Today, I have a big ask of you:
Please consider getting involved with PTEC3D. I'll set out what I am and what I hope to achieve, and then leave you with a bunch of links to dig around in, okay? I'll keep this page updated, too. There are always new things going on.
What I Am
Is obviously a nom du prawn which I adopted because it's more memorable, and easier to one day pass the mantle on. In real life I'm a retired disability pensioner who's disenchanted with a few things and really wants to do something about them.
 |
| Yes I'm inside that... |
What I Learned
This is the hard bit because it morphs so much. I started three or four decades ago worrying about climate change and waste, and that hasn't changed, except for the increasing levels of pressure and anxiety I feel.
I had several health scares that made me look into our food system, and the pressure and anxiety rose even further. I started writing - a lot of writing - about food corporations and the bastardry they were getting up to, from contamination to misinformation to food fraud to poisonings, from cheap tricks like bulking meat up with water to shit tricks like burying e coliin that meat. From olive groves producing 150,000litres of oil versus olive oil sales of 250,000litres, which meant almost half of it wasn't OO, to honey producers filtering all identifiable things out of the honey, which made it harder to establish any healing benefits, but made it way easier to just add in filtered glucose and corn syrup... You get the idea.
That also opened doors into corporate hi-jinks of all sorts. Which led to the whole vexing point of energy from fossil fuels, energy market price fixing / collaboration cartels, and - plastics. Which brought me all the way back full circle, only now I knew how much of all these modern defraudings, robberies, and straight up war on customers was being waged.
And of course, it's also led me right back to Global Warming.
What I'd Like To Achieve
I want to make everyone aware of what's going on, what these different malfeasances are doing to them, and how they can take action to prevent being assaulted by a things we call corporations thus giving them a "corpus" i.e. a body to make them seem human and yet which are protected by laws that aren't extended to other bodies on this planet. This is one of the more recent outcomes of everything I've been studying, and it's a social process that needs to happen.
I now also want to stop climate change, as directly as possible. So I've been working on ideas (that may well be unfeasible, or need a lot of massaging to make useful) to start fixing agriculture, energy, and waste. There's so much wrapped up in these three things that it's almost impossible to unravel it all, but if we don't, those aforementioned corporations won't.
Despite not believing that we should ever have been made as directly responsible for recycling materials that were developed not for our convenience but for corporate convenience and profits, I also recognise that we will need to clean this up for our future generations' sakes. So one of the things I'm doing is finding recycling things that can be done at home, for fun, community, or profit. Another thing I'm hoping to start is a free open source effort to design machines etc to make all of the above simple. And also to work on the technologies that'll reduce our use of fossil fuels and manufacturing in general to a much lower and more sustainable level.
I don't want us to sink back to the days of ox-drawn ploughs, I want us to realise we are the technological hominid and that we're now smart enough to realise that the Earth is a spacecraft and we've been throwing spanners into the machinery without realising what we're doing. (Much like Elon Musk has been doing with Twitter, actually, just with far more dire effects...) We need to recover those spanners and realise that everything on the planet is an Earthling and we all need the ecosystem life support system. ALL of us. Down to the last microbe. All depend on one another, all have a function. Even us.
What Can Come Of This?
I'm hoping to collect together a group of people that all want to get involved in stuff like this. Activism - only the most genteel and refined activism, of course, as everything else is just sparkling protest - but I am definitely hoping for agitprop, agitators, propagandists, petition starters, petition signers, lobbyists, people with pitchforks and flaming brands, and signs. A lot of signs.
I'm looking for people that want to write letters to the editor, to MPs and ministers and CEOs and CFOs and Generals and Majors and Admirals and Commodores. People that want to write on one or other of the blogs I currently do all the writing for. People that want to write documentation for revolution, for a new plastic shredder, or a How To Use AI For The Common Good book.
Ideally there are coders that want to create little bits n bobs to draw attention to our group, or that let us share information among us outside of normal media. Or an API to allow farmers to send climate data in exchange for better predictions. Or for vertical farm management. Scheduling software. Anything - literally, the sky's the limit as long as it progresses the whole organisation, is useful.
