Can you provide a link to your “passive hydro” guide? Sounds very interesting :)

In general I’m interested in learning some non-soil method that is still forgiving, does not need special tech (like pumps and stuff) and ideally not much more maintenance than a soil grow. Maybe I’m asking for something impossible.

Btw, I do have Tropf-Blumat and was going to set it up indoors anyway, to automate and optimize watering. not sure whether it helps for hydro, if you always have to supply nutrients in the water (I would not put nutes into the normal watering tank). I got that, full spectrum lights and ventilation. That’s as “high-tech” as I wanted to get :D

I guess in any case I’m going to try Plagron or Masterblend then, you convinced me! Maybe I should not make my life more difficult than needed when just starting out.

In any case, thanks for the patience with a total newbie :)

Good to know about reusing soil, I always thought it’s wasteful and inconvenient to throw it away and in an actual garden nobody would do that. So I am also definitely going to try reusing soil I use in the pots, just bought a sieve to simplify the process of removing roots etc. from used soil.

Only 5% compost ? I don’t know how dense compost is, but typical suggested DIY mixes use more like 1/4-1/2 compost, by volume.

I was planning to do 1/3 coir for the loose structure, 1/3 of some perlite or similar, to hold water better, and 1/3 compost for initial nutrients, and then see how it behaves and adjust.

Would you recommend to use other proportions? I was going to experiment with the perlite percentage and see how it behaves with respect to watering etc. But with compost I really don’t know how I would even estimate how much I need to add so that a plant has enough “food” from seedling up to the first weeks of growth.

Would adding more compost to the mix simply extend the “nutrient store” for longer? I’ve read that you cannot so easily over-fertilize with compost / organic fertilizers, so I guess it’s then more about price/availability?

Is it cheaper or simpler to have less compost and more of that (I guess solid) slow release fertilizer, is that why 5% is enough?

That does sound very convenient. If I could mix some soil with slow release fertilizer and it would last the whole season, that sounds pretty awesome. I guess it’s released due to repeated watering? Or is it decomposing and releasing at its own pace? Like, do I have to worry about releasing too much if I water too much?

Thanks for suggesting the right search terms.

I almost expected that someone would say that.

I often end up reading university level stuff when researching a topic, but in areas that are far from my own academic background it’s pretty painful to try and piece together the kind of semi-rigorous understanding I’m looking for.

Wish there was more material available on that level of “studied some other STEM field, but did not and will not study this field so lacks a lot of details taken for granted in that area, yet wants to learn more depth than pop-sci and dummy tutorials provide” for various disciplines.

Thanks for the great reply! I just assumed that this community is probably bigger, but yeah maybe next time I should ask in the German one, talking about plants in english not knowing a lot of normal words from gardening is a bit annoying :D

I see that I have mixed up a lot of things, between things relevant for soil and hydro. So your recommendation seems to be not to try to mix because it is counter productive, and if I use some compost-based approach I should stick with organic fertilization? I guess I could try to do that on the balcony, where the plants will live by the normal sun and weather cycle. Then I’m gonna research a bit more about organic fertilization too. Soil feels like a “black box” and more of a vibe thing than an exact science and that makes it somewhat hard for me to get into.

Indoors I’m pretty interested in doing “hydro” in coco coir, because I can store a lot of it dry and compact in the basement for years and not worry about insects or mold.

With hydro stuff however I am worried that I become too dependent on some “fertilization system” supplier and if I only learn to paint-by-numbers I don’t learn any transferable knowledge, even though hydro seems to be much more precise. Like, are there vendor-independent hydroponics recommendations per plant? Or you always just pick some fertilizer brand and follow the instructions, regardless of plant? And I can read info about hydroponics and apply it to growing in coco or something else which is non soil or are there some caveats? Because I’m not planning to have a hydro tank system, just interested in non-soil substrates.

And a very stupid question: is “compo complete” a soil or a mineral fertilizer? I thought it was mineral which is intended for soil, and now I’m confused as you said not to do such things. Thought organic fertilizer must be some worm humus or plant material or other stuff they add into soil, like indirect complex compounds of something decaying which is broken down by micro organisms, and that liquids are always mineral NPK mixes with immediate availability, or is that assumption completely wrong?

The most “outdoor” I have is the balcony, so it will be a pot- and box-based little garden (some that will be permanently outside and some more movable).

Thanks for the tips! Good point, I also maybe should not overthink or over-engineer it. I’m a software engineer so maybe I approach this way too analytical :D

Oh great, thanks! I’ll check them out. All the blog tutorials only scratch the surface (while copying from each other), but it is hard to find a suitable book that is reasonably comprehensive, written by someone who really understands the topic, but also approachable for someone without a lot of experience.

