Rob is growing and foraging 100% of his food for a year

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classical_Liberal
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Re: Rob is growing and foraging 100% of his food for a year

Post by classical_Liberal »

nomadscientist wrote:
Tue Jun 16, 2020 4:07 pm
given that someone in 1750 was able to write literature, rotate crops, build steam engines.
IQ is a good predictor of "success" in today's world. It's a tool that doesn't really define what it's name implies, IMO. That being said, if what we are really trying to impact is success in today's world, it's a good indicator that people in poverty are starting out a couple of steps down. Any argument that it's not a true intelligence indication (which I agree with) really doesn't apply in the context of the equal opportunity.

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Re: Rob is growing and foraging 100% of his food for a year

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classical_Liberal
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Re: Rob is growing and foraging 100% of his food for a year

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7Wannabe5 wrote:
Tue Jun 16, 2020 12:03 pm
Dynasty building is so 20 centuries ago.
Right, but aren't you the one who preaches (correctly) that generational wealth usually only lasts 3 generations in the US? So the problem of dynastic wealth is really only one of a very, very small percentage of the population. It would be easily solvable if those dynasties didn't own the political system.
Alphaville wrote:
Tue Jun 16, 2020 11:49 am
but any argument for taxes will be counteracted by arguments like “taxes are theft” in the united states
The above is where many people believe taxation has failed them. The government is really protecting the interest of a few dynasties, not the people. How will higher taxation solve this, unless it actually taxes the wealth of the .01%, which they will never allow? And if is does happen, we'll simply have new oligarchs who control that wealth taken from the previous. Convince me 8-)
Alphaville wrote:
Tue Jun 16, 2020 11:49 am
past attempts to remedy class differences have turned into a disaster. nevertheless we could look at places with the highest social mobility right now. one thing they seem to share in common is a
social safety network.
The other thing they have is a strong group culture, and a sense of group purpose. I think this is so important, and it a critical reason why safety nets in the US seem to have failed. My perspective of UBI comes from a year I spent living and working on native american reservations. There is a safety net there, almost UBI. Food, basic housing, and healthcare, free or near free. Yet these places are still miserable poverty breeding grounds. Because these proud people still lack purpose and feel defeated. Anything that addresses poverty has to address "poverty of the soul", just as much as it addresses poverty of the pocketbook. This requires a positive cultural intervention, not only a financial one. IOW, we have to address more than just the lowest level of Maslow's pyramid.

UBI in itself seems like a typical, consumer driven American solution, throw money at a problem and hope it goes away.
Last edited by classical_Liberal on Tue Jun 16, 2020 5:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.

nomadscientist
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Re: Rob is growing and foraging 100% of his food for a year

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@jacob

Thank you, this is very interesting.

It raises a lot of questions at the same.

E.g. does schooling also lower your IQ, by imposing mental load?

Does it lower your IQ if you think you'll fail your exams but not otherwise? This seems like a death spiral mechanism that evolution would select against, like if adrenaline made your muscles weaker.

Alternatively, perhaps it is a measure of diverted attention, so poorer subjects score lower on IQ-loaded tasks related to performing a survey in a mall, but higher on IQ-loaded tasks related to getting their car fixed. In that case, this effect should have no bearing on how well people deal with poverty.

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Re: Rob is growing and foraging 100% of his food for a year

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7Wannabe5 wrote:
Tue Jun 16, 2020 12:03 pm
@Alphaville:

Also high level of inheritance taxes. How can we rationally preach/teach meritocracy/work-ethic absent fresh roll for each generation? I simply do not buy multi-generational Laffer curve motivational nonsense. Dynasty building is so 20 centuries ago.
All you'll do is shift the methodology if you try to use the government seizure club, which will wind up benefiting the uber wealthy and further slam doors on getting into or staying in some sort of middle class. You really just can't tell people they can't do what they want with their property and pretend you have a free society. It's funny but the thing people seem to resent most about me is having a goal of leaving a legacy to people of my choosing (i.e., kids and grandkids and siblings).

