Finasteride only really effects hair on the scalp, since beard hairs aren’t effected by the chemical that finasteride protects against.

With closed source apps, we can’t independently verify what is or is not being collected.

But another, longer-term issue, is that because they are proprietary, if they became quite popular, they would very likely be sold to either a competitor to shut it down, or enshittified by adding transaction fees.

As an older example, Paperback Swap was an incredible website where people could give away books in exchange for a credit, which could be exchanged with another user for their book. There were no fees taken by the website, the only cost was shipping the books via media mail (which was extremely affordable, as the books would be wrapped in printer paper).

Paperback Swap was, at the time, a very popular website, with over a million books available. I used the service for many years happily exchanging books.

Then it was purchased by Amazon, which saw Paperback Swap as a threat to their used book market. They immediately enshittified the app, adding transaction fees and requiring you to purchase exchange credits or ongoing subscriptions. Within a couple years the community was effectively killed, and now shambles on as a shell of its former self.

Free, Libre open-source apps are the only long-term refuge from the constant churn of enshittification, as the community can always fork it to prevent bad-actors and venture capital from corrupting it.

For those reasons, you’re likely to experience some pushback on them. We’ve been burned so many times :(

Flohmarket could potentially be an alternative, though I’m not sure if instances can be set up to be purely barter.

If it were replaced with massive investment into public transport and new dedicated high speed rail between US cities, it’d be a huge net positive.

A man can dream, anyway.

To do it again would literally kill air travel in the country for the next 30 years. People would literally stop flying.

From a climate perspective, that would be fantastic.

There’s no requirement that they be unionized. Anyway, that’s unrealistic in the US.

It helps, because unions will have strike funds to supplement worker’s income during the strike. Most American’s have no savings and are living hand to mouth, which may discourage them from participating in a general strike.

For your second paragraph, I don’t disagree. Even with the potential for that, I consider it a mostly non-violent action, at least in comparison to a civil war.

Ah, gotcha, so when my neighbor’s house needs to be redone because he rewired it himself, I’m on the hook for that.

I already mentioned that a community could collectively decide to continue to enforce building codes.

Too bad I have to stand by and let a couple of transient drug addicts cook meth in the house next door again

There would be much less incentive to create drugs for profit in a world without money.

Not saying there wouldn’t be drugs or addicts, but it’s extremely likely the scale of the problem would be fairly drastically reduced, as many people turn to becoming drug addicts due to becoming homeless as a way to find some way to cope with the extreme stress and trauma of the situation. Without money, there would be no reason for China to continue to sell fentenyl and other drugs to the cartels to be shipped into the US, and the same for Cocaine from South America. That would leave only what could be reasonably produced at home, which would likely take the form of weed.

If, on the chance that someone did start producing meth in a community that has collectively agreed to not allow for that, they could potentially be ejected from the community.

Sure thing. That’s totally going to happen. … it fall apart into vague handwaving about how everyone will be all helpful sunshine and smiles, which we know for a fact, people aren’t that at any level of their being.

It seems that you believe people are only motivated by money, status, or power. But we have examples of societies that were able to implement an Anarchist way of existence, such as Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War, which abolished money, the state, and was able to thrive as federated communities. George Orwell went there, and spoke of how excellent that mode of society was, to the point that he fought in the war and took a bullet in the neck for it.

Except it wouldn’t be their home. Someone else built it

They could have built it themselves, too.

So the community bears the effort and cost of maintaining houses (or apartments) which they are not allowed to benefit from.

Bear in mind that the community would render aid to anyone who needs assistance in maintaining their own properties as well. It would be mutual aid. For the ‘cost’ of perhaps choosing to maintain a temporarily empty property, you would never need to ‘purchase’ a new roof, heater, or repairs for your own home. The community would help you the same way you helped them.

You’re also ignoring my mention of the benefit that this mutual aid would enable others to travel to maintained community housing anywhere in the world for free.

I think we would see a significant number of people jumping from home to home, trashing each one and then moving on to the next, leaving the community with the choice of cleaning up those homes, or letting them become uninhabitable hazards, and a blight on the neighborhood.

I think you’re putting a bit too much weight into the idea that the only thing keeping most housing stock in good condition is that financial barrier. I think most people would want to keep their home in good condition without financial pressures forcing them to keep it nice. If everyone let their home go into disrepair, then there would be no ‘good’ homes to jump to. It’s in the interests of everyone to maintain good housing stock, so that if you ever did move you wouldn’t only have shitholes to choose from.

