Ya
solarpunk memes
For when you need a laugh!
The definition of a "meme" here is intentionally pretty loose. Images, screenshots, and the like are welcome!
But, keep it lighthearted and/or within our server's ideals.
Posts and comments that are hateful, trolling, inciting, and/or overly negative will be removed at the moderators' discretion.
Please follow all slrpnk.net rules and community guidelines
Have fun!
Like, what are the other options? Homes seem mandatory for societal and economic interaction.
I'm enough of a socdem that the hexbear types ban me at first sight when I comment in their communities, but I'm still of the opinion that everyone is entitled to have A home. Something that is reasonably sized given the location, and there may be compromises in location itself (not everyone is going to fit in Manhattan after all). So an apartment in NYC or a single family home in flyover states somewhere. This is just using the US as an example because it's so culturally dominant, I think everyone knows what NYC is like. Everyone should be able to live in a home that affords them basic human dignity.
Now rich people can still have their mansions or whatever, but they'll have to pay for the privilege. The rest of us, if content with the aforementioned social housing, wouldn't have to pay. There would still be premium developments. Premium apartments or houses to rent or buy. But there would be no more profiting off the working class's basic need for shelter.
But there must be ads on every inch of the house until you purchase premium. Cmon, you can't just exist without suffering. What would be the point of life, if not torture?
Uhh hives? We could all start burrowing into the ground and living in communal tunnelways connected to nest rooms and grain storages.
In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit.
I find it interesting how in every single video game that involves fostering a population, it's up to you to make sure everyone is housed. Too logical and efficient for billionaires, I guess.
What I love about those video games is that they teach us very clearly that a command economy leads to prosperity (unless you suck as a player I guess), but then billionaires tell us no, free market capitalism and trickle-down are the way we have to go.
"Trickle-down" was a rebranding campaign.
It used to be called Horse and Sparrow Economics, with the idea being the Horses eat the grain, and Sparrows peck their meals from the horseshit.
The wealth layer has been playing this game against the poors for a long time.
Funny, because it taught me that that task in reality is impossible, given real nations can't load an old save file to fix their fuck ups in a simulation far, far simpler than reality.
Of course you could certainly argue that one person wouldn't be in charge of doing literally everything.
I've had similar thoughts about the auction house in World of Warcraft. Since the game caps the amount of gold you can have at a small fraction of the overall economy, no one person can buy everything and then jack up the prices.
weird take. video games have to have a command economy because they are designed to be played. a free market city builder would just be a screensaver.
I mean, the moral is that free markets are a fiction when primary accumulation is illegal.
I can't simply claim a vacant property at the clearance rate. I need to bargain with a landlord at a cartel price. And thanks to public-private collusion, we routinely tax, trade, and subsidize properties at three entirely different figures.
Every economy is a command economy. The question you have to ask is who is in control.
Along those same lines, they didn't put parking lots in Sim City. They tried, but it completely fucked everything.
Might be wrong, but I think in Cities Skylines all you're doing is zoning the city, and it's up to the people to build houses and live (or have their house burn down)
The idea of ownership is kinda silly.
Right? "My ancestors beat up your ancestors, so I deserve to live in wealth and opulence, while you deserve to be my slave"
It really is pretty fucked up.
There's that poem(?) about that
"""
"Get off this estate."
"What for?"
"Because it's mine."
"Where did you get it?"
"From my father."
"Where did he get it?"
"From his father."
"And where did he get it?"
"He fought for it."
"Well, I'll fight you for it."
"""
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9358361-get-off-this-estate-what-for-because-it-s-mine-where
“Private property is the smallest unit of warfare.” — The Terraformers (2023) by ~~Becky Chambers~~ Annalee Newitz
Edit: author name
The Dude would just say fuck it and not even bother arguing and tell Brandt that the Big Lebowski told him to take any one of his rental properties as The Dude's own.
Ultimately it comes down to might makes right. That’s the final argument of kings (the barrel of a gun). For all the progress we’ve made we still can’t escape the account of Thrasymachus.
Hell I'd take the right to build my own at this point. But I don't trust the U.S. to be worth living in for any foreseeable future.
I mean we're staring down the barrel of total civilization collapse by 2050 if we don't get climate change under control, so I mean, I'm not sure anywhere is gonna be all that good.
However, your point stands.
I mean, better to have 25 more years of relative normativity than 4 or less
Even ants and bees give everyone a house, food, and a job (with the majority of the hive/colony population having time off and rest at any given time). These people are advocating for us to be less evolved than an ant. Per EO Wilson, the guy who studied these fellas
Relevant passage from The Dawn of Everything by Graeber & Wengrow:
Let’s begin by asking: what did the inhabitants of New France make of the Europeans who began to arrive on their shores in the sixteenth century?
At that time, the region that came to be known as New France was inhabited largely by speakers of Montagnais-Naskapi, Algonkian and Iroquoian languages. Those closer to the coast were fishers, foresters and hunters, though most also practised horticulture; the Wendat (Huron), concentrated in major river valleys further inland, growing maize, squash and beans around fortified towns. Interestingly, early French observers attached little importance to such economic distinctions, especially since foraging or farming was, in either case, largely women’s work. The men, they noted, were primarily occupied in hunting and, occasionally, war, which meant they could in a sense be considered natural aristocrats. The idea of the ‘noble savage’ can be traced back to such estimations. Originally, it didn’t refer to nobility of character but simply to the fact that the Indian men concerned themselves with hunting and fighting, which back at home were largely the business of noblemen.
But if French assessments of the character of ‘savages’ tended to be decidedly mixed, the indigenous assessment of French character was distinctly less so. Father Pierre Biard, for example, was a former theology professor assigned in 1608 to evangelize the Algonkian-speaking Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia, who had lived for some time next to a French fort. Biard did not think much of the Mi’kmaq, but reported that the feeling was mutual: ‘They consider themselves better than the French: “For,” they say, “you are always fighting and quarrelling among yourselves; we live peaceably. You are envious and are all the time slandering each other; you are thieves and deceivers; you are covetous, and are neither generous nor kind; as for us, if we have a morsel of bread we share it with our neighbour.” They are saying these and like things continually.' What seemed to irritate Biard the most was that the Mi’kmaq would constantly assert that they were, as a result, ‘richer’ than the French. The French had more material possessions, the Mi’kmaq conceded; but they had other, greater assets: ease, comfort and time.
Twenty years later Brother Gabriel Sagard, a Recollect Friar, wrote similar things of the Wendat nation. Sagard was at first highly critical of Wendat life, which he described as inherently sinful (he was obsessed with the idea that Wendat women were all intent on seducing him), but by the end of his sojourn he had come to the conclusion their social arrangements were in many ways superior to those at home in France. In the following passages he was clearly echoing Wendat opinion: ‘They have no lawsuits and take little pains to acquire the goods of this life, for which we Christians torment ourselves so much, and for our excessive and insatiable greed in acquiring them we are justly and with reason reproved by their quiet life and tranquil dispositions.’ Much like Biard’s Mi’kmaq, the Wendat were particularly offended by the French lack of generosity to one another: ‘They reciprocate hospitality and give such assistance to one another that the necessities of all are provided for without there being any indigent beggar in their towns and villages; and they considered it a very bad thing when they heard it said that there were in France a great many of these needy beggars, and thought that this was for lack of charity in us, and blamed us for it severely.’
parasites ! weaklings ! your revolution is over ! the bums lost !