When she starts saying gays transform, I thought we were going further off the grid. Slightly disappointed she was referring to them 'transforming' into heteros. I was hoping for dragons.

@Shepppard -- I live in a town with plenty of kids "off the grid" in the sense you are speaking.

Believe me, they grow up just fine. In fact, they tend to be better adjusted because the parent(s) tend to be more conscious about the choices they make. (Home schooled to prevent your child from being exposed to sin is way way WAY different than being home schooled because you see your child's bright and intelligent spirit being crushed by the horror that can be public school.)

Nothing is perfect in life. There are pros and cons to everything. I see no reason to worry about these particular kids.

This card is the banks idea

It would be more accurate to say it was not any one person's idea but a convenience that both financial houses AND customers saw as a benefit. When debit cards first started to take off, it was not like the public stood up and started screaming in protest at an unwanted, undesired change. Quite the contrary. Debit cards made transactions far more convenient for EVERYBODY. We could now pay for gas right at the pump. We didn't need to carry a big wad in our pockets, wallets, and purses. We didn't need to sit at the checkout and hold up the line writing checks. We could do transactions on the internet. And now today were at the point where we can even run our OWN cards on smartphones with a simple dongle. It's a wonderful change over the days of cash & carry.

You are talking as if they became ubiquitous as part of some massive, evil conspiracy against the public's will. Such language is idiotic and foolish. It started small, and as technology advanced it just naturally filled a huge public demand for ease and convenience. The only problem is that some folks in their ignorance seem to think that 'convenient' should also mean 'free'. Folks who think that need to slap on a dunce cap and sit in the corner until all the stupid leaks out.

And a 'requirement'? Last time I looked I could get my paycheck in cash, take it home, operate strictly 100% 'off the grid' if I wanted. It isn't anywhere near as convenient, but you can do it. No one is 'requiring' you to have a bank account or a debit card. Such a claim is preposterous.

Geesus and blankfist,
Yes, citizenship is bestowed upon birth in most countries, and yes, taxes are a pretty basic, common sensical part of a successful civilization. (I'd lurve to here some examples to the contrary if you've gottem) There aren't many countries that don't have taxes. The few exceptions are failed states like Darfur and Somalia.

If you don't like living in a modern civilization, you can either go galt and move to darfur, go off the grid -unibomber style- or work from the inside to change our system to something more anarchical. The last one probably won't happen, because I don't think there has ever been a successful country that didn't have taxes, so just basic common sense is your enemy in this fight.

Beyond all this, I'd think you two would be more happy, because we are about to see government elected on all that free market rhetoric that you both so oft spew.

A huge wave of corporate candidates wrapped in the flag, waving free market ideology have been swept into office, taking over a majority of state legislatures, governors mansions and the house. That combined with a supreme court in the pocket, a filabustable senate and a President who doesn't like to use executive orders very often (which is basically the only thing he can do from here on out), means that free market ideology will have free reign. I expect you will see much privatization, deregulation and tax cuts in areas that benefit big business. Also, Iran is back on the table, because markets just love all the money there is to be found in the weapons of war and the plunder of resources. Tax giveaways to the super-rich are also taking a front seat.

It's ugly, smelly and not too bright, but it's still your baby, it has your DNA. Kiss the baby.

Hey Winston,
Sorry a couple of points I was trying to make got a little muddled and mashed together in my last comment during editing before I rushed out to work. Including my math on 6x10.

What I told youabout my friends building a house and being off the grid is true. I know because they did it, and I've seen it. Their house is in Quebec, not some backhills somewhere. I've been there. They made me pizza.

Yeah, I'm sure that they're paying some interest on the loan they got to pay for it all up front, but they did it for less than $11,000. And fully installed by electricians. They're fully off the grid for electricity. They use a gas stove instead of electric, and they don't have a microwave, in order to cut down on power drain. But they have a fridge, lights, hot water, computers and everything else you would expect a family home to have.

I don't know where you got the rest of your figures. All I can tell you is what I've seen with my own eyes. And that the tomatoes on the pizza were grown in their vegetable garden, the pepperoni sausage came from the meat shop a 10 minute drive away, and it made for a memorable meal.



