“Behold, the Amishinator!”
Don’t be silly.
The Amish don’t use buttons!
Do you see any buttons after the button was pressed? 😎
Some do
No more global warming, but a lot more sexual assault.
Global warming would continue tho even if this happened.
And deaths from tooth aches, small cuts, the flu…
Um, akshually, there would still be lots of burning things for heat and livestock. Livestock are the majority of all mammals on earth, outnumbering humans by a lot, only 6% of mammals are wild animals. In addition, lack of preserved food would lead to higher consumption.
BUT it being so unsustainable and full of disease would mean it would rapidly decrease populations, which would decrease ecological impact after a couple of generations, so it’s a sound strategy longterm.
My father claims the simple life on a homestead is way closer to nature and pollutes less than living in a city.
He cuts his wood with a chainsaw that’s using a mixture of gas and oil. This gas and oil certainly doesn’t come from the trees. Its imported. But it’s apparently the traditional way.
Then in winter he burns the wood to heat the house and it creates a circle of soot in the white snow all around it. But it’s all natural. On certain days, when you go outside around his house, you can taste the wood burning in the air. All natural!
If we all go back to owning our plot of land and exploit it like settlers, surely this is going to be good for the environment.
Tell him the NEW homestead way is better. Solar panels, lifepo4 batteries, electric chainsaw, heatpump primary wood burn auxiliary if you live somewhere it gets well below freezing.
Before anyone says anything solar still works on a cloudy day it just makes less, that’s why you size your array to make what you need when it’s cloudy not when it’s sunny. Summer can just have an over abundance of power nothing wrong with that
I’m trying and doing experiments. I have a cabin off grid on their land and it’s mostly solar, but I do need to burn wood during winter even if I don’t really like it. He has a sugar shack on another corner of the land and he’s also using solar, except the stoves and boiler. I bought him an inverter and he prefers this to the noisy generator.
However he pretty much hates everything else with batteries. My mother has an electric golf cart and he whines every time the lead acid batteries need maintenance or need to be changed (because of lack of maintenance). I could swap them for lifepo4 batteries, but they’re still going to lose capacity over time and we’re getting to the same point of “but I don’t have to put a $1000 worth of batteries in my tractor every few years”! Same “issue” with an electric ATV for the kids. He hates it because it needs to be charged and the lifepo4 battery had to be changed once. But apparently the cost of gas and diesel doesn’t register.
But yeah. So far at the latitude we’re at, solar power input and consumption varies a lot depending on the seasons. The solar setup is fine for the sugar shack because it’s used during the day in the spring, when there’s no leaves. But in the cabin, it’s been more complicated. I’m not there year-round and it works well in summer, but in winter the lifepo4 batteries need to be heated for hours if not days before I can charge them via solar, and get acceptable performance. It’s a work in progress.
I can highly recommend These batteries for home level power i have 6 of them and they make my offgrid life possible. Rated for 6000 deep discharges (or 16 years of literally daily deep discharge) they have a standard charge range of 5°C to 70°C naturally if you are in a cold latitude an even mildly insulted shed would be ideal to justify stay above that 5c mark.
If your sun is limited especially in winter consider giving east/west vertical panel orientation a shot. And that same site with the batteries has great deals on palettes of solar panels if you just need more in general.
If you aren’t already using 48V for inverters make the switch, much more efficient and long term cheaper. Put your panels into as large of a series string as your inverter will allow before parallel. Higher voltage incurs less resistance losses and it can be a pretty significant loss. Had an inverter die on me and had to drop to an older inverter while waiting for the replacement. It didn’t support the higher voltage as the newer one so had to drop from 320v to 80v ( from one string of 8 to pairs of 2 in parallel) ended up losing almost a full 1kW of peak potential
Natural and Traditional is an axe, not a chainsaw.
Well, a hand saw was also needed. But you are correct that a chainsaw wouldn’t be needed unless you’re taking about a water sawmill, which is similar in processing wood, but has no carbon footprint in that stage of wood production and usage.
Forget the chainsaw. Just burning the wood like we did in the past creates smog over a whole region. Wood burning is banned in my city and I can literally smell it when I go to the next city where it’s allowed.
Where I live winters are brutal and most people switched to electric heating over time. If everyone would go back to wood burning, we’d have really bad air quality and smog in winter, even in the countryside and over small villages.
The Amish are the biggest users of private jets. Don’t look that up.
Are you referring to this?
We need a button like this but it clearly and in common language states the levels of technology and quality of life we can expect.
Humanity globally votes on a spectrum of these agreements until we find a suitable level.
My pitch is; we maintain enough electronic production to keep us all online at a basic desktop computer.
We get one new phone each decade, and one replacement phone should it break.
Other than that, what do we really need? Electricity and farming, a mild amount of houses to be constructed.
We should minimize R&D to things that lower power costs or energy usage/efficiency.
But we don’t need a space program. We don’t need excessive military spending. We don’t need Formula One races, or joy rides in helicopters. We don’t really need tourism. We only need a limited amount of mining and manufacturing. We don’t need plastic toys.
We need a global shift in culture, lifestyle and cooperation… We need to be the techno-amish-collective.
I love most of it… But we definitely need a space program. That’s how we learn to be more efficient, and the cost is incredibly low
I don’t think it is, have you seen how much rocket fuel we use? That stuff is not great for the environment. Also it’s all tied up with the military industrial complex and there’s basically zero chance of us going anywhere good.
We should learn to terraform here before even thinking about mars.
GPS, Weather, atmospheric changes, ozone depletion, carbon and methane emissions, Continental drift, tracking chemical spills, catching climate criminals, it’s not necessarily about going somewhere. Without satellites we are blind. Not to mention all the things we only have today because they were invented in the pursuit of space exploration like memory foam, space blankets, phone cameras, infrared thermometers (I’m especially thankful for that one), scratch resistant lenses, water purification, cordless power tools, cochlear implants and TONS of other medical technologies, SSDs and Flash memory, the more I look into it the more there is.
