A good news story about one of the biggest rural tool-sharing libraries in the US.
"The library is like the best neighbor you ever had. Imagine if the person at the end of your block had 1,500 tools and they’d show you how to use them"
Article: "The self-imposed rules of the challenge are simple: participants pledge to stop buying non-essential items, be they unneeded shoes, additional beauty products or other impulse buys for a set amount of time, usually 12 months. " #consumerism#climate#sustainability
A weird part about minimalism is you get excited about getting rid of stuff that the average consumerism-minded person gets excited about acquiring.
A friend exclaims about getting a new mechanical keyboard, while I express the lightness I feel after selling mine and just using the perfectly fine laptop keyboard.
Do I really need a more visceral keyboard experience or is it just a weak compensation for some other lack or dissatisfaction from another unseen source?
Post-Modernity By Tom Murphy, originally published by Do the Math April 10, 2024
"...We are ripping through key deposits...of non-renewable resources (fossil fuels, aquifers, minerals, metals, fertile soils) on a [rapid] timescale. It’s all anyone alive today has ever known, although the scale is substantially higher today than our elders experienced as kids. Nothing like this can persist into even the intermediate future. Certainly on civilizational timescales (10,000 years since we began agriculture, then cities), the gig is up. Technically, some of these things may be said to be renewable (eventually & slowly replaced), but at nothing near the rate at which modernity consumes (requires) them...
Our capabilities exceeded what evolution prepared the ecosphere to tolerate, so that it’s a matter of deliberately tucking back into ecologically viable profiles, or else let the ruthless process play out, come what may..."
If you want to understand why people choose products that are bad for them, die the environment and are expensive as well, maybe just look at the dish washer tablets.
They take control away from you. They force you to use the same, manufacturer-selected amount of detergent every time, even if your dish washer is half empty and the dishes are almost clean. They also contain a prescribed amount of descaling agent, no matter the composition of the local drinking water.
They are also individually packed into little plastic sachets which tend to be a pain to open, or - if labelled “water-soluble” - they clog up your dishwasher because in effect, they’re not water soluble.
And they are significantly more expensive both per gram or per machine load than normal powder plus descaling agent powder.
From a consumer’s standpoint, there is not a single reason for dish washer tablets.
Yet, everyone buys them and it’s become increasingly hard to get the objectively better and cheaper alternative: powder.
And, of course you know why everyone buys them: They’re advertised as superior and producers make it very hard to get other types of products because they optimise their portfolio not based on what it best for consumers or the environment, but based on what’s best for their baseline.
Take this simple example and apply it to everyday life: computers, social media, cars, ffs even bicycles.
Unfortunately I think I have to replace my Android phone soon, something I'm not excited about. I don't want to have a smartphone at all, but it's hard to not have one with the way things work in society. Extremely annoying and wasteful.
The Story is in our Bones: Excerpt By Osprey Orielle Lake, originally published by Resilience.org March 22, 2024
"...Our extractivist, colonial economic model demands that humans endlessly take more and more from the Earth without long-term considerations. By design, it requires that we exploit Mother Earth and turn her gifts into a commodity. This exploitive economy also takes activities that people used to share and exchange with each other without money, and runs them through this same predatory economic system.
...“Collectively, the indigenous canon of principles and practices that govern the exchange of life for life is known as the Honorable Harvest. They are rules of sorts that govern our taking, shape our relationships with the natural world, and rein in our tendency to consume—that the world might be as rich for the seventh generation as it is for our own..."
I keep seeing gamers, movie lovers, and anime fans being constantly led down by corporations because the products are progressively downgrading, and they're screwing over their customers with micro-transactions or price gouging.
I always want to just tell everybody that maybe we don't necessary need these things. There are other ways to entertain ourselves and each other that are either cheaper or just free of charge.
Track all 3 back and we get to consumerism; the creation and delivery of dreams and stuff.
Kill the false icon of #consumerism and the rest will follow.
This is why unimaginative comfortable consumerists recoil at the notion of ‘#degrowth’. They can’t think beyond stuff to a more equitable rebalancing of carbon spend.
Now is the time for me to obtain a #NAS for some basic backups and archiving (1 like = 1 backup). But first things first.
#Homelab & #selfhosting enjoyers, how deep are your racks? Is 600mm enough? I don't expect to take advantage of cheap fullsize servers since these are usually loud as fuck and this thing will be in my kitchen.