UTMC

I like horses, I've never ridden one but I did learn to run a team of draft horses years ago.
Funny you should ask this today, I was just looking at local stables to see if I could pick up some part time work shoveling shit and grooming giant herbivores.
Really.

A few more things you'd have to live without, besides the bike:

- analgesics
- antibiotics (you think just because you kill it in the woods it'll be guaranteed germ free? think again)
- modern surgery to fix those bones that break when you fall of the horse
- narcotics to put you under and the vital sign monitoring equipment
- insulin (maybe you or your family need it, maybe you don't...)
- a phone to call the doctor with
- the internets, obviously
- weather forecasts
- reliable, modern food preservation
- reliably clean drinking water
- toilet paper
- if you can actually swing toilet paper, it won't be soft.
- Preparation H. See above.
- electric razors
- virtually all modern cleaning products and antiseptics
- central heating
- sewing machines. You wanna wear it, you gotta needle every last stitch.
- also, that needle will be made from bone or some soft metal. no steel for you.
- no cast iron either.
- you want nails, you find something anvil-ish and start swinging that hammer

Also, many things that aren't exactly high-tech but aren't avilable everywhere.
Like cheap rubber for rubber boots and raincoats, coffee, chocolate, citrus fruit, many spices, actual tea (rather than the herbal shit), tobacco. Transport is cheap because of high tech solutions. Never mind agriculture.
Oh, also, no agriculture? Ever wondered what got the neolithic revolution started in the first place? The desire to settle down to make...beer. Yep, no beer. Also, distilling or winemaking will be out. If you hole up for the winter, you might be able to make some form of fruit schnapps with ice-distillation.

And if you live far from the sea, enjoy your iodine deficiency (even when you can get iodine infused foodstuffs of all sorts, not to mention supplements, many people in the industrialized world today don't get enough iodine).

Now, don't get me wrong. You can do a lot of amazing stuff with fairly simple aplications of technology.
But as romantic as the idea of living like they did a thousand years ago, I personally wouldn't like a 30 year life expectancy and pre-historic infant mortality rate.
Life was brutal, short and painful. It's easy to fantasize about it from the comfort of a centrally heated, electrically lit, fairly fire-proof and most of all, above ground and dry abode.

Technology makes our lives better. We, as a species, just have lost the plot along the way and don't generally use it wisely or just stop to think "do I need it? do I even want it?", never minding preferring durable goods to disposable crap. Modern technology can make many of the simpler things basically indestructable. But does anyone care? No, because we want this years style. I blame Edward Bernays.

Animal domestication came with organized agriculture and civilization. Your romanticized hunter-gatherers didn't get them. Also, without the support infrastructure of civilization you would likely be dead already, so perhaps the unnaturalness of your existence that you rebel against is in fact your continued existence itself.

No. The last thing I need now is another animal to take care of, love them as I do.

p.s. About the poll question, what does Rench becoming completely unglued have to do with the matter of equines vs. motorcycles?

Toonce wrote:No. The last thing I need now is another animal to take care of, love them as I do.

p.s. About the poll question, what does Rench becoming completely unglued have to do with the matter of equines vs. motorcycles?

Well, glue is made from horses, isn't it?

Give me a bicycle over a horse (bless their noble furry hearts) any day.

Toonce wrote:p.s. About the poll question, what does Rench becoming completely unglued have to do with the matter of equines vs. motorcycles?

Nothing. Rench has always been unglued.

Fuck. Horses. They taste all right though.

We, as a species, just have lost the plot along the way and don't generally use it wisely or just stop to think "do I need it? do I even want it?"

Yeah, that.

Daft.

Fuck horses.

I'm waiting for the the uber cycle, the neuro-synaptic linkage between man and ever evolving machine that results in even more fighter jet-like speed and performance.

ORBIT CYCLES! NOW!

RECREATIONAL REENTRY!

I'm feeling a bit crusty and geriatric for even keeping consideration of tangible machines to ride around, much less transhuman euphoriascapes of pure thought and neuroelectrical stimulation.

Whiskeywrist wrote:
I'm waiting for the the uber cycle, the neuro-synaptic linkage between man and ever evolving machine that results in even more fighter jet-like speed and performance.

Well, OK.





But is it a café racer?

Whiskeywrist wrote:RECREATIONAL REENTRY!

