#uneven distribution of resources

[nokingsonlyfooles]

I did not survive The Belko Experiment

You can stream this movie for free, and the spousecritter and I did. I heard James Gunn was involved and it was "like a cross between Office Space and Battle Royale" and we thought, "Hell yeah." We expected absurdist comedy. We got a halfway plot switch to a brutal anti-authoritarian screed that failed to stick the landing and just ended with a sick joke.

I'm glad it exists and I think it said things that need saying, but I didn't enjoy it and I won't watch it again. You're free to make up your own mind on that.

But I would like to share my personal experience with a similar "game."

We got to the point in the movie where the authoritarian shitstain was separating the older folks for a culling - the rules were, if the workers didn't kill an arbitrary amount of people in an arbitrary amount of time, the higher ups would kill twice as many people.

My spousecritter objected with disbelief, "Why would they do what he says? They know he is going to kill them!"

And I knew why. I hadn't thought about it in a long time, but I knew. I said, "They just have to kill the first one who pushes back..." and while I was saying this, they did, "and it has to be fast and brutal. Then the rest of them won't. They don't have enough time to think."

And I had to further explain that I knew this because a high school Environmental Science student shot me in the head.

Not with a real gun. This was a "game," Columbine had barely happened, and we weren't being collectively sensitive about school shootings yet.

It wasn't really a game or an experiment. It was rigged from the start. We were supposed to learn a lesson about the uneven distribution of resources - it is bad, and causes people to do bad things. Simple. Oversimplified, in fact, and pretty pointless for that reason. But this is a class wherein I got a good grade for "saving" an island environment in SimIsle by raising money with off-shore oil drilling, so... I appreciate that the teacher was trying.

We were divided into groups, proportionate to how the population of the world exists, with proportionate resources. This "First World" has all the food and money, the "Third World" has all the people and the "Second World" has a fairish amount of each. Here's the food, each one of you has some money, get enough calories to survive by the end of Round One or you will die.

Oh, and to make sure you take it seriously, if you die, you will fail this exercise.

Now, I had some real bad circumstances. I had a total breakdown freshman year, all my grades were shit that year, and if I wanted a GPA that looked college-ready (like my abusive parents wanted me to have) I needed straight As with no margin of error. I was doing well in Environmental Science, but if I failed that exercise, there would've been... let's be gentle and inclusive and call it "disproportionate real-world negative consequences."

I can't have been the only kid in that situation. It wouldn't have been all of us, maybe not even most of us, but enough of us were motivated and the chaos of trying to survive without enough food for everyone commenced.

I was in the Third World, with most of the class. The others did not think of sharing their food with us in the time allotted, if such a thing would've even been allowed. We had a few kids selected to be government officials, and they had a military. The military had the ability to "kill" us.

Demonstrably, there was not enough food for everyone to survive the round and the clock was ticking. The government tried to get us to line up and purchase our food in an orderly manner, and the ones at the back of the line would clearly die at the end of the round.

In this milling mass of desperate high-schoolers, I (an anarchist in egg form) refused to stay where I was put and cut the line. And before I could open my mouth to protest, a "soldier" pulled out a finger gun and shot me. "Boom. You're dead. Go sit down."

"I... Buh..." I do not have an easy time talking when my emotions get the better of me in situations I don't understand. Not that it would've made any difference.

"Boom," said the teenaged boy whose grades were not nearly as good as mine and who managed to get made into a soldier, with a smile. Maybe it was revenge, maybe just relief. "You're dead. Go sit down."

I staggered over to the designated "dead" area and sat on the floor. I was the first. I sat there by myself until the end of the round.

There was slightly more food for everyone, given that I'd died, but still nowhere near enough. I think I couple more kids got killed for fighting with each other, (I'm not sure. The infighting might not've started until Round Two) but the biggest influx starved to death because they were at the end of the line and there wasn't enough food for them, as intended.

One of my fellow dead human beings muttered, "This isn't fair," and I agreed. There were a few more rounds, but the point was the headcount at the end. How many dead people were from the Third World group? Most of 'em. A few from the Second, and none from the First.

There, children. This is why there's famine in Africa (it's really not). Oh, and I was just kidding about failing you. This wasn't for credit.

I felt relieved and horrible, which I suppose was the point, and then the bell rang and we all went to our next class.

The Belko Experiment gave its victims all day. We had about forty minutes. Either way, that is not enough time for a lot of scared human beings to come up with rational solutions. Within these narrow boundaries, there can be no revolution, no humanitarian aid, no simple kindness. People are gonna die so let's start making decisions NOW! Only the dead ones have a minute to think and go, "This isn't fair," and they're not playing the game anymore.

This is not how a person does science. It is a particularly brutal method of storytelling, and, as an adult with more agency and experience, I think it's garbage. If you need to see people behave like snarling animals to make your point, there are much easier ways to force them to do that. But, the people running these "experiments" don't trust human beings to turn on each other, so they stack the deck from a position of authority with a threat of violence - whether they understand they're threatening violence or not.

If you leave people alone and let them exist out of crisis mode, sometimes they help each other. I think, with better social circumstances, that would happen more often, and faster. But even as it is, sometimes they help each other. And that's not what we want to see. If people help each other when we leave them alone in a game environment... What the hell are we doing that prevents them from doing that in the real world?

Uh, I think we're, um, stacking the deck from a position of authority with a threat of violence, fam. Just to start. There's a lot of other stuff, it's real complicated, but we're definitely doing that.

