The cultural divide between you and I is so great that I don’t even know where to begin to respond. I appreciate you sharing your point of view, at least.

Are you talking about fresh fruit and vegetables? That sounds like you’re wasting a lot - in terms of money, not just in terms of food. It’s pretty easy to tell whether fresh fruit and vegetables are going bad (getting rotten, getting moldy, and so on), and if they’re not going bad they’re fine to use, whether there’s an expiration date or not.

Which is to say, I don’t think reducing food waste is a non-starter, but I do think it’s a matter of bottom-up education and practice (for you, I think that would mean learning how to tell when fruits and vegetables are going bad, and being confident enough in your knowledge that you can feel secure eating fruit and vegetables you didn’t buy recently) as much as it is top-down changes in policy.

At this point, “we should install more solar panels and waste less food” is seen as crazy hippy delusion by the American right.

If anything, the American Democratic Party has swung too far in the other direction, portraying itself as defenders of the status quo - even being willing to move further right - in order to avoid being seen as “crazy hippies”.

Meanwhile, MAGA is a utopian movement - it wants to completely transform America in the image of an idealized Christian conservative past, and doesn’t care what laws it has to break in the process.

The Democrats haven’t been able to effectively challenge MAGA’s utopian vision, because all they offer is a return to the status quo under Biden, and Americans are sick of that status quo. And the American left outside the Democratic Party has been so marginalized (mostly by the Democratic Party) that even mild “let’s do things a little bit better” leftists like Bernie Sanders have no real voice in American politics.

It’s not about being crazy hippies. It’s about having a vision for a better America, a plan to carry it out, and the courage to fight for that plan even when people call you a crazy hippie.

They told us a rising tide lifts all boats. They didn’t tell us they’d strand us on the beach when the tide came in.

Yeah, but you know what they can do? Select the representatives we’re allowed to vote for.

I think there are at least two other reasons, too:

One, sweat equity matters. I know I value pieces of furniture I built myself more than furniture I bought, even though the furniture I bought is better quality - because what I made myself represents my skill and my labor and my commitment. And in a throwaway culture, creating that emotional commitment to clothing or furniture or a home matters.

And two, rammed earth tires require no supply lines, no 3D printers, no expensive tools or complex chemistry, no gas or electricity, even. Just used tires, local dirt, and local labor. If global supply chains fall apart and resources get scarce, people can still build Earthships - and the people who are building them now will be able to teach others how to build them in the future.

I don’t have a source, I’m afraid. I screenshot this off Tumblr and didn’t save the original link, but I know that it was a repost and that this image had been circulating for quite a while.

“This poll underscores that the term ‘democratic socialism’ now communicates something very practical to American voters: the kind of economic security and fairness once associated with the New Deal tradition,” said Bhaskar Sunkara, president of the Nation magazine and founding editor of Jacobin.

I really hope so.

Now hopefully the Dems will stop running right wing candidates and telling us “you have to vote for the blue conservative or the red conservative will win”, and, instead, support policies that actually help people.

Not holding my breath, though.

Literally true now for, eg, Eritrea and North Korea.

Which is one reason why I’m confident the 1951 Refugee Convention is going to be scrapped, probably with 60-80% of delegations to the UN voting in favor of scrapping it.

No country actually wants refugees crossing its borders. The 1951 Convention came from the world’s collective guilt and shame at the human cost of WWII; the wealthy and politically powerful, for once in human history, showing empathy for the victims of their geopolitical manipulations. But the last survivors of WWII are almost gone, and the lesson of that war is dying with them.

And the countries with the most refugees fleeing them are dictatorships that want their “human resources” back working for them - or their political enemies returned to face death or imprisonment.

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I’m coming to despise “modern art”. Or abstract art. . Or any art that makes itself look pointless at first glance and hides its meaning behind levels of “clever” symbology.

You want great abstract art? Here.

Us seeing this in 2025? Have to analyze it. And that confuses us into thinking great art requires analysis to understand. But the target audience IMMEDIATELY understood what the point was.

Art is propaganda. Art must be propaganda. Because art without a message is art without meaning. And art without meaning is a waste of paint and paper.

You can send a message however you want. But if your target audience doesn’t understand your message you’ve failed. Subtle and complex artwork that require deep study to decipher their meanings are nothing but aesthetic masturbation.

The greatest artistic victory of the America right wing state was to convince generations of left wing artists that great art transcends politics.

“But solar power takes fertile soil out of production and hurts farmers!”

Yet again, Republican policies hurt their own rural red state base.

Or is this article just concentrating on the old EVs that have no battery heating/cooling systems?

That. Because those are the EVs that were rolled out in developing countries without proper foresight or supporting infrastructure.

