admiralteal

I’ll never argue with someone who wants that true, rural/countryside/homestead life. The appeal is there for me too, even if my own calculus says the cons wildly outweigh the pros.

I’m pretty skeptical you’re going to find it 5 miles from a healthy town, though.

Big cities let people find their community because therefore a lot of different ones to try.

You should read the horror stories from so many of those NYC co-ops. Some would make even the most jackbooted HOA presidents blush.

I don’t really think this is unique to cities of some specific size. I definitely agree that it’s going to be harder to find a perfect fit in a smaller town. But it’s also harder to meet people at all in an anonymous metropolis where you have to work 75 hours a week just to make rent.

If you take away anything from what I have written, it’s that I think this dichotomy is bad. We need a compromise. The lowrise old-world city is what worked for our species for at least 5 millenia – it’s only in the past couple of decades we decided to rethink it and force a schism between the fake rural aesthetic of the suburbs and the productive, efficient downtown – and in so doing we destroyed both city life (by making it ungodly expensive thanks to the immense financial drain the suburbs and lack of continuing infill development represent) and the peaceful countryside life (by putting to death small towns in favor of the interstate highway big box store commercial strip). The only lifestyle that has weathered and still works pretty well in this day and age is the homesteader life, and to say that way of living is not for everyone is definitely an understatement.

This entire question is completely distorted by the poor-qualtiy postwar urbanism that is rampant everywhere.

The reality is, there shouldn’t be much difference. Lowrise cities – 2-4 story buildings/townhomes, small apartments, walkable neighborhoods/mass transit, corner groceries, all that stuff that people think can ONLY exist in big cities should be the norm for nearly all towns.

I don’t think many people would describe a place like, say, Bordeaux as a “big city”. 250kish people in 50 square kilometers is hardly Paris. It’s a small city, or maybe a big town. And it has everything you can want from a city and more. Shows, museums, beautiful multimodal neighborhoods, a robust tram system, restaurants and cafes and bars. All this kind of stuff.

The problem is we’ve all been mentally taught you can either live in island, R1A zoned suburbs which require driving to do ANYTHING or else you need to live in a huge metropolis like NYC. Or else we’ve been trained to think of a “city” like the bullshit they have in Texas, where it combines all the worst features of those island suburbs/car dependence with all the worst parts of city (crazy prices, noise, exposure to nearby-feeling crime, etc).

While a lot of the US big cities are trying to sort out the knots they’ve tied themselves in, your best bet to find beautiful, livable urban-ism is in those much smaller <500k cities that don’t even show up on the typical lists of cities. Especially if they are historic, since the more historic a place is the less likely it got bulldozed in the 60s to make room for more highways (destroying local neighborhoods in the process) Some kind of a big university also tends to be a plus, though it’s a mixed bag. Check for places that do not have an interstate carving through the middle of the city.

We can only get the amenities of modern urbanism in the biggest metropolises these days because of how badly the “suburban experiment” has distorted and destroyed our community life. And there can only be so many metropolises, so they’ve naturally turned absurdly expensive. People can’t afford to live in them because of how much people want to live in them. So they settle for suburbia, since financial poverty feels way worse than poverty of community.

This is a big part of why I dislike consolidating downloading and viewing.

I’ve been using PerfectViewer on a tablet for viewing for ages. I’m sure there’s a better one and would be game for recommendations, but I am very used to this app and its quirks.

There exist any number of ways to download and sync the chapters to my device. I currently mostly use the mangadex-dl script and a syncthings folder and it’s no trouble. And all my read chapters I can just move into an archive drive where I’ll have them if anything ever happens.

This is standard practice with media. You use something like MPV for viewing and the downloading is handled elsewhere.

I’d also bet that a huge portion of those offices rely on at least some kind of proprietary software that doesn’t play nice/officially support Linux. MS Office, for example, or Autodesk’s stuff. When I saw what a headache it would be to get these working on Linux, I just shrugged and decided I’d keep my dual boot available for when I inevitably have need.

You’re turning up the cost dial for every additional workaround or adjustment you ask of people. Just to save what is fundamentally seen as $50-200 up front cost on a system for a new Windows 11 Pro license.

I mean, you know they aren’t going to have adequate content moderation because they ALREADY don’t. Lack of moderation is the #1, #2, and #3 best reasons to defederate.

Wanting to see proof before taking positive action is valid and sensible. But you can’t pretend it isn’t something you can already make reasonable inferences about. This is not a new unknown and pretending it is is ridiculous.

