Post 3481379 by bhtooefr@mastodon.social
(DIR) More posts by bhtooefr@mastodon.social
(DIR) Post #3475916 by ajroach42@retro.social
2019-01-28T17:25:18Z
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All of the smartest people I know are in the midst of planning off-grid and occasionally nomadic living solutions. Some of them are going so far as to start raising their own food. On one hand, I keep thinking "what do they know that I don't?" On the other hand, I have plans for a sustainable farm, optional off grid power generation, and a little mountain cabin that's waiting on me to come back to it.
(DIR) Post #3475917 by ajroach42@retro.social
2019-01-28T17:37:12Z
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I guess what I'm saying is that uncertainty and worry about the future seems to be pretty widespread right now, and most people I know are reacting by trying to prepare plans B and C. I'm uncertain about plans B and C too, though. Because we're going to need organized communities to weather whatever is coming.
(DIR) Post #3476888 by emsenn@osada.app
2019-01-28T17:36:34Z
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@Still Andrew (I guess) I think you might be interested in my opinion on this, which is that usually those solutions require a sense of property that runs counter to the principles of their ideology and a too-large allocation of base resources to be feasibly egalitarian. I like a lot of their methods, but think they should be applied to urban lifestyles as well. Put another way, it's nice to dream of homesteading, but there's usually nothing stopping you from planting some potatoes under the kitchen sink. (I recognize we've made a LOT of strides in micro/home-production in recent years, especially with things like 3d printing, I guess I'd like to see some of the well-off nerds combine their interest in self-sustainability and micro-fabrication. (And digging into it further, I think there's probably some misogyny involved that farms and nomadry are popular but homecrafts and gardening are relatively under-developed.)(This would be a DM if I knew how to do that from Osada, maybe I can't, I don't like this platform too much after using it through the morning.)
(DIR) Post #3476890 by ajroach42@retro.social
2019-01-28T17:43:32Z
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@emsennIt is largely a balancing game, from what I can see. When I say "farm" I mostly mean indoor garden, supplemented by an outdoor garden and a beehive. Our little place is sub 550 sqft, after all. But things like power generation, materials fabrication, and to at least some extent food production really benefit from economies of scale.
(DIR) Post #3476891 by emsenn@mastodon.social
2019-01-28T17:48:54Z
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@ajroach42 @emsenn Agreed, I just see a lot of people who are pursuing self-sufficiency looking to reach that benefit of scale with their own personal production, and that doesn't seem much different than saying, "boy howdy do I wish I were landed," and like... yeah same.Giant cities, surrounded by hectacres of robot farms. It's pretty clear - to me - that's the way we're going to go, it's just a matter of how much time we waste exploring other potential solutions.
(DIR) Post #3478438 by feonixrift@x0r.be
2019-01-28T18:07:24Z
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@ajroach42 In my family (dad's side), every generation since we came down the mountain has sworn it was all gonna fall apart on their watch, and headed back to the hills at least once. Then again, even though I'm riding the wave of modernity getting a math degree in Germany... I live in a partially off-grid house here, have a camper/tinyhouse waiting for me in California, and plan to buy land to build off-grid on as soon as my PhD is done.
(DIR) Post #3478439 by feonixrift@x0r.be
2019-01-28T18:07:53Z
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@ajroach42 I often wonder if I'm not pissing in the wind by sinking money into something other than a homestead asap. But I knew plenty of kids whose parents went full back-to-lander, and they were at a bad disadvantage. So I'll play both sides.
(DIR) Post #3478440 by jjg@sunbeam.city
2019-01-28T18:15:46Z
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@feonixrift @ajroach42 Personally, I find learning & preparing for less civilization fun, so even if it doesn’t become necessary, it’s better than watching T.V.I kind of find the productization of being prepared to be weird. I mean, most of the modern off-grid/“prepper“ types I’ve met have less skill and situational awareness than a typical Boy Scout.
(DIR) Post #3478441 by ajroach42@retro.social
2019-01-28T18:30:16Z
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@jjg @feonixrift I don't think I'm talking about less civilization, exactly. I'm personally worried about something on the scale of the great depression. Our retail establishments are on the brink of collapse and they make up a sizable portion of our economy. The housing market is essentially run by speculators and money launderers. There's a real chance that we could enter a massive financial crisis at basically any point. My goal is to be able to help take care of folks when we do.
(DIR) Post #3478442 by jjg@sunbeam.city
2019-01-28T18:44:24Z
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@ajroach42 @feonixrift "My goal is to be able to help take care of folks when we do."That's a really good goal.Surviving on your own is pretty simple business. Surviving with a few more people isn't significantly harder.It's preserving enough capacity to help others where things get complicated.
