Stats for nerds
2recommend
5mentions
2people
2020–2025years
60% recommend40% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- You make a great point. To support your point, consider the "FIRE" movement for early retirement, and essays like: "How I live on $7,000 per year" http://earlyretirementextreme.com/how-i-live-on-7000-per-yea...
Frugality opens up a lot of lifestyle options. Although even given the $7000 a year, this person seems to have a lot of capital in a sense of goods, education, health, and relationships.
That said, there are a few nuances here.
Self-education is now cheap through the Internet (e.g. watching YouTube videos on how to do math or how to fix things). However compulsory education laws make that problematical for children (although there are homeschooling regulations in the USA that can be navigated, homeschooling is illegal in some parts of Europe). The credentialing arms race also means a lot of corporate-type or professional jobs are closed to people who skip college -- even as there are still other opportunities including subsistence production or small-scale entrepreneurship.
Many common antibiotics are cheap due to mass production. But antibiotics can have complicating side effects from wiping out healthy gut microbiota -- which may perhaps include cancer and depression because part of the immune system and part of neurotransmitter production are involved with the gut. Some other cures for things based around herbs are increasingly forgotten and also require access to a large enough area to roam in to find the herbs.
Most (not all) cancer can be avoided through a whole foods diet and active lifestyle. Such a diet and lifestyle is generally cheaper than the mainstream (especially if you have your own garden). See Dr. Joel Fuhrman's G-BOMBS approach as one example: https://www.drfuhrman.com/blog/237/g-bombs-the-anti-cancer-f...
But, since it is not all, some people in such communities will, as you suggest, die of things treatable in the mainstream. Also, since the people joining such communities presumably have already been eating ultraprocessed food for most of their lives, they are at higher cancer risk than if they had grown up that way (same with other chronic health risks like diabetes, obesity, heart disease, immune dysfunction, and more that are mainly byproducts of Western lifestyle and Western medicine). So, there are these additional background risks for someone going from the mainstream to the alternative -- but the alternatives may struggle under the weight of treating an influx of chronically sick people. (Of course, many mainstream cancer treatments only prolong life for at best a few months at a great cost in suffering and money, but that is a different issue.)
For good or bad, zoning regulations and pressure from neighbors restricts much of what people can do with their land. And cheap land tends to have issues (biting insects, lack of good water, distance from jobs, distance from markets, poor soil, swampy flooding, fire dangers, distance from other people, and so on). So such "cheap" land may actually be quite expensive in health costs and travel costs and labor costs and accepting various increased risks. The book "Life After the City" explores some of these issues.
Decades ago I read an article (in Westchester Magazine?) on someone who learned "primitive" skills for living in the woods. When asked why he did not go and live by himself in the woods using his skills, he replied that it takes a village to live well in the wilderness. So, an overall issue here is that if you want to live well cheaply (which includes some healthy social interactions for most people), you ideally need to be part of a community with related values.
But communities can have problematical dynamics -- especially when surrounded by another culture that is wealthier and more exciting in various ways. That is why, say, the Pilgrims left the Netherlands. The Pilgrims were tolerated in Holland after the left England where there were discriminated against. But they saw their children and other community members starting to adopt Dutch ways, and the older members also encountered other issues fitting into Dutch society. So some of them decided to go to what was then the remote wilderness in North America -- where they could enforce their restrictive norms on their children and neighbors without being surrounded by enticing "Supernormal Stimuli" and "Pleasure Trap" alternatives (both quoted items being names of books on those topics). https://dutchreview.com/culture/history/the-pilgrims-in-leid...
Of course, many of the Pilgrims died, and the ones that did not survived in part due to the compassion of the Native Americans (as well as plundered Native graves and so on). And their original collectivist vision of land ownership fell apart in the face of massive hard work and starvation and freeloading in that context. But that is another story. "Who Were The Pilgrims? This Is The Story You Didn’t Learn In School" https://allthatsinteresting.com/pilgrims
So, if you really want to be as happy as possible with such an alternative lifestyle, a big challenge is finding a lot of other people who want to live like in the 1920s, and actually willing to do that full-time, and all go to the same place, and somehow can afford to buy the land the community needs. And that is all a big challenge, especially since many (not all) alternative communities tend to fall apart over issues of equity or exploitative social/sexual relationships and so on. Some examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_utopian_commu...
