What constitutes a buy nothing year?

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7Wannabe5
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Re: What constitutes a buy nothing year?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@Myakka:

If I was simply caring for 3 or fewer children below age 6, and I happened to be standing by a Maple tree when one of them got snotty, that method might work. If I am caring for a group of 26 kids all herded together in a classroom, and my primary task is to make sure they pass a standardized academic test by the end of the year, it definitely won't. Expecting a teacher in a modern maximized for efficiency setting to do that would be like asking somebody who works on the line in a car factory to take a hike to the city park to forage their lunch. OTOH, if a parent were to train their child properly in the use of leaves or handkerchieves and provide them with their own supply to bring to school and some sort of sanitary container for transporting them back home to be composted or washed, then that might work.

IOW, this is an example of outsourcing efficiency which is kind of like how some more affluent countries seem more Green on paper, because they outsource all their dirty manufacturing. As an individual, if your source of income (or form of production)is from stock market investments*, while you live a simple life as a consumer, that is also a form of out-sourcing. If you live in a good, safe neighborhood, then you are likely outsourcing aggression to some security force, etc. etc. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to survive/thrive in the modern world without somehow averaging the same level of efficiency/being-a-competitive-asshole along the complex boundary of your lifestyle as everybody else.

*You don't have to compete with yourself while constructing the internals of your quality of life, like what constitutes a tasty lunch, but you do have to compete with others for externals such as "paying the property tax bill in a safe neighborhood with good schools." And you definitely have to compete with others if you derive your income from your own small business, and you can't sensibly do a "buy nothing year" for your own small business, unless it is really just an experimental hobby you are indulging.

zbigi
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Re: What constitutes a buy nothing year?

Post by zbigi »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Sat Feb 18, 2023 9:13 am
If you live in a good, safe neighborhood, then you are likely outsourcing aggression to some security force, etc. etc. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to survive/thrive in the modern world without somehow averaging the same level of efficiency/being-a-competitive-asshole along the complex boundary of your lifestyle as everybody else.
Not in every case. In case of the security issue, you can just live in a cheap area that is safe not because it has excellent police force, but because the locals simply don't do that much crime. I'm assuming there's plenty of smaller towns and rural areas in the US that meet this criteria.

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Re: What constitutes a buy nothing year?

Post by jacob »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Sun Aug 29, 2021 7:03 am
“Who is going to wash all of the disgusting snot rags produced by a herd of 5 year olds if Kleenex is not provided?”
Their parents.

This is exactly one of those culturally systemic issues where a BNY will both increase the width of the Overton window and likely shift it due to making more deliberate choices. Just like with "shelter" (Example given in the ERE book as a ranked list of options showing a very wide range), a similar range exists in terms of disposable paper products for cleaning purposes: [...], paper towels, [...], kleenex, [...], toilet paper, [...], toxic waste. People's individual Overton window will sit somewhere on this scale. If hankies are too many WLs away, maybe start with something easier like finding a non-disposable alternative to kitchen paper towels. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

For example, one of my first blog posts. It's clearly written by someone who had learned to blow their own nose (using a hankie) before elementary school and whose idea of kleenex sits somewhere between acceptable and radical in the Overton window https://earlyretirementextreme.com/on-nose-blowing.html which is roughly the same reaction I had the first time I saw an SUV.

Many of our choices are simply relative and arbitrary, that is, that is what they are from our perspective as consumers. Often there's been a directed marketing campaign to turn an inexpensive one time cost into a recurring cash outflow.

7Wannabe5
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Re: What constitutes a buy nothing year?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@zbigi:

True, I raised my kids in such a town. Was like something out of Norman Rockwell. Never even bothered to lock my doors. However, the trade-off was that either my spouse-at-the-time or both of us had faily long commute to larger city for employment opportunities, along with at least half of the other adults who lived in the town and supported its tax base. Otherwise, it would have become a ghost town, like many others nearby. Also, don't underestimate the aggressiveness of a small town police force. They ticketed everybody who drove 5 miles above the speed limit and didn't have a local address :lol: And, my kids told me years later that there were quite a few meth labs etc. hidden behind the scenery.

Obviously, even the most bucolic, self-sufficient, resource close-looped lifestyle requires competition for survival. For instance, you might have to put up an electric fence to keep oppossums out of your urban permaculture project or you might need to cut down a mature tree that is flourishing but competing too sucessfully for sunlight vs what it is yielding for human consumption. And, if your permaculture project is inefficient in the sense that you require more than 2 acres per human to make it function as a closed system, then you will be using more than your "fair share" of the planet/divided by current inhabitants, so you will be effectively fencing out other humans too. This is true whether you are using the acreage to provide consumption for current you or stockpile for future you.

