Adam Richard @adamrichard@qoto.org

At our latest philosophy night, I asked whether capitalism had instilled in us any ideas or mindsets that we accept without having questioned them. This is a question I was wondering about because I often hear people say that capitalism is the cause of the world's problems. Even though I consider myself a capitalist, I agree with them about many problems that they call capitalism, and I also want to root out any unquestioned beliefs or mindsets I may have in order to discard them if I realize I have no reason to hold them other than being trained to hold them. We didn't come up with a list of such beliefs at philosophy night but I've decided to try to brainstorm such a list of my own, so here it is. Please feel free to give suggestions to add to the list or feedback on the list. Do you think these ideas are good, bad or neither, and why?

* Get resources for myself (this is evolutionary and may be the primary source of the capitalist mindset, but gone haywire under industrialized society?).
* A person's success in life is determined by their wealth or salary (or signs of wealth, such as a bigger house or car or certain brands etc.).
* To get resources or to solve problems, go shopping (as opposed to making something, borrowing something, trying to figure out a solution, etc.),
* I have to go shopping and buy presents for the people in my life. If I don't, they'll think I don't care about them, or that I'm cold, etc.
* If I think of a good idea or an idea for a business or make something such as a book or work of art, then its value is what others are willing to trade for it. I should market it in order to make it well-known and popular.
* I need services which are provided by companies, and I pay for those services either with money or by consenting to ads or both.
* If I have a lot of free time, find a job or do something to be productive, i.e. do something that produces value.
* If I still have free time, buy entertainment products or services.
* If I have money, invest it to ensure that I'll have money to meet my needs in the future, since needs require money to meet. If I have a lot of money, protect it.
* Collect entertaining products or services to ensure I'll continue to be entertained or have access to them in the future (e.g. collections of all the best movies or books or games or shoes or collectible toys or artwork).
* As I gain wealth, increase my quality of life by replacing my things with newer, better things or things that look newer or better.
* Land is a resource. If I own it I should make use of it in the way that maximizes the wealth I get from it. If I don't own land then I can get resources by paying someone who does.
* If someone has done a favour for me, then I owe them a favour, and vice-versa.

Gatto, the famous educator who quit teaching to condemn the school system and won awards, made an important distinction between "networking" and "community" in his writings. A network is an impersonal resource, whereas a community is more personal, like a group of friends. For example, you have your professional network of people who are useful to you to do your job or to make income, vs your community of friends who you enjoy spending time with.

Although intended as a criticism of school (which is clearly a network, not a community), this distinction can also inform our idea of friendship in an important way. Gatto wrote before the days of Facebook, but his distinction was prophetic. Facebook is very obviously a network, not a community. No offense to any of you, but I don't count Facebook friends as friends - and I think everybody knows that. (How could anybody really have hundreds of friends?) Some of my Facebook friends are real friends, but even in that case, interacting with them on Facebook doesn't count as interacting as a community in my mind. When I send a friend request it's usually an indication that I'd like to *become* friends, and my friends list is friends + acquaintances, which is another word for "potential friends". The internet is a way to make plans to hang out in person, which is the legitimate community where friendships develop. Communicating solely online would usually be called "acquaintances" or "networking" in my view.

I have several close friends and have had many others throughout my life, with whom I spend time doing common interests together by choice. This is why school is a network, not a community - students aren't there by choice. The same is true of your workplace network, and is why I rarely become friends with co-workers. The friends I had as a child were not kids from a school math club or something like that, they were friends who I invited to my house and who invited me to their house in an unstructured way.

This is important because I think many people have lost community and replaced it with networks. Networks aren't bad, they have many uses. I prefer online banking rather than old fashioned bank tellers because I want my banking to be impersonal and automated and with as little human interaction as possible (precisely because my bank is not my community). Networks can even be useful to try to find new friends, but they can't replace community. When I was a child I specifically avoided joining clubs and groups in order to have free time after school during which I hung out with my friends in an unstructured way. As an adult I've joined tons of clubs and groups but I still see friendship the way I saw it as a child. Not that I intend to stop going to groups or clubs, but I want to prioritize hanging out with friends in less official ways, like I used to do as a child. For example, I prefer having friends over for board games rather than going to a board game event that costs $3 - it's less structured. (Pathetically, the $3 event is only popular *because* it costs $3 - if they made it free, nobody would show up!) A lot of people say they don't have time for hanging out because they have lots of events going on, and that's the opposite of my priorities - I go to official, structured events only if I have nothing better to do.