While not identical in beliefs, some people have quipped the Pilgrims were essentially the Taliban of their day. And in a way, it makes sense, because to leave behind your home as a community takes some common set of core beliefs and strong social bonds which are often associated with extreme religious sects.
To an extent, the Amish are somewhat like this as far as being tight knit religious-based communities which are apart from mainstream US society. But they still emphasize hard work and related material affluence -- and also happily selling goods and services to the lazy "English" all around them. So the Amish are not quite a community of leisure -- even if many people may find happiness in that life.
So, given that, the Amish are far from what Marshal Sahlins describes in "The Original Affluent Society" of hunter/gatherers who have lots of leisure time since most of the food they need does not take that long to acquire and is done often in a way people think is fun or at least engaging. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society
Unfortunately, hunter/gatherers are living in a productive landscape were generally displaced by militaristic bureaucracies wielding mass-produced "Guns, Germs, and Steel" (like how the first century of the US Army was mainly about being used to displace Native populations): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel
Which circles back around to why cheap land to live frugally in community is generally not desirable land.
I do think modern technological advances do make new alternatives possible. "OSCOMAK" is a project I came up with decades ago to help support communities of any size to develop whatever infrastructure they desire (but admittedly it is still more an idea than a realization): https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/ "The Oscomak project is an attempt to create a core of communities more in control of their technological destiny and its social implications. No single design for a community or technology will please everyone, or even many people. Nor would a single design be likely to survive. So this project endeavors to gather information and to develop tools and processes that all fit together conceptually like Tinkertoys or Legos. The result will be a library of possibilities that individuals in a community can use to achieve any degree of self-sufficiency and self-replication within any size community, from one person to a billion people. Within every community people will interact with these possibilities by using them and extending them to design a community economy and physical layout that suits their needs and ideas."
And like with the Pilgrim/Taliban, :-) I can imagine such tools most useful for a dedicated community trying to "live off the land" in the desert, ocean, Antarctica, or outer space (Moon, Mars, Asteroids, etc.). Those are all "cheap land" (with no or low taxes) in the sense of being generally far away and generally not pleasant places right now due to lack of one thing or another --- including unfortunately other people to form a community with.
See also the book "Retrotopia" by John Michael Greer for more ideas, including how to have "zones" of infrastructure and taxation at different levels that people can choose from.
An alternative to increase leisure though extreme frugality and living apart from society is to upgrade the mainstream society we have, such as with a basic income; improved subsistence with gardening robots, 3d printers, and solar panels; better collaborative decisions making in democratic government; and a stronger gift economy (like sharing information essentially for free via the web like HackerNews for example makes possible).
- Greer has written two speculative-fiction books about the downfall of the US: "Twilight's Last Gleaming" and "Retrotopia", apart from lots of other books.
I found both of the above two books entertaining as well as thought-provoking.
- Thanks for the interesting reply. Related to the Swiss model, how society controls levels of automation, and also resilience, you might like the sci-fi novel "Retrotopia" by John Michael Greer. It explores those issues from one perspective.
Here is one chapter from the novel (more are on that blog if you don't want to buy the book): https://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-12-31/retrotopia-neg... "This is the twelfth installment of an exploration of some of the possible futures discussed on this blog, using the toolkit of narrative fiction. Our narrator attends the Lakeland Republic’s annual drone shoot, and finds out that not all technological innovations start out from the current state of the art..."