BackDoorBarbie wrote:

i guess to simplify the answer here- if i were in a position to need to trade the bike for a horse- i would be forced to choose neither because it would just not be feasible for either- travel is likely out and if travel was an option- a horse (and therefore bike) is far from the option of one to keep- unless i started my own from scratch civilization/tiny agrarian town and forced everyone else to do my work for me so that i could travel on the horse or the bike. but thats not what you asked.

it asks the question; is technology really making us better off? honestly- i dont think it is. some guy who my teacher didnt require me to take note of his name said that "sustainability" is a small cluster of agrarian groups that have a single man operated machine. makes society easier and more comfortable but does not allow the society to overuse their resources. so off topic of horse vs. bike- but i guess in a way related but in the opposite direction...

With apologies for thread-tangenting,

Here's a nice example of a motorcycle-like machine that's for work:

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This is a dragsaw, a device made in about 1905-1915. With a can of gasoline and this machine, one man could saw a lot of logs in a day.





ps the anarcho primitivists are already among us in the Utility Tractor sub-cult...

pps say what you will about the anarcho primitivists at least its an ethos

BackDoorBarbie wrote:in plains tribes, horses ran wild so they maintained themselves.

Question (out of actual curiosity): What where the plains tribes doing before the European import-horses went feral? Did they use other animals, did they just walk, were there even that many in the plains?

Also, as for technology allowing us to overpopulate:
That is one of the things where I think mankind lost the plot a bit. We use all that technology to make out life easier, but then adopt the same social norms and lifestyles as our pre-industrial ancestors.
I think I could survive without rubber, communications, coffee. But I'd rather have that stuff than don't have it. I don't say I need all I have or have access to, but I have no shame in admitting: I want it. I do draw the line at shit that I'm not sure I want or need.

DerGolgo wrote:

BackDoorBarbie wrote:in plains tribes, horses ran wild so they maintained themselves.

Question (out of actual curiosity): What where the plains tribes doing before the European import-horses went feral? Did they use other animals, did they just walk, were there even that many in the plains?

Reaching way the hell back to my last history class, they weren't significantly nomadic. Hunter-gatherers and small-scale farming were your two basic options, and a lot of tribes picked a little from column A, a little from column B.

Turned out that horses give you all kinds of advantages, as both early Europeans and later North American tribes found out.

DerGolgo wrote:I personally wouldn't like a 30 year life expectancy and pre-historic infant mortality rate.

This.

Here's some of the stuff they're working on right now that may or may not come to fruit during our lifetimes, but will affect our kids and grandkids:

Tooth decay may soon be a thing of the past. Scientists have isolated factors that cause plaque to adhere to teeth, and the chemicals that cause fucking bone regeneration.

Production-ready solar cells are reaching towards 40% efficiency. A generation ago ago, 10% was a damn miracle. The guy who invented the super soaker is claiming to have some ideas that could bump that even further. Fusion tech is still twenty years down the road, but there's interesting rumblings about cheap, safe, plentiful thorium reactors. On-demand heating, cooling, light, potable water, communications and transportation are all possible with sufficient energy. Nations in northern Africa are exploring what it would take to simultaneously re-green the Sahara and replace the Middle East as Europe's source of ready energy.

Resveratrol has some reeeeally intriguing results in lab rats. A friend of mine pointed out the company researching this stuff, and I was planning on making a major pie-in-the-sky investment once the stock dropped another 10%. Instead, about a month later the biggest drug company in the world bought them out for double their market cap. What does it do? Just think "Fountain of Youth" and you're fairly close.

The last time I checked, high-tensile materials were right about the strength required for a critical milestone in lab testing. Should these materials ever reach large-scale production, space elevators (which do precisely what the description implies) suddenly become feasible. Elevators. Into. Space.

You can't cyberjack into the Internet- not yet at least. But direct neural interfaces are only a few steps beyond the prototype optical nerve interfaces that are allowing blind people to see without eyes. At the same time, exoskeletons like HAL and prosthetic limbs developed by Dean Kamen and others are picking up nervous impulses and converting them to action.

Transplant-able cartilage has already been grown for things like replacement ears. Regrown lungs are in the works, and then it's on to more complex major organs. The "first joint" problem hasn't been solved yet, but your grandkids may regard pinky donations as more of a loan program.

Two years ago, I was 20/600 in one eye and 20/800 in the other. Today, I'm a shade worse than 20/10 in both. Laser surgery is a nifty thing.

