lol @ liberals.. "I voted for the benevolent dictator and all I got was this panoptic totalitarian police state."
I voted for the benevolent dictator, and he really was benevolent, honestly. It was paradise on earth. And then, the regime changed, and the new dictator had the same tools at his disposal, and wasn't so benevolent.
I'm tempted to move there. One of the bizarre things about living here is that despite many other freedoms, like being able to put up solar panels without jumping through hoops, the state insists on this bizarre idea that the water that falls on your property (not "runs through" like a river, but falls from the sky) does not belong to you. Collecting rainwater on your own property is technically illegal and people have gotten into legal trouble for collecting water for crops. I guess this kinda goes to the "water monopoly" being discussed in a different thread.
From the comments on the Dilbert strip you linked to:
Myself, I like the argument that knowing and working with your neighbors is a good approach to security; thieves last Friday swiped my own hunting rifle. Big arms cache's will always be a strategic target for any organized pilfering, whether IRS or militia or garden-variety thug.
I do believe it's important to work with one's neighbors; in this way I disagree with the person I was talking about, and as I said, I still hope to turn him around. There is a school of thought that you are obligated not only to provide for yourself in an emergency but be equipped to provide for others. I think that's a good idea. But there's no shortage of garden-variety thugs, so security is still a requirement.
Regarding weapons themselves being a target, it's true. And anyone who thinks they've secured resources by having an unsecured hunting rifle leaning in the corner has not thought it completely through.
I know conservatives tend to be "fuck you, I've got mine (or I'll get yours and make it mine)", but it's still shocking to hear of someone who would willingly kill people they disagree with instead of being proactive to solve their own problems. I'm pretty sure that negates any right to EVER complain about ANYONE on welfare ever again.
I can't grasp how someone can rabidly rail against a certain behavior when taken by others, and then be completely unable (or unwilling) to notice when they do THE EXACT SAME THING. It doesn't take a genius to realize conservative thinking is the cause of America's demise.
Ok, so, you are free to believe whatever makes you feel better. (It's still a free country in that respect.) But I think you may be missing the point. Practicing self-sustainability is a fine goal when nobody else needs what you have. But if things turn bad due to any number of breakdowns (power, transportation, monumental crop failure) you will inevitably be put in a position where you need to defend what you have against people who have not prepared or have no interest in doing so. And that policeman who's car you shat on during that demonstration will probably not be defending you. You can rail all you want about it and try to paint it as a conservative issue, [1] and none of that will do one speck of good.
[1] If it's a conservative issue to take what you need without working for it, does that mean everyone on welfare (your example) who doesn't need to be is conservative? I think voting records might indicate otherwise.
A friend of mine is a firm survivalist, but he hasn't stockpiled any food, only weapons and ammunition. I asked him how that's supposed to work, and he said it's ok, whatever food he needs he'll just take from his liberal neighbors. What are they going to do, call the cops? Although I personally don't work that way, I have to admit, he has a point.
Your "friend" is a psychopath. My advice would be to stay well away from him (if he exists anywhere outside of your head).
If only the greens and survivalists learned to stop ridiculing each other, they might find they had some things in common.
The greens I know may be naive, but at least they're not planning to kill their neighbours.
Oh, he definitely exists. Think about it for a minute -- how likely is it that people with that mind set *don't* exist? I'll wait.
He has other qualities that justify being his friend. We disagree on this point, but I hope to turn him around some day. In the meantime, I'm mindful of this.
I think the point is, it's not enough to merely have supplies or the means to produce them, but inevitably at some point you will also need the means to defend them. This is where the greens fall short, I think, and in a real forced-back-to-nature situation, this would be their downfall. Society exists in part to defend the individuals who can't or won't defend themselves. Things can break down over something as simple as an over-hyped jury verdict. Then what?
I don't think I've read that one, but I'm familiar with the idea of a water monopoly. I think Heinlein wrote about it also. As I recall, he said that such a society could get profoundly rotten, but still not be overthrown from within. It always needed an outside influence to initiate collapse. It could be a very small influence.