I don't know how to express precisely the feature of modern society that's caused our communities to be replaced with networks. If I said "capitalism" a lot of people could relate, but it wouldn't be exactly accurate: yard sales are also capitalism, but they feel more community-like and I have no problem with them. It's more like people want something from people. I shouldn't have to subscribe to newsletters or see things that are Recommended for Me or Suggested for Me just to hang out with my friends. That stuff is so prevalent I can barely even read a book without being subjected to it, for crying out loud.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/04/22/earth-day-2024-celebrate-climate-change-optimism/72863462007/

This article mentions several good news points regarding the planet and some victories we've achieved in the past:
-the hole in the ozone layer (something people talked about as a big problem when I was a child) is healing, due to a phasing out of the chlorofluorocarbons that caused it.
-DDT, a big problem in the past, was banned and as a result the Bald Eagle, something that was almost extinct when I was a child, recovered and is no longer endangered.
-Acid rain, something that was looking like a problem that would keep getting worse when I was a child, is now on the decline due to regulations to reduce sulfur emissions.
-Solar and wind is now the cheapest source of electricity, and as a result, the switch to them is happening.
-2023 is expected to be the peak year in history for carbon emissions, with a reduction from now on. Although that's not good enough to limit global temperatures from increasing and prevent death and destruction, it is better than was predicted in the past.

As a result I can't agree with people who say that we're doomed no matter what or that there's nothing we can do. It's not all-or-nothing. Stopping the use of fossil fuels, by both individuals and entities, still has great value by accelerating the drop in emissions and limiting the temperature increase, which saves lives.

A couple pieces of great news that combine 2 of my favourite things: people making progress with climate justice, and governments getting blamed.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/european-human-rights-court-climate-1.7167866

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/young-activists-climate-change-lawsuit-federal-government-1.7067880

We talked about many topics at the latest philosophy night; here's my unbelievably biased summary of some of them.

Q: Can pets, or animals in general, provide the same need for companionship that human friends / family provide? I.e. are there people who can avoid being lonely solely by having animal friends, or do we all need other humans specifically?

A: Most people said, I think, said there is something special about humans which we need, though pets can help with loneliness and give us some of the same happiness we get from human friends. Though in some cases we like some animals more than some humans. A few people seem to be able to be happy as hermits, so it would seem that there are a few people who don't have as much of a need for other humans as most of us have.

Later, we also discussed the ethics of pets, in which I was potentially converted or rethought something: I've avoided having pets because I think animals should be free in the wild and aren't happy being the only animal among a family of humans. However, I was told that studies on dogs in particular have found that they can be happier with just humans and no other dogs, since they evolved to be a companion to humans. There are 3 categories of animals: wild, domesticated (animals that have changed to co-depend on humans), and animals that have evolved to live near humans (such as rats, pigeons, and squirrels). I do still think it's important to have dogs in the country, though, where they don't need a leash; the dogs on the farm I visited in South Africa were very different and seemed much happier than the city dogs on leashes I see here. But I'd have to admit that it's possible that such domesticated dogs might be happy enough, compared to wolves who live in the wild, to justify the existence of dogs who live with humans. For that matter, it occurs to me that some humans who live in civilization might be happier than many our more primitive ancestors, maybe even happy enough to justify the existence of civilization.

Q: Is there a difference between lying and omission?

A: This is another question that converted me; I've always thought of lying as wrong, but omitting information as not wrong. However, omitting relevant information in a way that selfishly manipulates someone can have the same effect as lying to them, so actually, I'd have to say it's as bad. I think we all agreed, though I'm still not sure if this makes lying in non-harmful ways OK.

Q: Does utilizing time properly make our lives meaningful and happy?

A: I think it does for me in the cases where I spend time to get more time overall, by activities such as scheduling, multitasking, or automating tasks, particularly for programmers. However, a lot of people feel that automating tasks, especially in the workplace, causes some people's jobs to become obsolete, which causes problems. And the really significant problem is that the automation, which is done by skilled, educated people who work in offices and are removed from the detailed reality, removes the jobs of low income, labour-oriented workers, who can't afford to lose their job or to pay tuition to learn a new profession that hasn't been automated yet. Many of us agreed that this is a strong argument for Universal Basic Income. I'm not really convinced it's an argument to not automate things, though. If we stop automating or intentionally reduce efficiency, we'll have more work to do and more people will have jobs but we might have either scarcer resources or people spending a lot of their lives working at manual labour. I do think it's valuable to be thoughtful in intentionally choosing to do some manual labour sometimes: for example, I intentionally wash dishes by hand and shovel snow with a shovel, and the process of doing those things can be mentally beneficial in small amounts, making me happier. The danger in having certain things done for you automatically is then squandering the extra time you gain doing things that don't make your lives meaningful and happy.