Email servers do not automatically feed content into and pull content out of your system. They only send and deliver to specific people at specific addresses. Federation is a firehose. You can close the hydrant before or after it gets hooked up to city water, but at the end of the day only people that chose to do things the sensible way will have dry socks and no water damage.

Intuit and H&R Block are the reason we have this depraved, inhumane, anti-consumer tax system. They’ve created the laws that make it necessary to use tax prep software. They should not be rewarded for this by getting business for that very tax prep software. Everyone should say no to TurboTax.

irs.gov/freefile

There are always a bunch of perfectly good competitors to them listed. Use those competitors. For most people it’s totally free.

Or places like Amsterdam that regularly rank top cities for drivers because they can afford good planning and maintenance on their svelt network. Because people who don’t want to drive just don’t.

It’s easy for a small town like you described to have just brutal congestion. And they routinely do, in the US, when the whole town is a highway offramp wart off an artillery feeder road made up of commercial parks and box stores. They end up with chains of back to back streetlights and tons of left turns across traffic and are always a headache to get through - not to mention dangerous. And they’re the most universal sight in North America.

Also the cities that have the most investment in things like multimodal public transit are also the best cities to drive in. If you just genuinely want or need the car those cities are better then the cities designed for the car. Designing for the car creates the worst outcomes for the car.

Parking requirements were established in an entirely unscientific way. And they’ve never really been updated.

A city with a lot less parking would be one that was easier for Grandma to get around in even if she was getting around in it in a car. People with significant disabilities are pretty much the only ones who should expect parking when they go to places.

…what do you think is going on here, in this thread?

It’s talking about taking peoples’ money based on your (fraudulent) ability to predict the outcome. There will be victims in the form of the people whose money was taken. Some of those people will see that the result didn’t match. The fraud will be evident to the defrauded victims.

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I agree with that wholeheartedly. “How do we make people want to behave better” is the question I want to pour my energy at, and I don’t think shaming them and making them defensive is the way to do it.

Because right now, we mostly do the opposite. We systematically encourage people to make the wrong choices through our markets and built environments. And pearl-clutching about bad actors in that environment is totally unreasonable and unfair, in my opinion.

Every time there’s a giant environmental summit, the airways will get packed with stories about its carbon footprint. A bunch of smug fuckers on Fox News saying “oh ho ho all these people had to FLY there to talk about trying to save the planet they’re such hypocrites GOTCHA”.

That’s all I can really say to this. The idea that we should in any way dismiss or reject an advocate just because they aren’t personally holding up to whatever standard you want to hold them up to… I mean sure, I guess if I found out Bernie Sanders spends his weekends in his lifted truck rolling coal it would change my perspective of him, but most people are just living their lives and trying to avoid unnecessary friction. We aren’t going to solve problems by being super judgemental and telling them they suck as people, but we can probably persuade them to vote for the people and things that WILL solve problems so long as we meet them where they are.

Not what you said. Flat out. What you said was:

If you can’t act with any level of personal responsibility, how can you be a good advocate for corporate responsibility?

Either this is a tautology – you define anyone who advocates for corporate responsibility as having some level of personal responsibility – or else it’s bullshit. If someone has a consumerist, wasteful lifestyle but also is a powerful advocate for change, then that is what they are. A powerful advocate for change, even knowing that change may one day force them to change their own lifestyle.

It’s like saying a smoker cannot campaign against cigarettes. It’s a load of crap. It comes from a place of wanting to place blame more than wanting to fix problems.

More people would walk, bike, or take transit if these options were less shitty. If the car weren’t formally preferred by the state and given priority over other options.

More people would eat fresh produce over fast food hamburgers if that produce were available as conveniently as the fast food dive instead of a supercenter you have to drive to at the edge of town.

Fewer disposable plastic goods will be used when the major companies stop handing them out left right and center.

This is all big “YET YOU LIVE IN A SOCIETY, CURIOUS!” energy. People can want to make their world more sustainable without adopting a full-on crunchy lifestyle. People can advocate for change knowing it will help others in the future even if it doesn’t match with how they currently live. I’m sick and tired of lefty types and environmentalists treating the “average person” like a simpleton who’s incapable of having complex thoughts or feelings. Who’s incapable of doing anything but acting in their own selfish, shortsighted interest. It’s not individual consumers behaving selfishly that got us here.

