The end outside of the container can have any number of means to attach a hose or pipe; like a barb, flange, thread, etc. For your application you will want a barbed bulkhead so you can just put a hose on there and don’t need to worry about the additional cost and work involved with rigid pipe.

Ah, I've seen those kinds before, and that seems fairly simple. Thanks!

As for the stain issue. The type of container you described leads me to believe it is a typical plastic storage box, almost all of those have a taper to the sides.

Of course, now I understand what you meant! Yes, the boxes are slightly tapered, so that would be an issue.

Tube and barbs also have the benefit of being easier to connect across a short distance and ensure a watertight connection. I would recommend putting the tube on both sides first, then installing the bulkheads in the containers to make life easier and avoid damage when trying to press the tube on the barbs after the bulkheads are installed.

Great tips, noted! Now I'll have to figure out where I can buy these locally.

Thanks again for great help!

Thanks for a great description!

A couple of questions:

A bulkhead fitting should have a rubber gasket that will seal properly without additional sealant

Since bulkhead fittings were suggested, I've been looking them up. The installation seems easy enough, but in all the videos I see I am stuck with a hole with threads on the outside, no one shows what comes next. What are the parts I would need for this? Do I need a join to connect the threads on the outside of each container?

The sides of the container won’t be parallel to the ground, so a straight pipe will put strain on the container that will lead to a failure. You will probably want to use flexible hose to connect the two containers, but two 45 degree elbows at each end of ridgid pipe(so 4 total) can take the strain out once you play with the orientations.

I didn't really understand this. Do you mean there will be strain due to the downward force exerted by the weight of the pipe and water? I'm hoping to have the distance between the tanks as short as possible, and the diameter should also not be too big.

Cheers, I'll look into those! :)

Good idea, didn't think about that!

Melting sounds like a good idea. What would you typically use to do it? A soldering iron perhaps?

When you say compatibility, do you mean in terms of adhesion, or are there other things I should be concerned about?

Awesome! If you’d like any suggestions for story ideas, let me know what other stories and general themes you like and I’d be happy to see if anything pops to mind.

Cheers! For now, what listed above is what I am most interested in reading up on :)

Also: can I give you a piece of writing advice related to your post above?

Sure, go ahead!

The main geopolitical change is that oil is not going to be anymore a king-maker. I would expect a second Arab Spring (though the Arab world is more than just the Arabian peninsula) with more success. I would expect a lower influence of Russia as well.

Yes, the decline in power of the petrostates would need to be handled well, and would definitely be important in figuring out how the overall landscape looks.

There are two possible flavors of future and really, both are credible, it depends on the stories you want to tell: more integration in supra-national entities or more independent states.

I think perhaps both could work at the same time (which I upon rereading see that you mentioned further down!)? More autonomy to regional entities within countries, but more collaboration on larger issues inside unions such as EU and AU (it would be difficult to avoid centralized power being forced down on local communities though). Maybe instead of seeing the EU moving towards a federal state, maybe we see the US moving towards something like the EU? There are several nations in Europe that would only be mid-sized states in the US, so I always found comparing single European countries to the US makes less sense than comparing the US and EU directly.

Also, do not forget the UN. It could consolidate in a form of government. It already has a de facto minister of trade (WTO), of labor (ILO), of health (WHO), of education (UNESCO). It is a slow process but solving the climate crisis could have given it the political credit it is currently lacking.

Interesting, I never thought of these bodies in that light before. I think the source of the lack of political credit is largely due to the ineffectiveness of the Security Council and the veto vote. I think a big change to this would be paramount for UN to work as some kind of "world government". And there is a fine line between such an organization being a force for good or a force for evil.

Depends how decisive and long-lasting that victory would be, right? Could we not see the right wing continue to push the country towards authoritarianism and possibly even a straight up fascist dictatorship, to then have that reversed through some big event before 2075? Or maybe you meant "wins against the left" as something very permanent?

What a poor contribution to the thread... I am well aware of the consequences, and I am highlighting one specific consequence that I am seeking advice on how to deal with. I am specifically asking for stories from people who have had good success either maintaining adult friendships despite divergence in lifestyles, or establishing new adult friendships. Your comment brings nothing to the table.

I interpret your last comment as "going with the flow" in order to "survive". If that is a strategy that somehow brings you fulfillment in life, good on you. I am very comfortable with my choice of not having kids, but as with everything, there are trade-offs, and I'm just looking for ways to navigate those. As the commenter below pointed out: the situation would be worse if I had kids myself, as I would anyway have to forego the kinds of adult interactions I've described (and am missing), and I would instead rely on enjoying the new type of children centric interactions. I sincerely doubt I would.

