CheGueBeara [he/him]

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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: January 2nd, 2022
  • CheGueBeara [he/him]@hexbear.nettoScience@hexbear.net•Asymptotic burnout and homeostatic awakening: a possible solution to the Fermi paradox?English
    0·
    2 years ago

    They’re using fancy words that amount to capitalist realism + analogies around climate change and other forms of overextractive collapse.

    I find these kinds of ideas very boring because they amount to a breathtaking lack of imagination. Really, they’re saying, “what if every other form of potential intelligent life is just like us?”, right down to the use of cities on planets and an infinite growth model for a global society. Cool, great, that’s what sci-fi is useful for, you can critique our society from within another one. But as a group trying to be very serious and use the big words…

    The Fermi Paradox is best answered by noting that its numbers are pulled out of some old white dudes’ asses and so its conclusions mean nothing. If anything, the difference between reality and the numbers game just puts a minimum bound on how wrong the numbers are.

  • CheGueBeara [he/him]@hexbear.nettomemes@hexbear.net•clearly you haven't read freakonomicsEnglish
    1·
    3 years ago

    It’s not a new idea in the general sense so you can find a few different ways it might be defined.

    When it comes to Marx, it’s about what he took (and often flipped on its head) from Hegel, where Hegel was the first nerd to get really into dialectics when it came to analyzing society.

    A very short summary of dialectics wrt Hegel and Marx is that it is an often-useful tool by which you can frame a thing is actually by the states through which it may transition, that a thing is better described by what it is and how it can become not that, and then by looking at the reasons this would happen, produce salient contradictions that explain the thing itself. This sounds confusing because it’s abstract, but it’s not really that foreign to most people nowadays.

    Example: there is a fly buzzing around your room. We can say that the fly is alive. Eventually, it will die, decompose, and become earth. We have the state of the thing (alive), another state of the thing (dead/dirt), and say that a fly may be better understood by knowing the processes that move the fly to or away from either state. And, most importantly, a hard subscriber to dialectics would say that our understanding of the fly should be about these processes in opposition, not a list of descriptions of the fly in the “alive” state. Metabolism keeps the fly alive. An end to metabolism, such as being exposed to the cold for a long period, leads to its death. It must constantly eat food to live. If it stops eating food, it dies. We can keep enumerating things to come up with insights that we believe are important until we feel satisfied that we have understood and distinguished the fly from other things via this process.

    This example is very similar to Hegel’s formation, where we understand the world through DEEP THOUGHTS and, in fact, reality relative to human interactions is derived from them and can only be understood via the correct extraction of those thoughts. Marx liked the processes and contradiction part, but disliked the ideas --> reality part, flipping it around: material forces stand in opposition, they are the processes, the transitions, and instead, ideas are the product of material things. A simplistic example is that Romans didn’t have an opinion on motorcycles, but there are deeper and subtler implications that Marx related to economic production.

    This is where simple fights about idealism come from as well, with Marxists appealing to economic forces determining the population’s ideas and socioeconomic transitions and crapping on people who think that it’s mostly about convincing people that the right ideas are true - and if we just had that, we’d win.

  • CheGueBeara [he/him]@hexbear.nettodoomer@hexbear.net•The wheat harvest in the US is gonna be fucked this year btwEnglish
    2·
    3 years ago

    If you have the space + money:

    • Flour is much cheaper in bulk. 25 lbs is ~30-50% cheaper bought all at once rather then 5 lbs at a time.

    • Storage is very important. I recommend a 5 gallon food grade bucket with a gamma lid.

    • Pest control is important with bulk food storage. Things that help include putting bay leaves in the flour, using an oxygen-killing pack in with the flour before sealing it for the first time, and using a secondary container for ~3-5 libs at a time so that the storage container is opened infrequently.

    For non-flour items, I recommend using the same strategy but for rice and beans. Rice can be kept free of pets by baking it at 150 for 30 minutes before storage. You can do the same for beans though the quality degrades a tiny bit (beans have fewer pests anyways).

    1 bucket of each is enough food for 2 people for a couple months all by itself (plus a vitamin to avoid malnutrition). Not a bad way to buffer yourself from food price swings. If you get some bulk fat like a gallon of refined coconut oil or peanut butter, you’ll have a ton more calories for cheap. I’d say the total cost for everything I just described is around $150-250 and would be enough calories for 2 people for 3ish months. Add some bulk spices and canned tomatoes and it could even taste good.

    Also all of these tips work for mutual aid buys and storage if you have access to a kitchen.