- Retrotopia by John Michael Greer has an aspect similar to different technology levels. Except that in the novel they are essentially taxation zones relating to infrastructure. If you want to live in a zone with, say, publicly maintained roads, then you have to pay taxes for it. Otherwise you could live in a zone without them. Same for other public amenities. More details here: https://theworthyhouse.com/2021/01/01/retrotopia-john-michae... "To maintain autarky, and for practical and philosophical reasons we will turn to in a minute, Lakeland rejects public funding of any technology past 1940, and imposes cultural strictures discouraging much private use of such technology. Even 1940s technology is not necessarily the standard; each county chooses to implement public infrastructure in one of five technological tiers, going back to 1820. The more retro, the lower the taxes. Family farming is apparently the main activity for the population, usually with horses and oxen (petroleum is nearly non-existent and the few motor vehicles run on heavily-taxed biodiesel). Towns and cities have been rebuilt in solid 1940s style; they are powered by modest amounts of central electricity, generated by manure, supplemented by point-source hot-water solar and wind. There is no internet, much less metanet, and no satellite access (portrayed as ubiquitously critical to the outside world’s functioning). Business is conducted at a 1940s level, as is all physical culture. Clothes are throwbacks—made of high quality, long-lasting materials, rather than the disposable “bioplastic” found in the outside world. Economically, Lakeland is somewhere on the continuum to distributism—the Grange is back in action, concentrations of wealth with disproportionate power are forbidden, and associations and other intermediary institutions are ubiquitous. Subsidiarity, rather than concentration, is the rule; banks are individual and tied to the community, for example. Automation is rejected as costing a society more than it provides, if properly accounted. ..."
- Thanks; that might be fun. You can also email me at the same userid at kurtz-fernhout.com.
For reference (nothing new for you, but others may find of interest) I just found a writeup on the Terregator where the document was started by others in 1984 but finished by Kevin Dowling years later: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2299052_The_Terrega...
Looking at that sparks some more thoughts...
Kevin himself demonstrates an interesting example of robotics as a career path. He was the first CMU Robotics Institute employee -- but ultimately left to work for a LED lighting company, then on to wearable sensors, and now on to 3D scanning: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/dowling-receives-alumni-award https://www.topionetworks.com/people/kevin-dowling-54395e99a...
I was very surprised to learn Kevin was leaving CMU RI for the LED lighting company -- given his commitment to robotics for so long. But, aside from interests perhaps changing over time, perhaps it's an example of people in robotics starting out trying to solve some big complex integrated thing of a general-purpose robot (e.g. Uranus, Terregator, Alvan, etc.) and then ending up focusing on various related details (solid-state electronics and sensors for Kevin; simulations and UI software for me).
And of course Mark Raibert's lab at CMU, then MIT, then BD, has (for decades) focused on improving walking. Walking was an area in which incremental progress could be made in contrast to more complex navigation tasks and manipulation tasks that may have seemed intractable in practice (especially in the 1980s). It's not clear to me though how much special insight BD might have into the larger unstructured navigation issue though.
Yet, as every piece of individual robotics technology gets refined by someone, whether walking, 3D scanning, image recognition, reliable mobile power sources, touch sensors, terrain mapping, and so on, we do get closer to someone putting all those things together again in a way we might have imagined in the 1980s but were always disappointed by each component's limitations. Essentially, BD's progress is necessary in terms of removing another excuse for not having amazing robots (i.e. walking is hard, but BD solved it) -- but by itself that is not sufficient to deliver the robots imagined in sci-fi stories (assuming we really still want them).
I can also guess there may have been a lot of falls edited out of that video? :-) For reference, a section of a larger video showing lots of falling walking robots: https://youtu.be/xEwtM0pKOV0?t=1154
Having linked to that collection of robot falls, I still feel it is at most a matter of time before all sorts of walking robots (and manipulating robots) can reliably do much better in unstructured environments. It's hard to predict exactly how long though -- whether years or decades. I should have been clearer in my previous post that while computer-controlled mobility is increasingly a solved problem like the BD video shows, using mobility effectively when navigating unstructured environments remains an open issue (similar as for manipulating in unstructured environments remains open). That may sound like a subtle distinction perhaps, but in the 1980s (as you undoubtedly know from first hand experience) just getting a computer to control a big motor reliably was a big deal.
As with your point on baby steps, another example is there are now about 200,000 Kiva robots in Amazon warehouses (somewhat structured environments) where automation makes a big difference in reducing costs -- even if the "robots" are not humanoid in form and not general purpose in function.
