Looking back at the millennia of human history, we've always formed communities, always assumed more-or-less specialized roles, and always used some form of debt to manage the social fabric and facilitate the exchange of goods and services.

The loners, the hermits, the "self-sufficient" seem to be outliers, doomed for a hard, brief life. Personally, I'd much prefer to live in society, and contribute part of my efforts towards sustaining it. That, to me, is living "for free" -- it's so much more of a free ride than trying to manually hack it and provide sustained food and shelter for decades.

I think it's the fantasy of having complete autonomy, of being completely free in the sense of never having to do anything that you don't want to do[1]. At least, that's that's the aspect of it that resonates with me.

But it's only that -- a fantasy. Much like other things that we fantasize about, it's impossible as conceived because it dwells on the upsides and omits the downsides. Humans run in packs. We are social. It's that aspect that has always been the key to our ability to survive even in extremely bad circumstances.

The trade-off, looking purely from a selfish point of view, is that we give up some degree of autonomy in exchange for benefits that are so essential and fundamental that we are in great peril without them. We have better lives as part of a group than in isolation, despite being unable to do literally anything we want.

In that sense, it's a lot like some kinds of sexual fantasies. Hot as hell in your imagination, but not so great (or even possible) in reality.

[1] As the Frank Zappa lyric goes: "Free is when you don't have to pay for nothin' or do nothin'. I want to be free."

To the question of saying "no.", It's questionable that all but the elite suffer from such stricture. For instance if I were to purchase in full some allotment of land which I inhabited, the government would still extract taxes from it, taxes which I would be obliged to pay, and thus I would necessarily require some income. That's without considering the more likely case of mortgaging a home in the suburbs, taking a loan for a car, the myriad bills necessary to sustain a "functional" life, all the sundry little accessories that invariably set up a treadmill of break and replace... Factor in a family and the manifold complications it inserts - viola - no options available.

This is, of course, not actually the natural course of things and all of this is malleable. Overcoming the massive inertia of the antiquated systems and their underpinning ideas is a huge challenge though. This itself largely due to the overwhelming coherent mass.

But I think anyone would be insane to say they support things as they currently are at any level. But very few are positioned to refuse. It's indenture, but structured in such a way that "society" can point its finger and place blame on the individual.

To solve this, you need to balance your obligations to the government (property taxes), against obligations from the government (bonds of some kind).

I'll use TIPs for my example, because it's harder for the government to inflate away these obligations.

A plot of land might have taxes of $1,000/yr. It looks like TIPs give a fixed real rate of 1.3%. So, $77k in TIPS will balance out your taxes. You need to add that to the true price of the land.

Obviously, there is the question of how you obtain that capital. So in a sense we are generally born "in the red", and need to work our way out of these implicit debts. But it can be done, even within the system.

1. If you look at recent Treasury auctions, 30-year TIPS are actually yielding 1.5%, not 1.3% (https://treasurydirect.gov/auctions/announcements-data-resul...).

2. In reality, you have a finite lifetime, so you can spend down the principal. Suppose you are 30 years old (about the youngest I could imagine this being possible), and that you plan on living to 100 (most people don't). That's 70 years. If you do the math, and use the 1.5% rate, it works out that you only need $43k, not $77k, to hit that $1k/yr number.

Auction results only show the coupon rate on the TIPS, not the total yield.

All TIPS are currently yielding more than 2.1%: https://www.wsj.com/market-data/bonds/tips

This math is wrong because you have to pay tax on the income from TIPS (unless you are low income enough that you net tax rate is 0%).

The real problem with that idea is that one's living expenses are almost certainly going to be more than $1000/year, even if you are able to grow enough calories and generate enough watts to be self sufficient.

In order to live off interest alone, you'd probably need $1M in assets or more. At that point, you could just live off the principle.

Living is work no matter where. The monestary, for example, is no different than having a job to generate tradeable value to live. The article might really be interested in places where you can live entirely self-sufficiently, without relying on inputs that society voluntarily grants.

For example, the Into the Wild guy in Alaska. He "lived" for "free", for a short time, but he still relied on an old vehicle for shelter (from society) and had a bunch of clothes and provisions. So, that fits the mold only if you include becoming a thief or outlaw and just taking things from society without trade or agreement, Not done successfully, anywhere, for any length of time.

While this does exist in theory, as I said, there are significant caveats. These are largely derived from the structure. However, I argue that the function could be optimized outside of, or with modification of the system. But overall the system in and of itself is self-reinforcing so there is a substantial barrier to such improvements, and such alterations will be made against an "adversarial network" for lack of a better term.

Isn't it what some arostocratic and monarchy families do?

Yes, as long as an entity owns the land they want to get paid for it - either to live on it, game, cross

I’d say the free life doesn’t scale but maybe it doesn’t have to for those that can find their own corner of Earth

Do Bedouin tribes pay taxes or tariff ?

If one is OK with the downsides, it's completely possible, and a lot of people have done it for extended periods of time, even whole decades...

So? It's not like society would dissapear overnight, and those people would be left with no such recourse.

The person asking just asked for some place without taxes and no price on a plot of land you can claim. They didn't say they want to move all of society to that, or that they want to make a point by relying on their own self entirely.

The point being that you're still giving up some amount of personal liberty in order to be able to successfully interact with society, even if that interaction is minimal. You are still a part of that society. You are not completely independent of it.

Ashleigh Brilliant had a great one-liner about this: no man is an island, but some of us are very long peninsulas.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/pond-scum

Walden bros are like house cats: fully reliant on a system of support they neither acknowledge nor understand.

Brilliant but, as human owned by felines, "actively disdain" may be more accurate than "neither acknowledge nor understand".

Surely you can agree that interdependence is a spectrum, and people can find satisfaction at different levels.

At least the newyorker article lays it's objections out clearly. It finds Thoreau repugnant for his libertarian outlook, and even more so when Thoreau comes to agreeable conclusions, but by different means than the author.

>"This is not the stuff of a democratic hero. Nor were Thoreau’s actual politics, which were libertarian verging on anarchist. Like today’s preppers, he valued self-sufficiency for reasons that were simultaneously self-aggrandizing and suspicious: he did not believe that he needed anything from other people, and he did not trust other people to provide it. “That government is best which governs least,” Jefferson supposedly said. Thoreau, revising him, wrote, “That government is best which governs not at all.”"

>His moral clarity about abolition stemmed less from compassion or a commitment to equality than from the fact that slavery so blatantly violated his belief in self-governance.

The author seems upset that Thoreau is not appreciative or thankful for the society he lives in. I think the last paragraph sums it up well.

>Granted, it is sometimes difficult to deal with society. Few things will thwart your plans to live deliberately faster than those messy, confounding surprises known as other people. Likewise, few things will thwart your absolute autonomy faster than governance, and not only when the government is unjust; every law is a parameter, a constraint on what we might otherwise do. Teen-agers, too, strain and squirm against any checks on their liberty. But the mature position, and the one at the heart of the American democracy, seeks a balance between the individual and the society. Thoreau lived out that complicated balance; the pity is that he forsook it, together with all fellow-feeling, in “Walden.” And yet we made a classic of the book, and a moral paragon of its author—a man whose deepest desire and signature act was to turn his back on the rest of us

I think this same sentiment is what is expressed elsewhere in this tread. "how dare you be ungrateful for what society has given you, and how dare you not care for your fellow man". I think some people will never understand the desire of others to simply be left alone.

