586 karma · joined May 17, 2016
2. If you want to cater for a bunch of people regularly you can do a lot with an accordion window & deck. Like this:
http://tinyhouseswoon.com/tiny-house-basics/
http://www.windorsystems.com/another-tiny-house-uses-win-dor...
Remember 2003, Iraq war, WMDs? That took thousands of dollars out of your pocket.
Let's agree on one thing here. Spreading false information is unhelpful.
The more you know...
It all makes sense now.
Here is an idea for you to save space, it's popular in Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dish_draining_closet
Saves time and space.
> Most of the time when they're shown off, they're sitting isolated on some huge lot somewhere in the woods, so housing density isn't it.
Your thoughts here are of $ per sq ft. THs are definitely more expensive per sq ft. However the absolute number, the house price, is much lower. In my area I can build a TH (320 sq ft + loft) for 50k (to a high standard) and rent land for $50 a month.
> If I look for ones that are actually for sale, they just seem to be rebranded college apartments or RVs - except now the sellers are charging twice
The Tiny Housers agree!
The prices for THs are extortion because a large number of middle class people with no building talent whatsoever don't have the confidence to build for themselves.
A TH is at least 1/2 the price if you build it yourself, which is what most Tiny Housers I know are doing.
> They often come with advice for how to get them into RV parks or mobile home parks, but those can be very expensive
Also agree with that.
That is why most THs aren't in them. I only know one person who has done that.
Most people I know, are on cheap land rents, owned property (in the countryside), or on a piece of land owned by family or friends (in the cities). Some Tiny House people make TH communities but that is less common.
> Just like RVs and mobile homes, most of the shed-like tiny houses are terrible housing investments because the market views them as what they are, RVs and sheds, and depreciates them over time on average, while actual real estate tends to appreciate over time.
Few Tiny housers worry about resale. They just want somewhere to live.
They are also mostly constructed with the same or better quality house building materials and techniques. This means the average energy bill is very low. I've heard as low as $10 per month, but $50 is more common.
In an important way you're wrong about the depreciation curve. Larger houses cost more to maintain. A Tiny House is easier to fix and maintain. I must say the ones I've seen are often built to a much higher quality standard than normal houses.
Most of them aren't moved much, they don't have the same use case as an RV.
I expect the well built ones to last at least 60 years. They're built with the same materials (or better) as a normal house remember.
> you may as well just buy a used mobile home, they're much more comfortable to live in
Aren't most mobile homes are for 3 season living? Tiny Houses usually use 2x4 or 2x6 stick building which easily means R values of 20+, mine is almost R40.
> there are many long-term stories of tiny home dwellers who run away screaming because of how cramped their living conditions are, and all the unexpected external costs (like self storage for their actual stuff) that never seems to get into tiny house movement propaganda.
That is probably true for some downsizers who were wealthier before, but in my case the Tiny House is actually considerably larger than any place I've been able to afford before.
Also you made fun of it earlier but it really does matter how a space is organized. You can have a bigger space feel much smaller if it is cluttered.
> I feel like what they're actually trying to solve is the desire of apartment dwellers to "own" a home without having to go through the normal home ownership system, which they've been conditioned to view as a trap of some sort for reasons, and "hack" that system by coming at it from some non-traditional angle.
Come on. Do you think paying 30 year mortgages is actually normal in history?
My grandparents didn't pay for a mortgage. The average person paid 5-10 years of savings for a house. Tiny Housers are only trying to get us back to that.
> It's also interesting how pretty much all of the professionally designed and purpose built tiny homes
Like I said before this is mostly a DIY movement. People are putting their own labour into this. It is not free or easy but it sure beats the shite out of being in debt.
I'd like to make four final points.
1. No taxes as of yet.
2. The ability to move, to make an exit, that is a really powerful option that is underrated.
3. I've talked to two homeless people who see a Tiny House as an way to escape living on the streets. Their THs might not be high end but it is a huge improvement.
4. Having autonomy is very underrated. No debt. Ability to move. Not having to worry about rent or bills. Getting some skills and know-how that might help you again in the future.
The Tiny House is meant to serve as a backstop against "losing everything".
Doesn't say anything good about the economy, does it?
The other factor is that it is fun to learn stuff and geek out. You pick up some building skills which you may be able to apply elsewhere.
In hindsight the burned out house next door was a definite clue!
No, although somebody requested I write an essay which I made on Gene Wolfe and Peter Thiel called 'Peter and the Wolfe'.
https://medium.com/@internaut_48577/peter-and-the-wolfe-b8de...
