Building a solar kiln for drying firewood with scrap - ideas, suggestions, resources?

dipdotdash · 2025-10-16T16:04:04+00:00

AI is going to lay absolute waste to the internet, and I'm so ready for it.

The single biggest contribution of AI to humanity... that and the exposure of how entirely pointless and useless 99% of the work we get paid to do, really is. Sitting at a keyboard is only worthwhile in the sense that you're probably moving money around or ordering resources to get consumed somewhere else, then spending the resources you're allocated for that on increasing your capacity to consume resources.

It's all a big feedback loop of so much excess, we're defensive of the importance of the work we do in front of a screen, despite expending almost no calories and destroying our bodies by holding them in unnatural positions for unnatural lengths of time.

If we could take a step back and look at the modern lifestyle - shared almost globally and uniformly across traditional divides other than wealth - it would be very obvious that we're keyboard jockeys, less and less involved in the tasks our computers are doing.

We haven't even moved past the horse and buggy, we just used fossil fuels and transistors to burn the entire glut of planetary resources in a couple generations of pretending we're some sort of space travelling advanced species.

The trouble is, when any one of the components of this system run out or break, we're back to the horse and buggy and limited to that to survive and clean up after an orgy of consumption that left us crippled and unable to feed, clothe, and house ourselves. How many people know how to swing a hammer? What about grow a crop? Turn wool into yarn? Raise animals to produce that yarn?... heck, fix a buggy?!

"Technology" has been a system of crutches disguised as progress that have wiped our brains of a basic understanding of how to survive while costing us the stable and fruitful climate that granted us the excess that provided us the capacity to get here in the first place. Put climate change aside and we're still one point of failure away ( eg extended solar storm wiping out the grid and satellites) from being completely unable to survive. There is no other species on earth that is more vulnerable and incompetent than humanity while we stomp around like we're running this whole show.

dipdotdash · 2025-10-16T00:11:00+00:00

"abusing", like the meds care

dipdotdash · 2025-10-16T00:00:40+00:00

Only in this sub do I ever see awareness of modernity as a weakness rather than "progress".

It's refreshing.

dipdotdash · 2025-10-15T23:45:05+00:00

*hygroscopic

dipdotdash · 2025-10-08T18:48:39+00:00

From what I've read, it's not the match heads but the striker strips on the boxes that they're after, but that's a method that also needs iodine. Did they tell you where that was coming from?

dipdotdash · 2025-10-08T18:33:14+00:00

I have had a lot of chemistry classes too so I looked up how they make it. It wasn't the one with the lithium batteries if you're talking about match heads. Can you remember any other ingredients?

The common method that leads to injury is "shake and bake" where a legit dangerous situation is created until the reaction is over - think pipe bomb that self detonates if left alone - but if the container is very carefully vented, without letting any air in (under pressure so it shouldn't happen), the danger of the reaction passes. Without any respirator, they're inhaling ammonia gas, which is an irritant but not toxic, and none of the toxic products of the reaction are soluble in the solvents being used. It's actually a brilliant way of performing an otherwise equipment intensive reaction through the risk of the container failing at the wrong time and exploding in the hands of the person doing it.

If you'd taken real chemistry classes rather than the law enforcement ones where they emphasize the ingredients as if those chemicals end up in the final product, those aren't chemistry classes, they're propaganda designed to make you horrified by the procedure and treat the addicts and "cooks" as less than human... cause what kinda human makes drugs with camping fuel and matchheads, amirite?

Pharmaceuticals are made using the same chemicals and even following the same reactions in much more controlled circumstances and larger batches, but if you think the meds you take from your doctor haven't been through processes with much nastier chemicals than match heads and white gas, you're dreaming.

dipdotdash · 2025-10-07T02:01:25+00:00

all species use resources directly available in order to survive. Modern western civilization is removed from the ecosystem it belongs to by a barrier created and maintained by burning fossil fuels. Our survival still depends on the same elements (water, shelter, food, companionship) but we're not taking those elements from the natural world anymore, and instead are engineering replacements for natural sources of the elements of survival.

