I wonder if a simple pipe cutter would actually work and be extremely quiet. I mean, I have no idea because they don't even exist here but you can cut through pretty thick steel pipe with a pipe cutter pretty quick. Seems like a big pipe cutter might do the job too. But I have no idea and no way to find out, so take my curiosity for what it's worth.
Nuclear power actually does kind of require centralization. You're not going to build a backyard nuclear facility because it just doesn't scale (also your home will be raided by the IAEA and whatever three letter agencies your local government has). Gas comes out of wells, so that's easy to centralize. Both of these can be easily centrally controlled.
Solar panels can be controlled exactly once. As soon as they're in the hands of the end user, they're no longer possible to control.
But even if they were centrally controlled, they're still easy to find attached to mass surveillance devices, from which they can be expropriated popularly.
How quickly would you be dead if you tried to steal nuclear materials?
Yeah, these are very different things with very different authority profiles.
There's always a set of assumptions implied by these types of questions that people tend to miss when answering them. We have to start by talking about those before we talk about anything else. The first is the implicit connection between morality and criminality. Slavery was legal. The Holocaust was legal. The current ethnic cleansing in the US, and the genocide in Gaza are both legal.
The state exists to maintain a specific order, a specific acceptable direction of violence. This is non-consentual hierarchy isn't just bad for the people being oppressed, it changes the oppressor. Arguments against slavery mostly centered the violence carried out against people, but some talked about the ways in which enacting violence also destroyed the person committing the violence.
The whole Epstein thing isn't some weird artifact of the current time. It's how power works. The dynamic of powerful men sexually abusing children goes back to Rome, at least. Sexual violence and power is intimately connected, and it extends from the locus of power in the king/president/dictator/elite class through society as patriarchy, racist violence, etc. Illegitimate hierarchy, in and of itself, infects the whole society manifesting as "crimes" and "things that really should be crimes but are never actually prosecuted."
This happens to also be connected to the military question (which I'll come back to in a bit) by the concept of "sovereignty." There can be no such thing as a system that can both create and modify rules and constraints itself with those rules, formally speaking. That's basically what Kurt Gödel proved. So every "constitution" that "protects rights" is fundamentally snake oil, at best.
Sovereignty is the supreme power, that which is above the law, and it is a fundamental property of all states. "National Sovereignty" is simply a property without which a state cannot exist. There must be something above the law, and that thing tends to be the worst people. Legal systems and militaries exist to maintain that fact.
The criminal legal system is a system of violence. It does not prevent violence, or protect people. It maintains a specific type of violence and a specific direction of violence. Everything else it does is a cover. If you happen to know what a "clearance rate" is, then you know what a thin cover that is. If you understand recidivism rates, you start to realize that prisons are not simply unhelpful but that they actively harm society. They create "crime." But why would a society use prisons if prisons create "crime"? Because prisons are tools of political violence. I'll prove it.
Restorative justice is one of the myriad of systems that exists as an alternative to punitive criminal legal systems like those in the US. It is far more effective at reducing anti-social behavior, and has been widely studied. This works, it works well, even for violent crime. Some places even do use it for non-violent crime like petty vandalism. It's cheaper than punitive measures and it works, why is it not being used now?
You know what else reduces "criminal" behavior? Free breakfast programs, free child care, lead abatement, the list goes on. All of these programs are cheaper than prison. In terms of return on investment, the criminal legal system is an absurd waste of money. It doesn't fulfill it's stated goal at all, and there are actually efficient and tested things that do. But what does this system do? Well, it maintains the political system by heaping so much trauma on vulnerable people that it's hard to organize, and it kidnaps and isolates political organizers. The purpose of a system is what it does. The criminal legal system is a tool of political repression.
So then, what do you replace the cops with? If you got rid of cancer, what would you replace the cancer with? You don't. You're cured of cancer. The treatment, that is, building this society, is the process of systematically challenging these hierarchies and dismantling them. The foundation of a solarpunk society is built on systems that address the causes of anti-social behavior - that help people heal from abuse, that help people see their internal biases, that help people hold themselves and others accountable for their actions, that help people grow into the types of people who can live in a solarpunk society.
