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Er... I got an electric car does that count? Based on $ keeping the old car is cheaper. Also divestment, purchase choices, charity donations, solar install.
by uberex 4mo ago
Er... I got an electric car does that count? Based on $ keeping the old car is cheaper. Also divestment, purchase choices, charity donations, solar install.
- Gibbon1 4mo agoBuying electric cars, installing solar, and switching to heat pumps are one of the few things you can materially do to screw the powers that be. The the other one is limiting your family size.
- gchamonlive 4mo agoThe only thing you can do to hurt the powers that be is not buying.
- pepperoni_pizza 4mo agoDepends on which powers for each specific choice. Electric cars don't run on Saudi-Trump-Putin juice, so they're pretty good step in screwing those, for example.
- Gibbon1 4mo agoThe difference between solar+batteries and oil and gas is the former is a durable good and latter are consumables.
- numpad0 4mo agoI think producing and consuming like crazy could also work, considering how quickly Twitter turned Elon Musk from most important to least interesting figure on Earth. Wealth and sensory capacity don't appear to be positively correlated at all.
- seba_dos1 4mo agoCan be done too. I live in a rather big city, so I don't own a car, as I can perfectly go by using public transport.
- retired 4mo agoOnly if you limit your work and social life to that particular city. Not something most people want to do.
- IneffablePigeon 4mo agoThere are many places in the world this is not true. I would say about half the people I know who live in London don’t own a car. They travel plenty - probably more than the people I know who don’t live in London. If they really need a car once they get to their destination they will rent one, or use taxis.
- retired 4mo agoFor The Netherlands you are really constricted to the city you live in if you don’t own a car. You can forget about going to a concert, a birthday party or catching an early flight without one. Or if you want to do anything fun on a Sunday in the east. Most people I know have a social life or do sports that require a car. If your children play football you really need a car. Last time I used a taxi in The Netherlands it was €210 for a 40 minute ride, that is reserved for the very wealthy. London is a well connected metropole with 15 million people, not really comparable to most cities. Edit, reply to Alex as I am rate limited with my comments: Please tell me how I can cycle the 60 kilometers from the airport to my home at 23:00 with a rolling carry-on suitcase. Renting a car is around €50 for a night out. And you need to reserve way in advance which is not great for spontaneous trips. Car ownership becomes cheaper and more convenient very quickly. I did car renting and after a couple of €1000/month bills I went back to car ownership. Renting a bus for the sports team is a lot more expensive than using the parents cars which are at no cost to the club. Reply to consp: You need the cars for football matches as public transport doesn’t get you there. The fields are outside of cities and matches are in the weekend when public transport is very limited.
- inigyou 4mo agoThere are things that could hurt them a lot more than ignoring them.
- JKCalhoun 4mo agoYou're being coy. Perhaps someone should clarify though that most of us are looking for legal means to rattle the shackles of our (Tr/B)illionaire overlords.
- badpun 4mo agoLegally, you can do a lot more than ignoring. If you have any talent for it, becoming an activist (say a youtuber) rallying people against whatever you believe is bad, can be pretty powerful. A single person (again, with some talent for public speaking etc.) has a real chance of making meaningful change this way.
- inigyou 4mo agoRallying people to do what? Boycotts? They have some effect, but never enough. The most influential YouTuber I can think of is Louis Rossmann, and you know, he's not a YouTuber, he's a MacBook repair guy who took up YouTube.
- badpun 4mo agoNo, not boycotts. The influencial youtubers I think of actually can shape political debate and thus policy - what they say, if it gains enough popularity, sometimes seeps into the political agenda of the ruling party (which is always looking to "score points" with the voters and has its ears to the ground listening which issues and points people are currently responding to). It's basically like being a columnist of an influential newspaper, except you don't need to have the right connections to become one.
- inigyou 4mo agoThe political establishment is savvy enough to score points on things they don't care about and ignore voters on things they do care about. That's why one party supports LGBTQ pride and the other opposes it, but they both support the genocide. LGBTQ pride doesn't really affect politicians' power, genocide does.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- tirant 4mo agoLimiting your family size is a lazy, short term solution. Having a bigger family and teaching them the right values is a much stronger and long term approach.
- onion2k 4mo agoIn a world where the brightest minds are paid to intentionally develop tools to make people betray their values (advertising, propaganda, rolling news, etc), I'm not sure anyone should feel safe about what they teach their kids. Many industries, but especially tech, will do everything possible to make them do whatever makes a few dozen people richer.
- inigyou 4mo agoThe best thing an individual can do against, say, the advertising industry, is to become an important person in an advertising marketplace and then destroy it. You spend 30 years to become CTO at Google and then you set the billing system to charge every customer $1,000,000, right before you drop an EMP in the biggest DC.
- venzaspa 4mo agoLimiting your family size has concrete outcomes, having a big family and hoping you can impart the right values so they go onto have an positive impact is no guaranteed. You can hope your child goes onto develop a fusion reactor that fits in a storage container but the likelyhood is they won't be. In my opinion it's a way to justify your own (perfectly fine) selfish desire to have a child.
- Gibbon1 4mo agoLarge family sizes dilute family wealth and leave children at a disadvantage to their better capitalized peers.
- kjkjadksj 4mo agoThe real eco hippies were fueling a 40 year old mercedes on fry oil. Powers that be want you to replace all sources of oil dependent product with another oil dependent product (after all, EVs depend on oil making plastic and grease a cheap commodity). They don’t want you to buy something they already sold to the unwashed masses decades ago. They want you to buy new thing. Never mind old thing still works.
- amanaplanacanal 4mo agoBuy a used EV, best of both worlds.
- weregiraffe 4mo agoNo, it doesn't. Your contribution is statistically insignificant. It was purely a symbolic gesture.
- Gud 4mo agoEven so, an electric car is not particularly good for the environment. Bicycles and public transportation.
- uberex 4mo agoBicycles and public transportation are better yes. If I were healthy enough I would consider a cargo bike and bring 20kg of shopping home on that (for real). It would be cool. Then buses for unladen journeys.
- tirant 4mo agoIf the cargo bike is electric, the threshold for healthy enough lowers significantly. My weekly shopping for a family of four is done on one like that, which I can park like 50cm away from the shop door and 50cm away from my home front door. That’s even more convenient than any car.
- retired 4mo agoI hope you understand that you are in a very privileged position to be able to afford that lifestyle. Not everyone can do that.