Powerless

And my penalty for being off the interweb for 24 hours: 31 unfiltered spammails

Things I would miss most in a world without readily available electric power:

1. Hot water on tap
2. The internet
3. Light without smoke

Not terribly surprising, I suppose, but there you go. Its not actually that hard to live this way for a day, but there are a lot of things that only show up in the long term: hot baths become weekly affairs, not daily; traveling 3000 miles to see your parents takes a week by rail; it takes a week to let your friends know, individually, by postal mail, what you have been up to.

And did I mention...while living without direct use of electricity and fossil fuels would be annoying, living without their indirect use would be nearly impossible. Without cheap available power, a bunch of products don't exist, and those that do cost orders of magnitude more to produce, since manual labor is once again king. Iron pans? I might be able to afford one. Books? Perhaps a few. My bicycle, ever-reliable source of cheap rapid transit? Weighs twice as much and is in constant need of repair. Cheap, refined soy protein? Not to be found!

Read the rest of my meandering thoughts from the day in the last post