Is that what he really wanted thought? Nobody was preventing Thoreau from disappearing into the wilderness. He did not do that because it would have been 1) very difficult and 2) quite dangerous. He was perfectly willing to embrace society when it benefited him personally.

Some people want to engage with society only on their own terms, and to the extent it benefits them.

It it is the case now, as it was then, that social participation is a more of a package deal, not itemized interactions. Some people chafe under this.

Don't get me wrong - loved the book, love the concept. The distance between both and reality is a little larger than is immediately obvious, however.

Maybe you could live a solitary life, on your own, using only what your land provides you, but there's no way you could access modern health care, then.

Same goes for Internet access (all those subway cables were laid by somebody, probably subsidised by some government, at least partially).

Same goes for roads, and so on.

This is a myth very few people could live because the others don't and one way or another support them.

A lot of people are stingy and don't want to contribute unless they're getting the bargain.

If someone else is getting the better end of the stick, they view this as a loss, and it makes them miserable.

Essentially, they view taxation and society as a zero sum game, rather than a positive sum game.

I think political polarization and extremism is making this a more and more common view.

I can't pay any taxes if $1 is used even indirectly for abortions, to fund wars, etc

Society is complex and can't really be reduced like this, but a growing number of people think it can be.

Government spending, especially without oversight, is an extremely inefficient method for "building community". The vast majority of taxes go to enormous, bureaucratic departments or programs with virtually no connection to individual people within one's local sphere.

Donating to, and actively participating in, church, schools, parks, community centers, etc is typically a lot more effective in strengthening a community, and one can easily be anti-taxes and very much pro-community.

And while local institutions can be more responsive and flexible, they also cannot exist without a larger entity helping maintain their sovereignty. (Otherwise larger and stronger forces would overthrow them.) Local only can also be a hassle for things like commerce or civil rights. Imagine every city having their own currency or rules about what "kind of people" are welcome or unwelcome.

However the OP's point was that someone who is anti-tax (or just wants some accountability and transparency) is "obviously" both anti-community and anti-society. I'm simply saying that being deeply invested in one's community via direct participation in, and/or contributing to, any of a number of local outlets and groups, is not incompatible with frustration regarding the lack of control over the use of one's tax payments.

I think this is the crux of it. I think it all comes down to the counterfactual used in comparison.

One group of people say look, this is all positive sum because without society, you would be living in a mud hut, so be gratefully for everything you get to keep beyond that.

The other group of people say look, I contribute far more to this society than I get back. Sure, I'm better off than if I lived in mud hut, but worse off than if I lived in a society with less involuntary obligation.

I would say it is the opposite. Looking back at the millenia of human history, it is people migrating. Successive waves out of Africa and across the continents, and everywhere else, constantly moving in order to live more "free". Whether that is for more resources, or away from conflict within a family or tribe, or from without, with organized religions and governments, etc.

Only recently have we stopped because, frankly, there is no place to go. We can still move around cities and countries (and that can help if you are escaping family or tribal issues), but most of the places we can go to are largely the same. If you have a problem with this economy, the proliferation of petro chemicals and other toxins, etc, there isn't really anywhere you can go to escape.

The folks who leave or want to leave are often characterized as losers, loners, etc, and from the point of the view of the people who are happy with the situation that they are trying to escape, they are losers- but that is exactly why they are trying to escape.

2) we didn’t stop moving around because there’s nowhere else to go. There is a huge amount of totally unpopulated (by humans) land in nearly every region. We don’t choose to live out there because it sucks. We stopped moving around because we discovered that instead of chasing food down all over the place, you can grow food right near you, then you can pick your favorite little bend in the river to shack up and live out your days with your buddies.

If that was all there was to it, why did we keep migrating after the agricultural revolution?

I think you are agreeing with me. People leave communities when they are not prospering within them.

This is what I was disputing. We haven’t stopped, and to the extent that we have, it’s not because there’s no place to go.

My agenda in replying to the original comment is that this desire to move is not abnormal. It is as much a part of human history as building community is. I wanted to point that out, because I am familiar with many well-intentioned and well-off people not understanding (and even feeling contempt) for people who wish to leave their community. If you are not happy, and not prospering within a community, why would you want to stay? I don't know if understanding the roots of that dissatisfaction will help us achieve a kinder gentler society, but at least it might help them no longer refer to those people as loners or losers (and have a little empathy and understanding).

My purpose was to respond to the original comment that the desire to leave community is not as strange and abnormal as it seemed to state. I think there is an equally strong claim that human history is of us leaving community as it is building community.

Most migrations in the last few hundred years that I am aware of were driven by social issues (economic, political, religious, etc), and not from natural environmental changes. I.e., Ireland's Great Hunger was not an environmentally driven exodus, even if a potato blight was involved.

Migration waves happened, but those were notable events cause by something rather then norm. They also usually or often involved people moving in groups rather then alone.

First thing, there really is no 'average' human that you can speak of without extensive qualifications about what you mean.

An enormous amount of people lived their lives nomadically up until recently. I don't just mean in North America but across Siberia into Europe, as well as in Africa and Australia and many other places.

If you go by sheer quantity of people (starting with anatomically modern humans) that would outweigh any sedentary people.

Single individuals did, but my comment was really about individuals or subcommunities leaving the larger commmunity when it became too oppressive.

Digging even deeper based on some conversations I've had with friends, a lot of these folks are running away from a string of bad bosses or toxic management.

Every means of making a living requires putting up with a bad boss, so its not surprising they start looking for alternative means of making a living/disconnecting etc. COVID exacerbated this.

With a traditional job, if you have a bad boss, you've got up deal with that non-stop. If you're driving for Uber/Lyft, the platform as your "boss" is an app, for better or worse. More importantly though, if you get an unruly passenger, they're kinda your boss, but only for the duration of the ride (except for extreme cases), so you don't have to put up with them as a bad boss forever.

In the Pali Canon, the Buddha is often referred to as “the recluse Gautama”. Seems like he found a way to have a pretty good life though. Your generalization doesn’t account for the other path in history where hermits got away from the maddening crowd and found peace of mind and knowledge.

You’d prefer to live in society, and that’s fine, but everyone isn’t wired the same way. They may be outliers, but I would disagree with saying that they’re “doomed”.

Society today is very hostile to wandering folks. Many western monastics independent of monasteries (especially female monastics) have a hard time getting alms without a lot of organization.

I'm pretty green to bicycle touring, but my anecdote reflects accounts I commonly read from other bicycle tourists, many who spend months and in some cases years on the go, all over the world.

Well, this requires not only that there be no taxes or external fees /today/, but /for all eternity/. Not very good predictive models on what tax regime will be in place a few civilizations down the road. But there's other challenges to living forever that, historically, have proven a bigger obstacle to most people than taxes.