>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:

600 square feet of panels is two 6'x5' panels on a rooftop--that isn't very big.
Elementary geometry says you need TWENTY 6'x5' panels to get 600 sq feet. Regardless, the issue is not the surface area per se but the COST to cover that much surface area. Photovolt panels are expensive, highly inefficient, and use toxic elements. They need maintainance, replacing, repair, and have a lifecycle. Same with the VERY expensive batteries you need to buy.
And it doesn't cost $50,000 per household.
Many estimates put the installation of a fully functional solar powered home at well over $50K. 660 sq ft costs $10,853 just for the panels using the cheapest product I could find. Then there is wiring, connectors, inverters, batteries, mounts, control panels, and monitors... The backhills of Alberta may be different, but in the U.S. it is highly illegal to install your own electrical system... You're looking at thousands in licensing, regulatory, and labor. $10K? Not on this planet.
But let's say you're super lucky and manage to get the whole shebang installed for only $25K somehow. [...]

blankfist, ever thoughtful blankfist. We often butt heads, but you always mount an intelligent argument. I appreciate this. This is why I will allow you to bear my sift butt babies when you come of age.

I think most consumers understand that their money goes towards evil. I myself, socially conscious politico that I am, buy clothes made of Indonesian children, play Super Mario Galaxy (don't have the sequel yet, champ) on Chinese suicide victims and put dead Iraqis in my gas tank. I do my small meaningless part for wallet democracy by boycotting Exxon/Mobil, Wal*Mart and McDonalds, but those corporations thrive despite of my best efforts. Aside from that, I am completely complicit in oppression, as are we all. It's easy to ignore the suffering when it's so far away and there are so many everyday low prices. Any change in this arena certainly won't come from consumers, because we all play a part in this circle of misery. The system needs to be busted in two.

(note for campiondelculo: Yes, of course we could all move to a forest, use Ubunto and live off the grid, but get serious dude, that is an absurd and semi-retarted expectation for a world population of billions.)

Foxcomm had little or no regulation and started out as a small business. This empirical evidence would seem to completely contradict your hypothesis. How might a true free market have affected Foxcomm or prevented its ills?

I do think the majority of people want to do the right thing, that's why I support democracy. Without democracy, there is no civic means of expressing the public will, which means the guy with the most money calls the shots. Not really all that different than what we have already, just with less voting and more slavery.

Not sure how the jail thing fits into the larger context, but solidarity with you on that brother. Set the prostitutes and weed users free.

You sound a little red when you talk about majorities, communalism, tibal desires and coexisting. Are you becoming a Marxist? Either way, I've got wood. Baby making time?

Well, the decay of power is one thing that makes the current grid bad. There are others, I'm sure, but I can't name any. The point is, though, that this solution won't necessarily come from the power company. It'll come from consumers who will see this as a way to reduce their energy costs, with a one-time investment that will pay for itself over time.

Once they have power generating capabilities in their own home, and they see they can make as much as they need and then some, the next logical step is to try to sell the excess back to the grid. There are ways of doing that today with solar and wind, but they usually require installing an expensive replacement to your current electricity counter (the exact name of the device escapes me at the moment .

The power companies themselves might see this as a more economic way of producing power than building a nuclear power plant, or a coal one. Distributing these in neighborhoods across a city lets you avoid massive blackouts by one power plant going down, like what happened in New York a while back, increasing the survivability of the grid as a whole. I'm in IT, so we're always thinking about Single Points of Failure in a network

The battery ownership approach reduces the price of the car, because you don't need to buy a battery with the car. Electric cars and plug-in hybrids cost as much as they do because of the battery, not because the car is infused with gold. Buying just a car and a subscription for monthly "eMiles", to use Agassi's term, gives you the benefits of the electric car without the cost of buying a battery. Batteries also decay over time, meaning buying the battery with the car (like in the Chevy Volt) would either require replacing the battery every few years, or driving less and less on the pure electric mode.

The smart grid is necessary. It will save money, it will give power companies options they never had before in terms of power management, and it will let end users generate power and reduce their bills by installing green energy producing equipment on and in their homes. It's the only thing that will let us move away from coal burning plants, nuclear plants and the rest of the deal-with-the-devil type of power generation we have today.

