Early Retirement Extreme Forums

There seems to be a social phenomenon in which an individuals (skills, ideas, labor, knowledge, etc) is valued more when it is not given totally freely Great point. However, I would note that somebody seen as willing to show up for low pay may be less respected than a volunteer in some situations. ...

@Slevin: True, and you could probably do something like put a lb of oat bran in a pair of panty hose, bury it deep in the woods for a month, and then steep it for tea instead of taking all those supplements. Maybe I will try to lose all my excess pudge by some such method and then sell my secret for...

I had a friend who had both skills. He told me that his strategy was to hire developers and other contractors when they were going cheap, but otherwise do most of the work himself, up to and including very occasionally taking a W2 position. He could afford to not work at all for very long stretches,...

@ffj:

Yeah, relative poverty is a tough nut, and I'm about the last person to suggest that Harrison Bergeroning the Haves is a great idea. Maybe all I'm really getting at is that the direct redistribution of skills can actually be a Win-Win-Win.

Yes, social embarassment is huge. It's interesting to me how different humans who suffer from Crohn's disease deal with the very real possibility of shitting their pants in public. Some don't let the possibility inhibit their activities at all. I'm not quite that bold (yet.)

@jacob: So, if you move fluidly from cross-legged to beginner's pose and then rise without using your arms at all, would that be two point deduction for knees? I'm pigeon-toed, so my hips and all of my musculature prefers beginner's pose to cross-legged, even when I am in good shape as opposed to th...

ERE1 is about learning from books, but ERE2 expands into social interaction. What I am very hazily envisioning is that the social interaction of those at/near ERE2 might reach out towards the "relatively poor." This could include both those less likely to read and those in the pre-cariat o...

Gotcha. Well, intuition has to do with pattern recognition. So, if you think about the sort of mathematical pattern recognition problem that is often found on standardized tests: 1,3,5,7...What comes next? , you could maybe consider Certainty. And/Or where's Daylen?

It has been my experience that I instinctively react differently in variety of emergency situations. Sometimes I am a runner or a hider. Sometimes I am a screamer. Sometimes I am a calm leader. Sometimes I am a fighter. Usually my behavior makes some kind of rough sense in context. For instance, scr...

There's the Taguchi Method for solving production quality problems. It could, in theory, be applied to Lifestyle Design.

Quite an ascetic aesthetic I am definitely not ascetic in my practices. Much more like the opposite. I have very little furniture, and I prefer to sit on the floor, because I have noticed that it is better for my chubby old lady back, and I read somewhere that how easily you can rise up from the fl...

$2225 per month for 2000 kcals per day?!?!

I am an agnostic rational, but I am also somebody who was either going to have 2 kids or 8 kids, because I've always felt that it was one of my purposes in life. For instance, I would be open to working part-time at an infant nursery again if the pay wasn't beyond abysmal (-don't even get me started...

The problem is in convincing the various perspectives [held by the relatively poor and their environment] that the issue is not a lack of money but a lack of competence ( or help from competent people who may even resist any change that would render their help unnecessary ). It's the mirror-image o...

Somebody knocking at my door right now with a box of donuts would radically increase my happiness in the moment :lol: If I re-envision 20M as maybe 500,000 barrels of oil, I don't know whether I would trust myself with the responsibility of figuring out how it should best be burned. Some weeks I can...

As somebody who has spent a good deal of time in the company of very small children, I rather strongly disagree with the "nurture" theory of installing "voices" or "sub-personalities." I think "nurture" often does contribute to how sub-personalities are expres...

"The numbers" are not a social construct (actually, the numbers are a social construct, but the shit is a physical reality, although the word "shit" does hold some cultural connotations, etc. etc.), but almost everything you think or feel about "the numbers" may be. Tha...

It doesn't help that my day to day life is so far removed from being any sort of physical challenge. I was feeling so sick last year the only projects I could take on or maintain were of the "brain in a box" variety. I kept asking myself "What would much lower rent (in terms of IQ) S...

@jacob: Well, off the top of my head, the humans who are old enough to have been engaged in the problem-scape since the early 70s are more likely to convey objective perspective of "humans are going to human." OTOH, some of the earlier writings of the older folk are more likely to come off...

This way madness lies... Many good suggestions above. I did end up spending some money in order to fulfill my 2022 Plant Something Every Day resolution (I conked out some time in May), but it was relatively minor on the obsessive hobby-scape spectrum. Also, on the other end of the process, you will ...