Fortunately, most people aren't overly concerned with living forever; and in that case, you only need a place that has no taxes for a finite amount of time. The goal, in this case, is to avoid taxes for the rest of your life. And in most jurisdictions, you can elect to just not pay taxes and not suffer consequences for a significant period of time, often five years or substantially more. As long as you intend for the rest of your life to be no more than five years or so (and have a mechanism to enforce this), a huge majority of the world has a favorable tax enforcement regime, even if the tax billing regime isn't to your taste.

Unless you have found the cure to death, it's enough that that holds for 5-6 decades for most of us here.

Not in any magnitude comparable to today, which even brings several qualitative and technical differences.

>The loners, the hermits, the "self-sufficient" seem to be outliers, doomed for a hard, brief life

Those were much more common that you seem to think, and even a lot of otherise "community" life included much more "alone" time (e.g. whole weeks or months away from the village).

All humans are a mix of good and evil. So you need a system in place to minimise the negative impact of this.

This is BTW the reason why utopian societies always fail.

That said, OOP's sentiment is largely caused by housing costs across the world.

Western society at least is two faced, on one hand liberty of the individual is emphasized but at the same time society is extremely hostile to those who either hold incompatible opinions or just don't fit in.

If you think about it, no government or human has authority to regulate the fact that a human exists. What many like OOP look for is the ability to self-determine without being policed by society or being enslaved, not by our natural needs such as food, shelter and water but by the requirements of society such as paying taxes, registering in databases, having information collected about us and the used to control us.

The typical american for example, simply to exist and sustain themselves as an adult has to get a birth certificate ,SSN, fingerprint taken, undergo drivers trainin and exam which involves more data collection, get a drivers license, can't buy a car outright so finance one which involves too much crap to list here, and get mandatory insurance for the car (forced to do business), mandatory health insurance enrollment unless they want to pay a tax penalty, piss in a cup to prove their drug usage innocence, in many physical jobs you have to let a guy massage your balls to prove you are not herniated (yes,really. Very common), if you do manage to get a job, you now need to live somewhere close which means renting for most and that in itself is a contract you enter where how you live in detail can get regulated by the landlord and the after you pay all these slave masters how you spend the money you have is also regulated heavily from food, drugs, sex,etc... and most people can't even get that far without working multiple jobs, if they are even that lucky. And if you have family, dependents, sickness anywhere that's a whole other story.

I mean, I get your view and I am with you. I like instant online shopping, doordash, airbnb, uber, walmart,etc... and I am privileged enough to enjoy that right now but you must understand the frustration of this living. There is no breathing room for most, especially younger people in their 20s and early 30s.

It's tempting to wonder, what if I could build a house from logs in the woods. Hunt and fish for food, read books for entertainment. Doesn't even have to be on your own.

We all get just one life and it's a shame how it is wasted working from one weekend on to the other being regulated and puppetted until you die.

Society benefits only those who are compliant with its rules and fit in properly. I mean these days, what society? It's just everything you say and do constantly recorded and scrutinized. Netflix had a moview recently "old dads" or something, it was frustratingly too real. Everything is political, no one is real, everyone is waiting for a chance to stab the non-conformist in the back. They know not the meaning of tolerance and inclusivity. Everyone seems to be an unauthentic murderous parrot if i can exagerate a bit. How can people manage not being themselves for so long!?

If you don't already have your own trusted people and places, it's best to avoid people as much as possible.

Life is meant to be lived, not barely survived, grateful society has tolerated your existence.

In my opinion the focus on making life as long as possible or allowing a society to exist as long as possible is misplaced. A life well lived should be everyone's goal, whatever well lived means for you.

All laws are ultimately backed up by threats of violence. Including the laws of whatever country you live in.

Governments around the world and throughout history have routinely decided who gets to live and who gets to die.

I am not happy about this but it is unfortunately true.

You can make every claim you want about lack of authority but it is easily overruled by a fist in your face.

Not having a government simply means that there will be more than one militant group enforcing things using violence. See “failed state”.

This is the capitalistic narrative since the agricultural revolution, thousands of years ago, but it's not true of most of human history.

During pre-agriculture we coexisted with many species, all living off the fat of the land, resources were plentiful for hundreds of thousands of years.

A delightful counterpoint and quick read is the book "Ishmael."

https://www.amazon.com/Ishmael-Novel-Daniel-Quinn/dp/0553375...

While they were plentiful. We chose agriculture because it means your entire tribe not dying of starvation because of minor variations in the local environment.

If local environments began to change, then your nomadic tribe moved along rather sitting around waiting to die. Birds fly south for the winter.

Which sucks if you’re injured when the migration must occur. Or if you migrate incorrectly. The evidence we have is for periods of plenty followed by harrowing narrowing of the population. These events are few in between and globally notable in the agricultural era (Bronze Age collapse, fall of Rome, et cetera).

Debt in that context was more of a social obligation - but served a similar purpose as what we understand debt to be today: to compel someone to do something. It engendered bonds of trust and interdependence, helping ensure the survival of the group. Food sharing was often obligatory: today's hunter who shares his catch with you becomes tomorrow's recipient when you make the kill.

You're right to note that the agricultural revolution was special -- in that the accumulation of surplus allowed people to store it, and lend it out. This lead to wealth being quantified and introduced the concept of interest.

"Capitalism" - as characterized by the drive to continuously reinvest in order to generate more wealth - doesn't come into play for another ten thousand years. The different prerequisites (wage labour, financial systems, property relations) arrive at different times - but we could say, ballpark, around the 16th century, with the advent of the chartered companies (eg, East India)?

sure, many services can be provided by for-profit businesses for a fee, but who helps to put out fires for example? who pays for equipment used by firefighters?

i see no way to make firefighting work unless everyone contributes.

unless you rely on generosity of some, but that would not be fair, nor is it sustainable.

how do you build streets? a public park? do you want to charge for their use?

how do you pay for cleaning streets? street lights? traffic lights? street signs? police? judges? jails?

there are many other examples that work better if the whole community collaborates to achieve them. taxes need not be only money but could be some other form of contribution.

How would that people make money?

as i said: taxes need not be only money but could be some other form of contribution

also taxes are simply mandatory contributions. that doesn't require a centralized power. but they are not a free market either.

the examples i gave can not be solved in a free market.

there are more: access to water in areas where i can't dig my own well (or where uncontrolled water use causes problems).

solving this with a free market inevitably means that there will be some people who won't have access to water because connecting them is to expensive. we see this problem now with access to internet in rural areas. pretty soon access to internet will be required, and that means, we as a community have to pay for it to enable everyone to get access to it.

another good example to look at is waste removal. while waste removal can be done trough private businesses and paid by the amount of waste you have, in cities it must be mandatory, because if it is not, then some people will simply throw the trash into the street. if it is mandatory, it is no longer a free market. but rather similar to taxes. but without a central power.

Why would anyone throw trash on street, with full of bins? Mandate usualy change human behavior in opposite direction.

Why would anyone throw trash on street

because it is to expensive to pay for someone to clean it up.

- because it is to expensive to pay for someone to clean it up.

