solbear

Well, there is no chance I will have this ready before the election, so I guess I will get to see what happens anyway.

But if your time frame is 50 years, the fascism would have to start soon.

January 20th, 2025? :p

Depends how decisive and long-lasting that victory would be, right? Could we not see the right wing continue to push the country towards authoritarianism and possibly even a straight up fascist dictatorship, to then have that reversed through some big event before 2075? Or maybe you meant "wins against the left" as something very permanent?

Wow, this is really cool - thanks for sharing! I'll take a closer look at this, I am loving the idea. I have just recently started with some traditional TTRPG (DnD), so this is really good timing in that sense as well :)

Nice, thank you! I've only read non-fiction by Doctorow so far (Chokepoint Capitalism and The Internet Con) - I think many of the things he advocates for are definitely part of a Solarpunk future, so I imagine his fictional works would be worth a read in that regard. I'll add it to my reading list, and I'll make sure to get the humble bundle that I recently saw advertised!

What a poor contribution to the thread... I am well aware of the consequences, and I am highlighting one specific consequence that I am seeking advice on how to deal with. I am specifically asking for stories from people who have had good success either maintaining adult friendships despite divergence in lifestyles, or establishing new adult friendships. Your comment brings nothing to the table.

I interpret your last comment as "going with the flow" in order to "survive". If that is a strategy that somehow brings you fulfillment in life, good on you. I am very comfortable with my choice of not having kids, but as with everything, there are trade-offs, and I'm just looking for ways to navigate those. As the commenter below pointed out: the situation would be worse if I had kids myself, as I would anyway have to forego the kinds of adult interactions I've described (and am missing), and I would instead rely on enjoying the new type of children centric interactions. I sincerely doubt I would.

I once described my perfect morning to a colleague, in much the same way you describe your Sunday morning. He started laughing and said that will be gone with kids. I told him that was one of the many reason I did not want kids, and he looked genuinely perplexed that was even a possibility. His main reason for wanting kids (at least what I could come up with at the time) was the joyous thought of being able to teach someone a lot of cool stuff. The fact that he could achieve that without kids (i.e. volunteering teaching kids programming, electronics or whatever) didn't seem to have dawned on him either. I haven't spoken with him for some time, and I imagine he has gotten a kid with his wife by now. I hope for his sake that the kid(s) will be interested in what he has to teach, because if he did not have any other reasons for wanting them, he's in for a disappointing couple of decades...

By the way, I'm sad this community is not more active. Are there any similar communities on Lemmy dedicated to a childfree lifestyle that goes under some name I don't know?

Until your system does anything useful with third party votes or couch-sitting, you go out and vote every time for whatever does the least damage to democracy. But don't disengage from the political world after the election. Between elections, you work to change the system. Find groups that tries to do this and volunteer. If you really care about it, you will need to dedicate your time to the cause, even though it might seem hopeless and may very well be.

I understand your situation sucks and you are tempted to say "Fuck the status quo" and desperately do something different in hopes that something will somehow change. But you know who do go out and vote, every fucking time? The racist assholes who would love to see Trump and his fascists cronies in power. And if that happens, it is game over. You will never get any chance to change anything, except from after a big traumatic event such as a big war ("civil" or otherwise).

I'm not sure that the combined energy consumption of the aggregate financial system is less than 0.5%, but it does, unlike Bitcoin, provide utility, not withstanding any reasonable objection to the fairness of this system.

Great read, thank you for that! I've written down some of my thoughts. Feel free to point out if I've misunderstood you, or if there is something you think I am wrong about.