> I like reading your thoughts (though I'm unclear on how much of it I believe).
I get enjoyment out of speculating about the big picture.
How valid those speculations are is very much up in the air. I don't want anybody to take everything I say as gospel, but I would also say that focusing on arbitrary details (e.g. I could be wrong about biotech since I possess no deep insights about how it works) does not meaningfully alter the Tech Stag Hypothesis. It can be falsified of course e.g. if real wages increase but my point is that 'what about solar' rebuttals don't really work. It is possible to have islands of progress in an ocean of misery.
This is a really important point. In the BBC series 'Ascent of Man';
Drive for Power: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x206z0e_bbc-ascent-of-man-0...)
Jacob Bronowski eloquently points out that the French had all kinds of cute toys, advanced contraptions but it was all so profoundly meaningless. It looked very advanced (and still does) but in another, truer sense, it was a dead end. The real change was happening elsewhere in places and ways less obvious.
Back on point, the Thielan perspective is that there is a Liberal view, a Conservative view, a Libertarian view... and so forth about the world. There are other contexts too like Royalist and Communist but the point is that it isn't quite sensible to state that one of these models is right and the others are incorrect. Even were one of these world views completely defunct, we know it existed for a real reason.
I hasten to add this is not relativism. Human society is dynamic and contextual. Sometimes something is true or real for a long time, and then it isn't. The divine right of kings is no longer valid.
Gene Wolfe explains all of this much better than I could ever hope to.
> Your previous posts have convinced me to read The Book of the New Sun. I'm optimistically hoping it is as good as you believe it is.
I don't think I've been quite the same since my reading of it.
I recommend reading Neil Gaiman's Wolfe Primer:
https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2007/gwng0704.htm
Don't forget the atmospheric 'music' of the spheres. I think I read Joseph Tainter's Collaspe of Complex Societies at roughly the same time. All of that together was quite an experience!
If you could tell me how you get on that would be marvelous. There are so few people who have read Wolfe and it is always nice to hear of travels along the same paths.
I believe that there exist giant but difficult to see cycles in our social world which occur on the order of every 50 or 100 years.
Around 1973 wage growth halted for 60-80% of workers in the West. As you can imagine, economic cycles and social cycles are linked, even if they are not the same and one lags the other.
The next generation after the millennials is not progressive, it is much further to the right than the right of the present. To cut a long story short I believe that the phenomenon we see in Israel with the young people there is going to spread to Europe and America.
My tentative guess is that this left/right divide we talk of, is actually tens of thousands of years old and is buried into our source code, our DNA.
It would make sense, would it not, since 'being wrong' politically usually meant death for whoever didn't turn out to be our ancestors.
It follows that 'changing our perspective' or 'education' is not going to work, that is thinking on the software level when the bug/feature is coming out of the hardware.
To give you a quick run down of what I think is on the cards.
- Root and branch purge (ex-STEM) of the universities for monetary and ideological reasons (looks like starting in Japan).
- Gen Z becomes the most right wing in living memory.
- Social programs go bankrupt. No Pensions. End of social democracy.
- Transnational nationalism becomes a thing.
- The middle class lose their jobs thanks to sustained cuts (dying tax base) and technology. Silicon Valley gets flak.
- Interest rates rocket upwards. Student loan debt and mortgage debt becomes unsustainable.
- Conflict breaks out in Europe.
- Surveillance and robotics technology bring us all kinds of new goodies.
The good news, as I see it, is similar to the 20th century. Depending on where you lived it was either a utopia or a dystopia. It was either the best of, or the worst of worlds depending on place and time. France on the eve of the Revolution, Germany before the crash, these were the most advanced societies of the time.
I suspect this all looks strongly like a step backwards but a glance at history suggests this is preferable to the alternative of a long slow stagnation. I suspect retrenchment is a necessary feature of our system.
The closest approximation might be Jorge Luis Borges with Tolkien with a dash of Neal Stephenson and Murakami.
At first I thought: I know what this is.
Then I thought. Wait... something's wrong here.
Then I thought. There is no way that is in the text. Can't be.
This was just the point where the rollercoaster is beginning the climb.
If you like complex and strange things, then this is for you.
Yes it is. However those examples will nearly always be specific instances and special circumstances with a few exceptions like the Hapsburgs.
What I see now is sustained transnational political collaboration. That suggests the formation of a larger political unit based on shared ideals and an external threat (this is always true). I don't mean that this networking is equivalent to the EU's attempts, it is more organic than that.