Isn't that one of reasons to throw it in to bin instead?

that's easy to disprove. there are businesses that do not care about maximizing profit, but have other goals. (look up b-corp for one form of that. in my own business the goal is to maximize the number of jobs that i can create)

regulations are shaped by lobby

which is really bad, because it means those who are the loudest get their way and everyone else suffers.

throw it into trash bins? and who empties the trash bins?

the point you are missing is that if noone pays for trash removal then trash doesn't get removed. so either everyone pays for their own, or the community collects money and everyone contributes to that. there is no way around that.

Bin empties a company that is payed for its job. Now it doesn't matter how much waste you produce, because its mandated and same for all for same price. But not all litter a same. Which makes inequalities. Same for health care (EU), education, etc.

you might argue that taxes are not the same thing, but i disagree. the point is that it is a required contribution, which is a condition for living in a community, which was the argument that i started with.

Imagine businesses in private sector that would charge you for things that you don't ordered. Its nonsense, somehow tolerable if done by state.

charge you for things that you don't ordered

that is not what is happening here. the state is not some foreign entity, but the elected representative will of the community. i want the trash taken care of, and so does the majority of the community.

if your government does not do what your community wants then you don't live in a functioning democracy. that is a different problem alltogether.

in summary: free market will not take care of those problems i mentioned. if you disagree, then i'd like to see a specific explanation how a free market can take care of those issues.

anything mandatory is not a free market.

to get these things taken care of, the community will have to enact rules or delegate someone to do it. how it makes that decision is is up to the community. it doesn't require a government that is not under the control of the community. nor does the existence of taxes imply the existence of such a government.

Democracy is rule of majority and make inequalities by definition. Minorities needs to accept rules that they do not agree with. It's like monopoly except it is forbidden to do competition by law. Decentralisation of taxes or financial system could solve many issues that escalate recently.

- i'd like to see a specific explanation how a free market can take care of those issues.

I don't think free market solve issues. Decentralisation and gathering in local communities could. Less mandateds = less laws = less taxes = more personal responsibility which means more effective solving problems that really matter for you and your close one.

- to get these things taken care of, the community will have to enact rules or delegate someone to do it. how it makes that decision is is up to the community. it doesn't require a government that is not under the control of the community. nor does the existence of taxes imply the existence of such a government.

I agree with that.

in short, it looks like we both actually want something similar here. what that is needs more discussion.

my idea of democracy also has a heavy focus on decentralization. basically i believe that decisions or rules should be made at the lowest level needed for that rule to be useful.

that means, things like traffic rules should be made at a national or better even global level because it is not helpful to have different rules for that in every city. same goes for issues like polution. those are global problems. but many other problems are local, and it is better to decide those on a local level. i'd even go as far as suggesting to make every possible choice at a local level first and only escalate to a higher level if the local decisions create a conflict with neighboring localities.

so i am 100% with you on decentralization. though i don't see less laws or less taxes as a goal or as an obvious result. decentralization could lead to less laws or taxes, but it doesn't have to. personally i don't care either way. that is up to each community to work out for themselves.

i think the problem at the start of the thread was that the claim was that there should be zero taxes or zero mandated contributions of any form. and that is something i disagree with. and it appears that you are not asking for that either.

the next question would be: how would a political or electoral system look like that enables those things? whether it is called democracy or something else.

Because we are not living in ideal word. Truly functioning democracy require freedom of knowledge to have free and conscious decision in voting. Our decisions are shaped mostly by media. Which is, again, centralized. Also, if you want to be elected by people, you need to be a populist. So democratic system tend to shape peoples mind either on left or right and gather them about specific ideas. For me, it makes unnatural dividing of people to categories and instead of solving problems together, we fight each other.

- basically i believe that decisions or rules should be made at the lowest level needed for that rule to be useful.

Absolutely agree.

- that means, things like traffic rules should be made at a national or better even global level because it is not helpful to have different rules for that in every city. same goes for issues like polution. those are global problems.

I don't agree with global level. Nations has different wealth, different technologies, etc. You cannot apply same rules for US or India. Same for pollution. For example US made huge capital on pollution in 20th century. Would you ban developing country to obtain their capital from pollution today and made similar wealth as US previously?

- there should be zero taxes or zero mandated contributions of any form.

There should be absolute minimal taxes and no mandates. Consequences forces communities naturally to finance what is important.

- how would a political or electoral system look like that enables those things?

I'm not sure how it should look like, but I would like to free ourselves from the idea of needed rulers above our lives. We willing to put our responsibilities to authority, which dispatch our decisions from consequences.

i agree with every point in that paragraph.

I don't agree with global level. Nations has different wealth, different technologies, etc. You cannot apply same rules for US or India

with traffic rules i meant the general stuff, like on which side to drive on, the colors of traffic lights, the design of street signs. those are pretty much already a global standard, and rightly so. because it does not make sense to have those work differently in different countries. of course there should always be carveouts for regional specifics. we don't need kangaroo warning signs in austria.

other examples are things that are for the most part already global standards. like the metric system. yes, the US should literally be forced to change here. it's become the laughing stock of the world on that issue. also copyright law. etc. money should be global. we don't need different currencies. maybe punishment for serious crimes. human rights. but on the other side there are many things that are global or almost global now, that should not, or need not be.

Same for pollution. For example US made huge capital on pollution in 20th century. Would you ban developing country to obtain their capital from pollution today and made similar wealth as US previously?

well, yes and no. i agree with you that it is not fair to just stop everyone from polluting when their economy depends upon it. but as pollution is destroying our climate, we have to do something about it. we can't just allow some areas to pollute the world while other areas don't. it would not work. what would, and does happen is that that those countries that decided to limit their pollution just export their production to pollute elsewhere.

what we do need to do however is to then enable other ways for these countries to prosper. we need to invest into those countries and build them up much like we built up some countries in asia and europe after world war 2. see more discussion on that in the thread on chocolate here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38073378

in particular this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38079451

I would like to free ourselves from the idea of needed rulers above our lives

agreed. partly i see this as a historical problem. we started out with rulers being absolute, like kings, etc.

eventually some started to elect their kings. etc. you know the history. that history is the reason we look at elected leaders as rulers above us.

so we need to change the understanding. that those elected representatives are there to serve us. not we serve them. their responsibility is to take care of our problems, and find and propose just solutions and rules for us to be able to live together.

there are a few things we can change to make the election system fairer:

first of the whole party system is designed for conflict and not cooperation. get rid of it. each representative should be independent. no more toeing the party line. make decisions only based on your conscience.

next point is a bit harder: get rid of the concept of candidates. don't allow election campaigns. don't allow media to promote certain people. let people get elected only based on their reputation as good citizens. this prevents influence of the elections by those who have more funding.

but that only works in small communities, where people have a chance to know each other. for big cities that practically means elections per neighborhood.

elect multiple people per neighborhood. also give each person multiple votes. maybe as many votes as the number of people to be elected. multiple votes avoids that a majority of votes concentrate on a single person. because everyone has to still assign the other votes they have.

these are then the community/neighborhood representatives, and they make decisions for their neighborhood.

elections on a higher level are made from those elected at a lower level. all the way to the top. this levels the playing field and it allows good people to become elected without financial resources.

i don't think a perfect system is possible. but this system would remove a lot of friction, combined with favoring decisions at a local level, it would be a lot better than anything we have currently.