But what about defense? Now we're back to talking about sovereignty. You can't have sovereignty without hierarchy, and you can't "conquer" a people without sovereignty. This is kind of the whole point (as I understand it, the book is still on my reading list) behind James Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed. In order for governments to conquer people, they have to first create a government to conquer. This has been the pattern for thousands of years. In Indonesia, the Dutch (VOC) systematically built governments among indigenous people and then turned those people against each other in order to control them. The England took 400 years to conquer the Irish because they had to force them to have a government first. Compare that to the Blitzkrieg taking over unwilling people in days by simply seizing the seat of power, or Russia taking over the US government without even declaring war.
Centralized governments are actually a vulnerability, not a strength. Decentralization actually gives you a pretty significant natural advantage. This advantage grows even more when you shift to irregular warfare. The US, with the most powerful military in the world, still has no good way to manage asymmetric warfare. And they never will. Because it's actually impossible. Cybernetically speaking, a decentralized asymmetric actor has greater variety than a centralized one. Any entity that can leverage that advantage will always beat centralized power. That's not even a new insight, Machiavelli even talked about this. Basically, if you want to rule a population that doesn't want to be ruled you essentially have to commit genocide (thus the Russian approach to Crimea, the English approach to Northern Ireland, the Israeli approach to Palestine, and the American approach to Turtle Island).
Even then it's simply a matter of time. Colonial societies are permanently at war with themselves. Entropy takes care of all empires, on a long enough time scale. And that's kind of the reality of it. Hierarchy is a high energy system. It is always working against entropy. Given enough time, entropy always wins. Decentralization just takes less energy.
We are living through a brief period where agricultural abundance cascaded into fossil fuel abundance, during a relatively calm and stable climate. Hierarchy is ending that stability and abundance. I don't expect hierarchical systems to be the biggest things to worry about, because I don't think they can actually survive in the world they are creating.
But, they can create a lot of havoc before they collapse (like the Nazis did). So a solarpunk society should be able to use decentralized tactics to speed up that collapse as much as possible. That looks like drones and tunnels attacking oil infrastructure and other logistics.
Also, I think they just described a normal day in the US. Cars can only exist because governments massively subsidize them. The highway system was a massive project that a lot of people didn't want. Chaos and death is the system. People don't have to run away when they hit a cyclist, because drivers are often not even held liable. There being no consequences for killing people on bicycles is exactly the system we have now.
Edit:
Cars kill at least 120 people every single day, and maim or permanently disable many more. HOW IS THAT NOT CHAOS AND DEATH?
Abolish free parking. Free parking is a massive subsidy, usually paid for by poorer people (some who can't even afford cars) to drivers (especially richer, white folks who rely on parking cause they're coming from the suburbs).
Parking should fund bike infrastructure and mass transit, if it's allowed to exist at all. Make parking expensive enough and people will drive less and you'll be able to fund better options. I'm gonna recommend "The High Cost of Free Parking" (even though I've never read it, only listened to interviews with the author).
Other than that, go yell at your representatives if you can. Call them. Go to city council meetings (if you can make it). If you can't, ask someone to bring a tablet with a video call and tell them exactly why you're not there. Tell them you know it can be done better. Tell them you want them to throw out their street design manual and replace it with a dutch one (I think this is may help). Be as absolutely loud and annoying as you can about everything that sucks and take every opportunity to tell people how much better it can be.
Get involved with cycling and transit freedom advocacy groups, if you can. If there isn't anything in your area, consider starting one. Start listening to "The War on Cars" podcast (they did an interview about that book I mentioned), because they also have some advocacy related content. Try to get people in your city or town in contact with the Dutch Cycling Embassy. I'm sure there's some more and I hope other folks also chip in with ideas.
Something something, welcome to the war on cars. (It'll make sense when you listen to the podcast.)
Also, do you mind if I quote you? I'm still updating it and I might try to publish it. This is a great quote and it would be great if I could throw it in that section, if you wouldn't mind.
Edit:
Oh yeah, watch Not Just Bikes and introduce as many other people to the channel as possible. Never underestimate the power of being someone who absolutely will not shut the fuck up about what is wrong and the fact that it can be fixed.
