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WiggleYourIndex | 11 years ago | on: From Poop to Potable

Last month there was a record rainfall..... 6-10 inches in urban areas.

Perhaps these pieces of wisdom could offer some guide:

"When it rains it pours"

"Get it while the gettin' is good."

"Waste not, want not."

To me, rainwater capture can apply anywhere with a roof, a sky, and a mind to build cisterns.

WiggleYourIndex | 11 years ago | on: From Poop to Potable

Rainwater arrives on location, cost-free, and pure && You can turn poop into valuable manure through composting :: 0 fuel costs, 0 waste, 0 overly complex machines with 0 "exciting business models".

WiggleYourIndex | 11 years ago | on: From Poop to Potable

"The tiger cannot change its stripes." (One can't change one's essential nature.) More importantly, a guise of philanthropy is an understandably effective front for profoundly immoral conduct.

Without going into detail, if you look underneath thin, shiny, white veneers of people with exploitative, corrupt histories, you'll find worse in their present day actions. Today, a fortune can be useful for "shaping public opinion". A thoughtful person with a good memory can see past a fake smile and a Blah Blah Foundation name by reading about what is happening in this world through reports by self-directed journalists who work for reasons beyond currency units.

Yes, I am a helper. And, I do appreciate your push to do more and to ground this discussion in practicalities. People around our planet need water purification today; and we may need simple, effective tools as well if winds shift.

WiggleYourIndex | 11 years ago | on: From Poop to Potable

Maybe you are too young to remember how his empire behaves toward people who help themselves. Look into his past if you want to understand what he values.

Pointing out a solution that anyone can build for less than a quarter of a day's worth of work should give you some indication about what's possible without extravagant numbers of currency units extracted from people through lies, manipulations, and other self-degrading acts.

Hopefully, this site, being for hackers, is where we can dismantle our broken systems and build sustainable ones in their place. Ideologies are systems too, just like water purifiers.

WiggleYourIndex | 11 years ago | on: From Poop to Potable

A simple gravity-fed, activated charcoal filled pipe with a germicidal UV LED final stage can remove and destroy everything, AFAICT. (I searched: ultraviolet hormones water purification.) I found some good guides searching, water carbon filter instructables. Sand and rock prefilters may also be important depending on sizes of filtration targets.

We should also note: if we want these technologies, we need to develop and deploy them by and for ourselves. This man will only lift a finger for humanity if it brings his hand closer to our necks.

WiggleYourIndex | 11 years ago | on: Global Slavery Index 2014

And here's one more part of this: a great letter by a Southern pro-slavery philosopher, about 1830's, was written to a capitalist abolitionist Northern philosopher. And the pro-slavery owner said,

Look, we would be very happy to give up all our slaves if we had the same conditions you have up there. Because slave ownership is only the optimal economic choice under very specific land-ownership conditions.If you have not very many people on a lot of land, the only way you can get them to work for you is at the point of a gun. Because access to land means self-sufficiency. If, on the other hand, you have a lot of people, and you've got land title all tied up, they have no choice but to work for you for whatever pittance. So, frankly, I'd rather have it like you do, because you don't have to pay for them when they get sick. You don't have to pay for their food when they're infants. You don't have to pay for them in their old age. So, frankly, you can offer them whatever pittance you want, and if they don't take it, you'll hire somebody else.

It made a lot of sense to me. Access to land is everything.

And, by the way, land ownership doesn't exist. I don't own this land here. What actually happens is, my mom owns a piece of paper that we all agree means that she owns this land. But she doesn't own any land, Warehauser doesn't any land. Sierra Pacific doesn't own any land, the US government doesn't own any land. They have pieces of paper that we all agree mean that they own the land. But what there is, is there's land, and there's starving people, and there's people who are paying money to live on land that other people have pieces of paper that say that they own, but it's all a shared hallucination.

http://www.davidsheen.com/firstearth/interviews/jensen.htm

WiggleYourIndex | 11 years ago | on: Global Slavery Index 2014

The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass initially declared, "now I am my own master", upon taking a paying job. But later in life, he concluded to the contrary, "experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

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