He’s being what a married man should be. Loyal and content. Idk that I’d call it regular tho. It seems rare.

He’s an absolute goat.

I mean if it’s as broad as ANY of the problems there’s tons of solutions. I think people should go back to more subsitence farming instead of being entirely reliant on grocery stores. You can’t grow all your food at home, but if you’ve got land you can have a sizeable garden and prevent the need to import as much. Doing this properly takes time to develop. Letting fruiting trees and bushes mature for example. But it’s doable in the near term. Solar is a huge one. Everyone should have it. There’s no reason not to as it’s super cheap these days. Build smaller, better insulated, homes. But honestly? The biggest problem is just the economy. For a very long time rural communities would have their own internal economy with their own shops, and services, and it worked well. But then Walmart style stores came in and decimated it. Rural areas in some parts of the US are essentially the stereotypical “3rd world” conditions. Do you ever wonder why people out here can be so insanely reactionary? That’s why. Even decently wealthy rural areas have pockets of extreme poverty usually because the local economy is just gutted. All the wealth is extracted by massive companies and sent elsewhere. With very little being invested back into the community. The wealth that IS invested back here is to build massive private estates and mansions for the few really rich people.

You also mentioned right to repair for phones. Tractors are a big one for this. Idk how much most people know about that, but companies like John Deere will sell someone a tractor and then make it impossible to repair it with software locks and shit. So you have to get it serviced by them and it costs an arm and a leg. You start talking about that and watch the farmers start to decide socialism aint so bad after all.

Well we’re not going to solve climate change under capitalism that’s for sure. Are you asking what my ultimate model of rural life would be? Like if I was a god just designing society from scratch? I don’t really operate that way. I don’t have some like “I want it to be this way” perfect utopia in mind. I think we’d have to do tons of experimenting and figure things out. While learning from existing socialist projects in the meantime to try and catch up to them. I’m also in favor of learning heavily from indigenous communities about how to do things. Food forests seem like a super viable option for farming for example. I also think people would generally speaking just need to use less resources.

But that’s not what I think about typically. I am more thinking about immediate results. And looking to historical examples for inspiration on how to get them. Lenin, Mao, etc. Taking things one step at a time. I see it as kind of impossible to figure out how to get from where we are to a utopia right now. We just don’t know that. So we have to figure it out over time. Through lots of trial and error.

Not at all. Let’s go Romanov some billionaires and get to work. I’m down.

The current model, even if you were to shift it all to EVs, is hugely unsustainable and very much subsidized to no end though, in substantial part somebody else is just picking up the bill here.

Yup. Totally agreed. What do you expect me to do about it? I live below the poverty line. I’m gonna save money anywhere I can and won’t apologize for it. You said it yourself that it’s subsidized. I’m not the one who chose to do that. I’m just making the best out of the hand dealt to me.

This is getting circular in logic

No, it’s not actually. It’s pretty simple. Individuals making lifestyle changes is never going to do anything about climate change. It requires systemic changes. For this specific scenario, if you want people to use a trash service, instead of dumping their trash themselves, make it cheaper to do it that way. This like “Oh this would be better because X” argumentation is not worthwhile. That is not how the real world works. People do things because they follow the path of least resistance financially and in their schedules, not because it’s the best way to do things. If we ever want to actually solve climate change we need to make doing things the greener way the easier way. Trying to get people to willingly spend more money on greener options is just as useless as the early 2000s recycling campaigns where they tried to have people seperate their own recycling. It’s never going to happen on any meaningful scale.

Also, I might drive a truck, but I can almost guarantee my carbon footprint is smaller than most people’s. Because China actually made solar panels cheap and I got some (I don’t use much power anyway so 600W is plenty for me). And I am just generally poor. So my truck’s about the only source of carbon coming directly from me outside my own respiration. I get a decent amount of my own food from fishing and gardening/foraging depending on the season. I’ve got a bunch of vining maypops I’ll be harvesting soon for example. Me and my 30 year old truck are not the thing destroying the planet.

It’s pretty easy to say we’d do a “one-time reorganization of society” when you don’t think about what that would actually entail. We’re talking about rebuilding every piece of transportation infrastucture on the planet. From the ground up. That’s not a simple one-time reorganization. It’s a decades long, maybe a century long, transition plan. I’m 100% on board with getting there eventually, but this is not the time. We haven’t even dismantled capitalism yet. How do you expect us to pull that off right now? And how exactly do you expect the everyday average person to react if your opening argument is “cars are bad and we should get rid of them”? Focus on the first steps. Expand rail infrastucture. Stop feature creep and make cars simpler, more reliable, and cheaper again. Reduce maximum speed limits on roads, forcing things to be built closer together again, and making it safer for pedestrians to walk on sidewalks. Bring back street cars and trolleys. Expand bus routes. etc.

Just because someone can get by without one for a specific task doesn’t mean they’re not needed for other people. I certainly couldn’t get by without mine. And I’m not talking about some modern overpriced tiny bedded piece of garbage. My truck is 30 years old and has a 6 foot bed. Still gets better gas mileage than those newer things. Would society collapse without them? No. But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t make a lot of poor rural peoples lives a hell of a lot harder. I don’t much give a shit about the GDP personally.

