Thank you. :)
I should add that, to my knowledge, there is no such rule in c/solarpunk. The rules are:
- be constructive: there is no need of another internet space full of competition, negativity, rage etc.;
- no bigotry, including racism, sexism, ableism, transphobia, homophobia or xenophobia;
- be empathic: empathy is more rebellious than a middle finger;
- no porn and no gore: let’s keep this place easy to manage;
- no ads / spamming / flooding, we don’t want to buy/consume your commodified ideas;
- occasional self-promotion by active members is fine.
Rules pertaining to talk about war, weapons, the military, weapons industry, agression vs. defense, imperialism vs. not conquering other lands, discussing history or politics, or staying strictly on topic - I don't see such rules.
I have the feeling that the rule was in the head of the moderator in question, which is not good at all - a moderator should stick to published rules.
The article is fine, and I second the recommendation to read it, but from the article to the slogan you present, things do not follow a logical path. Yes, war is both an incredibly expensive activity (diverting money that could be used) and a resource-intensive activity (the money goes into actual materials that almost surely destroy something or get destroyed) and an incredibly stupid activity (and it can snowball)...
...but the problem is that successful unilateral disarmament during a war tends to result in a situation called "defeat". If the defeat is not an attack being defeated, but defense being defeated, that is called a "conquest". Now, letting a conquest succeed has a historical tendency of the conqueror having more experience at conquest, and more resources to conquer with... which has, several times in history, lead to another conquest or a whole series of conquests. A regional war in Ukraine resulting in Ukraine being taken over by Russia has a high probability of producing:
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a bigger regional war later, in which Russia, using its own resources and those of Ukraine, proceeds to another country, gets into a direct conflict with NATO and then indeed there is a risk of a global war
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an encouraging effect after which China, noting that international cooperation against the agressor was ultimately insufficient, and deeming itself better prepared than Russia, decides that it can take Taiwan with military force
However, a war ending with inability to show victory tends to produce a revolution in the invading country. For example, World War I produced a revolution in Russia and subsequently a revolution in Germany, with several smaller revolutions in between, empires collapsing and a brief bloom of democracy in Europe, before the Great Depression and the rise of fascism ate all the fruits. The Falklands War produced a revolution in Argentina. The Russo-Japanese war produced the 1905 near-revolution in Russia.
It is better for Ukraine to not get conquered. It is better for Russia to be unable to conquer Ukraine. That result is also better for everyone around them. It's even better globally because it sets a precedent of large-scale cooperation defeating an agressive superpower, discouraging agressive superpowers from undertaking similar wars until memory starts fading again.
Unfortunately, until we see indications that Russian society is getting ready to stop the war (this could involve starting negotiations on terms palatable to Ukraine, a change of leadership, a withdrawal, a revolution, etc)... the path to achieving that outcome remains wearing out the agressor: producing enough weapons and delivering them to Ukraine.
Ultimately, both sides in a war wear each other down. The soldiers most eager to fight are killed soonest. The people most unwilling to get mobilized or recruited, and soldiers most unwilling to fight - they remain alive. If they are pressed forever, some day they will make the calculation: there are less troops blocking the way home than in the trenches of the opposing side. After that realization, they eventually tend to mutiny. Invading troops tend to do that a bit easier than defending troops, because they sense less purpose in their activity. In the long run, if nothing else happens, that will happen. There is just (probably, regrettably) no particularly quick shortcut to getting there.
Strongly disagree.
Disarmament is feasible (and very smart, because war is a terrible waste) if the other side is understanding and willing. In the 1980-ties, the USSR under Gorbachev was willing to mutually reduce nuclear weapons. Gorbachev also ended the attempt to make Afghanistan into a Soviet satellite state and loosened the rules in the Soviet bloc enough for most of Eastern Europe to leave the bloc. Russia under Putin has not shown any willingness to widthdraw or disarm. In fact, it is making desperate attempts to restart all the Soviet military industries, double down and overwhelm Ukraine.
(for those unaware: the war is Gaza is statistically a gang shootout compared to the war in Ukraine, the intensity differs so much that I'm not even addressing it - it's practically over, Hamas attacked and lost)
NATO countries are of course increasing military production - ironically at such a leisurely pace that EU has been able to supply some 0.3 million of the 1 million shells promised to Ukraine, while North Korea has been able to hand 2 million shells to Russia. I don't see a case for claiming that NATO is arming too fast. I see a case for claiming that NATO is arming ridiculously slow, at a pace which might allow Russia to force an unfavourable deal on Ukraine.