My mother-in-law owned one. Before we got her a charger for home she had to go to a charging station. Also, if you're on a roadtrip you can end up charging while you're out. Most of the time you would be charging overnight, but not all the time.
Yeah, we live in a high theft area of Amsterdam. They also pay total replacement with no deductible. We've actually already come out ahead when my other bike was stolen.
The rate is actually variable based on theft data in the area. It's gone up a lot recently, it might go back down. It was ranging between 68 and 71 for an the bakfiets and a regular omafiets.
Their service is also great. It was like less than a week turn around when my other bike was stolen. It's worth it.
We haven't owned a car in years, so bikes are our primary transport. We can't really afford to be without them, so it's kind of worth it given the situation.
Edit: it also covers bike rental, and it covers damage as well as theft.
The first one is usually like 6 weeks to 3 months and it's free. The next one is usually half price. Here's my receipt for our 3 year after a lot of hard riding:
This is the most expensive bill we've had. This year we had to replace the drive train. It was €90.
That bike is only 6k. Why would it cost 1k/yr? It's not a car.
Edit: I lied. I found a bill for like €407. During that service we added a €200 bike alarm. The other year was €161.
And technically, the total cost of ownership is a bit higher. Total replacement insurance for us is like €60/mo or something. But again, you could do absolutely no work on your bike, throw it in the canal, and buy a new one every year, and you'd still be able to buy an extra bike on top of replacing your old one every year with the money you save not having a car.
I wonder if a simple pipe cutter would actually work and be extremely quiet. I mean, I have no idea because they don't even exist here but you can cut through pretty thick steel pipe with a pipe cutter pretty quick. Seems like a big pipe cutter might do the job too. But I have no idea and no way to find out, so take my curiosity for what it's worth.
Nuclear power actually does kind of require centralization. You're not going to build a backyard nuclear facility because it just doesn't scale (also your home will be raided by the IAEA and whatever three letter agencies your local government has). Gas comes out of wells, so that's easy to centralize. Both of these can be easily centrally controlled.
Solar panels can be controlled exactly once. As soon as they're in the hands of the end user, they're no longer possible to control.
But even if they were centrally controlled, they're still easy to find attached to mass surveillance devices, from which they can be expropriated popularly.
How quickly would you be dead if you tried to steal nuclear materials?
Yeah, these are very different things with very different authority profiles.
Like... Dutch?
There's always a set of assumptions implied by these types of questions that people tend to miss when answering them. We have to start by talking about those before we talk about anything else. The first is the implicit connection between morality and criminality. Slavery was legal. The Holocaust was legal. The current ethnic cleansing in the US, and the genocide in Gaza are both legal.
The state exists to maintain a specific order, a specific acceptable direction of violence. This is non-consentual hierarchy isn't just bad for the people being oppressed, it changes the oppressor. Arguments against slavery mostly centered the violence carried out against people, but some talked about the ways in which enacting violence also destroyed the person committing the violence.
The whole Epstein thing isn't some weird artifact of the current time. It's how power works. The dynamic of powerful men sexually abusing children goes back to Rome, at least. Sexual violence and power is intimately connected, and it extends from the locus of power in the king/president/dictator/elite class through society as patriarchy, racist violence, etc. Illegitimate hierarchy, in and of itself, infects the whole society manifesting as "crimes" and "things that really should be crimes but are never actually prosecuted."
This happens to also be connected to the military question (which I'll come back to in a bit) by the concept of "sovereignty." There can be no such thing as a system that can both create and modify rules and constraints itself with those rules, formally speaking. That's basically what Kurt Gödel proved. So every "constitution" that "protects rights" is fundamentally snake oil, at best.
Sovereignty is the supreme power, that which is above the law, and it is a fundamental property of all states. "National Sovereignty" is simply a property without which a state cannot exist. There must be something above the law, and that thing tends to be the worst people. Legal systems and militaries exist to maintain that fact.
The criminal legal system is a system of violence. It does not prevent violence, or protect people. It maintains a specific type of violence and a specific direction of violence. Everything else it does is a cover. If you happen to know what a "clearance rate" is, then you know what a thin cover that is. If you understand recidivism rates, you start to realize that prisons are not simply unhelpful but that they actively harm society. They create "crime." But why would a society use prisons if prisons create "crime"? Because prisons are tools of political violence. I'll prove it.