I expect it’ll work out in the long run, but such a waste.

(clippy) It sounds like you’re trying to build a commune. Would you like help with that? (\clippy)

So I’m going to try to answer your questions, but before I do I want to emphasize the commune issue. It sounds like you’re trying to draw people together, artificially build a community where people live, work, and play in common under the guidance of the same organization, and keep them working together for a lengthy period of, frankly, impoverished struggle.

You’re trying to build a commune from the top down.

The problem with communes is they require a HIGH level of trust between members BEFORE they commit to sharing their lives, finances, and other resources. because of how quickly they can lose everything if the commune’s leadership exploits or fails them, and how easily they can be exploited by free riders and abusers.

And they need members who won’t abuse that trust. Which, historically, has been the sticking point.

When you set up a situation like this, where a person’s employment, housing, and social life all depend on maintaining their status within the same organization, you’re building a fragile edifice. Because if that organization fails, either through bad decisions, exploitation, or reasons out of its control, everyone who relies on it goes down with it.

It’s the opposite of the sustainability and resilience that we need in the uncertain future.

And it attracts a higher than normal share of desperate people, exploiters, and bad actors. Because people with good prospects in society won’t gamble those prospects, and people with strong economic and social ties to society won’t give those up, by submitting their entire lives to the governance of one organization.

Also, I am NOT millennial or Gen-Z so am not going to speak for them - polling people in those demographics directly would be a lot more helpful to you. And since the answers to a lot of your questions will reasonably correlate with age (e.g. older people who already own homes will be MUCH less likely to go live in a yurt), I think adding age ranges to your more formal polling will really help you focus on your core age demographics.

Anyway:

Q1. I’d be mostly unwilling, primarily since I’d have to quit my job, though I’d at least be curious. Not speaking for other generations.

Q2. It depends VERY MUCH on the details your question leaves out. Do I know the person? Can I choose the person? Can I switch people? Being stuck with the same roommate for five years can be fine and can end up a complete nightmare - the situation would need a strong conflict resolution model at minimum.

And then there’s the environment. What are summers and winters like? What heating and cooling exists? What kitchen/bathroom facilities are there? Is there any privacy in this four seasons tent? Is this going to be five years of basically camping?

And what’s the incentive? Do I have to pay for five years of camping? What do I get out of it and do I get any of that reward if I back out before the five years?

PLEASE DO NOT TRY TO ANSWER ALL THESE QUESTIONS. I’m not joining your commune and don’t need the answers. I’m just bringing up things people WILL want to know before committing.

Q3. Holy labor law violations, Batman! I count a max of 72 hours of blue collar + white collar + teaching work in there, and I would absolutely not sign up for anything even remotely near that without seeing a contract with much clearer labor terms and worker’s rights protections. And how exactly is the 8-24 hours of “leisure” separate from the rest of your life during that week? Is this managed leisure of some kind? Honestly that description reminds me of a 996 startup grind and I would come at it with extreme suspicion.

Q4. And there’s the incentive: five years of camping with a roommate and 996 grinding in exchange for the lifetime right to live in a 2000 sq ft house. For me: absolutely not. For younger people who have basically no chance of ever owning a house in this economy? I won’t speak for them, but maaaaaaybe?

Here’s the thing. I don’t believe land should be owned. I believe land should be managed by communities, with usage rights to a home guaranteed to the members of that community who reside in it. So from THAT standpoint your idea sounds like a great prefigurative phase shift from private ownership to community ownership. But it’s still ownership, because we still live under capitalism - and if I don’t own the home I live in, who does? What rights do they have that I don’t? And what happens when we disagree?

And circling back: who decides what counts as “satisfactorily maintaining”, and to whom can someone appeal if that decision-making body abuses its authority? Because if it takes five years to vest in a house, and in year 4 management realizes they’re not going to have enough houses for everybody and decides to kick out half their workers…

Q5. Fuuuuuuck no. This is where a lot of communes fail - because they’re totalizing, and the worker’s homes are linked to the worker’s jobs are linked to the worker’s status in the community, and if the employment fails everything fails. (Look up “The Farm” in Tennessee.) I think a community that relies so heavily on one employer, owner operated or not, multiple divisions or not, is dangerously fragile.

Q6. As long as it takes? Not writing any startup a blank check for my labor. Sorry.

Q7. Won’t change. My problems with this setup have nothing to do with the size of the house.

Q8. Holy shit, no, fuck that. So abusable.

Q9. My first reaction is to fear for victims of domestic violence.

