Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

[AxelHeyst]

How do we temporarily build spaces that are beyond the all encompassing consumer praxis? What would that mean for us individually, in small groups and on the whole as a community?

- An ERE fair-weather TAZ on BLM land in the west somewhere, ideally near a city where some ERE people already live. If, as likely, it's too far from the town for walking/reasonable-person biking, access to one vehicle could serve the needs of dozens. One crew makes forays into the city to hit the dumpsters: another goes into the forest for ethical wild harvesting if possible. Tents, vans, rigs, hammocks, tipis...

- Someone, or a group, decides to invest in a fixer upper house or warehouse space or loft etc. A cluster of ERE people descend upon it to fix it up while living in it, and share profits (coop style ownership?). Could be tiers - those with $ equity stakes in the venture and those participating in a more worktrade style arrangement. piratecaptainERE: HGTV style. (Imagine: N years in the future, the first EREite to achieve FI almost entirely via hustles and ventures associated almost with and for other EREites...)

- If one of you weirdos gets an honest-to-good schooner or equivalent I will drop everything and become a full time ERE pirate deckhand.

[jacob]

- If one of you weirdos gets an honest-to-good schooner or equivalent I will drop everything and become a full time ERE pirate deckhand.

That's literally a thing. I can make the connection if you want to. There's a tall-ship community in Chicago. I've been out out one once, but it wasn't really my scene. I'm more into racing smaller boats than driving a tourist bus on the water while dressed as a pirate.

[AxelHeyst]

Are these tall-ship enthusiasts actually on the lifestyle spectrum in the neighborhood of ERE, anarchists, or TAZ pirates? If they're not conducting nighttime raids on coastal village dumpsters while illegally downloading mp3s via a boosted wifi intercepting antennae with a solar-powered indoor growop belowdecks in a holistically integrated WOG-of-WOGs then I'm not interested. ERE pirate deckhand, not pirate larper deckhand.

[loutfard]

- An ERE fair-weather TAZ on BLM land in the west somewhere

Does TAZ stand for Traffic analysis zone? BLM land is quite clear.

[jacob]

@AH - The guy I know is FIREd (he used to be on this forum), but I think being FI is an exception. I'd describe the [tall ship] community to be more like part-timers and seasonal workers in service of the water-tourism industry, like tour guide or ski instructor except on the water in a big sailing ship. So more a revolving cast of twenty-somethings who like water as opposed to snow or mountains. But largely the same stereotype if you know what I mean.

People move around seasonally following the boats between here and the Caribbean or down south. Very few positions are full time. I think of it as LARPing on the water, but as an ex-racer that's probably me being a snob about sailing and not being into dressing up.

[AxelHeyst]

@jacob - that actually sounds fun for a seasonal yolo gig. Adding it to the list of possibilities.

@loutfard - temporary autonomous zone.

[Ego]

Are these tall-ship enthusiasts actually on the lifestyle spectrum in the neighborhood of ERE, anarchists, or TAZ pirates? If they're not conducting nighttime raids on coastal village dumpsters while illegally downloading mp3s via a boosted wifi intercepting antennae with a solar-powered indoor growop belowdecks in a holistically integrated WOG-of-WOGs then I'm not interested. ERE pirate deckhand, not pirate larper deckhand.

Oh, if only I could turn back time and introduce you to my neighbors, the salty, unwashed, derelicts out in the free-anchorage. Even today, incredible boats can be found on craigslist with owners so motivated to sell by the cost of their monthly slip fees that they are practically willing to pay you to take it. With a little patience, they could get a mooring ball in the bay and live there for $147 a month. I am amazed that more people don't do it. I sold a stove to one of these mooring ball dwellers a few months ago. True ERE salt of the earth.

[Jin+Guice]

Damn, I wish I liked boats.

My friend used to live on his boat. He was really good at shredding violin solos and ruining women's lives. He was also my first friend to die. Not 100% sure what became of his boat.

[jacob]

There's always this event: http://ephemerisle.org/index.php/Ephemerisle

It happens up in the SF Bay's delta behind Vallejo.

[ebast]

There's always this event: http://ephemerisle.org/index.php/Ephemerisle

"Dressing up"? take a look at those photos: I see more houses than boats!

ok, but to be mildly useful, I do have an associate who goes regularly (I have associates in low places) and if you buy his stories, nevermind the movement: he goes for the drugs but stays for the (much younger) women's lives to ruin.

@Ego's so right about your average salty derelict and there's some legit ERE praxis there, but before building your holistically-powered Providence to sail the seas of the Collapse, dig into Ephemerisle's Seasteading provenance: "sea tax" is a real thing and there's a reason your average boat-dweller looks more like a derelict than like Thurston Howe III.

