They would, but if I’m surreptitiously installing something to make a point, I’m not sure I want to start drilling into concrete. Maybe with a high vis vest during the workday.

Thanks, this was an unusually decent interaction all around

Fair enough. Personally I’m skeptical that there is a “passive corrective method” for individuals to fix problems in either system (maybe a socialist can identify one for us). There aren’t many passive solutions at all.

The way to fix these problems in either system is through regulation, governance, and collective action. People just buying other products hasn’t worked to correct the flaws in capitalism, regulation has, so you might as well go straight to that either way.

It’s to peoples’ best interest to choose a better product if they:

1. even know there’s a problem in the first place. Corporations have a long history of covering up faults in their products, sometimes for decades, before independent tests or reporting reveal them (during which time they’re outcompeting more legitimate competition on price).
2. competing products exist. Monopolies are a natural outgrowth of unregulated markets. It’s always more profitable not to have to compete so endless mergers are a threat which have to be regulated but frequently arent. It’s also much easier for an entrenched institution to crush or buy out new startups before they can become a problem. Add in collusion where companies that compete on paper secretly agree not to undercut each others prices and you end up with a market where there is no real competition and no need for costly innovation. And though regulatory capture may not exist in a truly unregulated free market, we certainly see it in real life, where superior foreign products can be outright banned from a market, the entrenched industry’s products made artificially cheap through subsidies, and new safety laws kept off the books to protect the corporate bottom line.
3. the competing product is actually superior. We frequently see a race to the bottom effect where most people consistently choose the cheapest product available (often because wages have been stagnant for generations and they’re poor enough that they legitimately can’t afford better) and better, safer, more ethical products are simply priced out of the market, whereupon the companies making them either start cutting corners themselves or go out of business. And we can refer back to point one where just because one product has been revealed to be unsafe doesn’t guarantee that the competitor hasn’t managed to hide an unknown hazard in theirs.

Asking regular people, many of whom are perpetually overworked and exhausted, to extensively research every product that’s made it to market (and to overcome marketing, illegal concealment of hazards, and collusion) strikes me as a kind of Just World Falicy thing, where the ‘opportunity’ to simply buy a better product becomes a chance to blame people for the bad things that happen to them. They should simply have bought a test kit and figured out that there was lead contamination in their baby formula. They should have studied auto accident statistics from the last five years to notice that that particular model routinely explodes in a fireball with the doors jammed. What did they expect buying something without doing their own research?

They also ignore that companies will cheerfully skimp on safety to save a buck and then spend far more than they saved fighting legal battles against the government to prevent or delay relevant regulations, against their own customers (or their next of kin) who have been harmed by their products, and against any kind of criminal prosecution. They’ll also spend millions on marketing to minimize awareness or the severity of the problem and to actively increase sales of the dangerous product. It’s not exactly an environment designed for fair and informed decision making.

Speaking of unfair, the history of monopolies, market collusion, and the race to the bottom have given us plenty of examples of companies removing that choice of product quality from the board entirely. If the people making the unsafe or unethical thing buy out all the competition and eliminate or cheapen the former competition’s products until the have the same problems, there’s no choice. If the competition look at the market and realize they can also take unsafe shortcuts and remain competitive, there’s no choice.

There’s a long history of rich people framing exploitation as the freedom to choose to accept a dangerous product or job or place to live. After all, if people are poor and desperate and propagandized enough there’ll always be someone to make that choice. And the lower they drive the quality of life, the more people will have to choose the same. But it’s not about saving you money. They’re not doing you a favor. It’s about saving money for themselves and framing things so you thank them for it.

Editing to add this link from another comment because I had no idea that (of course) there’s organized opposition by entrenched interests to prevent anything for the public good https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/06/dark-roof-lobby-white-reflective-roofs-laws-lobbying-urban-heat-islands/

I don’t think the current roofs are painted black - they’re naturally black because roofing tar and asphalt shingles are black by default (a lot of sheet metal roofing is too but you can at least get that in most colors). So it’s not a matter of swapping out paint but adding something new. It also adds a new maintenance cost - keeping the white roof clean/maintained. Paint flakes off, tarps etc wear and become tattered, dirt and pollen collect on the surface. None of this is a dealbreaker by any means but our society seems to run on defaults and there’s a lot of inertia in construction and a lot of pressure on builders to keep materials costs down (even if doing so costs the owners or occupants more in the long run).

