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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2025-089
Last week's posts on Moon of Alabama:
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Other issues:
Trump:
Palestine:
Iran:
China:
Germany:
War of Terror:
Use as open (not related to the wars in Ukraine and Palestine) thread …
@206 Tom
@206 Tom
The sharks own the reef.
It is possible to stay out of debt and get by with little, but the moment people try to step on the property ladder, they are visible, credited, of leverable value, serving interests.
If you create a property with your own work and materials, there are prohibitions, bureaucracy, and various kinds of attention that ‘appear’. Basically you become visible and leverable for having an attachment (residence, home, unmoveable property) of value.
Old style businesses, a small shop and next to zero overheads, someone comes along with a big offer for the property, or undercuts everything available, or influence buyers to convenience one stop shopping. Only the stubbornly traditional, specialist or dedicated resist the combination of offer and undercutting.
A functioning micro economy needs to supply its own basics (food, housing, clothing) , or to be able to trade them in while keeping balance of payments.
It is all very doable, but the property cost and finding or building a reasonable community that understands the ethic are barriers.
Craftwork is one good option for the minimalist, but there are various possibilities (near endless).
A simple recent example… look at the price of the cheapest wooden chair, then calculate the cost of wood to make, time to make. To sell at same price but handmade (which is usually primed) , and saying you would make ten dollars for sure for four hours work. That is three hundred dollars a month for a mornings shift. With no overheads that covers food. If you supply much of your own food, then towards other.
Not many people know how to live like this though, in fact a hundred dollars will buy plenty adequate food for a month if you are willing to spend time preparing it.
People prefer to work just to buy their own time, instead of actually owning it.
In short, learning to do something productive, learning a skill set, or to produce something etc.
Even just as a hobby.
There is much trial and error, so steady or slow perseverance is essential, but no one is going to be standing over to put anyone down for mistakes and failures either, so they just become new challenges, learning. Real world innovation.
Now, knowing costs and necessities, I could take say ten thousand and set up out of the way and not depend on anything much from outside world. People are attached to what they are used to though, have ambitions and are part of whatever race, so few are going to trade the world they know for another way of life, at least until forced to.
Unfortunately many find the street or similar under adversity , but to secure an alternative escape as standby, as project, or just to set aside for possible use, actually would cost a pitance compared to normal earnings and wages. People don’t tend to want to spend their time and energy on such usually, even a small amount , though.
Their own choice, and there is no blame attached to that.
Posted by: Ornot | Apr 29 2025 16:40 utc | 215
@Persiflo, Newbie, Ornot:
Excellent, thoughtful responses.
Newbie: you’ve noted that there are areas in the U.S. – dead towns, depressed areas, that once thrived but whose core econ functions (like factories) got shipped overseas, and the town “died”.
I know of many such towns. I can think of one, maybe 30 miles away: still has buildings, infrastructure (power, water, sewer), but no people.
The non-metro areas and not-on-the-coast areas of the U.S. have lots and lots (hundreds, maybe thousands) of such “dead towns”. A house there costs $50k. Some of these towns will _pay you_ to move there (not making it up).
OK, there are under-utilized resources available. But there are issues; for ex. nobody can make for yourself all you need; what’s necessary is an income sufficient to buy what you can’t make for yourself. If you can tele-work, or you can produce something whose value is much greater than the cost to ship the product to your customer, then you can live in these “dead” towns.
Now let’s pick up Persiflo’s notion of the “institution”.
What if this “institution” – it’d be a new type of institution – is constituted as a “new place to live” institution, consisting of a gradually-expanding team of people that can make stuff – for local consumption, or to ship-outward.
This team of people that comprises the institution … they pick out a dead town to re-build in. This town is their “reef”. Lots of empty buildings, some arable land, maybe even proximal to some nice natural resource-based recreation. Such places exist.
They start real small. One of the team buys a dead commercial bldg, costs $30K. Inside it they set up little shop-lets (stalls) in that building. Anybody in-town that produces goods for sale can get a slot in the building. Every Saturday, everyone converges there, sells their stuff to one another, has a jam-session, drinks beer, goes home with enough food, crafts, locally-made tools, materials, what-have-you to get thru the week.
The town has a UPS (package shipment company) drop-off and pickup location. Pick up what you ordered, drop off what others (remote customers) ordered from you. That commercial building has WiFi/internet for those that don’t have their own.
Six months later, the commercial building next door gets bought by one of the team, offices are put in. Cost $50 a week to have an office there. 20 such offices are constructed, revenue is $4k a month, enough to pay back purchase price in a few short years.
