The meme says "force you via taxes". And Jesus Christ Himself told people to pay their taxes.

Nothing is more punk than food not bombs. It’s just feeding everyone who shows up whether the government likes it or not.

Yes, and, Food Not Bombs is a great example to bring up, because they don't only feed everyone, they also share literature and talk politics and organize community action. From FNB's how to guide:

Your meal is not a Food Not Bombs meal if you don't provide literature and display a banner. Otherwise the public will think you are a church and have the impression your group believes that our political and economic system is fine and that all we need to do is care for those who are not able to make it. We are not a charity, we are seeking to build a movemnet to end the exploitation of the economic and political system.

I think very few orgs do "the personal is political" better than FNB.

It is to turn a fascist society into one that does not need them, one where it is effective to engage in social works and to collaborate with public institutions.

And we don't actually live in that society yet, and therefore protesting, feeding people, helping drug addicts, and doing odd jobs for your neighbors all remain punk af.

JFC. Selling food without a permit is illegal. Doing most home repairs without a license and permit is illegal. If I install a set of solar panels for my neighbor and she pays me in raw milk and eggs we could both be arrested. Don't tell me helping your community isn't punk.

It doesn't mean anything to whom?

Cause I bet it means a lot to the people who need food and shelter.

Is the point of charity to feed the hungry or to let rich people feel good about themselves?

It doesn't matter to the hungry person if the food they eat was paid for by taxes or voluntary charity. Food is food.

Your "concrete statement" was false. 2024 is not a "proper year" - it is in fact on track to be the hottest ever. Again.

I no longer have the patience to debate blatant climate falsehoods seriously. If you want respectful responses to your comments, respect your audience and don't make objectively false claims.

He feels he's using objective logic and data. And feelings don't care about your facts.

Look.

Human beings deliberately introducing species to foreign environments has been a long history of ecological disaster.

Ecosystems are so immeasurably complex that no one can guarantee what introducing a non-native species will do. Look at the Bradford pear, which was supposed to be a sterile hybrid.

And finally, the whole point of this program is to introduce species that are better adapted to surviving climate change than native species. Do you know what we call species that come into an area and survive and thrive better than the native species? Invasives. This project is literally creating invasive species - replacing native species with species that will supposedly survive better, on the argument that the native species will die out anyway with climate change so we may as well remake the ecosystem and see what happens.

Blind, stupid, arrogance. I'm embarrassed for humanity.

Urban tree experts don’t expect introduced species to cause major disruptions to native wildlife.

Sigh.

My first question for anything sustainable technology related is: does it scale?

After all, there are eight billion people on Earth. Presuming no mass depopulation events occur, the route to a sustainable civilization leads through high density, low impact cities exploiting economies of scale.

Dovecotes and ram pumps don't scale to modern city size. After all, what the doves would eat foraging in a modern city would make them unfit for human consumption. And the problem with powering things with falling water is water is an increasingly scarce resource.

This is homestead technology. It's not genuinely sustainable because we can't give everybody a homestead. There's not enough land on Earth for it. We need to move to denser, more efficient habitation models, use land more efficiently so we can rewild more of it, not spread ourselves out further and take more habitat for ourselves.

Here's the quote that got me:

To emphasize a cheerier [future], examples tend to be cherry picked or gently massaged. A section in Ritchie’s book argues, correctly, that deaths from extreme weather events are fewer than they were in the past. But this section all but ignores the fact that extreme weather events are becoming more severe and more frequent, a trend that will continue even if harmful emissions are slowed. And it ignores any deaths from extreme heat, which Ritchie attributed, in conversation, to the insufficiency of the data.

There's a difference between hopepunk and hope porn and what this article describes falls on the latter.

"Hope", in a lot of solarpunk/hopepunk/climate conscious circles, refers to the hope we can stop or reverse climate change without mass starvation, megadisasters, and horrifying levels of human suffering in the process.

There's no longer any hope of that.

And yet, as nihilistic as I feel, the article is also correct to say there are still things we as humans can do to mitigate the coming collapse. And if we all decide there's nothing we can do to improve things, give up and consume resources hedonistically party-on-the-Titanic style, the worst possible scenario is guaranteed.

