Yup, partisanship is what could break the world now, as people look at their savings and wonder if they are safe. At some point they might cave in,and go and take their money out, and then someone will publish some news about how they are all taking money out of the banks, and pretty soon lots of banks will have to go bankrupt. When this happened in argentina, only 250 dollars a week were allowed per family. I wonder how much there is now.
There is no secret fuel over the horizon like with petrol after WWII, and there is no magical alternative fuel that's going to move all our food and pharmaceuticals around the world if the US goes bust and takes europe with it. The US is not going to grow again in 6 months, or in 12 months, because measuring a country's wellbeing via GDP growth was a mistake in the first place, and it's now become very harmful to continue seeing the world that way.
So what happens as countries go bust is that a disposessed middle class goes out into the street, camps out, riots, but generally protests peacefully for stuff to get better. This is happening in egypt and north africa, but also in across southern europe, in chile, in marocco, belarus, iceland, turkey, the UK, israel, south america and pretty much anywhere you might have thought of as a stable or safe place even just a couple of years ago. And so the government becomes opposed to it's people, and the old alliances of media, police and bipartisan states start falling apart. We are at this point in Spain, where the Police now speak throught the police union, and beat up journalists and protesters alike, issuing public messages that are harshly critical of government and protesters. Meanwhile people lose jobs, houses, hospitals etc and everything is more and more extreme each day.
But I think there is a way through, which is through dialogue, through agreements by all parties - citizens, government, business, media and police or army forces, to collaborate because we have a huge crisis on our hands. Here is some timely viewing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8EYN1iBPdc
We all have to voluntarily take over as government and business fails, and keep basic services functioning. We have to relocalise, and figure out how to drastically reduce the need for transport, and most importantly, produce clean supplies of water, basic medicine and food. This can only happen with an active volunteer force, able to be creative and effective, and it just so happens that the pro democracy protests are basically formed from spontaneous voluntary acts from people across all (or most) aspects of society, and now at least in europe, by assemblies, allowing for high levels of organisation and very participative democratic decision making, and now - with social networking software like Lorea (based on ELGG), soon to be complemented by an information system allowing faster decisions and ability to organise complicated activities across a wide geographical area. Lorea can be found at http://lorea.cc/ or https://n-1.cc/ to see it in action.
I don't know if you see how hard that is going to be to reach this level of unity, with all the fighting going on at the moment. We need a huge amount of unity, and for a feeling to surface across the financially sick "western world" with some of what in the UK is known as the blitz spirit - an idea of shared catastrophe, that gets everyone out helping each other. I think a lot of the protests so far have embodied these feelings, of the drastic need to revolutionise our culture, politics, financial system and pretty much everything else, because of how harmful the damaged older system is(if we let things go on we will starve), and I really hope that October 15 - where wall street itself will be subject of a protest camp, can help bring more people to awaken to the idea that they have to take responsibility for this situation, and actively make things better, even if it means adapting
Yeah but you can get lots of urban vegetation though - dandelion is a good emergency foodstuff, you can eat the leaves, make the flowers into tea, and the roots can be fried with soya sauce...:)
Cities frequently have fruit trees growing all over the place, even on abandoned places by the side of the road because someone threw an apple core in the 70s and it grew...
In Bristol, UK there is a map of all edible fruit and nut trees and guides you can buy with all the different species of local plants and how to prepare them or use them medically.
I think the problem is long term survival - finding ways to meet your needs with something other than supplies or guns. If just you are lumbered with lots of stuff, or lots of weapons there is going to be someone stronger than you or someone who will work day and night to get what you have, but if you have skills and knowledge, you are better as a friend to these people. So here is your list but with some inventions and ecological solutions I've seen used a few times in open hardware/green circles, where a lot of the idea behind it takes from open source directly - the idea that you have to share knowledge openly:
Blankets/sleeping bags: learn to sow, knit, weave old clothes to make new ones, or get inventive with plastic bags or tyres to make woven baskets and footwear. You can make plastic bags into a waterproof coat if you iron the bits together wrapping them first in baking paper. Tyre is really durable and can get you really far making stuff with it. All you need to make shoes is a relatively varied amount of them, inner tubes are nice and soft, a sharp knife and some nails. If it is really wet and you need impermeable footwear, bags to the rescue again: just wrap your socks in plastic bags and they will stay dry, avoiding infection, trenchfoot etc in a wet/flooded situation.
Drinking water:make a freshwater filter - all you need is sand, stones and somewhere for the water to pass through, in hot places using solar ovens to boil your water (and to cook food without needing to cut down a forest a year just to heat food), also I hear there are simple ways of preparing water for drinking by just leaving it closed in a plastic container in the sun for a couple of hours.
Food: organic and permaculture based farming. Permaculture is more of a way of designing a way of living - with limited resources, and it's what was famously used in Cuba after the USSR collapsed and no more food or fuel was available from there. They all lost weight but by embracing this and doing without fertilizers they still managed to avoid mass starvation and everyone was relatively comfortable, and a lot better off once the organic harvests kicked in.
Ovens: the simplest indigenous ovens are just a hole in the ground with a fire on the bottom, that you puyt the food in and cover up with leaves and earth(kind of a slow pressure cooker), but you can also, with some practice, make a kiln - a bread making oven made out of mud, which will last about a week, and produce some tasty stuff for quite a large group of people...
Refrigerating food so it'll last longer: a couple of clay pots and water will produce a nice effect where the sand absorbs the heat from any food you put in the smaller pot: put the small pot inside the big one, fill the rest of the big one with sand, and pour some water in with it. The water will evaporate and the sand will get a lot cooler. So you have a little refrigerator. Keeping your stuff in a cool dark place can achieve the same effect, but the pots idea is much more lightweight and mobile.