We don't have to. We don't have bombs in our heads or a teacher who can ruin our lives with a red pen. We have police and politicians, I guess, but they're usually not in the room and they can't control you if you don't do what they say. School's out. And you can just feed people. Ever wonder what else you can do?

[kalamity-jayne]

I feel so fucking tired. Like, existentially.

It's just getting real fucking rough out there, everywhere, for trans folks.

Please let the trans people in your life know that you love them.

I've said this many times before but if you're cisgender this isn't a fucking request. You're responsible for this mess so the onus is on you to fucking fix it. You have an obligation to show up for us. No more excuses. FFS there's people out here with major platforms literally calling for our extermination and y'all are just sitting there with your thumbs up your asses.

If you're transgender, just try to keep on doing what your doing. Show up for each other, love each other, love yourself, and do whatever you have to do to stay alive.

[assaultmystic]

Disability is not a fixed state or attribute but exists in relation to assemblages of capacity and debility, modulated across historical time, geopo­litical space, institutional mandates, and discursive regimes. The globalization of disability as an identity through ­ human rights discourses contributes to a standardization of bodily usefulness and uselessness that discounts not only the specificity of location but also the ways bodies exceed or defy identities and subjects. The non disabled/disabled binary traverses social, geographic, and po­litical spaces. The distinctions or par­ameters between disabled and non-­disabled bodies shift historically, as designations between productivity, vagrancy, deviancy, illness, and ­ labor market relations have under­gone transformations from subsistence work to waged ­ labor to hypercapitalist modes of surplus accumulation and neoliberal subject formation. They shift geo­graph­ically, as varied cultural, regional, and national conceptualizations of bodily habitations and metaphysics inhabit corporeal relations differently and sometimes irreconcilably, and issues of environmental racism are prominent. They shift infrastructurally, as a wheelchair-­ accessible elevator becomes a completely altered vehicle of mobility, one that masks vari­ous capacities to climb stairs, in many parts of the world where power outages are a daily, if not hourly, occurrence. They shift legally, administratively, and legislatively, as rights-­ bearing subjects are formed and dismantled in response to health care and insurance regimes, ­ human rights discourses, economic opportunism, and the uneven distribution of resources, medical supplies, and basic care. They shift scientifically, as prosthetic technologies of capacity, from wheelchairs to cellphones to dna testing to ste­roids, script and rescript what a body can, could, or should do. And they shift representationally, as discourses of multicultural diversity and plurality absorb “difference” into regimes of visibility that then reor­ga­nize sites of marginalization into subjects of privilege, indeed privileged disabled subjects.

Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017, xiv-xv), Yasbir K. Puar

[deermouth]

The "American schools don't teach us this!" excuse is bad for a whole host of reasons, but one I often think about is that "the American public school system" isn't a very meaningful term in this context. Curricula and standards vary widely by location. I attended high school in a city that prides itself on "progressivism," and while that certainly didn't preclude my history courses from being chock-full of imperialist propaganda, I do get the sense that they were at least more... comprehensive, than those of people I know who grew up in more conservative (often rural) areas. It's also worth noting that schools are funded by property taxes, creating a fantastically uneven distribution of resources even between different schools in the same municipality.

Anyways, obviously there are myriad problems with the institution of education in America as a whole, but I can't believe that every single person using this excuse went to The Worst, Poorest, Most Conservative School In The Nation. It's OK to admit you weren't paying attention when you were 14.

[kaiasky]

my dream mc modpack is i think

create and tinkers. disable slime islands.

massively nerf storage. the player's inventory and backpacks stay the same, but otherwise 1 m^2 is a max of 10 item types and 64 items total.

in exchange for that, it's easy to make multi block storage or to unify multiple storage blocks into one interface like ae2. By the early midgame "ah, I need more cobblestone, let me add another cobblestone warehouse" is easy.

you CANNOT void items. If an item would despawn, it places itself on the ground if it can. If it's not a block, it places a "refuse layer" that stack up and form piles. and if it can't find a valid placement location then the chunk starts dealing damage ticks to you because fuck you! don't try and cheat my system

whenever possible, gathering items should impact the world. mining requires leaving mines and spoil tips, forestry and farming require space, industrial processes are larger and get larger the higher tech they are. Solar power takes up actual space, no "tier 5 draconic solar panel" shit. (When possible this isn't just "10x10x10 multiblock" it's a series of machines that need to work together.)

uneven resource distribution, you have to go different places for different ores, i love when modpacks do this

There's an early item called the drafting table that lets you enter into spectator mode with copy/paste and worldedit features within a range around the drafting table. Inventories linked to the drafting table get used by construction bots to construct and deconstruct. Expanding the range and capabilities of your drafting table is an important part of the mod. To get you started it has an inventory the size of 10 double chests, but you can't place two drafting tables within range of one another.

Construction bots can mine natural blocks but they can't collect them, to 1) encourage actual mining solutions and 2) let you build underground bases without creating tons of spoil.

