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With all the bad stuff happening in the world like politics war racism homophobia etc. What is some good news that isI happening that we don't read or see about?
Great, but the fictitious financial system is based on the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. If you want to see the US collapsing, then I guess it’s true that
“Democratic” system where your politicians are in bed with foreign lobbyists, and the same system that wages war on innocent people from other parts of the world and topples their government. What a beautiful system.
Decentralized networks seem to be getting stronger. The number of options you have is crazy. I’m hoping for the day that decentralized networks overcome centralized ones. It’ll probably still be a while (years at least, probably), but given time, I bet it’ll happen.
I also had an idea for a wifi network where a router talks to other routers in range to setup networks independent of the internet. The idea being that, if widely enough adopted, you could potentially cut out ISPs except in situations where the signal needs to travel long distances (like rural areas). The router would have an antenna for long-range communication, and then a second antenna to actually talk to devices in a smaller range. Kinda like meshtastic, but significantly faster (with the trade-off being distance and penetration).
I also had an idea for a wifi network where a router talks to other routers in range to setup networks independent of the internet. The idea being that, if widely enough adopted, you could potentially cut out ISPs except in situations where the signal needs to travel long distances (like rural areas). The router would have an antenna for long-range communication, and then a second antenna to actually talk to devices in a smaller range. Kinda like meshtastic, but significantly faster (with the trade-off being distance and penetration).
There are open source projects in the works for just such a thing, I forget the details at the moment but I heard about them from the Meshtastic Discord funny enough.
Look up the IEEE 802.11ah standard (or Wi-Fi HaLow) for example, it’s a standard that can achieve pretty good WiFi data rates for quite a distance (enough that a neighborhood mesh would work well), whilst running on low power, sub-GHz hardware (like the Meshtastic hardware).
There are mesh internet projects using this, I just don’t remember their names right now haha.
Sadly while it uses more or less the same frequency band as LoRa in the USA (around 900MHz), I’m not sure how useable it is here in Europe given the band licensing restrictions. I’d like to think they’ve thought of that! But I dunno? I’ve seen HaLow hardware that only used the US band, but maybe other companies price EU equivalent hardware.
Wouldnt that meshed network be just a sort of torrent-like network?
How would that anarchistic type of network even work without some authoritive entity deciding the public IP? Auto configured IP based on a MAC? Maybe a MACv8 (because we already use a hex based adress. Maybe increase the MAC adress to allow for longer adresses?)
We are currently undergoing the greatest transformation in energy infrastructure since the start of the industrial revolution. Solar power and batteries are not only growing, but absolutely exploding.
Solar has become so cheap so fast that it’s going to fundamentally change the very way we use power and energy as a civilization. Seriously, look at new power generation by source. It’s almost all solar and wind, with a bit of nuclear and natural gas as a rounding error. And really, new power generation is majority solar.
The key thing is that solar is a technology that can be mass produced in absurd quantities. And the more we produce, the cheaper we can produce it. It appears now that solar is this epochal leviathan, a glacier sweeping across the energy landscape that will grind everything else to powder before it.
We have a very clear path to a grid that is almost entirely solar and wind. There’s nothing wrong with nuclear, but it cannot even begin to compete economically against the tsunami that is the solar revolution. Hell, I expect the grid to be almost entirely solar in the future.
Obviously the Sun doesn’t shine all the time, but panels have gotten so cheap, so fast, that a lot of these problems are just being carried away by the solar tsunami. For swings over the course of a day, batteries are getting so stupid cheap that we’re going to have no problem making enough power during the day to meet our needs at night. But the bigger concern was always seasonal variation. How can we possibly store enough energy to last through a winter? In years prior, this was seen as the Achilles’ heel of a largely solar grid. To store that much energy in batteries would seem completely impossible.
But it seems the seasonal problem is going to solve itself. You see, if solar power gets cheap enough, you can start doing really wild things with it. Even on a snowy day in winter, solar panels still generate some electricity. They may only generate 10-20% of what they do on a clear summer day, but they still generate power. And if solar is cheap enough, you can simply size your system so stupidly large that you can meet even your winter’s need without any seasonal energy storage. If you spam enough solar panels, you can meet your needs in the winter and then have dirt cheap, essentially free power the rest of the year. And it really looks like this is where we’re headed.
I foresee that many of our most energy-intensive industries will adopt a seasonal or semi-seasonal schedule to take advantage of the dirt cheap power in the warmer months of the year. We have a crop growing season, why not an aluminum smelting season or an AI-model training season? Or that free summertime power could be used to desalinate vast quantities of seawater affordably. Or, such a low-cost energy source is exactly what we need to make bulk atmospheric carbon removal a real possibility.
We used to live in tune with the cycle of the seasons. We lived according to the cycle of the Sun. So important was the Sun to our ancestors that we named our greatest deities after it. Amun. Aten. Ra. Huītzilōpōchtli. Ba’al. Aryaman. Mithra. Apollo. Helios. Sol Invictus. These were but a handful of the thousand names we gave to the mighty Sun upon which we so depended. We rose to its light and slept in its absence. We worked when it shone brightest and in the winter, invented elaborate holidays and rituals to encourage its return. We built our entire calendars and organized our entire civilizations around its cycles.
With the Industrial Revolution, we abandoned this close relationship with the Sun. We learned to draw upon bottled remnants of old rotted sunlight, and for a time learned to live apart from the mighty Sun. And those energies in fossil fuels improved our lives so greatly; they raised us up from the mud. We improved our standard of living so much, that we would rather burn the world to ashes than give up the lifestyle we have grown accustomed to. And so, the great challenge of our age is to find a way to keep our lives and comforts going, without destroying the Earth in the process. Millions of people have dedicated their lives to this one central challenge of our age. All our efforts. All our sciences. All of our industry. Our brightest minds and every tool of finance and government at our disposal. All of it searching, seeking, trying to desperately to find a way out of this horrible trap that we have built for ourselves.
And now, after all this yearning. After all this wondering. After all this wandering. The solution was in front of us this entire time. A ray of Sunlight has been cast down into the cave that we are so lost in. And it is leading us back to the light. We will cast off these shackles and leave the fossil fuels in the dust where we found them. We will once organize our entire civilization around the infinite bounty that the Sun freely gives in such abundance. And we will continue to enjoy the fruits that science has given us, but in a way that not only does not damage the Earth, but allows it to heal. That is the future ahead of us. That is the light in the darkness. As our ancestors did from time immemorial, we will once again live in the endless generosity of the star that birthed us. And we will rejoice. And we will sing.
It’s true today that you can easily drive your entire home on solar power, but only if you live in a sunny country. If I was, I would install them immediately. They will pay back in like 5 years and after that, energy costs are zero.
I look forward to them becoming smaller and more efficient. In the future, we may be able to have glass that is made of solar panels, which means entire skyscraper buildings can charge their power continuously from the sun.
Violence has been going down for centuries. We’re hearing about it more, but it’s declining. It peaked around 1993, and it’s been trending downward ever since.
If you zoom out and look at super long term trends, it’s been declining for centuries.
Here’s homicides per capita in Western Europe. I highly recommend reading The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker. It goes into this in depth.