7Wannabe5
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Re: What constitutes a buy nothing year?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

jacob wrote:Many of our choices are simply relative and arbitrary, that is, that is what they are from our perspective as consumers. Often there's been a directed marketing campaign to turn an inexpensive one time cost into a recurring cash outflow.
True, but it is also the case that businesses who are more influenced by bottom line than marketing also make use of a lot of disposable products due to labor costs. That is why it would be more expensive to send your child to a Green Montessori type day care center where they provided cloth diaper changing, and used mugs instead of Dixie cups for snack time. It's more expensive to go to a restaurant that provides cloth napkins and cutlery, etc. etc. Why 100% of the corporations anybody holds in their index fund have paper towels in their employee bathrooms, etc. etc.

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Re: What constitutes a buy nothing year?

Post by jacob »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Sat Feb 18, 2023 10:55 am
True, but it is also the case that businesses who are more influenced by bottom line than marketing also make use of a lot of disposable products due to labor costs. That is why it would be more expensive to send your child to a Green Montessori type day care center where they provided cloth diaper changing, and used mugs instead of Dixie cups for snack time. It's more expensive to go to a restaurant that provides cloth napkins and cutlery, etc. etc. Why 100% of the corporations anybody holds in their index fund have paper towels in their employee bathrooms, etc. etc.
An alternative may be to travel beyond the valley of one's culture. For example, rest rooms in Japan generally do not provide paper hand towels for drying your hands (a public solution like free paper towels would be considered unhygienic). You're expected to bring your own and there's even a term for that which I forget. ETA: It's a tenugui. In Europe, people dry their hands by pulling a foot of dry cotton from a giant roll of cotton on the wall which in turn rolls the used/wet onto another roll which gets washed. I'm not sure this provides a reset in terms of habits but at least travel shows the existence of alternatives.

The point of a BNY is to break the cultural programming that every solution has to either be provided by the business or be a conveniently disposable product. This is why the sink-or-swim approach is so effective because it forces people's creative powers into thinking about alternative to buying instead of arguing why something is impossible in advance.

Perhaps adopting a traveler's mindset is a better approach. We're going to BNY-Land. It makes for a better experience to "do as the Romans, when in Rome", even if there's a learning curve, than to complain about everything being better at home or spending time planning how to bring all one's familiar conveniences and foods along for the trip. I think the latter is absolutely missing the point of traveling ... or the BNY experience. I kinda thought it was obvious, but now I would no longer be surprised if at least one person doing a BNY figured they could stock up on a year's supply of whatever they regularly buy in order to complete the challenge.

7Wannabe5
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Re: What constitutes a buy nothing year?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@jacob:

The "endless" roll of cotton was more frequently used in the U.S. in my childhood, and air dryers are more popular than paper.

Anyways, I should just shut up, because I do think a Buy Nothing Year is a good exercise for creative weaning from standard consumer habits. I also recommend getting rid of TV and car for similar reason*. I have little interest in the experiment, because I have already done multiple Buy Almost Nothing Decades. Is there a wet rag hanging by my toilet as I type, next to the roll I reserve for use by infrequent visitors to my tiny apartment, Yes. So, I am doing a poor job of making a "trans" argument along the lines of "Wouldn't it be even better if instead of just Buying Nothing as consumers, we also attempted to Do Least Harm as producers by making our own little ethical businesses rather than buying index funds?" while simultaneously acknowledging the likelihood of failure of this strategy in current environment.

OTOH, it is also the case that I am somebody who suffers from perverse tendency to engage in behaviors such as spending 4 hours working in garden followed by pulling up to drive-up window at Sonic on my bike to buy a $2 slurpee float. So, it's less that I am trying to signal EVEN MORE VIRTUE!!!, and more that I am wondering about the math, or the most functional balance of competition/co-operation, or similar.

*However, I would note that it has also been my experience that after many years of never going to a mall, eating donuts, watching TV, working W2 employment, dating somebody your mother would approve of, or driving a car, etc., it can be kind of fun or interesting when you do these things again - maybe like what you are experiencing with video games in the moment. But then it gets boring and "expensive" again, and it can take a bit of effort to rewean yourself. What doesn't change is your recognition of "the Cave" as only a subset of possible environments. It's the always available (until maybe it isn't!) easy mode.

