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A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

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191–200 of 390 posts

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#191

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…

Before money people traded favors. You help me butcher my cow, I help you rebuild your house (which was more work then the cow), so maybe later on your brother helps fix my plow knowing he'll eventually get something in return, and now I am trading favors with you and your brother, etc. This bonded people. It would have been insulting to say "here are two chickens for your lamb, we are now even, I owe you nothing eve…

“No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money,” wrote the Cambridge anthropology professor Caroline Humphrey in a 1985 paper. “All available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/barter-...

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#192
post #112

Money is only one kind of power as I learned from going from working stiff to millionaire (thanks software biz!) to homeless broke person (cursed alcohol.) There is the shamanic-like power of a deeply spiritual person. There is the leadership power of a good manufacturing supervisor or ship captain. There is the moral power of Martin Luther King or Solzhenitsyn. I've come to the conclusion that accumulating money is…

> Would this person have any power if they weren't rich? A lot of times the answer is no. In my experience, the answer is no like a solid 90-99% of the time. At least in America, the wealthy buy their kids into elite high schools, which feed into elite colleges, which feed into jobs at elite, increasingly monolithic institutions/corporations. Junior gets to fail again and again until they succeed, and then the return…

>In my experience, the answer is no like a solid 90-99% of the time. At least in America, the wealthy buy their kids into elite high schools, which feed into elite colleges, which feed into jobs at elite, increasingly monolithic institutions/corporations.

Well, this may be bad but what is the alternative? It's not like the life of an average citizen is any different other than in degree. They also use money to go to a good school and good college to get good jobs at good companies. I don't see the injustice here as substantial. I see bigger flaws in the money system than our society maintaining itself.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Inflation is bad for lenders (i.e. people keeping deposits in USD). People who work get paid based on their real value which means their pay rises if inflation rises. Of course it maybe difficult to get a raise for your current job but switching jobs will get you a raise that catches up to inflation. Here is a chart: https://imgur.com/a/eOXF0UO Note that there has been a shift in bargaining power since 1980 that is c…

> switching jobs will get you a raise

If only that option were realistically available to all, rather than just an entitled few.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#194

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.…

"There's no coercion other than a hungry stomach." This sounds like the classic punishment of being sent to your room without dinner, right? Removing the basic necessity of food is about as coercive as it gets. Even in civilized society we feed prisoners, give food to the hungry, etc.

A better way to phrase it would be "compelled by reality".

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but he's a leech on society. He has two children he could not support (and has no contact with), he's constantly mooching off others for his basic needs, and there's not a word in the article about him ever doing a single thing productive for society. And unlike many other homeless people who legitimately are unable to contribute productively, this is all his choice. He's lucky he's…

Funny, he'd fit more in a hunter-gatherer society because guess what they also don't have... (to spell it out: money). I mostly agree with what you write, but "You have to contribute productively" is such a capitalist mindset that it draws for me the picture of you being a Gordon Gekko type. I wonder if he'd agree to do some work like cleaning the city parks in exchange for some "gifted" groceries and a room. Obvious…

> "You have to contribute productively" is such a capitalist mindset

No it’s not. All socialist/communist societies required all able-bodied people to work, described themselves as worker-led, and idolized work in their propaganda.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#196
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the post money society doesn’t need philosopher poets scavenging cigarettes from trash cans Supporting the odd philosopher poet is the exact function of society, in my opinion. Some good things come out of having them that do not come out of having another corporate drone.

> Some good things come out of having them that do not come out of having another corporate drone. False dichotomy much? Name one odd philosopher poet that has brought anything to the table

Diogenes

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#197

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

Being in Victoria certainly helps with his lifestyle too. It's probably the best city in BC you could hope to be in if you're homeless. It's a nice city, there's lots of green space, lots of facilities around for the homeless, a relatively small actual homeless population then the tourist homeless population of young people camping for fun.

I really doubt he'd be able to maintain that lifestyle anywhere else. Definitely wouldn.t be able to live like that in Vancouver.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#198
post #153

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

> Go into the wild and grow/hunt food or trade some skill This is what I thought the article would be about. Instead it’s glorifying living on handouts and other people’s largesse.

That's far more complicated than you'd suspect, at least in the US. There are a litany of policies that criminalize self-sustainment. Granted I suppose one could consume pests without being harangued for poaching, but that doesn't mitigate property laws, and all property is owned if not privately then publicly and in either case most often requires license to be there, whether explicit or implicit. Certainly doing any reasonable amount of cultivation is seriously complicated by this. So you're legally barred from hunting, barred from cultivation, and you're left with scavenging or gathering and that's highly dependent on a number of factors. Granted the probability of being found out in the depths of the wild are minute, it is nonetheless a serious existential threat. Let's just say we're at the mercy of our captors.

Having addressed the question of legality of rogue individuals... And if an individual exploiting the wild is illegal, so is the group. Humans are social animals. Going it alone at length in the arboreal breast of mother nature would be extraordinarily taxing mentally for most people. That alone is a crucial disincentive, and with the legal disincentive it atomizes people and forces even the highest aspirants to dissolution of the ideal. And that's before the process is even allowed to occur. The impacts of each added person to a group of rogues would compound, and I'd posit exponentially. And with that impact the footprint naturally grows, and with the footprint the risk of detection. At the end of the day the risk assessment points to certain failure.

So the next best thing is urbanized scavenging, not because it's the idyllic means, but because it's the only certainty. If you offered these people license to fuck off, I suspect they would do just that, perhaps not all, but most. I know if I was given license, alongside my friends, to get out of dodge we might just take up that offer. But the whole concept of real liberty, real autonomy, real independence - that's an existential threat to the status quo, to the system, and to the policy makers and corporations that own them, and to the very few of those who pull the strings.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#199

Money is only one kind of power as I learned from going from working stiff to millionaire (thanks software biz!) to homeless broke person (cursed alcohol.) There is the shamanic-like power of a deeply spiritual person. There is the leadership power of a good manufacturing supervisor or ship captain. There is the moral power of Martin Luther King or Solzhenitsyn. I've come to the conclusion that accumulating money is…

Usually those "rich people's" thoughts are interesting not because they're worth millions or billions, but because they've built something impressive over their lifetime and probably have gained valuable insight as a result.

Most people wouldn't be very interested in an interview with a Walton heir for instance, but Sam Walton himself would have no problem drawing an audience.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#200

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

It is incredibly ironic that the very people that claim the system is bad, effectively cannot survive on their non-conformist lifestyle without the current system. In a way though, it's no different than a religion. Priests cannot effectively survive without parishioners giving them money. Priests likewise preach things about the modern era of morality are bad and we must change them. So if you think of these vagabon…

Maybe one could see it as a form of civil disobedience ... surely it counts that the person lets another person take the job he might have taken and ultimately uses less resources than the average worker (commute, buying power, paper trails etc) ... also one might argue those opting out help push up wages... I personally am in favor of working as little as possible, outlawing"big corporations" encouraging artisans and entrepreneurs and veggie farmers... I don't know what to say to the poster about the druggies.. except maybe have some compassion and consider maybe society should reach out and help more (maybe he lives in the US where the recent oxycodone epidemic was caused by the permissivness of said society)
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