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.

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.

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.

Electric Arc Furnaces are probably our best bet for that - they’re an established, proven technology and can be swapped over to a green power source without any other changes (assuming the society has the energy capacity). I think I remember reading that a factory somewhere in Europe had already done that but a quick search has failed me.

I really enjoy reading about the investigations that follow any big crypto heist, where they track the stolen money through various exchanges etc. The Swindled podcast just did one about a pretty poor attempt to launder crypto (see Razzlekhan) and Darknet diaries did one on the much more competent (suspected North Korean) heist of eth from Axie Infinity and their various laundering efforts including through Tornado cash. It’s surprisingly transparent in a lot of ways. It seems like stealing the money is often the comparatively easy part, and getting their huge sums out of crypto and into something they can use (while thousands watch the money like hawks) is much harder.

Yeah this painting is awesome

Thanks so much! Here’s hoping!

Site prep is key, so make sure to bring a sledgehammer.

Yeah I don’t think they’re talking about you

It depends on what you need to enjoy the space.

If you’re looking for a grass alternative and aren’t running around on it all the time, roman chamomile can be a good, low-growing, pet-safe plant. We used this on my neighbor’s postage stamp front lawn so he wouldn’t have to mow but it would still look nice and intentional. There are also a handful of other low-growing plants which require much less maintenance and are more drought-tolerant than grass, but they tend to be best for low-traffic areas, so if you’re out there playing catch or capture the flag with your kids most days they’re probably not as good as grass.

If you’re in a shady area, moss might be an option. It also prefers low traffic.

And the option abhored by HOAs and your fussiest neighbors: just don’t bother maintaining a perfect lawn. A lot of the work and environmental damage comes from keeping a perfect monocrop of a specific grass cultivar. Fertilizer to keep the soil good enough (which gets washed into local waterways and causes algae blooms) pesticides (which kill bees and a slew of other insects) and herbicides to kill any plants that try to compete with the grass (which remain in the soil as well). Traps for rodents that try to exist in the yard. Not to mention the energy and person-hours spent on trimming it frequently. Just accepting that grass isn’t really meant to form a thick lawn in most areas, and will look a bit patchy, multi-hued, and feature some other plants, will greatly reduce the effort and damage caused.

Or if you can’t stand the thought of doing that (or will get in trouble) consider downsizing it a little - section off the least-used sections of your lawn, plant some cool native trees or shrubs, throw down some mulch so it looks intentional.

And the last option (where applicable): no grass.

When I was a kid our house was in the woods, with no clearing to speak of, so we mostly just played on the forest floor, which was mostly leaves and pine needles. If you pick up the sticks and keep it somewhat open, it can look really beautiful.

https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-244-fine-art-and-meat-cleavers/

That’s kinda what I was thinking, yeah.

That’s interesting - this is the first I’m hearing of them doing that to jets.

This isn’t the original, but I took the photo and cleaned it up a bit:

I’ve seen similar, I’d never had trouble just running the drill till the sides were smooth before, but some of these sticks were still pretty live, and no matter how long I let the drill cut into the sides, or what speed I used, it still produced fluffy sawdust and left those splinters along the inside of some. I’d been planning to wait a year on those and drill them again but it took more sticks than I’d planned to fill it. For what it’s worth, they’re pretty soft, but they might harden as they dry? If it’s a legit risk for the bees I’ll definitely pull those tubes. I think cardboard tubes are probably the better way long term, certainly they’re less work which would make replacing them easier. I just prefer to make things myself when I can.

So far, we haven’t noticed any issues with birds or other critters. If we do, I’ll add a screen, but I didn’t want to risk making things easier for spiders, or helping water splash the holes if I didn’t have to.

We did have carpenter ants climb up behind the sticks so I need to figure out our solution to that. I’m really hoping thats new and that they didn’t get into the bee holes or take any eggs. The tree seems healthy so I’m thinking the bee house was what appealed to them?

I’ll update if I learn anything else.

Thanks! I just binged it and will check back for the updates

Just wanted to say I really like this idea, especially as mixed with local mesh networks. I agree with the point about storage, and mostly I’m just really looking forward to reading about some of these services, and seeing what this could look like in the future.

Good luck!

It’s an existing term, so using it mostly just helps skip the part where people explain to me that what I’m describing is a library economy. If you have a better term then I’ll check it out, but I’m also not above trying to get buy-in from as many people as possible, including white liberals.

This is very much me trying to describe a more ‘official’ and widely-adopted version of the casual networks we relied on for most of my childhood, from knowing which guys working at the dump will look the other way while you dig something out of the scrap pile, to getting a new refrigerator whose chain of custody involves a rich person buying it, never using it, an uncle storing it in a lean-to for a year, and a whole network of conversations and luck, and a brother with a truck and gas money, to get it. There’s a tremendous amount of luck and circumstance and uncertainty in those arrangements. If your job happens to throw away useful stuff, if you know someone who works in a rich guy’s house, if you can borrow a truck and someone’s time and the moment is right and someone else doesn’t take the thing or get impatient and throw it away. Most of us never really stopped doing that stuff on some level, though I’m the weird one in the family because fixing stuff and shepherding it to a home, sequestering it in purpose is one of my main hobbies, in addition to how I live fairly cheaply. I fell in love with my current city and our Everything is Free group because it’s so much more effective, inclusive, and wide-ranging than those networks of acquaintances we relied on before. When I ask around for something, or offer to give something away, I’m asking thousands of people, not dozens. And because the city has lots of white liberals who are happy to use the group, there’s lots of good stuff there. It’s a good start. But if you want to replace amazon with it, you have to be willing to trade time and convenience for the money and waste saved. The item you need might not show up for weeks or months, or it might not be quite a perfect fit, or you might find yourself hiking to the heights in the rain to get it because there’s other people on the waitlist. I’m trying to describe something bigger and more organized and more reliable than even that.

And yeah, the library economy or whatever you want to call it won’t be as convenient as a logistics titan which involves slavery and deforestation, which will fabricate a brand new whatever-it-is and deliver it to your door the next day. But it’ll hopefully be big enough and thorough enough to get wide-ranging buy-in. The company my SO works for recently brought in a specialist to explain the concept of “do less with less” to their management. It struck me funny, that they were explaining such a basic concept, but for some reason, it’s become kind of a thematic element, almost an aspirational goal in these postcards.

TBH, when I mentioned electronics, I was mostly thinking of the battery and controls to eke out as much efficiency as possible. I know the battery is a pretty common complaint around electric vehicles (fancy materials to get the energy density it needs, environmentally-damaging mines, hard to recycle) and also that mitigations definitely exist, including repurposing tired batteries to other tasks, like stacking them up in houses for solar power storage. I agree on all the rest - I wrote a whole rant way back about streetcars and how effective they were, even using late 1800s electrical tech, motors, and metallurgy. I think they’re a great option for electric transportation without many drawbacks when they’re on the grid (where they can draw straight from the source, and where the power can be stored in everything from gravity batteries to simpler and easier-to-maintain chemical ones), and a great starting point for a rebuilding society.

I could definitely see snow storage methods varying widely, especially based on location, and the intended purpose.