How techie are you?

[Jada59]

If it weren't for Internet, I could see myself easily living off the grid. The house that I grew up in was not on the main line so we often lost power for two weeks at a time. I'm used to it!

I do have an Iphone. I didn't initially want it but we got a family/everything data plan so I had to get a smartphone because that was cheaper than a separate plan for my flip phone. I do use the Iphone and like it. But..

That's about as far as I'll go. My theory is, the less bells and whistles, the less to go wrong or break.

I was at a Christmas party and the host had a 3D printer. He made baby Yodas and a little black cat for me. Uh... Um... Uh... Why? Why do I need this? I got me a real black cat.

I also don't want to talk to a device and make it do things for me. Nope. I'm not that lazy.

How about you?

 

[Conager]

I've been connected to the internet since about 1989. I am a Luddite, now. I haven't opened either my netbook or my laptop in at least two, maybe three years. If I cannot do something on my relatively small phone screen, I don't do it.

The last time I ordered something from Amazon all they sold at the time were books.

The last time I sold something on eBay was probably at least 10 years ago; maybe 15.

I've taken to collecting vintage technology. I have an awful lot of analog tech.

I have had a my eye on a Toyota 4 wheel drive for over a year but I've hesitated buying it. It's newer than my last Toyota and I'm seriously considering going older. Something carbureted with points for ignition.

I own a TV and a DVD player. I own several VCRs a various configurations, most of them in storage the one that I have available I'd does not rewind which is kind of a problem. My television isn't connected to anything other than the DVD player and I rarely watch it myself.

I've had satellite radio but these days I make do with whatever comes over the am or FM airwaves...and only in the car. I have set up several different radios and stereos in the house and hopes that I might occasionally use them but I find that I rarely do. I've got components for a fairly high-end 90s style stereo that I do nothing with as well as two or three turntables somewhere. I've got vinyl I've got player piano rolls I've got one of those really thick records not sure what they are or what they play on. I have quite a few 8-track cartridge has carefully selected to be 8-track groovy. Some I got specifically for an 8-track player hypothetically installed in some future hypothetical truck.

I prefer to read actual books but I've got about 15 of them on my bedside table that I haven't gotten too so there's something that kind of disconnect going on there as well. What I really want to read are a stack of daily newspapers but none of them exist that I would actually want to bother to read. Maybe I should get a subscription to the Wall Street Journal again it's been years.

I've considered picking up a vintage iPod and loading it but I don't really feel like learning how to use one. I put up with you too when I want to see or hear something specific but it's irritating to have an ad for each thing that I want to watch or listen to. I would probably be willing to pay to have that not happen except for the fact that that's what they promised us with cable TV and that certainly didn't last it it?

The problem with technology is it's ever-changing and not in universally better and more efficient ways. The learning curve for whatever the next application or device is far steeper than its utility.

 

[Conager]

Completely off the grid I could definitely do. I'm a big fan of hot water though so I'd have to have either a water source or a small tanker truck. I'm sure I could jury-rig something with a pump and some kind of wood-fired boiler.

My mom belong to some kind of book of the month club that frequently ordered far more than one book. I read all of them. One of them I was particularly taken with was a book on pioneering. How to build stone walls how to build your own transit to level at a distance. Some of the things that I know how to do probably came out of that book but I can't really remember specifics. Long before I ever heard the word bucket list it's been on my bucket list to just get a chunk of ground in the middle of nowhere and build something with what I find on hand.

My immediate neighbor was a landscaper but I think these days he's probably more of an arborist although I don't think he would call himself that. Essentially he's been cutting down trees that have died, cutting them into pieces bringing them into the yard and then when the pile of logs gets to be too much, he puts a ad on Craigslist or something and strangers show up and make lots of noise in the middle of the afternoon when I'm sleeping to haul these logs away to do whatever is the strangers do with the logs. I'm considering buying a hydraulic log splitter and taking all that wood off his hands and starting some sort of firewood business but the other idea that I've got is to go with him with some sort of jury-rigged portable sawmill and cut these big trees into something interesting. Maybe make myself a post and beam constructed workshop.

