All this tech, and no pictures of them anywhere in the article.
Graven images, you mean?
Modern Tech inside an Amish Horse-Drawn Buggy
81–90 of 113 posts
Re: Modern Tech inside an Amish Horse-Drawn Buggy
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cars give freedom to those who don't have it. It's easy to have a rosy pastoral view of the Amish, but the reality is grim for many young women subjugated to that culture. The ability for such people to see that the outside world can be far less harsh than the one they are used to will necessarily (and in my opinion should ) lead to the collapse of those communities.
The Amish are happier than almost all Americans: http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2007/03/16/happiness-wealth-a... You want those communities to collapse, because you see no other solutions except more tech, more greed, more 'progress'. That's the hamster wheel you've been given. What other life could there be?
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.
Re: Modern Tech inside an Amish Horse-Drawn Buggy
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would imagine they could manufacture incandescents if they so chose. Glassblowing seems like something they'd be OK with. And otherwise it's just a bit of wire and a vacuum.
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?
Re: Modern Tech inside an Amish Horse-Drawn Buggy
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
This would seem to be a classic example of a distinction without a difference.
It has to do with wanting something they can in principal maintain forever without outside help.
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.
Re: Modern Tech inside an Amish Horse-Drawn Buggy
#85Re: Modern Tech inside an Amish Horse-Drawn Buggy
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or we'll just make a lot more things out of metal.
I'm curious. What happens when one starts a fire on mars to forge a metal? We can't ship metal, it's much to heavy. So we have to consider that beneath the fine powdery surface of mars there lies basalt rock. Is there a type of concrete that can be constructed from basalt material?
Well, you can't start a fire in the atmosphere. So either you have one inside, or (more likely) you'd use induction heating to do the forging.
Concrete requires some rather specific calcium chemistry. But basalt is quite a good building material on its own, especially if you adopt Inca building techniques of mortarless flat-surface construction. Then all you'd need to do is construct interior insulating airtight shells to live in.
There's plenty of iron on the red planet, and from the red dust comes oxygen. Nitrogen will be harder to obtain.
Re: Modern Tech inside an Amish Horse-Drawn Buggy
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hm I guess if they can repair the body. Which is pretty easy. The other half of their philosophy is avoiding pride. So cool, you're self-sufficient. But not perfectly so, or that would be prideful. There's an old Amish joke - father is driving the family home from Meeting in the buggy. He turns to Momma and says "I guess we were the plainest ones there!"
Can you explain the joke? I'm not sure I understand the humour.
I am not the original poster but I understand it to be about bragging (and thus showing pride) about being plain (not showing pride). As in, "well, we sure did show them how much humbler we are than all of them".
Re: Modern Tech inside an Amish Horse-Drawn Buggy
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or we'll just make a lot more things out of metal.
I'm curious. What happens when one starts a fire on mars to forge a metal? We can't ship metal, it's much to heavy. So we have to consider that beneath the fine powdery surface of mars there lies basalt rock. Is there a type of concrete that can be constructed from basalt material?
You still need heat, but you can make fiber from basalt:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basalt_fiber
Among other things its used to make a type of rebar.
Re: Modern Tech inside an Amish Horse-Drawn Buggy
#89The Amish attitude towards technology is a pretty good model of what an eventual Mars colony will need. When (or if) people finally travel to Mars to stay, the biggest risk to the colony will be being dependent on imports from Earth. It will always be expensive to send ships from Earth to Mars, so it is folly to assume that resupply missions will continue indefinitely. So a colony which hopes to be viable must be vig…
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…
Since there are nutriments and water (even solidified) on mars, the biggest problem is really energy. If you have energy, you can make greenhouses fir fast growing plants such as bamboo and hemps, that we know how to turn into clothing, building materials, and many other things.
Re: Modern Tech inside an Amish Horse-Drawn Buggy
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it's also easy to fall into the trap of attributing more cohesion than there is and simplifying all of the groups into some sort of average. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish#Use_of_technology_by_dif...
There's some really interesting inconsistencies in that table. E.g. some think tractors for fieldwork aren't OK but lawnmowers are, for others somehow chainsaws are bad but washing machines are fine etc. Looking these over there doesn't seem to be any clear pattern to me. The grandparent mentioned them not wanting things that will "drastically change their way of life", surely having a washing machine is a bigger cha…
In the movie The Devil's Playground there is a discussion about how the Amish adopt technology. If I remember correctly, the criteria was based on whether the technology was disruptive to the community (i.e. how it affects the relations between people rather than an individual's day-to-day life). It's been more than ten years since I've seen the movie and I'm going on memory, but that made a big impression on me.