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Strike the earth!

Good idea, don't count me in, though.

Meh, I just like to vote. Don't care.

You'll probably have a lot of "Fun*", that's for sure.

GET A JOB, YOU HIPPIES.

[Aqizzar]

"I was planning on something happening to me at some point" is not good life plan.  Trust me on this one.  That said, I believe the primary way of joining a commune is by being part of one when it starts, since they never last long enough to gain new people.

[GlyphGryph]

Hey, I added a link.

And my life plans have worked out fairly well so far. And as to your second point, that is why I was happy to see this thread. ;P

[Criptfeind]

You guys know this is a joke right? That you have started to make real plans and ask for legal advice scares me.

[Graebeard]

You guys know this is a joke right? That you have started to make real plans and ask for legal advice scares me.

Well, it may have been a joke since the necro, but it seems like it started off as a fairly serious discussion.

The whole graduate --> job/apartment/spouse thing is kinda overdone anyway.  There are plenty of other ways to live, and there are plenty of common, and commonsensical, ways to exploit economies of scale to your advantage.  Throw in a community you enjoy being a part of and it actually seems really appealing.

For instance, no one is going to organize a soapmaking/furniture carving commune with a trebuchet lab.  But, there's no good reason a geek-oriented Co-Op wouldn't thrive with proper planning and follow through.  Say the Co-Op runs at a surplus, which it could easily do if many members were actually employed.  Aside from the economies of a common food pool (which are pretty awesome), you could use surplus to invest in projects and resources that anyone alone couldn't afford/justify.

Let's say you run a $300 surplus for 6 months.  The Co-Op buys a steel shed for the back yard and outfits it with tools.  Now you've got a workshop for everyone.  Same thing would go for any other common areas or niceties.  Can you afford professional quality microbrew equipment?  No, but 20 of you could.

Plus, when you move out and sell your shares you get the equity you put in to start with.  Can apartment renters say that?

The key is to look at examples of what works, change things to suit your needs, dwarf up and take the plunge.

[GlyphGryph]

Most University students essentially already live in a commune anyways. And I don't know when it was necroed, but if it turned into a joke at that point... well, alas. It sounded like great fun to me, and I've been known to go off for a year or more with less of a good reason than that, and it's almost always been worth it in the end.

[Graebeard]

It was here.  It's tough to tell how much real interest there is still here.  If anyone wants to seriously talk about specific plans they might want to just start a new thread.

[GlyphGryph]

Ah, that's where I stopped reading cause it got silly.

So, was there ever any real interest? And who expressed it?

[lordcooper]

I'm genuinely interested, although virtually penniless and in the UK 

[Criptfeind]

I believe it started as a joke but then became more serious. So you may have real interest.

Hell, by the time I enter the accounting field I will be more likely to work at home then anywhere else, something like this is very feasible for me, if you don't expect anything from me but cooking, cleaning, and money.

[Vector]

I don't know how real my interest is.  I don't know that I'd be actually able to get there, physically... but it definitely seems like someplace I'd like to spend a summer, maybe half a year when I'm on sabbatical or some other sort of break.

[Aqizzar]

See if any of the local junior colleges need a math professor?  Heck, we'd probably wind up near a college town anyway.

I don't know why I'm even entertaining this.  If I moved into a commune, my Dad would never let me live it down.

[Vector]

I'm generally going more for the "large university" route, but I could see working briefly at a junior college as a break between grad school and Massive Professorship.

[Aqizzar]

Judging by conversations with my own professors, doing a couple semesters at Turnpike Tech is the normal route of progression.  That or a teaching assistant position at their own college while getting the degree.  Point is, don't expect to get a big-name hire right out of school yourself.

[Vector]

Don't expect for it, but I certainly hope for it

[PTTG??]

Aside from schizophrenic cryptography and math professorship, how do pure mathematicians make money? Inventing and selling new number systems?

GraeBeard and Criptfeind are both right. I actually started writing this as a joke, kinda got into the idea, went a little ways semi-seriously, and then necro'd it full on Lol mode... but I am once again starting to think seriously about ways to pull this off.

I do think that a full commune would have a lot of issues... but a more open commun-ity, something splitting the difference between a college town and a hippie forest retreat, could avoid some of the issues. We might still split food and fuel costs, but break housing from one large buildings to a variety of separate ones, allowing people who want privacy or a family home to live separately while keeping several rooms for group living. We could similarly use a time-share model for visitors, vacationers, and part-time members to keep homes both in the community and elsewhere (i.e., a house that is used by college students during the summer, a vacationing family in the spring, and rented out to skiers or beachgoers, depending, during fall and/or winter).

Selling shares would tie in nicely to that, of course.

A large problem that any commun-e/-ity would have is trade deficit. We'd need to be able to produce something to export; the simplest thing would be simply to have members be employed, but there's a few other options. The ones that come immediately to mind are agriculture (all the other communes do it), indie software sales (Notch has made literally millions of dollars, and I'm at least as smart as him), power backfeeding (some utilites pay you if your solar panels or whatever produce more than you use), and mugs.

Also cost mitigation; If we seceded from the US or other host nation, we would avoid taxes, though we would also need to provide for our national defense and fire department and stuff... On the other hand, we could grow some DANK nugs. I'm only 13% serious about the succession... but Aqizzar's dad should be cool with it, since he could just say it's for States Rights or something. Anyway, that approach would make island settlement more attractive.

PS, In all seriousness, the Kermadec islands would a promising place to consider. What's NZ going to do? Sic Orcs on us? Even non-successionwise, it'd be an interesting place to settle. A more mundane place would be somewhere in the California Sierras, which are close to where I live and only lightly inhabited. Going for psuedo-dorm approach, there are a couple of good colleges on the west coast, particularly Digipen, which is a great geek college and close to Toady One. We may be able to get tax breaks if we move to Chile and set up a technical school. Basically, so long as it touches the Pacific Ocean, I'll go there.

PPS, It's 2:19 AM.