Lights: solar lights(the garden ones for example are usually to be found quite cheap), windup lights, small LED circuits that you can make yourself from sites like instructables or make magazine, a few carefully placed mirrors can bring lots of light to a room so that you don't need to rely on electricity working all the time or on having enough money to pay the bill. A couple of medium sized solar panels and a 12v battery from a car can give you lots of much needed electric power for night time lighting, recharging devices and all kinds of other uses.
Cooking: again solar ovens are brilliant and aren't only good for producing drinking water, but also for slow cooking some brilliant meals. Instructables this week is showing off a permanent design for one that rotates to follow the sun all day. Wood gas heaters are easily made from tin cans and some old newspaper or some sticks. It doesn't use up loads of fuel (which is fossil based anyway so creating more catastrophes the more you burn it, and li
Maybe a simple way forward is to turn the n900 series into what the G1 was a couple of years ago. With that phone, it became suddenly very simple to download a mobile sdk, plug the phone in, set some options and put a "hello world" application into a phone or even distribute it on that same day. I know further steps might get more complex along the line with android programming, but it's easier than symbian app programming is now. What puts me off android on the other hand is that it's not entirely open source and has that black box thing in there, and it doesn't work on older simpler phones, thereby excluding a huge amount of people in the world from it's use.
What if nokia managed to produce a symbian distro that "just worked" on phones like the n900, or even - magically, on some random cheap older simpler "featurephone", seamlessly recieving newly coded apps from developers and running them, and allowed developers to get programming a symbian app within a day? Perhaps by working on getting symbian stable enough and streamlined enough, and then adding some scripting language over it (there's already python for s60 so maybe something like that) or even a fancy drag and drop ui layout editor etc etc - basically if app creation was easier with symbian than with android or iphone, and there was an easy way to get it on more phones, it would really give symbian it's strength. Or it will do that anyway, slowly via open source, but in 10 years, and we'll still get the benefits eventually. It would be a shame if by that time nokia was irrelevant, so that this job would be up to the small 3rd world kiosks that repair and mod phones illegally, to take two sims at a time, unblock them, upgrade their firmware etc.
What do I need to read and where do I need to go to get android running on one of those old oneTs? Or whatever - it's a testing ground, sold to a very generic audience. I would love to be able to run an ubuntu distro on there, although android sounds worth trying on a netbook.
One thing about netbooks though is they are half way between a phone and a computer, so they shouldn't need to be so complicated - both in interface design and in expectations. Another is this reliance on google docs or youtube and other commercial free-as-in-beer (I never thought I'd say that) services that just don't seem to have a proper funding model in a very unstable economy.
We really need to develop distributed software models that we can use to keep this kind of thing going. Projects like opengoo, or various mesh network wifi projects and organisations seem really useful, and ones that could easily adapt towards it, but I think the netbook will eventually be their playground...
I would love to find out for sure if at 30-50 watts we're finally at something I can attach an exercise bike or a couple of solar panels to and actually get enough power to run it. In environmental terms it would be a huge breakthrough. And I wouldn't spend so much time reading email.
Regardless of who (or WHO) is right - and as with many of these big threats, you should "do what you should have been doing anyway" - an ecologist mantra that you can read more about here: http://www.energybulletin.net/node/25115.
And in this case this means resting, avoiding stress, getting lots of vitamins and above all avoiding pre processed foods and factory farmed animal meat: eat organic, locally grown food that hasn't travelled the world and been imbibed with chemicals or antibiotics that lower your own natural resistance to infection.
The reason we have pandemics like this one, Sars, Aids or bird flu is because of 30+ years of lowering resistance to disease due to the way we eat and the practices we have.
So if you do well with this, by August - by which time the virus may be much more dangerous - you'll have a nice resistant immune system. And if the virus disappears, you'll still have that nice resistant immune system!
Wrong generation really, I'm not a baby boomer, but I'll bite - yes as you say "green" is a really vague buzzword that everyone wants to jump on, sometimes with rubbish products that break straight away or that are only green in a small way, without addressing real issues or causing people to think they can buy their way out of our problems.
I'm a post baby boomer, born in the 70s, consumed during the 80s and 90s as if the world was infinite, as did all of "western" society and as you probably did yourself if you were around then, it was pretty hard not to, and I didn't question this really until the september 11 incidents. So I share that responsibility: as anyone alive and part of society now and in those years has, and probably much farther back in time and in different non-western societies as well, I helped fuck things up for our kids and other species.
But where I disagree with you is how to deal with this situation: one way, as you seem to do, is to just give up and only see the bad side of the so called green movement. I see it as a great opportunity for our teenage society to finally come of age and embrace it's limits, but I don't need anyone to agree with me on that. In anything there are positives, and one thing about being a "modern" environmentalist is that you can be more holistic - it's not about single issues any more, you don't need a beard, and it's certainly not such a side issue that people will not believe you. Most people nowadays have heard of peak oil, climate change, the food and credit crisis and the huge Ponzi schemes the financial system was built on. If you dig deeper you find even more crises that can seem really unsolvable. So what do you do? Just give up, dig for the last drops of oil, fight for the last scraps of food and secure the future maybe half or one generation down the road for your own family or country?
In everything we do there is good and bad. I really have trouble when companies go on about not being "evil" - it's very hard to be purely good, and we have to live with the fact that being alive means eating other living things, consuming resources and sometimes being destructive, but also it includes being creative, wise, strong etc. So nothing we do will be completely safe or positive, and no so called green products will be either, but we can go for the best we know, and try to do the best we can, improving our choices as we go.
What I think though is that everyone can have a positive vision for where they want things to go. These don't have to be the same vision, and sometimes they might even conflict, which is ok as long as we accept that people have differences. So in your example of carbon monoxide or electric car batteries, I think it's a bit of a waste of time to try and measure between how good one or another thing is - sure within reason, but it's a waste of time to aim for total green purity, and I think I prefer seeing this as a road with many corners and stops along the way, rather than just as green vs not green. Changing to low energy lightbulbs, recycling more or convincing people about a coming financial crash feels a bit 2007 now, so we have to keep going farther. People still have issues they see as more or less important than others, but if you give up, how are you going to keep going forward? Same with IT. Don't listen to the idiots or marketing departments, just make your own future and don't give up.