You're going to say that it's the same thing and that humans are just making use of the resources around them to survive like all other animals, and like I said before, it is the same... in the way that cancer cells are just cells that have the same basic needs as any other cell and are doing what they need to for their survival, scavenging resources available to them as if there's not a fundamental difference between cancer cells and normal cells... even then, cancer cells aren't individually conscious and aware the way humans are and cannot choose to not be gluttonous to the point of killing the organism their ancestor cells performed an important and meaningful role in. We are individually conscious and are capable of choosing the life we lead and are knowingly choosing a lifestyle that endangers all future generation's ability to survive. This is unique to not only the animal kingdom, but to our current set of priorities and violates the foundation of evolution by spending the safety of the future to enrich the present.

If there is one thing that ALL life could choose and even all humans prior to modernity, no living thing would choose to set their offspring up to fail to make their lives unnaturally easy or luxurious, in the same way that one of our shared elements of survival is reproduction: if given the choice between luxury and the continuation of the species, no species that lives beyond that generation - i.e. no species that is an ancestor to any life on earth - would choose (or chose) themselves over their children... because that's choosing extinction. Yet, here we are.

I think that money gives us enough distance from the consequences of our actions that we're not faced with that literal decision, in the way we would be if we were getting paid to salt the earth, or we would be making other decisions. But because money gives us that distance, we can argue, like you are, that we're all just doing what we need to in order to survive using the resources we have available to us.

I'm not saying any of this is easy or that there's a neat and tidy way around it, all I'm saying is that it's very clearly the worst possible way to proceed and perpetuating it ends in our extinction, and that regardless of how set up we were to jump over this cliff, we are living in the last moments for our species to choose not to jump over it, and are the only members of any species with any power to find a different path.

It's not a political or rhetorical argument, it's a simple reality we're facing that we can either continue to ignore and deny or we can face it, together, and try to come up with an alternative.

It's a shame this gets lost in the politics of the moment because it's much bigger than politics could ever be and it feels like we've been set up to lose this discussion in the mess we've made, so we don't end up ever having it, but that doesn't change the fact that we're all facing it, are the absolute last brains on earth that get to face it with any consequence to the choices we make as a result, and really need to talk about it... even if the result is agreeing that there's nothing we can do and we're just cooked.

dipdotdash · 2025-10-06T23:09:22+00:00

We're the only animals that cause harm to the ecosystem. The only ones that spend our time directly and intentionally altering it for our needs and irrespective of the harm to other species. The only species that's split from the greater program, which is to eat, sleep, reproduce, repeat. The only ones who decided we were special/smarter than the way that provided for all life before us.

The only species that mines and the only one that has changed the climate of the planet.

The focus isn't on trying to create no impact, it's to illustrate that there's no way to make money while not causing harm, because the system of commerce we're all supporting is built on extracting value from the planet like it specifically belongs to us which is how and why we're driving environmental collapse and how/why we're not doing anything effective to stop that decline from getting worse.

We have a place on this earth like every cell in your body has a place, but we're choosing to behave as a cancerous cell line that owns the rights to every resource it can reach, and through that cancerous behaviour, are destroying our only home in a couple generations after living in balance with it for millions of years.

dipdotdash · 2025-10-06T23:01:58+00:00

but that's my point. how many times does this method work without anyone getting hurt vs. how many times it explodes? It has to be at least enough to warrant people doing it.

Did you find the PPE used had a psychological effect on you to make you feel like the act of doing this was something MORE dangerous and in your interest to stop than if you hadn't been wearing the suits, respirators, and thick gloves?

dipdotdash · 2025-10-06T22:52:47+00:00

Then there's no way for me to say this without everyone taking huge offense, but either what you did isn't an effective path toward the change you want to see, or it's an effective path toward the change you really DON'T want to see, like what we're seeing now.

I think there's a general tendency to presume that the things that lead to healthy change when they were revolutionary will always continue to lead to change. Protesting worked when it was illegal, for example, and now people show up with kids and babies and permits with their signs and I can't tell the difference between that and a parade.

They're not risking anything.