I am somewhat surprised that there aren't more cheap-living communes in the US. A few thousand dollars could probably pay the living expenses of a few dozen people – assuming they are all on-board with such a materially minimalist lifestyle.

From John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930):

> > Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes --those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs-a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.

* http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

If I have to grow my own food, compose and perform my own music, build my own housing and vehicles, life will be shit.

If we do have division of labor and pay each other for the work, we've reinvented capitalism. If we don't pay each other, the incentives are very strong to be a free-rider.

Nope.

Capitalism, at least 21st century western capitalism, consists of 3 things:

1. relatively free markets, in the sense that what can be bought/sold and for how much is only loosely regulated

2. an entrepeneurial culture that supports the idea of "starting a business"

3. the idea that the rewards of any given human venture should go primarily to those who invest capital (rather than, say, labor or IP) in the venture

What you've just described doesn't specifically cover any of these three, and it particularly doesn't cover #3 which is the most pernicious aspect of capitalism (the other two could exist in a system that did not incorporate #3).

(1) says rewards are assigned based on supply and demand. If labor is scarce and investment is plentiful, rewards will go to labor. If investment is scarce, and labor is plentiful, rewards will go to capital (with the obvious caveat that there are many other factors that affect returns, and their distribution within the pools of labor and capital).

Unfortunately for western labor, there has been an exploding world population and lower barriers to trade & investment flows (globalization) for the last 40 years - hence a huge glut in labor. Rewards have gone to mobile capital, tech businesses and workers in the developing-world, not so much to blue-collar work in the west. But that is mostly supply & demand, not a built-in rule of capitalism.

There are certainly other ways of distributing the rewards, no question about that.

So the question arises: why do the rewards go preferentially to capital in so many of the ventures that exist in our system? Your argument claims that it reflects the (relatively) low supply of capital (compared to the (relatively) plentiful supply of labor; we'll ignore IP for now).

By contrast, I claim that it doesn't reflect that primarily, but is instead deliberate economic/political/legal choice made under significant influence by capital, and that's why we call it "capitalism".

If we lived in a world, for whatever reason, the rewards of a human venture went primarily to labor, we can still recognize that there's a "system" distributing the rewards, but we would not call that "capitalism".

So I'd partially agree with your argument but then invert it: an important reason why the rewards go to capital - i.e. we live in a capitalist society - is that there's sufficiently little countervailing pressure on this arrangement. How much this comes from population numbers, lack of political will, schemeing by the rich etc. is always going to be hard to say. However, a system that didn't work the way ours does would not be capitalism.

Wage-based employment in the western world is certainly an economy. It is affected by laws, taxes, regulations, wage transparency, negotiating power, unionization, social welfare benefits, etc. But it is approximately a market, and wages are affected by the supply of labor (with skills/without; with education/without; with an artisan skill/or not; prepared to do dull, repetitive, smelly, disgusting job/or not).

How is labor not a market?

And do you know workers with profit sharing, or performance-related bonuses, or share options? Well they are essentially capitalists in their own employer, with some (small, perhaps insignificant) share of the returns to the business.

Do you know anyone who is self-employed? They are solo capitalists, self-started, owners of their shop or tools, and a capitalist of one.

Do you have a pension that owns equities? You are also a capitalist.

You may hate your manager, or envy them, because they earn more than you, and get to boss people around. They are not capitalists. Managers are not capitalists. Don't confuse your hatreds. They are only capitalists to the extent that they also get share ownership and options. Choose your targets carefully, and be explicit in your class-warfare hatreds.

For a system to be capitalist, it requires additional features, and the most significant of these is the way the rewards of human ventures are distributed (i.e. primarily towards those who invest capital rather than labor or IP in the venture).

Claiming that A, B & C is the same as D surely needs to imply some concern about the actual meaning of D, no?

Pretty sure what I wrote was understandable for most. You probably also understood it, but felt the need to complain about the vocabulary.

The first two may be a necessary precondition for capitalism, but they in no way describe it - they are common elements in human communities that predate capitalism by millenia.

The dichotomy presented between capitalism as the byproduct of division of labor and the inevitability of free-riding in its absence paints a rather stark picture. However, this view presumes a rigidity in human motivation and socio-economic structures that simply does not account for the complex tapestry of human innovation.

Life is not relegated to the binary of paying or not paying for services. Consider that human motivation is not solely hinged on material compensation but also on intrinsic rewards—personal growth, satisfaction, and the joy of contributing to something larger than oneself. The potential for human societies to organize around principles that value these intrinsic motivations equally, if not more than the extrinsic, suggests that the welfare generated by division of labor need not be confined within the traditional frameworks of capitalism.

A more nuanced approach considers economies as organic, adaptable, and evolutionary entities that can incorporate diverse motivational drivers, beyond just financial incentives. In such systems, the fear of free-riding is mitigated not by imposing structures but by fostering a culture where communal contribution is as valued as individual success. This shifts the focus from a simplistic labor-for-pay model to a more expansive, dynamic model that embraces a spectrum of motivations and rewards.

This is extremely wrong. Every society in human history has some degree of division of labour. Capitalism is a specific economic mode of production that emerged from the embers of Feudalism a few hundred years ago, as merchant guilds and private manufacturors in urban centres gradually grew more independent whilst the noble classes who had subsisted off the labour of an agricultural underclass had gradually lost power. The exact process and reasons for this is extremely complicated and vast in scope.

There is also an unimaginably vast spectrum of potential ways of organising economic production in a human society, and many civilisations historically have exhibited different iterations of these. To make the claim that it is impossible to devise a system different from where

>we don't pay each other,[and] the incentives are very strong to be a free-rider

is not only to ignore not an entire field of historical and anthropolgical research, but also to not even bother to imagine any alternative to a very particular and unique economic system that we happen, by pure chance, to find ourselves in our infinitesimally narrow slice of time.

Right now in spain, the largest buisness group in basque (10th largest overall) is the Mondragon corporation. It’s worker-owned (but not worker managed), although each worker has voting rights. Clearly it is possible - even within capialism - to have some worker autonomy over production.

In 1936, during the civil war in Spain, around 60-75% of urban industry and agriculture was restructured by anarchist labour unions and run and managed by the workers to varying degrees of collectivization. Some towns abandoned the use of fiat currency entirely and instead used systems of vouchers, in small villages goods where distributed even more informally. Industrial production is reported to have increased during this time, and agricultural yields rose by around 30%.

How? There was no economic failure. It ended due to a political coup. After all there was the slight external complication of a proxy war considered by many to be a prelude to the defining conflict of the 20th century.

>never expanded

Apart from across an entire country you mean?

In any system including moderate technological complexity (e.g. roads, sewage disposal systems) there will be tasks that are useful, or even necessary, for a community but that nevertheless have low intrinsic rewards. Providing extrinsic rewards (e.g. money) in exchange for doing these tasks has nothing to do with capitalism.

