What hill are you willing to die on even if no one in your life agrees with you?
Water usage is probably my biggest. Living in a high desert, my wife and MIL see no problem with filling one side of the sink with hot soapy water to wash a few dishes because “that’s just how I’ve always done it”, to watering the grass and plants for hours. All of this makes me mental.
[off topic]
Have you tried replacing the grass with local flora?
Also, what your family uses is a drop in the bucket compared to what your local industry wastes.
Tehre are probably a dozen or more open air, private swimming pools that sit filled, full of chemicals, and unused 350 days a year, within walking distance of your place.
I checked out the gym near me, lifetime, who charge $330 a month. They have a heated Olympic size swimming pool outdoors year-round, in a climate that gets a fair amount of snow in the winter. So that’s what rich people do with our resources.
As far as water, yeah. Even in very arid places, it’s permitted to do agriculture to grow things like hay and use 80% of the local water supply. Even better, there’s a trend in the US where people from places like Saudi Arabia grow the hay, use our water, and then export it.
The people at that gym aren’t ‘rich.’
The rich folks are the ones with their own Olympic sized pools.
A frog is much bigger than an ant.
Both get crushed by a bulldozer.
The 0.01% are the ‘rich.’
I’m very anti-lawn and would love replacing it with native wild flowers. We unfortunately don’t own the house, a friend does. I may throw down some clover seed, which uses less water as a small defiant act.
And, yes, our city has the pools, at least a dozen 18 hole golf courses and three day a week watering. Absurd since we’re on the verge of drought every year. Hopefully the powers that be known what they’re doing
I tell ya you’re not missing much.
even the best hot dog is, well,l still just a hotdog.
Eating a hot dog on a Friday violates all major religions’ rules on food.
Nice. That’s the best part.
Getting married without a prenup in today’s world is foolish. Ask marriage counselors and they will in general tell you to get a prenup. A prenup is wrote by two people and both have their own attorney. Anyone who refuses to get one or even discuss one is someone you should run from. A prenup details how a divorce AND how a marriage should run.
Also anyone who wants operating system or device level age verification doesn’t understand how bad things will get if we do that. It’s only about mass surveillance and selling of your data. It does nothing to protect kids.
I have heard that before and I think the same as before I started my marriage: I will not start a marriage with planning how it might end. Also half of the assets is fair, ailment is fair. It stings when it happens but it’s fair. I say that as a man with a good income.
I knew the deal when I married my wife. I think part of marrying someone is the fact that ending the marriage is shitty. So you better be careful who you marry.
I mean this. I do truly wish you the best, but the reality is close to 50% of marriages end in divorce. With the exception of forced marriages, all of them started thinking it would last forever. Way too many divorces end with one side getting screwed. “Just be careful of who you marry” is a recipe for failure when taken it context of the above statistics. Many people are trapped in bad marriages and can’t really get a divorce without getting screwed. So that 50% number should really be higher. Every walk of life we plan for the worst and hope for the best, or at least if a person is paying attention they do. Marriage is a huge item. Plan for the worst (prenup) and hope you never need it. Either that or risk winding up as a statistic.
If you don’t get one (and are told to get one) then get screwed and look back realizing had you gotten a prenup things wouldn’t have been as bad…. Well I’ll have a hard time finding sympathy.
I can’t comment on the prenups as I have never even considered marriage.
I am not disagreeing with your opinion on device level age verification. I am interested in what you think we should do to protect kids online. There has been a lot of talk about this being the wrong way to do that but very little discussion on what other methods we could do.
Would you be opposed to a “this computer is used by a child” checkbox and just that true/false would be passed to apps?
