Thank you for the kind words! I would agree — and I think there are some more fundamental approaches, like housing density paired with in-fill of retail and shops, that can make that more accessible from the ground up. Literally!
When people "trade-in" a gas car for an EV, those gas cars are usually re-sold to peripheral countries with less regulations, where they continue running on dirtier fuel [1]. The emissions of the gas car continue, plus the embodied emissions of buying a new gas car and the ongoing emissions from the fossil fuel sources of electric charging.
Vehicles that weigh 4,000 pounds, primarily designed to move 250 pounds of people, are inefficient by design — there will never be enough materials or energy on Earth to change that. This will continue showing itself in pollution and other externalities, such as the significant microplastic pollution that comes from car tires [2], and the fact that EVs — which wear through tires faster — are making rubber one of the leading sources of Amazon deforestation [3.]
Of course, if you want to see solutions — they are buried all around us in North America, and exist all around us in many other parts of the world [4]. Feel free to contact me if you are interested in realizing solutions together, or just want to learn more. Contact in profile.
Hey u/thunderbong, thanks for this share on the browser side. Is there anyway to get in touch with you for a conversation? Between browsers, minimal forum software, and some of the other things I've seen you post about — I'd like to connect, about possibilities on working on these things! (If anybody else sees this and has a similar interest in minimal and OSS softwares around forum, chat, browsers, etc, feel free to reach out via my profile!)
I'm working on projects for local resilience, and this very much resonates. My contact is on my profile, glad to collaborate and explore this together!
Are you interested in collabing on projects like these? Feel free to message me, contact on profile, exploring economic alternatives to extraction and local economic empowerment/autonomy initiatives
I've been thinking about something similar — a large array of drones/flying machines, which can cover a large surface area, and be deployed above points of structural integrity in glaciers and biodiversity hotspots to lessen heating and support those prioritized locations. What you described and the motivations resonate as well. My email/contact is in my profile, would love to connect and explore together!
In the words of Donella Meadows, the ability to change paradigms -- very much in the realm of fiction -- is one of the greatest leverage points we have! Indeed, storytelling is one of our most important capacities.
Here's something I put out yesterday, a review of a story that doesn't exist, inspired Borges' Ficciones -- enabling me to get the key points out, without needing to write an entire book!
The book 'Our History Is the Future' by Nick Estes goes into detail on this.
Specifically:
The US army and settlers moving West executed buffalo because Indigenous peoples in the Great Plains depended on them. 'Every dead buffalo is a dead Indian' is one of the quotes from the time. The army/settlers would also poison the buffalo carcasses so Indigenous people couldn't eat from the dead carcass, and as a consequence, other animals in the environment (e.g. wolves) couldn't eat the meat either and likewise suffered, and further reduced the food supply.
This took place after the 1868 treaty of the Black Hills. So the US signed a treaty acknowledging Indigenous land and sovereignty. And then started a genocidal campaign, against the people they just signed the treaty with -- tresspassing on treaty defined land to do so and kill the buffalo. The Supreme Court acknolwedged the history of these wrongdoings in a ruling in 1980, awarding financial compensation to the Indigenous peoples -- however the Indigenous plaintiffs did not want monetary awards, they sought rematriation of their stolen land and the upholding of their rights under the 1868 treaty. The battles to uphold those treaty rights continue to this day.
(In 2007, the UN ratified the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which affirms Indigeous claim to treaty rights such as the 1868 Black Hills treaty (albeit in a 'non-binding' way). The declaration has now been ratified by all UN member nations -- US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand originally held out for several years -- and many groups are now operating with that document as a legal/political framework and justification to take their treaty and Indigenous rights cases forward.)
This is akin asking 'Will we build our community around hammers or screwdrivers?'
Network architectures are means, not ends.
The question is what are we trying to do?
Based on that context, we can determine whether a hammer, screwdriver, centralized architecture, decentralized architecture, or federated architecture is most beneficial for us. They all have tradeoffs (e.g. easier to remove screws than nails, easier to secure centralized than decentralized systems, easier to power federated systems than decentralized systems, easier to trust decentralized and federated systems than centralized systems) which can make them more or less useful for us in any given context. The point is, they are tools to help us realize our desired outcomes -- not the outcomes themselves.
You keep the shell because you're helping those groups maintain their own presence online? I'm looking into non-FB ways to do this, feel free to contact me, would be glad to explore and chat on it