fwiw, this story is also covered here, imho a more credible source: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/1/palestinians-demand-international-inquiry-after-mass-grave-found-in-gaza

gotta admit, that is a lot safer approach than trying some shit on the real thing

Have you tried your hand at biochar? I know composting the chips for mulch is high value in a farm operation, but a few tons of biochar can work like a permanent upgrade - improving the soil permanently with one addition - though ongoing permaculture operation continues. I am about to make a biochar cooker out of two steel barrels - inner fuel chamber and outer draft shell. It would probably be more effective with wood scraps than chips though - some air passages through the fuel.

To test it out for myself, I made a miniature version documented at https://github.com/jcadej/TLUD-biochar-reactor (uses a gallon paint can for the fuel chamber. You could test it small and see how it does with wood chips. When I make my bigger version, I will add it to the github project. My rough idea is to cut one barrel down the side and squeeze it smaller and bolt it so it fits inside the other.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/36/37/42/36374294e5183a96de3e3e6696f4d3ad.jpg

I am investigating some components of a system to make biochar with a solar concentrator but it is slow going. My idea is to circulate molten salt through the focus zone of a double-parabola channel. This focuses heat on the target pipe for a broad range of sun angles with no tracking. I have read that a eutectic mix of sodium carbonate and potassium carbonate (aka soda ash and potash, respectively) has a melting point under 500C, and fast pyrolysis is possible with molten salt at this temperature. I am trying to find information about electromagnetic pumping (aka magnetohydrodynamic pumping, just like Red October!) but there are very few such devices sold - mainly for continuous metal casting, apparently. If molten salt could be heated by sun and fast pyrolysis could be done (which makes a larger fraction of pyrolysis oil than slower processes would do), then there would be very little emissions and very little waste heat I think. Still some steam I suppose.

I think there was a time when he could have apologized for a dumb mistake and everyone would have moved on. It is world news now because HE chose another and unfortunate path - which probably has no route back to the sunlit lands.

Yes, that would be infuriating.

In my experience with limited diets, it is always advisable to take in as much variety as possible. So even if I only had milk and potatoes, for example, I would scavenge for some edible greens to add. Nutrition is not just about amino acids - there is a whole range of vitamins, minerals, and other less well known substances in foods that keep us healthy. I think if a person is down to having only one of your listed parings available to eat, they have a lot of problems to solve!

I lived a number of years in the rural Dominican Republic, and befriended some very poor Haitians who migrated there illegally. They subsisted on rice and beans to a great extent, but substituted a variety of other starch vegetables (green banana, various root vegetables, bread) when they could - and also learned through community collaboration, which wildly growing green plants were palatable. They would also sometimes buy the local “sausage” which contained about 10% meat byproducts, and the rest was mostly rice with probably some corn and other grains and spices). My point is that nobody reading this is ever likely to be as destitute as an illegal Haitian living off the land, but they still ate a somewhat varied diet.

Governments have always hired “contractors” for various services. So having some interactions with private business in the course of government dealings is not new. But there has been more privatization of services in the past century and I think particularly in the last few decades. In some respects, privatization can be a more economical way for a government to deliver a service - despite that the private company extracts a profit. But there are also many examples of privatization leading to excess costs. I think personally that privatization causes some of the same symptoms in the private firm as having monopoly power.

But the power of the government to coerce your cooperation undoubtedly extends to their hired minions.

Yes, the house here in Puerto Rico is also off-grid (though we have a connection available, just not in use). We moved in 2021, thinking the house would be very easy to sell, but we’ve never been able to get a real estate agent – it is too far out in the country! I had no idea Dominican real estate agents were so well off!

Sometimes it feels like the phrase “offgrid living” is almost entirely an American-English phrase. There are some UK-based off-grid discussion, but more than 90% of the time when I’d see this expression on reddit, there was an implicit assumption of US-centeredness. I lived off-grid a substantial portion of my life and it has almost all been outside the USA. So while I applaud those who manage to escape grid-dependence in the USA, for a person thinking of how to do it; I want to remind them that the first simplifying step can sometime be to simply go somewhere it is more easily achieved.

If you are not actually boiling the water during heating season, then just warming it is actually going to increase bacterial growth rather than decrease it. Also, heating will cause convection currents in the tank which will act to stir sediments.

Agreed. I am adding a relay to my system that will alert me and enable grid-power and battery charging when my LiFePO4 battery bank drops below 50V. One would expect that inverter manufacturers would include such a feature in inverters, or at least in the system control panels that one must pay extra to have, but there is nothing like that in my lousy Schneider system except one aux output on the MPPT controller. I sometimes feel I am using their equipment in a way they never dreamed it would be used.

Thanks! I will update when I know the outcome.

Thanks! Great info. You are right, I have lifepo4’s -two sets of 4x12V paralleled. There is an app with them to check the internal cell voltages, overall voltage of each unit, state of charge and number of cycles.

You mention the big current that can arise from paralleling batteries - are you suggesting a series-parallel wiring? I have had a lead-acid bank like that previously with cross-connections between series groups at each voltage level. Those cables were usually carrying small currents when all the batteries were in good condition. In a healthy lifepo4 bank with voltages even, could I set that up and would it help? Would a load resistor help (it normally would only see small voltage drops on the order of 0.1 or 0.2 volts, so a load resistor of a few ohms would pass very little current. I have also asked this question to the battery vendor. Awaiting their reply.

When I purchased the first four batteries, I bought a “balancer” from the vendor (KiloVault via AltEStore), but after a year it melted and they said a)it was no longer sold, b) it was not necessary, and c)I could have my money back. So that was fine. But now I am thinking it is time to look into this balancer concept again! I dabbled with an Arduino one time, but I hope there will be an off-the-shelf solution.

I had a good bit of fault tolerance with my last system using lead-acid batteries. If there were low power and the system shut down; it would do so when some big load started and caused a low-threshold to trigger. But the batteries would not be quite dead. So by disconnnecting loads, I could restore inverter function. In the case of these smart batteries; they are not so easily fooled: once they decide they are done, there is no getting a little more from them :( I guess in that sense they are quite binary.

I commented on OP

I think it depends on the country to a large degree. In industrialized nations, regulations are much more complex and surface- and ground-water protections tend to be more stringent. In more agricultural locales, the issue becomes one of not creating a nuisance or hazard with one’s waste, more than complying with the letter of a regulation. But you still need some means of managing waste - septic tanks are common because they are effective, but they depend on an abundant supply of water. If there is not water to flush, there will not be a septic tank.

This is an interesting project. Thanks for sharing it