The explanation I saw in another conversation was that certain settings (I think one-pedal driving?) for regenerative braking make it feel like you’re constantly switching between accelerating and braking with no in-between. Like as soon as you let off the accelerator the brakes come on, no ability to just glide along, so it feels very lurching. I love the idea of recovering power from regenerative braking so I guess if I get the chance to look for an electric car someday I’ll have to make sure it can be configured to just happen when I actually use the brake.

It’s also worth noting that while resellers can be annoying they can also fit a useful role in a network whose job is to keep stuff out of the landfill. When I’m giving away something nice through Buy Nothing I might prioritize people who also give stuff away, or at least seem to participate in good faith but there’s been times when I had acquired some niche ewaste normal people don’t need that I was happy to give it to a guy who would almost definitely sell it on ebay because that was the only likely way it’d find a home (and if it nets a retired guy in town $20 that seems okay).

At the Swap Shop where I sometimes help out, we can’t afford to be as choosey, but volunteers generally know who the resellers are and when they show up. We often put new or nice stuff out throughout the whole time we’re open rather than just upfront so other folks have a chance to get it, and often set things aside for specific people when we know they’re looking for something. We also have a limit on how many items people can take per week.

Generally it’s less of a problem than it probably sounds like. Some volunteers get annoyed by people taking tons of stuff, but I’ve seen the piles of stuff that still goes into the waste stream because we don’t have room for it.

In the end of the day I think it’s a bit of a headspace thing - the worry/anger that someone will game the system can make you miss the sheer amount of good it can do even with a few jerks in the mix.

Seems like local industry only wants to focus on ICE vehicles so there’s not much to protect

This sounds rad, which protocol/meshnet system are you using?

I’ve got two-ish projects that might count: I’ve been reading up on Reticulum mesh networking, particularly with LoRa nodes. I like the idea of that kind of network, but have no idea what amount of activity I’ll find nearby despite living in a pretty big city. I’m still at the stage of figuring out what to get and how I’d like to use it.

I’m also looking at setting up a Gemini server (the gopher-based web alternative protocol thing, not google’s dumb LLM) but I’m a bit skittish about anything that puts a hole into my home network, especially a service made by such a small group because I don’t know what kind of security holes might have been missed (I’m certainly not likely to spot them). Ideally I could set it up through Reticulum, so it’d be air gapped from my regular network, and it appears that someone has made that work, but I think it’d only be accessible to other folks on Reticulum and I’m not sure if that’d be worth it at first. We’ll see!

My active project at the moment probably barely counts because I’m going full analog. I’ve got two antique Leich 901 crank telephones (like an actual crank, not a dial. Turning it generates AC and rings all the phones on the network).

I plan to use them to rig an intercom between the kitchen and workshop. This’ll involve some woodworking as I’m making a nice box for the talk battery for one, and a display board with a voltmeter and two plexiglass-covered cutouts for displaying the wiring and batteries for the workshop end.

I got them all wired up with some really ugly splices and was impressed - they can ring each other and the sound quality is quite good when talking, no repairs needed! Attaching them together is rock simple, just a few wires, plug and play. But my plan is to wire in some old rj11 phone jacks to the display board and battery box so they can (mis)use standard phone cables to talk to each other. In fact I’m hoping to use some of the old wiring already in place in my apartment.

Thanks! Yes reforestation plays a big role - basically things are moving in stages but they’re deconstructing abandoned buildings to salvage as much as possible, then filling in any cellar holes and rewilding the lot. It’s a rural exurb so it was fairly sparsely settled even at its peak. New Hampshire wants to be trees so just leaving a clearing alone will generally grow a forest but I go into detail on succession species and how different site histories impact the regrowth. One section is pretty heavily based on a post about rough mounding from this community and I wrote about a project reintroducing eastern hemlock and talking about the Hemlock Wooley Adelgid.

It’s almost 200 pages with a lot of formatting for sections, text boxes, charts, etc, so I don’t think I can port the whole thing over, but I can certainly copy the sections that deal with phytoremediation, habitat restoration, etc for anyone who wants to read through (not sure how commenting works on etherpad). It’ll be published as a free PDF once I’m done but for the moment I’m so close to finished I’m kind of stuck with the google doc. But anything I can do to make sure it’s accurate will be worth it.

Okay, that makes more sense, thanks

If they’re not generating enough to backfeed even at peak, and they can detect when the power cuts off and deactivate until it comes back, is there an actual safety/legal issue?

The poor C-suite at that utility company already needs to find ever-increasing profits on a basically stable business model and now consumers can just precipitate electricity out thin air? That’s moving things in the wrong direction! Thank goodness they basically own our local government and shareholder value can be maintained.

In the US, bans on foreign cars which limit the number of ‘someone elses’ pretty dramatically.

Personally I also suspect a bit of collusion - they could sell it for less and undercut the competition but they all make more money if nobody cuts their price.

That’s awesome! Super impressed with with their leadership - last thing I’d heard was that it might have to be a wildcat strike when the government declared it illegal. Good for them sticking together

The belief in natural heirachies is baked into everything they do.

That’s a really clever answer to the ringer light! I should definitely be able to piece something together from there.

It also hadn’t occurred to me to just tap the phone itself for the voltmeter (though it feels a little less authentic than doing the line between them, somehow). It’s very good to know about the voltage tolerance - I’ll see what I can find!

