In what way? I use it from time to time to get movies and series. Is there any downside compared to other methods?

Genuine question, I’m not too familiar with the pirate world beyond pirate bay.

My parents don’t speak English, but I learned it as a kid by watching a lot of Cartoon Network. All the cartoons were in English, no subtitles or dub or anything. Somehow I assimilated the language without any external aid, and then learned the rest when we first got the internet and I started communicating with others via games.

So, if I had to teach a kid English, I’d just expose them to as much English as possible with plenty of context and encourage them to express themselves in English when they can. This is also a popular method how adults can learn languages, called tprs

The meaning and ideas of solarpunk are still evolving, but the main themes are freedom, community, ecology and pragmatism. I won’t go over the anarchic organisation of communities since I think you mistook the pragmatism for primitivism.

Solarpunk is not about primitivism and a return to a low-technological era, and neither is it a high tech cyberpunk spinoff, as some others think. Solarpunk is about using practical solutions that are also ethical and egolocially friendly. This often means not throwing stuff away, but fixing what can be fixed and reusing what can be reused, because mass production and consumerism is seen as a damaging force. So instead of trying to make up new tech and produce new things, solarpunk would ask you to first consider whether you can do something already with what you have, which means that a DIY approach is encouraged. However, if new technology can improve our lives without damaging everything else, it’s acceptable.

And it is the complete opposite of thinking about the “good old days”, as solarpunk is looking only towards the future. The ‘punk’ in the name means that when you look at all the doom and gloom in the future (capitalism, wars, global warming) you don’t fall into despair, but instead try to play your part in your community to fight it and promote a lifestyle of mutual aid and a respect for nature, with whatever level of technology can give you the best results.

That was my attempt at a short presentation. We have a wiki and a manifesto if anyone is interested

From what I heard, salt is usually packaged with iodine or some substances that prevent clumping that expire over time. So after some time the salt won’t have those anymore, but it should be safe to consume. Salt cannot spoil because bacteria cannot grow in salty places.

Don’t know how plastic containers relate to that sadly.

Crucified, hallelujah

That part is actually adressed in the solarpunk manifesto:

The “punk” in Solarpunk is about rebellion, counterculture, post-capitalism, decolonialism and enthusiasm. It is about going in a different direction than the mainstream, which is increasingly going in a scary direction.

15 mins on foot. I’m lucky to be in a city where you can get from pretty much any point to any point in 30 mins by bike, so relocation wouldn’t be that painful, but as things stand, my office is about 1km away from me.

Yeah, I forgot about that. It varies from company to company, I get exactly nothing above my standard salary each month lol

In Serbia as well. Whenever someone mentions an annual salary, I have to divide it by 12 to get some sense out of it, because we only talk about the monthly.

Right, I think it only covers personal information: companies can only collect what they need to run their service, users can request to see their data etc. I don’t think it applies to comments and posts.

I did stop to think whether to use that term or not. I still chose to because (at least in my experience) the way such people explain away the consensus is by giving political/economical motives to the scientists that uphold it. ‘Global warming isn’t man-made, they are just paid to say that’, ‘Vaccines don’t work, they just say that to sell more of them’, ‘Scientists have to fit the woke agenda’ etc.

For that reasoning to work you would need a huge connected network of researchers all hiding the actual truth and spreading lies for nefarious gains, and that’s a conspiracy if I ever heard one. Ofc there are people who just think they’re smarter than all of the scientists combined, but I mostly encountered the former type.

Thus I’d like to coin the term, negligible science.

Paul Hoyningen-Huene calls it facsimile science in the paper I mentioned and gives an overview of their characteristics, it’s quite a nice read.

You didn’t read half of my comment, did you? I literally said that there is a huge distinction between knowledgable people giving a full account of alternative theories (like Copernicus arguing against the consensus of a geocentric system) and conspiracy theorists just saying ‘no’ to the consensus with nothing to back it up.

