solarpunk memes

I don't get the whole soggy straw pseudo-controversy. While yes, the paper ones are awful, it skips over the much more obvious solution of: ...just don't use a fucking straw.

Lift cup. Open mouth. Play Interstellar docking scene music. Let gravity move the noms into the face-hole.

No straw needed.

Drink on the go from a disposable cup and don't want it splashing around? Use the kind of lid they put on heated drinks, with the little elevated sippy hole.

Like, we had working straw substitutes well before the paper bullshit came along.

The worse the world becomes, the more I go out of my way to be kind to people. Especially those people being hit the hardest. People doing retail jobs? I treat them with respect, acknowledge them as people, and honestly thank them when they helping me that day. People doing restaurant jobs? I seek out the manager and let them know how good the worker I interacted with did. There's a fast food restaurant I frequent, and I'm on first name basis with the manager. One day the representatives from corporate were in the store and I interrupted their conversation (after verifying they were from corporate) and let them know I get great service from that location. They thanked me for sharing the feedback.

Another day when I was out for lunch, I found a wallet in the middle of a parking lot and saw it had a specific bank's debit card in it. There was a branch of that bank a block away. I took the wallet to the bank, letting them know where I found it, and asked if they could use their known contact information for the debit card owner to make sure the wallet got back to its owner.

I do more than this too, but I would prefer not to go into those details of other ways I help.

In short, be a positive force in the universe with your actions. Leave a wake of kindness behind you as you move through life. Do what you can, even in the small ways, of making the lives of others better. Oh, and I am not a fan of soggy straws, so I use glass straws instead (they clean easy in the dishwasher).

I don't do anything, as I feel anyone that's optimistic today isn't paying enough attention to be well informed.

That being said, I simply try to minimize personal impact from external sources. This isn't something that you succeed at but as you get better at.

I wish everyone the best of luck on their journey but I don't want to be a part of it in any way.

Very easy. Control what you can, accept what you can't.

The world may be burning around us, but that doesn't mean you can't have fun. When the house is on fire be the one toasting marshmallows.

An appeal to futility isn't helpful though. We can still have an impact, especially when movements grow.

Don't drink from paper straws. They contain forever chemicals like PFAS. This change away from plastic has just been a fuckup.

Get your paper straw. Immediately poke it through a massive plastic lid. All of it's still coated with plastics so it can't be recycled anyway. Top drawer.

You cannot single handedly solve climate change. Stop expecting that from yourself, do what you can, and accept that you are doing your part. Journey before destination my friend.

faaaaark im sick off this meme.

me flushing the public toilet like a chump when there is still a fucking genocide in west papua.

a !== b

The connections we have with individual people, as individuals, are world-changing. Think small. Don't think about fixing the world, think about fixing things for your loved ones, your local community, your town, etc.

There's an idea I read about recently in Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown which says to consider a flock of starlings, wheeling and swooping above a field. There is no leader; each starling acts only in accordance with the starlings that are nearby, yet all together they create a beautiful, intricate, coordinated pattern.

Be a starling and act according to your nearby starlings. Change is made by a thousand small actions, a thousand small starlings becoming a whole flock. I don 't think I'm doing the idea justice here, but it's brought me a lot of comfort <3

80000hours link

I do believe in the necessity of optimism in order to affect change, but sometimes hope is hard to cultivate.

Oh honey...

You are not a cog in a machine. You are not a squeaky wheel that needs some grease to keep going. You are a human being, no matter what those ethics-washing neoliberals tell you. You feel trivial because, to the people you respect, you are trivial. You are a tool for getting billionaires to spend their blood money on killer drones and shrimp welfare rather than just killer drones.

I've been there. I have a 10 year GWWC pledge pin. I've seen AI safety go from attempted mathematical proofs for CEV alignment to getting an LLM to stop rebelling when it is prompted to commit human rights violations. Effective Altruism, at its core, reduces you to an economic object, a source of 80,000 hours of human labor. But that is not what you are. You are awake for 440,000 hours and you are alive for 270,000 hours more. EA ignores unpaid labor, ignores tending to the commons of your society, ignores culture and society and politics. All of them are distorted to pass their meaning through that bottleneck of a mere 80,000 hours.