So yeah, societies like the one in F451 should inevitably collapse. And come to think of it, by the end of the novel, it did.
Planning on the grid failing is always funny. I'm sure you have lots of guns, but what do you do when the grids down for weeks and people see your lights and smoke and come knocking?
Reminds me of the girl at Occupy Wall Street who was telling the reporter that we should all be forced to go back to subsistence farming. When the reporter responded that there would be mass deaths, the girl said "well, people die". A good followup question, I always thought, might have been "ok, so you're subsistence farming, and a bunch of armed men come and want your stuff. What then?"
A friend of mine is a firm survivalist, but he hasn't stockpiled any food, only weapons and ammunition. I asked him how that's supposed to work, and he said it's ok, whatever food he needs he'll just take from his liberal neighbors. What are they going to do, call the cops? Although I personally don't work that way, I have to admit, he has a point.
To answer your question, it doesn't really matter. I can't justify starving while my family freezes in the dark just because my neighbors are doing it. We're not even talking the typical urban fantasy of being the last survivor doing the Omega Man thing. There doesn't even need to be a complete breakdown of civilization for the power to go out for extended periods. Anyone reading slashdot for awhile knows how fragile and vulnerable our grid is. Why would you bet your life on that when relatively inexpensive means exist to make your own power? Moreover, it's green. Surely you're not arguing that I shouldn't make my own clean energy rather than use electricity from a coal fired plant?
Which goes back to my original point. If only the greens and survivalists learned to stop ridiculing each other, they might find they had some things in common.
There are ways around this at significant extra cost.
What, a $2000 switch as part of a $15,000 install is a "significant" extra cost? Every licensed installer I've ever seen includes that cost in the "basic" install and won't install without it. Grid-tie is cheaper than batteries and (unless you are planning for the apocalypse), more useful.
Batteries are mandatory. Grid tie is optional. Again, I'm not trying for "green", I'm trying for self sufficient.
So, is it a flat rate based on occupancy, then? Your electricity isn't metered? That would suck, because you can't lower your bill no matter what you do. You might as well draw as much as you can and,,, I dunno, use it to make artificial diamonds or something.
I'm in Oregon, and we *can* feed back into the grid, but the problem is the system is required by law to shut down if the grid fails so that power line techs don't have to work with live lines. (There are ways around this at significant extra cost.) So I've chosen to keep my solar and grid power circuits separate. At the moment solar only powers lights and shop tools. The next to be added will be the circuits servicing freezer and fridge, but that'll take more panels and batteries.
The stove has gas burners but electric oven, and I don't plan to generate enough current to power the oven. On the other hand, I have a wood stove and natural gas barbecue, either of which could be used in a pinch, so it would be reasonable to get mostly off the grid, and if the grid fails, still be able to live in moderate comfort.
Something that bothered me about Huxley's and Bradbury's (and other author's) vision of a future where life had become frivolous to the point of losing all meaning -- it seems like any such society would be wiped out by the first thing that came along that was not covered by the socio/technological infrastructure put in place by an earlier, smarter people. If society had gotten to the point where jobs consisted of manipulating things created by people long dead, and spending most of one's life being entertained by similar devices, what happens when something occurs that requires out-of-the-box thinking to survive? My guess is, you don't. So societies described by F451 and Brave New World and various others described by Brunner or Ellison, would by necessity be ephemeral. As soon as they were challenged, they'd fold.
My thought also. When part of the population tells another part (even a small minority) that they can no longer do something, the "self" part of "self censorship" no longer applies.
But the OP up there does have a point -- that according to the book, the people moved away from books more and more to attention deficit types of entertainment, and the government simply took advantage of a phenomenon that was already happening. So to a certain extent, the people did do this to themselves.
