The lack of official touchscreens/GPS/center console media etc seems like a good step - at the very least, unnecessary antennas and microphones should be easier to spot/replace with an old MP3 player with one annoying song.

So genuine question: are the parts like batteries/motors safe and otherwise good enough to be used in ICE conversions? Or is there some kind of software/network boobytrap to be circumvented? The car itself is a horribly flawed surveillance box, but it seems like the flaws I’ve seen are mostly a sort of problem by compilation, like the finished product is worse than the sum of it’s parts. Is there a chance at least that this overproduction could help provide parts for conversion vehicles?

Boss makes a dollar…

Depends on the area but thrift stores can be great for toys - if only because survivorship bias says anything that makes it there will last a long long time.

Local free groups like Buy Nothing can also be great for sports equipment, school supplies, kid sized furniture etc.

If it works, I’ll share any designs and lessons learned here!

I was wondering if it was something like this, thanks! I’ll see if I can get enough of it off to see if the main sheet is a fresnel lens

I’m clear on the other side of the continent but I really appreciate it, thank you! I hope you can find someone who’ll use it! And I’ll definitely post my progress!

Thanks! I’m hoping to build a solar forge - I used to do some blacksmithing using coal, but some videos of these things show them burning through steel - if they can get that hot, I could even forge weld again. I’ve still got most of my tools, minus the forge.

Honestly a utility vehicle that isn’t a surveillance box is like all I want from an electric vehicle

We had a kitchen scale with a damaged control panel - the on/off button stopped working. I opened it up, cut one of the battery wires, and soldered in a switch. Cut a hole in the case with an xacto knife, glued the switch through it and put it all back together. Now it has a hardware power switch. If you’re comfortable with basic soldering, maybe that would work for you?

Genuine question: would fiberglass and resin adhere to this material? I’m familiar with it from patching up old boats and canoes and could see that being an easy weekend project.

Boss makes a dollar…

I think things are going to get a good deal worse in the next few years, but also that the old systems crumbling could make space for something better. But if we want better things to grow, people will need hope and roadmaps. They need to know that things could be done differently and those solutions have to feel reasonable. And I think that’s where solarpunk media comes in.

I think fiction has an incredible ability to make these potential realities feel familiar and comfortable and attainable, to wear off all the rough edges and propaganda. Solarpunk settings can help people tour their options, and see what library economies, public transit-heavy cities, and robust systems of support and mutual aid look and feel like, how they might work (and problems that might arise and how they could be solved). So when someone starts trying to scare them about the dangers of socialism or anarchy they already know better because, in a way, they’ve been there.

When I work on solarpunk art, write solarpunk fiction, my research is mostly around rebuilding. What practices, technologies, infrastructures make sense for a society that’s trying to rebuild better. My hope is that we can speak to this generation and the ones that follow it, provide big dreams and suggestions on techniques, and hope they’ll recognize opportunities to improve things when they see them.

I don’t have access to a marketplace like this but I do a lot with our local free groups. Between my household and helping some neighbors cleaning out their homes, and relocating a fair bit of corporate ewaste, we’ve given away thousands of items. We’ve also obtained quite a bit of stuff we would have otherwise had to buy.

We’ve definitely run into resellers a few times, especially with electronics and big-ticket items. With an online group I can vet them if I’m really worried about the fate of the item - sometimes for something really nice that a lot of people want, I’ll check someone’s profile and if it’s nothing but them claiming expensive electronics, I might pass it to the person who gives at least some stuff away. But I also recognize that the folks who are asking for lots of stuff and aren’t offering up much might just be in hard times and need groups like this the most. So I try to err on the side of giving stuff to whoever can take it.

Most of the time I just want the thing gone and as long as I’m not worried they’ll throw it out themselves, if a reseller will take it and find a home for it, that’s fine by me. For a handful of items, like special brackets for wireless access points, I deliberately gave them to someone I suspected was reselling because I knew they’d do a better job finding a destination for them on eBay than I would in our local free group.

In the end of the day, my goal is to keep stuff out of the landfill, and I suppose resellers are a just a scammy, middleman part of the stuff-moving ecosystem that gets these items to someone who wants them. Even at a reseller’s markup, having this stuff circulating in communities instead of sitting in a landfill reduces demand for new products and hopefully diminishes - even just a little - how much has to be extracted.

I think there’s still plenty of spots for nuanced discussions on the net (including this instance), but you probably won’t have much luck finding them in communities dedicated to posting memes.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect absurd qualifications for an absurd salary, let alone a broad understanding of the basics of his industry.

We happened to start using them a few months ago and then stopped when they announced they weren’t in favor of diversity anymore. No plans to ever go back.

The genre name might not be common knowledge (and I’m not sure that’s the case) but cyberpunk aesthetics and themes and plot points have infiltrated so much of modern science fiction that cyberpunk communities frequently have trouble drawing a line around genre works vs mainstream scifi. And this is after companies and brand marketing “picked it too early” and made it a joke in the 90s. It just sort of kept going quietly, looked more and more prescient, and in the end, it had suffused through so many imaginations and works that it kind of was the mainstream.

I’m not sure the same thing will happen with solarpunk but given the way cyberpunk seems to have acclimatized us to our current distopia, I sort of hope solarpunk can do something similar. Maybe wear the rough edges and propaganda fears off building a society that actually looks out for its people and the habitats they live in.

If it works I’ll definitely post a step-by-step writeup here in the zerowaste community, and I’ll link from this comment if I remember!

This is really cool! I’ll do some more reading and tests first but this might be what I go with for an answer. If it’s as effective and non-oily as he says, it sounds perfect. Plus the fact that it’s just wax and oil and can be remelted if it scrapes or leaks, makes it sound pretty fixable long term.

Edit: also I don’t usually watch nonfiction YouTube stuff but I think I’m going to check out the rest of his content, thanks!