Abandoned South Dakota Town on Sale for $250k
fortune.com
fortune.com
It's a few acres of prairie with some buildings that need to be torn down. I'm not up to date on land prices in western SD, but I can't imagine good pasture land is worth more than $2k/acre, even with the surge in beef prices recently.
It's also worth noting that the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Indian Reservations are located in the poorest counties in America. I've visited a couple times and it really is striking that such poverty exists in America. The one stat I can remember from a volunteer trip several years ago was that an 18 yr old boy had a <50% chance of living to 25. When I was in high school we would play football and basketball games there on occasion - our bus always had police escorts in and out of town.
About the poverty: When I was in college in the mid-90s, I went on spring break work trips to the Rosebud reservation, and they cited a 90% adult male alcoholism rate.
I volunteered with the Habitat chapter near there. They could not build on the res because any houses under construction would be stripped of their copper wire and plumbing before they could be completed. What they really need is a big employer to set up shop there: rising tide floating all boats, etc.
You want to explain that, particularly the genetic component?
These studies are not really about one genetic condition that causes alcoholism, but genes or combinations that provide higher odds of immunity.
There is an a gene more dominant in parts of Asia that increases short term side effects for alcohol, reducing alcoholism.
Europe is suspected to have similar changes through genes that are less compatible with alcoholism dominating over others that might be better for most things, but not for the pickle that was the middle ages.
And no, it's not an excuse to give up on them, just a hurdle that needs to be overcome.
The casinos on some reservations have had a positive impact. At least there is a good employer in the area for those wanting a regular life. In my opinion (as an outsider) the best thing for them is to go to college off the reservation.
This doesn't pass any sniff test I can think of.
The life expectancy for males in the county (whole reservation) is 71-72 years. If 50% are dying in their "stupid nearly adult years" they are going to have to have bunch living past 100 to bring the average up.
What?
It seems so: "The South Dakota real estate agent said one Nebraska man said he want to buy the Swett ghost town and bring 2,000 Russian women and 600 convicted felons to live in the town. He wanted to build acrylic houses for the new residents to live in and set up cameras to run 24/7 and film the interactions, Syracuse.com reports."
EDIT: even the characters make sense. People watch reality for sex and bust-ups, so get attractive women and angry men at ration of 3 to 1 and you're pretty much guaranteed lots of sex and catfights. Give this man a medal!
The problem is upkeep and finding something useful to do with the place.
I know in Germany some of the NATO military towns have been repurposed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/20/us/arkansas-towns-new-owne...
On a side note, I was driving through rural South Dakota around ten years or so ago and stopped to eat at a small town diner. I checked out their bulletin board and was floored that someone was selling a house for $10k. So maybe the area could be a good deal for someone looking to get away from it all. :)
However, keep in mind that at that price point, you're usually forgoing things like reasonable Internet, neighbors closer than a mile away, and any kind of nearby amenities whatsoever. Oh, and the house usually needs a ton of work, and the basement is guaranteed to be damp at best, if not moldy.
$250k for a 6 acre plot of land with only one good structure on it seems overpriced for the region. I bought a 5.5 acre farm with a good house, garage, workshop, and sturdy fencing for $70k. Later sold it for $100k.
We are at a point in time when the wealthy are extremely wealthy. The billionaire club is substantial but even below that, personal wealth in the tens or hundreds of millions exists. What do people want to do with that wealth? It's more than can really be spent on comfort, entertainment, sex and such. Once upon a time money was power, or could be converted to it. Roman Consuls put personal wealth into political enterprises. They were the system of government and the wealth was intertwined with it. But, the main point was they had social, societal and military ambitions.
Where are the people today who would like to create a 1,000 person community? Where are the wealthy who would like to try a bold experiment in communalism, anarchism, feminism or whatnot?
Flippant answer is that the two groups—"the wealthy," and people interested in that sort of thing—have almost no overlap.
But I don't really think either of these are true. Bill Gates has some big "political" goals, societal scale ambitions. Elon Musk too, though he seems to like for profit companies as a vehicle. Some charities get substantial endowments and many in the leaser classes dedicate a lot of their time, attention & money to them.
* Experiments that have been tried (like anarchism and some kinds of communalism) and don't need repeating
* Obviously terrible ideas (anarchism again, communism, some others)
* Beyond the ready scope of purely legal changes (feminism)
And this is even before you start addressing the problems of getting 1000 people going in an environment with meaningful infrastructure. Or having it function economically without being a gaping money pit.
I suspect smart and wealthy people interested in changing society tend to realize that there are more ways to break society than there are to improve society. Therefore, smaller changes that do not individually break society are preferable to changing everything at once and praying you didn't introduce a killer bug somewhere in your batch of a million changes.
