Nice. I gotta wonder why a flying schoolbus which lands in meadows needs a pop-out “kids loading/unloading; do not pass” stop sign on the side, though. LOL. 😉

I was going to make a funny or meaningful comment, but fuck: look at this shithole full of liberals. Place is getting worse than Beehaw, TBH. Might as well be back on Reddit.

Looks interesting. Local, resilient, community power stations are a great idea, even set apart from the dual use for fruit and veggie farming.

I worry that in this case, since the power isn’t being delivered directly:

Lightstar’s community solar project will generate clean, local energy that home and business accounts can subscribe to a pay for portion of the electricity generated. This generation is then used as a credit to offset utility bills.

the existing utility company may be given far, far too much leeway to fuck people over, like in California where PG&E plays like crazy with the rates given to people pushing power to the grid from their solar panels, uses obvious rate differences based on time of day, and charges people fees just to use the infrastructure (which is absolutely fucking backwards, since every Joule of energy produced locally is a Joule that doesn’t have to be transmitted over their infrastructure from distant power plants).

On top of creating local solutions, we need to start decoupling them from the centralized and capitalist-controlled ones, and/or regaining a great deal of political power so that we can start setting conditions of our own.

Nice. Love to see people contributing both to this genre of source material and to FOSG. And doing it with a good set of players as you go is definitely the best way to do it. Keep on gamin’!

May take a look at the material later, though probably not going to participate in the game.

TBH my initial thought is that it would make more sense to produce source material for an existing genre-neutral system like the Hero System than to create a whole new system unto itself. Still, I guess if the system is going to be FOSG (Free and Open-Source Gaming 😉) then it would still make sense to do the extra work.

Hmm. Yeah, that’s a possibility. I do other stuff that’s similar, like working on community gardens and helping comrades who are interested in learning technical skills I’m practiced in. But collective remote work situations…that’s an interesting think to ponder!

Yes. My company decided to shut down the local office to save money (kept by the bosses rather than being distributed to us, of course). So some of us became remote indefinitely.

Generally, I love it. I can “commute” in my PJs, and avoid spewing a lot of carbon into the climate just to ship around my sack of flesh. I can take breaks throughout the day to tend my garden, and play music to help myself think. I don’t have to worry about packing a lunch, or wasting time and money and social energy eating out in the middle of the day. Hell, I can go take a nap when I don’t have any meetings scheduled and feel the need.

However, it does take its toll. Not having a direct, face-to-face, human connection with folks throughout the day harms the associations that build solidarity. And finding ways to do one-on-ones and continue organizing the workplace is proving next to impossible. So I’m honestly not sure it is worth it at this stage of labor struggle. In a more ideal world—once we’ve won a few crucial victories over capital (and perhaps state)—I see no reason why many of us couldn’t work from home, and even move those jobs that require more direct, physical labor closer to those homes.

That’s funny, because it literally does work in many places. You might want to refine your idea of how everything works, since you are simply wrong. 🤷

“One man’s wild dream.” Bleh. Flowery words for yet another bunk propertarian sea-steading project. I mean, he was literally planning to mine the shit out of the ocean floor and sell away more of the ecosystem to the capitalist market in order to create his Utopia. At least there was some acknowledgment of that at the very end.

Very glad the opportunistic scientific exploration happened along with it, though.

With regard to direct action, I don’t think general discussions of, or even encouragement of, illegal or violent activity should be discouraged. It’s when you get to talking about specific acts, specific targets, and actual planning that it should be disallowed (and people should know better than to discuss that shit online anyway). Like, encouraging people to shoplift, generally? To defend their communities? To engage in anti-fascist action? Why not?

I think some folks here are going way too far with suggestions like “[don’t] go beyond recommending safe/legal ways to resist the system” (@ProdigalFrog). If we’re stuck in that liberal mudpit, IMO there’s no point in having radical spaces (like I hope this is/can be) at all.

Correct. The ground is a MASSIVE heat sink, but can only absorb and transmit heat so quickly (how much thermal conductivity it has; just the mathematical reciprocal of insulation/resistance). Having a large contact area and/or water helps a lot. If you can get down to the ground’s natural/ambient water table, it’ll conduct a lot better than dry dirt and rock (not to mention that evaporation can help with sufficient air flow).

If you make use of flowing water, probably it’s just going to be a matter of the temperature of the source of water, as it’ll likely eclipse (depending on rate and volume of flow) what gets absorbed by the ground. Unless it’s a closed loop, in which case you’re essentially just increasing the surface area of ground you’re transmitting to (and you’ll need to take advantage of convective flows like with the air, or you’ll have to actively pump to keep the flow going).

All technology, by definition, is artificial.

Probably passive (taking advantage of energy and natural laws already present in the environment, like wind and convection) vs. active (making use of secondary forms of power like electricity, burning fuels, etc.) is a better distinction. If all you gotta do is e.g. at most open some vents at one time of day and close them at another, and not rely on the delivery of external power sources from human industry, calling it “passive” is pretty fair.

Absolutely. Lots of societies have used passive heating and cooling systems, well-suited to local climates. And we could learn a lot from them to help decrease our energy use.

There’s a lot of places you can build (partially) underground to take advantage of relatively stable ground temperature and natural insulation, too. Ain’t just fictional hobbits that lived in holes in the ground.

…harvests reflected sunlight hitting the back of the device, offering an unconventional route to producing higher energy yields for less space and cost.

Less cost seems probable. Less space really does not. Gonna probably need some mirrors to reflect onto that back surface, and it’s still going to require the same amount of incident area of solar radiation.

Mirrors are pretty cheap, though. So seems like a win.