The meme says "force you via taxes". And Jesus Christ Himself told people to pay their taxes.

Nothing is more punk than food not bombs. It’s just feeding everyone who shows up whether the government likes it or not.

Yes, and, Food Not Bombs is a great example to bring up, because they don't only feed everyone, they also share literature and talk politics and organize community action. From FNB's how to guide:

Your meal is not a Food Not Bombs meal if you don't provide literature and display a banner. Otherwise the public will think you are a church and have the impression your group believes that our political and economic system is fine and that all we need to do is care for those who are not able to make it. We are not a charity, we are seeking to build a movemnet to end the exploitation of the economic and political system.

I think very few orgs do "the personal is political" better than FNB.

It is to turn a fascist society into one that does not need them, one where it is effective to engage in social works and to collaborate with public institutions.

And we don't actually live in that society yet, and therefore protesting, feeding people, helping drug addicts, and doing odd jobs for your neighbors all remain punk af.

JFC. Selling food without a permit is illegal. Doing most home repairs without a license and permit is illegal. If I install a set of solar panels for my neighbor and she pays me in raw milk and eggs we could both be arrested. Don't tell me helping your community isn't punk.

It doesn't mean anything to whom?

Cause I bet it means a lot to the people who need food and shelter.

Is the point of charity to feed the hungry or to let rich people feel good about themselves?

It doesn't matter to the hungry person if the food they eat was paid for by taxes or voluntary charity. Food is food.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

The myth of the humble farmer or small holder living in harmony with his land is as bullshit as the myth of the noble savage. The vast majority of farmers see the planet as a resource to make money from. If they take any heed to local conditions, they think of it in tragedy of the commons style. For instance, in many places around the world, the aquifers irrigating farmland have less than 20 years before they're emptied. Local farmers are aware. They take it as a warning to pump as much water as possible as fast as they can, because if they don't take the water and turn it into profit, someone else will, and the water will still be gone.

And that's not even getting into how these brutal exploitative farming methods are what allowed the Earth's population to balloon to a unsustainable 8 billion and ravage the land and devour resources of every sort.

The vast majority of farmers are the enemy of the planet. In my more green authoritarian moments, I envision nationalizing every acre and setting up eco villages of subsistence farmers populated by the poor of our cities and worked by former corporate middle management reduced to serfdom. No one should own whole square miles of farmland. Not even farmers.

I'd argue that planned obsolescence is about designing something to break early and shorten its useful life, while graceful degradation is about designing things that are resilient, that work even after being broken, to give them as long a useful life as possible.

In that vein, the flashlight is a useful analogy even if you could argue it's not an exact example - it works when it power source is at full, it works when it has fewer power sources, it works when it has less energetic power sources, it just tones down its output to match the power it has available.

Apple, on the other hand, went out and said "if you don't buy a new phone we're going to make your old phone run slower". I think the battery life was just an excuse - did Apple really think its customers would rather have a slower phone than a phone with shorter battery life? Sounds ridiculous.

If you want a better example of graceful degradation in technology, think about solar panels. Solar panels gradually become less efficient with age - a 20-year-old solar panel is working at about 80% of its original efficiency. And for high efficiency needs, like powering a house where you have limited space to put solar panels, 80% might not be good enough anymore. But a solar panel that works at 80% is totally functional for other uses where less power is needed, so you can repurpose it and swap it out. And as long as somebody doesn't drop a rock on the panel and break it, it can keep going for decades more.

Less efficient panels can be repurposed for systems that need less power. Older computers can get new operating systems and be repurposed for less demanding uses. Some things can be repaired indefinitely, and some can't, but even things that gradually and inevitably decline in efficiency can be repurposed instead of being discarded. That's the sort of resilient design we need for a sustainable future.

Here in California, utility companies are "solving" this by instituting extremely high fees for the privilege of connecting your solar power to the grid. If I recall from the last time I ran the numbers, rooftop solar panels no longer make economic sense for the vast majority of residential customers - it costs more money to install me solar panels and pay the monthly connection fees then you'll save by producing energy over the lifetime of the solar panels.

Edit: I just googled and it looks like after public outcry the regulators pulled their really bad fee schedule to replace with a slightly less bad fee schedule. The system works!

Probably the one time in history PG&E tried to fix a problem ahead of time. 😆

Ironically, back then people my age were warning kids "don't trust anyone or anything you read on the Internet, don't give out any personal information to anyone".

Fast forward 25 years and my peers are quoting 8chan shitposts as fact and "investing" their life savings on crypto websites they heard about on Discord.

AOC is calling for protests. Equating protests to terrorism puts you in the ignoble company of the Iranian government, the Saudi monarchy, and the Georgia cops who charged protesters with felonies for distributing flyers.

And it eliminates the stigma of only the poor kids getting free lunches.

The stigma is the point.

Conservatives believe receiving charity should be shameful.

Because conservatives (and neoliberals) think poverty is a personal moral failure - if you're poor, it's not because society and capitalism and racism and structural inequality screwed you over, it's because you, personally, were lazy or wasted your money or broke the law or didn't work hard enough.

So if a child can't afford a school lunch, it's because their parents are bad people. And shaming that child with an obvious "free lunch" (I remember having a bright red card that I had to show in the cafeteria, and the lunch lady would sneer at me and loudly proclaim "here is your FREE LUNCH" and hand me a cheese sandwich and an apple when the other kids were getting pizza just to make sure everybody knew my parents were poor) teaches the child to be ashamed of their parents and be ashamed of their poverty so they'll work harder to avoid poverty as adults.

And if schools give every child free lunch, not only do they lose that "teaching opportunity", they teach children that food is a right and that everybody, no matter their economic status, should have enough to eat, which is a direct attack on the fundamental principles of capitalism and American society.

Go into a conservative space and tell them people have a right to food and shelter and medical care and watch them froth in rage.

Selective enforcement is the core of conservative law making.