I’m suddenly reminded of how the Hegseth administration has implemented a policy of double-tapping unarmed civilian boats and purging the US military of anyone who objects.

I’m not understanding your math. What would we need enough battery storage to cover annual use? The sun isn’t going to stop shining for an entire year, is it?

I get the benefits of that, and, that sort of megastructure power generation requires massive investment in power plants and a grid to carry the power.

One of the great things about solar is you don’t need megastructures or thousands of miles of cables, because you can generate power directly where it’s needed - need more power, add more panels. One of the great things about batteries is they work the same way.

That’s a boon for industry in rural areas with poor infrastructure, like, say, rural India. You don’t need to rely on a power plant hundreds of miles away to power your factory. You don’t need to trust the government to keep the power grid intact and stable. You don’t need to worry the government will divert the power you need in order to power the President’s brother’s data center or whatever. You plop down your solar panels and battery bank and get to work.

(That’s a disappointment from the article. India’s building an enormous solar megastructure way out in a rural area without the power transmission infrastructure to get the power where it’s needed. Smells like graft.)

And in 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice accused Adani executives of paying hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to Indian government officials to obtain lucrative supply contracts for its solar energy and hiding this from potential investors. The case was dropped this month after Adani made offers to invest in the U.S., though U.S. officials denied any link.

Lol. I’m sure they did.

That’s one reason why I think the boom in cheaper, better, safer battery tech is one of the greatest innovations of the 21st century.

Yeah, the sun doesn’t always shine. Yeah, you need 24/7 power for a lot of things (eg lifesaving medical equipment in hospitals). Solar isn’t practical for a lot of uses unless you can effectively store the power. But battery storage centers are getting better every day.

(On a related note, e-bikes and scooters are everywhere where I live. Personal solar powered transportation at a fraction of the cost and impact of cars. As soon as batteries got small and light and cheap enough to make them practical the market exploded. It’s amazing.)

They can’t make houses cheaper, after all. That would hurt the bankers and mortgage companies and property investors.

Purchasing an actual house is out of reach for the bottom 90% of young Americans. And they can’t lower housing prices because it’ll make rich people less rich. And they can’t increase wages because it’ll make rich people less rich.

So they define the American Dream downwards.

A young adult today can buy an RV for the same price, adjusted for inflation, as their parents spent to buy a house. And that’ll be the new aspiration. Buy an RV, rent a parking space, and start a family.

And the conservatives wonder why people aren’t having kids these days.

Lasting change takes collective action, not one rich guy throwing money around.

People like to toss out the factoid that Elon Musk could end world hunger with a tiny fraction of his hoarded fortune, and that’s true, as far as it goes. He could pay to feed everyone on earth. But if the structural, political, and economic factors that made those people hungry in the first place aren’t fixed, then weeks or months or years later they’ll all be hungry again.

I mean, take California’s high speed rail. Newsom and his predecessors have thrown something like thirty billion dollars at building a line from San Francisco to LA or wherever the hell it’s supposed to go, and it doesn’t really matter where it’s supposed to go, because they haven’t built shit. But the reason they haven’t built shit isn’t a lack of money - it’s because of landowners not wanting to give up their land for train tracks, it’s because of the glacial pace of environmental review and permitting, it’s because of sabotage by the richest man in the world who owns a car company and hates public transit on principle, it’s because of a hundred other things that a billionaire can’t fix by throwing money at it.

I don’t like Steyer, but he’s not wrong to believe that reforming California’s government is the only way to actually fix what’s wrong with California. He’s just wrong to think he can do it through the Democratic Party.

Capitalism is a system of distribution of goods with a basis of private property and competitive markets. In the past it has been praised for high rate of innovation and low costs of goods compared to older systems such as feudalism and aristocracy where small states subservient to a crown owned and managed industry.

Cool. Now tell us why it’s been condemned. You’ve only got half the definition there, and that doesn’t count as an honest explanation.

(Also: capitalism may work like that in theory, but it’s never been fully implemented in practice. Every so-called “capitalist” economy has the rich putting their thumb on the scale to make markets less competitive in their favor. The “economics 101” definition you give is so simplified that it’s useless for describing any real world economy. But that’s another rant.)

Things that are solarpunk: building tall, building dense, building multi-use. The more you limit your building footprint, the more space you have for farms and gardens and wild green spaces. A single 100-unit apartment complex, with a shuttle bus to the local train station, is roughly a hundred times more efficient than a subdivision with 100 single family homes and probably 200 cars.

People hate to hear it, but the American style of private home ownership ain’t solarpunk, or socialist, or any other brand of leftist. It’s pretty much the most capitalist thing a member of the working class will ever do.

Or pick the sprouts, cook them, and eat them. They’re like hardier asparagus 😆

“If the forests are doomed anyway, let’s log them all now and at least make some profit from it.” Trump, probably.

I don’t know. I stole it from Tumblr. Share at your own risk.

I think if we’re talking about “real dystopian collapse”, as in a major population reduction, there are going to be more leftover bullets than you could shoot in a dozen lifetimes. If you’re thinking about hunting small game, get something that shoots .22 LR, take it to the range every weekend, and don’t waste your time with slings and arrows.