 

[CandiCame]

I just got me one of those smart thermostats so I can tell my digital assistant what temperature I want the house to be by the time I walk in from where I'm unloading the car.

Which is great because I'm off the grid and this new heat pump would drain the system if we didn't do that. It monitors it even when there's nobody at the house and sends me a constant feed.

I've also got a doorbell camera and a new security system that works with the game cams that I use with the phone apps.

I don't understand the connection between, "lack of technology" and "off the grid".

I don't even know why people who are on the grid have smart houses. To save money? Like if it's not your system you don't need 99% of the shit it does. Like I have city water so I don't have a well monitoring system like I would if I cut that tie. But like if I bought meat I wouldn't have game cams. If I bought electricity I wouldn't have a smart thermostat and other smart electric shit to monitor and cut back on my electric. Because I'm literally outsourcing that to somebody. I mean, again, maybe if you wanted to save money or save energy for green reasons; but most electric companies charge you an average, not the amount you actually use.

So like... yeah, I don't get the connection. I'm about as off the grid as I can be without poisoning myself and my family so I use MORE tech than most folks. Like... when you're off the grid you really have to watch yourself more than folks who are on the grid. It's not like, "Well if I use too much power it'll be more expensive," it's, "well if I use too much power, fuck me I guess, I just don't have any now. Guess I'll just fucking die because I live in a temperate climate and it's December. Let's all huddle around the wood stove because daddy's an idiot. Merry Fucking Christmas."

 

[IrezumiKiss]

tech, eh?

well, I like — nay, lurve — the lightspeed accessibility of watching and reading smut whenever I like. When you mostly live in the erotic, that's a sweet boon.

oh yeah, that whole making one's work/career in a visual industry more streamlined and communicating with other bipedal mammals with opposable thumbs and what not, especially when forming gaming societies, that's cool too...I guess.

https://media3.giphy.com/media/26gR1wYpogPiJQuwo/source.gif

 

[CandiCame]

tech, eh?

well, I like — nay, lurve — the lightspeed accessibility of watching and reading smut whenever I like. When you mostly live in the erotic, that's a sweet boon.

oh yeah, that whole making one's work/career in a visual industry more streamlined and communicating with other bipedal mammals with opposable thumbs and what not, especially when forming gaming societies, that's cool too...I guess.

https://media3.giphy.com/media/26gR1wYpogPiJQuwo/source.gif

I'm a fan of the various medical advancements.

 

[Conager]

I'm a fan of the various medical advancements.

I'm of the not very informed but intuitively "known" belief that a lot of modern medicine is only needed because of modern "food."

Logically speaking that can't be true because paleo humans had paleo diets and they certainly didn't outlive us. My operating theory is that if I increase the percentage of foods that I consume that don't come with excessive packaging and preservatives that I will extend my life.

In order to test my theory I'm going to need a time machine and some paleo humans to study. I figure if I just show up with nothing but some worst-case antibiotics and antiseptics and some basic surgical implements that I can have them living longer than us.

 

[Jada59]

Thanks for your input. Our temperatures are somewhat mild. Many years I've not used heat at all. Depends on where I lived. This house does seem to get colder than some places I've lived. Like apartments.

 

[CandiCame]

I'm of the not very informed but intuitively "known" belief that a lot of modern medicine is only needed because of modern "food."

Logically speaking that can't be true because paleo humans had paleo diets and they certainly didn't outlive us. My operating theory is that if I increase the percentage of foods that I consume that don't come with excessive packaging and preservatives that I will extend my life.

In order to test my theory I'm going to need a time machine and some paleo humans to study. I figure if I just show up with nothing but some worst-case antibiotics and antiseptics and some basic surgical implements that I can have them living longer than us.

Jesus fucking Christ.

I'd love to see this particular breed of dumbassery try to survive without the centuries of agricultural science our ancestors have gifted us with.

