[deleted]
Is there anywhere in the world someone can just live for free?
261–270 of 493 posts
Re: Is there anywhere in the world someone can just live for free?
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was a line in the show Orville which stuck with me. The gist was: In a post scarcity society people started to value other for their compassion and "work ethic". If someone wants to read all day and learn, or be a bartender etc. then that is all the same, only laziness and not pursuing something was looked down upon.
A post-scarcity society is kind of a present-day reality for people with enough $$$ in the bank (including Seth McFarlene). Maybe that's the attitude he's cultivated. He's certainly no stranger to labors of love - I just found his old-school-crooner-style albums on youtube last week.
His entire life and career was centered on getting Fox to pay to make his Star Trek fanfic into a TV show. Orville is a lot better than I would have expected.
Re: Is there anywhere in the world someone can just live for free?
#263The book "into the country" covers people homesteading and gold prospecting in the 70s in Alaska.
They would live off a bag of rice and a bag of corn and whatever they could hunt or grow for the year, then once a year, get big bag of rice and corn.
It sounded, well, unpleasant, but exciting. But it's exciting because you are on the edge of survival.
cheap land colorado is a book about similar efforts today by people in CO. Again, not pleasant day to day.
Living on the edge makes for great stories, but tough conditions.
Re: Is there anywhere in the world someone can just live for free?
#264I've known of families that live "traditionally" in Hawaii. I'm sure it's close to this.
I also k own of some folks in New Mexico that are similar.
Its not the glamorous life portrayed by youtube, but they exist.
Re: Is there anywhere in the world someone can just live for free?
#265It's interesting how quality of life baselines have increased so much in the last century. If you wanted to have the QOL of someone that lived in the American West a hundred years ago, it could be done today for probably $100 a month all-inclusive of food, clothing, and shelter. But you'd be eating the same 5-10 things repeatedly, wearing the same clothes, have a few books for entertainment, minimal or no electronics…
You could probably set up a business of "economical retreats"... Live in the old fashion for a week or so. Very low costs to the business owner, and an interesting experience for the patrons. Call it "the simple life". You'd need to arrange things for them to do as well. Edit: perhaps not possible, as most people would lack the skills to e.g. wash clothes or cook manually. Maybe it could have instructors and classes…
Eco-tourism combined with glamping business?
Re: Is there anywhere in the world someone can just live for free?
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One thing everyone forgets is that the Amish people benefit from police and national defence, like everyone else. 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-p…
This is only partly true. By opting out of most of the financial system and deliberately living on small normal incomes. They will pay very little tax and certainly not enough to pay for investment and healthcare national infrastructure projects which effectively underwrite the income they get from outside their communities. There’s no free lunch here. They do benefit from things they could not afford if they lived i…
Not aiming for $$$ is literally tax avoidance!
Re: Is there anywhere in the world someone can just live for free?
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We stopped moving around because we discovered that instead of chasing food down all over the place, you can grow foor right near you... If that was all there was to it, why did we keep migrating after the agricultural revolution?
Because agriculture produces too much food that increase the population too much, so some of the offpring must find another site to cultivate.
That's a good point, and definitely operates over the long term (i.e., in this case, more than one generation). Also, overpopulation usually creates conditions that change the community and affect individuals and subgroups differently (prompting some to leave), so I don't think we are disagreeing about anything.
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.
Re: Is there anywhere in the world someone can just live for free?
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, which is why I don’t think any “post-work” society will ever happen on a mass scale. People will invent jobs if they feed a social need.
"Jobs" exist because division of labor is an enormous generator of human welfare. 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.
>If we do have division of labor and pay each other for the work, we've reinvented capitalism.
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.
Re: Is there anywhere in the world someone can just live for free?
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could probably set up a business of "economical retreats"... Live in the old fashion for a week or so. Very low costs to the business owner, and an interesting experience for the patrons. Call it "the simple life". You'd need to arrange things for them to do as well. Edit: perhaps not possible, as most people would lack the skills to e.g. wash clothes or cook manually. Maybe it could have instructors and classes…
This is called camping.
Camping is pretty high-tech with all the waterproof materials, preserved foods etc. Amish-style camping would be very different.
Re: Is there anywhere in the world someone can just live for free?
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn't mean it's false though? The parent seems correct that human beings are capable of subsisting and surviving for many many generations on very austere conditions.
Only by means of statistics - they had so many children that it compensated for high mortality rates. 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.
So you are saying it works? You just have to have 2.5 children.