(DIR) Post #3478443 by kelbot@fosstodon.org
2019-01-28T18:50:36Z
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@jjg @ajroach42 @feonixrift I'm thinking one of the most efficient ways to do that is probably teaching skills and making as much useful information freely available and easily accessible and spreadable. It may also be the only way to help those with their heads in the sand refusing to believe anything will ever go wrong.
(DIR) Post #3478609 by ajroach42@retro.social
2019-01-28T18:54:50Z
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@kelbot @feonixrift @jjg Learn, then teach. That's the way I live my life. It's served me well so far. It's also great when the people I teach significantly outperform me on the thing I taught them (which is basically always the case.)
(DIR) Post #3478717 by mlg@ideath.net
2019-01-28T18:08:03.181039Z
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@emsenn @emsenn @ajroach42 Same concerns, different conclusions. Giant cities surrounded by hectares of robot farms isn't the future, its the present. Watch videos of crop harvests, there's maybe a human sitting in a combine for show, or its just GPS controlled. Incredibly efficient in food per human labor, obscenely inefficient in a thermodynamic sense in that it ONLY works because its completely fueled by subsidized fossil fuels, both in building/operating the machines and production of fertilizer used in commercial ag. To answer the question of what people know who think going off-grid is the answer: US national debt doubled under Obama,and considers to grow currently. US gov't can print money to bail out banks, but they can't print energy to replace millions of barrels of oil that we can't buy once their credit is no longer good internationally. Diss small scale agriculture all you'd like, but it fed humanity for at least 1600 years.Cities are an overpriced scam to the glee of big-time property owners, so its good for them to push the idea that its impossible to move rural. In fact, not only has my expenses dropped massively since I moved, I can now plant fruit trees, raise livestock, and grow a garden for less than I could buy a townhouse on a postage stamp lot in the city I was living in before. I was prepared for an isolating existence but I found the community is stronger and more welcoming than anything I experienced in any city I've lived in. The reason I didn't do it sooner was the fear of not finding employment, so I sucked it up in cities for a long time to save up, but thankfully that hasn't been an issue either.
(DIR) Post #3478718 by ajroach42@retro.social
2019-01-28T18:20:31Z
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@mlg @emsenn @emsenn Hi! I don't think we've met. I'm Andrew. I don't think anyone was dissing small scale agriculture. I harvested some parsnips from my apartment garden this weekend. I have an apartment in a large city and a home in a small town (in the north GA mountains)At the moment, the home in north GA is more sustainable, and the community is better. I would live their full time if I could, and will eventually. But it's a stopgap, individual solution to a global problem.
(DIR) Post #3478719 by mlg@ideath.net
2019-01-28T18:30:29.295044Z
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@ajroach42 @emsenn @emsenn Hi Andrew, i'm 'mlg', pleasure to interact with you for the first time :)What you see as a stopgap, I think I see as the ideal I'm voting for with my feet and wallet.To a technology maximist perhaps I sound like a luddite, but I personally believe in an future built around Appropriate Technology as described by EF Schumacher if you're familiar. In a nutshell, we'll all be better off if humans are working on meeting human needs with human scale systems. "Specialization is for insects" and all that. Fundamentally, I don't see how industrial agriculture is more "efficient" unless you only ignore human effort as a cost, and not energy. I think we can both easily strawman the other side, certainly if you export a suburban lifestyle to the middle of the country, and make up the difference with longer car trips, you end up with a very inefficient lifestyle. but that's a big stretch from organizing your life so you need to restock on a few long-storing supplies a few times/year, producing as much as you can locally and choosing to patronize your local economy as much as possible too.
(DIR) Post #3478720 by bhtooefr@mastodon.social
2019-01-28T18:48:30Z
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@mlg @emsenn @emsenn @ajroach42 I suspect industrial agriculture can be made *vastly* more energy-efficient than it currently is, though.I can't speak to replacing fossil fuel-derived fertilizers with renewables, but even with the environmental impact of battery production, simply electrifying the machinery involved in farming can go an incredibly long way (payoff period for the environmental costs of electrification is rather short).
(DIR) Post #3478721 by kragen@nerdculture.de
2019-01-28T18:58:16Z
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@bhtooefr @mlg @emsenn @emsenn @ajroach42 Also, though, energy isn't scarce. Marketed energy is scarce, but the solar energy received by earth is about four orders of magnitude larger than world marketed energy consumption. It's just that, until a year or two ago, photovoltaic cells were more expensive than steam-turbine generators, watt for watt. Photovoltaic energy becomes humanity's primary energy source in the late 2020s.