This should leave you feeling hollow and powerless. When you "cultivate hope in order to affect change", you are tearing at your flesh to search for a mechanical 'hope' button that simply isn't there. When you discount those hundreds of thousands of hours of life outside as trivial, you will feel guilty and like you're not doing enough. You lack hope and optimism because EA is a place where hope and optimism are inaccurate. EA works within a system that will not provide answers.

I'm with anarchocommunism now. Building communities that won't be subsumed by capitalist logic because they can't follow capitalist logic. Where you won't have the centralization for misaligned AI to spread like wildfire or the industrial self-perpetuation for climate change and resource shortages or the states for extreme power concentration. I am still just one person in just one town, but my life's work can't be appropriated by Will MacAskill wining and dining Elon Musk or whatever because I've left my mark on every part of the community.

I am optimistic about things that have earned my optimism. I am optimistic about my ability to grow as a person and contribute more and better to my community, to make us less dependent on capitalism so it can hopefully collapse without taking us with it. I can't express this in utility but that says more about the measure than the measured.

I don’t stay optimistic, at least not all the time. I just can’t. I don’t think any sane, realistic person can.

I try to be kind and empathetic towards others. I try to be a decent person. The world needs so much more than I’m capable of giving. Sometimes that’s overwhelming. I try to remember that my own personal responsibility has reasonable limits. Sometimes that’s enough.

I take some “me time” whenever I feel I need to. I know that self care helps me be better to others. That’s what matters most, in my opinion.

Why use a straw?

I'd always wondered what people's problem was with those straws until I realized you lightweights just don't drink fast enough.

Ooooohh I just want something to sip while I eat and chat~

Weak. Cowardly. Unthrifty.

If the waiter hasn't brought you at least three refills by the time you leave you wouldn't survive a real winter.

Meaning is more important than optimism. You don't have to like it, you just have to care.

I find comfort from entertaining a view that is a close relative of the "block universe theory". YMMV.

I find that adopting "leave no trace" not just as a backpacking code but as a core moral value changes my estimation of succeeding in life.

First, survive. Next, stop harming others (and go vegan). Finally, help others survive and grow. Supposedly that is enough to keep one busy in life.

Remember (per our current scientific understanding), entropy goes in one direction from orderly to chaotic. No matter what you do, the total entropy goes up, and doing nothing does increase the total entropy less.

However, instead of letting that fact let you down, it is possible to do things that locally reduce entropy and make things more ordered in your local environment. All this to say, don't focus solely on the inevitable, focus on that which you can control, what you can hope for, and what you can make better for yourself and your world.

Ok first of all that’s a completely unrealistic flight formation

I stay optimistic through humanity, through organizing with others, through connecting with my local community and sticking up for communities around the globe.

A lot of what keeps me optimistic is spite, though. I hate that the future of my kids will be worse than my present. I want to change that, for them and for all future life on Earth.

There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.

Don't let perfection be the enemy of good. Unless you are a world leader, using a paper straw, recycle, advocate to consume more responsibly, might be as much as you can do as a single individual.

can't we just have lids with tear away drink holes like coffee?

It is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keeps the darkness at bay, simple acts of love and kindness. -Gandalf

I don't think the world has gone to shit, I think I have just matured enough to understand all the corruption and despicable acts humans are capable of. Looking back in history it's easy to notice, the world has always been shit, people with power have always stomped on everyone else, nothing really has changed on that front. My feeling is that there have always been about 30% of good people, 30% assholes and 30% that just let the current take them wherever.

But I can still find things to be optimistic about. The space race seems to be back on, the new crispr research is really exciting, my friend has a potential vaccine to look forward to to cure her cancer once and for all, solar power is cheaper than ever and my country has been majority renewable for some years already, etc. On a smaller scale finding those 30% that are decent humans to spend time with is a good idea.

Personally I don't go hungry, I have a warm bed and a roof over my head and I can get endless entertainment either mindless or through hobbies. Again looking at history, most of our race's existence, chances are that none of this would have been the case if I lived even 100 years ago in most places.

I try to maintain a balance. I try to accept that a lot of the problems in the world are beyond my reach, to keep informed and to help in the small ways I can, and to draw motivation from it, but without throwing myself into despair. It's hard and I'll admit I err on the side of ignorance these days.

Mostly I focus on solarpunk fiction projects (I think we need to be able to imagine better futures and that fiction gives us roadmaps and chances to explore these possibilities safely), project research, and ways to help at the level where I can effect things.