If you think people would suddenly start taking care of a home just because they have one, then I’ve got a bridge to sell you, just look at all the litter and pollution people dump everywhere. Take a moment and look at cars in parking lots, and I bet you’ll find at least one that is packed to the brim with garbage, to the point of being dangerous to drive.

I’m not saying in this new way of society that everything will just become magically perfect, but I very much doubt it would be an epidemic on the scale you’re thinking of. Even in your example of garbage filled cars, you don’t find half the parking lot like that, only one at most. Just because a handful of people might not take care of their home doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth it to stop millions of people worldwide from suffering and dying on the streets, throwing themselves under busses due to hopelessness.

No, there is a financial risk and financial incentive when you own a home, or even rent an apartment. If you don’t take care of it, then you lose out on that risk.

There are millions of dilapidated homes that are owned by the people who live in them. There are thousands upon thousands of rental properties that landlords will let become unlivable and condemned. Owning a property or even having consequences does not stop that from happening.

there are zoning laws, city, state, and national laws that pertain to maintaining a home, along with certifications and inspections to make sure the dwelling is safe to inhabit.

There is nothing stopping a community from continuing to enforce those laws if they desire.

but it’s also clear that “just make housing a right and let anyone move into a house that the community has to pay for and work to maintain” is an idealistic dream that naively handwaves away reality.

“It’s easier to imagine an end to the world, than to the end of capitalism.”

I’d suggest looking at some more in-depth analysis instead of dismissing the concept off hand from a short comment.

For a General Strike to work, there does need to be a somewhat unified vision of what the strike is against. That means getting workers educated about the situation as much as possible.

A boycott can sometimes work against individual corporations, but a boycott to make the government listen would require sustained participation from a massive section of the population, which seems unlikely to say the least. In contrast, a general strike only needs workers in critical unionized industries to join in to cause a virtual halt of economic activity (dock workers, train workers, truckers, etc). This lowers the numbers needed to be effective by an order of magnitude, and is thus much more feasible. History has shown it to be the most effective non-violent tool we have for over 100 years, and so far nothing else has come close.

Prefiguration could be considered a 3rd method. Building the alternative systems we want to see and use in the world to lower our dependence on the current system facilitates the ability to enact general strikes, boycotts, and reduces the leverage they have over us to not enact resistance.

A fourth method would be perhaps more extreme, like collectively destroying all of the world’s databases that contain financial debt records, Fightclub/Mr.Robot style. But that would require extreme coordination between established capable groups, and currently is not a feasible option.

Maybe it the family in it moved out because they only needed a quick place to stay short term after moving to a new city? Could be that it’s housing for a college student who has gone back home during summer break?

I think in most cases, short-term housing as you describe would be best served by more dense apartment complexes that are maintained by the community, and the people who stay in them for those short periods. They would be maintained in the same way that public transport or libraries would be maintained, as a public resource that everyone has access to and needs.

The benefit to those who maintain such complexes is that they would also freely have access to use such facilities in other parts of the country. This is not terribly dissimilar to how individual Native Americans were able to travel vast distances in America and expect accommodation from virtually any tribe they came across (that weren’t hostile due to a larger conflict), because without such universal accommodation, each tribe would be limited in how far they could travel or trade. It was to all tribes mutual benefit to give each other that accommodation, in an early form of mutual aid (you can read more about that in David Wengrow’s book, The Dawn of Everything, a very interesting read).

Maybe a nicer house opened up in the area, so the resident left their old house to go to the new one?

The Dispossessed by Ursula Le’Guin offers an interesting solution to that scenario. In that book, money does not exist, and housing is simply a right that all are entitled to. Couples and families are given larger accommodation when it becomes available, which is managed by an elected housing committee.

A single family home would be unlikely to be empty for long in a desirable area, so I don’t think abandoned homes would be a significantly bigger issue than they already are under our current system. As a current example, In Japan, many smaller rural towns with dwindling populations have such an abundance of unoccupied homes, that they’re actively paying people to move out to the area, and will sell the house for under $10k in the hopes someone will take them up and maintain it.

It would fall on the neighbors to maintain the house until someone else moved in to it.

Only if they wanted to. There would be no one to force them to do such a thing. They may elect to do so since they would have much more free time in a socialist world (estimates usually suggest around 3 months of community work would be required to give everyone a good standard of living, with the remainder of of the year being free time to do with as they please).