(DIR) Post #3478795 by bhtooefr@mastodon.social
2019-01-28T19:01:02Z
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@kragen @mlg @emsenn @emsenn @ajroach42 And, it's even worth noting that the land use of photovoltaic cells isn't really much of a problem.There's been research done into mixed solar/crop usage, and IIRC it was found that with the right solar panel coverage and mounting height, the crop productivity was ~80% of a pure crop farm, but also the solar productivity was ~80% of a pure solar PV farm.
(DIR) Post #3478869 by kragen@nerdculture.de
2019-01-28T19:03:05Z
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@bhtooefr @mlg @emsenn @emsenn @ajroach42 I think the land use of photovoltaic cells starts to become a problem a bit after 2050, though not because of impact on crops
(DIR) Post #3478873 by ajroach42@retro.social
2019-01-28T19:03:10Z
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@kragen @emsenn @emsenn @mlg @bhtooefr Sure! No question. But solar needs to be done on a community wide scale to be sustainable, and we haven't solved the storage problem in a sustainable way yet. Individual solar isn't the solution (because individual anything probably isn't the solution.)
(DIR) Post #3479236 by kragen@nerdculture.de
2019-01-28T19:16:01Z
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@ajroach42 @bhtooefr @mlg @emsenn @emsenn I'm not sure what you mean by "community wide scale" vs. "individual solar". Are you saying there's a coordination problem that has to be solved to prevent decaying into a shittier Nash equilibrium? Because I don't think that's true except, like, inside of individual solar panel factories. Are you saying that the total quantity of solar panels needs to be much larger before energy is cheap? That's true; it happens in the late 2020s, and we're in 2019
(DIR) Post #3479296 by bhtooefr@mastodon.social
2019-01-28T19:12:59Z
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@ajroach42 @mlg @emsenn @emsenn @kragen Storage sustainability is an interesting one as well, because there's so many ways to look at storage.Simply time-shifting loads to when there's a surplus of energy can get you a significant amount of the benefit of storage.Batteries... as I understand lithium-ion isn't as bad as it seems, especially w/cobalt-free chemistries.And, there's other chemistries than just Li-ion...
(DIR) Post #3479297 by kragen@nerdculture.de
2019-01-28T19:18:19Z
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@bhtooefr @ajroach42 @mlg @emsenn @emsenn Yeah, people are way too skeptical about storage. Even without time-shifting loads, PV generation plus storage is already cheaper than coal in significant parts of Earth, so the humans will switch to it relatively predictably.
(DIR) Post #3479375 by bhtooefr@mastodon.social
2019-01-28T19:15:34Z
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@ajroach42 @mlg @emsenn @emsenn @kragen Some of those chemistries are currently labor intensive to produce, although if we're obviously up against a wall of global warming (to the point of carbon taxation) and/or a resource shortage, a high-labor, low-resource/low-pollution battery starts to look reasonably financially attractive.(And, I mean, I have a friend who has a goal of making some of these chemistries cheaper and easier to produce...)
(DIR) Post #3479376 by bhtooefr@mastodon.social
2019-01-28T19:18:55Z
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@ajroach42 @mlg @emsenn @emsenn @kragen Then there's also things like molten salt storage (although AFAIK solar PV+batteries is more cost effective), gravity storage (pumped hydro (that has colossal carbon footprint to construct a new dam though), gravity trains), and even borehole thermal energy storage (look up the Drake Landing Solar Community, a suburban development (bleh) using BTES for seasonal storage of district heating energy).
(DIR) Post #3479377 by kragen@nerdculture.de
2019-01-28T19:20:54Z
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@bhtooefr @ajroach42 @mlg @emsenn @emsenn Yeah, and there's also isothermal compressed-air cavern storage and gyrobus-style flywheels, though I think those have maybe finally spun down
(DIR) Post #3479401 by emsenn@mastodon.social
2019-01-28T19:21:35Z
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@bhtooefr @ajroach42 @mlg @emsenn @kragen I gotta go with eukaryotic space balloons as my energy storage medium of choice, I'm sorry.
(DIR) Post #3479402 by kragen@nerdculture.de
2019-01-28T19:21:53Z
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@emsenn @bhtooefr @ajroach42 @mlg @emsenn Can't say I blame you.
(DIR) Post #3479448 by bhtooefr@mastodon.social
2019-01-28T19:23:31Z
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@kragen @ajroach42 @mlg @emsenn @emsenn Individual solar panels and storage batteries have a couple issues.They really only work on low-density (ideally single-family) housing, which means less efficient use of land area (which means longer transportation distances, which means higher transportation emissions).Additionally, there's not enough roof area to handle the full demand of the house, meaning you have to fill the yard with panels too.
