‘Woman on the Edge of Time’ by Marge Piercy is the most solarpunk novel I’ve read so far. Fiction, that is. And it’s early '70s!

Why are you calling a polite irish male voice “she”?

So, you mean the proper response to the failure of a shitty business model is to introduce a worse business model?

Automation is so much less fun than institutional cruelty!

I have met some rentier class people (massive wealth from charging for their massive assets), and their kids went to expensive private schools. The scenario is not hypothetical.

Kidnapping is a real fear at that level of remove from the ‘Great Unwashed.’

Our local high school cafeteria program has been running a sophisticated version of this without the biogas element for years. Fish in very large tanks feed the leafy greens hydroponics growing in ranks of pipes on the walls, it’s very productive. Greens get used in the popular cafeteria (open to the public) and also the salad food truck they run in the summer months. Fish used are tilapia. Power is solar.

The students studying food services get a lesson in energy systems and food sourcing as well as running a business. Superb food, too. All mostly due to one chef-teacher with vision.

In Ministry for the Future, the opposition to this garbage is successful by bringing down a few choice flights with drone swarms, then announcing more will come to those who dare.

I used to own a W124 series Benz (bought used for 5% of sticker price, I ain’t no fauntelroy). Nearly everything on it was redundant or excessively skookum.

When systems that weren’t as rugged started going down, like the vacuum controllers for doors or the 4matic computer etc, the car still worked safely with reduced convenience. A few minor design flaws like the wiring harness but that’s it. Room to work under the hood, too.

It was built in '93 when the engineers still ran the company.

Current main driver is the super reliable '03 CRV.

One of our cars is a 2016 GM and I just unscrewed the cell antenna instead of ripping out the cell module. Tracking disabled, or at least unreliable. The subscription nav is useless and easy to ignore. I would like to figure out how to prevent the siriusxm ads built into the infotainment system, still.

I look forward to better infotainment hacks down the road.

You’re right, and he probably thought he was saying Argentina.

Your typical walk in. I got it.

But your back yard is infinite.

Boats are the original tiny home.

Local classified right now has a 29 foot sloop with extra sails, recent bottom paint, and a 9hp outboard plus dinghy for $5700 CDN. It’s been up a while, you could bargain down, the seller seems motivated. It’s a 1978 boat so really skookum fiberglass on that.

A mooring buoy costs around $1500 to plop down but sometimes you can get one second hand for less. (Every Canadian is entitled by citizenship to a mooring buoy or two.)

An equivalent RV costs around $15k with nowhere to park.

People who assume that they are going to buy stuff new are just locked into a class-based mindset.

Around here you can buy a serviceable 29-foot sailboat for $5k, and a mooring buoy for $1k. It’s cheaper than a van by the river FFS.

People who live on sub-40-ft sailboats are usually just hanging in there. Source: that was nearly me before my fortunes changed slightly. Boats are underpriced because they are a lot of work.

My sister is a corporate executive. Her walk in closet is objectively larger than a 29-ft live aboard. Hell her ensuite bathroom is bigger than that and she lives in a duplex. You are lacking real world context I think.

Lawler suggests that he’s getting around $5000 per piece and there were three pieces, so that’s around $15k going to the local skating rink.

Yeah, but that’s just it, there is no one thing that fulfils all your needs if you are forced to use a particular tool, but it lacks privacy or freedom or other features.

I use chrome because I have to and also am curious and I need to know about how Google runs its shit. I run Firefox because of various features it has that are good for web development. I run Safari because it is fast and relatively private outside of the Apple ecosystem And has some great developer tools.

The effort of one keyboard twitch to move from one browser to the other is not really any amount of friction for me. It’s easier than switching from one tab to another inside the same browser, so I don’t get your fixation on a single tool.

And as a PS, I won’t touch Brave with a 10 foot pole anymore because of their Fuckery with crypto.

I, too, am forced to use Chrome for parts of my work.

I just run Chrome for that set of tasks. Then quit, or tab to Firefox for regular browsing.

This is SOP when dealing with uglies like google, microsoft, amazon, adobe, or meta: do the toxic thing or software they require, as sandboxed as reasonable, then get back to daily life and more knowable risks.

Well some people called it the Iraq War but it was the same war started by his daddy so we just called it Gulf War 2.0. It still lingers, mission was not accomplished.

I don’t have any of the footage sadly. The documentary never got made. I don’t think anyone has used the footage, probably sitting in a university archive somewhere.

However there were regular marches of notable size in both Windsor and Detroit, which were loosely coordinated with the millions marching elsewhere around the world. People showed a fair bit of opposition.

I think some of that energy segued into the Occupy movement too.

The number of empty houses in North America is absurd. Zoning and regulatory structure are as much an issue as construction.

The gulf war under Bush Junior saw millions of people marching regularly for months. I shot over 800 hours of video of those marches myself, in Detroit and Windsor.