What may have something to do with capitalism is whether or not people need to exchange their labor for goods or money in order to remain alive. In a system where this is no longer necessary, finding the right kinds of rewards and/or motivational culture to get people to do unpleasant tasks that still need to be done will be a challenge, I suspect.

Americans are way too materialistic and there needs to be a reckoning of this if anything is going to change. Even people I meet that live in other minivans or RVs want to have every single creature comfort they had when they were living in a house. I decided that in my van I would only carry what I need for the van or things I can easily put in the backpack and walk away with.

I definitely use the free places. They list in the Reddit post. At west I always stay on the BLM lands.

If this lifestyle works for you, then good for you.

Try raising children that way.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to live a comfortable life; the vast majority of humans forever have wanted this.

In the USA we have a problem with cost of living, but at the end of the day the reason for this is almost always misguided government intervention.

For example, in the housing market, many cities have made it prohibitively expensive to build high density housing (which is what is needed when you have high population density).

If you wanted to make medical care unaffordable then you’d design a system like the US system, with artificial limits everywhere on increasing supply, and (well I am well off topic but could go on forever on this).

I can completely sympathize with young people today who look at the ridiculous cost of living today and come to the (incorrect) conclusion that the problem is consumerism.

But it’s not. It’s a century of well-intentioned but ultimately harmful government policies.

By itself I think that this is a positive attribute. The problem comes when people believe that they deserve to live more comfortable lives than others, which seems true of most Americans.

Come on now, people have done it for hundreds of thousands of years. Just because it’s different from what you used to doesn’t mean it can’t be done. And it doesn’t mean the children will come out harmed in anyway.

> In the USA we have a problem with cost of living, but at the end of the day the reason for this is almost always misguided government intervention.

If there is no government intervention after the 2008 recession (QE, 0% rates) then many more people would be living like I am living. That’s how much people don’t want to reduce their lifestyle, they push it out as far into the future as they can. No matter what the cost of that is later on.

But you seem to think that the government and the corporate state or two different things when they’re one and the same. All these measures were to save stock, prices, assets, etc..But you seem to think that the government and the corporate state or two different things when they’re one in the same. All these measures were to save stock prices, assets, etc.

I’m not a young person, but I can understand what young people think when they see the boomers, who are doing all the consuming, spending all their money which they got from the government interest rates. It’s both not consumers and it is, because the government instituting 0% rates just turned every asset market into a bubble. And this gave everyone with the assets the ability to consume. But you know the government needs people to consume because that’s what creates GDP right?

So all the boomers with the larger amount amount of increase in asset prices, they didn’t have to sell their prices for more money, they don’t have to go on vacation and buy more things, they could’ve live more simply, and there would’ve been no inflation. But it’s the consumption from the people with the assets that to inflation. It’s not 0% interest rates alone that Cause inflation.

Come now, people also used to die from toothaches, and during those hundreds of thousands of years infant and child mortality was incredibly high, and education practically nonexistent.

These “we have done this since the beginning of time” arguments always make me chuckle, they are so incredibly simplistic.

Yes, life used to be more difficult. No, that doesn’t mean such a life was without meaning.

As recently as in the early 20th century the fertility rate required to sustain population numbers in Germany was over 2.5 - and that was well into the industrial era.

Before such obvious to us things like antibiotics or doctors washing hands it was likely much higher.

I have zero unhappiness about the way I live, my problem is other people make it hard for me to live this simplistic life.

I just read that some sociopath is trying to make it illegal for people to live intense in the UK. That’s what I’m talking about.

Last time I was in America (about 20 years ago) there was an item on the news about a child that had died because of an untreated dental problem.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/07/americans-he...

Would you be willing to share the list of what you have?

For cooking I have MSR rocket and camping cookpot and a set of utensils.

Also a gym bag with a towel and my shower stuff.

Most of the things that take up space in my van or things that I need for the van, like shades for the window and tarps to keep the van cool when I’m in the desert. Also tools, of course. I also carry about 18 gallons of water with me so I can stay out in the desert for extended periods.

Basically, I have clothes, food and shelter so I’m OK. I just wish the shelter was not a van.

And since I have to drive around so much to follow the weather It’s very hard to have long-term meaningful friendships.

The other thing is lack of stable healthcare but I am slowly weaning myself off of Western medicine so that has becoming less of a concern.

It’s not that I want to live this way, it’s the only solution I have right now unfortunately.

But even a mess of a studio costs $800 a month which I can’t afford.

even if I had a place to park that was stable I wouldn’t mind either. Just something close to a town with food and place to shower, etc.

There are definitely cities in the Midwest where you can get studios for <$500/mo still.

or just name one in general.

https://www.zillow.com/apartments/pittsburgh-pa/hampshire-ha...

This is one thing I’ve learned to look for in photos of online apartments. We’re looking at places at this price level.

I know that's not ideal, but how does that compromise compare to living in a van? Do you prefer to live without any facilities whatsoever to hold out for a proper stove and oven?

Well I don't know what triggers you, so that's hard to say. If it's cold weather, then... nowhere in the Midwest

> or just name one in general.

Witchita, cedar rapids (Iowa), etc

If you go to a much smaller town, there aren't even many studios, but you can find 1/2br for the same.

I’ve always had a problem with EMF. I used to work at Cisco and that’s when I had my first mental breakdown in a long time. It was a 1999 right when they started installing Wi-Fi in the buildings. I didn’t know that till many years later.

I have been looking at some places in Nebraska, but this is what I’m faced with.

I am not woo woo crank and I approached this with skepticism and rigor. But if you want to investigate, more, look at voltage gated calcium ion channels like the l type calcium channels and TRPV1 channels.

In my opinion, people who have EHS will have changes in these genes that make them more susceptible to the electromagnetic waves causing calcium influx into the nerve cells. it just happens to be a coincidence that these same genetics will cause mood disorders. That is because mood disorders are environmental diseases.

And I have been in psychological and psychiatric treatment for over 30 years. I think I have not hashed this through with my therapist and doctors is just an assumption on your part.

I will say you need to see a therapist. If you think there’s any certainty that EHS does not exist, because that’s as bold as me, saying that it does exist.

>I’ve tested it every way I can to rule out placebo.

I'm genuinely curious, could you tell me a little more about how you did that?

The simplest thing I do is not to measure an area before I am in that area for an extended period of time. So say if I am sleeping in a hotel, I see how I feel and how I sleep, and sleep probably the biggest effect EMFs have on me so it is a good marker.

For example, if I stay at a friends house and sleep over, I’ll see how I sleep and I’ll take a measurement in the morning. I cannot tell you how many hundreds of times I’ve done this, but the correlation comes out every time, with household EMF the higher the electric field, I sleep in the worse my sleep is. The higher the the magnetic field the more pain I have and the more depression I have. So the fields seem to be having different effects on me.

With Radio frequency EMFs I do the same thing, but I have a few other tools since my meter does not measure over 8Ghz I really can’t tell how much 5G there is so there’s an app called “Coverage?“ that used to supplement the reading with my meter.

Radio frequency EMF nearly always make me manic and psychotic and my insomnia is horrible and my anger threshold is pretty much zero. my tinnitus will also become louder after a certain amount of time but that time seems to vary. I also get a lot of bladder pain.