I'm sort of enjoying this too... It's not often that I get a chance to actually discuss this topic and articulate my point of view. Keep it going!
>> ^Stormsinger:
This is getting interesting now. I'd rate this discussion quite a bit higher than the video.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the decay during transmission was estimated at 7.2% back in 1995 (and unlikely to have gotten worse). That's a lot better than when I had expected, and doesn't supply much reason to convert to a new technology.
I've heard a bit about the battery ownership approach (undoubtedly from one of the sifted vids), and that may well offer a solution for the first two issues. It doesn't strike me as helping price, though. We'll see.
I'm far less enthusiastic about using car batteries for grid storage. That sort of aggregated solution has been proposed in other areas. The ones I'm familiar with were mainly IT-related, like using local hard-drives in a company's workstations to store backups. So far, I haven't heard of one example that didn't have serious issues. Admittedly, electricity is fungible, while data is not. But I still think control and coordination is likely to make it unfeasible. Think about the start of rush hour...all those cars that were making up a shortage get pulled off the grid in a very short time. That sort of scenario would make temporary shortages even worse, not better.
It probably -can- be done. I'm less sure it can be done efficiently and in a cost-effective manner. My own prediction is that the approach won't account for more than a miniscule fraction of storage. I'd put my money on non-battery storage, either gravitational or thermal.

This is getting interesting now. I'd rate this discussion quite a bit higher than the video.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the decay during transmission was estimated at 7.2% back in 1995 (and unlikely to have gotten worse). That's a lot better than when I had expected, and doesn't supply much reason to convert to a new technology.

I've heard a bit about the battery ownership approach (undoubtedly from one of the sifted vids), and that may well offer a solution for the first two issues. It doesn't strike me as helping price, though. We'll see.

I'm far less enthusiastic about using car batteries for grid storage. That sort of aggregated solution has been proposed in other areas. The ones I'm familiar with were mainly IT-related, like using local hard-drives in a company's workstations to store backups. So far, I haven't heard of one example that didn't have serious issues. Admittedly, electricity is fungible, while data is not. But I still think control and coordination is likely to make it unfeasible. Think about the start of rush hour...all those cars that were making up a shortage get pulled off the grid in a very short time. That sort of scenario would make temporary shortages even worse, not better.

It probably -can- be done. I'm less sure it can be done efficiently and in a cost-effective manner. My own prediction is that the approach won't account for more than a miniscule fraction of storage. I'd put my money on non-battery storage, either gravitational or thermal.
>> ^demon_ix:
Well, there are downsides to centralized power generation as well. Power decays when transmitted across large distances, and even the most centralized sources still have to be spread across the world.
Some of the problems with any smart grid concept is the financial viability. Why change the whole way the grid works, when all you're gonna do is run it the same way (from power plant to end user, across miles of power cable). Changing the way the economics work, by moving the power production to the home, or to the neighborhood will make a smart grid all the more viable. People will be able to put these things in the house, use up whatever power they need, and the rest will be sold back to the grid, for use in houses that don't have this capability.
One of the solutions to electric car adoption has been sifted a few times in the past, and is about to go into full testing in Israel soon before a scheduled commercial release in 2011. I'm referring to Shai Agassi's Better Place, which has been sifted quite a few times.
By separating the battery ownership from the car, they're changing the cost of the EV from what's the main deterrent today from those cars today, which is the initial investment. Their solution to range is replacing the battery, and as long as they manage their goal of almost ubiquitous charge spots, range will not be a problem for 95% of car users.
This also relates to the smart grid concept by giving power companies the means to store electricity around the grid in the form of car batteries. The concept is called V2G, meaning the grid can take power out of the car when needed, making it a battery for storing intermittent sources, like wind or solar. By itself it's not very useful, but in large EV quantities, it becomes a very viable option.
---
Wow, I sort of went off-topic there, didn't I? This discussion was about a stationary home/neighborhood power generation device at some point.
>> ^Stormsinger:
The problem with decentralizing power generation is that there really -are- economies of scale here. Large generating plants have significantly better efficiencies in all our current technologies. Centralized plants also offer a cheaper avenue for cleaning the results, whether that means CO2 scrubbing, filtering soot, or handling nuclear waste products. Perhaps fuel cells can change that...perhaps not. But in my mind, efficiency is more important than decentralization simply for the sake of decentralization.
People will support electric cars when electric cars are available that have a reasonable range, can be conveniently and quickly recharged, and have a reasonable price tag. That's likely to be quite a while, given our current battery technology. The question of where the electricity is generated has nothing to do with it.

What I was alluding to in the description was this woman's striving to make a name for herself with a view to a livelihood that will pay her bills and keep her mind and spirit fresh and alive-If all you folks who love this chick's vibe would send her a dollar, she'd be able to keep doing what she loves, instead of a day job-

Same with anyone who is climbing the mountain of self-promotion in their art and music.
Everyone is able to do it...to get off the grid and creatively make their way through this world...props to anyone making a go at it.

