So, I'm lucky enough to have built a house, and earthworks are expensive. A hobbit hole would cost as much as the house we live in, without the actual building, just the hole.
Modern day book burning. Done by the writers this time.
One thing which is irritating is just how ingrained Bunnings has becomes into our culture. Many people just go to Bunnings just for browsing. Unfortunately, they will also suck the air out of the room and basically force you to go to them. I have had to go to bunnings on occasion and have spent well more than I wanted to there.
Someone shared this article a while back, and while I don't agree with it, I do think it's instructive. You cannot exactly have an "authoritarian left" get along with a "anarchist left". This video about Hegemony also covers how we can possibly work together.
One, because an authoritarian left looks a lot like an authoritarian right (to an anarchist left). When both the Fascist and the Marxist want to take away your rights, you really need to know which one you're looking at.
Two, even within Anarchist circles, there's some disunity about how to bring about "the revolution". Some advocate for destabilising forces, which would "naturally" cause people to seek freedom. Others think we need to strengthen bonds of society. This, for reasons explained in the article, does not work.
However, even the authoritarian left won't "work" because the end goal for a Marxist is to remove the actual infrastructure of oppression, and like Lenin said, it's not gonna happen; you can't get there from here.
So the real issue is that most of us can agree on where we want to end up, but we can't really agree on how to get there. The Authoritarian left has wet dreams that we'll all somehow learn "the theory" (and frankly given the comments even the commenters in this very subreddit do not know "the theory" and I barely know it), and then something something revolution.
The Anarchist problem is that we explain "the theory" in "common" terms, so it doesn't really sound rational to someone who knows "the theory". Even then, most people are dumb, like ChatGPT dumb. They'll use the right words in the right places but they mostly know that because they're text prediction engines, so they're nominally "anarchist" until the capitalist gives them more bread and circuses for a bit.
In the end, I think a lot of ostensibly "left" causes aren't really "left" at all, so we really need to look at these organisations one at a time. Like the Hegemony video states, this is less about "left" and "right" and more about shared interests.
The one thing that I know for a fact (as an Anarchist), is that the way anarchist and left Organisation works is through social interactions. Sports clubs, Mastodon / Lemmy, families, school friends, uni friends, etc etc. All of these links, if they are strengthened, if we can use them more often than we use the capitalist machinery, are the social consciousness we need. If you eat your neighbours' bread and give them your tomatoes, you're closer to a left utopia, closer to "left unity", and closer to working together against tyranny.
So, we need to fight for third places, we need to fight for places to live, we need to fight for social connections which are peer to peer, not mediated by tech companies. If we can work with that, we can work on a unified left.
I'm using Monado with my WMR device. It's still very early days but progress is good. The big issue is that you'll need to have up-to-date firmware, and the only way to do that is on Windows.
A phone is such an essential part of getting things done today. If someone asked me to unlock my phone and then they took the data, I'd be so fucked. But at the same time, I can't really go overseas without it unless I get someone to house-sit.
Cultural Appropriation is real, but it usually refers to entire nations or massive artists or corporations adopting a caricature of smaller cultures, to the extent that people start associating it with that nation or artist rather than the culture. An example here is Picasso using African imagery, or pop stars copying underground music genres and effectively killing them off.
The problem is that people use it to talk about regular people starting a Sushi restaurant or whatever. They do not have the power to do this sort of thing.
Not really. I think there's a misconception that we want to solve all the problems and be good and pure, and because we can't do that we've got to be pure evil. That's not how it works. We're not trying to solve inequality or anything. That's just capitalism. We're trying to stop (and now sink) the carbon in the atmosphere. That's all. We can keep our shitty unequal capitalist world where we exploit poorer nations etc etc. That's a separate problem.
Also, we don't really need to use the specific metals he's outlined. We can use others. There are plenty of chemistries available, and there's a lot of lithium (in Australia for example). As long as the global south doesn't get the bright idea to use as much energy as the global north, we'll be fine.
I think space efficiency is not really a big factor. As others have said, every tower casts a shadow, so the sunlight is not being used.
However, it is good for indoor planting, because under a roof, space efficiency is necessary. So, we could have some sort of climate controlled greenhouses, and they would surround a vertical farm. The greenhouse "shadow" would be outside, and it means your plants are safely indoors, protected from heat and cold.
There was a study on the power efficiency of programming languages, and rust was in the top few. Bugs aside, lemmy - which is written in rust, has the potential to be among the most efficient ways to solve the problem. I'd think the total lack of ads and smarts would also help efficiency.
It's important to recognise the mechanism is more important than the intent. If people cannot blow the whistle safely, then the "government" can freely keep secrets. "Government" is in air quotes here because often it's the spooks or the military who get to keep secrets, often from the elected officials. This means that MPs are often kept in the dark (and sometimes on purpose, in a Berejiklian-style "I don't need to know about that" sense) and this means that a bunch of people who we pay taxes for can do what they like with impunity.
If the secrets are kept, then the people keeping the secrets are not accountable to anyone. This is a serious problem if they start to violate the rights of people on Australian soil. You might feel like it's not going to be you, but it well could be. There is no safety on that gun. The only way around it is to make whistleblowing safe.