BrightFadedDog

Lemmy is trying to help stop me procrastinating and refusing to let me log in to my Aussie.zone account on the computer. I’m going to show it that my procrastination cannot be stopped so easily and clean out the cat litter tray. The things we do when we should be studying. 🤣

I vote we officially name the spinny thing the Spinny Wheel of Deletion.

“> insert Spinny erasor comment here>”

How different stoves work for you partly depends on what types of things you cook, but there are also a lot of variations in how crappy standard electric stoves are.

I’ve used old coil stoves that were not that bad, but my mother’s new glass topped thing was so awful I learnt not to even try cooking some dishes. If you needed to brown anything you had to put the pan on for a 10-15 minute preheat to get anywhere near hot enough, then if you needed to reduce the heat to simmer it was best to just move to another burner if you could because it would take 5+ minutes to cool down. The top heat was just enough to brown something if you left it a long time and did not crowd the pan, but doing something like searing a steak or making a stir-fry just wasn’t possible.

But then I’ve also used gas stoves that are hard to work with and don’t have much control over the temperature - even my current stove I tend to switch burners to accommodate different heat levels better. So I guess a lot comes down to having the right specific stove to meet your requirements, more than being just a gas vs. electric issue. Having previously believed I’d never want anything other than gas I have been pretty impressed by the portable induction cooker I’ve been trying out, and I’m sure a better quality model would suit me for pretty much everything.

Oh, of course. Poor people just need to get enough money to own property and build everything required to create an autonomous society.

You have a wildly different definition of poverty to me.

What you are proposing is that “poor people” should all band together and create a new separate society, which is basically communist. Like some sort of left-wing Sovereign Citizen movement.

One big problem with this concept is that you cannot create a new separate economics whilst living in wider society. You still need to live somewhere, and you will need to pay the landlord with money. You will need to pay the electricity bill with money. You will still need to use joint facilities like roads, and the State is not going to happily provide all that to you for free, they will be looking at your new little economy and working out exactly how to value it to send you a tax bill.

While you are dealing with all of these issues, you also have to deal with the people within the group. How are you running it and making sure it is fair? It takes a massive amount of work to manage something like this on even a small scale. So you will need some sort of tax on transactions so that the people putting the time in to running it can be covered. Who is actually going to join if everyone’s time is valued equally - it will be a great deal for people whose skills are not valued on wider society, but a bad one for anyone with more valuable skills. So you won’t end up with a wide skill set involved, and can’t cover the requirements to do everything needed. So for example if you found a farmer who wanted to provide all their produce through this scheme, you could not provide the resources they need to produce and transport the produce. There is a massive difference between “making food” (ie, working at McDonalds) and actually creating food.

Plus what happens when things go wrong? When the person you arranged to come over to help you with something falls and hurts themselves, or they do substandard work that damages your property? Is your mutual aid group providing some sort of insurance coverage? Do you have some sort of dispute resolution process to mediate problems?

Having a strong community that supports members and shares resources can definitely be a good thing, and help to improve the lives of everyone involved. But “quit your shitty job and create a mutual aid network” is not at all a viable path to prosperity (or even to survival).