It turns out that a lot of the ailments that plague humanity are genetic. We're starting to find out the precise genes that cause not only traditional 'hereditary' diseases, but also predispose you to Alzheimer's and other nasty conditions. We've also successfully created life-forms with 100% man-made genetic code. The combination, along with the way retroviruses work, holds awe-inspiring possibilities for future medical treatment. Few (if any) of us will see 2100. But whether or not our grandkids see 2200 is still undecided.

For that matter, you can pick that sort of stuff out when you look at an egg and sperm cell closely enough, and even better when staring at a fertilized zygote. Mutters of Gattica, Ayn Rand and playing God will undoubtedly interfere with anyone who attempts research along these lines in the United States. I can't imagine wealthy Chinese kicking up too much of a fuss if someone told them their kid could be smarter, healthier, tougher, stronger, emotionally better adjusted and longer-lived than 99% of the current population. Personally, the idea of giving my children every possible advantage from the moment they're born is rather appealing.

Oh, and I'm writing this to you from the middle of Europe. If we preferred, we could boot up our choice of video-chat programs and talk to each other "face to face" from another continent.

Gahread wrote:

DerGolgo wrote:

BackDoorBarbie wrote:in plains tribes, horses ran wild so they maintained themselves.

Question (out of actual curiosity): What where the plains tribes doing before the European import-horses went feral? Did they use other animals, did they just walk, were there even that many in the plains?

Reaching way the hell back to my last history class, they weren't significantly nomadic. Hunter-gatherers and small-scale farming were your two basic options, and a lot of tribes picked a little from column A, a little from column B.

Turned out that horses give you all kinds of advantages, as both early Europeans and later North American tribes found out.

Not to argue, but to my knowledge they were plenty nomadic before european contact as well. They used dogs to drag their stuff around. In fact, as I recall, the Lakota word for horse literally translated to "sacred dog," because a dog that big that can carry that much was pretty damn cool at the time.

In a manner of speaking, they did as DG states we have done with the industrial revolution. Take something and incorporate it into your known lifestyle, rather than letting it change things all that much.

In my opinion, the plains culture did it to their advantage. We've don it to our disadvantage.

:shrug:

-Rench

I dislike horses, and we have had a few. The Dutchman in me says they make GREAT salami & summer sausage. Fuckin' hay-burners.

Pattio wrote: pps say what you will about the anarcho primitivists at least its an ethos

The horse abides, dude.

The Apache in me says eat the horse and walk.

I can see the IMDB page already:
"Rench (Will Ferrel) is a sympathetic yet clumsy biker with a disorganised way of life. After a wild party, he unintentionally interferes in a drug deal between mob and biker gangs and destroys most of the gang's bikes doing it. Running from the scene on his trusty (heer hey Rench, it's a sportster you ride right?) herrrr sportster ? he has to hide in an Amish community where he discovers the true values of life, love, and horse caring, his metal monster hidden under a blanket in a barn. In the end, having fain the respect of his pairs, the community will help fight back the mob and biker gang. Fade to black on rench' surprised face as the amish girl appears in leather riding her own motorcycle (supposed to be a harley but they used a daelim 125 for the shooting because the insurance company didn't let nathalie portman ride the real thing)".

Rench wrote:BWAHAHAHAHA!!! I LOVE THE AMISH!!!

Ahem. And NAtalie Portman? Much appreciated, but as long as we're shooting the moon, can we ger Kiera Knightly?

Speaking of shootings, fuck Will Ferrel, I genuinely hate everything he's ever done in film. ANYONE but Will Ferrel.

-Rench

I'll second that, on both points.

I fucking love horses. 18 plus hands high... Big black fuck off horses that scare the shit of you.

A guy I once knew thought that it would be awesome if the world went back to a super primitive state... he was convinced his great strength and stature would put him at the top of the heap, as far as feudal lords go. I would tend to agree with him.

I really like men who are manly, honest to god Alpha dogs. I don't think there are that many of them walking around. Too many opportunities for boys to put on men's clothing and claim they are something they are not. It would be awesome if darwinism/survival of the fittest, etc.. took over again. The world could use a little downsizing.

A guy I once knew thought that it would be awesome if the world went back to a super primitive state... he was convinced his great strength and stature would put him at the top of the heap, as far as feudal lords go. I would tend to agree with him.

Bow and Arrow.

piccini9 wrote:

A guy I once knew thought that it would be awesome if the world went back to a super primitive state... he was convinced his great strength and stature would put him at the top of the heap, as far as feudal lords go. I would tend to agree with him.

Bow and Arrow.

Sword and fire.

Old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill, every time.