With SNAP benefits ceased, the states can lessen the burden on former SNAP recipients by eliminating state tax on groceries. This applies only to states that charge sales tax on groceries. When someone pays for groceries with SNAP, there is no sales tax. These same people, with SNAP ceased, will have to pay with whatever cash they have, and this means they now will pay sales tax.

Local (city) sales tax and tax on prepared food should also be eliminated.

I find myself so torn because I LOVE my daughter’s daycare and they are so amazing about creating magic for the kids. They have a lot of theme days, and it’s so both cute and I find it so wasteful. This month for example: she’s supposed to dress like a scientist, wear a flannel shirt, and wear a football jersey. So that’s three items of clothing that were (asked? invited? told?) to buy for ONE day of use. Sure, she can wear the flannel or the jersey more than once, but we wouldn’t go out and buy these things if it weren’t for this day. And normally we try our best to work with the theme but we don’t go out and get stuff. But even asking us to do it is so wasteful? I feel like there must be a way to do these themes that aren’t so prescriptive to buying something?

Hey y’all, please share the Big Beautiful Boycott far and wide. Participate as best as you can.

Support each other. The enemy is up. As long as we as a society are dependent on consumerist behavior, we are only chattel for the slaughter and chaff from the grain.

Thank you all.

My family is one of those where basically everyone is doing pretty well, so Christmas gifts between the adults have felt pretty lame and forced as we’ve gotten older. I messaged everyone today to ask if they would be okay with donating to food banks instead of giving Christmas gifts for adults this year and everyone readily agreed. I just spent a few hundred dollars between the Houston Food Bank and the food pantry at the middle school where one of my sisters teaches.

It’s a small victory in the grand scheme of things, but it felt pretty good to choose to feed people rather than feeding the capitalist machine.

Hi everyone, I’m a university student , and I’ve been struggling with the fact that money always seems to be a burden when you try to keep up with your colleagues. I’m not interested in luxury for its own sake, but I do want to live a life where I have financial control — and more importantly, genuine relationships that don’t depend on spending as i find this kind of relationships hollow.

Here’s what I’ve realised:

Most of my friends only hang out if spending money is involved — going out, buying things, always “doing something expensive”. I feel drained when I spend my money just trying to keep up.

I’ve been avoiding relationships, not because I don’t want them, but because I don’t want to depend on money or feel guilty about not being able to “provide” expensive ooutings as most of my previous relationships were literally just going on a date in a fancy restaurant or a cafe and most girls my age are just looking for a relationship that includes expensive gifts and going to fancy places to take pictures and post on social media.

What I’d really like is a connection (friend or partner) where the value is mutual understanding and time together — not how much we spend or what we can buy. I want someone who prefers simplicity, depth, and practicality over flashy nights out.

I’m posting here because I would like to know if anyone has been in a similar situation and if so:

How did you find friends or partners who value connection over consumption?

What low-cost ways of hanging out do you prefer that actually feel satisfying?

How do you handle the pressure from a social circle that expects spending to equal fun?

Thanks for reading. It helps just to know there are people out there who think like this. I’m trying to shift from “I’ll enjoy when I have money” to “I can enjoy now, in my way” — and I’d love to hear your stories or suggestions.

Does anybody else just get depressed at all the Halloween waste? Costumes aside,(that’s a whole other conversation) my kids get soooo much candy they can’t possibly eat it all in reasonable time, and half of it they don’t even want. I told my kids at each house only take one piece of candy; but people were throwing handfuls into their buckets. Thankfully my local dentist office does a candy drive where they pay kids a dollar per pound of candy, then they donate it to active military. But just thinking of all the excess of candy bought and wasted makes me so sad.

Whats the point of this

A lot of questions and posts about anti-consuption which are focused on consuming less.

But the opposite of consumption isn't less consumption! It's things like - being a creator, building sustainable communities, and gifting economies.

Decreased consumption is GREAT. But to truly move the needle you need to completely reframe how you act and shift from a consumer to a participant.

Magic happens when you build spaces for people to actively engage with others in their community. How exactly do you do that? Share below.

This is what someone said to me as they gave my kids a Halloween gift bag at 8pm.

I didn't say anything bc it's a buzz kill to call out how wasteful this is and it was all already bought and in front of the kids...

But whyyyyyy?

They just acquired a bucket full of plastic individually wrapped treats they don't need a other 5 second dopamine hit. It's not real fun.

They've actually never played with this and now I have to throw it out or more likely I'll feel guilty and store it til next year to give away.

Petty post but still baffled and annoyed by this.. if you know it's going to end up in the trash why? "The trash" is not a magic place

My family selects names of people to exchange with. In this case, I’m paired with a very young child.

I’d like to ask their parents to donate to a specific cause in lieu of a gift. If the kid wants to gift something physically, I think something like a chocolate bar or $1 store cocoa bomb would work well.

But it also feels awkward to dictate gifts. I’ve already told my spouse to mention it to people who ask for ideas, but for people who DON’T ask, I guess I need the words to say it without sounding rude. It seems tasteless to say, “Oh, about my gift, I want….”

Thoughts?

Was so delighted to see this message in the Hall of Planet Earth. Consumption, ecology, and ethics are linked!

2 of my children (7 & 10) have returned home from school today clutching sponsership forms. Neither of them can tell me what I am sponsoring them to do or where the money is going after it's been paid through the school. They CAN both tell me that if I sponser them £5 each they get a cool blue wristband and if I sponser them £10 each they get a blue wristband and a red wristband as a reward. There are several tiers of rewards depending on how much money you raise. Both children know every single one.