I’m in multiple ways part of minorities, but luckily invisibly so, so I perfectly understand what you are saying with being “white” helping.

This year I started to learn some self defense, together with my wife. My gut feeling says we need to toughen up for whatever times are coming up, because in any case they won’t be good, that is for sure. I must say, no idea how much it would help in practice, and I hope to never find out, but it at least does help psychologically.

Having to watch all this insanity unfold on one hand slow motion (compared to movies) and also on ultra high speed (objectively / historically) and seeing where this is going without any ability to stop it leaves one feeling pretty helpless. Enact change… But how? Ultimately even hundreds of thousands protesters do not change a thing. We saw the same thing with climate change. Everybody knows what’s going on, nobody is really doing anything. Sadly, not only for such abstract threats but also very concrete and personified evils.

I think all we can do is try staying calm (but prepared) and remain decent human beings. I hope when the time comes I will have the courage and trust to help people who need and deserve it. Decent people helping each other could at some point be the only thing that remains, when all institutions have crumbed or gone rogue, and it’s crucial. Little actions by regular people can mean life or death. We cannot stop the storm, but we gotta try what we can in whatever sphere of personal influence we have. That’s all we can do and the best we can hope for. Everybody with a mind and heart keeping going and trying to do the right thing.

I wish you the best of luck to get through all this. Stay safe, stay sane.

Okay wow, thanks for the clarification. That is indeed weird. Yeah, then I guess I agree, it’s really … Just not very healthy behavior.

Okay I mean for some people maybe this whole Internet thing, becomes too much an end in itself, maybe they are missing something in life and trying to get it that way.

If you are employed, have family and/or friends and a hobby or two, how do you even have the time to mod dozens of subs and stuff like that?

So if they are doing it while being nice, one can actually say they could need some empathy. If they are not being nice, well, for such cases it might explain why the other things in life might be lacking.

Good one. I am the frame of reference myself… And we rewind time around me, kind of.

Okay, that at least does not sound so wrong like the “teleportation-style” approach!

What you say is like the extreme form of how time travel worked in Primer (the movie), which in fact is an interesting variation.

This is not wrong, but only in the sense of everything can be made money off. That’s just capitalism.

But apart from that, renewables are better for people, for the environment and for power distribution (no pun intended) because people can have solar energy themselves making energy more decentralized.

So what if somebody does get rich on solar and wind? Its important to not become too dependent on one Capitalist supplying some central piece of the non-fossil tech stack, for sure, but I think your simplification is not doing the whole topic justice and equating two very different things.

It’s like saying, plant based meat is bad because some capitalist is getting rich. Okay, rather keep eating meat, more than before, just to spite the evil startups producing veggie sausages!

My condolences from Europe. Most likely we will follow into the abyss like lemmings as usual, with a few years delay. US was always setting the trends for Europe, and I already worry about what happens in the old world pretty soonish as well.

German chancellor announced his crew. Blackrock and the gang. They will already start to strip social systems down, and the openly fascist party will use the growing discontent to seize power next time. Then fascists and oligarchs will finally kiss and unite, like in the US.

The whole “Western world” has this Virus right now, there is literally no escape. Because rest of the world has it even worse.

What a disappointing timeline to live in.

That is a rather toxic way of looking at the world. I get it, I kind of can rationally understand the idea that you can explain all selfless behavior as being selfish because the least you get out of it is dopamine, so you are wired to feel good doing what you think is right.

Now, can you tell me how this is just not a very shitty and cynical lens to view humans through? I’ve had my nihilistic phase in my 20’s. I hope you also find a way out of the hole of the “arbitrariness” of ethics.

Because each other is all we have, and ethics is ultimately what makes us human. The ability to reprogram our own pleasure circuit and maybe, just maybe, just use it to be not an asshole, just to start with. And then at some point just do something nice for others. Because if everybody did that, the world would not be the shithole it is.

I’m thankful to mods who volunteer their free time to tend to the garden of the communities they care about.

It’s the saddest part. He always said exactly what he was going to do. And Thiels plans were also known for years, in the open in obscure edgelord blogs. They all never made a secret out of their plans.

I wonder what else from the “crazy stuff he says” he will actually do at some point, like the famous “shooting some random person on the street” without consequences or something. Maybe in 2028.

I like https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe

Is ReVanced having any features I’m missing out on with NewPipe? (Serious question, never bothered trying ReVanced)

Is this maybe related to spin of particles that was considered to be “a kind of rotation momentum how it behaves mathematically but for all we know it does not literally represent any kind of rotation”…and it turns out it does in fact represent the fundamental rotation of the universe ?

