I definitely understand, as I was on reddit for several years as a lurker, then I started to occasionally comment, and then occasionally post. It was really only in the past 2 years that I became a pretty big poster and commenter on reddit. I think I actually post and comment more here on lemmy than even on reddit, if for no other reason than to help produce content and engagement here. Becoming a prolific poster and commenter ain’t a quick or easy transition, but I think even just upvoting niche stuff helps regardless. Like some of the smaller communities I’ve made here and been posting largely into the void, I still notice when I get like 3 upvotes instead of none at all. Every tiny bit of engagement here helps encourage others to keep on doing the same.

Yeah, I get the same thing as you. What I’ve done so far is I made a few communities here and am trying to fairly reliability populate them with content. Some of those communities are niche and I feel like I’m posting into the void sometimes, but occasionally I’ve gotten someone else actually posting some content in them. It does definitely take some commitment to bootstrap a new community, as people just won’t start posting on their own there until there’s a critical mass. So you just gotta take the hit, post into the void a while, slowly increase that subscribe count, until finally others start to join in.

It’s easiest with communities focused around memes or links, but I think it’ll take more effort with more niche hobby or technical communities, e.g., for programming languages or niche hobbies.

I agree also by rules-based utilitarianism. It’s important not just to consider the immediate, short-term utilitarian outcome, but to consider the utility of a world whereby we regularly make the same type of decision.

In a world where a riot is all it takes to sentence unpopular people to death, you create a perverse incentive for people to riot – or threaten to riot – in order to pervert the proper carriage of justice. Who knows how much net harm would be done in this world ruled by mob justice.

But the alternative is a world where rule of law exists, which I think is a far better world to live in.

Others have covered the details of labor laws in the US, so I won’t touch on that, but your question does make me think about why those kinds of labor protection laws are even seen as a necessity. And I think the answer to that is we (most people, not just Americans) view jobs as equal to livelihood.

But it makes you wonder what the world could be like if we had a universal basic income, where getting fired wasn’t actually the worst thing that could happen to you. It might still suck, but you’d still be able to have a roof over your head and food on your table while you searched for new work. This, critically, would give you more negotiating power when finding new jobs, as you’d likely be less desperate for a job, meaning you could credibly insist upon better pay and better conditions.

But we could take this one step further. In economics, there’s this concept called an externality, which is when you do something that affects someone else as a side effect. When you do something that harms someone else as a side effect (e.g., pollution), that’s called a negative externality. Negative externalities are actually a major problem in completely unregulated economies, because they cause the “invisible hand” of the free market to fail to achieve optimal distribution of goods, i.e., a market failure. The classic example of this is carbon emissions – the true cost to society of carbon emissions (from climate change) is not reflected in the cost of providing carbon-intensive goods, thus we have a tendency to over-produce and over-consume carbon-intensive goods and services. That is, the economy would be better off in the long-run if we emitted less carbon than we currently are, despite the short-term profits of polluting. Anyhoo, this mismatch between sticker price and true cost to society is why carbon tax is almost universally regarded to be the single best climate policy: by accounting for the costs of the negative externality, you can fix the market failure, and the invisible hand can once again work as it’s supposed to.

But where this relates to where I was going is there are also positive externalities, where you have a positive impact on someone else as a side effect of your activities. An example might be doing regenerative agriculture or rewilding a patch of land – the pollinator habitat you provide or the carbon you sequester has positive impacts on other people. And like how negative externalities tend to lead to overconsumption, positive externalities tend to lead to underconsumption. I.e., the economy would be net better off of more people did rewilding and regenerative agriculture, despite the short-term immediate costs they incur. And much like taxing negative externalities (e.g., carbon emissions) is a good way to correct those issues, subsidizing positive externalities is a good way to fix the issues of insufficient good activities.

So imagine if we not only had a UBI, but if the government also would pay you to plant trees or develop/maintain open-source software or any number of other activities that produce positive externalities. If we had these alternative means of maintaining a basic level of livelihood, then maybe we could decouple existing from jobs, and we wouldn’t feel a strong need to coerce businesses into holding onto people, nor would we need to coerce them into paying people enough or giving good enough working conditions – companies would have to pay well and offer good conditions and not fire for unfair reasons, else they’d struggle to fill vacancies.

We all saw how companies begrudgingly had to pay more during the “great resignation”. Or look how the professional class (e.g., doctors, engineers) get good pay and good conditions, precisely because they’re hard to replace. Give workers more options, make them less desperate, and they’ll be empowered to negotiate better pay and better conditions for themselves. Sure, some regulations would still be necessary, but I think there’s a lot of elegance in a bottom-up approach to labor relations.

Plus, banks actually serve an important economic role. When you put money in a savings account, the bank can lend it out to someone else as an investment, allowing enterprising individuals access to startup capital to build productive businesses or even just mortgages to buy homes, while also providing a quite safe means of storing your savings. Essentially, they connect those who have spare capital with those who need capital. And sure, there’s a lot of tomfoolery that goes on in the industry, but the core idea of banking is good.

