There are studies about people like you (said in the most positive of ways).

I’d ditch my car for the bike entirely if not for road trips.

The next step is to tally up the yearly costs of owning a car with all that this incurs, then weigh that against how many days per year you typically go on road trips and how much car rental would cost you in the amount of days you’d have to hire a car for.

If it looks like you’d more or less break even without factoring in those surprise costs that happen with car ownership (“Gee, that’s a nice alternator you’ve got there! It sure would be a shame if some day it decided to shit itself and then you’d have to pay for a tow to the mechanic’s to replace the thing while missing a day of work…”) and you think you’d be fine renting for road trips then you’re probably going to be better off selling the car, especially in the long run.

What I’d do from there, if I decided to pull the trigger, would be to set up a secondary bank account and automatically transfer money that would go to typical car-associated costs like insurance/registration/gas and set up an automatic transfer into that secondary account. Also set aside enough money to replace your ebike from the sale of your car so if anything happens you aren’t going to find yourself in a tricky situation. Then use the money that accrues in that secondary account to fund car hire when you’re ready for your next road trip. It’s going to be painful shelling out a thick wad of cash for a car rental on your first road trip but keep in mind that car ownership is a financial form of death by a thousand cuts that you rarely think about since it’s just the cost of doing business.

Honestly, over time I’d expect that the secondary account would start filling up faster than you can spend the money on car rentals which might free you up to buy other things you want.

The other option is to find a good friend or loved one who would be willing to split the costs for car sharing arrangement between the two of you. This would be a little bit tricky to navigate and you’d want to make sure that you’ve got the right person to do this with but if you went about it the right way you should be able to come up with a mutually-beneficial arrangment.

I’m broke lol, I’m not about to throw cash at S4A if I can just pique their interest instead and get them to think they came up with the idea to narrate the article by themselves

I used to be a terrible mischief-maker in my younger days but, with maturity, I’ve channeled this urge into achieving win-win outcomes for everyone. I have confidence in myself to get this one over the line by leveraging just the right amount of influence at the right moment.

Oh you were thinking of paying haha? I’m just gonna try drawing their attention to the article in such a way that it will just make sense for them to want to narrate it. I got a strategy all planned out already, just gotta wait until an opportunity presents itself to me - likely in the next few weeks. Will keep you posted.

Hell yeah! I didn’t even think about why having anthologies would be a problem until I encountered your post so it’s been a good learning opportunity. It’s not so bad having an anthology because you can timestamp within a playlist but it just makes more sense to have them as separate books because it’s more user-friendly that way.

I’ll see if I can entice Socialism For All to narrate the Jones Manoel article. S4A is on an Anti-Trotskyist reading arc right now and Manoel’s article fits neatly into that scope, plus the article is short - I’d guess it’s well under 30 minutes of runtime for a narration so I feel like that might be enough to get it over the line. I’ll see if I can work some magic in the next few weeks.

Elementary Principles of Philosophy
How To Be A Good Communist

Alright, the only thing I haven’t done is Lavender & Red because I S4A is still in the process of recording that one. I’ll have to remember to finish the job once they have completed it but that aside your playlist is complete.

Wage Labor and Capital
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

Getting there!

Unlimited hot soup on the lap of Trotsky!

On Practice and Contradiction
Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Other ones are in the pipeline but I have to redownload them because I ran out of space on my harddrive and deleted some of the original files since I wasn’t expecting to need them again.

I’m tired of learning new things

What Is To Be Done?
Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism
State and Revolution

Okay I need to sleep

Btw I’m working on splitting the audiobooks at the moment. I’m gonna have to get to it tomorrow because Audacity wasn’t playing well with my computer.

I don’t know if you saw my edit, but I will try to squeeze it in!

Of course I didn’t see your edit. Do I strike you as one of those ?

