Forwarded from Syndiegram (IFTTT)
www.sicknote.co
Don't have your baby in December either
The open enrollment blues.
Forwarded from Pantopia Library 📚
Joel Andreas - Addicted to War.pdf
19.9 MB
Joel #Andreas - Addicted to War: Why the U.S. Can't Kick Militarism
Forwarded from Dead Lasagna (Kozy Raccoon)
A surprisingly decent introduction to US militarism up until 2002-2003
"Honestly at this stage we don’t have any other option asides from rapid reduction in the amount of resources and energy we use. It will take too long for solar to come online. It will take too long for nuclear to come online. We do not have the luxury to keep consuming resources at the rate we are going.
I don’t think there is a contradiction between massively improving living standards and rapidly reducing the amount of resources it requires to reproduce us as a society. Too much emphasis is placed on the use of resources at the point of consumption rather than at the point of production. The problem is we are making too much crap and working too much, doing things which are ultimately rather pointless.
I think the key is the prioritisation of essential work and the shutdown of harmful and non-essential industries. The first lockdown shows that this is something that can be done and can reduce emissions quickly. Reallocating people’s time away from non-essential work towards essential work could be used as a way of reducing the working day, leaving us more time to ourselves. This would give us time to have fun in ways which aren’t mediated by the market (and therefore are based on using up resources), to look after the things we own and engage properly in society.
I think the second part is shifting resources to services which are free at the point of use, reducing the need to individual buy private resources which spend most of their lives not in use, and provision of a universal income where everyone has enough to live on regardless of whether they are taking part in the wage system. Why do we produce millions of cars a year which spend 94% of their lives parked? Wouldn’t it be easier if we could just borrow resources from a collective pool and then return them when we don’t need them? By making it so people have access to enough resources to live a good life without having to sell their labour to an employer, we can actually ask ourselves whether the work we are doing is necessary and whether we need to burn resources doing it. We can also start working on things which we know are necessary and need to happen, but aren’t being paid for through the wage system.
The economic consequence of enacting these policies is that there would be a collapse in GDP (as there was in the first lockdown) and an accompanying collapse in the value of pound. This would reduce our ability to import goods from abroad. Currently the UK subsists on its bloated financial sector and sits on top of global supply lines, sucking labour and resources out of the rest of the world and consuming resources in an entirely wasteful manner (much of our GDP is just consuming resources - a shirt sold here adds more to our GDP than making it does adds to Bangladesh’s). It would be a good thing if this consumerist nightmare would end. Do we even have the time or the energy to enjoy any of this stuff? Is this really living, buying products which are designed to break and made by slaves, to fill the void that living in this world leaves?"
- source
I don’t think there is a contradiction between massively improving living standards and rapidly reducing the amount of resources it requires to reproduce us as a society. Too much emphasis is placed on the use of resources at the point of consumption rather than at the point of production. The problem is we are making too much crap and working too much, doing things which are ultimately rather pointless.
I think the key is the prioritisation of essential work and the shutdown of harmful and non-essential industries. The first lockdown shows that this is something that can be done and can reduce emissions quickly. Reallocating people’s time away from non-essential work towards essential work could be used as a way of reducing the working day, leaving us more time to ourselves. This would give us time to have fun in ways which aren’t mediated by the market (and therefore are based on using up resources), to look after the things we own and engage properly in society.
I think the second part is shifting resources to services which are free at the point of use, reducing the need to individual buy private resources which spend most of their lives not in use, and provision of a universal income where everyone has enough to live on regardless of whether they are taking part in the wage system. Why do we produce millions of cars a year which spend 94% of their lives parked? Wouldn’t it be easier if we could just borrow resources from a collective pool and then return them when we don’t need them? By making it so people have access to enough resources to live a good life without having to sell their labour to an employer, we can actually ask ourselves whether the work we are doing is necessary and whether we need to burn resources doing it. We can also start working on things which we know are necessary and need to happen, but aren’t being paid for through the wage system.
The economic consequence of enacting these policies is that there would be a collapse in GDP (as there was in the first lockdown) and an accompanying collapse in the value of pound. This would reduce our ability to import goods from abroad. Currently the UK subsists on its bloated financial sector and sits on top of global supply lines, sucking labour and resources out of the rest of the world and consuming resources in an entirely wasteful manner (much of our GDP is just consuming resources - a shirt sold here adds more to our GDP than making it does adds to Bangladesh’s). It would be a good thing if this consumerist nightmare would end. Do we even have the time or the energy to enjoy any of this stuff? Is this really living, buying products which are designed to break and made by slaves, to fill the void that living in this world leaves?"
- source