On 3D-printing

I believe you are onto something in terms of creating more things ourselves on-demand, and I do think local additive manufacturing will be more common in households down the line, and not reserved for hobbyists. I am in the process of selecting a 3D-printer for myself, and in that process I have also begun envisioning many use cases for it. However, I have some concerns over how this will actually play out:

1. While I am fairly tech savvy, and I have no doubts I can learn what I need to learn in order to design and produce what I need, I wonder what it would take for e.g. my mom to be comfortable with, and get utility from, 3D-printers. We have lived in a specialized society for so long that the vast majority of people are almost exclusively consumers, and do not create anything anymore and even the thought of doing things yourself can be daunting. You mention open source designs and being able to build further upon it, and while I love the idea, I think (for now and at least the short-term) that most people would be fully dependent on a large repository of available designs that can be printed as-is. This smells like yet another area where we would see the emergence of a tech behemoth with a firm monopolistic grip offering a fancy platform with all the bells and whistles, with the ensuing enshittification that is sure to follow: tech lock-in to certain brands and "ecosystems", limitations to design inspection and modification, algorithmic manipulation to buy/print things we don't really need, etc. How would we guard ourselves against this and make sure that people would be free to use it to their own benefit, and not end up in the same kind of platform hellscape that we've seen for social media platforms, online retailers etc. already?

2. On-demand printing would certainly reduce overproduction of certain goods, as big retailers wouldn't need to keep large stocks to ensure availability. In certain industries, this overproduction is massive, and if it could be removed, it would be great. But do we not risk local overproduction? Say that 3D-printing of fabrics becomes viable do to at home, and at a low cost (comparable or lower to those horrible ultrafast fashion brands). What is to stop us from continuing the gross overconsumption that the average consumer engages with today? Especially if the dystopic vision of a tech behemoth running the show presented above comes into fruition. A new dress for every occasion, can't be seen to wear the same outfit more than once, or else your status takes a hit. Failed prints could also generate a lot of unusable scrap. There would in any case need to be in place robust recycling procedures, preferably local. This would need to account for different materials, plastics, metals (and sorting by alloy), and it would need to handle removal of any contaminants that could affect the quality of the recycled product (dirt or other foreign material that has come from use, this is at least easier with scrap material from a failed print as it should not be dirty).

3. As you point out, this can't work for everything. There are quite a lot of goods that require specialty production methods that cannot be replicated at home. I think manufacturing at some levels of complexity higher than what can be achieved with a home printer could probably be handled by community facilities with larger scale equipment and perhaps maintenance and operations staff. But more high-tech things, which my understanding of a solarpunk vision requires, such as photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, batteries and semiconductor components, requires large scale manufacturing. So that won't disappear, but by their own use of additive manufacturing, their own supply chains could be shortened quite a lot by producing more components in-house. If your assumption that we remove the concern for profit, than there wouldn't be any barrier to doing this, and I think that would be very beneficial.

Consequences for overproduction

What do you think can be done in regards to overproduction of goods? Should there be consequences for producing more than can be consumed? Do you think capitalism can be tamed in such a way?

I think yes, of course there should be consequences for producing more than can be consumed. The fact that there is none, other than whatever monetary losses they are impacted with from this wastefulness, which obviously is not enough to keep them from doing it, highlights one of the main problems with how capitalism works in our world: the real cost of transactions are seldom accounted for, which results in wastefulness and other poor choices from a sustainability point of view. Large-scale production often yields enormous economies of scale benefits, to the point where the marginal cost of production is barely anything. Doesn't matter to them if they produce way more than they can sell, because it doesn't cost them anything anyway. However, with high margins on sales, they might get a huge profit benefit from producing more in case it sells well. Leftovers we just dump in a river somewhere, not our problem anymore.

Can it be tamed however? In principle, more and smarter regulations would help. They would need to be widely agreed upon by several nations, as otherwise corporations could avoid the regulations by flagging out. In practice? I think we're a long way from this being straight-forward. Corporate interests have way too much to say in politics, especially in the US, and before that problem is solved I think there is a limit to how efficient regulations can be. I also believe that it is difficult to get the required corporation across several countries for the kind of regulation that would be needed. I think EU does some good things here, although they sometimes miss the mark completely for the sake of compromise, and in some areas are chasing the completely wrong types of regulation that are detrimental and not beneficial to our society.