stabby_cicada

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 normal to support a green roof. If your building is already built to support 10-20 stories, the additional weight 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.

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.