A Victoria man has gone two decades without money • Hacker News Board

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#141

Post by s1artibartfast » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

elliekelly wrote: post #77

kangnkodos wrote: post #17

He wants everyone to suddenly stop using money. If that happened, who would wash the dishes? Many communes have failed over this exact issue. They go on for several years with several people, usually women, making the sacrifice and doing what needs to be done. But eventually, the people who do the dishes get fed up and stop, or leave. And then the whole thing collapses. The alternative is for the leaders to have some…

Didn’t groups of people live without money just fine for most of human existence? We worked together. Money only entered the equation when the groups we lived and interacted with started getting too big and impersonal. Generosity is easier when you know the people benefiting from your work. Greed and freeloading are easier when you don’t.

I would argue that we are living in a all time high of human generosity, on a scale previously unimaginable. It just isn't carried out on a personal and emotional level.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#142

Post by saltdoo » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 4:22 PM UTC

an_opabinia wrote: post #139

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #74

I’m not sure living in the city off handouts, charity, and free tax payer provided facilities exactly promotes his no money philosophy. His life relies on the things he despises, if the economic collapse he predicts comes he will be among the first to starve to death. Go into the wild and grow/hunt food or trade some skill - the post money society doesn’t need philosopher poets scavenging cigarettes from trash cans

We could probably 10x the number of “handouts” as you call them, at least in the US, and nothing would change. We’ve auditioned it already: $4T in stimulus, the $600/wk employment checks, etc. What negative negative impact really did that have on an average person’s day to day life? “Handouts” made pay rise for the first time in decades. Even the landlords. I don’t know any landlords who are on the street because of…

Rising inflation says otherwise. Worst effects may be yet to come.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#143

Post by MrRiddle » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 4:25 PM UTC

Why should we care about a story from a homeless person with mental health issues?

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#144

Post by qwytw » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 4:26 PM UTC

an_opabinia wrote: post #138

seriousquestion wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there examples of that in groups larger than Dunbar's number?

Indigenous Americans, prior to colonists’ arrival.

This might had been the case in only low density areas (same as in all other continents), the majority of indigenous Americans did not live in classless societies.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#145

Post by an_opabinia » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 4:28 PM UTC

qwytw wrote: post #144

an_opabinia wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indigenous Americans, prior to colonists’ arrival.

This might had been the case in only low density areas (same as in all other continents), the majority of indigenous Americans did not live in classless societies.

Nobody said no classes. There wasn’t money like there was in Europe. There were by some intellectually honest estimates 50m people living in N and S America at the time of arrival, a huge number of people were living day to day without money.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#146

Post by lazide » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 4:29 PM UTC

AussieWog93 wrote: post #118

kangnkodos wrote: post #17

He wants everyone to suddenly stop using money. If that happened, who would wash the dishes? Many communes have failed over this exact issue. They go on for several years with several people, usually women, making the sacrifice and doing what needs to be done. But eventually, the people who do the dishes get fed up and stop, or leave. And then the whole thing collapses. The alternative is for the leaders to have some…

>If that happened, who would wash the dishes? I'm genuinely shocked to see so many people disagreeing with this premise. Very few people will voluntarily perform shitty, low-status jobs unless you motivate them. Everyone wants to hand out toys to sick kids and pose for photos, nobody wants to clean up their chemo-smelling shit and puke. It's been a real issue in every single volunteer-run organisation I've been a par…

A great many people here have not.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#147

Post by VictorPath » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 4:29 PM UTC

will4274 wrote: post #126

VictorPath wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the society has no money, there's going to be a whole lot of punishment going on The mostly uncontacted hunter-gatherer bands in the Amazon jungle have no money, and not much punishment. Men all go out and hunt. If they are old or young or sick, the hunters give them food. If they are fine and refuse to go out on a hunt, they tend not to eat. There is not much coercion. The women gather berries and the men hunt.…

Citation needed. This would certainly be atypical. Uncontacted tribes in other parts of the world (e.g. the Sentinelese) are famously violent. It's easy to imagine paradise in cultures we don't understand but reality is rarely that pretty.

> Uncontacted tribes in other parts of the world (e.g. the Sentinelese) are famously violent.

In the Amazon loggers and miners, often illegally, encroach on indigenous areas and kill members of the hunter-gatherer bands. Yes, the bands sometimes react in a "famously violent" response to these massacres.

I don't really see the connection in how these 50 person bands act together with their "famously violent" response to outsiders who are killing them.

Also the people I am speaking if are living in bands, not tribes.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#148

Post by an_opabinia » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 4:32 PM UTC

saltdoo wrote: post #142

an_opabinia wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could probably 10x the number of “handouts” as you call them, at least in the US, and nothing would change. We’ve auditioned it already: $4T in stimulus, the $600/wk employment checks, etc. What negative negative impact really did that have on an average person’s day to day life? “Handouts” made pay rise for the first time in decades. Even the landlords. I don’t know any landlords who are on the street because of…

Rising inflation says otherwise. Worst effects may be yet to come.

The USA was a fine place to live, many people happily gainfully employed, many investment accounts booking gains, labor and capital coexisting in harmony, when inflation was double what it is now.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#149

Post by igorkraw » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 4:33 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #40

igorkraw wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel you are presenting a false dichotomy. If this was true, why are the most boring jobs not paid the best? It seems that capitalist money is just hidden punishment: do something you don't want to do for a pittance, because you have no leverage. In a family, in a community there are also ways to incentivise prosocial behaviour just by culture, which is why e.g. most of German emergency operations are volunteer bas…

> If this was true, why are the most boring jobs not paid the best? Likely because many of those boring jobs have many more people qualified/capable to do them than there are spots to be filled. Even though we seem to need a lot of people to take goods out of totes and put them into cardboard boxes, there are a lot more people who are able to do that work than spots needed.

So what's motivating them? The post is responded to implied it's something else than punishment.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#150

Post by blix » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 4:34 PM UTC

VictorPath wrote: post #132

seriousquestion wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there examples of that in groups larger than Dunbar's number?

It depends how groups are defined. Agriculture is a precondition for a society divided into classes (for social, not practical reasons). Groups from the beginning of human behavioral modernity to the rise of agricultural slave empires in Sumeria etc. 10,000 years back worked this way. So from the drawing of cave paintings in El Castillo onward through the next 30,000 years, all humans lived like this. You could say i…

> Agriculture is a precondition for a society divided into classes (for social, not practical reasons).

I would completely reverse this... a society divided into classes is a precondition for agricultural society (for practical, not social reasons).

In the period of early civilization, convincing people to work 16 hours in the fields or in the mines is very difficult if they have any other viable option, including migrant hunter/gathering. Therefore, it is necessary to create a class of people that have no other viable options, either by slavery or other forms of inequality. The social structures surrounding inequality evolved as a method of maintaining this practical class stratification.