Frita
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Re: What constitutes a buy nothing year?

Post by Frita »

Regarding who would wash the kids’ snot rags, why not teach them to do it themselves? One activity in the Montessori Children’s House (ages 3-6) is hand washing items on an old fashioned scrub board and hanging them to dry. Very popular activity compared to others based on my observation. And one could count the Kleenex tissues and boxes being avoided, invest saved money in a bank account, etc. Sadly, my teen was a closeted nosepicker at age 5. Turns out he would wipe underneath furniture or anywhere else when adults weren’t looking. Better planning and observation on my part could have prevented that. :oops: Now he goes through a lot of Kleenex.

7Wannabe5
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Re: What constitutes a buy nothing year?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@Frita:

Yeah, that would be ideal, but a well-run Montessori kindergarten is very much like a permaculture project. It absolutely requires a good deal of intelligent management and intelligent management costs $$ unless it is somebody's passion project. Therefore, a kindergarten like this is most likely to be found in either VERY highly educated affluent realms, or occasionally in low income realm where somebody is devoted to making a difference and the parents are mostly oblivious and unlikely to contribute Kleenex anyways, or in rural realms where humans never really entirely stopped doing things from scratch. In middle-income, middle-class, typical suburban realm, no way it is going to fly.

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Re: What constitutes a buy nothing year?

Post by jacob »

@7wb5 - What you just wrote reflects the same pattern of interest, rejection, and "what's the big deal?" for the three different social classes if you substitute "well-run Montessori kindergarten" with "doing a BNY".

7Wannabe5
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Re: What constitutes a buy nothing year?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@jacob:

Yes, I agree. I was just extending the concept to maybe buying less pieces of corporations on the stock market, while maybe buying some more of the stuff needed to set up more "Montessori"-like productive asset centers at household or community or bio-regional level.

Frita
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Re: What constitutes a buy nothing year?

Post by Frita »

@7W5
Montessori principles can be applied at home with no to limited purchasing of materials. I agree with Jacob that the parents being responsible for washing snot rags. My point was that the laundry be a task taught to their children, not done for them.

The education business is not interested in non-corporate, non-warehousing options. And yes, Montessori is too expensive to cost effectively adopt in most public preschools and kindergartens.

7Wannabe5
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Re: What constitutes a buy nothing year?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@Frita:

I was weakly attempting an analogy. In most naive terms, the question I am attempting to ask is "What is the ethical sense of not buying any stuff and then using the money saved to buy shares of Amazon?" and/or "What is the ethical sense of getting rid of car and then using money saved to buy shares of Exxon?" , "Wouldn't it make more ethical sense to attempt to align investment behavior with consumption behavior?" or "Why not attempt a challenge equally as likely to promote creativity in the realm of investment or production?" For instance, an Only Invest In Local Community Year.

Ever since I first read YMOYL, the imbalance of setting ethics or values clarification level for spending portion of lifestyle very high, but level for "what you do to earn money" and "how you invest" portion of lifestyle at neutral for ethics/values and maximize for hourly wage/ROI has struck me as odd.

Frita
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Re: What constitutes a buy nothing year?

Post by Frita »

@5W7

Thank you for explaining. There does some to be a lack of integrity between earning and spending. It is like an adult-version of a toddler playing peek-a-boo and believing that since they cannot see anyone, others cannot see them. And sometimes there is some counterintuitive social signaling at play…like driving a Rivian four blocks to a conservation group meeting, implying superiority to gas vehicle drivers, and falsely assuming that walking or biking wasn’t a possibility. (Not throwing rocks because I am nowhere near 100% consistent myself.)

Have you read “Bobos in Paradise?” The bohemian bourgeois playing big money to appear quirky has a similar disconnect.

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Re: What constitutes a buy nothing year?

Post by jacob »

Keep in mind that when one buys (or sells) a share [on the secondary market, which is where 99.99... percent of all trading happens], nothing is actually consumed nor is anything created. The share simply exchanges ownership from the old owner to the new owner. This is very different than standard consumption in which the things and services one buys usually get destroyed down the line. Not so with securities. Aside from a few technical exceptions, securities are effectively forever. It's just a line in a database somewhere.