I'm not sure that the combined energy consumption of the aggregate financial system is less than 0.5%, but it does, unlike Bitcoin, provide utility, not withstanding any reasonable objection to the fairness of this system.

Great read, thank you for that! I've written down some of my thoughts. Feel free to point out if I've misunderstood you, or if there is something you think I am wrong about.

On 3D-printing

I believe you are onto something in terms of creating more things ourselves on-demand, and I do think local additive manufacturing will be more common in households down the line, and not reserved for hobbyists. I am in the process of selecting a 3D-printer for myself, and in that process I have also begun envisioning many use cases for it. However, I have some concerns over how this will actually play out:

1. While I am fairly tech savvy, and I have no doubts I can learn what I need to learn in order to design and produce what I need, I wonder what it would take for e.g. my mom to be comfortable with, and get utility from, 3D-printers. We have lived in a specialized society for so long that the vast majority of people are almost exclusively consumers, and do not create anything anymore and even the thought of doing things yourself can be daunting. You mention open source designs and being able to build further upon it, and while I love the idea, I think (for now and at least the short-term) that most people would be fully dependent on a large repository of available designs that can be printed as-is. This smells like yet another area where we would see the emergence of a tech behemoth with a firm monopolistic grip offering a fancy platform with all the bells and whistles, with the ensuing enshittification that is sure to follow: tech lock-in to certain brands and "ecosystems", limitations to design inspection and modification, algorithmic manipulation to buy/print things we don't really need, etc. How would we guard ourselves against this and make sure that people would be free to use it to their own benefit, and not end up in the same kind of platform hellscape that we've seen for social media platforms, online retailers etc. already?

2. On-demand printing would certainly reduce overproduction of certain goods, as big retailers wouldn't need to keep large stocks to ensure availability. In certain industries, this overproduction is massive, and if it could be removed, it would be great. But do we not risk local overproduction? Say that 3D-printing of fabrics becomes viable do to at home, and at a low cost (comparable or lower to those horrible ultrafast fashion brands). What is to stop us from continuing the gross overconsumption that the average consumer engages with today? Especially if the dystopic vision of a tech behemoth running the show presented above comes into fruition. A new dress for every occasion, can't be seen to wear the same outfit more than once, or else your status takes a hit. Failed prints could also generate a lot of unusable scrap. There would in any case need to be in place robust recycling procedures, preferably local. This would need to account for different materials, plastics, metals (and sorting by alloy), and it would need to handle removal of any contaminants that could affect the quality of the recycled product (dirt or other foreign material that has come from use, this is at least easier with scrap material from a failed print as it should not be dirty).

3. As you point out, this can't work for everything. There are quite a lot of goods that require specialty production methods that cannot be replicated at home. I think manufacturing at some levels of complexity higher than what can be achieved with a home printer could probably be handled by community facilities with larger scale equipment and perhaps maintenance and operations staff. But more high-tech things, which my understanding of a solarpunk vision requires, such as photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, batteries and semiconductor components, requires large scale manufacturing. So that won't disappear, but by their own use of additive manufacturing, their own supply chains could be shortened quite a lot by producing more components in-house. If your assumption that we remove the concern for profit, than there wouldn't be any barrier to doing this, and I think that would be very beneficial.

Consequences for overproduction

What do you think can be done in regards to overproduction of goods? Should there be consequences for producing more than can be consumed? Do you think capitalism can be tamed in such a way?

I think yes, of course there should be consequences for producing more than can be consumed. The fact that there is none, other than whatever monetary losses they are impacted with from this wastefulness, which obviously is not enough to keep them from doing it, highlights one of the main problems with how capitalism works in our world: the real cost of transactions are seldom accounted for, which results in wastefulness and other poor choices from a sustainability point of view. Large-scale production often yields enormous economies of scale benefits, to the point where the marginal cost of production is barely anything. Doesn't matter to them if they produce way more than they can sell, because it doesn't cost them anything anyway. However, with high margins on sales, they might get a huge profit benefit from producing more in case it sells well. Leftovers we just dump in a river somewhere, not our problem anymore.

Can it be tamed however? In principle, more and smarter regulations would help. They would need to be widely agreed upon by several nations, as otherwise corporations could avoid the regulations by flagging out. In practice? I think we're a long way from this being straight-forward. Corporate interests have way too much to say in politics, especially in the US, and before that problem is solved I think there is a limit to how efficient regulations can be. I also believe that it is difficult to get the required corporation across several countries for the kind of regulation that would be needed. I think EU does some good things here, although they sometimes miss the mark completely for the sake of compromise, and in some areas are chasing the completely wrong types of regulation that are detrimental and not beneficial to our society.