Q: If your girlfriend puts her sex toys in the oven to clean them and then leaves the oven on and goes to the grocery store, what should you do?

A: Have a serious discussion about your relationship.

Q: If everyone spoke their mind, would this world be a better place?

A: A bunch of people said no, which made me think I should maybe be more careful about what I say. I do certainly see that on the internet there is damage from people speaking their minds, though I'm not sure if people speaking their minds offline would have the same problems and am not even convinced it would be a bad thing.

A great point was made regarding politics: that there can be circles of people who are either liberal or conservative and, for example, if you're among a group of liberal-minded people, but you happen to believe one thing that doesn't align with their beliefs, then you might be shunned. Or similarly at a conservative workplace where you don't want to say too much because you don't want to risk your job for being non-conservative. In fact, each belief is separate, and it makes total sense to believe some things that are conservative and other things that are liberal. When people decide that they're one or the other, it becomes part of their identity and then when thinking about a new belief, they don't really think about whether it's true, they think about whether it's something that a liberal/conservative is supposed to believe, or they think about whether their friends / community will accept them if they say it. That's a huge problem and I think we need to become a lot more non-partisan and cosmopolitan in accepting people with different beliefs or values.

There are still a few beliefs or values that are in a different kind of category, where I may not feel safe or comfortable around someone who says them, and it's reasonable to have some boundaries. Things like racism / bigotry, or science denial conspiracies, or those people who tried to take over the US election by force in 2021. But the vast majority of conservative or liberal values are not like that, they're beliefs that people have a right to believe and say and we can get along just fine with people who believe and say them even when they're opposite to some of our core values.

Q: If a pig wants to be eaten, should you eat it? Is doing so better than eating a pig that doesn't want to be eaten?

A: I think everybody, at least at first, said they would eat the pig and didn't see how that's a dilemma. But this then leads to the question: does that mean it's better to genetically engineer pigs to want to be eaten? And with factory farms, we've done something like that: genetically engineered animals to not think the same kind of thoughts they would think in the wild, but to be more like vegetables. Yet there's a sense in which the fact that they don't care if they're eaten for that reason makes it worse. A great point was made about our relationship to death: we don't want to think about death and we remove ourselves from it, so that the death of a pet is a big deal for us, but free-range farmers see death every day. This means I think there's a virtue in facing death and the necessity of taking a life to eat, rather than keeping yourself separate from it.

This is funny and hyperbole but makes some important points:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/4aauib/lets_talk_about_the_free_software_dating_scene/

Those issues relate not just to dating, but in communication of various kinds, or where software use is expected / required. Yes, compromise is necessary, as of course I know because I have to compromise my values every day just to survive in society. With software that often means running proprietary software in some sort of container to protect my privacy, which involves lots of extra hoops and effort (which reminds me, does anyone have an old phone or tablet for sale on which I could install apps that people require me to use but which I don't want to give access to my real phone?).

Not only are we not treated as heroes or considered sexy for standing up for technological freedom, we very often are expected to conform to the software that people without these values use. Equality would mean that half of the time they would compromise and use free software, putting in the effort involved in doing so. There's only one time I can remember being accommodated regarding free software: at the University of Waterloo, a fantastic university, where everybody in my research lab was given a Linux computer to do our work, and we were also told that if we preferred Windows they would install it and accommodate us (but not a single one of us asked for Windows).

And the same goes for many other non-mainstream values, besides just software freedom / privacy. Compromising properly to live among people with different values would mean 50-50 compromises, but it always seems to be the people with the non-mainstream values putting in all the effort and compromising in order to connect with other people. But why not support someone's values even if they aren't your values? Like Sheldon in Young Sheldon who, though an outspoken atheist, goes to church to support his mother. If you want a travelling companion to get somewhere, why not offer to bike with an environmentalist 50% of the time, instead of offering them a drive 100% of the time, even if biking isn't your thing? If you want to eat with someone who happens to value food from farmers, why not eat food from farmers with them 50% of the time, even if you personally don't have a problem with grocery stores or processed food? Why not stand up for gender inclusion, even if you're cis gendered? Why not learn how to be neurodiversity-affirming in your actions, even if you're not neurodivergent? Why not build your house with a ramp, even if you can use stairs?

So sure, laugh all you want at that linked post, but having values that most people don't care about is tough. I say let's care about other people's values and not just our own.