Since for me, the symptoms do not start right away. It’s difficult to tell in an area if I’m going to be bothered by it unless it’s really strong. Since I’m homeless and drive around the whole country, I’ve been to places where EMFS were absolutely zero and I was literally cured of my mood disorder and insomnia, and where it was off the charts like in Phoenix where I have to take so much Klonopin just to drive through the city.

They’re probably the most important times I found where the times when I thought I was in a high EMF area and I slept great and it turns out I was in some weird pocket of low EMF exposure. For example, there is a park in the town that’s at a low level and it’s surrounded by trees. When I look it up on the Coverage? app, most of the 5G is gone. It sure enough when I took out my meter. The readings were exceptionally low.

I am not immediately bothered by things like using my cell phone, but the fact that my tinnitus is worse in my left ear where I use my phone, my whole life I don’t think is a coincidence.

But recently, and this is probably not as good as a placebo, but it sure told me a lot, I had a 24 hour Holter monitor put on because I have really weird blood pressure. They call it libel hypertension. I vary a lot during the day and actually at night it becomes really really low.

So this time when I had the Holter monitor on, I decided to go to places with high EMF and low EMF. And see what my readings were. Sure enough it correlated. My blood pressure was much higher like 160/98 in places with higher EMF. I also noticed something strange that I never realized before but my heart rate was lower when I was in high magnetic field and it was higher in an Area with high frequency EMF.

I just want other people reading this to understand I’m not some person running around trying to avoid EMS all the time. I mean they make my life shit but they’re not going to kill me. I’ve lived with my issues for 35 years and they haven’t killed me yet. If you met me, you wouldn’t see some better call Saul character that’s for sure.

https://www.industry.gov.au/science-technology-and-innovatio...

I’ve also found places in Nebraska, Montana, and Arizona, that are essentially radio free as well. But they are much more remote, of course.

How much power is the access point using? How many people are using the access point? Is data being actively transferred on the access point? Do you mean 5G like in 5 GHz or 5G like in 8 to 36 GHz? How long does one need to sit there to feel the effect? Does mid band 5G pass through walls?

Numerous researchers have already come out with the issues and the difficulties of testing for EHS and they need to test it in the real world.

And I agree, there are probably more people who think they have EHS than people who do.

Was this all in the guys head?

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/reveh-2021-01...

Or this family?

https://fortuneonline.org/articles/5g-radiofrequency-radiati...

A monastery of nuns or monks is something like that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosed_religious_orders

Even though the members live a minimal lifestyle of near-poverty, many monasteries are still not truly financially self-sufficient because their funding comes from an associated church's donations.

Amish communities may be an example of lower-cost living while being financially self-sufficient via selling crafts and furniture. (They're even financially independent enough to be exempt from paying and receiving government Social Security money.) It would be interesting to know of other communities that deliberately replicated Amish living (for cost/benefits) without being Amish.

This means they aren’t truly independent. They’re dependent in a way they could never afford to pay for themselves. They get by as free riders while everyone else pays for them.

Leaving aside the dubious benefits of police, Amish pay the same taxes as everyone else- with the exception of Social Security and workers' compensation, which they pay through their church. Those taxes entitle the Amish to their share of the national defense buff.

https://marketrealist.com/p/do-amish-pay-taxes/

> This means they aren’t truly independent. They’re dependent in a way they could never afford to pay for themselves.

That would seem to describe most, if not all, citizens of contemporary societies. Could you name someone who you consider truly independent? As the saying goes, "No man is an island."

The relevant comparison here is to other citizens, not to other states.

Yes, this hypothetical country would be peaceful and immune to the (justified) criticism the US receives over its intervention in foreign wars. However, think of all it (and the world) would lose. The rest of NATO would have to invest way more in defence in order to hold off Russia and China. The rest of the world would have to invest a huge amount in R&D for things like medicine and technology. And the only thing keeping this hypothetical "Amish United States" from being invaded are the oceans.

It's hard to take these sorts of counterfactuals too far though. On the one hand I might say "then the drug cartels in Mexico could invade the Amish United States and enslave everyone" but then it would also be equally valid to say the cartels would never exist in the first place if it weren't for drug prohibition and the demand for illegal drugs in the US. Still, I don't see how one big Amish nation would defend itself from gangs moving in and stealing everything they've got and enslaving people.

No, it isn't, and that's not how game theory works. No one is suggesting that everyone be Amish, and it seems fairly obvious that the Amish would act differently (e.g., invest in self defense) if that were the case.

I don't think you have a good idea of what life was like in the 1920s, even in the American West.

Here is what Cheyenne looked like in the 1910s - http://www.wyomingtalesandtrails.com/cheyenne1900s.html . People had cars then - and horses. Train service started in 1867. The local library started in 1886 so you could get books for entertainment.

You can see in the pictures there was even phone service.

Sears was making millions each year as a catalog mail-order company, so even if you lived in the middle of nowhere you could order just about anything for your house - including the house! In their 1920 book they wrote "Sears, Roebuck and Co. supply the needs of more than eight million families." https://archive.org/details/storyofsearsroeb00sear/page/2/mo...

So, go back another 50 years, to the 1870s of "Little House in the Big Woods". The family had venison, fish, pork, bear meat, squirrel, rabbit, "potatoes and carrots, the beets and turnips and cabbages" from their garden, red peppers, pumpkins, squashes, and yellow cheeses - all in the first chapter. Plus maple sugar, store sugar, honey from the bee tree, berries, pickles, milk from the cows, and made from all of those, "pumpkin pies and dried berry pies and cookies and cakes ... salt-rising bread" https://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/wildersewell-woods/wildersew...

Rather more than "the same 5-10 things repeatedly".

It’s cute for sure but I don’t know if I’d use a novel for children as an accurate portrayal of the median subsistence living experience 150 years ago.

Here is a glimpse of life in rural Oregon in the 1870s, as recorded in 1932: https://www.loc.gov/resource/wpalh2.29080415/?sp=7 . Her mother carded and dyed the wool herself, to make clothes. Peddlers would come by with bundles to sell, with "fancy shawls, printed goods, silks, and such other luxuries", sometimes sold for as high as $150/bundle. She bought a statue of Dickens from a peddler.

"The menu for a fine dinner would be: Chicken stew with dumplings, mashed potatoes, peach preserves, biscuits, and hominy." Dumplings and cobbler were staples. They had brown sugar and molasses. There was bread and milk, and teas made from local herbs. They had a schoolhouse. Most women wore calico (store-bought) and linsey-wollsey (locally made). Seems they had geese too.

For the big 4th of July event in Corvallis, her mother made 200 gooseberry pies.

Young women enjoyed the magazines Godey's, Peterson's, and the Bazaar.

This seems in decent alignment with the children's story. It does not seem like the spartan life keiferski suggests for some 50 years later.

Yes, Louis XIV didn't have internet service. Does that make the Sun King poor?

Clearly, no.

The usual way to do this through something like measuring the cost-of-living - the US started gathering this information during World War I. Your $100/month now corresponds to $6.50/month in 1920, says https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ , or $78/year.