I hope this continues to take off because it really is a big improvement.

Such a great project!

Sounds like ‘installed’ might be overselling it a little unfortunately - given that jerks carried them off. There are a few types of epoxy that could help. Pretty sure even JB Weld will stick wood to concrete. And they make some amazing specialist adhesives. It won’t stop the city but might delay the NIMBYs for a day or two. (Especially if they’re as old as I am and they throw their back out trying to pick it up the first time).

The reasons I’ve seen mostly have to do with upfront cost and convenience for maintenance. Support structures for solar panels can be pretty crude and basic if they’re just sitting low on a field. For a parking lot you need a much taller structure which will likely deal with more wind, but which is also designed to minimize the number of support posts so it’s not in the way, and to survive idiots running into it with their Ford fteen thousand.

If something goes wrong in a field the crew can just drive there and start working. If there’s a problem with the panels over a parking lot they may need to clear part of the lot, bring in bucket lifts, etc.

It can definitely be done and I think it’s a great idea all around but they’re usually looking with an eye towards how quickly the project pays for itself.

That seems like it would work quite well! Especially if the patio screen guarantees other critters won’t try to come in.

Not sure what tools you have access to but If you have a table saw you can cut a notch into the wood for the plexi before you assemble the frame.

I just helped my folks turn a porch into a catio - we used a layer of chicken wire on the inside with a layer of fabric bug screen on the outside. Years ago one of our cats got startled and ran right through a screen on our screen porch (fell one story into deep snow and kept right on going. He was fine, my dad was pissed). For this one we built wooden frames and stapled the screen and chicken wire on and attached those to the porch with wood screws. You could run slats from house to fence for support.

This is cool, kind of a small scale version of resin and fiberglass! Thanks!

Boss makes a dollar…

If it works, I’ll share any designs and lessons learned here!

I was wondering if it was something like this, thanks! I’ll see if I can get enough of it off to see if the main sheet is a fresnel lens

I’m clear on the other side of the continent but I really appreciate it, thank you! I hope you can find someone who’ll use it! And I’ll definitely post my progress!

Thanks! I’m hoping to build a solar forge - I used to do some blacksmithing using coal, but some videos of these things show them burning through steel - if they can get that hot, I could even forge weld again. I’ve still got most of my tools, minus the forge.

Honestly a utility vehicle that isn’t a surveillance box is like all I want from an electric vehicle

We had a kitchen scale with a damaged control panel - the on/off button stopped working. I opened it up, cut one of the battery wires, and soldered in a switch. Cut a hole in the case with an xacto knife, glued the switch through it and put it all back together. Now it has a hardware power switch. If you’re comfortable with basic soldering, maybe that would work for you?

It’s definitely getting harder and harder to draw genre boundaries - cyberpunk quietly infiltrated mainstream scifi to the point where you can find cyberpunk elements in almost any modern scifi. Not bad for a subgenre the corporations and marketers misused and overused until it crashed. I remember people talking about it like a joke in the 2000s so I’m very pleased it won in the end (though I wish people treated it more like a warning than a roadmap).

I can definitely see the inclination not to include Murderbot (I thought twice about including it on the list) mostly because it doesn’t feel cyberpunk. It’s very clean, there’s no sense of decline or collapse the corps are ruling over, and the locations by and large don’t fit the usual. Heck one area is lowkey solarpunk. I think it has a ton of cyberpunk elements, story beats, etc, but it’s almost fridge cyberpunk, you have to walk away and think about it before enough of them line up. And feel is a big part of the genre, I think.

I think Gibson stories are my main reread, partly because I think they work a little better when you already half remember what’s going on.

I also reread the Murderbot books quite often, they’re kind of comfort food stories for me.

I rewatch Cowboy Bebop sometimes for the same reason.

I reread the webcomic Black & Blue fairly often but that’s mostly because the person making it has been absolutely hammering out pages for years now and I almost always need to reread before I can catch up.