Be wary of anyone who argues the poor should go without food or protection from the elements, regardless of what flimsy justification they give for their cruelty; the most dangerous to each of us are those who appeal to our own beliefs.

The OP here isn't describing a hypothetical - folks are prosecuted for doing these sorts of things, just like folks occasionally get prosecuted for breaking & entering. If that goes away, we're left with the impossible task of creating unbreakable windows or - far more likely - we don't get to have nice things.

These are also the folks this law is actually aimed at. So mission accomplished...

You will find that SciFi has been mostly social commentary for quite a long time; what tends to throw us is familiarity!

In the US, a charge on your bank card results in at least a hold on your bank account - money you can't spend on anything else until the hold is lifted. Worst-case, there can be significant fees associated with this (overdraft, declined payments, etc.).

For most of us, that's a much bigger problem than a debt we may or may not end up paying interest on.

From personal experience, getting a credit card company to quickly resolve fraud cases is also much easier than getting a bank to do the same, even when it's ultimately the same institution.

Naturally, it's possible to take this too far; letting the conversation flow naturally before occasionally snapping back to the agenda is both more enjoyable and often more productive.

...this is also a common podcast format.

I have never heard the phrase "private podcast" used in this sense before (vs the group / company internal sense), but... I kinda like it; sets up some potential useful expectations!

The UK already went down this road years ago - cameras everywhere, public restrooms nowhere, prompt and automatic ticketing for parking violations but precious little in the way of assistance from humans should you need it. The shut-in dotage of a former empire too afraid to leave its house.

This is when co-mingling becomes actively dangerous. New members may (often, will) lack the necessary knowledge to identify core vs. fringe beliefs, to contextualize debates, to recognize insider "shorthand" for what it is, etc. They need (and are possibly even looking for) a useful education, not to become test subjects or disciples. They _cannot_ be engaging in useful research at this stage, even if this is what they wish to do (there are some unfortunate status-seeking behaviors that can come into play here).

Also coming with this scale are a crap-ton of meta discussions concerning basic community governance, including those around "how quickly do we have to kick out crackpots to keep them from recruiting here?" Those discussions _also_ shouldn't be co-mingled with the educational structure, although it's good for new folks to have some visibility into them and at least know that this sort of governance _exists_ in a tangible way (because if it's opaque, that thing you noted about crackpots playing victim becomes a LOT more effective).

This is all a huge amount of boring, tedious work, and... An awful lot of communities start in on it waaaay too late or don't bother at all. What if it stops being fun and exciting and everyone leaves? Of course, there are worse ways to go, but folks tend not to think about those until after they've happened.

It's not very different. It's barely different at all.

Right now, I have five tomato plants growing in my garden. Two of them I planted; the other three grew from seeds left in the ground by tomatoes that dropped from plants growing last year. All I did was refuse to uproot them when they sprouted. Five healthy plants, with different origins, but the differences are largely insignificant.

Groups and behaviors are much the same way. I've worked with hundreds of moderators over the years who wished to keep their hands clean and yet express some sort of dismay as to the sorry state of the communities they were nominally responsible for... Such moderators, like a gardener who does not want dirt under their nails, are best encouraged to find other hobbies.

I replaced it all with 9kW worth of panels (about $3k, shipped) on 4 simple 60° ground mounts, normal wiring and appliances. Angle is optimized for early spring / late fall - there's effectively no sun in winter, and the rest of the year I have excess power even with fixed, sub-optimal angles.

The diminished cost of panels alone over the past 20 years has transformed "off-grid" from a pastime for wealthy hippies into a reasonable solution for remote living.

Power-hungry laptops are trickier, but even so... I've gone a week or more trickle charging a laptop from whatever travel charger I happened to have on hand, using it for a few hours, then putting it in standby and charging it up again until finally the mfg-blessed replacement fast charger arrived. The alternative (and one I was faced with more than once in the bad old days) was "no laptop".

Worst experience I've had to date has been a Norco jump box that will charge via one high-power charger and one cable, a car charger it came with, and ... Via careful back feeding from a benchtop power supply.

The people you know may be obtaining it from less reliable apothecaries; that can be a real issue.

All three preservation techniques are practiced today as they have been since antiquity. It is not clear to me where food so preserved are likely to fall on the processed / ultra-processed spectrum...

If you have options when choosing food, a framework that helps you choose the better option is useful. The history of food production is mostly centered around developing options that provide, as a baseline, the three advantages you casually dismiss.

Otherwise you're just playing the same game of Humpty Dumpty.

Was your point that owning the steel companies is the path to riches even when most of the railroads fail?

It also doesn't work very well then either.

FWIW, I'm not arguing for either. I think it's pretty obvious this is 100% market manipulation and consequences be damned. In that light, this approach is working very well, just not towards an end that benefits most of us.

Whether or not actual mental deficiency is involved here is irrelevant; the strategy is the same whether performed intentionally or otherwise. Unfortunately, its track record is dismal in both cases.

However, this also highlights the primary difference between weed and meth, opiates: ease of manufacturing. The only other common drugs that come close are things like mushrooms and fermented beverages, and I'd argue both of those are still riskier.