“Do I look like some STD-ridden guy?”

“Well, STD-ridden guys tend to refuse condoms. That’s how they got their STDs. So you tell me.”

They’re stupid simple devices though. There’s not even any circuitry in a solar panel. There’s nothing to slip a backdoor inside. There’s caution, and then there’s just xenophobic paranoia.

People like to react that way to the idea, but it need not need be the purview of tinpot dictators. It’s good for a country to have a small amount of inflation. If your country is successful enough to maintain its currency for centuries without collapse or revolution, your currency will inevitably be devalued to the point of comedy. It should be just a reasonable thing for countries with healthy economies to do once every century or two. Sure if you do it every other year, it means you have a problem. But if it’s done only every few generations, it’s not something we should be afraid to do.

Craziest implementation? Burn the hydrogen in your home. But not in a furnace. Burn it in a mechanical combustion-powered heat pump!😁

In the novel Star’s Reach, in a post-collapse society, one of the main characters is a ‘miner.’ Their mining guild basically tears apart old concrete buildings, by hand, with sledge hammers to extract the old rebar from them.

OP said neolithic! You going to forge some rocks?

The world can support less than 1% of its current population if everyone reverted to a neolithic lifestyle. And countless species would be hunted to extinction during the collapse.

So in short, the answer to what I would do? Like nearly everyone else, just die. The folks from Sentinel Island will inherit the Earth.

Who cares if most of the panels are made in China? Panels last for decades. If China decides to embargo the EU and cut off the supply of panels, it would be a decade before that embargo really started to hurt. Enough time for Europe to spin up and entire PV supply chain from scratch.

You can’t apply the logic of petrostates to electrostates.

I like the idea of redenominating the currency instead. We issue a v2.0 of the dollar. No existing dollars are rendered invalid. You just start issuing new coins with 100x value. The new penny is worth one old dollar.

Define “it.”

Let’s go for maximum chaos. Set the Solar zenith to 1 AM.

The Jones Act.

The only good royal is dead royal.

Being a monarch or nobility of any kind is a crime against humanity. And yes, this applies to all, no exceptions. I don’t care how “constitutional” a monarch is. No one should have inheritable legal status or power. Inherited wealth is bad enough. Every king or noble should have to give up their title or give up their head.

Private businesses have regulations on their ads all the time. Cities across the country regulate how large shop ads can be.

If North Korea could do it, so can Taiwan.

North Korea did it, and it had the United States, the nation with the most powerful surveillance capabilities in the world looking right over its shoulder. And keep in mind, we’re still technically at war with North Korea. And North Korea might as well be an island. But really, the island part is irrelevant here, as Taiwan already possesses all the nuclear material it would need. It has a well developed nuclear power sector. The island gets half its electricity from nuclear power. And they have several research reactors. It already has all the fissile material it needs to build a bomb.

Taiwan doesn’t need thousands of nuclear weapons to be a credible threat to China. A dozen bombs with delivery systems would be more than enough to make a credible deterrent. The goal isn’t to be able to wipe out the entire population of mainland China. The goal would simply be to make any invasion so costly that the cost would vastly outweigh any potential gains. I don’t know what all Xi hopes to gain by conquering Taiwan, but whatever it is, it’s not worth losing the dozen largest Chinese cities in a series of mushroom clouds. To the Chinese leadership, the conquest of Taiwan is not worth getting Beijing nuked. Maybe Mao would have made that trade, back when China was a rural peasant nation. But now? China is the workshop of the world. The entire economy and China’s place in the world are utterly dependent on its megacities.

And yet, plenty of other countries have managed to do it…

A peaceful and realistic solution? Taiwan develops a strategic nuclear deterrent. They’re already a near-nuclear country and an industrial and technological powerhouse. A nuclear bomb is fully within their capability, and they already have abundant supplies of all the precursor materials in their possession. The most realistic solution to the Taiwan crisis is that Taiwan obtains nuclear weapons, and China is never able to threaten them with invasion again.

People come to Lemmy precisely because they’re tired of big algorithmic corporate platforms. They come here precisely to get away from AI slop on platforms like Facebook. Hell, half the people here have been banned from reddit based on comically flawed algorithmic AI moderation tools. This platform is heavily selected for people who dislike AI and AI content.