The Stuff You Should Know podcast for Dec 28 ("How Primitive Will Our Descendants Find Us?") was a really good one in which they guessed what things we do today that people in the future will consider barbaric or primitive (similar to how we think of people from the middle ages somewhat barbaric for violence, treatment of women, etc).

https://stuffyoushouldknow.com/episodes/

A summary of the things modern people do that they guessed will be considered barbaric, based on statistics, trends and scientific evidence:
-spanking children
-chemotherapy (not that it's bad, just that we're trending towards better alternatives)
-organ transplants (not that they're bad, just that future people will probably grow organs from cells instead)
-treatment of animals (soon we'll have lab-grown meat instead of raising animals for food)
-privately owned vehicles (soon transportation-as-a-service will take their place)
-using GDP (i.e. the growth or shrinkage of the stock market) as a measure of economic wealth
-burning fossil fuels

I agree with their assessment of all of those things. I also have a couple more guesses, but they're not nearly as assured or based on science and I'm not nearly as confident in them compared to the above:
-Working office jobs 40+ hours per week to survive. No matter whether climate change forces us to go back to a simpler, more agrarian / DIY way of life, or whether AI ends up providing our basic necessities, I can't forsee a future where working your whole life for corporations doing menial work will continue, and believe future generations will see it as slavery.
-Countries / corporations / systems where a few elites control the population authoritatively. I believe future generations will see us as having little control in our lives the same way kings controlled people's lives in the middle ages. I don't know how or when this will change to be more democratic / autonomous, but I don't think people will put up with it forever. In other words, I believe future people will not call voting for representatives who make all their choices "democracy", but will have a much more democratic way of life. And they won't call the ability to buy things that are all the same as each other from a few corporations who have all the power "free trade", but will have much more freedom in how they get resources.

A summary of philosophy night yesterday, from my perspective:

Q: Should we end or outlaw the sale of personal data by tech companies (similar to how we outlaw organ harvesting or some other morally objectionable activities within capitalism)?

A: We didn't exactly get around to answering this question, but talked about the kinds of things companies / AI does with data and the challenges an individual has in protecting their data. As noted, pretty much all companies are involved in collecting and selling personal data because they want to make more customers happy, and this makes selling their data profitable, so there would certainly be a cost to ending its sale. There is perhaps a more general problem where companies use long legal "terms and conditions" documents that are time consuming for an individual to understand as a way to prey on individuals and coerce them into technically agreeing to something that they don't truly consent to. I'd argue that practice is itself unethical, although it would be hard to outlaw. I personally do think we should end the sale of personal data but we noted that outlawing it would be difficult because it would mean going against big tech companies, which are currently the most powerful entities on the planet. The EU did successfully pass laws to limit this behaviour though, so there is some hope. On an individual level we can raise awareness and become informed ourselves, and although we discussed some software tools that are available to help, we also noted that it's only people who take the initiative to search for these tools who are actually protected. The average computer user just tends to go with the flow and won't find those options, so will be at risk. It's possible that making people more aware of the reality could prompt them to action and eventually influence lawmakers, culture, or even the companies themselves.

If companies couldn't sell data, many would become less profitable and some would even go out of business. However, I don't consider that a valid reason to continue the sale of data; I don't mind organ harvesters going out of business either. As human activities shift, certain businesses emerge while others die, and I'm OK with that.

Q: Could we live without industrialization? (Referring to the world in the book "A Psalm for the Wild-Built" by Becky Chambers.) Should we try to preserve industrialization and/or civilization?

A: We all thought that there are certain important things that industrialization gives us and that a world without it wouldn't be desirable. E.g. glasses would be very difficult to make without factories, so many people's eyesight would become limited, and computer chips require factories, so we'd have to give up computers. However, industrialization, although increasing efficiency, also makes us lose some adaptations, such as a bushman's ability to gather nuts and store them over the winter. Although initially, industrialization seems to give us benefits so can e.g. have nuts year round even if we can't gather them, after a while we can lose that adaptation, and perhaps worse, we then tend to just increase our wants and needs as it's easier to manufacture things to meet them. In my opinion it therefore comes down to a balance - we can have some industrialization but shouldn't have too much dependence. If we as a species choose an ideal path, we may never completely remove our dependence on industrialization or on culture, but with a shift in how we think about what we want, we may reduce our dependence and increase our freedom.

Q: What is power, i.e. what does it mean for a ruler to have power?

A: The ability to decree that something will happen then have it happen seems to be a fairly accurate definition. However, it's questionable whether people, even kings or dictators, ever have that power, because the only reason they're able to decree that something happens and to then have it happen is because in the context that they exist, the thing they decree is in alignment with people's beliefs or the culture or the realm of possibilities. If they had been a person to decree something else, they wouldn't have been put in that position of power. This means they're also subjected to the tide of events in the world that all of us are swept along in, and dn't have much more or less freedom than any of us. (Marcus Aurelius, the founder of stoicism, said this too.)

