Remote working from the countryside, taking my electric car (second hand, cheap, low range but recharged daily) to the fablab to discuss our current projects:

• A solarpunk video game (in discussion)
• A publicly funded research program about automating small scale production of several intermediate vehicles, focusing on Vhélio, an electric cargo bike. (ongoing, funded)
• A plastic press for making plastic sheets our of recycled plastic (done with 2 industrial partners, currently suspended but funded and started)

Last weekend I went to a local non-profit event of resistance against the far-right. Yesterday I got a call to help form a citizen's list for the next municipal elections.

To think that I went as far as rural Japan to find the things that I was looking for and that they were waiting for me in my native country (France), just next to where my parents live.

Note qu'on n'est pas sur /r/france ici, tu as le droit de modifier un titre trompeur pour dire ce qui s'est vraiment passé, à savoir qu'il a été condamné à verser cet argent et qu'il a demandé à avoir 10 ans pour le faire, donc il n'a pas du tout proposé de les verser, il a proposé de retarder le versement de la chose qu'il a été condamné à payer.

REND L'ARGENT!

Alexandra Elbakyan deserves a Nobel and a presidential pardon. I doubt any other person alive now has made more for science.

We need both.

There is more to life than basic services, but these should definitely be provided for in a non-profit way.

Pirated many things when I was student. When I started earning a living I realized that the amount they ask for is really not excessive so started paying for several media, but they keep insisting on making sure that what you pay has less usage value than what you pirate. Stopped buying CD when one was designed to not play on my computer. Stopped paying for movies since they decide to tell you where and when you are supposed to watch them.

I gladly pay for books (which half of the time I then pirate to read on my eReader) and video games but the other digital media are trying to establish a toxic relationship and I'll have none of it.

"Most obvious fascist candidate in US history"

"Does not go to vote"

"Wait we can have genocide and fascism at the same time?"

Oh look, Russian propaganda coming to lemmy! That's proof of growth here!

Yes! This has been very frustrating for me as an engineer. I chose this path in order to help solve the big problems of our times. And then realized that we don't need engineers for that, solutions are lying unused on the floor everywhere.

Climate: We know electrification displaces fossil fuel usage. And we know how to produce electricity without emitting CO2 (yes, nuclear, but now increasingly renewables). We don't have one solution to get out of the climate crisis, we have a dozen. I don't have any work there as an engineer. There is a political opposition to overcome, from conservatives mostly but shockingly also from ecologists who refuse to do their homeworks and still claim EVs or nuclear energy is not part of the solution. We could have solved the CO2 emission crisis in the 90s.

Work automation: My main focus as a roboticist. I started doubting my path when I realized that subway trains were not automated 50 years after it became possible (and done in a real world deployment). We could be in a post-labor society today, but the transition period to it is so scary that we refuse to take the jump.

Inequality: Redistribution works. Proven, published, profitable to the majority. Ergo, the minority of rich make sure democracy remains broken.

Fascism: Education works. Population educated about critical thinking and media literacy spread far less misinformation. People who know about the Milgram experiment are less likely to fall for unethical orders. Yet we do not do it.

It is weird. I am a big technophile and hard science lover but if I were back in my 18s I would rather choose either social science or arts as a lever to change things for the best. Engineers have done their work. We will continue to make it easier to bring good to the work but when you see ecologists moan about wind turbines being ugly, EVs being non-ideal and conservatives about coal being manly and chunky vibrating thermal cars being cool, it feels a bit like installing an escalator to the fitness center: the problem is not in the accessibility, it is in the will.

Interested in other peoples take on it btw.

Does Walmart have a monopoly on kinder chocolate? The idea is to have several distributors each with as complete a catalog as possible. Having such a shattered offers between platforms makes it very noncompetitive against any piracy solution.

In the 20th century, one of the big boost in general health was a better understanding of hygiene and its importance.

I do form the hope that in the 21st century we will make a similar progress towards mental hygiene and make sure to not create too toxic environments, give kids the kind of nurturing they need, and treat infections before they become deadly.

Some groups have managed to "teach empathy" to juvenile delinquents who are diagnosed with psychopathy. Finding a treatment is the first step. Then we need to grow as a society and realize that giving healthcare including mental one to everyone is not giving away "free lunch" but actually improving the overall society.

Land.

50 trees take a lot of space. The idea is to put these boxes where trees can't fit.

Note that these algae are not taking the room of 50 trees, that's really not the way to look at it. We want more trees inside cities, and whether or not this happens is totally decorrelated to whether or not we see these algae boxes or advertisement in the bus stops.

how much more expensive is manufacturing and maintaining them than planting and watering a tree is?

I don't think it is hard to imagine that a box of algae takes less maintenance than a tree inside a city. Typically you don't plant a seed in a city to grow a tree. You grow very specific resistant species in a tree farm and then transplant them once they are tall enough in a city. This is a long and expensive progress. Trees require maintenance: they need to be trimmed, healed, they may have fallen leaves that need cleaning, they may need watering when it is too dry, they need removal if they are too damage.

I think a tree has probably a similar level of need than these boxes, so 50 trees will largely exceed that.

I have gone back and forth on vertical farming. There are scams in the field, but there are also some merits (most of them apply to urban farming in general).

The main issue you have with vertical farming is that there is only so much stacking you can do before you get out of light. A pillar like in the illustration projects a shadow, in which you can't really put plants.

However right now sunlight is not the limiting factor for plants growth. IIRC depending on the plant it is either water or CO2 so you can do some amount of vertical farming. To me, the interest is not to come as a replacement for regular farming (so growing grains is not the issue, you will have a hard time beating the efficiency of a flat field + tractor), the interests are:

• freshness. Having herbs that you can cut as you need them is really a taste changer.
• air cleaning. Some plants do have the ability to fixate some VOCs.
• less transportation. Having the plants grown in the same building block means that the CO2 footprint will be much lower
• more efficient water usage. Careful with this one, in some places water will be more scarce in city than countryside, but water consumption of such systems is generally lower.
• less refrigeration. If the food has less transportation it also requires less refrigeration
• local fruits all year long. Assuming they are put in a controlled environment like a greenhouse, getting food that normally requires a lot of transportation locally becomes possible.

So to sum up, it is less of a solution to make regular agriculture sustainable and more to make sustainable agriculture more enjoyable. Actually one does not need tasty herbs and exotic fruits, but the ability t have them without poisoning the planet is nice and, well, solarpunk.