Your point is that we need to avoid ecological collapse right? One of the worst possible things we could do for the environment would be to come in and try to rebuild all the infrastucture in the world to make it more green. We need to learn how to use what already exists in a more green way. I’m not saying none of what your talking about could work. But it would be a slow and transitionary process. We can’t just come in and rebuild everything because it would be better another way. That would be horrible for the environment. So we’d be implementing some of these things but we would still have these huge road networks made for ICE vehicles. So we have to find a way to make use of them in a way that is less unsustainable. For example smaller trucks that are more energy efficient and building things to be easily repairable so theres less waste, and looking into hydrogen fuel cell technology (something China has been advancing a lot recently).

Well those operations use… bigger trucks. How is that contradictory to the point I was making?

I didn’t say they’d be the one driving. But idk how your gonna get someone who can’t walk to the hospital without a car.

It’s easy to do. I’ve been guilty of it myself before. Society is just crazy complicated and its easy to see a simple solution for where you are and forget the edge cases or just not know about places where it might not work. I’m totally on board with most of what your saying I just think it’s important to note we need to be flexible and keep different lifestyles in mind.

It’s really not. Trash trucks are huge and expensive. Trash services are expensive. There aren’t that many people out here to spread the cost around to which makes them more expensive. It costs me nothing to take a small detour when going to get groceries and throw some bags in a big trash compactor myself. So why would I pay out the ass to have a trash service? Make it cheap and I’d consider it, but I really don’t think you can do that for an area where population density is so low. Garbage trucks are designed for suburbia and cities. Think of all the materials it takes to build and maintain that massive garbage truck and to keep it gassed up. And compare that to me taking a 5 minute detour on a grocery run in a truck I already need for other things anyway.

See, this is what I mean. Everywhere can’t be a 15 minute city. 15 minute city’s are great, but for CITYS. You might not like it but it’s true that the rural communities of the world are the backbone of society, and despite the fact that people who very much DO NOT need them now drive pickup trucks and the trucks have been overbuilt to be ridiculously big in the US pickup trucks are very much a NEEDED thing in rural life. You can’t just entirely eliminate cars until you figure out a way to move a truckload of fertilizer from the store to someones farm without a pickup truck being involved, or figure out a way to not need farms anymore. There’s a reason China is pushing rural development so hard.

See I don’t think completely eliminating them is viable because disabled people and the elderly are always going to need personal vehicles in some capacity. But I’m on board with reducing their usage as much as we can. I think the idea that we could entirely get rid of cars is also a bit urban-centric. Like as someone who lives in a rural area I use a truck to take my trash to the dump, I drive a significant distance to get supplies, have to haul heavy things like propane and water jugs, and various other uses.

So what I’d personally like to see is that we build out public transport on the level of China, and then we PLUNGE speed limits. You can drive, but its faster to take the public transport in most cases. So more people would choose not to drive, or to just ride a bike (riding a bike on a 25mph road is way easier than on a 45mph road). You could also make things like golf-cart style mini-EVs street legal. This would all go towards basically eliminating automobile deaths outside of edge cases. Reduce the mass of vehicles, reduce the speed, and you reduce the energy transfered into a human body when they crash.

If I had praised the the EU for their open border policy and talked about how freedom of movement has had multiple positive impacts on the nations in it would you have felt the need to jump in and be angry and start bringing up french neo-colonialism in west africa, and german munitions support for israel, and their mistreatment of immigrants/rising far-right movements? I don’t think you would have. Maybe you should do a bit of introspection and try to figure out why seeing China mentioned in a positive light causes you to have such a reaction?

If you notice also, critiquing them here was done using specific examples. Not vague terminology with no concrete real world example of what you mean. I genuinely do not know what imperialism you are talking about in regards to China the only guess I can make is that sometimes people call the BRI imperialistic, which I think is a bit silly. And as for authoritarian it’s a useless term. Yes, China has laws. These laws restrict what people can do there. That is Authoritarian. Yet so do all nations. You do not disagree with their use of authority. You disagree with how they use it.

Stop being willfully obtuse. It’s obviously about the major recent news event.

“Oh well what if they just coincidentally made a post about a russian biolab worker making a mistake at the same time as this massive international story being in the news?”

Another great vid: https://youtu.be/RnCCY2YtVX0

Actually it is a communism vs capitalism thing. The problem arises in both, but the solutions available depend on the system. I reccomend you look up how China is handling its massive elderly population. For example the elderly there have huge public parks and get outside moving and socializing a lot. In big cities it’s common for them to have mid day slow dance meetings in the parks. This is only possible because the government’s priority is not producing profit for billionaires but caring for its people. So it maintains these things and the public transport required to get the elderly there, and the assistance to keep them fed and healthy.

This video is 15 years old: https://youtu.be/SvmV7GRRPq0

When people stay active and a part of their community into their old age instead of sitting in their huge houses alone or in a nursing home they require much less support to keep living.