Chisel mod but more. Most decorative blocks are unified into 20 'structural base' blocks that can be stonecuttered into a variety of decorative blocks. So e.g. you automate 'wooden structure block' which can be stonecut (in the drafting table ui this is a radial menu or something) into logs, stripped, planks, slabs, various 'chisel' textures all at a 1-1 ratio. When mined, they drop as 'x structure block', preventing you from needing to micromanage which building blocks you have enough of. eg you don't say 'shit i need more mossy bricks', you say 'i need more stone structural blocks' which means bigger factory, not crafting montage.

easy and convenient wireless redstone and wireless storage info, but no ender chest stuff. data is easy to get from a to b, and materials require infrastructure.

thermal dynamics viaducts are the primary player transportation thing, bc i think they rule extremely hard. lategame transportation is the jump clone ichun mod. and/or getting fired out of artillery. you gotta water bucket clutch tho

none of that 'oh the endgame is making creative items with omega crafting' shit. you launch a rocket into the sun (the joke is that this is the only way to truly void items, so it is the Ultimate Tech) and the credits play. there can be 'postgame' stuff but i hate a modpack that overstays its welcome and makes 100%ing it the only 'winning'.

[script-a-world]

hello! i'm currently building a world for a wild west themed ttrpg. the continent the game takes place in is a desert that's been cursed to be isolated from the rest of the world—no one can go in, no one can go out. anyone that tries to escape finds themselves lost in an endless expanse of sand. but i digress, anyways! the main issue of this continent (isolation aside) is the fact that it has no access to water at all. how people hydrate is through this fruit which has a liquid inside that the people can drink. think of a coconut but it can grow properly in a desert since it's magic.

i'd just like to know if there's any sort of worldbuilding advice or questions that could help me explore this idea in a more meaningful way? i already have some of the logistics of how this sort of thing could be distributed in a world like this but i want it to be more grounded. magic exists in this world so that can help explain some things but i want to be careful not to make it so wishy-washy, y'know? thanks so much!

Tex: Even the largest of deserts have an end, be it another biome or a body of water because the continent can only be so large across a planet. Aside from that, clouds will not inherently respect anyone’s boundary on where they can move as part of the water cycle and the natural unevenness of terrain means that water will eventually pool up somewhere, creating oases. Mountains, perhaps, may slow the movement of humidity in the air, but unless you’re willing to make a very, very, very large volcano that’s dead enough and large enough to accumulate sand (which in that instance would be more akin to volcanic ash and as sharp as ground glass), water will still naturally get in and settle into bodies of water. Accordingly, the “wild west” only existed because of the rapid development of trains and railroad lines, so even historically they were not actually isolated - merely delayed, in terms of what they were able to ship. By 1900, someone could travel from the East Coast of the US to the West Coast in approximately a week, depending on the route. If fresh food is packed well (say, seafood in ice), it wouldn’t even spoil for the duration of that journey. For desert flora that can act as reservoirs of water, the Saguaro cactus is a very good example of this (Wikipedia), as are many types of melons (Wikipedia).

Feral: The biggest concern historically, including during the Wild West, in desert climates was not getting hydration for the people but for the horses. Horses drink 5 to 10 gallons (20 to 40 liters) of water a day. Humans need 0.5 to 0.8 gallons (2-3 liters). Although humans/player characters of whichever races you’re using can probably get by with the sources of hydration Tex mentioned, but if they have mounts, there’s going to be a problem. With a ttrpg, this could just be flavor or it could be an actual resource mechanic. To make it more on the believable side, I would recommend wells being a thing. Maybe in towns or along common routes. Also keep in mind, fruits that provide hydration do not spontaneously create water; they absorb it, so there must be water somewhere, somehow. 

Wootzel: If this magic fruit is legitimately the only source of drinkable water, does that also apply to whatever other plants that grow? Are all animals in this area dependent on the fruit as well? Are people having to break the fruits over their crops?

I’m taking a wild guesstimation that if EVERYTHING that needs water has to get it via this fruit because there’s almost no ground water and no precipitation, then 80% or more of the plants growing in this area are the plant that bears this fruit. Or can other plants draw water from the ground in some way (but is it not accessible via digging or drilling a well or whatever because magic curse?), and it’s just fauna that have to drink via fruit?

Do the fruits or their liquid spoil easily, or at all? Do they ferment and become alcoholic? Do the local jackrabbits get drunk on them like deer with apples, and stumble around the desert at night?

What else is in the fruit-liquid? Is it just as functional a source of hydration as water, or are there any other substances in it that the body needs to process out… maybe via the kidneys… resulting in needing to drink more of this liquid than one would need to drink water?

Does evaporating this fruit liquid and trapping/condensating the resulting water work well enough if someone needed plain water for wound care, baby care, or whatever else?

How does anyone bathe?

Are many conflicts involving control of these fruit and the plant they grow on, since having that resource cut off is quickly deadly? Meaning, even if the conflict wasn’t originally about fruit-control, someone burns down someone else’s orchard and now that’s the main focus? Or is this stuff so prevalent that you could try to kill it and it just starts growing back from a crazy tap root the next day?

You have a premise that’s not highly plausible, and it would probably make life rough and precarious for the people and animals who live in this area, but it’s not impossible for human ingenuity to figure out how to make it work anyway. If you choose to keep your water-fruit as the only source of hydration, life is going to look QUITE different in this area.

Addy: I've got a couple thoughts, some are more rambly than others. The first question I've got is no water at all vs no water that's suitable for humans. There's a fair amount of difference in what those will imply for plant and animal life.

Most deserts have some amount of life, after all. Lizards, insects, jackrabbits, cacti, scrub brush, aloe very and other succulents, snakes, birds, foxes, dogs, etc - those all need water to survive. That water might be deep underground, it could be rare rainfall, it could be occasional floods (like what causes arroyos), it could be all sorts of things.

And what about horses? If you've got a wild west setting, horses (or similar mounted animals) and cattle are staples of that kind of setting. What do they drink? Horses need lots of water, especially if they're exercising. What do they eat? No water means no grass, no scrub, nothing to eat. Even if you're riding giant lizards, those lizards gotta drink.