Q: What makes a good person?

A: We didn't really find an answer, but 2 good points were made relating to what it means to be a good person. (1) You can't be a good person by *not* doing things, i.e. by asceticism. In the past people thought of abstaining from things such as premarital sex, alcohol, dancing, etc. was what constituted being good, but by defining goodness as avoidance you can end up being complacent when someone you know is suffering an injustice that you've kept yourself apart from. To use more modern examples relevant to me, not driving a car or not drinking milk doesn't make someone a good person either. (Note, of course, that this doesn't mean we should try to do bad things.) (2) Although helping others can be good, what often happens is that when someone shows themself to be helpful or useful, whether it be with volunteering or in their family, then people end up taking advantage of their usefulness. They may get asked to do many things and feel like they need to do those things in order to be useful and thereby good, but end up getting burnt out or overwhelmed, or never able to do the things that they want to do. I think we all agreed that this is not really the best way to be a good person, and that we should set boundaries to ensure that our own needs are met too. Whether helping others within the context of setting boundaries is sufficient to define a good person is something I'm still unsure about.

Q: Should we try to preserve history?
A: Yes, so we can learn from our mistakes. However, we have to realize that the history we've preserved is skewed; not only by being inaccurate but by having certain perspectives over-emphasized, such as the perspective of rich people who were able to hire historians, or by going into a lot of detail on wars while ignoring everyday life. Reading old novels is one way to get a more balanced perspective on how everyday people thought and lived, but that's still limited to recent history; writings that are several centuries old are mostly scarce and incomprehensible.

I made a summary of some things discussed at a recent philosophy night:

Q: Is AI intelligent / sentient / creative?
A: Some people thought it is becoming these things or has become some of them. It was noted that we tend to keep moving the goal posts of when we consider AI to be comparable to us; for example, in the past it was thought that the Turing Test was a good way to determine whether AI has surpassed us, but today AI can easily pass the Turing Test and does so regularly, yet we still feel like there are things that only humans can do. I personally do think that AI will eventually surpass us in intelligence and creativity but hasn't yet; it currently does some things better than us and other things worse than us. But I'm agnostic about whether it has attained or will attain sentience, because I don't know how humans attained it. In particular, I see no reason to assume that we attained it by becoming complex biological machines, though *if* that was the mechanism, then I see no reason why complex silicon machines couldn't attain it too. Nobody can explain where sentience comes from (see the paper "What Is It Like to Be A Bat?" by Thomas Nagel - http://www.philosopher.eu/others-writings/nagel-what-is-it-like-to-be-a-bat/).

Q: Do human lives depreciate in value over time? I.e. do future generations matter less than the present generation?
A: We first discussed why human lives have value at all, which we couldn't really agree on. Due to the trolley problem, some lives are more valuable than others to some people, and the value of a particular life is subjective - e.g. a person values their child's life more highly than the life of a random person. As to what makes lives valuable at all, I thought any being with the ability to make free choices and have experiences has intrinsic value, and I also think happy experiences have value which means a life that's experiencing happy experiences has value. But I don't know how to compare lives so, all other things being equal, I'd have to say each person's life is equally valuable.

Regarding future lives, many people thought we tend not to value them because we've never met them and we tend to care more about people we've met and know personally. Because of the real possibility of humans going extinct soon (given that we're currently in the middle of an extinction event of worldwide species), that means future lives have less value than present lives because they might not exist. So the answer to the question partly depends on how likely you believe humans will survive into the future. I personally think there's a pretty good chance that at least some humans will survive climate change, after which there could potentially be a lot more humans than have ever existed, and as a result, although I'd agree that the value of lives depreciates a bit due to this not being assured, I still think our actions in affecting the world for those future humans matters a lot more than we tend to assume.

Q: Can we have happiness without sadness?
A: Most people said no, you need to know what sadness is before you can realize you're happy and be happy. For example, if you're sick all you can think about is your symptoms and then when you get better you're happy just to do regular things that you previously took for granted. I personally wasn't convinced, and see no reason why someone couldn't be happy without ever being sad - they just might not realize they're happy or might not have a word "happy". Of the 4 types of happiness I mentioned: immediate pleasure, mood, joy, and contentedness with your life (feeling like it has a purpose), I'd say you can at least have contentedness with your life without knowing a meaningless life, and you can have immediate pleasure from brain chemicals firing without negative brain chemicals firing. A happy mood, however, might feel neutral if the only mood you ever know is a happy mood, and I'm not sure about joy.