As a result, you get more people like George Soros than you do Lenin. For which we may want to consider being thankful.
Note that I'm talking about communism as a way to structure societies, which Wikipedia describes as 'a socioeconomic order structured upon the common ownership of the means of production and the absence of social classes, money, and the state.'.
Now, some kind of Platonic ideal of Communism may work perfectly. It's certainly possible, in the sense that the possibility exists in a realm of pure abstraction. However, history shows that getting there isn't very practical and requires oceans of blood. A perfect system that you cannot get to is useless.
Previous work on this avenue of experimentation suggest remarkably strongly that it should not be attempted again.
Neither the Soviet Union nor Communist China were/are communist states. They had rulers, communist states cannot have rulers, otherwise they violate the need for absence of social classes.
We shouldn't dismiss an idea just because some people misunderstood it. If you can find a society that tried communist principals (and I mean all of the core principals, not half hearted attempts), I'll definitely be interested to know about them.
Again, a state of affairs that cannot be achieved by acceptable means is not an experiment worth repeating. There is no reason to think that a future attempt will have different results from past attempts. Given the costs, why would you think this a reasonable thing to try? Have you seriously considered the possibility that what you want is untestable, because to get to that state requires some intermediate stages we consider unacceptable?
Put another way: if a friend tells you that they have invented a way to solve all energy problems forever, they just need to start with a perpetual motion machine, how seriously would you take them?
As for past attempts, they were communist in name only. If I said the air doesn't exist because I can't find unicorns, that's the level of absurdity that calling a dictatorship a communist society exists in.
I'm suggesting that attempting to create a Communist society is a really bad idea. Every previous attempt to do so has led to exceptionally bad consequences. You've provided no reason to think that a new effort will avoid repeating these mistakes. In fact, all you've done is insist that the end goal of Communism has not been achieved.
That a leaderless society has not yet been created in the name of Communism isn't relevant to what has resulted from historical attempts to create such. It matters not one whit to the question of what all previous attempt to achieve such a goal have produced.
Is your goal of a leaderless society with shared means of production achievable? I don't know. I do know that I don't think it's worth killing another thirty million people for the sake of another attempt at finding out. History strongly suggests that that is a significantly more likely outcome of an attempt than the creation of a stable leaderless society with shared means of production.
It's in no way relevant that (Russia|China|North Korea|Cuba) are not or have ever been genuinely Communist in an idealist sense. It doesn't matter if there ever has been a True Scotsman.
In conclusion, every attempt at Communism has failed. This is because every attempt to get to Communism has failed. This is significant because it calls into question the plausibility and achieveability of any kind of transition to Communism. This in turn suggests that Communism cannot ever be evaluated because it is not achieveable by means we consider acceptable. Thus, the initial question of "Has Communism been attempted and failed, where Communism is defined in a textbook manner and the transition to it ignored?" is rendered null and void.
In other words, if you can't find unicorns, it might be time to reconsider the policy of virgin human sacrifice in order to search for unicorns.
It's clear now this is the core of your argument, so let's explore possible transitions further.
First of all, let's examine direct democracy. Direct democracy is closer to communism than any of the attempts (by nation states) that have been given its name. In the age of the Internet, direct democracy is easier than ever to organise. Effectively, you need two things:
1. An inclusive, informative news media.
2. A way to collect votes.
Are two things above hard to achieve? Depends on who you ask, but I'd say they were more than achievable.
How does direct democracy pave the way for communism? Firstly, it begins the process of breaking down the power structures that currently exist, and provides an alternative means of organising society that can fill the power vacuum. Secondly, it gets people used to the balance between the individual and the collective. We can achieve great things when we work together, but that should not come through forceful means, the rights of the individual to choose their own path should still be valued.
Thoughts?
You have also erred in other ways, such as assuming that an identical balance between the individual and the collective is desirable for all. Further, you've assumed that breaking down current power structures will be followed by your preferred "means of organizing society" being adhered to instead of new power structures being established.
You've also ignored tribe-forming behaviors that can be reasonable expected to occur around active, inclusive, informative news media. Or how nearly-hairless primates react to the presence of tribes other than their own. Along the way, you've also ignored the implicit power structures inherent in having news media systems and voting systems.
So, let's go back to the problem here. All historical attempts to transition to Communism have resulted in terrifying numbers of dead people. This is so strikingly uniform that I am disinclined to think it an accident. Why would this time be any different at all, given that we're still dealing with the same nearly-hairless primates?
