Letters: Readers respond to an article about quitting the rat race, with some saying their generation was handed an untenable position and others saying the struggle is nothing new
If you want, say, a boat; its probably less work to build it from scratch than to ‘earn’ it for the overwhelming majority.
Which is wild: Even with modern tools, economies of scale, and specialized master craftspeople (or more likely; enslaved teenagers halfway across the world chained to a shop bench, similar effect here) its easier to DIY than go through ‘society’, unless the thing has been made deliberately difficult to DIY-which more and more things, especially repairs and retrofits, are.
It takes more work, more coordination, and orders of magnitude more time to get the government to raise your taxes to half assedly feed the hungry with food that was gonna get thrown away than it does to just find a patch of land nobody’s watching and do it yourself from Fucking scratch. Every Fucking time.
All the big decisions, decisions about Commons, and decisions about the future, including habitability of the planet, are being made in what we can all agree is the dumbest fucking way possible, and regardless of our disagreements, 999/1000 random people off the street would find it difficult to make worse ones.
So, communist or individualist, insurrectionist or moderate, what kind of brain dead fucking moron would participate in this on purpose? Would follow the rules of this on purpose?
So, what the fuck is to be done?
P.S. If you say “vote” I swear I’ll fucking scream.
Okay maybe boats were a bad example. I probably should have used something I know about, but that’s all shit everyone thinks they can’t do.
Still, compare the effort you put in, keep in mind you’re being gouged on materials (because you’re being gouged on everything), and figure out how many hours at minimum wage to buy the sameish quality.
Boats are weird. I’ve looked at buying kit from CLC to build a 15’ Pocketship: about $12,000 US. Buying a used one, a couple years old? $15k.
Meanwhile, my local yacht club had a 26’ 1969 Westerly Centaur one step away from being crushed. Prior owner stopped paying storage fees and refused further contact, so the club put a lien on it. I picked it up cheap, $500. Nobody bothered cutting the lock off the companionway; it was chock full of tools and supplies the prior owner was using to refit it.
I’ve dropped some cash into finishing the refit, but nowhere near what I would have spent on a 15’ Pocketship, and I’ve got a much more capable boat. There are deals out there.
Very much the point. Building a boat is labor intensive. The materials are relatively inexpensive, compared to the time invested in building. The person selling that used Pocketship was likely the builder, and sees value in their time spent building it.
That ~50 year old Westerly? That labor is long gone. The previous owner did invest his time in a partial refit, but relinquished his interest when he stopped paying storage fees and let a lien be placed on it. The club has no time invested, just the lost storage fees, but would rather minimize future loss; an abandoned boat takes up space that would otherwise be generating revenue for them. The club members (nearly all power boaters) see little value in the boat itself. Any revenue gained from scrapping it would likely exceed the cost to scrap the fiberglass hull (again, a labor intensive process).
She really is a cool boat, though. I’m having a great time completing the refit, and I don’t see my labor invested as lost when I’m enjoying the process as much as I am.
But generally things are made to not be durable, excess commodities are destroyed(at a cost, they pay to destroy them), and vintage goods are at a premium.
Yes exceptions exist, but this is a known exploit, mostly patched.
So I’m extra glad you found this.
And I meant it when I said ‘fun project’. I do love me one of those.
Slightly less obnoxious, but equally ineffective; vote with your hands, your eyes, your feet. Don’t let them steal your labor your attention your time your anything. You can be passive and hold a strike. You van be active and strike back. I think a mix of both would be a lot more effective than just one.
But whatever you do, if its not just useless theatrical bullshit (which isn’t to say all theatrical bullshit is useless; just the useless kinds) its going to be illegal, and will face state retribution, even if its explicitly legal and protected in your local constitution.
Slightly less obnoxious, but equally ineffective; vote with your hands, your eyes, your feet. Don’t let them steal your labor your attention your time your anything. You can be passive and hold a strike. You van be active and strike back. I think a mix of both would be a lot more effective than just one.
You can also strike without striking. There’s a huge fuss over “quiet quitting”/“work to rule”, where people are striking by only doing exactly what they’re paid for, rather than adding in the extra that has become the norm. They’re not adding extra hours or pulling extra duties.
While I did misunderstood the goal of your comment, sry for that, it still holds some truth and might be applied concept wise to what you meant.
Refusing to pay taxes is, as much as refusing to vote politically, a refuse to participate.
Why should someone get a say in something that they refuse to be a part of?