Just kidding. About the hostile tone that is. I actually didn’t see it but that’s awesome thanks for letting me know. Also know that your comment inspired me to make this and submit it to the emoji comm lmao

For real, whenever I come across a baby leftist I have to restrain myself from acting like some sort of deranged person from a time travelling scifi movie who has come back to warn people about the dire reality of the future while I recite this article at them at a near-shouting volume.

Instead I’m like “Oh um, you know, uhhh… just be careful of the political organisations who sell you on this idea of them being the valiant underdog and how great everything could have been if only they weren’t robbed of their opportunity. You want to find an organisation that has a positive future perspective rather than just lamenting the past.”

I know that the character limit is tight but I just remembered that the short piece by Jones Manoel titled Western Marxism Loves Purity and Martyrdom, But Not Real Revolution could have saved me years wasted as an eclectic radical. I think it dovetails nicely after Left Communism but it’s updated and takes aim at people who idolise Che yet despise Castro and Stalin, that sort of thing.

I’d like to suggest it, if there’s room and you think it’s suitable. Also if you haven’t read it yet, goddamn you should because it’s really incisive.

And your friend has never denied pissing in the kitchen sink so… y’know…

If you want to be combative about it, you can always learn up on the history of food and point out all the things that he eats that are “fake”.

That cola? You know that’s fake, right? HFCS isn’t real sugar.

That ketchup you just used? That’s fake, you know? Unless it’s walnut ketchup (at the very least) or fermented fish kê-chiap, that’s fake ketchup.

Bread? Lol. I hope you are aware that bread made with commercial yeast is an imitation of real bread that has been leavened with naturally occurring wild yeast from the atmosphere; it’s completely fake.

Oh you want to eat sushi? Yeah, that stuff is fake. Putting vinegar into fresh rice to mimic the sourness from lacto-fermented fish that has been stored in rice is bogus af.

Just try it out for a day and see how tiresome that schtick suddenly becomes when he’s on the receiving end of it.

I don’t think this can be measured in a vacuum.

Let’s explore some different cases as a thought experiment:

A country achieves communism. I don’t think this is possible tbh but let’s go with it.

We can expect to see the “proles” consuming more than they would otherwise as they’d have all the products of their labour.

Let’s presume that people are people and that they aren’t going to suddenly develop much more class consciousness and a spirit of internationalism. Obviously I think that a communist society would go a long way towards this but let’s ignore that for argument’s sake.

Unequal exchange would mean that the communist society would be taking advantage of this arrangement, perhaps more than they would be able to otherwise.

But if this is the situation, we also have no bourgeoisie who do rampant exploitation of the third world. We have no more corporations. We have no more bourgeois democracy inflicting imperialism upon the world.

Perhaps consumption drops a whole lot purely by virtue of the fact that people would rather work 4 hours a day or 3 days a week. Perhaps in freeing up the products of labour and what would otherwise be capital and surplus value under the previous system, people are able to manufacture and acquire products designed for repairing with replaceable parts rather than for planned obsolescence. Perhaps people would be able to be more conscious consumers, opting for the things that have a lower environmental and social impact rather than working two jobs as part of a single-parent nuclear(ish) family and only being able to choose the simplest and most readily available options rather than carefully considering what they would genuinely prefer. Perhaps lots of people devote their time to things like gardening and producing food themselves because they only need to work 15 hours a week in their factory job to cover the rest of their needs.

It’s hard to estimate what it would look like exactly, especially in an unbiased way, but even in a conservative estimate I’d say that it would be a net-benefit for the third world as the degree of exploitation and the worst excesses of consumption would be largely curbed, not to mention all of the excesses of capitalism and imperialism being eliminated (from that society anyway).

So let’s look at a genuinely SocDem society next:

Imperialism is dead in the water. Capitalism is hemmed in. Billionaires are reduced to having no more than, say $10 million in net worth. If corporations still exist they are brought to heel and they are held accountable for their inevitable excesses.

Honestly in this society I would expect the net benefit to the third world to be worse than the example above but it would still be much better than what we have today.