Absolutely. In these times it is probably the only way to survive and stay sane. Being terminally online and informed is just leading to overdose of the shittiness of like everything. Create a soft bubble of bliss and steer away from noise and trouble. Before, I always thought that escapism is despicable but it feels increasingly like I’m not strong enough mentally to look in the face of reality for prolonged times these days. It’s like staring into the sun, it burns you.

This. Once you understand enough about the universe how all coordinates are relative and everything is moving relative to everything else… Like, how the fuck is time travel supposed to work it it was anywhere like this naive movie idea of it? Time travel Hollywood style is literally not a continuous operation and as such absolutely unphysical.

Yep, we have this one short and precious life. Should not waste it thinking too much about the eternity of un-being that comes after and rather make the most of the time we have here.

I put them on humus-rich soil

(I’ll show myself out)

Let’s better say what I do accept. I have read Marx and accept his analysis of dynamics of capital as correct, it’s hard not to see that it is spot-on. I accept the general paradigm that the foundation of all such dynamics is the underlying material conditions, i.e. wealth inequality, which leads to power inequality. He however never outlined a clear way out.

I read enough secondary literature about whatever people tried to build on Marx as ways out and have seen enough of evidence against “real existing socialism” and have first-hand family experience from this system. I know all the objections that it was state capitalism or whatever, but I am pessimistic about human nature.

Actual socialism emerging from a revolution and whatever leadership to stay uncorrupted instead of eventually seizing power seems very utopian and unlikely to me, just as utopian and naive as anarchists believe that self-organized structures will not degenerate back to capitalistic tribalism with a few extra steps that will just redistribute the power a little bit and new opportunists to win the next round.

You misunderstood my “European patriotism” (in quotes!), because I never said anything about loving or approving everything done by the organisation you criticize (EU). What I was talking about was the ethos of wanting to protect the least shitty system I see anywhere on earth right now, which is deployed most successfully around Europe-the-continent, the “real existing faulty bureaucratic democracy”.

You seem to be of the opinion that it needs to be dismantled and replaced by something else. The right extremists say the same. The problem is that it’s easy to call for destruction but it’s difficult to build. All I see is “we need to tear it down… And then we’ll somehow magically build something new from scratch”.

I am a software developer by profession. You know how this works? You have to work with shitty systems other people you despise built over decades. I wish I could throw it all into the garbage and just build from scratch. But unlike politics, where talk is cheap, here I can see and quantify how much fucking work it is both technically and socially. It’s just like wanting to “just build a different sky scraper” without understanding anything about engineering. You can try, and probably will end up with another flavor if ugly mess. You also need to (re)educate other developers, you need to convince people, and finally the users need to either not be bothered by your “improvements” and you cannot allow such a long down time or reconstruction phase because the outside world is not waiting for you to get your shit together.

Now, I think politics is exactly the same. Law is the code of society, and developers and users need to buy into different paradigms I.e. accept other values and standards and possibly form of organization. I don’t see any proposed alternative being even close to have a clear realistic path, except of a strong faith that “it somehow will work out”. I doubt that it works that way. History works incrementally, and complex systems become incrementally fucked up, does not matter where you start.

The radical left is losing against the fascists because the fascists learned how to incrementally win mind-share of the people and hide it’s radical nature, while the radical left is continuing to engage in black and white thinking and pushing regular people away.

That leads me to the hypothesis that the only way to fix the system is actually good people low-key moving up in power and tweaking it from the inside, that means the reverse direction of what is happening right now.

Then I believe we need “pro-social propaganda”, working in a subtle way like the capitalistic matrix, which means that you have to win back the media. If you have the media, you can win the hearts and minds of people.

The classic approach of the left only works in a society where the majority is in such distress that they are open to extreme changes and have nothing to lose. But the system we are in is a system of “good enough”.

So I don’t believe in the tactics of the radical left and I don’t believe in the existence of a solid plan, there is at most a “concept of a plan”, in the words of a well-known dictator. I doubt the practical experience and competence of radical left thinkers and intellectuals, who have never worked inside a complex system such as academia or a company and have a simplistic idea of “change management” for social, bureaucratic and technical structures. Being able to organize some demonstration or violent resistance to break something does not necessarily correlate with the ability to build something better in its place and might not justify possible damage done in between.

So what is the way forward? I have no idea. But that is why I hope for some genuine and smartly executed “reformist” movement and would not expect any good outcomes from naive “revolutionary” ambitions. The revolutionary left is ultimately also a collection of populist movements, in the sense of promising simple answers to complex problems.

What does that make me ideologically? No idea. I don’t care about labels. Call it “pragmatic realistic left” or whatever.