bitsplease

Where else is there to go if you want a mobile friendly link aggregator?

Hell, even if you're liberal in a lot of corners in this site

Big "avacado toast" energy lol

Was the point to make money? I figured it was just a publicity stunt/tourism draw

I started during COVID for practical reasons, but it's so simple and quick I don't think I'll ever go back - I just grabbed a $40 pair of plug in Wahl clippers and I've probably saved myself at least a grand by now in haircuts

I've definetely saved myself many purchases with my 3d printer, but I definetely think I've spent more on filament for dumb/fun prints than I've saved with practical ones lol - especially when I'm designing my own shit and need to prototype, I've gone through entire rolls just iterating on a single design until I get something I'm happy with..

That being said, it's all in how you use it!

Eating healthy

For some reason the general consensus is that eating healthy is expensive - probably because when people think about eating healthy, they're often thinking about Whole Foods type shit.

My wife and I have been losing weight over these last few months (40lbs down!) and one of the biggest things I noticed besides the number on the scale was how much less we were spending on food.

For one, you'll generally eat out less, because most of the really tempting restaurant options aren't that healthy

For another veggies, legumes, etc are cheap af, and those make up a huge part of a healthy diet. We buy our veggies in bulk from costco each week save a ton compared to when we'd be loading our carts with butter/cheese, fatty/sugary snack foods, and other r junk

We also just plain eat less, what we used to eat in a night now stretches to two nights, which means fewer trips to the grocery store.

We do eat more lean proteins (mainly chicken and fish) to bump our protein ratios up, and we buy protein powders and whatnot, but even accounting for all that, we're still saving a lot of money compared to our old habits

The less centralised things are the less vulnerable they are

I'm sorry, but how do you arrive at that conclusion? If I roll in with a giant, powerful military from my centralized state, how does being less centralized make your position easier to defend? The less centralized you are, the less capable of a coordinated defense you are, and the more likely it is that your territory will be conquered without being able to present a meaningful resistance.

And if you were referring to an internal threat from a populist leader, then that's assuming that the individuals involved don't let said populist leader make them more centralized for easier control - if you're just relying on the individuals always making the right decisions, then frankly you're doomed.

they're guaranteed to hold on to it for very long

Absolutely, and judging by history the typically dont. But a wannabe tyrant can do a lot of damage through their rise and fall, and tyrants have descendants.

, if you're interested then there is a lot of ink spilled on the subject. Either from the perspective of actually existing anarchists or theoretical books.

And I'm sorry but "just devoted weeks/months of your life to read anarchist literature" isn't a replacement for an actual rebuttal to my points, I have done some reading on anarchism, hence why I understand the concepts well enough to talk about them, but of course I'm not going to spend huge amounts of time reading up on a political system that I think is fundamentally flawed, and I've yet to come across any argument in your comments or others that actually negates any of what I've already said, most of it boils down to "we'll just figure it out bro, trust us"

The history of the Spanish civil war might be quite interesting to you, as the anarchists had to fight the strongly backed fascists, obviously eventually they lost but they did pretty damn well! lots to learn there.

Completely irrelavent scenario (and if it was relavent, the fact that they lost would support my point), the Republicans of the Spanish Civil War weren't from an anarchist society (nor were they all anarchists). They were residents of a non anarchist society who rebelled, using existing infrastructure created by the existing non-anarchist society.

The closest real analogue is what happened to the native Americans during the colonization (though even that is a very loose analogue, as many tribes were very very far from anarchic, though some were very very close to it), and we all know how that ended from our history books.

Ultimately this is the core problem as I see it - a hierarchical society will always be militarily stronger, practically by definition - and if history has taught us anything, it's that weak neighbors get eaten by their stronger neighbors.

Additionally I think most of these idealized community structures are overly optimistic about the likelihood of a charismatic leader coming along and getting people to follow them, and then not letting them withdraw that power. Anarchists talk about hierarchies without formal power structures, but what is actually stopping someone whose already effectively in charge from turning that power into something more permanent, especially if they've convinced the populace that they want that?

Its happened an endless amount of times all throughout history, and I really don't see why it wouldn't here. Ultimately it just seems like a fragile system that relies mostly on every single individual being perfectly rational and immune to the draw of populist leaders. Aka - completely unlike actual humans

Irrelevant, since my critique actually has nothing to do with Ukraine, but about constitutions in general.

So you're advocating for him to break the constitution he was elected to uphold, to hold an election that would have to be incomplete and unfair - all so that you, a person who isn't even a Ukrainian can feel better about the situation? Despite the fact that there's no call for this from the actual Ukranian public?

That's certainly an opinion to have lol

So, in your opinion - in order for Zelensky to not be a dictator, he has to break all the existing rules of law in order to completely replace the existing constitution? And he should be allowed to do this unilaterally? And this would make him not a dictator? He's not a fucking monarch dude, he's the elected head of state - he doesn't have supreme authority to do whatever the fuck he feels like.

The foundation of democracy is the idea that our elected officials have to abide by the rules of law that are already in place, including (and especially) those laws that concern how other laws are made. Otherwise any elected official could just declare themselves the new supreme ruler and toss out every law that limits their power.

And that's all putting aside the question of how you would even hold an election in war ravaged Ukraine right now, a significant portion of which is under hostile occupation lol

You really don't need any AI (assuming you mean LLMs like ChatGPT) to bot the shit out of Eve - the way the game fundamentally functions makes it dead simple to bot (it's not like WoW where you have to deal with pathfinding or positioning for combat) - you could write a mining bot in a weekend, and it's dead hard to catch because "normal" mining basically looks indistinguishable from botting