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The solarpunk version of that device is a library-issued thing that also plays borrowed and public domain content. A repairable, open version as advocated by Louis (who I like but is basically a private property advocate and not exactly on brand for here) is a bit more compatible with solarpunk but the reimagined world would see Spotify only selling a device in the first place that's a superset of standardised features so that it reverts to only be usable for the local library when they pull the rug.
It raises a lot of questions without answering with a clearly correct response and leaves adults feeling how a curious child might feel. It's not misinformation, it's a caricature of what we tell children.
It's less "WTF why?" when viewed as the opposite. It takes a topic typically covered in kid-friendly media and notes the depth of the topic is most decidedly not kid friendly and their presentation is not the only disturbing component of presenting these topics to kids, it's also the shallowness of coverage that leaves deep, dark, unanswered questions that's disturbing.
Darkness in creativity.
What does time mean and how does it rule your life.
Love and manipulation.
The bargain of incorporating digital media into your life.
What you're told about food vs. what you're not told.
The reality of following your dreams.
I know cyberpunk didn't originate punk but it's news to me that it didn't originate -punk as a reference to literary genre.
The gritty negativity is not the point this guy was making. He was suggesting that noir feels claustrophobic and noir is a critical component of cyberpunk which makes it distinct from other sci fi. I think there's some deeper analysis required to discard that assertion. The airiness of solarpunk means it's always at risk of losing that connection to its antecedent references.
There's a good argument I was given that solarpunk isn't punk because if it's optimistic it's missing the oppressive noir inherent in cyberpunk.
Also the social cohesion of throwing off shackles by a single oppressor is kind of not what solarpunk is about either.
So rather than accept that definition I've started saying solarpunk is the day after cyberpunk. In a world where a dystopia is overthrown solarpunk is what happens when you try to pick up the pieces.
So you might ask wheres the grit in the simple aesthetic stuff? The answer is that we are living the dystopian future right now so we don't need fiction to tell us about it, and the big bad is on the ropes, thrashing dangerously but ineffectually. Whatever messy hardships are affecting you are solvable collectively. The challenge of solarpunk is for you to articulate it in a way that resonates amongst your own communities.
Because cyberpunk with solar panels isn't solarpunk. It's solarcore cyberpunk.
In my country community land trusts are legally impossible but collective business ownership isn't, which has driven my curiosity in the direction of lowering barriers to entry.
So while a local street couldn't convert their collective holding into a legal collective that was easily amenable to newcomers based on prospective labour they could collectively buy a place as the landlord for social housing and short stay that suits shared community needs.
But then it's additional to the captial of their sunk investment so it needs to be a smaller ask.
That's why I've been trying to think about how to centralise the social and mutual aspects so that they're battle tested by the time a large financial investment can be sought. And then when opportunities come up individuals may not be so illiquid that they can't take advantage.
Major respect to doing the work of arranging a business plan. I appreciate its complexity and it scares me away a bit. I think if I had a great business idea I'd run it as a sole trader with a sound plan for an exit to community rather than try a cooperative first up.
Yeah this is kind of the point I was thinking about. Starting from a place where the majority investment is social capital, figure out everything else later. Rather than start with material investment or labour investment that's rarely distributed equitably. So if everyone gives freely what they can off of a small mandatory investment, but also places a premium on social cohesion, maybe you won't need to have mature processes and financial security until you know exactly what you need for the enterprise that emerges.
Because at the heart of it everybody taking their $2000 collectively to the casino is valid. Only if they win do they figure out when and how to cash out and that's actually a difficult democratic problem to determine a collective appetite for risk.
I've wondered about this concept a bit and your post crystallised it into a dumb idea.
Adventure capital.
Get like 100 people together through mutual friendships and form a group chat. Everyone chucks in $20. Take a vote on what to do with the pooled money. Repeat weekly. If a business arises make it a coop.
The key part is it starts with social relationships and social relationships have precedence ahead of governance. If anyone has a conflict of interest for a group decision they have to own up and be guarantor up to the value of $20 per person if things go bad, but if the don't declare it theyre on the hook for the full amount.
I think exactly what is legal is dependent on jurisdiction but and example would be a worker cooperative where all owners are union members or just where the unions role to represent a group of workers is enshrined in the cooperative model.
Basically I'm just suggesting to contact the union to work with them to set things up. It might or might not be a good fit.
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Union_Cooperatives
I just got that from a Google search. I don't know if it's a good resource and I'm not even sure what it describes covers the breadth of what is referred to as a union coop.
FOSS licences are a hack to subvert the biases of copyright. There's nothing pure about them. It would be just a bit of an extra overhead but there's nothing to stop you distributing the game under a proprietary licence that contains code you distribute separately under a FOSS licence and has assets derived from source art you also distribute separately under a CC licence. If you own the copyright you can do whatever you want at the point of distribution, including delaying the free distribution or putting it behind clear crowdfunding goals that offer a well defined "exit to community" for a property you don't necessarily want to keep working on forever.
Are you interested in a union coop? It might be fruitful to get in touch with a union appropriate for your personal circumstances to at least expand your network.
Insta-shadowbanned as I made an upvoted reply. Oh well.
Australia's history of volunteerism in sport is largely aligned with solarpunk values of decentralised collaboration and economies of abundance.
Maybe throw a solarpunk device on the boxing glove to make things a little more explicit.
I'm disappointed that I can't be utopian about my idea for a solarpunk crypto webring here but it's completely understandable why the rule exists.