Cheapness isn't really the point here. It's lack of a power grid, and the prohibitive cost, effort, and impact of building one up. (Ok, so cheapness is part of it.) The thing about solar is that it's not dependent on an existing power grid. This means it can be used anywhere there's a reasonable amount of sunlight and the power requirements aren't too massive. Caveat: It's not just the solar panels, there needs to be a way to store energy also, which usually means batteries, which have their own lifecycle issues.
Seriously, if they could put aside their differences, the greens and the preppers would realize they want the same thing for different reasons -- the greens because it's, well, green, and the preppers because it reduces or even eliminates reliance on the grid. It's all about marketing.
For instance, I'm not sure I buy into solar being all that green, when you take in the entire end-to-end environmental footprint including manufacturing and disposal at EOL. Nevertheless, I have solar panels and battery banks at my home, because they still work (at least until EOL) when the power shuts down, and that's valuable to me. At some point I would like to have enough panels to be completely off the grid, and the nice thing about solar is that you can do it in small increments, whereas power grids and centralized power generation needs to be done in much larger chunks, with MUCH larger start-up costs.
Well, you still need to store the energy somehow for non-sunny times. Even if it's a pump filling up a big water tank during the day, and then letting the water turn a turbine at night.
> Peru is using photovoltaics to provide small amounts of electricity without the infrastructure cost, which makes perfect sense.
....indeed. I read somewhere that eastern block countries have a better cellular infrastructure than the US, because they started later, without all the baggage of powerful existing telecoms. It'd make sense for this to work similarly for other forms of infrastructure.
Slashdot Mirror
Stacks of xboxes, maybe.
It's worse than that. Google "laws that contradict each other". There are circumstances where there is no lawful act.
> Of course you won't have to pay for it. But your vehicle registration will increase to $500/yr. Just a coincidence.
I believe this was in California. It's already $500/yr.
Then, don't disable it, hijack the content. We all wanted a license plate like the Aston Martin had in Goldfinger. Now we can have one.
Not to mention, displaying goatse at stop lights.
lol @ liberals..
"I voted for the benevolent dictator and all I got was this panoptic totalitarian police state."
I voted for the benevolent dictator, and he really was benevolent, honestly. It was paradise on earth. And then, the regime changed, and the new dictator had the same tools at his disposal, and wasn't so benevolent.
I'm sorry, I wish I knew how to make this funny.
I'm tempted to move there. One of the bizarre things about living here is that despite many other freedoms, like being able to put up solar panels without jumping through hoops, the state insists on this bizarre idea that the water that falls on your property (not "runs through" like a river, but falls from the sky) does not belong to you. Collecting rainwater on your own property is technically illegal and people have gotten into legal trouble for collecting water for crops. I guess this kinda goes to the "water monopoly" being discussed in a different thread.
From the comments on the Dilbert strip you linked to:
Myself, I like the argument that knowing and working with your neighbors is a good approach to security; thieves last Friday swiped my own hunting rifle. Big arms cache's will always be a strategic target for any organized pilfering, whether IRS or militia or garden-variety thug.
I do believe it's important to work with one's neighbors; in this way I disagree with the person I was talking about, and as I said, I still hope to turn him around. There is a school of thought that you are obligated not only to provide for yourself in an emergency but be equipped to provide for others. I think that's a good idea. But there's no shortage of garden-variety thugs, so security is still a requirement.
Regarding weapons themselves being a target, it's true. And anyone who thinks they've secured resources by having an unsecured hunting rifle leaning in the corner has not thought it completely through.
I know conservatives tend to be "fuck you, I've got mine (or I'll get yours and make it mine)", but it's still shocking to hear of someone who would willingly kill people they disagree with instead of being proactive to solve their own problems. I'm pretty sure that negates any right to EVER complain about ANYONE on welfare ever again.
I can't grasp how someone can rabidly rail against a certain behavior when taken by others, and then be completely unable (or unwilling) to notice when they do THE EXACT SAME THING. It doesn't take a genius to realize conservative thinking is the cause of America's demise.