However, I think sadness is a lack of happiness, or something missing that previously made you happy, which means I think you can't have sadness without happiness.

I really like the carbon tax in Canada, because the money collected from it goes back to individual people (I got it deposited in my account automatically through my tax account). That means they're taking money from polluters and re-distributing it to citizens, i.e. as a bit of compensation to the people who are harmed by the pollution. It's very rare that the government does something useful, but this is one of those rare times, possibly the only one I know of. As a libertarian, I'd like to see this form of taxation - taxing businesses that do harm and re-distributing it to those harmed - done for more kinds of harm than just pollution. It's the only kind of taxation that real libertarians support, and anyone who is opposed to it (notably, the conservative leader) isn't a real libertarian.

The fruit adventures continue: canned pears from someone's pear tree who didn't want their pears. Next up: pearsauce (i.e. applesauce but with pears).

Recipe: https://adam4235.github.io/recipes/snacks/canned_pears.txt

Apparently it's not the same dehydrator my Oma used after all, but my mom's. But my Oma also made fruit leather.

Making fruit leather using the same equipment my Oma (grandmother) used, from apples, raspberries and strawberries I picked this year. #earlyretirementextreme #foodisfree

Tons of randos and a few friends are constantly asking me about my ebike, so I made an FAQ:

1. Q: How fast does it go?
A: Up to 32kph (the law requires bikes you can pedal to max out at that speed).
2. Q: How far can you go with it?
A: I'm not sure exactly because the battery has never run out for me, but I've gone on trips of about 40km, using the throttle most of the time, and the battery said it was about half drained at the end. So probably about 50-100km depending on how much you pedal. This seems to be pretty standard for ebikes. Of course, range isn't as important as with an electric car or motorcycle; if you run out of electricity in an electric car, you're totally screwed. If your ebike battery dies, you can just bike home normally.
3. Q: Can it get up hills?
A: Yes, and you don't have to pedal up them. Depending on the steepness of the hill, if you're using pure electricity and not pedaling, the speed might decrease; when I go up the steepest hill I've been on in Fredericton, it slows down to about 15kph when I put the throttle to the max. But I've never found a hill I can't get up without pedaling.
4. Q: How much does it cost to power?
A: I estimate about 1kWh to charge the battery, which costs about 10 cents in NB. So about 10 cents per 100km or so, or in other words, an amount so small that it doesn't really matter. And it charges overnight, as opposed to electric cars which can take days to charge to full.
5. Q: Do the fat tires let you go in winter?
A: Yes, and that's the reason I bought it. A concern I had about ebikes before getting one was long term maintainability; i.e. bike shops might not be able to fix electrical problems. But by removing the battery I still have a fat bike, and it was about the same cost as a fat bike. You do still have to be careful to ride on paved roads and be careful around ice, but I've found fat tires more stable than spiked mountain bike tires. I couldn't get through Odell park without slipping, where the ice is bumpy, but I can go over most thin ice on paved roads and the walking trail no problem. But I had to be careful when turning at a stop sign if there's ice there, to first get off the bike and get on the new road on foot, rather than using the throttle or pedal assist to get started from the stop sign while turning near ice.
6. Q: Do you use your ebike to go everywhere?
A: No. I try to use my regular bike or walk, to get exercise. Getting exercise is one of the main reasons for biking, and ebikes kind of defeat that purpose. But I use my ebike if I'm already getting lots of other exercise. And I've heard people use excuses like they won't bike to work because they don't want to be sweaty or they can't bike up a hill, etc.; ebikes render that excuse obsolete.

LineageOS (https://lineageos.org/) on a phone, baby!

Sure, maybe not as sexy as a Librem 5 (https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/), but who can afford that?

I found the installation process pretty straightforward when I followed the instructions and had an officially supported phone. I omitted the Google apps. Maybe slightly more difficulty than installing Linux on a computer. There's no need to root your phone; it's mainly connecting your phone to a computer over USB and following some step-by-step instructions carefully. The biggest hurdle for me was that the OEM unlocking option was greyed out at first, with a message to connect to the internet or contact my carrier, and was still greyed out when I connected to the internet. At first I was scared my phone was locked, but when I removed the SIM card and rebooted, the OEM unlock option was enabled and I could proceed and unlock the phone.

There were also a few messages that seemed like error messages during the process, but turned out to be harmless. Everything worked in the end.

It's so nice to set up a phone without it asking you to register or login etc. Just a clean, basic phone. So far I've only needed apps from F-Droid for the basic things I use a phone for: calling, email, web browser, alarm, camera, music, podcasts, calendar, contacts, maps, messaging, books, and accessing my files portably.