Do you have a penchant and skill for making a simple household device recycle cardboard into eco-friendly chicken coop egg boxes? Or anything else like that? Maybe cleanly and safely extract the precious metals from e-waste using an old shaver and a crockpot? A device that'll roll along under it's own steam - and solar power - and clean PFAS out of the soil air and water? I'd love to talk with you and bounce ideas, find a way to get you funds to make prototypes.
The topic of AI never made it into my plans until quite recently. But there are a lot of edges to that new twist and I'll be adding a section about that.
Money. I know there are grants out there for these kinds of projects, but I'm not a good grant writer. I'm also not a good bookkeeper. And quite frankly, I'm getting on in years. This is a project that needs dozens of people involved in steering the various moving parts.
Some of the ideas I present will be worth turning into commercial projects, some will need to be not-for-profit for their entire life. Others will be the sort of thing that can go either way and will need some decisions.
Also - things like Milanote or whatever we decide is a good platform for discussion. I've chosen open source or free so far, because you only have free speech as long as the site provider agrees with what you say and do. If there's a sponsor involved, there's a cost. I'd prefer strings-free grants and private tiny micropayments because that way there's no fiscal hold over the group.
Getting the idea? I. WANT. YOU. to contact me, join the group email or the Discord server, organise any other means of collaboration you think would work, and to help run such a large widely-spread-out group of activists.
There. I've said it. It's an activist group, to start putting the brakes on rampant capitalism and authoritarianism, to chain the corporations and stop them destroying our homeworld / spacecraft as it's the only one we have.
And If You've Read Down This Far
Then I'd better list some stuff here. I'll start with the contact deets:
- Mastodon. Chat with me.
- Email. Write to me.
- Discord. Join the Discord server.
- Email Group. Join the group and get to read and reply to everyone's messages.
- PTEC3D Blog About recycling, and PTECH3D generally
- TEdALOG Lite II A more personal but still activist blog
- TEdADYNE Systems Cyber, AI, Ethics, EVs and any other bits
- Body Friendly Zen Cookbook Planet friendly Zen and activism
- TEdAMENU Tuckertime Recipes, health
- Grumpy Old Guy Energy, sustainability, government activism
- OHaiCorona.com I panicked, okay? And so this is my COVID react blog
And then some sundry stuff that's less important but you may want:
- Blog Newsletter Once a week only, get all posts in an email you can then delete at your leisure...
- Blog Aggregator Bookmark this link if you just want to see a running list of posts om the above blogs.
- Youtube I have a (little-used) channel
- Peertube The same content also goes here on an independent video site.
- Ko-Fi page You can make a one-off or repeating donation here.
- Paypal Direct Or you can just Paypal me a donation.
I stress that any donations I currently get are flat out just paying a small part of the hosting and domain name fees, and if we get a group together we can redirect all these donations to a group fund. But for now, even a few bucks a month means I don't have to shell out for hosting, or can actually buy a few parts to keep building projects towards recycling etc.
Also, one of the many docs I've been working on, a freebie Milanote. Basically, this outlines the various facets of attack on all the issues mentioned above. It has cards for ZFF (Zero Fossil Fuel), ENERGY, RCX (ReCycle eXtreme - bear with me, I like acronyms...) FOOD POLITICS, STEWARDSHIP, and More Thoughts. The cards are just outlines of some of the issues to do with each, and very little in the way of solutions. I do have some of those, but they're all just ideas and nothing too closely or deeply planned because - everything is subject to change, alteration, suggestions, and scrapping if needs be. These are things I'd like to throw into the Discord server, or the email group, or whatever we come up with, and let various moderators/discussion participants ruin with or replace with something else that works better.
And now there are two more topics that I'll be adding - AI and SPACE. Therre's not much we can do - yet - but they'll raise other issues. So by the time you read that Milanote, it may well have a few more cards...
So this is it - the start of a Whole New Thing, I hope... Over to you all!
No comments:
Post a Comment