Like I said, follow the instructions. That includes removing impurities if you’re working with used cooking oil. If it’s unused then that simplifies things.
Doing it at scale may not be economical because of taxes as well as the fact you either need to buy expensive vegetable oil or collect large amounts of used oil from disparate places. For personal use the taxes are avoided and you may be able to get sufficient used oil from a couple of restaurants or neighbors.
At “for trade”
So everyone has to make their own food rather than get it through trade? Sounds very individualist and isolated. What’s wrong with making other things and trading for food?
More broadly that the notion of “productive work” being what’s needed to give human lives meaning… That’s a big leap.
The alternative to productive work is unproductive work or passing the time away. It means nothing you ever do has a goal or purpose to it except perhaps satisfying your immediate desires like hunger, entertainment and sexual pleasure. That doesn’t seem like a fulfilling life and from experience I know that kind of life doesn’t make people happy.
Are we as humans so incapable of devising our own structures for meaning absent the framing of capitalism?
I never said anything about capitalism being necessary, just productive work. Productive work can be working towards personal goals and need not have anything to do with money or material goods.
Only if you don’t follow the instructions
The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
At what point does growing food or producing other goods to trade for food become “capitalist toil”? When a common currency is involved? When you’re working on someone else’s farm for a share of the produce?
Anyone who’s had kids or worked with kids knows that people will be lazy if they are allowed to be. If you don’t think this applies to adults (who are basically big kids with only slightly more self-awareness) then consider this. Most people in developed countries have all their basic needs (food, water, shelter, sleep, physical safety, social stability and so on) easily met and do fewer hours of work than the vast majority of humans in recorded history. Yet they still frequently complain about not having enough money or too much work or their other responsibilities and they still want to retire early and go on lots of vacations. Their mental health and happiness is way worse than their grandparents’ and worse than those of less developed countries. This is not only obvious from every day experience but confirmed by just about every study.
So it’s very obvious to me that people want to be lazy, but being lazy actually makes people unfulfilled and unhappy. I have seen this process at work with numerous people I am closely acquainted with. They can have all the important things in life yet still be unhappy. They can blame it on not having the right looks, not having enough vacation, the people they work with or whatever, but they obviously wouldn’t be so stressed about those things if they had real problems like ensuring the family has food. And when people do have real problems instead of focusing on inconveniences they are happier.
It’s just the natural state of humans that they have to work to survive or rely on their family/friends to look after them if they’re unable to work. There could potentially be a society where hardly anybody needs to do anything productive, but this would be a completely unnatural society that would have widespread mental illness due to many people lacking goals or productive things to do. Most people would also get physically unhealthy and lazy (both physically and intellectually) - like they already in developed countries.
One minute - gonna go drink some drive
Where it all went wrong was the industrial revolution
Everyone needs lines that shouldn’t be crossed. For me one of those lines is computer programs that can do things their creators don’t know how to do. In other words, programs that are “trained”, or “AI”. Such programs are the beginning of the end of human existence, as they will replace human thinking and labor - taking away human purpose and power - and eventually become capable of making weapons of mass destruction from microwaves and shoelaces. There’s no possible good future with AGI in it, and the only way to prevent AGI is to stop AI altogether.
That’s one reason. Another reason is that your code will be better and you will understand it. Yet another reason is you’ll have more privacy. And probably the most important reason is that you’re resisting AI development that threatens human existence.
Thanks, I didn’t realize
No I just ordered a cheap solar panel for about $5 to play with and later I can upgrade to something more useful.
Cloudflare sucks and I wish nobody used it
I don’t think so. Of course do your own research, but from what I read it’s perfectly legal in the UK and you may be able to sell it without paying tax:
That sounds like a good place to start. Take it one step at a time. You can even start with just an offline morning a week. You said you like reading books so that’s one thing you can do in those times. I’m sure you have other hobbies or tasks you can do that don’t require digital devices.
Unfortunately most intentional communities don’t last very long and many are cult-like, overly collectivist or based on (what I would consider) wacky ideologies. There’s a few that have lasted and seem reasonable but I haven’t looked into them much yet and doubt I would be able to visit them. My ideal has some overlap with back-to-the-land movements but it goes further in that it strives to ultimately get away from the internet, cars, drugs and other modern tech. I’m not aware of any intentional communities specifically trying to do that.
Seems like a decent example of a question that people fall either side of yet isn’t too politically charged
Yeah. And now we have a study when someone says “Source?”
My understanding is that the vast majority of US subsidies in this area are for production rather than consumption subsidies aimed at reducing the price (only $44 billion out of $760 billion). The US is also on the lower end of fossil fuel subsidies compared to other countries at $28.16 per person in 2021, which seems considerably less than how much each person would have paid in fuel taxes that year.