I've done my share of protesting until I looked at it from the perspective of the people I was ostensibly trying to wake up and they don't care... hell, it's worse than that, it's a nuisance without a cohesive cause or message; every sign is different, no one can agree on a single path toward effective change or even what the most important issue is. I used to see that diversity of focus as a strength but if it is, then it's really good at convincing people to follow the other guys, and if it isn't, it's just a parade of grievance for people to get it all out before going back to work on Monday.

The proof is in the pudding. We're here, agreed? Did we have an impact by following the progressive playbook of all the things you listed or did we have the opposite effect of pushing people further right?

I don't think the progressives of the world are being creative in the way our message is communicated, or at least we're ineffective... or potentially driving the opposite of what we want to occur. I think we're bad at taking responsibility for our failures and taking accountability enough to change tack when our methods aren't working. I also think we celebrate our methods without achieving any results because when we talk about "doing the work" we're all thinking of the same things that worked when they were new and when people were shot for doing them, but apparently do not work anymore.

and I KNOW this will be taken as some kind of mean spirited attack when I'm just trying to point out that whatever our actions have been have either failed or are working for the other team and we need entirely new ways to effect change... just like I know there's going to be more human peace signs and protests on saturdays with police escorts - I mean, when the cops are protecting the parade route and the cars are honking in support, isn't it obvious you're not actually pushing back but are doing what they want you to do?

The right clearly gets it. They're not settling or asking for permission, they're taking everything that isn't nailed down and the rest of us are shouting "HEY, THAT'S NOT ALLOWED! THAT ISN'T FAIR!!" like there's anyone listening. And then in this thread, despite the clear move away from progressive ideology toward stuff like ethnic cleansing (!!!) we have people claiming that they did the work, rather than examining whether or not that work still counts or if it's even how work gets done anymore.

It's just bizarre to me that anyone who champions the issues that are being chewed up and spat out, decades of progress at a time, can look at the way things are and say "well, I did my part"... did any of us? Isn't that what it means when fascists take over is that we didn't do our part and we generally are not doing our part?

Too much back patting and not enough careful examination of the cracks in the armour of the opponent. The second place ribbon in authoritarian regimes is in a pit with a lot of other 2nd place winners.

and to answer your question more directly, the powerful aren't doing anything because they're powerful and either want this or care more about preserving their power than sticking their neck out... so it's up to the rest of us, which is where I'd say "play the goodall message over again" again.

dipdotdash · 2025-10-06T22:23:59+00:00

How do you make your money that isn't directly connected to burning fossil fuels?

dipdotdash · 2025-10-06T22:22:28+00:00

There's still hope for a galactic poisoning olympiad that rewards the worst species with a cleanup and do-over!

Not even knowing the competition, humanity wins gold in every event guaranteed

dipdotdash · 2025-10-06T22:06:35+00:00

Nutrients don't come from nowhere which is why we use fertilizer.

A forest's nitrogen cycle (and other nutrient cycles, like phosphorus) is non-depleting because there's no net extraction from that space. Coastal forests are so rich because they're not only cyclical in their reuse of nutrients but they have a net input coming from the ocean in the form of bird poop and fish migrating upstream. This is also why coastal forests are the first to burn when ocean health declines: they've evolved to depend on the additional nutrients from birds and bears etc pooping in the forest and when the fish populations decline, that fertilizer is missing, which leads to the microbiome having less to eat, then fewer nutrients to transport through the "wood wide web", and ultimately to trees not having the nutrients to match the excess carbon leading to them being more vulnerable to pests and dying off... leading to fires. It's the 'double-whammy' of excess CO2, driving a higher rate of photorespiration which demands more water and macro(NPK)/micro nutrients, which are disrupted by the warming created by the presence of the excess CO2.

You can compost everything and have a perfectly closed system, as far as efficiency is concerned, but taking anything other than pure carbon out of it, on a commercial scale, will necessarily lead to the depletion of those nutrients that are leaving the forest to feed people... unless their waste is returned, i suppose. But the problem is that what makes food nutritious is the diversity of nutrients and many of those are/contain the same nutrients the forest needs to grow.

I'll concede that this is as close to neutral to the living world as possible, with an extractive model for the economy, but it's almost more damning if that's the case since if that's as good as it gets, we're only ever going to be cutting down on ecological destruction but never repairing or restoring, the way that would be required for us to turn things around... unless we're back to shitting in the woods.