This is very much a known concept in the philosophy of science, especially under Feyerabend who mentions ‘counterinduction’ often as a tool to prevent scientific thought from stagnating into a dogma because it might turn into a system where every fact that might prove it wrong is discarded right away. Like how the heliocentric system was opposed to almost every fact given by science at the time.

But this is a method (for a lack of a better word; ironically, Feyerabend’s whole point is that there is no strict and rational method) of actual scientific research by competent researchers. Someone with no more than the most basic understanding of biology, ecology and climate rejecting the consensus with no findings of their own to provide makes them a conspiracy theorist. ‘The Earth moves around the sun because xyz, and you can prove it’ in a geocentric society is a counterinductive questioning of the consensus. ‘Vaccines don’t work’, ‘Masks don’t work’, ‘CO2 isn’t making the planet warmer’ is 100% of the time a conclusion found on the internet with at most one or two shallow arguments disproved decades ago (see Paul Hoyningen-Huene’s: “Systematicity is necessary but not sufficient: on the problem of facsimile science”)

This might be due to the fact that I’m not a native speaker and I encountered this phrase at a later date, but people saying “it’s all but xyz” to mean “it’s xyz” really gets on my nerves. I get it, “it’s all but complete” means that virtually all the conditions are met for it to be complete, but I find it so annoying for some reason.

“The task is all but impossible” registers as ‘it’s not impossible, it’s everything else: possible’, so the fact that it means the opposite of that makes my brain twitch.

Now I’m not 100% sure of this because I’m working from memory, but I think Kropotkin gave examples for this in “Mutual aid”.

For Eskimos he mentions that anything an individual catches or gathers belongs to the clan as a whole, and then it is redistributed. People living in tribes (with no concept of a separate family) generally live ‘each for all’.

Village communities, on the other hand, recognized only movable property as privately owned, while land belonged to the community, and everything had to be done with the consent of the community.

When disputes did arise, they were treated as communal affairs and mediators were found to pass a resolution. If the resolution was not agreeable to one party, the case would go before the folkmoot and the decision reached was final. The party that had to provide some reparation could either accept, or leave the village and go somewhere else, but there were no law enforcers.

A little less rosy than Kropotkin, and not really anarchist, but Icelanders lived without a state until the late 13th century. They had a (bi)yearly gathering (the “Thing”) where all grievences could be brought forth before the judges and people. When a sentance was passed, it was up to the family of the ‘winner’ to see that the other side accepted it, there was no state figure to force them.

Ima, ima. Možda nas je malo, ali zato niko nema šta da kaže.

I’ve decided the best and most feasible thing I can do right now is thoroughly decoupling myself from the corporate consumerism world

I honestly think this is a very valid approach. Most people are imagining revolutions and a sudden and violent end to the capitalist class, but I’m more inclined towards the idea where people just change their life habbits so that they don’t depend on massive corporations. Step one stop using crap you don’t need, step two try to get the things you do need locally. If enough people do this, you might start seeing small communities that take care of a lot of stuff by themselves, and the moment you get a big enough community where at least some can live comfortably with little to no dependency from big corporations, things might change…

My bank once disabled my access to my funds out of the blue and told me to come in person because they have to check stuff like terrorist funding for each client from time to time, same thing happened to a colleague. So banks blocking you suddenly and without warning is very much a thing

I’m so traumatized by that video that now, 17 or so years later, I had to carefully scroll your comment in case the picture you posted was the screaming face

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it”

And at the end:

“No one keeps death in view, no one refrains from far-reaching hopes; some men, indeed, even arrange for things that lie beyond life—huge masses of tombs and dedications of public works and gifts for their funeral-pyres and ostentatious funerals. But, in very truth, the funerals of such men ought to be conducted by the light of torches and wax tapers, as though they had lived but the tiniest span.” [As if a child had died]

Seneca, On the Shortness of Life