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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • No, you might be a primitivist, feudalist, syndicalist, or any of many other ways of organizing society. What you adopt will depend on your values and how you perceive the relationship between people and capital. Ultimately the labels are helpful up to a point, because the application of theory, or praxis, will manifest in ways to meet the need of your time.

    Just to get ahead of it, capitalist can mean both one who supports capitalism as a way to organize society, and one who owns capital. From context it’s clear we mean the former definition.



  • Sure! So, there’s this mechanism called “methylation” that can turn off which genes are expressed at different times/in different tissues. It occurs in almost all organisms, but we don’t fully understand the role it plays across different tissues in plants. However, the evidence suggests it may play a significant role in cells going from being stem cells (as in can become many kinds of cell, not literally part of the stem), to being the tissue they ultimately end up as. Better understanding this may help us figure out why some plants can easily be vegetatively propagated, while others are more picky about it.


  • Trains have some weird environmental impacts, but they all can be mitigated through careful planning. Electric trains can be 100% renewables-powered, take less space for the level of transportation they can provide, are easily integrated next to green spaces, etc.

    One problem trains face is steel. From a harm-reduction standing, trains use less steel than cars, but if we’re going to look at it from a solar punk perspective, we can’t ignore the energy it takes to prepare hundreds of miles of track that needs to be repaired and replaced regularly. The challenge here is effectively with manufacturing, and it can be mitigated with efficient electric or hybrid furnaces with careful consideration as to the disposal of slag.

    Another challenge is that trains disrupt natural environments. Tracks would need to be elevated, put underground, or other features would need to be included to minimize impact on the natural environment.

    Something else considerable is that trains produce and distribute pollution. Brake dust, lubricating oil, and other man-made waste makes its way to the tracks and beyond. Environmental cleanup would have to be part of the plan for a solarpunk train system.

    One thing that attracts me to the solarpunk ideology is these kinds of questions. Everything is linked to everything else, and even “obvious” solutions to today’s problems aren’t without their own potential pitfalls.