drosophila

To my knowledge absolutely no one saying “Ban landlords” is also saying “Don’t build any more housing.”

There are plenty of people (EDIT: some of whom are in this very thread) who like to site that there are more vacant houses in the country than there are homeless people, as if to imply we already have all the housing we need.

But the fact of the matter is that US and Canadian cities have increased in population without a proportional increase in housing stock. The difference is mostly made up by more people living with their parents into adulthood, people living with more roommates to make rent, and multiple families living in “single family” houses.

We don’t do anything about it because home owners treat housing as an investment and expect its price to keep going up forever. Also because people hate multi-unit residential buildings for all sorts of nonsensical and racist reasons.

To be clear I am an advocate for the Vienna model of public housing and programs that temporarily repossess and rent out vacant properties, but I am first and foremost an advocate for housing abundance.

Farmers right now are fighting a legal battle for the ability to repair their own tractors.

It’s not good for farm equipment to be locked down and sealed off just like it’s not good for operating systems to be locked down and sealed off.

A little while back I ended up using YouTube for a few minutes without an ad-blocker. Every single video had a transphobic ad.

I didn’t think it was possible for me to hold any more contempt for advertising, but somehow they managed it.

So, I think the whole “well intentioned but hubristic scientist goes too far, tramples on the feet of god!” trope is pretty stupid in a lot of stories (although I still love a story about a character playing with forces they don’t understand if it’s executed well). But I also think you really have to consider where the “mad scientist” archetype comes from before you write it off as purely anti-intellectual:

1. To a large degree the mad scientist is an updated version of the evil wizard. Victor Frankenstein, the prototypical mad scientist, was trained in alchemy as well as chemistry and biology. Very often (such as in this very post) their laboratories are depicted as being in castles or even wizard towers.

2. Frankenstein was partly based on the sort of people who robbed graveyards. The more modern ‘howie lab coat, rubber gloves, and goggles’ mad scientist exploded in popularity after WWII, probably because of people like mengele and the invention of the atomic bomb.

There’s other themes present in the archetype of course (I already mentioned hubris and man’s vs god"s domain above, but there’s all the other stuff going on in Frankenstein too), but yeah. The ‘mad scientist’ archetype is a little bit like taking a normal scientist and removing their humanity and morals, leaving only their intellect and ambition/ego behind. A little bit like how a warewolf is a man stripped of all morals and self control, leaving only bestial impulses behind.

It’s intentionally stupid, which is why it’s not a permanent change.

They just want people to talk about it, send pictures of it to their friends, etc, and be an avenue for reminding people that goldfish crackers exist.

Nah, the cost of labor + materials + distribution is the minimum price of an item. The actual price in practice will be that price + whatever the manufacturer can get away with charging.

What determines the premium they can get away with is whether or not alternative goods exist and whether or not the consumers are informed of them, motivated to seek them out, and capable of making the switch.

There’s little to be gained in trying to make current-day nations pay reparations for things that their ancestors did.

“We will not blame [King George] for the crimes of his ancestors if he relinquishes the royal rights of his ancestors; but as long as he claims their rights, by virtue of descent, then, by virtue of descent, he must shoulder the responsibility for their crimes.”.
-James Connolly

How about we look forwards, instead?

How about we look at the present? Because colonialism isn’t over. People are still suffering from it right now. The global south is still actively being colonized and exploited right now.

You can’t drive a knife into someone’s ribs then say “what’s in the past is in the past, we need to look forward instead” when your hand is still holding the blade. How can you hope to start the process of healing if you haven’t even taken the knife out all the way?

Now, I don’t have all the answers for how that healing process is going to work for the world, but I’m pretty sure a billionaire dancing around in a golden hat and velvet robes with a title that says “God made my bloodline special so I can stab whoever I want” isn’t a part of it.

Humans need to move around to be healthy regardless, so any energy consumed to pedal a bike is immaterial.

Though I guess if the person in question just died that would be even more pollution free.

90% of the things they named weren’t cars but in practice if you actually compare cities with tons of cars vs ones with few you’ll find that removing cars removes 90% of the noise.

Though It may be that not being bombarded with car noise makes people quieter as well (like how being in a loud crowd makes you want to speak up as well).

Using solar panels to power artificial lighting so you can vertically stack farms directly inside cities doesn’t make any sense from a sustainability perspective.

But greenhouses in the suburbs that are tied into the city’s thermal grid and seasonal thermal energy store is the future of agriculture IMO.

By enclosing fields in greenhouses you decrease the land, water, pesticide, and fertilizer requirements, while also eliminating fertilizer runoff and the possibility of soil depletion from tilling. By tying a greenhouse into a thermal grid the greenhouse can act as a solar thermal collector in the summer while maybe even condensing the water that evaporates through the plants for reuse. Then you can use that same heat to heat homes during the winter or extend the growing season in the greenhouse even further.

https://www.renewableenergymagazine.com/storage/world-s-largest-thermal-energy-storage-to-20240409

https://www.dlsc.ca/

https://ag.umass.edu/greenhouse-floriculture/fact-sheets/heat-storage-for-greenhouses

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/152874/a-greenhouse-boom-in-china

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150070/almerias-sea-of-greenhouses

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/netherlands-agriculture-technology/ (Yes I know they use artificial lighting in a lot of these, and yes I know a lot of the value of their agricultural exports comes from flowers, but the point is it’s another example of large scale greenhouse use. Also they do still produce quite a bit of food in a small area, in addition to the flowers.)