Ale
ps:Disclaimer: I'm a webmaster for Transition Bristol in the UK. You can read more about the transition movement here: http://www.transitiontowns.org/
I wouldn't go for the fancy laptop bags with solar panels... Maybe they work well, but if you're a real geek why not build your own? To run a regular 15-24v input laptop for 6 hours a day you'd need:
2 x 30W Mnocrystalline Solar Panels 1 x 6amp Charge Controller 1 x 85 Ah Deep Cycle leisure Battery 1 x Cigar to Crocodile Clip Adaptor 1 x Universal Laptop adaptor
At least that's here in drizzly old england. Comes to around 250 pounds in our drizzly english money.
Carbon costs and payback aren't everything: computers today aren't green and aren't sustainable but don't just get sad and do nothing:)
Using solar panels for this means microgeneration and helps promote use of decentralised, off grid energy which I consider a positive social change towards green-ness, and it will help you in particular if you live in a place with frequent blackouts (i.e not the UK!). Think of it as a ticket to a cheap shed-studio setup, or temporary remote setups like at festivals or camping, and once it's all wired up and charging a battery, I can plug it into loads of other kinds of things.
I don't know about the pinball thingy, but generally, in the UK, you can see all the TV you want on iPlayer or any of the major and minor channels' own players - or just download Miro and thereby take part in legal, CC licensed or public domain video torrenting so as to watch whatever you want that's not spoonfed by media companies.
Same goes for online music - you can listen for ages on jamendo, last.fm or magnatunes, and an ever increasing number of net labels on archive.org etc, without ever so much as a sub-subpoena. Creative Commons music is now so varied and widespread that I don't see a reason to have to steal.
But for games? I guess games are still an area where there will be piracy... Open source and CC just aren't there yet (with big 3d flashy games, not the huge amount of simpler open source games around), although the guys at Blender are taking some first steps: http://www.yofrankie.org/
Well if so, then according to Chomsky it was created during the marshall plan post wwII if you're referring to the whole world. And that's when petrol was cheap and easy to extract. So politically created distribution system yes, but the problem now comes from their small concern for future scarcity - understandable enough though if the world was ruined and so many economies had collapsed after a huge war.
So I'd agree with the parent: grow some food! Or better put - relocalise the distribution system.
At least he could run some cable over and power other people's garden lights or floodlights for example, to protect against thieves and he might get some money (or a pinch of salt and occasional egg) from them? He'd certainly be a popular neighbour.
Yup - it's the small, simple and readily available things that count, a few ideas:
* The rollable water container - a round thing that you can roll over to get water with, rather than carrying it on your back/arms/head * The little heater with an AA rechargeable battery in it for the fan, that you recharge at the local solar panel * The huge and incredible mobile phone informal/illegal repair subculture in developing countries - such as putting 2 simms in the same mobile with a simple switch mechanism. * The pot with sand in it, and a smaller pot inside, that uses the physical properties of wet sand to create a refrigeration system for fruit and other perishables at markets * The solar furnace - a curved mirror or reflective sheet with a black pot in the middle. * The indian project to use harvested stomach bacteria to process recycled food into gas for cooking.
Loads of this stuff is happening and IT teams are out in the craziest places doing incredible things - these examples above are old, and I could dig out links if needed, but there's 10000 other projects that TED could highlight, even if you just want to talk about software: as well as the IT needed to create information infrastructures around completely non-IT stuff - like (this is more of a developed world example) the simple discussion boards and mailing lists used to power next generation barter/free/exchange systems like freecycle, freeconomy, feral trade and various post-LETS barter systems that are now taking off now that the administrative time-suck has been dealt with. Next step I think, will be project management systems that are just as simple and low-tech, so you can organise say a milk round around it.
But what you are getting at I think is peak oil - a lot of green/environmentalist people have known this for years - as does the far right wing here in the UK - the fact that what was introduced around the world as the main power source, transport fuel and fertilizer source after the 2 world wars, is now dangerously low in supplies and that this will mean a huge change in our lifestyles in the next few decades, as we revert back. - Except that now we have lots of other energy sources, there are women working too, lots of stuff is sitting in rubbish dumps rather than at the bottom of mountains, we have telecommunications, and generally it's a positive thought when you consider that this gap in fuel is also a natural limit to the amount of change we can give to the climate...
What this means for power plants is microgeneration -small varied local power sources - if you have lots of wind, sun or water around, use that. If you don't, there is bio fuel(the kind that doesn't help food crises!) and other new technologies, but half the power is lost transporting the fuel or power around - so it has to be generated and used locally too.
But the hope/change thing will really come in to play if society needs to change dramatically - as we transition to low fossil energy and varied alternates, we'll all need practical skills, strong local business and social connections and an open mind.
Drilling for more oil resources (as is the situation, I believe, with building more nuclear plants on diminishing uranium) will only buy you a few more years of this historical blip. The cheap oil is being extracted fast, and the stuff at the bottom and in the small oil fields left to find, is much more expensive to get. Oh and they're not just YOURS as you say - they also belong to future generations. And who knows how efficient they could be with extracting and using it?
It's this idea that you have to "scale up" that might be the problem itself: apply solution X to the same old X shaped hole: any magic solution X to the world's crises requires a commercially backed, large scale, centralised processing and distribution system.
But what if each person could get/produce a handful of bugs and make a bit of their own fuel somehow? A solution that didn't have to scale up BUT required the world to adapt to this energy source, as we did back in the 30s-40s-50s to adapt to petrol in the first place? (Like reducing use) And I wonder if there are already solutions like this around? And because they require adaptation, will they still be popular?
How about Buddhism? We do acknowledge people have gods, and many local gods in various countries were historically incorporated as bodhisattvas, but according to most schools of Buddhism, gods are not the point - and are living under the same laws of buddhism as the rest of us.
