Thispunk.

Naughty mushrooms doing theirs again, they are so good. I got remembered I never was the uninspired believer in a mechanical world I had become, and turned back to animist knower - a lot of what you write resonates very much with me! Congrats to getting out of the rat race, faraway friend. Cautious as well with the little prankstershrooms. Remember grounding inbetween flights. So many people are getting out - once we get together we will be unstoppable!

Yours is just one of many versions of ‘why I personally don’t do anything’: I’m all for change, but the others don’t want!

Society will never be fully aligned on the solutions and you cannot expect everyone to agree with you, but you still can work for your preferred solutions in smaller groups?

I would take diagnosis around Neurodiversity with a grain of salt. I suspect both conditions might be the same brain differences presenting differently, and I don’t think science has really gotten to the ground of this yet.

Yes, that and a lack of people who could work a local plant, apparently (but then again a lot of youngsters move away for work, go figure). The huge (not that huge really) company running both trash and water is quite interesting. They run at a loss since they exist and get good amounts of EU money, the directors are the town halls of the entire region, the company is listed on the stock market? Doesn’t look like the transparent entity I’d like to entrust my water and trash to … but then also, I admit I have zero clues about weird economic entities or composting on a commercial scale, just getting into it. Microplastics were mentioned - apparently it’s challenging to keep them out of the finished product. Then again, agricultural biowaste seems to be regulated differently? More research work to do.

Living in a tiny town has great advantages, it’s not difficult to just walk into the town-hall and ask all sorts of stuff. They are very un-bureaucratic here, and really seem to be trying to make things work. Then again, you find strange constructs like this private water and trash company where a suspicious lot of local power accumulates. Asking a lot of stupid questions and digging for financial reports is always entertaining and elucidating for sure.

I’d describe my feelings around the current solar boom as cautiously positive with a good sprinkle of skepticism.

I’d like to see billionaires investing in education towards self-regulating communities. I’d like to see them heavily investing in funding coops, not buying up startups. Billionaires investing in renewables means more money in billionaire’s pockets, because they will just sell the clean energy back to you for a profit while remaining the owners of everything and then some.

I’d carefully agree that more solar panels are good, but I’ve now lived through enough eco hypes to not have at least a few concerns. In the worst case we will now quickly and thoughtlessly plaster solar panels over hectares and hectares of useful farmland, important ecological reserves, and poor people’s homes, just because line go up. And probably trash them all in ten years when maintaining them proves too costly, or the next hype comes along. In the best case we actually start polluting less and use the time we buy to seek for more energy-saving ways of living in general.

No. I don’t want one giant Billionaire-backed project. I want a million small scale projects backed by local communities.

It’s a technological and a physical issue. We just can’t store every bit of information plus a picture of everyone’s cat. We can’t guarantee that no information ever gets lost. We’ve also not really stored and archived every shopping list, advertising, pamphlet, silly poem, ugly drawing etc. since the time of the printing press and that’s okay.

It might be a good idea to store and archive some written material as time passes but we want to be a bit picky about what we store. That said, I wouldn’t mind to find more shopping lists and less posh documents in museums.

Yeah, just like most material that was ever printed or carved into a clay tablet. It’s the way of things.

I wonder how to take on the efficiency question when considering waste heat. Would and older model generating more heat be the better choice? Has anybody started to dig into the complexities of calculating efficiency for circular systems?

Listening to whatever you like is punk as fuck

First of all, a hug from far, and may the alienation go away soon.

Second, I’ve found there’s no point in discussing politics with people. Not with friends, not with strangers. There’s no point in trying to find people ‘aligned enough’ with my political ideas. Since I’ve accepted that I feel that my attempts at spreading anarchism lead so much further! As long as I never mention the word (or any other political jargon), and always, always approach my fellow humans as humans and try to inquire about what moves them, not tell them what I think they should do.

What do you think is missing in your neighbourhood? If you think it’s human contact, try to start there and invent ways to encourage friendly contact. Maybe create a point for food sharing or book sharing. If people are too shy to speak to each other in person at this point, give them other options, so they can lose their shyness gradually.

Where are you based? I found myself facing the same problem. In my small rural community a 2nd hand and artisan market proved to be effective to get people out of their houses and meet up. No need to throw political theory at them immediately, it’s just great they appeared. Though I do admit there’s already a bit of a community to work with and entertainment is sparse around here so it’s easy to get people’s attention. Where are you based? Not sure what would work best there.

The organizing steps that worked so far for me and bf are described in the Community community of this instance (and the many social anxieties suffered by a person who wants to encourage community but isn’t very social to begin with).

The gist is really just that blockchains are a ton of computers everywhere recording the same list of transactions permanently, under a certain set of rules, and a normal database is just that, but under one person/company’s control

So do all Bitcoin or Ethereum holders have some kind of general assembly or online vote to decide under what rules their currency is run? Does one bitcoin equal one vote? Which blockchains are private, which are not?

Also, banking (including their computing systems) already adheres to a set of rules, luckily. Unfortunately heavily eroded by powerful global players, but very functional, at least in Europe. Hey there’s even cooperative banks and credit unions here if you look carefully! In my opinion we should seek to build common sense and evolve to an economy based on mutual trust, not build technology based on general mistrust.

Get off the internet if you don’t like datacenters and technology.

Non-haters don’t care about the differences between datacenters, technology and blockchain. They want M.O.R.E. T.E.C.H. because it’s new and shiny. ;)

I do understand my banking statement, and even most of the fees I’m paying or my account. I don’t really understand what happens in a blockchain. If you can explain it to me like I’m 5 maybe I’d be more likely to adopt the technology. I’ve heard rumours that it’s really just a glorified database - if that is true, what’s the difference between databases we already have, and this new fancy kind?

What are you even trying to say? I am still trying to find something actually useful where blockchain is necessary that doesn’t spend as much energy as a small country. Every ‘explanation’ of why I should adopt this tech for my project/business/government/younameit is intransparent as heck. Lots of hot air, especially emanating from all those data centers. Fuck blockchain and AI.

Stopped reading at blockchain technology.

No need to read the full article. Clipped ear shows it got neutered, so now it has more time to focus on business things.

Hmm I would personally categorize both the portable hydro as well as the capsule as junk gimmicks. I would want something reliable and farm-worthy for permanent use.

What do we really know about animal and plant communication? They might very well be talking to each other. Don’t be too quick to assume that as a human you would even know how other consciousnesses, let alone ways of communication, could work.

People who work closely with animals seem to lose their ‘human smart, monke stupid’ attitude relatively quickly, and those who study non-human consciousness deeply seem to make one groundbreaking discovery after the other these days.

We have to stop gatekeeping knowledge and start listening.