I have been living homeless for the last few months, here are some things I have learned:
- Every time I have gone up to a house, knocked on the door and asked to fill up a water bottle, people have always said yes
- There is a big difference in people’s minds between “travellers” and “homeless”. If you say you are travelling/exploring you will be treated a lot nicer than if you say you are homeless.
- You can ask big shops or restaurants if they have any spare/nearly out of date food and they may give you some. The worst they have said is no.
- People care a lot less than I thought. I have been cleaning my boots in a canal and no one even looked.
@mindpersephone Sometimes, rarely, when the stars and moons align and the weather and degree of light coming through the window and the volume of birdsong filtering into the house is *just right*
And taking TER trains in most of France is a disheartening experience
The vast majority of passengers are too young or too poor to have cars - they’re only here because they have no other choice
Many stations are knackered and run down
Most of the trains are modern-ish, but information provision is poor
uspol adjacent but relevant anywhere at anytime
reminder to use Signal or another encrypted messenger to talk to your friends. especially about sensitive topics that might be under heavy fire from politicians, but the more you use it for normal talk the harder it is to censor or use as a control mechanism
(I have nothing against financial mutual aid to be clear, but "sending the same dollar around fifty times among mostly-all-poor folks" is not a sustainable revolutionary strategy, even if in the short term it is certainly helpful)
Is there some kind of mutual aid matchmaking platform, preferably decentralized in some way?
Commercially run platforms do not qualify, nor do "you can technically do mutual aid here" platforms, I'm really looking for something with an ideological basis in mutual aid that actively encourages it.
Note that "mutual aid" here is not a euphemism for just "people asking for / offering money", I mean mutual aid in the broader sense, including doing stuff for people that they need
tangentially related to wordpress shitshow
A truly staggering number of people in tech seem to be entirely unfamiliar with "conflict of interest" as a concept, and unable to recognize that "someone chooses what role they represent depending on what is convenient to them at the time" is like, a textbook signal of a conflict of interest existing
tangent, economics theory, inflation
On a tangential note, I greatly enjoy learning of such "collapsing questions", questions that are pretty much guaranteed to collapse the house of cards that is some asshole's shitty and oppressive ideology because you just *cannot* answer them without gradually realizing how far off the path you are
Fedi, there is a spam campaign with only a QR code attached. I don't recommend scanning the QR code. I don't know what it does, I've heard that it tries to scrape your IP - but it's just good practice to not scan unknown QR codes. Report this spam if you see it, the account names are often gibberish.
economics theory, inflation
So here's a question that economists have never been able to give me a satisfactory answer to: if we didn't have money, and were hypothetically just exchanging goods and services for each other, would inflation be a good thing? And why does this answer suddenly change as soon as we have money as a proxy for trade?
Without fail, every economist (self-proclaimed or otherwise) that I've spoken to will launch off into a lengthy maze of abstract concepts and conceptual dependencies that are supposed to show how this makes sense, but crucially at no point in that chain of indirection is an actual answer presented, it just builds assumption on assumption and most of those assumptions are just capitalist ideology rather than anything that holds up to logical scrutiny, usually some unsupported notion of 'good for society'.
I highly recommend asking this question when someone claims to you that "inflation is good actually", and see what answer comes out, if any.
excerpt from a Minecraft modding thread, regarding abuse in a community and a fork
"Modding should be straightforward, I hate how divisive and confusing it's getting. Is it that difficult to just have all mods on one loader? I don't understand the inner workings of everything or care about community drama, whatever is happening here, but this is annoying as someone who just plays mods casually."
This is such an excellent illustration of how some people just don't want to recognize the hard work that goes into the things they enjoy, and expect things to magically materialize at no cost, monetarily or otherwise, to them.
To paraphrase: "I just want to have the free fun thing, without having to think about who made it under what conditions, and without any concern for their well-being, which I'm going to call drama because I cannot be bothered to care, why would I care about the community of people who made it for me?"
If you think that this is an acceptable thing to be saying, you should be thinking very long and hard about the implications of that.
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
- No alt text (request) = no boost.
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- Flirting welcome, but be explicit if you want something out of it!
- The devil doesn't need an advocate; no combative arguing in my mentions.
Sometimes horny on main (behind CW), very much into kink (bondage, freeuse, CNC, and other stuff), and believe it or not, very much a submissive bottom :p
My spoons are limited, so I may not always have the energy to respond to messages.
Strong views about abolishing oppression, hierarchy, agency, and self-governance - but I also trust people by default and give them room to grow, unless they give me reason not to. That all also applies to technology and how it's built.