As a Chilean, I should add the Mapuche in the south of Chile and Argentina to your list: Also decentralised, using forest to their advantage, made nomadic by the spanish conquest (the incas had had contact with them so they knew other people were out to get them) - and using what some call proto-guerilla warfare to ensure they were never conquered by the spaniards, and in fact the lands they had were pretty much theirs and only settled by a few nordic people who could handle the cold, it was only the "chileans" themselves - or the upper class mestizo ones who took over from spain, who managed to commit genocide by sending armies down in the late 18th century. So to go back to parallels with file sharing, decentralisation isn't infallible, especially if attacked from within!
But I won't argue that they put up any more or less resistance than the Maya. Both groups are still active now, and still oppressed by the nations around them.
Yes, not only this, but the private contractors are (AFAIK!) from companies like Serco and Sodexho, multinationals that also run detention camps for asylum seekers here in the UK.
I went to see someone (from an organisation called BID) speak about time spent in various UK detention camps, and he said that by far the best dying breed of camps are the ones where trained prison guards are on duty: they can tell the difference between a family that has endured countless suffering and persecution, and a regular adult criminal, where this is not so obvious to the private staff in the other camps.
He also said the "best" of these private guards, the most ruthless and able to take on the most difficult jobs, are the ones then entrusted with the higher paid role of deportation duties.
I'd have to add to this that of course it's a shocking abuse of human rights to detain children in prisons and detention camps, to inflict what amounts to persecution to people fleeing the same thing, and to subject people to the horror of UK deportation processes (helicopters, armoured vans, heavy police presence - scares the living shit out of the easiest deportation targets - families), but it's already been said here that this doesn't shock anyone anymore. Still I said it, not to shock, to inspire action to stop it.
Ale
ps: I have good reason to expect regular military police to have a hard time handling Guantanamo bay - so this reluctance might be part of the reason for this replacement.
Is there currently a radio channel or stream that only broadcasts Creative Commons and public domain music? Or readings of GPL code or something? That might solve the problem?
No idea if that would work, but I wonder what ways exist of sending something very small and fast up there that combines with water or otherwise reacts to finding a "goldilocks" life capable zone to make a simple life form on arrival? Maybe assemble itself into colonies of laser producing mites that can send info back? Might be easier than plotting a way through the stars with ion propulsion, but it would mess with any existing life there and not much else... I'm not that bothered by what happens when it gets there, but wouldn't the concept of us sending "spores" into space be a big scientific challenge?
The real answer to the "future of bio fuels" is not to use as much as we use now. There is no magic thing that will make the problem of resource depletion go away. The stark truth is we've used more than we had in the first place and now we're basically fucked if we go on this way. You can shift the problem about at a huge cost to all, or radically change lifestyles.
I don't mean go and buy a goat though: I mean we need to reorganise cities and suburbs so that people stay in their local area to get as much as possible of what they need(shops, work, socialising etc). This will mean much less car use. And in the states, they could get as efficient as Europe had to in the 70s and get used to higher fuel prices as has happened in Europe too, and that would already reduce the amount needed.
I think for now the only biofuel that's actually "5-star green" is the recycling of biomass, plant waste etc to produce very limited transport - like EU nordic countries for example. Latest issue of "The Ecologist" has an in-depth section on the US's bio fuel plans and it's current and potential effects, and proposing bio-gas as the only acceptable solution that's viable now (yes microbes may be viable one day - let's see that research money). I think sweden has a bus service running on this.
These giant rabbits are going to shit like rodent elephants. Rabbits are known to be very efficient composters, so there's another use for you. I wouldn't recommend it unless it was part of a package of some kind, but maybe if Great Leader Laurence Lessig can infiltrate they can CC-NK them and give every home a free rabbit...
They could also look elsewhere and see if they can simply add fat, but I hope they've taken this into consideration, but then again who says this isn't just a sci-fi lover's delicacy for those who are more "equal" than others?
Yes, and and all that is needed for a decentralised network that could support VR type stuff is pretty much what Second life or any MMORPG have got, but split up so that each computer attached to it uses their own hardware and storage space to serve their bit of the virtual reality that we create together.
It's so easy to start an open source project to do something like this (I guess requires time, love and hacking skill). Could be as easy as hacking some code from existing things (such as libsecondlife even), and adding some kind of naming system for locating other nodes and doing moderately quick downloads of environment data. Maybe some test case implementation of a small scale VR network too. It would then be up to everyone as it was for the internet, to figure out what to do with it all.
Hi - your post is really inspiring as I do similar stuff, and there's people in bristol university who'd be really into it too - people doing programming on maxmsp or just with electronics, to achieve what I think you've done much quicker and cheaper using fm! Please get in touch - also mp3-fm players could be used by an audience, and participation in sound stuff is really my big interest...
Second life is already quite a positive step towards open source compared to game engines, in that they opened the content area and are very focused towards creative commons and open source in the scripts you use within the site. With recent developments like adding.mono, it's really moving faster towards being a fully open source system and it looks like it's a long term solution to the problem of storage maintenance, but possibly also a safety net for the inevitable end of Linden Labs one day in the future...
More from a SL developer can say this better than me (at EurOSCON a month ago), but in summary from what I know each SL client is a grid application that does some of the processing. The key unnecessarily centralised thing about it in my opinion is that all the items you create are added to this central database, which is a bunch of servers somewhere. If you then move around in SL it queries these items and loads them up (sometimes quite slowly). It would be much better in my opinion to distribute this database amongst the clients and do away with the need for big storage. I guess though that it makes sense in SL for anyone doing storage to make a lot of money as their money comes from selling "land", but what about a world where land was free?
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, partisanship is what could break the world now, as people look at their savings and wonder if they are safe. At some point they might cave in,and go and take their money out, and then someone will publish some news about how they are all taking money out of the banks, and pretty soon lots of banks will have to go bankrupt. When this happened in argentina, only 250 dollars a week were allowed per family. I wonder how much there is now.
