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[Montague]

At least until whoever actually owned the land had you thrown in jail for trespassing. Or just shot you for the same. There's laws against doing stuff like that on land you don't own, from what I understand.

They'd have to notice you first, which is extremely unlikely if you are actually just living off the land far out in the boonies.  And if you just want land in the ass end of the country without any special natural resources or infrastructure, you could buy it for bargain basement rates if you are so inclined.  The rest of the country would leave you alone because you aren't worth the bother.

You'd be suprised how retarded some land owners are. Alaska is notoriously awful like this. The Native Corporations especially will sue and press charges anybody who comes on their land for any reason, doesn't matter if its swamp devoid of anything valuable for hundreds of miles in any direction. Locals will tattle on you.

Also, all land is owned by somebody in Alaska, even if it's completely inaccessible and nobody has ever even set foot there before.

Please tell me where in a city I can find a house to rent or buy with this kind of pay while still being able to afford both transport to work and food.  Maybe you could pull it off where I live now, but cities require a bit more money to live in.

Live in an RV just about anywhere. There are dozens and dozens of websites detailing this sort of alternative. Not having to pay rent is an incredible finanical relief.

http://tightfistedmiser.com/2008/11/11/a-500-a-month-retirement-budget/

[mainiac]

Well obviously you don't go to places where someone else is using the land.  The entire point is to go somewhere that is empty.  And worst case scenario, you put down some cash and buy yourself a nice old plot of land in the middle of nowhere in Montana or New Mexico.  Land far from civilization without natural resources is pretty affordable.  So anyone who is convinced that hunter-gatherer society is the way to go is more then welcome to try it out.

[Sheb]

Mainiac, the point was never than we Westerners are worse off than hunter-gatherer, but that for a significant parts of the world's population it was, as they were starving.

And yes, we know we couldn't reverse to hunter-getherers's societies. It's just a rethorical point.

[ChairmanPoo]

the point was never than we Westerners are worse off than hunter-gatherer, but that for a significant parts of the world's population it was, as they were starving.

This begs the question that hunter gatherers did never starve (I think the contrary is true - less reliable food sources = more risk of starvation. Hell, look at Temujin: he killed his own brother, when both were kids, because the latter had managed to hunt down a hare and was eating it by himself. That speaks volumes on how much food did this particular nomadic group have avaiable -though granted, this is not necessarily generalizable.

As to how many people are starving today: there's a significant number, but not a majority. Also, these stats don't differenciate between degrees of malnourishment.

http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/world%20hunger%20facts%202002.htm#Number_of_hungry_people_in_the_world

[SalmonGod]

How the hell has this progressed so far since my last post, when I've been unable to access the forum all day.  I've tried at least every couple hours and got 504s every time up until now.

Anyway, I was never suggesting that we should consider regressing to the stone age.  I know that would involve a tragic reduction in world population that is completely unacceptable.  I was saying that a large portion of the global population has it worse than hunter-gatherers did (and I was referring to hunter-gatherers).  As others have pointed out for me, they enjoy no modern luxuries.  They live crowded on polluted land that they're unable to escape, because they're surrounded by society that considers them worthless (because they have no means of providing worth to others) and does not welcome them.  Above all, there is basically nothing they can do about their situation, because they have no claim to any resources to work with or means to obtain opportunities to change their situation.  Add on top of this the extremely exploited, the child sweat shop laborers or subjects of the world's massive human trafficking networks, for example, who are a natural product of a system that measures even human beings in terms of their material value.

And those are just the people who would be materially better off as hunter-gatherers.  It's purely a matter of subjective values and personal experience so feel free to disagree with me.  I won't argue it much.  Still I believe that the majority of the world population may enjoy great material benefits from modern civilization, but do so at immense existential cost.  I'm not even talking about worry.  I'm talking about the pure miserable drudgery of daily wage slave existence -- the fact that most of us are forced for more than half our waking lives to behave as machines instead of human beings.

But this whole thing is a derail generated from massive over-analyzation of 2 sentences out of a post containing 27, and those two sentences were only tangentially related to my main point.  Good grief.  I'll entertain the debate, but to be honest, I don't really care that much about everyone's individual speculative comparisons on the quality of life of the first 98% of human history vs the following 2%.  Can we at least acknowledge that I've said other things, instead of casting them out because apparently a single off-hand controversial remark can make me difficult to take seriously?

[Kogut]

as nobody becomes too wealthy in comparison or tries to extert too much independance from the group.