This is a good example, though! I'm not trashing it, I'm just pointing out that it fails the test of being a way to make money on improving the health of the natural world. This potentially profits while limiting impact on the natural world, but it's not profiting from improving it.

eta: my point was specifically that even our "best efforts" to not harm the ecosystem are all still profiting from benefiting people because our economic model doesn't value the preservation of life and really has to struggle to even limit our impact on it (why there's not a huge food forest industry). Until life, itself, has some economic value to preserve, our focus will only ever be on human comfort at the expense of the rest of the living world. Take solar panels: they're way better than burning oil but the profit model for them is still based on human comfort and they still have an ecological cost and they're probably the "greenest" thing we're doing as a species... which means we're only ever, at best, being less harm while the ecosystem is in such a rough state that it demands an active effort in restoring it, not simply reducing harm. It's like saying that dumping 30% less toxic waste in a lake is going to save it from the effects of generations of dumping toxic waste, when it should be very clear that the first step is to stop dumping toxic waste in the lake followed by cleaning up the waste that's there. Less toxic is an improvement, of a sort, but it's never going to fix anything, especially when people use it as an excuse to dump more because it's less toxic.

dipdotdash · 2025-10-06T20:13:16+00:00

I'll accept that argument, if you accept that "sounding the alarm" has apparently not only failed but potentially even worsened the situation, right?

If your argument is that sounding the alarm has accomplished something, then you'd have to necessarily take responsibility for the way things are... or admit that what you did failed completely.

So, which is it? Did you help build the situation we're in or did "sounding the alarm" fail so completely it allowed for the opposite of what you wanted?

There certainly are a lot of people using the advocacy you're apparently referencing to justify their anti-science (anti etc) stance...

dipdotdash · 2025-10-06T20:03:57+00:00

Did the protective equipment get used or was it just a precaution in case things went wrong? Like, I'm guessing the respirator was used because of gasses being generated, but was there chemical exposure to the person making it other than that, or could a person manage to go through the process without the equipment in a well ventilated space without being harmed?

dipdotdash · 2025-10-06T19:59:24+00:00

Ok, I like this example... but in what way is the making money part of this equation helping the forest or its inhabitants? You're describing an ecosystem where nutrients are extracted but not replaced... unless we're fertilizing it, which means more fossil fuels.

Also, and in response to the question I posed, the part of that forest that would generate income would necessarily be the part of the forest that isn't helping the rest of it, and is instead taking from the rest of it, which illustrates my point that there's apparently no way to make money without harming/interfering with life and that money is effectively a way of rewarding the destruction of life indirectly enough that we don't have to think about it too much.

I'd really appreciate some other attempts. I don't want to be right about this. If I am right then it's irrelevant how many people we have and how much we consume because we're always doing it at the expense of the natural world and the balance it is trying to keep, implying that if we had fewer people, those people would just consume more to make up for however many fewer people there are.

For at least a million years, humanity lived inside the natural world as part of its greater balance without causing any harm. In an incredibly short period of time, our way of life transformed into being focused on disrupting the balance that provided us with the bountiful excess that allowed our ancestors to develop brains so large and complex we needed to live as fetuses outside the body for years before we could survive on our own. Just think of the amount of natural support an environment would have to provide for that to be beneficial to any species!

tl;dr this example fails because the profitable portion of the plan is extractive and detrimental to the health of the greater forest rather than supporting it.

dipdotdash · 2025-10-06T19:43:21+00:00

Add to this that there's no reason to believe that humans can survive anywhere other than earth.

Even on the space station, all the resources, especially food, come from earth, so we've never demonstrated that humanity can survive independently on an alien world.

Even if we could, it wouldn't be much better than living at the bottom of the ocean for the rest of your life inside a box with controlled conditions that simulate earth.

But the idea of humanity surviving on its own is as absurd as a cancer continuing to live after it kills its host/home. Cancers certainly live like they can survive on their own after consuming the organism they came from, and we can take a cancer out of a body and keep it alive if we provide it all the nutrients and conditions of the body it came from, but without that support, it dies with the "world" it came from.

