perestroika

This apperas to be a repeating pattern. :(

"If a company could have higher expenses due to disclosing data, they won't disclose" <- basic game theory for politicians

An interesting approach, thanks for sharing. :)

Asimov's laws don't fit at all into a context of dystopian inequality, and the concept of a robot revolution arising from selfless reasons is just as interesting as one arising from self-serving reasons.

Trying to predict the trajectory of actual change, I don't see a robot revolution anywhere near, however. What I think about:

• rapid social change causing misery, and
• people demanding state to alleviate their miserable conditions, and
• state either turning to AI to pacify the people with better words, or
• state turning to robots to pacify the people with stronger beatdowns, or
• state actually meeting demands with universal social guarantees, but
• the means of production remaining under oligarchic control, consequently
• people lacking agency in determining their future, and
• some people complaining about it, but
• everyone having bread and circus, demands being ignored, so
• some people trying to build new societies in the shell of old ones, but
• confrontations being inevitable

But in the near future, revolutions will still happen - done by people. However, I notice another social trend: with aging populations, the willingness to actually carry out a revolution will become less frequent.

Current fusion (thermonuclear bombs) require a fission bomb trigger to start fusion in a lithium deuteride body, but reactors - absolutely not.

Fusion reactors do one of the following:

• use magnetic fields and electrical current to contain + heat a ring tritium (hydrogen isotope) plasma to extreme temperatures
• use a laser pulse to compress + heat a capsule of tritium to extreme temperatures
• use a magnetic field and electrical current to collide two rings of helion (helium isotope) plasma at extreme velocities

Short version: fusion needs fission only in warfare.

Fusion: yes, when eventually feasible.

Fission: maybe. It has high energy density. But uranium ore is very thin and needs to be refined a lot. Storage of spent fuel is problematic. Generally, it costs a whole lot. Even if I consider it green, I don't see it solving the most pressing problems - setting up nuclear energy is slow.

I went for a compromise: my house is equipped with 24 V DC cabling (PC PSU sockets as wall sockets) and likewise has a 240 V inverter.

Small stuff that is always on (router, alarm system) connects to the DC lines with DC/DC converters. Also: circulation pump, LED lights, 3D printer, small battery chargers - these use DC.

Most rooms have fairly limited wiring, so a huge amount of copper wasn't spent... except in the direction of the water tank. In that direction, wires are massive because my opportunistic heat storage system (when the season is cold and excess solar energy becomes available) also uses DC.

Big stuff (charging the car, pumping heat or irrigation water, drilling, welding, cutting) uses AC.

As far as I understand, it's a place where to meet around some productive activity, as opposed to meeting around booze. :P

The intended side effect should also be ensuring that even less wealthy community members can access fancy tools.

Why they call them men's sheds is a mystery to me, since I can easily imagine a schedule where it's a women's shed or random folks' shed one some days.

In my home town (Tallinn, Estonia), one library (Pelguranna library) also lends out tools.

Tools can be selected from their library catalog, currently it seems to have 69 items. :)

I haven't used it because I now live out of town and have a plentiful supply of instruments, but it seems really neat that they did it. :)

Let's start with the easy:

• motors: the simplest electrical motor (a brushed linear motor) can be made of coiled wire and a battery (a battery will "ride" like a tiny train when placed inside a conductive coil and supplied contacts to it)

I mean to say that motors are simple. It only gets hard when they get very big or very special (or when power density gets high). Some people recycle some metal (or mine new metal if they really need to). Some metals are drawn into wire (copper), others supplied in blocks and sheets (steel, aluminum), some place has a CNC lathe, some place has a ball bearing factory, and thus it goes. If it's a permanent magnet motor, someone needs to make magnets too.

Obviously, trade and industry must exist - some place has raw materials, some place has favourable locations for energy production and storage, some place is preferred by people for living.

• solar panels: intermediate hardness, more precision is needed, but the manufacturing process is not impossibly heavy on machinery and knowledge... you need to cast silicon ingots, cut them into thin wafers, dope the wafers with other substances, deposit wires on them, assemble the cells into arrays with more wires, and seal them between glass or other transparent material, optionally adding a frame of aluminum or something else

...and if one doesn't have access to the tech to make solar cells, one can make solar concentrators and use solar power with heat engines. :)

• microchips (not your old-school transistor but memory and processors): level 9000 hard, a complicated supply chain is needed, the first questions of an anarchist might be "what level of hierarchy does this supply chain impose upon us?" and "what tech level can I climb onto without appreciable hierarchy?"

The machines to make microchips require extreme precision, lots of complicated engineering and cost a fortune. Nobody will ever let a J Random Hacker tinker with them (risk of damage to the machine), but a great number of random hackers insisting on independence from the Great Chip Collective - they could build their own chip-making ecosystem. Maybe it won't make fast or tiny chips, but it will make some kind of chips - maybe not enough to model the planet's climate or predict protein folding - but enough to run most industrial machines.

Given that nothing in human activity has yet had time to considerably influence outcomes for the better (CO2 concentration is still steadily rising) and it's the starting year of the El Nino swing of the Southern oscillation - I would not be surprised at all.

Thanks for sharing. :)

Myself, I use 3 separate PCM-60X charging controllers (house facade, panel block A in the garden, panel block B), a stack of Nissan Leaf batteries (controllers have been adjusted to match voltage), redundant autonomous balancers (if one drops, battery balancing is not lost), a battery alarm for model planes (if something gets funny, it beeps like a smoke alarm) and a no-name (DC-AC isn't much of a name) 5 kW square wave inverter from Taiwan.

What I really miss is not having a battery bunker. They're indoors among things that could burn, so they must be carefully watched. If opportunity arises, I want to move them into a safer location.

The house computer is a Raspberry Pi, but so far it's only involved with wasting energy. If it sees that batteries are full, in cold season it starts gradually ramping up heaters in a thermal storage tank, until it detects that voltage has responded and dropped. Then it keeps things that way, reducing load if voltage sinks and increasing load if voltage rises.

wherever I join I’ll be able to see and post and comment to the content of other Fediverse alternative instances

To some degree. I have a user account on Mastodon and so far, I've had great trouble following discussions and browsing communities on Lemmy. While I'm new to this landscape, it seems that not everything on Fediverse flawlessly interacts with everything else. Interoperability seems to work grudgingly and sometimes.

Also, some servers aren't federated with each other, and then you can't see what's going on there. Myself, I've already got two user accounts, one here on "slrpnk.net" and another on "lemm.ee".

Interesting project. :) When clicking the link, I was expecting to see CNC aluminum plates, but rebar didn't cross my mind. :) Cheap, doesn't require a skilled welder or good tools, and since it's steel, fatigue is not such a big obstacle. Rust will be an issue, though (solvable with zinc).