How do you think they are going to feel when some “house jumper” moves in who just lets the place fall apart and moves on to another location because it costs them nothing to let the house go to ruins and they have no personal interest in maintaining it?

How is that prevented in our current society? Many home owners let their home go into disrepair despite owning it. Sometimes this is done out of poverty, or a lack of motivation for upkeep. The only way to force someone to maintain their home in our current society is with HOA’s who give fines or even jailtime to individuals if they don’t. They don’t have the most popular reputations.

Regardless, a community could decide to implement HOA-like rules if they all agreed to it, and then someone could decide if they wanted to live there and abide by those rules, or go somewhere where there aren’t any (like our current system).

Cheers :)

I don’t mean regarding maintenance, I mean why are the houses empty?

I could see a very undesirable area having houses left abandoned, just as they are in our current system. But in areas that are desirable, why would a house be left abandoned for so long when everybody needs a place to live?

A group from in the community could keep track of what houses aren’t being used so they could direct people needing a home toward them. Perhaps if someone is moving they could inform that group that the house in now available, and give them the keys.

No prob my friend :)

Could you elaborate what you mean?

None of what I suggested is feasible to achieve within a political framework that is ultimately captured by capital. A handful of small particularly ethical landlords may support reform, but most will not, and the bigger corporate landlords will actively fight it with millions of dollars in lobbying, which the politicians have proven time and time again they are only too willing to accept.

Edit: It will take renters standing up, creating tenant unions, and engaging in direct action to cause real change.

In a theoretical socialist society, people would not be allowed to own multiple single family homes, only the one they’re currently using, since renting an essential need creates a power imbalance.

As a stop-gap, all currently rented single family homes (as in renting the entire house, not just a room in a house), could be converted to rent-to-own contracts, so that at some point that power imbalance ends and the renter is no longer being exploited.

Whether or not a small business owner is for or against raising wages depends entirely on their own ethical compass, and whether that compass is strong enough to turn away from the temptation of extra profit. It’s rare that individuals are so altruistic to be able to fully turn off the impulse for profit incentive and personal enrichment.

In contrast, a worker owned coop would not have that issue, as all workers would have equal incentive to raise wages as much as is reasonable while still maintaining the ability for the coop to thrive. Their individual ethics or moral compass wouldn’t factor in nearly as much.

That probably the realest thing that can be done without bloodshed.

The most effective non-violent action we can take is to organize a General Strike.

The country would be brought to its knees if suddenly deprived of profit and labor. That tactic was extremely effective in Chile in 2019, and had they not fallen for the trick of liberal reform, they would’ve had a successful revolution on their hands with virtually no bloodshed.

If you aren’t in a union (or even if you are, it’s worth dual-carding), please consider joining the IWW to unionize your workplace (bonus: you’ll get higher wages, better benefits, and more time off if you succeed!) to strengthen a general strike if we manage to enact one.

• 🌍 US/Global: IWW (Français) - (Español)

And for our international friends, you should join one as well, as fascism is gaining momentum globally. If your country isn’t listed below, just contact the IWW directly in the link above.

• 🇦🇷 Argentina: FORA
• 🇦🇺 Australia: ASF-IWA
• 🇧🇷 Brazil: FOB
• 🇧🇬 Bulgaria: ARS, CITUB
• 🇩🇪 Germany: FAU
• 🇬🇷 Greece: ESE
• 🇮🇹 Italy: USI
• 🇳🇱 🇧🇪 Netherlands & Belgium: Vriji Bond
• 🇪🇸 Spain: CNT
• 🇸🇪 Sweden: SAC
• 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: UVW

Hm, your posts seem to show up fine from Lemmy.world itself, at least from the desktop browser.

@obinice@lemmy.world, can you see Track_Shovel’s posts from the link above?

Be sure to also test if you can see Track_Shovel’s posts both logged out and logged in from that link. If it turns out you can see the images not logged in, but they become unviewable when logged in, an accidental block of Slrpnk.net in your settings page would be my best guess.

If they are viewable from the desktop site logged in, and the issue only occurs with Boost, then I would assume it may be an accidental site block within the Boost app itself, if that’s possible (I don’t use Boost).

A user here emailed slate asking if there would be any tracking, and they responded that it would not, as it wouldn’t have the hardware to make that possible.

We’ll see if they actually follow through on that.