The core of my argument is that every time someone who thinks like you gets taken seriously at a society-wide level, a crapload of people die and the end goal is never achieved. So far, you've failed to make a case that this time is different.
The difference is that it won't be a small group in power, taking away the rights of people. The power will be distributed throughout society, so there isn't a single point of failure and/or corruption.
> "You have also erred in other ways, such as assuming that an identical balance between the individual and the collective is desirable for all."
There's no such thing as an identical balance here, the balance will always be imperfect, but it is up to the individuals in the society to understand this balance, and try to make it as good as it can be.
> "Further, you've assumed that breaking down current power structures will be followed by your preferred "means of organizing society" being adhered to instead of new power structures being established."
I didn't state that direct democracy would definitely lead to communism, I stated that it would be a useful step to take before communism. In other words, should direct democracy take off, communism is not guaranteed, but it helps pave the way should people decide they want a communist society.
> "You've also ignored tribe-forming behaviors that can be reasonable expected to occur around active, inclusive, informative news media."
I don't doubt that tribes will form, but respect can still exist between tribes. For example, I'm not on the right-wing of the political spectrum but I can still respect thoughtful individuals that are. Furthermore, healthy debate is invigorating, people aren't only drawn to that which they agree with, debates between tribes can draw a crowd, especially if both groups feel well represented.
Also, I think you're misunderstanding what I mean by an 'inclusive, informative' news media, which isn't surprising. Inclusivity is important to ensure all views can be heard, the only way this is going to happen is by removing the filters that control mass media. If it helps, consider the new model for inclusivity will be closer to YouTube than TV.
However, this is only part of the solution, increasing available information doesn't help unless we can make sense of that information, which is why it is important for media to be informative. Extending the YouTube analogy further, every person is free to have their own channel, but efforts would be made to create cross channel content, either to refine the message of one 'tribe', or to engage with those they disagreed with. The easier these types of collaborative efforts are to organise and promote, the better chance we have of increasing our collective political consciousness.
> "I think that primates are instinctual hierarchical creatures, much given to hierarchies of power. I think we are also subject to a wide variety of cognitive flaws and easily misled by emotions. I think that any political philosophy based on blithely ignoring the traits of human psychology are is highly likely to fail. I further think that historical attempts to do so have displayed a disturbing tendency towards spectacular failure."
It'll take time to move beyond our past programming, but that's no reason not to try. The misguided attempts of the past show is that trying to force change through a totalitarian means is not desirable, it's important to raise our collective consciousness first, get people exploring new ways of living together without hierarchical social structures. Once we've had chance to understand this on a personal level, it'll be easier to get working on a larger scale.
And here's where you fail. What you have missed is that you aren't getting rid of power structures. You're replacing an explicit set of power structures with equally explicit rules with a set of implicit structures with no explicit rules. From there, I'm afraid it's a total shitshow.
You still get single points of failure. You still get corruption. You have just jettisoned your ability to deal with any of them effectively.
> There's no such thing as an identical balance here, the balance will always be imperfect, but it is up to the individuals in the society to understand this balance, and try to make it as good as it can be.
Excuse me. An identical balance for all individuals. A balance that is good for one person is incredibly bad for another. You're imposing uniformity where uniformity is unsuited.
> If it helps, consider the new model for inclusivity will be closer to YouTube than TV.
I am considering your model. Unfortunately, this model does not suggest what you think it does. Removing explicit filter systems just replaces them with implicit filter systems that accomplish the same tasks. Just as before, you're confusing getting rid of explicit power structures with getting rid of power structures.
Consider how Digg succumbed to organized influencers. Ask yourself how your system is immune to such things. Hint: it's not.
> It'll take time to move beyond our past programming, but that's no reason not to try.
Apologize to the dead created by people like you first. Consider how they came to be. Understand risk. Then come back.
I realize you think your reasoned discourse can convince, friend. However, all you have convinced me of is that you don't understand why past attempts to do exactly what you advocate have failed and why the consequences were so severe. That places you somewhere on the spectrum between misguided (if largely ignored) and incredibly dangerous (if heeded).
I suggest you start with learning about formal and informal power structures. Taking away the former does nothing except empower the latter.
Right, let's look at this.
Corruption exists because people are driven by their own self interest, and that self interest can be guided by those who can shift the personal priorities of the individual. If a person is 'bought off', their actions may change to be in line with those that bought them off.
How many people need to be bought off in order to corrupt the decision making process? Enough to have a majority of the decision makers under control. Compared to a representative democracy, is the number of decision makers smaller or larger under direct democracy? It's larger. That would suggest corruption is harder to maintain.