There is no secret fuel over the horizon like with petrol after WWII, and there is no magical alternative fuel that's going to move all our food and pharmaceuticals around the world if the US goes bust and takes europe with it. The US is not going to grow again in 6 months, or in 12 months, because measuring a country's wellbeing via GDP growth was a mistake in the first place, and it's now become very harmful to continue seeing the world that way.
So what happens as countries go bust is that a disposessed middle class goes out into the street, camps out, riots, but generally protests peacefully for stuff to get better. This is happening in egypt and north africa, but also in across southern europe, in chile, in marocco, belarus, iceland, turkey, the UK, israel, south america and pretty much anywhere you might have thought of as a stable or safe place even just a couple of years ago. And so the government becomes opposed to it's people, and the old alliances of media, police and bipartisan states start falling apart. We are at this point in Spain, where the Police now speak throught the police union, and beat up journalists and protesters alike, issuing public messages that are harshly critical of government and protesters. Meanwhile people lose jobs, houses, hospitals etc and everything is more and more extreme each day.
But I think there is a way through, which is through dialogue, through agreements by all parties - citizens, government, business, media and police or army forces, to collaborate because we have a huge crisis on our hands. Here is some timely viewing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8EYN1iBPdc
We all have to voluntarily take over as government and business fails, and keep basic services functioning. We have to relocalise, and figure out how to drastically reduce the need for transport, and most importantly, produce clean supplies of water, basic medicine and food. This can only happen with an active volunteer force, able to be creative and effective, and it just so happens that the pro democracy protests are basically formed from spontaneous voluntary acts from people across all (or most) aspects of society, and now at least in europe, by assemblies, allowing for high levels of organisation and very participative democratic decision making, and now - with social networking software like Lorea (based on ELGG), soon to be complemented by an information system allowing faster decisions and ability to organise complicated activities across a wide geographical area. Lorea can be found at http://lorea.cc/ or https://n-1.cc/ to see it in action.
I don't know if you see how hard that is going to be to reach this level of unity, with all the fighting going on at the moment. We need a huge amount of unity, and for a feeling to surface across the financially sick "western world" with some of what in the UK is known as the blitz spirit - an idea of shared catastrophe, that gets everyone out helping each other. I think a lot of the protests so far have embodied these feelings, of the drastic need to revolutionise our culture, politics, financial system and pretty much everything else, because of how harmful the damaged older system is(if we let things go on we will starve), and I really hope that October 15 - where wall street itself will be subject of a protest camp, can help bring more people to awaken to the idea that they have to take responsibility for this situation, and actively make things better, even if it means adapting
Yeah but you can get lots of urban vegetation though - dandelion is a good emergency foodstuff, you can eat the leaves, make the flowers into tea, and the roots can be fried with soya sauce... :)
Cities frequently have fruit trees growing all over the place, even on abandoned places by the side of the road because someone threw an apple core in the 70s and it grew...
In Bristol, UK there is a map of all edible fruit and nut trees and guides you can buy with all the different species of local plants and how to prepare them or use them medically.
I think the problem is long term survival - finding ways to meet your needs with something other than supplies or guns. If just you are lumbered with lots of stuff, or lots of weapons there is going to be someone stronger than you or someone who will work day and night to get what you have, but if you have skills and knowledge, you are better as a friend to these people. So here is your list but with some inventions and ecological solutions I've seen used a few times in open hardware/green circles, where a lot of the idea behind it takes from open source directly - the idea that you have to share knowledge openly:
Blankets/sleeping bags: learn to sow, knit, weave old clothes to make new ones, or get inventive with plastic bags or tyres to make woven baskets and footwear. You can make plastic bags into a waterproof coat if you iron the bits together wrapping them first in baking paper. Tyre is really durable and can get you really far making stuff with it. All you need to make shoes is a relatively varied amount of them, inner tubes are nice and soft, a sharp knife and some nails. If it is really wet and you need impermeable footwear, bags to the rescue again: just wrap your socks in plastic bags and they will stay dry, avoiding infection, trenchfoot etc in a wet/flooded situation.
Drinking water:make a freshwater filter - all you need is sand, stones and somewhere for the water to pass through, in hot places using solar ovens to boil your water (and to cook food without needing to cut down a forest a year just to heat food), also I hear there are simple ways of preparing water for drinking by just leaving it closed in a plastic container in the sun for a couple of hours.
Food: organic and permaculture based farming. Permaculture is more of a way of designing a way of living - with limited resources, and it's what was famously used in Cuba after the USSR collapsed and no more food or fuel was available from there. They all lost weight but by embracing this and doing without fertilizers they still managed to avoid mass starvation and everyone was relatively comfortable, and a lot better off once the organic harvests kicked in.
Ovens: the simplest indigenous ovens are just a hole in the ground with a fire on the bottom, that you puyt the food in and cover up with leaves and earth(kind of a slow pressure cooker), but you can also, with some practice, make a kiln - a bread making oven made out of mud, which will last about a week, and produce some tasty stuff for quite a large group of people...
Refrigerating food so it'll last longer: a couple of clay pots and water will produce a nice effect where the sand absorbs the heat from any food you put in the smaller pot: put the small pot inside the big one, fill the rest of the big one with sand, and pour some water in with it. The water will evaporate and the sand will get a lot cooler. So you have a little refrigerator. Keeping your stuff in a cool dark place can achieve the same effect, but the pots idea is much more lightweight and mobile.
Lights: solar lights(the garden ones for example are usually to be found quite cheap), windup lights, small LED circuits that you can make yourself from sites like instructables or make magazine, a few carefully placed mirrors can bring lots of light to a room so that you don't need to rely on electricity working all the time or on having enough money to pay the bill. A couple of medium sized solar panels and a 12v battery from a car can give you lots of much needed electric power for night time lighting, recharging devices and all kinds of other uses.
