Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

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.

[sonerohi]

But look at the technique he is using. He isn't grasping at the edges of the blade really. He is using the very tips of his fingers and his palms to apply pressure to the flat of the blade. Plus, the technique, and presumably the practitioner, are German. He can get away with it.

[PTTG??]

Conventional construction is $90 a square foot, depending. Steel prefab construction is a little less flexible, but costs $20 at absolute most (including labor, and I think windows and stuff, etc.), though those numbers are highly variable. I just took what looked good, so feel free to correct me.

Depending on the exact number of participants and the starting funds, I estimate that we could give everyone a private 12x18 foot room (5 Km by 8 Liters if my conversions are correct), plus a healthy 5888 sq. ft. (9002 metric power levels) of general space, assuming we don't buy any new furnishings. If we get the price lower than that $20, and everybody tosses in furniture, this could work out pretty well without ever needing a loan or any other financial juggling.

That 12x18 foot room would be pretty large. dividers and furniture would break it up into several comfortable spaces.

Stuff like dojos, meditation rooms, barns, forges, and stuff, would all be added gradually by vote. I definitely want to see them.

[sonerohi]

Dojo fo sho yo. Where else will showdowns occur? And a forge is necessary to repair gear.

[Aqizzar]

If you're looking for seclusion, I just got back from scouting the terrain across the County highways of Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma.  Plenty of room, plenty of lots looking to sell, probably for very little money, and shoddy old building to refurbish or hide prefabs behind.  Totally private, because every other house is right at human-eye distance, and surrounded by trees, when you can see each other at all.  Forget growing anything, that takes too long and too much land.  Instead, it's prime country for building windmills.  Even a private sized one could easily mean free electricity (and because well-water is mandatory, free water).  Enough land (not very much), and you could even make money selling the electricity.  Or just lease the land for a real company to build turbines on; ditto for leasing the land for cell-towers, radio towers, gas wells, and other such "eyesores".  If you're dead set on farming, it's more than secluded enough for drugs, but there's definitely no good market around.

CONS: The land probably isn't that cheap, and the capital outlay is enormous.  All Internet is satellite only, and the weather can be brutal even without tornadoes.  It's a three hour round-trip to the convenience store, and God knows none of us can subsist on vegetables.  The nearest computer hardware store is an all-day affair.  And we'd look pretty out of place, with our glasses, frail limbs, long hair, luminescent skin, and varying dictions, among the sun-burnt human doughblobs who populate the area.

[PTTG??]

I'm afraid that though we are looking for cheap land, seclusion, and geeky ways to make money, the isolation (distinct from seclusion insofar as seclusion is shorter-term), lack of utilities (internet), and possibility of witch-hunting mobs are indeed major cons.

Looking at the map, there are other places suitable for wind power, including Oregon and Washington... though I admit I am highly biased to prefer someplace around Redmond because that's where Digipen college is.

Spoiler: The Map (click to show/hide)

[Armok]

If the thread is already awesome, how awesome will the real thing be?

[LeoLeonardoIII]

The splotches of black look like goooold.

[SIGVARDR]

edited.

[Vector]

Unlikely to find one in a self-pronounced group of nerds.

Note that I'm not trying to degrade you or your idea here,but i would like to understand the why of it.

>_>

Not to put myself on a pedestal, but when it comes down to it I can lead.


As far as the why?  Because it would be awesome.

[SIGVARDR]

edited.

[Kagus]

If the idea of living in a communal nerdhive where people can pool their meager resources, be irritated by each other at regular intervals, and erupt in all-out Rube Goldberg wars against each other does not appeal to you, then you're obviously not geeky enough for us.

It's a social society of the socially inept.  You seem to have adapted a little too well to normal life to qualify.


One thing is being a hobbyist nerd, such as admiring the gizmos on your new phone or playing the occasional bout of some on-the-banks-of-the-mainstream game, but it's another thing entirely to be a true blue geek.

[PTTG??]

As I said, by pooling our resources, we get to own the place outright, with very low monthly costs. Plus, we can do things like have a workspace set aside for servers and routers or for blacksmithing or a Dojo...
 
Capital is the whole point of it. An apartment needs hundreds of dollars a month, minimum, plus utilities, plus plus plus. The commune or co-op needs a few thousand up front, then becomes rapidly much cheaper, and you get all kinds of resources (high-speed internet, various work spaces, other people doing the chores occasionally...) that you wouldn't have access to otherwise. If we where to get a bunch of adjacent apartements, considering we stay there for a couple of years, we'd pay more and get far less out of it. For one thing, if someone wanted to leave the commune, they could sell thier space to some new applicant, getting back some of the cash they put in. Someone leaving an apartment gets to stop paying rent.
 
As for leadership, this is not a business proposition. The group would be so small that direct democracy and consensus could easily work.
 

...and live alone or with a spouse,like normal people.

Why should we pretend to be something else? More importantly, have you ever met a truly normal person? They're scary. They're obese with three and a half fat kids in their minivan as they're on thier way to McDonalds for breakfast. *shudders*
 
But, to each his own, and of course, if someone isn't enthusastic with the concept, then they shouldn't join us. I've posted this not to change your mind, just show where my views differ from yours.
 
Hmmm... nerdhive.

[SIGVARDR]

edited.

[Grakelin]

I'm also a natural born leader whenever I'm in large crowds of nerds.

But that's just because my shirt has a collar, yo.

[Aqizzar]

I recall the stories of the Ron Paul unofficial campaign supporters - Pasty, scraggly twentysomething Internet-libertarians; addicted to communitarian spirit, wifi, and keeping their (parent's) money away from the taxman; packed a hundred to a farmhouse in the New Hampshire winter; about nine women among them.  Sounds like the good life, doesn't it?