Notices by Gemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐 (gcvsa@mstdn.plus), page 3

But when you look at the land area of cities all over the world, what you see is that the vast majority of the land area of nearly every city in the world is given over to low density structures.

The biggest problem we face in the US is the logistics of how our system of land ownership intersects with and destroys the ability of communities to intentionally plan for density while mantaining human dignity.

A centralized planning system or "socialism" is not necessarily the right response.

The great problem that the left in our society fails to comprehend, and therefore fails to address, is the fact that virtually every evil they ascribe to "capitalism" has nothing whatsoever to do with capital, but with land.

That is, the real problem is not "capitalism", the real problem is "feudalism"—the economic system whose basis is the private ownership of Nature.

Land is not capital, in Economics.

These design choices are not caused by any real constraints of land area in cities, but by the land area constraints placed upon communities by our prevailing systems of private land ownership, which confine development into discrete parcels and make coordination of development virtually impossible, if not merely extremely impracticable.

These are not physical constraints or even economic constraints, they are political constraints only, that do not implicate human rights; they can be altered.

America has become overwhelmed by what Ray Delahanty (City Nerd) calls "Rural Cosplay".

This falsely manufactured sense of rural identity politics has completely skewed most Americans' perceptions of our nation, our history, and our selves.

In reality, the so-called "American Dream" as most of us understand it, is a marketing project of the 1950s, not "deeply embedded in our nation's history and traditions", nor is it "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q_BE5KPp18

The reason people fail to understand this is because they think of Feudalism as a political system, not an economic system.

But, politics and economics are merely two sides of the same coin. Feudal power derives from the ownership of Nature, and it is that power over land which makes feudal lords their own governments—monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a territory is the very definition of "government".

The American Revolution did not destroy Feudalism, it only gave us new masters.

@kludgekml @hart It's not hard to find an anachronism, either.

You do realize that there are no sailboats currently operating in the international oceangoing shipping trade, right? You do realize that even if we were to go hog wild building sailboats, they could in no wise carry the tonnage that the global market currently depends upon, right?

It's not the 18th Century, anymore, sirrah.

@hart "If we switched to renewable energy", the number of ships crossing the ocean would fall by approximately 100%, because ships don't cross the ocean on renewable energy.

@Zimme83 @hart There's always one doofus who shows up with a tall ship. You do realize that there are no sailboats currently operating in the international oceangoing shipping trade, right? You do realize that even if we were to go hog wild building sailboats, they could in no wise carry the tonnage that the global market currently depends upon, right?

@skinnylatte One of the things about being an Asian person in America is that the concentration of people of Asian descent varies widely across the country, and in areas where Asian Americans are populous, we are treated very differently to how we are treated in regions where we are rare.

The peculiar demographics of Asian Americans also mean there is wide income disparity. Some of us are among the very affluent, others among the very poor.

@skinnylatte In America, we can at the same time have a social movement like "Stop Asian Hate" in the wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, at the same time as we have extremely privileged Asians allowing themselves to be used as stalking horses by white supremacists and other fascists, suing institutions of higher education to end Affirmative Action, because they are mad about Black Americans being offered seats at Harvard, which they feel have been unjustly denied to their little dumpling darlings.

@mattround @fraying Why is it always some dudebro with an anime girl profile and a userid with something like "yuri" in it?? Obvious *chan basement dweller troll is obvious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Experiments_Lain

@whitequark We started phasing out lead in gasoline in 1972. We still call it unleaded gasoline.

@youronlyone At least I know that my female GenX cousins in the PH are perfectly fine with LGBT people. Probably most of my GenX male cousins, too, or at least the ones I'm in touch with on SMS. It's the older ones that tend to be more conservative. Most of my female cousins are unmarried and are unlikely to ever get married.

My father's family is from Anda, Bohol, but a lot of my family lives in Calamba and/or Metro Manila. If I ever decide to move to the PH to retire, it will be near them.

@youronlyone What I mean by the social aspect is that I am a queer woman and a vocally anti-Roman Catholic atheist. There are aspects of our modern culture that make me deeply uncomfortable. Politically, I am on the left, and that puts me at odds with the Marcos and DDS crowd. My family is a politically active family in Bohol, but my politics do not necessarily agree with those of my extended family.

@youronlyone I have had almost all those problems in the US, too. What concerns me most about possibly moving to the PH is the political, economic, and social climate, not the weather and tectonic activity. But the PH is likely my only option if I find the US becomes too dangerous, since I have dual citizenship rights.

The #Fairphone is very interesting, but it’s not available in any meaningful sense in the US, one of the most lucrative markets—if not the largest market—in the world.

With Google’s recent announcement that they will no longer be providing device trees for Pixel phones, my plan to switch from my now 4.5 year old 2020 iPhone SE2 to a Pixel running @GrapheneOS might be in some doubt. We need alternatives to Apple, Google, and Samsung that aren’t entirely controlled by the CCP/PRC.

@skinnylatte @avuko Also, beer in the EU and Asia commonly comes in 355 mL bottles. Why? Because that is the metric equivalent of 12 US fluid ounces, which has been a global standard for a very long time.

@skinnylatte @avuko One of the items that sticks out is the fact that even in the EU, mechanics' socket wrenches all use US standard drive sizes: 1/4", 3/8", 1/2". The sockets themselves are metric, but the ratcheting drive is SAE (the US Society of Automotive Engineers, which developed the standard). In the US, we use mostly metric tools, now. Very few things are still made using the older SAE standards.

@skinnylatte That isn't really true, though. Most of the rest of the world does business with the US and UK and is very well familiar with our standards. Even in the EU, there are still things that are measured by US units, rather than metric measurements.

@skinnylatte Haha, that's exactly the reverse of all of us who grew up with US customary measurements. Half a pound is 8 ounces, and if you suggest to someone that they order "225 g" of something, it feels wildly over complicated.

The metric system has zero relationship to human scale.