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.

[Kadzar]

The simple system I showed for the mechanic and the web designer does have one problem: people whose crafts involve their own skills but little materials, such as a lawyer or a web designer, draw $0 from the commune and then give back 70%. The people who use materials, such as a soaper or mechanic or jeweler, draw $50 from the commune and then give back 70%. (For example).

This means the people who don't need materials actually contribute more in net than people who do use materials. In general, however, jobs that use materials should probably have higher profits than those without materials, so it evens out.

The commune also needs to make sure they know what the books look like, so they can vote no on materials expenditures that are known to end up losing the commune money. These are cases where the materials cost more than 70% of the retail price.

With a scroll saw, vice, power drill, and sander, I can turn yard waste into some nice wooden beads. I would need materials, but they would be free.

[DJ]

Materials must be a lot more expensive in USA, because for that kind of money you could build a similarly sized brick and concrete house in Bosnia. Wooden houses are orders of magnitude cheaper.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Yeah, the whole point of the communal food budget is that you can feed everyone the staples for hell of cheap and then supplement that with good stuff based on what's on deep sale. And even then you still have food budget money left over for treats. Especially since people are eating home-cooked food instead of eating out.

And people have their own money for things like shredded octopus or chocolate covered strawberry gummy bears or whatever.

The commune thing doesn't mean everyone shares everything. Your personal space, for example, is yours. People can't just come in and use your toothbrush and computer. Likewise, your clothes and stuff.

But you know how sometimes people get tired of some clothes? Never wear it, or whatever? Trades! And maybe you have a rip that you might be able to fix, but it would take forever? If only you did it all the time, and you could do it for your friends, and they did stuff for you like that too. You'd be really efficient at it and do a good job, and get everything done really quickly.

Really the communal thing is more about certain shared living spaces, ability to buy in bulk, sharing skills so you don't have to spend money, and a creative energetic environment.

Heck, I'd make curry all the time.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Haha let's try a crazy idea.

Say you have a building with concrete block structural walls. You can put something else on the inside, siding on the outside, etc. Just for now, we will ignore the floor inside and the roof, and any door or window openings. Consider the blocks saved on door and window openings to be the ones you'd break in construction.

This guy says a 12" x 8" x 16" block is $2.42. Let's take a building with 20x20 inside space, which means 80' linear wall length. Again, we're not calculating right, it's on the safe side. The walls are 12' high. That's 960 square feet of walls. One brick is 1.33 sqft. This means we need 720 bricks to build the walls. About $1750 just for concrete block walls.

But those are big box home improvement store prices.

[qwertyuiopas]

Careful what country you build in, they might burn you as a witch/communist/cult/annoying neighbour.

[Aqizzar]

Holy crap, you people are really serious about this aren't you?  Okay, I'll play along.  A few comments-

I don't where the idea of a Non-profit organization came from, but that's a lot harder to pull off than it sounds like.  The better option would be to just incorporate.  All you need is the legal documentation, and you can have a corporation that does absolutely anything.  Heck, it's occasionally in vogue for gay couples to file themselves as a corporation, so they wind up paying taxes in line with married people.  The corporation would hold all the pool money, everyone would effectively be an employee of same, all "stock" would be held in the group, taxes would be filed by the incredibly low small-business tax rate (might even get small-business assistance, provided we don't explain the company like it's a hippie commune), all kinds of tax-breaks on necessary company expenditures like vehicles, insurance pool breaks, and all the other stuff that goes along with it.  People who work outside jobs could just live on the company's own property, nominally paying rent for legal purposes but basically just being well-paying freeloaders, if you get the idea.  It's a little more complicated, but it winds up solving a lot of problems, with zoning-overoccupancy and taxes and money pooling and so forth.

I also propose that a very clear Membership Charter be drafted, preferably as early as possible, including provision for kicking people out.  Allowing everyone to keep some amount of money and private property is absolutely necessary - as Vector well elucidated, people like having their own stuff.  Their own place to sit around, their own books to read, their own clothes to wear, and the satisfaction of having your own money in your pocket to do your own shopping with.  We are anti-social nerds after all, that's the whole reason we'd do something like this - the real hippie communes all fell apart do to human avarice, and they actually wanted to live like one giant family.

