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Joined 19 days ago
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Cake day: October 4th, 2026

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  • Your garden example is exactly it. I call this American Solarpunk.

    Regular solarpunk is the happy version. Everyone has panels, the cities are green, the fight is over and the good guys won. Nice to look at. Not where we live.

    American Solarpunk is the fight … happening right now. The sun is free. Rain is free. Dirt is free. And every single thing between you and those free things has a toll booth on it. Permits. Inspections. Interconnection agreements. 25-year leases where some investment firm owns the power coming off your own roof. Utility fees you pay even when you make your own electricity. And now they’re pulling the ladder up for farmers too.

    It’s not that they’re against solar. They’re against you having it without them. Same reason they’d come for the garden. A tomato plant doesn’t feed a family, but it teaches you that you don’t need them, and that’s the dangerous part.

    So the “punk” in solarpunk should mean what it meant in cyberpunk: the people on the ground finding their own way around the system. Buying panels direct from China. Putting them on a pergola instead of the roof so it’s not a “solar install.” Building a battery bank in the garage without asking anyone. Learning to crimp your own wire. Is this the real movement? It’s not a pretty future. It’s a fight.









  • Join the club of being owed money. Edward J. Friel Co.: a Philadelphia cabinetmaker never paid more than $83,000 for work completed in 1984 at Trump’s Atlantic City casino. The family business eventually closed. (wtvr) The Paint Spot (Miami): owed about $34,000 for the Doral renovation. A judge ruled for the shop and later ordered Trump’s company to pay about $300,000 in legal fees. Andrew Tesoro: the architect of the Westchester golf clubhouse, offered just $25,000 on a much larger bill. (alternet) Atlantic Plate Glass: lost $450,000 in its final settlement over work on the Taj Mahal. (enewspf) Michael Diehl: a piano dealer who was only partly paid for Taj Mahal pianos.




  • Consider it a tech demo, not a pitch. I’m using it to try things out. . Next I’d like to explore not storing passwords or email addresses at all, and running small local discriminative models to flag spam. This work will help me with other efforts in my life. That’s the extent of it… well other than having convos with people and trying not to panic that teh world is so crazy.

    What I like about the fediverse is that we can talk, and nobody has to adopt anyone else’s interface, view or agenda to do it.