I have a pasta maker attachment for my stand mixer, and it makes it surprisingly easy to make fresh pasta. So I’ll knead together some semolina, egg, and warm water until I get a nice dough (using the stand mixer, of course), then feed it through the pasta maker attachment to make fettuccine. Boil and make a simple sauce with browned butter, pasta water, a splash of heavy cream, a spoonful of whole grain mustard, a spoonful of garlic paste, then topped with some freshly grated pecorino and a drizzle of olive oil.

Sounds fancy, and it does take a bit more time to make the pasta from scratch, but it’s not hard at all and it’s ludicrously delicious. Plus, 99% of people are impressed by even the idea of fresh pasta.

If I’m going for “easy” as in “fast”, too, I’ll use a package of storebought gnocchi and chop in a zucchini instead.

I might even go so far as plant a few policies in their heads. “We are in a climate emergency, and we should address it immediately with policies such as carbon tax-and-dividend, ending subsidies for harmful industries such as fossil fuels and industrial agriculture, investing in both established and promising renewable energy sources such as solar and wind and tidal and geothermal, reducing our dependence on cars with more electrified public transport and denser urban design, and encouraging better urban land use patterns with land value taxes.” One sentence = one thought, right?

Knowing humans, if we didn’t use this magical power to guide them to good solutions, a good number of us would conclude, “That’s it, we need to nuke China and India to save the Earth!”

Do you have a fridge? If so, you can just stick half an onion (not minced, obviously) straight in the fridge for a few days just fine. The exposed surface will dry out slightly, but that’s not an issue if you’re just using them for sauce. I usually use a whole onion per dish anyways, since I love onions, and they’re a dirt cheap way to add flavor and some semblance of vegetables to a meal.

If you have a freezer, frozen peas are also really cheap and nutritious, and they basically only need to be thawed. Plain pasta with salt, little bit of butter or oil, splash of vinegar, some of the pasta water (all those starches in the pasta water will help a simple sauce come together), and frozen peas is really cheap and easy, yet somehow really tasty.

You can also bulk it up if you add beans. Beans are cheapest if you buy a bag of them dry at some place like walmart (I prefer pinto beans and chickpeas, but you can go with any beans you like) instead of going for canned. Just soak the dry beans in a bowl of water overnight on the counter, replace the water, then boil them on the stove for about an hour (until they’re soft) and strain. Chickpeas also taste pretty good with pasta.

Other options if you have a fridge is to crack an egg into the pasta right after you’ve strained it and mixing it so it can cook in the residual heat. You can also chop up a hotdog and put it in your sauce. Surprisingly tasty.

You can get by without tupperware to store leftovers if you eat just one or two big meals a day; it allows you to do more in bulk with a one-pot meal, with less preparation, and you just eat it all in one go. I also find I can get away with leaving it on the counter for up to a couple hours and then finishing it if I don’t want to eat it all in just one sitting.

Also, the cheat codes to making food taste good, even if not fancy, are salt, fat, and acid. Even plain pasta tastes really good if it’s properly salted and given a generous drizzle of oil and vinegar. Bouillon cubes are also a good cheat code to making things taste better for cheap. Heck, you can even buy a cheap bottle of vinaigrette salad dressing (e.g., italian or greek dressing) and pour that on your pasta for a basic pasta “salad”.

Our cities would be compact, walkable, jam-packed with quality transit, and nearly car-free. Cargo would be transported with cargo ebikes, barges along rivers and canals, local freight rail, and cargo trams. People would move by foot and bike and trams and metro and high-speed rail.

The surrounding countryside would be home to ecological, sustainable smallholder agriculture, preferably with plenty of technology for efficient precision agriculture. Instead of massive monocultures of corn, we’d have diverse polycultures of dozens of different crops, both annuals and perennials.

Nature would be abundant, protected, and rewilded. We would remove most roads into wild areas and replace with trains and velomobile trails, which would be much lower impact on wild habitats. Every city would have easy, rapid transit access to natural areas by rail, so anyone can go hiking or exploring or whatever they like.

Our economy would be centered around productivity, not rent-seeking and speculation. We would use policy to reduce barriers to entry to create highly competitive markets. We would heavily tax externalities like carbon emissions and fertilizer runoff and PFAS contamination.

We would tax people on what they take, not what they make. Income taxes? Nah, you did the labor; that value should belong to you. Carbon emissions? That materially harms others so you should pay tax on that. Hoarding valuable god-given land? You didn’t make it, so you should pay taxes on the land you deprive from the rest of humanity.

Our democracy would be reformed with a much better voting system like mixed-member proportional representation (MMPR) or single transferrable vote (STV), so we could have healthy multiparty systems.

Our society would publicly invest more in research and development, open-source projects, infrastructure, and anything else that generates positive externalities. You rewilded 100 acres of native grassland? Society should pay you for your valuable labor.

The balance of power between labor and employers would be balanced. A citizen’s dividend or universal basic income, subsidies on positive externalities (like rewilding), and the economic general growth spurred by elimination of rent-seeking would allow for an empowered working class that could capture its own productivity gains, demand better pay, and demand shorter hours. Much like how the professional class can demand good pay and good working conditions currently.

In short, the economy would be centered around Georgist principles, environment and agriculture around permaculture, and democracy around technocratic and representative democracy. A shared, sustainable prosperity for all.