[Jin+Guice]

Confessions of an ERE Hoarder: Storage, Maintenance and Organization

I think, as a society, we are bad at storing, maintaining and organizing. We bias the new. I know I do.

As I make my way through WL6, I'm realizing I have a poor concept of maintenance and storage. I was taught to buy everything, with the expectation that everything could be thrown away. It's very difficult for me to envision maintenance and storage costs when acquiring.

I have difficulty with the maintenance costs of my own life and body. I bias activities that are "productive" and have output I can show off, rather than maintenance activities upholding the status quo. It is difficult for me to anticipate the maintenance cost of a thing/ activity/ person/ emotional endeavor.

A symptom of the same disease, I also struggle with storage capacity. The most obvious manifestation of this is physical, always having a bit more possessions than I have capacity for. However, this is true in every area of my life. I'm never "good enough" at any activity. If I get a new interest, I rarely consider the time or energy maintenance costs or the spatial constraints of the activity. Despite having an extensive workout routine, my body is never quite where I want it. I never quite do all of the workouts I plan.

This leads to a problem of organization. Having difficulty getting rid of things, not maintaining them well and not anticipating storage capacity leads to disorder. Typing that out, I'm actually amazed at the level of organization that I'm able to maintain, given my tendencies in these areas.

"Money as Addiction'' discusses how each time saving technological advance quickly becomes productivity increasing and time neutral (credit to Jacob, as this is also in the ERE book). Joseph Tainter postulates that societies build complexity until the point where all energy is spent on maintenance of the complex systems built, with no room for expansion or flexibility. They then begin to slowly collapse.

Both of these ideas resonate greatly in my personal life. Any extra capacity is stuffed to the brim with little attention paid to maintenance. This eventually overwhelms my capacity for organization. This means more and more energy is spent on maintaining what is already there in a less and less beautiful and useful fashion.

This is what addiction does to us. We add something to the system, which initially brings it to a higher state or relieves an internal tension. Over time this thing moves from positive to necessary. Necessary things require maintenance. Having something go from positive to maintenance is generally negative. "Money as Addiction" describes this as moving from 0 to 1 to -1. The object of addiction, which once brought us to new heights becomes something we need to survive. Needs require maintenance. We now work even harder to get to our steady state.

I think this is going to make moving from WL6 to WL7 difficult. I'm beginning to wake up to the negative effects of my lack of attention to maintenance, storage and organization. It's bringing me discomfort and, as always, discomfort is the catalyst for change.

[Ego]

I'm beginning to wake up to the negative effects of my lack of attention to maintenance, storage and organization. It's bringing me discomfort and, as always, discomfort is the catalyst for change.

My buy-low, sell-high lifestyle means that I need constant reminders of this and reach the discomfort point often. I find that frequently rereading (and reposting) the first paragraph of this article helps too.
https://aeon.co/essays/we-live-in-a-one ... a-polymath

I travelled with Bedouin in the Western Desert of Egypt. When we got a puncture, they used tape and an old inner tube to suck air from three tyres to inflate a fourth. It was the cook who suggested the idea; maybe he was used to making food designed for a few go further. Far from expressing shame at having no pump, they told me that carrying too many tools is the sign of a weak man; it makes him lazy. The real master has no tools at all, only a limitless capacity to improvise with what is to hand. The more fields of knowledge you cover, the greater your resources for improvisation./quote]

[jacob]

I think, as a society, we are bad at storing, maintaining and organizing. We bias the new. I know I do.

As I make my way through WL6, I'm realizing I have a poor concept of maintenance and storage. I was taught to buy everything, with the expectation that everything could be thrown away. It's very difficult for me to envision maintenance and storage costs when acquiring.

Consumer-society only pays attention to the producer and consumer part while ignoring the abiotic (a technology-driven belief that resources are infinite, very cheap, and substituteable) and the decomposition (out of sight, out of mind, the world too is infinite and so we can just throw things away).

Once aware of this loop, there are two solutions (maybe more) to solving this.

The first is to become increasingly self-reliant to the point of self-sufficiency. Have enough skill to creatively make nearly every product ... and take it apart again in order to use the ingredients in new solutions. Ultimately, this requires very little money, and is the foundation for ERE WL7-8. At thus point, money is seen as the lube to resolve any remaining friction in the loop. This can also be seen as the individualist's solution. At this point the dependence on others and society at large converges on a low number.