There's a little bit more to it though. Corruption can take different forms. Corruption based on material wealth may be effective with representative democracies, but even if it doesn't scale, the more insidious form of corruption is corruption of the mind. To guard against this, you need 'inclusive, informative' news media, as it's vital to be able to expose lies and misinformation.
Direct democracy with an effective news media is more resistant to corruption than the representative democracy with corporate media that we have now. If you disagree with that statement, let me know.
> "You're replacing an explicit set of power structures with equally explicit rules with a set of implicit structures with no explicit rules."
> "Consider how Digg succumbed to organized influencers. Ask yourself how your system is immune to such things. Hint: it's not."
So your argument is that implicit power structures are just as problematic as explicit power structures as you can still have a small number of actors who seek to game the system to their own advantage?
> "Excuse me. An identical balance for all individuals. What is good for one person is incredibly bad for another. You're imposing uniformity where uniformity is unsuited."
You've just repeated what I said with different words.
> "Apologize to the dead created by people like you first."
I find that insulting, quite frankly. As I've said before, none of those societies you're referring to were communist societies, nor did they start out as communist societies and devolve into something else. They were never communist to begin with, and did not make efforts to become more communist as time went on.
Here's an analogy that should help explain why that statement is misguided. Imagine I'm a Muslim, and this is just after the Paris shootings. I can state that Islam is a religion of peace, and so state that the people who carried out the attacks were not true Muslims, regardless of what they claim to be. Would your response still be 'Apologize to the dead created by people like you first.'?
This is only true if you make a series of very large assumptions about the people involved. Such as that voters individually choose to consume an inclusive variety of media, instead of filtering to just the media that caters to their tribe.
This is the sort of assumption that seems easy if you are utopian and don't really understand tribalism in nearly-hairless primates. Suffice to say it's not nearly as simple as you think and far from the guarantee you clearly believe.
> So your argument is that implicit power structures are just as problematic as explicit power structures as you can still have a small number of actors who seek to game the system to their own advantage?
Implicit power structures are worse. This is because they lack accountability mechanisms and centralize power, making corruption easy while also making it difficult to get rid of. This is in no way an improvement.
Frankly, it's becoming painfully clear to me that you simply don't understand power.
> I find that insulting, quite frankly.
Bully for you.
> As I've said before, none of those societies you're referring to were communist societies, nor did they start out as communist societies and devolve into something else. They were never communist to begin with, and did not make efforts to become more communist as time went on.
I imagine you think it's just a coincidence that without exception, every single historical case wherein sincere attempts at Communism were made the result was a dictatorial bloodbath. You think the examples aren't relevant.
After all, they were not true Scotsman.
I'm afraid I'm done with this conversation. If I believed in God, I'd be praying very hard that you never find yourself near levers of power. You have no conception of how much your naivety terrifies me.
This is the sort of assumption that seems easy if you are utopian and don't really understand tribalism in nearly-hairless primates. Suffice to say it's not nearly as simple as you think and far from the guarantee you clearly believe."
Content filtering is possible, but it's equally possible in a representative democracy with a corporate media, you could argue it's pretty clear that it happens (news outlets catering for left-wing, right-wing, etc...).
Educating the population to think for themselves and to be open to conflicting views is the key to mitigating against this. Agreed?
> "Implicit power structures are worse. This is because they lack accountability mechanisms and centralize power, making corruption easy while also making it difficult to get rid of. This is in no way an improvement."
I attempted to clarify what you were referring to by implicit power structures, please give an example of the type of power structures you are referring to.
> "Frankly, it's becoming painfully clear to me that you simply don't understand power."
> "Bully for you."
> "I'm afraid I'm done with this conversation. If I believed in God, I'd be praying very hard that you never find yourself near levers of power. You have no conception of how much your naivety terrifies me."
Is it really necessary to resort to ad hominems? I've tried to be polite, we clearly disagree but have I said something that offended you personally?
As for the underlying substance, yes I'm well aware that humans aren't perfect.
> "I imagine you think it's just a coincidence that without exception, every single historical case wherein sincere attempts at Communism were made the result was a dictatorial bloodbath. You think the examples aren't relevant."
No, I don't think it's a coincidence. Why is that? Marx suggested that it was necessary to have a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' as an intermediate step on the way towards communism... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletar...
I disagree that such a step is necessary, I believe instead that you can bring in communist ideals gradually. There are some examples of how this works in practice, Chile under the leadership of Salvador Allende offers a good example.
At the end of the day, someone has to be the one to make the call to press the button.
In your efforts to try to fix bugs, you are re-introducing older bugs. Have you considered that a rewrite from scratch may not be ideal here, given how hard it is to get a functioning system?