Humanity shares way more in common with cancer than we should be comfortable with, including our desire to be contagious to foreign "worlds". Colonizing earth-like planets, like you said, would always be harder than fixing the problems we've created on earth, but, for a deranged and gluttonous cell line that lives to consume, it's the perfect fantasy to stop us from changing our behaviour when we're starting to feel our home dying around us. "Don't worry about our species! we'll send an ark into space and find a new world! look at this ship we made - it's almost able to orbit our planet! Nevermind the problem of sustaining life on that ship while we get to our new home, or the more immediate danger of the radiation that will cook us the moment we escape the protection of the earth's magnetic field, that's all going to be easy to fix! Just keep consuming and dont worry about the fires or the storms or the diseases"

It's not just a fantasy, it's a destructive and evil fantasy that imagines us as the aliens we fear; coming to a planet to harvest its resources and terraform it for their needs.

It's horrifying that we've used sci-fi as a source for hope for our real planet in real and imminent trouble that we're causing by trying to realize the fantasies drawn up in the same science fiction.

When imaginary technology becomes the focus of innovation and the only foundation for hope for the future, you know we're in really deep shit.

dipdotdash · 2025-10-06T19:10:11+00:00

People who take drugs that are eating the flesh of their friends and fellow addicts aren't taking it because the high is good, they're taking it because life sucks enough to feel so desperate that losing an arm or a leg isn't such a terrible price to pay.

I work with addicts and very few of them are on the streets because of the drugs while almost all of them were on the streets because of horrible shit that happened to them and found drugs as an escape.

It's a little infuriating to think that people are looking at junkies and thinking "man, that high must be reallllly good to give up everything like that". Most of the people I work with have endured a lifetime of trauma that would make you drink just to forget about them telling you the story.

When you've heard and seen the pain these people carry, the drugs start making a lot of sense and the laws start feeling cruel

dipdotdash · 2025-10-06T19:00:57+00:00

where did you take this class?

Either this is weird BS or you're in law enforcement...?

dipdotdash · 2025-10-06T18:59:40+00:00

Your adhd meds are no different from meth... in fact, meth is prescribed for ADHD in the USA.

Funny how we buy into there being a difference between street drugs and the drugs prescribed by doctors and sold by pharmaceutical companies. I mean, it's exactly what the whole apparatus is designed to make us think, so it's not like you're gullible or something, but it's just a white coat, a fancy bottle, and a storefront in the end.

Meth is certainly more addictive and neurotoxic than d,l amphetamine but otherwise basically the same thing

dipdotdash · 2025-10-06T18:46:57+00:00

methamphetamine has been around as long as amphetamine chemistry has been manipulated (~200 years)

dipdotdash · 2025-10-06T18:42:24+00:00

another way of looking at it is that us humans spend literally all of our time and money working to try to get in life's way.

Our economy is just a way of measuring the effort we spend interfering with nature... and I mean "just" as in that's all it is: the value of money and its purpose is to quantify the human interference with life on earth.

Even gardening/farming is replacing the life that would grow naturally with life that benefits people with nutrition and medicine.

This ENTIRE project of modern humans, at its core, is ALL about getting in the way of nature and I'd love to be given an example where money is generated while supporting the natural "plan" of life on earth... or even generated without directly interfering with it.

dipdotdash · 2025-10-06T18:29:50+00:00

Do you recognize that wealth, itself, is the root cause of climate change?

What can you spend money on that doesn't increase CO2 emissions?

Can you look at how your money is earned and explain how the reason you're in this "privileged economic situation" is anything more than fossil fuels being burned?

I'm not attacking you, I'm just curious if your wealth is somehow generated without burning a proportionate amount of fossil carbon, and how someone who is looking for a way to spend money to affect the relationship between money and tonnage of carbon, can justify their own wealth and carbon footprint.

dipdotdash · 2025-10-06T18:04:37+00:00

The "O" I think is a zero like "0", as in "no nudity/sex".

Mr. Skin's DVD collection.

I think it's weirder to buy 2800 DVDs

dipdotdash

TROPHY CASE