Owning shares might be a moral issue, but in terms of the ecological or social impacts of a given corporation, it does not really matter who owns the shares(*)(**). What matters for its existence as a ongoing concern is whether there's a demand for the products and services that the corporation provides and that is determined by how much consumers spend, that is, whether there's a revenue or not.

Starting a new business that directly increases overall consumption however ...

(*) Minor effects include the ability to proxy vote at shareholder meetings and putting upward/downward pressure on the share price which relates to what kind of financing the corporation has available. It is very very hard to starve a corporation of money and make it unable to secure financing this way though.

(**) Unless one gets political about whether those who paid for the capital in some way need to be compensated or whether all the results of the labor belong to the workers. Again, this is a moral issue.

zbigi
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Re: What constitutes a buy nothing year?

Post by zbigi »

@jaboc
On a margin, if you buy and hold a share, you've effectively taken it out of circulation for the duration, reducing supply of shares, and so increasing the price of remaining ones? Which means, the company can now release new shares at more favourable conditions, which incentivites it to do so, and invest obtained money into business, leading to more pollution etc. This may seem absolutely tiny, but in aggregate buying and holding shares may actually have a significant effect?

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Re: What constitutes a buy nothing year?

Post by kane »

I think that BNY mindset can actually be leveraged in running a business in the same way as in personal life. Funnily enough, BNY is not so much about buying per se as it's about an attitude (the same way ERE is not about buying/selling as it is about attitude in buying/selling).

If you're running a business and you have to buy a widget to build something, you can either "buy it as you need it" effectively making 5 orders in a day (or worse, driving up to the shop 5 times a day) or plan it ahead, think whether you will need those widgets in future projects, stock up earlier, wait for a discount, keep track of which widgets are the most needed for a business (using DIY software?)... sky (and your Wheaton level) is the limit. Do you actually NEED this widget in order to create this product? pinky swear?

Compare it to the guy who can only think ahead x days (standard consumer) and now make a bet which company will make a dent in the market. I can only tell that I've seen both types of companies in action and the difference is enormous (and if you could take a sneak peek into their accounting sheet this will be clearly seen).

I like that 7W5 is trying to push a different mindset here (a Red one "I cannot see a spreadsheet for this case so I will stick to stock market thanks" vs Green one "I remembered about my widget supplier's son birthday, gave him a piece of cake and he answered "forget about it" to my question how much I pay for a widget that I forgot about and had to restock") :D

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Re: What constitutes a buy nothing year?

Post by jacob »

zbigi wrote:
Mon Feb 20, 2023 2:36 am
@jaboc
On a margin, if you buy and hold a share, you've effectively taken it out of circulation for the duration, reducing supply of shares, and so increasing the price of remaining ones? Which means, the company can now release new shares at more favourable conditions, which incentivites it to do so, and invest obtained money into business, leading to more pollution etc. This may seem absolutely tiny, but in aggregate buying and holding shares may actually have a significant effect?
Yeah, that's how corporate finance is supposed to work with companies issuing either shares or bonds depending on the rate. In the US, the only corporations that emit shares on a semi-regular basis are REITs. Of course the opposite also happens when companies buy back their shares. There was a thread on that at some point. In general, though, trading doesn't affect the company.

A better argument would be that the secondary market (what we all use) allows the primary market where IPOs happen to exist. This is how the founders sell their business for cash and that cash comes from selling into the secondary market. For the most part, though, what allows a business to exist or grow are retained earnings (which require revenue) and borrowing money.

These concerns/perspective is why I've focused a lot more on the consumption side of things. Also because this is where one can individually make a huge difference relative to oneself. Whereas trying to affect large scale entities is but a drop in the water. ESG funds, for example, did not make a difference to the point where you can look at a share price or corporate financing options and conclude that this or that company is either ESG or non-ESG. The effect is/was subtle.

OTOH, as to @kane's remark. Those who run a business, like a mom&pop business or a dog&pony show (like mine), where they have control could make a significant difference applying a BN(lets just remove the Y)-attitude. I also know of examples where two different businesses essentially produce the same amount of services but where the operating margins are close to 100% and close to 0% respectively and that to a large degree comes down to the "CEO"'s attitude to spending.

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Jean
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Re: What constitutes a buy nothing year?

Post by Jean »

Do people really dry their hands after washing them?

chenda
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Re: What constitutes a buy nothing year?

Post by chenda »

Jean wrote:
Mon Feb 20, 2023 9:40 am
Do people really dry their hands after washing them?
Absolutely. Drying is an important part of the cleaning process, removing dead skin cells.

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