Cooking: again solar ovens are brilliant and aren't only good for producing drinking water, but also for slow cooking some brilliant meals. Instructables this week is showing off a permanent design for one that rotates to follow the sun all day. Wood gas heaters are easily made from tin cans and some old newspaper or some sticks. It doesn't use up loads of fuel (which is fossil based anyway so creating more catastrophes the more you burn it, and li
Maybe a simple way forward is to turn the n900 series into what the G1 was a couple of years ago. With that phone, it became suddenly very simple to download a mobile sdk, plug the phone in, set some options and put a "hello world" application into a phone or even distribute it on that same day. I know further steps might get more complex along the line with android programming, but it's easier than symbian app programming is now. What puts me off android on the other hand is that it's not entirely open source and has that black box thing in there, and it doesn't work on older simpler phones, thereby excluding a huge amount of people in the world from it's use.
What if nokia managed to produce a symbian distro that "just worked" on phones like the n900, or even - magically, on some random cheap older simpler "featurephone", seamlessly recieving newly coded apps from developers and running them, and allowed developers to get programming a symbian app within a day? Perhaps by working on getting symbian stable enough and streamlined enough, and then adding some scripting language over it (there's already python for s60 so maybe something like that) or even a fancy drag and drop ui layout editor etc etc - basically if app creation was easier with symbian than with android or iphone, and there was an easy way to get it on more phones, it would really give symbian it's strength. Or it will do that anyway, slowly via open source, but in 10 years, and we'll still get the benefits eventually. It would be a shame if by that time nokia was irrelevant, so that this job would be up to the small 3rd world kiosks that repair and mod phones illegally, to take two sims at a time, unblock them, upgrade their firmware etc.
What do I need to read and where do I need to go to get android running on one of those old oneTs? Or whatever - it's a testing ground, sold to a very generic audience. I would love to be able to run an ubuntu distro on there, although android sounds worth trying on a netbook.
One thing about netbooks though is they are half way between a phone and a computer, so they shouldn't need to be so complicated - both in interface design and in expectations. Another is this reliance on google docs or youtube and other commercial free-as-in-beer (I never thought I'd say that) services that just don't seem to have a proper funding model in a very unstable economy.
We really need to develop distributed software models that we can use to keep this kind of thing going. Projects like opengoo, or various mesh network wifi projects and organisations seem really useful, and ones that could easily adapt towards it, but I think the netbook will eventually be their playground...
I would love to find out for sure if at 30-50 watts we're finally at something I can attach an exercise bike or a couple of solar panels to and actually get enough power to run it. In environmental terms it would be a huge breakthrough. And I wouldn't spend so much time reading email.
Regardless of who (or WHO) is right - and as with many of these big threats, you should "do what you should have been doing anyway" - an ecologist mantra that you can read more about here: http://www.energybulletin.net/node/25115.
And in this case this means resting, avoiding stress, getting lots of vitamins and above all avoiding pre processed foods and factory farmed animal meat: eat organic, locally grown food that hasn't travelled the world and been imbibed with chemicals or antibiotics that lower your own natural resistance to infection.
The reason we have pandemics like this one, Sars, Aids or bird flu is because of 30+ years of lowering resistance to disease due to the way we eat and the practices we have.
So if you do well with this, by August - by which time the virus may be much more dangerous - you'll have a nice resistant immune system. And if the virus disappears, you'll still have that nice resistant immune system!
Ale
Hi,
Wrong generation really, I'm not a baby boomer, but I'll bite - yes as you say "green" is a really vague buzzword that everyone wants to jump on, sometimes with rubbish products that break straight away or that are only green in a small way, without addressing real issues or causing people to think they can buy their way out of our problems.
I'm a post baby boomer, born in the 70s, consumed during the 80s and 90s as if the world was infinite, as did all of "western" society and as you probably did yourself if you were around then, it was pretty hard not to, and I didn't question this really until the september 11 incidents. So I share that responsibility: as anyone alive and part of society now and in those years has, and probably much farther back in time and in different non-western societies as well, I helped fuck things up for our kids and other species.
But where I disagree with you is how to deal with this situation: one way, as you seem to do, is to just give up and only see the bad side of the so called green movement. I see it as a great opportunity for our teenage society to finally come of age and embrace it's limits, but I don't need anyone to agree with me on that. In anything there are positives, and one thing about being a "modern" environmentalist is that you can be more holistic - it's not about single issues any more, you don't need a beard, and it's certainly not such a side issue that people will not believe you. Most people nowadays have heard of peak oil, climate change, the food and credit crisis and the huge Ponzi schemes the financial system was built on. If you dig deeper you find even more crises that can seem really unsolvable. So what do you do? Just give up, dig for the last drops of oil, fight for the last scraps of food and secure the future maybe half or one generation down the road for your own family or country?
In everything we do there is good and bad. I really have trouble when companies go on about not being "evil" - it's very hard to be purely good, and we have to live with the fact that being alive means eating other living things, consuming resources and sometimes being destructive, but also it includes being creative, wise, strong etc. So nothing we do will be completely safe or positive, and no so called green products will be either, but we can go for the best we know, and try to do the best we can, improving our choices as we go.
What I think though is that everyone can have a positive vision for where they want things to go. These don't have to be the same vision, and sometimes they might even conflict, which is ok as long as we accept that people have differences. So in your example of carbon monoxide or electric car batteries, I think it's a bit of a waste of time to try and measure between how good one or another thing is - sure within reason, but it's a waste of time to aim for total green purity, and I think I prefer seeing this as a road with many corners and stops along the way, rather than just as green vs not green. Changing to low energy lightbulbs, recycling more or convincing people about a coming financial crash feels a bit 2007 now, so we have to keep going farther. People still have issues they see as more or less important than others, but if you give up, how are you going to keep going forward? Same with IT. Don't listen to the idiots or marketing departments, just make your own future and don't give up.
