As a very young kid, I thought there was a very hungry monster that lived inside vacuum cleaners. The switch was just a lever to open a flap and expose the monster’s sucking hunger.

You are confidently incorrect on this. Currency == money. Money is, for we hoi polloi, a barely consentual conversion and exchange system for our labor, hypothetically allowing us to convert our labor into readily fungible exchange units. Money, at the Capital Class level, is debt, and therefore control, i.e. power. Money is just how they keep score.

There are plenty of barter and Communist (“from those of ability to those of need”) economies, just on scales that fly below the radar of most economists. Your sweeping assertion leads me to believe that you may simply be ignorant of those non-monetary exchanges. Would you be willing to add more context to your assertion?

Wampum was used by Eastern Costal tribes as a storytelling aid.

In the Salish Tribes, dentalium shell necklaces were used as a status symbol/indication of social rank. Some tribes used the necklaces as a type of currency, but I’ve only heard the “some tribes did this” part; never anything about which specific tribes used dentalium as currency.

Obviously, anything that holds perceived value can be traded.

Source: went to junior high in a school that taught two full years of Haudenosaunee (also called Iroquois) history.

Salish source: I’ve been a volunteer naturalist in the Puget Sound for eight years with an annual training requirement, with entire days allocated to history of the original Salish tribe for the area where we’re working.

The Salish Tribes existed in the PacNW for over 13,000 years without money.

I see a lot of specific examples, but here is a good engineering guideline: do not skimp on physical interfaces. **Anywhere energy is changing form or if it touches your body, don’t skimp on those. **

For example

• tires
• bicycle saddle
• heaters/furnaces
• electrical inverters
• keyboard
• mouse
• engines
• shoes
• eyewear
• clothes (buy used if necessary, but always buy quality clothing)

Quality usually means more money, but sometimes one is able to find a high quality and low-cost version. In my experience though, trying to find the cheap version that works well means trying so many permutations; it would have been more economical to just get the more costly version in the first place.

:( indeed. This got me right in the feels.

We hoi polloi think in money numbers and what we can afford to purchase. For the Capital Class, it’s all about power. Money is just how they keep score.

Ever see a toucan in person? I had an employee with a toucan he would sometimes bring into work. It could throw things, especially round fruit, with uncanny accuracy. Like it could easily play catch from at least 2m away.

Glaucous-winged gulls also seem to have uncanny accuracy with defecation, but that’s not quite throwing.

According to Consumer Reports, Topo Chico consistently tested the highest for PFAS among carbonated waters. But they also said almost all store-bought carbonated waters tested positive for PFAS.

Our social media and blog are severely neglected, in large part because of surveillance and chokepoint capitalism (see: Cory Doctorow). But this would probably be the best entry point into our socials: https://youtube.com/@svcascadia

We live on an ocean-going sailboat. We make our own water and electricity. We have ~25 years of membranes, filters, and most parts. While we have the means to move around to cooler climes, going further northward means more severe storms and shorter working life of everything. So there’s that consideration.

Having the escape hatch of the boat does a lot to ease the anxiety.

Other coping mechanisms:

• fixing people’s bicycles for free and evangelizing micro-mobility
• monitoring and mapping marine health in maritime communities (kelp, fish counts, bottom conditions); yes this is “just” monitoring, but one measurement is worth 1000 opinions and hopefully helps to move the needle on getting everyone to pull together on environmental protections
• community education on aeroponics and micro-hydroponics
• community support on emergency preparedness

I’m sure I’m skipping over some of my other copium prescriptions, but those are the most salient.

How do I subscribe to acoustic propagation facts?

Sailing, scuba diving, cooking a big meal for friends, having a lazy start morning sipping coffee with my partner.

Right there with ya. Oh, I tried so hard. Walking and junk collection simulators in a depressing, ugly setting. The humorous bits are way too infrequent to make up for the litany of misery.

A recumbent racing league would be awesome, both fared and non-faring

Oooooh! I’d watch this. Hell, I’d probably get back into racing. And I don’t even like recumbents that much (but still think they are the superlative design for most people). Without the UCI interference, we’d see some crazy cool stuff. I feel like the best we can get right now are the recumbent speed/distance records.

The UCI could fuck up a wet dream. They actively harm the advancement of bicycling. Whenever the UCI starts administering a race type, that whole industry sector is permafuct. Disc brakes (regardless of how one might feel about discs) were banned for many years, resulting in delay of that technology despite the demand being there. Recumbents are a superlative bicycle design for most humans, but thanks UCI ban.

One of the main reasons gravel bikes have innovated so quickly is because the UCI has yet to stick its stupid nose into the races. But they’ll be along shortly to ruin the fun.

If my juggling of balls catches your fancy, you might also be interested to know that I also smoke meat, play the flute, and churn butter. 😆

Oh, throughout the whole thing, he and his employees were treated like garbage. He would get through security, go directly to the person’s office, and reassemble the pistol in front of the manager. And then my friend (or one of his employees) would get interrogated for hours on unrelated questions, like it was somehow my friend’s fault that the TSA failed their audits.

I travel a lot for work. US Customs and the TSA are absolutely a sick joke. I could easily write a novella on the extremely poor training of TSA employees. I have a small permanent retainer (read: braces); about 25% of the time, that is considered suspicious, and I get an enhanced inspection. “Ya know, I could just open my mouth and show you what’s in there.”

The TSA always determines that my juggling balls are suspicious, so I never pack them in carry-on anymore. I have NEXUS, yet I always get an enhanced inspection on return to the US. Literally every other country to which I have flown just waves me through, even before I got Pre-Check/NEXUS/Global Entry.

My partner had her rigging knife in her backpack on a flight out and back. She was unpacking and found it in her backpack after the trip. Good catch, TSA.

And the absolute frosting on the TSA shit sandwich: one of my close friends owns a private security firm. His company was approached by the TSA to assist in security audits at a major international airport. He and his team were contracted to “smuggle” fake firearms through TSA checkpoints, any way they could. The TSA repeatedly failed to detect the firearms for each of five audits. The TSA division (district? regional?) manager, frustrated at his group’s 100% failure rate, determined that my friend’s company must have specialized criminal training, and everyone who worked that contract were put on the no-fly list. It took him about 18 months to unfuck that mess for him and his employees.

I had written a few more paragraphs about TSA hassles, but I think y’all get the picture.

I miss lawn darts, but the ban made sense. Holy hell, people were stupid with those things.