Even hunting and foraging is easier now because of agricultural science. Almost all of our food is more nutritious. Every cave person that has ever been found has had massive vitamin D deficiencies, for example; which makes your teeth rot out, which is a big part of why the life expectancy was like 30. You can't absorb calcium without the D and it's found in almost no food. We supplement it now in milk, cereal, and whatnot. You had to get that shit from sunlight; which didn't give you radiation posioning as fast back then because we hadn't actively destroyed the ozone; but it was still standing out in a field of radiation that was killing you hoping you'd get enough to survive and failing bigger than hell. B12 is another one that almost nobody had until vitamin supplementation became a thing because you can almost only get it from meat and then only in a half-assed form that's hard to break down; and that was in a world where you got your meat from dire deer that were bigger than cars back when you were lucky to get it once a month and half the men in the tribe died trying to get it.

Y'all need to be thankful for what you have. This shit kills me.

Them antibiotics gonna save you from scurvy? Polio? Whooping cough? There's a reason we're living longer now than at any time in the past. It's because most of the shit that used to be a death sentence can be avoided with a shot and people's bones grow right because nutrition is so much better.

Hell, here in Kentucky, the technological advancement of wearing a goddamn pair of shoes, which for some reason didn't catch on until the 80s, is the single biggest life saving device in our history. Parasites were our leading cause of death for centuries; these worms people got from running around barefoot. So better take a good pair of shoes back with you because antibiotics ain't gonna do shit against those parasites. There's a specific bug poison you gotta take, like right now. Like I have had this and didn't die from it, when I was a kid, because that's just a huge fucking thing here. And let's not pretend that a good pair of shoes isn't technology. That took a while. Dollar Tree flip flops save lives.

 

[Conager]

Depends on which apartment and how warm your neighbors like it. The closest I've ever come to actually living in an apartment was prefab army barracks style company "man-camp" other than the occasional night at my then fiance's place or a few months I spent couchsurfing at a friend's half of a company duplex.

My fiance had a second floor apartment. The place had industrial central heating and air included. Plenty warm (overly so) in winter. Hard to cool in the summer.

This place is drafty, likely no attic insulation. As long as I've been rebuilding this place for the landlord I've considered taking a peek up there and adding some blown in insulation.

 

[CandiCame]

Thanks for your input. Our temperatures are somewhat mild. Many years I've not used heat at all. Depends on where I lived. This house does seem to get colder than some places I've lived. Like apartments.

I live in the middle of nowhere, in a forest, in the woodlands. It's cold as the last circle of Dante's hell here. There's this thing on the news where people's animals are freezing to death, because apparently I live in the middle of a bunch of cruel fuckwads who are leaving dogs outside in the snow to freeze to death. That's how we're living here. That pissed me off; I heard that on the radio today and it made me want to kill somebody. Like you know there's snow on the ground; why the fuck did you leave your dog out in it?

Edit: I mention this because it ties in with my smart thermostat. I don't have to leave it turned up like I do for humans, because dogs can withstand MORE cold than humans; but I can change it throughout the day to keep it above, "my pets will freeze to death" levels. Even if I'm not home. So I can change the heat without draining my system.

 

[Conager]

Dollar Store flip flops save lives.

You can't tell me that the wheat that we eat now is more enutritious than the wheat from 50 years ago. All that selective breeding now is for crop yield it has nothing to do with nutrition.

Being able to transport fruits and vegetables year-round or having them in your freezer or even canned helps of course.

So I'll bring some vitamin B12 and several gallons of vitamin D fortified milk with me.

 

[Conager]

And some old tires to make rubber tire sandals.

 

[CandiCame]

Dollar Store flip flops save lives.

You can't tell me that the wheat that we eat now is more enutritious than the wheat from 50 years ago. All that selective breeding now is for crop yield it has nothing to do with nutrition.

Being able to transport fruits and vegetables year-round or having them in your freezer or even canned helps of course.

So I'll bring some vitamin B12 and several gallons of vitamin D fortified milk with me.