In the real world I think you have to balance some notion of idyllic everyone everywhere gets a trophy (the same trophy, no less) with the colder reality that many of us have families who to us are more important than unborn children of people we'll never meet in places we'll never go. I wish them no ill, of course, but I'm emotionally invested elsewhere. That pesky reptile brain doing its thing again. It's irrational, but I'd much rather give whatever I have to give to my kids and have them pour it down a rat hole then give it to the government to pour part of it down a rat hole and line their pockets with the rest.

If anything, the last 50 years have taught us that the government sorely lacks competence when it comes to meaningfully going to bat for distressed communities. We've already given them 8-10X the total wealth of those who made Forbes' 2019 list.

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Re: Rob is growing and foraging 100% of his food for a year

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Of course humans want to leave their resources to their own kids. Nothing wrong with that. My suggestion was systems level.

OTOH, I’m also in favor of enacting huge disincentives for teen pregnancy. Maybe even mandatory adoption.

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Re: Rob is growing and foraging 100% of his food for a year

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classical_Liberal wrote:
Tue Jun 16, 2020 5:05 pm
Convince me 8-)
nah... :D

what rez did you go to? was it as a missionary?

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Re: Rob is growing and foraging 100% of his food for a year

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nomadscientist wrote:
Tue Jun 16, 2020 4:07 pm
Thucydides
owned gold mines in thrace

classical_Liberal
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Re: Rob is growing and foraging 100% of his food for a year

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Alphaville wrote:
Tue Jun 16, 2020 8:17 pm
what rez did you go to? was it as a missionary?
No, I'm not a fan of organized religion personally, although I know it's very good for some people and have no animosity towards it. Well, that's not entirely true. I have no animosity towards it if it's not pushed on others.

There were a couple we worked with in SD, I went as a nurse.

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Re: Rob is growing and foraging 100% of his food for a year

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classical_Liberal wrote:
Tue Jun 16, 2020 11:26 pm
No, I'm not a fan of organized religion personally, although I know it's very good for some people and have no animosity towards it. Well, that's not entirely true. I have no animosity towards it if it's not pushed on others.

There were a couple we worked with in SD, I went as a nurse.
ah! but not working for ihs i assume?

reason i asked is every tribe is different—although ptsd is real. different language, different customs, different religions, different history of relations with colonizers and the us government. although us citizenship (and with it the vote) was only granted all-around in 1924.

anyway, it’s true that public support breeds a level of dependence, but that’s also in part because it doesn’t allow freedom in return.

e.g., ihs gives you “free” healthcare (in exchange for your land, your rights, your property, etc) but only as long as you live in the reservation and you’re in a federally recognized tribe. (there is some level of care in some urban centers, but it can be seriously limited).

if you went there as a non-ihs provider (IF) it would mean that there was an insufficient level of care from ihs that you were filling in for. this is common: e.g., there are ihs outposts in the parts of the navajo nation recently afflicted by covid, but they were only 25% staffed, so they couldn't cope.

and on the reservation you might “get” land or housing (maybe, again depending on tribe), but you can’t buy/sell real estate and any investments you might make on it are lost.

generally speaking we have in this country public assistance that is dependent on poverty and strict conditions. e.g, medicaid expansion is free if you stay poor. so there’s a massive incentive to stay poor if you suffer from a pricey medical condition (eg diabetes). and you have to be constantly proving that you’re still poor. and because you're still poor you keep eating low-protein food that makes you obese. and on & on.

even the transit system in many areas is designed to segregate the poor: weird routes, limited service, terrible hours: only the poor want to ride the bus, so it doesn't get enough funding, so it keeps getting worse, rinse, repeat.

but ubi is different because it lets you do whatever you want with it, which yes, you might blow it in the casino, but you might also pay for a new roof.

even milton friedman, free marketer extraordinaire, was in favor of ubi type schemes. the earned income credit is actually his brainchild if i’m not mistaken.

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Re: Rob is growing and foraging 100% of his food for a year

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@Alphaville

Yeah IHS is always short staffed. Where there isn't enough medical staff for IHS the gov't pays for non IHS healthcare as well and for things IHS branches can't handle from an accuity standpoint. I'm honestly not exactly sure the mechanisms there, the payment systems for US health care are a mess. This is mostly the fault of the government in it's half-assed measures though.

Regarding UBI, I'm on the fence about its potential effectiveness. Friedman, as a neoclassical anti keynesian, wouldn't be the only person who would probably favor it. I brought up Thomas Paine earlier, if he lived today he'd probably be a proponent.