What kind of civil disobedience did you have in mind, pinky?


There are plenty of things you can do within the law:

-Run for office - if you don't think our elected officials are effective, then consider running yourself. A good starting point is the local school board or city council. Even these small races can be competitive and give you a taste of what elections are all about. Warning: You will spend most of your time fundraising.

-Volunteer/contribute to a campaign that you believe in.

-Volunteer/contribute to a political activist group/think tank that shares your values. (If you give the Mormon church a percentage of your income, then you are already doing this.)

-Letters to the editor - Let your opinions be heard by the masses through your local paper. To amplify your voice, send your letter to many papers. You can also recruit ideological allies and focus a large number of letters on a single (or multiple) target.

Protest - In recent years, the media has given short shrift and minimal coverage to protests, which undoubtedly reduces their effectiveness, but if you can zero in on a weak and/or vulnerable target, you might be able to bring local community pressure to a particular individual, business or group.

-Lobbying - Become a billionaire and then manipulate politicians with your fortune through lobbying.

-Start an organization/think tank to further your own political ideology.

-Slacktivism - I do think arguing online, and posting videos has a small effect, which is better than nothing. I've certainly learned things on VS that have informed my world view. I'm sure political conversions are very rare around here, but arming yourself and others with information and philosophy is important non the less.

-Create - Write a song, book or essay. Make a youtube video. Put up some posters. etc....


Outside the law:

-The most common type of CD I know of is where protesters will assemble illegally, knowing full well they will be arrested. These are often coordinated with the police ahead of time, and are usually polite affairs, where the officers treat you with respect and release you very quickly after arrest. I don't see much point to this honestly, outside of the symbolism.

-Tax resistance is something that is being spoken about a lot these days, but I don't see it as an effective way to accomplish anything. At best, the government won't notice, at worst you (like Thoureau) go to jail until your taxes are paid. I suppose it could be effective if you could get a large number of people to do it, but the risks are much higher than the potential for political gain, so I don't see very many jumping on the band wagon. Plus, our taxes aren't all that high relative to the rest of the developed world. It's generally only corporations and the super wealthy that would benefit from reduced taxes.

-Armed Revolution/Coup - There is no support for either of these options, outside of the Hollywood fantasies of some militia groups.

Other options:

-Go off the grid. Like Thoreau at Walden Pond, you could move outside of society and live off the land. Live modestly without a lot of material possessions, because the things you own end up owning you. There are various communes you could join, or you could just build a cabin in the woods and have your solitude.

^This:

>> ^NetRunner
No, my position is that it's impossible to create a situation where all people experience liberty's primary meaning: freedom from constraint.

and this:

Actually, given the definition of the word, yes. Liberty is like the mathematical definition of a circle. You can approximate one through a lot of rigorous work, but circles themselves don't really exist in the real world.

are two entirely different arguments, which one are you claiming is true? From what I can tell, you started off arguing the later, but modified it slightly as we started talking about it.

Liberty undoubtedly exists, as proved in my example of people living off the grid. You can't use "paying taxes is illegal" as relevant to someone living in the forest 100 miles from the nearest road, because law does not exist unless there is someone there to enforce it - in exactly the same way that tyranny does not exist unless someone is there to be a tyrant.

As far as I can reason, liberty is the natural state of the world. Everyone has liberty until someone choses to violate it by becoming a tyrant just like the world is lawless until someone choses to enforce a law.

If you view liberty as the "absence of tyranny" rather than the "presence of complete freedom" I think it will make a lot more sense.

As far as real-world application, if you make tyranny illegal, and enforce it through law, you will have guaranteed liberty for all - don't you think?

>> ^imstellar28:
Just to reconfirm, your position is that it is impossible for human beings to live in the absence of both tyranny and misery?


No, my position is that it's impossible to create a situation where all people experience liberty's primary meaning: freedom from constraint.

As far as confinement, servitude, or forced labor, I think it's possible for a government to enact policy that forbids it in many ways, but just like government enforcing property rights, there will always be people who are going to break the law in ways that are both overt and covert.

