but a lot of the demand can be met by buying used stuff

Firstly, the covid pandemic was a multi year event.

The initial shocks happened in the first 3 months.

Secondly, publicly traded companies were enriched greatly from that time. Also it wasn’t conscious degrowth or a lack of ability, it was supply chain issues that caused products not to be available for purchase.

Yup, that’s why the control here is in the consumers’ hand and again, it’s sort of like reducing your consumption so it starts hitting the metrics enough for corporations to realize the risks.

I already barely buy shit. I’ve always said “if the economy hinged on my purchasing habit, the country would go bankrupt”.

well, you’re already part of the movement:)

should all buy less and be more mindful of where our money goes. I think we should buy locally and promote businesses that you agree with on levels beyond the value of the good or services they offer as often as possible. However, I don’t think we can effectively protest this way unless it was a true lifestyle change for a large portion of the country.

I’d disagree, we saw it with COVID how vulnerable corporations are. They’ll always focus on stock buybacks and stuff like that over recession-proofing. Also, this is quite an equitable movement. Those who can’t afford new shit are already contributing to it.

We could even make an app that shows stephen miller, steve bannon, or one of the dogeshits talk whenever people got tempted to buy shit.

Ask yourself what that means to business contracts which depend on those laws to be guaranteed,

Agree. If they feel the rules of engagement can be changed unilaterally, we can show that this can go both ways.

n the strike is over. If the company can anticipate well enough, they’d raise prices when the demand comes back and come out ahead in the long run.

You have to use/consume less, and for an extended time period, not just change when that purchase happens.

But yes, with that caveat, use less, and choose the lesser evil when you do need to buy something. The individual effect is small, but small things add up.

The mitigation is to focus on used goods so it is much less painful. Unlike gas, people don’t need that new TV, or that next phone, gaming console, their Nth streaming sub and use alternative (wink) ways to consume entertainment media.

Yup, delayed consumption would be the most likely outcome, but that’s not necessarily a problem if people can apply this pressure in a meme-like fashion. It’s sorta like the gamestop squeeze.

Also the immediate personal pain could be mitigated by buying used stuff.

I think this energy density math really depends on whether only the core or the whole surface area is taken into consideration.

A headline without calling it an “Artificial Sun”?!

the more specialized the workforce, the harder it is to overcome staffing limitations. for example, in Italy, there’s a huge physician shortage (at least when I lived in Europe there was). You won’t fix that with simply changing the management culture.

So many assumptions…

1. You assume that there aren’t life or death exceptions/emergencies (see my updated post above).
2. You assume that I only practiced medicine in the USA
3. You assume that US hospitals run like businesses (private insurance companies, most hospitals don’t)
4. You assume doctors, especially subspecialists grow on trees.

Headline reads: “i turned off ALL notifications forever”.

My take: there exist people who can’t do that.

Your take: US bad.

My take: not a US-specific issue.

Your take: please describe your call schedule in detail because your claim is unusual.

Thank you, but no thank you.

I use an IP phone for calls that you can switch off. The paging system is a whole 'nother story.

it’s neither a US- nor a profession-specific issue. it’s an issue of any high-stakes, relatively niche occupation.

That idea of yours would be perfectly fine if it was just you, but it isn’t: it’s you and all other people who think like you

Definitely not an “idea of mine”. That’s the US experience (I’m a doctor here). The US’s most common electronic medical record system developed a secure messenger app that replaced pagers so yeah for outpatient work most of the time-critical messaging goes through your cell. So no, I can’t be on DND 24/7. (I do have very aggressively tweaked work/personal/etc notification settings, but sometimes the urgent messages do need to come through after hours)

if they are doing outpatient work, they don’t. even worse, the paging systems migrated to cell phones.

sauce: am doctor

Headlines like this are annoying AF. You wouldn’t want your doctor keeping their phone on DND 24/7.

Edit: I didn’t expect people to need examples, but here you go, something that happened to me few months ago:

23:21 - my IP phone rings, I’m literally about to go to sleep but I set this specific type of call to come through. I recognize the number and I know it’s an emergency so I pick it up. A patient’s family calling about them being in their local ER and the ER physician is about to pull the plug on my patient. I spend the next hour yelling at the ER physician to do his fucking job, frantically arranging a transfer. Next day afternoon, I’m having a full conversation with my patient in our hospital. If I didn’t fight for this person, and let this go through the regular channels, they would have died.

My comment isn’t primarily about work culture or work/life balance. There are some calls that you take because it’s the right thing. Advice from people who claim they can turn off all notifications just tells me two things, 1) they don’t know how notification scheduling works 2) they aren’t the kind of people that others ever rely on in an emergencies.

One of the interesting energy capture ideas I’ve seen with Solar and wind is based on kinetic potential energy in high-rise buildings. So you build a sort of heavy weight elevator that is elevated during windy and sunny hours and then it slowly gets released and gravity driven friction generating energy.

This coupled with solar windows and it’s a pretty neat idea (not sure how viable though)

Edit: examples: https://spectrum.ieee.org/gravity-energy-storage-elevators-skyscrapers

that was an edgy idea in the book, but stuff like that happens in ecological systems all the time. I read the book around the time of the election, and it read like a manifesto to justify oligarchic takeover as the next phase of human development (see the part how societal rules where assigned to the government and how the internet will take it back)