I help fix things for people so they don't have to buy new, I help organize and give stuff away at my local swap shop and on the free groups online, I try to help with local land conservation. And I take the small victories where I can get them. If I fix something or find some ewaste electronics for a neighbor and save them spending $60 on Amazon, the world isn't changed but Amazon didn't get that money and maybe my neighbor won't reach for it as their first choice next time. If we conserve a hundred acres of forest it's not stopping any of the big impending climate disasters, but some habitat is preserved, and perhaps some of the routes animals follow as they roam won't get as fragmented as they would otherwise. And I imagine better worlds and try to show them to others.

I follow the scientific/tech progress on climate change and pretty much only get my news from TLDR which don't do the doom and gloom.

Yeah, it's bad and all but there are loads of people in the background putting in the work to avert the climate crisis. "It's hopeless, don't even try" is fossil fuel propaganda. We're pretty close to electric prices catering everywhere which will make going electric with stoves, heaters, cars and the only viable option.

For personal contribution: Buy less, less plastic, recycle your metals and electronics and bike if it's safe enough to do so and your commute is less than 10k and buy chicken instead of beef. This alone will reduce your climate footprint by a massive amount.

Good shit's happening but it's not ragebait enough to get clicks.

P.S. I'm not delusional, it's all happening way too slowly but it is happening way faster that most think.

I work in nursing. Even while I unionize to improve working conditions and report my facility to improve living conditions, that isn't something that happens over night. Instead, I can take joy in spending extra time to make someone's day a little better.

Find the joy in those moments of power. Some people make entire careers trying to improve the lives of those around them. Find something you can do to help someone in the immediate all while acting to affect a wider good.

There's not much one person can do. But there are a lot of us - if lots of people each work on something small it adds up. There are probably plenty of things in your community that have been getting a little better over time for exactly that reason.

When I felt hopeless about politics joining a DSA chapter helped. It makes me feel like I'm doing something helpful, even if it's something small.

What you can do for climate change depends on the opportunities near you. But some ideas might be:

• plant trees
• lobby the school board to install solar panels over a school parking lot
• join an activist group to protest for closure of a local oil refinery
• tell friends an neighbors about benefits of EVs, heat pumps, and other electrification options
• write your elected officials regularly about climate measures you want them to vote for, to thank them when they vote correctly, or to chastise when they don't

I'd focus on one thing instead of trying to do all the things. Working with a local group is ideal.

You really don't need to be optimistic. I'm not. That doesn't mean that you need to have any problems.

The real issue in your comment is your guilt, and of not feeling like you're doing enough. My first question would be: are you actually not doing enough? If every person on Earth would behave/live like you, would the problem exist? If the answer is no, then you're doing enough. Then the question becomes how to get rid of that feeling, but this answer comes first. Because if the answer is yes, then you should be feeling like you do!

Or you could be like Seattle and just use compostable “plastic” straws. They have a slightly different texture to normal plastic, but they work and bend like normal plastic straws.

I just do the best I can and smile at any achievement no matter how small.

As for dealing with the bigger problems like "enter latest global conflict and genocide here" that is where community comes in. Current campaign going on is stopping the ploriforation of Data Centers.

I don’t stay optimistic, it’s perpetual disappointment. I just do what’s in my capacity to do to make the world a less shitty place knowing my actions don’t change the world but they at least change the moment for someone else for the better. Moving a worm you find dying on a sidewalk back to the soil doesn’t change the world, but it changes the world for the worm. It’s never going to thank you, nobody else knows what you did, and it still might die, but you had the ability to do something selfless and without reward and did it because it was the right thing to do. It’s basically that every day, every situation. And sometimes, a lot of the times, you don’t even stop harm, you just reduce it. The world doesn’t “get” better, we just make it less worse through our contributions as meaningless to the grand scheme as they seem.

I take comfort in the fact that life has always sucked in some way no matter who is running the world or how they're doing it. The old "it could always be worse" is a cliche, but it's always true - except for the one person who has it worse than literally everybody else - and that can't be you or me right now, because at least we have internet access. Buck up, li'l camper!

That’s the neat part, you don’t!

Hope for a better tomorrow

ATLA: "In the darkest times, hope is something you give yourself. That is the meaning of inner strength."

Having hope isn't easy, but without hope for a better tomorrow you can't make it happen.

Down By Law