So hope is a lie. But it's a necessary one. Because if we work hard motivated by hope we might salvage something of human society for the future. If we give up we're guaranteed to go extinct and take multicellular life on Earth with us.

You know who says changing beef consumption is impossible so it's meaningless to even try? Beef industry spokespeople.

I mean, what's more impossible - changing Western dietary habits or changing the entire structure of capitalism and representative democracy that allows rich people to own private jets?

The majority of children born today are born in densely populated - and highly polluted - cities where they can't see the stars, and are unlikely to ever have enough disposable income to travel for pleasure. The thesis holds.

Cryptocurrency is the online equivalent of the neo-Nazi bar.

You know how the story goes, with the bartender who tells the customer "you have to throw out neo-Nazis as soon as you see the uniforms or the tattoos, no matter how polite and well-behaved they are. Because if you let Nazis stay and get comfortable they'll invite their friends, and word gets around that Nazis can drink comfortably at your bar, and customers who don't want to drink with Nazis leave, and suddenly you have a Nazi bar". You all remember that story?

Well, cryptocurrency in online spaces - especially futurist spaces and technological spaces - it's a lot like that. Cryptocurrency supporters are constantly looking for opportunities to promote cryptocurrency. And they obviously see a movement like solarpunk, which talks a lot about decentralization, and mistrusts the global financial system, and so on, as fertile ground for shilling cryptocurrency.

And if you let cryptocurrency supporters hang out and talk about how awesome cryptocurrency is, they will inevitably start shilling their particular flavor of cryptocurrency. And that's inevitably a capitalist scam and will inevitably harm anyone stupid enough to fall for it.

And the problem is not just that cryptocurrency is a capitalist scam. It's that, if you don't shut down cryptocurrency talk aggressively, you get more cryptocurrency supporters. Because the crypto bros see that cryptocurrency discussion is allowed, and they join in, and they invite their friends, and they start shilling their scams. And then you get crypto spammers and scam bots and the personal messages inviting you to elite investment opportunities and all the other scummy garbage that infests cryptocurrency websites. You either block cryptocurrency talk or you get a website full of crypto garbage.

In other words, cryptocurrency supporters need to be shut down as quickly and ruthlessly as any other bots and spammers. Because if you don't you inevitably get a website full of bots and spammers.

Yes. Approximately 73 million people per day, to be exact.

Talk about the API user revolt all you like, the statistics clearly show all those moderator complaints did exactly two things: jack and shit.

https://backlinko.com/reddit-users

He did, in fact, want to be prosecuted. Are you familiar with the concept of civil disobedience?

Some of us told you Biden's climate bills were performance and pork and wouldn't make any difference. Some of us told you the goal was to funnel money to political allies, not save the environment.

You told us to vote harder and donate more money to Democrats in the midterms and it would work out somehow.

Yeah. How's that "most environmentally friendly president in history" talking point working out?

Humans do not do climate change.
Some activities do climate change.

Is this the climate denier version of "the Civil War was about state's rights"? An intellectually dishonest linguistic distinction used mainly for propaganda?

I mean, if some activities do climate change who the fuck do you think is doing those activities?

Land is hard to get now because of overpopulation.

Once your neighbors start dying off in the mass famines of the next few years you'll have plenty of opportunity to expand.

And if you make the best of the land you have now, you'll have more calories than your neighbors and be better suited to take their land. So it's win-win.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

The myth of the humble farmer or small holder living in harmony with his land is as bullshit as the myth of the noble savage. The vast majority of farmers see the planet as a resource to make money from. If they take any heed to local conditions, they think of it in tragedy of the commons style. For instance, in many places around the world, the aquifers irrigating farmland have less than 20 years before they're emptied. Local farmers are aware. They take it as a warning to pump as much water as possible as fast as they can, because if they don't take the water and turn it into profit, someone else will, and the water will still be gone.

And that's not even getting into how these brutal exploitative farming methods are what allowed the Earth's population to balloon to a unsustainable 8 billion and ravage the land and devour resources of every sort.

The vast majority of farmers are the enemy of the planet. In my more green authoritarian moments, I envision nationalizing every acre and setting up eco villages of subsistence farmers populated by the poor of our cities and worked by former corporate middle management reduced to serfdom. No one should own whole square miles of farmland. Not even farmers.