101–110 of 110 posts
Man, I hate traveling. I can understand the appeal of a spartan lifestyle, but I can't understand the appeal of not knowing where your head is going to rest tonight.
My co-founder and I have been doing this for three years. We have two backpacks and we are nomadic. Interestingly, it isn't online services that have enabled this so much as a lifestyle choice. We value travel and figured it was cheaper to run our startup in most parts of the world than it was in our origin city. We don't use a lot of online services for our business. Biggest one is Gmail, really, and hosting. Things…
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It doesn't scale, it's not intended to scale. If millions of people were vagabonding, we could look at an array of possible options, the most obvious being an AirBnB-style approach to renting rooms for days or weeks at a time. If you're happy to share a house, it's already cheaper to spend a month each in Paris, Amsterdam, London, Berlin, Edinburgh and Barcelona than it would be to stay in Paris, including airfare. H…
I presumed no such thing. The people they left behind are doing service work remember: they're accountants, lawyers, bankers, and so on. But how many corporate workers drinking does it take to make a vineyard a viable business? Or vacationing, a boutique B&B? Because if you have two B&B owners who simply swap to go on holiday, or two vineyards who simply drink each other's wine, then you've invented a perpetual motio…
My co-founder and I have been doing this for three years. We have two backpacks and we are nomadic. Interestingly, it isn't online services that have enabled this so much as a lifestyle choice. We value travel and figured it was cheaper to run our startup in most parts of the world than it was in our origin city. We don't use a lot of online services for our business. Biggest one is Gmail, really, and hosting. Things…
Which cities have worked out well or poorly for you?
I'm probably traveling a bit heavy right now (mbp 17, 7d and lenses, kindle dx, iPad, outdoor, business, and casual clothes, global blackberry) and going for value luxury (50-100 per night for a 2br 5 star hotel suite, or a nice condo rental). I think that will increase my productivity and happiness, but I'll try the lowest cost option later this year. The people in student or backpacker places are definitely more interesting than at the oriental or peninsula. Mainly Asia and au/nz for now, and Europe probably next, and then maybe a couple months of USA.
In the past I've lived sort of like this and found it quite lonely and alienating. What the article doesn't mention is that nobody really wants to hang out with the weird guy with no stuff and no apartment. If you're single, only really strange and desperate people want to date you. I also found that the act of finding another place to stay quickly became tedious. In the past, nomads were out being nomadic with the r…
Listen and weep:
http://brandonovak.com/nudie-novaks-sexcapades
"When he was a homeless heroin addict, Brandon banged a waitress INSIDE OF A DUMPSTER."
Brain uploaders are missing that backing up your brain would create a clone of your mind - not transfer your conscious experience inside a digital world. Vacations of this nature would be your clone telling you the good time they had.
But honestly I think biotech could progress to the point to where biological aging is neutralized. Cells break down and make copying failures for only a few specific reasons. I think the biological will be preserved and merely augmented with better human-machine interfaces.
Also cloning yourself or making a digital backup from yourself isn't that much different from having kids. Both are to ensure the survival\existence of data whether its encoded genetically or not.
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Everybody wants to hang out with a traveller. They all have questions. People who would never dream of doing what we do, are happy to tell us their dreams about doing what we do, believe it or not. Everyone seems to find the idea romantic even if they could never do it. Back when I was traveling by myself I found it easier to meet women on the road than at home. I guess maybe you would think these women were "really…
People do want to hang out with a traveller - for an evening. There's also a difference between being a "traveller" and just being a guy with no home and no stuff. The article seemed to be more about the latter.
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Physically yes but not in any other sense. From the sounds of things he's not reduced the number of books and albums he owns, just changed the storage medium. It also mentions that he has a backpack full of "designer clothes" which suggests that he's just as hung up on the nature of the things he does have. What's changed here is the medium but what would really be interesting is if there were a significant cultural…
> he still seems to be as much a consumer as he ever was I'm not debating that, but is it necessarily a bad thing? I don't interpreting your comment to say that it is, but it raises the question. The wonder of the internet and "consumer culture" is that we now have access to the creative output of millions of people we otherwise wouldn't. As long as I can choose my level of participation, I like having it there.
Consumption isn't necessarily bad but waste is. Maybe that's an interesting point - it may be that because so much of his life is digital he wastes less though I suspect it's not that straight forward. Perhaps there is no physical waste but we shouldn't underestimate the tiny drip drip drip power consumption (in theory for eternity) for on-line services and backups.
And minimalism in this sense may actually make things worse. Having shelf after shelf of physical books / records / CDs is a reminder for many how much stuff they've got that they never read or listen to. I certainly know people who download (illegally in the case I'm thinking of so the definition of consumer is questionable) more music and more films than they will ever listen to or watch and certainly more than they would ever have if they had to physically store them.
Rambling now but I suspect it's not as simple as it might appear at first glance.
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It could be. But what if he cooks, cleans, fixes household appliances, teaches them to juggle, removes viruses from their computers, and gives them spectacular prints of photographs he took?
You don't just pay a plumber to fix your pipes; you pay him to leave afterwards.