So either this fruit (what season does it grow in?) is cultivated en masse for liquid extraction, or there is some other source of water that's cursed to kill sentient creatures, so you've got stuff that animals can drink but people can't. Still have the plant cultivated en masse, but you've got some more flexibility on it. Your people will need to bring their own water along, but they can stop by rest areas, etc to let their animals drink.

Either way, farms are going to be absolutely crucial logistical standpoints in this setting. Cattle can move themselves (which makes them easy(ish) to steal), but plants need careful tending in an unmoving place. I'm seeing some kind of fortified settlement, where you've got the water farms heavily defended by whatever militia/military forces you've got in the area (having some kind of control system over the water would make it easier to manage people to your desires), with towns surrounding them.

If you've got a strong magic setup, maybe the plants grow best over certain ley lines/underground magical "currents," so you've got isolated strongholds

The strongholds have a heavy amount of control over their local area, since they're the ones who have the ability to produce the fruit on the scale required, but trying to transport that water raises issues of thievery. So once you get outside, say, half a day's ride, you run into logistical issues + thievery problems. That's about 15-20 miles if it's flat, or 10-15 miles if it's hilly, by horseback. A covered wagon can cover ~8-20 miles per day, so that lines up pretty well with a day's distance for a shipment of water. 

And then, outside of those strongholds, you can get smaller crops of water-fruit, but not much. You could get bandit outposts that focus on raiding water (or that have their own secret ley line water nexus growing spot), so as to keep them outside of the law. If you have scrub that animals can eat (even if the groundwater would poison humans), then that also frees up a lot of possibilities for stuff like cattle rustling, since you'd be able to actually keep the cattle watered at watering holes.

That's one way to do it, and sort of the general trend I could see happening (people need water to live, whoever controls the water controls the people). If there's no water, at all, besides what's produced by this one plant, this plant better grow really easily, or else there's nothing around to live off of. Also, if it's a fruit, then the harvest season would be a big deal. 

[luminalunii97]

The reason I post on Tumblr is that I'm trying to spread the news about the Iran revolution and my targeted audience is non-iranians around the world. It's a fact that people of different nations mostly know each other by nationalities and not subgroups and ethnicities. For example, I know people from China or Russia or Argentina as Chinese and Russians and Argentines, but I have very limited knowledge about the cultural and linguistic diversity within different countries. I know about some ethnic groups through media or documentary programs, and I know more about the people of neighboring countries because of proximity and common grounds, but you can't expect me to know the demographics of every country around the world, and in return, I don't expect citizens of other countries to know the details of existing ethnicities in Iran, a country that has been isolated and pushed out of pictures for decades. With all these said I like to give very basic information about the ethnic structure of Iran's population.

Ethnic map of Iran

Iran has always been a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-culture, and multi-lingual nation. Iranian is the nationality and not an ethnical or racial identity. Persians, Kurds, different branches of Turks, Balochs, Lurs, Arabs, Gilaks, Mazanis, etc, etc, are the racial or ethnic identities that have made Iran's body. These ethnic groups have their own language or dialect, their own culture and food, costumes and urban legends, and in some cases particular religion. This makes Iran a very colorful country, which obviously can be a place of wonder but also trouble.

Some of the Folk Costumes in Iran

The relations among these ethnicities and their relation with the capital and the ruling system through history is complicated and differs from region to region, dynasty to dynasty. As you might know, the country you know as Iran today is the remains of an old empire that has gone through many uprises and downfalls, wars and invasions, and rebordering. Here's a quick video of how Iran's borders have changed through history; got bigger, shrank in size, and moved east and west.

The trouble with having so much variety within a country is the unpleasant manifestation of racism, favoritism, and discrimination. This problem has gotten a lot worse under the islamic republic regime. Even though favoritism and racism by the government have existed to different degrees in previous dynasties, the Islamic Republic took it to another level and since it's a theocracy, they added the element of religion stronger than ever to the discrimination mix.

Currently, in Iran, the uneven distribution of wealth and resources, and the government's neglect in many provinces and cities have made a huge gap between prosperity levels in crucial cities like tha capital, Tehran, and everywhere else. Tehran currently is the most populated city in western Asia. It's actually overpopulated, and this overpopulation is causing many environmental problems like air pollution in the city. The main reason is immigration because of the concentration of facilities and opportunities in the capital in contrast with non-existent facilities in other areas. Many people, including my family, have moved to Tehran, temporarily or permanently, to get a better chance at education or finding a job.

Apart from financial fairness, the islamic republic has been dead set on destroying ethnic identities in Iran. Banning the writing, reading, and learning of native languages at schools is one example. In many cities around the country, Persian is not the first language of daily communication. Persian as the official language is the mediator language that makes it possible for people from different regions to communicate. Different accents of Persian are the main and only language in many cities. Some cities are bilingual, but in others, Persian is like English in European countries, just a mediator, not the main native language. Almost everyone can understand and speak Persian, but native languages are the preferred language of daily life in cities with the majority of that ethnic population.

Another example is the restriction on wearing native clothes. In this one, the Islamic Republic hasn't been completely achieved, but they've been able to pale the usage or change the original form of most ethnic styles. For example, to make all the Iranian women uniformly dressed, they successfully changed the colorful veiling of Baloch women to a Black chador.