However, I don't recommend buying a new phone for this purpose. For people who are stuck with a phone that isn't officially supported, or who are less technically inclined and don't want to take the risk / time in flashing a different OS, I made a guide which you can see at https://adam4235.github.io/encyclopedia/computer/android_reduced_tracking.html. That may be almost as good as using LineageOS; if you look at the ways Google tracks you (https://productivityhub.org/2019/05/30/all-the-ways-google-tracks-you-and-how-to-stop-it/), all the things listed there use your Google account. That's if you're concerned about tracking by companies; it probably wouldn't protect you from tracking by governments (the best way to do that is to not have a cell phone).

https://www.un.org/en/actnow/ten-actions

It's good to have a list of actions individuals can take for climate change, tangible ones that regular people can do, and I like this list because it's from an "official" / trustworthy source, the United Nations (making it more likely to be backed by evidence than if it's a list from a random website),

An interesting action that I hadn't considered before is removing invasive plant species, which I can't really do since I don't own land, and which I'm suspecting might be more relevant to people who garden in a non-food way. But when I owned a mini-home there was an invasive plant that maybe I should have tried to kill and replace with a native species, and I just wasn't aware of the importance of doing so.

Also consider the mention of electric vehicles, which I sometimes hear people say cause harm. However, the website notes the harm that EVs cause, and still lists it as a positive climate action. I certainly am anti-car in general and never plan to buy a car, electric or otherwise, but for some people / situations I think it's a reasonable choice. Nobody is saying they don't cause harm, but that gas-powered cars cause *even more* harm. Importantly, that item is preceded by "walk, bike or take public transit", which is still the better option when feasible.

I was interested to note the lack of an item that I've considered important: don't have children. It could have been omitted because it would be too controversial / would feel too restrictive on people coming from an official entity such as the UN, but it's believable that the population could peak and eventually decline and in the long term work out OK. But I still can't in good conscience justify having biological children when there are many children who want to be adopted. And even if the population will eventually decline, the current population still feels like more than the planet can happily support, since it would take so many people being so vigilant in doing these 10 actions to reduce our level of pollution.

As I was donating a couple placemats to Hospice Boutique, an old lady in line in front of me was trying to donate a monitor and some other computer stuff. They wouldn't take it because they don't take computer stuff, so I was like, "I could use that monitor to go with an old computer I'm planning to give away soon". She agreed but didn't know much about computers, and I think because she didn't know what thing I was talking about when I said "monitor", she just started giving me stuff in case the things she was giving me was the monitor I was referring to. So I got an old monitor, an old laptop, and an old tablet.

The tablet ended up not turning on, and the laptop is super old with Windows XP. However, unlike newer laptops, it has a working DVD drive. I installed Puppy Linux on it, a distribution intended for extremely old hardware, which wasn't too difficult and works great even on hardware that seems to be about 20 years old! And it played DVDs right away without needing to install any new software. So now I have a portable DVD player.

The biggest challenge was that when I first tried installing Linux using the bootable USB key I had of a more mainstream distribution, it just showed a black screen. I thought it might have meant the laptop was dead until I realized that the USB key is for 64-bit computers, and this laptop is so old that it's 32-bit.

So the moral of the story is: if you have a super old computer that you think is worthless, it can still be used. Just install Puppy Linux!

I finally figured out how to set up a website on my own computer in my own house, something I'd been trying to do for a long time. So my game, Algebrain, is now available for you to try for free via that method at this URL, at least until I get a power outage:

https://algebrain.duckdns.org/

This is an improvement over the previous URL in that it's set up with SSL which means you can play with a game controller (e.g. an XBox controller or PS3/4/5 controller or whatever controller you may have for playing PC games), and also the multiplayer mode should work. Feedback would be appreciated both in terms of whether you have any problems accessing the website (e.g. warnings or errors) and also feedback on the game itself (i.e. is it fun, did you find any bugs, does it succeed as a proof of concept, etc). I'm definitely a noob at web admin so I probably screwed up something.

To see the controls for using a game controller, go here:

https://adam4235.github.io/algebra/algebrain.html

I also documentated the steps I had to go through to set up a website on my own computer in my own house:

https://adam4235.github.io/encyclopedia/computer/setting_up_web_server.txt

It was frustrating how difficult it was compared to setting up a webpage through a service or through a server that you rent, which I've had little difficulty with in the past. To me that discrepancy is a gaping flaw in the structure of the internet. If we want a free, open, and democratic internet, then why should it be /easier/ to share my stuff from someone else's computer who I pay a fee to, rather than just sharing it from my own computer? The common advice I hear: "it's only $10/month" and "that's less than the cost of maintaining your own computer" is dogma as far as I'm concerned. The server I'm using is an old laptop with a broken screen which would otherwise be basically garbage, so my method is free and saves resources.