Also, note that the tyranny of the majority only applies if and when force is applied. Being in a minority is not necessarily problematic.
Here is the explanation you seek, friend. You are implicitly re-creating a leading class. The problem only appears solved because the class is implicit instead of explicit.
And historically, you've probably killed a couple million people by now.
Persuasion is far more palatable than physical force. Furthermore, in a direct democracy, those with charisma still do not make the final decision, all decisions go to a vote. If an individual proves influential, then they have a level of power, but opinions that serve the influential individual at the expense of their audience are not likely to gain traction.
Oh, and you've overlooked how readily people are led into supporting positions directly contrary to their interests. It happens all the time. Tribal social structures and group identities make it easy and common.
Nothing about this ends well.
Have a nice day.
The power of the "influencers" depends on the education level of the general population, does it not?
> "Oh, and you've overlooked how readily people are led into supporting positions directly contrary to their interests. It happens all the time. Tribal social structures and group identities make it easy and common."
As I've said to you before in an earlier comment, it'll take time to undo our earlier programming, to make us less prone to follow hierarchical structures (and to think with a mob mentality). The education to enable this can start today, we don't need to change our society in order to start changing ourselves.
No. It does not.
If the population has been taught critical thinking and given plenty of chance to practice this in their formal education, then I don't see how it can't mitigate against the damage that "influencers" could do.
To be clear on what critical thinking is and can do:
Of course anyone can go down the path of "well that wasn't real communism" and that goes for any ideology where humans are involved. You won't achieve the utopian ideal put forth in a book. And that's really part of the failure, not the reason to explain it away.
The fact is some people work harder than others, are more ambitious than others and sacrifice more. And the reason people appreciate a capitalistic society is not only can those types of people get rewarded, those same people motivate others to aspire. And we also know that it's easy to deflate the ambitions of people when they feel like the extra work won't get them any further.
Which in my view is why these communist countries develop the fantastic religion around their leaders and at the same time take on the violent means to force their people into working harder. Respect through fear, intimidation and in the case of NK a fantasy of motherly love by the dear leader. Yes I said motherly that wasn't a mistake.
But we're talking about countries here, when if you want to talk about communism from a smaller scale, I'm sure I'd have little to argue with, other than that you don't exactly see a lot of what I would call technical progress coming out of communities, at least none I've ever heard of.
Let me put it to you like this, any society that doesn't put shared ownership of the means of production at the top of its agenda is not and can never be communist.
If it were a winning combination the world would look that way. The world is not going towards a communist utopia because they are too easily corrupted.
Communism at that scale sucks. Why not start your own communist group if you're hell bent on it. Shared ownership is not 'ownership' You don't "own" something if everyone owns it. That's ridiculous doublespeak.
Okay then, point to one communist society that started out with shared ownership and devolved into a dictatorship. All the examples I know of started out with a ruling elite and stayed with a ruling elite, so I'm curious about which of these societies devolved over time.
> "If it were a winning combination the world would look that way."
We've barely begun to explore the possibilities of how societies can work. Furthermore, it's not exactly a common topic of debate in most people's social circles. If it'll take some working examples before people are open to new ideas, then so be it.
> "Shared ownership is not 'ownership' You don't "own" something if everyone owns it. That's ridiculous doublespeak."
People often need to relate something new to something they already understand. If the word ownership bothers you then you can drop it, the key word is shared. Communist societies share the resources that enable material wealth.
> "Why not start your own communist group if you're hell bent on it."
I do intend on living in an ecovillage one day, does that count?
Not real communism.
"Of course anyone can go down the path of "well that wasn't real communism""
Because it isn't. This isn't a "No True Scotsman" thing; North Korea is not in any way, shape, or form Communist. It is a dictatorship led by a despot. Nothing more.
When was wealth never not power? Pretty sure that always and still is the case. Rather than serve in the senate (though some millionaires do of course - the senatorial class in the US is extremely wealthy compared to their constituents), the ultrawealthy just setup and donate to PACs as well as use their money to drive propaganda efforts (e.g. Rupert Murdoch). And then of course you have people like Peter Thiel who want to create an offshore libertarian paradise.
Also you would be surprised on how much can truly be spent on sex and entertainment. Multimillionaires go broke all the time due to drugs, partying, and overwhelming decadence.
There are similar experiments happening on a smaller scale. I would argue that you wouldn't want to fund these communities through wealthy benefactors, otherwise it creates a sense of deference and obligation, it's far better to have a more egalitarian community IMO.
Basically the type of person willing to give up current access to family, friends and job to go there are predominantly weird.
The exception is young people chasing jobs and education ie college towns, San Francisco, SoHo
Or tax havens.