millie

The responses to this thread on SLRPNK of all places just shows how far gone we are. Even here people default to a commerce-centric worldview where the idea of not waking up to an alarm is a ridiculous proposition.

A world in which humans allow their bodies to sleep and wake up naturally? Don't be absurd!How would we prioritize meaningless toil over our own health and happiness if we entertained our bodies' own internal clocks?

Waking up in a panic is your duty as a primate.

Have you not seen like, housing projects? High rises? Run down old apartments? Everybody who doesn't have the kind of money you do doesn't live like they do anyway. Like, in terms of transportation, I spend my whole work day driving people around who don't really have the money to spend on a cab but have the money to spend on a car even less.

That doesn't mean they manage to pretend they're rich anyway, it means they make sacrifices you've probably never once in your life had to think about.

When they do splurge to make themselves briefly comfortable, it's at the cost of more sacrifices that you don't have to deal with anymore if you ever did. And then they get to deal with people rolling their eyes about how financially irresponsible they are.

Meanwhile the same people who make six figures are literally relying on people who make minimum wage in order to make their own lives convenient. And yet somehow that's supposed to end up with everyone magically living like you?

You live in a fantasy world. Not everybody has the time or the money to prioritize spending several hours cooking. Not everybody is left with enough energy by the end of their minimum wage no benefit grind of a day that you expect them to tolerate in order to sustain your hunger for little conveniences like places to go buy fresh food to cook for your family.

Kinda sounds like you're rich. I'm definitely not.

Wanna help? I can probably make an amount of money that you barely sneeze at go absurdly far.

With the level of technical knowledge we've achieved, there's no way we're going back to doing things exactly the way they used to. One example that jumps out at me is the method this primitive technology guy on youtube uses to stoke his furnace. He's basically made a little manual turbine out of leaves and vines to push his air rather than one of those little squeeze box things.

Obviously I'm not a blacksmith or historian so I don't actually know how common something like that might have been, but I'm guessing it's not super old. In any case, I'm sure there are other ways that we'd apply our more advanced knowledge to tackling the sorts of problems we'd be looking at with a collapse of manufacturing and shipping infrastructure.

Honestly, a technologically adept but non-industrial society of artisans sounds kind of cool.

Pretty sure this is super common on some equipment. The ellipticals at the gym I used (before it moved) had them , but I never bothered.

To be fair, I can close my eyes and just sort of flail on an elliptical in a way that would absolutely hurt me if I tried it on the ground. It's also a lot lower impact and when I'm done I can just stop.

What game?

I mean, isn't the point of this article that they won't stay that way?

Humans alter the landscape, but when nature takes it back why take away what it's making use of?

Why does everything have to be for us?

The big difference there is that you can make biodiesel from an extremely common waste product (grease) in your back yard. Grease cars are very DIY, whereas oil mining operations really aren't.

As far as the amount of oil we use currently, a lot of that is going to be related to the unnecessary infrastructure of social hierarchy. Consider, for a moment, remote work. Employers who run offices tend to want their employees to come into the office every day, which leads to millions of people commuting on a daily basis. Not only do they have to burn the fuel required to move their cars from point A to point B, but they're stuck in traffic so they're constantly wasting momentum (and thus fuel) by braking and idling.

Pivoting to the office itself, now you've got a bunch of people hanging out in a big open space that needs to be climate controlled. Often this space has massive, bare windows, which isn't fantastic for heating efficiency. Offices aren't really built for efficient human habitation.

When people refuse to come back to the office, switching jobs or retiring early, they're helping to make things more efficienct by taking power away from the points where it's concentrated. Flattening out the hierarchy is better for all of us and better for the planet.

Centralized hierarchies really just take the work that's being done by much smaller groups of workers and claim credit for it while imposing an unnecessary organizational infrastructure over the top of them and taking the value of their labor. If you work at a corporate restaurant the food you're selling isn't prepared by some huge corporate infrastructure, it's prepared by the people who work in the restaurant. If they weren't getting their supplies from the company that owns the place, they'd be getting it elsewhere.

These sources of collected power want us to think we need them. They want us to think that because their name or their logo is on the side of a building they're the reason anything gets done. But the reality is that it's the people actually doing the work, and they often don't really need someone telling them how to do it from up on high.

I'd argue that it's a bigger problem when assholes are able to take over the positions of power they're typically attracted to and make the lives of others miserable. I'd much rather assholes just be, like, kinda uncooperative but no more influential than anyone else.

I definitely think a lot of the inefficiencies that make people think we 'need' capitalism are caused by capitalism itself. People see these huge infrastructures and assume they're necessary when they may well be so cumbersome that they detract from getting their stated task accomplished more than they contribute to it. Someone made a comment elsewhere about how much unnecessary management we have in our society, and I honestly think that's a major component.

Work goes so much better when there isn't someone breathing down your neck. Just a bunch of useless people lording over everyone for no reason and we waste sooo much time, effort, and resources on them.

Clickbait title. The places in question are: the South of the US, the Andes in Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador, and in highlands African countries like Ethiopia and Kenya.