I absolutely agree with everyone who recommends an older machine and a good service centre. But I’ve gone against that advice for myself and have a newer computerised machine for myself, simply because it has a needle threader and my eyesight is not great these days - I was starting to struggle to thread the needle on the older machine.

Anything that’s not the cheapest machine will generally be ok. Most of the fancy options that make machines expensive are not really necessary, as long as the machine can sew straight and zig-zag you have nearly everything covered.

I’d mostly like to keep them to a few posts so the actual discussion posts won’t get lost. At the moment the idea is people can post that sort of thing in the pinned introduction post, but I am thinking of something along the lines of themed picture posts in the future.

There are plenty of groups which have primarily photos, you are free to join those if that is what you are after. This group is for discussions, if that is not what you are after feel free not to join.

Oh, of course. Poor people just need to get enough money to own property and build everything required to create an autonomous society.

You have a wildly different definition of poverty to me.

What you are proposing is that “poor people” should all band together and create a new separate society, which is basically communist. Like some sort of left-wing Sovereign Citizen movement.

One big problem with this concept is that you cannot create a new separate economics whilst living in wider society. You still need to live somewhere, and you will need to pay the landlord with money. You will need to pay the electricity bill with money. You will still need to use joint facilities like roads, and the State is not going to happily provide all that to you for free, they will be looking at your new little economy and working out exactly how to value it to send you a tax bill.

While you are dealing with all of these issues, you also have to deal with the people within the group. How are you running it and making sure it is fair? It takes a massive amount of work to manage something like this on even a small scale. So you will need some sort of tax on transactions so that the people putting the time in to running it can be covered. Who is actually going to join if everyone’s time is valued equally - it will be a great deal for people whose skills are not valued on wider society, but a bad one for anyone with more valuable skills. So you won’t end up with a wide skill set involved, and can’t cover the requirements to do everything needed. So for example if you found a farmer who wanted to provide all their produce through this scheme, you could not provide the resources they need to produce and transport the produce. There is a massive difference between “making food” (ie, working at McDonalds) and actually creating food.

Plus what happens when things go wrong? When the person you arranged to come over to help you with something falls and hurts themselves, or they do substandard work that damages your property? Is your mutual aid group providing some sort of insurance coverage? Do you have some sort of dispute resolution process to mediate problems?

Having a strong community that supports members and shares resources can definitely be a good thing, and help to improve the lives of everyone involved. But “quit your shitty job and create a mutual aid network” is not at all a viable path to prosperity (or even to survival).