Next is to consider things as they are today:

Increased wages are going to lead to increased consumption. But things like earlier retirement and better healthcare, education, environmental and workplace safety etc. are going to reduce the impacts on the third world - healthcare, especially stuff that is way downstream, has a big footprint. Workplace and public health and safety makes things better for everyone. Carving out chunks of profit to go towards better conditions generally means less money for wars and less money going towards imperialism, not always but more so than not. Workers having unions and solidarity means that there’s more chance of things like general strikes, which can achieve good outcomes for the third world.

I think under this scenario we could expect to see a net benefit that is significantly reduced compared to a SocDem hypothetical scenario. It might even come out as a wash, if you really want to make a conservative estimate.

Idk this argument seems overly simplistic and very undialectical honestly. It’s a bit like the reactionaries who complain about veganism or measures that benefit the environment and they charge vegans with being responsible for the deaths of animals due to industrialised agriculture or they concern-troll over the carbon footprint of a proposed expansion to rail transport.

I mean, yeah, there’s definitely an environmental footprint that gets incurred when you manufacture a car seatbelt and that’s fine. But if 100,000 seatbelts prevent one single person from becoming a permanent wheelchair user then the comparative environmental footprint is vastly in favour of making those 100,000 seatbelts because the environmental footprint incurred by the necessary medical and accessibility interventions from one preventable case of someone ending up as a permanent wheelchair user are far greater.

This is not an argument in favour of eugenics or to lay the blame for the social and environmental impacts of being disabled at the feet of the individual though. I’m just trying to highlight that we should not fall victim to an overly reductionist assessment of things in a very static way or otherwise we end up with well-intentioned measures that can have ramifications that are far worse than what we prevent.

Likewise we should not oppose fighting for better working conditions in the first world out of concern that any improvements here are simply going to make things worse in the third world because it’s not nearly as simple an arrangement as one where improvements here necessarily make things worse over there in equal measure.

I’m in some other English-speaking shithole halfway around the world from you so I don’t have any brands that I’d be able to suggest unfortunately.

It’s going to depend on your use case.

Are you just looking to do walking? If so it might be worth considering a walking pad - they’re more portable and stowable, you can set it up in front of a TV or a desk with your tablet on it with a stand. Good if you just want to get some steps in or to use at a standing desk and that sort of thing.

If you’re looking for the option to jog or run or you want to have incline settings then a treadmill is the way to go. The most important considerations here are tread length and horsepower (generally speaking the higher the horsepower, the longer your treadmill will last.)

Also try to stick to regular recommended maintenance, especially if you’re using either regularly.

I mean, as discipline psychoanalysis is essentially dead in the water and has been since before Anna Freud even died her well-deserved death, may she rot in piss.

Whereas psychology as a discipline has greatly expanded and is extremely dynamic and it has analytical and descriptive power that outclasses psychoanalysis in all respects.

I don’t think that anyone but the most avid psychoanalist would argue that psychology is on par with or somehow inferior to psychoanalysis. My point was more about how in terms of outcomes for patients, you’d assume that psychology would have completely surpassed psychoanalysis given that it isn’t based on crackpot nonsense but rather it draws on, what, like a solid century of genuinely scientific endeavour and application. But that’s not the case - for all the advancements that psychology has made, and they are massive, in some ways it still seems to be stuck achieving outcomes on a rough par with the Austrian School of Sex Wizards and Oneiromancy.

Basically: Wrong ideas -> Wrong conclusions -> Respectable outcomes

vs

Good ideas -> Good conclusions -> Respectable outcomes

Which is just to say that something can be extremely flawed and yet still be useful. I wouldn’t encourage anyone to approach Freud without very healthy skepticism but that also applies for plenty of other things too and even if its foundations are false, its analysis is false, and its conclusions are false doesn’t mean that it is devoid of anything useful. All it means is that you’re going to have to separate out the wheat from the chaff and the ratio of wheat:chaff is going to be much less than desirable.