Ale
ps:Disclaimer: I'm a webmaster for Transition Bristol in the UK. You can read more about the transition movement here: http://www.transitiontowns.org/
I wouldn't go for the fancy laptop bags with solar panels... Maybe they work well, but if you're a real geek why not build your own? To run a regular 15-24v input laptop for 6 hours a day you'd need:
2 x 30W Mnocrystalline Solar Panels
1 x 6amp Charge Controller
1 x 85 Ah Deep Cycle leisure Battery
1 x Cigar to Crocodile Clip Adaptor
1 x Universal Laptop adaptor
At least that's here in drizzly old england. Comes to around 250 pounds in our drizzly english money.
Carbon costs and payback aren't everything: computers today aren't green and aren't sustainable but don't just get sad and do nothing :)
Using solar panels for this means microgeneration and helps promote use of decentralised, off grid energy which I consider a positive social change towards green-ness, and it will help you in particular if you live in a place with frequent blackouts (i.e not the UK!). Think of it as a ticket to a cheap shed-studio setup, or temporary remote setups like at festivals or camping, and once it's all wired up and charging a battery, I can plug it into loads of other kinds of things.
Ale
I don't know about the pinball thingy, but generally, in the UK, you can see all the TV you want on iPlayer or any of the major and minor channels' own players - or just download Miro and thereby take part in legal, CC licensed or public domain video torrenting so as to watch whatever you want that's not spoonfed by media companies.
Same goes for online music - you can listen for ages on jamendo, last.fm or magnatunes, and an ever increasing number of net labels on archive.org etc, without ever so much as a sub-subpoena. Creative Commons music is now so varied and widespread that I don't see a reason to have to steal.
But for games? I guess games are still an area where there will be piracy... Open source and CC just aren't there yet (with big 3d flashy games, not the huge amount of simpler open source games around), although the guys at Blender are taking some first steps: http://www.yofrankie.org/
Ale
Well if so, then according to Chomsky it was created during the marshall plan post wwII if you're referring to the whole world. And that's when petrol was cheap and easy to extract. So politically created distribution system yes, but the problem now comes from their small concern for future scarcity - understandable enough though if the world was ruined and so many economies had collapsed after a huge war.
So I'd agree with the parent: grow some food! Or better put - relocalise the distribution system.
At least he could run some cable over and power other people's garden lights or floodlights for example, to protect against thieves and he might get some money (or a pinch of salt and occasional egg) from them? He'd certainly be a popular neighbour.
Ale
Yup - it's the small, simple and readily available things that count, a few ideas:
* The rollable water container - a round thing that you can roll over to get water with, rather than carrying it on your back/arms/head
* The little heater with an AA rechargeable battery in it for the fan, that you recharge at the local solar panel
* The huge and incredible mobile phone informal/illegal repair subculture in developing countries - such as putting 2 simms in the same mobile with a simple switch mechanism.
* The pot with sand in it, and a smaller pot inside, that uses the physical properties of wet sand to create a refrigeration system for fruit and other perishables at markets
* The solar furnace - a curved mirror or reflective sheet with a black pot in the middle.
* The indian project to use harvested stomach bacteria to process recycled food into gas for cooking.
Loads of this stuff is happening and IT teams are out in the craziest places doing incredible things - these examples above are old, and I could dig out links if needed, but there's 10000 other projects that TED could highlight, even if you just want to talk about software: as well as the IT needed to create information infrastructures around completely non-IT stuff - like (this is more of a developed world example) the simple discussion boards and mailing lists used to power next generation barter/free/exchange systems like freecycle, freeconomy, feral trade and various post-LETS barter systems that are now taking off now that the administrative time-suck has been dealt with. Next step I think, will be project management systems that are just as simple and low-tech, so you can organise say a milk round around it.
http://www.barackobama.com/issues/energy/ - you can check yourself for magic pixies, but they are notoriously hard to find if they don't want to be found.
But what you are getting at I think is peak oil - a lot of green/environmentalist people have known this for years - as does the far right wing here in the UK - the fact that what was introduced around the world as the main power source, transport fuel and fertilizer source after the 2 world wars, is now dangerously low in supplies and that this will mean a huge change in our lifestyles in the next few decades, as we revert back. - Except that now we have lots of other energy sources, there are women working too, lots of stuff is sitting in rubbish dumps rather than at the bottom of mountains, we have telecommunications, and generally it's a positive thought when you consider that this gap in fuel is also a natural limit to the amount of change we can give to the climate...
What this means for power plants is microgeneration -small varied local power sources - if you have lots of wind, sun or water around, use that. If you don't, there is bio fuel(the kind that doesn't help food crises!) and other new technologies, but half the power is lost transporting the fuel or power around - so it has to be generated and used locally too.
But the hope/change thing will really come in to play if society needs to change dramatically - as we transition to low fossil energy and varied alternates, we'll all need practical skills, strong local business and social connections and an open mind.
Drilling for more oil resources (as is the situation, I believe, with building more nuclear plants on diminishing uranium) will only buy you a few more years of this historical blip. The cheap oil is being extracted fast, and the stuff at the bottom and in the small oil fields left to find, is much more expensive to get. Oh and they're not just YOURS as you say - they also belong to future generations. And who knows how efficient they could be with extracting and using it?
Ale
It's this idea that you have to "scale up" that might be the problem itself: apply solution X to the same old X shaped hole: any magic solution X to the world's crises requires a commercially backed, large scale, centralised processing and distribution system.
But what if each person could get/produce a handful of bugs and make a bit of their own fuel somehow? A solution that didn't have to scale up BUT required the world to adapt to this energy source, as we did back in the 30s-40s-50s to adapt to petrol in the first place? (Like reducing use) And I wonder if there are already solutions like this around? And because they require adaptation, will they still be popular?
Ale
How about Buddhism? We do acknowledge people have gods, and many local gods in various countries were historically incorporated as bodhisattvas, but according to most schools of Buddhism, gods are not the point - and are living under the same laws of buddhism as the rest of us.
