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Nebraskan Farmers Were Using Wind Turbines Before Environmentalism Was Invented

Many seem to forget that electric cars, windmills generating energy (whether electric or mechanical energy) are just not new ideas.

The difference is that the technology at the time was limited by what was known then. Today, we can make things work much more efficiently. With the networking of ideas, we are also able to exponentially improve what we know.

So many inventions have come about from society's need to solve challenges and problems. And yet so many ideas were violently resisted as well - remember when all cars had to be proceded by a person waving a flag, or where it was thought that steam locomotives would cause cows to stop producing milk, when we thought humans could not travel faster than they could run, when we were not made to fly, when we thought 5G cell towers were going to cause cancer, and so the list goes on and on.

Our biggest problem today is we are a society of buying everything - so things cost more, we lose our ability to fix and repair things, and then we panic that a new invention is going to take all the jobs away. In fact, new things (like just moving from horses to cars, or typewriters to computers) have created more new jobs after the transitions.

Society's difficulty is more one of not being willing to change, and today even more so, with the misinformation that is so popular.

See https://hackaday.com/2024/11/14/nebraskan-farmers-were-using-wind-turbines-before-environmentalism-was-invented

#technology #windpower #environment #change

to be decided 1y ago

> Our biggest problem today is we are a society of buying everything - so things cost more, we lose our ability to fix and repair things, ...

I'd phrase the problem differently:

Our biggest problem today is that people are hugely underestimating the future pain/cost that comes with choosing the _new_ and special products over the existing and more standard (and thus maintainable by oneself) old products.

The reasons are clear: companies try to maximize profits and thus do not want people to be able to repair/maintain anything. So they push towards more complexity.

Choosing the older and non-special product feels less rewarding to most people and more like a hassle, than just taking what's being put at the front of the shelf or top of the search results.

Bicycles are a good example. People should just refuse to use/buy bikes that need special parts/components which are not standardized (such that they can be bought from different companies).

If people want simple, maintainable things, they need to make the effort to look for these things and buy them instead of what's actively pushed to the market by the big companies. The effort will be rewarded with long lived things that cost less.

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Discussion

Danie 1y ago

So true, the constant purchasing means people lose their ability to repair things, and companies have no need to make things repairable or provide parts. It's no wonder laws are now needed to force companies to make items repairable by users or other parties. And of course all the disposed stuff is even worse for landfills.