I think the zeitgeist is beginning to shift, and we can help move it along with our own collective effort, and leading by example in our own communities (online or offline).

I don’t disagree that stopping the majority of emissions at their source (corporations) is the ultimate end goal, but as you say, we don’t know when that will happen. Could be in 3 years, could be in a decade or two.

I’m advocating we do what we can to buy us (and especially the poorest and most vulnerable populations) a little more time while we wait for that major reckoning to happen. Besides, if we’re collectively unwilling to even give up a little bit of beef in favor of plants or chicken, that doesn’t bode well for us when the time comes to make much bigger sacrifices to take on those big polluters, and capitalism itself.

If we make society more egalitarian someday, we’ll still ultimately have to rely on people becoming informed of what we need to do to save the planet from climate change, and then enact those things in their lives willingly themselves. There’s no real reason we shouldn’t be a part of that change now, rather than wait.

And I do want to emphasize how incredibly good Impossible meat is as an extremely convenient drop-in replacement for ground beef or steak bites. It often goes on sale, which brings the price down to be fairly comparable to animal meat. If you haven’t tried it yet, I highly suggest picking some up when you see some on sale, it makes the transition away from animal meat much much easier, as it allows you to continue to use all of your existing recipes. Quorn is another really solid option that’s comparable in price to animal meat, and when cooked with some beef or chicken stock, tastes very, very similarly to real meat in a recipe.

You could also create your own meat alternatives with tofu or Seitan, which are very cheap to make ^^

As is Tofu, Seitan (homemade), and lentils!

As an individual, it’s a drop in the ocean, yes. But done collectively at scale, those drops become a meaningful difference. In regards to animal meat, if we collectively switch to plant based options, we literally strangle the means for the animal industry to pollute. It’s a form of direct action that anyone can partake in. Even just opting for chicken instead of red meat, if done collevtively, would result in substantial decreases in emissions.

There are quite a few options we can do that either cost nothing to do, or even save money compared to the higher emission option.

1. Animal meat is usually more expensive than a plant based diet. Quorn is on par or cheaper than ground beef, homemade Seitan from vital gluten comes out to around $1.80/lb. Tofu, lentils, and beans are also extremely cheap. Red meat is the most polluting, so even just switching to chicken + vegetarian options would make a substantial difference.
2. Turning the temperature down in the winter will use substantially less energy and lower your bills, and can be compensated for with the use of hot water bottles, heating pads, and bundling up, along with other methods.
3. Consider joining your local Strong Towns (if you live in the US) to help make non-car transport more viable, even for rural areas.
4. Buy used instead of new where possible, and buy as little as needed.
5. There are low-cost solar options that can be implented slowly over time, and can be made extremely affordable using used panels from Craigslist/Facebook marketplace.

All of these combined will drastically lower your emissions. As an individual it wouldn’t impact much, but done collectively, it can make a genuine difference. I can at least vouch that you’d be joining in with me :p

The thing is, we’re at a point where any reduction or slowing of Co2 is a victory, and can at the very least buy us (especially the populations most effected) a little bit more time to get our collective shit together against the big polluters.

But we don’t know when that time will come, so we need to do as much as we can until then. We know the billionaires planes will continue, but we can at the very least prevent some of our own emissions from compounding with them. Us doing our bit is not negated by the billionaires not joining in with us. It’s not fair, but the climate doesn’t care about fair, it cares about total emissions.

So let’s chip in collectively to slow things down, even if only slightly, until we can slow it down a lot. :)

Give the plant based meats a try, like Impossible meat or Quorn. They’re astonishingly good now, and have completely replaced animal meat for me.

It likely wasn’t federated to lemmy.zip. Try subscribing to it and then reloading it a few times. Otherwise you can go to it directly from https://slrpnk.net/c/money to see what should be showing up once it’s federated.

Since Taler isn’t operating in the same way as the wild-west of crypto, and needs to secure the adoption of existing banking institutions, its rollout is going to be much slower.

It hasn’t been widely adopted yet, but the big change that occured is it only just recently released a stable 1.0 version that makes wider adoption possible, and passed some essential security audits, including for iOS.

In addition to recently being approved and available in Switzerland, it is also planned to be added to a Ko-fi-like payment/donation system thanks to a grant by the NLnet foundation, which will hopefully enable it to gain wider adoption by creators or youtubers, as an example. In the future, it could become a replacement for Zelle if more banks adopt it (I suspect credit unions would be more likely to give it a try, if they became aware of it by their membership, and it was requested a lot).

There’s a bit more discussion of it over at !money@slrpnk.net, if you’re interested.

It likely does have more representation and mind-share here on lemmy since it aligns with the ideals of many users here in particular, we’re going to be more tuned into alternatives like that compared to the wider population.

GNU Taler is an anonymous digital cash, but it’s not yet widely adopted, I think only a few banks in Switzerland are using it. Hopefully if continues to gain momentum.

Even in that link, there are just as many people praising it as there are damning it, which is fairly common for all languages, due to how opinionated people can be on that subject.

Based on the fact that you’re downvoting all my comments in this thread, I would wager you are amongst those highly opinionated people 😅

No prob! Hope it works well for you ^^

I’ve personally never seen that sentiment toward Lua. It’s also used in Pico-8, and that’s quite well regarded.

If you want to make a 2D Zelda style game, there’s the Solaris engine, which is purpose built for that very task.

It’s open-source and completely free to use.

There’s a pretty massive item market for this game to use real money for in-game items, where the seller will meet you in a match and drop the gear. So there’s a big financial incentive for people from third world countries to hack so they can quickly acquire valuable items to sell on that market.

Ah! My bad, it’d been a while since I saw that video.

The cheating problem is off the charts. There was a really good video of someone who investigated how bad it was, and found that about 50% of players were using wallhacks. of matches will have a hacker.

I played it for a couple months. The gunplay was pretty impressive, but the cheaters made it incredibly frustrating, and after seeing that video, I uninstalled and never looked back.

EDIT: The video in question.

It’s mostly underwhelming, IMHO. Pick it up on sale only, if you can. And make sure you have at least 8gb of vram, or it’ll cease working after you get to Italy.

I got that notification for the first time today as well, guessing it’s just s tactic to get people to create accounts they can data mine to sell to AI companies.

The exact effect of these chemicals is still not known. Microplastics seem capable of limiting crop yields, so that’s certainly a horrific issue combined with reduced yields from climate change as well. But chemicals in general, as horrific as they are, are not quite an existential threat capable of completely destroying our ability to grow food.

Current farming practices depleting topsoil is a bigger threat to food production than chemicals, generally, except for pesticides likely causing the collapse of the bee population, which is an existential threat.