Ok, so, you are free to believe whatever makes you feel better. (It's still a free country in that respect.) But I think you may be missing the point. Practicing self-sustainability is a fine goal when nobody else needs what you have. But if things turn bad due to any number of breakdowns (power, transportation, monumental crop failure) you will inevitably be put in a position where you need to defend what you have against people who have not prepared or have no interest in doing so. And that policeman who's car you shat on during that demonstration will probably not be defending you. You can rail all you want about it and try to paint it as a conservative issue, [1] and none of that will do one speck of good.
[1] If it's a conservative issue to take what you need without working for it, does that mean everyone on welfare (your example) who doesn't need to be is conservative? I think voting records might indicate otherwise.
A friend of mine is a firm survivalist, but he hasn't stockpiled any food, only weapons and ammunition. I asked him how that's supposed to work, and he said it's ok, whatever food he needs he'll just take from his liberal neighbors. What are they going to do, call the cops? Although I personally don't work that way, I have to admit, he has a point.
Your "friend" is a psychopath. My advice would be to stay well away from him (if he exists anywhere outside of your head).
If only the greens and survivalists learned to stop ridiculing each other, they might find they had some things in common.
The greens I know may be naive, but at least they're not planning to kill their neighbours.
Oh, he definitely exists. Think about it for a minute -- how likely is it that people with that mind set *don't* exist? I'll wait.
He has other qualities that justify being his friend. We disagree on this point, but I hope to turn him around some day. In the meantime, I'm mindful of
this.
I think the point is, it's not enough to merely have supplies or the means to produce them, but inevitably at some point you will also need the means to defend them. This is where the greens fall short, I think, and in a real forced-back-to-nature situation, this would be their downfall. Society exists in part to defend the individuals who can't or won't defend themselves. Things can break down over something as simple as an over-hyped jury verdict. Then what?
> With grid-tie solar, you'd have full power for about 8 hours a day, you'd just lose power at night.
Night is when you need it the most.
Some would say, you have a pool? That's not very green.
There are hand-pump filters that will render the water drinkable without having to boil it.
I don't think I've read that one, but I'm familiar with the idea of a water monopoly. I think Heinlein wrote about it also. As I recall, he said that such a society could get profoundly rotten, but still not be overthrown from within. It always needed an outside influence to initiate collapse. It could be a very small influence.
So yeah, societies like the one in F451 should inevitably collapse. And come to think of it, by the end of the novel, it did.
Planning on the grid failing is always funny. I'm sure you have lots of guns, but what do you do when the grids down for weeks and people see your lights and smoke and come knocking?
Reminds me of the girl at Occupy Wall Street who was telling the reporter that we should all be forced to go back to subsistence farming. When the reporter responded that there would be mass deaths, the girl said "well, people die". A good followup question, I always thought, might have been "ok, so you're subsistence farming, and a bunch of armed men come and want your stuff. What then?"
A friend of mine is a firm survivalist, but he hasn't stockpiled any food, only weapons and ammunition. I asked him how that's supposed to work, and he said it's ok, whatever food he needs he'll just take from his liberal neighbors. What are they going to do, call the cops? Although I personally don't work that way, I have to admit, he has a point.
To answer your question, it doesn't really matter. I can't justify starving while my family freezes in the dark just because my neighbors are doing it. We're not even talking the typical urban fantasy of being the last survivor doing the Omega Man thing. There doesn't even need to be a complete breakdown of civilization for the power to go out for extended periods. Anyone reading slashdot for awhile knows how fragile and vulnerable our grid is. Why would you bet your life on that when relatively inexpensive means exist to make your own power? Moreover, it's green. Surely you're not arguing that I shouldn't make my own clean energy rather than use electricity from a coal fired plant?
Which goes back to my original point. If only the greens and survivalists learned to stop ridiculing each other, they might find they had some things in common.
There are ways around this at significant extra cost.