The other is source and sink in the "used goods" market for as long as possible, thus cycling back from consumption by selling on a product so that someone else may use it. This avoids producing a new one. It also avoids having to decompose it ... or turn it into storage-entropy. (Imagine how much never-to-be-used technology is sitting around in drawers and boxes in people's attic. It's a de facto dispersed landfill.)

I bias activities that are "productive" and have output I can show off, rather than [...]

Interesting bias with the "showing off". I've definitely noticed how such a bias leads to connecting with a wider part of the public cf. being biased towards "it takes one to know one" or "it takes one to appreciate something". It's the difference between "I'm sure this is very interesting, but I don't understand any of it" (spending a year researching something arcane and publishing a paper on it) to "This is so awesome. Tell me more" (buying a plane ticket to a scenic tourist destination and posting pictures on instagram).

The different effects should not be underestimated in terms of serendipity and random human connections. It's way more likely to connect with someone over e.g. football than it is to connect over e.g. mountain bike bog snorkeling (yes, that is a thing).

I often wonder whether people who are almost exclusively into "popular topics" do it deliberately or whether they just lack imagination. In all likelihood, they take their cues from their surrounding humans instead of generating them internally. Or?

[7Wannabe5]

The first is to become increasingly self-reliant to the point of self-sufficiency. Have enough skill to creatively make nearly every product ... and take it apart again in order to use the ingredients in new solutions. Ultimately, this requires very little money, and is the foundation for ERE WL7-8. At thus point, money is seen as the lube to resolve any remaining friction in the loop. This can also be seen as the individualist's solution. At this point the dependence on others and society at large converges on a low number.

The other is source and sink in the "used goods" market for as long as possible, thus cycling back from consumption by selling on a product so that someone else may use it. This avoids producing a new one. It also avoids having to decompose it ... or turn it into storage-entropy. (Imagine how much never-to-be-used technology is sitting around in drawers and boxes in people's attic. It's a de facto dispersed landfill.

This same approach can be applied to roles/relationships, ideas/ideologies, activities/lifestyles, property/contracts, etc. etc.. I would suggest, for example, that combining this approach to products/technologies with analogous approach to roles/relationships could produce functional inter-dependence at a level beyond the individualist's solution. Imagine how much never-to-be-used human potential is sitting around in drawers and boxes gathering dust in Modern level corporate careers and Traditional level marriages. It's a de facto prison camp.

[jacob]

Imagine how much never-to-be-used human potential is sitting around in drawers and boxes gathering dust in Modern level corporate careers and Traditional level marriages.

I don't have to imagine. The answer is unfortunately "not that much". Consumer-specialists have surprisingly few skills. They don't work one job---more accurately, a small part of one job---to pay for everything else because it's more efficient that way but because they simply don't know how to do anything else. Gathering a group of people who all lack skills is not going to magically create skills out of the void. Basically, you can't form a group and get anything better out of it than you could from the top 1-2 members of the group alone.

(Obviously anyone with below average skills would benefit from the group while anyone with above average would lose. To complicate matters slightly, we can consider synergy effects, which is positive, and cost of organizing, which is negative.)

Corporate careers are deliberately designed so that humans can be productive despite their general lack of skills / lack of general skills. Circling together is not a good structure. I'm not saying that corporate people don't have hidden talents. It's rather that the average number of talents is between 0 and 1 with the median a lot closer to 0. If there's serious weight to be pulled, the majority will not be able to pull their own and the group is better off without them. As such, creating interdepence requires some SERIOUS coordination skill of finding just the right person with the right knowledge for a particular problem. This is a lot harder to getting people together for something low-skilled like "having fun at a party" and [showing up on a particular date and time] is hard enough in and of itself.

In summary, there's no hidden untapped resource to be had simply by bringing random people together. Perhaps such a resource could be built, but that is a far away from where we are now.

[7Wannabe5]

Basically, you can't form a group and get anything better out of it than you could from the top 1-2 members of the group alone.

Assuming that the 1 or 2 members of the group are the most skilled in all factors relevant to the problem at hand, and that they are aware of all factors that could be relevant to the problem at hand. For simplistic example, 1 human with level 10 engineering skills/level 0 marketing skills and 1 humans with level 9 gardening skills/level 2 marketing skills, might benefit enormously from the integration of 1 human with level 6 marketing skills. In more general terms, the Expert solution often fails to include enough factors in the model due to tunnel vision, whereas the Consensus solution often fails due to attempt to include too many factors in the model. Only wholly imaginary boundaries allow for excluding other humans as unimportant to a sustainable lifestyle model. Other humans are HUGE!

