> gas powered ice cutter to make ice for non-electric icebox
> The diesel engine burns fuel to drive the compressor that fills the reservoir with pressure. From the tank a series of high-pressure pipes snake off toward every corner of the factory.
> power their combine or threshers with diesel engines, if the engine only drives the threshers but is not self-propelled, so the whole smoking, noisy contraption is pulled by horses
> In their goal to remain off the grid, yet modernize, some Amish have installed inverters on their diesel generators linked to batteries to provide them with off-grid 110 volts. They power specialty appliances at first, like an electric coffee pot.
Just like Shabbat elevators, to me these all sound like weird, hacky, kinda stupid, environmentally unfriendly solutions to problems caused by ridiculous made up rules, that -- ultimately -- don't even matter, because while 50 or so years behind everyone else, the Amish are still going to adopt grid electricity, smartphones and Node.js sooner or later.
You can also find the same amount of hacker DIY ingenuity in places where scarcity is not self-imposed, e.g. rural Russia, and those people get much more respect from me than weird religious communities almost piggybacking on the rest of the society.
Yes, they're abiding by a weird set of made-up rules, but a set of rules that they've agreed upon as a community in order to preserve a specific set of moral and philosophical imperatives. The rules aren't there just to make life difficult or to exclude technology for no reason, but to preserve a culture which they (and other similar communities) believe is more important than simply adopting any technology without due consideration of its effects.
You can certainly critique individual judgement calls on their so-called "self-sufficiency" - e.g. reliance on external oil mining & refinement does seem an unfortunate choice - but at a high level I think saying their rules "ultimately don't even matter" misses the point a little.
The intent (and benefits) of adopting things late is twofold: it allows more time for judgement calls to be made on impact, and it also instils self-sufficiency in individual members of the community, which ultimately is a pretty large collective benefit in itself when it comes to day-to-day living.
> in places where scarcity is not self-imposed
Not everyone has the freedom & resources to leave home and settle (& succeed) somewhere else, but for those who do, scarcities can be self-imposed by personal decisions on where to stay.
Either way, I'm not sure how someone deserves more or less respect for taking similar approaches just because their situation is either chosen by them or by fate.
I agree that the rules seem completely made up, but I think the most interesting thing in the article is that it makes it clear that there's a lot of Amish geeks, and these people are very curious, like all human beings. The geeks are really drawn to technology, and they find ways to implement more and more technology, despite the byzantine rules.
If they end up switching more to solar (which the article hints at), it will probably help them be more self-sufficient. Even though they have their own convoluted process for approving technologies or not, they will probably converge towards the more efficient and cost effective solution, just much slower.
They probably won't adopt node.js unless node.js survives for another 50 years. That's the benefit of slow: the stuff that poofs into and out of existence for 5 years or 10 years never even makes it onto the radar.
The last few paragraphs of the article strongly hint at that. With the boy carrying a cellphone and the inverter-for-coffee pot stuff and how the line is moving and how the amish are steadily adopting technology at their pace.
I mean, the boy's father also says that there will always be "horse and buggy" Amish. We are forgetting that there are different Amish orders that lie on a spectrum of conservatism within the Amish community. Even if there are some groups that end up looking more like us there will always be the Amish who don't use the internet, electricity, and probably even diesel power.
> The diesel engine burns fuel to drive the compressor that fills the reservoir with pressure. From the tank a series of high-pressure pipes snake off toward every corner of the factory.
> power their combine or threshers with diesel engines, if the engine only drives the threshers but is not self-propelled, so the whole smoking, noisy contraption is pulled by horses
> In their goal to remain off the grid, yet modernize, some Amish have installed inverters on their diesel generators linked to batteries to provide them with off-grid 110 volts. They power specialty appliances at first, like an electric coffee pot.
Just like Shabbat elevators, to me these all sound like weird, hacky, kinda stupid, environmentally unfriendly solutions to problems caused by ridiculous made up rules, that -- ultimately -- don't even matter, because while 50 or so years behind everyone else, the Amish are still going to adopt grid electricity, smartphones and Node.js sooner or later.
You can also find the same amount of hacker DIY ingenuity in places where scarcity is not self-imposed, e.g. rural Russia, and those people get much more respect from me than weird religious communities almost piggybacking on the rest of the society.