In relation to your hill: While you’re entirely correct, that’s absurdly small potatoes compared to industrial water use. Yes, we should be conscious of our water use and limit unnecessary overuse, but a higher priority ought to be regulating industrial use. Data centers are the obvious example of using way too much for bullshit that ain’t worth the water or power. Speaking of power, we could reduce water use by power plants. Nearly all generate power by boiling water. I’m a power plant operator at a plant that happens to use reclaim water as our source water, and we purify on-site for the main process, and we have a brine concentrator and crystallizer on-site to recycle the cooling tower blowdown and remove the solids to a dumpster that goes to a landfill. Unfortunately we burn methane, so I can’t say that we’re green, but we at least discharge zero water into local waterways (except storm drains when it rains).
My hill: Vote with your wallet. If you really believe in something, stop giving money to companies fighting against it. I won’t buy chikfila because the owners actively spend money on gay conversion camps and lobby to reverse the legality of same sex marriage. It’s impossible to research every little thing before every purchase, and sometimes there’s no reasonable alternative, but something like chikfila is easy to avoid. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, but don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Little changes can add up, and doing anything even a little bit better is an improvement over not trying.
Bonus hill: Put your fucking grocery cart into the cart corral. It takes ten seconds and prevents cars from getting hit. It’s kind of the simplest measure for societal decency. I don’t believe in the death penalty, but what value are you contributing to society if you’re too selfish to return your fucking cart?
Goodsuniteus.com is a start to seeing where your money goes. Still looking for a better alternative.
The good news is as the giant evil corporations buy up everything it gets easier to just stop buying shit in general.
From Wallet Voting by Cory Doctrow:
Wallet-votes always go to the people with the thickest wallets, and statistically, that is not you.
It doesn’t mean to keep shopping at Amazon if you hate their business practices, it just means that you & your friends won’t have any impact on Amazon’s business policies.
Granted, you’d be a hypocrite, so definitely don’t shop where you hate, but don’t expect a giant corp to change.
I think the general point is that the financial hurt that I can put on a company is peanuts compared to someone with deep pockets (ie: shareholders & businesses). Even if I were to get all my friends, family and direct coworkers to alter a shopping behaviour, it’s unlikely to result in any change.
On the other hand, if I were to take that same group and be able to pressure my political representatives to do something about it (as we frequently see in California), then something may change. Similarly, me quitting my job out of disgust with a non-recycling policy won’t get any attention, but if I can get my union to take it up, then the company will listen.
TL;DR: a person can’t make change, a group of people can.
Love the drops-fill-buckets mindset!
Piggy backing on your comment: for folks wanting to put their money to more ethical use, here are some resources:
These are mostly US and climate focused resources since that’s where I am. Would love to see other people’s resources too!
In my area, as in many others, we had a few e-scooter rental companies for a few months. They pretty much just weren’t viable because people didnt care for the stuff. Basically if its rented, people will only care in so far as they can be held responsible.
Additionally, public transport doesn’t really work here because we dont have the population density.
That principle is important.
In any system where goods ( of some kind ) are not owned by the people using them, then you have to make those goods near-impossible-to-break, which is part of where communist Brutalism aesthetic comes from.
There was a book by a shelled-moluscs scientist who was born blind: he sees through his fingertips.
He’s the one who pointed that principle out, having lived in communism for part of his life, & once the principle’s understood, it can’t be unseen.
Know somebody who cares for their tools like jewelry?
They’d all be destroyed, pronto, in communism.
That’s the price that gets paid when nobody owns what they’re using.
And THAT principle, means that it then becomes possible to design means-sharing-systems that can work.
The e-scooter rental systems that many cities now have, is 1 example: idiotproof, indestructible, & they enable significant improvement in the city.
But consider contractors who need to be able to get anywhere, with their tools..
public transport may break their work.
Rurally, not having a vehicle’s .. often suicide.
& if the city’s designed like US cities, towns, & villages, where they engineer it to break any other form of transport, then you cannot get to the supermarket without a car, from many locations.
It takes much more whole-systems orientation, to get it right, than what the US has been doing..
< shruggeth >
just some perspectives, is all..
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