The analogy I would use is TCP/IP vs the OSI. The EU is doing OSI. The nationalists are doing TCP/IP.
> As far as in-group determination goes, I'm not sure I see why it can't be made to work on roughly the lines of the classical American model - that is, a privilege earned in exchange for bringing specific and substantial value.
Right. And/or ideological terminal goal continuity. The Sikh and western Chinese are very much aligned with us, they are almost never a problem. This is one of the problems with the 'integration narrative' the center-left/right don't want to consider. There exist examples of non-integration and zero conflict.
The American experiment proves that Europeans can work together. That's the good news. After centuries of ethic and religious warfare no less. A larger political unit was successfully forged, which is still remarkable in historical context. Australia is another example just to show it isn't luck.
I also foresee no real political problems with Hispanics and Asians, I think this election has shown that.
The problem is that, especially in Europe, large portions of some subgroups have decided to reject the West and desire to establish a parallel state. The evidence for this is overwhelming, everything from secret courts to large caches of guns being discovered.
There is also a considerable number of native born citizens who are a real problem. To understand why take a look at this article by Charlie Stross:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/11/playtime...
In my view they are like RINOs, except that they are Westerners In Name Only. These people are contributing to a very dangerous polarization between the Muslims and other inhabitants of our territories. I believe that if civil conflict breaks out they will work against attempts to unify and establish civil order and this shall have horrifying consequences. The blunt end of the State, the army, the police, the intelligence, are all right wing to a man. I've seen sectarianism before, it's not a pretty sight.
> It is sharply defined. But in a political environment where nuance is anathema, no one pays the distinction much heed ... What matters is culture, not race. Regarding the latter as metonymous of the former indicates a failure to have fully thought the matter through.)
I know that, but the newspapers are very attached to their caricature of reality and that exerts influence. In Germany and Sweden the Pravda-ization is out of control. There is 'progress' and there is 'hitler'.
> Well. Their narrative had such hegemonic power, anyway. That's taken quite a blow in the last couple of weeks, and whatever else comes of a Trump presidency, that by itself strikes me as worthwhile ... Let us comport ourselves so as to earn the favorable judgment of history, and the rest will attend to itself. Let us do otherwise, and a generation from now our kids will be fighting the same damn war in the same damn trenches.
I think America will have indigestion but ultimately be fine. I cannot say the same about Europe. It is a horror show unfolding in front of us, a few more attacks and reprisals are sure to start.
The only solutions that would prevent this are deemed politically impossible and so we shall deal with the political inevitable.
What IS that?
Without self identifying as a Muslim, go to a random variety of forums and ask the question "What is the future of Europe and Islam" or just "Europe and Muslims" in search engines.
https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Europe%20and%20M...
I think it is part of an algorithm which (when it works) prevents deadlock.
Whenever the (left/right) stakeholders have a balance of power at a stable equilibrium, upsetting the system just leads to a waste of energy, what I called 'trashing'. It's similar to feature creep or faux innovation.
The cost of shooting down net negative moves over and over could sap the strength of the whole system because there is an opportunity cost to ignoring the few possible net positive moves.
So without conservatism, paradoxically, there is no progress.
It does have failure modes though. Peter Thiel points out one of them, which is that in order to produce net positive moves the economy must be healthy (you cannot horsetrade in a zero sum game).
The other failure is that you can get caught in a local minimum.
I believe one or both of these modes are taking over at present.
I'm positive Milo is a patriotic Yiannopoulos Supremacist.
I don't think either of the two would be eligible to join Aryan Brotherhood or any group of genuine article white supremacists.
I think the distinction between 'nationalist' and 'supremacist' should be sharply defined. Mixing the terms is like using socialism and communism interchangeably.
I myself am NRX but not any kind of nationalist because I believe that model for determining an in-group is too hit and miss. Don't forget that nation state nationalism is mostly a 20th century phenomenon. Note the paradox of nationalists working together across borders, classical nationalism is going meta.
Conservatism in a system could serve to prevent trashing of scenarios that always go to deadlock.
A while back Clinton asked for a special crypto phone from the NSA (like Obama has) and they told her to fuck off.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/nsa-re...
If she was apprehensive she would never have asked.
Putin cannot give him directly to America without the Russian stance losing credibility and they would look mercurial which would deter others using it as a safe haven. They've made plenty of hay out of Snowden's presence and would be loathe to lose possible future haymaking supplies.