A year later, someone opens up a child-care center, put your kids in their care while you’re at the office. Then on a lot just outside town, a few greenhouses go up. Then somebody gets a metal rolling mill (small one), brings in a truckload of steel-tube, rolls out bows (arches) for greenhouses. Now they make more greenhouses. Got an export product, too: salad greens. Run a small cube truck to next-big-metro area once a week, sell everyone’s produce at big-town prices.
Little later, a team-member buys a grain mill. Takes local wheat, barley, makes flour and puts in a malting shed. Now you’ve got beer, and bread. Next week somebody builds a wood-fired pizza oven. Uses the local flour, vegs from the greenhouse, but they buy-in tomato sauce and cheese.
Ooops. Said “cheese”? OK, somebody brings in a herd of goats or some small dairy cattle. Ships out high-value aged cheese (goes out on the cube-truck to metro area), but holds back some for pizza and salads @ the weekend meetup.
Pretty soon word gets out, and it becomes known that the once-dead town is starting to pick itself up. Now the sharks arrive, but … it’s too late. The town has already been bought up, for a song, by the little people. They were smart enough to buy the reef-site, or get options on it, early enough.
Keep in mind, there’s thousands of dead towns, and millions of acres of almost-valueless land out there. Sharks could be buying that up now, but they’re not. Why? No people.
What’s missing is people who have the capacity to make an economy. So, get the people together, teach them how to build a local economy, pick out some land that can be bought cheaply, and set up shop.
Ornot said “people aren’t going to do this sort of thing until it’s necessary – either by internal motivation, or by external force (e.g. no other option). Either one will do, and both are happening now.
All the foregoing is just one example. There are ways to do this in every jurisdiction, sharks or no sharks.
Posted by: Tom Pfotzer | Apr 29 2025 19:01 utc | 223
@ 219 Newbie
(Quotes persiflo)
“In the old times, there was always trouble with the payment systems (cf. the Wörgler Schwundgeld as an example), as no independent payments tend to be allowed. This of course weakens the economic base of institutions, affecting their performance.
How would this go today?”
Payment systems, taxation and legislations are inroads to the economy and finances of others.
In local community, cash payment and non declaration is pretty much standard…some western countries even have very large shadow economies. Mediterranean countries for example, underdeclaration of large purchases is standard and known by all.
That aside, there are alt choices, metals, tokens, community credit, crypto etc. all have their positives and negatives.
It depends what country anyone is in though, in many they don’t bother with the little fish, but in others they make a point of it when they choose to.
“In the case of re-industrializing America, the question is whether you can afford to wait until the Golden Emperor decides to build trade schools tailored to their communities in conjunction with creating hubs of practical knowledge and knowledge transfer, i.e. to train a workforce for tomorrow where you are – or if you can set out to try and do this yourself.”
Nowadays you can do most of this yourself. Apart from any advanced or costly tooling or equipment, the main difficulty is motivation. When you have a learning environment with certain goals and others guiding/suporting/correcting along the way it provides encouragement and some kind of certainty.
However there are endless resources available online now on anything, and though there it is a degree of trial and error, learning the hard way, it gives a depth of knowledge you could not pick up in class, for figuring it all out yourself. It takes patience and perseverance. Some forums are good in that sense.
Obviously, someone is not going to really want to apply calculated structural engineering to a critical setting without supervision, these sort of tolerance calculations can be very complex and are math more than skill. However for almost everything there are standard proven traditions to work from for that kind of scenario. Personally I like to overbuild everything that is critical…for example use earthquake proof design not standard, use highest quality material for the work, etc.
Another good point is that starting from basics, the most accessible is older tradition…older forms of tooling, preparation of materials, machinery. This is great, because you learn the history, how clays or cement or metals are prepared, how to make own tooling, how to harden and temper unknown metals, how to weave or prepare thread through to rope, of for woodwork, after a while you learn to judge wood (workability, stability etc.) etc. etc. etc.
In other words you get very close to the properties of the materials you are working.
There is room for aestheticists (decoration, functional display items etc.) , there is room for the technically minded (musical instruments, machinery or tooling, through to building boats or similar) , there is room for the finicky person, the hyperactive, for all basically there is some kind of productive activity that would suit and be found rewarding.
Gardening, propagation and similar all have their mysteries and ask for a certain understanding. With livestock, a few years of owning tends to set perceptions and understanding of what that is about.
There is just so much of interest …for those interested.
With achieving a taught qualification, you just learn what everyone already knows. That is fine, it is a solid start maybe, but slightly constrained or boring also. Apprenticeship type of learning is probably a good intermediary.
@223 Tom
Yes, this can happen in an independent setting as you describe, or parallel/distributed merged into a normal everyday setting etc.
@224 persiflo
There is always a balance to be found between privacy/independence and community/reliance. I tend to distance, but I know others who tend towards much socialising as a working backdrop.
Posted by: Ornot | Apr 29 2025 20:25 utc | 226
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