I think steampunk and most other aesthetic styles with -punk suffixes are better counterexamples, but cyberpunk is definitely punk. It depicts a dystopian future as a warning and rebels against it. The bad guys are always the tech megacorp inc. and so on. Then this core message went over peoples heads and you get all the aesthetic styles without actual punk in them. Solarpunk has a very strong social aspect to it (the punk and the anarchism) to differentiate it from greenwashing realestate development visualizations (building but with plants on it).

China definitely isn’t solarpunk. The -punk suffix is included in the name for a reason. As Doc_Cranckenstein said, it’s an anarchist philosophy.

why would anyone use a vpn to locate themselves in br*tain?

I doubt that. The sixth most populous metropolitan area in France and a regional capital was and perhaps still is under threat. In Brazil I think the farmers were lighting fires because it’s an easy way to gain land for pastures without having to deal with pesky jungle protection stuff. Just blame it on the big ass fire that suddenly broke out.

The bit about eliminating chimneys is that you can use a TEG to power a fan which gets the smoke out, instead of relying on convection, which needs a chimney, and many impoverished places lack the means to make holes in roofs. A properly designed chimney absorbs and stores a considerable portion of the heat flowing through it.

Also not sure about the max temperature these things can handle. They mention that the benefit of using these between a heat source and water that is being heated is that the water keeps the element from getting too hot.

There’s one comment about 30°F and you did not reply to that.

And my apologies, you do you.

I didn’t see anything pointing to fahrenheit here. The meme had Celsius and nothing after that specified anything else.

And I think I did see some medical professional about those plugs not long ago talking about just how dangerous it is to actually do that.

The HR person will get fired if the facial recognition sees her not smiling like that.

I think I’ll test this theory. I also agree that fascists should perchance go fuck themselves.

If you’re using electricity for that climate control, then that would be a waste of energy. I think the main appeal here is for places where wood is already burned for cooking and water heating. I imagine it could be a nice way to generate a bit of electricity during cold and dark winters when the sun isn’t shining all that much.

Edit: I have no clue why that one downvote came, but I guess I could elaborate on why it would be a waste of energy: The TEGs generate electricity from the movement of thermal energy from one side to the other. The article states their efficiency to be about 5-6%. That means that of the heat coming in from the outside, about that much is turned into electric power. The rest just heats up your indoors and the AC will have to work that much harder. The exact same goes if the outside is cold and inside is hot. It cools down the indoors and the AC will have to work that much harder. They can be practical in certain situations, when there’s lots of thermal energy but little electricity, like when wood is being burned. Burn a little more wood to get a bit of electricity. I’m sure there’s situations like what I described above where that tradeoff would be beneficial.

Not great indoors. No. How could you even think that?

And 20-22°C is perfect for outdoors. Over 25°C starts to get too hot.

Also somebody will put one of those things up themselves and immediately get a frostbite on their colon.

The superhuman AI did social hacking on the devs and convinced them that it was a good substitute for them doing their jobs

Well, the obvious solution would be to appoint a temporary supreme leader who, wait a second, he just abolished the republic and appointed himself emperor for life. Nevermind.

Centralized decision making is more efficient than its decentralized alternative, but that would be race to the bottom, the culmination of which would be a society of drones controlled by the central authority in every regard. So decentralization may be a losing position, but I still consider it worth it. The means are the ends.

Also worth noting that asymmetric warfare and guerrilla tactics benefit from the agility afforded by decentralization.

Less centralized control. Lenin sowed the seeds for Stalinism when he centralized the political system after the revolution. Selfish actors seek power, and the selfless find themselves corrupted by it. The position being open for everyone just means that anyone can become a tyrant.

As I said, I’m not against cooperation with more hierarchically structured factions.

And to answer your question: I won’t pretend to know. With the current wave of fascism, we might end up with a thousand year reich, or then it crashes and burns and the swing goes the other way real fast. Or maybe nothing happens and capitalism just reinvents itself yet again to sputter along for however long it can (at this rate a century at most).

Interpersonal dynamics are impossible avoid and charismatic people are difficult to deal with in this regard, yes, but those should be easier to address than when there’s institutional structures propping up the dipshit in question.

I’m not against cooperation with more hierarchically structured factions, just explaining my interpretation of what falcunculus was talking about. Like them, I’m also quite wary of the prospect of replacing our current dipshit overlords only to end up with a different dipshit waving a red flag.

Ownership means control. If you own something, that means that you have control over it. Obviously with something as large as a country, most of what that asset produces will go into sustaining said asset. A factory owner doesn’t invest the full revenue of his enterprise into personal luxuries, he has to first pay all the running expenses.

And even then, that person doesn’t need to be fond of luxuries in order to still be an owner. I haven’t looked into what luxuries Stalin enjoyed and I don’t much care. My point is that he had power over everything in the country, and the proletariat had little power over the supposed “dictatorship of the proletariat”.

That is the biggest issue, agreed. But as pessimistic as it is to say it, I’m willing to bet that humanity will scale back in the size and complexity of societies, willingly or not. The current systems are unsustainable, and what can’t be sustained, will not be.

I’m hanging my hope on whatever parallel societal structures people start to form in the cracks as the old systems start to crumble.

The point in anarchism is that nobody can be trusted to have coercive power over others, because there’s always that one dipshit who will seek that position of power for selfish ends, or then the position of power corrupts a person to become a dipshit.

Dipshit anarchists aren’t a problem in that sense because they never get into a hierarchical position of power because there are none.

I disagree. Space exploration is mostly still done on public sector money, with the goals of national prestige, scientific advancement and as an appeal to the biological human impulse to seek out the unknown. Private endeavors are mostly focused on using space to grow the terrestrial economy (satcom megaconstellations [Even spacex and their starship is primarily being developed to serve this end]) and as investor bait (the loonie space data center rush and every such impractical startup). The noble search to conquer the cosmos is just PR for them.