Generally speaking this whole idea of gaining and acquiring capital rearranges your decisions from being chiefly about what you want to do, to what you must do in order to earn the freedom to do what you want to do. It's not "servitude" per se, but it does mean the bulk of your work efforts are being directed to serve another person's design or demands, and not your own. I think that's necessary, but I don't think the benefits that come from that work should go disproportionately to the person who merely brought the worker to the work.

Trespassing laws close off vast portions of the world from being freely entered. I'm not sure I'd call that "confinement", but you are constrained in where you may go by property laws. In Finland, the land is considered available to all, and people are allowed to hike through open land, or camp there if they choose. "Trespassers will be shot" signs don't exist there.

People aren't forced at gunpoint to work, but certainly our society allows tremendous hardship to befall people who cannot work for one reason or another. I don't think a person's worth begins and ends with how much money they can earn working a trade, and find the idea that people think "liberty" includes having the choice to let people like that suffer have misunderstood what role "liberty" should play in our lives.

To me, our system is neither liberty nor tyranny. I don't see betterment in a system that focuses on "liberty" to the exclusion of all else, especially if it doesn't realize that property and liberty are in direct conflict as concepts.

As for misery, I don't know any way to guarantee freedom from feeling miserable, including giving people freedom.

Living off the grid doesn't change much, other than it cuts off much of your interaction with the outside world. People who do that aren't free from the laws of the nation whose land they're in, and they still need to pay relevant taxes (property taxes if nothing else). They do free themselves from a lot of the trappings that rampant modern capitalism imposes on you, which is why a lot of the really far-left people like to create communes where they grow their own food, generate their own electricity, eschew mass media (TV mostly), and focus on higher pursuits (like smoking dope and having orgies).

Usually though, that takes a lot of money to set up, and most are doing it for spiritualistic reasons (focus on becoming more connected to nature, family, God, etc.).

Far-right people do the same thing for some of those same reasons, though a lot seem to presume to think they are also free of laws and taxes, and stockpile weapons, and do the whole thing out of fear of the encroachment of tyrannical socialism...

^
Actually, given the definition of the word, yes. Liberty is like the mathematical definition of a circle. You can approximate one through a lot of rigorous work, but circles themselves don't really exist in the real world.

If that is true, then no counter-example exists, correct?

One definition of liberty, as given above, is "the condition of being physically and legally free from confinement, servitude, or forced labor." Are you telling me such a condition has never existed anytime in modern human existence, nor could it ever exist in the future?

There are thousands of people "living off the grid" have you heard of it? What do you make of such people, who live in remote areas either alone, with families, or in small communities and are completely self-sufficient? I cannot see any way that they experience confinement, servitude, or forced labor, and as such, I believe they constitute a firm counter-example to your assertion.

Just to reconfirm, your position is that it is impossible for human beings to live in the absence of both tyranny and misery?

My GF and I lived in San Francisco in a house with five other people which we all collectively rented. We both worked 50+ hrs a week, and rarely got out to do anything fun. We had put about 90k away, and thought about buying a house with it. If we had done that four years ago we would have negative equity, and owe over $0.5M, instead we got out.

We moved to Pittsburgh PA, where we bought two houses for < $20k each. We rent one and live in the other, we do web work and print design when they come our way.

The cash flow about breaks even, but we have no debt, and we have everything we need, and loads of free time.

I have a cyclical habit of downsizing my life. After I dropped out of UCSB in the late '90s I went to live off the grid in Canada for a few years, the catalyst being the existential arrest caused by my job as a university IT manager.

After I resettled in SF I was sqatting, and dumpsering myself a generally punk-rock existence (minus musical preference). As tends to happen I ended up living with my GF and living a somewhat "normal" life, until we decided to buy a house, and realized we would not be able to do it in SF, and so we downsized to Pittsburgh, and became landlords (gasp squatter -> landlord in 4 years flat).

I'm kinda hoping for total economic collapse, so that I can massively simplify my life again. I'll be planting a garden this year, to make sure we can keep veggies on the table if California has trouble shipping them out in their current low-water-reserves condition, that's going to be my bad economy "side business".

>> ^Payback:
It's disgusting when 76.5% of the world's people live without any electricity at all.


I think it's disgusting I don't have a time traveling DeLorean. I don't pity people who don't have electricity or think I'm disgusting for having it. In fact, some people in the US live 'off the grid' and they like it just fine. Mother Jones magazine has lots of good articles about it and they are good to read. What we're trying to do is educate people who live in areas that don't have electricity about ways to get clean water, use basic solar energy and do other things. They live comfortably.