I found this episode of the Philosophize This podcast to be quite interesting:

https://philosophizethis.libsyn.com/episode-072-insecurity

It's about how insecurity is similar in some ways (but also kind of opposite) to morality, or at least the way many people perceive morality. In both cases, you're letting other people's approval or disapproval change your behaviour, and possibly your happiness. Of course, there can be a big difference in the type of approval you're caring about - e.g. being insecure about whether your clothes are out of style is much less serious than a murderer not wanting someone to know they've committed murder.

I think morality goes beyond the approval of other people though, and I think a lot of people perceive morality as being merely the approval of other people.

I'm also probably a person that does what the podcast says people don't really do: constantly think about whether a choice is the most moral choice. I was wondering if it might be because of being aware of climate change that I'm that way, because in the face of climate change lots of little actions that people do regularly, or which weren't possible hundreds of years ago, gain moral weight. But I don't think that's it - I think even without climate change I'd be often thinking about the wider impact of my actions, for some reason. E.g. enslavement of workers or animal rights or genocide, and even pollution without climate change is still pollution.

However, maybe I don't constantly think about morality that often after all: one thing the podcast neglects to mention that seems relevant is the role of habits in morality. If you decide in advance one and for all what a good action is, then develop habits that are in line with your morality, then you've "programmed" yourself to automatically avoid immoral actions and don't need to think about them for each action. E.g. by having the habit of biking / walking to get places I just go places, and don't need to optimize the trip or weigh its benefits against the carbon footprint like I'd do if I drove. It's sufficient to philosophize once in a while to re-evaluate whether your (habitual) actions match your beliefs, as well as to look for errors in those beliefs themselves.

But in many cases the habit of trying to do the right thing can also give you the habit of trying to do what other people expect of you even when their expectations are morally neutral (or wrong). Changing to ignore those expectations has the potential to increase your happiness significantly, by causing new connections with different people. E.g. I can sometimes impress people by rambling on about money, but since money is boring to me, I may be meeting those people's expectations while failing to meet the expectations of some different people who would be more interesting. (But sometimes I ramble on about a boring thing because I can't think of anything interesting to say, and that might be different.)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/homeless-encampments-bc-1.6783020

The situation in Vancouver with the tent city removal makes me very disturbed and also ask questions about the (prejudiced) assumptions people make. For example: is the word "homeless" actually appropriate? In some cases, people who live in tents consider it their home, and it seems they sometimes decline an offer of an "official" shelter when it's offered. That means their tent is their home. You might not like it being their home, and maybe they aren't happy either (though there was a philosopher who was happy living in a barrel), but if they consider it their home, then it is. Maybe "houseless" is a better word?

Viewed that way, the removal of a whole tent city because of some crimes that some people commit is ludicrous, even if those crimes are legitimate concerns. Imagine if a street got bulldozed while its occupants were away at work just because it was a neighborhood with high crime? If we treat that situation as ludicrous, but the tent city removal situation as normal, it proves our discrimination on the basis of wealth.

When I visited South Africa the townships in cities seemed to have many similarities: people who couldn't get a house ending up living in smaller, more temporary dwellings closer together. They had purportedly higher crime which the police also didn't do anything about because they didn't care about the townships. Yet even in that country with relatively racist policies and its enormous gap between the rich who lived in "big" houses and the poor who lived in townships, I never heard anyone even consider the idea of the police going through and *removing* a township. It would just be understood that the idea wouldn't make any sense because that's just where a large number of people live. So I guess South Africa 1, Canada 0: but in both cases, the police should change to treat *individual* criminals who live in the poor, temporary dwellings exactly the same as they treat criminals who live in houses.

Of course it would be great for Canada to do something to house anyone who wants to be housed, but even if you want to argue that it doesn't have enough money to do that, at the very least cities could remove the by-laws that hinder it from happening, as I've been saying for years. That costs $0. I.e. let people build tiny houses, or 2 small houses on one plot of land, or put trailers in someone's driveway with permission, or build a tiny house in a friend's yard with permission. And people can give someone permission to camp in their yard. And the government(s) *must* give people some spot where they're allowed to live in a tent for free, because otherwise they're being illogical, because all the other options cost money, and not everybody has money, so logically there will otherwise be some people who have no valid place to exist. Even having money doesn't guarantee you can find housing - currently houses and apartments require outbidding someone else or being chosen by someone else in an interview, and the only reason I have a place to live is because of being very blessed to be born in the situation I was born in.