We are on the same side, even if it’s not directly obvious. You showed that with you second point.
By voting with you wallet for corporations that fulfill your values, you choose to give them more power over other corporations that don’t.
The same concept applies to voting politically. You give your vote to a party that fulfills your values over a party that doesn’t.
I the real world not paying taxes is not an option, as much as it’s not an option to not spend any money on any corporation, if your part of the society.
We are able to choose in a given context, that for sure has its limitations.
Let’s say your not happy with the possible options that you can vote for, be it a financial or a political vote, you are free to fill the niche you think is missing. Start being active politically or economically and if there are more people that think like you and act according to this, things can change.
But if nobody does this, things will definitely move in the direction of the values from people that do the things above.
There is the famous phrase. “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Like in what case? Even just in terms of material and ignoring the cost of one’s own time and the tools required, it’s usually cheaper to buy.
There is legit only a few things where it makes sense from an economic point of view to make on your own. Most hobby craftsman don’t do it for the money. There’s something to be said about quality but that takes practice and hence, more money.
idk man, i’ve found it vastly cheaper to buy lumber and build tables from that lumber, which are going to be vastly more durable than anything you can buy for that price.
You do need tools of course, but you might know someone that has some, or you can simply get into wood working, and start saving more money. They’ll pay for themselves eventually.
PCs? You can often build those specifically to your needs, much cheaper than what can be found on the existing market. Especially for servers. Sure i spent 600 dollars on 36 TB of hard drives. How expensive is 18TB of cloud storage over the period of 5 years? (you might say 36TB* actually, but it’s redundant for backup purposes. Trust me, it’s worth it.)
it’s more work, but you can absolutely do it for less money. You need to have a realistic scope and be able to meet your own needs, and nothing more. You probably don’t need the shit that exists in a suburban home for example. So don’t build one. Build something to specifically serve you.
It’s a little different for boats naturally, but that was just an example.
I bought a 12 year old thinkpad laptop to be used as my daily driver laptop. It’s not fast, it’s not small, it’s not light, but it’s a fucking trooper of a machine, and i love it. It does exactly what i need a machine to do. And all in, including the screen upgrade which i got from another used machine i’m probably about 200 dollars in. And have two batteries that i managed to get from either machine. Did i get lucky? sure, unrealistically lucky? No, i was just eyeing ebay every now and then. And i have a spare parts machine.
this is genuinely my plan. Work in trades to pick up a skill (and hopefully make a decent bit of coin) buy some land, and build it out. Spend as little as possible, and enjoy it as much as possible.
I feel like it’s viable. Maybe i’m hopeful, idk. We’ll see.
it’s certainly not radical, i agree with that. Personally i just don’t really care about others. So it’s not like it would really bother me one way or the other.
I do have foundational beliefs on a lot of this shit, but if i don’t have to think about it, then i won’t, and i see no other reason others couldn’t follow in suit.
It can look like there’s an outside, but that’s a lie our masters tell, so people who’re fed up walk away instead of fighting back, violently or otherwise.
i don’t consider it outside, i consider it to be the corner of a large room with a lot of people in it. But that corner just so happens to have very few people in it.
i’ll be around, it’s not that i won’t, it just depends on how important it is to me really. If we’re talking fundamental individual freedoms, i’ll be there.
So I’m in the united states. The second (or third) major step towards fascism… Well here’s how I remember it:
It was the year 2000, first election I was remotely politically conscious for. I, uh, didn’t vote. Had opinions tho.
So there was this fascist piece of shit-his dad was a former CIA director, his grandpa was point man for a failed fascist coup (thank you smedley butler. Not that I knew about this at the time, being a literal child), and the guy running against him was kind of a bland milquetoast wonk-but his credentials and rep were, in retrospect, pretty perfect. Conscious and cautious about global warming, knew about the internet, kind of all the right shit for the moment.
So when the fascist piece of shit took office, everyone gave my mom shit, because she voted for a third party and allowed it to happen. Nevermind that we live(d) in CA, where votes in federal elections are between like 1/5th and 1/500th of a full citizen, and the electoral votes for CA still went to the bullshit wonk. She caught shit for years. And it kind of confused me.
Because here’s the thing; the bland milquetoast wonk won the election. I don’t mean “he won the popular vote; the electoral college is bullshit” (although he did and it is) but he won in college votes too. He won by every metric.
