but a lot of the demand can be met by buying used stuff

Firstly, the covid pandemic was a multi year event.

The initial shocks happened in the first 3 months.

Secondly, publicly traded companies were enriched greatly from that time. Also it wasn’t conscious degrowth or a lack of ability, it was supply chain issues that caused products not to be available for purchase.

Yup, that’s why the control here is in the consumers’ hand and again, it’s sort of like reducing your consumption so it starts hitting the metrics enough for corporations to realize the risks.

I already barely buy shit. I’ve always said “if the economy hinged on my purchasing habit, the country would go bankrupt”.

well, you’re already part of the movement:)

should all buy less and be more mindful of where our money goes. I think we should buy locally and promote businesses that you agree with on levels beyond the value of the good or services they offer as often as possible. However, I don’t think we can effectively protest this way unless it was a true lifestyle change for a large portion of the country.

I’d disagree, we saw it with COVID how vulnerable corporations are. They’ll always focus on stock buybacks and stuff like that over recession-proofing. Also, this is quite an equitable movement. Those who can’t afford new shit are already contributing to it.

We could even make an app that shows stephen miller, steve bannon, or one of the dogeshits talk whenever people got tempted to buy shit.

Ask yourself what that means to business contracts which depend on those laws to be guaranteed,

Agree. If they feel the rules of engagement can be changed unilaterally, we can show that this can go both ways.

n the strike is over. If the company can anticipate well enough, they’d raise prices when the demand comes back and come out ahead in the long run.

You have to use/consume less, and for an extended time period, not just change when that purchase happens.

But yes, with that caveat, use less, and choose the lesser evil when you do need to buy something. The individual effect is small, but small things add up.

The mitigation is to focus on used goods so it is much less painful. Unlike gas, people don’t need that new TV, or that next phone, gaming console, their Nth streaming sub and use alternative (wink) ways to consume entertainment media.

Yup, delayed consumption would be the most likely outcome, but that’s not necessarily a problem if people can apply this pressure in a meme-like fashion. It’s sorta like the gamestop squeeze.

Also the immediate personal pain could be mitigated by buying used stuff.

True, and this is a very sad statistic. It would be great is we would actually work on mental health in this country.

It’s 99% the guns though. The US has shitty mental health safety net, but not worse than in Eastern Europe, the murder rates (which is driven by gun violence) are much lower there. If you exclude firearm deaths it drops to similar rates to that of Europe. I personally think that increasing fines and punishment for bad gun ownership is the way to go.

They lay the blame, and lay the groundwork, to wreck shit next time while shifting blame from themselves.

Yup. The funniest thing is how important the national debt becomes with a democrat at the helm, but how irrelevant it is with a republican presidency.

All of that, combined with the “perfect” storm of tRUmp, really sped it up.

Agree, trump is a symptom not necessarily the direct cause.these all happened because of citizens united and the influx of infinite money into politics that was bound to tip the balance away from actual citizens towards corporations.

On civil war, if we were in the slow boil phase I’d agree with you, but the ghouls like stephen miller coming out the woodwork combined with a lot of people suddenly having a lot of free time (I mean fired), things are much more likely to turn heated.

they didn’t overthrow biden’s “tyranny” either. Instead of the overthrowing tyranny bullshit, guns have a great track record of killing kids and helping depressed men end it all.

y on online outreach and have to be proactive IRL spreading messages that it really is a class war. There’s no better time than now, no more apparent point in history than today, it’s just pulling those people away from the propaganda for them to realize it. Somehow, We The People, need to convince the Boiling Frogs.

If you look at the stats on what proportion of US population can read beyond 6th grade level you can predict that there’s nearly zero chance pulling these people out of their bubbles.

On civil war, if we were in the slow boil phase I’d agree with you, but the ghouls like stephen miller coming out the woodwork combined with a lot of people suddenly having a lot of free time (I mean fired), things are much more likely to turn heated.

I think this energy density math really depends on whether only the core or the whole surface area is taken into consideration.

’s the ghost of Lenin with a steel chair! Or maybe we’ll get something entirely new? It’s frankly impossible to guess while we’re living in it. I think cold balkanization is both the most likely and most optimistic scenario. IN THE MEANWHILE, yeah, you’re still going to see all the window trimmings of the USA; the maps will still say USA, we’ll at least nominally still have the things that make America America (like the constitution still sitting in its fancy protective case, as though the GOP didn’t just wipe Trump’s ass with it), it’ll all look weirdly normal while they make the republic’s corpse do a funny little jig.

to date, that 400,000,000 pew-pew stick and freedom rod are proving super effective against tyranny. Civil was is becoming more and more likely though.

A headline without calling it an “Artificial Sun”?!

the more specialized the workforce, the harder it is to overcome staffing limitations. for example, in Italy, there’s a huge physician shortage (at least when I lived in Europe there was). You won’t fix that with simply changing the management culture.

I use an IP phone for calls that you can switch off. The paging system is a whole 'nother story.

That idea of yours would be perfectly fine if it was just you, but it isn’t: it’s you and all other people who think like you

Definitely not an “idea of mine”. That’s the US experience (I’m a doctor here). The US’s most common electronic medical record system developed a secure messenger app that replaced pagers so yeah for outpatient work most of the time-critical messaging goes through your cell. So no, I can’t be on DND 24/7. (I do have very aggressively tweaked work/personal/etc notification settings, but sometimes the urgent messages do need to come through after hours)

if they are doing outpatient work, they don’t. even worse, the paging systems migrated to cell phones.

sauce: am doctor

Headlines like this are annoying AF. You wouldn’t want your doctor keeping their phone on DND 24/7.

Edit: I didn’t expect people to need examples, but here you go, something that happened to me few months ago:

23:21 - my IP phone rings, I’m literally about to go to sleep but I set this specific type of call to come through. I recognize the number and I know it’s an emergency so I pick it up. A patient’s family calling about them being in their local ER and the ER physician is about to pull the plug on my patient. I spend the next hour yelling at the ER physician to do his fucking job, frantically arranging a transfer. Next day afternoon, I’m having a full conversation with my patient in our hospital. If I didn’t fight for this person, and let this go through the regular channels, they would have died.

My comment isn’t primarily about work culture or work/life balance. There are some calls that you take because it’s the right thing. Advice from people who claim they can turn off all notifications just tells me two things, 1) they don’t know how notification scheduling works 2) they aren’t the kind of people that others ever rely on in an emergencies.

One of the interesting energy capture ideas I’ve seen with Solar and wind is based on kinetic potential energy in high-rise buildings. So you build a sort of heavy weight elevator that is elevated during windy and sunny hours and then it slowly gets released and gravity driven friction generating energy.

This coupled with solar windows and it’s a pretty neat idea (not sure how viable though)

Edit: examples: https://spectrum.ieee.org/gravity-energy-storage-elevators-skyscrapers