happybadger [he/him]

A cargo ebike. No insurance (very cheap anti-theft insurance if you want), no registration fees, $20/year in electricity. I can get anywhere in the city as fast as driving but that’s no longer stressful. Instead of being stuck in traffic and dealing with road raging drivers, I get to zoom along nature paths with the strength of an Olympic athlete. My commute feels liberating instead of like the first and final insult of my day. It’s the first thing I’ve purchased since a smartphone that feels like it’s a foundational 21st century technology. Most of my problems with 20th century development go out the window with it.

What really fucks things up is that I’m next to some of the most fertile agricultural land on the planet. You can dig 3m down and still have beautiful black topsoil that grows anything you throw in it. These grasslands used to be 2m tall and so thick that missionary convoys looked back and couldn’t see the footprints of their hundreds of members. All of that land is used to grow corn and soybeans for cattle. The people driving four hours from food deserts to pick through the scraps of our grocers are doing so from land I would kill to farm on. I could provide those entire communities with countless healthy calories if I could afford the land that currently feeds cows whose beef I can no longer afford.

The Grapes of Wrath should be required yearly reading for adults. The only difference between its 1930s setting and now is that everything is Oklahoma. I can’t flee to anywhere better than the place I can’t afford to live in anymore.

edit: Required reading and they get a free gun after completing a short essay about the themes.

I can drive about 200km for the cost of a combo meal at a fast food restaurant. My average weekly grocery bill for one person is maybe $100, up 50% from five years ago, while my hourly wage is $17.50 and nobody is hiring. Especially in the American West where things are as spread out as like the Mongolian steppes, it’s wild how driving 80km+ is a normal commute from towns where you can’t buy healthy food.

The local foodbanks are so overwhelmed that they restrict access to people who live in the city or county. Our surrounding counties are poorer agricultural ones, some in red states without our state-level welfare funding to offset the loss of federal funding, and their residents will drive hours to use our food banks. We’re really defining the hinterlands with this crash.

Give yourself time and space to distance yourself emotionally from it. Delve into something that lets you reestablish your identity and do independent personal growth, then use that regained confidence to find the kind of relationship you want. I just hike exhaustively until I no longer think about them or care what they’re doing, becoming more of a naturalist which helps my self-worth. In that community I can find people with similar politics who make better partners. If you try to rush your recovery from that relationship or turn to self-destruction instead of growth, you just further entrap yourself in the patterns that resulted in the last one.

I mean the period of heat death beyond that. The black holes have to be fed and eventually that matter will dry up. The universe will keep expanding and chasing thermodynamic equilibrium until some maximum point of entropy where every particle is spread out over increasingly vast distances, with such a total loss of interactions between them that temperature across the universe is 0 K. We’d be doing the Alpha Centauri generation ship thing but to find the next electron.

As existentially bleak as living through climate change is, I’m glad my brain only has to deal with the crisis of watching one planet in one solar system die. The average schmuck in Warhammer 10¹⁰ will be chasing the last sparks of warmth in a blizzard that will only get worse. The last habitable planet, the last active star, the final energy source they can find that will keep the temperature above 0 K for their grandchildren. They’ll have every beepboop gizmo the universe ever achieves to counter the crisis but there’s nowhere they can go short of making a new one, the same kind of deus ex machina we hope for but representing a new kind of hyper-death instead of just clean energy. Maybe they’ll still be able to grow crops if scientists manage to duplicate physics perfectly in some kind of thing outside of everything within the next 18 months according to the latest IPCC report. Individuals aren’t built to manage whatever psychic damage that causes no matter how much we abstract what it means to exist.

She’s an unstoppable chaos queen with a stink-nipple on her butt

New Jordan Peterson book just dropped

beepbeepbeep

Social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.

Step 1: everyone be nice to each other

Step 2: please bro

I just have a sense of morbid curiosity about 2028. How little will democrats have learned from the past decade? How can they possibly fail in a more embarrassing way than 2024 or install a more embarrassing person than 2020?

This is liberalism’s moment to really eat ass+hair.

If they have nothing to hide, they shouldn’t be afraid.

I’m considering applying this to my plant science research. In response to drought stress we observed that the tree became -3 smaller marijuana. Accelerometer data reflects the impact of this change in biomass, with hotdog levels variably +2 to +5. We demonstrate that as the tree becomes smaller marijuana it also becomes bigger hotdog.

Yeah, already brewed coffee. Typically I’ll use ground coffee for the pre-brewed beans and coffee grounds for the remnants after brewing.

my plants when I give them the coffee grounds as a weekly/monthly fertiliser, perfect for vegetative growth with a pH of 6.5 and plenty of nutrients.

Favourite: civic infrastructure. I turn a lever and safe water comes out. If my entire city uses the bathroom at the same time, nobody gets cholera. I’ll be warm this winter. I can bike on a flat path to a lake owned by the public, then charge my phone for it at free and browse hexbear instead of looking at that lake. When infrastructure works and meets our core needs it’s a miracle of collectivism.

Least favourite: Atomisation and the idea of isolated “first/second/third place”. There’s no reason a park can’t be as educational as a university class or as enriching as a wilderness or as productive as a homestead, other than we choose to develop it for one limited set of recreation use. Downtown cores don’t need to be hyper-commercial, hostile spaces that are unsafe to walk around but we develop them for the benefit of capital instead of pedestrians. The ideal garden city is intensely focused on critical geography and situating people in a larger socioecological project. The lines should be blurred between grey and green space, between commercial/residential/social, and between human/natural enrichment as much as possible. It’s all the worse when you bring in the separation of town and country with those rural communities alienated from civic infrastructure and cultural participation and the urban communities alienated from touching something other than grass.

At what point did the current politics leanings of the Democratic party would make up your spiritual and moral framework?

When Obama won in 2008 and didn’t end the wars or close Guantanamo Bay or provide recession relief, I knew I wasn’t a liberal and that the democrats represented a .

Before that I read the Communist Manifesto at like age 12. Its worldview made more sense than the social studies textbooks I was otherwise reading and when I found the Theses on Feuerbach it gave me a foundation for secular morality/ethics that clicked with the Sartre and Camus I was starting to read.

I don’t know what you are, but my is beeping.

Me screaming that Fred Rogers had a preeminent jazz pianist improvise every episode’s theme song to no one in particular.