241–250 of 493 posts
No has mentioned that the initial assertion is incorrect? The US Government sent troops to remove native inhabitants. Then they gave the land away. Having an army clear the land ahead of time makes a lot of homesteading possible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean have you not read Walden? This idea of being more self-reliant and independent is popular with a lot of people, it's a central precept of certain schools of philosophy and ethics as well. No, they weren't all miserable hermits who died young. If you don't like that lifestyle it's fine, but you don't need to pee in everyone else's Wheaties.
I mean, have you not heard about how during the Walden years Thoreau was fully dependent on and subsidized by others? 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".
The monastic community of Mount Athos, Greece. It's free in the sense you don't pay anything, but you have to become an Orthodox monk, with whatever that entails
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The whole of westward expansion can not be explained with that alone at all. It took a lot of violence, multiple wars and like 400 years.
Without smallpox et al., it very likely would not have happened at all. The settlers/colonialists would have faced a massively larger existing population, and would almost certainly have lost the violent struggle. There would still be people of European descent in the Americas, but not as part of the dominant culture.
The Aztecs could have picked up tech like gunpowder and horses in a few decades and easily kept the Spanish out of their home turf, if 90% of them hadn't died from Smallpox and Maasles.
You can go out in the middle of nowhere in Siberia and live like the Lykovs[1]. It's a very difficult life. Another alternative is being a yachty and living on a boat and sailing to uninhabited islands. Mostly you can live undisturbed, but after a few years people will show up and bug you if it's part of a well organized country. There's the Chagos archipelago for example which is only visited by people who do open o…
My son's been camping the streets of Denver for about 5 years now. He seems happy for a "homeless" guy.
This is interesting. He’s doing this entirely by choice? You don’t have a problem with it?
You know that people can't control their adult children, right?
You can go out in the middle of nowhere in Siberia and live like the Lykovs[1]. It's a very difficult life. Another alternative is being a yachty and living on a boat and sailing to uninhabited islands. Mostly you can live undisturbed, but after a few years people will show up and bug you if it's part of a well organized country. There's the Chagos archipelago for example which is only visited by people who do open o…
I like SV Delos, but they are very far from living cheaply, much less “for free.”
Brady is extremely handy and good at everything involved in boat maintenance so that saves a lot of money. The lesson I learned watching that show is sailing around the world is for people who are very wealthy or very good at all aspects of boat maintenance. Especially when their water maker breaks in the middle of nowhere and they have to diagnose the problem and jerry rig something to make it work.
OP's premise of "living for free" seems to mean "not pay taxes" and "use what resources are available". I wonder what the motivation is here, I've heard this sentiment expressed many times. It usually seems to imply "away from others". 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 f…
OP's premise of "living for free" seems to mean "not pay taxes" and "use what resources are available". I wonder what the motivation is here, I've heard this sentiment expressed many times. It usually seems to imply "away from others". 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 f…
I mean have you not read Walden? This idea of being more self-reliant and independent is popular with a lot of people, it's a central precept of certain schools of philosophy and ethics as well. No, they weren't all miserable hermits who died young. If you don't like that lifestyle it's fine, but you don't need to pee in everyone else's Wheaties.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Come on now, people have done it for hundreds of thousands of years. 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.
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.
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.