stabby_cicada

joined 1 year ago
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 minutes ago

But if you're selling energy bsck to the grid, you're using the infrastructure and they have to pay you for running your meter backwards. Even paying you a reduced rate for the energy you produce is a losing proposition for them.

It's a bit worse than that, even. If there are too many people sending too much energy back to the grid, the grid can get overcharged and blow up. So energy companies have to dump the excess power somewhere to keep the grid stable.

There are a lot of potential solutions to this problem. (Before anyone says Bitcoin fixes this, no it doesn't.) unfortunately, energy companies are currently taking the laziest and least efficient solution - pay business owners to run their factories uselessly in order to drain excess power from the grid, and pass the cost on to consumers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 minutes ago

Thing about batteries is.

From an environmental standpoint, both mining the raw materials and producing the batteries uses a lot of energy and produces a lot of pollution.

Morally, many raw materials for batteries come from desperately poor conflict zones, so you have megacorps staffing mines with slavery and child labor, paying local warlords/dictators for permission to operate, having those warlords/dictators kill protesters and union organizers, etc.

If we can get a hydrogen economy working, and the equipment and technology don't need conflict minerals or polluting heavy industry to manufacture, it would be a boon for the world both practically and morally.

But that's a big if.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

I'd be willing to bet most Lemmy users are passive gentrifiers at best - though they'd be deeply personally offended if people (accurately) called their housing choices gentrification. Still cool image tho 😂

[–] [email protected] 3 points 15 hours ago

Thank goodness.

[–] [email protected] 86 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Becoming?

Becoming?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago

Bacteria, sure. Maybe. But fecal parasites? Incompletely composting your own feces is a great way to help your intestinal parasites complete their life cycle by consuming their eggs 😆

 
[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 days ago (4 children)

If you think that's bad try posting on the vegan community 😆

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (23 children)

Anarchist types prefer consensus-based decision making processes to democracy. We want the entire community to agree on a course of action, not just let 51% order 49% around.

 
[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

The American welfare system is byzantine, unfair, corrupt, and ineffective. People need this workaround on cooked food because there are irrational, pointless restrictions on what kinds of food people can buy with EBT. That's the dystopia part.

It's awesome that good people do good things to fix the problems caused by a dystopian system. But if the system wasn't broken, they wouldn't have to.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Yep. And back in the days of the USSR, the Kremlin would rant about how racist Jim Crow was. The North Vietnamese dropped leaflets on US bases encouraging black soldiers to defect because the US government was using them as cannon fodder.

This was propaganda and it was also true.

If China and Russia are spreading propaganda about police brutality in the US, the solution isn't to silence criticism of the police. The solution is to reform the goddamn police.

 
 

Please read the whole thing (and if capitalists and conservatives were consistent, they'd be livid, too, at the idea homeless people's property can be stolen and thrown away under the euphemism of "cleaning" - aren't property rights sacred to them?), but here is the conclusion:

This is what we give up — always so much more than we think — in agreeing to scapegoat, to sacrifice the homeless everyone else gives up public space. An ordinance that says no camping or sleeping in public quickly becomes no loitering in public. Stories are already emerging in the wake of the Grants Pass ruling of random people being told that they cannot sit, cannot eat, cannot exist in public space. Often these people aren’t homeless, but how can they prove that? This ruling furthers the trend, one which is not new, of the privatization of public space and the need to be a consumer to exist out in the world. And this is just one way that abandoning the unhoused hurts us all. Equally significant is that in abandoning those who cannot afford housing we agree to frame shelter as something you must earn, rather than a basic need that we all must be granted in this world. That cannot stand.

What we need, now more than ever, is solidarity across all forms of division. We cannot allow the dehuamnization or that criminalization of homelessness, of poverty, of those struggling to get by in this system, both because it is unjust and because it hurts each and every one of us. Anything that targets struggling individuals instead of the system they struggle under reinforces the oppressive mechanisms of the system and takes us a step further from liberation, from freedom, and from the world we need.

 
 
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