I’m not too sure about varietals of any of the trees. One mango I know is called a lemon meringue mango, and as you might guess is very citrusy. It’s much smaller and paler than the usual Caribbean mangoes at the supermarket. Likewise not sure about either avocado. One is what’s colloquially called a Florida avocado. It’s huge - like bigger than a softball - with a smooth, bright green skin. The flesh is a bit watery, to the point where I use cheesecloth to wring it out if making guac. Milder than a haas as well. The other variety is really interesting. It ripens on the vine until it is dark purple or almost black, like an eggplant. This one is delicious and slightly floral. I haven’t seen any fruits on either tree again this year, so something is definitely up. An arborist was over a few years ago to do some pruning and didn’t mention anything problematic about either, so it will likely take some research to figure out. I’m not aware of other avocado trees in the neighborhood, but certainly one possibility is that they’ve lost their pollinators.

South Floridian here. We have 2 varieties of avocado, 2 of mango, 2 of coconut (6 trees in total), blood orange, lemon and grapefruit. When they’re in season there is too much fruit to even give away, since many neighbors have some of the same growing as well. I use stake fertilizer twice a year on the citrus and keep them mulched as they’re still a bit small. The others are well established and take no maintenance other than occasional pruning.

Something is up with my avocados though. They were great producers for years (one is quite old, probably 60+ years, the other is probably in its 30s but not sure), but these past two years there have been so many blooms but almost no fruit. So you get the downsides of massive “rains” of pollen when there’s a slight breeze, but none of the upside of free avocados :/

I also have about 2 dozen pineapple tops that have been propagated and planted. Many of them are pretty young, but we get around 3-4 teeny-tiny pineapples per year. Again no maintenance once they’re going (I usually propagate them in water until the roots are a good 6-8" long before putting them in the ground).

I’m thinking about adding a banana shrub, but have also thought about sugar cane since then between that, (once I learn how to process and distill it) the coconuts and the pineapples I could realize my life-long dream of making a fully home-grown piña colada.

It very much depends on how they were approached and managed, and of course “industrial-scale” reforestation has really only been considered for the last few decades, and implemented for even less so the jury is still out. On an individual basis though they can be wildly successful, for example

https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/12/26/572421590/hed-take-his-own-life-before-killing-a-tree-meet-india-s-forest-man

And

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/stories-52122285

But there are numerous examples of monoculture reforestation and attempts that just failed altogether as well.

… which you can’t buy because it sold out as soon as it went on sale like it was a GPU.

Yeah I wondered about how much of “women said this is what they want” was really “women can’t imagine having mouths to feed in this environment”. Wanting for self satisfaction and wanting for avoidance of future hardship are different.

The interesting thing about mutualism is that it isn’t even a degrowth strategy, it’s more like a de-escalation-of-capital-accumulation strategy. Economic growth for the mutual owner/operators still happens (otherwise it would never have taken off in the first place).

Just wanted to drop a note and say I binged this and then Murder in the Tool Library in 2 days. What a nice little universe you’ve built! I had never even heard of smashwords before your mention, but I’ve made a couple of other purchases in the last few days and will certainly use it to try and build a big enough library to distract me for the next 4 or 5 years :)

Out of curiosity, do you have any recommendations for other solarpunk or similarly utopian indie fiction?

From the article:

The richest 1 percent (77 million people) were responsible for 16 percent of global consumption emissions in 2019 —more than all car and road transport emissions. The richest 10 percent accounted for half (50 percent) of emissions.

To be a member of the richest 1% of the world you need a net worth of about $800k – so while the billionaire class is still a massive problem, an even larger problem ecologically is that tens of millions of moderately wealthy people from wealthy nations have massively outsized carbon footprints.

Yup, typically I just mentally multiply by 1000 (nice round numbers). But obviously a 100MW farm in the Sahara is going to produce more in a year than the same 100MW farm in Germany. It’d be cool to see a list on a global scale that showed a table and maybe generation vs demand curves for the area they serve. Maybe I’ll put it on my “projects I’ll never get to” list.

Like capacity x capacity factor, e.g. if your 100MW site produces power 50% of the time (because of nighttime, clouds, etc) then it would produce, over the course of a year 100,000,000 x 24 x 365 x 0.5 = 438 GWh annually (very simplified).

Does anyone know of a site that tracks the typical GWh of these big installations?

Maybe the most surprising thing here is that regular biking is still twice as efficient as e-biking even given our mediocre metabolic efficiency and a physique that isn’t exactly designed for the bicycling motion.