I would predict: if Putin wins in Ukraine, or gets considerable parts of Ukraine as war spoils, in a decade's time, the next war will be Russia vs. Eastern Europe. Most of the warring parties will be NATO members then. And indeed, those countries (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria) - they have all rapidly raised their military production and purchases.
About escalation: so far, all the long-range offensive weapons supplied by NATO have come with the strict condition that they may not be fired at Russian territory, and Ukraine has respected that - firing them only at occupied Ukrainian territory. Not a single ATACMS or Storm Shadow has landed in a Russian nuclear bunker, not to mention a seat of government. Ukraine is using Western missiles to shoot at its own (occupied) territory, hardly an escalation.
(a side note: Ukrainian-made drones do land in Russia regularly, mostly destroying aircraft that would bomb Ukraine - and World War 3 has not broken out because of that)
To finish up, I'd like to point out that the US is not even scheduled to give airplanes to Ukraine. The F-16 planes are being given by Denmark and the Netherlands.
P.S.
What's the rationale for calling Biden "Genocide Joe"? If that's an appropriate nickname, what do we call heads of state who start an actual war? :o
P.P.S.
Problems have differing levels of urgency. Wars tend to have the highest. Several EU countries have indeed been forced to scale back their climate plans because they don't have enough money to make the green transition and help Ukraine defend against Russia at the same time. The rise in interest rates has also contributed - it's harder to finance projects with a loan. However, they have also made incredibly fast pace at curbing their use of Russian oil and gas. Ironically, by proving what a fine seller Russia is ("run for the hills" grade of fine), Putin has contributed greatly to the transition off fossil fuels. Once he's deposed, tried and jailed, he should get a medal for that. :)
Wow, interesting. :)
I tried getting something like this a while ago.
I wrote a Java program that would use an USB serial adapter on Linux to talk to a radio modem (I tried a few varieties, mainly RFDesign and Chengdu EByte) and broadcast text messges. The program was roughly subdivided into a backend (repeater, this could be a Raspberry Pi) which didn't care about message content, and a front-end (user interface) which tried to decrypt every message, enabling messages without any recipient or sender ID.
The cipher was a one-time pad, and the clue to decryption was the unencrypted "pad index" field telling which index to take key material from (the program would take it from all of one's pads and try sequentially). If the message did decrypt, a checksum was revealed which matched the rest of the message, and this is how the program told the difference between success (show in the UI) and failure (discard, republish for others, don't retry decryption).
I also demonstrated (poorly) use to comrades in Finland during one Musta Pispala festival, but we didn't get far at all - buggy software and under-performing hardware are hard to demonstrate. But I did learn a lot and might retry some day. :)
I've followed the protests to some degree. The short answer: they lost, because the authorities had loyal goons and those had weapons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahsa_Amini_protests
Key points:
By February 2023, the regime stated it had arrested tens of thousands of protesters.[49]
According to France 24, by mid-March 2023 protests "had dwindled" across most of the country.[15] On March 13, the government claimed it had pardoned 22,000 citizens arrested for protesting.[49]
Perhaps a staggering level of peaceful solidarity action would have helped, but in the end, if cops and other enforcers cannot be stopped with persuasion, shaming or other forms of social pressure, if they remain willing to use violence... then only more effective violence will stop them. :(
Before Iran, we saw that in Belarus in 2020, where mass rallies were beaten down and suspected leaders arrested or driven into emigration. Street protesters fought back using crude and limited self-defense tools, not enough to counter a modern repressive apparatus:
1,373 injured including children[57]
4–11 dead[58]
30,000+ arrested[59][60][61]
at least 6 are missing[62][63]
Before Belarus, we saw Ukraine in 2014, where protesters did overcome the police, but not before they started using tractors, shotguns and hunting rifles, firebombs to burn vehicles or firehoses to make their own water cannon. Cops no longer showed up to work - because work was becoming personally and incredibly dangerous - they were fewer than in other countries, there still existed a democratically elected parliament (to sort out the aftermath)... protesters made a great effort and deposed the president. The military was not political and stood down, letting events unfold (not the case in Iran or Belarus, not the case in Myanmar, etc). Chaos was short-lived, the parliament did sort things out. But then another country intervened in an unexpected way...
