Musk’s target audience are liberal, West Coast, technocratic, white or upper caste Hindu, brogressives and techbros - men (and the occasional token woman like Elizabeth Holmes) who give lip service to equality and talk a good game about social justice, and then go home to their gentrified neighborhoods and beat their wives. The kind of people who vocally celebrate the anti-capitalist ethic of Burning Man and then spend the burn in a luxurious private compound with dozens of servants and sex workers getting high off their ass while artists perform for them like Venetian nobles patronizing Renaissance painters.

His target audience are precisely the people who would name drop the Culture when promoting their latest startup but revert to moralizing about “traditional Western values” the instant someone actually behaves like a Culture member.

Mineral oil is a petroleum distillate, a byproduct of fossil fuel production. I’m not saying it’s necessarily unsafe or unethical to use, but calling it “all natural” is a bit of a reach.

Sounds like an excuse.

What I mean is: it sounds like his handlers kept making excuses and you kept accepting them because you wanted to believe them.

I know, I’m frustrated too. I dismissed the Alex Jones Fox News crowd because they were known liars, they’d lied to us for decades, and this really did seem like standard conservative projection to deflect from their candidates’ obvious mental issues.

Hate to admit it. But the conservatives were right and we were wrong.

Same as when one of the big name hosting companies takes a site down. You hope it’s archived, and if it was important enough to you, hopefully you saved it to your personal server.

What you’re describing is a major benefit of federation. Any site can be taken down. But when a federated server goes down it’s because the site owner exercised their control over their own data. If Google or Amazon takes a site down, you lose your data, but they keep copies to use however they want.

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I completely agree that second hand goods and clothing are a vital part of anything punk. Especially if there’s a particular brand or model that’s routinely found secondhand in good condition, due to its durability or whatever - that’s the sort of information we should share with one another.

I wouldn’t want to see too harsh a sourcing requirement for secondhand goods, even. It’s not like you can prove a statement like “I see these at yard sales all the time” even if you do. And even posts about things that are rare and difficult to find are valuable posts, because they let people know “hey, if you see this at a yard sale, you should grab it”.

Maybe require that every post has a sourcing statement - “this is where I got X” - and require that either the item is still sold or you acquired it secondhand recently indicating the item is currently available secondhand. That will disallow the “I inherited this refrigerator fifty years ago, they don’t build them like this anymore, I refill it with bootleg Mexico CFCs and it runs like a dream” kind of posts and still allow for secondhand and vintage stuff.

Instant Pots aren’t a fad anymore, either, so you can probably pick one up used cheap or on a buy nothing group.

I don’t use my instant pot for rice because a saucepan is simpler and easier to clean, but I’m happy with it and I’m sure it would work just fine for rice.

I agree with you. I think property is theft; in an ideal world everyone would have the right to shelter and no one would own land privately. And I also think fear of housing insecurity - including the fear of a landlord extorting or evicting you - is the biggest reason America is obsessed with home ownership and I can’t criticize anybody for pursuing it. The only way to have secure housing in the US today is to own your home, and everyone has a right to secure housing.

Selective enforcement is the core of conservative law making.