I haven't listened to the episode.
However I will say that solarpunk is optimistic about technology. Cryptocurrency in speculative fiction is a valid topic for optimists.
As for critiques of crypto look no further than Molly White of "web3 is going great" fame. The whole thing is incredibly toxic and disappointing.
But the most disappointed are the people who remember the optimism at its invention. Those people are welcome to contribute to solarpunk solutions and if they want to recapture that optimism bounded by a realistic scepticism informed from current events by all means discuss crypto.
The idea that a technology shouldn't be discussed optimistically is anathema to solarpunk. That particular expression of some guy linking crypto to lunarpunk rings to my ears like one of the more cynical attempts to coopt an aesthetic for personal gain that I've ever heard in my life, but even so I think the black and white nature of your critique is a bit of a knee-jerk reaction and I'll try to temper my prejudice until I've listened to the episode.
Ad hoc and dispatchable decentralised manufacturing is solarpunk af.
Economies of abundance require surplus capacity. If that surplus capacity is decentralised it means you don't have to oversize a centralised mass production capacity.
Opportunistic and seasonal manufacturing are other modes where it's advantageous not to sink a big chunk of capital into mass production capacity.
There's a lot to like about the industrial ecology of 3d printed products and replaceable parts suitable for 3D printing.
I would be amazed if the plant wasn't named after the cellar spider usage. Australia is unsurprisingly on team actual spider for this one.
Not necessarily. I think weird stuff happens with scale and one of those might be that kinder and more compassionate at odds at some levels.
If you have true kindness then there are some almost paternalistic attributes to it. "You have to be cruel to be kind" is one saying that is obviously not broadly applicable but the fact it seems true in some contexts means that there are spaces, times, and currents on the internet where it's going to be hyper applicable and understanding that is a challenging thought experiment let alone a clear basis for community building.
Pluralism is my watchword. I think the generation gap was a conflict, somewhat manufacturer, somewhat legitimate, that has been to some level been replaced by a platform and community gap. Some communities have norms which feel welcoming and safe for some and stifling for others. Each wants to own some space, and will recoil from a space suitable for another to the point where they can't understand any genuine person wants to be there, at which point it's assumed the other is just bots, actual or dehumanised to the point of indifference.
Getting those conflicts resolved rather than schisming into a million shards of marginally increased comfort is probably an environment which seems less kind and compassionate but in reality requires kindness and compassion for entire groups and categories of people we find distasteful on interactions at a personal level.
So I guess my summary is yes i in the kind of way Louis Theroux can make you more compassionate for the Westboro Baptist Church while still retaining a distinct hostility for them, but no if you mean people need to get along better in the same spaces. I think it's a mistake to think the internet is fine but for the norms of our current society that solarpunk principles address. There are real wicked problems in giving everybody access to information without a way to guide them to find common ground on the information they choose to internalize as common sense and conventional wisdom, because the assumptions inherent in what you feel to be common are often simply not the case for the people with whom you share an online interaction.
It seems like a win to me that into my fourth decade I've never owned a car.
Majorly inspired by Hans Roslings presentation about modes of regular transport I've aspired to make sure my expenditure with income doesn't follow the same path of increasing transport carbon intensity. As I get older my income increases and I want a lifestyle where that means a nicer time cycling rather than more expensive car.
That doesn't mean I've never commuted by private vehicle or don't drive regularly but through favours and car share and deliberately choosing my housing for public transport access I've avoided the sunk cost question of car ownership.
Now that I'm a parent I've just bought a family cargo bike to further stave off buying a car. We've admittedly relied substantially on borrowing a car from grandparents so the win is revised down to avoiding sunk cost trips rather than avoiding a car altogether but it still feels like a win to me.
The Earth is creature in the same way that a human is a bus for bacteria. It's a fun perspective shifting sleight of hand that is most fun when you don't realise you're being tricked.
In Australia we lost two decades of immigration policy and gained a fuckload of human misery in Pacific gulags to the phrase "stop the boats". In the end the profiteers of the slogan just made the statistics unavailable and pretended they fixed it once and for all.
Car share schemes make this intractably true only for a ridiculously expanded definition of "inner".
It's lazy to think the sunk cost argument is broadly applicable. Everyone should run the numbers themselves.
Destiny + Bastiat vs. populism on Will Cain's platform is the content I need in my feed.
You're perfectly correct that the tweets stand on their own. I really haven't read a the story at all but nothing so far jolts me out of my entrenched position that journalism has an organic left bias in terms of the people attracted to it and I don't care much for people playing the man.
I finally found the tweets after hitting paywall after paywall and there's nothing particularly surprising in the two I saw. She wasn't at NPR at the time. She's got an endorsement from a wikipedian whose opinion I respect (Molly White does web3isgoinggreat.com). I'm satisfied that her opinions aren't out of line with many marginally left of centre and on that standard there's no reason she should be disqualified from holding a C level position at NPR. I'm happy to elaborate if you want.
Singapore is a very interesting place and I wouldn't want to make absolute statements about it but the gardens are themselves awe inspiring even if they were regarded as a product of capitalist excess. The cloud forest is an air conditioned garden but it's also a shrine to Singapore-safe environmental messaging.
Nevertheless for anybody seeking inspiration for fiction I think that location is appropriate to draw from. Just the fact you were surprised it was a real place makes me think it should stay.
What's this pic? Would you agree with me it could be changed to something more punk and present?
solarpunk