The original colorful clothing of Baloch women vs the black chador Islamic Republic has forced on them

Last but not least, based on religious beliefs, cities with the majority of non-shia muslim populations face discrimination times and times worse. Lots of Kurdish and Baloch cities have a majority of sunni muslim people. In the recent protests, the level of oppressing violence these cities have faced is far worse than in other states. Where in Tehran they shoot us mostly with shotguns, they only use battle rifles in Kurdistan and Zahedan. In only one day, Bloody Friday of Zahedan, they killed at least 96 Baloch people. Baloch people are also the first group of arrested protesters the regime has started executing. They're being murdered by the regime everyday now. These were only discriminations they're faced during the protests. A region with many metal mines like gold, and various industries is in so much poverty you'd think it's a war-struck place. Poverty, lack of clean drinking water, and identity paper restrictions are some of the examples of problems in Sistan and Baluchestan province.

In Kurdish cities the regime brought Tanks and DShK to suppress people, as if a foreign army has striked. People of Kurd never accepted the Islamic Republic regime and have been fighting its authority for decades now. Mahsa Amini, as you probably know by now, was from a Kurdish city named Saqez. The protests started in front of the hospital she passed away in, in Tehran, but it turned into full on revolution at her funeral, in her homeland, where Kurd women took their headscarves off and chanted "jîn, jîyan, azadî".

Fighting regional and racial discrimination in the free democratic future of Iran will be another obstacle our nation should deal with alongside women's rights, children's rights, LGBT rights, and working group rights.

[cogitoergoetc]

Banana-Centric Praxis

I've been thinking about how to codify my sociopolitical ideology, because I'm pretty confident in the belief that no existing political theory survived smashing into both the information age and the world population multiplying almost eightfold over the last hundred years. These things take time to adapt to change, and time is not a resource we have anymore, so I have been snatching up the things that seem most useful from ideas that were formulated when there were "only" 1.5 billion humans to account for. And I think I've hit on a good example to express what I've cobbled together.

Problem: A system in which the global north has year-round access to bananas is exploitative, cruel, and unsustainable.

Perturbation: It is functionally impossible to get millions of people to cooperate with a change that takes their bananas away. Even if it is best for everyone in the long run, you simply cannot get people to agree to give up their bananas, and efforts to force the issue will spend more energy fighting them than it will actually changing the system that has made bananas an expectation.

Proposal: The most efficient solution, then, is to grow bananas closer to them. An arcology system capable of growing bananas in a northern winter is one that, necessarily, will be capable of growing pretty much anything else, including the sort of staple crops that local communities actually need. Something that can do both at once in sufficient volume will solve a whole hell of a lot more problems than the issue of bananas. This, in turn, will do a whole lot of good for people who do not care about bananas because they are suffering from starvation of food in general: an arcology you put in a wealthy city will work just as well if you put it in an impoverished and exploited region.

So it's no longer an issue of economics, or supply chains, or uneven distribution of capital. It's a problem of nitrogen fixation. And we have made a whole hell of a lot of progress on efficient nitrogen capture in the last 20 years. We'd make a lot more, a lot faster, by getting people to agree to something that will result in their own locally grown bananas.

There's about a thousand evident problems in this approach! I am keenly aware of that. But the fundamental logic still applies, I think: traditional methods of fighting entrenched societal harm are not working fast enough, but neither are the systems that enforce that societal harm. There are too many people suffering now to just let these methods keep slugging it out. The most useful societal change will come from jumping on the absolute torrent of new technologies being developed, before ways can be found to fit them into the extant, exploitative system.

Or, to put it more cynically: if people were willing to give up their personal luxuries because those luxuries demand exploitation of others, they would have done so centuries ago, and effort spent to try to wrestle the bananas away from them is effort wasted, because we're vastly outnumbered by the people who just want to keep the damn bananas. If human selfishness cannot be defeated, it can instead be harnessed as a resource. You gotta work with the system you have.

It's an idea that is terribly bitter to the tongue of the brain. It is from a perspective that I will freely admit is disgustingly privileged. It smacks of trickle-down economics, and does not address the problem that people pleased with their local bananas will fight tooth and nail to keep from using the same technology to help starving people.

But we're also at a period in human history where the people developing those technologies have more in common with the people starving than the people funding their research, and when it comes time to use that research, it will be the researchers that have the most chance to take control.

It is one opinion of many, and no one in all of human history has found the "right" way to fix this stuff. I do not have any illusions that I, one of 8 billion plus, am the one to finally crack it.

But it seems workable enough to me. So work on it I shall.

[probablyasocialecologist]

The orthodox assumption that technological developments can maintain and even grow current levels and patterns of consumption while staying within safe environmental limits faces three major issues: 1) attempting to grow green production while also growing overall demand and consumption makes decarbonization doubly difficult, 2) global production is already sufficient to meet human need, but the distribution of resources and of economic growth is extremely uneven, 3) many existing government and private sector pledges to decarbonize assume massive use of carbon capture and storage technologies, which are unproved at scale, and carbon offsetting schemes whose efficacy in actually avoiding emissions remains uncertain.

The Lancet Planetary Health, Less is more

[thypandatetor]

How do you spin roving if its in very small strands? I am trying to spin wool that my uncle gave me to make him a pair of gloves. I made my own drop spindle but I'm not sure how to make the yarn! It's coming out very uneven.

Any advice is appreciated!! Thanks in advance!!

