Ned Harr

Since this thread has bubbled up again, I owe everyone an update: our trip to NM this year got cancelled for budgetary reasons (we are going somewhere closer instead that does not require plane tickets) and next year is already earmarked to see an aging family member in Europe, but 2028 or 29 maybe...

Interdependence (the "system" by which one person fulfilling his or her dreams requires helping another person fulfill their dreams in turn) seems to be an emergent quality of human existence, because we evolved in, and continue to develop within, and thanks to, complex social systems.

This is true whether a buddy is helping you hoist a wall of your hand-hewn log cabin into a vertical position, or whether you are working a job at someone else's company to pay a mortgage at a bank owned by someone else. And going it completely alone will make you go nuts, with loneliness if not just sheer lack of conversation.

Maybe one of the curses of being human is having the ability to envision the ideal of pure solitude, but not the ability to actually achieve it. I suppose our answer to this is to enjoy and appreciate the little ways we need other humans in our lives, despite the way this fouls up a serene primordial experience of being alone in the wilderness.

carl gibson wrote:you can get a propane chest freezer - no reason to burn up one electrical device allowance on that one.

Does it not have an electronically controlled thermostat?

I'm having trouble interpreting the OP question...does it refer to anything with any electrical circuits running in it at all, or does it refer to the stuff people normally think of as "electronic devices", i.e. where the "electronic" part is the main attraction: phones, tablets, gaming devices, GPS, etc.?

EDIT: I now see my confusion has already been addressed. Yeah for me, in an ideal world where I could chuck away my phone, it'd be my laptop, which was kinda sorta my only electronic device for a long time.

EDIT #2, having thought a bit more about it: I try to, like to, ponder and scrutinize my relationship with technology--not just electronic devices but any object, method, or system manifested from the application of intention to formerly inert or passively received inputs. Intention, as I see it, is central to technology usage; without intention you don't have technology, you just have the received environment. The question in the OP feels like it's prompting me to audit my technology choices: what electronic devices am I so dependent on or attached to that I couldn't give it up?

Trivially, the answer is nothing. In fact, I can go much further: I feel like if tomorrow I had to go live in a hut in the jungle, I could; it would be jarring but I would accept it and get used to it, and if I had experienced people to learn from and who could help look out for me I'd do fine living that way for a long while.

If on the other hand you kept me here in the world of cars and cities and products and jobs, and merely subtracted all but one of my electronic devices and forbade me to get any more, it would be terribly inconvenient, I would not be able to meet my professional obligations, and it would be sad too because I'd lose some of my hobbies and some of my ways of learning. Alas, electronic devices have a way of ratcheting into our lives.

But as long as I am being intentional about using them, and a flame of nonattachment to them is kept burning somewhere deep down, I think having electronic devices is fine.

Heard this one from a guy at Pollinator-palooza yesterday:

Why do chicken coops have two doors?

Because if they had four doors they'd be chicken sedans

I think water with a few wedges of lemon floating in it is my favorite drink, period full stop. For fun I will sometimes also add a few mint leaves, or basil leaves if I've got'em, or just the leaves by themselves. Really there are many infusions that are delicious and refreshing in water.

Anyway I read once, when I was little, that one of the coaches of the Oakland A's used to put lemon slices in his team's water cooler and this somehow aided their performance.

Reminds me of The Scream by Edvard Munch.

Similar to Anne Miller, more details needed. Here's two thoughts I had just in response to the OP:

1. If code inspections aren't really a thing where you live, that's great because you have more freedom to build in a way that suits your needs, less pressure, etc., but remember that code exists for a reason. There are hundreds of years of safety and building wisdom baked into code. Sure, you can find examples of egregious unnecessary oversteps in code, but most of it is time-tested and hard-earned knowledge. If it were me I would still try to meet or exceed code wherever possible. Besides, one day your locale may become more strict about code compliance and then if you need to do a permitted renovation or something, your existing house might not be grandfathered in, and bringing old stuff up to code is always more of a pain (and more expensive) than doing it right the first time.

2. Building below grade is always harder than building above-ground. Underground you are in darkness, if you want access anywhere you must excavate there, and water will be pressing against your walls with enough force to topple reinforced concrete. Exterior foundation walls are a perennial failure point because you have to excavate further out from them, build the walls, then backfill, and the backfill will never be as compacted as virgin soil, so it will have a tendency to sink over time and create a kind of ditch around the edge of the house, where water will collect and seep down and push against the walls and cause related problems. Personally I would not build below grade unless 1) I had access to a bunch of free or steeply discounted excavating equipment and experienced excavating labor, and/or 2) I had absolutely no choice and needed to build below grade.

I think learning to cook is really about learning to taste.

Edit: Not sure who I'm really writing to here, but I changed my mind. I decided learning to taste is how you become a GOOD cook. Just cooking can be done without taste at all, you just follow recipes.

My advice for learning actually isn't to go right to a cookbook, it's to start with something extremely easy and simple, like ramen noodles. This is what I did when I was a kid, and I'd say it's how I learned.

First you follow the instructions on the package. Then next time (or maybe that very first time if you're brave) you experiment by adding a new ingredient you think would go well in it.  As you do it more and more, you try other ingredients, and try adding them at different times, and see how different things combine.

This is where learning to taste happens. How did the two ingredients go together? How did the flavors differ if you cooked them for longer or shorter amounts of time? Etc.

When you eat food other people cooked, try to identify the different flavors. If you taste something you like and can't identify, ask what it is. (You can even do this in restaurants, if you sense you have a good rapport with the staff!) See if later at the store you can find some of that ingredient, and taste it so you learn its flavor. Start experimenting with that, seeing how it affects things you make.

Then (this is also how I did it) as you go you also start to collect little tricks, you develop knife skills, you learn to make a roux, to deglaze, to save and reintroduce drippings, and so on. I never used cookbooks for this, but I did use cooking shows and a few cooking Youtube channels. Chef John's "Food Wishes" is my favorite, I recommend that.

Replying so I can find this later, I am intrigued.

If I could add some specificity here, I'd say there's something critically important about using technology intentionally vs. taking it for granted (which usually ends up as being totally unquestioningly reliant on it).

In fact I am developing a theory which states that intentionality is key to what distinguishes "technology" from "nature" in the first place.

What I like about this theory is it also helps distinguish technology from nature in animal contexts--e.g. chimps fishing for ants using sticks, dolphins using bubbles to trap fish, birds dropping clams onto rocks to open them.

We think of chimps & sticks, dolphins & bubbles, and birds & clams & rocks as part of nature, but when intention--choice--enters the picture you get simple technological systems! If it works in those contexts then I know it works in ours.

Choices are driven by preferences, and preferences are driven by values, so for the purposes of this thread we can think about how the values of permaculture inform our preferences and then how those might be expressed as choices. It's this process of making the choice to use or not use a given tool that is important, more than whether that tool ends up getting used or not used.

Two people can use the same gardening app but if person A does it because he always uses apps for everything and it would never have occurred to him not to, while person B does it because she stopped and thought about her options first and decided using the app still would be a valid expression of her permaculturalist values while fulfilling her goals, then person B is using technology in a permaculturalist way, while (I would argue) person A is not.