The future of power in America is obvious. State governments will make corrupt deals with data centers and factories to keep their electricity costs low, and raise prices on residential users to compensate until poor families are priced out.
Buy your solar panels now. Before electricity changes from a right to a privilege.
As a covid lockdown hobby, I got an Arduino starter kit. I found myself buying all these little parts for these projects that I had thought up. I ended up losing interest in Arduino because of all the cheap and tiny bits that get made in China and shipped to the rest of the world. All those tiny parts must be shipped in more disposal packages that help protect the parts from moisture and shock.
There’s so much energy and waste involved in all these tiny parts and integrated circuits when you look at the whole picture of manufacturing, packaging and shipping.
Robots, technology and open hardware/software concepts are all really interesting. It just gets hard to justify the environmental impact of all this fun tech.
When I went into the hobby the idea was to learn how to repair stuff. Should have kept strictly to that. But a nice Arduino project guaranteed to work as announced is so much more gratifying, so I ended up doing that, or worse, collect stuff for future projects I was going to do.
I think my lowest point, when I was getting a little better at actually putting the pieces together, was developing a plan for my first own invention! A pet toy for lonely cats, basically a glorified treat dispenser with a screen attached, where the bored lonely house cat can swat at digital mice. Of course there’s an online leaderboard, so owners can compete with their cat!
A slightly better project was a sensor-based sun tracking system for a solar oven. I just ended up concluding it was rather stupid, because a sensor is useful when we don’t know where something is, and we do know where the sun is.
Now it’s all boxed and shelved, and I am spending time re-thinking my position towards technology - which tech and tech activities do I actually want to endorse? I guess it’s time well spent, and if I get back to doing stuff in the future I won’t end up as a walking trash-producer.
I got into Arduino through my electrical apprenticeship. We had an electronics course to teach us electrical flow, sensors and boolean logic with integrated circuits. I was working on a project for lights and lighting patterns. Also had a couple other smaller ideas but eventually gave up on all of them.
My world view at the time was being challenged and changing rapidly. It’s far to easy to get lost in tech crazes because there’s always something new to distract you from the truly destructive nature of tech.
I kept a couple parts but sold off everything else for the price of a lunch. The person who bought everything from me was a teacher and said his students would appreciated the box of parts. I didn’t feel so bad since they would get used instead of collecting dust.
I’ve since been focusing on less tech related interests. I’m attempting to work towards a minimal tilling garden. I maintain my own bicycle. I’ve recently picked up whittling. I have a bunch of untreated wood I can use and the wood shavings can be used in my garden. I am working towards simplicity after burning out hard from technology related complexity.
I never planned on staying in the automation industry for long, planned to complete my apprenticeship and run. Management delayed my apprenticeship and then covid further delayed things. All the new revelations of abuse, waste and destruction ate at me pretty hard and little voice in my head wouldn’t stop screaming at me to get out. In an attempt to offset the damage feel like I caused, I planned to get fired and somehow took down the HR manager with me on the way out. Still got my severance pay and a ban from a large, international automation corporation. Maybe I didn’t offset my damages but it was still very satisfying.
It’s so similar to what happened to me, and I think quite a few others, one could almost believe some good forces of nature guide us towards better ways. I tend a garden, make colored pencil drawings that take a few weeks to complete. Walk a lot. Try to consume local as much as I can. For two years the burnout was so bad even other people and the need to use spoken words to communicate with them was too complex.