Nobody cared. Because elections don’t count. They’re not real, and you will never win begging. It was entirely a wasted effort. The aristocracy just appointed the guy they wanted. Don’t get me started on 2008, the first one I did vote in, and how that bastard betrayed every single fucking thing he promised.
You tell me to get off my ass and do something, have you ever actually done anything in your life? I don’t mean sucking some aristocrat’s dick, so you can beg them for scraps later, that aren’t worth 1/10 of the effort you spent doing the lobbying, much less getting them their throne, but actually fixing building solving something with your own fucking hands abd organizational capacity?
Ever? Or are you so obsessesed with being in a fucked up machine you can’t even see what it’s for, what its doing, and what purpose you serve within it?
When you see someone dying on the street between five buildings, all of them with ‘(residential) for rent’ signs on them so old they’re barely legible, what’s your first thought? Do you think every politician doesn’t fucking know? Is your first thought to beg all the people who are profiting off this poor fuckers death? This isnt a hypothetical BTW, I saw this enough times this week that I straight up stopped fucking counting. So what should I have done, according to you?
Yes, don’t try to fix it all alone. Organize. Change. But the systems that allowed these Fucking oligarch shit stains to ruin it so bad? The ‘good’ people when they do take the reins in a system where their only levers are ‘taxes’ and (ratcheted)‘cops’? What century are we on of prison reform? 2? 10? I know it’s been nonstop since before the steam engine. Still seems pretty bad.
Direct action doesn’t mean ‘go it alone’. Bring your friends. Collab with strangers. Make new friends. Actual democracy can actually be pretty fucking fun, but it gets a lot sweatier.
If you want, say, a boat; its probably less work to build it from scratch than to ‘earn’ it for the overwhelming majority.
Which is wild: Even with modern tools, economies of scale, and specialized master craftspeople (or more likely; enslaved teenagers halfway across the world chained to a shop bench, similar effect here) its easier to DIY than go through ‘society’, unless the thing has been made deliberately difficult to DIY-which more and more things, especially repairs and retrofits, are.
It takes more work, more coordination, and orders of magnitude more time to get the government to raise your taxes to half assedly feed the hungry with food that was gonna get thrown away than it does to just find a patch of land nobody’s watching and do it yourself from Fucking scratch. Every Fucking time.
All the big decisions, decisions about Commons, and decisions about the future, including habitability of the planet, are being made in what we can all agree is the dumbest fucking way possible, and regardless of our disagreements, 999/1000 random people off the street would find it difficult to make worse ones.
So, communist or individualist, insurrectionist or moderate, what kind of brain dead fucking moron would participate in this on purpose? Would follow the rules of this on purpose?
So, what the fuck is to be done?
P.S. If you say “vote” I swear I’ll fucking scream.
I am building a wooden boat right now, and this isn’t true. I’m about $1500 in on a Bolger Cartopper, which is 10’6" with 4’ beam.
Okay maybe boats were a bad example. I probably should have used something I know about, but that’s all shit everyone thinks they can’t do.
Still, compare the effort you put in, keep in mind you’re being gouged on materials (because you’re being gouged on everything), and figure out how many hours at minimum wage to buy the sameish quality.
Boats are weird. I’ve looked at buying kit from CLC to build a 15’ Pocketship: about $12,000 US. Buying a used one, a couple years old? $15k.
Meanwhile, my local yacht club had a 26’ 1969 Westerly Centaur one step away from being crushed. Prior owner stopped paying storage fees and refused further contact, so the club put a lien on it. I picked it up cheap, $500. Nobody bothered cutting the lock off the companionway; it was chock full of tools and supplies the prior owner was using to refit it.
I’ve dropped some cash into finishing the refit, but nowhere near what I would have spent on a 15’ Pocketship, and I’ve got a much more capable boat. There are deals out there.
Not really the point. Glad you got a cool boat+project tho!
Very much the point. Building a boat is labor intensive. The materials are relatively inexpensive, compared to the time invested in building. The person selling that used Pocketship was likely the builder, and sees value in their time spent building it.
That ~50 year old Westerly? That labor is long gone. The previous owner did invest his time in a partial refit, but relinquished his interest when he stopped paying storage fees and let a lien be placed on it. The club has no time invested, just the lost storage fees, but would rather minimize future loss; an abandoned boat takes up space that would otherwise be generating revenue for them. The club members (nearly all power boaters) see little value in the boat itself. Any revenue gained from scrapping it would likely exceed the cost to scrap the fiberglass hull (again, a labor intensive process).