We can look up actual numbers. From the Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics #357 at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31158004110184&se... dated May 1924 and covering the years 1918-1919 we can see breakdown of expenses for different places in the western US:

In Butte, Montana, the poorest family (1 out of 102 surveyed, with 4 people) made $900-$1,200 per year, and had $1,022.50 in expenses. (see page 14). Of that, about $900 was spend on food, clothing, rent, and fuel/light.

In the gold rush town of Cripple Creek District, Colorado (page 22) one family of 80, with 3 people, made under $900, and had expenses of $853.

In Trinidad, Colordo, 2 of 78 families (average of 4.5 people per family) made less than $900/year, and had expenses of $973.

And these are the poorest of the poor! They are in the city, which does affect the numbers - farm living can be cheaper, but surely not by a factor of 10.

So the idea that $78/year was in any way representative is clearly low-balling it by a lot, even if you only meant for a single person rather than a family.

The tables show a 1920 far different than the world you are thinking of. Look at the miscellaneous items for those in the Western states making at most $900/year, at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31158004110184&se... . 72% of them had life insurance, 11% paid membership to social clubs, 50% paid for movies, 89% got a newspaper, 78% paid for a physician, 22% paid for glasses, and so on.

If 1920 is your comparable, then in 2023 you also need to pay for those, on top of lodging, food, heat, and furniture, for your $100/month.

I have no doubt there were a handful of people in 1920 who lived on $6.50/month, perhaps living by themselves in the back-country of Alaska, but that will be on the extreme low end, far below the baseline of nearly everyone living in the American West a hundred years ago, and hardly representative.

Maybe people prefer having pressurized clean tap water and sewer systems due to something other than marketing and social pressure. I know the women in my life would definitely prefer it compared to my grandmothers who had to travel to get water from the well everyday.

But alas, if there is any opportunity to misinterpret a comment in the least obvious way possible, someone in the comments will be sure to do so.

Welcome to the Hacker News comment section.

I've lost track of how many times I've posted three paragraphs of thoughts and ideas and maybe some nuance, only to have someone leave a drive-by reply of "Ahh, but in paragraph 2, sentence 8, you said 'all' when in reality it's 'most'. Gotcha! Your entire comment is flawed!" I do this too though once in a while, so I guess nobody's perfect.

It is the infrastructure, moving mountains to move water, paving land to move food, laying wires for electricity and communication, train lines to move fertilizer, refineries, ports, universities to study medicines, etc.

$100 per month is not going to cover any of this, but I am pretty sure you are going to want the benefits.

Healthcare alone will blow through that, and not sure where you will draw the line on necessary and unnecessary for that.

People at some point in their lives might be spending a majority of their money on unnecessary items, but eventually, it will catch up to them (and potentially be made up by government subsidies).

Again; you’re missing the bigger point entirely and fixating on specific numbers that I threw out as a quick example.

My point was to dispute this overly simplistic assertion:

>but with the nature of marketing and social pressure, almost no one is willing to make that kind of sacrifice today.

You’re trying very hard to completely miss the broader point and are instead nitpicking something that I didn’t even claim. This is entirely a waste of time.

It’s also why discussion culture has gotten so terrible on the internet, because instead of making obvious assumptions about my intent, people insist on critiquing little irrelevant pieces of it.

I would like you for one day to stop, and each thing you use, break down the supply chain that is necessary to produce each step and part of that product, and then break those products that make each step of that process and so on until all you have is raw materials. It's highly likely you'll give up even before doing that on a very very simple item. But the inner connection between the crap you do need, and the crap you don't need isn't going to look like what you think.

Then I'd like you to do some research on tribes that lived outside of modern technologies. How many of those 'individuals' think of themselves like they are their own little gods, versus how many of them deeply understand they have on the members of their tribe to keep them alive?

For that matter, my current home is inside city limits. While we have municipal water, we are not connected to the city sewer system and instead rely on a septic tank.

It annoys me to no end that I’m not legally able to make major repairs to my septic system, as it’s only allowable under a grandfather clause in the city code. If, say, a utility truck ever drives into my back yard and over my septic tank, I’ll be on the hook for ~$10k to reverse the plumbing in my home, bury a sewer line to the connection at the street, and backfill the old septic tank.

“Best” of all is that in the six years I’ve owned this home, city workers have twice parked bucket trucks in my back yard without even speaking to me. One of those times resulted in my having to dig up and replace a portion of my septic system’s drain field. The city laughed at me when I asked that they pay for the damages. I could have taken them to small claims court over it, but the actual material cost wasn’t enough to justify it.

Of course there are utility easements encumbering the property, so I’m not upset about those being used. The easements are a defined area along the edges of the property, though - not carte blanche to drive all over my yard with heavy equipment. I spoke with the workers on both occasions, and they didn’t even know how to look up where the easements were.

NB: I see I went off on a tangent there, but I’m going to leave it. That sort of dispute is exactly the kind of thing that people who want to “just live” are trying to avoid. It’s one thing to voluntarily submit to rules in exchange for some benefit - it’s another to have rules imposed on you from the outside without consent, and then to have the “authorities” in the arrangement ignore the rules without consequence while simultaneously requiring you to carefully adhere to them.

Already you're bitching about "omg its so easy for other people to practically end my life by messing up the tenuous balance I have between getting fresh water and the flow of untreated shit I produce"

Yea, this is easy when there is a few people working with plentiful water resources then it all works fine. When lots of people show up, you are shitting in each others mouths and dying of cholera and begging these "authorities" to save you. Think for 5 minutes about the argument you typed out and you'll figure out why these other complex systems exist.

And while not Amish myself, I was born in the middle of Amish country and have quite a bit of experience with populations that choose to analyze technologies before they accept them into their lives, and rejecting those they do not like. But the Amish have the same issue, they live in very low density populations. As their populations increase their members tend to leave for modern lives. Trying to live in cities without modern conveniences has lots of issues.

I think the Ancapistani was providing context that this is not a universal truth. There are plenty of areas, outside of cities, where people live much more self reliant lives, and they are not third world hellscapes.

I’m definitely not saying municipal utilities are a bad thing - I’m sharing my experiences that show that they aren’t always necessary.

The comment I originally replied to said:

> Maybe people prefer having pressurized clean tap water and sewer systems due to something other than marketing and social pressure

I’ve lived in rural areas, small towns, and the “big city”. It’s not as binary a proposition as the original commenter was making it out to be. That’s all I’m trying to share.

It might be typical and expected but that doesn't mean it was desirable even then. People lived that way because they had to. It was always considered a difficult way of life. It's more likely that people gave it up as soon as they could when they had the chance.

I think there are two different concepts here. You can be materially minimalist, i.e. you can refuse to buy superfluous consumer products that are pushed by marketing etc. You will still need housing, healthcare and transportation (assuming that you have to drive to work). Those things have very real objective benefits and their widespread adoption can't be explained with marketing or social pressure. And you won't be able to get those for 100 dollars a month (correct me if I'm wrong). If you are foregoing those as well you're not just materially minimalist, you're basically going off-grid and abandoning civilization altogether.