The wheat you'd see then wouldn't be worth eating. It's literally little tiny granules on stalks with almost no nutritional value. We've got GMO records on that shit literally as early as written language started developing in Europe. Wheat is one of the crops that we jumped on as soon as we could, because we need it to live, but it was absolute shit and we basically had to graze like cattle before we started breeding it for yield.

You understand that there was a reason famine and starvation used to be leading causes of death, right?

 

[Conager]

The wheat you'd see then wouldn't be worth eating. It's literally little tiny granules on stalks with almost no nutritional value. We've got GMO records on that shit literally as early as written language started developing in Europe. Wheat is one of the crops that we jumped on as soon as we could, because we need it to live, but it was absolute shit and we basically had to graze like cattle before we started breeding it for yield.

You understand that there was a reason famine and starvation used to be leading causes of death, right?

.. but we have jumped the shark on availability and affordability of calories. Red is attractive and green is repulsive because we needed to know how to find calories easily and avoid wasting effort on celery. Now we have to supplement with rabbit food just to get enough roughage and to trim our calorie intake to something reasonable. Well, that is unless you want to just go ahead and live for decades as Rob did morbidly obese and then have that shit surgically removed and your stomach stapled and tucked.

 

[CandiCame]

.. but we have jumped the shark on availability and affordability of calories. Red is attractive and green is repulsive because we needed to know how to find calories easily and avoid wasting effort on celery. Now we have to supplement with rabbit food just to get enough roughage and to trim our calorie intake to something reasonable. Well, that is unless you want to just go ahead and live for decades as Rob did morbidly obese and then have that shit surgically removed and your stomach stapled and tucked.

You want your wheat to be high calorie. Like... I don't understand what you're trying to say. That you think it's better to starve because your nutrients are spaced out because the food is so shitty? Like wheat is calorie dense anyway; you actually get fewer calories and more nutrition now then you did with wild wheat that we cultivated. Because you have to eat less of it but the overall caloric intake (to get the same amount of nutrients) has gone down.

We're not supplementing with rabbit food; humans are supposed to have a mostly plant based diet. We're supplementing with meat. You're not supposed to live on double bacon cheeseburgers and fried chicken any more than you're supposed to live on cake. If you've got so much sugar in your blood vampires are calling you Kool-Aid that's on you, not on the advancements we've made to sugar cane.

But the carrot you're eating now is a lot more nutritious than a wild carrot. That's why it's so much oranger. Having more beta carotene makes it orange. And we didn't even do that on purpose. We didn't know at the time that being orange meant being good for you, the people who did that did it because the people in the Netherlands who were growing carrots had a royal family called Orange-Nassau and the color is named after them and they just loved the shit out of the color orange. It just coincidentally was also the healthiest; so people in other countries noticed it was better for them, that they could get more nutrients from the orange carrots, and started buying the shit out of them. Carrots used to be purple and shitty.

Just like eggplants used to be egg shaped and shitty and nanners used to have almost no nutrients and be 90% shitty seeds. Nanners we did kinda back ourselves into a corner with- like our nanners are the most nutritious, but they're also the least hearty, because we sacrificed heartiness for taste and nutrition; and you know what loves taste and nutrients as much as humans? Literally all the bugs. All of them. So there was a pestilence upon nanners so bad it caused a war with nanner shortages as the primary cause; which I know because the Donkey Kong series is based on the banana wars. But we, as a species, learned from that to have a backup version of any GMO crop. Because it only takes one, "Oh shit we could actually almost run out of nanners" to make us realize we need at least two strands of any given crop in case we lose one.

Edit: Also, unless there's something actively preventing you from doing it, you can try getting off your ass and burning some calories. Help your mom move in the snow and pack some coal in for your grandparents. Then you can eat whatever the fuck you want. I've been eating doughnuts for breakfast for the past week and I'm still a fuckin twig person.