She really is a cool boat, though. I’m having a great time completing the refit, and I don’t see my labor invested as lost when I’m enjoying the process as much as I am.
But generally things are made to not be durable, excess commodities are destroyed(at a cost, they pay to destroy them), and vintage goods are at a premium.
Yes exceptions exist, but this is a known exploit, mostly patched.
So I’m extra glad you found this. And I meant it when I said ‘fun project’. I do love me one of those.
Vote with your dollars and strike at the root.
Slightly less obnoxious, but equally ineffective; vote with your hands, your eyes, your feet. Don’t let them steal your labor your attention your time your anything. You can be passive and hold a strike. You van be active and strike back. I think a mix of both would be a lot more effective than just one.
But whatever you do, if its not just useless theatrical bullshit (which isn’t to say all theatrical bullshit is useless; just the useless kinds) its going to be illegal, and will face state retribution, even if its explicitly legal and protected in your local constitution.
You can also strike without striking. There’s a huge fuss over “quiet quitting”/“work to rule”, where people are striking by only doing exactly what they’re paid for, rather than adding in the extra that has become the norm. They’re not adding extra hours or pulling extra duties.
When I say ‘strike back’ the labor actions that come to mind all involve machine guns.
Further, this is one case where decidedly not voting (to borrow the analogy) would have an impact.
Reminds me of the short story Enough, by William Ledbetter that I just read.
See also https://bdsmovement.net/ for a practical, targeted example.
For whoever thinks not voting will be any form of good decision. Ask yourself this question.
How can someone distinguish a not vote because your fine with how things are from a not vote out of protest?
idk maybe ask the people that run the fucking electorate why there isn’t a “fuck you this shit sucks” option.
Great example how to not solve anything.
Stay delusional my friend
“go vote, otherwise you’re bad”
“ok so make voting better”
“no”
Definitely not what I meant. My example would be more like refusing to pay taxes in protest.
Except thankfully it’s not illegal to refuse to give money to corporations, just very difficult.
While I did misunderstood the goal of your comment, sry for that, it still holds some truth and might be applied concept wise to what you meant.
Refusing to pay taxes is, as much as refusing to vote politically, a refuse to participate. Why should someone get a say in something that they refuse to be a part of?
We are on the same side, even if it’s not directly obvious. You showed that with you second point. By voting with you wallet for corporations that fulfill your values, you choose to give them more power over other corporations that don’t.
The same concept applies to voting politically. You give your vote to a party that fulfills your values over a party that doesn’t.
I the real world not paying taxes is not an option, as much as it’s not an option to not spend any money on any corporation, if your part of the society. We are able to choose in a given context, that for sure has its limitations.
Let’s say your not happy with the possible options that you can vote for, be it a financial or a political vote, you are free to fill the niche you think is missing. Start being active politically or economically and if there are more people that think like you and act according to this, things can change.
But if nobody does this, things will definitely move in the direction of the values from people that do the things above.
There is the famous phrase. “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
I agree with the general sentiment but it’s almost always much more work and money to build something from scratch, especially a boat.
My point is it fucking should be, with modern tech and skilled specialists and economies of scale, but rarely actually is.
That all that shit isn’t for us, we do not see the benefit of it.
Like in what case? Even just in terms of material and ignoring the cost of one’s own time and the tools required, it’s usually cheaper to buy.
There is legit only a few things where it makes sense from an economic point of view to make on your own. Most hobby craftsman don’t do it for the money. There’s something to be said about quality but that takes practice and hence, more money.
idk man, i’ve found it vastly cheaper to buy lumber and build tables from that lumber, which are going to be vastly more durable than anything you can buy for that price.
You do need tools of course, but you might know someone that has some, or you can simply get into wood working, and start saving more money. They’ll pay for themselves eventually.
PCs? You can often build those specifically to your needs, much cheaper than what can be found on the existing market. Especially for servers. Sure i spent 600 dollars on 36 TB of hard drives. How expensive is 18TB of cloud storage over the period of 5 years? (you might say 36TB* actually, but it’s redundant for backup purposes. Trust me, it’s worth it.)
it’s more work, but you can absolutely do it for less money. You need to have a realistic scope and be able to meet your own needs, and nothing more. You probably don’t need the shit that exists in a suburban home for example. So don’t build one. Build something to specifically serve you.
It’s a little different for boats naturally, but that was just an example.