As a Chilean, I should add the Mapuche in the south of Chile and Argentina to your list: Also decentralised, using forest to their advantage, made nomadic by the spanish conquest (the incas had had contact with them so they knew other people were out to get them) - and using what some call proto-guerilla warfare to ensure they were never conquered by the spaniards, and in fact the lands they had were pretty much theirs and only settled by a few nordic people who could handle the cold, it was only the "chileans" themselves - or the upper class mestizo ones who took over from spain, who managed to commit genocide by sending armies down in the late 18th century. So to go back to parallels with file sharing, decentralisation isn't infallible, especially if attacked from within!
But I won't argue that they put up any more or less resistance than the Maya. Both groups are still active now, and still oppressed by the nations around them.
http://www.mapuche-nation.org/
http://www.zapatistas.org/
Ale
Yes, not only this, but the private contractors are (AFAIK!) from companies like Serco and Sodexho, multinationals that also run detention camps for asylum seekers here in the UK.
I went to see someone (from an organisation called BID) speak about time spent in various UK detention camps, and he said that by far the best dying breed of camps are the ones where trained prison guards are on duty: they can tell the difference between a family that has endured countless suffering and persecution, and a regular adult criminal, where this is not so obvious to the private staff in the other camps.
He also said the "best" of these private guards, the most ruthless and able to take on the most difficult jobs, are the ones then entrusted with the higher paid role of deportation duties.
I'd have to add to this that of course it's a shocking abuse of human rights to detain children in prisons and detention camps, to inflict what amounts to persecution to people fleeing the same thing, and to subject people to the horror of UK deportation processes (helicopters, armoured vans, heavy police presence - scares the living shit out of the easiest deportation targets - families), but it's already been said here that this doesn't shock anyone anymore. Still I said it, not to shock, to inspire action to stop it.
Ale
ps: I have good reason to expect regular military police to have a hard time handling Guantanamo bay - so this reluctance might be part of the reason for this replacement.
Where did you get, or how did you make the solar cooker?
Is there currently a radio channel or stream that only broadcasts Creative Commons and public domain music? Or readings of GPL code or something? That might solve the problem?
No idea if that would work, but I wonder what ways exist of sending something very small and fast up there that combines with water or otherwise reacts to finding a "goldilocks" life capable zone to make a simple life form on arrival? Maybe assemble itself into colonies of laser producing mites that can send info back? Might be easier than plotting a way through the stars with ion propulsion, but it would mess with any existing life there and not much else... I'm not that bothered by what happens when it gets there, but wouldn't the concept of us sending "spores" into space be a big scientific challenge?
The real answer to the "future of bio fuels" is not to use as much as we use now. There is no magic thing that will make the problem of resource depletion go away. The stark truth is we've used more than we had in the first place and now we're basically fucked if we go on this way. You can shift the problem about at a huge cost to all, or radically change lifestyles.
I don't mean go and buy a goat though: I mean we need to reorganise cities and suburbs so that people stay in their local area to get as much as possible of what they need(shops, work, socialising etc). This will mean much less car use. And in the states, they could get as efficient as Europe had to in the 70s and get used to higher fuel prices as has happened in Europe too, and that would already reduce the amount needed.
I think for now the only biofuel that's actually "5-star green" is the recycling of biomass, plant waste etc to produce very limited transport - like EU nordic countries for example. Latest issue of "The Ecologist" has an in-depth section on the US's bio fuel plans and it's current and potential effects, and proposing bio-gas as the only acceptable solution that's viable now (yes microbes may be viable one day - let's see that research money). I think sweden has a bus service running on this.
These giant rabbits are going to shit like rodent elephants. Rabbits are known to be very efficient composters, so there's another use for you. I wouldn't recommend it unless it was part of a package of some kind, but maybe if Great Leader Laurence Lessig can infiltrate they can CC-NK them and give every home a free rabbit...
They could also look elsewhere and see if they can simply add fat, but I hope they've taken this into consideration, but then again who says this isn't just a sci-fi lover's delicacy for those who are more "equal" than others?
Ale
Yes, and and all that is needed for a decentralised network that could support VR type stuff is pretty much what Second life or any MMORPG have got, but split up so that each computer attached to it uses their own hardware and storage space to serve their bit of the virtual reality that we create together.
It's so easy to start an open source project to do something like this (I guess requires time, love and hacking skill). Could be as easy as hacking some code from existing things (such as libsecondlife even), and adding some kind of naming system for locating other nodes and doing moderately quick downloads of environment data. Maybe some test case implementation of a small scale VR network too. It would then be up to everyone as it was for the internet, to figure out what to do with it all.
Hi - your post is really inspiring as I do similar stuff, and there's people in bristol university who'd be really into it too - people doing programming on maxmsp or just with electronics, to achieve what I think you've done much quicker and cheaper using fm! Please get in touch - also mp3-fm players could be used by an audience, and participation in sound stuff is really my big interest...
skoria at gmail... see you soon!
Second life is already quite a positive step towards open source compared to game engines, in that they opened the content area and are very focused towards creative commons and open source in the scripts you use within the site. With recent developments like adding .mono, it's really moving faster towards being a fully open source system and it looks like it's a long term solution to the problem of storage maintenance, but possibly also a safety net for the inevitable end of Linden Labs one day in the future...
More from a SL developer can say this better than me (at EurOSCON a month ago), but in summary from what I know each SL client is a grid application that does some of the processing. The key unnecessarily centralised thing about it in my opinion is that all the items you create are added to this central database, which is a bunch of servers somewhere. If you then move around in SL it queries these items and loads them up (sometimes quite slowly). It would be much better in my opinion to distribute this database amongst the clients and do away with the need for big storage. I guess though that it makes sense in SL for anyone doing storage to make a lot of money as their money comes from selling "land", but what about a world where land was free?