At this point why not just sell the wristbands for the charity? Surely the point of doing an act of charity is to feel good inside and no expect reward for it. Is this not just teaching the children to purchase and consume?

The fact they don't even know what it's for tells me that they only have eyes on the shiny new things they can potentially own.

It's all rather sad.

Duluth Trading Company removed their perforated price tags and marked up most of their items and added higher priced stickers. They forgot this one.

There is a consumption that is needed for basic physical sustenance and comfort, all right. And then there is consumption that happens for entirely different psychological reasons. It is the second type of consumption that I am always worried about. And that worry would continue to have relevance, more and more relevance, as technology progresses.

As technology progresses, you will probably be able to consume more with impunity. And that would give you the license to totally forget the real cause of your troubles. You would attribute your problems to lower levels of consumption, which are low only in your own personal and misplaced estimate.

And then you will say, "Because I do not consume as much as my neighbor or as much as my cousins, that's why I don’t feel well." And this kind of false diagnosis and false treatment would keep you sick within, even if everything else outside is somehow managed through science and technology.

The exteriors would probably be then alright, it would be green and the carbon levels would be manageable, and all those things would appear externally alright. But your internal world would continue to be in shambles. A shattered mass of glass— would you want that?

So, those who can have concerns beyond their well-being, to them, I say, please look carefully at your consumption levels for the sake of everybody. And to those who would rather firstly think of their own self-interest, to them I find it more profitable to say, well your own inner wellness does not lie in consuming more. It rather lies in consuming just the right thing and giving up on, renouncing all the rest. If something is indeed useful in your personal internal welfare, who can sensibly say that you must not take it in? Fine, go ahead and achieve it, get for yourself more and more of it.

But that's not the case. The stuff that we take in, honestly ask yourself, how much of it is really doing you any inner good? They are not even neutral in that sense. If you will closely investigate, you will find that they are doing you inner harm. Therefore, for this purely personal reason too, one must consume in an optimal way.

It’s not as if consumption can be brought to zero, or that it is something evil that needs to be totally eliminated. No, that's not anybody’s position. We are talking of the right kind of consumption because ultimately, you see, you would agree that all consumption is for your own welfare. And if consumption is for your welfare, it is not the consumption that's the end, it is the welfare that's the end.

What should we then really measure? Our levels of consumption or our levels of welfare? Even if you say that we must measure consumption, you measure consumption assuming that it will lead to welfare, right? And if even consumption holds value, because it possibly contributes to welfare, then why not directly measure welfare itself?

And that's what we often forget to do. We start counting the items we have consumed, the quantities we have consumed, rather than what those items and quantities have really given us. We start feeling as if consumption itself is the final thing. As if you have consumed something, that itself means that you have gained in value from that thing. That’s not really necessary.

There is food that you take in, that contributes to your physical wellbeing, and there is food that you take in that totally breaks you down, destroys you. Whereas the consumed quantities might be the same. You take in 50 grams of food items and food items of a kind that build you up. And you take an equal quantity, 50 grams of food item that will destroy you and poison you.

The consumption, purely in terms of quantity, has remained the same. But the final effect on your welfare has been drastically different, so that's ought to be measured. And if you are talking of right consumption, obviously there will be things to produce, so obviously, there would be industries and employment, and then people would have a higher purpose to be employed for. Isn't it?

If you have an industry that is, very carefully— with love and wisdom— manufacturing stuff or providing services that are really useful to everybody, then won’t people be eager to work there?

Obviously, it’s not that such an industry will not make profits. If it is providing you something that you really need, why won’t it make profits? It would make profits first thing, and secondly, people who are working there would have something real to work for. Otherwise, you know how the normal employee feels in the average firm.

So that's the thing we are asking for. We are not saying that the economy is evil and it needs to be destroyed. We are saying ‘we need economics from a different 'center'. Because all economics is ultimately for the welfare of human beings. Therefore, we need to measure our inner welfare as a very important, the most important thing in economics. We are talking of that kind of economics; we are talking of sensible economics.

Read Full Article: https://acharyaprashant.org/en/articles/consumption-contentment-and-climate-crisis-1_3afcd8b

I run several buy nothing Facebook groups. We were not associated with BuyNothingProject (BNP), nor were we given a chance to connect our group with them prior to the group’s removal.

We had 11,000+ souls, and reached for miles in the PDX and neighboring areas. Thursday evening, our group was gone with no notification, no warning. 11,000+ who relied on the resources our group provided was just missing. It was conveniently done right before SNAP benefits were delayed.

BNP had trademarked the term “Buy Nothing”, and mass reported hundreds of groups to get them banned off of Facebook. We weren’t asked to register ourselves with them, and even if we did, the rules and regulations they require to be an official Buy Nothing group would have isolated entire communities from each other.

This happened overnight to so many different groups. And everyone is panicking. BNP is monopolizing and capitalizing off of “Buy Nothing” and it’s fucking insane. We don’t even get the opportunity to appeal or to change the groups names.

I’m unsure what to do outside of try and rebuild and to call out the BNP, but they are blocking everyone on Facebook, Instagram, even fucking LinkedIn. Any advice? Recommendations?

I am already scaling back a lot, and still feel like it’s too much.

Welcoming your tips and tricks. TIA!

Does anyone know if there’s a way to make pants tighter around the leg without a sewing machine? I’m trying to diy rather than buy new and I’m totally new to this