Trump wouldn't know what to do with him if he had him. The Dems immediately take to the high horse and he loses the libertarians altogether. That loses him the balance of power with the social conservatives and that would be a problem for him getting re-elected because Sanders could easily turn him into George III.
The alternative is for Russia to get something big like formal recognition of Crimea (flying as Putin the magnificent horsetrader putting Russia first) and Snowden gets a quick trial with relatively short sentence of five-ten years and STFU good behavior policy thereafter.
I think the first scenario is the more likely so I think Snowden may receive an invitation to a nice European country such as Switzerland.
Right!
I think there were important psychological differences, perhaps represented by Trump's retort 'Because you'd be in jail' and "I'm with you" in response to "I'm with her". The content doesn't matter but the wordplay does. I don't remember Clinton using his slogan against him or cracking a real joke. With the two examples I've given I feel like she walked straight into them.
This difference also exists with their supporters.
There is a humour element at The Donald (even the name) that I felt was missing from /r/politics.They often were playing caricatures of themselves as an in-joke e.g. copying Trump's mannerisms, making obviously absurd claims "ten feet higher!".
/r/politics was stocked with 'issues' and veryseriousstuff. I don't think the Clinton supporters were deliberately attempting to engage in theatrics beyond the lookatthisoutrage threads. The Donald is filled with outrage threads too but with a side of jesting/in-jokes.
Students house-sharing at universities.
Online dating.
In particular an effort of your sort is appealing to the prefrontal cortex.
However politics is not higher math. It lives in the lizard brain. It's strongly connected to our survival instincts which is why it is both dangerous and important i.e. all this exists for a reason. I don't know if you could interfere with that without resorting to brainwashing.
Remember Douglas Adams's Total Perspective Vortex?
The Net is speeding up people's 'transitions'. It used to be the case that a person gradually changed their political perspective, but now with the Net this has gone into overdrive.
It is now common to meet people who have genuinely undergone several political perspective changes. It is slow but real.
I suggest somehow speeding that process up yet further would do a lot of good. I don't think you can 'teach' people, but you can get them to argue with each other, and then get them to examine how their thinking is evolving over time.
Looking at your past comments/posts on the Net gives you some humility, many of us would be strangers to our younger selves now.
Appealing to self interest (you used to think X too) could improve empathy. It would at least result in people appreciating complexity and prevent them writing each other off altogether.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12578680
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12585096
With particular emphasis on
"If you are cash poor you can investigate the option of buying second hand materials and tools. You can basically build a Tiny House for $0.00 if you really needed to, but there is a catch. It will cost you time and effort to curate the correct supplies. Still, for some people this is the right option to get decent affordable housing. "
He is a currently unrecognized Giant, on the level of our new Shakespeare. Literally every famous author you've heard of says it. Gene Wolfe is what the journeymen read to improve their craft but he is little known outside rarefied circles.
I wrote a piece 10 days ago (so before the election) explaining why a reading of Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun explains Peter Thiel's motivations in backing Trump. He was following a thread nobody else saw. So many smart people, yes on the alt right also, are missing a much bigger picture.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12884413
It is not an exaggeration that this book changed my life. You don't have to be a neoreactionary to read it but reading it alongside Joeseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies is a wonderful and enriching life experience that will definitely change how you view the world.
In addition I strongly recommend you watch Peter Thiel's videos on Youtube such as this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw-rxtwhzcY
Tainter, Thiel, Wolfe, Moldbug. If you wish to scry deeply into the world, that's how I'd start. Many people reading this will be liberals or progressives. To them I say, this is a rabbit hole nobody else is going to recommend, if you sincerely are interested in the order of the right's thought, here it is.
Scott Alexander has a good overview here:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-...
This quote is priceless
"The good Catholic in medieval Spain doesn’t feel repressed, even when the Inquisition drags away her neighbor. She feels like decent people have total freedom to worship whichever saint they want, total freedom to go to whatever cathedral they choose, total freedom to debate who the next bishop should be – oh, and thank goodness someone’s around to deal with those crazy people who are trying to damn the rest of us to Hell. We medieval Spaniards are way too smart to fall for the balance fallacy!"
The tldr is that neoreactionaries believe that many beliefs about modern society are not just wrong, but not even wrong.
The follow on header might be more relevant to this particular thread though:
"Wait, You Mean The Invisible Multi-Tentacled Monster That Has Taken Over All Our Information Sources Might Be Trying To Mislead Us?"