"Bali’s water is disappearing.
The island uses 2.4 billion liters a day. Tourism takes 65% of that. Villages up in the mountains have dry wells. Rice fields that fed the island for a thousand years are turning brown. Rivers look like someone dumped a bucket of cement in them.

But go ahead. Search “eco villa Bali” right now. I’ll wait.

See all those pools?
Each one uses 50,000 liters of water, got refilled every week. Chemically treated so your ass doesn’t break out. But don’t worry, the villa has a compost bin and they don’t use plastic straws so it’s basically carbon neutral.

Villa listings love the word 'eco-friendly.' Many slap on green badges that look official but come from programs with zero third-party audits. The pool still uses 50,000 liters. The badge just makes you feel better about it. Then they print it out, stick it in a bamboo frame next to the Buddha head they bought at the tourist market. Feeling eco yet?"

sorry for the *stack link, but many writers i like from developing countries are on it, and this is an impt post:

every time someone says 'hey it's so cheap to have a nice villa in bali' here's the exploitative math behind it

---

the money quote

"Villa owner: Australian guy named Brett who visited Bali once in 2015 and decided he deserved to own a piece of it.

Property manager: UAE company with an office in Seminyak and a token Indonesian partner who doesn’t do anything.

Booking platform: American corporation headquartered in San Francisco.

Cleaning staff: Indonesian woman named Wayan who’s been scrubbing toilets for five years and still can’t afford to take her kid to the doctor without selling her phone.

But sure. “Locally staffed.”

https://wulanadlerunfiltered.substack.com/p/balis-40000-villas-and-the-8day-cleaners

#Indonesia #Travel #Bali

Send this to all the Substack folks in your life who want to move to Ghost: https://luma.com/mp1i5386

Lex knows so much about this and can help (and you might end up working with me too in your Ghost migration) (I help out at Outpost coz they are really cool)

#Ghost #Substack

There’s an interesting model emerging in China where hetero single women, are opting out of marriage completely and settling down with each other in a platonic way. Divorced women are joining them too and co-parenting: https://youtu.be/7r-4OiXcLGY

It’s not that far-fetched. There have always been pockets of female community in Chinese history, like the Samsui women. It’s easy for try to read some repressed homoerotic subtext into it, but I think when times are tough, community is what gets us through it. No matter where you are.

I’m very thankful that I like and adore my parents, because I know it is my ‘duty’ to return and provide elder care in a decade or so. There is just no other way around it.

At the same time, I also feel for my friends, who feel the similar call of ‘duty’, except far more heavily and unhappily, because their parents were awful to them.

One of the hardest things about being an immigrant is I don’t know what to do with ‘rugged individualism’.

I am considered one of the most ‘westernized’ and ‘independent’ people in the society I come from (people think it’s too much.. moving to a whole other country? Too independent) but

Even I really struggle with some of the daily manifestations of hyper individualism that surrounds me.

A friend had just visited a developed Asian country and wondered why it wasn’t full of homeless people. I said well it’s probably that Asian homelessness looks different, but there’s probably an element of.. you don’t want to be the person who people say let your second cousin die and starve on the streets. The social shame, I tried to explain. Also, if it’s a warm or religious place, they have food.

I felt it was very similar to what I saw my parents grasping with when they visited me. On BART, kids were making loud sounds. My parents glared at them. Nothing happened. They were confused. I had to explain to them that.. there is just no social shame. Glaring at them doesn’t mean anything, they just think you’re weirdos. It isn’t anyone’s business that they’re making loud sounds.

So while I think there are pros to some community consciousness, I also think the people who want to sell a vision of ‘collectivist societies are better’ are also failing to account for the patriarchal bs that comes with it. We take care of our elderly because we are shamed by it, but it is largely the mothers and grandmothers doing the work.

But what I’ll never, ever get used to is this: the idea that in some places, poor people, sick people, elderly people, deserve to be cast aside and deserve no help. That’s a level of cruelty I do not wish to understand.