Without going on an incredibly lengthy rant, the best way to protect individual human rights is to guarantee those rights universally, and, if those rights have to be restricted or removed for some reason, have a carefully structured procedure with objective oversight, checks and balances, and an appeal process, before anyone’s rights are restricted. And if this sounds like a court system, that’s because taking away people’s rights for the good of society is what a court system does, and even then there are some rights not even a court can take away. And evicting someone from their home should definitely be under the jurisdiction of such a court system.

A system where someone can lose their place in a commune - lose their home, lose whatever sweat equity they put into the work of the commune, and so on and so forth - if a sufficient number of fellow commune members hate them enough to vote against them, is a bad system. The way it could facilitate racism, bigotry, prejudice of all kinds, should be obvious.

And I bring up domestic violence in particular because I’ve seen too many people somehow find the courage to accuse a well-respected community member of abuse, and end up ostracized, punished, even banished from their community, because the community took the side of the well-respected member and believed they’d falsely accused a good man of a heinous crime.

Direct democracy may not be the worst possible way to run a judicial system, but it’s really, really close.

Q10. That question has so many caveats and unknowns that the answer to it wouldn’t change anything for me.

There is definitly the potential of “dark” Solarpunk stories set in the nearish future aka “it’s going to get worse, before it gets better”. Climate refugee settlements (slums) would be probably the perfect setting.

The Great Transition: A Novel by Nick Fuller Googins fits this mold, and is just a good book in the process. It takes place some twenty years after the worst of the climate crisis, with extensive flashbacks to the worst of it, and doesn’t sugarcoat either the work it’s going to take to get to a sustainable society or the problems such a society might have.

The bigger issue I see is the cop/detective trope that probably needs a lot of deconstruction to not come accross as hopelessly anachronistic in a Solarpunk story.

How so? I mean, I can see how a solarpunk setting might not have cops or criminals in the capitalist sense, but it would still have justice and injustice, people trying to hide injustice and people trying to bring injustice to light. Make one of the latter your protagonist and you have a detective story.

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Same. I haven’t had time to watch this yet but I’m looking forward to it.

Though my first thought is: you can believe in animal rights without being a vegan. (I mean, if a mountain lion eats a goat, has it violated the goat’s rights? There are plenty of people who, for example, oppose the unimaginable cruelty of factory farming on animal rights grounds and still believe there are moral ways to kill animals for food. I don’t want to get into whether that’s an ethical or even internally consistent position, it’s enough for my point that they exist.)

But you can’t really be a vegan without believing in animal rights. Because veganism isn’t about diet - choosing to not eat animal product out of health or environmental concerns makes you plant-based, not vegan. Veganism is an ethical philosophy based on the belief that animals have rights, including the right not to be used as resources by humans.

I think that veganism is about personal conduct, and animal activism is about changing the world

And this gets to my second thought. The personal is political. If you are a vegan, if you live your beliefs, if you only go to vegan restaurants and only purchase vegan food and only cook vegan meals for your friends and family, you are changing the world. Because living your values, and showing those values to the people around you, changes how they think and feel about veganism and animal rights. Maybe to a small degree. Maybe you’re only changing the people around you a little bit. But that’s how all change starts - one person at a time.

And same way with animal rights. If you believe in animal rights, but you don’t change anything you say or do because of that belief, then, yeah, you’re not making any difference, any more than if you were a vegan who eats meat while around other people to avoid standing out. But if you make decisions because of your belief in animal rights - say, you don’t purchase from companies that conduct animal experimentation, you don’t wear fur, you don’t eat veal - then you are, to some degree, being an activist. You are having that same kind of little daily impact that makes a vegan lifestyle inherently an activist lifestyle.

Anyway, yeah, the personal is political, and don’t devalue the importance of personal conduct in making a difference to the world. That’s my rant.

Wait wait wait. Hold on. You believe that Republican voters do not like or support Trump personally? That they disagree with his policies but grudgingly support him because the Democratic alternative is worse? That Trump’s support among Republicans voters is primarily a matter of Party loyalty?

That’s so profoundly the opposite of what I’ve experienced that I can only assume we’re living in different parallel universes.

Nah. Tbh it’s just your average Twitter comment thread, arguing over pointless shit, and then one side of the argument reposting the thread on their own website with a bunch more commentary about why they’re right.

And it’s the side I agree with, but still.

If you think every Republican believes and agrees with all or even most of Trump, then you are in a bubble.

https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/approval/donald-trump/approval-rating/republicans

Lol. Trump has almost a 90% approval rating among Republican voters. That’s not “hold your nose and vote” territory. That’s not “I disagree with Trump but I support him because I’m a loyal Republican” territory. Republican voters love Trump because he gives them what they want. And the Republican establishment saw the writing on the wall and got in line.

Republicans outplayed you at the ground level. Part of that is religion

Looooool.