And with that being said, trapping small game is more efficient than hunting with any kind of weapon, so if you wanted to learn bushcraft for hunting for food after the end, that’s where I’d start.

social connections would likely serve you better than wasting all your time and energy working a yard garden that produces a measly haul

Join a community garden. You get both social connections and the yard garden experience - and as a bonus, your social connections are with people who know how to grow food and can give you advice 😆

That being said, don’t be too dismissive of “supplementing” your diet. If you know what you’re doing you can grow all the fresh veggies a person needs on a few hundred square feet per person. Fresh veggies are the kind of food most vulnerable to supply chain disruptions - like if, “hypothetically”, some toddler dictator decided to throw a tantrum for no apparent reason and start a war right on top of the shipping lane that the majority of the world’s fertilizer passes through - and they’re also the most beneficial kind of food to grow yourself, because you can grow varieties optimized for taste and nutrition instead of varieties optimized for shipping and appearance on grocery store shelves.

(Book recommendation: Ten Tomatoes that Changed the World. Read the chapter on how fresh Florida tomatoes are grown and you’ll never buy anything but canned tomatoes again 😆 )

Yeah, it takes knowledge and experience. Which is why you should start gardening now, so that you’ll have those skills when they become necessary.

I wonder if Malcolm X ever considered that alienating white liberals decreased their ability to help his cause.

Did you look up the context of this quote? Because here, read the whole thing:

The White liberal is the worst enemy to America and the worst enemy to the Black man.

Let me first explain what I mean by this White liberal. In America there’s no such thing as Democrats and Republicans anymore. That’s antiquated. In America you have liberals and conservatives. This is what the American political structure boils down to among Whites. The only people who are still living in the past and thinks in terms of “I’m a Democrat” or “I’m a Republican” is the American Negro. He’s the one who runs around bragging about party affiliation and he’s the one who sticks to the Democrat or sticks to the Republican, but White people in America are divided into two groups, liberals and Republicans…or rather, liberals and conservatives.

And when you find White people vote in the political picture, they’re not divided in terms of Democrats and Republicans, they’re divided consistently as conservatives and as liberal. The Democrats who are conservative vote with Republicans who are conservative. Democrats who are liberals vote with Republicans who are liberals. You find this in Washington, DC.

Now the White liberals aren’t White people who are for independence, who are liberal, who are moral, who are ethical in their thinking, they are just a faction of White people who are jockeying for power the same as the White conservatives are a faction of White people who are jockeying for power. Now they are fighting each other for booty, for power, for prestige and the one who is the football in the game is the Negro. Twenty million Black people in this country are a political football, a political pawn an economic football, an economic pawn, a social football, a social pawn…

Politics have changed a lot since then, of course, but I think his message is pretty clear, and still valid. If you’re the kind of “white liberal” who doesn’t give a shit about Black rights except when you need Black votes to get your candidates elected - and there are tons of those holding office in the Democratic Party today - then you are an enemy of the Black man and America as a whole.

Shocking that these fascist clowns aren’t good at governing even for their own ill ends.

You’re missing the point of the exercise. They didn’t want to govern - they wanted to break shit.

Musk went in with the attitude “we will cut everything we have an excuse to cut, and then if one of our political allies objects to a cut, we’ll put it back”.

And DOGE implemented that plan perfectly.

They cut a bunch of grants that had nothing to do with “wokeness” because their goal was to cut as many grants as possible, no matter what they were for. The LLM was there as a propaganda tool - it let them falsely claim they were only cutting “woke” grants. It was there to give DOGE an excuse. The fact that it was wildly inaccurate was the reason they used it.

people losing income

More than a million of the poorest people in the world have died - so far - of starvation, exposure, and preventable disease, because of DOGE’s illegal cuts to federal programs like USAID.

Sure, we can call that “people losing income”. It’s technically true.

But Jesus, if I did something illegal and a million people died because of it, I’d spend the rest of my life in prison.

I’m sorry, what presidential candidate in the last five generations wasn’t part of the Epstein class?

Even Bill Clinton, a poor boy from rural Arkansas, got to be an honorary member of the Epstein class. And my God did he enjoy the privileges of that class.

look, hate harris all you want, but iran? venezuela? cuba? migrants in cages?

Remember Afghanistan? Iraq? Syria, Libya, Yemen, Ukraine? And also Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and a dozen others? And all the proxy wars and “interventions” I’m forgetting about or that never made the news?

Pre-Trump America was less blatant in its warmongering. It made the effort to build “international consensus” before bombing the fuck out of poor brown people. And it preferred to made economic warfare, through sanctions, which don’t make headlines when they kill poor brown people.

Harris would have killed Iranians with sanctions rather than bombs. And perhaps you think that makes a difference. But whether a little girl dies of starvation from American sanctions, or is blown up by American bombs, she’s still fucking dead.

Fuck, Trump’s “random bombing go” strategy let Iran close the Strait and made America take the blame for it - and if that lets Iran negotiate with the world and end Western sanctions using the Strait as leverage, Trump’s war might end up saving more lives than it kills.

As for migrants in cages: Trump made no new laws. Trump made no new policies, even. Trump enforced existing laws more harshly and blatantly and publicly than America previously had. And Harris promised to do the same fucking thing in her campaign.

What’s happening to migrants today is what the American people wanted. The killings, the beatings, the disappearances, the private prisons and forced labor and inhumane conditions, all of it.

Only we saw it happen openly, on the streets in Minneapolis, in front of a million cell phones and cameras, instead of out in the Texas desert where the only cameras belong to the Border Patrol. And seeing the Border Patrol treat middle class white protesters like immigrants was too much for some people.

Putting migrants in cages is what America wants. America just doesn’t want to see the cages. It hurts their feelings.

I don’t vote.

Good people don’t vote.

I may not be a good person but I try my best.

And at least I can claim the dignity of refusing to participate in the Epstein class’s quadrennial popularity contest.