With this precondition also communism is possible.

[scriver]

  I think you underestimate how difficult it is to progress from one side of the globe to the other on foot.

You don't need to cross the globe to get to someplace warmer than where you are. Getting any measure closer to the equator means getting closer to someplace warm.

1. You can't outpace winter.

2. There would already be other people living there. Not only is it ridiculous to believe the land wasn't already populated to the limit in the south (where people wanted to live because of it being easier, hell, the only reason people headed away from the warm regions were overpopulation), these people wouldn't take kindly to a sudden mass immigration hunting their prey and gathering their fruits. Cue great territory wars. Hell, hunter/gatherers would be in a constant state of mutual raiding and border warfare anyway, unless another tribe leader got strong enough to proclaim himself Chief of Chiefs over the area.

To return, no, they could not "just go south". Hunter/gatherers in the north had to live of what little they had during winter, and what they could raid off others. H/g's were very much stationary, even if they did not have farms or big towns. They had territory that needed to be defended, and they needed shelter from the weather (which means a fluid system of villages). That means staying in the area you know, and if you want the greener grass, you better be prepared to fight over it with the people already living on it.

[kaijyuu]

Still I believe that the majority of the world population may enjoy great material benefits from modern civilization, but do so at immense existential cost.  I'm not even talking about worry.  I'm talking about the pure miserable drudgery of daily wage slave existence -- the fact that most of us are forced for more than half our waking lives to behave as machines instead of human beings.

IMO fixing this just needs a gear shift. New technology that makes jobs easier should be used to reduce employee hours needed (without reducing pay). Right now new technology is used to reduce the number of employees needed (and we wonder why jobs are sparse despite high corporate profits). So currently, some lose their jobs, and the remainder have no easier time going about theirs despite new technology that's supposed to do exactly that.

Someday we might end up like the Jetsons with 7 hour work weeks but we're currently not heading in that direction. Doing so will require, of course, either some sort of control over capitalism to force it, or some other economic system. Dunno which is more feasible.

[Nadaka]

http://news.yahoo.com/investigators-4-reps-got-discounted-loans-050417947.html

[DJ]

Hunter-gatherers had a better (ie more varied), but less reliable diet. Transition to farming was basically trading quality for security.

[Montague]

Hunter-gatherers had a better (ie more varied), but less reliable diet. Transition to farming was basically trading quality for security.

I dunno, have you ever eaten wild edible plants growing out in the woods or whatever? Alot of stuff is edible and the majority of it is pretty awful, low in nutrients and tastes like crap.

IMO fixing this just needs a gear shift. New technology that makes jobs easier should be used to reduce employee hours needed (without reducing pay). Right now new technology is used to reduce the number of employees needed (and we wonder why jobs are sparse despite high corporate profits). So currently, some lose their jobs, and the remainder have no easier time going about theirs despite new technology that's supposed to do exactly that.

Someday we might end up like the Jetsons with 7 hour work weeks but we're currently not heading in that direction. Doing so will require, of course, either some sort of control over capitalism to force it, or some other economic system. Dunno which is more feasible.

Industrial production in the USA is the highest it has ever been, while the number of employees working in heavy industry has gone down dramatically. Advancing technology making human labor obsolete is about the best argument there is for a welfare-state. In the future technology will put even more people out of work. Deciding a new direction to figure out a new sector to employ people might be one solution, since people hate the idea of giving out money to people that didn't do anything to earn it, it sorta rules out just putting a large segment of unemployed people on the dole.

[Sheb]

Hunter-gatherers had a better (ie more varied), but less reliable diet. Transition to farming was basically trading quality for security.

I dunno, have you ever eaten wild edible plants growing out in the woods or whatever? Alot of stuff is edible and the majority of it is pretty awful, low in nutrients and tastes like crap.

The father of a friend of mine spent two years living in forests, eating only what he could find. Never heard him complain about lack of tastes.

[ChairmanPoo]

Quantity is a quality of it's own.

[DJ]

I'm mostly referring to meat. Farmers had protein-poor diets, which is why medieval peasants were significantly shorter than modern people.

[scriver]

I would like to point out that the early Stone Age farmers would still have had a very diverse diet as they still hunted and gathered in addition to farming. In fact, early farming was just making one of your camp sites permanent because you knew there was a a field of wild wheat nearby that gave a rich harvest. People did not start getting any noticeable less varying diet until they gathered into such large amounts at the same place (large towns and cities) that there weren't enough fruit, roots and plants around for everyone to gather from.