Green roofs do need more support. But think of it by percentages. A one-story house is going to need significantly more structural stability than a normal house if it wants to support a green roof. If your building is already built to support 10-20 stories, the additional weight (and cost) of the green roof and the reinforcement underneath is not as big a concern.

Personally, I would prefer solar panels on roofs and green spaces on the ground where the public can enjoy their benefits. But more green is better than less.

I have another tip!

Michael Pollan has a dictum for health: eat “real food”. And by “real food” he means food containing only ingredients your great-grandmother would recognize.

(Or someone else’s great-grandmother in some other region/culture, if you’re eating food from somewhere else. Food you’d see on a farm or in a market before the rise of industrial food processing, is the point.)

A way to do that in a modern supermarket is “shop the edges” - do most of your shopping in the produce section, the bakery, for non-vegans the meat and deli sections, the fresh unprocessed food sections that are located on the edges of the building in a typical American grocery. Then duck into the middle of the store for staples like rice and beans and oil and stay far away from the frozen food section.

And when you do that - when you avoid pre-processed food, buy fresh ingredients, and make your own food - it’s easier to eat vegan because you control every ingredient that goes into your food. Your food will not have mysterious chemicals that may or may not be animal derived. Your food will just be food.

And not only will you be eating more ethically, you’ll end up a lot healthier.

Vegan meat substitutes are still fairly healthy compared to actual meat.

I agree, although that’s more a function of how unhealthy meat is than how healthy meat substitutes are.

And I think there’s a significant difference between traditional meat substitutes, like tofu and wheat gluten, and modern meat substitutes like impossible burgers, with high levels of sodium and saturated fat and chemical binders and industrial processing and so on.

Congratulations!

My two best tips are:

If you remove non-vegan ingredients from non-vegan recipes without adding anything else, or substitute vegan meat/cheese/dairy for the real thing, you’ll always think something’s off because it’s never going to be exactly the same. And meat substitutes that are highly processed to try and match the texture and flavor of meat are as bad for you as highly processed anything else.

So my recommendation is: practice cooking recipes that are naturally vegan. There are a lot of vegan dishes in Indian and Chinese cuisine, for instance. There are old recipes from before factory farming when meat was for special occasions instead of every day.

Pizza is flatbread with sauce and toppings, and there are a ton of naturally vegan flatbread recipes. Experiment. Go wild. I’m not telling you not to try vegan cheese, but also try pizza dough with (eg) pesto, shallots, and four different kinds of mushrooms, and see how that goes 🍕 🍕

My second tip is: forgive yourself if you slip.

Food is an addiction. And I mean this quite literally. Fat is psychologically addictive, sugar is psychologically addictive, meat is psychologically addictive. Millions of people in the West don’t feel a meal is complete without a meat dish - by which I mean they literally don’t feel full unless they know they ate meat. I was one of them. It took months before I could finish a vegan meal and not still feel hungry after.

Doing the right thing is hard when the world wants you to do the wrong thing and your body agrees with it.

So if you have cravings you can’t beat and go buy a pizza - forgive yourself and promise yourself to do better tomorrow.

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The form factor is the problem. We carry a propaganda faucet slash ad delivery service with us 24-7-365, we check it obsessively for a quick dopamine fix throughout the day, and we have convinced ourselves this is good for us.

Low margins just means big corporations have th advantage, because they make profit through volume.

If renting wasn’t profitable at all, landlords wouldn’t rent.

And in many cases they don’t. Which is one reason why ten percent of US houses are vacant.

But that misses the point, which is that housing should not be a for-profit industry.

If you repair a house, if you maintain a house, if you renovate a house, you have the right to be paid for your labor. Any profit you “earn” from rental payments, above that amount, is money you didn’t earn - it’s money you were able to extort from your tenants because you have a piece of paper saying you own the house and your tenants do not.

Whether a landlord makes $1 profit or $10000 profit, that profit is still “earned” by collecting rent on property, not by creating any value for anyone.

Housing is a human right. And rent collection is theft.

Thank you for reading it!

The United States was preparing in advance for bad actors like Trump since 1787 and it didn’t fucking help.

A managed economy could happen and would be highly efficient, especially because running a nation is a collective endeavour. Individuals fail but groups have memory.

Yeah. Imagine how prosperous the United States would be if the current administration was running it as a managed economy.

If we can’t dream big, all we can do is maintain the status quo. And the status quo kind of sucks.

One in ten houses in the US are vacant.

https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-vacant-homes-are-there-in-the-us/

“Society” has more than enough housing. We just distribute it poorly.

