Call me a peasant any day cause overnight oats are delicious. Here’s my recipe you are now asking yourselves for: 1/4 cup steel cut oats, 1 Tbsp chia seeds, a glob of honey, 1/8 tsp salt, 1/4 tsp cinnamon, 3/4 cup of milk, then in the morning add 1/4 cup crushed walnuts and a ton of blueberries.
Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s gruel o’clock for this peasant.
pro tip: try frozen berries and add them the night before to infuse the oats with berry juice. which is also practical because you can mix all together the night before in a to go jar and in the morning you don‘t waste any time and can get right to slaving away for our feudal overlords
And the quick and dirty recipe:
Maple and Brown Sugar Oats
- Oats
- Hot Water
- Brown Sugar
- Maple syrup
- Pinch of Salt
Doing this to Farina also makes Malt O’ Meal - Brown Sugar version
Sorry, but this one is just oats with sugar while the one above actually has fruit and nuts for that healthy boost.
I actually don’t mind people who want to live in tiny homes. After all, it’s our societal fixation on mcmansions and suburban sprawl for all that has caused us to pass restrictive zoning laws and parking minimums and setback requirements and everything, which have created an artificial scarcity of housing. And it’s this artificial scarcity of housing that investors, speculators, landlords, and old homeowners use to extract ungodly amounts of wealth from the younger and working class. If we abolished those laws, built more housing, and solved the housing crisis, we wouldn’t be feeling nearly so much like peasants, working paycheck to paycheck and under mountains of debt.
If there’s no housing scarcity, your landlord can’t extract nigh-unlimited amounts of money from you.
I’m a bit of a minimalist and dream of a well designed tiny small home. You can cram all of the bells and whistles of modern living in 800-1100 square feet easily and be comfortable while you’re at it. It only gets tricky when kids come into the picture, id imagine. But I’m dreaming of a tiny small home so I don’t think kids are a reasonable decision financially lol
That’s not really a tiny home, that’s just a slightly smaller house. They have a tiny home show where I live, and the biggest ones are 350-ish sq ft. Most are under 200. I’d love to get really crazy and build one that’s like 400sq ft - when they’re really well designed, that feels massive, but it’s still small enough to clean in like, an hour.
Yeah 1000/1100 is in the “small but normal” territory. 800/900 is fairly small if your household has more than one person though. But well designed I could see 400-500 being pretty cozy. Tbh, with 800 sq ft I’d have like 300 living and sleeping space and the rest for my kitchen and bathroom lol. I don’t have a dream house, I have a dream shower and kitchen
i don’t want a tiny home, i want to live in a god damn cooperatively owned commune.
If everyone is there because of some shared interest in the project then sure, it might work. But if you ever lived in a building owned by the very people that live there, like it happens all the time in Europe, you know people often act very much against the shared interest.
I would actually love that. They’re building something that’s sort of in that vein where I live, where each family/individual has their own house of sorts, but there’s a big communal building with a giant kitchen and dining space, library, living room, gardens, etc, instead of trying to pack all of that in each house. Everyone has to commit to contributing somehow, whether it’s lawn maintenance or helping cook communal meals or whatever. Unfortunately, it would make my commute about an hour, so that’s a no go, but it sounds nice.
Not really. Capitalism is when owners of capital employ workers to use that capital to create goods and services which they sell to generate a profit. In capitalism the capitalists own the means of production. In feudalism they don’t have to care about production, they just own the land and then charge rent.
Adam Smith is notorious for his support of capitalism, but he was extremely critical of rents. The “free market” he talked about wasn’t one that was free of any government regulation, it was free of rents. You don’t have to do any work to get rent, you just have to own something. And rent gets worse when the owners of that something have a monopoly.
Imagine a capitalist who leases a textile factory and fills it up with workers earning minimum wage. Trucks drive up to one side of the factory and drop off spools of yarn, out the other side come sweaters which are sold for a big mark-up. The capitalist can do things like monitor his workers and fire them for taking more than 5 minutes to use the bathroom, or he can demand they work night shifts during holiday season to maximize his profits. The key thing here is profits – the amount left over after subtracting the costs from the revenues.
Now imagine the feudal landlord who owns the land that the factory uses. He doesn’t care if the factory is profitable or not, all he cares about is that it’s on land he owns, and he demands that he is paid rent for the use of his land. Maybe climate change means that sweaters stop selling so well, so the capitalist’s profits start to disappear. The feudal landlord doesn’t have to care. It’s his property, and the person leasing his property has to pay rent.
