No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
This, as much as possible and in as many areas as possible. Keep everything local as much as possible and minimize consumption. I've found that satisfaction arises much more readily from minimum consumption than maximum consumption, which might be why the advertising industry spends billions per year to convince us that backward is forward.
Totally agree with participation at grassroot level though. Run for office because you can count on the ghouls sending a candidate.
I do want to just take a second to highlight this. The idea of buying local and buying from people who make things instead of corporations can be hard. It's expensive. And obviously the point is that we are all struggling. So looking at all the stuff I buy I thinking I need to spend so much more on all of that is daunting.
We all live under the same shitty capitalistic hellscape. We can't get out of it. We can only do what we can. Need a new dresser? A locally made one will cost you a lot. Don't stress about not being able to afford it. If you need to, get a cheaper one.
But for a lot of things, you can get it for just as cheap looking around on Etsy. If they have their own website where you can order it so they don't have to pay Etsy money, even better. My boyfriend is in his last semester of nursing school, so I'm getting him a gift, and it's custom made. It's expensive, but most things I would get him are probably made with cheap labor in another country, and would just help prop up a large corporation.
Does this mean everything I buy is custome made? That it's made locally? No. I can't afford that. But I stopped using Amazon for just about everything, have started buying from people when I can, and it's honestly kind of nice. I got to help someone make a living doing what they want to do, instead of just working a job. So even though we can't afford it all the time, it's great to do it when you can, and not let the idea of it needing to be everything make us feel defeated and then never doing it.
When I said buy local I was specifically talking about food and similar. Depending on few factors such as: climate, availability of land, other people with similar goals, food can be easy to produce either as a group or individual basis and there are systems looking at an aquaponics cycle for example tilapia -> leafy greens -> BSF maggots -> you can either split this into chickens and tilapia or just back into tilapia (we've done this it really requires a group effort and land availability).
Other things as you've mentioned like furniture can be a little more challenging due to economies of scale (also child labour, corruption, and general shittery) that major corporations are able to exploit that a local tradesperson can't.
For this sort of stuff I just try to budget, I never buy it immediately.
I guess it's about compromises, and unfortunately for certain things we have to do so.
To reiterate the importance of a group, it's really made it a lot easier to cut costs by having a group with various expertise.
Oh yeah, food is definitely a great one. I'm lucky in that towards the end of summer, our local vegetable garden will sell a lot of their stuff in front of the local church. It's right next to my apartment complex. I love baking, especially muffins, so I'll go right over there and grab some blue berries and raspberries. Get a pumpkin for Halloween. Maybe some watermelon. And all of that money goes back into things for the garden for the next year. I think it's great.