What, a $2000 switch as part of a $15,000 install is a "significant" extra cost? Every licensed installer I've ever seen includes that cost in the "basic" install and won't install without it. Grid-tie is cheaper than batteries and (unless you are planning for the apocalypse), more useful.
Batteries are mandatory. Grid tie is optional. Again, I'm not trying for "green", I'm trying for self sufficient.
Existing legacy wire is the baggage part, and mobile companies growing out of existing wireline companies is the powerful part.
So, is it a flat rate based on occupancy, then? Your electricity isn't metered? That would suck, because you can't lower your bill no matter what you do. You might as well draw as much as you can and,,, I dunno, use it to make artificial diamonds or something.
I'm in Oregon, and we *can* feed back into the grid, but the problem is the system is required by law to shut down if the grid fails so that power line techs don't have to work with live lines. (There are ways around this at significant extra cost.) So I've chosen to keep my solar and grid power circuits separate. At the moment solar only powers lights and shop tools. The next to be added will be the circuits servicing freezer and fridge, but that'll take more panels and batteries.
The stove has gas burners but electric oven, and I don't plan to generate enough current to power the oven. On the other hand, I have a wood stove and natural gas barbecue, either of which could be used in a pinch, so it would be reasonable to get mostly off the grid, and if the grid fails, still be able to live in moderate comfort.
Something that bothered me about Huxley's and Bradbury's (and other author's) vision of a future where life had become frivolous to the point of losing all meaning -- it seems like any such society would be wiped out by the first thing that came along that was not covered by the socio/technological infrastructure put in place by an earlier, smarter people. If society had gotten to the point where jobs consisted of manipulating things created by people long dead, and spending most of one's life being entertained by similar devices, what happens when something occurs that requires out-of-the-box thinking to survive? My guess is, you don't. So societies described by F451 and Brave New World and various others described by Brunner or Ellison, would by necessity be ephemeral. As soon as they were challenged, they'd fold.
My thought also. When part of the population tells another part (even a small minority) that they can no longer do something, the "self" part of "self censorship" no longer applies.
But the OP up there does have a point -- that according to the book, the people moved away from books more and more to attention deficit types of entertainment, and the government simply took advantage of a phenomenon that was already happening. So to a certain extent, the people did do this to themselves.
Ah. New York City. It figures. I think in that case, the decision was made that control was more important than acting responsibly.
I'm on the west coast, and I didn't even have to tell my homeowner's association before I put up the panels.
Cheapness isn't really the point here. It's lack of a power grid, and the prohibitive cost, effort, and impact of building one up. (Ok, so cheapness is part of it.) The thing about solar is that it's not dependent on an existing power grid. This means it can be used anywhere there's a reasonable amount of sunlight and the power requirements aren't too massive. Caveat: It's not just the solar panels, there needs to be a way to store energy also, which usually means batteries, which have their own lifecycle issues.
Seriously, if they could put aside their differences, the greens and the preppers would realize they want the same thing for different reasons -- the greens because it's, well, green, and the preppers because it reduces or even eliminates reliance on the grid. It's all about marketing.
For instance, I'm not sure I buy into solar being all that green, when you take in the entire end-to-end environmental footprint including manufacturing and disposal at EOL. Nevertheless, I have solar panels and battery banks at my home, because they still work (at least until EOL) when the power shuts down, and that's valuable to me. At some point I would like to have enough panels to be completely off the grid, and the nice thing about solar is that you can do it in small increments, whereas power grids and centralized power generation needs to be done in much larger chunks, with MUCH larger start-up costs.
Well, you still need to store the energy somehow for non-sunny times. Even if it's a pump filling up a big water tank during the day, and then letting the water turn a turbine at night.
> Peru is using photovoltaics to provide small amounts of electricity without the infrastructure cost, which makes perfect sense.
I know not these hoops of which you speak. Citation?
You assume that the internet is something one would want to spend time away from.
> what's cheaper than Windows 8?
What's cheaper than Windows 8 is sticking with whatever they currently have.
That's a good one too. Life imitates art.