Is this your first spin? Because your first spin is always going to come out uneven and chunky lol Its the spinner's rite of passage! Omg also, are you spindles old knitting needles?! Amazing

What part are you struggling with? If its already drafted out thin like the far left chunk in your pic, you mostly just need to put twist into it. If it feels the twist is uneven, you can unwrap it from the cop in long chunks, like full wing span, at a time and the twist should distribute itself as evenly as it can (thinner parts will hoard twist). I highly suggest the butterfly hold for this unravel and reravel (Spin Off is also a great resource for spinning). My first wheel only has one bobbin and when I transfer my singles to a cake winder I will sometimes put my wheel like 10ft away just to let the twist even out.

I am very ok at spinning, but let me know what youre up to and I will try my best to help!

[uselessheretic]

i feel like i see the thing relatively often where someone will say that ed's not actually that mentally ill, fans are just racist and also somehow this is izzy's fault because the only time he shows symptoms of mental illness is through izzy supposedly. even though in episode four alone we see him talk about suicide ideation, how discontent he is in life, and how burnt out he is.

but when people urge others to add an antiracist lens to their analysis and point out the historical racism within the psychiatric system it seems like?? they think that the only explanation is for ed to just be a lil depressed and that poc who are otherwise perfectly fine are constantly being slapped with extreme diagnoses. which, that is a thing that happens btw. people will call the cops on and forcefully institutionalize black folks who they have disagreements with and weaponize psychiatry against them.

that said, when talking about something like the uneven diagnosis distribution between poc and white people of schizophrenia (since that's something that's been researched) it's not that doctors are talking people who are otherwise perfectly mentally healthy and attributing their behavior to mental illness (although again it does happen.) usually though what people are referring to is how doctors are quick to diagnose poc with schizophrenia before doing their proper diligence and going over the other possibilities including histories of depression, trauma, and abuse. certain traits they exhibit are overemphasized and others minimized or ignored. a black person and white person may show the same exact symptoms, but the doctor will first have the white person tested for PTSD or BPD and try alternative treatment plans, while marking the black person off before considering other possibilities.

it's dangerous and disturbing where poc will be put through a series of medications that do not help, receive no treatment for the actual root of the problem, and then in the process often be criminalized as well since there is a much greater social stigma and forced state control over people diagnosed with schizophrenia.

i just feel like if you're gonna talk about ed and misdiagnosis through a racial lens, it'd be more accurate for him to immediately get diagnosed with something like schizophrenia without the doctor doing anything more to look into him. ignoring things like his history of child abuse and how trauma can cause certain responses. or for something he said metaphorically to be taken as literal where he might describe himself when angry as "the kraken" and the doctor marks that down as a sign of delusions. overemphasizing verbal expressions of angers as signs of violence. hearing ed say "it feels like my boss is out to get me" where he means that the boss keeps picking on him and it feels racially motivated, and the doctor puts on the record that he suffers from paranoia.

also just saying but there is actually a LOT out there you can read about māori mental health and the issues surrounding NZ's system. about 1 in 3 māori adults meet criteria for a mental disorder and this is a result of a racist health system, poverty, and, very importantly, colonialism. but like? i promise you don't need to create your own theories on how ed's identity interacts with mental health as if you're the first person to considered that. kaupapa māori mental health services are literal resources in place to address māori mental health needs within a cultural context. like! it's very cool actually for these things to be made available through hard community work that rejects colonialist psychiatric systems and instead utilizes a holistic and indigenous approach to wellness.

idk it's just so much more complicated than ignoring ed's very real mental illness and writing it off as no biggie. tbh it feels very um american centric as well to make assertions about relationships to mental health and race without ever acknowledging the specific community history here and that this isn't a new conversation. if you want to say you're examining ed through an anticolonialist framework then it would help if you did literally any work to find out what that looks like currently.

[elbiotipo]

musings about my space opera story currently rotating in my head

the "galactic imperium" or "galactic republic" are just so passé. I want a situation similar to our current world. So there is a sort of galactic UN where most goverments take part, and galactic-wide organizations thar regulate trade, perhaps a military alliance against strange threats (like rogue singularities and such), but no central goverment. And those organizations are dominated by the most powerful civilizations, with lots of single-planet states, like city states, scattered across the stars

Can't decide if I'm going for something set in the *height* of Galactic civilization (like Traveller or Star Wars) or something more post-apocalyptic, perhaps there was an utopian civilization that collapsed and people live in the ashes of that, which would explain why there are so many powerful rich worlds and some worlds backward in technology (though imperialism and dependency theory can make that too)

"Dark energy and matter make most of the universe. The distribution of dark energy is uneven, and it flows like currents, shaping galaxies and star systems. Though the use of exotic materials, one can ride these currents to other stars. Some routes are easy to navigate, and are pillars of galatic civilizations. Others are harsh and have killed many an astronaut" (so space is basically a star ocean, whoa biotipo, so poetic)

(these exotic materials can only be manufactured or extracted in few worlds... perhaps both, like oil)

I'm fucking tired of human-only settings or settings with only a few major aliens. There will be plenty of aliens, so many you can't keep track of them, some very important and well known, others in the background. HOWEVER, there's no universal translator or shit. I'm taking the Heterogeneous Linguistics approach, every species has its own way of communication and some are quite removed from human ones. And every species has lots of cultures and subcultures.

In fact, some alien cultures might have humans sharing their culture and viceversa. You can meet a human who is completely removed from any Earth culture or language, since they have lived for generations in alien world. (Humans are numerous and of course the POV of the audience, but in this context, they are just like any other species)

Though it hurts as a biologist, for the purposes of a space opera setting I will dispense with too alien-aliens (they are all able to communicate and think with each other, in a way) or aliens with different biochemistries. They are able to interact with each other without decontamination or enviromental suits and they mostly eat the same kind of food and such. However I will retake the idea for another time.

