spinnetrouble

I dig it

I get where you’re coming from. (Also, “profitable” has nothing to do with “ecologically responsible.”) I have a lot of the same concerns about bringing plants indoors and having to meet their needs using a lot of energy and material inputs when growing them outdoors with free energy and fewer resources works so well. However, one thing outside can’t do easily is multiple layers of plants. If we can find a way to bring the vertical part of vertical farming outside, I’d be more supportive of it. It’s just a tough problem to solve when it takes a lot of money to build the structures and the structures can get wiped out in one bad weather event.

The birdpants on this thing

The depth of human complexity truly knows no bounds!

You should probably move so you don’t continue polluting the neighborhood xD

This is a great question. There’s a framework/way of thinking called the Social Model of Disability that would be a very important part of solarpunk culture.

The Social Model says that it’s not the person who’s disabled, it’s the society that disables them by not having the right supports built in to meet their needs. Everybody has the same general needs, and people with disabilities have extra needs on top. The people are fine as they are. Disabilities aren’t necessarily something to be “fixed.” It’s society’s responsibility to make sure everyone has what they need. If a person is disadvantaged, it’s because the society they live in is failing them, not because they have different needs.

It’s the embodiment of people actively looking out for each other at every level of society. Neighbors taking responsibility for helping their neighbors recover from surgery by doing chores while they heal up, people working as personal care assistants getting paid enough to live comfortably on, specialty health services being available in rural communities the same way they are in cities, sidewalks having safe curb cuts for people who use wheelchairs to not get dumped out of them when they try to do something as simple as crossing the street, and facilities being designed to truly include everyone and offer them the same experience instead of “separate but equal.”

Introverts and people with communication challenges aren’t expected to talk to their neighbors and ask them for help; their neighbors should be observant enough to notice where they’re struggling and step up because they already have a friendly relationship and talk from time to time. It’s an absolutely massive shift from the way we do things now, and it is so long overdue.

In terms of food, I don’t think we’d be limited to unprocessed local goods. We’ll still have the energy to transport and cook food, and we’ll always have people who like to develop new recipes. I haven’t thought about ways to bake that in to society yet, but now I will!

I gave up drinking so I could smoke more pot

I hear your frustration. It’s so hard to watch the people around you get that close to doing the right thing–we had such good momentum for a while–and then veer towards the opposite end of the behavioral spectrum like they were pushed. That kind of discouragement feels fucking terrible.

Take whatever time you need to heal up. If that’s forever, it’s forever; I’m sorry we left you in this state. I don’t blame you for walking away, but if having someone to commiserate about the ridiculous state of affairs would help you sort out the internal chaos and make it easier to live with, please reach out. I’m always down for political gossip.

What a classic. There’s an arcade nearby with a Tapper cabinet. There’s one control, and it’s a keg pull.

What’s the strength modifier on a chicken laying an egg?

This is no lower 48 Roadkill Cafe, “you kill it, we grill it.” This is a whole different set of cooking skills

Looks like a sturgeon, maybe? I’m no fishologist

Sure, he can move all his stuff. He can move all his stuff wherever the fuck he wants, I don’t mind. Need help packing?

“Un-fucking-believable” is standard usage, but “unbe-fucking-lievable” still works as an alternate. That’s when you’re down to artistic judgment and choosing which form fits your case best. Mixing it up and using something unexpected is a good way to provide emphasis.

It’s obvious to native speakers, but when you’re new to it and trying to learn the cadence to help make sense of spoken language, rules like these help

These are the tips language learners like me rely on

What happens when you flip it around? Instead of needing a solar panel to power something, what could you do if you had a solar panel that had sensors, lights, or transmitters attached to it? None of those attachments cost anything additional to run and they don’t decrease the panel’s output. You just hook all the panels you want together into an array, and the damn thing could basically monitor itself and send error notifications to you when a problem needs fixing. That’s a lot better than what we’ve had so far, either isolating, identifying, and solving problems without any guidance at all, or needing a monitoring system (computer) that soaks energy in order to keep tabs on your hardware. Some of the solar/battery systems you can buy now even rely on the extra power consumption of an AI agent to make sense of your error codes for you. It’s crazy how many points of improvement this team made. I really hope it’s practical on a large scale!

This is really cool news!

The article title focuses on the two different types of energy input, but as everybody’s noticed, the rain provides such a tiny amount of output that it doesn’t contribute more than a watt or two over a whole panel. Put that on hold for a minute and let’s look at some other exciting parts of this:

• Long-term solar panel durability has been a hurdle we’ve struggled to overcome. Part of this is due to the sensitivity of the materials to both water and the physical impacts of raindrops hitting them.
• Protecting sensitive materials that collect light can be a challenge because most things you coat them with will decrease the amount of light they’ll gather, and most of what’s left is really expensive (in money, materials, or energy) to effectively and uniformly apply while maintaining its light collecting ability.

So this research group in Spain comes along and says, “Hey everybody, check this out! We got a twofer: we can make solar panels more durable and just as efficient by putting them in a box and spraying them with hot gas! Pretty great, right? Oh, but wait! There’s more! The stuff we’re coating the panels with can also give you a trickle of energy just when it rains! The raindrops bouncing off the panels, I’m serious. That’s enough kinetic energy to drive a tiny potential. It’s not a lot, but it’s still better than two for one!”

Now let’s go back to the tiny bit of electricity produced by rain. These panels might be able to generate enough power to trickle charge a small battery (like on a weather station that tracks data) when it rains. With the way we’ve been engineering things like LEDs and sensors to be smaller and more energy efficient, we’d be able to use these solar panels to keep them running without needing any other energy source. It’s totally fucking free, doesn’t take anything at all from the panel or its efficiency to drive something like a sensor on a train track that can immediately send a localized signal when there’s a track failure or maintenance needs to be done. If you spread those sensors out over an entire rail system, you could offload an incredible amount of work without doing anything more than installing the new panels and getting it going. Improving rail safety (especially in a place like America where the rails are so bad and so inadequately maintained due to capitalist pressures that the trains are a gamble every time they run) with something as clean, simple, automated, and inexpensive as this is incredibly solarpunk stuff. I’m not a person of vision, so really I’m excited to see where they go next. Most of what I’m thinking about right now is municipal/government and industrial stuff, things that would give repair crews more information on the problems they’re being sent out to fix instead of just “sensor offline” messages. Beyond improving industrial safety through greater automation of simple functions, disaster response/recovery times could also see some seismic changes. I’m fuzzier on the consumer side of things, but small things like solar roofing providing power to automated garden switches or illuminated house numbers and doorbells that don’t need to be wired into the house are all steps towards us consuming less energy. I just think that’s neat!

Would $20/hr make it acceptable to you? $15? Minimum wage? When you find a point that’s different but acceptable, that’s a hangup, not a standard.

I have the same concerns over geothermal fracking right now. We’re only willing to find out how much we can disrupt the underlying rock by going too far a few times, deliberating over the acceptable death and damage toll, and then deciding to stop doing that whenever ~40% of the country agrees it’s time to stop.