the homeless are more akin to pests as far as the money is concerned.

I'd go one step further. Homelessness, and poverty in general, are necessary to capitalism. If the consequences of poverty weren't so bad, workers wouldn't fear losing their jobs so much. Homelessness helps maintain the authority of the boss over the worker and the corresponding hierarchy of capital over labor.

San Francisco infuriates me. There are activist groups that are made of actual literal unhoused people telling the city what they need and what they want. And the city could just give people the money they need for a fraction of the administrative costs it spins on its non-profits and its government agencies.

But the city says homeless people are drug addicts and criminals and can't be trusted to use money responsibly.

So they funnel millions of dollars to corrupt non-profits and government agencies who promise to use the money responsibly for the benefit of the homeless and they fucking don't. There was a $350K program run by the Salvation Army in partnership with the local public transit agency. One homeless person used their services.. One.

At least government agencies are, at some remove, responsible to the taxpayers and the voters. Non-profits dedicated to "helping" the homeless have a very strong incentive to make the problem worse. Because the worse the homelessness crisis becomes, the more money goes to the nonprofits. So they take government money, give it to their employees, make some sort of pathetic token effort to help unhoused people, and as the crisis worsens they go back to the government and say "the crisis is worse, we need more money".

And civilians look at the amount of money being poured into assistance to unhoused people, and look at the crisis getting worse, and say "more money and services won't help these people, we need to criminalize them". And fucking Newsom is all over that because he's angling for the Presidency and military style crackdowns impress the fascists in red states.

There's a homelessness crisis because of government corruption and incompetence. And the majority of Americans think the solution is to give the government more military power, more police power, and let those same corrupt agencies brutalize the homeless more. It's sickening.

You don't understand. That protest provoked an emotional reaction in me and I didn't like it. Responsible protests don't hurt people's feelings. They went too far.

Libraries have free books. That takes profit from Amazon.

Libraries have free Internet. That takes profit from ISPs.

Libraries have free research tools and expert guidance from librarians. That takes profit from all sorts of companies that profit off your ignorance.

And worst of all, that stuff is all publicly funded, so when you look at a library you see government helping people. And there's nothing conservatives hate more than government that helps people.

Cryptocurrency is the online equivalent of the neo-Nazi bar.

You know how the story goes, with the bartender who tells the customer "you have to throw out neo-Nazis as soon as you see the uniforms or the tattoos, no matter how polite and well-behaved they are. Because if you let Nazis stay and get comfortable they'll invite their friends, and word gets around that Nazis can drink comfortably at your bar, and customers who don't want to drink with Nazis leave, and suddenly you have a Nazi bar". You all remember that story?

Well, cryptocurrency in online spaces - especially futurist spaces and technological spaces - it's a lot like that. Cryptocurrency supporters are constantly looking for opportunities to promote cryptocurrency. And they obviously see a movement like solarpunk, which talks a lot about decentralization, and mistrusts the global financial system, and so on, as fertile ground for shilling cryptocurrency.

And if you let cryptocurrency supporters hang out and talk about how awesome cryptocurrency is, they will inevitably start shilling their particular flavor of cryptocurrency. And that's inevitably a capitalist scam and will inevitably harm anyone stupid enough to fall for it.

And the problem is not just that cryptocurrency is a capitalist scam. It's that, if you don't shut down cryptocurrency talk aggressively, you get more cryptocurrency supporters. Because the crypto bros see that cryptocurrency discussion is allowed, and they join in, and they invite their friends, and they start shilling their scams. And then you get crypto spammers and scam bots and the personal messages inviting you to elite investment opportunities and all the other scummy garbage that infests cryptocurrency websites. You either block cryptocurrency talk or you get a website full of crypto garbage.

In other words, cryptocurrency supporters need to be shut down as quickly and ruthlessly as any other bots and spammers. Because if you don't you inevitably get a website full of bots and spammers.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

The myth of the humble farmer or small holder living in harmony with his land is as bullshit as the myth of the noble savage. The vast majority of farmers see the planet as a resource to make money from. If they take any heed to local conditions, they think of it in tragedy of the commons style. For instance, in many places around the world, the aquifers irrigating farmland have less than 20 years before they're emptied. Local farmers are aware. They take it as a warning to pump as much water as possible as fast as they can, because if they don't take the water and turn it into profit, someone else will, and the water will still be gone.

And that's not even getting into how these brutal exploitative farming methods are what allowed the Earth's population to balloon to a unsustainable 8 billion and ravage the land and devour resources of every sort.

The vast majority of farmers are the enemy of the planet. In my more green authoritarian moments, I envision nationalizing every acre and setting up eco villages of subsistence farmers populated by the poor of our cities and worked by former corporate middle management reduced to serfdom. No one should own whole square miles of farmland. Not even farmers.

... doesn't this already exist?

I mean to say, anyone can already start a website and call it a wiki, set whatever policies they want, synchronize with other websites via RSS feed or whatever, and open it to editing by anyone and everyone (or no one) they choose.

And anyone does. There are hundreds of thousands of wikis out there.

The point of decentralization and federation was to merge the benefits of personal websites - privacy and personal control of your data - with the communication and collaboration powers of centralized social media. So your account is hosted on your instance and under your control and then you can go post on a thousand other instances with that same account. And I don't think it's failed in that.

But wikis are already personal websites. And if somebody wants to federate a wiki they can host it on the same server they have their Lemmy instance on and put a link on the Lemmy homepage.

And the idea that a bunch of people hosting their own wikis with no correction or accountability mechanisms will be less corrupt and have less disinformation then those same people working together to build consensus on the same website? Not persuasive, is all I'm saying.

That's the point of the 15 minute city - that is, a city where everything its people need is within a 15 minute walk. People travel less and when they travel they walk or bike. The alternative, in other words, is better city design.

Here in California, utility companies are "solving" this by instituting extremely high fees for the privilege of connecting your solar power to the grid. If I recall from the last time I ran the numbers, rooftop solar panels no longer make economic sense for the vast majority of residential customers - it costs more money to install me solar panels and pay the monthly connection fees then you'll save by producing energy over the lifetime of the solar panels.

Edit: I just googled and it looks like after public outcry the regulators pulled their really bad fee schedule to replace with a slightly less bad fee schedule. The system works!

Probably the one time in history PG&E tried to fix a problem ahead of time. 😆

AOC is calling for protests. Equating protests to terrorism puts you in the ignoble company of the Iranian government, the Saudi monarchy, and the Georgia cops who charged protesters with felonies for distributing flyers.

Selective enforcement is the core of conservative law making.

Really emphasizes how vital "right to repair" is. If a Tesla didn't have proprietary software and centralized control over its cars it wouldn't matter how irrational Musk was. But Tesla owners have to trust Tesla to maintain both the hardware and software in their cars, which means buying a Tesla is a long-term commited relationship with that company. And same with Ford, GMC, every car company whose software is a black box - if you can't repair your own vehicle, you have to trust the management of the car company won't screw you over for fun and profit.