Blake [he/him] @ Blake @feddit.uk

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3

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704

Joined

2 yr. ago

No, that’s not quite right.

So right now, people pay rent for shelter, they buy food, they need to pay for childcare and all that kind of stuff.

Imagine that we collectively got people progressively into housing co-operatives, and we got more food co-operatives set up to grow and process food, and we used mutual aid more and more for tasks like childcare.

Progressively, the need for money becomes less and less. Eventually it reaches a point where all it takes is a small push to get people to just stop doing any work that isn’t part of their mutual aid efforts, and capitalism collapses.

It’s just clearly worse than growing vegetables in a field, really

supply chain isn’t really an issue once you’ve got your setup going

Til you run out of phosphorus, or potassium, or whatever.

There’s no way that lab grown meat would be more efficient than just growing vegetables,

Worms are less of an efficient food source than, for example, beans. The sci-fi trope of eating insects is silly. Deus Ex had it right - soy food is the future. (And the present!)

I know you’re not really being serious, but it doesn’t really. I considered the logistics of this for an RP I was running and it doesn’t add up. You need way way way way more food to grow a human being than the human being provides in food when they’re dead. At most, being very very generous, you could meet 1% of a society’s food needs with cannibalism. And that’s a really high estimate. It’s really more of a special treat than a daily diet!

Aeroponics is really vulnerable to power outages and disease is still a concern, it’s a lot more expensive and vulnerable to supply chain disruption too, and consumes power power than just growing stuff in a polytunnel

Crops, but not unbelievably large monocrop farms. Diverse, rotated soil in reasonably sized fields, widely distributed. A variety of different crops mitigates blights, and they’re the most efficient food source, in terms for how much food produced based on the inputs (amount of land, water, energy, etc.) and other considerations (land used, greenhouse gas emissions!

I don’t think they are saying the taxes are bad

Come on, stop arguing that black is white. The article calls the report damaging and even you said that it highlights how badly the country is performing. The article very clearly has the message of “isn’t it bad how much the Tories have raised taxes?”

Why are you like, arguing about this? I don’t really understand.

There are biases beyond who funds the report. Neoliberalism is biased against taxes, economists are overwhelmingly neoliberal and the think-tank is a group of economists. It’s not that complex, really.

Thank you, but beware, as your new brother for life has some crazy hot takes and likes to argue a lot on the internet even though he probably shouldn’t. Lots of sibling responsibility! Although I don’t know which of us is the big brother / little brother.

I have a duvet too, I usually don’t make my bed but when I do it’s all about the trick shot - grab a corner of the duvet in each hand and whip it forward fast - like reins or something - and let it fall more or less perfectly on the bed with almost zero effort. Might take a bit of practise to get used to but this is what I’ve been doing for a long time!

Thank you, and yes, absolutely, sometimes I go beyond this as well (for example, I’ll decide to pair up some socks) but it’s always an added extra bonus, not an expectation that I’m failing to meet. Psychology matters as much as anything!

I literally just said I’m not talking about direct democracy. It was just an example of an alternative, and one that I specifically said I didn’t support.

All cards on the table, since you’re trying to understand my position, I’m a libertarian socialist. I support the abolition of money, the police, prisons, social classes, states and all unjustified hierarchies. I believe that power ultimately corrupts anyone who wields it and the only solution is to abolish all forms of power as far as is possible.

I think a good way to structure society would be groups of approximately 50-150 people (but absolutely no more than 200) represented by someone in their community in a council of delegates where decisions are made. The representative would not make decisions on behalf of their community but rather would act as a liaison between the community and the larger council. Proposals made at meetings of the council would be brought back to the communities to be discussed and for consensus to be built and a decision to be reached (or for a request for more information / clarification) and then that feedback would be brought to the council, where the delegates would share the feedback/decisions made by their community and they would make amends to the proposal to make it work. The barrier for approval for a proposal to be accepted would be high - something like 90% but certainly no lower than 75% - meaning that true consensus has to be reached, rather than a tyranny of the majority.

This is the model used by some cool groups such as workers/housing co-operatives, and I think it would work well for larger societies. Maybe it’s been used by large societies, I honestly don’t know.

You can do that too, but it’s less fun! I’m just very easily amused, of course, but there’s something joyful about wearing odd socks. Especially if they’re contradictory. Like, I wonder what people think of someone wearing one bright pink sock and one yellow sock. Or one sock that says “Star Wars” on it and another sock that has dinosaurs. I have some Star Wars Han Solo socks where Han Solo looks like John Travolta. That’s not relevant to this, but every time I see those socks, they make me laugh because he looks very funny.