Getting back to agency, you feel that UBI, due to people having control over it, would feel agency with how it's spent. I think, maybe. Part of the problem with "free" money is that humans treat it different. It's like we have this obsessive need to feel like we earned or deserve something, then we treat it with more care. Also feel better about ourselves. I think it's this type of behavioral economics that would really come into play with UBI. This will determine if it's a trap like the current welfare system. I also think if we make it so people actually "earn" UBI in some fashion there would be support. I mean look at SS, it's basically old age UBI and it gets support from almost everyone. People feel they've "earned" it through their payroll contributions of a lifetime of work. Yet it's highly progressive.

If someone were to put me in a corner and say come up with a UBI plan now. I'd start with a UBI plan where it can be "earned" by any citizen volunteering sometime in their youth for a type of US peace corps. Something that builds skill, helps those less fortunate in their region, creates a sense of American culture, builds relationships and self esteem. I would probably open up this Peace Corps opportunities to private nonprofits, as long as they are reviewed and meet some base level of accountability, along with having a government run option. This way each can serve according to their own moral standard and avoid it becoming a purely nationalistic trap (ie _____ youth). It could be structured like SS, so that after a basic amount of time is met, by say age 25, you could continue to participate and earn more UBI benefits, but scaled down like SS bend points. This type of plan would help defer its own costs through means other than taxation. By helping offset social wows that currently end up costing a metic s**t-ton of money in nondirect manners. Plus these kids would probably build some infrastructure too, in some of the options available, saving other public monies. Seems like a win-win-win, if it could be accomplished without politicizing it and forcing a single standard to all of the volunteer options.

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Re: Rob is growing and foraging 100% of his food for a year

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The demands made by tools on people become increasingly costly. The rising cost of fitting man to the service of his tools is reflected in the ongoing shift from goods to services in over-all production. Increasing manipulation of man becomes necessary to overcome the resistance of his vital equilibrium to the dynamic of growing industries; it takes the form of educational, medical, and administrative therapies. Education turns out competitive consumers; medicine keeps them alive in the engineered environment they have come to require; bureaucracy reflects the necessity of exercising social control over people to do meaningless work. The parallel increase in the cost of the defense of new levels of privilege through: military, police, and insurance measures reflects the fact that in a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.
Ivan Illitch- "Tools for Conviviality" -1975

Yup. That about sums it up.

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Re: Rob is growing and foraging 100% of his food for a year

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@7W5
Ivan Illitch who also wrote “Deschooling Society,” nice. I will control my school talk addiction by not starting. ;)

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Re: Rob is growing and foraging 100% of his food for a year

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@Frita:

He does make the interesting point that parents, or the public, are really seeking several different services from the educational system. These include babysitting and opportunity for social interaction as well as environment that fosters learning. He argues that by just going along with historical precedent that tries to achieve all these goals at once, the ability to foster a learning environment suffers.

He also argues in favor of more hands-on organic, generalized opportunities for learning. The more that we strive to create “professional”, the more licensing and barriers to entry are created and entombed in giant institutional structures, and the more helpless all of us become in realms of self-care. For instance, the percentage of Americans who still were primarily engaged in building their own homes in 1920 vs. today.

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Re: Rob is growing and foraging 100% of his food for a year

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@Bigato

I watched the 13+ survival crops video last night. It is very informative...I recently learned this year just how abundant pumpkin plants can be. I planted one seed and now have a pumpkin plant that is 6 foot long. Still blows my mind.

I need to up my cooking skills though. I feel like a diet of just veggies and the occasional protein would be tough to adhere too unless one knew how to cook vegetables well.

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Re: Rob is growing and foraging 100% of his food for a year

Post by white belt »

I stumbled upon this video, which goes way more in depth about Rob Greenfield's upbringing and motivations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EAKkh6P_ds

I think it is interesting how it relates to some of the privilege discussion earlier and also shows the mindset shift that took place as he moved through different Wheaton levels. At the 8 minute mark, he talks about how he cannot recall an "a-ha" moment that spurred him to change his habits, but rather it was a gradual process that unfolded as he gathered more information.