Thank you very much for your help, I really appreciate it!

It’s an incredibly useful skillset in my opinion (though I’ll admit the saying about everything looking like a nail when all you have is a hammer probably rings truer than I’d like to admit). One of my main hobbies is scavenging furniture on trash day and fixing it up to practice furniture restoration. We got a ton of the stuff in our place that way. Sometimes I fix nice stuff I don’t need and give it away on my local Buy Nothing page just to keep it out of the landfill.

I also turn replacement handles for knives and spatulas and other kitchen stuff on the lathe, and help out with carpentry projects for friends and relatives.

The big cost is space for tools and lumber. Where I am at least, tools aren’t especially hard to come by secondhand so most of mine are hand-me-downs or purchased at consignment shops. Older tools are almost always better quality than newer stuff, except for safety, where some of the new ones have much better designs or features. I find most of my lumber through Buy Nothing or trash day - haven’t bought any for years now.

Doing woodworking when I can get the time - there’s nothing like a spinning chunk of wood or whirring bandsaw blade to narrow your thoughts down to just one topic. I have a hard time quieting my mind but that works pretty well. Probably about as close to zen as I get.

Creative stuff, writing/editing a solarpunk TTRPG campaign guide when my mind is in the right place, doing the art for it with a podcast on in the background when it isn’t and I want to be distracted. Chipping away at these projects feels good. I can end the day thinking about what I got done and planning next steps.

A bit of volunteering gets me out and into the company of folks I get along with.

Thanks, this was an unusually decent interaction all around

Fair enough. Personally I’m skeptical that there is a “passive corrective method” for individuals to fix problems in either system (maybe a socialist can identify one for us). There aren’t many passive solutions at all.

The way to fix these problems in either system is through regulation, governance, and collective action. People just buying other products hasn’t worked to correct the flaws in capitalism, regulation has, so you might as well go straight to that either way.

It’s to peoples’ best interest to choose a better product if they:

1. even know there’s a problem in the first place. Corporations have a long history of covering up faults in their products, sometimes for decades, before independent tests or reporting reveal them (during which time they’re outcompeting more legitimate competition on price).
2. competing products exist. Monopolies are a natural outgrowth of unregulated markets. It’s always more profitable not to have to compete so endless mergers are a threat which have to be regulated but frequently arent. It’s also much easier for an entrenched institution to crush or buy out new startups before they can become a problem. Add in collusion where companies that compete on paper secretly agree not to undercut each others prices and you end up with a market where there is no real competition and no need for costly innovation. And though regulatory capture may not exist in a truly unregulated free market, we certainly see it in real life, where superior foreign products can be outright banned from a market, the entrenched industry’s products made artificially cheap through subsidies, and new safety laws kept off the books to protect the corporate bottom line.
3. the competing product is actually superior. We frequently see a race to the bottom effect where most people consistently choose the cheapest product available (often because wages have been stagnant for generations and they’re poor enough that they legitimately can’t afford better) and better, safer, more ethical products are simply priced out of the market, whereupon the companies making them either start cutting corners themselves or go out of business. And we can refer back to point one where just because one product has been revealed to be unsafe doesn’t guarantee that the competitor hasn’t managed to hide an unknown hazard in theirs.

Asking regular people, many of whom are perpetually overworked and exhausted, to extensively research every product that’s made it to market (and to overcome marketing, illegal concealment of hazards, and collusion) strikes me as a kind of Just World Falicy thing, where the ‘opportunity’ to simply buy a better product becomes a chance to blame people for the bad things that happen to them. They should simply have bought a test kit and figured out that there was lead contamination in their baby formula. They should have studied auto accident statistics from the last five years to notice that that particular model routinely explodes in a fireball with the doors jammed. What did they expect buying something without doing their own research?

They also ignore that companies will cheerfully skimp on safety to save a buck and then spend far more than they saved fighting legal battles against the government to prevent or delay relevant regulations, against their own customers (or their next of kin) who have been harmed by their products, and against any kind of criminal prosecution. They’ll also spend millions on marketing to minimize awareness or the severity of the problem and to actively increase sales of the dangerous product. It’s not exactly an environment designed for fair and informed decision making.

Speaking of unfair, the history of monopolies, market collusion, and the race to the bottom have given us plenty of examples of companies removing that choice of product quality from the board entirely. If the people making the unsafe or unethical thing buy out all the competition and eliminate or cheapen the former competition’s products until the have the same problems, there’s no choice. If the competition look at the market and realize they can also take unsafe shortcuts and remain competitive, there’s no choice.

There’s a long history of rich people framing exploitation as the freedom to choose to accept a dangerous product or job or place to live. After all, if people are poor and desperate and propagandized enough there’ll always be someone to make that choice. And the lower they drive the quality of life, the more people will have to choose the same. But it’s not about saving you money. They’re not doing you a favor. It’s about saving money for themselves and framing things so you thank them for it.

There are some interesting proposals for electric ships using containerized batteries which can be loaded/unloaded with the same cranes they use for shipping containers and charged in port. https://cleantechnica.com/2025/05/24/beyond-the-harbor-electrifying-short-sea-routes-and-hybridizing-blue-water-shipping/

It may not be suitable for transoceanic trips but a lot of shipping follows the coasts or even travels by river where this may be more practical.