One interesting idea would be that many aliens are descended from prehistoric Earth transplants... so dino aliens and such. This would make sense to make relatable aliens. However this would give Earth too much importance and I don't want that, it's already too important for humans in the setting (though not all)

There's a relativist generation ship "culture", or more like way of living, with many of these ships from many different civilizations crossing the galaxy, forming trade clans (actually in the millions for each "ship"). They are interesting because they are separate from the main FTL culture, and they might keep ancient traditions that are gone, since their passage of time is different.

There are "clusters" of worlds surrounding particularily important trade routes or worlds. Beyond them, the Galaxy is mostly sparsely settled, mostly by resource operations or refuelling stations (think the big cities in large countries compared to the interior)

Earth is kind of a holy city for many humans, but even more revered: ancient, legendary, revered, featuring in the minds and cultures of many humans. Much like say, Jerusalem or Mecca, it is also a place where people live and there's a long history and current political and social issues. And it's not the capital of anything, it's very culturally important, but other worlds have long surpassed it in political and economical power.

In fact, there might be many humans that couldn't care less about Earth. Some might even deny they descend from there, especially in a "long night" post-apocalyptic scenario.

If there's a galactic capital, it might be a dyson sphere made by ancient civilizations. In fact, it might have been continously occupied by thousands and thousands of years and different civilization "cycles"

[womenofnoise]

Moor Mother - Circuit City back cover

Transcript below cut

Reverse Gentrification of the Future Now

The present realities of housing for low-income people living in Philadelphia are located temporally-spatially near the one in Circuit City. We are experiencing an affordable housing crisis, and this crisis is exacerbated by the average of 22,000 eviction filings each year and the unknown number of illegal evictions.  In my work as Managing Attorney of the Housing Unit at Community Legal Services, where we provide legal representation and advice to more than 3,000 low-income tenants a year, I hear countless stories of tenants who face racial, sex, gender, family, ethnicity, and disability discrimination from landlords; stories of tenants intimidated into not complaining about substandard housing conditions that exacerbate health and safety problems; or tenants who received eviction filings from disgruntled landlords that have resulted in virtual blacklisting from future homes and opportunities for stability. Growing displacement and mass evictions of entire buildings of often low-income residents is a particularly vicious form of eviction that has widespread health and economic impacts, and destroys economic, cultural, and racial diversity in neighborhoods. Mass evictions, often unexpected, further aggravate the city’s shortage of affordable housing—existing affordable housing units are often lost forever, putting pressure on resources and housing stock elsewhere in the City and concentrating poverty in particular neighborhoods.

Compounding these issues is pervasive housing discrimination –  single mothers and their children, seniors, Black people, LGBTQ people, immigrants, and people living with disabilities are disproportionately impacted by evictions and lack of access to safe, habitable, and affordable housing.  Tenants face systemic and individual discrimination at every stage of the process – they are barred from getting into a new home for discriminatory reasons, and often kicked out of their homes for those same reasons.1 The ACLU, for instance highlights how “women of color bear the burden of eviction,” noting that women of color made up 62% and 70% of the tenants facing in eviction in Chicago and Philadelphia respectively.2 These and other instances of structural inequity related to housing disproportionately impact the City’s poor, Black and Hispanic populations live in racially concentrated poverty.3 This loss of housing has a distinct racial impact, where 63% of African-Americans live in project-based housing compared with 44% of the city’s population, and where African-Americans are disproportionately more likely to carry severe housing cost burdens in the city.

These types of inequalities are often framed in terms of spatial inequality and displacement from location. However, as Helga Nowotowny notes, “power, exercised by central authorities, establishes itself over space and over time.”4 (emphasis added). Hierarchies of time, inequitable time distribution, and uneven access to safe and healthy futures inform intergenerational poverty in marginalized communities the same ways that wealth passes between generations in traditionally privileged families. Sociologist Jeremy Rifkin says that “temporal deprivation is built into the time frame of every society,” where people living in poverty are temporally poor as well as materially poor.”5 For example, time poverty is routinely used to penalize marginalized people in the justice system, where being ten minutes late to court can mean losing your job, kids, home, and freedom. Time and temporal inequities show up at every step of the eviction process, for example, from the short or fully waivable notice requirements for termination of a lease agreement, to the time required for an evicted family to vacate a unit that is severely out of line with the time needed to secure new housing.  Inevitably, marginalized Black communities are disproportionately impacted by both material, spatial, and temporal inequalities in a linear progressive society, with many Black communities forced to occupy “temporal ghettos” as well as spatial ones.  

Circuit City considers both the implications of time and of space involved in privatization of public housing, gentrification, displacement, and redevelopment. There is no set year or place in the play, but instead a layering of multiple temporal spaces.  The residents of Circuit City  are integrating the time(s) of redevelopment, privatization,  and hyper-gentrification, into the pre-established temporal dynamics of the community, layered over and within the communal historical memory and the shared idea of the future(s) of that community. Nested within those layers are individual, subjective temporalities and the lived realities of the residents, at odds with the linear, mechanical model of time on which Circuit City and its external spatial-temporal constructs are etched.  It takes as its central provocation a practical strategy for achieving a Black flight, a reverse gentrification, and inverse displacement, and the conditions necessary for temporal autonomy and spatial agency.  Circuit City is presented using Black Quantum Futurism praxis as a critical framework, fusing Afrodiasporan philosophies and rituals with quantum physics, recovering artifacts of Black temporal consciousness, and dismantling oppressive social temporal constructs.