Regarding the property itself, more searching is necessary, but I have to admit the "buy some rural land and build a concrete fortress on it" plan has its appeal.  Research research research I guess.  Once again, the primary concern is making sure the area itself has enough employment and market opportunity to make enough money to keep everything going.

[Heron TSG]

Holy crap, you people are really serious about this aren't you?

It would be an interesting venture, for sure. In fact, if it happens to be near enough to the college I plan on going to, I could either pop in and visit or (if it's really close) join in.

[Aqizzar]

Wait, what area are you talking about?  Did the dudemind already decide on the embark site?

Anyway, I was having a look around for shits and giggles.  I googled growing tech industry areas, and the first that came up was Madison Wisconsin.  It sounded kinda legit, so I looked up large home realty in the area.  I should have remembered that this is actually a fantastic time for enterprising communes to pick up large houses on the cheap, because the realty bubble and employment just blew up, so an awful lot of suburbanites and banks are sitting on giant ranch houses and cracker boxes they can't wait to get rid of.  For instance - 5 beds, 3 baths, for $190000 cold.  2300 square feet is a little cramped for a floorplan like that, and it doesn't look like an area you could get away with having a lot of twenty-something freeloaders living in, or building wacky expansions on, but it's a good indicator of what to look for.  EDIT: Actually, this one is even better, with a little more character and cheaper to boot.

Fuck, every new detail makes the whole thing seem that much more possible and appealing, doesn't it?

[Cthulhu]

Get an abandoned nuclear silo.

[Heron TSG]

Did the dudemind already decide on the embark site?

I don't think that it's been decided yet, but I myself am going somewhere on the West Coast.

[Aqizzar]

Silos are cool and all, but the starting point site for buyable silos indicates the three big problems with that route.  First, the private owners of these things always demand either full payment up front, or large down-payment and very secure financing, and a lot of them won't even say how much they want unless they think you could pay it.  The other problems being that they're all in the middle of fucking nowhere, and you're still paying six figures for an undeveloped concrete box with a grass roof.  For that trouble, you could just buy farmland and erect the block-shack as discussed.

I tried looking for apartment buildings and multi-family dwellings for sale, but because they're so much fewer and often corporate owned, there's not a big listing for them.  One of the coolest was this place in Connecticut,an over-large store front zoned for residence.  Pretty swanky, astoundingly cheap, damn big, and in a great location.  Plus, the floor-level could even be a real store.  All for a measly two hundred and twenty grand.

For just slightly cheaper, there's whole damn apartment complex in Okmulgee Oklahoma.  Coincidentally, I just drove through Okmulgee a few days ago, and it's about as scenic as you'd imagine semi-rural Oklahoma to be.  Now don't get me wrong, the space is incredible, and any amount of technical education is a good leg into the local job market.  Just have to deal with the locals.  Worth thinking about though, is that with multiple buildings like that, the "commune" could be one building, while the others are rented out as apartments to help pay for the whole enterprise.

And going back to Wisconsin, $250k could get this.  Look at the size of the place, and it's actually livable.  For my money, the Connecticut place is still better, but it's nothing to sneeze at.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

So guess who lost his job today :/

Oh well. Two and a half years of experience to add to the resume.

[Aqizzar]

So guess who lost his job today :/

Well damn.  What happened?  And hey, what do you do?

[Realmfighter]

I know this is kind of insensitive to say, but this is the Geek Commune thread, not the Sad thread.

[Aqizzar]

Oh yeah.  Maybe he missed it, and I didn't think about it either.  Hey Leo, tell us all about it there.

So that this point isn't a complete waste of space, I hereby propose the drafting of a Commune Charter, and nominate myself as Chief Parliamentarian of the drafting.  Let's get organized people.