Father; husband; mechanical engineer. Posting from my self-hosted Lemmy instance here in beautiful New Jersey. I also post from my Pixelfed instance.

  • 92 Posts
  • 320 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • Start with a modest goal and do some research on the tools you would need to build it. Assess the space you have available and adjust your goal and/or your tool selection accordingly. Go find those tools second-hand (Craigslist, etc.). I think just about every power tool you would need for furniture making will require calibration so learn how to do it properly and actually take the time to do it. Eye protection, a respirator, and probably hearing protection are a must. Share your work on here!








  • You’re more or less describing cap-and-trade…

    I don’t think I am. Under cap-and-trade, it’s still possible for more than a safe amount of fossil fuels to be extracted from the ground within a given time period and subsequently burned. There’s some similarity in the market mechanism, but in my scheme it’s connected to actual fossil fuel extraction, not hypothetical emissions quantities.

    If suburbia was an advantageous place for them, they’d already be there. …

    I don’t think the wolves are instinctively avoiding human populations. Wolves were deliberately exterminated from these places, so deliberate efforts are required to bring them back.

    … high voltage transmission means that a plant can still be a few tens of kms outside of a city before transmission losses start to add up.

    Transmission losses aren’t the issue. If the plants are close to where people live and work then you can take advantage of cogeneration to provide district heating and utility steam. Also, urban nuclear plants can strengthen the relationship with agricultural regions by generating hydrogen/ammonia for GHG free fertilizer.

    Any sort of dirty water recovery is more efficient at the municipal scale…

    I agree, but homes should already have the plumbing to automatically collect bathing and laundry water for flushing toilets. The excess can get sent to the municipal water treatment plant and set aside for industrial uses.

    Seems that’s not a super easy thing to do (read expensive)…

    It gets more inefficient if the pee is mixed with the rest of the wastewater, so the idea is to adapt our bathrooms to help keep it separate. Perhaps converting to composting toilets, which collect urine separately, is the way go to here to help with gray water management as well. Anyway, if recovering phosphate from urine seems expensive, that’s just relative to mining it from problematic places.



  • I’ve got a few:

    • In addition to fluoride, water supplies should be dosed with small amounts of lithium. Maybe LSD, too.
    • Incel bounties: Anyone who has trouble getting laid can check into a facility where they are assigned a bounty equal to a set rate times the days they’ve spent in the facility. They can leave any time, but the clock restarts if they come back. Volunteers may show up and offer to have sex with a participant. If the participant agrees and the deed is done, the bounty gets split between the volunteer and the participant.
    • Hard rationing of greenhouse gas emissions: every year everyone gets issued an equal amount of GHG vouchers that, in total, represent a safe amount of GHGs that can be emitted that year. Fossil fuel companies then need to buy these vouchers on the market and turn them into the government in order to get permission to extract the representative amount of fossil fuels. Doing so without permission would carry a severe penalty. This concept could be applied to water supplies, fisheries, and other resources as well.
    • Imputed rent as taxable income instead of flat property or wealth taxes.
    • No fares for urban public transit. Instead, a special property tax should be applied to real estate inversely proportional to its walking distance from transit stops.
    • Reintroduce wolves to suburban areas to keep the deer under control.
    • Electric airships instead of fossil fuel powered passenger jets.
    • Nuclear power plants within or adjacent to urban centers, especially in colder climate regions.
    • Gray water recovery built into homes and municipal water systems.
    • Urine collection programs for phosphate recovery.