Wall-E, is that you?

The farmers themselves have to come to their senses as well and support these government reforms or eventually the crime gangs might take the land and eat the owner. After that is done I hope we can return to a commons system of land use.

Hmm, the farmer interviewed in the article farms 570 ha - maybe consider a restoration of smaller-scale farms and restoration of the commons before complaining about criminals roaming lands the size of an entire village?

The concentration of ownership into fewer and fewer hand means that smaller farmers had to sell out to the big guys, a process that has been going on for very long. When there is nothing left but large swatches of land owned by single persons what is normal folk supposed to do? Turn into serfs again? It’s not even possible anymore because most farmers will just import the cheapest farmhand from other countries because nobody can live a dignified life from the pittance they pay workers.

Not to forget, with large areas of land in a single hand comes monoculture and all the destruction associated with it.

Fuck it, distribute the land to the crime gangs and teach them how to garden.

I would take diagnosis around Neurodiversity with a grain of salt. I suspect both conditions might be the same brain differences presenting differently, and I don’t think science has really gotten to the ground of this yet.

What do we really know about animal and plant communication? They might very well be talking to each other. Don’t be too quick to assume that as a human you would even know how other consciousnesses, let alone ways of communication, could work.

People who work closely with animals seem to lose their ‘human smart, monke stupid’ attitude relatively quickly, and those who study non-human consciousness deeply seem to make one groundbreaking discovery after the other these days.

We have to stop gatekeeping knowledge and start listening.

That would lead into philosophical discussions as to what knowledge means. I do see that we have the tendency of assuming others have less agency or are less aware of their actions than us. We do that as individuals and as a species, so I tend to be careful. I also wish I had useful food cravings, mine don’t tend to be too healthy.

That must be the most encouraging thing I’ve read in a while. Sounds like a fairly good future.

Goats know. Sheep know. Equines know. If I make sure the farm animals have access to different flora around the pastures they won’t get ill. It’s nice following the animals around and finding out what they eat, and other ways they use plants. The more time I spend with animals the more I think it’s us humans being the dumb ones.

On that note, watching what great apes do in their natural habitat might teach us a few things about plants.

I got into and forced my way through a degree in EE just to prove I could as a foreign student working mother. Dropped out after half the time in part due to burnout, in part due to loss of motivation.

Learned a million different things (literally from basket weaving to drone racing) all stored away or suffering from lack of time after figuring out how to do them well. These days I’m between pretty decent and almost hopeless at everything. Want a mediocre wooden bed? A fairly good bathroom with mosaic art? A vegetable garden? A small computer program?

I sometimes wonder what this ADHD thing is good for, for sure it must have some purpose? It’s like I’m waiting for the big conclusion of something that connects all the things I have been picking up throughout the years.

Trauma is the grounds on which more trauma grows.

You sometimes need rest? Don’t try to work harder, try to work less. Your body and brain might be telling you it’s recovery time.

I know I can force myself to be more productive, and can work really hard, and will eventually reach burnout, because I force myself to work hard really efficiently. So yes, I found some ADHD brainhack to study, work, raise a kid and tend a small farm, all at same time. It worked great for about 7 years, then my energy was depleted.

Nowadays the only thing I’ll get busy for is fighting for the 4-day work week and against the productivity myths people tell themselves.

I love corduroy! On my local farmer’s market a gypsy always has a pile of them available. There’s all kinds of brands but probably all out of the same factory - did they fall off a truck somewhere? 3 for 10EUR. I bought my first couple 20 years ago, they lasted ten years before I got too fat for them and gave them away. Now I started spending another 3 of them. When one pair gets wet outside on the farm I hang them close to the fire and dress the next pair. I bought them extra plus size and hope to get more than 10 years out of them this time!

I guess every case is different - and you have to figure out what works for you.

Recently I had to replace my laptop, and as I use it for work I have no choice but going for a not too old model and install a double boot with Windows. I’d rather not, but there we are.

Phones, not sure, I use mine to read lemmy posts, but also for online banking and paying stuff, and taking photos of plants and mushrooms that I want to identify. But I also dislike having the phone with me all the time and wish I could return to dumb phone and restrict my social media use to the laptop. One could get used to pay stuff in town again, and have a sketch book and some pencils for the plants and mushrooms.

As for e-waste/energy waste - there also seem to be a lot of different approaches. How far do you want to go to restrict your energy use, for example, given that each transmitted byte costs energy? Some people will want to become amish-ly strict and will allow only the most essential snippet of text, others don’t want to give up their daily moving cat picture with bells and whistles and a pop tart …

To really explain in depth what seems to be an approach of engineering and new age quackery would go too far here. I’ll try to be short:

Solarpunk (the main topic of the instance where Permacomputing is at home) tries to imagine a (near and implementable) future where humans manage to live in harmony with nature, not to return some more primitive way of life of the past, but instead come up with a mixture of modern tech and traditional techniques of community land management, a lot of it copied from native land management techniques.

These techniques (often summarized under the term ‘permaculture’) aim towards a land management that is less energy-intensive than our current modern agriculture. This can be achieved by mimicking (or modifying) naturally existing ecosystems and turning them into food landscapes. A lot of resources in these landscapes are circled, instead of bringing in large external inputs.

A few people have taken this approach and apply it to computing, and try to redefine how we could use the internet in less energy-intensive and more human ways and work with what we have at hand.

I could have written your comment some five or six years ago, before I saw how permaculture worked and that it worked, but ‘let nature do the work’ is definitely a thing compared with how we got used to do stuff in the fossil fuel industrial era.