Edit: And that should show you how dedicated I am to eating like shit, because I have a partial and if you want chocolate and sugar mushed into a film of nastyness and then stuck between your teeth and your gums to the point that you have to take your teeth out and brush them afterwards; that's the perfect way to do that. And it's nasty. And if you're me, you're running around the house trying to get people to look at how nasty it is until they all get real mad at you and somehow you find this hilarious.

 

[Conager]

https://www.daily-choices.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/44237/25-7.jpg

Just bumped into this.

Seemed topical.

 

[CandiCame]

https://www.daily-choices.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/44237/25-7.jpg

Just bumped into this.

Seemed topical.

Ah shit, that reminds me- with the aforementioned parasite thing better bring some fuckin water purifiers because for most of human history we drank alcohol exclusively because the water was straight up nasty. The only way we had to even half sterilize it was to make it so alcoholic nothing could live in it.

Edit: So another piece of tech to be thankful for- water purification techniques. Be that an actual plant or camping filters; don't drink the water. Living as I do in the mountains it is absolutely buckwild to me to see water sold as 'spring water' because spring water is full of parasites and coal slurry. Don't drink that shit. I've seen tourists drink that shit. Do you want cancer and dysentery? Because that's how you fuckin get it.

 

[Liar]

I was at a Christmas party and the host had a 3D printer. He made baby Yodas and a little black cat for me. Uh... Um... Uh... Why? Why do I need this? I got me a real black cat.

Dunno. Why would anyone want...stuff? It's no different than porcelain figurines, or paintings for the walls or other superficial tat.

I also don't want to talk to a device and make it do things for me. Nope. I'm not that lazy.

It's not even lazyness. I'm lazy as hell, and if I can chosse between yapping at Alexa to turn on the lights, or just push a button, the button is less effort and quicker.

 

[Conager]

Dunno. Why would anyone want...stuff? It's no different than porcelain figurines, or paintings for the walls or other superficial tat.

It's not even lazyness. I'm lazy as hell, and if I can chosse between yapping at Alexa to turn on the lights, or just push a button, the button is less effort and quicker.

I wonder if that's a word choice or if you literally have more of a button than a rocker switch for your lights? I know your outlets are different but it never occurred to me to wonder what your light switches are like.

 

[about_average]

Depends on how you define techie.
I work in IT so that's pretty techie, but don't need the latest gadgets in my house or car or life.
If it's tech and actually serves a useful purpose I will consider it, but I definitely am no awed by tech other than on a theoretical level.

My newest car is a '98 and even that has too much tech in it.

I have no interest in "smart" anything, more from a security standpoint, but really I don't need to be able to check what's in my fridge while I'm on holiday in Jamaica. Or even while at the grocery store.

I've heated with wood since 1974 and harvest it myself, our gas furnace doesn't even work.
We have a large garden and grow a lot of our own food.

I lived in a cabin in Vermont in 93/94 with no utilities, including no running water except a pipe from the spring up the mountain, needed 4WD to drive to the cabin and bathed in a galvanized tub by the woodstove. I was quite content.

 

[Liar]

I wonder if that's a word choice or if you literally have more of a button than a rocker switch for your lights? I know your outlets are different but it never occurred to me to wonder what your light switches are like.

Nah switches of some design are standard for domestic wiring. But I have some dimmers that are plain buttons. Tap for on or off, hold for cycled dimming.

I also have fancy-ass smart lightbulbs in some rooms that I can control from my phone, or if I wanted to, by voice. But I have those mapped to wall mounted buttons too.

The reason I have those lights is not particulaly nerdy. I live way north with long, dark winters. I can control the color temperature of those bulbs, meaning I can get more sunlight-y wavelenthts indoors at this time of year.

 

[Biggs_Darklighter]

Non-invasive tech is fine and fun. The more invasive stuff like Home or Alexa and a lot of the "smart" shit needs to stay away. I won't have it in my house and I think people who do are stupid.

 

[lovetoread]

i am a tech, so im very techie

 

[Mtnmike]

Guess I'm just old fashioned, I have a remote for the t.v., a flip phone and a tablet and still can't operate them real well.