday-people consumption.

Well, it looks like the Department of Defense is the U.S. government’s largest fossil fuel consumer, accounting for between 77% and 80% of all federal government energy consumption since 2001. So why is this huge percentage missing from this long analysis?

Anyways, if he talks about the US military petroleum consumption, please let me know. Or if I got something wrong with this new info I got about the US military, let me know too.

I tend to agree with several things you talk about, but I have the impression we see things differently. For example, on one hand I agree with you when you say that we cannot let the Rich-Super Rich Economic Classes/Owners to just produce even a single new piece of plastic, but on the other hand for me the root of the problem is that the extraction of oil worldwide is still expanding instead of phasing out. Meaning that, as long as this is the case, more and more plastic will be produced.

Apart from that, of course bacteria eating plastics sound like a great option, but they are not the only way to get rid of plastics. Some alternatives would be fungi that “eat” plastic, or mycelium that replace plastics. Here are some relevant articles.

This podcast is about organising, solidarity, and ways that bring people together. Legal action part of their repertoir, but they don’t just do that.

Of course cultural appropriation of spiritual indigenous narratives from westerners is something that has been happening for decades. And I totally see the point of your analysis.

In a way, what I was trying to say is that even tho this kinds of appropriations need to be fought so they don’t take over the political discourse about ecology, by itself this doesn’t seem enough imo. In order to fight the power imbalance that colonisers have created throughout the centuries, I believe there is also a need to consciously take into consideration, as well as incorporate the suggestions and approaches of indigenous people in the relevant discourses in western politics, ecology, and their intersections. Certainly, without the element of appropriation, but as as equals.

I tend to agree with this article, but it is also a very slippery slope.

We must be careful not to erase once more indigenous/local narratives because we don’t like the vocabulary used. We risk to contribute into reproducing the colonisers’ power imbalance by disregarding local knowledge, just because it is presented in non-western way (i.e. cultural burnings).

I only know that it is both casually used as a park and that they are also regularly doing stuff there.

Hmm I’m not totally sure that it is something you exactly find first and deploy after. Of course there are a tone of things to read, discuss etc but I have the impression that you find some parameters and then it’s a trial and error process. Maybe.

Sometimes there are already people doing stuff like that near you. In a squat or a non-hierarchical collective nearby? Sometimes these collectives do not exist in our area, so maybe try to find other people with similar interests close to where you live and start something all together? As it says in the article:

It doesn’t matter how small you start, just start and see how it grows.

I dunno. From my experience in doing similar stuff for the first time I learned something else. Long story short, the things I imagined or feared etc, had nothing to do with what happened in reality. And doing the project felt great also because it opened the door to new kinds of interactions with other people.

I’m not trying to be lovey-dovey or something. With time, challenges emerged, some tough, some easy and badly handled, you name it! But what you describe reminded me of some of my “fears” before starting a project for the first time, this is why I thought of mentioning the above.

Thank you so much. Doing this immediately!

Maybe I should have specified that where I live it’s summer now, so windows are always open and will be so for many more weeks. Meaning, releasing it outside would not prevent it from coming back in.

Of course, that’s exactly what I’m saying.

As long as it is implemented within capitalism, it will never be neutral. Capitalism is destructive because it exhausts all natural resources and disregards all living creatures and ecosystems, for the sake of monetary profit and infinite economic growth. All these, on a finite planet. Clearly, eternal growth is a cancerous way of development, and it has nothing to do with sustainability.

I see things differently than the way they are analysed in this text.

AI by itself is nothing. What it is depends on the context, and the context here is capitalism. This is very obvious because most, if not all, the problems atributed to AI in this text, actually derive from how capitalism works. Maybe I should I say how AI works under capitalism.

So the problem for me is not the tool itself, it’s who is holding it. Meaning, going after AI, doesn’t change how capitalism operates. It’s by unstiching capitalism that the broader social and economic relations get the chance to reconfigure.

If I understand you correctly in the part you talk about labor, robotics and AI, it reminds me of what was said by capitalists when automations started being employed in factories, meaning many, many decades ago.

At the time the capitalist narrative was saying to workers stuff like “we know you work hard, but thanks to the technological advancements in automations your children will work less and have a better life”. We very well know this never happened, only the rich got richer, to the detriment of everybody else and the planet as a whole.

So, allow me to say, this approach is not new.

I was wondering if anyone here has read it as well. And what your take is.

Personally, I will not read it because:

Meet the authors

James Arbib is a technology investor and the founder of Tellus Mater, an independent philanthropic foundation dedicated to exploring the impacts of disruptive technology and its potential for solving some of the world’s most challenging problems.

Tony Seba is a world-renowned thought leader, author, speaker, educator, investor and Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

In relation to the content of the book, I wouldn’t be too surprised if these two capitalists suggest misleading technological “solutions” to a problem that is not technological in nature, but systemic. Meaning, the problem is the eternal growth of the capitalist system on a finite planet, and there is no techno-fix for that. Also, I’m pretty sure they are making baseless claims about humans and human societies to back their proposals.

Anyways, now that I said all that, may I suggest another reading? Totally free and priceless :)

What is Solarpunk?

I just realised that we should also keep in mind that the time-frame of this study is several decades, so we are talking about about an average through the decades.

What you said reminded me of an argument that I recently heard and found quite interesting, as well as accurate.

It was saying that the developing countries are actually the colonising ones because they got prosperous from ferociously extracting the resources from the places they colonised. In the so-called “post colonial era”, theses western countries kept their development through economic exploitation of the same areas and people.

Edit: So the developed countries, should actually be called developing instead. And what we call now developing countries should be called exploited, abused or something similar.

Ok so it looks like they try to shift to the sociocracy model.

Coincidentally, I have a friend who worked for some years in a company that was trying to shift from a typical hierarchical structure to a co-op with a horizontal decision-making processes, using sociocracy. For them, and to my understanding, it was not going great. They actually kinda kept replicating the typically centralised structure for too long but this time using the “circles” deriving from sociocracy. That said, maybe by now they have managed to move on from this transitional phase, but I don’t know since my friend doesn’t work there anymore. That said, from the conversations we had, I got the understanding that there has been successful approaches in other coops, in the sense that they had achieved consent-based decision-making processes.