Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Modern Tech inside an Amish Horse-Drawn Buggy

blog.caranddriver.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 113 posts

Re: Modern Tech inside an Amish Horse-Drawn Buggy

#101

Post by TeMPOraL »

rubidium wrote: post #99
TeMPOraL wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so. It's more like - a lot of technologies help you join bigger communities, in particular the Universal Culture[0]. If your community is defined mostly by not being part of universal culture, technology becomes an existential threat to it. -- [0] - defined as the culture that outcompetes other cultures; often called "Western culture", but it's not really important where it came from. McDonalds, for ins…

Your "universal culture" sounds a lot like corporate consumerism and lacking in real cultural diversity.

Corporate consumerism may be a part of that, sure. Not saying it's good or bad, it just is.

As for lack of "real cultural diversity", well, people apparently don't care. I know that I don't. Cultural diversity is just random noise for me - it's cool to look at when you have lots of spare time / income, but when I'm making day-to-day decisions about what to wear, eat, or use for my tasks, I'm going to pick it based on factors like quality, cost-effectiveness and usefulness. Or in other words - it's fun to go to a ${insert culture} restaurant from time to time, but day-to-day, I'm gonna buy the white bread that's the same and universally available almost everywhere.

Re: Modern Tech inside an Amish Horse-Drawn Buggy

#102

Post by evgen »

lostboys67 wrote: post #94
evgen wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They make many pressure rated air hoses in those communities? Didn't think so. As previous poster noted, it is all effectively arbitrary window dressing.

If it where the case they should be using belt drive driven by wind/horse power - until fairly recently mech eng techs in the uk where taught how to design belt drive systems

Belt drives are far more limited and attached tools are not mobile in any way whatsoever. Not even close when it comes to substitution technology.

Re: Modern Tech inside an Amish Horse-Drawn Buggy

#103

Post by snarf21 »

ams6110 wrote: post #75
snarf21 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Lancaster PA and most Amish can't afford the farm land here anymore (its become housing and malls) and have moved west. Lots of Amish now work in the trades (construction/electrical/roofing/etc.) Someone picks them up and takes them to their job sites. Their general low standard of living (no car payments or electronics budgets) allow for that to be a very solid income for most.

> no car payments The article quotes ~$8,000 for a new buggy, plus a horse which although they produce themselves has to be fed and cared for. That to me sounds in the ballpark of the cost of owning a decent used car.

"A lot of people will get 20 or 30 years out of a buggy before they do any major rebuilding of it." They tend to get a lot more use out of them and even then, they are rebuilt and given to their kids for far less than another new buggy.

Obviously, there will be some who buy new more frequently, but that goes directly against their way of life (to not seek the material things of this world) and is not that common.

Re: Modern Tech inside an Amish Horse-Drawn Buggy

#104

Post by ars »

int_19h wrote: post #83
ars wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wire is pretty special though, it's a coil of coil, with extremely tight tolerance. i.e. if you look at it it looks like a coil, but actually the wire that makes up that first coil is itself an even smaller coil. You have to wind it such that no part of the wire touches (or it will burn out at that spot). It's titanium which is not an easy material to make wire out of without special industrial equipment. And no…

Isn't incandescent bulb filament made of tungsten, rather than titanium?

Yes, sorry, that's a typo. The high melting point is what I was thinking of, and that's tungsten.

Re: Modern Tech inside an Amish Horse-Drawn Buggy

#105

Post by teilo »

oh_sigh wrote: post #11

How do Amish people generally make money? I know there are markets that sell Amish goods to non-Amish, but there must be more to their income than that.

When I was in college, someone hired a team of Amish to build a car stereo shop across the street. It was quite fascinating to watch. They built it using techniques you normally see when building a barn. They sunk a whole series of posts into the ground. They were all different lengths. It made no sense when you looked at it, no apparent rhyme nor reason to it.

They poured a slab around the posts (well, the concrete company did), and then they got out their chainsaws and started cutting the tops off the posts and leveling them to each other. They attached cross members, and out of the chaos emerged the superstructure of the building. It went up fast. When they were done you would never know it wasn't built using traditional methods.

Re: Modern Tech inside an Amish Horse-Drawn Buggy

#106

Post by [deleted] »

khuey wrote: post #38
dreamcompiler wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no wood on Mars. A great deal of our infrastructure (not just Amish infrastructure) is wood-based, and the first Martians will have to find a substitute for it. The typical substitute for wood is plastic, but that comes from petroleum, and there's none of that on Mars either. I suppose one of the first things we'll have to build on Mars is greenhouses -- not just for food, but for plant-based plastic to build…

Or we'll just make a lot more things out of metal.

[deleted]

Re: Modern Tech inside an Amish Horse-Drawn Buggy

#107

Post by stcredzero »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #91
stcredzero wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because most industrial vacuum processes happen in the 15 psi context of conditions on Earth. We already know that the Sabatier process will work in Mars like conditions. The chemistry has been around for a century, and demonstration hardware specifically for Mars conditions was built over a decade ago.

Will work != will have enough output to be useful. I'm hopeful, but honestly, I haven't seen any decent estimates. Anyone has a link to such?

This thread seems to suggest that the big barrier is energy. The reason why natural gas and petroleum are used as feedstocks for the manufacture of plastic on earth is precisely because using them reduces the required energy input. The thread is also a good source of a few interesting links.

http://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=6970

In terms of having enough output from a material standpoint, the requirement is still mostly energy. It would require a lot of energy to move enough CO2 through the plant.

Re: Modern Tech inside an Amish Horse-Drawn Buggy

#108

Post by int_19h »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #96
int_19h wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making people happy is surprisingly easy; all it takes is a couple of electrodes inserted into the brain. So if that's the only bar that you have, the Amish are way overthinking it.

In theory yes; in practice, it's beyond our technological capabilities at the moment. A better alternative would be drugs. And honestly, it's our "universal culture" that's more susceptible to this failure mode.

I recall reading about such experiments done on rats, and that was at least a couple decades ago. Is it really beyond our technological capabilities? Note, I'm not talking about electrodes to induce dreams or some such; just a simple direct electric stimulation of the pleasure centers. Presumably, the resulting sensation is that you wouldn't know why you're happy - you're just happy.

Re: Modern Tech inside an Amish Horse-Drawn Buggy

#109

Post by InitialLastName »

forkandwait wrote: post #52

Whenever a discussion of Amish comes up, I have to link to my favorite hard core Anabaptist sect, the Hutterites. Unlike th Amish, the Hutterites love technology. They choose what technology to use as part of a very strict church system, like the Amish, but are very much into diesel engines and the internet and the like (note the link below). See [1] and [2] below. They also live communally in farming colonies of abo…

> English variants of Anabaptism (Quakers, etc),

It's important that you know that Quakers aren't Anabaptists[0].

They hold the "peace church" thing in common, and have both essentially fallen out of consort with mainline Protestantism, but that's about it.

[0]http://www.quakerinfo.org/index

Re: Modern Tech inside an Amish Horse-Drawn Buggy

#110

Post by lostboys67 »

evgen wrote: post #102
lostboys67 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it where the case they should be using belt drive driven by wind/horse power - until fairly recently mech eng techs in the uk where taught how to design belt drive systems

Belt drives are far more limited and attached tools are not mobile in any way whatsoever. Not even close when it comes to substitution technology.

well machine tools are not that mobile and neither are air powered tools as you normally use those in abuilding that has compressed air on tap.
Post reply on HN