Nebraskan Farmers Were Using Wind Turbines Before Environmentalism Was Invented
Many seem to forget that electric cars, windmills generating energy (whether electric or mechanical energy) are just not new ideas.
The difference is that the technology at the time was limited by what was known then. Today, we can make things work much more efficiently. With the networking of ideas, we are also able to exponentially improve what we know.
So many inventions have come about from society's need to solve challenges and problems. And yet so many ideas were violently resisted as well - remember when all cars had to be proceded by a person waving a flag, or where it was thought that steam locomotives would cause cows to stop producing milk, when we thought humans could not travel faster than they could run, when we were not made to fly, when we thought 5G cell towers were going to cause cancer, and so the list goes on and on.
Our biggest problem today is we are a society of buying everything - so things cost more, we lose our ability to fix and repair things, and then we panic that a new invention is going to take all the jobs away. In fact, new things (like just moving from horses to cars, or typewriters to computers) have created more new jobs after the transitions.
Society's difficulty is more one of not being willing to change, and today even more so, with the misinformation that is so popular.
See https://hackaday.com/2024/11/14/nebraskan-farmers-were-using-wind-turbines-before-environmentalism-was-invented
#technology #windpower #environment #change
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> Our biggest problem today is we are a society of buying everything - so things cost more, we lose our ability to fix and repair
something that is rarely mentioned is how IP laws (combined with lack of provisions for right-to-repair and such) screwed over farmers big time
Yes, in the past I understood patents etc were supposed to help actually spur on new innovation. But the opposite seems to be happening. A hundred years ago one inventor would improve another's inventions and there seemed to be such progress. Now it is a legal minefield. But literally preventing someone from repairing a tractor, is criminal.
About 5 years ago, my country passed a law that we no longer needed to take our car back to the agent to be serviced, and warranties would not be voided. That increased competition a bit and gave consumers more choices.
But cars are going the same way as tractors - you need all the diagnostic computers etc to work on them. I grew up being able to change oil, filters, plugs, and adjust the timing, using a feeler gauge, etc. Back then, we could buy a workshop manual for every car.
yes exactly!
it seems that nowadays IP is mostly weaponized to make cooperation outside a silo like a large corporation (which can afford the necessary level of lawyering and licensing) impossible
software, for some reason has *mostly* escaped this fate for now, but it's true for everything else, everything is a legal minefield of patents, copyrights, it's almost impossible to make anything
> But cars are going the same way as tractors - you need all the diagnostic computers etc to work on them
and unfortunately, "computers" always has to mean locked-in closed source systems in this case, there's no why computer technology has to be like that, it could be serviceable, but there is so much economic and political power behind going in the other direction
Yes we've certainly seen open source software working well - some choose to pay to have it hosted for them, others are more savvy and host it free for themselves. It can end being a win-win-win.
I remember the beginning days when you could not buy a hard drive without having the pre-paid Windows OS on it. I remember the liberating feeling a while later when we could buy blank drives and format OS/2 Warp onto it. It's always big industry that tries to control their markets.
I give no resistance to novel energy technologies. I do give resistance to charlatans who would demonize traditional, proven energy technologies, as if people don't rely on them to "live well" in the 21st century, which I believe is the real goal.
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> Our biggest problem today is we are a society of buying everything - so things cost more, we lose our ability to fix and repair things, ...
I'd phrase the problem differently:
Our biggest problem today is that people are hugely underestimating the future pain/cost that comes with choosing the _new_ and special products over the existing and more standard (and thus maintainable by oneself) old products.
The reasons are clear: companies try to maximize profits and thus do not want people to be able to repair/maintain anything. So they push towards more complexity.
Choosing the older and non-special product feels less rewarding to most people and more like a hassle, than just taking what's being put at the front of the shelf or top of the search results.
Bicycles are a good example. People should just refuse to use/buy bikes that need special parts/components which are not standardized (such that they can be bought from different companies).
If people want simple, maintainable things, they need to make the effort to look for these things and buy them instead of what's actively pushed to the market by the big companies. The effort will be rewarded with long lived things that cost less.
So true, the constant purchasing means people lose their ability to repair things, and companies have no need to make things repairable or provide parts. It's no wonder laws are now needed to force companies to make items repairable by users or other parties. And of course all the disposed stuff is even worse for landfills.
Worst is that is expanding further to services too - when I started in IT we did all our own network cabling, server management, etc. Now more and more that gets outsourced, ending with cloud services, and inside the company there is no-one that can do any of that any more. Everything must be bought, everything becomes a subscription, and you just lose control of it. Worst is, you don't have internal qualified IT staff to even evaluate quality and manage the outsourced services.
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