It has to do with the economic system and local urban planning. Many cities in Europe have refused permits for Mac Donald's to open shop, and that's a good thing. Because once settled, these megacorps who pay less than 1% taxes will take away all the business because they can have a bigger variety of products/services that a small shop can't afford, at a price driven by economies of scale that a small shop can't afford, treating employees in an illegal manner that a small shop can't afford to go to court over, and avoiding taxes through loopholes which small shops can't afford to know about.

If you can, don't let chains setup store near your home. If you can't, seriously consider getting involved in sabotage operations with people you trust. That's how Google ended backing off from Kreuzberg (Berlin) a few years back. Mac Donald's also had a few famous burnt-down "restaurants" here in France, but sabotage doesn't have to involve flames. A pack of sugar down the concrete-mixer will do the trick. If the shop has opened already, anything to block the locks will block business for at least a few hours.

It's David vs Goliath but if you've got support from your neighborhood you can win. Just don't ever think police and politicians are on your side.

> The myriad heirloom tomato shapes and colors you’re referencing were all carefully sought after and stabilized by human gardeners.

They've been groomed for generations, yes. But they've not been stabilized. When i talk about the variety of tomato colors/tastes, this is something natural that will happen over a few generations in your garden.

Plants will often borrow taste from other surrounding plants, as for color i have no clue what triggers them to change, but i've seen with my own eyes after a few years, new generations of vegetables starting to change colors (not uniformly across the entire garden). This of course is not possible with trees (eg. apples/oranges) as you would need to wait several generations of trees (that's a long time), nor is it possible when you plant seeds from the supermarket every year to replace last year's plants, as the commercial seeds are almost bit-by-bit copies of one another and will yield the same tasteless tomatoes bypassing the natural circle of evolution to your local environment.

If you can, i strongly encourage to go talk to local farmers and borrow a few seeds. There's some amazing stuff out there which you won't find in commercial gardening shops. At least that's the case here in France, where the government for many years made it illegal/criminal to share or sell "peasant crops" (which a judge ruled is legal only a few years back).

That's part of what's frustrating me about this! Usually non-profit projects/protocols are extensible, like the web and the Internet. This, despite the fact that for-profit corps try to appropriate/destroy the free/extensible platforms just like Microsoft/AOL tried with the Internet in the 90s.

So here, we end up in a situation that because silicon valley moguls exploited an extensible protocol (by hijacking the standardizing committee to their profit) we adopt a self-defense reflex of making everything minimalist to reduce the attack surface.

I'm interested in low-tech/ecology in general. For me, the equivalent in the physical world would be if you're not happy with a house using too much resources/energy so you decide to live without walls or floor, with a simple ceiling over the head. Sure it does the job of protecting you from rainfall, but does it fit all the other functionalities we expect from a home? I'm much more interested in a clay-based (or other local materials) housing, personally.