A third option is to train with a gun buddy and buy one when you feel it is definitely needed. no major financial burden, and you get firearms training.

That is not significant a distinction for me to care to differentiate one from the other. They both are right-libertarian, are wanting laissez-faire capitalism with as close to zero oversight as possible, and are cutting taxes as low as possible by gutting public services. Whether one still wants to keep state-funded cops and fire departments is no longer relevant when the end results of both are corporate-nation hellscapes in my view.

Sorry, Bud. The names are mostly just advertisements and not necessarily useful for understanding the underlying philosophy.

American Liberalism (capital ‘L’) is fluid over time at best in its philosophy, and is actively shifting to further elitist interests from a less charitable perspective. It often prioritises corporations over people and cherry picks which cases of violence are or aren’t acceptable by the state.

American Libertarianism (again, capital ‘L’) is Anarcho-capitalism, which believes the world would be a better place if the state was bordering on non-existent, and companies were allowed to operate completely unregulated.

Seems to be that while trade was helpful in the past, it is now an obsolete practice that creates power imbalances and should be abolished as a practice entirely.

The tagline they have on trade-free.org is:

"the ones who offer, should not ask anything in return

the ones who receive, should not have to give anything in return"

I’d argue that the emergence of capitalists and capitalist ideology, and the amassing of currency is just a natural tendency of currency itself. Currency itself is a tool of transactional thought, and I’d argue that if we could move away from transactional trade and focused more on mutual wellbeing, we could do without currency entirely.

oh boy do i have a new suggestion for you (I think it’s mostly new, or not in common discourse). Haven’t read through all their reasoning or evidence. It’s just extremely out of left field.

What do you mean by ‘cheater’? Like ‘scammer’?

I’m not following.

Markets were originally decentralized, and while that has its problems, a decentralized market is miles better than a monopolized market.

Like, are you thinking of Etsy or Amazon or something? Because those are all run by a single point-of-sales and logistics collectives.

What we’re talking about is basically building a means for getting all the websites around the web of small shops and such (or in this case all the various game store fronts like steam, itch.io, GOG, and EPIC GAMES) and giving you client which allows you to browse and order from them simultaneously. All that store’d have to do is add the protocol to their server and add themselves to a list.

Each server would likely have to utilize a payment service. In that fashion it’d be no different than how stores host their own websites you can order from. In my mind, the federated protocol would simply be a means for a person to browse stores similar to how one can navigate a mall or market.

For games, the further benefit after would be that via a client of the protocol, you could then download your games from the various stores in a singular library page.

Federated marketplace protocol really should happen at some point.

Like, it seems like a very clear solution to an online monopoly risk. Maybe I’m wrong, though.

Some hikes shouldn’t be done alone.

Also this seems like it’s gearing you towards selfish thinking which can set you up to be more isolated and lonely as a person.

I gear towards joining in things that others I like the company of want to do. I get to hang out with them while doing some activity, and they get to enjoy that activity. Of course, if I’m going to invite someone to something, it’s most often going to be something I can enjoy myself. If it requires others I just check with my friends on who’s interested and do followups with them to reduce barriers and increase their chances of making it.