Yeah, with sufficient unthoughtfulness, refusing to do research, and with poor enough planning, you can fuck up literally anything? I’m not sure what your point is. I didn’t say it was suitable for everybody, or that it magically cannot fail, or that it will always be worth it in all circumstances (if your soil’s contaminated, yes, you will want to be careful about how you garden and your costs will likely be higher), or that gardening, unlike anything else, is a good fit for everybody’s brain and that every single person can do it effectively.

I just think it’s kinda dumb to go after home gardening as somehow not useful or valuable just because it’s not a complete, viable replacement for industrial agriculture. It’s a completely stupid false dichotomy.

Basically you need to think about how to do it cost-effectively and sanely. Just like anything else you do (you do think about that, right?)

Counterpoint: if you, personally, can save some dollars so you’re mainly spending on the things you can’t grow, that’s hardly a bad thing. Also, working with soil is known to be good for you. Exposes you to soil bacteria that are known to boost mood.

And it sounds corny as fuck and I didn’t really take it seriously until I did it, but homegrown produce can be so incredibly much better than what you get off an industrial farm.

Just let people participate in feeding themselves and be happy, fuck.

EDIT – to make a pedant happy

Considering how expensive fresh produce is getting, it doesn’t have to change the direction of inflation to be worth it.

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Look up what people used to say about digital art and tell me if history repeats itself or not

It never went away.

They’re probably going to find themselves having to explain what it means that a social media platform is itself engaged in speech, instead of functioning as a platform for others to speak. TikTok users, whose voices are allegedly curtailed by the ban, aren’t exactly prevented from going to another platform.

If they say that it’s Tiktok’s speech that’s curtailed, they’re going to have to explain carefully how they’re not a foreign influence operation.

The language of the first amendment is pretty stark, but the courts have always understood it has various limits.

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Typically how this goes is that a centrist liberal Democrat will get the nomination, and then push the left and progressives to support them because this centrist liberal can be transacted with. Once in office, they’ll stomp all over the left and progressives, do literally less than the bare minimum needed to support the idea that they are in fact trying to get support from progressives and leftists, and then demand more votes four years later so progressives and the left can all get taken for another ride by some rich asshole who has more in common with Elon Musk than they do with most Americans.

Clinton more or less promised this type of governance to the left, and only tried, all too tardily, to come around after it became clear that people might actually not show up for someone who openly hates them and literally does not share their politics, and that raw identity politics alone was not going to be enough to get her into government.

Biden, surprisingly, has out of nowhere done a variety of progressive things. He allowed himself to be pushed on student loans. Like actually though. He banned non-competes, which won’t fix capitalism, but if you’re a capitalist liberal who believes in transacting with the left and in properly managing markets through policy, then that was a 100% necessary move. And he did it, without even that much fanfare.

While he’ll never be pro-labor in the way I would want to see in order to be a supporter, the fact that he is actually willing to engage in transactional politics with progressives/the left really does count for something to me. He’s still a strikebreaker and I won’t give him credit for being a pro-labor candidate, but being willing to cut deals on things here and there does mean he has something to offer.

Who decides who comes into power? Strictly speaking, the party officials in charge of primaries in the US.

What gets me is how controversial things like this are in the US. Non-competes are antisocial, because they blunt one of the few mechanisms capitalism has to keep employers in check – labor market mobility. One of the things that’s supposed to make capitalism kind of okay is the fact that “if you don’t like it, you can go elsewhere.” Well, if you’re not allowed to start a business or get another job in your line of work for like years after you leave, how the hell are you supposed to actually do that? How does the labor market route around bad employers when workers are literally trapped?

Way I see it, a non-compete is just an employer’s way of telling you they’d keep you trapped in a box in your off-hours if they could.