Tiresia

How do horizontal power structures handle problems of global scale? The COVID pandemic and how people behaved and created consequences for others comes to mind.

Horizontal power structures can only be stable if people have a healthy culture of proactively fighting selfish actions. Any teenager will have experienced students firing their teachers, the village taking children away from abusive parents, women going on a sex strike to get men to take allegations of catcalling seriously, etc.

So when COVID rolls around and some people act selfishly, people already know from experience how to act with it. People are already familiar with shunning friends because they refuse to grow out of hurting others, they're already familiar with boycotting specific businesses and finding alternatives. And most importantly, people already know that all of this is waiting for them if they do choose to be selfish, so they are way more likely to choose the right thing from the start.

Ideally, horizontal power structures also come with Restorative Justice. For every crime that people have ever heard of, they'll have seen the process of someone being kept at a safe distance until they learn why they were wrong and make amends to those they wronged, and receiving help with learning.

But sure, suppose somehow that 40% of the population doesn't really care much about keeping each other healthy and is not going to budge without consequences. In that case: Making people sick is an act of violence, so people would be in their rights to use the threat of reciprocal violence to keep people that refuse to wear masks at 2m distance.

This would be a problem that needs discussion. My fifteen minute answer would be that those of the 60% that feel comfortable with it could be given consent by the community to walk around with 2m long halberds (shaped to be blunt when poking and sharp when slicing) and keep the 40% out of spaces where they would cause harm with the threat of force. They could share a digital zine on how to make these halberds from common household materials, and have the normal justice system for people that misuse those weapons.

can’t exile them without a power structure that can use force on them

If you can't find twenty people to work together to overpower and exile one person, that's a good sign that you're wrong about wanting to exile them.

Another idea on that scale might be best exemplified by climate change (or pfas etc). Do horizontal power structures mean most people could ignore how they’re impacting others negatively? If not, how would that be handled on a global scale?

In a horizontal power structure, a nation disregarding the agreed-on CO2 output norms is the same thing as a person disagreeing the agreed-on "no catcalling" norms. Talking to them, boycotting them, using violence if necessary. If the USA and EU didn't have a position of power over the rest of the world, their excess CO2 production would be answered with a boycott from the rest of the world.

The willfully negligent poisoning of others is also an act of violence. People who do not understand that reckless scientific experimentation or deployment of untested chemicals is murder can be stopped by any means up to and including violence. In a horizontal power structure, every Chemours factory would be carefully decontaminated rubble.

Though more realistically, Chemours would never have existed. There would not be a patent on PFAS. People would treat those that deploy PFAS without prior study on its health effects as violent. People would discover its toxicity and environmental harm within years of its discovery and before any large-scale roll-out, and the cleanup of contaminated sites would be manageable by volunteers.

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Get in the van, no using pronouns here >:(

Sorry, I was trying to make a reference to an image macro. What I was trying to express is that I didn't understand the explanation.

I'm not American, and no.

It would be cool if you could get tickets for showings with either yelling or no yelling.

Besides, better working conditions for the team means more mentally healthy workers means a better and more creative product.

That's huge. That means that if you're in the tenth percentile of income/emissions, you might well be emitting less than the global average.

I say this because it's true if you make the assumption of exponential decay. Their data isn't accurate enough to check that assumption, but it's the most parsimonious one, and in this case the function that fits would be:

 E = 29.5 e^(-P*0.36)

Where E is the emission fraction and P is the percentile as an integer. This results in the table below, with the numbers in bold the ones that the function is fit to.

Since a percentile is 1% wide, an emission fraction of 0.8% is below the global average.

This assumption doesn't fit with the remaining 90% of the population, but it makes sense that the exponential relationship would slow down as people maintain a "poverty line" minimum footprint. If this consideration already affects the 10th percentile, it's possible the 10th percentile still emits more than the global average.

I don't have a car and I don't eat meat, so it definitely doesn't include me.

Sorry for not engaging with the content, but please add paragraph breaks. kthx

The program has the information, but that doesn't mean the people that wrote the code felt it was worth their time to make the "upgrade" text inclusive to Linux, if they even considered the possibility of Linux.

Megaprojects are too small. The Manhattan Project didn't have its effect on the shape of war in its purview, the Apollo Program did not question the value of one-upmanship vs the USSR, the Three Gorges Dam did not concern itself with the decision making process for the industrial consumption of its electricity.

This requires thinking on the scale of planned economies, geopolitics, and ideology. We have to dismiss GDP and profit as a measure of success and find measures that indicate long term stability; to redesign the mandate and authority of the UN and IMF to liberate the global south and workers around the world from a life of miserable neocolonial overproduction; to choose a shape of laws and education and social norms that stops promoting overconsumption and focuses on the best things in life being free.

Tell that to the 10% of the German population that didn't survive WW2.