Of course, my personal perspective is likely somewhat (mis)informed by the fact that I have a surfeit of Old Affluent Multi-Skilled Midwestern Engineers that Somebody Else Put in Relationship Dumpster in my social circle. Also the fact that Erotic Capital is more fungible than Skillz Capital, especially if the Skillz Capital is lacking social lubrication. So, if an Engineer who can also Build Book Cases is locked in a useless corporate meeting and a Math Teacher who can also Do Other Stuff is locked in a dull monogamous relationship, then they are unable to that extent to engage in mutually beneficial barter or productive collaboration.

[jacob]

Of course, my personal perspective is likely somewhat (mis)informed by the fact that I have a surfeit of Old Affluent Multi-Skilled Midwestern Engineers that Somebody Else Put in Relationship Dumpster in my social circle.

Yes. Outside their highly specialized/siloed job-skill, regular single-skilled folks are barely more capable than regular 5th graders. I consider it likely that you, as a teacher, can produce a better result on any school test you might give your students regardless of how many students are in the group(s) and how they work together. The students will likely also not include insights that you somehow missed or haven't seen before.

People who love community often bring out a chart showing how 2 people have 1 connection, 3 people have 3 connections, 4 have 6 and so on ... and how fast the number of connections blows up. Just imagine all the conversations. The problem is 1) that a lot of these conversations are not worth anything (but people will be offended if pointing that out); and 2) that worthless conversations add noise rather than signal and that this gets worse and worse the more people are added. (Much like how a party gets louder and louder the more people there are.) This is why think tanks are not composed of thousands of people. There is, therefore, an optimal number in any group (usually around 5-7 tops). This optimal number depends on the people in the group and what kind and how many skills they bring in. It gets more complicated because the number also depends on each individual. A multi-skilled individual is already a group of their own. As such, they have to compare whether adding people makes sense for them (perhaps, group members are willing to do grunt work, or they bring cookies, ...) or whether they are better off splitting away from the group.

Since the gold lies in the combination of specific individuals, this makes achieving these combinations costly. They have to be found. They're not there for the taking.

[7Wannabe5]

I consider it likely that you, as a teacher, can produce a better result on any school test you might give your students regardless of how many students are in the group(s) and how they work together.

If you want to narrowly define skills to core academic skills accomplished with paper and pencil, that would probably be true. However, my lowest ranking 1st grade math student recently won a dance competition, and would definitely beat me in that skill set. Some other skillz many of them could beat me at if tested:

1) 50 yard dash.
2) Cartwheel contest.
3) Singing contest.
4) Charm and cuteness contest.
5) Social Media Navigation
6) Shooter type Video Gaming
7) Cleaning out the narrow tubing at the pickle factory.
8) Tree climbing.
9) Handwriting (my scrawl is practically illegible.)
10) Arm Wrestling.

Also, a group will almost always beat an individual at any endeavor that requires a certain level of speed, covering the field and luck. For instance, I am extremely good at book scouting, but a group of 6 kids running around with bar code scanners could beat me at a sale.

Since the gold lies in the combination of specific individuals, this makes achieving these combinations costly. They have to be found. They're not there for the taking.

That's why it may be more "lucrative/affordable" to figure out how to "cook" with whatever human resources are on hand by being flexible in terms of "recipe/problem." There are many tasks I could assign to an average 6 year old as part of a Permaculture Project, but fewer as part of a Build Microwave Oven from Scratch Project.

[Ego]

Gathering a group of people who all lack skills is not going to magically create skills out of the void. Basically, you can't form a group and get anything better out of it than you could from the top 1-2 members of the group alone.

If there's serious weight to be pulled, the majority will not be able to pull their own and the group is better off without them.

We often joke about how the tenants we wish would leave, don't leave, and the tenants we hope will stay longer, leave sooner than we'd like. Similarly, the people we hope will apply for an apartment, do not apply, and the people we do not want to apply, do.

Fortunately, we have an screening process. The characteristics that make them seem undesirable to us as tenants also bleeds through into their work histories, credit reports, and whatever else the AI is considering when it declines them.

If ERE City is decentralized, it will not have a screening process. Mental picture of poor Refrigiwear-clad Jacob and DW, whispering to one another while huddling in the cellar, pretending they are not home, as their groupie from hell who moved in RIGHT NEXT DOOR peers through the front window, wondering when he's coming out to lead the Tuesday afternoon skillzathon.

In other words, the group will need a black-ball function to keep out those who the group would be better off without.

[AxelHeyst]

@Ego that’s the most compelling argument I’ve yet come across for an intentional community esque approach: you can screen people and boot the few bad apples that slip through.