[joy-bringer]

It isn't that Earth is overpopulated (its more an uneven distribution of resources problem) but humans LOVE to explore as far as they can and now that they've explored every corner of Earth they are turning their eyes to the metaphorical heavens of space and distant planets.

“Oh!! Humans are such adventurous creatures!”

[wedelivergravel01]

Benefits and Advantages of Stone Slingers

As a stone slinger service provider in Toronto, your business, WeDeliverGravel.com, offers numerous benefits and advantages to your clients. Let's delve into the key points that highlight the value of stone slingers in the construction industry:

Time and Labor Savings: Stone slingers significantly reduce the time and effort required for material placement on construction sites. By automating the process, these machines can accurately and swiftly distribute aggregates, eliminating the need for manual labor. This time-saving aspect translates into increased efficiency and productivity, allowing construction projects to progress more rapidly.

Improved Efficiency and Productivity: With stone slingers, construction professionals can complete material placement tasks in a fraction of the time compared to traditional methods. The streamlined process minimizes downtime, reduces logistical challenges, and ensures a smooth flow of operations. As a result, construction projects can be completed more efficiently, allowing you to take on additional jobs and increase overall productivity.

Accurate and Precise Material Placement: Stone slingers excel at delivering precise and consistent material placement. These machines are equipped with advanced mechanisms that allow for accurate targeting and controlled distribution of aggregates. This precision eliminates uneven coverage, prevents wastage, and ensures a uniform surface finish. Clients can expect high-quality results with minimal need for additional adjustments or corrections.

Cost-Effectiveness in Material Distribution: By optimizing material distribution, stone slingers help minimize waste and reduce costs. The accurate placement of aggregates avoids overuse, ensuring that materials are used efficiently without unnecessary excess. This cost-effectiveness benefits both your business and your clients, as it reduces the overall project expenses and maximizes the value of the resources utilized.

Enhanced Safety on Construction Sites: Stone slingers promote a safer work environment on construction sites. By automating material placement, these machines minimize the physical strain on workers, reducing the risk of injuries and fatigue. Additionally, stone slingers reduce the need for manual handling and transportation of heavy materials, minimizing potential accidents and enhancing overall site safety.

By emphasizing these benefits and advantages, you can effectively communicate the value proposition of your stone slinger services through WeDeliverGravel.com. Highlighting your commitment to delivering efficient, precise, cost-effective, and safe material placement solutions will attract clients in the Toronto construction industry.

[victoriabyrnearth101]

My favorite animal when I was a child was a duck. My dad and I used to go for early morning runs on the Erie Canal and pass by ducks in the morning sleeping or just waking up. I love them because they are cute and just mind their own business unlike geese which will chase you if you come anywhere near them. Something I found out about ducks is that they cannot feel cold in their feet because they have no nerves or blood vessels in their feet.

During the fall for some reason I am always in the mood to listen to American Authors. When I played travel softball in middle school and high school, my mom and I would listen to their album “Oh, What a Life” on our way to my tournaments. For some reason, that album always reminds me of fall. My favorite fall movie is the Thanksgiving Charlie Brown movie. I am a big fan of horror movies, but overall that is my favorite fall themed movie. I love Linus dispensing his wisdom on everybody, Peppermint Patty making Charlie play football, and Snoopy and Woodstock trying to cook the meal. It just puts me in the fall mood!

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was established in 2002, the year I was born. This is a very important act for businesses as it aimed to make financial statements more accurate and reduce fraud. It increased the standards for companies as the company leaders now are required to sign off on their financial statements, making them personally responsible if there is any material misstatement. This came about because of mostly the Enron scandal where the company was knee deep in fraudulent activities, as well as some other large companies that were doing similar activities. I found this interesting because this comes up a lot as an accounting Major, and these big accounting standards came into place the year I was born.

The song “You are my Sunshine” (the Norman Blake version) was my favorite song as a child. I absolutely loved this song and still do. I made my parents play it on repeat during car rides until they became sick of it. It really is a sad song, but I have always loved it. The lyrics “you make me happy when skies are grey, you’ll never know dear how much I love you” always made me feel comforted, even though it is a song about a man’s wife leaving him for another man. It is a song about unconditional love as the man is pleading to his wife to come home and he will spend the rest of his life trying to make her happy and love him. As a child I saw it as a happy and sweet song, and even though I now know it’s meaning, it still resonated with me in the same way when I hear it. To me it means unconditional love and not giving up on someone.

Attendance Prompt:

“Gold has always been the color of reverence and revered itself. Part of its allure lies in the mineral’s scarcity and uneven distribution. Although mines have been discovered all over the world, gold rushes mean that they are quickly exhausted and abandoned in favor of those that have been newly uncovered.” (Page 85, The Secret Lives of Color)

I chose this quote because it reminded me of the Taylor Swift song “Gold Rush”. It is one of my favorites of her songs because it relates to this concept of people flocking madly to something desired. The song is about a guy that all the girls are in love with, which is like how people treat gold. They see or hear that there is gold and they rush to make it theirs. The scarcity factor of gold also reminds me of the economic idea of scarcity. In economics we face scarcity of resources, money and time, so gold reminded me of that and how the limited supply of it makes it a good form of money.