Coincidentally, I currently work on a robotics project -- a gene sequencer -- but I rarely think of it as doing "robotics". That is mostly because the robot itself is essentially an off-the-shelf commercialized device integrated into a larger unit with lots of other specialized hardware (and it is the specialized hardware including custom chips and related reagents and laser beams that are the star of the show). I myself generally just work on UI stuff that essentially forms an ecosystem that surrounds that device. I don't usually work on software running on the device itself -- which others do, who I sometimes envy. :-) And then I think of all the headaches involved in making robotics work reliably, and I am glad again to only have to wrestle with JavaScript-related technical quirks. :-) Ideally, the customer never has to think about the robot. They can't even see the robot when the device is closed and in operation. Ultimately, the customer doesn't even really care that there is a robot in the big box they bought -- they want to see results (even if the robot is essential right now to delivering the results).
Maybe like with all technology, as in Heinlein's "Rolling Stones" novel's discussion of advanced in propulsion from complex IC engine to simpler nuclear rocket, one can wonder how any system using a robot might be simplified to remove the robot entirely to reduce costs and increase reliability. For example, one could make a robot that washes dishes like a human does, picking up one at a time and rinsing it under a faucet and drying it with a towel -- but using a special-purpose dishwasher is overall more effective and energy efficient. However, someone still needs to load the dishwasher and put the plates away in a cabinet, but that usually does not take much time or trouble. And maybe that is an aspect of robotics in general as a field -- that when we set out towards some goal involving figuring out clever ways to deliver the results that currently involve human-like motions (walking, carrying, stacking, looking, etc.), often we eventually achieve the same results or better in different specialized ways. So, "mechanism" advances, even if anthromorphic "robots" get eventually bypassed. The value becomes in creating mechanisms to do thing that humans can't do easily or enjoyably or reliably or profitably. The 1956 Theodore Sturgeon story "The Skills of Xanadu" has a spin on that, where "work" is made into play using nanotech and networks and mobile computing.
For another example, any modern car is essentially a robot full of computers and sensors and actuators -- but it does not look or work like a human or other organic creature. We don't usually say 2020s car mechanics are "robot technicians" even though that really is what they are by 1980s standards of the ancestral Terregator. That is because the "robotics" aspect of cars has disappeared into the background culturally through incremental progress.
And even designwise, there are also no direct "horse" components in a Tesla electric car, but a Tesla still delivers similar (or better) results in most ways to the horse-drawn carriage which was its ancestor (or human-drawn carriage for rickshaws). Although, "better" perhaps ignores that horses were self-replicating, horses had more "horse sense" about navigating unstructured environments to bring home drunks, horse carts could be refueled anywhere there was grass, horse hooves and wide horse-cart wheels could handle rougher terrain than many cars, and so on (objectives still remaining for advanced robotics). So, some things also got lost along the way amidst other advantages (like not needing to deal with horse manure or abandoned dead horses in cities, which used to be a tremendous problem).
So, two steps forward but one step back as so often with technology. Let's just hope overall technology is not two steps forward and two steps back though (at the risk of quoting another Paula Abduhl song). Or worse, two steps forward and three steps back. See the book "Retrotopia" for thoughts on technical advances taken together sometimes leading to more problems then they solve.
When electric motors were new, a home might have one that multiple devices could be connected to. Now most people would have a hard time saying how many electric motors (or other actuators) are in their home (e.g. in the microwave, in the dishwasher, in the CD player, etc). The same is happening with computers and sensors as they become embedded in so many devices. Robotics in that sense is perhaps increasingly all around us -- even as we notice it less and less?
Economically, making better special-purpose tools (like a dishwasher) is not that threatening to the income-through-jobs link on which our current economy rests for distributing purchasing power (like discussed in "The Triple Revolution Memorandum" from 1964). That is because humans are still needed in the loop somewhere. In contrast, general purpose robots (and especially general purpose AI) and related larger systems will stretch that link much more to the breaking point. So the broader question is how (or if?) we (who?) want to structure our technosphere and economics so it remains (non-cyborged-)human-compatible...
Here is my own dystopian/utopian commentary on that from 2010 involving robots inspired by Marshall Brain's "Manna": :-) "The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