Restorative justice is one of the myriad of systems that exists as an alternative to punitive criminal legal systems like those in the US. It is far more effective at reducing anti-social behavior, and has been widely studied. This works, it works well, even for violent crime. Some places even do use it for non-violent crime like petty vandalism. It's cheaper than punitive measures and it works, why is it not being used now?
You know what else reduces "criminal" behavior? Free breakfast programs, free child care, lead abatement, the list goes on. All of these programs are cheaper than prison. In terms of return on investment, the criminal legal system is an absurd waste of money. It doesn't fulfill it's stated goal at all, and there are actually efficient and tested things that do. But what does this system do? Well, it maintains the political system by heaping so much trauma on vulnerable people that it's hard to organize, and it kidnaps and isolates political organizers. The purpose of a system is what it does. The criminal legal system is a tool of political repression.
So then, what do you replace the cops with? If you got rid of cancer, what would you replace the cancer with? You don't. You're cured of cancer. The treatment, that is, building this society, is the process of systematically challenging these hierarchies and dismantling them. The foundation of a solarpunk society is built on systems that address the causes of anti-social behavior - that help people heal from abuse, that help people see their internal biases, that help people hold themselves and others accountable for their actions, that help people grow into the types of people who can live in a solarpunk society.
But what about defense? Now we're back to talking about sovereignty. You can't have sovereignty without hierarchy, and you can't "conquer" a people without sovereignty. This is kind of the whole point (as I understand it, the book is still on my reading list) behind James Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed. In order for governments to conquer people, they have to first create a government to conquer. This has been the pattern for thousands of years. In Indonesia, the Dutch (VOC) systematically built governments among indigenous people and then turned those people against each other in order to control them. The England took 400 years to conquer the Irish because they had to force them to have a government first. Compare that to the Blitzkrieg taking over unwilling people in days by simply seizing the seat of power, or Russia taking over the US government without even declaring war.
Centralized governments are actually a vulnerability, not a strength. Decentralization actually gives you a pretty significant natural advantage. This advantage grows even more when you shift to irregular warfare. The US, with the most powerful military in the world, still has no good way to manage asymmetric warfare. And they never will. Because it's actually impossible. Cybernetically speaking, a decentralized asymmetric actor has greater variety than a centralized one. Any entity that can leverage that advantage will always beat centralized power. That's not even a new insight, Machiavelli even talked about this. Basically, if you want to rule a population that doesn't want to be ruled you essentially have to commit genocide (thus the Russian approach to Crimea, the English approach to Northern Ireland, the Israeli approach to Palestine, and the American approach to Turtle Island).
Even then it's simply a matter of time. Colonial societies are permanently at war with themselves. Entropy takes care of all empires, on a long enough time scale. And that's kind of the reality of it. Hierarchy is a high energy system. It is always working against entropy. Given enough time, entropy always wins. Decentralization just takes less energy.
We are living through a brief period where agricultural abundance cascaded into fossil fuel abundance, during a relatively calm and stable climate. Hierarchy is ending that stability and abundance. I don't expect hierarchical systems to be the biggest things to worry about, because I don't think they can actually survive in the world they are creating.
But, they can create a lot of havoc before they collapse (like the Nazis did). So a solarpunk society should be able to use decentralized tactics to speed up that collapse as much as possible. That looks like drones and tunnels attacking oil infrastructure and other logistics.
IIRC, PLA just doesn't biodegrade unless it's exposed to high temperature. It's "biodegradable" but only under specific conditions.
Oh, there are also "minimum parking requirement" zoning laws that force builders to subsidize parking.
Another strategy can be to try to get gas stations shut down.
I do think there's a lot of potential to change things through local government, but there's also direct action like Tactical Urbanism as well.
Thanks!
Also, I think they just described a normal day in the US. Cars can only exist because governments massively subsidize them. The highway system was a massive project that a lot of people didn't want. Chaos and death is the system. People don't have to run away when they hit a cyclist, because drivers are often not even held liable. There being no consequences for killing people on bicycles is exactly the system we have now.