The idea is, we abolish the concept of private property, but retain the concept of personal property.

Personal property being stuff that’s used by one person, or ome family, or one small group, and ownership rights come from that use.

So a car would be the personal property of the driver or drivers who use it - the same as a computer or microwave or toothbrush would be the personal property of the person or people who used it. You drive it, you fuel it, you repair it, and that’s what makes it yours.

How to produce and distribute goods (like houses and cars and toothbrushes) without a system of private property, purchase, and ownership is a major site of leftist contention 😆

As always, the poor are human shields for the rich.

Believe it or not, people on the left have been discussing this for centuries.

The general idea is recognizing a right to “personal property”, which you get from using something, instead of the capitalist idea of “private property”, which you get from buying something.

Currently in Western capitalist societies, if a rich person buys fifty houses, he owns fifty houses; he can live in one and collect rent from the other forty-nine, or leave the other forty-nine vacant, or tear them down to build a statue to himself, as he chooses.

In a society without private property, that rich person could only own one house - the house he lives in - because he lives in it and uses it. The people who live in and use the other forty-nine houses would own those. And the land underneath the houses would be owned by nobody, but belong collectively to the community.

Landlords hate this idea.

Here’s a really super basic summary:

https://www.workers.org/private-property/

And here’s a long complicated discussion:

https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/anarchism-and-private-property

do you guys just enjoy joking about it all?

Yes.

Morale matters.

Humor is a weapon.

Preaching to the choir is an important part of a pastor’s job - because who wants to hear the Word more than true believers do?

Online circlejerks are powerful community building tools - they reaffirm true believers’ loyalty, strengthen the commitment of moderates, and expose visiting lurkers to the movement’s perspective and the passion of its members.

Let’s not forget how racist circlejerks on FB and Reddit and the chans memed Trump into office in 2016.

Jerking about problems can’t be all a movement does, of course - but an online movement that doesn’t share memes, and in-jokes, and news that supports it, and similar kinds of community building, is dead on the ground.

As usual when it comes to climate impact, the US will be fine. Three out of every four calories of corn is used to make ethanol or feed animals, both of which are ridiculously inefficient uses. Hell, corn syrup is in everything because the US grows so much more corn than it needs that we practically give away the corn syrup.

Soybeans are even less efficient - less than 3% of the American soybean crop is actually eaten by human beings, despite soybeans being a complete vegetable protein and one of the healthiest foods out there.

In other words, the United States could lose 9/10ths of the land growing corn and soybeans and still feed itself with plenty to spare.

All that land is only under cultivation at all because the United States can’t stand the idea of giving up one foot of the land it stole in the name of manifest destiny. Because if we weren’t using land for corn and beans in the Midwest or grazing cattle in the Great Plains, people might start asking why not give it back to the indigenous peoples we stole it from.

So yeah, America will be fine.

It’s the rest of the world that’s going to suffer for America’s climate crimes.

Taking away a billionaire’s private jet, as cool as that would be, won’t cut your electric bill. Shitty Euro bakery curtains will 😆

I agree. Biden’s presidency was the biggest lost opportunity of my lifetime for exactly that reason.

FDR responded to a similar global challenge - the Great Depression - by transforming the American government to serve the needs of struggling Americans - and the American people rewarded his courage and vision with overwhelming support when he ran for his second term.

Biden? Barely tried to improve America. And everything he tried failed. He couldn’t even reduce student loan payments. And when Harris had the opportunity to break with him and fight for her own vision of what America could be, she either had no vision of her own or was too afraid to fight for it.

The American “left” is terrified to promote anything more than a return to the Obama-era status quo. But if they don’t find their vision and courage the United States is guaranteed one party Republican rule for another generation.

I cannot say I agree, and I think I recall that some indicators currently suggest we’d need about 3 planets to keep going at the same pace.

The back of the envelope calculation says if everybody on Earth lived like an average American we’d need the resources of about four Earths to cover it:

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33133712

That being said, from the same source, if everyone on Earth lived like an average Indian we’d only use half the Earth’s resources and could support twice as many people.

So it’s not about the number of people - it’s about the standard of living those people have and the resources they use.

I think the most effective way forward is more efficient and sustainable lifeways - if the richest countries learn to consume less, if people around the world get access to better technology and better institutions to raise their standard of living without raising their resource consumption.

And it’s interesting to note, the better off people are, the fewer children they tend to have. If we improve people’s lives worldwide, a steadily declining population will be a natural side effect.

An incredibly difficult goal, of course, but worth pursuing.