StrayCatFrump

I have a hard time understanding what they are “crusading” about. I believe they don’t know either

Pretty sure it's just enhancing and absolutely securing their own power over others. Seems pretty simple, really: whatever vector you can use to legally, extra-legally, or even illegally crush those who don't want to be ruled by you, foment hate and fear against them, take away their resources, and just altogether put them at your absolute mercy, you take.

Oh. I'm also talking about the right in general (liberals), not just the nominally conservative ones. Haven't met a liberal yet with any power who's not threatened by even the chance that leftist ideas will be realized. Those that aren't conservatives just don't seem to feel like it's quite as inevitable (why would it be when they co-opt leftist ideas and movements and funnel them into liberalism, making sure avenues like the Democratic Party are as radical as people can get), so they're more content to use legal and general economic methods to subvert, control, and starve us...at least most of the time (but then, there's always shit like election fraud like they pull against the Green Party, though).

I know a guy who made his own thongs out of the treads of old tires and some simple straps. He said they were comfortable as hell and had lasted him like thirty years. I wonder if we can extend that to more complicated designs with creative, alternative, recycled materials (and corresponding methods of construction) to do something between that and the masterfully crafted boots in the OP.

Leather is obviously a very physically suitable material and has been used for millennia. But I'd like to come up with stuff that's inexpensive, easy, and doable by folks without a lot of wealth, intensive years of practice, apprenticeship, etc. Who cares if they can't be used to climb the highest mountains, withstand a monsoon, and last for a decade? If we can build it out of stuff you can find in your garage, a thrift or fabric store, and a recycle bin, and put a good few hours of work into making something that'll protect you without being monstrously uncomfortable or otherwise destroying your feet, I'd be good with something that'd last a year or so (maybe even a few months) and be usable for walking down the street to the store. Then a pair of normal, commercial shoes could be worn for fancy and important stuff and would undergo less wear.

Many anarchists criticism of private property rests on the idea that it is the root cause of the capitalist’s legal right to appropriate the fruits of their employees’ labor. The article shows that it is not. It is the employment contract that is to blame for this violation.

Those are the same thing, though. The author is really putting a lot of stake into the separation of owning capital vs. renting it, and trying to make both of those things distinct from decision making. But ownership is fundamentally about decisions and control. Rent changes that very little. You rent a home, and perhaps get a tiny measure of control over the decisions regarding it, but the landlord retains ultimate decision-making power (buying, selling, renovations, kicking you out, etc.), and capitalism is 100% geared toward ensuring that stays true even in the most wild scenarios we can conceive of regarding tenants' rights under capitalism. And the same remains true of owning a "company"—and, of course, the means of production that are a part of it and keep you from just walking next door and creating a new one if you don't like how the capitalist runs things (yes: this is the part—the enforced scarcity—that makes "owning a company" actually worth something, so it is fundamental to the system).

if you don't think that ownership and control are intrinsically linked, think long and hard about what it would mean to "own" something but not be able to make any decisions regarding it (including where anything produced by it goes). WTF does that "ownership" mean? It's like donating to an infrastructure project to get your name put on a sign by some stretch of highway: it means absolutely fucking nothing.

Correct. The ground is a MASSIVE heat sink, but can only absorb and transmit heat so quickly (how much thermal conductivity it has; just the mathematical reciprocal of insulation/resistance). Having a large contact area and/or water helps a lot. If you can get down to the ground's natural/ambient water table, it'll conduct a lot better than dry dirt and rock (not to mention that evaporation can help with sufficient air flow).

If you make use of flowing water, probably it's just going to be a matter of the temperature of the source of water, as it'll likely eclipse (depending on rate and volume of flow) what gets absorbed by the ground. Unless it's a closed loop, in which case you're essentially just increasing the surface area of ground you're transmitting to (and you'll need to take advantage of convective flows like with the air, or you'll have to actively pump to keep the flow going).

Absolutely. Lots of societies have used passive heating and cooling systems, well-suited to local climates. And we could learn a lot from them to help decrease our energy use.

There's a lot of places you can build (partially) underground to take advantage of relatively stable ground temperature and natural insulation, too. Ain't just fictional hobbits that lived in holes in the ground.

Twitter is truly the 4chan of the modern Internet. Well, if 4chan had been broadcast and normalized all over the fucking news, anyway, instead of being the closeted cesspit of bigotry that it was.

Seems a little on the...ah, "colonial tourism"?...scale. It's not like these folks are going to stay and do some kind of real cultural exchange and contribute or anything. But at least they seem reasonably sympathetic and respectful of boundaries, and it's neat to get a brief glance and a bit of cool liberation propaganda at the end.

...harvests reflected sunlight hitting the back of the device, offering an unconventional route to producing higher energy yields for less space and cost.

Less cost seems probable. Less space really does not. Gonna probably need some mirrors to reflect onto that back surface, and it's still going to require the same amount of incident area of solar radiation.

Mirrors are pretty cheap, though. So seems like a win.