...the conclusion of rather depressing. Most successful revolutions require at least a bit of remaining democracy in the background, and an apolitical military. Even then, peaceful revolutions are rare.
A colony on the surface of Venus would have other (more pressing) limiting factors than hydrogen production.
Among them, cooling - as far as we know, it's almost hot enough to melt aluminum on the surface, and the pressure is 93 Earth atmospheres, giving the highly corrosive Venusian atmosphere excellent thermal conductivity to quickly cook any human despite passive and active protection.
A colony could perhaps exist floating in the clouds, but Mars and the asteroids are generally considered better candidates for space colonization.
Thus, I think the foremost application of this technology will be on Earth. :)
Looks sound, but I'm not qualified to say if success will follow. It's certainly stable and also a low-grade fuel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_formate
Upon heating (in the range from 253 C to 411 C), sodium formate decomposes into various compounds - either hydrogen and sodium oxalate, or hydrogen and sodium carbonate - so it's true that it can be used as a fuel without releasing the carbon. Shipping it somewhere where it gets converted back to sodium formate is the tricky part, because that seems unlikely to happen onsite (on a small site, anyway).
They essentially say that (better) international cooperation is required, and must be functional at the required (global) scale... and the other paragraph essentially cautions that "some might find it easier to take from neighbours", leading to war, which is a proven and terrible waste of nearly all resources.
I would note that while we don't have a global society, we do have a global information space (enabling different actors to understand the same data and to see a mutual failure as the end of certain actions, even if their viewpoint differs) - and we do have global trade. Arrangements where an economy making a transiton off fossil fuels, for example, enacts carbon use limits locally and simultaneously taxes carbon-intensive imports across its borders, would remove the biggest dis-incentive to transitioning - that of getting things cheaper by polluting somewhere else.
Snow can definitely be useful in summer - but I would store it differently. I have observed that the local airport simply piles its snow up into a massive heap. This heap sometimes lasts until early June.
If I would need to store snow, I would likewise pile it, but would use two tricks: the ground under the heap would be thermally insulated, and once weather turns warm, the heap would be covered with a blanket of some kind. A hatch is just as good as a blanket, of course, but uses more material.
Actually, since storms have a tendency to blow away blankets, a depression / pond where to deposit the snow would probably be handy. Nothing too well engineered - just an insulated bottom and a location that keeps ground water elsewhere.
The wood-powered car is a nice idea.
As for whether electric cars need fancy electronics - that is a debatable topic. :) A brushed DC motor wears out fast, but definitely doesn't need fancy stuff. An inverter to produce 3-phase alternating current for a brushless motor can be rigged up with relays and reed switches, but those have a shorter lifetime than power transistors. A fixed-speed motor controller can likely be radically simpler than a variable speed controller. As for how simple a transistor-based motor controller can get... well, at least one microchip is advisable. But it doesn't do much - the calculation it performs is simple. I think that in a solarpunk society, someone would manufacture such a chip in their excessively well equipped barn. The chip would not be efficient, but would work.
Now, power transistors would better be efficient... so they cannot be too homebrew. I think a dedicated factory might be needed to make those. The other parts - resistors, capacitors, are a piece of cake.
Thanks, I'll try to find a description of it. :)
About using 2 chains: yep, I've thought about it. Attachment points would be at the outer ends of the first (smalller) bar of the A-shaped plow. Haven't tried it yet, but will.
IMHO the foremost questions are:
How much space is available?
Is it a flat place, or a cluttered place? In a cluttered landscape, wind is turbulent. If wind is turbulent, a turbine spends a lot of time turning into wind, and less time producing. Also, good quality laminar-flowing wind is high up then, typically out of reach for a single household. :(
If the landscape is flat, that favours trying with wind.
A wind turbine's power is determined by the wind speed and the swept area (the square of the radius). Efficiency is determined by flow qualities (laminar is way better than turbulent) and airspeed on the airfoil (long rotor blades are more efficient, but bigger, more dangerous, more difficult to handle, etc).
I second the advise to check out a wind atlas, and see the turbine designs of Hugh Piggot - if not to copy, then to learn what is worth buying. :)
Myself, I rely on vertical solar panels in winter. They do produce a lot less (from November to February, I have to charge my car in town). I have only one experimental wind generator, which is sadly a joke. It's a vertical axis turbine on a 5 meter mast with an e-bike motor at the top. Wind is collected by an array of stainless steel salad bowls. Due to low swept area and low airspeed, it's enough to make a few flashlights work. :D