josh's harp @joshsharp@mastodon.social

🧠 🖊

le guin fills this icy planet with life and myth and familiar human spirits and specters, those of ambition and authority, compassion and faith, patience and prejudice. she’s so good at worldbuilding!

it’s striking how many of her settings are anarchic in nature: driven by custom more than law, possessed of loose and interlocking authorities. she infuses the world with nuance, granting even Winter’s desolation a mystic vibrancy.

without capitalism we wouldn’t have all these great innovations like uber, uber for hotels, uber for delivery food, and uber for ambulances

There's no law that says there can only be one NASA. I've got my own NASA.

Never
Authorized
Slingshot
Aeronautics

We just build giant slingshots and on the day we find a big enough rubber band, we're launching my step-dad to Mars. (He's excited about it.)

I would like to learn how to make friends as an adult without, preferably, leaving my house and if possible without meeting new people.

No one needs to starve. No one needs to freeze. No one needs to die. There is enough for everyone. More empty homes than all the people without them, more food than grocers can even sell. The labor and the materials to end scarcity exist now. It is not a far-off dream. We can end scarcity in this life.

PROFESSOR: so tell me why are you all are taking this class on social media?
EVERYONE: *some variation on “I like instagram and want a job”*
ME: I’m interested in the ways social media allow companies to assert ownership over organically formed communities… *tents fingers* and how to put a stop to that
PROFESSOR (nervous): …ok

another thing i want to work on is creating an economic network inside the fediverse.

by this, i don’t mean something like bitcoin or some other method of value exchange, but instead solving a more fundamental problem.

the fediverse is largely comprised of people who have small businesses (like bespoke commissions, etsy stores, small companies, etc.), but we don’t have any way of discovering who can sell or provide what you’re looking for.

i want to try to find solutions to this problem — keeping $ flowing inside the fediverse, from participant to participant, helps indirectly to fund fediverse development: if there’s more $ flowing inside the fediverse, then there’s more opportunity for that $ to make it into the hands of the people building the network. also, keeping the $ inside the fediverse helps to more directly benefit fediverse participants in general. it’s a good situation for everyone.

keeping more of the $$$ inside the fediverse is a very early step toward building a self-reliant fediverse, which contributes to the eventual death of the nation-state.