Thanks for all your work keeping this place going!

I’m onboard. My whole life people around me have treated the economy and the environment as two abstract concepts that give us things, eternally opposed to one another - insisting that we need to make sacrifices to protect the economy (giving up a minimum wage, long-lasting infrastructure, and - most importantly - huge swaths of the world around us). After all, the economy gives us jobs and cheap cheap products. You won’t be able to visit a national park or spend much time outside in general but you can buy a bigger TV every year so it’s all worth it right?

I was already buying as little as possible for more general environment reasons. Producing less waste, reducing the need for new manufacture and shipping ever so slightly (and the need for extraction along with them). I put a lot of work into sheparding items around so they wouldn’t end up in the landfill.

But now I’m doubling down on those actions and the motive is spite rather than worry for my world (and though it doesn’t say great things about me, that’s definitely the stronger and more effective emotional state).

I’m going to do my best to sit here like a tiny black hole in the economy, taking in my wage and spending out as little as possible, and helping others do the same. I can make and fix a lot of things for others and help them get lots of stuff for free that would otherwise be thrown away. They’ve complained for years about millennials and now zoomers killing industries because we don’t buy enough. Buddy that wasn’t even deliberate; you ain’t seen nothing yet.

I’ve watched this specific one! The rifftrax actually made for a pretty great time - from what I remember the movie had some cool ideas (and the jokes kind of filled in for the rest).

TBH buying less overall and buying used stuff (or getting secondhand stuff via Buy Nothing groups or similar) where possible should help. I already try to buy as little as possible and to avoid buying new but I do plan to cancel a few subscriptions and a bank account. I’ll see in a few days if figuring out specific companies (beyond the ones I already avoid) to skip for food and such seems worthwhile.

Not at all. I shouldn’t have expected the sarcasm to cary. Perhaps I’m jealous of the shield of those folks’ pessimism (assuming any of it was said in good faith in the first place).

Edit: I will admit it wasn’t a productive contribution to the conversation. Seeing the title call it a disaster got my temper after mostly seeing so many conversations on this instance about how none of it matters and we’re all monsters for sullying ourselves trying to mitigate the damage with a vote. I might have also mixed you up for the mod of that community.

Don’t worry, I’ve seen plenty of lectures from our friends on c/notvoting which made it clear that both candidates were near equally bad. So no real harm done.

I mean, you can’t have everything

GraphineOS seems to set the benchmark for secure de-googled android phones and has a very short list of supported devices. I think I’d suggest starting with one of those, and once support eventually drops, if you’re comfortable with a reduced security capability, looking to lineageOS or similar. I think if Graphine supports a phone, it’s pretty much guaranteed to have support on the more general OSs.

For a while I looked at ruggedized smartphones (some with removable batteries!) that were supported by lineageOS and others. I didn’t find one I was convinced would hold up as long as I wanted, and I had security concerns so I ended up getting a decent secondhand phone with guaranteed security support for a few years and putting it in a good case.

Sometimes I check in on various raspberry pi smartphone projects. I love the idea and think it’d probably be able to last the longest (or be turned into something else after an upgrade) but I don’t think any feel reliable enough to me yet.

I think I can see that. It’s a deeply surreal feeling, when it seems like your whole society sincerely believes something you think is obviously wrong.

That’s a good idea! I do that with peanut butter at a fancy grocery store - I wonder if there’s one around that does juice

I hadn’t realized how lucky we were - we have one of those crunchy refill stores in town, where you can bring your own containers and buy various powders and liquids (primarily cleaning supplies though they do some seasonings as well. I wish I could buy orange juice that way (I basically gave up on drinking it because I didn’t need any more plastic bottles). We switched to various dilutions of castile soap for most things, and a generic dishwasher powder for our little countertop rig.

Wish we had a space for letting out steam about this situation, instead of having to attract this kind of attention everywhere we go.

I don’t think there’s a way to make the community private to just members, but it could be set to local only. That might help but I’m not sure how much it would change, I think it’d still show up on the local feed on slrpnk.net. I just see it there, so I’m not sure how other people from other instances find it.

That said, from recent conversations I get the impression that at least some members want this to reach lots of people and scold/shame them, so this community might not be a good candidate for a dedicated ‘letting off steam’ spot. I do hope you’re able to find one.

I figured it was in response to people using the ships as a gotcha. Pointing out that solar panels are manufactured using power that, itself, isn’t green yet, and are shipped using non-green methods. If done in good faith, I’d suspect the were unfamiliar with using one existing process to bootstrap a new one, but it’s usually just another way of saying we should maintain the status quo (however bad) until its replacement is absolutely perfect.

