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A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

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Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#361

Post by nonameiguess »

jerry1979 wrote: post #234
imtringued wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He also has an unhealthy relationship with money. Withholding money from being spent is immoral because that money is needed to pay debts and saving money causes unemployment. Spending all the money you get is moral. Of course you are allowed to spend your money on stocks and bonds to maintain real savings.

Do you have any resources that explain how saving money hurts others?

It reduces the multiplier on money supply, which can be harmful in aggregate if it is sufficient to create a deflationary monetary environment. Given how little impact a single earner who isn't Jeff Bezos can make, or even Bezos himself in the face of offsets from central banks, I highly doubt any individual's savings efforts are doing any harm in practice.

You may as well say that taking any water out of the ocean is immoral because if all water was removed, the fish would die.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#362

Post by curryst »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #224
mikem170 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly the same. Money changed a lot of things, much more than just an accounting tool. The use of money drastically changed the scale in which goods and services could be traded. Before money people kept track of who owed who a favor amongst the people they dealt with. Family, friends, and others learned who they could trust not to be a mooch. Money made possible much larger scale projects, enabling the industr…

I think we agree that the accounting tool changed the possible scale, but we are still trading the same thing. For example, I use currency to track and buy favors from some laborer in China I have never met.

I don't think it's the scale, but the specialization. When what you need is unspecialized manual labor, favors work great because those kinds of favors are fungible. It starts to fall apart when you need specialized work. I.e. I'm a farmer and I need to see a doctor. The doctor doesn't want to see me, though, because 134 other farmers already owe him/her favors and he/she doesn't know what to do with the favors he/she already has.

The doctor needs a way to convert all those favors they don't need into favors they do need. You could trade them, but then you need an exchange rate. There's 400 farmers in the town and only one electrician; is a favor from the electrician worth the same as a favor from a farmer? At a certain point, it makes sense to just exchange stores of value rather than try to manage favors like assets.

> but we are still trading the same thing

I don't really think they are. Favors are closer to an asset. $5 is $5, regardless of the holder. Favors have bearer-specific value, such that one might be near-worthless to me but priceless to you.

> For example, I use currency to track and buy favors from some laborer in China I have never met.

To me, this demonstrates the above premise. That laborer in China would rightly value your favor at near-zero. You're too far away for them to meaningfully cash in on that favor. Your favor behaves like an asset that they have no use for. Money is distinct in that it allows you to crystalize the labor that would have been done into a physical form, and allows you to do it ahead of time. No more worrying about fungibility, and no more worrying about whether the other party will actually honor the favor.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#363

Post by thatguy0900 »

noduerme wrote: post #343
LightBearer wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sound mad that this fellow has found a way to not contribute to the society you think everyone should. Jealous?

No, I think he's missing out on the best part of life - building creative things for others to enjoy and to improve their lives. And elevating the total refusal to add an iota of value to the world from your own existence into a form of sainthood is the apogee of lazy Gen Z culture, isn't it? I pity the guy, as any sane person should, but I also think it's grotesque that hangers-on are attracted to his lame opinions.

Did you read the article? He wrote and distributed multiple books, and is also coding some kind of video game on a flash drive with whatever computers he has access to. I would wager he's building more creative things for others to enjoy than most people who have jobs, and I say this as someone who would not give this man any money or food.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#364

Post by noduerme »

musingsole wrote: post #348
jerry1979 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any resources that explain how saving money hurts others?

It's a pretty natural conclusion from many economics teachings that will highlight money only has value in the middle of a transaction and is virtually ethereal while sitting in any account.

That's like saying potential energy doesn't exist, only kinetic energy.

Money is like a loaded gun. It doesn't have to be fired. Just walking into a room waving one around will change the nature of most interactions.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#365

Post by jamal-kumar »

grawprog wrote: post #197
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

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. Definit…

Hi, someone from Victoria who hasn't bothered to live there for a long long time.

You used to be able to enjoy nice parks with your kids without worrying about junkies living in nearby tents taking up what used to be sports fields throwing used needles into the playground. Now they put up warning signs for parents to sweep around to make sure that this isn't a problem.

https://vancouverisland.ctvnews.ca/victoria-posts-warning-si...