No matter how you measure it, it’s clear a lot of big capital and corporate interests are fighting hard against the reforms that will make it easier and less stressful for people to adopt better, more sustainable lifestyles. People are being pressured to live certain lifestyles by the fact that our entire society is built on the economic power of consumerism. The idea of personal responsibility has been efficiently weaponized to get people mad at their neighbors for not composting instead of being mad at their city for expanding that 4-lane suburban artillery to “make room” for the expected traffic to another Walmart (that will be getting property tax incentives to build there).

You bring up EVs as if it makes your point, but they don’t. EVs make my point. The individually-responsible thing most people can do is switch out their ICE car for an EV. It’s the best they can do to lower their personal footprints in a society that requires most people drive for most trips. And even if every ICE passenger vehicle were swapped out with an EV tomorrow, that would not be even close to enough – not to even mention most people cannot afford that trade and the halo of other hugely negative problems that would come from it.

This is the problem with any focus on individual responsibility. We need to take action collectively. The voices tut-tutting people for eating fast food over growing their own potatoes in a window box are weapons used by conservatives and capital to divide and conquer, even when they’re repeated by self-professed progressives.

You have it so frustratingly, exactly, totally, and entirely backwards that I am not sure I should even reply. You’re projecting onto me and that sucks for me.

I’m here advocating for change and reform in any way we can get it, but also reminding everyone that we need to focus on the actions that will ACTUALLY stand a chance of fixing problems: top-level reform through collective, political action.

You’re saying people who can’t “put their money where their mouth is” cannot be considered part of the movement even if they are advocating for change and reform outside of their personal lives. That will drive them away and make the top-level collective political action we need that much harder.

And here’s the leftist purity tests coming out. Nothing hurts these causes worse than attitudes like this.

The idea that someone might advocate for a society that makes it easier for everyone (themselves included) to make the right choices is not some absurd, extreme, selfish position. It’s a totally normal, mundane perspective. And here you are rejecting anyone who doesn’t maintain your highest standard of moral virtue from your cause.

It is the opposite.

The way people vote affects the regulations and markets. It directly impacts their personal behaviors.

Telling people you can support corporate responsibility and keep consuming the way you do today is a lie.

It’s also not something I nor anyone else here has said. It’s a total strawman. The point is that you can advocate for systemic changes that will even affect your own behaviors without being a leader in those behaviors.

People need to believe reduced consumption is a moral good for both people and corporations.

Yes. To get them to vote and act collectively. You don’t need every single person to be a leader held to some invisible and impossible standard and told to GTFO if they can’t hit that standard. You need them to vote.

I disagree. It isn’t lip service.

It is NOT your personal decisions that are ruining the planet. Only collective action can do that and so only collective action can address it.

The term carbon footprint was invented by British Petroleum to fracture and confuse people who desired a more beautiful and sustainable world. It worked like hell. Insanely effective. Still showing continuing efficacy even when British Petroleum behaves with such ruinous irresponsibility they had to change their goddamn name to try and make people forget who they really are.

You should be a responsible consumer to the degree you can. You should make choices to signal your own preferences to the world, to remind people that a better life is possible, and to reward the businesses that behave well. You should not be shaming and gatekeeping people who fail to behave their best by holding them to incredibly unfair standards like “if you can’t act with any level of personal responsibility, how can you be a good advocate for corporate responsibility”. You absolutely, 100% can be an a good advocate for corporate and collective responsibility without having good personal behaviors and we NEED the people who behave exactly like this if we want the planet to have a future. Because we need their votes. And people who gatekeep and shame others for their perceived bad behaviors drive them away instead of calling them in.

“Free markets” do not exist nor work. Period. Even Wealth Of Nations says so.

Without regulatory control, they become rapidly captured by capital interests that push anticompetitive practices to tie up the market.

To prevent this, all societies, to some degree or another, impose regulations on the markets. They do so in a variety of ways for a variety of philosophical reasons and to varying degrees of success, but there exists no free market anywhere and never could. A truly “free” market would immediately be captured and exploited.

All modern countries but for a few theocracies and authoritarian states function on fundamental principles from socialism, not “capitalism”. Even the ones that claim to be fundamentally Liberal or capitalist are still perfectly happy removing property from a person for the public good – proving there is no fundamental belief in private property – and will follow policies that may harm individuals but benefit the overall social good. And this is good and proper, because these truly “capitalist” principles cannot work in practice.

Let me just repeat for emphasis: free markets do not, have never, and could never actually exist. They just can’t and don’t. It’s preposterous to pursue them. But it IS possible for a socialist to make use of property leases – which look and feel the same as private property but aren’t – and markets to exchange them to give you something that “feels” like a free market but is actually just socialism.