Hearing people talk about the need to build more affordable housing in the US makes me physically sick with frustration.
The "housing shortage" is artificial. We need redistribution, not continued production.
I get that the laws aren't there. They should be. I'm so tired of people pretending there aren't dragon-hoards of vacant housing. We don't need to build more, we need a revolution to let people fill in the spaces which already exist in their area.
Not letting someone have a house that's been empty for years, just because they don't have money... I can't understand it. It's the most basic thing. Once you have shelter, you can start to come back to yourself enough to get the rest of your life together.
*sigh* I understand that building more houses is necessary under this stupid fucking system, because a revolution is much more difficult and slow, and people need housing ASAP. I just get so mad thinking about how there are physically plenty of spots they could be (There are over 20 vacant homes in the US for each homeless person), and people are using profit and capitalist principles as an excuse to keep them from being there.
7 notes
·
View notes
This might seem like an "old man yells at cloud" situation, but it's just wild growing up and being told how dangerous distracted driving is - how, at highway speeds, you can traverse the length of a football field (100 yards, 91 meters) in a matter of seconds - how one split second sending a text while driving could result in a potential fatal crash, and then getting on the road as a driver and being surrounded by billboards. Their entire purpose is to catch one's attention, so they're lining major roads, which tend to be highways. How is it that you're told how important it is to never be distracted while driving, but still being advertised to?
At best, this type of advertising is an eyesore to pedestrians and motorists and a general waste of electricity to light it, and at worst, it is an active danger considering they are there to advertise and therefore, must catch people's attention.
I'm not even against advertising in theory, but this particular mode bothers me so much and I hate how pervasive it is - especially in large cities or highways.
3K notes
·
View notes
Millions of solar panels are piling up in warehouses across the Continent because of a manufacturing battle in China, where cut-throat competition has driven the world’s biggest panel-makers to expand production far faster than they can be installed.
The supply glut has caused solar panel prices to halve. This sounds like great news for the EU, which recently pledged to triple its solar power capacity to 672 gigawatts by 2030. That’s roughly equivalent to 200 large nuclear power stations.
In reality, though, it has caused a crisis. Under the EU’s “Green Deal Industrial Plan”, 40pc of the panels to be spread across European fields and roofs were meant to be made by European manufacturers.
However, the influx of cheap Chinese alternatives means that instead of tooling up, manufacturers are pulling out of the market or becoming insolvent. Last year 97pc of the solar panels installed across Europe came from China.[...]
The best estimates suggest that about 90 gigawatts worth of solar panels are stashed around Europe. That solar power capacity roughly equates to 25 large nuclear power stations the size of Hinkley Point C.[...]
The sheer scale of the problem was revealed in a recent report from the International Energy Agency (IEA).
It warned that although the world was installing at record rates of around 400 gigawatts a year, manufacturing capacity was growing far faster.
By the end of this year solar panel factories, mostly in China, will be capable of churning out 1,100 gigawatts a year – nearly three times more than the world is ready [sic] for. For comparison, that’s about 11 times [!!!!] the UK’s entire generating capacity.
For some solar power installers, it’s a dream come true. Sagar Adani is building solar farms across India’s deserts, with 54 in operation and another 12 being built.
His company, Adani Green Energy, is constructing one solar farm so large that it will cover an area five times the size of Paris and have a capacity of 30 gigawatts – equal to a third of the UK’s entire generating capacity.
“I am installing tens of millions of solar panels across these projects,” says Adani. “Almost all of them will have been imported from China. There is nowhere else that can supply them in such numbers or at such prices.
“China saw the opportunity before others, it looked forward to what the world is going to set up 10 years on. And because they scaled up in the way they did, they were able to reduce costs substantially as well.”
That scaling up meant the capital cost of installing solar power fell from around £1.25m per megawatt of generating capacity in 2015 to around £600,000 today – a decrease of more than 50pc – making it cheaper than almost any other form of generation, including wind.[...]
“Up to 2012 there was a healthy looking European solar panel industry but it was actually very reliant on subsidies and preferential treatment.
“But then European governments and other customers started buying from China because their products were so much cheaper. And China still has cheap labour and cheap energy plus a massive domestic market. It’s hard to see Europe recovering from those disadvantages.”
Trying sososo hard to make this sound like a bad thing [23 Mar 24]
467 notes
·
View notes
I'm debating starting a youtube. One of the things I love about learning how to do stuff is sharing the process and skills involved with people and that seems to be the preferred platform for that kind of thing; I find that with a lot of what I'm making it's so niche or weird that there's not easily findable tutorials on how to do what I want to do, so maybe it would help if I made them? Tiktok is okay as a quick and easy way to slap process videos together but I kind of hate it and I also don't like how unsearchable and short-lived content is there.
Youtube would be a lot of work, and I'm not convinced it would be worth the effort, but on the other hand, if I could get some traction there, it would be nice to have passive ad revenue to offset project costs without having to directly sell the random crap I'm making.
I dunno, guys. This site has been home for my art for a long time, and I don't see that changing, but it would be nice to have resources to put into some of the larger projects that aren't directly sellable.
562 notes
·
View notes