I'm never going back, it's gotten that bad. I know so many people who have died from overdoses. It would have been a nice place around 12 years ago but after around the Vancouver olympics, the region has turned into some kind of black hole of misery and misambition outside of the wealthy condo social bubble and being on the wrong end of the ensuing wealth disparity. Unchecked money laundering on the housing market was a huge problem leading to this kind of scenario as well. Almost none of my friends who stayed there are the successful and happy ones. Even if you have like two decent blue collar jobs you may still end up living on a friend's couch for long periods of time just for a lack of affordable housing where your neighbors aren't doing shit like moving a stove at 4am because they dropped their flap of fent-adulterated heroin behind it (my own experience in the last apartment I rented before it really went to shit out that way -- that still cost me like 1000/mo)

Nice weather means that the rest of frozen canada sends their local problem drunks on greyhounds to live in the only region where they don't get found frozen to death in bus stops. They do this in the USA, too, quite sadly.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvg7ba/instead-of-helping-ho...

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#367

Post by mikem170 »

tills13 wrote: post #331
mikem170 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure he's asking for any of your tax money? I didn't notice in the article any mention of him collecting benefits. He dumpster dives for food if nothing else. People give him some things, of their own free will. And don't forget about all the rich people that your tax monies subsidize [0]. Those are people who have money, and are being given more from your taxes. How much different is this guy than those rich…

The article mentions he gets his coffee from a local food kitchen. > And don't forget about all the rich people that your tax monies subsidize This is What-about-ism. I can be upset about both.

Point taken on what-about-ism. I find that I do that perhaps too often. But these connections keep jumping into my mind. I wonder if people get mad about one thing, but not the other. I wonder what the commonalities are, what the differences are. I grant that it can lead to tangents, but I guess I find value in it. For example, in this case, does society cut the mooching rich more slack than the mooching poor? It seems that many of us aspire to be rich, and that many consider the poor to be lazy. Our system seems to have a lot of bias built into it. I wondered if I was seeing that in your comment, and threw my reply out there. Maybe I should have worded it differently?

Anyways, back to the guy in the article, lots of other taxpayers are happy to support local food kitchens, that's why we have them. He didn't "take" the coffee, they gave it to him.

I understand that you disagree. Other people feel different. That's politics.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#368

Post by mikem170 »

giantg2 wrote: post #353
mikem170 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reality being land owners backed by the state who don't allow people to wander off and grow their own food?

During the depression, some governments actually had areas in the government land, like parks, that people could sign up for a garden plot. You could grow your own food. This allowed people in the towns and city land to grow on.

That's interesting to hear! I guess it matters how many people are struggling whether they might allow such things. (The group protects itself more than it protects low-status individuals in the group?)

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#369

Post by TheRealPomax »

markzzerella wrote: post #312
TheRealPomax wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would society need to even be a predator though? The whole point of society is that we organized into large enough groups that what the "natural order" was no longer applies: societies literally rise above the natural order by replacing that order with something we as society control. That means things like corporations, and working hard for your money, but also means things like "meaningless art", and allowing p…

>the whole point of society is that we don't need this ridiculous "natural" nonsense. We beat it. It can stay outside. We replaced it with society. When the silent part is said out loud. "We" didn't beat anything, and "we" certainly aren't gods that managed to counter natural law, despite the current zeitgeist that likes to pretend it is so. Humans are predators, and to pretend otherwise will be the folly of our spec…

What a wonderfully Machiavellian and incomplete argument, given the history of societies all the way up to today. You'll go far, kid.

Next time though, don't make the classic mistake of talking about the group by talking about individuals in the group. Society is, and this one's confusing if no one taught you this before, not the same as the sum of the behaviour of individuals in that society. They're entirely different rungs on the ladder of abstraction.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#370

Post by grawprog »

jamal-kumar wrote: post #365
grawprog wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Definit…

Hi, someone from Victoria who hasn't bothered to live there for a long long time. You used to be able to enjoy nice parks with your kids without worrying about junkies living in nearby tents taking up what used to be sports fields throwing used needles into the playground. Now they put up warning signs for parents to sweep around to make sure that this isn't a problem. https://vancouverisland.ctvnews.ca/victoria-post…

Have to admit, it was a few years ago now I was there. I was just mostly comparing it to the situation in Vancouver. A friend of mine lived there for a while before moving back to Edmonton. He described it a lot like what you say. Overpriced, not many jobs. He ended up couch surfing for a bit after he couldn't afford his apartment any more before he ended up leaving.

>Nice weather means that the rest of frozen canada sends their local problem drunks on greyhounds to live

Sounds like what's happened in the town I live in over the last 2 years or so. The problem's gotten bad. Though it's not so much drunks but fentynyl and meth addicts.

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