Feudalism led to the Irish potato famine. Even during the famine, Ireland was exporting food to England because the feudal landlords required their payment, even if the Irish were unable to feed themselves.
The modern world is looking more and more like feudalism and less and less like capitalism. Amazon rose to prominence using capitalism. It made profits when people ordered things online. The cost to buy those goods wholesale then pack and ship them to individual buyers was less than the price people paid for that service. In the early days, every product listed on Amazon’s website was sold by Amazon. Anything else would have been absurd. And, of course, Amazon wasn’t selling search ads on its website. It was in the business of selling goods, so when you searched for “cat beds”, it wanted to sell you a cat bed. Amazon had to compete with other rival websites that sold things online, as well as with physical stores like Wal*Mart.
These days, Amazon has transitioned from a capitalist enterprise to a feudal landlord. They forced local businesses to close. They bought up their online competition. Nowadays, they don’t make much of a profit on their store, they make rent by selling space on their search results page. Amazon makes much more money by selling space on its search results page for “cat beds” than from selling people cat beds. Because Amazon is a choke point through which most online commerce flows, Amazon gets to raise the rent it charges for space on that search results page to absurd levels.
Whether or not you hate capitalism, I think it’s clear that feudalism is much worse.
This is not the definition of feudalism
Of course it’s not “the definition” of feudalism. But, being paid for the use of something you own is a key aspect of feudalism.
the common theme in it is reciprocal obligations
Suuuure… I’m sure that’s how the feudal lords framed it for their subjects. But, when push came to shove, if you didn’t work the lord’s fields he could have you whipped. If he failed to protect you from brigands you could… complain quietly to the other serfs? The lord would only need to fear aristocrats higher up the food chain than themselves.
Everything that you say is feudal about Amazon, is definitively capitalist
No, it may be happening in an economy where capitalism is one of the main economic systems, but it definitely isn’t capitalism.
Real estate companies are still capitalist even though they deal in real estate.
Take away the company from this example. Is an individual a capitalist if they own land and receive rent from people using that land? How is that different from a feudal lord who owns land and demands rent?
Basically true, but consider the alternative. Given how expensive things are now, if you don’t live a very minimal lifestyle you are going to be much more trapped in your career than someone who does. You won’t be able to retire early, you won’t be able to switch to something lower paid but more enjoyable/laid back, you won’t have the means to take some time off to pursue your own business ideas or just dealing with life stuff.
If you’re dead set on living the “American Dream” or something and refuse to hold back on treating yourself with luxuries, you are going to end up being even more of a tool of your technofeudalist masters. Acknowledging that doesn’t mean turning a blind eye to what is happening, it’s just basic self preservation of your freedom.
The problem is that more and more the tiny house and so forth is no longer a choice, but a neccessity to survive. In places like Silicon Valley a normal job basicly forces you to either communte for hours every day or live in a tiny house just to survive. Looking at the rent increases and high home prices combined with high intrest rates, the cost of housing looks like it will grow in the coming years. That is not just a US problem, but the case in many parts of the developed world. In poorer countries it is a reality for even longer and for even more people.
That being said, if you have the choice, building up some wealth is certainly a good idea. With a bit of it and some good ideas, it becomes much easier to drop out a bit out of the capitalist hellscape and avoid the worst problems.
The thing is, the need for large expansive homes have substantially evaporated in younger generations as technology advances.
The desire for a massive home as a well off (not wealthy, but above peasant) person was due to:
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Needing somewhere to store all your necessary shit, your tools of your trade, etc etc.
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Needing somewhere for your servant(s) to live, because they took care of the house for you
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Somewhere to store all your books and other pleasantries
However, our servants are now tiny little robots that dont need to eat or sleep, they dont need an entire bedroom and seat at the table.
The entire knowledge of all of humanity no longer requires a library of alexandria, but instead can fit in your pocket.
Many folks have all the tools of their trade able to fit in a small laptop bag at most.
When you can largely fit all your requirements of modern life in a single cardboard box, as opposed to needing several rooms, the desire for a mansion dwindles. Entire kitchens have been replaced with a single microwave and a hotplate.
Meals that used to take an entire day and a whole kitchen staff to prepare, now take a single person hitting an on button.
We have VR, laptops, netflix, the entire internet, etc etc all at our fingertips.
And most importantly, we have cars and whatnot. A trip to the store is no longer a “wake up at 6 in the morning to get the horses saddled and hitched, then three hour ride into town, get back home just before sunset” affair.
