Notices by Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz), page 150

@bob I'm very jealous of the train system in China. For about the cost of the new Hong Kong to Beijing service, we could have electric high speed rail from one end of our tiny country to the other. People could travel to the capital by land, in about the same total time as flying (when you factor in security, picking up baggage etc), for a fraction of the energy cost, and with almost no carbon emissions.

@bob the railways were bought back in Aotearoa (NZ) about a decade ago. They're now in a better state than they were, but so much more could have been done with the public funds wasted on white elephant road building by the last government. Starting with electrification of the whole network.

@RangerMauve do you mean that the problem could be solved by getting people to use magnet links for linking to #PeerTube videos, instead of the URL to a particular copy? If so, it's a matter of user education rather than a technical fix.

@aral the #EFoundation (#Eelo) proposals seems quite similar to the vision you were putting forward in the early days of Ind.ie. Have you been in touch with them?

@mlg happy to look up any authors you recommend too, of course. #P2P education is a two-way street :-)

@dimitrisk trur that. There's a book called 'The New Zealand Experiment' by a legal scholar named Jane Kelsey, and a documentary called Someone Else's Country by Alistair Barry, that tell the story of how all this was done by NZ governments of both "left" and "right" through the 1980s/90s.

@mlg one other thing, the word "rents" has a particular use in political economy, going back at least as far as Adam Smith's critiques of the rentier class in The Wealth of Nations. "Intellectual property" is an example of rent extraction by this definition. Probably worth doing some reading about this too.

@mlg this discussion is starting to get a bit circular. I suggest you read some of the references and authors I've shared with you, plus Charles Eisenstein and Daniel Quinn. Seek out some critiques of their work too, and spend some time digesting it all, particularly thinking about the interplay between agency (individual choices) and structure (social frameworks within which those choices are made). Then maybe we can chat some more :-)

@mlg At the moment I live on a university campus, where everyone can eat super-cheap meals together at giant canteens. So ... kind of? ;-) I have lived in intentional communities in the past, and I'd love to do so again, for sure.

@mlg I live on a university campus, where everyone can eat suppertogether in

@RangerMauve did you read the original post that describes the problem under discussion? I only ask because I'm struggling to grasp how your suggestion solves it (not saying that mine does, were just spitballing here):
https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/101152781407463631
@leip4Ier @cod3monk3y

@jeremiah the tobacco industry knew how harmful their products are, and covered it up to protect their profits, and the opioid pushers are exactly the same. Did you know that PR flacks working for tobacco companies coined the phrase "anti-science" to attack public health activists campaigning against tobacco, and a lot of well-meaning people took that at face value, until those whistleblowers leaked the companies' own self-condemning science. Worth thinking about.

@jeremiah so when I see people making excuses for the people who profit from opioid proliferation - essentially parroting the key messages from their defensive PR - yeah, it pisses me off. For the same reason is does when I see people making excuses for tobacco companies, and victim-blaming the addicts they create with their highly profitable business.

@jeremiah look I'm sorry if my tone was aggressive, but I met a lot of junkies in my late teens and 20s, and I've seen first-hand the damage opioids do. I've also known a lot of people who smoke ganja , both for recreational and for medical reasons. The relative dangers of the two were clear to me long before Professor Nutt and co published in the #Lancet showing opioids are one of the few drugs more dangerous than alcohol, and cannabis is *much* less dangerous than either.

@dazinism yeah, keeping working hardware out of e-waste is a passion of mine. I got given this Android device recently. I'm mainly using it as a way of dipping my toes in before I spend any serious money on a mobile. I've already learned that getting the right screen size is important, and that dual-SIM is useful. Also that it's a good idea to put in external storage before installing lots of apps ;-)

@Michcioperz your comment about going beyond "instanceism" seems very sympatico with IndieWeb thinking. As I understand it their focus is federation between bespoke homepages, rather than using off-the-shelf packages like #GNUsocial or #Mastodon.

@Michcioperz this is an intriguing idea. Have you looked at the ways the #IndieWeb folks are experimenting with #ActivityPub? Eg #P3K
https://indieweb.org/p3k

@jeremiah 3) the pain relief properties of cannabis are some of its most studied applications. Medical grade cannabis, in prescribed doses, in an appropriate delivery system for the patient, can replace any current use of opioids. Pill sellers have to deny and block that for as long as possible, for the same reason oil companies have to with climate change and renewables, and Microsoft did with GNU/Linux; because none of the later are as easy to monopolize.

@jeremiah once again it seems like you've dived in to defend the pill industry without reading the linked article. 1) Nobody prescribes opioids after minor dental surgery in countries with even semi-functional public health systems. 2) after getting wisdom teeth out in NZ, you get told to take over-the-counter paracetamol or Ibuprofen. I just smoked a couple of bowls instead and I was fine. Total replacement, without the risk of addiction and death by OD.