(DIR) Post #3479527 by ajroach42@retro.social
2019-01-28T19:25:43Z
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@kragen @emsenn @emsenn @mlg @bhtooefr What I meant here is that power generation benefits from economies of scale, and that solar power from an existing utility provider will be cheaper and have a lower environmental impact than solar power produced by individual homes. If that's changed, or looks to be changing, that's good news.
(DIR) Post #3479881 by freakazoid@retro.social
2019-01-28T19:36:45Z
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@kragen @emsenn @emsenn @mlg @ajroach42 @bhtooefr Wind is substantially cheaper than PV in most places, it's just harder to do at small scale.It seems like for most applications small scale is actually going to be inherently worse for the environment than large scale due to its inherent inefficiencies unless you make heavy use of features that aren't possible at larger scale, like undersizing your storage because you're willing to turn things off.
(DIR) Post #3481379 by bhtooefr@mastodon.social
2019-01-28T19:28:28Z
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@ajroach42 @mlg @emsenn @emsenn @kragen Environmental impact of solar produced by individual homes is basically the panel production and installation emissions, and that's practically a rounding error nowadays (the panels are basically the same for everyone, installation probably is higher emissions for a home (it's basically the emissions of a couple pickup trucks or so)).
(DIR) Post #3481380 by bhtooefr@mastodon.social
2019-01-28T19:32:41Z
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@ajroach42 @mlg @emsenn @emsenn @kragen That said, being off-grid will affect matters - you will probably generate energy you can't use if you're off-grid.Pushing that power into the grid, though, means everyone can use it.And even community grids may not be able to optimally balance generation vs. loads, either - exporting to the main grid means factories can absorb the power when spot prices for electricity go negative due to overproduction.
(DIR) Post #3481454 by kragen@nerdculture.de
2019-01-28T20:23:09Z
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@bhtooefr @ajroach42 @mlg @emsenn @emsenn Yeah, that's pretty much true true; every apartment building requires a solar farm somewhere. I think the transportation thing is fixable — small tunnels with electric bikes and a JIT railway-like right-of-way reservation system to avoid collisions or stops — and then you might as well just live underneath your solar panel fields and eliminate the substations and high-voltage transmission lines.
(DIR) Post #3481513 by kragen@nerdculture.de
2019-01-28T20:24:43Z
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@bhtooefr @ajroach42 @mlg @emsenn @emsenn I do agree about the potential for reducing the need for energy storage by sharing the storage more broadly, but I don't think that will justify transmission infrastructure anything like what we need for hydroelectric, nuclear, and even coal.
(DIR) Post #3481569 by kragen@nerdculture.de
2019-01-28T20:26:54Z
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@bhtooefr @ajroach42 @mlg @emsenn @emsenn In the short term, though — before 2050 — we probably can't expect cities to change much except in the direction they're already changing, which as noted earlier is in the direction of high-density megalopolises with dysfunctional transport and very little low-density housing. Probably we'll see some significant effects due to changes in warfare, as we did in the 20th century.
(DIR) Post #3481574 by bhtooefr@mastodon.social
2019-01-28T19:41:41Z
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@freakazoid @ajroach42 @mlg @emsenn @emsenn @kragen Lazard's levelized cost of energy analysis has utility-scale solar photovoltaics as being typically cheaper than on-shore wind now (much narrow range of pricing, towards the lower end of on-shore wind's pricing): https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-and-levelized-cost-of-storage-2018/
(DIR) Post #3481707 by kragen@nerdculture.de
2019-01-28T20:31:59Z
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@freakazoid @bhtooefr @ajroach42 @mlg @emsenn @emsenn PV has pretty much caught up to wind in substantial parts of the world now, and will probably pass it almost everywhere around 2022.Undersizing storage by turning things off is doable at scale through either a market system or centrally planned load-timeshifting. Lots of commercial buildings run their HVAC chillers at night to save costs; in a solar world they'd do it in the day, but the principle is the same
(DIR) Post #3482531 by freakazoid@retro.social
2019-01-28T20:58:58Z
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@ajroach42 Thinking about nomadic lifestyles reminded me of a local icon, Wo'O Ideafarm. For a while he had a "house" that was a bicycle trailer that he'd ride around Mountain View with, until the police seized it. I think he's worthy of a Wikipedia page, but there isn't one, and there isn't a good centralized source of info about him, so I'd suggest a web search instead.
(DIR) Post #3484612 by bhtooefr@mastodon.social
2019-01-28T20:52:47Z
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@kragen @freakazoid @ajroach42 @mlg @emsenn @emsenn Also, centrally-planned load timesharing is a strategy that has existed for decades.(For as long as I can remember, my family had a RF shutoff device on the water heater, as the local electric co-op gave rebates for purchasing electric water heaters that they could shut off during periods of extreme load.)