There are some interesting projects turning them into pedestrian bridges and roofs for bike racks.

I don’t know how well remembered this is but big media execs latched on to the aesthetic of cyberpunk in the 90s and overused it so clumsily they killed the entire genre for over a decade. They stripped any punk message and turned it into another extreeeeem joke of the era.

Solarpunk needs more time to find it’s feet and build a body of work that embodies it’s values. So I’d much rather the big companies piss off for now rather than successfully define what it’s about for mass audiences.

Seconding this - if I ever move back home I’ll be looking for some kind of little electric kei truck for hauling trash and supplies. Most of my driving when I lived there was under 50mph and over fairly short distances.

It’d need to be stable - not a fluctuating investment the way most crypto folks seem to use cryptocurrency.

It’d need to be more private than blockchain crypto. From following the investigations of various crypto heist, it seems like your only defense against anyone being able to track your spending is the obscurity of your wallet. It’s like having every bank account’s activities public with just the names blanked out. I know tumblers and such exist but I’d rather the privacy was built in to the system. This is probably the biggest hurdle since you have to trust someone to keep track of the money, whether it’s a bank or a public ledger.

It’d need to be backed by something other than waste. I know that’s the proof-of-work systems and that there are lighter alternatives that are probably fine. But if there has to be surplus calculations those should go towards distributed calculations for identifying planets or tracking weather patterns or something.

A few folks I know switched smoothly from “climate change is fake” to “maybe it’s real but there’s nothing we can do about it at this point. Might as well live it up.” Basically anything to avoid change at any level.

I think that’s the defeatism they’re talking about here, not people pointing out the issues.

Good points! I suspect the ‘even thickness’ thing came from broken up concrete pads/sidewalks/patios, where the result would be irregulary shaped on X and Y but somewhat consistent for Z depending on how well they prepped the site for the slab. In that case it might end up pretty similar to landscaping rock. In some of the photos you can see they have a much flatter top and much more irregular edges and undersides.

100% agreed on demolition practices. There’s a lot of potential in deconstruction for reclaiming building materials rather than consigning them to the waste stream. The tradeoff is in time, person hours (my grandfather once claimed a truckload of bricks from a demolished mill to build the family fireplace - my mother and her siblings weren’t allowed to come inside that summer unless they chipped cement off some bricks and brought them with them). And in materials/energy - blades for a concrete saw and power to run it, perhaps. I’m sure there are other ways to get more-or-less regular building blocks but they’ll have some cost to balance against the good of saving the materials and reducing the need for new manufacturing. Either way, there’s some cool potential. Treating rubble or urbanite like quarried stone I think fits the solarpunk ethos.

Thank you for the details on bonding concrete! I’ve used cement to patch some holes in custom-shaped, 45° concrete blocks I made once (didn’t shake all the air pockets out of the first couple) so I knew you couldn’t just stick concrete to concrete, but not how to actually go about it when you had to. I’ll refer back here if I need to fix it someday, or if it comes up in any of my stories.

Thanks!

Thanks! I’m very much not nautical so take this with a grain of sea salt. I think yeah, able to travel faster and use weaker winds, plus perhaps better handling in whatever conditions the hull was designed for. The person I was talking with mentioned that the original hull from the windcoop looked like ones meant for the north Atlantic where it’d be dealing with short choppy waves. Presumably this one would heave up over them a bit more than the original, so it’d be a less-smooth ride. That might mean more wear and tear? That’d be a trade off they’d have to assess.

I think generally I very much want to depict a slower society, one that’s actually willing to take an efficiency hit if it means protecting animals, or habitats around it. That sort of consideration is sort of unthinkable in our current world, but yeah, I think it’d be worth it. Hopefully looking out for whales is a small piece, indicative of a much larger cultural theme.

Similariy, I hope that this society is configured differently enough, paced slowly enough, that it can tolerate some unreliability without issue. I imagine they have some high-priority, guaranteed-fast shipping for important stuff like aid, medicine, food, but that the rest of their shipping might show up late or early depending on the favorability of the weather, and that people expect that. I think that might be a general theme in a lot of areas of life - they’ve looked at the tradeoffs and decided that the convenience isn’t worth the cost in externalities. Sort of heresy to a modern American (or so it feels in some of my IRL conversations) but plenty of societies, including our own, got by that way.