Yes please! More of this sort of thing!

endless screaming

While it's not the mainstream, it's not everyone that constantly wants more. There are many religious orders that practise asceticism, voluntary simplicity, and other behaviours which are not growth focused. Minimalism as a movement in western society is genuine. People do sometimes reach a point where they stop being seduced by consumerism, realising it doesn't bring the happiness it falsely promises.

I tried to do EC (elimination communication) but wasn't super successful, but it did mean my daughter was very used to sitting on a mini potty regularly well before we did "proper" potty training with big potty. About a month before 2nd birthday got a book about potty training from the library, and then spent a weekend pants free, and she got it very quickly. Got poops a lot faster than pee though, she only had maybe 2 poops in a nappy after her 2nd birthday, but I had to keep putting nappies on for longer drives or trips because she just wouldn't tell me she needed to pee. She was pretty much fully toilet trained by 3, but has had a couple of accidents, 2 bed wetting one end of day at childcare. Not sure about those but not too worried about it.

The T1000-E is a truly impressively designed piece of kit. I feel like so much I've been into when on bleeding edge is janky or too easy to break, these are solid.

Christopher Alexander is brilliant. Regularly return to A Pattern Language, so much inspiration.

Yes for emergency services radio is probably better, but have had the conversation that those bands get very busy when there is actually an emergency, and unless you're directly involved in the emergency response it's better to keep quiet even if you have the devices. To keep everyone else in the loop a mesh would be really helpful and allows for direct comms between people without radio knowledge. I've done enough radio stuff at festivals to know it's a bit daunting for beginners. But these days pretty much everyone, even your grandma, has a cell phone and most understand apps and text messages. So the learning curve is pretty small.

Keen on Reticulum, but my focus atm is Meshtastic because of the ease of use, both Android and iPhone are dead easy to set up in less than 2 minutes and my use case is for more local nodes in most cases that would be with people with minimal technical skills.

I'm sorry for the good ones, but the current actions are a huge threat to democracy worldwide, and while I think the puppet masters expect this response and globalisation is already in the process of collapsing (read The End of the World Is just the Beginning - Mapping the Collapse of Globalisation by Peter Zeihan) we can try and avoid this fate elsewhere. It is NOT inevitable that the tech bros rule us all as serfs, but getting away from Big Tech, means cutting off the US out of our digital lives as much as we can.

Everyone here is ahead of the game 👍

Thanks for posting, this really rounds out the Blonde Politics video that has been getting around.

I think we can all do something. I know our economy is tiny, but Australia buys way more from the US than they buy from us... and you know what a big chunk of that is? Services. Some of those are hard to shift but others are easier.

I've hosted all my websites and registered all my domains in the US for over 20 years.

That changed yesterday and I'm transferring everything over to Australia.

For Fedi, look at Australian servers where you can. Subscriptions? Fuck off Netflix et al. Get out of Google as much as you can. If you're here you are probably already out of FB and Reddit, but leave anything else you can that is US based and try to support AU or EU.

Don't buy US foods, cars, or technology where possible (let's face it, most of those are crap anyway).

And you know what, most of the US based internet is shit now too. It was fun 20 years ago, but consistent enshittification has been the worst in the US. At least the EU is trying to fight it.

Yes our economy is tiny, but we can change more than you might think, and as the rest of the world probably will do similar, the US won't be quite as well off as it thinks it is.

The worst case I've read about is BurningMan 2023, once enough people were on the mesh it completely stopped working and they had to write a special version of the app so it wouldn't fail so badly... so it looks like there are ways to mitigate congested networks, but that is not stock. I admit I'm a complete newbie but there are some scathing comments about how poor Meshtastic is, though I've read others that say it's fine for what it tries to do but not great for other purposes. So my gut tells me Reticulum would probably be a better long term protocol which you could develop a stand alone app for BBS, instead of piggybacking on Meshtastic app.