It’s now “hop in the car and drive over to the store in 10 minutes”
And unlike horses, a car doesnt need a whole ass stable and stablehand. It can just… sit there lol
So yeah, its perfectly reasonable for us to slowly revert back to small life, everything we could possibly need to live life can fit in an extremely small square footage now, theres literally no need to have a giant mansion, it’s largely pointless.
In most towns and cities, grocery store should be within walkable distance to allow people to get what they need for the next day or two, removing the necessity for large pantries or food storage rooms. Also getting benefits of eating healthier and fresher.
Also this, yeah, as farming scales and technology enables farmers to be able to manage larger and larger swathes of land with less and less labor involved, more and more people congregate in central hubs, major cities, etc, which means more and more people are within walking distance of all the needs.
Is this astroturfing?
Of course I want more space! small rooms with a small number of rooms is claustrophobic and cluttered. I need space for me and all my shit!
The point is, you almost definitely have way less shit on your property, than a middle or upper class family would have in the 1800s.
You probably dont have a whole ass horse stable, and separate living quarters for your stable hand, yes? And all the “stuff” that would be involved in maintaining that horse stable, and all the stuff that the stablehand would own for their own life, right?
And you likely dont have servants, and a cook, right? And all their stuff and their living quarters?
And your computer can hold an entire library worth of books on it, an entire blockbuster worth of VHS tapes in movies, etc etc?
And you probably dont have dozens and dozens of boxes of photographs in storage, right? All of that now can fit in your pocket in a single USB stick.
No matter what your trade or craft is, even ones that involve working with your hands, its extremely likely someone 200 years ago would have required like twice as much stuff to do it. Our tools have become smaller, compact, multi-use, storable, foldable, digital, etc etc.
We’ve gone from giant machines that took up entire rooms, to extremely powerful ones that take up a fraction of the space.
Think about something as simple as just printing off some pamphlets, do you know how much stuff was involved in that process 200 years ago?
Now, you can mass produce pamphlets with just your phone or a laptop and an inkjet printer.
I would say there certainly are a small handful of hobbies and skills that have not had much change in terms of downsizing. Weightlifting / exercise, for example, is largely functionally the same. Steel is still steel and you cant really “downsize” the fact you have a certain density, and you simply just have to live with that. People have tried to come up with countless fancy ways to downsize weightlifting but at the end of the day, a barbell is a barbell.
Sewing also hasn’t changed dramatically in terms of scale either. Modern sewing machines arent that much different in size. Sure they have gotten a little bit more power in a bit smaller shape but, if you look up sewing machines from 200 years ago they, well, sorta still look the exact same not gonna lie.
But overall, most of the day to day living is just a LOT smaller and simpler. A small electric hand vacuum can do the work one handed in a few minutes that would have taken ages before. Microwaves cook food at extraordinary speeds that someone from a hundred years ago would absolutely consider borderline magic.
Servants? Stables? How rich do you think the average person is?!
I absolutely have more space and more things easily manufactured compared to a peasant with a shit ass job, even from just 100 years ago, have you seen how small the average persons house is? There’s houses around me built in the 1800s and I can barely stand up or fit a modern couch in them. They didn’t have kitchens they had a fire and a pot in the lounge.
You seem to be talking about peoples work tools, which would be at work, not in their house.
I wish houses weren’t required by law to have a lawn. I could save so much space if I didn’t have one and all the junk to take care of it.
This thread blows my mind.
You’d prefer to just be boxed in with people all around you and concrete everywhere? That’s what developers would do if they weren’t required by law to give you space. Pack them into smaller spaces and get more money!
I’m mostly unhappy with front yards. Basically no one in my area uses them for anything. They’re just money and time sinks you have to put up with for very little benefit. I’m totally ok with having a backyard because it actually gets used.
You could look into lawn alternatives. Here the rules are no weeds and vegetation can’t be over 6 inches unless it is intentionally cultivated. So I have native plants in garden beds around my house that take up roughly 50% of the yard, and the “lawn” portion is mostly native groundcovers that are unlikely to reach above 6 inches. I rarely have to do anything to it since it’s mostly native. We go out there maybe once a month to mow the little grass that’s left (which we’re phasing out as natives spread) and pull weeds.
It was a little more work up front to make beds and plant natives, but we did it the lazy way, starting out small and expanding over the years as natives grew and spread. We did temporary borders of cardboard with rocks on top to smother grass and expand out as needed.
