There is more to spreading out than urban sprawl. Our towns and even villages used to largely self-contained. Now you're lucky to find a bank, a bakery, a grocery store, and a hardware store in the same place outside of something big enough to be called a city.

People talk about walkable cities, by which they mean that people can walk to most of their normal goods and services. What is that but a town/village model for communities?

Edit: okay, that turned into a bit of a ramble :)

TLDR: at some point, we have to come to terms with the fact that Earth has not got infinite space or an infinity of resources. The sooner we start acting on that knowledge, the better for everyone.

Why would we ever want even more people when we struggle to properly serve the current population? And we've struggled for many years. Immigration is critically important, not for population, but for diversity. Monoculture in all forms is weakness.

I have no problem with urban lifestyles and actually miss some aspects of it. But we are rapidly losing our ability to support alternative lifestyles. Small cities that once thrived now struggle. Towns and villages are becoming less viable. Yet campgrounds are collapsing under the weight of demand.

I've lived my whole life, 67 years, in Saskatchewan. Our population grew by 10-20 percent during the time that Canada's population grew by 50 percent or more. In the 1960s an 70s it was rare to not be able to find openings at any campground on the spur of the moment. That started changing in the 80s and 90s when popular places would fill up on long weekends. By 2000, we had to start making reservations. Today, all but the most out of the way campgrounds require weeks or even months of planning and, often, all but the earliest of birds are shut completely out.

It may seem strange to focus on campgrounds, but I think that this demand is at least partly driven by the loss of non-urban choices in lifestyle. To a first approximation, it was never the villagers and farmers and ranchers who were driving campground demand, but the residents of cities. If everything is to be urbanised, what is left for those for who would choose something different? If we cannot serve the variety of human needs or even such a simple and basic human need to occasionally escape, what hope is there for anything else?

At some point, whether in 50 years or 500, we are going to have to find ways to deal with steady or even falling populations. Nothing about this little rock is infinite. The sooner we recognize that and start building our economies, societies, and institutions accordingly, the less aggressively we need to act. And the less aggressively we need to act, the easier it will be on people, businesses, and nature.

LeBlanc said allowing voters to cast their ballot at any polling station in their riding would require Elections Canada to adopt new technology so that a person would be removed from the voter list across the district once their ballot is cast.

Alternatively, they could trust but punish:

Don't worry about the very small fraction of people who abuse this to cast multiple ballots. Without a fairly large scale, organized effort, it's extremely unlikely for multiple votes to change an outcome under any electoral system.

Use the records collected at polling stations to identify cheaters then to throw every one of the offenders and organizers in prison and permanently prohibit any future participation in the process at all: no voting, no running, no party membership, no volunteering, no working on campaigns either directly or indirectly. Nothing, not even working as the night cleaner for an advertising agency that has political clients or a media outlet that covers or reports politics and elections in any way.

In the unlikely case that the multiple ballots are in a high enough volume to require rerunning the election, charge it to the offenders. They won't be able to pay, of course, but they'll be on the edge of poverty for the rest of their lives.

This site has a good explanation of sovereign citizenship. Specifically:

In the 18th-century colonies, nouns were usually capitalized, although the practice was going out of style by the time of the Revolution. Based on that, sovereigns see secret meaning in the use or non-use of capitalized letters. For example, a "citizen" is a sovereign citizen imbued with all natural rights, whereas a "Citizen" is a 14th Amendment citizen subject to the rules and regulations of government.

While that is specifically American in context, I think the principle is the same. It's basically a kind of numerology but with the conventions of written language.

Speaking of numerology, I can't wait for them to discover that, in ASCII, adding or subtracting the value of a [space] (decimal 32) converts between upper- and lowercase. (A=65, a=97; B=66, b=98...). Surely that gives the [space] a special magic, but is it good magic or bad magic or can anyone use it? And the fact that lowercase uses bigger numbers than uppercase must also carry some significance, right?

For a fun time, use the phrase "sovereign citizen capital letters" in a web search.

They could start by focusing on profits instead of margins. I don't care if your margins are 50% or .005%, if you're extracting billions in profit, you have room to reduce your margins, preferably through some combination of price drops and increased wages for everyone who works in the actual retail outlet.

I like the idea of slrpnk, but not lemmy.world.

My lemmy "philosophy" is that generic centralization should be discouraged. I prefer more "category-like" centralization. This is not just to support my preferred usage pattern (browse and participate "local" on multiple instances), but to ensure that lemmy doesn't evolve toward major centralized instances that end up just being just another clone of the various commercial platforms.

Centralization means less diversity in rules, less diversity in enforcement, and higher instance costs. I think the loss of diversity is just a bad idea, because it leaves less room for widespread experimentation. Higher instance costs could be a problem if instance owners find themselves needing to monetize the instance in order to remain solvent. The outcome is a generally less resilient system.

Well of course they are. I learned as a kid that there are lots of things you have to get right to get a bullseye, but you'll never even get close to the target if you don't aim with intent. Has anyone seen any aiming? Any evidence of intent? Or just a target painted in kaleidoscope colours?

Missed the swing bike and the skatebike.

I don't know where Dad dug these things up, but he started supplying us with strange and wondrous ways to hurt ourselves on 2 wheels, starting with a home made small penny farthing in 1962, an early banana seater, and a circus trick bike (20" wheels, vertical fork tube, and 1:1 fixed gear).

This may not apply everywhere, but around here (Saskatchewan), retirees are the lifeblood of service and community organizations. From the quilting club that generates revenue for brain injury research and food banks to the senior centre that helps people age in place, retirees are a critical component of the glue that holds us together.

Even if you have a fairly narrow economic view of what it means to contribute to society, there is no question that retirees are making those contributions. While actual money is required for most things, nothing happens without people putting in time and retirees have plenty of time and aren't shy about using it.

This is something I became aware of as my older relatives retired. Now that I'm retired myself, I'm more active than ever in the community, despite having also retired from the volunteer fire and rescue service.

It's child's play.

We live where there is no municipal water or sewage. We have two holding tanks, one for water, one for waste. We haul the fresh water ourselves, but there are contractors we could hire. We call a pumper truck to empty the waste water tank occasionally and they haul it to a municipal dump site where it gets treated along with the rest of the municipal sewage.

There are RVs all over the place with appropriate toilet and water systems.

In the early 1980s, I worked at remote work camps with wash shacks that had hot and cold running water with flush toilets.

It's a solved problem.

It doesn't matter what you teach or how you teach or even if you teach. It all helps set the directions taken. Personally, I'll take knowledge over ignorance and inclusion over exclusion, even when I find those things personally uncomfortable.

I agree, but I think we should pay more attention to the tipping point of not getting our asses together.

Taking action requires massive and global changes to the way society works and the way governments interact at both small scales (federal, regional, municipal) and large (treaties, international law, knowledge transfer, wealth management). We cannot fix the climate without first fixing society.

< wall of text rant removed >

On reflection, I think the real tipping point was c. 1980 with Thatcher (there is no such thing as society), elected in 1979, and Reagan (government is the problem, not the solution), inaugurated in 1981. Everything flows from the policies and societal structures they created and destroyed. For 30 years we've been taking for granted that the society they and others like them forged is just how things work. And we're still actively moving the wrong direction.