GDP has its own limitations, as it measures aggregate economic activity and does not take into consideration things like wealth distribution, environmental impact, unrenumerated labor. Further, imagine a society where everyone must pay for something that used to be free, like breathable air. If air becomes commodified, GDP goes up, but quality of life goes down as something that was previously a public good enters the realm of private profit. Extrapolate for various kinds of state-run services.
It sounds like the refrigerator is the problem here:
"But they still have rainy weeks where they run out of power and have to run their gas-powered generator to keep the refrigerator from spoiling."
You don't need to run any other appliances all night when the sun isn't shining. Also, why would you even have a microwave, toaster, and ELECTRIC dryer? Those all use obscene amounts of power.
I live off-grid and we run laptops (using boost converters) and lights directly off 12v DC. A big part of making an off-grid system work is reducing your consumption drastically in ways that you can't even do if you're plugged into the grid.
> Also, why would you even have a microwave, toaster, and ELECTRIC dryer? Those all use obscene amounts of power.
Of the three appliances above, only the dryer uses a large amount of ENERGY, and energy is what's important for sustainability calculations. I can run my RV's microwave just fine from a 2000-watt inverter and two deep-cycle batteries which are recharged from a 180-watt solar panel, as long as I don't run it very long and I use it during daytime. An electric dryer is a different story because it has to run a long time to be useful. But there's no reason a toaster and microwave can't be part of a modest PV system.
> Also, why would you even have a microwave, toaster, and ELECTRIC dryer? Those all use obscene amounts of power.
Modern dryers are actually quite efficient. I live in an apartment without a balcony, and bought a new electric condenser dryer the other week. A standard cycle at half load (4.5kg / 9lb) uses 1.2 kWh. If you use it once every two or three days, over the course of a year it will use about the same amount of electricity as a fridge freezer.
But yes if I was living off grid, it would probably be the first thing to go...
" Also, why would you even have a microwave, toaster, and ELECTRIC dryer?"
To me, only the electric dryer might be optional because the alternatives are even worse.
A microwave or toaster would be replaced by another appliance, which has its own problems. Toaster ovens would run longer than the microwave. You can have a propane baking oven or propane burners on a stove, but this isn't all that efficient either. Or you can make fire and cook there, just to warm up your leftovers from yesterday. A Microwave or toaster seems like a comparative smart choice.
The electric clothes dryer seems the wasteful bit, since you can just hang the clothes on a drying rack. I haven't personally used a clothes dryer in years. It is most definitely a luxury, even if one has children since folks can just buy a few more clothes to make up for drying time.
The sun is also very intense when it shines and it dries out clothes very quick. We have problems because the sun dries out the soil too much for plants so we have to put them in shadier areas. I live in an area with 300+cm of annual rainfall.
Depends what you are warming - cold pasta dish? Just pop it in a pan with a little water or oil and will be hot in no time - can heat with gas (or wood, or biomass if you want to be truly off-grid [off-grid doesn't always meet environmentally friendly sadly...]). I guess that is one of the 'benefts' of off grid living in the UK - you will likely always have a fire burning anyway much of the year.
Heating with energy generated from solar is going to be 'costly' for some time. Amazed they run a tumble dryer - but guess it is very humid there?
> Also, why would you even have a microwave, toaster, and ELECTRIC dryer? Those all use obscene amounts of power.
For the former two, I think microwaves and toasters are efficient uses of energy. Heating/toasting the equivalent with propane or some other fuel isn't worth the trade-off of running the generator for a few extra minutes.
But I guess it depends on how big you size your inverter, and if you intend on having a 2ndary power source.
> He and Sokchea scaled back their lives to live within their solar-powered means — ditching their toaster and microwave, giving up laundry on cloudy days when their batteries wouldn’t be able to recharge.
I read this as they completely got rid of their toaster and microwave. Otherwise I think it would read "giving up their toaster, microwave and laundry on cloudy days".
Is it you that I recall reading about who is/was living on the big island? Would be neat to meet up sometime if you're open to it, would be neat to see what you've built considering that you also do software development :)
Hey, not the poster you responded to, but I am an off-gridder in Puna who codes and actually was classmates with Luke Evslin (super good guy back then, sounds like he still is). I would love for a group of big island Hacker News reading off-gridders to get to know each other!
Which means even less requirements for such "private" pubs. However if SSB is ever to replace Twitter, I would guess there would be other, "public" pubs that try to get all the content possible.
You don't need to trust the security of pubs. Validation of messages happens through cryptographic signing and public messages are public anyways. You also don't need to trust that pubs will be online much because your followers will also help host your content.
> So, if I post a GB worth of diary entries, who ends up caching it by default? Just my followers? People I follow? Pubs I connect to?
your followers, their followers, and their followers (assuming everyone is using the default replication settings). These may include pubs or people you follow. If you are able to connect to a pub then most likely it is willing to replicate your feed.
Your computer will only help host data that was hosted by people that you follow. If you don't want to spread content that you disagree with, don't follow people who post such content.
Winco is a privately-held company with an ESOP (employee stock ownership plan). Employees do not have voting rights. This is better than most private companies, but cooperatives provide voting rights in how the company is run which I think is more important.
Collective action is hard, particularly when tech companies form and dissolve very quickly and turnover is high. In addition to unions, worker ownership through cooperatives is another avenue for better conditions. In worker cooperatives, workers own the business, so business objectives are much more aligned with labor. Cooperatives don't have to worry about management union-busting or moving production elsewhere.
Consider that in a private company, surpluses are paid out to executives and shareholders. How is that not "inefficient"? Meanwhile, workers are paid a subsistence wage of however low the company can get away with paying. In a worker-owned, worker-managed business, those surpluses could be spent on higher wages, lower prices, or increasing productivity. Without having to generate profits for investors and shareholders (who contribute no labor to the enterprise), wouldn't that make a firm much more "efficient"?
Offline is not a mere feature you can bolt on to existing architectures because you are really building a distributed system. Architectures that work well for distributed systems and especially p2p architectures thrive in this environment. Elsewhere in these comments people are discussing command queues, but this idea presumes that servers are somewhat reliable and that all operations need to go through a centralized point of control and failure. Instead, you can take this idea further and implement a kappa architecture (sometimes also called "event sourcing") where you maintain a log locally on every client which is the source of truth, not a server. When a network connection is available, you can replicate the log to a server or directly to other clients. You can build indexes (materialized views) that sit on top of this log to answer queries more quickly than reading the entire log out every time. You can also blow away these indexes and rebuild them from the log whenever your requirements change (migrations).
Unfortunately the web is missing a few pieces that would make it a very good platform for fully p2p, distributed apps. Service workers are a good start, but they have a 24-hour upper cap on max-age of the service worker itself, so users can't trust on first use (TOFU) and then be more secure against kinds of active targeting. The suborigin specification and iframe sandboxes for distributing apps offline and p2p would be much more useful for offline sandboxes if they didn't require that a server send an http header. These will become much more important as the web bluetooth API matures, which can allow distributing user data and application updates in a totally offline environment.
Even without being fully offline, it's very odd that when an automatic update to android or windows comes down the pipe, people in remote areas download the exact same bytes from servers in America over and over again, all over a thin pipe. They could fetch that data from each other and save a lot of money on bandwidth and data caps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product#Limitat...