You’re absolutely right. I don’t fold shit. If I need to wear a proper shirt then I’ll iron it when I need it, but usually just wear T-Shirts & polo shirts, so it doesn’t matter.

Yep, just give yourself permission to live out of the basket and put the basket on a shelf. It’s tidier and you don’t feel as bad about it.

“Causing harm to us” was my short-hand interpretation - I’m just a guy writing internet comments, they don’t have to be perfect - but I don’t think it’s an unfair reading of the article.

Acting like their analysis is unfeeling and unpolitical is classic IFS bullshit. Raising corporation tax, energy profit levy and top rate income tax are all good things and you want me to complain about it just because the Tories are doing it? Is tribalism more important than policy?

I’d call out this crap regardless of who’s in power because it’s just typical neoliberal “taxes are always bad” bullshit. Tax the shit out of corporations and the wealthy, please.

No, it doesn’t, that’s a very narrow perspective - I’m guessing that you’re quite young and you’re not familiar with alternative systems of organising society.

There are many alternatives, but I like the idea of consensus based decision-making. It’s a little bit like direct democracy - instead of voting for people to represent you, instead you directly get to support or block decisions made about the society you live in.

For example, currently, we elect politicians to represent us, and we try to elect a politician who would solve climate change. But that doesn’t seem to work. Imagine if, instead, we could all directly vote on an idea - whether or not we should end fossil fuel subsidies, for example? That’s direct democracy, but it gets rid of electoral politics. For full context, I don’t support that kind of direct democracy, but there are countless alternatives to representative democracy, I just wanted to share one which was simple and easy to explain.

Hijacking your thread to advocate for my lazy ideology. Disclaimer I have pretty severe ADHD so this might be extreme for most people but for me this makes life liveable.

Forget trying to make things look super tidy and neat like in an IKEA commercial. Make your living space functional, comfortable and easy to maintain. Reduce the amount of physical, mental and emotional effort required to maintain your environment. For example, for laundry:

1. Don’t iron anything unless you really need/want to. (Job interview, going on a date, appearing in court, etc.)
2. Anywhere you’re liable to undress, have a basket for dirty clothes. It should be open-topped (no lid!) and mobile, like a laundry basket, so when you need to do a load of laundry, you can pick up and use the whole basket - functioning both as the hamper and the basket. Bedroom and bathroom are the usual places for this! You want the act of tossing dirty clothes in the laundry to be just as easy as tossing it on the floor.
3. There’s no such thing as odd socks. They’re called mix ‘n’ match socks now. Like Mashems!
4. No neatly folded clothes or hangers or anything like that, except for very special things such as in point 1 - everything just gets dumped into big drawers based on category. I have little fabric boxes that fit into a kallax to keep this relatively neat looking but super easy.
5. If something can’t survive going in the washing machine mixed load cycle and the tumble dryer daily load, it is not welcome in my life. (There’s a similar rule about the dishwasher!)

You get the idea. Embrace your laziness, don't bother yourself with half a second what people might think of how you live. This is surprisingly neat and orderly and takes almost no effort to maintain. If you keep finding your basket is misplaced, buy another basket and keep it in two places. Stop fighting the current and go with your flow. Accept who you are, even if you’re a lazy bitch like me!

No. Nothing to do with voting. Just forget that voting exists. Imagine that the politicians are unelected. How would you go about changing the system in that scenario? That’s how you need to be thinking, because that’s essentially the situation that we’re in.

Yeah, misread your comment, sorry!

Your numbers are a wee bit off, but close enough - my calcs give £27bn corp tax rather than £21.6 (remember they’re increasing it this tax year to 25% from 19%).

It’s irrelevant anyways. The windfall tax is all just propaganda to mitigate criticism of the fossil fuel industry. I don’t want to defend the Tories at all, I agree with you that they’re taxing the working class greater for the benefit of the wealthy. But that isn’t what the article is saying, and that’s why I’m annoyed at the article. The article is bullshit not because it criticises the Tories, the article is bullshit because it’s complaining about the wrong things! They mention three conservative government policies which they claim are causing harm to us, and of those three policies, two and a half of them are things we should be pushing for MORE of. (Higher corporation tax, taxes on the fossil fuel industry, higher income tax for people with high incomes). Those policies are bad because they don’t go far enough.

Plenty of games are anti-capitalist (cookie clicker is the first one that came to mind!) but they are usually critiques of capitalism by demonstrating the issues with it, rather than demonstrating alternatives.

There’s a minecraft mod where villages will give you free resources if you’ve been helpful to them in the past, but it’s quite limited. I agree it would be interesting to play a game where alternative systems are clearly depicted. Would fit well with a sci-fi game.