jadero

I’m glad I’m old enough to not have to consider living at the population density you suggest. I find the population density of Saskatchewan to be quite enough. I lived in a small city (Saskatoon) for 40 years and the last 10 were flat out miserable. The first 30 were tolerable only because we escaped to nature every weekend.

Tundras aren’t going to be all that liveable just because the temperature is a bit nicer. They’ll still get very dark in the winter. Like 24-hour darkness, in some of it. Some people thrive, some people cope, some people go batshit crazy when daylight hours drop below about 4 hours a day.

That’s actually the easy part. Most tundra is sitting on top of permafrost. I worked on low latitude tundra for one summer and if my experience there is representative, melting permafrost is going to turn a lot of tundra into swampland for a long time.

Even if I’m wrong about the tundra turning into swampland, there isn’t really all that much room. Good luck cramming a few billion people above 55 or 60 degrees latitude.

Yes, I agree. My perception of hobby communities, at least the online ones, is that there is an inordinate amount of time spent trying to figure out how to monetize what used to be seen as a primarily recreational activity.

I know that some of it is self defense, in the sense that some hobbies are expensive enough to stretch a budget to the breaking point.

Some of it is likely due to incomes not keeping up with the cost of living and, of course, some people are budding entrepreneurs.

But it seems to me that there are a lot of people who feel that it’s not reasonable to have a hobby that has no income potential.

I’ve tried to explain this to people before, without success. I’m starting to think that most people have no concept of what it means to be passionate about something, so they go through life with nothing more than pastimes to keep their minds off reality.

For me it’s building boats. I’ve only ever built 2, the last one 20 years ago. But the amount of time and money I spent on magazines and plans both before and after those actual builds dwarfs the time and money it would take to run a lemmy instance. And now I’ve got 3 years and several thousand dollars into building and equipping a shop so I can build another one.

I’ll throw out a few bucks here and there because it feels like the right thing to do, but I actually want hobbyists, people with a passion for it, running the show. After all, that is what made reddit work. All the passionate mods doing their thing as a hobby.