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Re: Rob is growing and foraging 100% of his food for a year

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white belt wrote:
Fri Oct 02, 2020 8:28 pm
I think it is interesting how it relates to some of the privilege discussion earlier and also shows the mindset shift that took place as he moved through different Wheaton levels. At the 8 minute mark, he talks about how he cannot recall an "a-ha" moment that spurred him to change his habits, but rather it was a gradual process that unfolded as he gathered more information.
When you look at the ERE Wheaton scale, the lowest levels are most often punctuated by bullet points and to-do lists. The middle levels move on to spreadsheets and charts and such. The highest levels are the hardest to articulate and aren't easily parsed into steps or tenets.

IOW, the lowest levels are the most succinct and they gradually get more fluid/nebulous as you progress. I think that's partly why Greenfield, Boyle, jacob, and others tend to gloss over the details of their origin stories and point to other teachers for the baby steps -- they don't think in bullet points anymore. It's one thing to take a pile of parts and explain step-by-step how to put an engine together. It's another thing altogether to explain how to build an engine while observing it humming along at top speed.

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Re: Rob is growing and foraging 100% of his food for a year

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jennypenny wrote:
Sat Oct 03, 2020 6:25 am
IOW, the lowest levels are the most succinct and they gradually get more fluid/nebulous as you progress. I think that's partly why Greenfield, Boyle, jacob, and others tend to gloss over the details of their origin stories and point to other teachers for the baby steps -- they don't think in bullet points anymore. It's one thing to take a pile of parts and explain step-by-step how to put an engine together. It's another thing altogether to explain how to build an engine while observing it humming along at top speed.
Nisbett (https://www.amazon.com/Mindware-Tools-T ... 374536244/) describes this process for chess players. Beginner's favor moving around single chess pieces (like a rook or the queen) w/o consideration for the whole. Apparently this is called a duffer strategy. Intermediate players begin to think it terms of analysis and tactics basically running through a mental check list for each piece (how is/can this piece be threatened a few moves ahead) but Nisbett argues that they do not really "understand" chess. Indeed, that's about the level I play at (ELO ~ 1350) and a more experienced player (ELO ~1900) once told me that "I play like a computer". A crossover happens when people start thinking in terms of combinations and how two or more pieces work together. Experiences players think intuitively in terms of patterns and how all the pieces work together. It is no longer about the pieces. They will probably not be able to explicitly walk you through their mental process. In particular, they don't go through lists because much of what the "list computation" covers for them is so ingrained that they've forgotten the details or rather assigned it to the subconscious mind.

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Re: Rob is growing and foraging 100% of his food for a year

Post by jennypenny »

While I obviously agree with @jacob about the difficulty in learning/teaching from higher levels of knowledge, there is a danger in learning the baby steps from people who specialize in the lower levels. Sometimes those people teach you things that will help you, but also cement you in that particular level. I know I've had to unlearn some earlier advice because while it might work at first, it hinders progress later on.

I'm struggling to come up with a good example. I guess if you look at something like tools, at first you might think buying the cheapest tool is best, then later realize that a BIFL version that at least has some resale value might be best. Eventually you might find that not owning the tool at all is best.

Sometimes I hear basic advice and cringe because I feel like it wastes the new-to-me energy people have at the beginning on tactics they'll need to abandon later. Like instead of telling people to use coupons and sign up for a dozen rewards programs to keep from going over their grocery budget, it might be better to tell them they aren't allowed to do any of those things and should put the time into learning how to shop within their budget because it would force them to eliminate processed foods and learn to cook more right from the start.

We've always traveled on DH's work-related rewards points and FF miles because he accumulates them regardless, but I'd never tell someone starting out to use CC churn and other tactics to rack up enough for travel -- I'd tell them to figure out how to travel without a need for that level of point-hacking.

I guess my point is that sometimes you can skip some steps by listening to scale masters instead of level leaders. It can help to see there's a bigger picture out there even when you can't see it clearly. When I read FIRE blogs, I feel like most of them stop at the FIRE level and view people further ahead of them, like jacob, as having a different goal instead of realizing that it's a more nuanced/exhaustive version of the same goal. Their advice reflects that misunderstanding and lack of vision.

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Re: Rob is growing and foraging 100% of his food for a year

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