Edit: Cars kill at least 120 people every single day, and maim or permanently disable many more. HOW IS THAT NOT CHAOS AND DEATH?
Abolish free parking. Free parking is a massive subsidy, usually paid for by poorer people (some who can't even afford cars) to drivers (especially richer, white folks who rely on parking cause they're coming from the suburbs).
Parking should fund bike infrastructure and mass transit, if it's allowed to exist at all. Make parking expensive enough and people will drive less and you'll be able to fund better options. I'm gonna recommend "The High Cost of Free Parking" (even though I've never read it, only listened to interviews with the author).
Other than that, go yell at your representatives if you can. Call them. Go to city council meetings (if you can make it). If you can't, ask someone to bring a tablet with a video call and tell them exactly why you're not there. Tell them you know it can be done better. Tell them you want them to throw out their street design manual and replace it with a dutch one (I think this is may help). Be as absolutely loud and annoying as you can about everything that sucks and take every opportunity to tell people how much better it can be.
Get involved with cycling and transit freedom advocacy groups, if you can. If there isn't anything in your area, consider starting one. Start listening to "The War on Cars" podcast (they did an interview about that book I mentioned), because they also have some advocacy related content. Try to get people in your city or town in contact with the Dutch Cycling Embassy. I'm sure there's some more and I hope other folks also chip in with ideas.
Something something, welcome to the war on cars. (It'll make sense when you listen to the podcast.)
Edit: Oh, here's something a little less aggressive than my ranting if you're wanting to convince non-anarchists: https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2012/12/06/who-else-benefits-from-the-dutch-cycling-infrastructure/
Also, do you mind if I quote you? I'm still updating it and I might try to publish it. This is a great quote and it would be great if I could throw it in that section, if you wouldn't mind.
Edit: Oh yeah, watch Not Just Bikes and introduce as many other people to the channel as possible. Never underestimate the power of being someone who absolutely will not shut the fuck up about what is wrong and the fact that it can be fixed.
My mother-in-law owned one. Before we got her a charger for home she had to go to a charging station. Also, if you're on a roadtrip you can end up charging while you're out. Most of the time you would be charging overnight, but not all the time.
Awesome! Added. Lemme know if you want to be cited in a different way. Thanks again!
You and I agree. Everyone on this sub agrees. I think it's becoming a more popular opinion, but I think we're still a bit on the edge.
Oh no, that was great. Do you mind if I just pull quote you into the article? I think you said it all as well or better than I would.
Oh shit! I knew I was missing something. Thanks. I'll add that in.
Talk more about your problem. Complain as much as possible to your city government. Organize or join a transit union.
It also sounds like your city needs more green space. Yeah, my only advice is, "fight like hell for you kid's future."
AAA estimated that it was over 12k in 2024. I doubt that price has gone down.
Yeah, we live in a high theft area of Amsterdam. They also pay total replacement with no deductible. We've actually already come out ahead when my other bike was stolen.
The rate is actually variable based on theft data in the area. It's gone up a lot recently, it might go back down. It was ranging between 68 and 71 for an the bakfiets and a regular omafiets.
Their service is also great. It was like less than a week turn around when my other bike was stolen. It's worth it.
We haven't owned a car in years, so bikes are our primary transport. We can't really afford to be without them, so it's kind of worth it given the situation.
Edit: it also covers bike rental, and it covers damage as well as theft.
Sounds like you have a project. :P
The first one is usually like 6 weeks to 3 months and it's free. The next one is usually half price. Here's my receipt for our 3 year after a lot of hard riding:
This is the most expensive bill we've had. This year we had to replace the drive train. It was €90.
That bike is only 6k. Why would it cost 1k/yr? It's not a car.
Edit: I lied. I found a bill for like €407. During that service we added a €200 bike alarm. The other year was €161.
And technically, the total cost of ownership is a bit higher. Total replacement insurance for us is like €60/mo or something. But again, you could do absolutely no work on your bike, throw it in the canal, and buy a new one every year, and you'd still be able to buy an extra bike on top of replacing your old one every year with the money you save not having a car.
Wait, are you saying carrying multiple tons of steel every time you need milk is extreme?