I bought a 12 year old thinkpad laptop to be used as my daily driver laptop. It’s not fast, it’s not small, it’s not light, but it’s a fucking trooper of a machine, and i love it. It does exactly what i need a machine to do. And all in, including the screen upgrade which i got from another used machine i’m probably about 200 dollars in. And have two batteries that i managed to get from either machine. Did i get lucky? sure, unrealistically lucky? No, i was just eyeing ebay every now and then. And i have a spare parts machine.
this is genuinely my plan. Work in trades to pick up a skill (and hopefully make a decent bit of coin) buy some land, and build it out. Spend as little as possible, and enjoy it as much as possible.
I feel like it’s viable. Maybe i’m hopeful, idk. We’ll see.
I don’t want to criticize that, it soubds pretty nice, but that’s nowhere near as radical as I was thinking.
Plus, remember; there is no outside, walled gardens do not endure, thermodynamics apply, and you cannot lifeboat the coming catastrophes.
it’s certainly not radical, i agree with that. Personally i just don’t really care about others. So it’s not like it would really bother me one way or the other.
I do have foundational beliefs on a lot of this shit, but if i don’t have to think about it, then i won’t, and i see no other reason others couldn’t follow in suit.
It can look like there’s an outside, but that’s a lie our masters tell, so people who’re fed up walk away instead of fighting back, violently or otherwise.
i don’t consider it outside, i consider it to be the corner of a large room with a lot of people in it. But that corner just so happens to have very few people in it.
Til it doesn’t. Good luck, I guess. Could stand your help to really fix shit though.
i’ll be around, it’s not that i won’t, it just depends on how important it is to me really. If we’re talking fundamental individual freedoms, i’ll be there.
Vote and be engaged. Nothing else you do alone will be effective, including being upset about it.
Copy pasting:
So I’m in the united states. The second (or third) major step towards fascism… Well here’s how I remember it:
It was the year 2000, first election I was remotely politically conscious for. I, uh, didn’t vote. Had opinions tho.
So there was this fascist piece of shit-his dad was a former CIA director, his grandpa was point man for a failed fascist coup (thank you smedley butler. Not that I knew about this at the time, being a literal child), and the guy running against him was kind of a bland milquetoast wonk-but his credentials and rep were, in retrospect, pretty perfect. Conscious and cautious about global warming, knew about the internet, kind of all the right shit for the moment.
So when the fascist piece of shit took office, everyone gave my mom shit, because she voted for a third party and allowed it to happen. Nevermind that we live(d) in CA, where votes in federal elections are between like 1/5th and 1/500th of a full citizen, and the electoral votes for CA still went to the bullshit wonk. She caught shit for years. And it kind of confused me.
Because here’s the thing; the bland milquetoast wonk won the election. I don’t mean “he won the popular vote; the electoral college is bullshit” (although he did and it is) but he won in college votes too. He won by every metric.
Nobody cared. Because elections don’t count. They’re not real, and you will never win begging. It was entirely a wasted effort. The aristocracy just appointed the guy they wanted. Don’t get me started on 2008, the first one I did vote in, and how that bastard betrayed every single fucking thing he promised.
You tell me to get off my ass and do something, have you ever actually done anything in your life? I don’t mean sucking some aristocrat’s dick, so you can beg them for scraps later, that aren’t worth 1/10 of the effort you spent doing the lobbying, much less getting them their throne, but actually fixing building solving something with your own fucking hands abd organizational capacity?
Ever? Or are you so obsessesed with being in a fucked up machine you can’t even see what it’s for, what its doing, and what purpose you serve within it?
When you see someone dying on the street between five buildings, all of them with ‘(residential) for rent’ signs on them so old they’re barely legible, what’s your first thought? Do you think every politician doesn’t fucking know? Is your first thought to beg all the people who are profiting off this poor fuckers death? This isnt a hypothetical BTW, I saw this enough times this week that I straight up stopped fucking counting. So what should I have done, according to you?
Yes, don’t try to fix it all alone. Organize. Change. But the systems that allowed these Fucking oligarch shit stains to ruin it so bad? The ‘good’ people when they do take the reins in a system where their only levers are ‘taxes’ and (ratcheted)‘cops’? What century are we on of prison reform? 2? 10? I know it’s been nonstop since before the steam engine. Still seems pretty bad.
Direct action doesn’t mean ‘go it alone’. Bring your friends. Collab with strangers. Make new friends. Actual democracy can actually be pretty fucking fun, but it gets a lot sweatier.
you are a hero