JacobCoffinWrites

This was really interesting, thank you for taking the time to write it out!

If you ever want to write about the generator mafia I'd love to read it, but also definitely no worries if not! Thank you for the perspective!

I absolutely love lowtechmagazine! I haven't read the others so I'll check them out, thank you very much!

I'm kinda glad I don't have time at the moment to get obsessed with a new topic (though it's lurking in my future now) - this is really cool. I used to mess around with RTLSDR stuff, this looks like it'll scratch the same itch and possibly be more useful. Meshnets seem like a wonderful solarpunk technology and I really look forward to seeing where this'll go.

Ten years is a long time but I appreciate their ambition

Just wanted to let you know I got Alpine installed on the spare and it's running great! It's small enough to fit just on the built in storage chip - even with Mate, udisks2, and other creature comforts, wavemaker cards (sort of a web app scrivener clone) and libreoffice-writer it's still got 7 gigs free. Plus it's fast enough to have both writing tools and a web browser open at the same time without lagging. I'm impressed.

I've got some old old laptops which I saved because they're physically in great shape, but too weak to run almost anything modern. I'll see if this'll work for them next.

Thanks for the recommendation!

This is really cool, thank you for taking the time to model your design, it really helps me picture it, and it seems like there's some good advantages there in smaller modular units being easier to lift off, and capable of higher pressure.

I copied an original soda locomotive design, where the water boiler is inside the larger tank of caustic soda:

The soda heats the water, releasing steam, which is run in pipes back and forth through the boiling tank and soda tank to further heat it, then driven through the pistons, before being condensed and released into the outer vessel to produce more heat.

I like the idea of pushing the design choices further, mixing in electric motors etc.

The good news is the canisters of soda don't need to be lifted into the focal point of the solar concentrator. Historically at least it sounds like they often connected them to an external (coal) boiler and pipes superheated steam through to dry them. It seems to me these could use a similar setup with a hookup leading to something like this: https://inhabitat.com/old-fashioned-steam-engines-could-solve-solar-energy-storage-problem/concentrated_solar/

That should lower the labor amount a bit, and make for safer work.

Here's a quick shot at a side view of what I'm thinking of. It doesn't show as many gauges etc as I'd have liked, but feel free to point out any modifications you think it needs!

It can be hard to get people to move platforms - most folks have moved to big centralized social media which provides most of what they need in one place, so recruiting may be kinda difficult. On the uphand, the filter effect of a federated local network might mean you get more of the utopian minded activist types looking for a decent place, and fewer lazy racists, but I'm not sure (I've never been on nextdoor because I've heard ours is essentially a Fox News comment section for your street).

I've been blessed with an awesome experience in meeting my neighbors online through the local Everything is Free groups (unfortunately stuck on Facebook). So there's something of a filter there, the kind of people who join care about not wasting stuff, and will go through extra effort to make sure someone gets it. Or they just need something and this helps them stretch the budget. Either way, the vast majority have been great and I've been able to build some cool friendships through this group.

At the same time, despite this interest, the local freecycle page is pretty dead. With maybe a post or two per week compared to the low hundreds per day on the Facebook group.

I think there's some value in meeting people halfway and providing these things on the platforms they're already on, but I've also fled more and more into federated alternative spaces and mostly ditched the default ones. So this kind of thing really does appeal to me. I'll keep thinking on how to help with this. I just thought I should speak up as someone who's actually had a good experience meeting his neighbors through an online group. Maybe there's something in my experience that could be generalized? I'm not sure.

Unsecured, as in stuff like mt gox where the nearest thing to a bank for crypto just closed one day and stole hundreds of thousands of Bitcoins with no recourse. Unsecured like watching the crypto scene reinvent/rediscover financial regulation one theft, scam, or disaster at a time. That's a perfect fit for a cyberpunk setting.

Unrelated to my point about the genre, I'll admit I'm especially skeptical that it's the devaluation of currency is what's responsible for the endless growth mindset of capitalism, or that systems that seem to be used more like investment stocks than a currency are structurally capable of fixing it.

I'm sure the some of blockchain technology has some practical uses, there's probably a way it can work as currency, but I have a hard time seeing any way to separate the modern cryptocurrency scene from investment capitalism

Edit: I really do wish you luck in doing so though

I've been a fan of cyberpunk for years, and I feel like an unsecured currency backed in computational waste (proof-of-work style) is a perfect fit for a cyberpunk setting. If I'd read it in a story years ago I'd have said it was a little on the nose

Can't it? Is there any restriction on someone minting a brand new coin and trying to convince people it's worth money?

Aside from all the scams, the other use I've seen is corporations trying to use them to create artificial scarcity of digital goods, essentially making NFTs a new flavor of DRM with an added, desperate hope of making DRM and FOMO marketing tactics seem cool, techy, and hip.

I don't like DRM, I don't like artificial scarcity, and the basic premise of NFTs reminds me of those old infomercials where someone promises to sell you the rights to name an actual star, except it's only in their proprietary database and you have to go to their website to see that anything has changed. I'd rather just have a copy of the digital image itself than a receipt someone gave me claiming that I own it.